Solo

‘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.’