by Alex A King
I nodded because what else could I do? He sounded like a legit Greek philosopher, and I knew my Greek philosophers. After my mother died I quit looking to God for answers and took up philosophy instead. Regular history had a better track record than biblical history. They say there’s wisdom in the Bible, but it’s a long slog through the begetting and incest.
The old man’s apartment was cluttered in an orderly way. The living room walls were barely visible behind the shelves, each of them filled with an arrangement of doohickeys and figurines and books. The hall closet was open, but I couldn’t see inside from where I stood.
“I was a collector of life’s mysteries,” he said. “I am waiting now to collect the final one, but the delivery man is late, that malakas.”
“Before he gets here do you suppose you could tell me who sent Grandma the box?”
He rolled over to the closet door, pushed it shut. “I was trying to go out like that guy from Kung Fu, but I couldn’t find rope or a blue pill, so here I am talking to you. The man you want, they call him Rabbit.”
A hot, invisible needle shoved itself in my eye. An old memory was the hand behind the needle. It wanted to be remembered, and it wanted to be remembered now.
I winced. “Why do they call him Rabbit?”
“Because he has a hundred children. What’s wrong with your eye?”
“Nothing’s wrong with my eye. Does he have a real name?”
“Stelios Dogas is his name. There’s something wrong with your eye or your head.”
“I’m fine—really. Where have they got him locked up?”
“Larissa’s prison. It’s a big yellow building, the color of piss.” He chuckled. “You are going to see him, aren’t you? Before you do, see about that eye or they will keep you there.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my eye. Someone has to talk to him. Grandma isn’t here. He sent a clue and I have to find out what it means.”
“I think you are mental.” He drew little air circles on one temple. “Going there is the worst thing you could do. If you think it’s a clever idea you have problems.”
No, I knew it was stupid. Worse than stupid. It was totally stupid. Sometimes a woman needed an adverb to underscore how idiotic something was. This was one of those times.
“Sometimes clever and right are the same thing, sometimes they’re not.”
“That’s a good answer. I didn’t think you were capable of it.”
I grinned at him, but it was window dressing. Inside, my nerves were firing off messages. Can you believe this chick? All balls and no brain. Rabbit … Rabbit … Rabbit … “I got lucky.”
“Must be your grandmother’s genes.”
I asked him something I hadn’t had a chance to ask anyone else yet. “What was my grandfather like?”
“Yiannis?” He shrugged. “Imagine a rock sitting on the ground, doing nothing. That was your grandfather.”
That was … unexpected. “How did he die?”
“He walked into an ambush. He was looking for a sofa so he could sit.”
“My other grandfather died when a dog crapped on his lawn.” Mom’s dad had famously blown an artery screaming at the neighbor’s Great Dane.
“Must have been some crap.”
“It was on his newspaper.”
He nodded like he knew about dog crap and newspapers. I guess some things were universal.
“You go to see Rabbit, you be careful. He has charmed the pants off virgins, nuns, married women, and the occasional Turk.”
“He’s in prison.”
“Bah! Bars mean nothing to a man like that. If there is a crack he will fill it. Don’t show him anything he can put his poutsa in.”
Suddenly, the earth vanished beneath my feet. That sharp, pointy memory had conjured up a battering ram. It slammed into the barrier between past and present, flooding my head with an old tune Dad used to sing.
“I Left Her Foot in a Box and Carried With Me Her Shoe …” I sang.
“That is a song we used to sing about Rabbit,” he said sharply. “Where did you hear it?”
“In a kitchen.”
“We used to sing it the bar and at parties. Always there was ouzo involved. Rivers of ouzo.”
“There wasn’t any ouzo when I heard it, just Greek salad.” And the cold tolling of an early warning bell that none of us had recognized as the beginning of an end.
“Things have really changed if that song was served with salad.”
“I hate change,” I said.
“Funny, because that is all you have done since you got here. And there is more coming—an avalanche of change, I think.” He rolled over to the shelves on the north-facing wall, grabbed a leather and metal contraption that looked like ancient horse-wear. He tossed it to me. “Put this on before you go.”
“What is it?”
“A chastity belt.”
I threw it back, trying not to let the “Ewww” escape. “It’s a maximum security prison.”
“That doesn’t mean the security is good. All it means is that it has the maximum security the prison can afford.”
* * *
AS PAPOU SAID, Larissa’s prison building was the color of stale morning urine. With its razor wire hairdo atop the fence, it was impossible to mistake the prison for anything other than a correctional facility. What it was correcting I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t look like it could make honest men out of anything, let alone crooked human beings.
“Want me to come with you?”
That was Stavros. He’d tagged along for the forty-five minute drive, after I told him where I was headed. Elias was with us, too, discreetly parked several spaces away.
“I should be fine,” I told him. “How hard can it be?”
“When my friend Rikki was in here I used to bring muffins every month. He really liked muffins.”
“Is he still here?”
Stavros lifted his chin then lowered it. That’s what passed for a headshake around here. “Someone shanked him for the muffins. They were good muffins.”
“What kind?”
“Apple cinnamon.”
“Those are good,” I said. “Okay, here goes.”
My wardrobe was limited. Most of what I owned was in my closet back home, the one in Mom and Dad’s house, where I still technically lived because it made Dad woozy to think about cutting the cord. I’d leased an apartment a couple of weeks ago, but Grandma had it burned down before I could move in … or tell Dad. Anyway, clothes. I went with jeans and a fitted T-shirt. It was the closest thing I had to business casual.
Getting into a Greek prison turned out to be easy. I showed them my passport, signed the sign-in sheet, followed a rolling boulder made of a Greek mother’s baklava. Maybe I’d seen too many movies, but I expected to wind up on the good-guy side of one of those booths with a Plexiglas window and an archaic handset. When the guard led me to a cramped room with a metal table, complete with a loop for cuffs, and two metal chairs, I asked about the booths.
“Sold them,” he told me. “It was that or toilet paper.”
“I bet the prisoners appreciated the paper.”
“Wasn’t for them.”
He left me alone in the room. Before long, I began wondering if I should sing prison songs. The only one I knew was that Sam Cooke song, but everything except the chorus was hazy. I tried to recall inspiring lines from The Shawshank Redemption, but nothing was happening except boredom.
After too much time had passed, the blob rolled back in with a coworker and a lanky old man wearing handcuffs and a uniform straight off a zebra’s back. He had a complexion like the Grand Canyon, thinning gray hair, and a pair of rubber slip-on shoes that were two sizes too big.
His gaze felt me up. His mouth settled into a leer.
“Who are you?” he asked as the guards shoved him at the chair on the far side of the table, and chained him to the table’s loop. Then the guards made a big production of leaving the room.
Ha! I wasn’t fool
ed. They were listening in, guaranteed.
“Katerina Makris.”
“I know Katerina Makri. You are not her.”
“Little old lady?” I held my hand up to my chin. “About this tall?”
“She was not so old the last time I saw her.”
That was the thing about prison: Put a man behind a wall and the rest of the world marches on without him—sometimes all the way to a cliff. A lot had changed in Greece during the past fifteen years. When they’d tossed him inside, Greece was saving up for an Olympics it couldn’t afford. The government had still been faking a happy marriage to the European Union. People were collecting money that was scheduled to evaporate in a few short years.
“That was a long time ago. Sometimes people go for years without looking older, then—BAM—the years gang-bang them. Maybe that’s what happened to Grandma.”
“You are Michail’s girl.” He shifted in his seat. The leer didn’t quit. “Now I see it. What do you want? A little …” There was nothing ambiguous about his hand gesture.
“Dream on, old man,” I said. “Papou warned me about you.”
He spat on the ground. “That malakas. I shit on his head.”
That was going to be tricky from prison, unless his aim was stellar and he had rocket-fueled bowels. I sat in the chair the guard had left for me, and hoped he wouldn’t spit in my direction. I wasn’t programmed with the kind of disrespect required to slap an elderly man, who was only several naps away from the big sleep.
“You sent Grandma a puzzle box.”
“Did I? What was inside?”
“You don’t know?”
His face was blank. “Who knows? I don’t know.”
Chapter 4
“WAIT—what? How can you not know? You sent Grandma the box.”
“I made the box, yes, but I did not send it. I’m not responsible for what’s inside.” He leaned forward, winked. “What was inside, my baby?”
Ugh. “Grandma said it was a clue. A message.”
“What message?”
“Now would be a great time to quit playing dumb.”
“You could show me what’s under that shirt. What happened to dresses? In my day women used to wear dresses.”
“I could leave,” I said.
“But you won’t. Because you want something from me, or you wouldn’t be here.” He swished his hand through the air. “Forget it. I’m too old and tired for games. I don’t know anything. All I did was make the box. I had no choice.” He did a little head wag as he weighed his words against the fate of what was possibly his eternal soul. “Okay, I had a choice, but I wanted a tsibouki and a carton of cigarettes. You don’t know what it’s like in here. No women. Not enough men who look like women from the back if you squint until everything is blurry.”
The thought of him on either end of a blowjob was horrifying. Where was the mind bleach when I needed it?
“Who did you make it for?”
“I don’t know. A guy. I have made many boxes for many people—ask your Grandmother. I made many for her so she could send messages to her enemies”
Questions balled up at the back of my throat, but I only let the pertinent one pass. “What guy?”
“A guy.”
“Did he have a name?”
“Everybody in Greece over the age of three months has a name.”
That was true enough. Up until a Greek Orthodox baptism at three months, every baby was named Moro—Baby. Never mind that there are no surprises what the child’s name will be. Every kid gets a hand-me-down name from one grandparent or another. Only risk-taking parents, who are obviously cruising for disinheritance, veer off the beaten-to-death path.
“So what was it?”
He leaned back. His smile had the illicit gleam of an ivory dagger. “If I tell you, if I do you this favor, then you owe me a favor, yes?”
My debts were stacking up. First Baby Dimitri, the Godfather of the Night and Cheap Souvenirs, had coughed up an item in his store in exchange for a, thus far unredeemed, favor. Now Rabbit wanted to swap my something for his something. An even trade? Somehow I doubted it. But he had me over the figurative barrel. He had information—information I needed. Somebody had commissioned him to make that box, and that somebody wanted to send a message to Grandma.
“A comparable favor. One of equal value. Nothing more, nothing less.”
The ivory dagger unsheathed itself another inch. “Deal.” He tapped the table between us with flat palms. “The name you want is Eagle.”
“That’s not a name, it’s a nickname.”
Two palms up. “That’s what I have.”
“What does he look like?”
“What does any man look like? That’s how he looks.”
A vein throbbed in my temple. “Can you be more specific?”
“Not without some kind of restitution.”
“What do you want?”
His fingers tapped out a rhythm on the tabletop. His eyes wiped their smutty selves all over the top half of my body like he wanted something of a sexual nature. Which meant I’d be leaving here without a description.
“Souvlaki,” he said after he’d spent way too much time trying to engage his x-ray vision for a peek under my shirt.
My breath whooshed out in a relieved stream.
“Sure,” I said. “I can do that. If the guards are okay with me bringing in food.”
The door opened. The human meatball stuck his head in. “The charitable thing to do would be to bring some for everyone.”
“The whole prison?”
“No. Who cares about the prisoners? Most of them are on a hunger strike anyway. I’m talking about us.” He glanced at Rabbit. “And that guy, I suppose.”
My nest egg shuddered. “How many?”
“On this shift, twenty.”
I tried not to gawk. “Twenty for this whole place?”
“Times are hard.” He pulled me aside, out of Rabbit’s hearing range. “See these guns?” He patted what on a smaller person would have been a hip. “No ammo.”
“What if you need to shoot somebody?”
He shrugged. “This is why we fry fish on their lips, so they do not have strength to revolt.”
To fry fish on someone’s lips was the charming Greek way of saying they got their kicks tormenting prisoners.
“There a souvlaki place around here?”
“Down the street.”
I went back to Rabbit. “You want anything to go with that souvlaki?”
“Patates tiganites!” the guard called out from the other side of the door. Fried potatoes. French fries.
“You heard the man,” Rabbit said. “Hey, do you know why they call me Rabbit?”
“Papou said it’s because you’ve got a hundred kids.”
He wagged his eyebrows at me. “We could make it a hundred and one.”
Ugh.
‘Down the street’ wasn’t down the street. At least that’s what my phone said. And I believed the latest technology over the hungry guard. It was down the street, two over, and down five more streets.
Stavros was backing out of the parking spot when I heard something rumbling in the distance. I squinted.
“That sounds like a helicopter,” I said.
“It is a helicopter.”
Definitely a helicopter. A nimble black one.
“Think they’re bringing in a new prisoner?”
Stavros shrugged. “Could be.”
“We should watch,” I said. “The souvlaki can wait, right?”
The bird buzzed closer, lower.
In the pilot’s seat was a horrifyingly familiar figure. Wearing black wasn’t a fashion statement to Grandma—it was a billboard. She was devoted to my grandfather, despite his premature departure some thirty years earlier, and she made sure the whole world knew it. Nowadays his remains lived in an olive oil can in the kitchen.
I said, “That looks like Grandma flying it.”
“That is Baboulas flying it.
”
A cable slithered out the side, its end tumbling to the prison roof. A second figure zipped down the cable.
“And that guy jumping out of it looks like Xander,” I said.
“They could be twins.”
“What are they doing?”
“If I had to say, I would guess that they are attempting a prison break.” Stavros had his phone out in a flash. “Takis will want to see this.”
“You’re recording it?”
“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
“Evidence of a crime?”
He shrugged. “It’s not the worst crime I’ve recorded.”
I was suddenly curious. “What was the worst?”
He opened his mouth to tell me, but then all hell broke loose. Sirens began to howl. They knocked the other four senses out of whack. Guards who’d trained for this stumbled around with their combat gear. Inmates, who’d been hoping for some excitement in their day, tore around like chickens.
Xander had acquired a guard uniform from somewhere. He scaled down a drainpipe, cut through the unruly crowd—easy when you’re part wall—barged in through front doors.
My breath caught. Grandma and the helicopter were hovering above the building, line dangling. My gaze slid all over the place, hunting for predators. The guard towers were—miraculously—unmanned.
When I mentioned it to Stavros he said, “Austerity measures. They cut funding and jobs. The prisoners are lucky to get food. There is a rumor that the kitchen cooks rats. In Korydallos there are two hundred inmates for every guard. They say it’s standing room only in some of the cells.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Our prison system stinks, too, but it’s not that bad. Yet.”
I watched with a fascinated sort of horror as guards battled the prisoners. The meatball hadn’t been lying about the bullets. One guard hurled his handgun like a boomerang. It came back when a burly prisoner snatched it up and beat him with his own weapon.
A rope ladder unraveled over the side of the helicopter. Xander appeared on the roof with a slight, graying figure.
Rabbit.
He shoved Rabbit up the first few rungs, boosted himself up behind the old man. They scrambled up and into the helicopter.