was Athens, and from here it looped its way from glittering capital to glittering capital in a tangle of telegraph and telephone wires. He’d made discreet use of these people and what he suspected was their leaking sieve of an organisation. They were eager to help. And they’d found exactly what he was looking for in London.
London. The irony pleased him.
When he was sure he was not overlooked, Soulios sat down again, ordered some more tea, and took from his wallet another photograph. He placed it over the first. Dark brown with weathering and much use, the subject was barely distinguishable. Three dark heads close together, six bright eyes, a white streak which might have been a pearl necklace around a slim throat. Three innocents dead.
But it would take four lives to pay the bill.
His loving eyes made out the fading features with painful clarity. His wife, his six-year-old son, and his two-year-old daughter. Their image was still there, etched forever on his mind, as, clasped in each other’s arms with not even a burial sack to cover their dead faces, livid and lost, they sank slowly beneath the grey waters of the Bosphorus.
Chapter 5
October 1928. Athens
.
I n an ancient scoop of land, a sheltered hollow on the southern slope of the Acropolis where the rock was still warm from the day, a man’s scream ripped through the gathering darkness.
The scream followed the unmistakable sound of a blade thrusting into flesh.
For a few seconds all other sounds were pushed to the edges of perception; the rumble of traffic, the pealing of a cracked church bell, the squabbling of a pair of birds were discounted by everyone within earshot as listeners strained to make sense of what they’d heard.
It came again, the same butcher’s blow, accompanied this time by a grunt of effort. A second piercing shriek of surprise and outrage turned abruptly into a guttural rasping: the gargle of a dying man whose lungs refuse to function, whose air passages are filling with blood. And yet the unseen victim went on fighting to snatch one more breath.
The Little Summer of Saint Demetrios had settled over Greece, smiling a blessing. It looked as though they were to have a gentle October. But the harsh heat of the past months lingered on in the citizens’ minds, a recent and scorchingmemory. The memory was too easily triggered by a glance upwards to the contorted shapes of trees outlining the hills and the occasional whiff of charcoal carried down on the breeze. September rain had quenched the sporadic fires and already underbrush was shooting fresh and green amongst the blackened stumps, a premature taste of spring.
As the sun set, the evening sky began to flush with the grey-purple light that the slopes of Mount Hymettus bounce back with some optical witchery to stain the heavens for a few moments over the city. Athens, the violet-crowned, was settling gratefully for the night under a single silken sheet.
It should have been a moment of deep peace but, somewhere just out of sight, a man was screaming in his death throes.
A grey shape, hooded and masked, detached itself from a crowd of similar grey shapes standing frozen in horrified tableau within yards of the butchery, and with a wide gesture called for silence. “Quiet!” The voice was deep and authoritative. The crowd stopped its murmuring at once. And then the same voice came again: “There’s been murder done here!” The comment was sepulchral in meaning and delivered with an awed intensity, yet it was so superfluous, following the blatantly obvious nature of the assault, that it risked provoking an explosion of nervous laughter from two women who were sitting at ease on the hillside, listening, a short distance away.
This was no time for levity. The dying man’s pain was evident to all who heard it; his dogged refusal to surrender to whatever horror was staring him in the face aroused a sympathetic agony. A third slicing blow and a low gurgling sob had them twitching in
London. The irony pleased him.
When he was sure he was not overlooked, Soulios sat down again, ordered some more tea, and took from his wallet another photograph. He placed it over the first. Dark brown with weathering and much use, the subject was barely distinguishable. Three dark heads close together, six bright eyes, a white streak which might have been a pearl necklace around a slim throat. Three innocents dead.
But it would take four lives to pay the bill.
His loving eyes made out the fading features with painful clarity. His wife, his six-year-old son, and his two-year-old daughter. Their image was still there, etched forever on his mind, as, clasped in each other’s arms with not even a burial sack to cover their dead faces, livid and lost, they sank slowly beneath the grey waters of the Bosphorus.
Chapter 5
October 1928. Athens
.
I n an ancient scoop of land, a sheltered hollow on the southern slope of the Acropolis where the rock was still warm from the day, a man’s scream ripped through the gathering darkness.
The scream followed the unmistakable sound of a blade thrusting into flesh.
For a few seconds all other sounds were pushed to the edges of perception; the rumble of traffic, the pealing of a cracked church bell, the squabbling of a pair of birds were discounted by everyone within earshot as listeners strained to make sense of what they’d heard.
It came again, the same butcher’s blow, accompanied this time by a grunt of effort. A second piercing shriek of surprise and outrage turned abruptly into a guttural rasping: the gargle of a dying man whose lungs refuse to function, whose air passages are filling with blood. And yet the unseen victim went on fighting to snatch one more breath.
The Little Summer of Saint Demetrios had settled over Greece, smiling a blessing. It looked as though they were to have a gentle October. But the harsh heat of the past months lingered on in the citizens’ minds, a recent and scorchingmemory. The memory was too easily triggered by a glance upwards to the contorted shapes of trees outlining the hills and the occasional whiff of charcoal carried down on the breeze. September rain had quenched the sporadic fires and already underbrush was shooting fresh and green amongst the blackened stumps, a premature taste of spring.
As the sun set, the evening sky began to flush with the grey-purple light that the slopes of Mount Hymettus bounce back with some optical witchery to stain the heavens for a few moments over the city. Athens, the violet-crowned, was settling gratefully for the night under a single silken sheet.
It should have been a moment of deep peace but, somewhere just out of sight, a man was screaming in his death throes.
A grey shape, hooded and masked, detached itself from a crowd of similar grey shapes standing frozen in horrified tableau within yards of the butchery, and with a wide gesture called for silence. “Quiet!” The voice was deep and authoritative. The crowd stopped its murmuring at once. And then the same voice came again: “There’s been murder done here!” The comment was sepulchral in meaning and delivered with an awed intensity, yet it was so superfluous, following the blatantly obvious nature of the assault, that it risked provoking an explosion of nervous laughter from two women who were sitting at ease on the hillside, listening, a short distance away.
This was no time for levity. The dying man’s pain was evident to all who heard it; his dogged refusal to surrender to whatever horror was staring him in the face aroused a sympathetic agony. A third slicing blow and a low gurgling sob had them twitching in
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