by Alex A King
“Laki? Who knows?” He zeroed in on me. “Why did you go to see Rabbit?”
“I wanted to make new friends.”
He laughed. “New friends! You are making a lot of new friends in Greece. Not always good ones. Look at us.”
“We’re not friends.”
“But we could be, someday.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Laki throw something that looked suspiciously like a bottle with a rag sticking out of the top. A bottle with a rag on fire.
“Jesus,” I screeched.
Laki grinned back at me. “Watch this,” he called out, pointing to the bottle in his hand. He threw the bottle into the open window of a small, black SUV.
Somebody screamed, girlish and thin. A man bolted across the street, fire licking his clothes and hair. He leaped off the cement dock, into the water. Then the vehicle exploded in a blinding halo of flames
Like a tide retreating before a tsunami hits, the beach emptied and poured into the street. Everyone wanted to gawk at the burning car. Never mind that it could spit hot metal at any moment.
“That was Elias!” I shouted. “You set my assassin on fire!”
“So Laki did you a favor.”
Speaking of Laki, he was back. “Did you see that? That was a good one.”
As if we could miss the giant fireball.
“That’s my assassin. He’s with me!”
“He was following you, watching you through binoculars. A creeper,” Laki said. “That’s why I make fire.”
“He’s supposed to be watching me! That’s the idea!” I stopped for a moment. “Where do you keep the bottles?”
“It is a secret.” He flashed the gold stash in his mouth.
After abandoning shop, I jogged over to the water’s edge, peered into the water. Elias was standing there, steaming. The fire had fizzled most of his hair, and his eyebrows were singed. He smelled like a burning voodoo doll.
“You okay?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I think so. How is my hair?”
“You could be a trendsetter,” I said. “I bet there’s some weirdo in Paris right now dying to make burnt hair the hot new thing.”
“My car?”
I glanced back at the burning automobile. It was beyond help. A few blocks from here a fire truck was howling for traffic to get out of its way.
“Gamo ti maimou,” he said, as I helped him out of the water. “Now I’ll have to steal another one, and I hate stealing cars.”
I wasn’t sure relations with a monkey weren’t illegal in Greece. There was that whole alleged “monkey bite” that supposedly killed King Alexander in the early 1900s, so I didn’t comment on the first part.
“You can’t steal a car!”
His forehead scrunched. “Why not? Other assassins do it.”
“Why don’t you rent one?”
“I don’t have a license. The plan was to get one after Fatmir paid me for killing you.”
A thought crept across my mind. “Wait—I’m your first contract?”
He nodded.
Shit.
Damn it.
I felt sorry for the guy. I rubbed a hand across my forehead. A headache was coming, I knew it.
“You want to ride back to the compound with me?”
“What for?”
“Maybe Grandma will let you borrow one of our cars.”
He brightened. “You think she’d be okay with that?”
“As long as you don’t kill me.”
He thought about it. “Okay.”
* * *
MY GRANDMOTHER WAS STANDING by the fountain when we eased up to the compound gates. With her was Xander, dressed down in baggy cargo shorts and a T-shirt. A third person was with them, a face I didn’t recognize. In her hands the woman held a handkerchief. They worked constantly, twisting the cotton, wringing its wretched neck. Her face was stricken, her posture desperate and defeated. I put her in her mid sixties, not a widow judging from the colorful geometric print dress she wore. Her heels hung slightly over the backs of her sandals.
I pulled through the gates, parked. Grandma waved me over.
“Wait there,” I told Elias, nodding to the garage. I couldn’t leave him sitting in the sun.
“This is my granddaughter,” Grandma was saying as I walked over. “Katerina, this is Kyria Koufo. She has come to me with a problem.” She gestured for her guest to speak. “Tell Katerina what you have told me.”
“But she’s a girl—“
“She is my granddaughter,” Grandma said, a steel blade under the velvet cushion of her words.
The other woman didn’t look convinced. Her eyes darted from Grandma to me, and back again, as though seeking a loophole. If there had been one I’d have tossed it to her. Something about her demeanor suggested that her story wasn’t only sad, but humiliating.
“It is my husband,” she said, lying down under Grandma’s steamroller. “He sleeps with my friend. Both of them betraying me, those snakes. That I could have lived with, but yesterday I discovered they have concocted a plan to kill me. My husband will inherit everything, and he and my friend will live a pretty life together while I rot in the ground with worms gnawing on my lips.”
I wasn’t sure worms gnawed, but what did I know about worm physiology?
“He cannot be allowed to get away with this,” she went on.
“Kyria Koufo is a woman of considerable wealth,” Grandma said. “Wealth she has earned. We have known each other for many years.”
The scorned woman bobbed her fashionably coiffed head. “I know your grandmother is wise in these matters, so I have come to her for counsel.”
Grandma looked up at me. “I want to know, Katerina, what would you do?”
My brain blew a gasket. “Excuse me?”
“How would you handle this problem?”
‘I don’t know’ probably wasn’t the answer Grandma was looking for, or one she’d accept. I chewed on the inside of my cheek while I considered the angles.
“What outcome do you want?” I asked Kyria Koufo. “Do you want to keep your husband? Divorce him?”
“I told her not to marry him,” Grandma said. “I knew he would be a problem. Is that not true?”
Kyria Koufo bowed her head. “I was weak. Blind.”
“Love has a funny way of making you its bitch,” I said. They looked at me blankly. “It’s an American saying. It means love can make you do what it wants.”
“I never loved him,” Kyria Koufo said. “But he is hung like a bull.”
Yikes. There was a visual I didn’t need. “So … what do you want to do?”
“He is my husband, she cannot have him.”
“You want to keep him?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I want her not to have him.”
That seemed fair-ish. “If you tell them you know about their plan, they’ll deny it. If you try to end it first, he’ll … uh … talk you out of it—if it’s the money he wants.” Think, think, think. “How did you find out?”
Grandma spoke. “They tried to hire a contractor.”
That was a pretty way of saying the couple tried to hire a hitman.
“One you know, I presume?” I asked her.
Grandma gave a one-shouldered shrug.
Kyria Koufo closed her eyes. “If he had come to me like a man and asked for a divorce, I would have been fair. He was a good, attentive husband, until this. Five percent of my fortune could have been his.”
Five percent, eh? The epitome of generosity.
“Why don’t you ask him for a divorce and offer him that five percent settlement?”
“And let her have him?” She stabbed her chest with one finger. “Never!”
What was I supposed to suggest? The woman was the architect of her own problems.
“You could push her down some stairs,” I said, joking.
Kyria Koufo looked at Grandma. “Clever girl. That idea I like.”
“I was joking,” I yelped. “For the rec
ord, it wasn’t a suggestion.”
She stuck a hand in her pocket and pulled out an old-fashioned change purse, stiff satin with a silver clasp. She snapped it open, retrieved some coins, pressed them into my hand, folding my fingers around the cool metal. “Buy yourself something nice, eh?”
“You can go now, Katerina,” Grandma said.
When I looked back, Kyria Koufo was spitting out words in a thick stream, while Grandma stared at some distant point, far beyond the iron gates.
* * *
IT STILL DIDN’T SEEM possible that I, Katerina Makris, who had never been anywhere outside of the United States, was in Greece. At home, places like the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone were old, but they lacked a certain weathering that crossed the line between old and ancient. Greece was a heap of ancient things built on top of something antediluvian, stacked on the very beginning of time itself. Greece felt like God’s starting point and, at times, His first draft.
What was Meteora if it wasn’t a blip in the blueprint, the result of a hand not yet used to the drafting pencil?
The sandstone towers stood isolated between the Pindos Mountains and the Plain of Thessaly. The towers that were still occupied by monasteries and their religious guardians were often speckled with tourists traipsing up the hundreds of steps thoughtfully cut into the steps, now that hauling people up via basket or rope was considered a safety issue.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING I was loading up my car for a road trip I hadn’t told Grandma about, when Donk rolled up to the gatehouse on his scooter.
“Yiorgos,” I said.
His mouth drooped. “Donk. I don’t get why I’m stuck with you.”
“You misunderstood. I’m stuck with you.”
“Are you kanksta?”
“No.”
“You got a gun?”
I retrieved Dad’s old slingshot from my bag. “This is so much better than a gun.”
“Says who?”
“Says me.”
His gaze wiped itself across my Beetle. “This is a girl’s car.”
“Don’t like it? You can ride in the trunk.”
Soft chuffing broke out behind me. I whirled around to see Xander laughing. He was soaping up his motorcycle. It was big and black and he rode it hard.
“He’s a gangster,” I said to the brat. “You should go with him.”
Xander’s laughter died suddenly. Donk had that effect on people.
“Can’t,” Donk said. “My uncle said I’ve got to go with you or he’s going to cut my mother’s allowance.”
“Your mother gets an allowance?”
“She doesn’t work.”
“Why not?”
He gave me a look like I was clearly Greece’s biggest idiot. I wasn’t—not while Greek Eminem was standing in front of me in his saggy pants. “Because she’s a mobster’s sister,” he said. Then he looked me up and down. It made me feel like slapping him. “I’m the nephew of a powerful man. You want to give me tsibouki?”
“How old are you?”
“Sixteen. I heard you old ladies like them young. Coukar.”
“I’m twenty-eight and I’m too old for your crap,” I said. “Get in the car.”
“Where are we going?”
“Road trip.”
It was ninety or so miles to Meteora. We could be there and back in a day—easy—me and my sidekick, Donk. Too bad the idea of being alone with this schmuck made me want to barf. I needed company, solidarity, someone who knew how to wear pants.
“What if I don’t want to go on a road trip?” he said.
“It’s not optional.”
“I don’t have a permission slip.”
“Do I look like I care?” I trotted over to Xander, who was busy with a sponge. “Is Stavros around?”
He shook his head.
Damn. I didn’t want to go it alone with Snoop Amoeba here.
“Come on,” I said. Donk rolled his eyes, muttered something under his breath. But he followed me through the arch, into the courtyard.
He blew out a whistle. “Cool creeb,” he said in English, doing a hatchet job on my mother tongue. “What’s with the crack house in the middle?”
It was one thing for me to insult Grandma’s dilapidated shack. It was quite another for someone with droopy drawers and a stick-on tattoo of knuckle-dusters on his … I was going to say bicep, but it looked more like his arm swallowed a mouse. Anyway, this kid wasn’t going to insult Grandma’s hovel. The end.
I stopped. Looked him dead in the eye. “That’s where the wicked witch lives. She eats disobedient children.”
“Are you on your period?”
“Don’t make me hurt you, Yiorgos.”
He winced. “Okay, okay. Don’t have to be a bitch about it.”
It was all I could do not to grab him by the ear and drag him upstairs. I settled for stomping. Stomping was for angry people and giants—and I was no giant.
I knocked on Marika and Takis’ front door. It flew open a moment later.
“Katerina!” She looked past me to the scowling Donk, lurking in my shadow. “Who is this?”
“Yiorgos. He’s Baby Dimitri’s nephew. I’m giving him lessons.”
“Don’t say that name,” Donk said.
Marika shot him a warning glance. “What kind of lessons?”
“He’s learning how not to be a kolotripos.” I mouthed the last word, which was Greek for asshole, in case her kids were within earshot.
“Donk,” the boy said. “My name is Donk.”
She squelched a smile. “Come in, eat, drink. Are you hungry? You look hungry.”
I shook my head. “Thanks, but I was kind of hoping you might want to go for a drive.”
“A drive?”
“In my car.”
“On …” Her eyes lit up. “… An adventure?”
“On a small adventure.” I held up my fingers to show her how small. My finger and thumb weren’t even an inch apart. But Marika didn’t look like she minded. An adventure was an adventure was an adventure.
“Takis never takes me on adventures, only Walt Disney World. And that was not an adventure. He ate and drank and looked at girls while I dealt with the boys.”
“So you deserve an adventure.”
“I think,” she said slowly, “I would like an adventure.”
“It might be dangerous,” I warned her.
“No problem. I will bring supplies.”
* * *
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, Marika was done mustering supplies. She had changed from her housedress into another nearly identical flowery dress. Her hair was like mine, up in a no-nonsense ponytail. She was carrying a cooler in one hand and a big, black handbag over one shoulder.
No food necessary, I’d told her before Donk and I had come downstairs to wait, and her eyes widened. “You mean we are going to … eat out?”
“Scout’s honor,” I said, although I’d never been a Boy Scout and Marika had no idea what I was talking about anyway. All she knew was that it was a solemn promise, and that we were going to eat food she didn’t have to cook. I was going to have words with Takis when he and Aunt Rita returned from their powwow with Fatmir the Poor. There was no actual law about taking your wife out for dinner once in a while, but it was bad manners not to.
So Marika had forgone the food, but she brought out a cooler anyway.
“What’s in the cooler?”
“Insurance,” she said. She handed it to Donk.
He folded his arms. “Homie don’t carry nothink,” he said in mangled English.
“Carry the cooler,” I said.
“No. You can’t make me.”
I looked at Marika.
“I have got this,” she said, and clobbered his ear.
“Ow!” he wailed. He snatched up the cooler and trudged to the Beetle.
“Put it in the backseat,” she called out.
Xander was still sponging down his motorcycle.
“We’ll be back tonight
,” I told him.
He gave me a look like I was supposed to tell him where I was going, and I gave him a look right back that said no way, wasn’t happening. Grandma wasn’t the FTA; I wasn’t required to file a flight plan. Anyway, I was sure they had a transmitter on my car.
“What are you doing?” I asked Donk. He’d tossed the cooler in the backseat and grabbed shotgun for himself.
“Nobody puts Donk in the backseat.”
Marika slapped the back of his head. “Get in the back,” she said.
“What’s wrong with you?” he howled.
I grinned. “She’s got a bunch of sons and her husband’s a henchman. She’s not about to tolerate bad manners from Snoop Pipsqueak.”
His head tilted, shaving several points off his IQ. “What is ‘pipsqueak’?”
“Google it,” I said.
Marika and I fastened our seat belts and blasted out of the compound.
Chapter 7
WE RAN OUT OF CITY, then we ran out of villages, and soon we were on a thin road to the middle of Nowhere, Greece. Nowhere, Greece is somehow more charming and picturesque than Nowhere, USA. Pockets of wildflowers had spilled onto hillsides. The silver-green olive trees snarled at beeches, both of them wrestling for the same thimble of water. In places, the road seemed to be on the endangered species list: its edges had giant bite marks where the earth had been shaken away, leaving the blacktop nothing to sit on.
“This is boring,” Donk said from the backseat, where he was slouched with one arm draped over the door. “You bitches are boring. I want to stop at a strip club. Are there strip clubs wherever we’re going?”
“Sure,” I said. “They dress up like nuns.”
“I plowed a nun once. That’s how good I am. Even a nun wanted a piece of the Donk.”
This one was an eye-roll a minute.
“Kid,” I said, “I don’t even know how you can say that with a straight face.”
“You don’t believe me? Who wouldn’t want a piece of this?”
I made the mistake of glancing back. He was manhandling his mortadella—with enthusiasm and vigor.
Oh, God. “You’ll go blind,” I said.
“You’ll go blind when I shoot it in your eye.”