Chapter One
That was another of the things he used to think about as he stood there in the grey light of dawn waiting for the barrage to begin. How had it got to be like this? And if he had known, could he, Seymour – since he didn’t believe in blaming other people when the world went wrong – an ordinary police officer in the East End of London, have done anything to stop it? Or even part of it? The aeroplanes, for example? He could hear it now, as he stood there, the irritating, gnatlike buzz of the spotter-plane coming to take up position and call all hell down from the skies. Could he have stopped that? Stopped Stevens, say. But, of course, someone had stopped Stevens and it hadn’t made any difference. The barrages had still gone on. But had there been a moment when it might all have been averted? That moment, for example, in Athens in the autumn of 1912.
It all began, unpromisingly, with a cat.
‘A cat?’ said Seymour disbelievingly.
‘That’s right.’
‘Surely I’ve not been sent out from London to investigate –’
‘Well –’
‘It was a very nice cat,’ said the Second Secretary, molli-fyingly: ‘one of those blue-eyed ones. Angora, I think you call them.’
‘Yes, well, maybe, but –’
‘The Sultan was very fond of it.’
Sultan? Wait a minute, where was he? Surely they didn’t have Sultans in Greece?
‘What Sultan is this?’ he said cautiously.
‘The one in Istanbul. Only he’s not in Istanbul now. He was sent into exile. First to Salonica, then here.’
‘With the cat,’ said the Second Secretary.
‘And his wives. Some of them, that is.’
‘And the cat’s been poisoned?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, I’m very sorry to hear it. But, look, is it really necessary to send a police officer all the way from London –’
‘Oh, yes. It’s rather important, in fact.’
‘To investigate the death of a cat?’
‘Most definitely. You see, it’s not just the death of a cat.’
‘No?’
‘No. It’s widely thought that the cat was a sort of sighting shot for the Sultan. Cat first, Sultan next. And the Sultan’s been complaining of stomach pains.’
‘Well, I can see that’s more serious. But – Look, what the hell’s it got to do with Scotland Yard? Or the British Embassy in Athens, for that matter?’
‘We’re suspected of having had a hand in it.’
‘Of poisoning the cat?’
‘And maybe the Sultan. Nonsense, of course. But that’s what people here are saying. So, it’s important to sort this out as quickly as possible.’
‘Find out who did do the poisoning,’ said the Second Secretary.
‘Yes. Yes. I can see that. But – I’m sorry, but I still cannot see why it was necessary to send to London for a detective. There must be police out here –’
‘Not trusted. Look, old boy, if it wasn’t us who did it – and I can assure you it wasn’t – then who was it? The Greeks, think the Ottomans. So they’re certainly not having a Greek to do the investigating. And vice versa. The Greeks think the Ottomans did it. So the last person they want doing the investigation is a Turk. And the same with the others.’
‘The others?’
‘The Bulgars.’
‘The Macedonians.’
‘Montenegrins –’
‘Serbs –’
‘Slovaks –’
‘Et cetera. Welcome to the Balkans, old boy.’
‘No one trusts anyone,’ said the Second Secretary.
‘But why should they trust the British any more –’
‘Oh, they don’t. But we happened to have a warship out here and were able to knock heads together. In the end they saw the merit of an independent investigation.’
‘But I rather gathered from you that they didn’t think we were independent? That we’d actually done the poisoning ourselves?’
‘Oh, they didn’t like it. But what with the warship being so handy –’
‘It took some time,’ said the Second Secretary, ‘but eventually it was agreed to send for Scotland Yard. And they sent –’
‘Me,’ said Seymour. Not altogether happily.
‘The obvious choice,’ said the Commissioner, and sighed.
Seymour was the obvious choice because he was about the only person in the police, or England, for that matter, who had any command of foreign languages. It made him an odd bird at Scotland Yard; which accounted for the sigh.
For Seymour definitely was an oddity. He wasn’t, for a start, in his colleagues’ view, properly English. He maintained he was, of course, and pointed out that his grandfather had come to the country fifty years before, and that both his father and he himself had been born and bred in the country. But his grandfather had originally been named Pelczyinski and his mother, Karolyi, which was one of the things that had given him access to other languages.
The other was the fact that he had grown up in London’s immigrant East End.
‘I see you have Greek,’ said the lordly soul at the Foreign Office who had interviewed him before allowing him to depart for Athens. ‘Where did you acquire that? Winchester? Oxford?’
‘Whitechapel,’ said Seymour unflinchingly. ‘There are a lot of Greeks in the East End.’
‘Good Lord!’ said the man from the Foreign Office, aghast. He had hesitated for a moment and then: ‘That would be demotic Greek, I suppose, not classical?’
‘Greek as it is spoken today, yes,’ said Seymour.
‘Well, I suppose that could be useful,’ said the man from the Foreign Office doubtfully and he had quickly moved on to other subjects.
That was not quite how old Tsakatellis, the shopkeeper from whom Seymour had learned most of his Greek, had spoken.
‘The Greek language, my boy,’ he had said, frequently, ‘is one of the glories of the world. It was the first great language of civilization; and its time may be coming again.’
Similar claims, however, were made by the Italians, Jews, Germans and Poles living further along the street and Seymour was inclined to apply a general discount to such claims. The fact was, though, that whatever might be the case at the ancient universities, in the East End foreign languages were alive and kicking, and it was there, as a boy, going round with the police interpreter, that Seymour had first acquired them. They were, of course, useful to any policeman working in the polyglot East End. But they were also useful when the rare call came for a policeman who could work abroad.
‘But why,’ asked Seymour, ‘would England want to poison the Sultan? Never mind the cat.’
‘To start a war. Or stop it, depending upon your point of view.’
‘War?’ said Seymour incredulously.
The First Secretary got up and beckoned him over to the window.
‘Do you see those flags?’
‘Yes.’
‘Anything strike you about them?’
‘Only that there are a lot of them.’
‘You probably saw some on your way from the port?
’ ‘Yes. The streets were full of them.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Well, there are a lot of soldiers about. And bands. But I thought ..’
‘What did you think?’
‘That it was a festival or something. A Greek national festival.’
‘It will probably turn into one,’ said the First Secretary grimly, ‘if they win the war.’
War? How was it that Seymour hadn’t heard about this? It hadn’t been in any of the newspapers. Surely he couldn’t have missed it on his way to the sports page?
‘But – who are they going to be fighting against?’
‘The Ottomans. Turkey. And that, of course, is where the Sultan comes in. And the cat.’
‘The casus,’ said the Second Secretary.
‘What?’
‘Casus. Casus belli.’
Latin, in fact, was not among Seymour’s languages. But he got the drift. The cause of war.
* * *
Around the corner, as he made his way to the hotel after leaving the Embassy, came a herd of goats. It was the second herd that he had seen. This one stopped in front of a house and a woman came out carrying some pans. The herdsman selected a goat and milked it straight into the pans, filling one after another. Then the herd moved on.
‘The Athens milkman,’ said the Second Secretary, who had obligingly offered to show him to his hotel. ‘Not like ours, of course. There are cows, up in the hills, but the Athens woman prefers goat’s milk. More reliable in hot weather, I’m told.’
‘The cats, presumably, prefer goat’s milk, too?’ said Seymour.
The Second Secretary looked startled.
‘I have never considered the point,’ he said.
Off in the distance he could hear a bell clanging. The clanging came nearer and round the corner charged a new electric tram. Seymour was impressed. He hadn’t expected to find anything like this down in Athens.
The goats scattered, plunging into nearby doorways. The herdsman shook his fist at the tram and shouted abuse. The driver, on his platform, grinned and then clanged the bell triumphantly.’
‘The old and the new,’ said the Second Secretary. ‘Of course, all places are. But Athens is older than most.’.
Up on the hill Seymour could see the Parthenon, its columns clear against the blue sky. Old Tsakatellis had spoken about this, too.
‘A sacred spot for all Greeks,’ he had said. He had looked sternly at the young Seymour. ‘It ought to be sacred to you, too,’ he had said. ‘This is where democracy began.’
Seymour had nodded his head. Democracy, he knew, was a good thing. Later he found that not a lot of it spread to the Whitechapel police station. Still, now, he looked again at the Parthenon, and with respect. This was where it had all begun. And so long ago, too! A sneaking doubt crept in. Ought it not to have got a bit further by now?
The tram clanged away. The herd reassembled – and then scattered again as another vehicle came speeding round the corner. This time it was a motor car. Seymour had not seen so many motor cars in his young life, even in London, as not to have his eyes drawn. It shot in and out of the traffic, between the horse-drawn carriages, with their drivers shouting imprecations, around the heavy ox-drawn carts with the ubiquitous mysterious hand painted on their sides, perhaps to ward off the evil eye, or possibly, these days, the ever more evil motor car, and braked sharply – and fortunately – at a line of bewildered donkeys, each piled high with grapes. Then off it shot again, leaving a great cloud of dust and people spluttering in its wake.
Dust. That, in the end, was Seymour’s abiding impression of Athens. When the motor car had passed, he had expected the dust to settle down. It didn’t. It just hung in the air. Whenever it looked inclined to settle, something always came along to disturb it. There was a thick layer of dust on the road – in fact, the road was dust, and it was perpetually being stirred by the feet of the donkeys, the oxen, the horses and the passers-by, not to mention the goats. When it did settle, it settled in a thick film that covered everything, including the new lightweight suit of Panama cloth that Seymour had just splashed out on.
His shoes were thick with it. That, no doubt, explained the omnipresence of bootblacks. All along the road and gathered in thousands at every caf´e and hotel and outside all the big shops were small boys, who banged their brushes together noisily to attract custom and who would dash out into the street to whisk the dust from your boots even as you walked along.
‘It’s the wind,’ said the Second Secretary. ‘And the drought. The wind blows the topsoil off and then everything below dries to dust. And there are no trees, of course. They’ve not had time to grow.’
‘Not had time to grow?’ said Seymour, looking up at the Parthenon, which seemed pretty old to him.
‘Since Athens was chosen as the new Greek capital about seventy years ago. When Greece gained her independence from the Ottomans. Most of what you see about you has been built since then. It’s like walking through a new town.’
‘It’s like walking through a desert,’ said Seymour.
At the entrance to the hotel small boys rushed forward to flick the dust from his shoes with long feather brushes.
The Second Secretary halted.
‘You’ll want to give yourself a bit of a sponge-down, I expect,’ he said.
Yes, indeed. And to wash the dust out of his hair and from behind his ears and out of the corners of his eyes, not to mention shaking it out of his pockets and out of the turn-ups of his trousers and from the folds of his handkerchief.
‘And have something to eat, I’m sure,’ said the Second Secretary. ‘But be up bright and early in the morning because you’ve got to meet Dr Metaxas.’
‘Dr Metaxas?’
‘And go with him to the mortuary, where he’ll run through with you the details of the post-mortem.’
‘Post-mortem? On whom?’
‘The cat, of course.’
When Seymour came down the next morning a tall, thin figure in a dark suit was pacing nervously up and down in the foyer.
‘Dr Metaxas?’
‘Mr Seymour?’
They shook hands.
‘Have you had breakfast? No? Well, don’t. Do what every Athenian does.’
He took Seymour to a caf´e in the central square where hundreds of people sat out at tables starting the day as they meant to go on: slowly.
Almost all the tables were already occupied but Dr Metaxas found his way to one which wasn’t and where he was apparently known, since people at the adjoining tables greeted him. He sank down into a chair with relief and at once a waiter brought coffees. He put them down and looked at Dr Metaxas.
‘Yes?’ he said enquiringly.
‘Yes,’ said Dr Metaxas.
‘And for the gentleman?’
‘Ouzo?’ asked Dr Metaxas.
‘This early?’
The doctor shrugged.
‘No, thanks,’ said Seymour.
The waiter brought Metaxas a small glass of ouzo and the table a plate of sweet cakes. Seymour didn’t fancy the cakes, either, but this, it seemed, was breakfast.
He had just picked one up when people at all the tables around him began to stand up. Cab men rose on their boxes, small bootblacks stiffened to attention. Even inside the caf´e people were getting to their feet. Everyone was rising.
Except Dr Metaxas.
A band marched past followed by some soldiers carrying a flag. People took off their hats. Dr Metaxas stayed put.
The band went off across the square and came to a halt outside a large building on the other side.
‘The Palace,’ said Dr Metaxas. ‘They’re changing the guard. We have this rigmarole every morning.’
They all sat down again.
‘I don’t believe in palaces,’ said Mr Metaxas. ‘Or kings, either. As you see, I am in a minority.’
The doctor’s sympathies were apparently well known since no one seemed to take umbrage. Seymour caught, indeed, a few grins at surrounding tables.
‘In any other country,’ said Metaxas, ‘including, I believe, your own, the monarch is treated with indifference. Only in Greece is he taken seriously. While this was understandable initially – when we became independent it was pardonable to demonstrate enthusiasm for having a ruler of our own – to persist with it is folly. It is a betrayal of the deep democratic instinct that makes the Greek special.’
He looked challengingly at Seymour, as if expecting his dissent.
‘Yes, my Greek friends in London say something similar,’ said Seymour.
‘Ah, you have Greek friends in London?’
‘Indeed.’
‘Let us drink to such friendship!’
Seymour felt he could not demur this time, and the waiter brought two glasses.
And then two more. And then two more.
‘What about the post-mortem?’ said Seymour, after a while.
Metaxas brushed it aside.
‘Post-mortem? On a cat? Ridiculous!’
He waved a hand to the waiter again.
Seymour began to feel unhappy.
‘You don’t think –’
Metaxas glared at him.
‘I,’ he said, ‘am a medical practitioner from the School of Medicine at Athens. My business is healing people. Not animals. If they want an animal looked at, why don’t they ask a vet? Why do they ask me, Metaxas? It is an insult. Not just to me, but to Greece! The Sultan, yes, his body I would examine. With pleasure. Very great pleasure. But the cat! No!’
He banged his hand on the table.
No one took any notice but a young woman suddenly appeared before them. She was dressed in black and had a dark shawl over her head.
‘You are becoming argumentative,’ she said to Metaxas. ‘It is time for you to go to the hospital.’
‘Hey! He can’t!’ cried Seymour. ‘He’s got a job to do!
’ ‘I know his jobs,’ said the woman, standing over them implacably, like some dark figure from Greek tragedy.
‘You’ve been drinking,’ she said accusingly. ‘Again!’
‘I’ve been having breakfast!’
‘And you’ve been encouraging him,’ she said to Seymour.
‘No, I haven’t!’ protested Seymour.
‘He is a guest, a colleague!’ cried Metaxas. ‘Just out from England!’
‘Is this true?’ she asked Seymour.
‘Yes.’
‘You’re a doctor?’ she said. ‘Out from England?’
‘I’m a policeman.’
‘He arrived last night,’ said Metaxas. ‘I went to the hotel this morning and he hadn’t had breakfast. So –’
‘So you took him to the Plaza? Well,’ she said to Seymour, ‘perhaps you really don’t know any better. But you do,’ she said, turning back to Metaxas.
‘Breakfast. That’s all it was,’ said Seymour, conciliatorily.
‘And in England it is the custom to drink ouzo at breakfast?’
‘Listen,’ said Dr Metaxas, ‘I needed a drink before going to the mortuary. That’s where the job is.’
‘Is this true?’ she asked Seymour.
‘Yes.’
She thought for a moment, and then nodded.
‘All right, then. You’d better go. To the mortuary. Just to the mortuary. And then bring him home,’ she said to Seymour. ‘Straight home.’
‘Are you married?’ asked Metaxas.
‘No.’
‘Take my advice: don’t. And if you do, don’t have a daughter. Women are always up your ta. . .
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
