The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [92]
When they returned to their village, they found that Stav-ros’s mother was dead, and his six brothers and sisters, and most of his cousins, had been taken across the frontier and on to Russia by the Communists, to be trained for some future Greek revolution. Stavros’s father gave him his gold ring and told him to marry and breed new children. Then, carrying his British rifle, he set off through the woods to the east. Stavros never saw him again.
Stavros married an Athenian girl, and found that he had married her too quickly: she cuckolded him within the year with an old lover who had fought against Stavros as a member of the Communist ELAS partisans. Stavros killed his wife’s lover, shipped on a freighter to Marseilles, and joined the Foreign Legion. Christopher met him in Indochina, where he was a sergeant leading a platoon composed mostly of Germans. Because of Stavros’s long experience as a guerrilla fighter and his personal enthusiasm for killing Communists, his platoon was one of the most successful units operating in the Indochina War on the French side.
After Dienbienphu, Glavanis went directly to Algeria, where he was shot in the chest by an Arab terrorist while sitting in a cafe in Oran. He lost a lung as a result of his wound, and Christopher recruited him a week after he was invalided out of the Legion, offering him the prospect of going into action against Communists.
In Vietnam and later in Algeria, during periods when he was recovering from wounds, Glavanis had headed military interrogation teams. He knew a great deal about the natives who had passed through his hands; because the French had lost both wars, many of the people they had tortured were now generals or government ministers or high party officials.
Christopher had often used Glavanis as a source of information, and once or twice as a courier. But he had never until now needed him for his primary skills.
Christopher took Glavanis and Eycken to his rented car, parked in a dark street by the Forum. Glavanis stood for a moment, gazing at the broken columns. “I miss Greece,” he said, “these stones remind me.” He lifted his hips off the seat when he got into the front seat, and reached into his pocket. Christopher opened the small box Glavanis handed him and found a gold-plated fingernail clipper inside: the Greek never called on a friend without bringing a gift.
When they drove through the gates of the villa on the Via Flaminia, Glavanis said, “My God, Paul—what is this place?”
The villa, a long, towered building, lay at the end of a drive that passed between perfectly matched cypresses. Gravel walks led through the grounds, past statues and fountains, hedges and fish ponds, flower beds and water jokes—a passerby could be soaked by a hidden jet in any of a dozen places. There was one stretch of walk where fountains formed an arch over the path for a distance of a hundred meters, so cleverly designed that not a drop of water fell on anyone who walked beneath the spray.
“It belonged to some Roman nobility, and afterward to one of Mussolini’s mistresses,” Christopher said. “Late in the war, the SS used it as an interrogation center for important prisoners —after that, nobody wanted it.”
The Rome station had furnished the villa with black leather furniture, antique tables left behind by the Italians and the Germans, and thick carpeting that absorbed the echoes thrown out by the tile floors. An elaborate alarm system that covered the grounds with electric eyes and the interior of the villa with devices that sensed the heat of an intruder’s body had been installed. The bar was stocked with the national