by Alex A King
“You don’t know which one of them is your sheep?”
“Of course I know! It is my sheep!”
Cripes. This was going to take some time. I could feel eternity butting into my day. “So, go get your sheep and take it home.”
He stomped down to the paddock, jumped the fence, waded through the sea of sheep. When I had decided we’d be here forever, he crouched down and cupped a ewe’s face and shouted, “I found her!”
“That is my sheep,” came a voice from the hut behind us. “We are in love.”
“You’re a sick man,” I said.
“You do not understand our love!”
He was wrong, I knew all about loving sheep … in souvlaki. Chunks of lamb smothered in tzatziki, topped with feta crumbles, onions, and tomatoes, all wrapped in a warm pita …
My stomach launched a protest. It was empty and it wasn’t going to stand for that nonsense.
“You want to grab a souvlaki when we’re done here?” I asked Aunt Rita.
“Sounds good,” she said. “You buying?”
“I’m buying.”
George scooped up his sheep—identical to the others—and deposited her on his side of the fence.
“And you call me sick,” he said. “Who eats sheep?”
“Who is eating sheep?” the man in the house called out.
“These two,” George said. “Can you believe it?”
The hut’s door flew open. Yiannis poked his head into the sunshine. “You are a monster. Only monsters eat sheep. Sheep are not for eating.”
“What do you do with your sheep if you don’t eat them?” He opened his mouth. My hand shot up to stop him. “Forget it,” I said. “I really don’t want to know. You two should form a club or something.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” George said. “We could have T-shirts.”
* * *
WE LEFT the sickos to their sheep and got the souvlaki to go. I bought one extra.
“Hungry?” my aunt asked, eyeing the foil-wrapped roll.
“It’s for a friend.”
I had Aunt Rita drive us to Penka’s stoop. The Bulgarian was counting change into a well-heeled woman’s hand. The woman jumped when she saw us walking their way.
“Shame on you,” my aunt said. “Why you buy your pills from Baby Dimitri?”
“Your guys are charging too much,” the woman said. “These are tough times.”
Aunt Rita rolled her eyes at me. “Don’t listen to her, she’s a millionaire.”
“Yes, and I intend to stay one!” She stalked away in a swirl of skirts and the familiar tapping of high heels on concrete.
“What did she buy?” Aunt Rita asked Penka.
“Is confidential.”
I couldn’t stuff the laugh back down. “You know you’re a drug dealer, not a doctor, right?”
“Bah! What do I care about who buys what? Fentanyl. She buy Fentanyl.”
My aunt turned to me. “Now we have a problem because I know we did not raise our prices.”
“Baboulas is away so the cats are playing?”
“I don’t know what that means, but I think they think they can take advantage of Mama being locked up. Come, we have to go.”
I handed Penka the souvlaki. “Lots of tomato and cheese.”
“What is this for?”
“It’s either a bribe or a payment.”
“At least you are honest. For what?”
“I’m curious if you’ve seen a guy around with an eagle on his shoulder.”
“Look at the beach. Every day I see men with eagles on shoulder, on back, on chest, on legs. Everybody has tattoo. Is tacky.”
“I don’t have one.” My gaze slid to Aunt Rita, who had an anchor on her forearm. A remnant of her time in the army, back when she was a full-time man. She told me she’d joined because she dug sailors.
“Tattoo is not tacky. Is tacky that everybody has one. So common. Want to see mine?”
Before I could say “No” she’d bent over, flashing a mile of Cyrillic lettering, entwined with painful-looking thorns.
Aunt Rita winced.
I squinted at the letters. “What does it say?”
“Is Bulgarian saying. ‘Big leek.’ “
The sixth grade part of my brain translated the words into English, substituting that second ‘e’ for an ‘a.’ A tiny laugh bubbled out. I tried covering it up with a question. “What does it mean?”
“So what. Big deal. Nobody care. I have another one on the front.” She jerked down the neck of her tank top, nearly knocking our eyes out. “This one says, ‘My lighthouse hurts.’ “
“You have a lighthouse back in Bulgaria?”
“No. It means I do not give fuck.”
“The eagle,” I said, remembering why I’d brought Penka souvlaki.
“What eagle?”
“The man with the eagle. It’s a real eagle that sits on his shoulders.”
“Greeks are crazy,” she said. “Why would you want animal shitting down your back?”
“For what it’s worth, I don’t think he’s completely sane.”
“What he do?”
“Killed some people. His brother, father, a few others.”
“Same-old story,” she said. “People like him in Bulgaria, too.”
“Have you seen him, heard of him, anything?”
“I would remember if I see man with eagle on shoulder.”
That was true. Some things you don’t forget.
She glanced around. “Okay,” she said. “I see him now.”
Everything froze except my mouth. “You see him … now? Where?”
“Behind you, on beach.”
Aunt Rita and I swung around. Sure enough, Periphas Dogas was leaning against a streetlight, feeding his bird an ice cream. He was openly watching us.
“Is ice cream safe for birds?” I asked.
“Who knows?” my aunt said.
“Google. Google knows everything. I’m going to talk to him.” He was a killer, yeah, but this was broad daylight and he was surrounded by sunbathers and other assorted tourists. “Call Melas and tell him Periphas is here.”
I’d lost him before. I wasn’t about to screw up a second time.
“You can’t—“ my aunt started, but her voice was lost behind the bored roar of an oncoming bus. I darted across the street between traffic.
When I got there, the man and the bird were gone. All that was left of them was ice cream melting in a warm puddle.
Chapter 19
NOT FIVE MINUTES LATER, three cop cars screeched to a stop across from Penka’s stoop. Melas, Stained Shirt, and two other uniforms.
“Where is he?” Melas asked. The wide expanse above his brows was creased like he’d taken up forehead origami. This particular piece was called An American Pain in My Greek Butt.
I tried not to look pathetic. I mean, the guy had been standing directly across the road from me, but somewhere between here and there—a whole twenty feet maybe—I’d lost him. How does that happen? Understandable if you’re hunting, say, one of the Davids—Copperfield or Blaine—but Periphas was some criminal kook with an eagle. How could a guy disappear that quickly with a big bird on his shoulder? I had searched the beach, looked both ways along the road, then flitted back to roost with my aunt and Penka.
“Gone?”
“Yeah, I figured that. Where did he go?”
Ten seconds and he was already infuriating me. He was dangling bait and I bit.
“If I knew that I’d be there, wouldn’t I?”
“Rita said you went to talk to him.”
Aunt Rita looked at me and shrugged.
My hands knew the drill. They moved into position, on my hips. “Yeah, so?”
“Not a fast learner, are you? I figured the whole Baptist thing would have make you think.” He thunked his knuckle on my forehead. I slapped his hand away.
“It’s a public place. He was hanging out, watching us.”
“What about your ento
urage? They see where he went?”
My mouth dropped open. I’d forgotten about them. Sure enough, they were all parked further down the road.
Melas pointed out the cars to the uniformed cops. They sauntered off in the direction of the parked assassins, who were casually slouched behind their steering wheels, trying to look as though they didn’t kill for cash. Except Donk, who was hanging out car window watching everything, tongue lolling, hair waving. He reminded me of a big, goofy dog. He pulled his head in fast when he realized one of the cops was gunning for him.
“What was he doing?” Melas wanted to know.
“Periphas? Feeding ice cream to his eagle.”
The V between his eyes deepened. “Is it safe to feed ice cream to a bird?”
“That’s what I said! Aunt Rita was going to Google it for me.”
He looked at my aunt.
“I’m still looking,” she said. “I got distracted by an ad for fake nipples. Those things are amazing,”
“Jesus,” Melas muttered. His gaze slid sideways, back to me. “So he was feeding his bird. What else? Was he armed?”
“I couldn’t tell. He was leaning against that lamppost.” I pointed to where Periphas and his bird had been a few minutes ago. “A bus cut in front of me, and by the time I reached the other side he was gone.”
“You’d think a guy with an eagle on his shoulder wouldn’t be easy to lose.”
“Maybe he jumped into a car and zipped off while I was crossing the road. It’s not exactly quiet here today. There’s a lot of traffic.”
“Any more questions, Nikos? You know where to find us,” Aunt Rita said. “We’ve got somewhere to be.”
Melas raised an eyebrow in my direction.
“Don’t ask me,” I said. “She drove. I’m along for the drive. Gotta love this freshly baked air.”
“I know where you live if we’ve got questions,” he told me.
“Not living there—staying. Temporarily. Like a hotel.”
“Some people wind up living in hotels.”
“Not me. I’ve got a perfectly nice home.”
“Maybe you’ll show me someday soon.”
Was he serious? Pulling my leg? I couldn’t tell. All this weirdness was messing with my radar. And I still didn’t know if it was okay for birds to eat ice cream. I wanted to say they had problems with lactose, but maybe that was the Japanese.
I said goodbye to Penka, who was glaring at the cops, enough pressure behind her gaze to rips holes through them. Cops were bad for business, even when their attention was focused on someone else.
“Thank you,” she said to me. “I love police. Next time bring more. Maybe they kill all my business.”
* * *
AUNT RITA STOPPED three blocks up. Same stretch of beach, different crowd. No swimmers here—this was where the dedicated coffee drinkers hung out. And they were hanging out, enjoying the bleached starkness of the day, frappes close at hand, cigarettes poised between their fingers. Greece had the highest consumption of tobacco in the European Union. There were laws, sure, but they said nothing about smoking in public places if they weren’t enclosed by at least two walls. Here there were no walls, but the umbrellas kept the low gray cloud in captivity.
“That is our dealer.” Aunt Rita nodded to a table, where a woman was playing games on her phone. She had the requisite frappe and an ashtray, where a cigarette sat slowly dying. The woman lifted her head. A religious epithet formed on her glossed-up lips. She was my age, or within a stone’s throw of it. Stick-straight hair that had chosen to lie flat after repeated threats with a straightening iron. She had one of those ombre dye jobs—dark brown at the roots, blond at the ends—that was trendy a couple of summers ago. She wasn’t a fashion victim, but she was walking down a dark alley alone after midnight. It wouldn’t be long before Vogue leaped out from behind a dumpster and clubbed her over the head.
“Rita,” she called out, swapping the phone for the cigarette. She took a long drag then swapped again, adding her contribution to the cloud fund as she blew out a long plume of smoke. “You want Percocet? For you it’s free.” She laughed at her own h-i-l-a-r-i-o-u-s joke.
“Oh, to me you give it away? Because I heard prices went up.”
Two palms up. “I sell the stuff, I don’t set the prices. Got a problem with that, talk to Varvara.”
“That louse. I am going to speak with her. In the meantime, prices go back to normal.”
The dealer shrugged. “No problem.” She looked up at me. “Are you on Facebook? I need more lives in Candy Crush. The malakas beat me again.”
“Uh, I guess,” I said. She looked at me expectantly. “Katerina Makris,” I said. Ten seconds later I had another pending friend request. Her name was Tina Pappas and she was queen of the selfies. Seriously, the woman had over a thousand pictures saved to her albums, all of them self-inflicted, by the looks of it. Sometimes there were other victims with her, but hers was always the primary mug shot.
“Hit me with it,” she said. I gave her another Candy Crush life, and she sighed the way I imagined a heroin addict did when they shot up. Then she grinned at my aunt. “How is Xander? I haven’t seen him around lately.”
Aunt Rita didn’t say anything about his current status, which was missing. She sighed and said, “Gorgeous. I could eat that man on a spoon.”
Tina’s attention slid to me. “What about you?”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
Tina shook with laughter. “Really? You haven’t noticed that Xander is a god? Are you human?” She clicked her fingers and leaned forward. She looked me straight in the eyes. “Are you a lesbian?”
“Busy is what she is,” Aunt Rita said. “Baboulas has big plans for her and they do not include Xander.”
“You and Xander?” I asked Tina. She shrugged, one-shouldered.
“I wish,” she said. “Maybe someday.”
* * *
THIS TIME we were headed inland. Aunt Rita was playing an old song from the 80s. Someone was going crazy in the Seychelles, and she was doing it with a voice like fingernails down a cheese grater. I suppose if a person had to go crazy tropical islands would be the place to do it.
Aunt Rita had given me the low-down on Varvara, who was one of the Family’s suppliers. The pills went to Varvara, who dished them out to the dealers. Then the machine slipped into reverse to send the money back up the chain to the Family’s pockets.
The assassins and Cleopatra were following. She must have had a life outside the stalking business, because she was never around in the mornings.
“Does my face look different to you?” Aunt Rita asked.
“Different how?”
“Different.”
That covered a lot of territory, some of it hidden behind her Yoko Oh-no sunglasses. “Did you get something done?”
“Virgin Mary, no! I will never let a doctor cut up my face. What if they put the pieces back together wrong? What if they mix them up? It could happen. I know a woman who looks like Kyrios Patata Kefalas. Her eyes don’t match, and now she has a mustache.”
She was talking about Mr. Potato Head.
“I don’t think you have to worry about the mustache, seeing as how you already shave.”
“True. But what if they lose my nose? Remember Michael Jackson? Ay-yi-yi.” She patted me on the nose. “So do you see how I look different?”
I hated to admit defeat, but … “I’m an idiot, so you’ll have to tell me.”
“Botox!” she said proudly.
“Didn’t you have to go to a doctor for that?”
“No! I did it myself. It falls off the back of a medical supply truck and we pick it up. So this time I took a little for myself, to freshen up.”
“You stabbed your own face with a needle?” I felt my face shift into the ‘horrified’ position.
“Sure, why not?”
We stopped at a red light. She raised her glasses. Sure enough, the skin around her eyes was baby smooth. Her eyebrows wer
e the sharp edges of a coffee table. Her forehead was where things went wrong. The flat half fell off a ledge, landing on four lanes of heavy traffic.
“Your forehead is uneven.”
She dropped the glasses back into position. “I know. There wasn’t enough Botox. Got to wait for another delivery. Until then, I’m going with hats and big sunglasses. What do you think?”
“That should work.”
She didn’t look too worried. Half of her couldn’t. “Do you think so?”
“I didn’t even notice until you took the glasses off.”
“So, you’re saying keep the glasses on? What about at night?”
“Can’t you buy some more Botox?” Everything I knew about Botox came from the gossip columns. If someone looked unnaturally surprised, while maintaining a forehead flatter than my chest at thirteen, then chances were they’d been Botoxed.
“What for? I already get it for free.”
“I thought you could even things up.”
“Is it that bad?”
“No.” Not that bad—but bad enough.
“Because I have some of those hats with the little veils.”
“You’re fine—honestly. Just …” I eyed her sideways. “… keep the glasses on for now.”
Aunt Rita turned right, then right again. The Barbie car crept up a suburban street, a mixture of one and two-story houses. It looked middle class Greek, with its mature trees and shrubbery, and late model cars parked along the streets. The road was hardly cracked at all. At the front of each property was a fence. Or a wall. Really, it was more of a wall-fence. Three feet of stucco wall topped with two feet of iron fence. Almost nobody in Greece—at least in this area, it seemed like—had driveways. She pulled up to the curb. Cut the engine. The music died an instant death.
“Varvara is going to shit her pants.” She reached over, popped the glove box. A handgun and silencer tumbled out.
“Are you going to shoot her?”
She screwed on the silencer, slapped it into my hand. “I’m not shooting anyone. You are. But only in the leg or something. You need to scare her, not kill her.
“What?” I squawked, shoving the gun back at her. “I’m not shooting anyone unless my life is in immediate danger.”