by S. C. Abbey
“Pleasantries won’t be necessary, kýrie—” Agent Linard said as he stared down the poor policeman who was starting to look a little nervous. “You have something, which as of this morning, belongs to us.”
“What—?”
“Well, someone actually.”
Inspector Floros looked confused. “Do you have a name?”
“Louis Tanner,” said Agent Michel.
“The American?”
“You remember well,” commented Michel.
“It’s not every day we get an American committing suicide in his motel room. Though I must say that Americans top the list of foreigners troubling my streets,” Floros replied. “What do you need a dead man for?”
“That is of national security interest and doesn’t concern you,” Michel declared. “If you so badly wish to know, it would probably be the last thing you ever wish to know. Do I make myself clear?”
Floros swallowed the lump in his throat and nodded frantically.
“Good, we all understand each other,” Michel said with a smile that didn’t quite fit his face. “Now, where is Tanner?”
“I-I’m afraid you are too late, I have already informed the American Embassy about this. In fact, we were just about to transfer custody of the body to the Consulate—”
“I didn’t know the police were that efficient,” Michel said, the smile disappearing from his face.
“We—”
“Which morgue is he at?” asked Linard.
“The one at Anapafseos—”
“Kyriakidis?” Michel added.
Floros nodded his heavy head, squashing his double chin in the process. Michel turned to look at Linard. His partner acknowledged the eye contact before walking away from the desk. Linard took out his cell phone and dialed a number, putting it to his ear. The call soon went through, which he spoke in a rapid Greek. He rejoined the table when he was done and gave Michel a firm nod.
“Looks like it’s settled,” Michel said. “You needn’t worry about this case anymore.” The two men abandoned the desk and headed toward the door.
“But—”
“We will send a courier to pick up all the files pertaining to this case. Have them ready by 2:00 p.m. in the afternoon,” Michel said before he twisted the knob and opened the door. “Stay out of trouble, Inspector.”
Chapter 8
HARVEY NODDED AT the staff who had guided them to where they currently were—standing in a cold room in the morgue.
“I’ll be outside,” said the staff in a thick accent.
Louis lay uncommunicatively on the stainless steel table, with a white sheet providing him decency from the bottom of his armpits all the way down his entire body—his face exposed. Though Harvey logically assumed the body had been washed and tidied to the best it could have been, he could still see the crusty, dried blood that got stuck in Louis’s nails and the two angry-looking deep scars that ran across his wrists, one on each side. He reached out to trace the hardened scabs on the left wrist. A chill shuddered from within his body and he could feel goose-bumps beginning to form on his forearm.
“That’s him, all right,” said Obermaier. He had a blue-and-white checked handkerchief held up to cover his nose with, although there was clearly no horrid smell whatsoever. Harvey didn’t reply the chunky attorney. He was too busy immersed in a memory he shared with Louis…
It was six years ago. Louis had gone on to disappear and appear as he wished, as always. One day, he had decided to turn up in New York, to speak at an event at Columbia University regarding a high profile expedition he had led to the Black Sea. Needless to say, he had emailed Harvey, requesting him to be present at the event. Harvey by then had long left the memory of the will at the back of his head and agreed to attend the talk. It had been a full-attendance event—there were press, faculty, students, and members of the public who were all lucky enough to get their hands on a ticket and were interested in what Louis had to say. Harvey had found it interesting enough, though nothing out of the ordinary when it came to Louis. When the event ended, Louis had to squeeze through the swarm of press and whatnots trying to get a few questions or a photograph from him to get to Harvey, who was sitting in the front row, and they embraced like brothers. “Guess what I left out from my speech about the trip,” Louis had said.
“It better be good, I’ve not heard from you for months.” Harvey had laughed as Louis guided him out of the hall with an arm around his shoulder…
“Were there any last wishes he had? Besides taking him home personally.” Harvey broke the silence between him and Obermaier.
“Not that I know of,” replied Obermaier.
Harvey turned to gaze to him. “Did you try to contact Rachel Tanner again?”
“I did. I instructed an associate back in D.C. to persist every day until we got hold of her. No luck with that so far.”
Harvey gave in to a deep sigh. “So what now, how do we transport the body back?”
Obermaier’s mood seemed to perk up at that question. “That shouldn’t be too difficult! I’ve already prepared and gotten the documents transferred to a local attorney facilitating the release for us. I called him when we landed, he should be here anytime soon—” His phone rang as soon as he finished the sentence. “Obermaier here—hey Mr. Xanthopoulos, we were just speaking about you—no, not at all—perfect, let’s get this settled then.” He ended the call swiftly.
“The local attorney’s waiting outside, I’ll head out to get the release papers done and then we can get Tanner out of here. Professor, would you like to—”
“It’s all right, I think I’ll stick around here a little longer. You go ahead, I’ll look for you in a bit.”
“Sure.” Obermaier strolled out the cold room.
“Thanks,” Harvey said with his eyes still fixed on Louis. The same memory came hitting him again like waves on a shore…
“Knock it off, quit shitting me!” Harvey had said with an incredulous look on his face.
“I shit you not, my friend, I shit you not,” Louis replied with the familiar mischievous look on his face.
“You mean to tell me you actually found forty perfectly preserved shipwrecks more than five hundred years old in the Black Sea, and you actually took one out?!” articulated Harvey with his eyes wide opened, a little louder than he should have.
“Gosh Harvey, keep it down!” Louis punched Harvey on his shoulder. “The Turkish would hang me if the Russians don’t reach me first. Learn to keep a secret, will ya?”
“Sorry—” whispered Harvey with a sheepish look on his face. “Where is it now?”
“In a container on a commercial ship heading toward us as we speak,” replied Louis.
A deep frown started to form on Harvey’s face. “But what’s the point, you’ll never be able to exhibit it. Not here, not anywhere in the world.”
“Who said I was planning on doing that?” Louis smirked. “The moment the commercial vessel touches port, it will be transferred to a private vessel heading back across Atlantic—for the Ukraine.”
Harvey couldn’t have looked more surprised. “It was commissioned?”
Louis nodded. “Private collector. He’s actually building a gallery just for it, can you believe it?” Louis then leaned in and lowered his voice. “His name is Yakiv Shevchenko, I’ve done quite a few deals with him.”
“How much this time?”
“Twenty-five million—”
“Shit—”
“—Dollars. And that’s excluding shipping and handling—”
“You money-obsessed son of a bitch,” Harvey joked.
Louis had responded by laughing so wholeheartedly then…
“Mr. Nolan.”
Harvey mentally shook himself from the flashback and turned around as a voice interrupted him.
Chapter 9
“MR. NOLAN.”
HARVEY turned at the mention of his name. A young man in his thirties with
a cleanly shaven head and stern-looking eyes stared back at him. He held a kraft paper folder with one hand and his cell phone in the other. Harvey didn’t recognize him.
“You are…?”
“Sergeant Stephenos Linard,” the man said as he slipped his cell phone into his pocket and held out his hand. “I was there at the scene when it happened. I dropped in to say hello when I heard someone was here to claim Tanner.”
Harvey shook Linard’s hand. “What a coincidence.”
Linard ignored Harvey’s comment. “I’m so sorry for your loss. Things are always worse when a loved one dies abroad.”
“It is,” Harvey said as he took a quick look at Louis before turning back to the clean-shaven man. “Were you part of the investigation, Sergeant? If you were at the scene—”
“I was.”
“How did you all came to the conclusion that this was a suicide?” asked Harvey with a somber look on his face.
Linard looked slightly taken aback by the question. He flipped open the folder and scanned through the report for a couple of seconds. “Mr. Nolan, there were no fingerprints or signs of a second person in the room of the motel, which was locked from the inside. The CCTV recordings also didn’t capture anyone who wasn’t supposed to be there.”
Harvey found it strange the sergeant had to read the report when he should have been the one who wrote it. “Hmm…” He cast a look of doubt at the police officer. “How tall was the building?”
“Three stories,” answered Linard, a little more definitive this time.
“Assuming that Louis’s fatal injuries were not self-inflicted, the attacker could have easily jumped out the window. Were there no windows?” challenged Harvey.
“Mr. Nolan, this isn’t a Hollywood movie,” Linard said, not really addressing Harvey’s concerns. “As much as I can understand that you are grieving for your—?”
“Louis was one of my best buddies.”
“—friend, I ensure you that the Hellenic Police takes every case very seriously. But I’m afraid all evidence simply points toward Dr. Louis Tanner taking his own life, there is no doubt about that.”
Harvey kept his gaze on Linard, not saying a thing. His growing dislike for the dismissive police officer was starting to show in his demeanor.
“Besides, there was a suicide note,” continued Linard as he stared into the folder he was holding on.
Harvey’s brows raised. “That’s something new. Do you still have it?”
“I believe I do,” replied Linard as he pulled out a printed copy of a photograph of the death note.
Harvey held out his hand to receive the document and dived into reading it the moment he had it in his hand.
Dear World, in light of the possibility, that I may…I just cannot go on…Thank you for…Louis Tanner. Harvey read the note to himself. His expression turned from shock to confusion.
“He didn’t mention his sister,” said Harvey matter-of-factly.
“So?” said the police officer.
“There is no way Louis would have written a suicide note and not mention his sister—the only family he has left,” Harvey declared.
Linard shrugged his shoulders with the same look of indifference on his face.
“This letter wasn’t written by Louis,” said Harvey with a voice laced in steel.
“Of course it was,” Linard said with a slight rising anger in his voice as he snatched the document back from Harvey’s hands and kept it back in the folder. The two men looked at each other in an awkward silence.
“Mr. Nolan, I need to ask you something,” Linard broke the silence, his tone back to normal. “Did Tanner mentioned anything to you about a timber box he had?”
What box? There were a million questions screaming at Harvey for him to look for answers but he didn’t share his inner thoughts with the dodgy Greek police officer. He simply shrugged his shoulders just like how Linard had dismissed him earlier. He seemed to have successfully annoyed the clean-shaven man by the look on his face.
“I think I’m done here,” Harvey announced. “How soon can I take Louis home? What’s taking Obermaier so long?”
“Not so soon, I’m afraid,” Linard replied. “I believe my colleague is currently explaining to your American friend out there that there seems to be an issue with the paperwork. We will need further authentication before we release the body.”
“Sergeant Linard, with all respect, this is bullshit—” Harvey was starting to lose his patience.
“Mr. Nolan, this is not America. You may find your rights as an American citizen somewhat dwindling if you don’t control your speech,” Linard threatened, “We will inform you when Louis Tanner can be collected,” speaking as if he was an item on a shelf. “In the meantime, I would advise you to stay put in your hotel if you choose to remain in Athens. Otherwise, feel free to leave the country.” He stepped aside. “Have a nice day.”
Harvey stomped out of the morgue without saying another word.
Chapter 10
I SAT ON the ledge of the roof that separated me and the city. The sprawling view of the bustling evening crowd lay before me. The expanding volume of people looked like ants crawling out from one hole of their nest into another. In and out, appearing and disappearing. They almost looked too easy to kill, too easy to flatten with my thumb—squash and turn. These people were pathetic. They almost never sensed the undercurrents of the world that moved time along. It was this unseen current that provided the progress and advancement of the human race, bringing about evolution with the rise and fall of individuals and empires. All things ran in cycles, all loops returned to their origins.
Every once in a while, a single ant might deviate from its course, abandoning its ranks out of sheer curiosity or absolute idiocy. It might attempt to defy the course of nature, whether deliberately or unconsciously. But such is the nature of the course of—well, nature. As reckless as the winds of a hurricane or calamitous as the approach of a tsunami—it couldn’t be deterred in its impending accession, nor dissuaded from its adamant path. And that was what happened within the past few days.
I held onto my cell phone, weighing the two options that lay before me. I would very much rather not take the first one, which was to dial the number of Luther Blake and inform him that an ant had deviated from its course and managed to cause quite a bit of trouble. The trouble was not quite the trouble it had caused, it was troubling only because of the fact that we hadn’t foreseen it. Oh well, with all said and done, you can only kill an ant one time, no matter how much it irritated you. If only they could pop right back up so I could smash them back down again.
The second option was the one I preferred. Look for another ant that shared its trail and follow it home to burn the damned nest down. And I knew the exact son of a bitch who was waiting for me to perform exactly just that to him. Puny greaseball, we should have never trusted him. Why did we have to go through him anyway? Ball-less politicians, good-for-nothing assholes. I always hated to be away from home that long. My daughter was still waiting for me where I left her. At times like this, I’m grateful to her mother. Only at times at this. That’s right, I’ll go ahead with option two.
The man whimpering on the ground chose that exact moment to produce a gurgling sound, as if he had heard my thoughts and was agreeing with them. Or perhaps it was just because I had knuckled his throat with a little too much thrust earlier on. I have been told I tend to underestimate my strength. I hopped down from the inside of the ledge onto the roof and used my foot to nudge the man so he faced upward instead of looking at the ground. The man heaved heavily at my ungentle handling. His eyes were half opened, he sounded like he wasn’t going to last very long. I reached down and gripped his neck—my hands were so huge compared to his neck that I easily covered more than half the circumference of it. His eyes shot wide open when I applied some force in my grip. The bursting blood vessels soon made them all red and bloodshot. He looked like he was trying to sa
y something but, to be honest, I really wasn’t in the mood to listen to anyone say anything. I chose to respond by squeezing harder. He responded by dying.
I let go of the body, wiping my hand by the side of my trousers. I should have worn a glove, but what’s done was done. Not that it mattered.
Another dead ant, how many of them do I have to bulldoze through before I solve this mess?
I had no intention of the remote prospect of a defeat. I cringed at the memory of the previous time I had failed. Blake went through me like a grater on cheese.
I have no intention of being shredded again. That’s right. I’ve had it. No more tip-toeing. It’s either your head on the chopping board or mine.
I slipped my cell phone back into my pocket.
Blake can wait.
I approached the entrance of the stairs and kicked the door. It flew open without resistance.
Pray hard, mister. The devil is coming for you.
Chapter 11
SPECTOR SCOOTED OFF the road as he hopped onto the pavement, still thinking about the little meeting he had with Zee the day before. And Hall, oh god, Spector didn’t know where to start. It wasn’t exactly a no-good-reason kind of loathing when it came to the huge man with the perpetually silly-looking face. Hall had, after all, almost gotten him killed once—he wasn’t that dumb, he just looked the part. Underestimating his intelligence would get your head smashed in really quickly, and most of his adversaries had found out the hard way. Sure, they were teammates—snort—members of the same group whose goals were usually aligned, and that was what always got Spector into trouble. Trust and reliance—he just never seemed to learn. Though Hall did redeem himself, in a way, by eventually pulling him out of the shithole he had gotten into because of Hall in the first place. But he still really didn’t like the big guy.
What a waste of natural resources, the food he consumes in a week is probably enough to feed an entire Amazonian village for a month.