Solo (Aka the Cretan Lover) (v5) Read Online Free PDF

his teeth. 'To the Legion,' he said. 'The most exclusive club in the world.'
    He drank from the bottle and passed it across.
    He was on tour in Japan when he received news of his grandfather's death. The old man, increasingly infirm with advancing years and arthritic in one hip, had needed sticks to walk for some time. He had lost his balance on the tiled floor of the balcony of the apartment and fallen to the street below.
    Mikali cancelled what concerts he could and flew home, but it was a week before he got to Athens. In his absence, the coroner had ordered the funeral to take place, cremation according to Dimitri Mikali's wishes as conveyed in a letter of instructions to his lawyer.
    Mikali fled to Hydra as he had done before, to the villa on the peninsula beyond Molos. He crossed from Athens to Hydra port on the hydrofoil and found Constantine waiting to pick him up in the launch. When he went on board, the old man handed him an envelope without a word, started the engines and took the boat out of harbour.
    Mikali recognized his grandfather's writing at once. His fingers shook slightly as he opened the envelope. The contents were brief.
    If you read this it means I am dead. Sooner - later, it comes to us all. So, no sad songs. No more of my stupid politics to bore you with either because, in the end, the end is perhaps always the same. I know only one thing with total certainty. You have lightened the last years of my life with pride and with joy, but most of all with your love. I leave you mine and my blessing with it.
    Mikali's eyes burned, he experienced difficulty in breathing. When they reached the villa, he changed into climbing boots and rough clothes and took to the mountains, walking for hours, reducing himself to a state of total exhaustion.
    He spent the night in a deserted farmhouse and could not sleep. The following day, he continued to climb, spending another night like the first.
    On the third day, he staggered back to the villa where he was put to bed by Constantine and his wife. The old woman gave him some herbal potion. He slept for twenty hours and awakened calm and in control of himself again. It was enough. He phoned through to Fischer in London, and told him he wanted to get back to work.
    At the flat in Upper Grosvenor Street there was a mountain of mail waiting. He skimmed through quickly and paused. There was one with a Greek postage stamp marked Personal. It had been sent to his agent and re-addressed. He put the other letters down and opened it. The message was typed on a plain sheet of paper. No address. No name.
    Dimitri Mikali's death was not an accident - it was murder. The circumstances are as follows. For some time, he has been under pressure from certain sections of the government because of his activities for the Democratic Front. Various freedom-loving Greeks had together compiled a dossier for presenting to the United Nations including details of political prisoners held without trial, atrocities of every description, torture and murder. It was believed that Dimitri Mikali knew the whereabouts of this dossier. On the evening of the 16 June, he was visited at his apartment by Colonel George Vassilikos who bears special responsibility for the work of the political branch of Military Intelligence, together with his bodyguards Sergeant Andreas Aleko and Sergeant Nikos Petrakis. In an effort to make Mikali disclose the whereabouts of the dossier he was beaten severely and burned about the face and the private parts of his body with cigarette lighters. When he finally died because of this treatment, Vassilikos ordered his body to be thrown from the balcony to make the death look like an accident. The coroner was under orders to produce the report he did and never actually saw the body which was cremated so that the signs of ill-treatment and torture would be erased. Both Sergeants Aleko and Petrakis have boasted of these facts while drunk, in the hearing of several people friendly to our