The Soviet Comeback by Jamie Smith (best ereader for academics TXT) 📕

She pouted slightly, looking even more beautiful for it. He leant down and kissed her on both cheeks, very slowly. Their cheeks rubbed softly against one another and he breathed deeply, taking in the smell that can only come from sun-warmed hair. Like warm bread, honeysuckle and fresh cut grass rolled into one.

He paused above her and she gazed up at him. He became keenly aware of the other patrons in the bar looking surreptitiously at him out of the corner of their eyes. Some were more obvious. He reluctantly moved away, and asked, “Can I see you again?”

“You want more wooden statuettes?” she asked archly.

“I meant can I see you again… like this.”

“Why?” She asked, again using that direct approach that he found so disarming.

He groaned inwardly. “Ah, because I… ah. Because some things in life feel worth pursuing.”

She looked at him impassively and he grimaced at his choice of words — unrecognisable from any version of himself he’d ever encountered to date.

“I can’t decide if you’re really this sweet and awkward, or just very, very smooth.”

“I’d like to think I’m pretty smooth.”

“I think it’s probably the former.”

“I see,” he said, not sure how to take it but aware that it wasn’t a dismissal. “So perhaps I could call into the shop again?”

“I can’t stop you.”

“Would you want to?” he asked.

“Come to the shop and find out would be my advice,” she said, smirking openly at him now.

“Do all Greek women make things this difficult for someone asking them out, or is it just you?”

She laughed that rich throaty laugh again that seemed to tickle the very air in front of her. “You have a safe journey home, Nathan.”

“Is to epanidìn,” he said, touching her on the shoulder gently as he walked past. See you soon.

The man in the straw hat was snoring gently with his head on the table, revealing a curious mark on his neck, and two empty bottles in front of him. Stepping past him, Nikita noticed the judging eyes from the local patrons were back on him again, although some of the eyes were now also resting on Elysia. But already his heart was cold and steeled to any sense of feelings as he began to play the night ahead through in his mind.

He had a plan, but it would not be easy.

CHAPTER 8

It had not been a good day for Maria Demopoulos. As maid to Josef Zurga, she’d already seen more than would be enough to turn her to God, had she not already been a devout member of the Greek Orthodox Church for all of her seventy-five years. But today he was in a foul mood. He had run out of wine which never meant a peaceful day at work for the members of his household at the lighthouse fort on the east coast of Skyros. The members of his household consisted of Maria, the butler Cato, and whichever whore he had flown in that week. Them, and the huge array of security guards and Alsatians that constantly rotated watch, surrounding the small complex. She shuffled down the corridor, with the note that had just been delivered clutched in her hand which looked more like a claw these days, the arthritis making the unfurling of her fingers ever harder.

As she reached the door to his bedroom, she heard a crash and saw Cato hurriedly leaving the room, an empty tray in his long-fingered hand and what looked like tzatziki dripping down his left shoulder.

“The old goat didn’t want lunch today, it seems,” he said calmly to Maria, his face fairly impassive. He was a tall man and extremely thin, with his black hair fluffed into a rakish side parting and a thick black beard, giving him the look of an upside-down broomstick. “Good luck,” he said, winking, forcing a scowl from Maria, before loping away down the corridor, looking all the while like he might tip over.

She breathed in and pushed open the door.

“What is it you want now? Can I not be left in some peace?” said Zurga in a heavy Russian accent as she entered his bedroom. A sallow faced man was sitting on the bed in underpants and an unbuttoned shirt, revealing a distended paunch. A thick rug of chest hair nearly connected at the neck with the hair of his unshaven face. Far from obese, he rather had the look of a fit and vital man gone slightly to seed, with soft edges and crumbly skin from too long spent overindulging and not enough time outside.

He pushed himself up, an empty bottle of wine rolling off the bed and clattering onto the floor, its fall broken by an array of debris surrounding the tiles around his bed.

Maria looked witheringly at him, paying his tone little heed. Her eyes scanned his bedside table which showed empty sachets of white powder. No wonder he was in a foul mood, out of both cocaine and wine.

“A letter delivered for you, Josef.”

“I told you to call me Mr Zurga. Give it to me.”

She tossed the note to him negligently and he snatched it up from the bed sheets and ripped open the manila envelope as she turned to leave the room.

His eyes quickly scanned the crumpled paper within, and then widened in fear.

“Tonight? TONIGHT?” he muttered to himself.

Maria turned back, her interest piqued.

“Who sent this? Talk fast, woman.”

Maria shrugged. “He didn’t give a name. I couldn’t even see his face because he was wearing a large straw hat.”

Josef leapt out of bed and rushed past her, his unbuttoned shirt flowing behind him.

“What is happening tonight? What did it say?” Maria called after him, but he ignored her.

She stooped down to pick up the note from the floor where