The Silver Stain Read Free

his heroin addict girlfriend was released from psychiatric care. In the meantime, the Fat Man had combined his daily visits to provide breakfast with acting as Mavros’s unofficial secretary and office manager. Years of grinding through the Communist Party’s multiple layers of bureaucracy had made Yiorgos a remarkably competent record keeper. The fact that – with off-white shirts stretching over his paunch and threadbare trousers – he was hardly presentable to clients was a way of controlling his involvement in cases.
    The Fat Man looked out over the opulent blocks around the park of Dhexameni. ‘What would your father have thought about you ending up in this platinum-coated sewer?’
    ‘Oh, thanks,’ Mavros replied, going back inside. ‘What would he have thought about you avoiding the comrades and coming here every day?’ He looked at the photographs of his family on the display table by the fireplace. His mother had taken most of them with her, but there were still portraits of his father, Spyros, with his thick black hair, hooked nose and piercing gaze: and of his brother, Andonis, a bright-faced version of the older man, who had been popular with the opposite sex from his early teens.
    ‘Let them go,’ the Fat Man said softly, going towards the kitchen with his tray.
    Mavros thought about that. His father, a lawyer who was also a high-ranking official of the then illegal Communist Party, had died when he was five and he had few memories, mainly of a serious, prematurely aged man whose smile had been tinged with sadness, but who always greeted him with a tight hug. His brother Andonis, who disappeared during the Dictatorship aged twenty-one, had played a much larger part in his life, and was the reason he had become a missing persons specialist. But Andonis was the only failure in his career – every trace of his brother had led to dead ends and desolation.
    ‘I have let them go, Yiorgo,’ Mavros called. And it was true. Spyros, despite being a hero of the Party, had never been close enough to inspire him – whence his essentially apolitical stance – while Andonis had gradually ceased to influence him. Besides, he had sworn to his mother that he would concentrate on his own life and on Niki rather than his lost male relatives. ‘I have, believe me.’
    The problem was, he didn’t always believe it himself.
    Mavros was showered, his shoulder-length and still black hair damp on the shoulders of his denim shirt, and shaved, an activity he undertook once a week at most, when the landline rang.
    ‘You know who this is,’ said a gruff voice.
    ‘Do I?’ Mavros replied. ‘The Prime Minister? The ghost of Maria Callas with a bad cold?’
    ‘As funny as ever – you think.’ Nikos Kriaras, head of the Athens police organized crime division, was a man with no humour in his soul. ‘I have little time for this, so listen carefully. You will shortly have visitors. It would be a very good idea to take the job you will be offered. A very good idea indeed.’
    ‘I’ve had bad experience of your good ideas,’ Mavros said, immediately antagonistic to anything suggested by the well connected but less than straight cop.
    ‘Tell me why I should do what you say.’
    Kriaras sighed. ‘Why are things never easy with you? All right, this is nothing to do with my current portfolio.’ The commander was terrified of phone taps and habitually spoke in a clipped mode he thought would be incomprehensible to outsiders. ‘My friends at the Concert Hall would like your input on this.’ A child could have broken that codename. Next to the main Athens music venue was the American embassy.
    ‘Oh, great,’ Mavros said, remembering a case involving the Americans and a terrorist that had nearly cost him his life. ‘I think I’d rather take in the May sunshine on my balcony, thanks.’
    ‘Don’t screw with me, smart-arse,’ Kriaras said. ‘Take the job. It’ll be well paid, it’s not dangerous and you’ll meet