Jack Higgins: Solo

Katina Pavlo and the boy’s grandmother continued to raise him between them. The two women had an extraordinary instinctive understanding that drew them together where the boy was concerned, for there was little doubt that both loved him deeply.

Although Agnes Fuller’s duties as principal of Howell Street High left her little time for teaching, she was still a pianist of no mean order. She was therefore able to appreciate the importance of the fact that her grandson had perfect pitch at the age of three.

She started to teach him the piano herself when he was four and it soon became apparent that she had in her hands, a rare talent.

It was 1948 before Dimitri Mikali, now a widower, was able to make the trip to America again and what he found astounded him. A six-year-old American grandson who spoke fluent Greek with a Cretan accent and played the piano like an angel.

He sat the boy gently on his knee, kissed him and said to Agnes Fuller, ‘They’ll be turning in their graves in the cemetery back there in Hydra, those old sea captains. First me – a philosopher. Now a piano player. A piano player with a Cretan accent. Such a talent is from God himself. It must be nurtured. I lost a great deal in the war, but I’m still rich enough to see he gets everything he needs. For the moment, he stays here with you. Later, when he’s a little older, we’ll see.’

From then on, the boy had the best in schooling, in music teachers. When he was fourteen, Agnes Fuller sold the house and with Katina, moved to New York so that he could continue to get the level of teaching he needed.

Just before his seventeenth birthday, she collapsed one Sunday evening before supper, with a sudden heart attack. She was dead before the ambulance reached the hospital.

Dimitri Mikali was by now Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Athens. Over the years, his grandson had visited him for holidays on many occasions and they had grown close. He flew to New York the moment he received the news and was shocked by what he found.

Katina opened the door to him and put a finger to her mouth. ‘We buried her this morning. They wouldn’t let us wait any longer.’

‘Where is he?’ the professor asked.

‘Can’t you hear him?’

The piano sounded faintly through the closed doors of the sitting-room. ‘How is he?’

‘Like a stone,’ she said. ‘The life gone from him. He loved her,’ she added simply.

When the professor opened the door, he found his grandson seated at the piano in a dark suit playing a strange, haunting piece like leaves blown through a forest at evening. For some reason, it filled Dimitri Mikali with a desperate unease.

‘John?’ He spoke in Greek and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘What’s that you’re playing?’

‘“Le Pastour” by Gabriel Grovlez. It was her favourite piece.’ The boy turned to look up at him, the eyes like black holes in the pale face.

‘Will you come to Athens with me?’ the professor asked. ‘You and Katina. Stay with me for a while? Work this thing out?’

‘Yes,’ John Mikali said. ‘I think I’d like that.’

For a while he did. There was Athens itself to enjoy, that noisy, most cheerful of cities, that seemed to keep going day and night without stop. The big apartment in the fashionable area near the Royal Palace, where his grandfather held open house most nights. Writers, artists, musicians, they all came. Particularly politicians, for the professor was much involved with the Democratic Front Party, indeed provided most of the finance for their newspaper.

And there was always Hydra where they had two houses; one in the narrow back streets of the little port itself, another on a remote peninsula along the coast beyond Molos. The boy stayed there for lengthy periods with Katina to look after him and his grandfather had a Bluthner concert grand shipped out at considerable expense. From what Katina told him on the telephone, it was never played.

In the end, Mikali came back to Athens to stand against the wall at parties, always watchful, always polite, immensely attractive with the black curling hair, the pale face, the eyes like dark glass, totally without expression. And he was never seen to smile, a fact the ladies found most intriguing.

One evening, to his grandfather’s astonishment, when one of them asked him to play, the boy agreed without hesitation, sitting at the piano and playing Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E flat, mirror-brilliant, ice-cold stuff, that reduced everyone present to astonished silence.

Later, after the applause, after they had left, the professor had gone out to his grandson, standing on the balcony, listening to the roar of the early-morning traffic which never seemed to stop.

‘So, you’ve decided to join the living again? What now?’

‘Paris, I think,’ John Mikali said. ‘The Conservatoire.’

‘I see. The concert platform? Is this your intention?’

‘If you agree.’

Dimitri Mikali embraced him gently. ‘You are everything to me, you must know this now. What you want, I want. I’ll tell Katina to pack.’

He found an apartment near the Sorbonne in a narrow street not far from the river, one of those village areas so common to the French capital with its own shops, cafés and bars. The sort of neighbourhood where everyone knew everyone else.

Mikali attended the Conservatoire, practised between eight and ten hours each day and dedicated himself solely to the piano to the exclusion of all else, even girls. Katina, as always, cooked and kept house and fussed over him.

On 22 February 1960, two days before his eighteenth birthday he had an important examination at the Conservatoire, the chance of a gold medal. He had practised for most of the night and at six o’clock in the morning, Katina had gone out to get fresh rolls from the bakery, and milk.

He had just emerged from the shower, was fastening the belt of his robe, when he heard the screech of brakes in the street outside, a dull thud. Mikali rushed to the window and looked down. Katina lay sprawled in the gutter, the bread rolls scattered across the pavement. The Citroën truck which had hit her reversed quickly. Mikali had a brief glimpse of the driver’s face and then the truck was round the corner and away.

She took several hours to die and he sat in the hospital beside her bed, holding her hand, never letting go, even when her fingers stiffened in death. The police were subdued and apologetic. Unfortunately, there had been no witnesses, which made matters difficult, but they would keep looking, of course.

Not that it was necessary, for Mikali knew the driver of the Citroën truck well enough. Claude Galley, a coarse brute of a man who ran a small garage close to the river, with the aid of two mechanics.

He could have given the police the information. He did not. This was personal. Something he had to handle for himself. His ancestors would have understood perfectly, for in Hydra, for centuries, the code of the vendetta had been absolute. The man who did not take vengeance for the wrong done to his own was himself cursed.

And yet there was more to it than that. A strange, cold excitement that filled his entire being as he waited in the shadows opposite the garage at six o’clock that evening.

At half past, the two mechanics left. He waited another five minutes, then crossed the road to the entrance. The double doors stood open to the night, the Citroën parked pointing towards the street and behind, a concrete ramp sloped steeply down to the basement.

Galley was working at a bench against the wall. Mikali’s right hand slipped into the pocket of his raincoat and tightened on the handle of the kitchen knife he carried there. Then he saw there was an easier way. One that carried with it a considerable measure of poetic justice.