Osaka,
Japan
It wasn’t until two days later that Professor Noriko Adachi saw the picture. The tattoo on the dead child’s foot filled the screen on her office computer like cancer on an X-ray. Awful. Disgusting. Yet Japan’s most famous living literary scholar couldn’t stop herself from looking at it.
No sooner had charity workers on the beach noticed the unusual ‘L’ sign than theories began abounding on the web as to what it meant. Most were laughably wide of the mark. One or two came closer to the truth, more by luck than judgment in Professor Adachi’s opinion, pointing the finger at ‘people-traffickers’. But no one had yet said the word ‘Petridis’.
Most people still don’t know, Professor Adachi thought bitterly. And those who do are too cowardly to speak out.
Lovingly, she picked up the gilt-framed photograph in pride of place on her desk and traced a finger over the glass. Her only son, Kiko, was standing outside his dorm room in America, beaming with pride in his UCLA T-shirt. Above him, the dazzling California sky shone cartoon-blue. Fifteen years ago next week. What a perfect day it had been, so full of hope and promise.
A year after that picture was taken, Kiko Adachi was dead. The hardworking, diligent student and athlete, and love of his parents’ life, had fatally overdosed on a new, lethally strong brand of cocaine, recognizable by the ‘L’ insignia on the baggies, specially shipped onto US college campuses by Spyros Petridis.
A year after that, Noriko and her husband Izumi, Kiko’s father, had divorced. Izumi complained that his wife had become obsessed with Petridis and his glamorous wife Athena, by that time a UN special ambassador and world-renowned philanthropist whose charisma and beauty had so dazzled the world’s most powerful men that her husband operated their empire with near impunity.
Izumi was right. Noriko was obsessed. She wrote countless articles about the Petridises’ criminal activity, which no one had the balls to publish. She even penned a novel about her son’s death, with the names and identities thinly disguised, but no one would print that either, despite the professor’s fame. After two and a half years of fruitless effort, it was the happiest day of Professor Noriko Adachi’s life when she woke up to the news that Spyros Petridis’s helicopter had gone down in a remote part of Utah, killing him and his wife instantly in a white-hot ball of flames. All that was left of Spyros Petridis had been a few charred bones, just enough to confirm a DNA match. As for Athena – Lady Macbeth – the heat was such that she’d been completely incinerated. Burned to dust. Erased.
In the twelve years since, Noriko Adachi had returned to the University of Osaka and rebuilt her career and what was left of her life. Spyros and Athena had robbed her of her family, but she still found some solace in books, in the literature of tragedy and loss and rebirth that had been her academic world since her own student days.
Until now.
Her gaze returned to the screen.
One picture, one emblem, and it all came flooding back.
Another dead boy.
Somebody else’s son.
Nobody could have survived that crash, Noriko told herself, forcing her rational brain to kick in, to override her emotions. No human could have lived through that fire.
But perhaps Athena Petridis wasn’t human? Perhaps she was truly a monster, a devil, an evil spirit like the Japanese Kamaitachi, mythical sickle-wielding weasels who would slice off children’s legs. Perhaps she was a witch.
Professor Noriko Adachi sat at her desk and let the hate take over, pumping like poison through her veins.
If Athena Petridis is alive … I’ll kill her.
Los Angeles, California
Larry Gaster pulled over on Mulholland Drive, his silver Bugatti Veyron gleaming in the sun. On the passenger seat, the image of the drowned child’s branded heel filled the screen of Larry’s iPad.
It was a struggle to breathe. Reaching forward, the legendary Hollywood producer opened the glove box, fumbled for the bottle of Xanax, and crammed three pills into his mouth, grinding them between his porcelain-veneered teeth with grim desperation.
A profoundly vain man, Larry Gaster looked much younger than his sixty-five years, thanks to the efforts of LA’s most talented surgeons and their patient’s limitless funds. Larry’s skin was smooth, his brown eyes bright, and his luxurious chestnut hair still only lightly flecked with gray. Unlike most of Hollywood’s big hitters, Larry Gaster wasn’t satisfied with having young actresses line up to go to bed with him simply because he was powerful and rich. He wanted them to want him too. To desire him, physically. These days, despite his best efforts, that was becoming harder and harder to achieve. Some people might put that down to his age. But Larry Gaster knew different.
It was Athena. Athena Petridis.
If only he’d never laid eyes on her!
Larry Gaster had been forty-seven and one of the most desired men in Hollywood when he had agreed to produce a biopic about the great Greek beauty’s life. Athena met him at the Beverly Hills Hotel for lunch in a white flowing dress that made her look like an angel. It was the beginning of the end for Larry. He fell in love with her immediately and although they never slept together, never even kissed, Larry’s obsession for Spyros Petridis’s wife became the driving force in his life.
Athena was a victim. A good woman, a perfect woman, trapped in a violent marriage to a monster. That was the truth, and it was what Larry Gaster portrayed in his film. Larry wanted to rescue Athena from Spyros. He wanted to keep her in America, to build her a palace up in the Hollywood Hills where she could live, safe in his protection, eternally grateful for his gallantry like Queen Guinevere to Larry’s Sir Lancelot.
But things hadn’t happened like that. The day after production wrapped on the movie, Larry Gaster was kidnapped outside his office on Sunset Boulevard in broad daylight. No one knew what had happened during the week the producer was missing, and no one ever would. Larry had said nothing – to the police, to his family, to anyone. He’d simply shown up at the gates to his Beverly Hills estate one morning in a state of shock. The fourth finger of his left hand had been severed and the letter ‘L’ had been branded on the base of his right heel.
L for Larry. That was what he told people who noticed it in later life.
The film was never released.