Blood & Gold Read online

  Praise for Codename Xenophon:

  ‘Leo Kanaris takes us to post-crash Athens as austerity bites and political corruption spirals… Codename Xenophon is compelling and evocative (the sparkling sea and sun)… Kanaris has written a little gem, perfect for the beach.’

  Scarlet MccGuire in Tribune

  ‘Blessed with all the virtues of a traditional murder mystery, this debut novel has a sharp political edge. Three years in Athens left Leo Kanaris with a loathing for the self-serving parasites and bureaucrats who “had paralysed the country for decades”. In Codename Xenophon, this insider’s view of a paralytic society is seen through the eyes of George Zafiris, a private investigator who does his best to tread the straight and narrow, while those around him are too greedy or plain scared to take responsibility. It is the apparently motiveless killing of an elderly academic that embroils Zafiris in political machinations at the highest level. But, as his dogged perseverance begins to pay off, he comes to realise that even the best intentions can have tragic consequences. With vivid characterisation and a plot that thickens without obscuring the essential threads, Kanaris emerges as a sharp new talent in crime writing.’

  Barry Turner in The Daily Mail

  ‘The narrative flits from a frenzied Athens to the idyllic islands as politicians, Russian crooks, corrupt (and/or incompetent) policemen thicken the plot, the world-weary Zafiris nimbly negotiating a Byzantine culture in which morality, truth and justice are malleable concepts. The first in a proposed quartet to feature George Zafiris, Codename Xenophon is a bleak but blackly comic tale that does full justice to its laconic, Chandleresque heritage.’

  Declan Burke in The Irish Times

  ‘Anyone picking up this book needs to be cautioned at the outset: it will eat considerably into your time for other things and be extraordinarily difficult to lay aside. In Codename Xenophon Leo Kanaris has woven a tight and quirky tale of murder, high-level intrigue and corruption in the timely setting of modern Athens and its island satellite, Aigina.’

  John Carr in The Anglo-Hellenic Review

  ‘This debut novel is interesting, educational, thoughtful and well worth the time to read. I look forward to more investigations with George Zafiris.’

  The Poisoned Pen Review

  ‘Set in Athens in 2010, Kanaris’s impressive debut, the first in a projected quartet, effectively evokes Greece’s noble antiquity while portraying its current financial crisis, which his hero, PI George Zafiris, attributes to former prime minister Papandreou, who created the “most bloated, obstructive bureaucracy on the planet.” Zafiris, scraping by from case to case, aching from the infidelity of a wife he still loves, and at every step hamstrung by corrupt and arrogant police, investigates the shooting of a Greek scholar and confronts a Gordian knot of governmental corruption, adulterous relationships, and vicious criminals. Struggling to preserve his self-respect, Zafiris prevails – almost. Disgusted by those whose respect for Greece’s past leads them to avoid present-day responsibilities, Zafiris worries constantly over his country and its future, but he survives through fitful glimpses of the spirit that gave birth to Western civilization, still strong after 2,500 years.’

  Starred review in Publishers Weekly

  Contents

  Praise for Codename Xenophon

  Title

  The Author

  Characters (In Order of Appearance)

  Part One The Man on a Bicycle

  1 Meeting in Maroussi

  2 Funeral by the Sea

  3 Conversation with a Fly-Half

  4 The Answering Machine

  5 Information Underload

  6 Town Hall

  7 Threads in a Web

  8 Among Doctors

  9 Dinner with Petros

  10 EAP

  11 Boxed

  12 Unboxed

  13 A Body in the Bushes

  14 Three Brothers

  15 Dr Skouras

  Part Two North and South

  16 Memento Mori

  17 The Musicians

  18 Missing

  19 Edessa

  20 Alexander’s Gold

  21 Into the City

  22 Kokoras I

  23 The Holy Mountain

  24 A Monk’s Life

  25 Kokoras II

  26 Unexpected Quarter

  27 Anna II

  28 The Diarist

  29 Untouchable

  30 The Crop

  Part Three The Package

  31 Hospital Papers

  32 The Two Andonis

  33 Pursuit

  34 Catch-Up

  35 End Game

  36 News Bulletin

  37 The Death Trap

  38 The Other Side

  Copyright

  The Author

  Leo Kanaris was a teacher for many years. He now writes full time and lives in southern Greece.

  He is the author of two novels featuring the private investigator George Zafiris: Codename Xenophon and Blood & Gold.

  He is currently working on his third George Zafiris novel: Dangerous Days.

  Characters (in order of appearance)

  George Zafiris – private investigator

  Colonel Sotiriou – Head of the Violent Crimes Department, Athens Police

  Dimitris – proprietor of the Café Agamemnon

  Nikolaos Karás – rugby-playing police officer

  Mario Filiotis – Mayor of Astypalea

  Eleni Filiotis – wife of Mario Filiotis

  Andreas Filiotis – brother of Mario

  Mrs Kyriakou – secretary to the Mayor of Astypalea

  Zoe Zafiris – wife of George Zafiris

  Pavlos Marangós – car dealer, Athens

  Dr Skouras – Consultant in General Medicine, Red Cross Hospital, Athens

  Haris Pezas – owner of an electrical shop, would-be assistant of George Zafiris

  Petros Karagounis – businessman, schoolfriend of George Zafiris and Mario Filiotis

  Keti Kenteri – violinist

  Anna Kenteri – sister of Keti Kenteri

  Paris Aliveris – composer, husband of Keti Kenteri

  Emmanuel Karyotakis – funeral director

  Gavrilis – hotel owner in Edessa

  Thanasis and Rena – taverna owners in Pella

  Dr Mylona – Inspector of Classical Archaeology, Thessaloniki

  Byron Kakridis – Minister of Justice

  ‘O Kokoras’ (‘the Cockerel’) – construction boss and Edessa strong man

  Stephanos – school-teacher from Preveza

  Father Seraphim – monk on Mount Athos

  Nick Zafiris – son of George and Zoe Zafiris

  ‘Stelios’ – photographer

  Vladimir Merkulov – Russian businessman

  Margaritis – butcher in Markopoulo, friend of Haris Pezas

  Andreas Marangós – pornographic film director

  Part One

  The Man on a Bicycle

  1 Meeting in Maroussi

  Athens, September 2015. George Zafiris, private investigator, was seated at a café in Maroussi, reading a police report. A cup of Greek coffee stood untouched on the table in front of him. The day was cool for the time of year and a breeze ruffled the paper in his hands.

  ‘On Friday 29 August a bearded man, 50 years of age, wearing a grey suit, was riding a bicycle along Spyros Louis Avenue, between the Olympic Stadium and the Golden Hall. A truck loaded with firewood was travelling behind. For unknown reasons the man on the bicycle lost his balance and was hit by the truck. An emergency call was received by police at 11.03 am. Service vehicles arrived at 11.15 am. The driver of blue Magirus Deutz HK 4596, Gavrilis Pagakis, aged 37 from Larissa, was arrested and charged with manslaughter. The victim died from his injuries. He has be
en identified as Mr Mario Filiotis, Mayor of Astypalea.’

  George read the report a second time, folded it, laid it on the table.

  Opposite him sat Colonel Sotiriou, Head of the Violent Crimes Unit, watching him closely.

  ‘Well?’ said Sotiriou.

  ‘It’s written by a moron,’ he said.

  ‘I agree it’s not a model of report writing,’ said Sotiriou. ‘But you can’t be sure the person who wrote it is a moron.’

  ‘OK,’ said George. ‘Maybe he’s just badly trained. Maybe he’s on drugs. Maybe his head is being scrambled by death-rays from outer space. That’s not the point.’

  ‘What is the point?’

  ‘Why did Mario Filiotis fall off his bicycle? He wasn’t a man to do that.’

  ‘Good question.’

  ‘You must know who wrote this.’

  Sotiriou gazed back at him blankly.

  ‘I take that to mean yes?’

  Sotiriou did not answer directly. ‘He’s no fool,’ he said.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘He passed the report to me personally.’

  ‘And what were you supposed to do with it? Apart from the obvious.’

  Sotiriou did not reply.

  ‘This was a road accident,’ said George, ‘not a violent crime.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Sotiriou eyed him attentively.

  ‘OK,’ said George. ‘So he knows more.’

  ‘That is what I assume.’

  ‘Have you asked him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  The Colonel ignored the question. ‘Give me the report,’ he said.

  George pushed the sheet of paper across the table. The Colonel held a cigarette lighter to one corner. The report flared and shrivelled in the ashtray.

  ‘What’s the officer’s name?’ asked George.

  ‘Karás,’ said the Colonel. ‘Lieutenant Nikolaos Karás.’

  ‘Can I talk to him?’

  ‘Only in private.’

  ‘How am I going to do that?’

  ‘He plays rugby.’

  ‘Rugby?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  George was puzzled.

  ‘It’s a kind of football,’ said Sotiriou. ‘Played with an olive-shaped ball.’

  ‘I know that, for heaven’s sake!’

  ‘His team is the Attica Warriors. They train on Tuesday evenings. Olympic complex, B ground. Go there tomorrow, half past eight. Watch the last ten minutes of training. He’ll find you.’

  ‘Suppose I’m busy tomorrow?’

  ‘If you want the job, be there.’

  ‘And who’s my client?’ asked George.

  ‘For the moment I am.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘In strict confidence.’

  ‘Are you paying?’

  ‘Funds will be provided.’

  ‘Public or private?’

  ‘Let me worry about that.’

  Sotiriou stood up. They shook hands without warmth and the Colonel slipped away.

  George stayed to finish his coffee. He replayed the conversation in his mind, seeing the Colonel’s face, his grey-green eyes, the skull-bones thinly covered by tight yellow skin. He was an odd man. Cold, scholarly, hard to fathom. He had insisted on meeting in Maroussi, miles from his office. George had asked yesterday for the police report on Mario’s death, expecting to be refused. Sotriou had offered it at once.

  He paid the bill and walked down Thiseos Street, past a beggar child mangling out La Cucuracha on an accordion, past empty shops with peeling yellow ‘To Let’ notices, past another beggar – an old man in a worn-out suit kneeling on a folded newspaper – until he came to a bakery on the square. Hot bread smells wafted through the doorway.

  He asked for horiátiko psomí and handed over two euros. Fifty cents came back with a rustic loaf, still warm in a paper bag. He held it to him like a baby. Outside on the pavement, he dropped the fifty-cent coin into the old man’s palm and was thanked politely in return. This was no professional beggar. The voice was educated. He looked like a retired schoolmaster or bank clerk. What torments had this man been through? George did not feel like asking. There were too many cases like that in this endless, tedious crisis.

  His friend Mario was dead. He had no space in his heart for anyone else right now.

  George walked back up Thiseos Street to his motorbike, unlocked the luggage box and rested the loaf among a jumble of receipts and business cards. He owed the bike to Mario, who had told him to stop driving a car in the city.

  ‘And how the hell am I supposed to get around?’ George had asked.

  ‘Ride a bike.’

  ‘A bike in Athens? Think I want to kill myself?’

  Mario replied: ‘Just living here a bit of you dies every day.’ He swung the Ducati off its stand, kicked the starter, felt the rush of force as he revved the engine. He accelerated quickly into the stream of cars.

  On Kifissias Avenue, riding south, he kept thinking of his friend. Above the traffic, the glass towers, the dark haze of exhaust fumes, he glanced up at the blue sky, in which a few monumental nimbus clouds hung suspended. Out there in space he could imagine Mario’s soul floating – planing like an eagle, surveying the struggle he had been released from. Athens would seem like a toy village to him, its crazy intrigues as inconsequential as the scurryings of an ant-hill.

  He hoped that something survived of that remarkable man. An essence, an indestructible core of energy. It seemed unlikely. Yet also necessary. Otherwise what was the point of anything?

  The Olympic Stadium loomed up on his right, its white steel arches like the bones of a bird’s wing flung across the sky. On an impulse, he swung off Kifissias onto Spyros Louis. Maybe worth a look, he thought. The scene of the accident.

  This road was busy too, a fast-moving horde of cars, trucks and buses. The stadium lay to his right, behind fences, its vast aerial structure a souvenir of the age of extravagance. Where had that all gone? The ambition, the optimism, the belief? All that remained was an enormous bill, the interest payments multiplying, compounding unstoppably, choking the life out of Greece.

  He found a place to pull over, where the road widened for a bus stop. He cut the engine and lifted off his helmet, narrowing his eyes at the glare. Around him, a landscape of concrete. Everything on the road moving at seventy to eighty kilometres an hour. A strange place to go cycling. Practically an invitation to some fool talking into his phone to knock you down. But then the whole city was hostile to cyclists. Hostile to pedestrians, dogs, birds, every living thing. George climbed off the bike and picked his way along a narrow strip of pavement. Crushed Coca Cola cans and empty Marlboro packets littered the ground, their colours washed pale by the sun. Weeds thrust pugnacious heads through broken paving stones. The traffic rushed by.

  He glanced up, wondering about street cameras. There had to be one along here. All the football matches in the stadium, the wild supporters, the paint-sprayers and seat-burners. That was surely worth a little surveillance? But the lampposts were bare.

  Except one, right there opposite the entrance to the stadium. A trio of loose wires dangling off the post like seaweed, just out of reach of his upstretched arm.

  He grabbed a quick photo of it on his phone, then straddled his bike and turned for home.

  2 Funeral by the Sea

  George lived in a 1970s apartment block in Aristotle Street, one of thousands in the centre of Athens. Faced with marble but poorly maintained, it turned a blank and dirty face to the world. Things improved once you got past the grubby entrance hall and up the echoing stairway. An armoured front door, installed a few years ago to discourage unwelcome visitors, led to a five-room apartment, comfortably arranged, with George’s books, pictures, music, collections of seashells and old weapons. Sometimes his son Nick was at home, back from his engineering studies abroad. Sometimes too his wife Zoe – when she was not on Andros, leading the artistic life. At the end of s
ummer she would be in Athens more. Andros was cold and damp in winter.

  He unlocked the front door, dropped the loaf on the kitchen table and opened the fridge, looking for a beer. There was a bottle of Fix in the door, but his eye went at once to something else: a package on a shelf. The wrapper was from Lourantos, the cheese and salami shop on Andros.

  He closed the fridge without taking the beer and went quietly through to the bedroom. Zoe was asleep there, face down, wrapped in a sheet. A bottle of pills stood open on the bedside table.

  He inspected the label. ‘Fermoxan’. He wondered what that might be.

  Back in the kitchen, he opened his laptop.

  Fermoxan: used in anxiety disorder, depression, panic disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Common side effects: nausea, sexual dysfunction, agitation, blurred vision, constipation, diarrhoea, dizziness, drowsiness, dry mouth, headaches, insomnia, loss of appetite, strange dreams, sweating, tremors, vomiting, weakness, weight gain…

  He read this with alarm. Not so much for the grim catalogue of negatives as for what it implied. This was heavy medicine. Prescription only.

  George opened the fridge again. This time he took out the bottle of Fix. He levered off the top and sipped the beer, watching the sky, thinking.

  Three days ago, he had been in Astypalea. Sprawled in bed in a room he had taken for the night, above the ‘Australia’ taverna, fretting and turning, unable to sleep. He remembered fumbling for his watch in the half-light, struggling to make out the figures. Twenty past five. It was too early to get up – he had slept at two – but his mind was alert and already at work.

  He stood up, moved unsteadily into the bathroom and let rip into the gloom. His mouth was dry, head like a blast furnace.

  He pulled the chain; pipes gurgled and clanked all around him. He crossed the room to the open window and stared out at the sky. The town lay below, curved and stepped like the tiers of an ancient theatre. The air was cool and damp. A pair of dogs barked, exchanging warlike salutes across the darkness.

  As he watched, still half asleep, the air began to brighten. The sun’s first rays struck the fort on the ridge across the bay. They flared on a flagpole, a line of roofs, the whitewashed cupola of a church. Down in the harbour, still in shadow, a row of fishing caïques lay unmoving at the quay.