Frances Diem Vardamis's 'Time Running Out'

Normally I'm not a fan of detective fiction, but Yannis Lavonis, the world-weary Greek detective of Frances Diem Vardamis's novels, is a character who's gotten under my skin, and I have happily followed him through several adventures.

His latest, in Time Running Out, takes him to Vladimir Putin's Russia, where capitalism and religion are running amok at the same time. Talk about the return of the repressed.

Historians will sort out the impact of the Soviet interlude on Russian (and world) history, but two of its characteristics were particularly salient. It abolished private capitalism, except in the violent underground economy where it continued to flourish, concentrating all legitimate resources in the state. And it likewise suppressed the public practice of religion, converting the country's major churches to museums and substituting the doctrine of dialectical materialism for all others.

America thought it had a tough time just trying to ban booze.

The fall of the Soviet empire in 1991 brought capitalism back in the form of legalized larceny, as former government managers seized the state's assets for themselves. With a little guidance from Goldman Sachs, a near-instant class of billionaires arose.

Russian Orthodox revival

Putin, the former KGB agent, is the creature of this new plutocracy, but he also has the problem of managing it. That's most of contemporary Russian politics in a nutshell. Dissidents and pro-democracy activists are the sideshow, though they're the ones who get attention in the New York Times.

That capitalism would come back like a snapped rubber band was a foregone conclusion in the new Russia. The interesting question was whether the Orthodox Church would rebound similarly.

Organized religion is in sharp decline everywhere else in the industrialized world. Even in our own God-fearing republic, the Catholic Archdiocese of New York ordained exactly one new priest last year.

But Russian Orthodoxy has sprung back to life. And that's a complicating factor, because the Russian church has always been deeply enmeshed with the Russian state.

That's where Yannis Lavonis begins his latest case.

Stolen icons

Lavonis, as we meet him here, is soldiering on toward retirement, having provoked an embarrassing and near-fatal scandal on a previous assignment. His former assistant now holds his former job— Deputy Director of Criminal Investigation for Athens—and, sitting at his old desk, is ill-advisedly trying to impress Lavonis by sharing the details of a case involving the disappearance of valuable icons from Greek monasteries whose common thread is an electronically tagged dog who reappears at each burglary site.

Unknown to his former protégé, Lavonis has been assigned to the same case, and has been taking a crash course on ancient art (which bores him profoundly, except as an object of pelf). It's the kind of investigation Lavonis gets these days— slow-dragging but politically sensitive because it involves the church, which in Greece as in the new Russia is a power not to be trifled with. Good police careers can be ruined this way, but Lavonis's career is ruined already.

The trail soon leads to Russia, where the black market for icons is particularly thriving. But Lavonis and his headstrong ex-partner, Aphrodite Davvetas, find that a great deal more than larceny is going on.

Wages of capitalism

In Russia, capitalism seemed to have reached its apocalyptic form. In the first decade of its revival, tens of millions were thrown abruptly into poverty and insecurity, even as the new mogul class shot up. The average male life expectancy fell by seven years, a level of demographic catastrophe reached previously only during world wars or great plagues.

Religious apocalypticism naturally followed suit. The churches were open again, and the great patriarchs began to claim some of their former authority. But the church seemed to have been reborn in the midst of Sodom.

Under such circumstances, it wasn't difficult to imagine a new cult that prophesied the end of the world springing up, covertly supported by elements in both church and state. Political messianism has had a long history in Russia; Soviet communism had been in many respects its latest incarnation.

In over his head

Yannis Lavonis, sent off on the kind of wild-goose chase that concludes an unsuccessful career, found himself in terribly far over his head, indeed involved in matters far beyond the scope of a small power such as Greece. Even were he less expendable, he could count on no support from home. Once he got in trouble, his colleagues would simply disavow him.

Lavonis's hole card, perhaps, is his partner Affi, whose father is the retired district attorney of Athens. But she seems more trouble than she's worth, especially when her disgruntled American fiancé, Dave, shows up. Dave is a fluent Russian speaker, but a rank amateur at detective work.

Lavonis has family trouble, too. His long-estranged father André, a Communist resettled in Russia after the Greek Civil War of 1944-49, is living in Moscow. Nursing a long grudge against his abandonment as a child but also knowing André to be still connected in high places, Lavonis visits him, unaware that the connections are sinister too.

No action hero

The Greeks will be of little help to him, but Lavonis has American contacts from a previous caper, and the arrival of Dave puts an American national in play.

Still, Lavonis knows better than to pursue this kind of trouble. He's no action hero, but a man in his 60s with children still to raise. He has no personal stake in whatever is going on, and his country, in dire straits of its own, has more important problems than the fate of some icons that are unlikely to be recovered.

Nevertheless, Lavonis is a bloodhound. Set him on a trail and he doesn't like to give up the scent. Nor does his impulsive partner, who he knows will never abandon it.

What he doesn't know is that the trail will take him to the Arctic Circle, where a bizarre dénouement awaits him that brings together the fantasy of a Christian apocalypse with the reality of a nuclear one. It won't be one from which anyone escapes unscathed.

Feral dogs, too

Vardamis knows how to build a thriller, and her scenes have a rich, often cinematic feel. She has a shrewd sense of the underside of Great Power politics, and an ability to conjure up the most varied places and characters crisply and vividly. In Time Running Out, she even offers us a superbly realized chapter on the communal life of feral dogs.

What keeps a detective novel series together, though, isn't simply exotic locales and characters, or ingenious plot twists. It's a single character we come to care about, and the vision of life he articulates.

Yannis Lavonis isn't an American-style loner. He's a Greek family man who cares about keeping things together, and who knows from his profession how difficult and dangerous that can be in the world as it is.

Often enough, he's ready to pack in the job. But trouble is in his blood, too, as it is in any good cop's. Here's hoping he comes back for another round.♦


To read a response, click here.