Mavros looked at them and then nodded. He’d been made another offer he couldn’t refuse.
SEVEN
The Kerstens gave Mavros a money-belt filled from with cash from their safe. It made him look like he had a pot belly.
‘Are you sure you trust me with this?’
Rudolf looked at him unwaveringly. ‘I’m sure. I can’t send anyone from the hotel staff with you in case they recognize my grandson. We do have a standing on the island.’
Mavros nodded, wondering if now was a good time to ask about the wartime atrocities he’d heard about from Waggoner. He decided against it, not fully trusting the former SOE agent.
‘I’ll think of something,’ he said, wondering if he would.
‘Oskar often goes to that bar, the Black Eagle, behind the old harbour,’ Hildegard said.
Mavros had a feeling he’d been there with his brother-in-law. In any case, it was only a few minutes’ walk from Anna and Nondas’s flat. He wondered if Barba-Yannis would still be awake — it would be an opportunity to get the keys.
‘Anything else I should know?’ he asked.
The Kerstens exchanged a glance. ‘Well,’ Rudolf said, ‘Oskar got involved with a far-right group back in Germany after he left school. It’s possible some might be out here with him. He. . he also has contacts with a group of extremist Greeks.’
Whence the skinheads, Mavros thought. Neo-Nazis and bonkers Greek hyper-patriots. Were they worth it for a thousand euros? Definitely not, though there was no harm in checking Oskar Mesner out. Maybe he’d be on his own in the corner of the bar nursing a small bottle of lager.
‘I have. . I have weapons,’ Kersten said.
‘World War Two relics or something more modern?’ Mavros asked, unable to restrain himself.
‘I have nothing from the war,’ the old man said in a low voice.
‘No, thanks,’ Mavros said firmly. Like his father and brother, he was opposed to violence in all forms except verbal. It was said on the Left that both Spyros and Andonis would have risen even higher than they did in the resistance movements they were engaged in if they had sanctioned the use of armed revolution.
‘Here,’ Kersten said, giving him a folded piece of paper. ‘This note tells Oskar that this is the last money he will receive from me. Please give it to him after you get the coins back.’
‘One of us will be awake all night,’ Kersten said, with a soft smile. ‘We have great faith in you, young man.’
Mavros wished them goodnight, inordinately happy to be called ‘young’ when he was forty-one. Maybe it was the long hair.
Renzo Capaldi was hovering outside the private door, looking like a giant who was about to be thrown out of his castle for eating the furniture.
‘Mr Mavros, is there anything I can do?’
‘I don’t know. Dance Swan Lake?’
It was as he approached the main door that the thought struck him. He looked in his pocket and found the car-hire company card, then pressed out the number on his mobile.
‘Is Mikis around?’ he asked the woman who answered. ‘I’m with the film crew at the Heavenly Blue and I’d like him to pick me up?’
‘Now?’
‘Would that be a problem?’
‘Not unless he’s hitting the beers, which he better not be.’ The woman laughed. ‘I’m his mother.’
Mavros wondered if Mrs Tsifaki had biceps like her son’s.
‘No, it’s all right,’ she said after a pause. ‘He was watching the basketball. He’ll be with you in under ten minutes, Mr. .?’
‘Mavros.’
‘Black by name, not black by nature, I hope?’
‘Only occasionally.’
Mikis turned up in the same Jeep.
‘Where are we going?’ he said, after greeting his passenger.
‘Centre of Chania. Sorry to drag you away from the basketball.’
‘Nah, it’s rubbish. Opium of the people.’
Mavros turned to him. ‘That’s not exactly what I expected to hear from a guy who spends his time servicing Hollywood capitalists.’
Mikis laughed. ‘I’m not a member of the party or anything, but I like some of the things Marx said.’
‘Yeah, so do I,’ Mavros agreed. He’d never had any interest in joining the Communists or any other party, despite his father’s decades of underground service. He’d never been sure why, but it was probably because he didn’t like authoritarian structures. According to the Fat Man, it was because he didn’t care about his fellow men and women, something he tried to disprove in his work. It was an ideology of sorts.
‘I’ve got to pick up some keys and then deliver something,’ he said to Mikis. ‘You’re not rushing off anywhere?’ It had occurred to him that having the burly Cretan at his side might be useful if Oskar was with his friends.
‘Whatever you want. It’s the production company’s bill.’
Driving around the old town of Chania at night, even during the early part of the tourist season, was less than straightforward. Mikis dropped Mavros as near Barba-Yannis’s place as he could; they’d arranged to meet outside the Black Eagle twenty minutes later.
Mavros knocked on a neatly painted blue door, encouraged by the sound of a television inside. The door opened and a wizened old man with a spectacular moustache looked up at him. Even at night he was wearing the vraka, though he had taken off his high boots.
‘Is that you, young Alex?’ he asked, squinting.
Twice in one night, Mavros thought. Once more and I’ll turn back into a student. He shook the old man’s hand and asked him how he was.
‘Better than I ought to be. I was ninety last month, you know.’
Mavros passed on greetings from Nondas and Anna, then said he was in a hurry — he’d call back to see the caretaker at a more civilized time.
‘Civilized?’ the old man cackled. ‘This is the best time of the day. The TV’s full of girls in their underwear. Have you ever called one of those numbers?’
Swallowing laughter and taking the keys, Mavros headed down the narrow street to the flat. It was on the second and third floors of one of the Venetian houses that had escaped the German bombing before and during the Battle of Crete. Inside it was cool, the furniture covered in sheets. There were cockroach traps all over the place. He considered taking a knife from the kitchen or leaving the money there, but decided the presence of Mikis would be enough to keep things calm.
He locked up after himself and stowed the heavy keys in his jacket pocket. The Black Eagle was round a couple of corners and a hundred paces nearer the harbour. Although it was past midnight, music was playing from all directions and the yells of drunks rang out regularly. Mavros remembered what David Waggoner had said about the Cretan deal with the devil — it sounded like the demons were loose tonight, and it was still only May.
He saw Mikis in a doorway about ten metres from the tables outside the bar.
‘What’s up?’ he asked.
‘I don’t think you want to go in there,’ the Cretan said. ‘It’s full of shaven-headed shitheads, the kind who think Hitler was a god. There are Germans and Greeks. The latter call themselves the Cretan Renaissance.’ He laughed harshly. ‘They wouldn’t know a renaissance if it performed colonic irrigation on them.’
Mavros laughed, then went closer and glanced inside. The back of the bar was full of shouting yobs, one of whom was Oskar Mesner. The question was, how to lure him out on his own?
From The Descent of Icarus:
We got our toe in the door at Maleme and over the next couple of days the Auntie Jus landed mountain troops in large numbers. There were plenty of planes hit as they came in to land or took off at their excruciatingly slow speed, but our forces were mustering. Captain Blatter had several RAF men shot for refusing to assist in shifting damaged aircraft from the runway. I felt sick the whole time, going about my duties like a machine. Wachter kept away from me and I was sure he had told the other men about my failure to fire. Cowards were not countenanced in the ranks of paratroopers, so I was left alone.