Solo - Jack Higgins [4]
'John?' He spoke in Greek and put his hand on the boy's shoulder. 'What's that you're playing?'
'"Le Pastour" by Gabriel Grovlez. It was her favourite piece.' The boy turned to look up at him, the eyes like black holes in the pale face.
'Will you come to Athens with me?' the professor asked. 'You and Katina. Stay with me for a while? Work this thing out?'
'Yes,' John Mikali said. 'I think I'd like that.'
For a while he did. There was Athens itself to enjoy, that noisy, most cheerful of cities, that seemed to keep going day and night without stop. The big apartment in the fashionable area near the Royal Palace, where his grandfather held open house most nights. Writers, artists, musicians, they all came. Particularly politicians, for the professor was much involved with the Democratic Front Party, indeed provided most of the finance for their newspaper.
And there was always Hydra where they had two houses; one in the narrow back streets of the little port itself, another on a remote peninsula along the coast beyond Molos. The boy stayed there for lengthy periods with Katina to look after him and his grandfather had a Bluthner concert grand shipped out at considerable expense. From what Katina told him on the telephone, it was never played.
In the end, Mikali came back to Athens to stand against the wall at parties, always watchful, always polite, immensely attractive with the black curling hair, the pale face, the eyes like dark glass, totally without expression. And he was never seen to smile, a fact the ladies found most intriguing.
One evening, to his grandfather's astonishment, when one of them asked him to play, the boy agreed without hesitation, sitting at the piano and playing Bach's Prelude and Fugue in E flat, mirror-brilliant, ice-cold stuff, that reduced everyone present to astonished silence.
Later, after the applause, after they had left, the professor had gone out to his grandson, standing on the balcony, listening to the roar of the early-morning traffic which never seemed to stop.
'So, you've decided to join the living again? What now?'
'Paris, I think,' John Mikali said. 'The Conservatoire.'
'I see. The concert platform? Is this your intention?'
'If you agree.'
Dimitri Mikali embraced him gently. 'You are everything to me, you must know this now. What you want, I want. I'll tell Katina to pack.'
He found an apartment near the Sorbonne in a narrow street not far from the river, one of those village areas so common to the French capital with its own shops, cafes and bars. The sort of neighbourhood where everyone knew everyone else.
Mikali attended the Conservatoire, practised between eight and ten hours each day and dedicated himself solely to the piano to the exclusion of all else, even girls. Katina, as always, cooked and kept house and fussed over him.
On 22 February 1960, two days before his eighteenth birthday he had an important examination at the Conservatoire, the chance of a gold medal. He had practised for most of the night and at six o'clock in the morning, Katina had gone out to get fresh rolls from the bakery, and milk.
He had just emerged from the shower, was fastening the belt of his robe, when he heard the screech of brakes in the street outside, a dull thud. Mikali rushed to the window and looked down. Katina lay sprawled in the gutter, the bread rolls scattered across the pavement. The Citroen truck which had hit her reversed quickly. Mikali had a brief glimpse of the driver's face and then the truck was round the corner and away.
She took several hours to die and he sat in the hospital beside her bed, holding her hand, never letting go, even when her fingers stiffened in death. The police were subdued and apologetic. Unfortunately, there had been no witnesses, which made matters difficult, but they would keep looking, of course.
Not that it was necessary, for Mikali knew the driver of the Citroen truck well enough. Claude Galley, a coarse brute of a man who ran a small garage close to the