The Greek Tycoon's Achilles Heel (10 page)

At first she could see very little. Outside the dawn was breaking, but the shutters were still closed and only thin slivers of light managed to creep in. By their faint glow she realised that this room had been designed as a celebration of love.

The walls were covered in paintings depicting gods, goddesses and various Greek legends. Incredibly, Petra thought she recognised some of them.

‘These pictures are famous,’ she murmured. ‘Botticelli, Titian—’

‘Don’t worry, we didn’t steal them,’ Lysandros said. ‘They’re all copies. One of my mother’s ancestors wanted to “make a figure” in the world. So he hired forgers to go all over Europe and copy the works of great artists—paintings, statues. You’ll probably recognise the statues of Eros and Aphrodite as well.’

‘The gods of love,’ she whispered.

‘His wife directed matters, and had this room turned into a kind of temple.’

‘It’s charming,’ Petra said. ‘Had they made a great love match?’

‘No, he married the poor woman for her money, and this was her way of trying to deny it.’

‘How sad.’

‘Love often is sad when you get past the pretty lies and down to the ugly truth,’ he said in a flat voice.

But now she scarcely heard him. Disturbing impressions were reaching her. Something was badly wrong, but she wasn’t sure what. Then she drew closer to a statue of Eros, the little god of love, and a chill went through her.

‘His face,’ she murmured. ‘I can’t see, but surely—’

With a crash Lysandros threw open the shutters, filling the room with pale light. Petra drew a sharp, horrified breath.

Eros had no face. It looked as if it had been smashed off by a hammer. His wings, too, lay on the floor.

Now she could look around at the others and see that they were all damaged in a similar way. Every statue had been attacked, every painting defaced.

But the worst of all was what had happened to the bed. It had been designed as a four-poster but the posts too had been smashed, so that the great canopy had collapsed onto the bed, where it lay.

Someone had attacked this temple to love in a frenzy, and then left the devastation as it was, making no attempt to clear up. Now she could see the thick dust. It had been like this, untouched, for a long, long time. That was as terrible as the damage with its message of soul-destroying bitterness.

‘You asked if she were in here,’ Lysandros said. ‘She’s been
here since the night I brought her to this house, to this room, and we made love. She’ll always be here.’

‘Was she here when—?’

‘When I did this? When I took an axe and defaced the statues and the pictures, smashed the bed where we’d slept, wanting to wipe out every trace of what I’d once thought was love? No, she wasn’t here. She’d gone. I didn’t know where she was and after that—I didn’t find her until she died, far away.’

He turned to the wrecked bed, gazing at it bleakly as though it held him transfixed. Shivers went through Petra as she realised that he’d spoken no more than the truth. His dead love was still present, and she always would be. She followed him through every step of his life, but she was always here, in this house, in this room, in his heart, in his nightmares.

‘Come away,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing here any more.’

It wasn’t true. In this room was everything that was terrible, but she wouldn’t admit that to him, lest her admission crush him further. She drew him to the door and locked it after them. She knew it would take more than a locked door to banish this ghost from his dark dreams, but she was determined to do it.

He’s got me now
, she told the lurking presence in her mind.
And I won’t let you hurt him any more.

She didn’t speak to Lysandros again, just led him back to their bed and held him in her arms.

At last some life seemed to return to Lysandros and he roused himself to speak.

‘Since we’ve been here together, I’ve found myself going more and more to that room, hoping that I could make myself enter and drive the ghost away.’

‘Perhaps I can help you do that,’ she suggested.

‘Perhaps. I’ve resisted it too long.’

‘Am I something you need to resist?’ she whispered.

He took so long to reply that she thought he wasn’t going to say anything, but at last he spoke as though the words were dragged out of him by pincers.

‘From the first evening you have filled me with dread,’ he said slowly. ‘With dread—with fear. There! That’s the truth. Despise me if you will.’

‘I could never despise you,’ she hastened to say. ‘I just can’t think of any reason why you should be afraid of me.’

‘Not of you, but of the way you made me feel. In your presence my defences seemed to melt away. I felt it when we met at the wedding. When I discovered that you were the girl on the roof in Las Vegas I was glad, because it seemed to explain why I was drawn to you. We’d been practically childhood friends so naturally there was a bond. That’s what I told myself.

‘But then we danced, and I knew that the bond was something far more. I left the wedding early to escape you, but I called you later that day because I had to. Even then I couldn’t stay away from you because you had an alarming power, one I shied away from because I’d never met it before and I knew I couldn’t struggle against it.

‘Do you remember the statue we saw in the Achilleion Palace? Not the first one where Achilles was in all his glory, but the second one, where he was on the ground, trying to remove the arrow, knowing that he couldn’t? Did you see his face, upturned to the sky, begging help from the gods because he knew that this was stronger than him and only divine intervention could save him from its power?’

‘But he was fighting death,’ Petra reminded him. ‘Do I represent death?’

He smiled faintly and shook his head.

‘No, but you represent the defeat of everything I believed was necessary to keep me strong. The armour that kept me at a cautious distance from other people, the watchfulness that
never let me relax, so that I was always ahead of the game and all the other players. In your presence, all of that vanished. I implored the gods to return my strength so that I could be as safe against you as I was against everyone else, but they didn’t listen—possibly because they knew I didn’t really mean it.

‘Your power over me came from something I’d never considered before. It wasn’t sex, although there was that too. Lord, how I wanted to sleep with you, possess you! It drove me half demented, but I could cope with that. It was something else, much more alarming.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I could make you laugh. I’ve always loved doing that, not because it gave me power but because I hoped it might make you happy.’

‘It did, but it also alarmed me because it meant I was vulnerable to you as to nobody else in the world, man or woman. So I departed again. This time I went away for days, but then I began to worry that you might have returned to England, and I discovered I didn’t want that after all. I was acting like a man with no sense, wanting this, wanting the opposite, not knowing what I wanted—like a man in love, in fact. So I called you.’

‘I was with Nikator,’ she remembered. ‘He guessed it was you and warned me against you.’

‘He was right.’

‘I know he was. I never doubted that for a moment. Do you think I care what that silly infant thinks, as long as you come back to me?’

‘When I saw you again I knew I couldn’t have stayed away any longer,’ he said, ‘but I also knew I’d come back to danger. I was no longer master of myself, and that control—that mastery—has been the object of my life. I understood even then that I couldn’t have both it and you, but it’s not until now—’

It was only now that he’d brought himself to face the final
decision, and for a moment she still wasn’t sure which way it would go. There was some terrifying secret that haunted him, and everything would depend on what happened in the next few minutes.

Suddenly she was afraid.

A
T LAST
he began to speak.

‘It started in my childhood with my mother’s fantasies about Achilles and his hidden vulnerability. I understood the point about keeping your secrets to yourself, but in those days it was only theory, little more than a game. I was young, I had more money than was good for me, I felt I could rule the world. I fancied myself strong and armoured, but in truth I was wide open to a shrewd manipulator.’

‘Is that what
she
was?’ Petra asked.

‘Yes, although it wasn’t so much her as the men behind her. Her name was Brigitta. She was a great-niece of Homer, not that I knew that until later. We met by chance—or so I thought—on a skiing holiday. In fact she was an excellent skier, but she concealed that, just kept falling over, so I began to teach her and somehow we fell over a lot together.

‘Then we abandoned skiing and went away to be by ourselves. I was in heaven. I didn’t know any girl could be so lovely, so sweet, so honest—’

He drew a ragged breath and dropped his head down onto his chest. He was shaking, and she wondered with dismay if this was only memory. After all these years, did some part of his love still survive to torment him?

She reached out to touch him but stopped at the last minute and let her hand fall away. He didn’t seem to notice.

After a while he began to speak again.

‘Of course I was deceiving myself. It had all been a clever trap. She was thrown into my path on purpose so that I could make a fool of myself over her. Even when I discovered who she was I didn’t have the wit to see the plot. I believed her when she said she’d concealed her background because she was truly in love with me and didn’t want me to be suspicious. Can you imagine anything so stupid?’

‘It’s not stupid,’ Petra protested. ‘If you really loved her, of course you wanted to think well of her. And you must have been so young—’

‘Twenty-one, and I thought I knew it all,’ he said bitterly.

‘How old was she?’

‘Nineteen. So young; how could I possibly suspect her? Even when I found out she was using a false name, that she’d engineered our meeting—even then I believed that she was basically innocent. I
had
to believe it. She was the most beautiful thing that had ever happened to me.’

She could have wept for the boy he’d been then. To cling to his trust in the face of the evidence suggested a naïvety that nobody meeting him now would ever believe.

‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘We planned to marry. Everyone went wild—the two foes putting their enmity aside to join forces and present a united front to the world. My father advised me to delay; he was uneasy. I wouldn’t listen. We came here to be alone together and spent the summer living in this house. I wouldn’t have thought that anyone could be as happy as I was in those weeks.’

His mouth twisted in a wry smile.

‘And I’d have been right not to believe it. It was all an illusion, created by my own cowardly refusal to face the fact
that she was a spy. She didn’t learn much, but enough for the Lukas family to pip us to the post on a lucrative contract. It was obvious that the information must have come from her, and that she’d listened in to a telephone conversation I’d had and managed to see some papers. She denied it at first, but there was simply no other way. I turned on her.’

‘Well, naturally, if you felt betrayed—’

‘No, it was worse than that. I was cruel, brutal. I said such things—she begged my forgiveness, said she’d started as a spy but regretted it in the end because she came to love me truly.’

‘Did you believe her?’ Petra asked.

‘I didn’t dare. I sneered at her. If she truly regretted what she’d done, why hadn’t she warned me? She said she tried to back out but Nikator threatened to tell me everything. But he promised to let her off if she did one last job, so that’s what she did.’

‘But Nikator must have been little more than an child in those days,’ Petra protested.

‘He was twenty. Old enough to be vicious.’

‘But could he have organised it? Would he have known enough?’

‘No. There was another man, a distant cousin called Cronos, who hadn’t been in the firm more than a couple of years and was still trying to make his mark. Apparently he was a nasty piece of work, and he and Nikator hit it off well, right from the start. People who knew them said they moved in the same slime. Cronos set it up and used Nikator as front man.’

‘Cronos set it up?’ she echoed. ‘Not Homer?’

‘No, to do him justice, he’s a fairly decent man, a lot better than many in this business. The story is that after the whole thing exploded Homer tore a strip off Cronos and told him to get out if he knew what was good for him. At any rate Cronos vanished.

‘Obviously, I don’t know the details of any family rows, but my impression is that Homer was shocked by Nikator’s
behaviour. Being ruthless in business is one thing, but you don’t involve innocent young girls. But Nikator had come down hard on Brigitta when she tried to get free. He bullied her into “one last effort”, and she thought if she did that it would be over.’

‘No way,’ Petra said at once. ‘Once he had a blackmail hold over her he’d never have let it go.’

‘That’s what I think too. She was in his power; I should have seen that and helped her. Instead, I turned on her. You can’t imagine how cruelly I treated her.’

But she could, Petra thought. Raised with suspicion as his constant companion, thinking he’d found the love and trust that could make his life beautiful, he’d been plunged back into despair and it had almost destroyed him. He’d lashed out with all the vigour of a young man, and in the process he’d hurt the one person he still loved.

‘I said such things,’ he whispered. ‘I can’t tell you the things I said, or what they did to her—’

‘She’d deceived you.’

‘She was a child.’

‘So were you,’ she said firmly. ‘Whatever happened to her,
they
were responsible, the people who manipulated her. Not you.’

‘But I should have saved her from them,’ he said bleakly. ‘And I didn’t. We had a terrible scene. I stormed out of the house, saying I hated the sight of her and when I returned she’d vanished. She left me a letter in which she said that she loved me and begged my forgiveness, but there was nothing to tell me where she’d gone.’

Petra made no sound, but her clasp on him tightened.

‘I couldn’t—wouldn’t believe it at first,’ he went on in a voice that was low and hoarse. ‘I went through the house calling her name. I was sure she had to be hiding somewhere,
waiting for a sign from me. I cried out that we would find our way somehow, our love was worth fighting for.’

And after each call he’d stood and listened in the silence. Petra could see it as clearly as if she’d walked the house with that devastated young man. She heard him cry,
‘Brigitta!’
again and again, waited while he realised that there would be no answering call, and felt her heart break with his as the truth was forced on him.

And she saw something else that he would never speak of—the moment when the boy collapsed in sobs of despair.

‘What did you do after that?’ she asked, stroking his hair.

‘I believed I could find her and still make it right. I set detectives on her trail. They were the best, but even they couldn’t find her. She’d covered her tracks too well. I tried the few who remained of her family in another country, but they weren’t close and she hadn’t been in touch with them. I tried Nikator. There was just a chance that he knew something, but I’m convinced he didn’t. I scared him so badly that he’d have told me if he could.

‘In the end I faced facts. A woman who could escape so completely must have been very, very determined to get well away from me. But I didn’t stop. Months passed, but I told them to keep looking because I couldn’t face the prospect of never seeing or talking to her again. I had to ask her forgiveness, do what I could to make it right.

‘At last I got a message from a man who said he thought he might have found her, but it was hard to be sure because she couldn’t talk and just sat staring into space all the time. I went to see her and found—’ He shuddered.

Petra didn’t make the mistake of speaking. She simply sat with him in her arms, praying that her love would reach him and make it possible for him to confront the monster.

‘I found her in a shabby room in a back street, miles away,’
he managed to say at last. ‘The door was locked. The last time anyone had gone in there she’d been so frightened that she’d locked it after them. I kicked it open and went in.

‘She was sitting up on a bed in the corner, clutching something in her arms as though she had to protect it. She screamed at the sight of me and backed away as though I was an enemy. Maybe that’s how I looked to her then. Or maybe she just didn’t know me.’

Another silence, in which she felt his fingers tighten on her arm, release her and tighten again.

‘At last all the fight seemed to go out of her. She sagged against the wall and I managed to get close and look at what she was holding.’

His grip was agonisingly tight. Petra closed her eyes, guessing what the bundle had been, and praying to be wrong.

‘It was a dead baby,’ Lysandros said at last.

‘Oh, no,’ Petra whispered, dropping her head so that her lips lay against his hair.

‘It was premature. She’d hidden her pregnancy and had no proper medical attention, so she gave birth alone. Then she just sat clutching the child and not letting anyone near her. She’d been like that for days, shivering, starving, weeping.

‘I begged her to calm down, told her it was me, that I loved her, I’d never harm her, but she told me to go away because she had to feed the baby. By that time he must have been dead for days. He was cold in her arms.

‘The people who owned the house were decent and kindly, but they couldn’t cope. I had her moved to hospital, ordered the best attention for her, said I’d pay for everything—whatever money could buy, I’d give her.’ He said the last words with bitter self-condemnation.

‘I went to see her every day in the hospital, always thinking that the care she was receiving would soon take effect, she
would become herself again, and we could talk. But it didn’t happen. As she became physically stronger her mind seemed to retreat further into a place where I couldn’t follow, and I understood that she wanted it that way. But still I waited, hoping she’d recover and we could find each other again.

‘Then she had a heart attack, apparently an adverse reaction to a drug she’d been given, but the doctors told me that she wasn’t fighting for life. Her will had gone, and it was only a matter of time. I sat beside her, holding her hand, praying for her to awaken. When she did I told her that I loved her and begged her forgiveness.’

‘Did she forgive you?’ Petra asked quietly.

‘I don’t know. She only said one thing. By that time she’d accepted that the child was dead and she begged me to make sure he was buried with her. I gave her my word and, when the time came, I kept it. She’s buried with our baby in her arms.’

‘She must have recognised you to ask such a thing,’ Petra said.

‘I’ve told myself that a thousand times, but the truth is that she might have said it to anyone she thought had the power to ensure that it happened. I’ve tried to believe that she forgave me, but why should I? What right do I have after what I did? I terrified her into running away and hiding from the world when she desperately needed help.

‘What kind of life did she have? The doctors told me she was severely undernourished, which had damaged the child, hence the premature birth—and death—of my son.’

‘You have no doubt that—?’

‘That he was mine? None. She must have been about a month pregnant when we parted. They were very tactful. They offered me a test, to be sure, but I refused. Such a test implied a doubt that dishonoured her. She was carrying my son when I abandoned her.’

‘But you didn’t throw her out,’ Petra protested.

‘No, I wanted her to stay here until I could arrange our breakup to look civilised in the eyes of the world,’ he said savagely. ‘And then, fool that I was, I was surprised when I came back and found her gone. Of course she fled. She looked into the future I’d mapped out and shuddered. I didn’t throw her out, but I drove her out with coldness and cruelty.

‘If I’d known—everything would have been different, but I made her feel that she had no choice but to run away from me. So there was nobody to help her when she knew about her condition. She faced everything alone, and they both died.

‘I was with her to the last. She died in my arms, while I prayed for a word or a look to suggest that she knew me. But there was nothing. She’d gone beyond my reach and all I could do was hold her while she slipped away, never knowing that I was begging her forgiveness. I destroyed her life, I destroyed her last moment, I destroyed our child—’

‘But it wasn’t—’

‘It’s my fault—don’t you understand?
I killed them, both of them.
I killed them as surely as if I’d—’

‘No,’ she said fiercely. ‘You mustn’t be so hard on yourself.’

‘But I must,’ he said bleakly. ‘If I’m not hard on myself, who will be? How many times since then have I gone to her tomb and stood there, watching and waiting for something that’s never going to happen?’

‘Where is her tomb?’

‘Here, in the garden. I had the ground consecrated and got the priest to come and bury them both at the dead of night. Then I covered the place so that nobody can find it by accident.

‘Then I had to decide what to do with myself. I looked at what this kind of life had made of me, and I hated it. I told my father I was finished with it all, and took the next plane out of Greece, trying to escape what I’d done, what I’d turned into.

‘When you and I met, I’d been on the run for two years.’ He gave a brief bark of laughter. ‘On the run. Like a criminal. That’s how I felt. I went to Monte Carlo, to New York, Los Angeles, London, Las Vegas—anywhere I could live what they call “the high life”, which is another way of saying I indulged myself in every despicable way. I drank too much, gambled too much, slept around too much, all because I was trying to escape myself. But at the end, there was always a menacing figure waiting for me at the end of the road. And it was me.