Blood & Gold Read online

  He pulled on some clothes and splashed water on his face.

  In the kitchen, Olga, the owner of the taverna, was salting an enormous piece of lamb. She paused, wiping her hands on aproned flanks.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Zafiris! Coffee?’

  ‘Please.’

  He watched her stir the little copper pot, the gas flames dancing blue and gold.

  ‘Did you know Mario?’ he asked.

  ‘We all knew him.’

  ‘What was your opinion of him?’

  ‘A very good man.’

  ‘And as Mayor?’

  ‘He did great things.’

  ‘For example?’

  ‘The airport. New roads. Restoring old buildings. A man of action. Not the usual politician, who is all talk.’

  She began scattering potatoes in the roasting tin: each one seemed a token of Mario’s achievements. ‘Education. Respect for nature. Respect for ourselves. For each other. For the community. We stopped burning rubbish. We cleaned up the beaches, the countryside. We smartened up the town.’

  ‘He built an airport and roads,’ said George, ‘but respected nature. How did he manage that?’

  ‘What’s your problem?’

  ‘It’s usually one or the other,’ said George.

  ‘Mario held public meetings. Told us that grants from Europe were linked with measures to protect nature. He said, “You can’t have one without the other. You must do it right.” Proper accounts, receipts, everything. Have you heard of such a thing? In Greece?’

  ‘Never,’ said George.

  ‘When a man like that goes, you ask yourself why didn’t God protect him? He always takes the good ones for himself, and leaves us the criminals, the destroyers, the idiots.’

  ‘Who’ll take his place?’

  ‘The deputy.’

  ‘What’s he like?’

  ‘Nothing special. An opportunist. A follower, not a leader.’

  ‘Will you come to the funeral?’

  ‘Of course!’

  She opened the oven door, letting out a blast of hot air, and shoved the tray of lamb and potatoes in.

  ‘Everyone will be there. A man like that comes once in a generation, if you’re lucky.’

  The coffee bubbled up inside the pot. She poured it into a little white china cup and said, ‘Go out and sit on the terrace. It’s a lovely day. I’ll bring it to you.’

  *

  At ten o’clock a fishing boat rounded the headland, its mast a white cross against the sea’s blue. George waited on the quay. Around him were figures from the taverna last night: police chief, deputy mayor, director of the archaeological museum… None of Mario’s school-friends had made it from Athens. One or two had sent apologies. The rest not even that.

  The locals were out in force. Old people mostly – bent, wiry, their rough faces hacked out of the same rust-brown rock as the island’s farms and roads. The young looked like a different species, fat and pale, crammed into tight black dresses and suits.

  Eleni, Mario’s widow, stood out, tall and haggard, with her two teenage sons. Their faces were blank as stone. Next to Eleni, a stocky man in his forties, with an angry, restless air: this was Andreas, Mario’s brother. George walked over and offered his condolences. Eleni thanked him, her green eyes glittering, electric, and said softly, ‘He rests with God.’

  The fishing boat touched the quayside. On the foredeck lay the coffin, heaped with white lilies. Six men in dark suits and sunglasses moved forward from the crowd. They climbed on board, hoisted the coffin to their shoulders and stepped awkwardly onto the quay. As they set off towards the town, the crowd formed up behind them.

  George walked beside Andreas. It was a tough climb to the church, a steep slope of ribbed concrete, the sun hot on their backs. They trudged heavily, saying nothing. Townsfolk watched from open windows and doorways, crossing themselves as the procession passed.

  At last the street curved into the shade and George felt able to think again.

  ‘This is a crime,’ said Andreas suddenly.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They killed him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Everyone. Everything.’

  ‘That’s not a crime.’

  ‘To me it’s a crime. People abused his generosity.’

  ‘You can’t prosecute a whole community.’

  ‘I told him: half the petitioners who come to see you are just trying to cheat their neighbours. The only injustice is what they’re planning – with your help. He gave them all a hearing. Every damned one! Even known liars and tricksters. Why? Why, God damn it?! At the cost of his health? His family?’

  ‘Everyone says he was a good man.’

  ‘I’m sick of hearing that.’

  The street cut back into the sun.

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘They killed him! These people, his friends and neighbours, all these hypocrites, crossing themselves, looking so holy and miserable!’

  The procession faltered as if his accusation had been blasted out on loudspeakers. One of the pall-bearers, an old man, was in difficulties. His strength seemed to drain from him, his feet became tangled. The man behind lost his rhythm under the lurching weight. The syncopation spread. Before they could stop it the coffin was slipping backwards. They could not hold it. It slithered from their shoulders and hit the ground with a loud crash of splintering wood.

  ‘Pah!’ snorted Andreas. ‘They can’t even get this right!’

  The pall-bearers stopped, wiped sweat off their faces, glad of the rest.

  ‘You can’t blame the public,’ said George. ‘He should have protected himself.’

  ‘One hundred per cent! They’re evil, grasping, cheating bastards. Every damned one!’

  ‘We’ve all lost a friend,’ said George, ‘and you’ve lost a brother. But let’s try to be rational. You can’t blame these people for something that happened on a bicycle in Athens.’

  Andreas gave him a look of pity and disgust. ‘You’ll see how they did it,’ he said. ‘Mark my words.’

  A murmur began in the crowd, a current of puzzlement. The priest looked about him, his eyes flickering fearfully above the long grey beard. The chief of police stepped forward. Two men started shouting at each other.

  Andreas pushed through to the front. ‘What’s going on?’

  George followed. Between the mourners he saw the coffin, one corner smashed open, its blue silk interior visible. People looked away as if in shame, but George’s eye was caught by something else, something unexpected. The edge of a clear polythene bag, hanging out of the coffin. He could not see what it contained, but whatever it was it didn’t look right. The chief of police told everyone to stand back. He knelt beside the coffin, picked out the bag, unsealed it, and extracted a square, slender box. He raised the lid and found a layer of tissue paper, which he lifted delicately aside. A wreath of tiny golden leaves sparkled in the sun.

  *

  While the front line of the crowd marvelled, others pushed forward to get a glimpse. The police chief quickly took charge. ‘The funeral is cancelled,’ he announced. ‘Go home. This is now an incident! A matter for the police!’

  He organised a cordon around the damaged coffin and repeated the order to go home.

  No one budged.

  He surveyed the crowd with disgust. ‘Shame on you,’ he said.

  ‘We want to know what’s happened,’ said a man.

  ‘You can see what’s happened!’

  The crowd remained and the police chief with a scornful expression pulled a mobile telephone from his pocket.

  ‘Bring a truck,’ he barked. ‘Up the main street. Outside the bank. The mayor’s funeral has gone tis poutanas.’

  Andreas shook his head and muttered, ‘Listen to him, the animal! All he knows is poutanes.’

  The police chief turned to the crowd again. ‘I told you to leave,’ he shouted. ‘Move back! Away from the coffin!’

  Soon the rumble of a p
owerful engine could be heard. The police truck appeared at the bottom of the hill and with much shouting and hooting it ground its way forward through the reluctantly parting crowd.

  Two young officers jumped out, dropped the tailgate, and with the help of the pall-bearers loaded the coffin onto the back.

  ‘Where to?’ asked the driver as he opened his door. ‘The cemetery?’

  ‘Are you mad? Think, man! This is potentially a crime. It needs investigation, a report!’

  ‘Very good, sir. So… where then?’

  ‘The station!’

  ‘Will you come in the truck?’

  ‘No. I need to stay here, speak to the priest, organise this mess. I want you to unload at the station, put the coffin in a cell and lock it. No one goes near it and you answer no questions! I’ll be there soon.’

  An hour later they were crowded into the police station, family and friends, discussing what to do. Five chairs, ten people, cigarettes burning. Voices talking over each other, competing to make the same few obvious points. The coffin was resting on the bed in one of the cells next door.

  ‘This will have to be officially investigated,’ said the chief of police. ‘It’s a major incident.’

  ‘All I want to know,’ said Andreas, ‘is where is Mario? Because he sure as hell isn’t in any of those plastic bags!’

  It was a question no one could answer. They telephoned the funeral directors in Athens, who said the paperwork was in order. Andreas shouted, ‘This is not about paperwork, you morons. It’s about a man! My brother!’

  He slammed down the phone.

  They rang the hospital where Mario had been taken, but the receptionist could not get an answer from the mortuary. There was a strike, she said, try again tomorrow.

  ‘A strike in the mortuary,’ said Andreas. ‘There you have our country in a nutshell. Death wrapped in death. Public services that serve no one but the public servants themselves!’

  ‘Let’s not exaggerate,’ said the police chief. ‘There are plenty of honest public servants in this country.’

  ‘They should be exhibited in a museum,’ said Andreas.

  The police chief asked the director of the archaeological service to examine the items in the coffin. She opened half a dozen packages and peered at them with a magnifying glass. She pronounced them to be a mixture of Hellenistic and Roman finds, of excellent workmanship and unusually well preserved. Probably from a tomb, a royal or aristocratic burial. She held one of them up, a necklace of tiny golden bees. For a few moments all were spellbound by their delicate beauty.

  The police chief asked her what such objects might be doing in a coffin on Astypalea.

  She replaced the necklace carefully in its box.

  ‘Illegal export,’ she said. ‘That’s the most likely explanation. There’s never a shortage of buyers, especially abroad. If that’s the case, and they have been taken illegally from a dig or a museum vault, burial on a quiet island would be a convenient half-way stage on their journey, allowing them to disappear for a while, until the trail goes cold.’

  ‘But where is Mario?’ said Andreas. ‘What the hell is the connection between all this gold and my dead brother? He wasn’t a smuggler! He wasn’t an archaeologist! Where is he?’

  ‘I can’t help you with that. All I can do is try to find out where these treasures have come from.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Andreas. ‘It’s no bloody use to me.’

  Mario’s wife asked him to calm down. He snapped back angrily: ‘Am I the only one with any feelings?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re the only one shouting.’

  ‘Why don’t you shout too? He’s your husband!’

  She stood up abruptly.

  ‘I’m taking the children home. They’re upset enough already. You’re making things worse, as you always do.’

  They left the room with the same stony faces they had shown to the world all morning.

  Andreas continued to fulminate. He said he would personally cut off the testicles of whoever was responsible for this crime and throw them bleeding to the sharks.

  George looked at his watch. ‘I’m really sorry,’ he said, ‘but I need to get the airport.’

  ‘I’ll take you,’ said Andreas. ‘We’re wasting our time here.’

  *

  George watched the aeroplane float down out of a burning azure sky. It bounced once, settled on its wheels and rolled in, buzzing like a chainsaw. A door opened in its side and steps zigzagged to the ground. A dozen passengers emerged, groping into the fiery light. The two pilots followed, in dazzling white shirts and dark glasses. They stood on the tarmac, taking in the emptiness, the silence.

  An announcement crackled out of the loudspeakers. George walked slowly to the aircraft with the other passengers. They bent themselves into the seats in the stuffy interior, the air smelling of hot plastic and upholstery. George felt tired and depressed. He hated leaving the islands – any island, even one he had visited for a funeral. He accepted a boiled sweet from the dark-eyed young stewardess and gazed out at a tumble of rocks beside the runway.

  With a roar the plane moved off, accelerating bumpily along the tarmac, lifting quickly into the air. George saw the butterfly-shape of Astypalea laid out below, one of those strange echoes in nature, like clouds that resemble the outlines of countries or lakes that magically form the head of a wolf… Ahead stood Amorgos, a wind-sharpened blade of rock, rising sheer and pale from the water. Beyond it, a hundred miles of sea. Then Athens, the tormented, the addictive, the intolerable… He waved away the offer of a drink and closed his eyes, exhausted.

  A change in the engine’s note brought him back to consciousness. Sleepily he checked his watch. Thirty-five minutes gone, and they were starting their descent. They sloped down through a ferocious heat haze towards the city, the earth scarcely visible through its mustardy blur of dust and boiling exhaust fumes. Why, he wondered, do I live down there, in all that filth?

  3 Conversation with a Fly-Half

  Back at home that evening, searching on the internet, George quickly found a rugby club, but it was in Athens, Georgia. In fact he found a complete parallel city to his own, a utopian Athens of functioning public institutions and friendly policemen, with an all-new marble Parthenon gleaming like freshly moulded plastic. He lingered for a few minutes on this improbable place, this mockery of the ‘real’ Athens rooted in the red soil of Attica, where a pact was made with the Furies to cancel the ancient debt of blood and revenge, building instead a state founded on law, tolerance and mutual respect. That was a pious myth if ever there was one… Smarting at the painful turn of his thoughts, he clicked off the Georgian Athens and returned to his own. He searched on through the results till he found the Athens Warriors Rugby Football Club.

  It was one page only. A team photograph showed two rows of muscular young men, wild-haired and grinning. There were no names to the players. Any one of them could have been Police Lieutenant Nikolaos Karás. The team trained on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Anyone interested could telephone the Secretary.

  At the Olympic complex the next evening, in a landscape of empty swimming pools and unused sports fields, he watched a tangle of bodies writhing on the grass. The ball, lost in the knot of limbs, suddenly escaped. A lone figure scooped it up and sprinted furiously for freedom. An opponent raced to intercept him, his arms reaching greedily out. He dodged to the right and ran on. Another appeared, flung himself at his legs, cutting him down. As he fell he flicked the ball to his right. One of his team grabbed it, ran on, passed again, took the return pass and dived over the line. The trainer’s whistle shrilled and a shout of triumph went up from his team.

  ‘Bravo ré pousti!’

  George was in a cloud of nostalgia. Winter afternoons in London. Mist dripping through bare trees. Wet mud in his clothes and hair. His spirits riding strangely high. Happiness sharpened on a whetstone of cold and discomfort. He tried to explain it to his friends back in Athens, kids who played basketball
on balmy evenings and went water-skiing. They couldn’t see the point and ignorantly laughed.

  The final whistle blew and the players strolled off the field. George waited a while, watching them pull on tracksuits and untie their boots. One of them stood up briskly, waved to the others and jogged across to him.

  ‘Mr Zafiris?’

  ‘That’s right. Nikos Karás?’

  ‘The same.’ They shook hands.

  ‘Do you have a car?’

  ‘Motor bike,’ said George.

  ‘OK, I’ll take mine. You can follow me.’

  They threaded through the streets south of the stadium to a bar under a quartet of plane trees. They ordered two Fix beers.

  ‘I need to eat something,’ said Karás. ‘Bring a big plate of mezé.’

  ‘It’s a high energy game,’ said George.

  ‘Seen it before?’

  ‘I used to play.’

  ‘Oh yes? Which team?’

  ‘London University.’

  Karás nodded. ‘That’s the place to learn. The game’s too crude here. We like the aggression, but we’re not so good on the teamwork.’

  ‘I saw a nice try.’

  ‘That was Thanasis. I gave him the return pass.’

  ‘That’s teamwork.’

  ‘I know. And practice. We rehearsed that exact move this evening. But under match conditions we revert to type and it’s every man for himself.’

  The beer and mezé arrived. They filled their glasses and wished each other good health. Karás pushed the plate of food towards George. ‘Help yourself.’

  George said, ‘You eat. I’ll just drink for now.’

  Karás speared a piece of stewed octopus.

  ‘You’ve read my report?’

  George nodded.

  ‘What did you think?’

  ‘It left a lot of questions unanswered.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You knew it as you wrote it?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘So why did you file it?’