Solo (Aka the Cretan Lover) (v5)
Read Solo (Aka the Cretan Lover) (v5) Online
Authors: Jack Higgins
SOLO
Jack Higgins
Open Road Integrated Media
New York
For my daughter, Ruth Patterson, who thinks it's about time
CONTENTS
Revenge is a kind of wild justice.
--Francis Bacon
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, 0 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.
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, brought 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 bouse 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, cafes 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 Citroen 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 Citroen 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 Citroen 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 Citroen, 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.