Crying Blue Murder (MIRA) Read Online Free PDF

brown stain on what would otherwise be a pair of beautiful blue eyes,’ the Fat Man interrupted with a guffaw. ‘Good health, my friend.’
    Mavros smiled. ‘Go to the good, comrade.’
    The café owner watched the door close and shook his head before stuffing the money he’d been left into his back pocket.

CHAPTER THREE
     
     
    M AVROS went out of the Fat Man’s and into the sunlight that was broiling the city. Ahead of him the Erectheion and the Parthenon were riding the tainted air above the rocky plug of the Acropolis. He took his sunglasses from his belt where they’d been hooked by one leg and put them on. Turning quickly to the left, he strode up the street towards the enclosing wall of Hadrian’s Library. If he was lucky Deniz Ozal wouldn’t have got too far ahead.
    He caught sight of the Turkish-American in the crush around the engineering works in Monastiraki Square. Although the city council had been trying to clean up Athens in advance of the Olympic Games that were only three years away, it wasn’t getting very far with the Flea Market. The bottom line was that tourists liked the dusty, overpriced souvenir, clothing and junk shops, and they liked the coconut and dried-fruit sellers. The coins and small-denomination notes they left in the begging bowls proved that they were even sympathetic to the gypsy women in bright chiffon veils, their pathetically deformed children spread out on the pavements like exhibits in a medical museum. So, as it was in no one’s interest to change things, the council let the traditional local colour remain despite the revulsion it induced in many upwardly mobile elected members.
    Mavros closed on Ozal as he moved up Pandrosou, making sure he was obscured by a group of French women who were haggling over the price of an ugly red-figure vase. He rarely accepted jobs before he’d obtained some background on his potential clients—he had once narrowly avoided conspiracy charges when a Piraeus gangster hired him via an intermediary to trace a guy who subsequently turned up attached to a cement block in the harbour. Deniz Ozal had piqued his interest more than most. He’d never yet come across an employer who told him the whole story at the first meeting. The Turkish-American seemed curiously at home in Greece. Mavros wasn’t convinced that the Greek he knew came straight from a tourist manual. He was also wondering about the business dealings Ozal had apparently been pursuing in the weeks since his sister disappeared, dealings which seemed to mean more to him than Rosa did.
    Stepping sharply to the right, Mavros positioned himself behind a stand of postcards—the ubiquitous fertility god Priapus with his giant, bent erection to the fore—as Ozal rang a bell on the other side of the street. This was interesting. The door opened and a shadowy figure in a bright red shirt ushered the Turkish-American in. Although the door closed quickly, Mavros had time to recognise the host and, anyway, he knew the premises. Tryfon Roufos of Hellas History SA was one of the most notorious— meaning corrupt—antiquities dealers in Athens. He was able to find his customers anything from Bronze Age figurines to the rarest of Byzantine icons, as long as they were able to pay his grossly inflated prices and live with forged certificates of provenance. Ozal had confirmed that he was in the antiques trade. It looked like he might not be restricting himself to the clearings from Scottish country homes these days.
    Mavros waited where he was for a few minutes, scaring off a solicitous male shop assistant with a glare, before he walked on up the street. He hadn’t found out anything concrete about Ozal, but at least he had a better idea of the person he was dealing with. Anyone who did business with Tryfon Roufos was well endowed both with funds, as the Turkish-American’s clothes and briefcase had already suggested, and with dubious commercial intentions. Neither of these was necessarily a