It took a while – okay, less than a minute – for it to sink in. He wasn’t a target anymore. He was – get this – a feared man.
He took a little spin around the yard, a victory lap, soaking it up, letting all the suckers know who the new King was. Wasn’t there a movie like that already? The Fisher King?
Yeah, he could learn to like this joint.
Five
“I knew I’d never get enough of her. She was straight out of hell.”
When Angela and Sebastian got back to the villa, he was seriously spooked. This was a crazy woman and, lordy, if he ever got the hell away from her, he might well write her as a character in his book. The book he’d never written a line of but he would, he was literary, like Amis and Borroughs. He’d just sit down one day and voila, masterpiece. You either had it or you didn’t and he bloody well had it.
One literary effort that he actually did produce was a poem in the technical college entitled:
Lenin and Your Letter
He just flat out loved that title. It had politics, love and, to be totally honest, true resonance. And, okay, he’d been a little wiped when he wrote it, but excuse me, look at all the greats – Scott Fitz, Hem, Behan, Bukowski, Berryman, Jerry Rodriguez. Hadn’t they all been a little, well, spiffed when they wrote their finest work? You wanted pain, compassion, suffering, Sebastian knew you had to fucking live it.
He just wished he could remember the bloody poem. Only one line had remained with him:
Lenin, you Jewish hack
Ah, the thrill. Did he actually write that? He did. Oh, Booker Prize be praised. And God bless Salman Rushdie. Sebastian had his very brief moment of fame as the student union, all five of them, had accused him of anti-Zionism. Lordy, it was what every real literary lion endured.
Whoops, the deranged bitch was shaking him, not with the cleaver, least not yet, saying, “Hello, shite-face, time to like, you know, clean up?”
And he did, but her language! Was that really necessary? She should go to the U.K. where they mightn’t like you but, by golly, they always had manners.
They scrubbed the place down, every last drop of blood, etcetera, gone. Would they bring in forensics of the Greek variety? Hello, let’s be honest. The Greek variety of forensics was probably one greasy inspector with his hand out, dropping cigar ash all over the crime scene and trampling on bloodstains. They were clear, and if he could now just get clear of the mad cow he could get his show on the road.
She gave him the golden opportunity, snapped, “Where are my fookin cigs?”
And he jumped on it, said, “Hon, I’ll jump on the scooter, get you a fresh pack.”
Then, distracted, she said, “And buy some booze, too. Jesus wept.”
There was a ferry to Athens – he checked his fake Rolex – in two hours. He put the pedal to the metal and he was out of there. He had a tiny villa rented as close to the port as he could find. He’d learned the hard way, always have your getaway planned. All he needed was his passport, his Cambridge tie, borrowed (so to speak) from a chap – damn tie opened more doors than his wonderful polished BBC accent – his trusty Gladstone bag, one of the few genuine items he owned – and one of those Moleskine diaries, nicely weathered and one of these days, he might actually jot something down in it. He believed he looked suitably battered, had that climbed the Himalayas and crossed the damn Ganges look. Made him seem like a Bruce Chatwin traveler type. He hadn’t actually read Chatwin, but that hardly mattered. Most of all, he had his stash, the vital element, the get-out-of-town-and-fucking-fast-old-bean dosh.
He wouldn’t have time to get the deposit back on his little scooter, but as he’d paid with a bum credit card, it was kind of poetic justice; and if he did take the time the psycho bitch would be starting to wonder was he making the bloody cigarettes and come looking.
He shivered, seeing her with that cleaver. God he was sweaty, from fear and stress, the golly goshed heat. He liked to be always, in every sense, cool, but a cleaver can change a lot of habits. He’d had to forego taking a shower in his haste to get out, and he promised himself now that he’d book into the King Kronos in Athens, get the penthouse, use his Platinum Visa, only ever taken out for real occasions and Jolly Hockey Sticks, this was one of those times.
He threw his Jermyn Street bespoke shirts, his beloved linen suit and Panama hat (his nod to Somerset Maugham – and, truly, he must read the crusty old bugger someday), and splashed some cologne on. Not too much, a hint darlings, not like the mad Paddy he’d met who seemed to climb into the bottle, not only of Jameson but cologne. He sighed, thinking, The Irish. They had not one ounce of restraint.
He went to get his stash, carefully hidden under the loose tile in the shower. Tipota, Greek for all gone. Not a bean. The bloody hell was this? And a note. A note? Darling, Lest you ever think of running out on me, I’m, shall we say, holding this in trust for you. Xxxxxxx Love you loads
Only one time he’d been a little the worse for wear on the old retsina and allowed her to come back to his place and the cunt, she’d cleaned him out.
He checked his wallet. He had his vital credit cards, his return ticket to Athens, and about 200 Euro.
Move, the voice in his head urged.
He did, and fast.
Angela, waiting for Sebastian to return with the cigs and booze, was on her hands and knees, scrubbing Georgios’ blood, getting a bad case of deja vu. Yes, somehow it felt like she’d been through this before, but the worst part was this time she’d seen it coming. She was driving along the tunnel, the headlights coming right for her, and the idea that maybe she should, like, slow down or, even better, turn around, hadn’t occurred to her. Falling for a British accent of all things. Couldn’t it at least have been an athletic Brit, a David Beckham type? She knew she was posh enough to get any British guy she wanted, but she wound up with fookin’ Sebastian. Honestly, she’d never met a bigger wuss, as you’d call it in America. He was so fooking polite, she was just dying to take him to a few bars she knew in Ireland, introduce him to a few guys she knew, they’d make a man out of him all right.
And what about the way he said “lordy” all the time and wore that God-forsaken safari jacket? He looked like an early victim in an Agatha Christie film, the first annoying bastard who gets bumped off. In bed the other night, he’d started reciting some god awful poem, something about a fookin Zionist. Pluck any drunk off the street in Dublin, he could write a better poem than that shite.
Another thing: Would he open his jaw when he talked? Sometimes she’d have sworn his mouth must be wired shut.
Sebastian was useless, no doubt about it, but right now she needed him, to get out of this mess. After they’d dumped the Greek’s body off the cliff she’d decided they had to clean up every drop of blood from the villa, then take off pronto. One thing Angela knew how to do was run like hell. They both agreed there was no way they could stick around and explain what had happened. The “he raped me and I killed him in self defense” story wouldn’t go over well with Greek cops – after all, nearly chopping off a guy’s head wasn’t exactly like spraying him with mace. She’d taken it a little too far, yeah, so, what else was new?
And where was Sebastian already? She needed ouzo, a whole bottle of it, and how long had he been gone, a half hour already?
The doorbell rang. Finally! What would his excuse be, that he’d soiled his knickers along the way and what a bloody inconvenience it was?
This was the last time she was dating a Brit.
But when she opened the door she saw a woman – dark with almost a full mustache and a unibrow.
“Where is my Georgios?” the woman demanded.