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