The Green Lady Read Free Page B

voice high and his face red. ‘But this is your last warning, sir.’
    There was a spontaneous burst of applause from the other passengers. Mavros let the young official go and looked at the old man. He didn’t seem to understand what was going on.
    â€˜Can I help?’ Mavros said. ‘Where do you want to get off?’
    Cloudy eyes took him in. ‘I . . . I don’t know.’
    Mavros turned back to the ticket inspector, who was preparing a rapid exit at the next stop. ‘He needs help. You don’t only issue fines, do you?’
    The young man stared at him and then nodded meekly. ‘I’ll hand him over to the route controller in Syndagma.’
    â€˜Thank you.’
    Mavros watched as the official helped the old man off and led him to the grey kiosk. Mission accomplished.
    â€˜Bravo, my son,’ said a middle-aged woman in black. ‘May the Lord look favourably on you.’
    Not very likely, Mavros thought, smiling thanks at her. Although he wasn’t a member of the Communist Party, he definitely wasn’t religious; but he did believe in doing the right thing, no matter what it took. Maybe that would have rubbed off on the ticket inspector.
    He got off the bus at its terminus on the south side of the Acropolis. This perspective was less familiar to him than the opposite side. He used to live over there, with a superb view of the Erechtheion and the Parthenon’s perpetual scaffolding, until the rent became too onerous. He still missed his old flat. There had been good times in it, many of them with Niki.
    Mavros walked up the path through the pine trees on the slopes of Philopappos. He had strolled there before and knew its history. One of the disputed sites of the prison where Socrates had been held before his state-sponsored poisoning by hemlock was nearby and the hill was also known as the Mouseion because of a temple to the Muses on its flanks. There had been ancient fortifications, part of the great strategist Themistocles’s walls, as well as less edifying later military uses. The Venetian general Morosini had bombarded the Turkish-held Acropolis from the hill in 1687, resulting in the explosion that wrecked the Parthenon. Philopappos had also been the apple in the eye of numerous conspirators as an artillery location, the last being the Colonels during their coup in 1967. In the past when he had such thoughts, Mavros’s brother Andonis would have flashed before him. Now there was nothing. After years of pleading by his mother and sister, Mavros had finally let Andonis fall into the abyss.
    Mavros felt the sweat build up all over his body and cursed the Fat Man’s pastries. He needed to get on his exercise bike, but the heat hardly encouraged that. He came out of the trees and looked up at the Tomb of Philopappos himself, a marble tower over ten metres high with friezes and statues commemorating the eponymous grandee from the second century AD. There was a small group of young people in identical T-shirts around the base, and he made out the tones of an American classicist in full lecture mode. As for the mystery woman, not a sign. He skirted the tomb, slipping on the smooth stones, and took in the view. Although there was a heat haze, over the glinting blue sea he could see the triangular peak of the mountain on the island of Aegina and, beyond, the distant mountains of the Peloponnese stepping southwards.
    â€˜Mr Mavros.’
    He turned and took in a statuesque woman in her mid-forties. She was wearing a loose-fitting grey dress that displayed well-turned ankles, but it was the face beneath the straw hat that seized his attention. It was finely constructed, with almond-shaped pale blue eyes, a narrow nose and unpainted lips, the cheekbones high enough to suggest Slavic or Russian roots. She could have been beautiful, but her expression was infinitely sad and there were dark rings beneath her eyes. Brown hair with blonde highlights hung untended