Crying Blue Murder (MIRA) by Paul Johnston Read Free Book Online Page B

you’ve been through all the public and secret records you or anyone else can find. Please—’ she took his hand ‘—let Andonis go.’
    ‘Where have you been looking this week,
adherfouli
?’ Anna said from behind him, her use of the affectionate diminutive at odds with her stern tone. ‘Eh, little brother? Where have you been wasting your time since I last saw you?’
    Mavros straightened up. ‘I traced a taxi-driver in Glyfadha. I heard about him from a new contact. The guy had supposedly been in the security forces during the dictatorship.’ He looked away from the bookcase. ‘It turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. He spent the winter of ’72 to ’73 building a hotel in Limnos.’
    ‘Mother’s right, Alex,’ Anna said, grasping his arm. ‘You have to leave Andonis in peace.’
    Mavros shook his sister off gently, not wanting to fall out with her. He was attached to her, even though he rarely made that obvious, but he didn’t much like her gossip-fuelled life or her ultra-modern house in the rich suburb of Kifissia. The poster he’d seen for the Theocharis Museum came up before him again, the image of the white flask with the sepulchral boatman. Ancient Greek myth had it that the souls of the unburied dead roamed for ever, denied access to Charon’s bark and the shadowy underworld ruled by Hades. That was how he’d thought of Andonis since he was a boy. His elder brother was a lost spirit wandering the earth, haunting him by day and by night, often appearing as a blurred face in which only the bright blue eyes were real. The reality was that Andonis was a permanent part of the structure of Mavros’s life. Because of his dual nationality he’d always felt different from other Greeks, and the mystery over his brother’s disappearance during the country’s most recent experience of totalitarian rule had made the sense of alienation, of living on the margins, even more pronounced. The fact that he had a flawed eye seemed like confirmation of that.
    ‘Yes?’ Anna asked, touching his arm again.
    Mavros nodded haltingly, loath for her to know that he resented the way she’d built a life that had little or no room for Andonis. The truth was that he used Anna’s intimate knowledge of Athenian society in his work; as long as he disguised any requests that were to do with their brother, she never refused him. He wasn’t proud of the way he manipulated his sister, but he didn’t want to lose that precious resource.
    Dorothy struggled to her feet, waving away their offers of assistance. ‘I’m going to make us some lunch,’ she said, limping towards the kitchen.
    ‘No, no,’ Anna declined hurriedly. ‘I really must go.’ She bustled away after kissing them both. She knew that the meal would take time to prepare and consume.
    Mavros remained, allowing his mother to limp around, fussing over him and feeding him the smoked salmon she’d started ordering on the Internet from a supplier in the Highlands of her homeland. He’d never felt comfortable in the flat. He didn’t like the heaps of books and papers relating to the publishing business Dorothy had run single-handedly for years. He felt that the clutter had given her a way to block out those she had lost, though he knew she remembered Spyros and Andonis in her own way. Over the years she’d filled a niche in the book trade for philhellenic publications, the scribblings of the numerous British visitors over the centuries who’d succumbed to Greece’s charms. Mavros was with the majority of Greeks on that issue. He couldn’t stand the pseudo-lyrical bullshit, twisted history and shallow, updated mythology that professional Greece-lovers spewed out. A famously crude critic had once called them ‘Greek landscape fuckers’ and he could see what the guy was getting at—sexually repressed Northerners were often inspired by the mute terrain rather than by its human occupants who might answer back. Dorothy took an opposing view and, as