Authors: Paul E. Hardisty
‘Just what you’d expect from Neo-Enosis.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘But there’s something I don’t understand.’ He’d not had time to consider it until now. ‘Those men tonight, the ones with the guns.’
‘Murderers.’ She put her head on her knees a moment, looked back up at Clay. ‘This will make the Commission’s work almost impossible. If people were scared to talk before, just imagine how difficult it will be to get any credible testimony now.’
‘There’s something else.’
‘What?’
‘Those weren’t Greek Cypriots, Hope. Any of them.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Were you listening to them?’
‘No, I…’
‘They were speaking Russian.’
They passed the Ayia Napa headlands just after noon the next day and brought
Flame
into the Larnaca marina four hours later. They’d spoken little, taking turns on watch so the other could sleep below. Now they stood by Clay’s rental car, the late-afternoon sun slanting across the marina car park. Clay could see the stress on Hope’s face, the circles under her eyes like bruises, the lines around her mouth deeper, more anxious than before. A few hours can change the way you see everything.
They agreed that Clay would drive Hope to her house near Paphos. It was Wednesday, Maria was looking after the seminar, and there was no reason for Hope to go back to Nicosia and the university. Weekends she usually spent working at the Lara Beach research station she’d set up almost five years ago with a series of grants from the EU and the Government of Cyprus. Clay knew she didn’t want to be alone.
They drove along the coast road, watching the Med flash past, the tired fields littered with stone, the soil stripped away to reveal the island’s bare white bones, the forests that once covered this place centuries gone now, hacked away by successive empires. Just after dusk, Clay stopped at a roadside
periptero
. Hope got out, stretched her legs and disappeared into the shop. Clay walked through the dust of the parking lot to a payphone booth wedged up against a lamppost.
Crowbar answered first ring. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he barked in Afrikaans.
‘Guess.’
Crowbar hesitated a moment. ‘That was you?’
‘You heard?’
‘It’s all over the papers today.’
‘And you,
broer
?’
‘We have to meet.’
Clay gave Crowbar Hope’s address.
‘Tonight, then.’
‘Hope says it’s hard to find.’
‘
Fok
, Straker, you growing an old woman’s beard now? See you there in two and a half hours.’
Clay put down the phone and walked back to the car. Hope was already sitting in the passenger seat, the dome light on, a copy of the Cyprus English-language daily spread across her lap. A photo of the wall, the slogan clearly legible, the burnt-out buildings in the background accompanied the headline:
Six Dead in Karpasia Revenge Attack
.
Clay started the car and pulled onto the coast road heading west.
After a while Hope folded the paper, switched off the dome light. ‘It says that two men are now in hospital suffering from burns and smoke inhalation, but are expected to recover.’
Clay said nothing, drove on.
‘You saved them, Clay,’ she whispered.
Grey tarmac scrolled away under a myopic funnel of light.
‘The Turks are making a big noise about it,’ she went on. ‘They say they have identified three of the dead attackers as Greek Cypriots. They are demanding that the Greek Cypriot government round up the senior members of Neo-Enosis and bring them to justice. It also says that the Turkish Cypriot police have evidence that at least two others who were involved fled the scene on foot that night, possibly to the coast and by boat to the south. They are wanted for questioning. There is no mention of my friend.’
But Clay wasn’t thinking about the fire, or the shootings. He was thinking about Rania. He’d gone ashore that night hoping that the villagers might provide something that would lead him to her, perhaps tie her disappearance to Erkan. Knowing that Erkan was
there, in his monastery in Karpasia, had given him the vague hope that he might have been able to press on, confront the
bliksem
one more time, find her there, bring her home. Now he had nothing, just a scared scientist and more police after him.
It was dark by the time they reached Paphos. Hope directed him through the town to the coast and along a maze of narrow roads that snaked through the rocky carbonate hills rising up from the sea. After a while they came to a small hamlet, twenty houses perhaps, perched on the edge of a rocky hillside, the coast a fractal white line half a dimension distant, the sea stretched out across the whole world, dark and foreboding, as if you might fall into it. The road was barely wide enough for one car. Clay slowed and looked back over the darkened hills. A pickup truck sauntered along the winding valley-bottom track towards the coast road. Hope waved them on past a series of abandoned homesteads – there were so many here, derelicts of crumbling masonry and caved roofs, the arches slumped and ragged, the keystones dropped like old teeth.
‘Here,’ she said, pointing to a narrow, tree-lined lane. ‘Stop.’ Hope jumped out of the car, opened a tin postbox, pulled out a clutch of letters and sat back in the car. ‘Just down here,’ she said.
Clay pulled the Beretta from his pocket and checked the action. Then he guided the car down the lane to a rock-edged turnaround, where he switched off the engine. Hope took him by the hand and led him on foot through an old stone archway into a night garden of thick underbrush and tall, swaying trees, their branches black against a moonlit sky. The house was old, limestone brickwork casements and corners, clay-tile roof, wood-shuttered windows, a tiled veranda set with wicker chairs and a wooden table, and everywhere the cascade of vegetation, as if the place were clothed in it. She opened the front door, lit a hurricane lamp and led him through the house, carrying the lamp before her by its handle. A black-and-white tile floor, a stonework fireplace, flashes of framed watercolours on the walls, hand-drawn, washed sketches of sea creatures, turtles and fish and crustaceans of the kind you see in guidebooks. Hope handed
him the lantern, opened up a set of French doors, then unlatched and folded back floor-to-ceiling shutters. A cold breeze flooded the house. The Med sparkled under a cloud-strewn night sky.
Hope left him on the balcony and reappeared a moment later with a couple of beers, handed Clay one, put the lantern on a small side table, and turned it low. Then she crouched to a small outdoor fireplace and struck a match. Soon a fire crackled in the clay hearth.
Hope turned her back to the fire, warming her hands behind her. ‘I’m off grid,’ she said. ‘I have a twelve-volt solar photovoltaic system, gas for cooking, and my water comes from a spring out back that runs all year. This is my sanctuary.’
Clay checked his watch. Just over two hours since he’d spoken with Crowbar. There was no way he’d find the place. Hope was curled up in her chair, arms clasped over her shins, like he’d seen Rania do sometimes.
‘Okay?’ he said.
She nodded.
‘Don’t worry. We’ll find her.’
‘I miss her.’
Clay bit down, said nothing, sipped his beer. Me too.
Hope opened her letters, slicing open the envelopes on their short end with a polished wooden opener, glancing at the contents, setting them aside. ‘Bills,’ she said. She drank some beer, then picked up the last letter, opened it, unfolded the thick bond paper, read, turned it over, and reread. She looked up at Clay and let out a little laugh, setting the paper with the others.
‘What is it?’ said Clay.
Hope shook her head. ‘It’s…’ She picked up the letter, looked at it again, crumpled it in her hand and dropped to the floor. ‘It’s nothing.’
Before he had time to ask again, a rapping sound echoed through the house. Clay pulled out the Beretta and walked quickly to the front door.
‘
Die fokken duer oopmaak
.’
Clay opened the door. Crowbar stood on the veranda, stamping his feet on the tile. He was wrapped against the cold in a thick woollen jumper and black leather jacket. ‘
Fokken Med, ja
? Is supposed to be
fokken
hot,
ja
?
Fok
I miss
Afrika
.’ His gaze wandered over the cuts on Clay’s face, the singed eyebrows, the puffy red burns on his forehead and nose. ‘
Fok mie
, Straker. You get better-looking every day.’
Clay shrugged and led Crowbar through the house to the veranda.
‘Hope, this is my friend Crowbar. He’s helping me find Rania.’
Hope looked her new guest over. ‘Crowbar?’
‘
Koevoet
,’ said Crowbar. ‘That’s how you say it.’
Hope brought him a beer. ‘Here you go, Mister Koofoot.’
Crowbar smiled at the attempt and took a slug of the beer. Then he reached into the pocket of his jacket and placed a folded newspaper on the table. ‘She’s alive,
broer
.’
Clay grabbed the paper, opened it up and tilted it towards the light. There it was, on the front page of that day’s
Independent
. The headline read: ‘
North Cyprus Land Grab Terror
’.
Clay looked up at Crowbar. ‘It only happened the night before last.’
‘So she must have filed yesterday,
ja
. She’s here, on the island.’
The title of the piece also clearly ruled out Erkan. A cascade of relief washed through him, like being in the field hospital and the doctor looking down at you through a blood-spattered surgical mask, the blur of people moving all around you, yelling, screaming, the moans of the wounded and the dying, and his muffled voice telling you not to worry, that you’re going to make it and you believe him.
‘And if she’s writing and filing stories, then she must be free,’ said Hope, breathless. ‘She hasn’t been kidnapped at all.’ Her smile was big, like her name.
‘Then why hasn’t she contacted anyone?’ said Clay, looking at Hope. ‘Not even you.’ He could see the words hit her, the smile die, the pain spread through her. It felt good for a second, faded fast.
Hope grabbed the paper, read the article in silence, put it down.
‘Rania writes here that the murders we witnessed were made to look like the work of Neo-Enosis, but that in fact it was Erkan’s men, hired guns. Not simple retaliation for some old grievance, she says, but an attempt to silence those who would speak out against the land grab in the north.’ Hope frowned. ‘She doesn’t
want
to make contact. She’s hiding. How else could she have accessed this kind of information?’
It made sense. Rania had been trained by French intelligence. Clay knew that if she wanted to disappear, she could. But then, why the note left in the hotel room in Istanbul? Had he misread it after all, willed into it some meaning that was never there?
Hope said, ‘The Turks are saying that the gunmen were Greek. Rania appears convinced they were Erkan’s men, Turks. You told me you thought the gunmen were speaking Russian.’
‘Not thought,’ said Clay. ‘They were.’
Hope glanced up at him. ‘Okay, then. They were.’
‘Russian?’ said Crowbar.
Clay nodded.
‘Why would Erkan hire Russians?’ said Hope.
Crowbar drained his beer. ‘Why not? This place is crawling with ’em. Funnelling cash out of Mother Russia as fast as they can milk those big fat tits of hers.’ Crowbar stood, wandered off towards the kitchen.
Hope looked at Clay. ‘Your friend. He’s … colourful.’
Clay said nothing, let the silence sit between them.
Crowbar returned with three beers clawed in one hand, set them on the table.
‘Do help yourself,’ said Hope.
Crowbar grinned at her and opened a beer. Then, speaking to Clay in Afrikaans, said, ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’
‘Don’t worry,
broer
. She’s–’ Clay stumbled, stopped. She’s what? Rania’s lover? Future godmother to their child? Fucking third peg in a
ménage à trois
? ‘She’s okay,’ he said.
Crowbar looked at Hope and continued in English: ‘Your research place, just down here at Lara Beach.’
‘Yes?’
‘You don’t know?’
Hope leant forward in her chair. ‘Know what?’
‘It was ransacked two nights ago, destroyed. Equipment wrecked, windows smashed, documents taken, that nice new Toyota Hilux torched.’
Hope’s eyes widened. Even in the dim firelight Clay could see initial disbelief give way to the body blow of bad news. Her face crumpled.
‘No one was hurt,’ said Crowbar.
‘Jesus,’ said Clay. ‘Who did it?’
Crowbar stood, stretched his shoulders, twisted his torso in a slow arc back and forth, as if he were limbering up for a fight. ‘I did.’
Hope gasped. ‘You?’
Clay stood, squared up to his old platoon commander, waited for an intelligible answer.
Crowbar raised his hands and sat back in his chair. ‘Look, I’m trying to help,
ja
.’
‘By smashing up her research station? Are you fucking crazy, Koevoet?’
‘
Ja
, definitely.’
Hope leapt up and open-palmed Crowbar across the face. The crack of skin on skin pierced the night air.
Crowbar sat unmoving.
Hope looked at Clay, back at Crowbar. There were tears in her eyes. ‘Five years’ work, you asshole. That’s what that place was. It represents thousands of volunteer hours, irreplaceable funding painstakingly raised. And you walk in here like it’s just another…’ she stumbled. ‘…I don’t know, and tell me you’ve destroyed it. For heaven’s sake,
why
?’
‘It was my employer’s idea. Not mine,
ooma
,’ said Crowbar in English. The attempt at respect was lost on Hope.
‘You better start making some sense,
oom
,’ Clay said in Afrikaans.
Crowbar rose from his chair, put a hand on Clay’s shoulder. ‘Look, Straker. I’m
fokken
here, aren’t I?’ he said, his voice calm, even.
‘Who are you working for, Koevoet?’
‘A friend of yours. Same one tried to kill you in Istanbul.’
Clay’s throat tightened. ‘Regina Medved.’
Crowbar nodded.
Clay sensed the movement of Crowbar’s torso, the coil as he shifted his weight to his back foot. He just had time to turn his head through thirty degrees before the blow fell.
Crowbar’s huge right fist ploughed into Clay’s cheekbone, sending him spinning to the ground. Clay landed hard, his left shoulder and hip taking the brunt of the fall. To his surprise he was still conscious.
Hope screamed, started moving towards the house. Crowbar put out a big, hairy arm and stopped her dead.
Clay put his hand to his face, felt the bruise coming up. Nothing was broken; no teeth missing. Normally, a bareknuckle blow from Koevoet meant fractured bones, concussion.
Crowbar stood above him, a grin as big as the African sky spreading across his face. ‘I’ve waited a long time to do that,
ja
.’ He reached down and held out his hand.
‘Jesus, Koevoet.’ Clay reached up.
Crowbar hauled him to his feet, inspected the welt growing on Clay’s face. ‘With the burns and the shot, that looks
lekker, ja
?’ he said in Afrikaans.
Hope stepped back, her way still barred by Crowbar’s arm. She seemed to have recovered somewhat, now stood hands on hips. ‘Either speak in a language I can understand, and tell me what the hell is going on, or get out,’ she hissed. ‘Both of you.’
Crowbar sat back in his chair as if nothing had happened, took a sip of beer. Clay and Hope looked at each other. Clay shrugged, sat. So did Hope.
In his heavily accented, stuttering English, Crowbar started to explain. While Clay and Hope had been north, he’d met with an old contact in the shipping business in Limassol. Crowbar had used him a number of times in his DCC days to ship ‘goods’ from Israel via Yemen to South Africa, in contravention of international sanctions. Israeli weapons, such as the famous Galil assault rifle, later produced domestically by Armscor as the R4, were the backbone of the SADF armoury during the Border War. His contact, who did a lot of work with the Russians in Cyprus (‘and I mean,
a lot
,’ said Crowbar) had
confirmed that Regina Medved was on the island, meeting with the heads of her various businesses. Crowbar had managed to meet, if not with the dowager herself, with her number-two man, in Limassol, two days before. As a result of that meeting, he now worked ‘on contract’ for the Medved family empire. Smashing the research station had been his first task.
Crowbar finished his beer and put the empty bottle on the floor between his feet. ‘I don’t know where Rania is, Straker. But I can tell you, Regina Medved doesn’t have her. She just put a one-million-dollar price on Rania’s head.’
Fear detonated inside Clay’s chest, tore through him like fragments of mortar casing.
‘And something else. The reward for Zdravko Todorov has just gone up. Two million dead, three alive. Same as you. I think she wants to have some fun with him before they kill him.’ He glanced over at Hope, leaned in close to Clay, whispered. ‘They say she gets off on torture. Likes to watch.’
Clay looked up at him.
‘I mean, literally. She masturbates while they torture the bastards.’
Clay sat up, took a deep breath.
By now Hope was sobbing quietly in her chair, Punk’s sweater hanging from her thin frame like a lost dream.
Crowbar stood, started towards the doorway, ‘Beer, Straker?’ he said, disappearing into the kitchen.
Clay looked at Hope. ‘No wonder Rania disappeared.’
Hope looked up through her tears. ‘But she hasn’t abandoned us.’
Clay nodded. Us.
Crowbar reappeared with two cold Keo grasped in one hand, a 35mm camera with an externally fitted flash hanging by its strap from the other. He handed Clay a beer. Clay put it on the table next to the other one he’d hardly touched.
‘So why would Medved want me to destroy your research station?’ Crowbar asked Hope, cracking the top of his beer. ‘What has she got against you?’
‘I’ve never met the woman. All I know about her is from the news. A reclusive oddball oligarch obsessed with Orthodox Christian mythology, another of the great Russian carpetbaggers.’ Hope wiped her face with the sleeve of Punk’s jumper. More tears for wool. She looked at Clay. ‘What has she got against
you
?’
Clay shrugged.
‘He killed her brother,’ said Crowbar.
Clay shot him a stare.
Crowbar frowned. ‘You said she was okay.’
‘I
am
okay,’ said Hope. ‘And after yesterday, I’m not surprised either.’
‘Is it because of the Commission?’ said Clay.
Hope leaned forward. ‘Why would Regina Medved care about the Commission?’
‘Have you heard of a company called EcoDev?’ said Crowbar, fiddling with the camera.
‘Sure,’ said Hope. ‘It’s one of the biggest, most successful property development outfits in Cyprus. Arch rivals of my friend Nicos Chrisostomedes.’ She exhaled through pursed lips. ‘EcoDev has started the application process for a major resort just west of here, at Toxeflora Beach in the Agamas. It’ll never go ahead, though, because it’s on Turkish-owned land that has been incorporated into the proposed Agamas National Park, and because, after Lara Beach, it’s the last and most important remaining turtle-nesting beach in Greek Cyprus. So yes, the Commission is going to want to speak to EcoDev.’
‘Being in the park didn’t stop the Alassou Resort going ahead,’ said Clay.
‘That was one of Chrisostomedes’ deals,’ said Hope. ‘Also on Turkish land.’
Clay thought back to his meeting with Erkan, right after Rania had disappeared. ‘According to Erkan, that deal was “facilitated” by Minister Dimitriou. Even Erkan was in on it.’
Hope looked at him quizzically. ‘Are you sure?’
‘I have proof.’
Hope stared out into the night for a moment. ‘If word ever got out that Chrisostomedes had colluded with Erkan, it would mean the end for his business here. He’d become a pariah. People here have long memories and they don’t forgive. As for Dimitriou, his political career would be over.’ Then she reached to the ground, picked up the crumpled letter and started to unfold it. ‘Now this makes sense,’ she breathed, smoothing out the paper and handing it to Clay.
Hope caught a breath. ‘It’s from Nicos Chrisostomedes. He wants me to join him for dinner the day after tomorrow at his mansion in the Troodos Mountains. He wants to discuss making a major donation to the research station.’
Clay looked at the date. Yesterday. ‘I thought…’
‘Yes,’ Hope interrupted. ‘I’ve been highly critical of him in the media.’
‘When he wrote this he would have known that the station had been destroyed. Sounds like he wants to show you his caring, benevolent side, before the enquiry starts.’
‘Obviously,’ muttered Hope. ‘It’s so transparent it’s embarrassing.’
‘Are you going to go?’
‘I’m not so stupid as to think I can find the kind of money he’s talking about through the grants system – not a second time. Although I can’t possibly imagine how this can work. He wants to develop Lara Beach, I want to protect it. But yes, I’m going. I’d be crazy not to.’
Crowbar stood, faced Clay, brought the camera up to his face. ‘Put your hands behind the chair,
ja
,’ he said. ‘Try to look pissed off.’
‘I
am
pissed off.’
‘Good,
ja
.’
‘What the hell are you doing, Koevoet?’
‘Your hands.’
‘Hand.’
Crowbar smiled. ‘Your arms then,
soutpiel
. Behind, like you’re tied.’
Clay put his arms behind the chair, stared into the lens, understanding.
Crowbar hit the shutter button. The flash pulsed.
Just then, Hope’s mobile phone buzzed. She flipped it open, listened a moment, eyes widening. She started to speak but stopped short. ‘Yes,’ she said, listened again. ‘I understand.’ A few seconds later she closed her phone and looked at Clay. ‘That was Rania’s office. They’ve received a message from her.’