The House of Cards Complete Trilogy (90 page)

***

He crossed himself in the laborious manner of the Orthodox and knelt in the new-cropped grass beside his wife’s grave, positioning his bones like a man older than his years. “
Eonia
mnimi
—
may her memory live forever
,” he muttered, running his hand along the lines in the marble, ignoring the complaints of his splayed leg. At his elbow, Maria replaced the fading flowers with fresh, and together they reached back with silent thoughts and memories.

“This is important,” he said, “to do honor to the dead.”

Greek legend is built around the Underworld, and for a man such as Passolides who knew he must himself soon face the journey across, the dignities and salutations of death were matters of the highest significance. Throughout the history of the Hellenes, life has been so freely cast aside and the dark ferryman of the Styx so frequently paid that elaborate rituals of passage have been required in order to reflect a measure of civilization in a world that was all too often uncivilized and barbaric. Yet for George and Eurypides there had been no ritual, no honor, no dignity.

Since their metaphorical stumble across the brothers’ graves an appetite for his own life seemed to have been conjured within Passolides. He had gained a new fixity of purpose, and if for Maria it seemed at times to be excessively fixed, at least it was a purpose, a mission, a renewed meaning, which had produced within him a degree of animation she had not witnessed since the happier times before her mother had passed away. Even his leg seemed to have improved. During the day he had begun to leave the shadows of his shrine, taking frequent walks on a limp leg through Regent’s Park, often muttering to himself, relishing the open green spaces once again, the arguments of sparrows along the hawthorn paths, the rattle of limes beside the lake. It was as close as he could get in the center of London to the memories of a mountainside.

As Maria polished the cool marble headstone she examined her father carefully, sensing how much he had changed. His small round face was like a fruit taken too long from the tree, wizened, leathered by age and ancestry, his hair sapped steel white, cheeks hollowed by the pain of his clumsy and uncomfortable body. Yet the eyes glowed once more with a renewal of purpose, like an old lion woken from sleep, hungry.

“What was the point,
Baba
? What were the British hiding?”

“Guilt.”

He knew his subject well. Guilt had filled his own life to exclusion, the feeling that somehow he had failed them all, comrades and kin. He had failed as the eldest son to protect his younger brothers, failed again as a cripple to pick up the banner of resistance dropped by them. He would never admit it to anyone and only rarely to himself, but secretly he resented his martyr brothers, even as he loved them, for George and Eurypides were the honored dead while Evanghelos was inadequate and miserably alive. He struggled in their shadow, unable to live up to his brothers’ memory, uncertain whether he could have found the same courage as they had, and deprived of any chance to try. He would never be a hero. He’d spent a lifetime trying to prove to the world that his dedication was the equal of his brothers’, even while in his cups blaming them. He blamed them and in turn blamed himself for the worm of envy and unreason that turned inside him. Yet now, it seemed, and at last, there was hope of relief, somebody else to blame.

“Guilt,” he repeated, rubbing his leg to help the blood circulate. “What else does a soldier hide? Not death, that’s his business. Only guilt has to be buried away. Burned.”

She plucked a few stray strands of grass from around the grave as she listened. He thought she knew nothing of his hidden shame but she had lived with it all her life and understood, even though she could do nothing about it. “Go on,
Baba
.”

“They had a right to kill my brothers, under the British law. George and Eurypides had guns, bombs; who but a few toothless Greeks would have complained? The British once hanged an eighteen-year-old boy, Pallikarides, because he was found carrying a gun. It was their law. Mandatory.” He had trouble with the word, but not its meaning. “No, it was not their death they tried to hide. It must have been the manner of their dying.”

“So that’s why they burned the bodies, because of what they had done to them. Torture?”

“It happened.” He stopped, his eyes focused on a land and a point in time far away. “Maybe they weren’t bodies when they burned them. Maybe they were still alive. That happened too.” On both sides, although he didn’t care to remember and it was something else he would never admit to his daughter. But even after all these years it had proved impossible to wipe his memory of the figures soaked in gas and vengeance.
“Prodótes!”
Traitors, Greek convicted of informing on Greek, stumbling down the village street, still screaming their innocence through charred lips, eyes no longer sighted, burned out, their bodies turned to bonfires that branded a terrible message of loyalty into all who saw. But George and Eurypides had betrayed no one, weren’t
prodótes
, hadn’t deserved to die like that.

“You know what this means,
Baba
? There may be more hidden graves.”

For the Greeks of Cyprus, on long winter’s nights when the womenfolk stoked the fires of remembrance and told stories of the life of old, no memory cut so deep as that of “the missing ones.” In 1974 Greek extremists in Athens, frustrated at the lack of progress toward
Enosis
, union between island and mainland, had conspired to overthrow the Nicosia Government of Archbishop Makarios. It was a fit of madness from which Cyprus would never recover. Five days later the Turks had retaliated and invaded the island, dividing it and breaking up the ethnic jigsaw in a manner that ensured it could never be remade. During that time a thousand and more Greek Cypriot men had disappeared, swept up by the advancing Turkish Army and swept off the face of the known world. Their suspected fate had always been a source of unfeigned outrage to the Greeks and embarrassment to the Turks—such things happened in war, misfortunes, examples of isolated barbarity, even wholesale mistakes, but who the hell liked to admit it afterward? Yet in the quest for peace the Turks
had
admitted, surrendered all they knew about “the missing ones,” which after nearly a quarter century was painfully little—a few scattered graves, old bones, fragmentary records, faded memories—but even a small light shining upon the island’s darkest hour brought understanding and helped ease the suffering, had allowed families to mourn and do honor to the dead.
Myrologhia
. Yet now it seemed there were more graves. Dug even earlier, by the British.

For Maria, who had never known her uncles and could therefore not share fully in their loss, the issue was a matter of politics and of principle. Yet for her father it was so much more. A matter of honor and of retribution. Cypriot honor. Vangelis retribution.

“We must find out what we can about these hidden graves,
Baba
.”

“And about the crimes they tried to bury in them.” He heaved his bent body up straight, like a soldier on parade. “And which bastard did the burying.”

Thirteen

Trial by ordeal is a system of feudal torture that has been done away with everywhere, except in Westminster.

At the south-facing entrance to the Chamber of the House of Commons stands an ornate and seemingly aged archway, the Churchill Arch. Its antiquity is exaggerated, the smoky pallor having been produced not by the passage of time but by its presence so close to one of Reichsmarshall Göring’s bombs, which razed the Chamber to the ground on 10 May 1941. On either side of the archway stand bronze statues of the two great war leaders of modern times, David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. Lloyd George’s pose is eloquent, Churchill’s more aggressive, as though the old warrior were hurrying to deliver a booted blow to the backside of the enemy. A little further along is a plinth bearing no statue, perhaps left as an act of encouragement to all those who pass and who hope, by dint of endeavor and great achievement, to join the rank of revered statesmen.

Roger Garlick would not, in any passage of lifetimes, number among them. Of course, he had a high opinion of himself that fit his role as a Junior Whip, one of those whose task it was to round up Government MPs and herd them through the voting lobbies. Garlick was a man of considerable girth but limited oratorical ability; he recognized that his chances of achieving high public acclaim were thereby limited and relished the opportunity to exercise his influence more privately, through the dark arts of whipping. He feasted on abuse, his favorite diet being new members and any woman.

“Roger!” The cry of recognition came from Booza-Pitt, making his way through the Members’ Lobby where MPs gather to collect messages and exchange gossip and other materials necessary to their work. Booza-Pitt reached out and squeezed the Whip’s arm in greeting but didn’t stop. Garlick was a useful contact, a man who was willing in private and under pressure from a second bottle of claret to share many of the personal secrets he had unearthed about his colleagues, but the middle of the Members’ Lobby was not the place. The Transport Secretary made off in search of other indiscretions.

The Lobby was crowded, as was always the case in the half hour before Prime Minister’s Question Time when Members assembled for the ritual spilling of blood—occasionally Urquhart’s, more frequently that of the questioner and particularly that of Dick Clarence, the youthful and ineffectual Leader of the Opposition who had a tendency to appear as a schoolboy attempting to be gratuitously rude to his long-suffering headmaster. There had to be order in class, and it was Garlick’s job as one of the form prefects to impose it. Thus, when he spotted Claire entering the Lobby, his eyes extended like the glass beads on the face of a child’s bear.

“Missed you at the vote last night, my dear. I stood up for you, of course, but the Chief Whip threw a terrible tantrum. Took me half a bottle of whiskey to calm him down.” He pinned her up against the base of Lloyd George.

“Sorry, Roger. Pressing engagement, I couldn’t get out of it.”

“Not good enough, you know, old girl. I put my arse on the line for you, now you owe me. How about saying sorry over dinner tomorrow night?” He leaned his thick arm on the statue behind her, bringing them closer together, an intimacy he claimed by right as a Whip. He reeked of Old Spice and other things less sweet. She was searching the Lobby for someone else—anyone else—to distract her attention, but he did not notice, his own eyes were clamped firmly upon her blouse.

“Sorry, Roger, can’t do tomorrow. I’m having my hair done. Following night’s out, too, I’m hoping to go to assertiveness class. If my husband lets me.” She smiled, hoping he might take the hint.

“Next week, then,” he persisted. “It’d be fun. There’s a hint of a reshuffle coming up, new jobs going, we could discuss your future. Might even be able to get you added to the Whip’s List of new stars.”

As he spoke, a fellow Member squeezed past and Garlick took the opportunity to move his body still closer, trying to brush against her. Claire voiced no objection; in this hothouse of stretched emotions and endless nights it was not uncommon for her to be propositioned, particularly after Members had indulged in a good dinner, and alienating every colleague who had put a hand on her knee or an amorous arm around her waist would leave her a member of a drastically reduced party. Boys’ club rules, and she had asked to join. But she didn’t have to take Garlick’s crap.

“Not next week, Roger. I’m having a new kitchen fitted.” She continued to smile, but with great firmness she placed her fingers on his chest and pushed him away.

Both his attitude and the corner of his lip turned with the rejection. “Bloody women! You’re all the same in this place. Useless. How the hell can we run the country with you crying off every time you get a migraine or one of the kids goes down with mumps.” Other Members standing nearby had begun to tune in; he was aware he had acquired an audience and raised his voice. “It’s about time you got something straight. This isn’t a knitting class or a crèche, it’s the House of Commons, and you’re here to do as you’re told. Leg up. Lie down. Roll over. Adopt as many different positions as a missionary in a pot. You were elected to support the Government, not to wander through the voting lobbies as though you’re picking and choosing underwear at Marks & Spencer. You turn up when we tell you and do as you’re told!”

The blood was flowing early today; from among the colleagues gathered around came a shuffling noise, a mixture of embarrassment and expectation, like the sound of a butcher’s apron being passed.

“I am very sorry I missed last night’s vote, Roger. I had no choice.” She took great care to squeeze out any tremble or trace of emotion that might have crept into her voice.

“What was so important, then, that you had to let us all down? For God’s sake don’t tell me you had a pressing engagement with your bloody gynecologist.”

“No, I wasn’t on my back, Roger. I was with Francis. You know, the Prime Minister? He asked me to become his PPS.”

The audience around them stirred and Garlick’s jowls began to take on a deeper hue of crimson. He appeared to be having trouble controlling his lower jaw. “The Prime Minister asked you to become his…” He couldn’t finish.

“His Parliamentary Private Secretary. And you know what kind of girl I am, Roger. Couldn’t possibly say no.”

“But the Chief didn’t know anything about it,” he stammered. He prayed he was being wound up.

Of course the Chief Whip didn’t know, couldn’t possibly have been brought in on the discussion. He was one of those marked to end up in the pot beside the missionary. Along with several of the Junior Whips.

“FU was planning to mention it to him over lunch today. It obviously hasn’t come down the line yet. At least, not as far as you.”

A senior member of the audience plucked at Garlick’s sleeve. “Game, set, and testicles, I’d say, old boy,” and walked off chortling.