The Unhappy Medium 3: Wretched Things: A Supernatural Comedy, page 19
‘Thanks,’ said Viv. ‘What do we do next?’
‘First,’ began Vasilakis, ‘we get your Bonetaker into the Gorge, see if he can pick up a trail.’
‘Is that wise?’ asked Bennet. ‘The Bonetaker can hide from curiosity, but we can’t. From what I’ve heard, the Gorge is simply crawling with tourists and rangers; won’t we stick out a bit?’
‘Is true,’ replied Vasilakis. ‘So, we go tonight … in darkness. The sun will be down by eight. If we leave here by 5.30, we can be in position on the plateau for sunset.’ The Cretan then looked down at their footwear to confirm what he had already suspected. Bennet’s Hush Puppies, Viv’s flip flops and Gabby’s tattered Vans looked sheepishly back at him. ‘This won’t do,’ declared Vasilakis, pointing. ‘These are not good. The walking in the Gorge is very hard. It can be brutal, especially in darkness. The stones, they are like steak knives.’ Vasilakis checked his watch. ‘You’ve got an hour. Buy some boots.’
*****
The story of Boris Nahrapov was, in many senses, the story of modern Russia itself. Nahrapovs were spread across the tail end of the Great Patriotic War, the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the family name cropping up in each rise and fall like the footnotes in a school history book.
There had been a Nahrapov in the inferno of Stalingrad, an intelligence officer fast-tracked through the heat of battle to a senior role in the Soviet secret services. Post-war, Comrade Yvgeny Nahrapov had busied himself purging Stalin’s supposed enemies the length and breadth of the USSR, leaving the gulags rammed with enemies of the state, few of whom would return to enjoy the worker’s paradise at a later date. Brutal, unquestioning and thorough, he had murdered the innocent with as much zeal as the guilty, his pistol pumping a ton of lead into so many undeserving necks he didn’t even bother counting them. When Stalin died, Yvgeny slipped with ease into the all-new KGB, shadowboxing with MI6 and the CIA through the most frigid days of the Cold War.
Though he had the romantic virtues of a conger eel, General Yevgeny Nahrapov had embarked on a marriage in the late sixties, producing two sons and some of the most disagreeable wedding photos ever taken. Given the rampant cronyism of the Soviet Union, the boys, Boris Nahrapov and his brother Viktor, were destined for middle-of-the-road greatness, Viktor having an accelerated climb through the ranks of the Soviet Army and Boris following his father into the KGB. While Viktor gained the rank of major in the quagmire of Afghanistan, Boris’s rise through the intelligence services was as steady as it was unstoppable. By the time the USSR began to collapse, he was tipped for the top jobs, which was a shame because, within a very short time, all such jobs were to vanish.
Crippled economically, shamed in war and shunned by former allies, Russia lost its empire to a world fed up to the back teeth with autocracy. Poland, Romania, and Ukraine, like children leaving an abusive family home, each bolted to join the capitalist West. The Eastern Bloc, once a much-feared tower of solidity, turned overnight into a drunken game of Jenga and was no more.
For the Nahrapovs as a family, it was a disaster.
Yvgeny Nahrapov, unable to process the disaster, decided to have two massive strokes, the second of which was fatal. The boys’ mother celebrated her new-found freedom from the old bastard by drinking herself to death in a matter of months, while Boris was obliged to drive taxis around Leningrad for the influx of gloating Western tourists. Viktor, now a colonel general in the Kursk Oblast, survived by selling his military hardware to distant foreign warlords, stripping his tanks of their tracks to sell to scrap dealers.
But, as one Russia lay dying, another was being brutally conceived.
This was no ideological edifice, no rallying call for the liberation of the perpetually oppressed masses. This was a grubby new Russia, delivered by the back-street midwife of opportunism and greed, a black market kleptocracy with the moral compass of a card shark. Foolishly, the victorious West, delighted to witness the death of the socialist dream, was content to let the market, however black it may be, have its wicked way with the corpse of modern Russia. Unchecked, the emerging monster was left to mature, the worst of the old repressive state machine shifting from an Orwellian nightmare to a gangster’s paradise. Utilising their networks, spies evolved into hoods, then to ‘businessmen’, before emerging finally as that most familiar of Russian scumbags, the oligarch. Selling off the wreckage of the Soviet car crash, the oligarchs grew rapidly and preposterously wealthy, egged on by a population too desperate for change not to fall for that classic sleight of hand … ‘trickle-down’.
By the end of the 1990s, Russia's abundant natural resources had lifted the bankrupt carcass of the Soviet Union out of the ditch, creating something superficially progressive. For a while it looked like even the long-suffering Russian people, forever the victims of Russia's tumultuous history would finally get a slice of the pie.
It wouldn't last.
The West, hopelessly addicted to fossil fuels, chose to ignore the warnings.
Russia’s gangsters morphed into international playboys, robber barons who were now eye-wateringly rich, while the poor people of Russia, as always, found themselves bypassed by the surging economics.
Boris Nahrapov was one such baron. His money generated through plundered natural resources and irresponsible weapons deals, Boris transformed himself from broken-nosed back-street hoodlum to international jet setter in a mere fifteen years. Sharp in white linen, the oligarch skirted the Mediterranean in his superyacht, wasting money he didn’t remotely earn … in casinos.
But, it wasn’t all roses for Boris Nahrapov.
Desperate for respect from the long-embedded Western jet set, Boris threw himself at Cannes, Miami, and London … money no object, wanting to be wanted.
He wasn’t.
The thing is, the new Russian élite simply didn’t fit. Despite panic buying all the trappings of the super-rich, the peasanty origins of the oligarchs were just impossible to hide. Boris could flaunt all the Gucci and Prada he could buy, but his face was that of a brawler, the broken nose a sure sign that he was about as trustworthy as a fox on a chicken farm.
This is why, like so much of the Russian nouveau riche, Boris didn’t seem to want to be Russian at all. Patriotism might encourage the masses to accept deprivations and injustices in the hope it would lead to the opposite, but it was of no use to men like Boris Nahrapov. Boris wanted to be Swiss. Boris wanted to be American, French, English or Italian … anything other than Russian. This manifested in him rarely, if ever, stepping back onto the frozen soil of his native land. One or two trips to visit his high-ranking army brother aside, Nahrapov was all over the Med in his superyacht, jetting in and out of Florida or kicking back in his ostentatious villa in Cyprus.
It was in this very villa, some five years earlier, that Boris Nahrapov had first been approached by the Consortium.
The call had come at a time when the distance shown to him by Western élites had felt particularly corrosive. The Russian had been receiving social snubs from Royal Ascot to the Maldives Regatta, leaving him wildly frustrated and oddly isolated despite his own private army and pay-as-you-go social circle.
At first, the call had seemed like a fairly mundane business enquiry, but within a few months, Boris had found himself initiated, first into a dark echo of the Masons, then gradually into something a bit out of the ordinary. About as spiritual as a club hammer, it had taken Nahrapov some time to realise that he’d stumbled into something not only exclusive but supernaturally rather disturbing.
He didn’t care.
Nahrapov was now mixing with real movers and shakers, powerful people who only moved and shook behind massive hardwood doors, forces that could change the world without the world even noticing.
Boris grabbed it with both hands.
Sworn into the most horrifying of secret societies, the oligarch informed none of his old connections.
Seamlessly, he drifted discreetly from the one world … to the other.
Leaving Russia to its own devices, Boris became estranged from all but his brother Viktor, now a high-flying general in the Southern Army. In time, even that connection began to falter.
From the Consortium’s perspective, Boris Nahrapov had many, many uses.
The oligarch’s army of smugglers could move many dubious ‘things’ around their world, no questions asked … none answered. Through his brother, there were also gunmen on tap, savage bully boys who’d shoot their own legs off if the price was right.
There was no getting away from it. Boris Nahrapov got things done.
From his base in Cyprus, Boris was the clear choice for the operation on Crete. A mere day’s voyage away by superyacht, he felt confident in his operatives, leaving them to give the Germans the usual mix of carrot and stick, the carrot being more money than Dr Kraakenhausen had seen in his life. The stick? Instant annihilation if the archaeologist reneged or came up empty.
Content he’d got this balance right, Nahrapov retired to his villa in the hills above Paphos. There, he killed time with his current floozy, a fake blonde with authentic stupidity … and waited.
But now, the oligarch had been waiting longer than he was happy with, far beyond the Germans’ original optimistic timetable. The discovery, of which the archaeologist had been so confident, was now three months late … and getting later. Becoming uneasy, Nahrapov sent his best man to keep the Kraakenhausens under surveillance.
A mobile rang incessantly upon a marble tabletop, its chirping tone competing with the relentless cicadas singing outside by the pool. Slipping a kimono on above his speedos, the bronzed but flabby oligarch left his companion, the blonde some thirty years his junior, and came back inside the seven-million-Euro villa to take the call, topping up his fifth vodka of the morning as he did so.
‘Boris Nahrapov,’ he grunted into the phone. ‘Who’s this?’
‘It’s me, Comrade Boris … Dima Matsigura,’ answered the voice. ‘On Crete, watching the Kraakenhausens, just as you ordered.’
‘Go on,’ commanded the oligarch.
‘There’s been a development, sir,’ continued Matsigura. ‘They seem to have found a way in.’
‘Seem?’ asked Nahrapov, removing his shades. ‘Why? What did the German tell you?’
‘That’s just it,’ explained Matsigura. ‘Kraakenhausen didn’t tell me anything. I’ve been watching the bastard through binoculars. They seem to be going in … on their own.’
Nahrapov sighed, his not inconsiderable belly pushing through his open kimono as he angrily slugged his vodka. Then the oligarch slammed the empty tumbler down on the table.
‘What do you want us to do?’ asked his henchman, once the swearing had subsided.
‘Stop talking,’ snapped Nahrapov. ‘I’m thinking.’ The oligarch closed his eyes briefly, then took a cigarette from the coffee table. Lighting up, he drew the smoke deep, held it way too long, and then let it go.
‘Call the Rostov boys,’ ordered Nahrapov. ‘Have them ready to go as soon as we have transport and weapons. You stay where you are. I’ll meet you in Crete.’
‘Trouble daaaaaaarling?’ purred the girl, writhing her sinuous limbs across her lounger like a spoilt cat, as Nahrapov returned to his chair beside the pool,
‘Not for long, Astrid, my little sparrow,’ said Nahrapov, his knuckles whitening on the arm of the lounger. ‘Not for long.’
Chapter 17
Underground
By the light of Enrico the Hermit’s oil lamp, he and Newton had been walking for hours. Sore from his swan dive, Newton was silent, sullen, and in no mood for adventure.
‘Are you always dissa silent, sullen, and in no mood for adventure?’ asked Enrico, after a painful two-mile stint along a snaking tube of polished rock.
‘Recently, more so,’ admitted Newton, as they sat down in a small alcove, a simple bench carved from the surrounding bedrock. ‘What’s on that fresco?’ he asked, looking at the wall opposite. ‘Are those … lemons?’
‘Lemons?’ asked Enrico. ‘Sì’
‘I hate lemons,’ said Newton.
‘So you said,’ answered Enrico. ‘But you know what they say … if life gives you da lemons, maka da lemonade.’
‘Gawd, I hate that bullshit,’ snapped Newton. ‘What if you don’t like lemonade? I don’t like lemonade. I hate lemonade. I hate all lemon products. Why drink something that tastes like battery acid?’
‘Is very healthy, da lemon,’ explained the hermit. ‘Many health benefits. Grows well here onna Crete too. It grows lika da bloody weed.’
‘They are welcome to it,’ huffed Newton. ‘Can’t stand the stuff. I hate the taste almost as much as I hate that damn saying. Bloody Pollyanna nonsense. Who came up with that line? Jiminy bloody Cricket?’
‘You get a lot of lemons in your life then Dr Barlow? I’m thinking yes?’
‘A fair few,’ answered Newton. ‘My whole life is now one huge lemon. I have zest for life.’
‘Your Purgatorian life?’
‘For sure.’
‘Odd,’ said Enrico, adjusting his boots. ‘Most people would leap atta da chance to live da Purgatorian life. Money, security, excitement anna da mystery.’
‘Mystery,’ snorted Newton. ‘Why does everyone think mystery is a good thing?’
‘Innit?’
‘Nope,’ said Newton. ‘Not to me, it isn’t. I’m not one of your typical Purgatorian nutjobs. I’m a rational scientist, and we scientists like facts, not fairytales.’
‘Issa fair enough,’ shrugged Enrico. ‘Whatever makesa you happy. Except, going by your general demeanour, I’m sensing itta doesn’t.’
‘No, it doesn’t,’ admitted Newton. ‘Not anymore. I used to deal in facts. Oh, happy days. Nowadays, the closest I get to hard facts are my daily toilet stops.’
‘How long you beena doing dis, again?’ asked the hermit.
‘Six months,’ replied Newton, making it sound far longer.
‘Frankly, I’d have thought you’d have gotta used to it by now.’
‘How can I?’ huffed Newton again. ‘None of it makes any sense.’
‘Did it before?’
‘Yes …!’ exclaimed Newton firmly, his confident face then falling away, taking the certainty with it. ‘At least, I thought so … at the time.’
‘Science, eh? Notta lot of that around when I wassa da big fish,’ remarked Enrico. ‘Da Moors were quite big on it, but the Christians? Nah, a brutish lot.’
‘Dark Ages,’ continued Newton darkly. ‘I used to laugh at that pre-Renaissance world, with all its superstition and magic. Oh, how I laughed. Little did I know.’
‘My expectations must have been lower dan yours. All da same, what’s the point of worrying about it all, eh?’
‘I’m not worrying,’ corrected Newton, tired of the buoyant resignation. ‘I’m looking for answers, for reason. If I’m worried about anything, it’s that I’m the only one still bothering to worry.’
‘I used to fret about stuff. Not anymore.’
‘Lucky you,’ muttered Newton.
‘Not luck,’ said Enrico, waving a finger. ‘Philosophy.’
Newton curled his lip, his dislike of philosophy being up there with yoga, line-dancing and colonic irrigation. ‘If I ask nicely, can you not tell me anything about it?’
‘Si, Il Capitano,’ replied Enrico, saluting sarcastically. ‘Hey. It’s notta my job to convince you of anything. But, I’ma happy to chat … iffa you do.’
‘Yeah, I don’t,’ insisted Newton. ‘I don’t need to think differently, thank you very much. I think just fine already.’
‘If you think so well, why is you so unhappy?’
‘I’m not unhappy,’ corrected Newton. ‘I’m frustrated. Big difference.’
‘You seem to want things to be a way dey demonstrably are not,’ observed Enrico. ‘It’sa good word “demonstrably”, donna you think? Not as good as “vernacular”, but still pretty good.’
‘Well, that’s all wonderfully upside-down. Because it’s not clear right now doesn’t mean it will be demonstrably unclear forever. Later, it will be demonstrably whatever I demonstrate it to be.’
‘That’s iffa you demonstrate it,’ said Enrico. ‘Which you probably won’t. I was inna da Purgatorian frontline for thirty years, man anda boy, and I can tell you, it mayda less sense at da end than it did atta da beginning. Which issa fine by me.’ The hermit smiled happily at this, which only served to aggravate his companion several more notches around the dial.
‘Fine? Why the hell is it fine?’ demanded Newton. ‘Human beings are enquiring investigative beings; why should anyone stop that when it comes to the Afterlife? Eh? Makes no sense whatsoever.’
‘Notta to you, maybe. But then it isn’t about you, funnily enough. Or me for that matter. It’s not about anyone.’
‘Then what exactly is it about?’ demanded Newton.
‘Dammed if I know,’ laughed Enrico. ‘You know what? Maybe dat’s da whole point. I issa just speculating here, but maybe something awful happens to you if you do know da truth.’
‘Oh, come on,’ protested Newton, feeling mildly insulted. ‘What am I, a child? I’m not some South Sea Islander seeing an aeroplane for the first time. I can handle anything.’
‘Except not knowing, it would appear.’
‘Except that, yeah,’ agreed Newton. ‘Anyway, what makes someone go from being a pirate Purgatorian to a hermit? Isn’t there a bit of an issue at play there for you? Doesn’t sound like the actions of a sane man.’
‘I suppose not,’ admitted Enrico. ‘Well, it’s lika dis. I’d been sweeping da Mediterranean clean for fifteen action-packed years. I was overconfident … full of self-importance. Looking back now, I guess it was inevitable.’
‘What was inevitable?’ asked Newton.
‘Hubris,’ explained Enrico. ‘Da curse of all vain men. And trust me, I wassa pretty damn vain. Thought I could do anything. Of course, I wassa dead wrong. I overreached myself, got my fatta little fingers burned … and lost everything. So, no. I wasn’t “sane” by da end. I was a shadow of offa my former arrogant self.’
