Solo
Jack Higgins
The timeless Higgins classic, available in ebook format for the first time.In the depths of a cavernous of concert hall, a gifted psychopath plots and waits, his thoughts on nothing but music and murder. He kills for pleasure, constantly searching, and with a brand new target in his sights, his mind spirals once again into torture and violence.But this time, he has chosen the wrong victim; the teenage daughter of one of the most feared and respected SAS soldiers known; a man with more training and advanced killer instinct than even himself.Now, the hunt is on. As soldier stalks maestro for a brutal vengeance, one attempts to outsmart the other in a deadly game of cunning, skill, and bloody expertise, building to a nerve-shattering climax.
Jack Higgins
Solo
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Solo was first published in the UK by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd in 1980 and later by Pan Books in 1981. This amazing novel has been out of print for some years, and in 2009, it seemed to the author and his publishers that it was a pity to leave such a good story languishing on his shelves. So we are delighted to be able to bring back Solo for the pleasure of the vast majority of us who never had a chance to read the earlier editions.
Dedication
For my daughter
Ruth Patterson,
Who thinks it’s about time.
Epigraph
Revenge is a kind of wild justice.
Francis Bacon
Contents
Cover (#ulink_b1a8b4fb-84e5-5cab-a327-77d50385bc50)
Title Page
Publisher’s Note
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
The Cretan turned in through the gate in the high,…
1
Some forty sea miles south from Athens and less than…
2
The British Secret Intelligence Service, known more correctly as DI5,…
3
But in Belfast that day, extraordinary things had been happening…
4
By evening Morgan had reached Leeds. He left the city…
5
Baker stood in front of the fire, warming himself as…
6
Katherine Riley was having lunch in her study at the…
7
The Europa Hotel in Belfast stands in Great Victoria Street,…
8
Harvey Jago inspected himself carefully in the bathroom mirror. In…
9
Not that any of it mattered for at the very…
10
It was raining heavily in the first grey light of…
11
At Heathrow, it was just three-thirty as Katherine Riley hurried…
12
For most of his seventy-two years George Ghika had been…
13
Morgan was tramping over the mountain on his way home…
14
It was almost six o’clock when Kim answered the ring…
15
In the Green Room behind the stage at the Albert…
16
Harry Baker was talking to a uniformed inspector in the…
About the Author
Other Books by Jack Higgins
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
The Cretan turned in through the gate in the high, brick wall surrounding the house near Regent’s Park, stepped into the shrubbery, merging with the shadows. He glanced at the luminous dial of his watch. Ten minutes to seven, which meant he had a little time in hand.
He was wearing a dark anorak from one pocket of which he produced a Mauser with a bulbous silencer on the end of the barrel. He checked the action and slipped it back into his pocket.
The house was imposing enough, which was only to be expected for it was owned by Maxwell Jacob Cohen – Max Cohen to his friends. Amongst other things, chairman of the largest clothing manufacturers in the world, one of the most influential Jews in British society. A man loved and respected by everyone who knew him.
Unfortunately, he was also an ardent Zionist, a considerable disadvantage in the eyes of certain people. Not that it bothered the Cretan. Politics were a nonsense. Games for children. He never queried the target, only the details and in this case he’d checked them thoroughly. There was Cohen, his wife and the maid – no one else. The rest of the servants lived out.
He took a black balaclava helmet from his pocket, which he pulled over his head, leaving only his eyes, nose and mouth exposed, then he pulled up the hood of the anorak, stepped out of the shrubbery and moved towards the house.
Maria, the Cohens’ Spanish maid, was in the living-room when the doorbell rang. When she opened it, she received the shock of her life. The phantom before her held a pistol in his right hand. When the lips moved in the obscene slash in the woollen helmet, he spoke somewhat hoarsely in English with a heavy foreign accent.
‘Take me to Mr Cohen.’ Maria opened her mouth to protest. The pistol was extended menacingly as the Cretan stepped inside and closed the door behind him. ‘Quickly now, if you want to live.’
The girl turned to go up the stairs and the Cretan followed. As they moved along the landing, the bedroom door opened and Mrs Cohen appeared. She had lived with the fear of this kind of thing for some years now, saw Maria, the hooded man, the gun, and in a reflex action, jumped back instantly into the bedroom. She slammed and locked the door then ran to the telephone and dialled nine-nine-nine.
The Cretan pushed Maria on. The maid stumbled, losing a shoe, then paused at the door of her master’s study. She hesitated, then knocked.
Max Cohen answered with some surprise, for it was a strict house rule that he must never be disturbed in his study before eight in the evening. He was aware of Maria standing there, one shoe off, terror on her face and then she was pulled to one side and the Cretan appeared, the silenced gun in his hand. It coughed once.
Max Cohen had been a boxer in his youth and for a moment, it was like being back in the ring. A good solid punch in the face that knocked him clean off his feet. And then he was on his back in the study.
His lips tried to form the words of that most common of Hebrew prayers recited by any Jew, the last prayer he utters in death. Hear, O Israel. The Lord our God, the Lord is one. But the words refused to come and the light was fading very fast now and then there was only darkness.
As the Cretan ran out of the front door the first police car to answer the call turned in at the end of the street and he could hear others approaching fast. He darted across the garden into the shadows and clambered over a wall into another garden. Finally he opened a gate to let himself out into a narrow lane a few moments later. He pulled down his hood, removed the balaclava helmet and hurried away.
Already, his description, obtained from the maid by the crew of the first police car on the scene, was being transmitted over the radio. Not that it mattered. A couple of hundred yards and he would be lost in the greenness of Regent’s Park. Straight across to the underground station on the other side, change at Oxford Circus.
He started to cross the road, there was a squeal of brakes. A voice called, ‘Hey, you!’
It was a police car, one quick glance told him that, and then he dodged into the nearest side street and started to run. His luck, as always, was good for as he ran along the line of parked cars, he saw a man up ahead getting into one. The door slammed, the engine started.
The Cretan wrenched the door open, dragged the driver out head first and jumped behind the wheel. He gunned the motor, swinging the wheel, crumpling the nearside wing on the car parked in front, and drove away quickly as the police car roared up the street after him.
He cut across Vale Road into Paddington. He didn’t have long if he was to lose them, he knew that, because in seconds every police car in that part of London would be converging on the area, sealing it up tight.
There was a road works sign, an arrow pointing to the right which didn’t give him much choice. A one-way street between warehouses, narrow and dark, leading down to Paddington Goods Station.
The police car was close now – too close. He increased speed and saw that he was entering a long narrow tunnel under the railway line, then he noticed a figure up ahead.
It was a girl on a bicycle. A young girl, in a brown duffel coat, a striped scarf around her neck. He was conscious of her white frightened face as she glanced over her shoulder. The machine wobbled.
He swung the wheel, scraping the nearside wing against the tunnel wall so that sparks flew. It was no good. There just wasn’t the room. There was a dull thud, no more than that and then she bounced to one side off the bonnet of the car.
The police car braked to a halt sharply. The Cretan kept on going, straight out of the end of the tunnel into Bishops Bridge Road.
Five minutes later he dumped the car in a side street in Bayswater, crossed the Bayswater Road and walked briskly through the trees across Kensington Gardens, emerging at Queen’s Gate.
There was quite a crowd when he crossed to the Albert Hall and a queue up the steps to the box office, for there was an important concert that night. The Vienna Philharmonic doing the St Anthony Chorale by Brahms with John Mikali playing Rachmaninov’s Concerto No. 2 in C minor.
21 July 1972. The Cretan lit a cigarette and examined the picture of Mikali on the poster, the famous one with the dark, curly hair, the pale face, the eyes like clear black glass.
He walked round to the rear of the building. One of the doors had an illuminated sign over it which said Artists. He entered. A doorkeeper, in his booth, glanced up from his sports paper and smiled.
‘Evening, sir, cold tonight.’
‘I’ve known worse,’ the Cretan said.
He descended to the corridor leading to the back of the stage. There was a door marked Green Room. He opened it and switched on the light. It was surprisingly spacious as dressing rooms went and reasonably furnished. The only thing which had visibly seen better days was the practice piano against the wall, an old upright Chappell which looked in imminent danger of collapse.
He took the Mauser from his pocket, opened a dressing case, removed the base panel and stuffed the Mauser inside out of sight. Then he took off his anorak, tossed it into the corner and sat down in front of the dressing mirror.
There was a knock on the door and the stage manager looked in. ‘You’ve got forty-five minutes, Mr Mikali. Can I get them to bring you some coffee?’
‘No, thank you,’ John Mikali said. ‘Coffee and I don’t agree. Some chemical thing, my doctor tells me. But if you could manage a pot of tea, I’d be most grateful.’
‘Certainly, sir.’ The stage manager, on his way out again, paused. ‘By the way, if you’re interested, there’s just been a newsflash on the radio. Someone’s shot Maxwell Cohen at his house near Regent’s Park. Hooded man. Got clean away.’
‘Good God,’ Mikali said.
‘The police think it’s political, Mr Cohen being such a well-known Zionist. He only escaped death by a miracle last year, from that letter bomb someone sent him.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s a funny kind of world we live in, Mr Mikali. What kind of man would do a thing like that?’
He went out and Mikali turned and looked in the mirror. He smiled slightly and his reflection smiled back.
‘Well?’ he said.
1
Some forty sea miles south from Athens and less than five from the coast of the Peloponnese, lies the island of Hydra, once one of the most formidable maritime powers in the Mediterranean.
From the middle of the eighteenth century many ships’ captains amassed huge fortunes trading as far as America, and Venetian architects were brought in to build large mansions which may still be seen to this day in that most beautiful of all ports.
Later, as Greece suffered under the harsh regime of the Ottoman Empire and the island became a haven for mainland refugees, it was the sailors of Hydra who challenged the might of the Turkish Navy in the War of Independence that finally brought national freedom.
To a Greek, the names of those great Hydriot sea captains, Votzis, Tombazis, Boudouris, have the same magic as John Paul Jones for an American, Raleigh and Drake to the English.
Amongst those names, none had a more honourable place than Mikali. The family had prospered as blockade runners when Nelson commanded in the Eastern Mediterranean, had provided four ships for the allied fleet which had crushed the might of the Turkish Empire once and for all at the Battle of Navarino in 1827.
The fortune that was the result of the piracy and the blockade running of the Turkish wars, shrewdly invested in a number of newly developed shipping lines, meant that by the end of the nineteenth century the Mikalis were one of the wealthiest families in Greece.
And the men were all seafarers by nature, except for Dimitri, born in 1892, who showed an unhealthy interest in books, attended Oxford and the Sorbonne and came home only to take up a post as Lecturer in Moral Philosophy at the University of Athens.
His son, George, soon restored the family honour. He opted to attend the School of Merchant Marine at Hydra, the oldest of its kind in Greece. A brilliant and gifted seaman, he held his first command at the age of twenty-two. In 1938, restless for fresh horizons, he moved to California to take command of a new passenger cargo ship for the Pacific Star line, working the San Francisco–Tokyo run.
Money meant nothing to him. His father had deposited one hundred thousand dollars to his account in a San Francisco bank, a considerable sum in those days. What he did, he did because he wanted to do it. He had his ship, the sea. Only one thing was lacking and he found that in Mary Fuller, the daughter of a high school music teacher, a widow named Agnes Fuller, whom he met at a dance in Oakland in July 1939.
His father came over for the wedding, bought the young couple a house by the sea in Pescadero and returned to a Europe where gunfire already rumbled like thunder on the horizon.
George Mikali was half-way to Japan when the Italians invaded Greece. By the time his ship had made the round trip and docked in San Francisco again, the German Army had taken a hand. By 1 May 1941, Hitler, by intervening to save Mussolini’s face, had overrun Yugoslavia and Greece and driven out the British Army, all in twenty-five days and for the loss of fewer than five thousand casualties.
For George Mikali there was no way home and from his father there was only silence, and then came that Sunday in December when Nagumo’s strike force left Pearl Harbor a smoking ruin.
By February, Mikali was in San Diego taking command of a transport and supply ship not much different from his own. Two weeks later his wife, after three years of ill-health and miscarriages, gave birth to a son.
Mikali could be spared for only three days. In that time he persuaded his mother-in-law, now a high school principal, to move into his home on a permanent basis, and tracked down the widow of a Greek seaman who had served under him and had lost his life in a typhoon off the Japanese coast.
She was aged forty, a solid, heavily built woman named Katina Pavlo, a Cretan by birth, who had been working as a maid in a waterfront hotel.
He took her home to meet his wife and his mother-in-law. In her black dress and headscarf she had seemed to them an alien figure, this short, stocky, peasant woman, yet Agnes Fuller had found herself strangely drawn to her.
As for Katina Pavlo, barren through eighteen years of marriage, her prayers and several thousand candles lit in desperate supplication to the Virgin unanswered, what was happening seemed like a miracle when she looked into the cot at the side of the bed and saw the sleeping child. She gently touched her finger to one tiny hand. He made a fist, held on as if he would never let go.
It was like a stone dissolving inside her, and Agnes Fuller saw it in the dark face and was content. Katina returned to the hotel for her few things, moved into the house that night.
George Mikali went to war, sailing to the islands again and again, one milk-run after another, until the early evening of 3 June 1945 en route to Okinawa when his ship was attacked and sunk with all hands by the Japanese submarine I-367 commanded by Lieutenant Taketomo.
Always in ailing health, his wife never recovered from the shock and died two months later.
Katina Pavlo and the boy’s grandmother continued to raise him between them. The two women had an extraordinary instinctive understanding that drew them together where the boy was concerned, for there was little doubt that both loved him deeply.
Although Agnes Fuller’s duties as principal of Howell Street High left her little time for teaching, she was still a pianist of no mean order. She was therefore able to appreciate the importance of the fact that her grandson had perfect pitch at the age of three.
She started to teach him the piano herself when he was four and it soon became apparent that she had in her hands, a rare talent.
It was 1948 before Dimitri Mikali, now a widower, was able to make the trip to America again and what he found astounded him. A six-year-old American grandson who spoke fluent Greek with a Cretan accent and played the piano like an angel.
He sat the boy gently on his knee, kissed him and said to Agnes Fuller, ‘They’ll be turning in their graves in the cemetery back there in Hydra, those old sea captains. First me – a philosopher. Now a piano player. A piano player with a Cretan accent. Such a talent is from God himself. It must be nurtured. I lost a great deal in the war, but I’m still rich enough to see he gets everything he needs. For the moment, he stays here with you. Later, when he’s a little older, we’ll see.’
From then on, the boy had the best in schooling, in music teachers. When he was fourteen, Agnes Fuller sold the house and with Katina, moved to New York so that he could continue to get the level of teaching he needed.
Just before his seventeenth birthday, she collapsed one Sunday evening before supper, with a sudden heart attack. She was dead before the ambulance reached the hospital.
Dimitri Mikali was by now Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Athens. Over the years, his grandson had visited him for holidays on many occasions and they had grown close. He flew to New York the moment he received the news and was shocked by what he found.
Katina opened the door to him and put a finger to her mouth. ‘We buried her this morning. They wouldn’t let us wait any longer.’
‘Where is he?’ the professor asked.
‘Can’t you hear him?’
The piano sounded faintly through the closed doors of the sitting-room. ‘How is he?’
‘Like a stone,’ she said. ‘The life gone from him. He loved her,’ she added simply.
When the professor opened the door, he found his grandson seated at the piano in a dark suit playing a strange, haunting piece like leaves blown through a forest at evening. For some reason, it filled Dimitri Mikali with a desperate unease.
‘John?’ He spoke in Greek and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘What’s that you’re playing?’
‘“Le Pastour” by Gabriel Grovlez. It was her favourite piece.’ The boy turned to look up at him, the eyes like black holes in the pale face.
‘Will you come to Athens with me?’ the professor asked. ‘You and Katina. Stay with me for a while? Work this thing out?’
‘Yes,’ John Mikali said. ‘I think I’d like that.’
For a while he did. There was Athens itself to enjoy, that noisy, most cheerful of cities, that seemed to keep going day and night without stop. The big apartment in the fashionable area near the Royal Palace, where his grandfather held open house most nights. Writers, artists, musicians, they all came. Particularly politicians, for the professor was much involved with the Democratic Front Party, indeed provided most of the finance for their newspaper.
And there was always Hydra where they had two houses; one in the narrow back streets of the little port itself, another on a remote peninsula along the coast beyond Molos. The boy stayed there for lengthy periods with Katina to look after him and his grandfather had a Bluthner concert grand shipped out at considerable expense. From what Katina told him on the telephone, it was never played.
In the end, Mikali came back to Athens to stand against the wall at parties, always watchful, always polite, immensely attractive with the black curling hair, the pale face, the eyes like dark glass, totally without expression. And he was never seen to smile, a fact the ladies found most intriguing.
One evening, to his grandfather’s astonishment, when one of them asked him to play, the boy agreed without hesitation, sitting at the piano and playing Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E flat, mirror-brilliant, ice-cold stuff, that reduced everyone present to astonished silence.
Later, after the applause, after they had left, the professor had gone out to his grandson, standing on the balcony, listening to the roar of the early-morning traffic which never seemed to stop.
‘So, you’ve decided to join the living again? What now?’
‘Paris, I think,’ John Mikali said. ‘The Conservatoire.’
‘I see. The concert platform? Is this your intention?’
‘If you agree.’
Dimitri Mikali embraced him gently. ‘You are everything to me, you must know this now. What you want, I want. I’ll tell Katina to pack.’
He found an apartment near the Sorbonne in a narrow street not far from the river, one of those village areas so common to the French capital with its own shops, cafés and bars. The sort of neighbourhood where everyone knew everyone else.
Mikali attended the Conservatoire, practised between eight and ten hours each day and dedicated himself solely to the piano to the exclusion of all else, even girls. Katina, as always, cooked and kept house and fussed over him.
On 22 February 1960, two days before his eighteenth birthday he had an important examination at the Conservatoire, the chance of a gold medal. He had practised for most of the night and at six o’clock in the morning, Katina had gone out to get fresh rolls from the bakery, and milk.
He had just emerged from the shower, was fastening the belt of his robe, when he heard the screech of brakes in the street outside, a dull thud. Mikali rushed to the window and looked down. Katina lay sprawled in the gutter, the bread rolls scattered across the pavement. The Citroën truck which had hit her reversed quickly. Mikali had a brief glimpse of the driver’s face and then the truck was round the corner and away.
She took several hours to die and he sat in the hospital beside her bed, holding her hand, never letting go, even when her fingers stiffened in death. The police were subdued and apologetic. Unfortunately, there had been no witnesses, which made matters difficult, but they would keep looking, of course.
Not that it was necessary, for Mikali knew the driver of the Citroën truck well enough. Claude Galley, a coarse brute of a man who ran a small garage close to the river, with the aid of two mechanics.
He could have given the police the information. He did not. This was personal. Something he had to handle for himself. His ancestors would have understood perfectly, for in Hydra, for centuries, the code of the vendetta had been absolute. The man who did not take vengeance for the wrong done to his own was himself cursed.
And yet there was more to it than that. A strange, cold excitement that filled his entire being as he waited in the shadows opposite the garage at six o’clock that evening.
At half past, the two mechanics left. He waited another five minutes, then crossed the road to the entrance. The double doors stood open to the night, the Citroën parked pointing towards the street and behind, a concrete ramp sloped steeply down to the basement.
Galley was working at a bench against the wall. Mikali’s right hand slipped into the pocket of his raincoat and tightened on the handle of the kitchen knife he carried there. Then he saw there was an easier way. One that carried with it a considerable measure of poetic justice.
He leaned into the cab of the Citroën, pushed the gear lever into neutral with one gloved hand, then released the handbrake. The vehicle gathered momentum, started to roll faster. Galley, half-drunk as usual, only became aware of the movement at the last moment, and turned, screaming, as the three-ton truck squashed him against the wall.
But there was no satisfaction in it at all, for Katina had gone, gone for good, just like the father he had never known, the mother who was only a vague memory, his grandmother.
He walked for hours in the rain in a kind of daze and was finally accosted by a prostitute on the embankment, close to midnight.
She was forty and looked older, which was why she didn’t turn the light up too high when they reached her apartment. Not that it mattered for at that particular moment, John Mikali was not sure what was real and what was not. In any case, he had never been with a woman in his life.
A fact which his inexpert fumblings soon disclosed and with the amused tenderness such women often show in these circumstances, she initiated him into the mysteries as quickly as anyone could.
He learned fast, riding her in a controlled fury, once, twice, making her come for the first time in years, groaning beneath him, begging for more. Afterwards, when she slept, he lay in the dark, marvelling at this power he possessed that could make a woman act as she had; do the things she had done. Strange, because it had little meaning for him, this thing that he had always understood was so important.
Afterwards, walking the streets again towards dawn, he had never felt so alone in his life. When he finally came to the central market it was a bustle of activity as porters unloaded heavy wagons with produce from the country, and yet they seemed to move in slow motion as if under water. It was as if he existed on a separate plane.
He ordered tea in an all-night café and sat by the window smoking a cigarette, then became aware of a face staring out at him from the cover of a magazine on the stand beside him. A slim, wiry figure in camouflage uniform, sun-blackened face, expressionless eyes, a rifle crooked in one arm.
The article inside, when he took the magazine down, discussed the role of the Foreign Legion in the war in Algiers, which was then at its height. Men who only a year or two before had been stoned by dock workers at Marseilles on their return from Indochina and the Viet prison camps were fighting France’s battles again in a dirty and senseless war. Men with no hope, the writer called them. Men who had nowhere else to go. On the next page there was a photo of another légionnaire, half-raised on a stretcher, chest bandaged, blood soaking through. The head was shaven, the cheeks hollow, the face sunken beyond pain, and the eyes staring into an abyss of loneliness. To Mikali it was like staring at his own mirror image. He closed the magazine. He placed it carefully on the stand, then took a deep breath to stop his hands from shaking. Something clicked in his head. Sounds came up to the surface again. He was aware of the early-morning bustle around him. The world had come back to life, though he was no longer a part of it, nor had he ever been.
God, but he was cold. He stood up, went out and walked quickly through the streets, hands thrust deep into his pockets.
It was six o’clock in the morning when he returned to the apartment. It seemed grey and empty, devoid of all life. The piano lid was open, music still on the stand as he had left it. He had missed the examination, not that it mattered now. He sat down and started to play slowly and with great feeling that haunting little piece ‘Le Pastour’ by Grovlez that he had been playing on the day of his grandmother’s funeral in New York when Dimitri Mikali had arrived.
As the last notes died away, he closed the lid of the piano, stood up, crossed to a bureau and found his passports, both Greek and American, for he had dual nationality. He looked around the apartment for the last time, then let himself out.
At seven o’clock, he was on the Métro on his way to Vincennes. Once there, he walked briskly through the streets to the Old Fort, the recruiting centre for the Foreign Legion.
By noon, he had handed over his passports as proof of identity and age; passed a stringent medical and signed a contract binding him to serve for a period of five years in the most famous regiment of any army in the world.
At three o’clock the following day, in company with three Spaniards, a Belgian and eight Germans, he was on his way by train to Marseilles, to Fort Saint Nicholas.
Ten days later, together with a hundred and fifty recruits and a number of other French soldiers then serving in Algiers and Morocco, he left Marseilles on a troopship bound for Oran.
And on 20 March, he arrived at his ultimate destination. Sidi-bel-Abbès, still centre, as it had been for almost a century, of all Legion activity.
The discipline was absolute, the training brutal in its efficiency and designed with only one aim. To produce the finest fighting men in the world. Mikali flung himself into it with a fierce energy that drew him to the attention of his superiors from the beginning.
When he had been at Sidi-bel-Abbès for a few weeks, he was taken to the Deuxième Bureau one day. In the presence of a captain, he was presented with a letter from his grandfather, who had been informed of his whereabouts, asking him to reconsider the decision he had taken.
Mikali assured the captain that he was perfectly happy where he was and was requested to write a letter to his grandfather saying so, which he did in the captain’s presence.
During the six months that followed, he made twenty-four parachute jumps, was trained in the use of every form of modern weaponry, was drilled to a peak of physical fitness he would never have dreamed possible. He proved to be a remarkable shot with both rifle and handgun and his grading in unarmed combat was the highest in his class, a circumstance which caused him to be treated with considerable respect by his comrades.
He drank little and visited the town brothel only occasionally, yet the women there vied for his attention, a circumstance which had long since ceased to intrigue him and still left him supremely indifferent.
He was a junior corporal before he saw his first action in October, 1960 when the regiment moved into the Raki mountains to attack a large force of fellagha which had been controlling the area for some months.
There were some eighty rebels on top of a hill that was virtually impregnable. The regiment made a frontal attack that was only apparently suicidal for at the crucial point in the battle, the 3rd Company, which included Mikali, were dropped in on top of the hill itself by helicopter.
The fight which followed was a bloody, hand-to-hand affair and Mikali distinguished himself by knocking out a machine-gun post which had accounted for more than two dozen légionnaires and looked for a while as if it might ruin everything.
Afterwards, as he was sitting on a rock tying a field service dressing to a flesh wound in his right arm, a Spaniard had stumbled past him laughing insanely, holding two heads in one hand by the hair.
A shot rang out and the Spaniard went forward on to his face, crying out. Mikali was already turning, clutching his submachinegun, firing with one hand at the two fellagha who had risen from a pile of corpses near by, knocking them both down.
He stood there for a while on the hillside waiting, but no one else moved. After a while, he sat down, tightened the bandage on his arm with his teeth and lit a cigarette.
Within the twelve months that followed, he fought in the alleys of Algiers itself, dropped three times by parachute by night into mountainous country to attack rebel forces by surprise and survived ambush on numerous occasions.
He had a wound stripe and the Médaille Militaire, was a senior corporal by March, 1962. He was an ancien, which is to say the kind of légionnaire who could survive for a month on four hours’ sleep a night and force-march thirty miles in a day in full kit if necessary. He had killed men, he had killed women, children even, so that the fact of death meant nothing to him.
After the decoration, he was pulled out of active service for a while and sent to the guerrilla warfare school at Kefi where he learned everything there was to know about explosives. About dynamite and TNT and plastics and how to make an efficient booby trap in dozens of different ways.
On 1 July, he returned to the regiment after finishing the course and hitched a lift in a supply truck. As they passed through the village of Kasfa, a hundred pounds of dynamite, detonated by some form of remote control, blew the truck in half. Mikali found himself on his hands and knees in the village square, miraculously still alive. He tried to get up, there was a rattle of a machine pistol and he was shot twice in the chest.
As he lay there, he could see the driver of the truck twitching feebly on the other side of the burning wreck. Four men came forward carrying assorted weapons. They stood over the driver, laughing. Mikali couldn’t see what they were doing, but the man started to scream. After a while there was a shot.
They turned towards Mikali, who had dragged himself into a sitting position against the village well, his hand inside his camouflage jacket where the blood oozed through.
‘Not too good, eh?’ the leader of the little group said in French. Mikali saw that the knife in the man’s left hand was wet with blood.
Mikali smiled for the first time since Katina’s death. ‘Oh, it could be worse.’
His hand came out of the blouse clutching a Smith and Wesson Magnum, a weapon he had procured on the black market in Algiers months before. His first shot fragmented the top of the man’s skull, his second took the one behind him between the eyes. The third man was still trying to get his rifle up when Mikali shot him twice in the belly. The fourth dropped his weapon in horror and turned to run. Mikali’s final two shots shattered his spine, driving him headlong into the burning wreckage of the truck.
Beyond, through the smoke, villagers moved fearfully from their houses. Mikali emptied the Smith and Wesson, took a handful of rounds from his pocket with difficulty and reloaded very deliberately. The man he hit in the stomach groaned and tried to get up. Mikali shot him in the head.
He took off his beret, held it against his wounds to stem the flow of blood and sat there against the well, the revolver ready, daring the villagers to come near him.
He was still there, conscious, surrounded only by the dead, when a Legion patrol found him an hour later.
Which was all rather ironic for the following day, 2 July, was Independence Day and seven years of fighting was over. Mikali was flown to France to the military hospital in Paris for specialist chest surgery. On 27 July, he was awarded the Croix de la Valeur Militaire. The following day, his grandfather arrived.
He was seventy now, but still looked fit and well. He sat by the bed looking at the medal for quite a while then said gently, ‘I’ve had a word with the Legion Headquarters. As you’re still not twenty-one, it appears that, with the right pressure, I could obtain your discharge.’
‘Yes, I know.’
And his grandfather, using the phrase he had used on that summer evening in Athens nearly three years before, said, ‘You’ve decided to join the living again, it would seem?’
‘Why not?’ John Mikali answered. ‘It beats dying every time, and I should know.’
He received an impressive certificate of good conduct which stated that Senior Corporal John Mikali had served for two years with honneur et fidélité and was discharged before his time for medical reasons.
There was more than a little truth in that. The two bullets in the chest had severely damaged the left lung and he entered the London Clinic for chest surgery. Afterwards, he returned to Greece, not to Athens, but to Hydra. To the villa beyond Molos on the promontory above the sea with only the mountains behind, the pine forests. Wild, savage country, accessible only on foot or by mule on land.
To look after him, he kept an old peasant couple who lived in a cottage by the jetty in the bay below. Old Constantine ran the boat, bringing supplies from Hydra town when necessary, saw to the upkeep of the grounds, the water supply, the generator. His wife acted as housekeeper and cook.
Mostly he was alone except when his grandfather came over to stay. They would sit in the evenings with pine logs blazing on the hearth and talk for hours on everything under the sun. Art, literature, music, even politics, in spite of the fact that this was a subject to which Mikali was totally indifferent.
One thing they never discussed was Algeria. The old man didn’t ask and Mikali never spoke of it. It was as if it had never happened. He had not touched the piano once during those two years, but now, he started to play again, more and more during the nine months it took him to regain his health.
One calm summer evening in July 1963 during one of his grandfather’s visits, he played, after dinner, the Bach Prelude and Fugue in E flat that he had played that evening he had decided to go to Paris.
It was very quiet. Through the open windows to the terrace the sky was orange and flame as the sun set behind the island of Dokos a mile out to sea.
His grandfather sighed, ‘So, you are ready again, I think?’
‘Yes,’ John Mikali said and flexed his fingers. ‘Time to find out, once and for all.’
He chose London, the Royal College of Music. He leased a flat in Upper Grosvenor Street off Park Lane which was convenient for Hyde Park where he ran seven miles every morning, wet or fine, always pushing until it hurt. Old habits died hard. Three times a week, he worked out at a well-known city gym.
The Legion had branded him clear to the bone, could never be shaken off entirely. He realized that just before twelve one rainy night when he was mugged by two youths as he turned into a side street coming out of Grosvenor Square.
One took him from behind, an arm around his neck and the other appeared from the entrance beside some railings to the basement area of a house.
Mikali’s right foot flicked expertly into the crotch, raising his knee into the face as the youth screamed and keeled over. The second assailant was so shocked that he slackened his grip. Mikali broke free, swinging his right elbow back in a short arc. There was a distinct crack as the jaw bone fractured. The boy cried out and fell to his knees, Mikali simply stepped over his friend and walked quickly away through the heavy rain.
At the college his reputation grew over three hard years. He was good – better than that. They knew it; so did he. He formed no close friendships. It was not that people disliked him. On the contrary, they found him immensely attractive, but there was a remoteness to him. A barrier that no one seemed to be able to penetrate.
There were women in plenty, but not one who could succeed in arousing the slightest personal desire in him. There was no question of any latent homosexuality but his relations with women were genuinely a matter of complete indifference to him. The effect he had on them was something else again and his reputation as a lover reached almost legendary proportions. As for his music, at the end of his final year he was awarded the Raildon gold medal.
Which was not enough. Not for the man he had become. So, he went to Vienna to put himself under Hoffman for a year. The final polish. Then, in the summer of 1967, he was ready.
There is an old joke in the music profession that to get on to a concert platform in the first place is even more difficult than to succeed once you are there.
To a certain extent, Mikali could have bought his way in. Paid an agent to hire a hall in London or Paris, arrange a recital, but his pride would never stand for that. He had to seize the world by the throat. Make it listen. There was only one way to do that.
After a short holiday in Greece, he returned to England, to Yorkshire as an entrant in the Leeds Musical Festival, one of the most important pianoforte competitions in the world. To win that was to ensure instant fame, a guarantee of a concert tour.
He was placed third and received immediate offers from three major agencies. He turned them all down, practised fourteen hours a day for a month at the London flat, then went to Salzburg in the following January. He took first prize in the competition there, beating forty-eight other competitors from all over the world, playing Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto, a work he was to make peculiarly his own in the years to come.
His grandfather was there during the seven days of the festival and afterwards, when everyone else had left, he took two glasses of champagne on to the balcony where Mikali stood looking out over the city.
‘The world is your oyster now. They’ll all want you. How do you feel?’
‘Nothing,’ John Mikali said. He sipped a little of the ice-cold champagne, and suddenly and for no accountable reason, saw the four fellagha walking round the burning truck and coming towards him laughing. ‘I feel nothing.’
In the two years that followed, the dark eyes stared out from the pale, handsome face on posters in London, Paris, Rome, New York and his fame grew. The newspapers and magazines had made much of his two years in the Legion, his decorations for gallantry. In Greece, he became something of a folk hero so that his concerts in Athens were always considerable events.
And things had changed in Greece now that the Colonels were in charge after the military coup of April 1967, and King Constantine’s exile to Rome.
Dimitri Mikali was seventy-six and looked it. Although he still kept open house in the evenings, few people attended. His activities on behalf of the Democratic Front Party had made him increasingly unpopular with the Government and his newspaper had already been banned on several occasions.
‘Politics,’ Mikali said to him on one of his visits. ‘It’s a nonsense. Why make trouble for yourself?’
‘Oh, I’m doing very well really.’ His grandfather smiled. ‘What you might call a privileged position, having a grandson who is an international celebrity.’
‘All right,’ Mikali said. ‘So you’ve got a military junta in power and they don’t like the mini-skirt. So what? I’ve been in worse places than Greece as it is today, believe me.’
‘Political prisoners by the thousand, the educational system used to indoctrinate little children, the Left almost stamped out of existence. Does this sound like the home of democracy?’
None of which had the slightest effect on Mikali. The following day he flew to Paris and gave a Chopin recital that same night, a charitable affair in aid of international cancer research.
There was a letter waiting for him from his London agent, Bruno Fischer, about the intinerary for a tour of England, Wales and Scotland in the autumn. He was spending some time going over it in his dressing room after the recital when there was a knock on the door and the stage doorkeeper looked in.
‘A gentleman to see you, Monsieur Mikali.’
He was pushed out of the way and a large, burly individual with thinning hair and a heavy black moustache appeared. He wore a shabby raincoat over a crumpled tweed suit.
‘Hey, Johnny. Good to see you. Claude Jarrot – staff sergeant, Third Company, Second REP. We did that night drop at El Kebir together.’
‘I remember,’ Mikali said. ‘You broke an ankle.’
‘And you stayed with me when the fellagha broke through the line.’ Jarrot stuck out a hand. ‘I’ve read about you in the papers and when I saw you were giving this concert tonight, I thought I’d come along. Not for the music. It doesn’t mean a damn thing to me.’ He grinned. ‘I couldn’t pass up the chance of greeting another old Sidi-bel-Abbès hand.’
It could be he was after a touch, he was certainly shabby enough, but his presence brought back the old days. For some reason, Mikali warmed to him.
‘I’m glad you did. I was just leaving. What about a drink? There must be a bar near here.’
‘Actually I have a garage only a block away,’ Jarrot said. ‘I’ve got a small apartment above it. I’ve got some good stuff in at the moment. Real Napoleon.’
‘Lead on,’ Mikali said. ‘Why not?’
The walls of the living-room were crowded with photos cataloguing Jarrot’s career in the Legion and there were mementoes everywhere including his white képi and dress epaulets on the sideboard.
The Napoleon brandy was real enough and he got drunk fairly rapidly.
‘I thought they kicked you out in the Putsch?’ Mikali said. ‘Weren’t you up to your neck in the OAS?’
‘Sure I was,’ Jarrot said belligerently. ‘All those years in Indochina. I was at Dien Bien Phu, you know that? Those little yellow bastards had me for six months in a prison camp. Treated like pigs we were. Then the Algeria fiasco when the old man went and did the dirty on us. Every self-respecting Frenchman should have been OAS, not just mugs like me.’
‘Not much future in it now, surely?’ Mikali said. ‘The old boy showed he meant business when he had Bastien Thiry shot. How many attempts to knock him off and not one of them succeeded?’
‘You’re right,’ Jarrot said, drinking. ‘Oh, I played my part. Here, take a look.’
He removed a rug from a wooden chest in the corner, fumbled for a key and unlocked it with difficulty. Inside there was a considerable assortment of weapons. Several machine pistols, an assortment of handguns and grenades.
‘I’ve had this stuff here four years,’ he said. ‘Four years, but the network’s busted. We’ve had it. A man has to make out other ways these days.’
‘The garage?’
Jarrot placed a finger against his nose. ‘Come on, I’ll show you. This damn bottle’s empty anyway.’
He unlocked a door at the rear of the garage and disclosed a room piled with cartons and packing cases of every description. He opened one and extracted another bottle of Napoleon brandy.
‘Told you there was more.’ He waved an arm. ‘More of everything here. Any kind of booze you want. Cigarettes, canned food. Be cleared out by the end of the week.’
‘Where does it all come from?’ Mikali asked.
‘You might say off the back of a passing truck.’ Jarrot laughed drunkenly. ‘No questions, no pack drill as we used to say in the Legion. Just remember this, mon ami. Anything you ever need – anything. Just come to old Claude. I’ve got connections. I can get you anything, and that’s a promise. Not only because you’re an old bel-Abbès hand. If it hadn’t been for you, the fellagha would probably have cut my balls off, amongst other things, that time.’
He was very drunk by now and Mikali humoured him, slapping him on the shoulder. ‘I’ll remember that.’
Jarrot pulled the cork with his teeth. ‘To the Legion,’ he said. ‘The most exclusive club in the world.’
He drank from the bottle and passed it across.
He was on tour in Japan when he received news of his grandfather’s death. The old man, increasingly infirm with advancing years and arthritic in one hip, had needed sticks to walk for some time. He had lost his balance on the tiled floor of the balcony of the apartment and fallen to the street below.
Mikali cancelled what concerts he could and flew home, but it was a week before he got to Athens. In his absence, the coroner had ordered the funeral to take place, cremation according to Dimitri Mikali’s wishes as conveyed in a letter of instructions to his lawyer.
Mikali fled to Hydra as he had done before, to the villa on the peninsula beyond Molos. He crossed from Athens to Hydra port on the hydrofoil and found Constantine waiting to pick him up in the launch. When he went on board, the old man handed him an envelope without a word, started the engines and took the boat out of harbour.
Mikali recognized his grandfather’s writing at once. His fingers shook slightly as he opened the envelope. The contents were brief.
If you read this it means I am dead. Sooner – later, it comes to us all. So, no sad songs. No more of my stupid politics to bore you with either because, in the end, the end is perhaps always the same. I know only one thing with total certainty. You have lightened the last years of my life with pride and with joy, but most of all with your love. I leave you mine and my blessing with it.
Mikali’s eyes burned, he experienced difficulty in breathing. When they reached the villa, he changed into climbing boots and rough clothes and took to the mountains, walking for hours, reducing himself to a state of total exhaustion.
He spent the night in a deserted farmhouse and could not sleep. The following day, he continued to climb, spending another night like the first.
On the third day, he staggered back to the villa where he was put to bed by Constantine and his wife. The old woman gave him some herbal potion. He slept for twenty hours and awakened calm and in control of himself again. It was enough. He phoned through to Fischer in London, and told him he wanted to get back to work.
At the flat in Upper Grosvenor Street there was a mountain of mail waiting. He skimmed through quickly and paused. There was one with a Greek postage stamp marked Personal. It had been sent to his agent and readdressed. He put the other letters down and opened it. The message was typed on a plain sheet of paper. No address. No name.
Dimitri Mikali’s death was not an accident – it was murder. The circumstances are as follows. For some time, he had been under pressure from certain sections of the government because of his activities for the Democratic Front. Various freedom-loving Greeks had together compiled a dossier for presenting to the United Nations including details of political prisoners held without trial, atrocities of every description, torture and murder. It was believed that Dimitri Mikali knew the whereabouts of this dossier. On the evening of the 16 June, he was visited at his apartment by Colonel George Vassilikos who bears special responsibility for the work of the political branch of Military Intelligence, together with his bodyguards Sergeant Andreas Aleko and Sergeant Nikos Petrakis. In an effort to make Mikali disclose the whereabouts of the dossier he was beaten severely and burned about the face and the private parts of his body with cigarette lighters. When he finally died because of this treatment, Vassilikos ordered his body to be thrown from the balcony to make the death look like an accident. The coroner was under orders to produce the report he did and never actually saw the body which was cremated so that the signs of ill-treatment and torture would be erased. Both, Sergeants Aleko and Petrakis have boasted of these facts while drunk, in the hearing of several people friendly to our cause.
The rage in Mikali was a living thing. The physical pain which gripped his body was like nothing he had ever known in his life before. He doubled over in spasm, fell to his knees, then curled up in a foetal position.
How long he stayed there, he had no means of knowing, but certainly towards evening, he found himself wandering through one street after another as darkness fell, with no idea where he was. Finally, he went into a small, cheap café, ordered a coffee and sat down at one of the stained tables. It was like the echo of an old tune, the café in Paris by the market all over again for someone had left a copy of the London Times. He picked it up, his eyes roaming over the news items mechanically. Then he stiffened as he saw a small headline half-way down the second page.
Greek Army Delegation visits Paris for Nato consultations.
In his heart, he knew whose name he was going to find even before he read the rest of the news item.
After that, the whole thing fell into place with total certainty, as if it were a sign from God himself, when the phone rang. It was Bruno Fischer.
‘John? I was hoping you’d arrived. I can get you two immediate concerts, Wednesday and Friday, if you want them. Hoffer was due to play the Schumann A minor with the London Symphony. Unfortunately he’s broken his wrist.’
‘Wednesday?’ Mikali said automatically. ‘That only gives me three days.’
‘Come on, you’ve recorded the damn thing twice. One rehearsal should be enough. You could be a sensation.’
‘Where?’ Mikali asked. ‘The Festival Hall?’
‘Good God, no. Paris, Johnny. I know it means climbing right back into another aeroplane, but do you mind?’
‘No,’ John Mikali said calmly. ‘Paris will be fine.’
The military coup which seized power in Greece in the early hours of 27 April 1967 had been expertly planned by only a handful of colonels in total secrecy which to a great extent explained its success. Newspaper coverage in the days which followed had been extensive. Mikali spent the afternoon before his evening flight to Paris at the British Museum, checking through every available newspaper and magazine published in the period following the coup.
It was not as difficult as it might have been, mainly because it was photos only that he was after. He found two. One was in Time magazine and showed Colonel George Vassilikos, a tall, handsome man of forty-five with a heavy, black moustache, standing beside Colonel Papadopoulos, the man who was, to all intents and purposes, dictator of Greece.
The second photo was in a periodical published by Greek exiles in London. It showed Vassilikos flanked by his two sergeants. The caption underneath read: The butcher and his henchmen. Mikali removed the page carefully and left.
He called at the Greek Embassy when he reached Paris the following morning, and was received with delight by the cultural attaché, Doctor Melos.
‘My dear Mikali, what a pleasure. I’d no idea you were due in Paris.’
Mikali explained the circumstances. ‘Naturally they’ll get a few quick adverts out in the Paris papers to let the fans know it’s me and not Hoffer who’ll be playing, but I thought I’d like to make sure you knew here at the Embassy.’
‘I can’t thank you enough. The Ambassador would have been furious if he’d missed it. Let me get you a drink.’
‘I’ll be happy to arrange tickets,’ Mikali told him. ‘For the Ambassador and anyone else he cares to bring. Didn’t I read somewhere that you have some brass staying here from Athens?’
Melos made a face as he brought him a glass of sherry. ‘Not exactly culture-orientated. Colonel Vassilikos, Intelligence, which is a polite way of saying…’
‘I can imagine,’ Mikali said.
Melos glanced at his watch. ‘I’ll show you.’
He moved to the window. A black Mercedes stood in the courtyard, a chauffeur beside it. A moment later, Colonel Vassilikos came down the steps from the main entrance, flanked by Sergeants Aleko and Petrakis. Aleko got in front with the chauffeur, Petrakis and the Colonel in the rear. As the Mercedes moved away, Mikali memorized the number although the car was recognizable enough because of the Greek pennant on the front.
‘Ten o’clock on the dot,’ Melos said. ‘Exactly the same when he was here the other month. If his bowels are as regular, he must be a healthy man. Out to the military academy at St Cyr for the day’s work, through the Bois de Meudon and Versailles. He likes the scenery that way, so the chauffeur tells me.’
‘No time for play?’ Mikali said. ‘He sounds a dull dog.’
‘I’m told he likes boys, but that could be hearsay. One thing is certain. Music figures very low on his list of priorities.’
Mikali smiled. ‘Well, you can’t win them all. But you and the Ambassador, perhaps?’
Melos went down to the front entrance with him. ‘I was desolated to hear of your grandfather’s unfortunate death. It must have come as a terrible shock. To have returned to the concert platform so soon after…I can only say, your courage fills me with admiration.’
‘It’s quite simple,’ Mikali said. ‘He was the most remarkable man I ever knew.’
‘And immensely proud of you?’
‘Of course. Not to continue now, if only for his sake, would be the greatest betrayal imaginable. You could say this Paris trip is my way of lighting a candle to his memory.’
He turned and went down the steps to his hire car.
He had a rehearsal with the London Symphony that afternoon. The conductor was on top form and he and Mikali clicked into place with each other immediately. However, he did ask for a further rehearsal the following afternoon between two and four as the concert was at seven-thirty in the evening. Mikali agreed.
At five-thirty that evening, he waited in an old Citroën in a lay-by on the Versailles road not far from the palace itself. Jarrot was at the wheel.
‘If you’d only tell me what this is all about?’ he grumbled.
‘Later.’ Mikali offered him a cigarette. ‘You said if I ever wanted anything to come to you, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, but…’
At that moment the black Mercedes with the Greek pennant cruised by and Mikali said urgently, ‘Get after that car. No need to rush. He’s not doing more than forty.’
‘That doesn’t make sense,’ Jarrot said as he drove off. ‘Not in a heap like that.’
‘It’s simple really,’ Mikali said. ‘The Colonel likes the scenery.’
‘The Colonel?’
‘Just shut up and keep driving.’
The Mercedes took the road across the Bois de Meudon, the park at that time in the evening quiet and deserted. It started to draw away. At that moment, a motorcyclist swept past them at speed, flashers going, a sinister figure in crash helmet and goggles and dark, caped coat, a submachine-carbine slung across his back.
He disappeared down the road passing the Mercedes. ‘Bastard,’ Jarrot spat out of the window. ‘There’s been a lot of these CRS swine riding around on those flash motorbikes recently. I thought they were only supposed to be riot police.’
Mikali smiled softly, lit another cigarette. ‘You can slow down. I know how to do it now.’
‘Do what, for Christ’s sake?’
So Mikali told him. The Citroën swerved violently as Jarrot braked hard and pulled it in to the side of the road.
‘You’re crazy. You must be. You’ll never get away with it.’
‘Oh, yes, I will with your help. You can supply me with everything I need.’
‘Like hell I will. Listen, you madman, a voice on the phone is all the Sûreté would need.’
‘What a fat, stupid man you are,’ Mikali said calmly. ‘I’m John Mikali. I play in Rome, London, Paris, New York. Does it make any kind of sense that I could be contemplating such a crazy idea? Why would I do such a thing? My grandfather fell to his death from that balcony by accident. The court said so.’
‘No!’ Jarrot said wildly.
‘Whereas you, old stick, are not only a cheap crook, as became painfully clear when you showed me all that loot at your garage that night. You were also heavily involved with the OAS.’
‘No one can prove that,’ Jarrot said wildly.
‘Oh, yes they can. Just your name and even a hint of an OAS connection and it’s Service Five, isn’t that what they call the strong-arm squad – the barbouzes? Half of them old mates of yours from Algiers, so you know what to expect. They’ll spread you on the table, wire up your privates, then press the switch. You’ll be telling them everything down to the finest detail within half an hour, only they won’t believe you. They’ll keep on, just to see if they’ve got it all. In the end you’ll be dead or a drooling idiot.’
‘All right,’ Jarrot groaned. ‘Don’t go on. I’ll do it.’
‘But of course. You see, Claude, all you have to do is live right. Now let’s get out of here.’
He wound down the window and let the evening air cool his face. He hadn’t felt so truly alive in years, every nerve in him strung to perfect tune. It was like that last final moment in the wings before walking out into the light towards the piano and then the applause rising, lifting in great waves…
It was just after six o’clock on the following evening as Paros, the Embassy chauffeur at the wheel of the Mercedes, turned, Versailles on his left, and entered the Bois de Meudon. Sergeant Aleko sat beside him. Petrakis was in the back on the occasional seat, facing Colonel Vassilikos who was studying a file. The glass panel was closed.
It had rained heavily all afternoon and the park was deserted. Paros was taking his time as usual and became aware, in the rapidly falling dusk, of lights close behind him. A CRS man in dark uniform raincoat and helmet pulled alongside and waved him down. With the collar turned up against the rain, the dark goggles, Paros could see nothing of his face at all.
‘CRS,’ Aleko said.
The glass panel opened. Colonel Vassilikos said, ‘Find out what he wants.’
As the Mercedes braked to a halt, the CRS man pulled in front, got off his heavy BMW machine and pushed it on its stand. He walked towards them. His raincoat was very wet and he carried a MAT 49 machine-carbine across his chest.
Aleko opened the door and got out. ‘What’s the trouble?’ he demanded in bad French.
The CRS man’s hand came out of his pocket holding a .45 Colt automatic of the type issued to the American Army during the Second World War.
He shot Aleko in the heart, slamming the sergeant back against the Mercedes. He bounced off and fell into the gutter on his face.
Petrakis, sitting in the occasional seat, his back to the glass panel, took the second bullet in the base of his skull. He fell forward, dead instantly, bowed as if in prayer on the seat beside the Colonel who cowered back, frozen in shock, his uniform spattered with blood.
Paros gripped the wheel tightly, his entire body trembling as the barrel of the Colt swung towards him. ‘No – please no!’
Over the years Mikali had learned to speak Greek of a kind to meet even the most exacting demands of Athenian society, but now he reverted to the accent of the Cretan peasant as taught to him by Katina so many years ago.
He pulled Paros from behind the wheel. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded, keeping his eyes on Vassilikos.
‘Paros – Dimitri Paros. I’m just an Embassy driver. A married man with children.’
‘You should choose a better class of employment instead of working for fascist bastards like these,’ Mikali said. ‘Now run like hell across the park.’
Paros stumbled away and Vassilikos croaked, ‘For God’s sake.’
‘What’s He got to do with it?’ Mikali dropped the Cretan accent and pushed up his goggles. An expression of total astonishment appeared on the Colonel’s face. ‘You? But it isn’t possible.’
‘For my grandfather,’ Mikali said. ‘I wish I could make it slower, but there isn’t time. At least you’ll go to hell knowing who it’s from.’
As Vassilikos opened his mouth to speak again, Mikali leaned in and shot him between the eyes, the heavy bullet killing him instantly.
A second later he was pushing the BMW off its stand and riding away. A car passed him, going towards Versailles. In his mirror he saw it slow as it approached the Mercedes, then stop. Not that it mattered now. He turned off the road into one of the footpaths and vanished into the trees.
In a secluded lay-by on the other side of the park, deserted at that time of the evening, Jarrot waited fearfully beside the old Citroën truck. The tailgate was down forming a ramp and he was pretending to tinker with one of the rear wheels.
There was the sound of the BMW approaching through the trees. Mikali appeared and took the motorcycle straight up the ramp into the back of the truck. Jarrot quickly raised the tailgate, then rushed round to the cab, climbed behind the wheel. As he drove away, he could hear police klaxons over to his left in the far distance.
Mikali stood at the open furnace door at the garage and fed the CRS uniform in, piece by piece, even the plastic helmet. The BMW stood in the corner beside the Citroën truck, stripped of the false police signs and number plates which, being mainly plastic, burned quite nicely too.
When he went upstairs he found Jarrot sitting at the table, a bottle of the Napoleon in front of him and a glass.
‘All three,’ he said. ‘My God, what kind of man are you?’
Mikali produced an envelope which he dropped on the table. ‘Fifteen thousand francs as agreed.’ He took the Colt from his pocket. ‘I’ll hang on to this. I prefer to get rid of it myself.’
He turned to the door. Jarrot said, ‘Where are you going?’
‘I have a concert,’ Mikali told him. ‘Or had you forgotten?’ He glanced at his watch. ‘In exactly thirty minutes, so I’ll have to get moving.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ Jarrot said and then added violently, ‘What if something goes wrong? What if they trace you?’
‘You’d better hope they don’t. For your own sake as much as mine. I’ll come back after the concert. Say eleven o’clock. Okay?’
‘Sure,’ Jarrot said wearily. ‘I got no place to go.’
Mikali got into his hire car and drove away. He felt calm and relaxed, no fear at all, but it seemed obvious that Claude Jarrot had very much outlived his usefulness. Plus the fact that his attitude left a great deal to be desired. He was certainly not the man he had been in the old days in Algeria. It was unfortunate, but it seemed painfully apparent that he was going to have to do something about Jarrot. But for the moment, there was the concert.
He reached the opera house with only fifteen minutes in hand, had barely time to change. But he made it and stood watching in the wings, as the conductor went on stage.
He followed him to a storm of applause. There was a full house and he noticed Melos and the Greek Ambassador and his wife in the third row, Melos sitting in the aisle seat.
The Concerto in A Minor was written by Schumann originally as a one-movement fantaisie for piano and orchestra for his wife Clara, herself a concert pianist. Later, he expanded it into a three-movement concerto which the music critic of the London Times once described as a laboured and ambitious work and praised Madame Schumann’s attempts to pass her husband’s rhapsody off as music.
In Mikali’s hands that night it sparkled, came alive in a way that totally electrified the audience. Which was why there was considerable surprise, to say the least, when half-way through the intermezzo, in response to a message brought by a footman, the Greek Ambassador, his wife and the cultural attaché got up and left.
Jarrot watched the news on television. The killing was obviously political, according to the commentator, which was proved by the fact that the assassin had allowed the chauffeur to go free; had referred to the victims as fascists. Probably a member of one of the many disaffected political groups of Greeks living in exile in Paris. In this case, the police had an excellent lead. The man they were seeking was a Cretan – a Cretan peasant. The chauffeur was definite on that. He had recognized the accent.
The pictures of the bodies, particularly in the rear of the Mercedes, were graphic to say the least and made Jarrot remember some of Mikali’s exploits from the old days. And he had said he was coming back after the concert. Why? There could really only be one reason.
He had to get out while there was still time, but to whom could he turn? Certainly not to the police and not to any of his criminal associates. Quite suddenly, in spite of his half-drunken state, he thought of the obvious answer. The one person. Maître Deville, his lawyer. The best criminal lawyer in the business, everyone knew that. He’d saved him from prison twice now. Deville would know what to do.
He wouldn’t be at his office now, of course, but at the apartment where he lived alone since his wife had died of cancer three years previously. Rue de Nanterre, off the Avenue Victor Hugo. Jarrot found the number and dialled it quickly.
There was a slight delay then a voice said, ‘Deville here.’
‘Maître? It’s me, Jarrot. I must see you.’
‘In trouble again, eh, Claude?’ Deville laughed good-humouredly. ‘I’ll see you at the office first thing. Let’s say nine o’clock.’
‘It can’t wait, Maître.’
‘My dear chap, it will have to. I’m going out to dinner.’
‘Maître, have you heard the news tonight? About what happened in the Bois de Meudon.’
‘The assassinations?’ Deville’s voice had changed. ‘Yes.’
‘That’s what I’ve got to see you about.’
‘Are you at the garage?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I’ll expect you here in fifteen minutes.’
Jean Paul Deville was fifty-five years of age and one of the most successful lawyers practising at the criminal bar in Paris. In spite of this, his relations with the police were excellent. Although he used every trick in the book on behalf of his clients, he was fair and just and scrupulously correct in his dealings. A gentleman in the old-fashioned sense of the word, he had cooperated to the advantage of the Sûreté on more than one occasion which made him a popular figure in that quarter.
His family had all been killed when Stuka dive-bombers had pounded Calais in 1940. Deville himself had not served in the army because of bad eyesight. A clerk in a lawyer’s office, he had been shifted to Eastern Germany and Poland along with thousands of his fellow countrymen as a slave worker.
Like many Frenchmen, caught behind the Iron Curtain at the end of the war, he had not reached France again until 1947. His family in Calais having all died, he had decided to make a new life for himself in Paris, going to the Sorbonne on a special government grant for people like him, and taking a law degree.
Over the years, he had acquired a considerable reputation. He had married his secretary in 1955, but there had been no children. Her health had always been poor and with cancer of the stomach she had taken two painful years to die.
All of which had occasioned nothing but sympathy for him, not only with the police and his own profession, but amongst the criminal fraternity as well.
It was really rather ironic when one considered that this benign and handsome Frenchman was, in reality, Colonel Nikolay Ashimov, a Ukrainian who had not seen his homeland for something like twenty-five years. Probably the single most important Russian Intelligence agent in Western Europe. An agent, not of the KGB, but of its bitter rival, the Intelligence section of the Red Army known as the GRU.
The Russians, even before the end of the war, had spy schools at various places in the Soviet Union, each one with a distinctive national flavour like Glacyna where agents were trained to work in English-speaking countries in a replica of an English town, living exactly as they would in the West.
Ashimov spent two long years preparing in a similar way at Grosnia where the emphasis was on everything French, environment, culture, cooking, and dress being faithfully replicated.
He had a distinct advantage over the others from the first as his mother was French. His progress was rapid and he was finally posted to join a group of French slave workers in Poland in 1946, enduring the hardships of their existence, assuming the role of the Jean Paul Deville who had died of pneumonia in a Siberian coalmine in 1945. And then, in 1947 he had been sent home – home to France.
Deville poured Jarrot another brandy. ‘Go on, drink up, I can see you need it. An amazing story.’
‘I can trust you, Maître, can’t I?’ Jarrot demanded wildly. ‘I mean, if the flics got even a hint of this…’
‘My dear fellow,’ Deville said soothingly, ‘haven’t I told you before? The relationship between a lawyer and his client is like that between priest and penitent. After all, if I’d disclosed what I knew of your OAS connection to the SDECE…’
‘But what do I do?’ Jarrot demanded. ‘If you saw the news on television, you know what he’s capable of.’
‘Fantastic,’ Deville said. ‘I’ve often heard him play, of course. He’s quite brilliant. I remember vaguely reading in some magazine that he’d served in the Legion for a couple of years as a boy.’
Jarrot said, ‘He was never a boy, that one. If I told you some of the things he pulled off out there in Algiers in the old days. Why, at Kasfa, he took two bullets in the lung and still managed to kill four fellagha with a handgun. A handgun, for Christ’s sake.’
Deville poured him another brandy. ‘Tell me more.’
Which Jarrot did. By the time he was finished, he was thoroughly drunk. ‘So what do I do?’
‘Eleven o’clock, I think he said he’d return.’ Deville glanced at his watch. ‘It’s ten now. I’ll get my coat and we’ll go back to the garage. I’d better drive. You’re in no fit state to cross the street on your own.’
‘The garage?’ Jarrot’s speech was slow and heavy. ‘Why the garage?’
‘Because I want to meet him. Reason with him on your behalf.’ He slapped Jarrot on the shoulder. ‘Trust me, Claude, to help you. After all, that is the reason you came to see me, isn’t it?’
He went into his bedroom, pulled on a dark overcoat and took down the black Homburg hat he always wore. He opened the drawer in his bedside bureau and took out an automatic pistol. He was, after all, going to confront a man who, if everything he had heard tonight was true, was a psychopathic killer of the first order.
He weighed the pistol in his hand, then taking, on hunch alone, the biggest chance of his life, he put it back in the drawer. He returned to the other room where he found Jarrot at the brandy again.
‘Right, Claude,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Let’s go.’
The concert was a total success. Mikali was called back again and again with many sections of the audience clamouring for an encore. Finally, he obliged. There was an excited murmur, then complete stillness as he seated himself at the piano. A pause and he started to play ‘Le Pastour’ by Gabriel Grovlez.
He parked the hire car some distance from the garage and walked the rest of the way on foot through the heavy rain, letting himself in quietly through the judas in the main gate. He still had the Colt in the right-hand pocket of his raincoat. He felt for the butt as he stood there in the darkness listening to music faintly playing in the apartment above.
He went upstairs quietly and opened the door. The living-room was in half-darkness, the only light the lamp on the table at which Jarrot snored gently in a drunken sleep.
One bottle of Napoleon beside him was empty, another already a quarter down. A portable radio played music softly and then the announcer’s voice interrupted with more details on the massive police hunt for the assassin of Vassilikos and his men.
He reached over and switched it off, then took the Colt from his pocket. A soft voice said in excellent English with a slight French accent, ‘If that’s the gun I think it is, it would be really an error of the first magnitude to kill him with it.’
Deville stepped from the shadows at the back of the room. He still wore his dark overcoat and carried a walking stick in one hand, his Homburg in the other.
‘They would extract the bullet from his corpse, forensic tests would show it had come from the same gun which was used on Vassilikos and his men. I am right, am I not? It is the same gun?’ He shrugged. ‘Which still doesn’t mean they would stand much chance of tracing you, but silly to spoil such a brilliant operation with even a single act of stupidity.’
Mikali waited, the Colt against his thigh. ‘Who are you?’
‘Jean Paul Deville. By profession, criminal lawyer. This creature here is a client of mine. He came to me earlier tonight in considerable agitation and told me everything. You see, we have a special relationship. I am, you might say, his father confessor. He’d been a naughty boy with the OAS a year or two back, I got him off the hook.’
He reached inside his coat, the Colt swung up instantly. ‘A cigarette only, I assure you.’ Deville produced a silver case. ‘I haven’t fired a gun in years. No blunt instruments. Nothing up my sleeve at all. This whole affair is between you and me and this poor drunken swine here. He hasn’t spoken to another living soul.’
‘And you believe him?’
‘Who could he run to? Like a scared rabbit, he came to the only safe burrow he knew.’
‘To tell you?’
‘He was afraid that you intended to kill him. Quite terrified. He told me everything about you. Algeria, the Legion. Kasfa, for example. That little affair made a deep impression on him. He gave me the reason for the whole thing as well. The fact that Vassilikos had tortured and murdered your grandfather.’
‘So?’ Mikali waited patiently.
‘I could have written a letter detailing all these acts before leaving my apartment tonight. Posted it with a covering note to my secretary asking for it to be passed on to the right people at SDECE.’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
Deville walked over to the window and opened it. Rain poured down relentlessly. There was the sound of traffic in the night.
‘Tell me something – do you usually speak Greek with a Cretan accent like you did in the park?’
‘No.’
‘I thought not. A brilliant stroke that, coupled with your reference to Vassilikos and his men as fascists, to the chauffeur. Of course it does mean that all over Greece tonight, they’ll be hauling in every Communist, every agitator, every member of the Democratic Front they can lay their hands on.’
‘That’s their hard luck,’ Mikali said. ‘Politics bore me, so could you kindly get to the point.’
‘It’s really quite simple, Mr Mikali. Chaos – chaos is my business. I have a vested interest, as do my masters, in creating as much of it as possible in the Western world. Chaos and disorder and fear and uncertainty, like you have created, because what’s happening in Athens tonight is also happening in Paris. There isn’t a left-wing agitator in the city who won’t be either under cover or in police hands by morning. Not only Communists, but Socialists. The Socialist Party won’t like that and very soon, the workers won’t like it either, which makes things rather difficult for the government with an election coming up.’
Mikali said softly, ‘Who are you?’
‘Like you, not what I seem.’
‘From way back east? As far as Moscow perhaps?’
‘Does that matter?’
‘Like I said, politics bore me.’
‘An excellent basis for the sort of relationship I’m seeking.’
‘So what do you want?’
‘You, my friend, to repeat your performance in the Bois de Meudon when I require it. Very special occasions only. A unique and totally private arrangement between the two of us.’
Mikali said softly, ‘Blackmail, is that it?’
‘Don’t be stupid. You could kill me now – and Jarrot. Walk away from here with an excellent chance of no one ever being the wiser. Who on earth would ever suspect you? Good God, you even played for the Queen of England at a special reception at Buckingham Palace last year, isn’t it so? When you’re in London, passing through Heathrow, what happens to you?’
‘They take me to the VIP lounge.’
‘Exactly. Can you remember when Customs anywhere in the world last checked your baggage?’
Which was true. Mikali put the Colt on the window ledge and took out a cigarette. Deville gave him a light. ‘Let me make one thing clear. Like you, politics mean nothing to me.’
‘Then why do what you do?’
Deville shrugged. ‘It’s the only game I’ve got. I’m lucky. Most people don’t have any game at all.’
‘But I do?’ Mikali said.
Deville turned. There was a strange disturbing intimacy between them now, standing together at the window, the smell of the rain on the night air.
‘Your music? I don’t think so. I’ve often felt sorry for creative artists. Musicians, painters, writers. It’s over, particularly in the performing arts, so soon; the briefest of high points. Afterwards, down you go. Like sex. Ovid really put it very well over two thousand years ago and nothing has changed since then. After coitus, everyone is depressed.’
His voice was soft, and eminently reasonable. Patient, civilized in tone. For a moment, Mikali might have been back at the villa in Hydra, sitting in front of the pine-log fire, listening to his grandfather.
‘But this evening – that was different. You enjoyed it. Every dangerous moment. I’ll make you a prophecy. Tomorrow, the music critics will say that tonight you gave one of your greatest performances.’
‘Yes,’ Mikali said simply. ‘I was good. The house manager said they won’t have an empty seat in the place on Friday.’
‘Back in Algeria you killed everyone, isn’t that so? Whole villages – women, children – it was that kind of war. This afternoon, you killed pigs.’
Mikali stared out of the window into the night and saw the fellagha turning from the burning truck at Kasfa, drifting towards him in slow motion as he waited, stubbornly refusing to die, the red beret crushed against his wounds.
He had beaten Death then at his own game four times over. He felt again the same breathless excitement. The affair at the Bois de Meudon had been the same, he knew that now. A debt for his grandfather, yes, but afterwards…
He raised his hands. ‘Give me a piano score, any concerto you care to name and with these, I can give you perfection.’
‘And more,’ Deville said softly. ‘Much more. I think you know this, my friend.’
The breath went out of Mikali in a long sigh. ‘And who exactly would you have in mind in the future?’
‘Does that matter?’
Mikali smiled slightly. ‘Not really.’
‘Good – but to start, I’ll give you what my Jewish friends would call a mitzvah. A good deed for which I expect nothing in return. Something for you. Your touring schedule. Is it likely to take you to Berlin during the first week of November?’
‘I can name my own dates in Berlin. I have an open invitation there always.’
‘Good. General Stephanakis will be visiting the city on the first of November for three days. He was, if you’re interested, Vassilikos’s direct superior. I would have thought you might have more than a passing interest in him. But for the moment, I think we’d better do something about friend Jarrot here.’
‘What would you suggest?’
‘A little more of this Napoleon down him for a start. A pity to waste good cognac, but there it is.’ He pulled the unconscious Jarrot’s head back by the hair and forced the neck of the bottle between his teeth. He glanced over his shoulder. ‘I do hope you can manage me a ticket for Friday’s performance. I’d hate to miss it.’
At five-thirty the following morning it was still raining heavily at first light when the night patrolman for the area stopped by the slipway which ran into the Seine opposite Rue de Gagny.
His cape was soaked and he was thoroughly miserable as he paused under a chestnut tree to light a cigarette. As the mist lifted a little from the river, he saw something down there in the water at the end of the slipway.
As he approached, he saw that it was the back of a Citroën truck, the front end of which was under the surface. He waded down into the freezing water, took a deep breath, reached for the door handle and pulled it open. He surfaced with Claude Jarrot in his arms.
At the inquest which took place a week later, the medical evidence indicated a level of alcohol in the blood three times in excess of that permitted for vehicle drivers. The coroner’s verdict was simple. Death by accident.
The concert on Friday was everything that could be hoped and the Minister of the Interior himself was present at the reception with the Greek Ambassador, closeted together in a corner. As the press of well-wishers slackened around Mikali, Deville approached.
‘Glad you could come,’ Mikali said as they shook hands.
‘My dear chap, I wouldn’t have missed it. You were brilliant – quite brilliant.’
Mikali looked around the crowded room, filled in the main by some of the most fashionable and important people in Paris.
‘Strange how much apart I suddenly feel from all this.’
‘Alone in the crowd?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘I’ve felt like that for something like twenty-five years. The great game. Walking the knife edge of danger. Never certain just how long you can get away with it. Waiting for the final day. The knock on the door.’ Deville smiled. ‘It has its own excitement.’
‘Like being on a constant high?’ Mikali said. ‘You think it will come, this final day of yours?’
‘Probably when I least expect it and for the most stupid and trivial of reasons.’
Mikali said, ‘Don’t go away. I must have a word with the Minister of the Interior. I’ll see you later.’
‘Of course.’
The Minister was saying to the Greek Ambassador, ‘Naturally, we are doing everything in our power to wipe out this – this blot on French honour, but to be frank with you, Ambassador, this Cretan of yours seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. But only for the moment. We’ll get him, sooner or later, I promise you.’
Mikali heard all of this as he approached. He smiled. ‘Your Excellencies, I’m honoured you could both attend tonight.’
‘A privilege, Monsieur Mikali.’ The Minister snapped his fingers and a waiter hurried forward with champagne on a tray. They all took a glass. ‘An astonishing performance.’
The Greek Ambassador raised his glass. ‘To you, my dear Mikali and to your genius. Greece is proud of you.’
As Mikali raised his own glass in return, Jean Paul Deville toasted him in the mirror.
General George Stephanakis booked into the Hilton hotel in West Berlin on the afternoon of 2 November. The management gave him a suite on the fourth floor, with adjoining rooms for his aides. They also made sure, as a courtesy, that the room service waiter was a Greek and also the chambermaid.
Her name was Ziá Boudakis, age nineteen, a small girl with dark hair and an olive skin. In a few years, she would have a weight problem, but not yet and that evening, as she let herself into the suite with her pass key, she looked undeniably attractive in the dark stockings and short, black uniform dress.
The General would be back at eight, they’d told her that, so she busied herself quickly in turning down the beds, and generally tidying the suite. She folded the coverlets then turned to put them away in the wardrobe, pulling across the sliding door.
The man standing inside was dressed in black pants and sweater, his head covered with a balaclava helmet through which only his eyes and nose and lips showed. There was a rope around his waist, she noticed that, and that the hand which grabbed her throat, choking off her scream, was gloved. And then she was inside in the dark with him, the door closed, leaving only a chink through which the room could be seen.
He released his grip and in her terror, she spoke instinctively in Greek. ‘Don’t kill me!’
‘Heh, a Greek girl,’ he said, to her total astonishment, in her own language. She recognized the accent at once.
‘Oh, my God, you’re the Cretan.’
‘That’s right, my love.’ He swung her round, a hand lightly around her throat. ‘I won’t harm you if you’re a good girl. But if you’re not, if you try to warn him in any way, I’ll kill you.’
‘Yes,’ she moaned.
‘Good. What time does he get in?’
‘Eight o’clock.’
He glanced at his wrist. ‘We’ve got twenty minutes to wait. We’ll just have to make ourselves comfortable, won’t we?’
He leaned against the wall, holding her against him. She was no longer afraid, at least not as she had been at first, but excited in a strange way, aware of him hard against her, one hand around her waist. She started to move against him, only a little at first and then more as he laughed and kissed her on the neck.
She was more excited than she had ever been, there in the darkness, turned to meet him as he pushed her against the wall, easing the dark dress up above her thighs.
Afterwards, he tied her wrists very gently behind her and breathed in her ear, ‘There, you’ve had what you wanted, so be a good girl and keep quiet.’
He tied a handkerchief around her mouth to gag her, again with surprising gentleness, and waited. There was the sound of the key in the lock, the door opened and General Stephanakis was ushered in by two of his aides.
They were all in uniform. He turned and said, ‘I’m going to have a shower and change. Come back in forty-five minutes. We’ll eat here.’
They saluted and left and he closed the door. Stephanakis dropped his cap on the bed and started to unbutton his tunic. Behind him, the door of the wardrobe rolled back and Mikali stepped out. He held a pistol with a silencer in his right hand. Stephanakis gazed at him in stupefaction and Mikali pulled up the balaclava.
‘Oh, my God,’ the General said. ‘You – you are the Cretan.’
‘Welcome to Berlin,’ Mikali said and shot him.
He turned off all the lights, pulled on his balaclava again, then opened the window and uncoiled the rope about his waist. A few moments later, he was abseiling down to the flat roof of the garage in the darkness four floors below. It was no great trick. In training at Gasfa on the Moroccan coast in the old days, a Legion paratrooper had been expected to abseil down a three-hundred-foot cliff or fail his course.
Safely on the roof, he pulled down the rope, coiled it quickly about his waist, then dropped over the edge of the garage to the ground.
He paused by some dustbins in the alley and took off his balaclava helmet which he folded neatly and slipped into one pocket. Then he pulled an ordinary paper carrier bag from behind the dustbins and took out a cheap, dark raincoat which he pulled on.
A few moments later, he was walking away briskly through the crowded evening streets, back to his hotel. At nine-thirty, he was at the University of Berlin, giving a recital of the works of Bach and Beethoven, to a packed hall.
The following morning, Jean Paul Deville received a cable from Berlin. It simply said, Your mitzvah much appreciated. Perhaps I can do the same for you some time.
There was no signature.
2
The British Secret Intelligence Service, known more correctly as DI5, does not officially exist, is not even established by law although it does in fact occupy a large white and red brick building in the West End of London not far from the Hilton hotel.
Those whom it employs are faceless, anonymous men who spend their time in a ceaseless battle of wits aimed at controlling the activities of the agents of foreign powers in Great Britain and increasingly, what has become an even more serious problem, the forces of European terrorism.
But DI5 can only carry out an investigation. It has no powers of arrest. Any effectiveness it has depends in the final analysis on the cooperation of the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard. It is they who make the arrests so that those anonymous men of DI5 never have to appear in court.
Which explained why, on the night of the shooting of Maxwell Cohen, it had been Chief Detective-Superintendent Harry Baker who got out of the police Jaguar outside the mortuary in Cromwell Road just after nine o’clock and hurried up the steps.
Baker was a Yorkshireman by birth from Halifax in the West Riding. He’d been a policeman for twenty-five years. A long time to be disliked by the general public and work a three-shift system that only gave you one weekend in seven at home with the family. A fact his wife no longer commented on for the simple reason that she’d packed her bags and moved out five years previously.
Baker had grey hair and a badly broken nose, a relic of his rugby-playing days, giving him the air of an amiable prize fighter. Which was deceptive for it concealed one of the sharpest minds in Special Branch.
His assistant, Detective-Inspector George Stewart, waited in the foyer, smoking a cigarette. He dropped it to the floor, put a foot on it and came forward.
Baker said, ‘All right – tell me.’
‘Girl of fourteen – Megan Helen Morgan.’ He had his notebook open now. ‘Mother, Mrs Helen Wood. Married to the Reverend Francis Wood, rector of Steeple Durham in Essex. I spoke to him on the phone half an hour ago. They’re on their way now.’
‘Now wait a minute,’ Baker said. ‘I’m beginning to get a bit confused.’
‘The girl’s landlady is in here, sir. A Mrs Carter.’
He opened a door marked Waiting Room and Baker moved in. The woman who sat by the window was stout and middle-aged and wore a brown raincoat. Her face was blotched, swollen by weeping.
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