by Alex A King
“That’s some entourage. All three trying to kill you?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Something tells me with you it always is.”
“The only thing complicating my life is Greece. I used to be a couch potato.” Judging by the look on his face, something got lost in the translation. “Lazy,” I said. “I like TV and potato chips.”
His face went through the motions of processing my words, then he nodded.
“I’ll follow you.”
“Wait—follow me where?”
“Your place. Those organs are evidence.”
* * *
ANOTHER DAY, other party. When I pulled up outside the garage the bouzouki music was already going. A bouzouki is the bastard offspring of an acoustic guitar and a banjo. It’s downright twangy.
These bouzouki players were live and they were family, so there was no switching them off. Rembetika—Greek folk music—and I don’t get along. It’s like listening to twenty cats expressing ennui over a sardine.
“I did not know Baboulas was making a party today,” Marika said. “If I had known I would have stayed behind.” The way she said it I knew she knew, and she’d had no intention of staying behind. She was digging the adventure too much.
Donk brightened up. “Party?”
“Don’t get excited,” I said. “It’s not your idea of a good party.”
“Can’t you drop me off at a strip club?”
“No. For starters, I don’t know where one is.”
“I do.”
Marika shut him up with a look.
My phone rang. The second I answered, Takis barked, “Is my wife with you?”
“Sure she is, Booger Eater.”
“Heh,” he said. “Who eats boogers? Pigs, that’s who.”
I oinked.
“I cannot believe she told you those lies! She is a monster!” He went silent for a minute. “Tell her to come home, or I will change your lights.”
Translation: I’d better send his wife home or he was going to put the hurt on me.
“Already there,” I said and disconnected. “That was your husband,” I told Marika. “He wants you to come home.”
“Poor little Takis,” she said. “Nobody to wipe his kolos.”
I wasn’t entirely sure that was a metaphor, so I left it alone.
“Come on,” I told her and Donk. “My nose says there’s good food happening.”
My nose was right. Once again they’d trotted out the giant rotisseries, and now a sheep was busy rotating over glowing coals. I tried not to look deeply into its dead eyes.
Unlike Harry Harry, it still had both of them.
Long tables had been set up with chairs. Not a formal sit-down lunch, but more of a buffet and choose-your-own-seat when you get hungry. Aside from the meats, every Greek side dish and appetizer ever had been magicked onto a couple of tables. It was a miracle the legs didn’t buckle under the weight of all the food.
“Kokoretsi! All right!”
Melas had caught up to us, and he sounded way too excited about Greece’s most deceptive dish. Kokoretsi looked like the best thing you could put in your mouth. The meat crisped to a golden crust as the hot coals worked their food voodoo, and it smelled like the kitchen of a five-star steakhouse. But under the hood it was lungs, kidneys, hearts, and other gross things tied onto the spit with intestines.
You couldn’t pay me to eat it, but I was happy to sit here and breathe.
“You’re a sick man, Melas.”
He rubbed his flat belly. “What I am is a hungry man.” He grabbed a plate and began constructing a skyscraper of food.
My stomach was making noises like it could eat, but I kept having flashbacks to the morgue. I left Melas and the others to their party and went back out to where the three assassins and Cleopatra were parked.
“You guys can come and eat, if you like. Looks like there’s plenty for everyone.”
“Is that kokoretsi?” Elias asked. I nodded and he jumped out of his car, reeled in by the scent of cooking organs. Lefty followed.
But not Mo. He stood there, staring at some point beyond my left ear. As far as I knew he still didn’t know his employer was dead.
“Tell the Yankee pig I do not want her food.”
Nobody told me anything, on account of how there was nobody there to tell him anything. Except Cleopatra, and she was busy picking at her teeth in the rearview mirror.
“It’s not my food,” I said.
His gaze fixed itself to a point beyond my left ear. “Ask the pig if there is pork.”
“No pork,” I said, mostly sure that was true.
He slouched off after the other guys. Which left me and Cleopatra.
She got out of the car and stretched, revealing an ocean of bare midriff.
“I guess I could eat,” she said.
I stopped her with my hand. “No. No food for you. You can stay here.”
Jaws grinned. “I don’t think so. I was invited.”
The guard. I was going to kill him. Okay, maybe not kill, but we’d be having words, and most of mine were scheduled to be loud.
I hoofed it back to Grandma’s house with every intention of curling up with a book. After the morgue I wasn’t in the mood for fun or socializing. As soon as the chilled body parts were in Melas’ custody, I’d excuse myself without excusing myself, that way no one would have chance at talking me out of it.
That was the plan.
The kitchen was empty. The countertops were clean. I lifted the fridge’s handle, yanked open the door.
Blinked.
Two somethings were missing. The penis and heart were gone. Not a sign of the plastic containers Grandma had put them in.
I checked the freezer. Nothing except ice cream and some regular meat. Checked the garbage. No Mr. Winky. No heart.
Ohmigod. We had been robbed.
I called Melas, wailed, “We’ve been robbed!”
Chapter 12
OUTSIDE THE REFRIGERATOR, that no longer held organs of the human kind, Melas was balancing his plate of food on one hand. He was picking at the meat with a fork, contemplating the situation.
“Maybe someone threw it out,” he said.
“Why would they do that?”
“Was anything else taken?”
A quick jaunt to the bedrooms said no, this was an isolated incident.
“I wouldn’t know where to start,” he said. “Everyone in your family is a criminal, so they’re all suspects.”
“What kind of sicko steals a heart and—“
“Organ,” he said. “Please say organ.”
“You’re weak.”
“I’m male.”
Yes, yes he was. It took most of my willpower not to notice. The rest of my willpower went into avoiding seconds and thirds of my grandmother’s pastries. If I let down my guard right now I’d be torn between tossing myself at Melas and stuffing the baklava on the counter down my throat.
“As I was saying, who would steal organs?” I thought about it—hard. My gaze traveled around the kitchen, up his legs, down his arm, back up his arm to his wide shoulders, down again—reluctantly—to the food in his hand. “Oh God,” I gasped. “The kokoretsi!”
The color drained out of Melas’ face. The plate clattered to the floor.
“Ugh,” he said. Then he bolted for the bathroom.
Boy, was he about to be surprised. The toilet was—
“Outside,” I said, as he ran back into the room.
He flung the kitchen door open and vanished. Seconds later I heard the sound of him heaving.
This was one of the many reasons I avoided organ meat. You never knew.
I cleaned the food off the floor, dumped it in the garbage, poured a tall glass of refrigerated water and carried it out to him. He was pale, shaking, leaning one-handed against the outhouse wall.
“I ate a dick,” he mumbled. “I ate a dick.”
“Maybe it was in a different part. The spit is pre
tty long and the … you know … wasn’t that big. It can’t have stretched far.”
He dry heaved again.
Grandma hobbled into the yard a few moments later. She stopped inside the gate, hands pressed to the small of her back.
“What’s wrong with you, Nikos?”
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
“Are you sick? You look sick.”
I clued her in. It took a moment, but then a grin broke out on her face. “Po-po! I told the men to get the rest of the meat out of the refrigerator. They must have taken it.”
“It’s evidence, they can’t eat it!” I said.
We looked out at the people carrying their plates over to the kokoretsi for refills.
“Too late,” Grandma said. “Better we do not tell them.”
“But … evidence.”
“Do you want to see Greek people panic and stampede?”
“My God,” I said, horrified. “Now we’ll never know if it was that poor man’s penis.”
“What man?” Grandma asked.
Melas took a long sip of the water I’d poured. He pulled out his phone, tapped on the gallery. He handed the phone to my grandmother.
“You can’t show her pictures of dead people,” I said.
“I’d wager she’s seen a body or two before,” he said.
Grandma nodded. “Maybe one or two.” She passed the phone back. “I know him. He is in sex trafficking.” Her face said she didn’t approve. Grandma was not, according to Dad’s former—and now dead—best friend, a fan of the exploitation of women. “His name … I do not remember.”
“Harry Harry is dead. Fatmir the Poor is dead,” I said.
“Fatmir and Harry Harry are dead?” Melas asked.
I ignored him. “And now we’ve got another body in the morgue, one missing his penis.” It was simple math, but Greece made my brain sticky, like hot chewing gum. I had three assassins, one of whom was still working for a dead man, one who was working for the family …
The answer practically wrote itself down.
“Geez.” I slapped myself on the forehead. “Lefty? Hey, Lefty!” I called into the compound.
Lefty wandered over, plate in hand. “Thanks for the food,” he said. “Usually my targets don’t feed me, but you’re okay. I hate to kill anyone who gives me food, but the job’s the job. It’s not personal.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah. “Show him the picture,” I told Melas.
“What?”
“Humor me, okay?”
Melas pulled up the picture of the dead guy.
“Is this your employer?” I asked Lefty. He took a long look and jerked his head up. Tst. “No.”
Disappointment spiraled in my head, alongside a smallish whirlwind of fear. This meant someone out there still wanted me dead, and for now they still had all their body parts.
“Who’s your employer?” Melas asked.
“You think I’m going to tell a cop?”
Melas folded his arms. He looked big and bad, and if I’d known the guy’s name I would have sung like a bird.
Lefty deflated. “I don’t know his name. All I know is his money is good and he doesn’t look like the guy in the picture.”
“Can you describe him?” Melas asked.
“He looked like a man. Head, body, arms, two legs. Brown hair. I didn’t look closer. You don’t in this business.”
That was most of the world, outside of Scandinavia.
“I could haul you in for questioning,” Melas said.
“You could try, but it won’t help. I don’t know what I don’t know.” He sauntered away, eating.
“If another box shows up,” Melas told us, “call me and don’t touch it.”
Takis wandered over. He was carrying a plate and fork, too. “What’s going on?” he asked, mouth stuffed with kokoretsi.
“Keep doing that,” I told him.
“What?” Flecks of food flew.
“Chewing. I’m enjoying watching you eat a dick.”
“What are you talking about?”
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
* * *
BEFORE MELAS LEFT I had one request. “If someone claims the body, can you let me know?”
“Why do you want to get mixed up in this?”
“I don’t. I want to know, okay? Can you do that?”
“Sure,” he said. “And don’t forget, my mother still wants you over for coffee.”
Ugh. “I don’t understand why.”
He leaned against his cop car, arms folded. He was made of steel cables, strapped together with delicious man-candy.
“She wants to know you. And she wants her plate back.”
“Fine, fine, I’ll go.”
“When?”
Never. “When I have time.”
“What are you doing now? You could follow me over, I’ll show you where my parents live.”
“Can’t right now,” I said, lying my ass off. “I’ve got a thing.”
“What kind of thing?”
“Uh …” I glanced around, looking for a suitable excuse. There was nothing, not even my goat. “Argh! I can’t think of anything. Why, brain? Why?”
“Follow me,” he said.
The Melas family lived in Makria, in a two-layered square box. Like most of its neighbors it was white, the roof was red, and the yard was hidden somewhere under a forest of greenery. The pots were—predictably—red. It was a wonder there was any red paint left for the rest of the world, the way Greece slapped it all over the place.
What this house had that its neighbors lacked was a helmet-haired lady warrior. She was slight. She was short. She wanted my head on the plate I was holding—I knew it.
She lowered the broom in her hand when she spotted me skulking along behind her son.
“Is that my plate?”
“Yes, Kyria Mela. Thank you. I washed it three times.”
She took it from my hands. “I will wash it again, to be sure.”
“Mama,” Melas said.
“What? It could have picked up anything on the way here. Have you read about the Ebola in America? Terrible. People dying all over the place.”
“Two,” I said. “We had two Ebola deaths.”
“Like I said, all over the place.” She swiped her gaze across my everything and made a judgmental face. “Come inside. Nikos, are you hungry? I will fix you something.”
“I already ate at Katerina’s place.”
“What did you eat?”
“Lamb, salad, bread. They were having a party.”
She patted him on the arm. “That is not a meal. I will make you a plate.”
“Lucky for you you’ve got one right there,” I said, nodding to the plate I’d returned. Holy flying razor blades, my mouth was a runaway train.
“Yes,” she said dryly. “Very lucky.”
“What’s her problem?” I asked Melas, after she’d vanished into the kitchen, leaving us in her special company room.
“What do you mean?”
My eyebrows lurched north. “Never mind.”
I sat in that small, airless room, hands in my lap, ankles crossed, trying not to screw things up. Something told me Kyria Mela—no S on account of her second X chromosome—didn’t approve of the sort of woman who crossed her legs. She was bound to see it as the move of a slut.
Only my eyes wandered around the room. Lots of photographs were cluttering the table—a dining room-sized behemoth elaborately carved out of dark wood. The frames were heavy and ornamental, most of them crystal or silver-plated. Most of the faces in the photos were a variation on Melas’s theme.
“You have a brother?” I asked him.
“And two sisters,” he said. “They smashed my mother’s heart when they moved away.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “You’re the baby of the family.”
He laughed. “Eldest.”
“Damn. I had you pegged for the youngest.”
“Why?”
“It’s the, uh,
umbilical cord.”
“What?”
“You’re, uh …”
“Jesus,” he said, realization finally dawning. “You think I’m a mama’s boy.”
I opened my mouth to deny it, but then his mother swept back in, carrying a tray loaded with coffee, cold water, and some kind of sweets. She rested the tray on the table and divvied up the goods. The sweets were sticky preserved cherries. Diabetes was coming for me, and I’d go a willing victim.
“Drink the coffee,” she commanded. “After, I will read the cup.”
“You mean … my future?”
“Your past, your present, your future. All of it is inside the cup.”
“Mama, leave her alone. Katerina doesn’t want her cup read.”
Maybe her ears heard him, but her face didn’t. “Everybody wants their cup read.”
Normally I would have laughed it off. I’d visited my share of psychics over the years, usually arm-in-arm with one friend or another. Stick a bunch of teenage girls in a room, eventually one of them was going to suggest a clairvoyant or a Ouija board. We’d do anything to see if that hot guy likes us back. This seemed like a golden opportunity. Probably it was woo-woo hocus pocus, but what if it wasn’t? Melas’s mother was scary enough for me to believe she might have a direct line to the other side.
“It’s okay,” I told him. “Read my cup, please.”
Did she approve? Disapprove? Who can say? Her face was a flat sheet of glass in a dark cave. The woman gave away nothing.
“Drink the coffee, not the grounds.”
The coffee was thick enough that a spoon would have trouble leaning, and it was sweet enough to rot teeth in a flash, but I swilled it down until there was nothing left but grounds and a burning in my gut.
“Hmm,” she said, eyeing me. “Turn it over on the saucer, twist clockwise three times, then push it to me.”
I did as she said, then we sat and waited for a few minutes.
“You have a beautiful family.” I waved my hand at the crowd of photographs, their heads of varying heights on the tabletop.
“Lucky will be the woman who marries into this family. Everyone in my family makes beautiful babies.”
I swear to God—with whom my relationship is shaky, at best—Melas’s mouth twitched, that rat bastard. He was getting a kick out of this. Maybe to him this was payback for the dick-eating incident.