The Messenger of Athens Read online

  The Messenger of Athens

  Anne Zouroudi

  To Jim, whose faith never wavered

  No words were lost on Hermes the Wayfinder

  who bent to tie his beautiful sandals on,

  ambrosial, golden, that carry him over water

  or over endless land in a swish of the wind . . .

  A gull patrolling between the wave crests of the desolate sea

  will dip to catch a fish, and douse his wings;

  no higher above the whitecaps Hermes flew

  until the distant island lay ahead . . .

  Homer, The Odyssey

  Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Prologue

  It was the spring of the year; the air was light and bright, the alpines were in bloom. It was a fine day to be out.

  She had been out there for two days.

  They had found her, at last, but they were not treating her with reverence, or due respect. How could they? Beneath the rising helicopter, she dangled between a soldier’s khaki-trousered legs, arms flung wide like a welcome, her own legs spread, open to them all. The deafening beat of the rotors, amplified and echoing off the canyon walls, killed all talk; but the men of the search party had already fallen into silence, now they were bringing her up. Along the unfenced roadside, in small, sombre groups they waited – soldiers, policemen, civilians – looking across the scree of landslips, down towards the dry, rock-strewn riverbed where she had lain.

  Dropping low over the dirt road, the helicopter hurled out debris: dust, stones, vegetation ripped from its roots. Behind the windscreen of an old, black Toyota, the driver draped his arm around the shoulders of a man with tear-red eyes, who, flinching, turned away his face.

  Shielding his own eyes from the debris, an army officer screamed orders at a group of young soldiers – Line up, four-a-side, line up! – but his words, lost in the roar of the rotating blades, failed to reach them. Running forward, mad with impatience, he seized one of the boys by the arm and dragged him into place, pushing and shoving the boy’s comrades into the two rows he had planned.

  Catch her as she comes down, he shouted. And don’t screw up!

  They didn’t hear him. They pulled faces and made obscene gestures at his back. New National Service conscripts, hair shorn grey and muscles still soft, they stood in two shambolic rows, hearts racing and self-conscious, arms outstretched to receive her.

  Due respect, they had been told. Due reverence.

  The other men looked on.

  She began her descent. The wide canvas sling beneath her underarms set her at an angle, so her spread legs came first. At once, the boy soldiers were confounded: how to look up to receive her and not look up her skirt? Due respect, after all. But as she descended, the storm of whirling dust grew worse, more distracting. Snorting dirt from their nostrils, spitting grit into the road, when her legs came within their reach, none of them noticed. Above them, the winch man was yelling: Get hold of her, you cretins! They didn’t hear him. Then her legs were before their faces, changing their dilemma – no longer how not to look up her skirt, but how ever again to think of a woman’s legs without seeing these: the glistening of protruding, splintered bone, the foot angled bafflingly to the shin, the livid bruising spread over the yellow-tainted skin, the heaviness of purple at the backs of thighs and calves where her blood had pooled.

  Steeling themselves to touch dead flesh, they took the weight. Her naked arms were cold, no worse than that. Preparing to remove the sling, they were coping, and confident that they had borne the worst. Then, the two boys at her head saw their mistake: her eyes were not closed as they had thought, but gone, eaten. Shrieking, they pulled their hands from under her. Her head snapped back. The officer, who had placed himself at a suitable distance, moved his mouth in curses they couldn’t hear; running forward, he bullied the gagging boys back into place, putting her head in their hands as the others struggled to free her from the sling.

  It was done. The officer signalled to the helicopter crew, who winched up their man and slewed away, upwards and to the south, out towards open sea.

  The silence in the helicopter’s wake seemed profound. Unprepared for the sudden quiet, the men coughed, ground out cigarettes, looked around. Some action was expected of them. She was here; now what? The boy soldiers held her at their waists, faces averted and grimacing.

  Stepping up to the army officer, the Chief of Police brushed dust from the sleeves of his jacket and smoothed his hair. Now the air was clearing, the nauseating smell of her began to drift over them. Flies came from nowhere to settle on her face.

  ‘Who’ll take her down?’ asked the army officer. He knew their superstitions and beliefs, and the local taboos.

  ‘I’ll ask Lakis.’

  Lakis, the Cretan, an outsider. Any job for cash. The Chief of Police beckoned to the tall, balding man standing beside a white pick-up and gestured – towards the corpse, towards the vehicle, a twist of the hand to ask the question in the silent language of the Greeks. Lakis bowed his head, Yes.

  The army officer signalled to the boy soldiers. Staggering to the tailgate, they slid her into the truck, face-up on its dirty floor.

  The Chief of Police called out to a black-robed priest – a young man, heavily bearded – who sat on a rock, smoking a thin, untidily rolled cigarette. The priest stood, flicking ash from the skirt of his robe. Approaching the pick-up, he looked in at her, and reached over the side to fold her arms across her breast. He raised his hand and made, slowly, the triple cross of the Orthodox church. Lowering their heads, the men all signed the same symbol, over their hearts.

  Lakis took his seat behind the wheel. Hitching up his robes, the priest climbed in beside him, followed by the Chief of Police. Slowly, they moved away down the mountainside; one by one, the trucks, cars and jeeps of the search party followed.

  It was no time for humour, but as he put the truck in gear Lakis could not resist a crude remark about the smell she brought with her; before they had reached the first bend in the road, the Cretan, the priest and the Chief of Police were all laughing.

  One

  Early morning, and a sombre sky. The sea, stirred to sand slurry by a bitter wind, had turned opaque. The tyres of the slow-moving garbage truck spread wide the pools of overnight rain; water ran through rusted guttering on to the steps of the National Bank and dripped on to the tables of the deserted fish market. On the café terrace, a stooping woman swept at wet leaves falling from a plane tree; in the church tower, a solitary bell tolled for mass. The small boats at their moorings rocked and tipped, pulling at their ropes. Beyond the headland, the horn-blast of the approaching ferry was lost in the rain-heavy squall.

  On the upper deck, leaning on the railing which overlooked the stern, was a stranger, a fat man. He had stood there since the dim dawn had given enough light to show the dark sea passing beneath them, watching the foaming wake rise and fall away, waiting for the first view of their destination. From time to time, he took a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of the raincoat which flapped around his thighs, and smoked, the cigarettes burning down fast in the gusting wind; t
o every vessel he sighted he raised a friendly hand, as if acquainted.

  As the boat docked, he did not join the small, impatient crowd waiting below for the ramp to drop, but waited, watching, as the passengers pushed on to the quayside.

  A crewman, probing with a screwdriver into the workings of an anchor winch, called out to him.

  ‘End of the line, friend.’

  The fat man smiled.

  ‘Good day to you, then,’ he said, and, picking up the holdall at his feet, made his way down the iron staircase and on to the quay below.

  He stood apart, sheltering from the rain under the portico of a butcher’s shop. He smelt blood, and chlorine bleach. The crowed thinned, shouting greetings and goodbyes, carrying away its strapped-up suitcases, its bags of groceries, its badly behaved children, its crates of fruit. Then the crowd was gone, and he was alone.

  He stepped out from the shelter of the portico into the rain.

  He had, at first, no clear idea of where he would find them; but they gave themselves away. At the harbour’s end, in the lee of the high sea wall, a dozen vehicles were haphazardly parked; amongst them, almost hidden, was a car in their distinctive livery. As he drew close, the car’s white signage became clear: Astinomia. Police.

  The stone face of the building to his left was alive with flourishing, pale-trumpeted convolvulus; and there, wrapped around with tendrils, obscured by greenery, he found their sign – POLICE – and an arrow angled upwards, following the long line of a slender stone staircase.

  The fat man ran, quite lightly, to the top of the steps, where he faced a heavy, unmarked door. He pulled it open and walked through.

  Their office, grand in its proportions, was austere. The plaster coving beneath the lofty ceiling was ornate; but the unvarnished boards of the floor were bare, and dotted with hammer-bent tacks, as if some covering, carpeting or linoleum had been ripped out and not replaced. They might have moved in only yesterday, or be leaving tomorrow; or they might have been there for years, without caring or noticing that there were no blinds to cover the cracked panes in the high, narrow windows which looked out across the sea, no lampshade on the naked light-bulb swinging from its long length of flex in the draught from the door, no filing cabinets, no procedural manuals, no posters or notices pinned to the pale walls, no chairs for visitors to sit on as they made their complaints.

  He stood at the centre of the room and placed his holdall carefully at his feet, as if it might contain something fragile. The three policemen watched him, silent and unwelcoming, as if he had intruded at a crucial moment on some private conversation. The undersized man at the utilitarian, steel-topped desk behind the door (whose uniform, too large, diminished him further) tapped the lead of a blunt, chewed pencil on the desktop, setting a slow rhythm for the lengthening silence. His eyes moved from the fat man to the door, as if he planned to leave the moment an opportunity arose; the contents of his desk – a stapler, an ink-pad, a rubber stamp, nothing more – did not suggest there was anything to detain him here. Across from him, a broad-set man, bull-headed, heavy-jowled, with thick, white hair and comical, dark eyebrows, leaned his elbows on a similar desk, similarly empty: three ballpoint pens, all neatly capped, two opened letters in their envelopes, and an ancient Bakelite phone, whose plaited cord ran down between his feet and out through a hole drilled through the skirting at his back. His wet, red lips were slack, implying a bovine slowness and plodding wits. When the fat man entered, he shifted so his jacket’s upper arm – embroidered in silver with a sergeant’s chevrons – was forward, towards the fat man, ensuring that his rank would not be missed.

  And at the back of the room, so far from the windows that the light was weak and the room was left in shadow, sat the third. He stretched his slender legs, crossed at the ankles, through the knee-hole of a capacious antique desk, between two ranks of small, brass-handled drawers with tiny locks. To left and right the desk held stacks of paperwork – cardboard files, blank forms, forms filled out and signed in duplicate and triplicate, applications for licences, parking tickets, violation-of-permit notices, summonses, dockets, memos, letters, business cards, candy-striped computer printouts – and on the floorboards all around his feet were piled more files, their spines bearing dates, or numbers, or names. At the centre of the desk, lying on the worn, gold-tooled leather, one file, closed, with a name handwritten in dense, black capitals: ASIMAKOPOULOS. And from between the stacks of paperwork, like a rat peering out from a hole, he watched the fat man, the skin of his face eerily pale in the shadows, the deep black of his narrowed eyes and clipped moustache stark as ink drawn on white paper.

  The dark eyes looked the fat man up and down, taking in his bulk, admiring his suit – both the cut of it, which flattered his bulk, and the cloth, a fine, grey mohair of such quality that, as the fat man moved, it shimmered with a lavender sheen. The eyes approved of the sports shirt the fat man wore beneath the suit – rich purple, with a small, green crocodile over the left breast. They noted that the waistband of his trousers was belted with Italian leather. But the grey curls of the fat man’s hair were too long, and the prominent frames of his glasses were unfashionable, and dated. And his shoes, his shoes were baffling. For who but an eccentric, with such a marvellously tailored suit, would wear tennis shoes – old-fashioned, white canvas tennis shoes?

  The fat man looked round at them all, and smiled.

  The sergeant sat up straight in his chair, and shook the sleeve of his jacket so that the stripes lay flat on his arm.

  ‘May I help you, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m here to see the Chief of Police.’ The fat man’s accent was clear, and well-bred. All his words were beautifully enunciated, like newscaster’s Greek; such clarity of speech told them he was not from these islands, nor from anywhere within two hundred miles of their boundaries.

  ‘I am the Chief of Police.’ The man in the shadows spoke quietly, but with arrogance. He pulled his legs in beneath his chair, and he too sat up straight.

  The fat man stepped over his holdall and crossed the room to stand before the overladen desk. He held out his hand. His manicured fingernails were filed square, whitened at the tips and buffed almost opaque.

  ‘My name,’ he said, ‘is Hermes Diaktoros. I have been sent from Athens to help you in your investigations into the death of Irini Asimakopoulos.’

  The constable behind the door dropped his pencil. It rattled on the floorboards, then rolled, as if making its escape, towards the door.

  The Chief of Police, leaning forward to take the fat man’s hand, hesitated. The undersized constable jumped up from his chair to pick up his pencil, and the Chief of Police glared at him. Then he took the fat man’s hand, and shook it, firmly, and pursed his lips as if about to speak. But he said nothing.

  So the fat man went on. ‘I expect you’re surprised at my name: Hermes Messenger. My father’s idea of humour. He was a classical scholar.’

  The Chief of Police still didn’t speak. He had no idea what the fat man was talking about. The constable, back in his chair, tapped his pencil on his desk.

  ‘I call these my winged sandals.’ The fat man pointed to his tennis shoes, beaming at the joke. There was silence.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the fat man to the Chief of Police, ‘I didn’t catch your name.’

  ‘Panayiotis Zafiridis,’ said the Chief of Police. He indicated the bovine sergeant: ‘Harris Chadiarakis’ – and the undersized constable – ‘Dmitris Xanthos.’

  ‘A pleasure,’ said the fat man.

  The Chief of Police leaned forward across his desk.

  ‘Why are the Metropolitan Police interested in Mrs Asimakopoulos’s death?’ he asked. ‘It was in no way suspicious. I’m afraid you have wasted your time coming all this way. Perhaps if you had telephoned first I could have saved you the journey.’ He shrugged, and put on an expression of regret. ‘Your problem, now, is there’s no ferry out till tomorrow.’ He hesitated as if thinking, then pointed to the phone on the ser
geant’s desk. ‘Maybe we could requisition the coastguard launch to take you to Kos this evening. There is someone in their office who owes me a favour. You’ll get a flight to Athens from there with no problem at all. Harris, get me the Port Police Office.’

  The sergeant’s hand went to the phone’s receiver, but the fat man turned to stop him.

  ‘Just a moment, please,’ he said. He looked back at the Chief of Police. ‘Where is the body?’ he asked, in a low voice.

  The pencil tapping became faster.

  The Chief of Police reached, frowning, for a notepad and a plastic ballpoint pen.

  ‘Who has informed the Metropolitan Police of this death?’ he asked, scribbling with the pen until the ink began to flow. He sounded concerned. ‘I believe we should take action in this matter. Wasting police time is a serious offence.’

  The fat man stepped forward and, placing the fingertips of both hands on the Chief of Police’s desk, leaned towards him.

  ‘We were talking about the body,’ said the fat man. ‘I’d like to see it as soon as possible. Then I can get on with my investigation.’

  The pencil tapping ceased. The Chief of Police considered for a moment, then spread his hands.

  ‘She was buried yesterday,’ he said. ‘There was no reason to delay. As I’ve said, the death was in no way suspicious.’

  ‘It matters not,’ said the fat man, easily. ‘I’ll make do with the autopsy report.’

  Simultaneously, the sergeant and the constable opened drawers in their desks, found pieces of paper there and began to read.

  ‘May I sit down?’ asked the fat man, politely.

  Sighing, the Chief of Police stood, and from the darkness of the corner behind him, lifted out a cane-bottomed chair.

  ‘Thank you,’ said the fat man, placing it at an angle to the policeman’s desk and sitting down. ‘I wonder if you might have an ashtray I could use?’