by Alex A King
“Do you have grandchildren?” I asked.
“Ten. Five girls, five boys. But do they live close? No. They smashed my heart when they moved away.”
“Well, at least you’ve still got M—Nikos close.”
“Yes, one out of four. He knows better than to leave his mama and shit in my heart.”
Oh boy. Mommy issues in aisle three. The umbilical cord was more of a leash, short and tight around his neck.
What was I supposed to say?
Fortunately, she plucked the cup off its saucer and began to tilt it this way and that, absolving me of the need to say anything.
“Hmm,” she said in an ominous tone. Was that aimed at my past, present, or future?
I leaned forward eagerly, like a little kid. “What is it?”
“Death.”
Oh, was that all? My heart rolled a few paces forward, then clunked to a STOP. It looked both ways before resuming its dull thud-thud.
“Death in your past, death in your present, death in your future.”
“Death is in everyone’s future, eventually.” I was trying not to freak out. “Unless they’re a vampire or Keith Richards.” I thought about it for a moment. “Come to think of it, Keith Richards could be a vampire, which would explain a lot.”
She glanced up from the cup to gaze upon a babbling idiot. “There is no such thing as vampires.”
“Don’t say that too loud, you’ll incite a riot. Twilight fans are merciless.”
A sigh rose out of her throat like a submarine. “A lot of death in your cup. But I see children, too. You will have an easy time with those big hips.”
My mouth dropped open. “Huh.”
“And your father,” she said, “is still alive.”
Chapter 13
“MAMA,” Melas said.
“He is?” I croaked.
“You be quiet,” she told her son. “The cup knows.”
“It’s a cup. Don’t get her hopes up.”
She reached over, flicked his ear. He yelped.
Any other time I would have laughed, but my head was spinning on the inside. It was a big, old centrifuge in there, and in the center Dad was standing still, wondering what the hell was going on—but he was alive. He also resembled Harrison Ford, tied to the stake in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I lifted my head. “Are you sure?”
“The cup knows,” she said darkly.
“Does the cup ever get it wrong?”
“Sometimes it obscures the truth.”
“So, it lies?”
“How can it lie? It is a cup.”
How much of a know-it-all could an inanimate object be?
“Exactly. So how can it know?”
“Magic,” she said, like that was completely reasonable. “Your grandmother always comes to me when she wants to know the future. If it is good enough for her …” She shrugged, face twisted like it was my own fault if I didn’t buy into her party trick.
“Okay, so he’s alive. Where is he?”
“Eh, the cups shows many things, but not maps.”
Of course not.
* * *
THE AFTERNOON FELT like it wanted to cut me.
Melas walked me to the edge of the village, where our cars were waiting. Before I knew it, he had me between a sheet of metal and a hard place. “My mother likes you,” he said.
“See, now I didn’t get like from that. Tolerate, maybe. Mostly I think she wants me dead. I’m kind of seeing a pattern when it comes to Greece.”
“Trust me, she likes you. And I like you, too.” His gaze moved to my mouth.
“Don’t even think about.”
“I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“Well, you need to, and so do I.”
He lowered his mouth to my ear. “I knew you were thinking about me, too. Why don’t you tell me some of your thoughts and I’ll tell you some of mine.”
My brain stuttered.
“Penis Guy,” I said. “You’ll let me know if someone claims him, right?”
“Tell me about the heart.”
“What about it?”
“What’s the real story?”
“I told you: An eagle dropped it.”
“Dropped it?”
“I guess it was heavy,” I said.
“Where did this … eagle drop happen?”
“Meteora.”
“What were you doing in Meteora?”
“Following a lead.” Of sorts.
He raised an eyebrow. “And?”
“Dead end.”
“You scare me,” he said.
“You scare easily.”
He laughed. “No, I don’t. The things I’ve seen … Anyway, you do scare me. It bothers me, you running around out there, no idea what you’re doing.”
Ugh. “Spare me the chauvinist spiel. Like you, I’ve got a job to do, and I’m doing it. Things would be smoother if people like you cooperated, but you’re not. So I’m working with what I’ve got.”
“Which is?”
“Next to nothing.”
“How does Stelios Dogas fit into all this?”
It took me a second to realize he was talking about Rabbit.
“I’m not sure he does fit into this.”
“Then why did your grandmother bust him out of prison?”
I pushed him away from my neck. “You’re groping in the dark, Detective Melas.”
“Speaking of groping in the dark, you want to go out tonight?”
“No.”
“Good,” he said. “One of us has to show restraint.”
* * *
THE PARTY WAS OVER, the Family—and the family—gone to their afternoon beds. Because the eating stopped didn’t mean Grandma’s hands quit cooking, though. She was baking again, but her hands were working slowly, a cat tiring of its prey’s lack of get-up-and-oh-god-run.
“Did Nikos leave already?”
I slumped into my usual chair at her table. “He had somewhere police-ish to be.”
“I wonder who ate that man’s poutsa?”
I wouldn’t put in my hand on a Bible and swear to it, but I think she winked at me. “Hopefully your least favorite family member. Is it true, does Kyria Mela really read your coffee cup?”
She shrugged. “Everybody does it. Why do you ask?”
“She read my cup.”
Her eyebrow twitched a silent ‘And?’
“She told me Dad is still alive. Also, she said I had big hips.”
“Your hips are good Greek hips.”
Aunt Rita came slouching through the door. The kisses she blew did nothing to cut through the swirl of perfume. “My Virgin Mary, there is nothing wrong with your hips. I would kill for your hips.”
It was true; Aunt Rita’s hips were lean, probably because the infrastructure was male. But I had to hand it to her: she was rocking the Daisy Dukes and cowboy boots.
Grandma crossed herself. “Kyria Mela read this one’s cup. She told the girl Michail is still alive.”
“Then he is alive!” Aunt Rita said. “Kyria Mela’s cups never lie.”
“She said sometimes they obscure the truth.”
“That’s not a lie, it’s …”
“Obscuring the truth,” Grandma said.
Aunt Rita snapped her fingers. “Exactly. Obscuring the truth.”
My eye twitched. “Explain to me how that’s not lying or getting things wrong.”
“Give her an analogy, Rita,” Grandma said.
My aunt rubbed her hands together. “Let me warm up the brain machine. I’m supposed to be sleeping and my head knows it.”
“Why are you up?” I asked.
“I was asleep, but then I had a dream I ate a poutsa.”
We looked at her.
“Not a sex thing,” she said quickly. “I was eating it as a food. It was weird and disturbing, so I woke up.”
Did I look at Grandma? No. If we locked eyes right now the laugh would burst out of my mouth.
; “That is weird,” I said, trying not to let nature take over.
“And disturbing,” Grandma added.
Aunt Rita’s gaze flitted between us. “What’s wrong with you two?”
“Analogy, Rita,” Grandma reminded her.
“Okay, I’ve got one. There’s a rug on the floor. A small, round, handmade rug that is worn thin in places. Under the rug is a child’s small toy. I don’t know what kind of toy because I can’t see it. And you ask me what’s under the rug. I tell you something is under the rug but because I can’t see it I don’t know. Then you ask me to guess, and I say my best guess is that it’s a ball. The bump is ball-shaped, so it could be a ball, but it could also be a doll’s head or something else close to spherical. Eventually we get tired of guessing and we pull the rug off. Underneath is a snow globe. See, the rug showed the shape of the thing, but that is all. The cup is the rug. What Kyria Mela sees in the cup, that is the snow globe.”
“So … Dad is alive but he might be hiding under a rug?”
My heart was chilling out, refusing to pump faster, under the hazy circumstances. My head, like Fox Mulder, wanted to believe. The rest of me was involved in a tug-o-war between the two, so I felt jittery and out of sync with my body.
“Move over,” I told Grandma. “I feel the need—the need to bake.”
* * *
IT WAS LATE when Melas texted. I’d been listening to the slow splash of the pool as Xander did his nightly laps. How the guy could float with body fat that low was a question for someone who hadn’t dropped out of college when her mother died.
We have pickup.
Who?
Why?
Just curious.
A moment later, my phone buzzed. Melas.
“Don’t think you can go looking for these guys. They buy and sell women like you every day.”
“I’m not looking for anyone. I want to know who claimed his body. Was it family or …” I rifled around for the right word. “… coworkers?”
“Family,” he said. “Wake is tomorrow.”
“Where?”
“Sweet dreams,” he said and ended the call.
That wasn’t the end of that—not by a long shot. I swapped my T-shirt for a cotton knit sundress, shimmied out the window, and tiptoed out to the pool. My goat was there, nibbling on Xander’s towel.
“Bad goat,” I hissed. I tugged on the towel, then the goat, but neither of them showed any sign of cooperation. Finally I settled for reclining in one of the poolside chairs, my face suggesting that I knew n-o-t-h-i-n-g about a goat eating a towel.
Goat? What goat?
If Xander knew I was there, he made no indication until he climbed out of the pool, like a submarine rising silently out of the sea. Even after he was on dry land he didn’t speak—not that he ever did. He relieved the goat of his towel, using what must have been magical goat-whispering powers, and locked onto my gaze with his, while he toweled himself off. My tongue glued itself to the roof of my mouth. He was peanut butter; I was bread. There was a joke there about spreading, but I wasn’t going to make it.
“The dead guy, the one without the …” I waved in the general direction of his groin, trying not to look closely. “Do you know who he was?”
He nodded. To his credit he didn’t go all shaky at the mention of a lopped off knob.
“I don’t suppose …” I shook my head. “… you know where his family lives?”
He stared straight at me, unreadable. Then he threw the slightly chewed towel over one shoulder and stalked off.
I followed. What else was I gonna do? I trailed behind him, over to the main building that surrounded the courtyard, where I knew he had a ground floor apartment.
He stopped when he reached his door. Turned around, a ‘Why me?’ expression on his face.
“Can I come in so we can discuss this?”
He opened the door, waved like he was saying ‘Be my guest,’ but with a sarcastic edge.
Xander’s place was bachelor chic. Sleek computer on his desk, black bedding, brushed aluminum appliances. In the bedroom floor, under a throw rug, a trapdoor had been cut, leading to the compound’s control room. Grandma could run the world from down there. She had eyes and ears in area police departments, including Detective Melas’s shabby building.
I didn’t help myself to his couch or chairs, and he didn’t offer. He vanished into his room, came back a moment later wearing a loose pair of shorts, so I was forced to keep staring at a mile of upper body muscle, all of it smooth and tan.
“I don’t want to talk to them.” Yet. “I want to scope them out without my tail. Two of the men who wanted me killed have shown up dead, missing body parts. And now we’ve got a dead gangster with a missing penis—a penis we no longer have, so nobody can check if it was his or not. But it has to be, right? How often does anybody in Greece end up with a dick whacked off? Not often, I bet.”
He picked up a notepad and pen, scribbled a message.
What happened to the penis?
“The same thing that happened to the heart: kokoretsi.”
What I expected was for him to turn pale, but he didn’t. He leaned against the wall, laughing silently. Laughter suited him. It downgraded him from god to mere mortal—the kind of mortal a woman might want to know better.
“All I can say is I’ve been vindicated,” I said. “There’s a reason I don’t eat kokoretsi, and this is it. You never know when someone is going to toss in some human organs.”
He reached for the paper. Don’t like it either. Can’t trust it.
“I think someone is sending Grandma a message by killing people who wanted me dead. I need to find out who that someone is, and why they’re doing what they’re doing.”
You won’t find any clues at the dead guy’s place. The killer is already gone.
“Probably you’re right.” He gave me a look that suggested he was right more often than he was wrong. “But humor me, please.”
He humored me all the way into Volos.
* * *
ARGONAUTON WAS the name of the coastal road. The way was lined with tavernas and other eateries on one side, and the gulf on the other. Boats hitched to the harbor-side sidewalk—a wide, flat grey ribbon, dotted every few feet with charming lamp posts, wooden bench seats with rust-chewed hardware, and the occasional garbage can—bobbed and swayed as the tide danced to the moon’s silent dog whistle. Each of the eateries occupied the bottom floor of an apartment building. With these views the residences couldn’t be anything more than high dollar, although the exterior walls were on the low end of fancy, and the awnings—Greeks loved their awnings—were a few decades newer than the Parthenon. Greeks who had money liked to pretend they didn’t have money, the way people back home who lived in trailer parks liked to wear designer sunglasses and carry Louis Vuitton bags. Never let it be said that Americans don’t know how to prioritize. Designer goods are our right.
Severed Penis Guy, whose real name turned out to be Petros Fridas, lived halfway down the city block in a pale yellow apartment building. The ground floor taverna was one giant washing machine that existed to clean grubby money. I knew this because Xander lobbed a text message into the backseat. He wouldn’t allow me in the front, after an episode where I switched his music. Xander was hopelessly devoted to Rembetika, and I had declared the tinny screeching as noise pollution.
On the other side of midnight, Volos was slowly losing steam. Summer meant schools were out and tourists were still pouring into town. They were at least a month away from bubbling out of the airports, the train stations, the highways of their homelands, and trickling back into their houses. Tonight—well, this morning—they were stumbling to their hotel rooms, while Greeks straggled back to their cars in search of bouzoukia and discotheques. The main difference between the two was the music. The former featured live bands; the latter employed a DJ.
Anyway, they were bleeding away from the promenade, leaving Xander and I to figure out the best way into the Fridas ap
artment. The main door was stuck in the side of the building, but it required either a key or some benevolent soul to push the buzzer and unlock the sucker from inside. We didn’t know anyone who lived here—
Xander pushed one of the lighted buttons on the panel.
A moment later a woman’s static-speckled voice asked who was there. Xander said nothing. Laughter crackled out. The buzzer buzzed. Xander turned the handle and opened the door. From the way he was standing it was obvious he expected me to go first.
“Girlfriend?”
He shook his head.
“Lover? Paramour? Booty call?”
He shrugged. The light in his dark eyes suggested maybe, but he wasn’t talking. Aunt Rita had told me there were no women—or men—and that as far as she knew he lived like a monk. I wasn’t buying it. Men who looked like Xander didn’t go without company for long.
Something unidentifiable skittered through me, leaving a small hollow feeling in its path. The word Hmph! sprang to mind.
“Let’s go,” I whispered, slapping biology aside. Not that I had any real clue where we were going or what we were looking for. I was relying on the old know-it-when-I-see-it.
We wended our way upstairs to the penthouse. It struck me that this was the second time I’d gone snooping through a dead man’s home (although Cookie had only been faking death at the time, as an audition for when he became really dead a couple of days later). That, too, had been a penthouse apartment, although this one seemed higher dollar. The lack of garbage, hulking like paper spiders in the corners, suggested that either the inhabitants of this building were cleaner or they employed a janitor. When we came to the dead man’s door, we discovered the police had marked it with a yellow tape X, one that told us we could not pass.
Xander did some kind of henchman spell on the door, involving a lock pick, and the door swung open. Not too many days ago I’d picked Melas’s door, but it had taken me several more minutes and a YouTube video or two to figure it out. Xander had perfected the art of breaking and entering. Probably he had more experience.
We ducked into the apartment.
Fridas lived alone. Word on the street—okay, the Internet; I Googled on the way over—was that he was a bachelor and a mama’s boy. He had a steady stream of girlfriends, but none of them had earned the privilege of moving in for more than a night or two at a time. Wherever the latest woman was grieving, it wasn’t here.