Chapter 37

He slept badly, waking several times in the middle of half-remembered nightmares and decided that he would clear his mind by continuing what he had dubbed his ‘delight and dismay’ tour of exploration of the island. The previous night’s power cut fitted neatly into the ‘dismay’ category but as so often, was counter balanced by the artless hospitality of Maria and George. He had already been to Nicosia and felt at home amongst the multi storey, glass and concrete blocks in the commercial centre. He had crossed over – an experience not unlike death and rebirth, he thought – to the north of the City. He could not take his car through the check point, even though the red number plates and ‘Z’ prefix instantly identified it as a hired car and therefore probably driven by a tourist – a delightful system, he though, to highlight vehicles whose drivers might not be familiar with the roads. A Turkish soldier had checked his passport and waved him through without any hint of welcome. He was as dismayed at the derelict buildings in the occupied part of Nicosia as he had been by the rusting barbed wire and the concrete-filled, pale-blue painted oil drums in the UN-policed buffer zone. However, as always, that dismay had been balanced by the delight of the natural hospitality of the Turkish Cypriots from whom he bought coffee and with whose other customers he chatted happily for nearly an hour. He had felt that as a precaution – against what, he was unsure – he should find out where the British High Commission was. He found it at the end of a quiet, leafy avenue lined with neat, suburban homes but it was squeezed against the ‘Green Line’ and the overgrown and neglected gardens of dilapidated houses ringed by barbed wire and marked with a faded, leaning sign warning him in three languages to keep out of a minefield.

Today he was going to go to the resorts of Agia Napa and Protaras in the East of the Island The storm had fizzled out in the night and the roads were drying under a once again cloudless blue sky. He felt uncomfortable ringing Deborah from Maria’s apartments and he stopped before he turned on to the motorway to recount a summary of the information he had gained the previous night. Deborah had a meeting with Helen Knight arranged for the next day so that Marianna could relate her experiences and she would take that opportunity to brief the journalist with George’s information. Marianna had had a very difficult time and was still badly shaken. She had been threatened by two men who told her that someone called Mikhail was owed a lot of money for her travel and the trouble she had caused and she had to go to work for nothing until the debt was cleared. When her brother had intervened, the two men had beaten him up. That was when the whole family had gone into hiding. George interrupted to ask about Mikhail. Was he a Russian or an Albanian but Marianna didn’t know and had never met him anyway. He was just a figure in the background. Conrad and Lydia were still slowly travelling back, taking the opportunity for Lydia to see something of Italy, Switzerland and France under Conrad’s worldly guidance.

By mid-morning the rush hour was well over and the motorway was delightfully free of traffic as it swooped between dun-coloured hills relieved by villages with imposing Orthodox Churches and copses of eucalyptus, palm and stunted conifers. The air was washed clean and the light restored to its full, Mediterranean intensity. There were several, wheeling, large black crows out for their morning flights. Traffic was so light that, at times, no other vehicle was in sight. Passing the British Base at Dhekelia, George overtook a battered, local pick up truck and noticed that the driver had a mobile telephone to his ear. Two minutes later, he noticed the truck growing rapidly larger in his mirror. It stayed there as the driver tailgated him, so close George could clearly see the man’s expression as he rummaged in the glove box for something. The pickup stuck to his tail for a couple of kilometres and through several alterations in speed before it finally pulled around him and roared ahead, the exhaust smoking, as if on a mission. As the truck passed him, George glanced at the driver, a middle aged man hunched forward at the wheel and not wearing a seatbelt, but he stared intently ahead, declining to return George’s glance. The truck stayed in the overtaking lane until it gradually disappeared from view. ‘What was that all about’, George wondered? ‘Stupid, dumbshit, goddam motherfucker!’

Nisi Beach had escaped last night’s storm and was as delightful as George had been told it would be. The tanning, topless, thonged, bodies of the British and Scandinavian tourists meant he had to spend more time in the water than he otherwise might have but made him miserably conscious that he was probably the only person on the beach who was not with someone else and he left feeling forlorn. In the afternoon the distant view of Famagusta’s crumbling, ghost-town hotels, unoccupied since the Turkish invasion and occupation thirty years before and seen through binoculars from a platform constructed in the garden an enterprising local, provided the dismay. No day seemed complete without a leavening of that.

On the way back to Larnaca the car started to play up and by the time he pulled up outside the car hire office it was smoking and coughing and spluttering so badly he did not have to explain why he was there. Stelios, the manager was just about to close for the day.

“No problem, Mister George. I will fix it tomorrow.”

“Well, actually, Stelios, I was rather hoping to go to Limassol first thing tomorrow morning. I’m going to spend a few days there. Do you have another car you can let me have?”

“You are a good customer and Maria’s friend so I tell you what I do. All my cars are hired but you can take my Pajero for a few days, for the same special price. No extra charge. You bring it back when you come back to Larnaca. No problem.”

“Well, thank you. That’s fine but your Pajero is not a hire car.” George was looking at the standard, white number plate.

“No problem, no problem. It is insured and everything but if anybody asks you, if the police ask, just say you have borrowed it from me because I am your friend. Do not say you are paying and everything will be fine, fine.” George’s reluctance to sail close to and perhaps across local car hire rules was overcome by his need for a vehicle and his desire to drive the nearly new, top of the range, four by four for a few days and he accepted Stelios’ offer. He wanted to go to Limassol to implement plan ‘D’. Idly turning the classified pages of a local, English language paper, he had spotted an ad for a massage and escort service. The advert offered the ‘hand maidens of Aphrodite’ and ‘full body massage for gentlemen’ and incorporated a drawing of a scantily clad girl lying with her head propped on her bent arm and one leg drawn up in what was clearly intended to be seductive pose. The number was for a mobile telephone. George hoped that one or more of the ‘hand-maidens’ might provide him with more useful information but he did not feel comfortable inviting a masseuse to visit him at Maria’s so he was planning to combine his enquiries and his explorations from a base in a Limassol hotel. Meanwhile, plan ‘C’ was ticking along nicely. Anita and Dora now accepted him as a confident and had told him they would quietly ask around for information about girls from southern and Eastern Europe who had gone to the West, through Cyprus or by other routes, to work unwillingly in the sex trade. More importantly and more dangerously, they would ask and listen for information about the men who arranged the traffic. George felt he could leave them to it for a few days.