The Legacy of the Yellow Dancer E-Book

Paul Werner

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Serie: Laura Förster Trilogy
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 699

Beschreibung

Laura Forster decides to shirk the responsibility of following in her late father's footsteps as the managing director of a successful Hamburg-based logistics company. In order to come up for air, she rushes aboard the next best plane to the Caribbean, where her father's yacht, the Yellow Dancer, is berthed. What she doesn't know yet: she is unwittingly letting herself into a nightmarish journey to the other side of the Carrollian mirror, where life runs upside down and comforting certainties are as rare as a needle in a haystack. Will Laura succumb to the harrowing spectres of evil or will she prevail and return a duplicate of the tough, unforgiving amazon that is her newly-found sister Solitaire? One way or another, the hurricane-harried West Indies have never been a place for the meek and faint-hearted...

Leseprobe

Table of Content

First Chapter

The Rock

Three Gentlemen in White

Dead Man’s Hand

Second Chapter

The Heiress

The Great Escape

The Buffalo Soldier

Third Chapter

The Phantom

One-Eyed Jacques

Persephone’s sheaves

Fourth Chapter

The March of the Ten Thousand

Twilight at the Bridge

The Unsinkable

Fifth Chapter

Salty River

Hounds of Hell

Snow White’s Thong

Sixth Chapter

Crossing the Line

Withering Flowers of Evil

The Dragon Den

Seventh Chapter

The Greek Job

A Kindhearted Captain

The Black Queen

Eighth Chapter

The Hermits Ark

Solitaire’s Colleges

The Fervid Ferryman

Ninth Chapter

Baron Samedi

The Stalking Iroquois

Death of a Guardian Angel

Tenth Chapter

The Yellow Dancer

Penelope’s Odyssey

Three Gentlemen in Black

FIRST CHAPTER

1. The Rock

The woman swims for her life. Her naked arms thrash the boiling sea in a languid rhythm whilst her torso keeps rolling left and right in tired succession. Panting, her gaping mouth desperately gasps for air before her head disappears again. Wave upon wave seizes the woman and lifts her up with sudden force onto the frothy crest. Hovering there for seconds on end, the blast of the roaring gale hits her with devastating might. Foaming white spray lashes into her face like a thousand needles and causes brief spells of agonizing blindness. Then, corpse-like, she again falls into the dead calm at the bottom of the waves and seems forever lost in their narrow black canyons. Her arms and legs are becoming leaden, her desperate lunges for breath ever shorter. Like merciless hammer blows, her pulse resounds through her head all the way to the tips of her dark gleaming hair. Her lungs are distended to bursting point. Her stomach cannot hold the swallowed salt water any more. Time and time again the woman chokes, coughs and throws up. Her eyes hurt as if slowly gnawed away by gush upon gush of hydrochloric acid. Her skin burns as if on fire and comes off in flakes here and there like scorched parchment.

It’s been some time since the woman had her last clear thought. At present, she is driven by nothing but her stubborn will.

“Keep going,” one of two voices is shouting at her from somewhere in the raging darkness.

“Don’t give up on me now! Don’t go wilting away like a wretched pussy! Don’t you dare drown the two of us like rats in this wet blue graveyard called the Aegean. You really want to end up as fish-food, a relish for eels, crabs, and worms somewhere in the dim depths of this corpse-saturated pond of a sea? Well, do you?”

Whenever she feels flat out and finished the woman turns on her back and, for a few blissful moments, abandons herself to the rolling billows. As long as she keeps breathing the sea will support her. Such are the terms of their tacit agreement. The freshly polished stars above are dancing like a million rhinestones on a cowboy riding the fiercest bull in a Saturday night rodeo.

“Don’t even listen to her! Just let go, Sweetie, why don’t you?” The lizard-like lisp of the second voice keeps whispering into her ear out of the dark. “Why won’t you let go? I’ll catch you alright, cross my heart and hope to die.”

Helplessly adrift like this, the woman will be pushed further and further south by the combined forces of wind and current. As she knows full well, nothing but bleak emptiness awaits her there. With the half-choked death cry of a wantonly harpooned young whale, she turns back onto her stomach and continues her pointless fight.

Each time a particularly massive wave tosses her all the way to the roof of the sea, the wildly flickering lights of the Lesbos coast lure the woman on. Too far, she’ll never make it there. Suddenly, the black hump-back of a massive shadow starts squeezing itself between the woman and the coastal lights. A writhing, glistening leviathan emerging from the unfathomable depths of the ocean, the shadow is towering right in front of her, blocking her sight, barring her passage.

Hesitatingly, the woman’s alerted consciousness regains control. Painfully slowly, she begins to grasp what it is that is emerging before her: a tiny rocky islet, saddle-formed, a black elevation of volcanic stone, unlit, uninhabited, unheeded like so many other wood-devouring remnants of a world in the making. Scorned by fishermen, dreaded by sailors but at present her stalwart promise of rescue, her pledge of salvation. Like an ugly blot on a paling old photographic negative, it shows against the dark background of the northwest coast of Sappho’s blessed island. A characteristic helmet-like bluff around the middle of the islet, hardly taller than a sailing-boat’s mast, identifies it beyond doubt. The woman has almost reached it. Another twenty, thirty strokes and she will once again feel solid ground under her feet. Or would, if it weren’t for the deadly grindstones of cliffs protecting the islet from the perpetual onslaught of the restless, never tiring sea. Razor-sharp edges of volcanic rock will be lurking just underneath the billowing surface. The bloated, half-eaten corpses of men, women and children drowned at sea and eventually washed ashore, are they not frequently disfigured by deep cuts and vicious bruises? Such gruesome tell-tale wounds give us but a vague idea of how the unfortunate victims’ tragedy. In full sight of land, already eagerly filling their lungs with the invigorating scent of humid soil and lush vegetation, blindly following the shouts and cries of beachcombers allegedly rushing to their rescue, such victims of the sea’s wanton irony ended up torn to pieces by the grey sharks’ teeth of those impassionate cliffs.

As she comes up for air, the woman can already distinguish the lighter splashes of the surf from the much darker grumbling of the unwavering rows upon rows of billows tracking south like phalanx upon phalanx of a conquering army. As soon as the rolling waves hit the abruptly rising seabed, the water is no longer deep enough for them to complete their circle. As they see their passage blocked, their frustrated, mindlessly raging energy makes them rise like horses confronted with some insurmountable hedge. A human being unfortunate enough to end up between the “hooves” of the breaking surf and the anvil of the iron reef will be crushed like an egg falling off a wall.

The woman realizes the deadly danger, yet has little chance to withstand the sheer power of the sea. Helped only by the feeble light of the peeping moon’s sickle behind her back, she makes a huge effort at freeing herself, but is found wanting. Persistent bursts of sheet lightning from the top of the Lesbos mountain range are effectively blinding her like misleading flashes from a piratical coast. At the renewed flashing of forked lightning she catches a glimpse of the tiniest, sorriest excuse of a sandy beach to her right, closing in at breakneck speed. Here and now, this is her only bid at landing on the islet in one piece. She mobilizes what little forces she has left to break the steely embrace of the surf and steer towards the sandy patch. For the briefest of moments, it looks as if she is not going to make it. But then her half-mangled body is lifted clean over the belt of cliffs by a last thundering wave and dumped like flotsam onto the wet abrasive sands.

For what feels like an eternity, the battered woman lies motionless in the thick, white froth of algae and the loose mats of seaweed that mark the transition from water to land. As if unwilling to let go of their prey, the long, wet tongues of the dying waves keep sucking at the woman’s bloody feet and legs. Yet even the unfettered forces of the elements have to admit defeat at some point. Tonight, the sea cannot complete its grim work of destruction. Grudgingly, it surrenders the woman to the interminably raging gale that tortures her pickled body with the onslaught of a myriad of bullet-like grains of sand.

The silent thunderstorm yonder has slowly moved south. With the first shy twitches of her burnt-out muscles, life returns to the woman. Her hands trembling, she reaches down her leg and pulls out a large combat-knife with a saw-tooth blade from the sheath strapped to her right ankle. She seizes the handle with both her bleeding hands, lifts it above her head and rams its blade into the sand to the very hilt as if putting a stranded yet still breathing whale out of its misery with a final almighty blow. Then she pulls herself further up the beach, inch by inch. Over and over she repeats the process, drives the knife hard into the ground and crawls forward like some antediluvian creature hesitatingly leaving its ancestral habitat to venture into new territory. Finally, she reaches the foot of the bluff. The crumbling porous surface of its undulating volcanic rock-face offers her fingers a precarious first support. She succeeds in assuming a sitting position and leans her aching back against the abrasive stone that welcomes her with the faint memory of yesterday’s sun.

She tries to stand up but her tired legs, suffering from cramp, refuse to obey her. She groans, half turns and eventually finds herself kneeling in front of the rock like a pilgrim, having taken unspeakable pains upon herself to worship some obscure orthodox martyr on the run said to have breathed his last on this godforsaken spot.

The woman’s chest, bleeding from a multitude of raw bruises, is racing up and down like the glowing pistons of a tormented engine shortly before seizure. The starry skies are already fading at the mere suspicion of dawn’s first rosy cracks as the woman eventually rises to her full height. Lean, dark-haired and endowed with the almost impeccable build of an amazon steeled in combat, she stands there in the wavering twilight. With that slight stoop of hers, she forms a perfect effigy of hounded Leto, barely delivered of her glorious Delian twins, Apollo and Artemis. An idol, as good as naked in her torn rags of shorts and tattered stripes of T-shirt, she leans against the wet and rough stone. Her legs still shaking, she gropes her way along the steeply rising rock-face as if looking for some crack or gap, some hidden Sesame that will miraculously open and allow her into the rock’s secret womb. The gale now hits her squarely in the face and chest, rendering even the shortest of her steps hard and painful. The woman could do herself an easy favour by walking in the other direction, turning her back on, and eventually escaping from, the tireless sandblaster. On the other, leeward side of the bluff she is likely to find cover and protection. Yet perversely, she insists, unflinching in her battle to wrench inch upon inch of rock from the powerful grip of the wind.

At long last her fingers, long gone numb, feel a void. A sharp receding edge in the rock marks access to a low cave, hardly larger nor deeper than a blast-hole, witness of some half-hearted and quickly abandoned mining folly. Her peculiar insistence was not in vain and suggests that the woman knew about this cave. She stoops and disappears in the black hole into which the gale cannot follow her.

As her eyes adapt to the cavernous twilight, she catches sight of a dull shimmer next to her feet. She picks up a plastic bottle almost baked in sand, probably left here weeks or months ago by one of the rare visitors to the island. A marooned fisherman, maybe, having to sit out a gale such as this one, who, upon his hurried departure, carelessly left the bottle behind. With her bruised fingers, the woman is given a hard time by the red screw top, literally welded to the bottle by the heat of uncounted days and weeks of evening sun lighting up the cave that vaguely faces west. Eventually, she seizes the plastic with her teeth and turns the bottle with her hands, until the screw top gives in. The sickening foul smell emanating from the bottle twists the woman’s stomach. But thirst beating nausea any time, she braces herself and swallows the lukewarm water in greedy gulps. Then she throws the empty bottle down and lets out a troglodyte’s happy morning belch which, echoing from the cave’s walls, seems to shock and silence even the gale if only for a second.

“Welcome to scenic Neanderthal,” the woman murmurs, forcing a wry smile from her cracked dry lips. Then she bends down and crawls left on all fours. On the far side of the cave, she runs into a heap piled up on a wooden pallet as if readied for an imminent UPS dispatch. Wrapped in a military-style tarpaulin and covered by a net, it has been perfunctorily stuffed with a few withered twigs in a perfunctory effort at camouflage. As low as the pile seems, it takes the lion’s share of the measly space proffered by the cave.

The woman pulls out her knife again and starts to cut, first the net and then the rope which firmly ties the tarpaulin. Suddenly she stops. A strange bulge in the tarpaulin betrays the presence of something underneath that does not belong there. A booby-trap maybe, meant to blow to pieces any inquisitive simpleton careless enough to lay an unauthorised hand on the pile. Very slowly and carefully the woman cuts the last knots of the rope and little by little pulls the tarpaulin towards her, which allows her to release it as soon as she happens to feel the slightest resistance caused by a ripcord detonator. Still holding her breath, she finally throws the tarpaulin aside.

The pile on the pallet consists of several layers of brick-sized packages, each wrapped in shiny plastic foil and sealed by bits and pieces of silvery tape. On the top layer, only a yard or so away from the face of the kneeling woman, a coiled-up snake is hissing indignantly at this blatant violation of its territory. Taking in the distance instinctively, it rises just high enough for its small, pointed fangs to dig into the intruder’s hollow cheeks.

The woman does not flinch, betrays neither shocked surprise nor fright, but meets the snake’s menacing hiss with a like sound. Her knife hand, hidden from the reptile’s weakly sight by the pile, moves imperceptibly upward. The snake’s almost humanlike “brows” over both eyes identify it as a sand viper. Its bite, though painfully venomous, does not represent any mortal danger for a healthy adult, even if untreated for lack of an appropriate antidote. Should the snake succeed in plunging its fangs in the woman’s head or throat, however, that would in fact worsen her odds of survival rather dramatically. More likely than not, the woman is aware of this. Yet once again, she displays that curious pig-headed resolve of hers, does not shy away from the bizarre battle of chicken and coolly returns the viper’s stare.

Neither is the angered reptile the least bit disposed to relinquish its cave to the shameless intruder. Ever so slowly, the woman lifts her left hand and moves her fingers as in a shadow play meant to humour a grouchy child. When it finally comes, the snake’s thrust at her fingers is right on target but just a split second too slow.

With lightning speed its would-be prey pulls away her left hand and, profiting from the thrust’s own momentum, cuts the snake in two with a single well-aimed upward slash of her saw-toothed blade.

Using the tip of her knife, the woman picks up the snake’s head with its still defiantly wide-open mouth and looks into its unseen eyes as if distrustful of its ill-famed kind even beyond death. Only when she has ascertained that all life has left the reptile for good, does she toss the head into the sea to be devoured by the crabs. The rest of the snake’s body, still writhing in the sand like a severed live cable, she brushes aside.

Then the woman devotes her attention to the watertight bricks. She pulls one of them out of the pile at random, cuts a small slit in the plastic foil and takes a sample of the mealy white powder with the tip of her blade. A few milligrams melting on the taste-buds of her tongue seem to suffice for her to verify the quality of the merchandise. With a nod of appreciation, the woman re-wraps the package and pushes it back into the pile.

Meanwhile, daylight has broken and the islet’s resident sea-birds, flapping the ruffled feathers of their wings at the gale, meet the morning with their routine cacophony. The storm rages on undiminished, stripping the first rays of the glowing red sun of their habitual warmth. The woman dresses her wounds to the best of her abilities with bits and pieces of her torn garments. To avoid inflammation, gangrene, and tetanus during the coming hours, she will need a lot of luck since medical help of any kind will remain beyond her reach for quite a while.

A few deft cuts with the knife suffice to turn the stiff tarpaulin, soaking with the salt of the humid sea air, into a primitive, tent-like poncho, whose seams touch the ground. She slips the cape over her head and shoulders and looks around, as if searching for a mirror to tell her whether colour, size, and shape are commensurate with her type or whether she should not opt for something a mite tighter, racier, more in keeping with her untamed personality.

At last, the woman forces herself into a narrow crack between the back of the pile and the wall of the cave. Here, she feels protected against both wind, snakes, scorpions and the inquisitive looks of uninvited humans. Anyway, the shipping lanes to and from the Dardanelles give the rocky islet such a wide berth that there is no way anyone can discern coastal details from the bridges of passing cargo ships or ferries. Given the prevailing weather conditions, the appearance of foolhardy fishermen in the area should be just as unlikely. If the rocky islet impressed itself on drug traffickers as a convenient hiding place, this is very likely due to precisely its isolated location and gruff well-nigh inaccessibility.

The woman wraps the self-made poncho round her exhausted body, rams the knife into the ground in front of her and closes her eyes. She does not wear a watch. When she wakes up, the light of the afternoon or evening sun will allow her to assess the time of day. She wastes no thought on escaping from the islet. What with the storm howling and the last of her of physical forces spent, any attempt at swimming across the raging sea to the coast of Lesbos cannot but result in drowning. Only minutes go by until her head drops onto her chest and a low rattling snore comes out of her half-open mouth.

2. Three Gentlemen in White

None of the usual suspects in Yannis’ Funky Pelican could tell with any degree of conviction exactly when the three strangers’ nameless blue boat had arrived in the tiny fishing harbour of Mithymna. Gazing into the grounds of their thimble-sized coffee cups and flipping their komvoloi chains of prayer beads of coloured glass back and forth in their greasy, callused hands with a soft clicking sound that seemed to keep time with the ticking of the kafeneion’s clock, they had discussed the matter at some length. Petros, the bearded owner of the recently opened local “hyperrmarket”, claimed he had glimpsed it enter the harbour at dusk, or shortly after.

Now that was a great deal less precise than the patrons might have wished, for one thing. For another, Petros’ credibility had seriously been called into question ever since he had called in the first batch of low-flying UFOs to the police at Mytilini. Nothing short of Petros being kidnapped and held at ransom by a Martian vanguard would redress that situation.

Never mind the three men’s doubtful ETA, their presence was generally felt to have something awkward, unpleasant, vaguely oppressive about it. Despite their expensive-looking white suits, they looked a raggle-taggle threesome, as oddly out of place as an owl’s cast on a tombstone. Their blue motorboat had been tied up fairly sloppily, to say the least. Its already battered and bruised aluminium hull took another beating, incessantly grinding as it was against the rough cement of the primitive quay in the swell. With next to no luggage, no oilskins and, it would seem, not so much as a single pair of life vests, they had to be city dwellers who, blessed with a handsome dose of ignorance, had ventured out to sea and probably very nearly perished.

They were no Turks, Yannis was absolutely positive. After many decades of rubbing shoulders with the “goat-busters” from the mainland opposite, he would have recognized, albeit hardly understood, Turks by their language. If anything, they looked more like Georgian money collectors, trained to break the legs of bankrupt yacht owners. One of them, their leader or spokesman, as it would seem, even sported a thick moustache vaguely reminiscent of Joseph Stalin.

The men’s obscenely tight white pants lamentably unfit for keeping anatomical secrets, soon became the object of openly admiring looks on the part of local females of pretty much all ages and grudging comments on the part of Mithymna males. Talk of swings and roundabouts: the quantity of linen saved on their pants seemed to have gone into the shaping of their flapping oversized jackets. Both trousers and jackets were quickly covered with blots of sweat and dust. Whatever business they had at Mithymna, if any, they could not possibly have planned to stay for any length of time. Yet here they were, trapped, held hostage by the fickle summer gale the locals call meltem, sometimes blowing over in a matter of hours, often enough lasting for weeks on end. It was notorious for driving even locals crazy by its unrelenting strength and wantonness.

“Estragon, Thyme, and Origan,” as Yannis would call them, had moved into the grubby bread-and-breakfast on the top floor of the Funky Pelican. Not because they had taken a spontaneous liking to its mildewed walls, ramshackle furniture and saggy beds, but because it was Mithymna’s only accommodation available at that time of the year. Petros thought they might be mob hands, but Yannis begged to differ. True, what with their obvious lack of style and savoir-vivre, they would have qualified as mobsters. But your typical wise guy would not readily set foot in a motorboat, no sir. After all that regular ravioli, tortellini and capellini, a wise guy’s stomach would be much too doughy for the rough motion of the sea, Yannis’ compelling argument went.

On a more jocular note, he then once again treated the patrons to their favourite urban legend of the dead mafioso lying on the coroner’s table. As the forensic pathologist opens the victim’s skull with his whining oscillation saw and takes out the man’s brain, he comes across an engraving saying, “Buy your pizzas at Paolo’s”. As such, the episode shed precious little light on Estragon’s, Thyme’s, or Origan’s possible behest, but the veterans at the Pelican, who knew every word by heart so that they would anticipate certain passages by mouthing them before Yannis even got there, still appreciated it as if were the very first time. Judging by his uncanny ability to take his public to a joke’s climax, Yannis would probably have made a decent stand-up comedian.

Maybe they were traffickers of human beings. More recently, the uninterrupted rush of desperate refugees, illegal migrants and destitute asylum-seekers venturing across the narrow Lesbos strait from the Turkish coast in all sorts of inflated craft had increased yet again. Or perhaps they were just common criminals on the run who had ventured too far out to sea and had been caught out by this sudden burst of a gale? For your average smugglers, they seemed too heavily armed and perhaps a little overdressed. They never did take off their jackets but, every now and again when launching into an argument over cards, they would wave their arms about like a bunch of dancing flamingos flapping their wings. It was on such occasions that the Greeks caught glimpses of the shiny pistol butts in the men’s shoulder holsters. In fact, the men had probably bought their jackets oversize for the express purpose of discreetly housing their bulky artillery.

Dimitri and Vangelis, the local sheriff and his deputy, had preferred to put their regular visits to Yannis’ kafeneion at the end of their regular evening rounds on hold for the time being. Though they did claim it had nothing to do with the strangers’ sudden arrival, the coincidence was striking enough. At the Pelican, their move was met with silent approval. Handguns as packed by the men in white the two cops only knew from American gangster movies and gory TV series. Their own regulation firearms were just about fit for putting down packs of stray dogs getting hungry and aggressive during winter time. Their shells frequently got jammed in the chamber and the magazines had an awkward propensity of dropping on your boots after the first few tentative shots. With guns like that Dimitri and Vangelis were obviously no match for the likes of Estragon, Thyme, and Origan. Hence, as long as the strangers kept the peace and made no trouble, discretion was the better part of valour, as far as those two were concerned.

In his best pidgin English Yannis had tried to break the disconcerting piece of meteorological news to the men in white that the probable duration of the present bout of meltem was unpredictable even for himself. The strangers obviously did not understand Greek, and their own language, in turn, was an incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo to the Greeks. Which is why both sides had to resort to either basic English or sign language as practised by deaf-mutes. Only trouble was that even this wonderfully silent means of communication appeared to have different vernaculars.

The vague nature of Yannis’ weather forecasts understandably did little to cheer up the sullen mood of the strangers. They probably felt that the privileged first-hand view of the wind-swept harbour and the boiling sea they enjoyed from their room above the kafeneion added insult to injury. The howling gale, the roaring sea, and the rattling shutters not only functioned as undesirable reminders but, on top of that, kept them from falling asleep at night. The lamps in their room burned until the wee morning hours, at any rate. Nevertheless, they were up before noon, probably in the vain hope of being able to leave again soon.

Other people, finding themselves in the strangers’ present situation, might have felt tempted to profit from the time spent waiting by visiting some of the sights the area had to offer - other than the shabby, overcrowded refugee camp further east, that is. But the men in white seemed to foster the same kind of general contempt for their environment as they did for the Greek patrons in the kafeneion. For hours on end, Estragon, Thyme and Origan would ride their rickety wooden chairs like cowboys glued to their blazing saddles. Wiping their brows with grim determination, they would slam their cards on the table like fly swatters, while sweating booze big time.

Even though the strangers picked no fights with the locals, the Greeks felt increasingly unnerved by the frequent quarrels of the three. On one occasion, Estragon was apparently accused by the other two of dealing the cards falsely. On another, Origan would seem to have played out the wrong card at the wrong moment and on yet another, Thyme had forgotten to announce the colour of his game quickly enough. Thus, it went on and on. In their general state of frustration, they simply didn’t miss a single opportunity to pick a fight. Estragon, a tall, lean man with scarecrow limbs, who Petros was pleased to nickname “Tiny”, was the worst offender. Nervously lifting and dropping his shoulders whenever he got excited, he would never accept defeat in good grace. Thyme and Origan, both of average height, the former bald and plump, with a pit-bull face and the latter lean, moustachioed and beady-eyed, had a better grip of themselves. “Curly”, as Petros mockingly called the bald guy, would take a long time before raising his voice, but when he did eventually, the other two would shut up all the more quickly. “Chucky”, Petros’ favourite because of his remote likeness with the child-demon of the horror-movie, was the calmest of the three. Petros wagered that butter wouldn’t melt in that man’s mouth, but dared not put him to the test either.

Their language was a mystery. Not even Kostas, who had seen many parts of the globe during his almost life-long career as a truck driver for many different hauliers had any idea in what bizarre lingo these strangers conferred. In his usual convivial manner, Kostas had addressed them first in English, then in a sort of French, and had finally even ventured his hand at some German, ignoring the irregularity of some of its more complicated verbs. All he had got for his considerable pains, though, were darkish looks and silent shaking of heads. If there is truth in Oscar Wilde’s saying that the despised do well to look despising, the palikaria of the Funky Pelican were doing the right thing ignoring the strangers as much as they felt ignored by them. If they insisted on being left alone, that, too, could be arranged.

Tourists might have objected to the strange manners and possessive attitudes of Estragon, Thyme, and Origan, but this was a little too early in the season for tourists to find their way to this windward side of the island. Besides, frequent media reports on the chaotic situation of Arab and African refugees in quickly hammered together Lesbos camps had given the island a bad karma, so that sun-seekers and holiday-makers from abroad were likely to be looking for alternative destinations this year.

On the morning of the third day the meltem stopped almost as abruptly as it had started. Once the wind had died down, it took only minutes for the boiling sea to follow suit. As they came blustering down the staircase, the strangers, complete with large Gucci shades, dark three-day stubble, sweat-soaked shirts and creased jackets, seemed bursting with renewed energy. Small, bald headed Thyme pulled out a roll of ruffled green presidents and held it under Yannis’ nose. The Greek, using only his thumb and index finger as if asked to collect a turd, daintily picked three ten-dollar bills and ironed them out on the table, still damp from being wiped down with a wet cloth only minutes before. When Yannis saw that Thyme did not bother to even look at the bills, his disappointed face showed how much he regretted not having charged more.

The three men stepped out into the street. To all appearances, they were really in a hurry to shake the Mithymna dust off their Italian designer shoes. When they arrived at the harbour, Tiny went about pouring fuel from the several jerry-cans they had brought with them into the tank of the nameless, nondescript blue-hulled boat. Since he did not take the trouble of using a funnel, and did not have a particularly steady hand either, it did not last long for an overflow of fuel to trickle down the side of the hull and drip into the harbour water. Immediately, an oil film, iridescent with all the colours of the rainbow, began spreading at great speed. Chucky, impatiently waiting for his tall companion to finish the refuelling operation, eventually turned the ignition key before Tiny had even had the time to screw the lid back on the tank. The engine did not start right away, a fact which came as no great surprise to the Greek fishermen standing by. The spark plugs were probably moist with fuel. Petros suspected the starter battery, but since the engine had performed a few slow turns before going back into a coma, the battery was acquitted by common consensus.

After a short break, Tiny tried again. A few reluctant coughs and that was it, as though the engine was not quite ready to run but, at the same time, was loathe to disappoint the onlookers whose numbers had almost imperceptibly increased. Then it apparently had second thoughts and burst into sudden life with a series of shotgun-like backfires and a solid cloud of blue smoke. The three strangers slipped their mooring lines, performed an elegant U-turn around the mole-head, pushed the gas-lever down and roared off in a northerly direction, skipping over the residual swell like a flat pebble over the smooth surface of a lake. At each bound, the men’s wide open jackets flapped joyously in the air.

The villagers made three miniature signs of the cross in quick succession and stared after their bizarre visitors’ speeding craft. Before long however, their interest in the presumed destination of the trio gave way to relief about their departure. A slightly more patient observer might have concluded that the strangers were heading for the Turkish coast, whence they probably had come in the first place. Their little open boat with its limited fuel reserve would hardly take them much further, anyway. Which was probably just as well, since they seemed not to possess so much as an inkling of navigation.

“At least they are lucky as far as weather conditions go,” Petros said on the way back to the kafeneion. Whatever destination lay at the end of their little Odyssey, the sea was not likely to cause them any trouble today. In normal times, they would have had to beware of the coastguard patrols, yet the times were anything but normal. The rising number of refugee craft sinking or running aground were giving the coastguard ships on the Eastern side of Lesbos enough of a headache as it was. After a series of hefty budgetary cuts, the coastguard had neither the necessary staff nor the financial means at its disposal to do more than perform as many rescue operations as they could handle. Meanwhile, for boats passing west of Lesbos, all was plain sailing. In the case of the three men in white, this state of affairs may actually have been for the better of all parties concerned, since, who knows, had they been intercepted by an eager patrol, Estragon, Thyme, and Origan might have felt sufficiently unnerved by three days of useless waiting to let the coastguard guys have a taste of their fine artillery.

3. Dead Man’s Hand

Hardly has the blue motorboat reached the north-western cape of the island and is effectively hidden from the sight of the Mithymny villagers, it veers sharply to port and heads for the open sea. For an hour or so it stays on its westerly course until, even for someone scanning the sea from one of the peaks of the Lesbos coast, it has effectively dropped beneath the horizon. Apparently, the men in white do not take chances and want to make absolutely sure no-one can watch them from the shore. Only when that is ascertained beyond reasonable doubt do they steer southeast. After a while, the hazy silhouette of a low-lying saddle-shaped rocky islet with a helmet-like hump ever so gradually emerges from the haze.

A light breeze from the north and the south-setting current in this part of the Aegean combine forces with the boat’s engine to drive the craft on at a brisk pace. Once alongside the saddle, the men in white deaden the boat’s speed and slowly circle the islet. Either they are naturally distrustful or else they are not quite familiar with the islet’s miniature topography and need to look for a suitable landing spot. Finally, they discover a gap in the belt of barely visible cliffs. They allow the engine to peter off and run the boat’s keel onto the sands of this little speck of beach. With that eerie crunching sound feared by every sailor’s ear, the craft comes to a jerky halt.

Curly, who has placed himself at the bows with the noose of a rope in his hand, underestimates the force of the impact and almost topples over headlong. Then, his balance restored with some difficulty, he hops over the railing, yet makes his second misjudgement of the day and lands with both feet ankle-deep in the creamy algae scum and sticky bladderwrack. Swearing blasphemously, he blames his two mates for ruining his expensive Italian designer shoes. Following the instructions of his grinning mate at the helm, the bald man ties the loose end of his rope round the nearest boulder in a rather perfunctory way. He asks his chums to throw him his jacket, takes off his shoes and socks and clumsily trudges through the wet sand towards the cave, whose access is clearly visible now that the sun has cleared the hump on his way west. Meanwhile, the two men in the boat keep a look-out for anyone stupid enough to show up in the most unfortunate place at what would turn out to be the worst, and last, moment of his life.

Curly has just about reached the mouth of the cave when the pile of drug bricks wrapped in plastic foil comes into his sight. He hesitates, realizing that there is neither a tarpaulin nor a camouflage net. Whoever dumped those packages on this uninhabited islet would not have left the place without protecting the pile, albeit sloppily, from wind and weather. Nor would they have cast off again without hiding it from the looks of fishermen, a race of people passing by the oddest of places in the pursuit of their prey such as the popular red snapper or the rock-bound Aegean lobster. To pile up the packages on the sand without placing them on a wooden palette or at least shoving a few wooden boards underneath constitutes a further breach of precautionary diligence uncharacteristic of experienced smugglers and drug-traffickers.

The gale had raged for several days alright, but a tarpaulin fixed with a rope doesn’t just grow wings or evaporate into thin air. Something untoward seems to be going down here. Curly whistles through his teeth as if summoning a dog. Turning his head over his shoulder to face the boat, he pulls out his shiny gun from the shoulder holster. With a few rapid movements he checks the magazine, chambers a round and releases the safety catch. His two mates in the boat, whose line of vision to the cave is blocked by the bald man immediately do likewise. The metallic sound of the pistol slides gliding back and forth still lingers in the air as, from somewhere near the top of the hump, a huge bird of prey pounces, claws first, onto the man underneath with a cry that makes his blood curl. “Stalin” remains paralyzed by shock just long enough for the harpy to ram her knife into his neck upon landing. Thus, the moment her feet touch the ground, her first victim is already dead and done with.

The two others have only fractions of a second to overcome their utter amazement. The frightening figure in her flapping poncho wings seizes the slumping “Stalin” with her left arm and aims his gun with her right hand at his two mates. While on her knees, she holds the corpse in front of her as a human shield and pulls his cold trigger finger. Six shots resound in quick succession. Two bullets hit “Stalin’s” corpse, the remaining four home in on the men on the boat. Tiny falls over board backwards and smashes into the shallow water which immediately turns red with blood. Chucky manages to fire two pointless shots in the air and collapses over the steering wheel.

Pulling her knife out of his neck, the woman with the poncho pushes “Stalin’s” corpse aside like a discarded crash-test dummy. She searches his clothing and grabs the short-barrelled Smith & Wesson back-up she can feel hidden in his ankle holster. She empties his pockets but finds no papers nor ID that might give clues about “Stalin’s” origins or nationality.

Stepping into the boat, she unceremoniously pushes Chucky overboard and greedily gulps down the contents of two plastic water bottles stuck under the helmsman’s seat. A cool box in the stern holds some stale sandwiches and a plastic bag with half-mildewed oranges. She turns the box upside down and hastily bolts down whatever edibles fall out on the floor. Then she sits down in the sand, belches and slips out of her poncho. Naked, she offers an even more horrific sight, if anything. Her thighs, arms and chest are covered with bad bruises that have formed clods of dried blood. Her left biceps must have been grazed by a bullet during the short skirmish with the men in white. On all fours, she crawls to the bald corpse, tears his blood-stained shirt to strips and, with loud moans, ties them round her fresh wound.

For a little while longer she sits in the sand as if mesmerized by the unreal decor. Somewhere out at sea the low humming sound of a distant boat’s diesel engine cuts through the excited chatter of the gulls circling with anticipation. The woman shudders out of her trance. On the rocky islet, she will not remain undiscovered for long, that’s for sure. Not now that the gale has passed. Were she to be found in the company of three massacred men and a large quantity of dope, however, it would take a lot of time-consuming explanations for her to get away scot free.

Seizing him by the collar, she pulls Tiny’s corpse out of the water, turns him on his back and drops him on the sand. Once she has rifled through his clothes she undresses the man and spreads his pants, shirt and jacket, all nailed to the sand with knives, to dry in the sun. “Chucky” gets much the same treatment but is at least allowed to keep his clothes on. It’s obvious that none of the three could have proved their identity to either police or coastguard, which leaves but one conclusion. Wherever they came from and were headed to, the three gentlemen in white never intended to be taken by the law alive. At least that part of their plans could be said to have come out right.

Eventually, the woman drags the corpses over the sand into the cave and places them with their backs to the wall right at the entrance. Turns out Tiny got two in the chest whereas Chucky displays some two reddish-black holes where his beady eyes used to be. The sea-gulls, always going for the eyeballs first, have a disappointment coming. A black spot of burnt sand and pieces of charcoal are all that is left of the pallet and proof of the fact that, at some stage or other during her enforced stay on the islet, the marooned woman must have succeeded in lighting a camp fire of sorts.

In Tiny‘s jacket pocket she finds a deck of cards which she now re-arranges with the “faster-than-your-eyes” shuffle of an inveterate casino hand. To the hummed sound of Kenny Roger’s Gambler the woman deals everyone his hand of the day. Then she bows backwards out of the cave and straightens herself to her full height. “Gentlemen, the name of the game is seven-card stud,” she instructs the three corpses, “and don’t even think of pulling any fast ones unless you want me to come back to punish you, which I’m pretty sure you don’t.” Then she leaves the three to their fate and turns to the pile of drugs.

Brick upon brick she throws into her spread-out poncho and pulls the lot across the bloody sand down to the water’s edge. Three times she repeats the process, until all the packages are stowed away in the boat and covered by the tarpaulin no longer standing in as a poncho. All guns and knives she hides in the cool box. Tiny’s shirt, trousers and jacket have sufficiently dried so she puts them on. “Pret-a-porter sucks,” she murmurs, as she tries to roll up the sleeves of the jacket and the legs of the pants, so as not to look too much of a scarecrow on shore leave. The improvised bandage on her upper arm has come loose and blood colours the jacket’s sleeve.

The woman takes a last long look around, very much like an artist critically mustering her finished work before signing it with a flourish and releasing it for auction. When she turns the ignition key, the engine, still warm from the past effort, jumps to life immediately. The woman taps on the electronic fuel-gauge to her right a few times and gives a satisfied nod as the indicator ever so slowly moves in the direction of “half”.

The woman in white gets out and is just about to throw off the noose of the boat’s rope when she suddenly stops. Once again, she crawls into the cave and fiddles with the poker cards. At last she throws the three corpses a farewell kiss, frees the rope and slowly pushes the boat away from the beach. As it gets into the deeper water and is being seized by the first gentle waves, the woman just about manages to hop aboard before it drifts off irretrievably.

In reverse she manoeuvres the motorboat away from the cliffs until there is room enough to turn and go full ahead. A school of dolphins with high expectations welcome the boat as though it were an acquaintance of old and go through the rigmarole of jumps and zig-zag swerves. When no reward is forthcoming, the disillusioned animals move on, crackling and whistling with frustration. Soon the boat is but a darkish blot dancing on the shiny blade of the Aegean.

SECOND CHAPTER

1. The Heiress

“...and since you obviously lack your father’s experience, you might wish to profit from the competent support of an excellent manager such as Peter Hansen, at least in the short and medium term, eh, medium term. Peter Hansen, I hasten to add, enjoys the unqualified approval of both our business partners, represented here by their respective attorneys. Thank you for joining us, Gentlemen. On top of this, I dare say the man has done a brilliant job whenever standing in for Robert, eh, for your father, as you well know. May I take it then that, in view of his outstanding track record, he will be welcomed here by you too? Eh, Laura? Laura, are you alright?”

Dr Sanders, the company’s chief legal representative of long standing, contracted his nimble eyebrows over his rimless progressive-lens glasses and interrupted his routine presentation with a touch of irritated bewilderment. As he kept staring at his female opposite with a slight frown, an awkward silence fell across the small conference room. Finally, Dr Sanders resorted to clearing his throat somewhat ostentatiously.

Laura Forster blushed like a school-girl caught secretly exchanging WhatsApp messages with a friend by her notoriously distrustful maths teacher. Progressively sedated by Dr Sanders’ sonorous voice, she had allowed herself to sink into a mild stupor and now straightened herself in her chair with a sudden strong jerk that caused its upholstered back to crackle like a dry branch under the foot of a clumsy redskin. She nervously tore at a notoriously unruly strand of her thick darkish hair that was tightly brushed back and braided to a sumptuous bird’s nest of a bun at the back of her head. As she did so, the tiny scar over her left eyebrow, hardly visible until now, seemed to turn pink.

“I’m sorry, what was that? I mean, yes, certainly, definitely. You will have to excuse my brief spell of absent-mindedness, I just don’t sleep well at all these days, you see.” The stern baritone of the firm’s legal eagle instantly transformed itself into a velvety crooning contralto.

“But of course we sympathize with you, Laura. I am sure, we are all of us most understanding, eh, understanding. Even though I suspect some of us would prefer your catching up on your sleep some other time, once the dust has settled again, if I may say so.”

Obviously, Dr Sanders was the kind of lawyer used to having his audience, or jury, riveted. On behalf of the dimmer section of the parties involved, he had acquired the habit of repeating certain key elements of his rhetoric so as to make them stick. Laura had never quite got used to Dr Sanders’ cherished idiosyncrasies, rhetorical or otherwise. She did not mind his vaguely schizophrenic manner of calling everybody by their first name, if he knew it, yet at the same time treating them on family name terms, as it were. No, what really got to her was his affected use of foreign languages, preferably French rhetorical dainties which, as a rule, did nothing to elucidate the gist of his train of thought but rather were picked to gloss over the sheer banality of many of his assertions. You did not have to be a fanatic linguistic purist to frown on such linguistic snobbery.

Right at the start of this important meeting, devoted to the execution of the entrepreneurial legacy of Robert, Laura Forster’s suddenly deceased father, Dr Sanders had stressed that he would take a dim view at both lack of focus and time-consuming loquacity. Time was money, he repeated several times, lest someone forgot. Strictly speaking, as chief legal representative, he had no official leading function in the running of the company’s daily business and even lacked procuration, as Laura had recently discovered with some surprise. Yet, during the formative years of the forwarding agency founded by Robert a generation or so ago,, he had managed to capture and occupy vital strategic corporate high ground. And, due to his extensive first-hand knowledge of, and insight into, both the company’s official records and its less well documented underhand dealings, he had time and time again stood his ground against the repeated onslaught of promising aspirants to his throne.

“Yes, as I said, all of us here can relate to what you must be feeling so shortly after this cruel loss, which, need I remind you, is ours as well. That said, I suggest we take a short break at this juncture. Figuratively speaking, we are not on the run, are we now?”

He was the only one to smile at his pathetic little quip. Granting his nimble eyebrows a rest, he went for the intercom button. Pushing it was the sign for his secretary residing in an adjacent room to have coffees served by the young blond intern who was everybody’s darling these days. The attorney got up and opened one of the high, narrow windows a crack. Though situated on the fifth floor, the conference room was immediately invaded by the humming, screeching, and hooting orchestra of the city traffic. From somewhere far off, a solemn church bell started ringing. Four light chimes were followed by eleven darker ones. Laura felt goose-pimples forming on her skin and blamed the wet cold of this Hamburg April day.

“We’re not on the run,” she murmured to herself. “Or are we?” She wasn’t quite so sure about that. After having a virtual ton of bricks falling on her so recently, the idea of a strategic retreat had a lot going for it. A retreat where to? She lifted her head from the heap of files piling up next to her laptop and looked out of the window as if the answer was to be expected from over there. All morning, surprise bursts of pale sunlight had fought a losing battle against the persistent fall of vicious icy rain. This year’s foul April weather appeared determined to confirm its dubious reputation.

Laura picked up her black Prada jacket from the adjacent chair. Sven Larsen, the rather good-looking company’s fiscal expert and Robert Forster’s private investment wizard, helped her to drape the jacket round her shoulders. On other occasions, Laura would have minded neither Sven’s matey smile nor his tender touch on her shoulders. Under present circumstances, however, both his facial expression and his gesture were out of place since they suggested an affective intimacy that did not really exist - not as far as Laura was concerned.

For the length of the ninety minutes that the conference had lasted so far, Laura had found it very hard to stay on the ball. She would never confess to it, but in her heart of hearts she felt blatantly overwhelmed by events. Which was a novel experience for her, who used to be feared in many circles as a merciless control freak. True, her expensive education, with economic and entrepreneurial studies and internships both at home, in England and in the US, had been aimed at preparing her for precisely this contingency of taking over the management of her father’s company at some far-away point in the future. But at the moment this concept proved both a lot less remote and far less abstract than she had always assumed, Laura found herself shying away from the crushing weight of responsibility like some female version of Atlas asking to be excused because of a suspected acute hernia. Seriously, how is anyone to prepare for something they hope with all their might is never going to happen?

She had been looking forward to being shown the ropes of the trade gradually, one by one, and had had every reason to, because with all the hindsight in the world, no-one could have even vaguely suspected her father’s sudden fatal heart attack. Least of all Laura, who was closest to him. There had never been any one of the usual harbingers of coronary doom such as ventricular fibrillations, palpitations, frequent bursts of cold sweat or repeated chest ache, not one. On the contrary, after two decades of sustained effort and supreme personal sacrifice on behalf of the firm he had built up from scratch, her father had, more recently, seized every opportunity to take time out and absent himself from business. For three or four weeks in a row, he would absent himself, “bugger off”, as he called it, and maintain his one and only cherished hobby, yachting.

His favourite sailing grounds were the West Indies, he said. Over the years, he must have gained the notoriety of a pink elephant over there, Laura had often thought. She could, of course, have asked him to take her with him on his sprees now and again. Yet, to begin with, Laura was not particularly fond of sailing, to put it mildly. On top of that, she had understood at an early age that a merry widower still harbouring a host of libidinous appetites such as Robert was likely to find ways and means of relief and relaxation in the Caribbean which he would not readily want to impart, not even to his daughter. Particularly not to his daughter.

Whenever he returned from one of his ‚wet safaris‘, as he called them with a grin frequently bordering on the lascivious, he would appear fully recovered, free of stress symptoms of any kind and with a deep-fried tan to boot. Whatever nagging headaches he might have taken with him to the other side of the ocean, he must have left on the Caribbean beaches like so many cracked or wilting coconuts.

And then this proverbial bolt out of the blue. After attending a routine morning conference, he had stepped down from the old-fashioned paternoster he had always obstinately refused to get replaced by some modern contraption, and had collapsed dead or dying on one of the Persian cleaning ladies’ trolleys. Just like that, in a matter of seconds. No famous last words, on whose deeper meaning Laura could have mused for months and years to come. The sad truth was that, on this unspectacular April Wednesday, the Grim Reaper had put on his glasses, checked in his black book and ticked off the name of a certain Robert Forster, Esquire. Curtains. Neither his moderate drinking record nor his restrained though admittedly gourmet eating habits had bought Robert a ticket for longevity. As for smoking, he had already given that up shortly after the even more untimely death of Laura’s mother Frederike, some twenty years ago.

“You can’t look inside a man,” had been the quizzical comment of the doctor from the hastily summoned LC ambulance once it had become obvious that any further attempts at resuscitation would be in vain. “You can’t look inside a man.” What exactly the nervously blinking medicine man had meant by that would remain his secret. Presumably a consecrated formula of embarrassed resignation he resorted to whenever he had to offer a quantum of solace to the inconsolable.

Of course, Laura fully understood that a going concern such as ROLA Logistics Inc. was in dire need of a refurbished management structure after such a brutal cut. T’s had to be crossed and i’s to be dotted as fast as possible. The logistics business was a proper shark pool, Robert had always insisted. Anyone caught hesitating, flapping, flailing or fidgeting, was instantly devoured. A destabilizing event such as the death of a company’s figurehead was a gilt-edged occasion for predators circling with intent. Some competitors were financially well enough equipped and only too eager to swallow firmly established ROLA, thus permanently ridding themselves of a loathsome rival on both the domestic and international front.

All of this stood to reason alright. But so shortly after the funeral, which, due to Robert’s peculiar status of a lonely child without surviving next of kin of any kind other than his daughter, of course, Laura had had to organize practically single-handedly, she felt incapable of such strategic considerations. The death of Laura’s dearly beloved mother had turned her mourning husband and daughter into a sworn conspiracy of two against the rest of the world. Irrespective of the thousands of miles which often enough separated them from one another, Robert and Laura had kept in touch almost daily via the modern means of communication, social media and the like.

Days or even weeks spent together in their villa in Blankenese were few and far between and hence, all the more cherished by both of them. Laura was painfully aware of the fact that her father looked upon her as a substitute for Frederike in more ways than one. It flattered and, at the same time, frightened her. Frequently, she had asked him whether he hadn’t half a mind to re-marry, making it perfectly clear by the same token that he would certainly not have to fear any resistance or mental reserve against whoever he might happen choose as his second wife or permanent companion. A promise which, on reflection, she hadn’t been quite sure she would be able to keep. But that was beside the point and, anyway, the idea had never seemed to catch on with him. If any promising female comets had crossed his lonesome orbit more recently, Robert had not let any hints drop. This she took as an expression of his deep respect for Laura’s staunch sentimental attachment to her mother.