by Alex A King
I chewed on my bottom lip for a moment, calculating what, and how much, I could say.
“I saw Rabbit.”
“I know. Your name was in the sign-in book.”
“No. At the compound.”
“Shit.” His expression turned several shades grimmer. “Shit. Why are you telling me this?”
“A problem shared is a problem halved?”
“What?”
“It’s an expression.”
“In America, maybe. Here it’s a problem doubled, especially if you share it with a cop.”
“Well excuse me,” I said. “It just came out. You were being so nice to me and all, I thought I should share something.”
He eyed me suspiciously. “What do you want?”
“Nothing.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Quit nagging me about going home. And stop getting in my way. I’m going to keep hunting for my father, with or without your help.”
“I could put you in a cell and keep you there.”
“You could try. I’d chew my way out.”
He shook his head and laughed. “I believe you.” His gaze slid left. “Jesus,” he muttered. His mother was moving this way, cutting across the village square, a small plate in each hand. She sat both in the middle of the table and dusted her hands together. “You eat sweets, eat homemade.” She shot death rays at the proprietor, a small, round man with a white apron and a friendly countenance. If pushed to it, I’d choose his sweets over hers; there was a high probability of poison or truth serum in her offering. To me she said, “Come back to see me again soon. We will have coffee, us women.”
“Okay,” I stammered. And I would, as soon as I wanted to self-flagellate, which would probably be soon.
She stamped a kiss on her son’s head then hurried off again, headed toward the church.
Melas drove me back to the compound. The black metal birds were still outside the gates, pilots waiting on their cargo. There were no other signs of life, except the security guard, who was sitting in the guardhouse, biting his nails.
It was a bad habit—one I sometimes shared—but at least he wasn’t spanking the Greek monkey, like his predecessor.
“What’s happening?” I asked him. Melas was at my side. I had a feeling he wouldn’t peel off until the other guys packed up their high-tech toys and buzzed away.
“They are searching the place.”
“The whole place?”
He nodded. “They are talking to everybody.”
“What did they ask you?”
“Katerina—“ Melas started.
I shot him a not-now look.
“The wanted to know about a man called Dogas.”
“What did you tell them?”
He shrugged, two palms up. “Nothing. I don’t know any Dogas. They showed me a picture, but I have never seen him before.”
If he was lying he was good at it. Probably it was genetic.
“And they asked if Baboulas has a helicopter. I said I know nothing about a helicopter. I stand at the gate all day, and all I see are cars, motorcycles, and sometimes farm animals. But no helicopters except these ones.”
He went back to his post, leaving me to deal with Melas.
“Want me to come with you?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I can do this.”
“Do what? Lie to the police?”
“Whatever it takes,” I said.
Was that true, would I do whatever it took, even if it was wrong?
And who would be responsible for the measuring?
Grandma was sitting in a chair near the pool when I stomped into the courtyard. Her chin jerked up the moment she spotted me. The meathead cop swiveled his upper half to follow her line of sight.
He jumped up as I closed in on them. “Who are you? You the granddaughter?”
The courtyard was silent and still even though every corner seemed to be filled with small clusters of law enforcement and family. Takis was nearby with two cops. His arms were folded, his expression closed. He was mouthing off about steroids and their effects on male genitalia. From the looks on their faces he wasn’t making friends. By the pool, Stavros was sweating as a three-man clump loomed over him. His mouth was moving, his expression playing dumb.
Xander was nowhere in sight. I wondered if Grandma had stashed him away somewhere as soon as trouble dropped out of the sky. Did they know about the underground hideaway and control room? What about the armory, such as it was? I mentally crossed my fingers that Grandma’s secrets were safe. Somewhere along the way, the good guys had become the enemy. They were an impediment, cluttering the path between my and my goal. I never assumed, for ever a moment, that they could help me get to Dad—not these guys, at least.
“I’m Katerina Makris,” I told the cop. I planted myself close to Grandma. “You okay?” I asked her.
“They are doing their jobs,” she said. “Apparently they lost a prisoner.”
“Stelios Dogas was not lost,” the cop said. “Someone broke him out.”
“It was probably aliens,” I said. “It usually is.”
The cop twitched. “It wasn’t aliens.”
“Are you sure? Because, man, aliens are pretty tricky with their spaceships and their beams of light.”
He was looking at me like I should be the filling in a straitjacket burrito. That was kind of the idea. I wanted him to think I was an airhead, this side of nuts.
“That your yellow car out front, the VW?”
“I don’t own it.”
“You drive it?”
“Never on Sunday.”
If he got the move reference it didn’t show. “What about on the other days?”
“Only on some of them.”
“You ever drive it to Larissa?”
“Not even once.” That, at least, was true.
“Because a Katerina Makris signed into the Larissa prison on the day the prisoner escaped.”
“I was there, but I didn’t drive.”
“Did you record a prison break while you were there?”
“No.”
“Why were you at the prison?”
“I like convicts.” I waggled my eyebrows suggestively.
“You’re sick,” he told me. “You should get help.”
“I know,” I said melodramatically. “That’s what everyone says.”
He cleared his throat. “Did you meet with Stelios Dogas while you were there?”
“This is going to go really slowly if you keep asking me questions when you already know the answers.”
“There’s more to asking questions than getting answers.”
I did a ditzy head wag. “Like … what?”
“The truth.”
Should I fluff my hair? I wasn’t good at these things. Probably my hair was too sweaty for a real fluffing. “Sure, I met with Dogas.”
He stared at me. I stared back. It looked like he was waiting on extra words to roll out of my mouth. Too bad. If he wanted words, he’d have to work for them. His whole body was tense. Any tighter and bits would start snapping off.
“What did you see him about?”
“Um … It’s kind of embarrassing.” God, gods, and the other deities would have to forgive me for the lie I was about to tell. Any other time I would tell the cops I was hunting down a lead on Dad, but if I told them the truth it would dunk Grandma in the boiling water. The last thing I wanted to do was give them a motive for her springing Dogas from the clink. “My plan was to make him fall in love with me so we could get married. Then when he died—and he’s so old it’s bound to be soon, am I right?—I’d have him stuffed and sell him to a crime museum.”
Grandma was watching the sky, her face as unyielding as a brick.
He straightened up. “The crime museum?”
“Uh huh. I think it’s in Kentucky or something. They’re always looking to acquire new pieces. They pay big, too.”
“My Virgin Mary,” he said. “You Americans are sick.”
There was movement at the arch. A gang of suited men—government suits, zero shine—strode into the courtyard as though their pockets were stuffed with bits of paper that gave them permission to do bad things. They were golems: take away their paper they’d be unarmed.
They stopped for a moment, scanned the courtyard, then one of them pointed and nodded in our direction.
My flight-or-fight kicked in, and then stood down when it realized I was screwed.
“Find the brother?” one of them asked the cop interrogating Grandma and me.
“Not yet.”
Brother? Whose brother?
“Keep looking.”
He reached into his coat then presented Grandma with a piece of paper. She looked it over, no expression to indicate whether it was good news or bad.
Then she stood, without so much as a groan. She was steel, and she wanted them to know they would crawl before she would bend. “Katerina,” she said. “Tell your aunt to call my lawyers.”
The men didn’t cuff her, which was the best I could say. They formed a loose square around her and marched her toward the arch.
“You can’t take her!” I yelled at them. “What right do you have? Where are you taking her?”
“It will be okay,” Grandma said over her shoulder. But she didn’t look okay to me. What she looked like was a little old lady. My grandmother.
“Police brutality,” I said. I whipped out my phone and began filming. One of the meatheads broke off the pack and snatched the phone out of my hands. He flung it across the courtyard.
“You can’t do that!” I shouted.
“Katerina, stay,” Grandma said. “The family needs you here. Be here for them.”
* * *
I STOOD watch in the courtyard, arms folded. I stood until the sun skulked away and the cops went chasing after it in their helicopters. Family came and went, all of them with questions and not nearly enough answers.
“Katerina,” Marika said. “Come. Eat. There is nothing you can do right now.”
“They said something about a brother. Rabbit’s brother, I presume.”
The night was warm but it was taking tiny cool bites. The answer popped in my head like a fragile bubble.
“Papou. He’s the brother, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
“Probably, like me, they thought you knew.”
I shook my head. “I didn’t know.”
“You are one of us, so sometimes we forget you don’t know all the things we have always known.”
That made sense. “What do I do now? Who’s in charge?”
“I think you are.”
Yikes. There was no way I could run the Family until Grandma’s lawyers jimmied the door, greased the wheels of justice.
“Okay,” I said. “I want to see Aunt Rita, Papou, Xander, Takis, and Stavros in the kitchen as soon as possible. “And anyone else Grandma would call during an emergency.”
“Baboulas would not say as soon as possible. She would say right now.”
“Right now, then.”
“I will tell Takis to find them.”
* * *
NO PAPOU. No Xander. It was Aunt Rita, Takis, and Stavros gathered around Grandma’s kitchen table.
“I have been doing this almost my whole life,” Takis was saying, when I slouched into the kitchen and boosted my butt onto the kitchen counter. I didn’t have the heart to fill Grandma’s seat. “Being a mobster is what I do. This is my profession. So why do they treat me like I am going to talk if they ask a few uncomfortable questions? I know how to keep quiet. If you talk in this business you die. I don’t want to die, I have a family. Okay, so sometimes my wife makes me wish I was dead, but not real death, more like vacation death. Go to an island, drink fruity drinks with little umbrellas and cherries, get a massage from a pretty girl, spear some fish. Maybe try sushi.”
“I make sushi,” Stavros said.
“You? Ha!”
“My sushi is good,” he mumbled.
“Sushi,” Aunt Rita said. “Who can eat raw fish?”
“You eat taramasalata,” I said.
“That’s different. It’s eggs.”
“Raw fish eggs,” I pointed out.
She shrugged.
“I love sushi,” I told Stavros.
He beamed. “I will make sushi for you.”
I shot him a grateful smile before getting down to business. Arms folded I said, “Where are Papou and Xander?”
Takis looked at Stavros, who looked at Aunt Rita. They all shrugged.
“We don’t know,” Takis said.
“They’re not in compound,” my aunt said. “We checked everywhere after the police left.”
“You called the lawyers?”
“Before Mama even left the grounds.”
Aunt Rita was on top of things. She should be the one running this sketchy three-ring circus. Yet everyone was looking to me like I could perform magic.
Ask Tomas: I couldn’t even belch the alphabet—any alphabet.
“Have we heard anything from them?” I asked.
“Not yet,” she said. “They’ll be contacting you as soon as they hear something.”
“Me? Why me?”
“They know Mama expects you to take over if we can’t find Michail.”
“I’m not taking over anything.” Everyone stared. They didn’t believe me. Maybe something was getting lost in translation again, like, probably, my opinion. “I’m not! This is temporary. As soon as my father turns up I’m going home—with him. Thanks to Grandma I have to get a new job, and a new apartment. I don’t know anything about running a crime syndicate—and I don’t want to.”
Stavros hung his head. “I thought you liked us.”
Oh boy. “I do like you. You’re all my family. But I’m not a criminal. I’m a Greek-American woman who wants a decent job, a great guy, and some kids, someday.”
Takis made a sour face. “She thinks we’re criminals.”
“You’re the mob,” I said. “That’s as criminal as it gets.”
“No family is perfect,” he said.
My aunt though, she was looking at me with sympathy. “I understand. I wanted to be Aliki Vougiouklaki, but she already had the job.”
“Who?”
“She was Greece’s National Star! Our Bardot and Julia Roberts!”
My eye twitched. “Why didn’t you pursue an acting career?”
“My wife wanted me to be a businessman, and my mother wanted me to be a businessman for her. And now here I am, a businesswoman.”
“I want to be a stay-at-home father,” Stavros said.
Laughter blurted out of Takis. “Who wants to do that? Nobody, that’s who. I have four sons and I would rather shove my kolos in a cactus than stay at home with them.”
“I wouldn’t mind,” Stavros said.
“Okay, then I will tell Marika you are her new babysitter.” He pointed at Stavros with his thumb. “This one cannot get a woman, and he’s planning to stay at home with his children? Where is your poutsa? Did somebody cut it off?”
“You’re kind of an asshole,” I told Takis.
He shrugged. “Somebody has to do it.”
Stavros bobbed his head like a sparrow. “He can be very useful during an interrogation, or when we need to hurt somebody.”
This—this was exactly what I was talking about. I couldn’t be in charge of anything where I needed a staff asshole.
“So what’s the plan?” Takis asked.
What was the plan? If there was one no one had told me. And if they expected me to make one, I was too busy freaking out on the inside to plot. Someone else would have to do it.
I said the only thing that made sense to me. “First let’s see what the lawyers say. In the meantime, we look for Papou and Xander.” I pulled the shattered pieces of phone out of my pocket, dumped them on a heap on the
table. “And I really need a new phone.”
“What happened?” Aunt Rita asked.
“Police brutality.” Then a thought popped into my head. “Where is Rabbit?”
Chapter 16
“WE DON’T KNOW,” Aunt Rita said. “If Mama sent him somewhere she didn’t say where.”
“Do you think she had him …?” I slashed my throat with one finger and hoped it translated.
Takis went tst. “Nobody gets whacked around here without me knowing about it.”
I wondered if he was with Papou and Xander. That seemed like the most obvious answer. It made sense for Grandma to banish all three men with a single magic trick; one was an escapee prisoner, one was his brother, and the third man had busted him out of his cell.
“Okay,” I said. “Put the word out that all three of them need to be found. They can stay in hiding if they want, but I want to know where they are.”
The two men took off in different directions, but Aunt Rita hung back.
“You look like you’ve got a question.”
My laugh was on the bitter side. “Dozens. But for tonight I need to know how to get into the cellar.”
“What have you got in mind?”
I jumped off the countertop. “Nothing yet. But I need somewhere to go and think.” And watch, while I was at it. If there was anything to see, I wanted to see it.
“Come, I will show you.”
She led me into the front yard. We stood where the concrete varied almost imperceptibly from its surroundings. Aunt Rita grabbed the one of the knobs on top of the fence and twisted.
“You see it?”
“I see it,” I told her. This spot in the yard was all but hidden from the rest of the compound. Grandma’s garden was where the wild things lived, and most of them were leafy. For all I knew she had a triffid or two. So the odds that a random family member could spot Grandma—or us—taking a quick jaunt down to the control room were limited. Not that they’d talk if they knew … unless they were the Family leak.
The concrete pad sank slowly. The temperature dipped with it. Nature has its own air conditioning—in Greece it’s called subterranean caves.
When it stopped we were standing in the Batcave.
There were no bats in Grandma’s Batcave, but it had electronics out the wahzoo. Rows of computers, a wall of monitors, and a captain’s chair with a big red button nearby, hunched under a plastic cover.