Solo

But there was no satisfaction in it at all, for Katina had gone, gone for good, just like the father he had never known, the mother who was only a vague memory, his grandmother.

He walked for hours in the rain in a kind of daze and was finally accosted by a prostitute on the embankment, close to midnight.

She was forty and looked older, which was why she didn’t turn the light up too high when they reached her apartment. Not that it mattered for at that particular moment, John Mikali was not sure what was real and what was not. In any case, he had never been with a woman in his life.

A fact which his inexpert fumblings soon disclosed and with the amused tenderness such women often show in these circumstances, she initiated him into the mysteries as quickly as anyone could.

He learned fast, riding her in a controlled fury, once, twice, making her come for the first time in years, groaning beneath him, begging for more. Afterwards, when she slept, he lay in the dark, marvelling at this power he possessed that could make a woman act as she had; do the things she had done. Strange, because it had little meaning for him, this thing that he had always understood was so important.

Afterwards, walking the streets again towards dawn, he had never felt so alone in his life. When he finally came to the central market it was a bustle of activity as porters unloaded heavy wagons with produce from the country, and yet they seemed to move in slow motion as if under water. It was as if he existed on a separate plane.

He ordered tea in an all-night café and sat by the window smoking a cigarette, then became aware of a face staring out at him from the cover of a magazine on the stand beside him. A slim, wiry figure in camouflage uniform, sun-blackened face, expressionless eyes, a rifle crooked in one arm.

The article inside, when he took the magazine down, discussed the role of the Foreign Legion in the war in Algiers, which was then at its height. Men who only a year or two before had been stoned by dock workers at Marseilles on their return from Indochina and the Viet prison camps were fighting France’s battles again in a dirty and senseless war. Men with no hope, the writer called them. Men who had nowhere else to go. On the next page there was a photo of another légionnaire, half-raised on a stretcher, chest bandaged, blood soaking through. The head was shaven, the cheeks hollow, the face sunken beyond pain, and the eyes staring into an abyss of loneliness. To Mikali it was like staring at his own mirror image. He closed the magazine. He placed it carefully on the stand, then took a deep breath to stop his hands from shaking. Something clicked in his head. Sounds came up to the surface again. He was aware of the early-morning bustle around him. The world had come back to life, though he was no longer a part of it, nor had he ever been.

God, but he was cold. He stood up, went out and walked quickly through the streets, hands thrust deep into his pockets.

It was six o’clock in the morning when he returned to the apartment. It seemed grey and empty, devoid of all life. The piano lid was open, music still on the stand as he had left it. He had missed the examination, not that it mattered now. He sat down and started to play slowly and with great feeling that haunting little piece ‘Le Pastour’ by Grovlez that he had been playing on the day of his grandmother’s funeral in New York when Dimitri Mikali had arrived.

As the last notes died away, he closed the lid of the piano, stood up, crossed to a bureau and found his passports, both Greek and American, for he had dual nationality. He looked around the apartment for the last time, then let himself out.

At seven o’clock, he was on the Métro on his way to Vincennes. Once there, he walked briskly through the streets to the Old Fort, the recruiting centre for the Foreign Legion.

By noon, he had handed over his passports as proof of identity and age; passed a stringent medical and signed a contract binding him to serve for a period of five years in the most famous regiment of any army in the world.

At three o’clock the following day, in company with three Spaniards, a Belgian and eight Germans, he was on his way by train to Marseilles, to Fort Saint Nicholas.

Ten days later, together with a hundred and fifty recruits and a number of other French soldiers then serving in Algiers and Morocco, he left Marseilles on a troopship bound for Oran.

And on 20 March, he arrived at his ultimate destination. Sidi-bel-Abbès, still centre, as it had been for almost a century, of all Legion activity.

The discipline was absolute, the training brutal in its efficiency and designed with only one aim. To produce the finest fighting men in the world. Mikali flung himself into it with a fierce energy that drew him to the attention of his superiors from the beginning.

When he had been at Sidi-bel-Abbès for a few weeks, he was taken to the Deuxième Bureau one day. In the presence of a captain, he was presented with a letter from his grandfather, who had been informed of his whereabouts, asking him to reconsider the decision he had taken.

Mikali assured the captain that he was perfectly happy where he was and was requested to write a letter to his grandfather saying so, which he did in the captain’s presence.

During the six months that followed, he made twenty-four parachute jumps, was trained in the use of every form of modern weaponry, was drilled to a peak of physical fitness he would never have dreamed possible. He proved to be a remarkable shot with both rifle and handgun and his grading in unarmed combat was the highest in his class, a circumstance which caused him to be treated with considerable respect by his comrades.

He drank little and visited the town brothel only occasionally, yet the women there vied for his attention, a circumstance which had long since ceased to intrigue him and still left him supremely indifferent.

He was a junior corporal before he saw his first action in October, 1960 when the regiment moved into the Raki mountains to attack a large force of fellagha which had been controlling the area for some months.

There were some eighty rebels on top of a hill that was virtually impregnable. The regiment made a frontal attack that was only apparently suicidal for at the crucial point in the battle, the 3rd Company, which included Mikali, were dropped in on top of the hill itself by helicopter.

The fight which followed was a bloody, hand-to-hand affair and Mikali distinguished himself by knocking out a machine-gun post which had accounted for more than two dozen légionnaires and looked for a while as if it might ruin everything.

Afterwards, as he was sitting on a rock tying a field service dressing to a flesh wound in his right arm, a Spaniard had stumbled past him laughing insanely, holding two heads in one hand by the hair.

A shot rang out and the Spaniard went forward on to his face, crying out. Mikali was already turning, clutching his submachinegun, firing with one hand at the two fellagha who had risen from a pile of corpses near by, knocking them both down.

He stood there for a while on the hillside waiting, but no one else moved. After a while, he sat down, tightened the bandage on his arm with his teeth and lit a cigarette.

Within the twelve months that followed, he fought in the alleys of Algiers itself, dropped three times by parachute by night into mountainous country to attack rebel forces by surprise and survived ambush on numerous occasions.

He had a wound stripe and the Médaille Militaire, was a senior corporal by March, 1962. He was an ancien, which is to say the kind of légionnaire who could survive for a month on four hours’ sleep a night and force-march thirty miles in a day in full kit if necessary. He had killed men, he had killed women, children even, so that the fact of death meant nothing to him.

After the decoration, he was pulled out of active service for a while and sent to the guerrilla warfare school at Kefi where he learned everything there was to know about explosives. About dynamite and TNT and plastics and how to make an efficient booby trap in dozens of different ways.

On 1 July, he returned to the regiment after finishing the course and hitched a lift in a supply truck. As they passed through the village of Kasfa, a hundred pounds of dynamite, detonated by some form of remote control, blew the truck in half. Mikali found himself on his hands and knees in the village square, miraculously still alive. He tried to get up, there was a rattle of a machine pistol and he was shot twice in the chest.

As he lay there, he could see the driver of the truck twitching feebly on the other side of the burning wreck. Four men came forward carrying assorted weapons. They stood over the driver, laughing. Mikali couldn’t see what they were doing, but the man started to scream. After a while there was a shot.

They turned towards Mikali, who had dragged himself into a sitting position against the village well, his hand inside his camouflage jacket where the blood oozed through.

‘Not too good, eh?’ the leader of the little group said in French. Mikali saw that the knife in the man’s left hand was wet with blood.

Mikali smiled for the first time since Katina’s death. ‘Oh, it could be worse.’

His hand came out of the blouse clutching a Smith and Wesson Magnum, a weapon he had procured on the black market in Algiers months before. His first shot fragmented the top of the man’s skull, his second took the one behind him between the eyes. The third man was still trying to get his rifle up when Mikali shot him twice in the belly. The fourth dropped his weapon in horror and turned to run. Mikali’s final two shots shattered his spine, driving him headlong into the burning wreckage of the truck.

Beyond, through the smoke, villagers moved fearfully from their houses. Mikali emptied the Smith and Wesson, took a handful of rounds from his pocket with difficulty and reloaded very deliberately. The man he hit in the stomach groaned and tried to get up. Mikali shot him in the head.

He took off his beret, held it against his wounds to stem the flow of blood and sat there against the well, the revolver ready, daring the villagers to come near him.

He was still there, conscious, surrounded only by the dead, when a Legion patrol found him an hour later.

Which was all rather ironic for the following day, 2 July, was Independence Day and seven years of fighting was over. Mikali was flown to France to the military hospital in Paris for specialist chest surgery. On 27 July, he was awarded the Croix de la Valeur Militaire. The following day, his grandfather arrived.

He was seventy now, but still looked fit and well. He sat by the bed looking at the medal for quite a while then said gently, ‘I’ve had a word with the Legion Headquarters. As you’re still not twenty-one, it appears that, with the right pressure, I could obtain your discharge.’

‘Yes, I know.’

And his grandfather, using the phrase he had used on that summer evening in Athens nearly three years before, said, ‘You’ve decided to join the living again, it would seem?’

‘Why not?’ John Mikali answered. ‘It beats dying every time, and I should know.’

He received an impressive certificate of good conduct which stated that Senior Corporal John Mikali had served for two years with honneur et fidélité and was discharged before his time for medical reasons.

There was more than a little truth in that. The two bullets in the chest had severely damaged the left lung and he entered the London Clinic for chest surgery. Afterwards, he returned to Greece, not to Athens, but to Hydra. To the villa beyond Molos on the promontory above the sea with only the mountains behind, the pine forests. Wild, savage country, accessible only on foot or by mule on land.

To look after him, he kept an old peasant couple who lived in a cottage by the jetty in the bay below. Old Constantine ran the boat, bringing supplies from Hydra town when necessary, saw to the upkeep of the grounds, the water supply, the generator. His wife acted as housekeeper and cook.

Mostly he was alone except when his grandfather came over to stay. They would sit in the evenings with pine logs blazing on the hearth and talk for hours on everything under the sun. Art, literature, music, even politics, in spite of the fact that this was a subject to which Mikali was totally indifferent.

One thing they never discussed was Algeria. The old man didn’t ask and Mikali never spoke of it. It was as if it had never happened. He had not touched the piano once during those two years, but now, he started to play again, more and more during the nine months it took him to regain his health.

One calm summer evening in July 1963 during one of his grandfather’s visits, he played, after dinner, the Bach Prelude and Fugue in E flat that he had played that evening he had decided to go to Paris.

It was very quiet. Through the open windows to the terrace the sky was orange and flame as the sun set behind the island of Dokos a mile out to sea.

His grandfather sighed, ‘So, you are ready again, I think?’

‘Yes,’ John Mikali said and flexed his fingers. ‘Time to find out, once and for all.’

He chose London, the Royal College of Music. He leased a flat in Upper Grosvenor Street off Park Lane which was convenient for Hyde Park where he ran seven miles every morning, wet or fine, always pushing until it hurt. Old habits died hard. Three times a week, he worked out at a well-known city gym.

The Legion had branded him clear to the bone, could never be shaken off entirely. He realized that just before twelve one rainy night when he was mugged by two youths as he turned into a side street coming out of Grosvenor Square.

One took him from behind, an arm around his neck and the other appeared from the entrance beside some railings to the basement area of a house.

Mikali’s right foot flicked expertly into the crotch, raising his knee into the face as the youth screamed and keeled over. The second assailant was so shocked that he slackened his grip. Mikali broke free, swinging his right elbow back in a short arc. There was a distinct crack as the jaw bone fractured. The boy cried out and fell to his knees, Mikali simply stepped over his friend and walked quickly away through the heavy rain.

At the college his reputation grew over three hard years. He was good – better than that. They knew it; so did he. He formed no close friendships. It was not that people disliked him. On the contrary, they found him immensely attractive, but there was a remoteness to him. A barrier that no one seemed to be able to penetrate.

There were women in plenty, but not one who could succeed in arousing the slightest personal desire in him. There was no question of any latent homosexuality but his relations with women were genuinely a matter of complete indifference to him. The effect he had on them was something else again and his reputation as a lover reached almost legendary proportions. As for his music, at the end of his final year he was awarded the Raildon gold medal.

Which was not enough. Not for the man he had become. So, he went to Vienna to put himself under Hoffman for a year. The final polish. Then, in the summer of 1967, he was ready.

There is an old joke in the music profession that to get on to a concert platform in the first place is even more difficult than to succeed once you are there.

To a certain extent, Mikali could have bought his way in. Paid an agent to hire a hall in London or Paris, arrange a recital, but his pride would never stand for that. He had to seize the world by the throat. Make it listen. There was only one way to do that.

After a short holiday in Greece, he returned to England, to Yorkshire as an entrant in the Leeds Musical Festival, one of the most important pianoforte competitions in the world. To win that was to ensure instant fame, a guarantee of a concert tour.

He was placed third and received immediate offers from three major agencies. He turned them all down, practised fourteen hours a day for a month at the London flat, then went to Salzburg in the following January. He took first prize in the competition there, beating forty-eight other competitors from all over the world, playing Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto, a work he was to make peculiarly his own in the years to come.

His grandfather was there during the seven days of the festival and afterwards, when everyone else had left, he took two glasses of champagne on to the balcony where Mikali stood looking out over the city.

‘The world is your oyster now. They’ll all want you. How do you feel?’

‘Nothing,’ John Mikali said. He sipped a little of the ice-cold champagne, and suddenly and for no accountable reason, saw the four fellagha walking round the burning truck and coming towards him laughing. ‘I feel nothing.’

In the two years that followed, the dark eyes stared out from the pale, handsome face on posters in London, Paris, Rome, New York and his fame grew. The newspapers and magazines had made much of his two years in the Legion, his decorations for gallantry. In Greece, he became something of a folk hero so that his concerts in Athens were always considerable events.

And things had changed in Greece now that the Colonels were in charge after the military coup of April 1967, and King Constantine’s exile to Rome.

Dimitri Mikali was seventy-six and looked it. Although he still kept open house in the evenings, few people attended. His activities on behalf of the Democratic Front Party had made him increasingly unpopular with the Government and his newspaper had already been banned on several occasions.

‘Politics,’ Mikali said to him on one of his visits. ‘It’s a nonsense. Why make trouble for yourself?’

‘Oh, I’m doing very well really.’ His grandfather smiled. ‘What you might call a privileged position, having a grandson who is an international celebrity.’

‘All right,’ Mikali said. ‘So you’ve got a military junta in power and they don’t like the mini-skirt. So what? I’ve been in worse places than Greece as it is today, believe me.’

‘Political prisoners by the thousand, the educational system used to indoctrinate little children, the Left almost stamped out of existence. Does this sound like the home of democracy?’

None of which had the slightest effect on Mikali. The following day he flew to Paris and gave a Chopin recital that same night, a charitable affair in aid of international cancer research.

There was a letter waiting for him from his London agent, Bruno Fischer, about the intinerary for a tour of England, Wales and Scotland in the autumn. He was spending some time going over it in his dressing room after the recital when there was a knock on the door and the stage doorkeeper looked in.

‘A gentleman to see you, Monsieur Mikali.’

He was pushed out of the way and a large, burly individual with thinning hair and a heavy black moustache appeared. He wore a shabby raincoat over a crumpled tweed suit.

‘Hey, Johnny. Good to see you. Claude Jarrot – staff sergeant, Third Company, Second REP. We did that night drop at El Kebir together.’

‘I remember,’ Mikali said. ‘You broke an ankle.’

‘And you stayed with me when the fellagha broke through the line.’ Jarrot stuck out a hand. ‘I’ve read about you in the papers and when I saw you were giving this concert tonight, I thought I’d come along. Not for the music. It doesn’t mean a damn thing to me.’ He grinned. ‘I couldn’t pass up the chance of greeting another old Sidi-bel-Abbès hand.’

It could be he was after a touch, he was certainly shabby enough, but his presence brought back the old days. For some reason, Mikali warmed to him.

‘I’m glad you did. I was just leaving. What about a drink? There must be a bar near here.’

‘Actually I have a garage only a block away,’ Jarrot said. ‘I’ve got a small apartment above it. I’ve got some good stuff in at the moment. Real Napoleon.’

‘Lead on,’ Mikali said. ‘Why not?’

The walls of the living-room were crowded with photos cataloguing Jarrot’s career in the Legion and there were mementoes everywhere including his white képi and dress epaulets on the sideboard.

The Napoleon brandy was real enough and he got drunk fairly rapidly.

‘I thought they kicked you out in the Putsch?’ Mikali said. ‘Weren’t you up to your neck in the OAS?’

‘Sure I was,’ Jarrot said belligerently. ‘All those years in Indochina. I was at Dien Bien Phu, you know that? Those little yellow bastards had me for six months in a prison camp. Treated like pigs we were. Then the Algeria fiasco when the old man went and did the dirty on us. Every self-respecting Frenchman should have been OAS, not just mugs like me.’

‘Not much future in it now, surely?’ Mikali said. ‘The old boy showed he meant business when he had Bastien Thiry shot. How many attempts to knock him off and not one of them succeeded?’

‘You’re right,’ Jarrot said, drinking. ‘Oh, I played my part. Here, take a look.’

He removed a rug from a wooden chest in the corner, fumbled for a key and unlocked it with difficulty. Inside there was a considerable assortment of weapons. Several machine pistols, an assortment of handguns and grenades.

‘I’ve had this stuff here four years,’ he said. ‘Four years, but the network’s busted. We’ve had it. A man has to make out other ways these days.’

‘The garage?’

Jarrot placed a finger against his nose. ‘Come on, I’ll show you. This damn bottle’s empty anyway.’

He unlocked a door at the rear of the garage and disclosed a room piled with cartons and packing cases of every description. He opened one and extracted another bottle of Napoleon brandy.

‘Told you there was more.’ He waved an arm. ‘More of everything here. Any kind of booze you want. Cigarettes, canned food. Be cleared out by the end of the week.’

‘Where does it all come from?’ Mikali asked.

‘You might say off the back of a passing truck.’ Jarrot laughed drunkenly. ‘No questions, no pack drill as we used to say in the Legion. Just remember this, mon ami. Anything you ever need – anything. Just come to old Claude. I’ve got connections. I can get you anything, and that’s a promise. Not only because you’re an old bel-Abbès hand. If it hadn’t been for you, the fellagha would probably have cut my balls off, amongst other things, that time.’

He was very drunk by now and Mikali humoured him, slapping him on the shoulder. ‘I’ll remember that.’

Jarrot pulled the cork with his teeth. ‘To the Legion,’ he said. ‘The most exclusive club in the world.’

He drank from the bottle and passed it across.

He was on tour in Japan when he received news of his grandfather’s death. The old man, increasingly infirm with advancing years and arthritic in one hip, had needed sticks to walk for some time. He had lost his balance on the tiled floor of the balcony of the apartment and fallen to the street below.

Mikali cancelled what concerts he could and flew home, but it was a week before he got to Athens. In his absence, the coroner had ordered the funeral to take place, cremation according to Dimitri Mikali’s wishes as conveyed in a letter of instructions to his lawyer.

Mikali fled to Hydra as he had done before, to the villa on the peninsula beyond Molos. He crossed from Athens to Hydra port on the hydrofoil and found Constantine waiting to pick him up in the launch. When he went on board, the old man handed him an envelope without a word, started the engines and took the boat out of harbour.

Mikali recognized his grandfather’s writing at once. His fingers shook slightly as he opened the envelope. The contents were brief.

If you read this it means I am dead. Sooner – later, it comes to us all. So, no sad songs. No more of my stupid politics to bore you with either because, in the end, the end is perhaps always the same. I know only one thing with total certainty. You have lightened the last years of my life with pride and with joy, but most of all with your love. I leave you mine and my blessing with it.