The Green Lady Page 9

  The brigadier got up and glanced around the kitchen, then went into the saloni. The small statue in the wall niche caught his attention – an austere ancient god with signs of worship beneath him. He would tell his inspector to pack it up and take it to the helicopter. There was a professor at the university in Athens who knew about the deities of pre-Christian Greece.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ he told the chief, leading him outside. ‘You’ll be provided with a story by the end of the day. I want the only copies of all relevant reports driven to me by eight p.m. You are personally responsible for deleting them from your officers’ computers. Make sure the crime scene is cleaned up and the tourists allowed into the stadium as soon as possible. And think about this: if any of your people talk, you’ll be sharing a shit-bucket with a cell full of illegal immigrants till your dying day.’

  The chief cursed under his breath as the helicopter lifted off shortly afterwards. The arrogant fuckers from Athens. They ignored you for years, then they trampled all over you like elephants on heat. He hoped Kriaras and his bum boy crashed into the gorge in a ball of flames.

  After Angie Poulou’s call, Mavros considered his options, such as they were. Then he went downstairs, where the Fat Man was snoring on the sofa. He turned off the TV and gently shook his shoulder.

  ‘No, Marilyn, don’t go aw . . .’ Yiorgos looked up at Mavros. ‘You bastard. I was in the middle of—’

  ‘I seriously don’t want to know. Listen, we’ve got work first thing in the morning. Are you up for it?’

  ‘Yes!’ his friend said. ‘What do you want me to do? Put the squeeze on that shit sucker Poulos?’

  ‘Not quite yet. But what you can do is this . . .’

  He was woken by the Fat Man’s heavy paw at six a.m. They drank a quick coffee and wolfed down some galaktoboureko, then took the trolley up Alexandhras Avenue to the hire car depot. His friend had a clapped-out Lada, but that would be about as useful for tailing as a double-decker bus.

  ‘Remember,’ Mavros said, ‘the trick is to keep close enough to your target so she doesn’t do a disappearing act on you and far enough away so she doesn’t spot you.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I can handle it.’ Yiorgos was like a child let loose in a department store on Christmas Eve. He put his hand in the pocket of a remarkably uncrumpled white shirt. ‘Look, I’ve written down the registration number of her Mercedes.’

  ‘Very good. Keep in touch by mobile.’

  ‘Yes, who knows? We might end up a long way apart.’

  ‘Or the Bekakos couple might park in that multi-storey near his office and stay there all day.’ Mavros immediately felt guilty about urinating on the Fat Man’s parade. ‘No, I’m sure we’ll find something useful out. If you end up tailing Maria on foot, try to hear what she says but don’t blow your cover.’

  ‘What cover?’ his friend asked, looking at his swollen midriff and grinning.

  Mavros had a feeling this was going to end in an ocean of salty tears, but he smiled. The fact was, the lawyer and his sour wife were the only leads he had. He was hoping the former would take him to the mother-lode.

  He hired the same small Citroen, this time for three days. His friend took one look at the Fat Man and found a Peugeot saloon that had seen better days but would bear his weight. They drove up Kifissias Avenue, Yiorgos practising his tailing on Mavros. He didn’t do badly, considering the large numbers of official Olympics vehicles on their way to the athletes’ village and various venues. The great arch of the main stadium was absorbing the sun like an ancient archer’s bow at rest.

  They parked at opposite ends of the street from the Bekakos house and waited. Mavros hoped the couple weren’t early risers. As it turned out, they kept normal hours. The lawyer’s Porsche appeared first. Mavros went after it, nodding to Yiorgos as he passed. He was apprehensive about how the Fat Man would do, but there was no time to worry about that. Rovertos Bekakos had his phone to his ear almost all the time. At first Mavros thought he was going into the centre, but he turned right and headed for the national road. He went north and accelerated hard. The Citroen struggled to keep up, managing to do so only because of the large amount of traffic. That thinned as they went over the ridge at the last of the suburbs. Mavros wasn’t the world’s greatest driver and he had to floor the accelerator to keep Bekakos in view. After a time, the lawyer indicated and took the exit for Thiva. The road from then on was slower and Mavros managed to get to within three vehicles. They bypassed the ancient city of Oedipus and continued to the junction north of Livadheia. It was then that it occurred to Mavros to turn on the radio.

  The local station was broadcasting about only one topic: the demonstration that was blocking the road between Paradheisos and the Hellenic Mining Corporation’s bauxite works. Now he knew where Rovertos Bekakos was heading.

  Akis Exarchos had borrowed the tractor from a friend who supported the action, but didn’t want to take part. He arrived outside the Ecologists for a Better Viotia office in Kypseli at six-thirty in the morning, the trailer loaded with rocks from a nearby quarry.

  ‘Ah, here he is,’ said the young bearded man known as Lykos, the Wolf. Like the other one, he was an Athenian, but at least his family had a small farm in the prefecture.

  Angeliki, Lykos’s wife, girlfriend, no one knew exactly what, smiled at him too. She was of medium height with long black hair, wearing combat trousers and a camouflaged T-shirt that was too big even for her substantial breasts.

  ‘Aki!’ she said. ‘You are our hero. What would we do without you?’

  The fisherman’s cheeks reddened. The young woman always made him feel awkward. She was clever and he had a hard time following the fervent speeches she made about the aluminium plant’s despoiling of the earth and polluting of the sea. But she and her man inspired him, as they had done many of the locals. Even some of the workers in Paradheisos turned up to listen, though they never participated in the protests. Not that there had ever been a demonstration like the one planned for today. There weren’t many protesters, but they were going to make a difference. And, in case things turned nasty, Akis had his shotgun and a selection of fishing spears under a tarpaulin. It was time the ecologists were taken seriously.

  Lykos led the procession of five vehicles in his battered VW van, Angeliki hanging out of the window and broadcasting through a megaphone.

  ‘Stop the polluters! No more mining! Close down the works!’

  The few workers who were up and about in Paradheisos showed little enthusiasm for the slogans. They probably imagined the procession was headed for the main square, which is where they’d held sit-ins before. But those had been carefully calculated diversions. This morning they were headed elsewhere.

  Akis thought about Yiorgia. Would his wife have approved of what he was doing? She had been the local, born and bred in Kypseli, while he had been a labourer on the roads from the north of the country before he met her. They had fallen for each other in seconds and her father had approved, despite Akis’s limited prospects. He’d shown his son-in-law everything he knew about fishing before his belly was riddled with tumours and he went to the place where his daughter had now joined him. Yes, he thought, Yiorgia would be in favour. She hated the permanent cloud that came across the water from the plant, as well as the red scars in the mountains behind it.

  He looked over his shoulder as they drove along the town’s sea front. There were banners streaming from the windows of the cars: ‘Down with the HMC!’ ‘Close the plant NOW!’ At the junction with the road to Dhistomo, Lykos bore right and soon the line of vehicles was on the road that led to the bauxite works. They had almost made it. The ecologists had found out exactly where the Hellenic Mining Corporation’s land started, half a kilometre from the plant – there, even the road became private. Lykos stopped the VW. Even at this early hour, the pollution cloud was heavy over the hill that lay between them and what the workers called Red Gold Valley.

  ‘On you go, Aki!’ Angeliki called, through the megaphone.<
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  He manoeuvred past the van and started the series of turns that would get the tractor and trailer at right angles across the road. Then he drove as far forward as he could and pulled the lever. The trailer rose and the rocks thundered over the asphalt. He jumped down to see how far back he needed to go to block the road completely and then reversed to close the gap. Turning off the engine, he took the keys and hid them in his sock. He looked back towards Paradheisos. Already a line of HMC workers’ cars was forming behind them. They wouldn’t be going any further unless they got out and walked. That was when the fun would really start.

  ‘Well done!’ Lykos said. He had run the VW as close as he could to the ditch, as had the drivers in the cars behind on both sides. Anyone trying to walk would face a slalom between stationary vehicles and angry protesters. That wasn’t the end of it. The night shift would be clocking off soon and several hundred tired men would be unable to get to their beds without running the gauntlet. The ecologists weren’t going to be popular, but Akis didn’t care. The workers had sold their souls and, what was worse, had condemned their own families to the illnesses caused by the poison clouds and the bauxite residue that was piled in heaps around the plant and illegally dumped in the bay.

  By the time the police arrived, there had already been several fights. Akis had blood on his knuckles and face, but he hadn’t been knocked down. At first, only the few officers stationed in Paradheisos showed up. The protesters knew them and their foibles. The adulterer was hit by condoms filled with yoghurt, the drinker drenched in local ouzo, the gambler pelted with coins and the dope smoker had dried grass thrown over him. Even the boiler-suited workers laughed. Soon cops from Viotia headquarters in Livadheia turned up. The man in charge was taller than most basketball players and, unusually, had an air of reason about him.

  ‘All right, you’ve had your fun,’ Akis heard him say to Lykos. ‘Let the workers past. They’re not the enemy.’

  Angeliki started chanting slogans through the bull horn again and the protesters joined in.

  The policeman came over to Akis. ‘Give me the keys, will you?’

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘Deputy Commissioner Telemachos Xanthakos. You?’

  ‘Akis Exarchos. Fisherman and anti-HMC campaigner.’

  The cop smiled. ‘Is the latter a job? Does it pay well?’

  Akis wasn’t falling for friendly overtures. ‘Does yours? Can you sleep at night?’

  Xanthakos scowled. ‘The keys, please.’

  Akis bent down and took them out of his sock. ‘Here you are.’ Before the policeman could take them, he threw them as far as he could into the bay.

  Then a full-scale riot broke out.

  Mavros stayed a reasonable distance behind Bekakos as they drove westwards. The lawyer took the turn to Dhistomo, where 218 men, women and children had been massacred by the Waffen-SS in 1944, then followed the bends down to Paradheisos. By now, Mavros had heard on the radio that the road to the bauxite works had been blocked and that fighting had broken out between protesters, workers and police. According to one sententious announcer: ‘It’s a disgrace that Greeks cannot conduct themselves in a civilised fashion while our country is hosting the Olympic Games, that inspiring symbol of Panhellenic peace in the past.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ Mavros muttered. ‘A few days off at Olympia and then internecine war for the rest of the fighting season.’ He knew Greek history and he was sick of uninformed patriots harking back to the days of Pericles and Alexander. It was funny how rarely the twenty-seven-year Peloponnesian War that ripped the heart from classical Athens and numerous other cities was mentioned. Or that in the pankration event at the ancient Olympics, only biting and eye-gouging were penalized and contestants could end up dead.

  As he drove past the zones of houses in pink, yellow and white, he realised he had come to some kind of cloud cuckoo land. He was no longer in Greece, but in someone’s idea of a perfect community. He knew well enough where ideas like that led – to slaughter in the streets of towns like Dhistomo. The bay ahead looked inviting, but the water had a strange hue, as if the sea bed itself was bleeding. Across the Corinthian Gulf, the mountains of the Peloponnese were only just visible through the dirty cloud that emanated from behind a high headland. A line of cars over a kilometre long could be seen on the road from the dormitory town to the works.

  Rovertos Bekakos took the Porsche as far as he could, before getting out and pounding his hands on the bonnet. Mavros watched the lawyer make a call on his mobile. A few minutes later, a young man on a motorbike, helmet on his arm, pulled up. Bekakos hitched up the legs of his expensive suit trousers and wrapped his arms round the rider’s abdomen, then they set off for the centre of conflict.

  Mavros had no choice but to follow on foot.

  NINE

  Yiorgos Pandazopoulos was in twentieth heaven. Not only did he have a car that was considerably less decrepit than his old Lada, but he was actually being a dick – a private eye, Philip Marlowe in Athens. He’d always been envious of Alex’s profession and his greatest joy had been hearing about his friend’s cases. Apart from the one he’d foolishly got himself involved in and nearly ended up dead; his mother had given him serious shit about that, may the Saints preserve her. Alex would have ripped the crap out of him for that Christian thought. He’d never been able to understand how Communists could remain attached to the faith they’d been baptised into, even though they knew it was ideologically compromised. It was a shame Alex had only known his father Spyros for a few years. The old man would have explained to him that even Communists needed a religious crutch, especially where death was concerned. Still, at least Alex had found out about Spyros’s activities during the Second World War. That had given him a fuller picture of the man who was one of Yiorgos’s enduring heroes. But Alex would never be at rest until he discovered what had happened to his brother Andonis. Even though he didn’t talk about him much any more, Yiorgos knew he still felt the absence keenly.

  The Mercedes appeared about an hour and a half after the Porsche. The Fat Man started his engine and waited until Maria Bekakou had reached the end of the leafy street before setting off after her. He had a few anxious moments in the back streets of Kifissia, but then settled two cars behind her on the toll road that led towards the airport. Maybe she was doing a runner. He picked up his phone to call Alex, then decided against it. He was capable of doing this job without bothering his partner.

  The Peugeot was going at full speed and only just keeping in touch with the Merc. At least there wasn’t much traffic and he could still see it in the distance. Sure enough, Maria Bekakou was heading for the airport. She went into the short term car park. Yiorgos did the same, stopping a couple of rows behind her, then set off after her on foot as quickly as he could. The sun was hammering down and he felt his clothes dampen. She was wearing a white blouse and a short pale green skirt, and shoes with heels that slowed her down effectively. By the time she’d reached the road separating the car park from the terminal buildings, the Fat Man was only five metres behind her. She never looked round, suggesting either that she had nothing to hide or was careless.

  Maria Bekakou went into the departures hall. She was carrying only a small handbag. If she was going to fly, it would probably be to a Greek destination. But she walked past the check-in counters and turned left, walking down the mini-mall of shops and restaurants. She glanced at the overpriced goods on display, but didn’t stop. The place was festooned with Games-related flags and hoardings, making the scruffy old men selling lottery tickets stick out like cockroaches on a wedding cake. No one was buying from them. The tourists were loading up with Olympic souvenirs, including the appalling Athena and Phevos dolls, and locals with any sense were running for flights to escape the mayhem of Athens.

  Then the target – Alex had used that word when he’d instructed Yiorgos – went into one of the restaurants, bought a small bottle of water and headed for a table in the far corner. The Fat Man was tempte
d by the pizzas and convinced himself that a couple of slices – oh, all right, four – would make his presence more convincing. He paid, choking back indignation at the exorbitant price, and found a table only two away from Maria Bekakou. She was speaking on her phone and completely ignored him.

  It occurred to Yiorgos as he was chewing his way through the cardboard pizza that his appearance was actually an advantage when it came to surveillance. Who would imagine that a sweaty slob stuffing his face would be a private eye? The target certainly didn’t. He was invisible to her as she sipped from her bottle, then lit a long cigarette. She looked at her watch a couple of times, convincing the Fat Man she was meeting someone. And so she was.

  The man was wearing dark glasses and a Panama hat, the jacket of his cream suit over his arm. It wasn’t until he glanced at Yiorgos and then swept his gaze around the restaurant that the drachma dropped. He was Paschos Poulos. What was the missing girl’s father doing meeting his lawyer’s wife – someone he was supposedly avoiding, according to Alex’s client – at the airport? He wasn’t even carrying a briefcase and, besides, it was impossible he could be flying anywhere, given his commitments with the Games. The Fat Man licked tomato sauce from his lips. Could they be shagging? They’d exchanged kisses and he had touched her hand a couple of times, but they didn’t give the impression of being lovebirds. For a start, they were arguing, their voices sometimes raised above the racket in the busy eating-hall.

  Yiorgos tried to make out what they were saying. He heard the word ‘paradheisos’ several times, then a loud French family took the table in between and he couldn’t pick up a thing. Besides, the couple was getting ready to leave. He stood up a few seconds after them and lowered his head, ears straining. That was when he heard the words that sent several shivers up his overheated spine.