Crime Always Pays (17 page)

Ray

Ray, like practically everyone else in the Peloponnese, had heard Anna howl. Then, from across the street, watched Karen march out of the ferry terminal and turn right to where the train station was right there, convenient, practically on the docks. Karen staring straight ahead in case she might see Ray somewhere and have to admit she was maybe looking out for him. Everyone giving her a wide berth, one girl and her wolf. One thing Ray didn't have to worry about, Karen wouldn't be mugged for any khaki duffels while Anna was around.

          He cut diagonally across the street, angling towards a café beside the bus depot, a place he could watch the train station and see Karen coming out if for some reason the Greeks objected to transporting a wolf on their rail network. Took a seat in the shade, ordered a frappe and asked for ice in it, sparked a Marlboro light. An oily heat from the traffic shimmering the air, the sun high and fierce. 

          For a while he toyed with the notion of hopping the ferry to Italy, one due in from Bari in an hour or so. Ray liked good pizza. But the idea of going back on board so soon after an overnight from Trieste was too much, and Ray wasn't fully convinced as to why he should be the one, Karen coming the prima donna, to leave the country.

          This was when he saw Rossi playing sherpas, pushing a suitcase along the other side of the street, Rossi togged out like a soldier now, his ragtag platoon dandering along behind him in civvies having a ball pointing stuff out to one another, Hey, lookit that, it's a cute little train station. Ray holding his breath, willing them to keep going …

No go. A brief discussion outside, Rossi jabbing his forefinger around like he was conducting a mini-orchestra, something upbeat, Beethoven's
Fifth
, and then they all trudged into the dark maw.

So Ray had to decide fast, twist or stick. Except, twist and Karen'd know he was watching over her, Karen the independent type, none too keen on guys lurking in the shrubbery with her best interests at heart. Sticking, that all came down to one thing, whether Rossi was liable to try something in a public place, witnesses all over.

It was Ray, if he was Rossi, he'd have sat tight, watched Karen off the train in Athens, tailed her from a discreet distance. Except Ray wasn't Rossi. And what Ray knew of the guy, this coming from Karen, who was biased, okay, but Rossi was unpredictable. It comes to Rossi, she'd said, you need eyes in the back of your eyes … 

Then there was the last Ray'd heard from Rossi, up at the lake, Ray down for the count and still in shock after shipping the round that broke bone, Rossi hunkering down to say, '
Don't try and find me, Ray. No kidding. You won't even see me coming
.'

So there was that, too. Ray and threats a bad mix.

He eased his arm out of the sling, packed the sling away in the hold-all. Pulled the shirt-sleeve down over the cast, buttoned it tight, tucked a five under his frappé and shouldered the bag, zigzagged through the traffic across the street. Still no idea of what he was going to do. But pretty sure he'd have enough, busted arm or otherwise, to face down Rossi. This being the plan until he made it to the front of the station and the big guy, Rossi's muscle wearing a t-shirt with a big pink daisy, came ambling out. Ray had a quick scan to make sure Rossi wasn't toddling along in his wake and said, 'Hey.'

The big guy paused. 'Yeah?'

'Don't suppose you know,' Ray nodded at the station, 'what time the next train goes to Athens?'

'The one that was supposed to go now,' the guy said, 'that's delayed, or maybe cancelled. Anyway it's not going.' He shrugged. 'Don't ask me when the next one goes.'

'Not waiting for it, huh?'

Whatever the guy said was drowned out by a mournful blare, a long hiss, the unmistakable shunting of rolling stock. The guy looking back at the station now, frowning as he scratched his jaw.

'Thought you said it wasn't going,' Ray said.

'Was what we were told,' the big guy said. He shrugged again. 'Must be for someplace else.'

'Probably, yeah.' Ray wriggled his shoulder, getting the bag comfortable. 'You in a hurry,' he said, 'to get to Athens?'

The big guy blinking at him now. 'Why?'

'We could rent a car,' Ray said. 'You and me. Split it two ways.'

'There's three of us,' the guy said. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. 'Two more in there.'

'Better still,' Ray said. 'A four-way split. That'd make it about what we'd pay on the train anyway.'

'I dunno,' the big guy said. Working the angles, Ray could tell. Trying to nail the scam. He said, 'I don't have any, y'know, credit card or nothing.'

'I'll rent the car,' Ray said, 'you can sort me out with cash. Yeah? Meet you back here, say half-an-hour. Are we on?'

'Yeah, okay. Half-an-hour.'

'Or thereabouts. I'm late, don't go running off, stiffing me for the whole car.'

'No worries,' the big guy said. He put out a hand. 'I'm Gary, by the way.'

'Jerry,' Ray said. They shook. 'Nice to meet you, Gary.'

'Likewise, I'm sure.' The guy hesitated. 'Listen, there's just one thing.'

'What's that?'

'You pick us up, any chance you'd mind pretending we're on Sicily, headed for Palermo?'

Karen

'Most people,' Pyle was saying, 'everyone's got a camera these days, they're happy with photographs, nice little keepsakes to jog the memory. Others, they want more, maybe they got engaged, fell in love. Something they can hang on the wall over the fireplace.'

He'd come over in '65, twenty-one years old, to serve his obligatory year in the Greek army, help keep an eye on the perfidious Turks. Lasted two months, Pyle refusing to say why, then found he couldn't go home. The disgrace, mainly. 'That and no one would pay my ticket.' So he bummed around Greece making sketches, landscapes mostly, he never did have an eye for people. Met Cohen on Idria. 'You know Leonard Cohen?'

          'Not personally,' Karen said.

          'Funny guy, you wouldn't think it from the songs. And Marianne, man, she was a looker. Soul to go with it too.' Leonard persuading Pyle he had talent, was an artist. 'But he told everyone that. Mostly I think he was trying to convince himself.'

          Either way, Pyle stuck at it. Rode out the whole Colonels farrago, passing for Greek, Pyle fairly fluent, courtesy of his father, from long before he arrived in Greece. Then the tourists started coming back. Pyle being bi-lingual, he kind of fell into tour-guiding, week-long excursions into the islands. Bringing the sketchpad along. People started to notice, offered to pay for his drawings, the roughs. Wasn't long before he had his own shop, a one-room gallery up a side-street off the waterfront on Paros. 'I was never going to be rich, but I was living in the islands, all that sun, the people. And the light, Christ. Lawrence Durrell, you know him?'

          'Again, not personally.'

          '"God's eyeball," he called it. Which,' Pyle said, 'isn't something you capture with a camera unless you're professional, and good. Ever see that 
View over Toledo
, El Greco?'

Karen nodding along, then shaking her head. The baked earth though the windows shimmering like hot biscuits, enough to dry out her eyes just looking at it.

'Man, that's a picture. They got it in the Met, in New York, it's a force a fuckin nature. It's Spain, okay, but the light's the same … And El Greco, the Greek, was from Crete originally. Although, my own favourite? 
Laocoon
, with the nude guys fighting snakes.'

          'Nude?'

          'What'd be the point of fighting snakes in togas? It's art, for Chrissakes.'

          'And people email you their photos, is that it?'

          'Telling me where they took it, all the details, what date. Even what time of day, if they can remember. So I can get the right angle, the light.'

          'And off you go, easel under your arm.'

          'Hi-ho, hi-ho,' Pyle grinned. Lying back in the seat opposite, the khaki duffel on the seat beside him, Anna's head resting on that. Gazing up at the guy now, her soulful brown eyes unblinking while he scratched between her ears.

          'You don't just paint them from the photograph?' Karen said.

          'Such cynicism from one so young and cynical.' He shrugged. 'I like the islands, Karen, being free to travel around. Anyway, a photograph? It's like one tile in a mosaic. I go where they were, I get to see what they saw, the whole vista, see if I can't give them more of a sense of it all. More the way they remember than how they saw it.'

'So what have you got on now?'

'Coupla things,' Pyle said. 'I generally let 'em build up, four or five, then take off for a month. One's up to the Acropolis, although a little different than usual, looking down into the amphitheatre, a nice sunset kicking in from off to your right, the west, the sky's a lovely bluey-green, like mouldy turquoise. Then there's the monastery over on Amorgos, you ever been?' Karen shook her head. 'Beautiful place,' Pyle said. 'Very peaceful. You can see why the monks hang out there. That movie, 
The Big Blue
? They shot a lot of the exteriors there.'

          Anna batting her tail against Karen's legs, making these squirmy whines way back in her throat. The girl responding, Karen believed, as much to Pyle's growly Southern drawl as his fingers scratching between her ears. He was easy on the eye too, greying but still cool, claiming one-half Greek, a quarter Spanish, one-eighth Cherokee. What she liked best was how he didn't give her the third-degree about who she was running away from back in Patras. Just rolled with it, leaving it to Karen whether she told him or not.

          She said, 'I should mention, I've never seen Anna react like this before. Usually you'd be missing an arm by now, at least an arm. I mean, the girl's a killer twice over.'

          Pyle grinned, chucked Anna under the chin. 'Pop was a park ranger,' he said, 'although originally a keeper at Athens Zoo, this before the Nazis came in. Anyway, when I was a kid? I wanted to be a park ranger too. Y'know, like Old Smokey?' Karen shook her head. Pyle shrugged. 'What I'm saying is, I always got on okay with the animals. Pop got posted to Alaska one time, Christ, we must've been the only Greeks in Alaska. The bears'd come in raiding the garbage, I'd be out there waving like they were Yogi and Boo-Boo. I never got this close to a wolf, though. Saw some from a helicopter once, Pop tracking these good ol' boys on Alaskan safari, so loaded they couldn't even hit their own fuckin helicopter from inside. Basically, they 
chased
 the poor bastards to death.'

Karen, a first time for everything, found herself wishing she was twenty years older, just for one night.  

          'So this gallery,' she said. 'Who looks after it when you're away?'

          Pyle smiled. 'I had a dollar for every time I heard that question,' he said, 'I wouldn't need any gallery.'

          'I'll just bet,' Karen said. 'But what I'm wondering is, did any of them ever offer to buy their way in?'

Doyle

First thing Doyle said to Sparks after kissing her cheek was, 'We're leaving.'

          'But I only just 
got
 here.'

          Doyle took one of Sparks' bags and marched off across the tiny terminal, out into the blinding glare to the cab she'd had wait right there at the front entrance. 'It's a volcano,' she said when they were in. 'The entire island, it's a live volcano. They've lost whole civilisations here.'

          'Like, thousands of years ago.'

          Doyle stared. 'You knew about that?'

          'You didn't?'

          Doyle was always the last to know. 'I checked,' she said. 'Last time the balloon went up was in the year of our Lord nineteen-hundred and fifty. Which sounds to me like it's well overdue another balloon.'

          Sparks shrugged. 'Where're we going?'

          'First place that doesn't have cataclysmic destruction.'

          'What about Niko and this friend of his?'

          'He'll be ringing later.'

          'What if he rings the Santorini code?'

          'Then we find ourselves a new Niko.'

          Sparks left it until the cab dropped them off at the port. With an hour or so to kill, they took a couple of coffees over to the edge of the dock, sat with their legs dangling. 'You okay?' Sparks said.

          'I don't know.'

          'What's up?'

          'Ever been shot at, Sparks?'