‘I’ve been spending some time in Dendra,’ said the fat man, ‘and I’ve made the acquaintance there of a businessman who’s fallen on hard times. I understand there was some kind of calamity which would undoubtedly have been reported in your newspaper.’
‘What calamity?’ She picked up a coffee mug decorated with the slogan of a minor Socialist party, but finding it empty, she frowned, and she put it down.
‘An outbreak of food poisoning.’
The journalist inhaled long and deeply from the cigarette, then stubbed it out, taking her time to bend and break the butt, and using it for a few moments to stir the grey residue in the ashtray.
‘So you’re interested in that. Who’s your businessman?’
‘An Italian gentleman, by the name of Lorenzo Rapetti.’
‘Are you a lawyer?’
‘I? No. Why should I be a lawyer? Do you know Signor Rapetti?’
‘I know of him.’
‘And you remember the story, of course?’
She shrugged. From a capacious handbag by her feet, she found a pack of Marlboros and a cheap lighter.
‘How could I forget? It was the biggest story to hit this prefecture for years. Four people were dead. The nationals were all over it.’ She smiled a bitter smile. ‘It seemed like the only time the phone’s rung since my father passed on.’ As if choosing from a box of chocolates, she dithered over the cigarettes before drawing out her selection and lighting it, and dropping the pack and the lighter back into her bag. ‘But I’m sure Signor Rapetti has told you the whole story. What do you need from my archives?’
‘Signor Rapetti hasn’t told me a great deal, nor have I had much detail from anyone else. I was troubled by the sorry state of his business when his product is so good.’
Her eyes grew wide.
‘You ate at his place?’ She made a triple cross over her chest, drawing a vague crucifix in blue smoke with the burning cigarette. ‘Kyrie, you are a braver man than many.’
‘As you see, I have lived to tell the tale. What I’m looking for is indisputable evidence that his shop was the outbreak’s source. I assume it was never proven, or Signor Rapetti would be in jail as we speak, on a charge of manslaughter.’
With some reluctance she stood, leaving her cigarette in the ashtray.
‘I’ll show you what we have. Remind me, when was all this? A year ago, two?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know exactly,’ said the fat man. ‘I knew nothing of this affair until I arrived in Dendra. I travel widely, sometimes to places where newspapers don’t reach.’
She made her way between the desks to a bank of tall steel cabinets, and opened one to show racks of the Neochori News hung horizontally on spindles. She lifted one out to check the date.
‘You could start here,’ she said. ‘Fortunately for you, we’re a weekly and not a daily. I keep meaning to put all these on microfiche and have a bonfire with the back issues. It would make everyone’s life easier, but microfiche machines cost money I don’t have. Anyway, help yourself.’
The fat man lifted half a dozen papers from their spindles, and carried them to an empty desk. Esmerelda filled her coffee mug from a dripping filter pot.
‘I’m afraid I can’t offer you coffee,’ she said. ‘I only have the one cup.’
‘No matter.’
‘I drink far too much. But it seems to make the day so much brighter.’
As she sat back down at her desk, she drank a mouthful from her mug, and picked up her cigarette. The fat man glanced across at her, and saw her expression was more hopeless than bright. He read the front page of the first newspaper before him, from the last week in December of the previous year. Its headline was, predictably, Happy New Year. He skimmed the news pages of that edition, stopping when he came to the features pages. There was nothing relating to the drama in Dendra, and the three previous editions drew a similar blank; but in the fifth paper he opened, dated late in November, at the bottom of page six he found something of interest: an apology and retraction of inaccuracies published against Lorenzo Rapetti.
The fat man glanced again at Esmerelda. Cigarette in mouth, she was transcribing shorthand from a reporter’s notebook into longhand.
He put the newspaper to one side, and read the headline of the next: Four dead: Poisoning source set to be confirmed. There was the same photo Renzo had in his window, of him receiving his award, over a report that a source had named Dendra’s gelateria as the likely origin of the fatal bacteria, and claiming an arrest could be expected any time soon. The story ran over the front cover and most of page two, detailing the outbreak, those affected and including photographs of those who had died. The fat man read the story carefully, twice; then he took out a small notebook with a pencil in its spine, and copied down the names of the victims.
He closed the paper.
‘Kyria Dimas,’ he began.
‘Despinis,’ she said. ‘I’m not married.’
‘I saw a photo and an award in your reception – your father, I assume?’
She took the cigarette from her mouth, and replaced it in its cradle in the ashtray.
‘That’s Papa,’ she said, and made more crosses, this time with the point of her pen. ‘This paper’s founder. When he ran it, all these desks were full, and the paper sold in tens of thousands. He had such a nose for a story! They’d ring from Athens almost daily, asking whether there was anything they should know about. And he’d give them tips, but this paper always published first, and broke the story. Scoop after scoop fell into his hands. When he left us, somehow the news dried up, and I had to let the staff go. Now there’s just me, and Stefanos who runs the presses. Me, him and those racks of old editions.’
Like a lush with a bottle, she tipped coffee down her throat, and drew again on the shrinking Marlboro.
‘It seems he trained you well, though,’ said the fat man. ‘This article is well drafted, and your writing has flair. It’s a good piece of journalism. Except, of course, for its obvious flaw.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That the facts are not facts. In the way of too many newspapers, you haven’t let the lack of proof stand in the way of your story, and now Signor Rapetti’s business and his life are in ruins, because of your speculation that his shop was the source of the outbreak.’
‘I had it on good authority.’
‘Whose authority? A police officer? A doctor? A public health official? Why is your authority not named and quoted?’
‘You must know no journalist reveals their sources.’
‘If your sources are reliable and official, why should you not? Give me a name, and I shall speak to them myself.’
He held his pencil ready over his notebook. Behind her glasses, Esmerelda’s eyes narrowed.
‘Are you sure you’re not a lawyer?’ she asked. ‘Well, you can tell Rapetti there’s no point in suing me. I’ve nothing to be sued for, as you can see.’
‘I’ve told you, I am no lawyer. But why protect someone who’s fed you false information?’
Esmerelda shook her head.
‘You’re assuming the story’s wrong. But Rapetti remains the likeliest culprit, in my view.’
‘I’ve been there,’ said the fat man, ‘and the place is spotlessly clean, his working practices beyond reproach.’
‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘but aren’t you overlooking the obvious, that he has improved his habits since those people died?’
‘Are you not overlooking the obvious, that his business was very successful? Whose business did he damage when it became so? Have you not considered that his business might have been sabotaged? I suspect your father’s secret was an understanding of the unpleasanter side of human nature, and I think he’d have followed up every possible line of enquiry. The best journalists share traits with the best detectives. You, by contrast, went to press without proving anything, and so were forced to issue an apology which did absolutely nothing to repair the damage your libel caused. You are lucky ind
eed that Signor Rapetti hasn’t sued you. You broke a basic tenet of journalism, printing a story based on hearsay, digging out a photograph from your files, putting the piece together without ever leaving your desk. That’s not journalism, that’s laziness. Your father would have turned in his grave.’
His words brought colour to her sallow cheeks.
‘My information was much more than hearsay. And we had the photo on file. What was the point?’
‘The point was, if you’d gone out like your father and poked your nose where it wasn’t welcome, who knows what you might have discovered? You might have had a scoop, and there might have been two awards hanging on that wall, instead of one. You might have made your father proud. Instead, you brought his paper into disrepute by publishing an unproven story which ruined a man’s livelihood.’
‘I only printed what people were saying.’
‘Do you know nothing of people, Despinis Dimas? You took tittle-tattle, and repeated it to thousands. That is unforgivable.’
‘I think it’s time you left,’ she said.
‘Since I have what I need, I shall do so.’ He slipped the pencil into the notebook’s spine, and tucked the notebook away. ‘I shall leave you to contemplate how your father would feel if he knew how lazy a journalist you are. A newspaper should be an instrument of good, not a rag for repeating gossip. I shall discover for myself whether Signor Rapetti was guilty or not. But before I say anything to anyone on my findings, I shall be very sure of my facts. My view at the moment is that someone has tried to shift blame on to an easy target, and that Signor Rapetti has been something of a scapegoat, with your paper whipping him through the streets. Please, think about what you have done, and what you might do to make reparation. Yassas.’
He made for the door; but as he reached it, she stopped him.
‘Kyrie Diaktoros. Wait.’ She ground out the second cigarette, and stood up again from her desk, brushing flakes of ash from the lap of her skirt. ‘If I was wrong about Rapetti, then I’m sorry. But I’m not as convinced as you are of his innocence, and if he was responsible for those deaths and has got away with it, then I’m not sorry at all. You might yet find his tears are crocodile’s. Let me show you something.’
She turned to a filing cabinet behind her, and searched a drawer until she found a collection of photographs, blown up to the size of a sheet of writing paper. She offered them to the fat man, who studied them in silence. The pictures were taken at early dawn, and the poor light affected the quality; but they clearly showed the gelateria, and in each one, the reflection in its window of a camera’s flash. Taken in sequence, the first showed a man with his back to the camera, washing the shop window with a sponge. In the second picture, the man had turned towards the lens, clearly startled by the flash; in the next four, he was approaching the photographer. The last was almost a close-up of Renzo Rapetti, but not the gentle, disheartened man the fat man had met; in this picture, Renzo Rapetti was angry and aggressive, baring his teeth at the photographer, and threatening with his fist. And in all the photographs, what he was trying to erase from the window was easily read: sprayed in black, the word Poisoner.
‘Where did you get these pictures?’ asked the fat man.
‘I took them,’ said Esmerelda. ‘I might disagree with your saying I’m no journalist, but you’ll see from those I can’t defend my photographic skills. They weren’t good enough to print, hence our using the file picture of Rapetti receiving his award.’
‘He looks very angry.’
‘He was livid. I thought he would hit me, but he didn’t, in the end. He tried to snatch the camera, but I ran away. He didn’t follow me. I wasn’t expecting to come across him. It was very early in the morning, as you can see.’
‘So why were you there?’
She shrugged.
‘I was doing what any newshound does. I was following a tip-off.’
‘From whom?’
‘You know,’ she said, ‘I don’t think you’ve said why you’ve come here, or why you’re asking your questions. You say you’re not working for Rapetti, that you’re no lawyer, and you don’t strike me as a policeman. So what exactly is your interest?’
‘Truly, I am no lawyer, and there’s no police force in this country that would employ me. My methods are too maverick, too unorthodox for them. I work for the highest Authorities, whose interests lie in justice where there’s been none. I act on their behalf, in the capacity of what you might call an investigator. So you could help me a great deal by telling me who it was who gave you your tip-off.’
‘You’ve a low opinion of me, but I respected and trusted my source. She’s the valued asset of any journalist, the fount of local knowledge. And what I know about local knowledge is that people round here know everything there is to know about one another. When I saw what was written on that window, I took that to mean someone in Dendra knew something, knew the truth, but didn’t know how to prove it. I didn’t run that article out of laziness. I ran it out of frustration. I could see how it was going to be. Time was going by, and no one was coming up with anything new – not the police, no one in public health, not the medical profession. Someone was going to get away with it, and no one was going to take responsibility for the deaths of those poor people. And I’m far more my father’s daughter than you know. I couldn’t bear that fact. So I gambled, with my reputation, with this paper’s reputation. I gambled it all on what my father taught me – that somebody, somewhere always knows. I took that writing on Rapetti’s window to be local knowledge. And you know what? I stand by it. The woman who saw the writing was my aunt. She keeps long hours, and saw it on her way to work. You should talk to her, hear what she has to say. You’ll find her in Dendra, at the sign of the cockerel.’
The fat man handed back the photographs.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘And my apologies if I have given you offence.’
‘If you’re sorry, you might make it up to me by doing me a favour,’ she said. ‘There’s little enough happens in this backwater, so if you find a decent story, let me be the first to know.’
Twelve
The road where Lefteris had shown the oil wholesalers on his plan was a dead end, still paved in last century’s cobbles and littered on its pavements with dumpster waste scattered by feral cats. The fat man drove slowly past a repair shop for heavy vehicles, and raised his hand to a grimy mechanic who stopped work to watch him pass. Alongside the repair shop, a site had been cleared, and an estate agent’s billboard showed an artist’s impression of new offices to be built there; but investors had not come forward, and only the concrete bones of foundations poked through clay studded with the broken bricks of demolition. At the road’s end was a high wall set with shards of bottle-glass, and tall wooden gates standing open, splitting the signage painted across them – Zysis & Co AE.
The fat man drove through the gates, into a yard fronting a warehouse, and parked between an unmarked transit van and a tanker rig. The place seemed quiet. From the repair shop along the road came the whine of an angle-grinder.
A middle-aged man sat on a stack of empty pallets, eating a sandwich overfilled with meatballs and fried aubergines. The fat man climbed from the Tzen, and wished him kalo mezimeri.
‘Can you tell me where I’ll find whoever’s in charge?’
The man had just bitten into his sandwich, and his mouth was too full to speak. Instead, he pointed to the open roller-shutter which was the warehouse entrance.
Beyond the reach of daylight from the yard, the warehouse was dark. The concrete floor was slick with greasy spillages, and over everything hung the soapy smell of crushed olives. The space inside seemed diminished by its division into bays, each one identified by a white number on the wall. Many of the bays were empty; others were filled with aluminium barrels, or with cases of oil in five-, two- or single-litre bottles, shrink-wrapped and ready for shipping. Nailed high overhead was a red-lettered sign: No shipments in or out without management approval.
; In the near corner, two half-glazed stud walls made an office with no roof, where a man was talking on the phone, carrying the base with him and pacing up and down to the extent the phone wire would allow. The fat man studied him through the glass. Unshaven for several days, he wore jeans which were too big for him, and a cable-knit sweater. On a silver chain around his neck was a deep-bowled silver spoon, and tucked into the waistband of his jeans was a creased white cloth marked with oil stains. The man turned, and seeing the fat man, raised a finger to him to ask him to wait, and continued talking animatedly into the phone.
‘Two-four, and not a cent more,’ he said. ‘I didn’t say it was good, I said it’s what I can pay . . . Last year was different. Five years ago it was three-six. I don’t have to tell you how the market is . . . Fine, if you think you’ll get more there, be my guest. I’ve heard he’s paying two-two, two-three. Try there, and then come back to me.’ He glanced again at the fat man. ‘I have to go. We’ll talk later.’
He replaced the receiver on the base. Immediately the phone began to ring. Again, he raised a finger to the fat man, and answered it.
‘Yes? Michaeli, how are you, how’s the family . . .? Good . . . Two-four, my friend . . . It’s not great, I know. I’d pay more, but it’s down to my brother, and he’s a hard man, as you know. But tell me, what have you got? . . . Sounds good. Listen, I’d have to try it, of course, but maybe I could go two-six, two-seven . . . You’ll get no joy there, my friend, they’re saying he’s paying lower than ever . . . OK, a firm two-seven, if the quality’s right . . . Tomorrow, the day after. I’ll be here . . . See you then.’
He banged the receiver on to its base, and slammed the phone down on a cardboard file thick with papers. When it rang, he snatched off the receiver, cancelled the call and laid the receiver alongside the phone. The silence seemed to please him, and the muscles of his face relaxed. He beckoned the fat man through into the office, but though he mustered a smile of welcome, his attention was distracted; he lifted the receiverless phone base from the file, and began to search through the papers inside.
The Feast of Artemis (Mysteries of/Greek Detective 7) Page 15