by Alex A King
I gave Donk a nudge with my foot. The poor kid was out. “So now they know, they figured they’d kill me instead of using me for leverage.” I did some fast thinking, trying to swim my way between the sharks in my head. “Who’s next in line?”
“Rita or Kostas, as far as I know. But they don’t want the job, or Baboulas wouldn’t have pinned it on you.”
Uncle Kostas was a stranger. I’d never met him, never knew he existed until this month. I knew precisely nothing about him, except that he was about to become the head of his own Family in Germany.
And Aunt Rita was vocal about not wanting to sit in the captain’s chair.
“Where is Aunt Rita?” I combed the crowd for that blip of fabulosity in the matrix. Just in time to be useful, Takis and Stavros slouched over.
“Cool shotgun,” Takis said. “I don’t think belongs to you.”
“Finders keepers.” Everyone looked at me, puzzled. “It’s … an American thing. It means I found it, I get to keep it.”
“At least until Baboulas gets back, eh?” Takis said.
I repeated my earlier question. “Where’s Aunt Rita? I don’t see her anywhere.”
“How should I know?” Takis asked. “What do I look like, her babysitter?”
I managed to get a grip on my sudden urge to wrap my hands around his scrawny neck and shake. It seemed like bad business to strangle your unofficial sidekick’s husband. Lucky for me, and for Takis, Stavros had something useful to say.
“She’s visiting her children. The ex-wife only allows visitation once a month.”
My heart broke a little for my aunt. I didn’t know a thing about their situation, before or after the divorce, but I had an inkling how much Dad loved me … and how much my mother had loved me before cancer stuck its thumb in her. I could only imagine how it must feel not to have free access to your kids.
But maybe their mother was doing them a favor. This family …
“Thanks,” I mouthed. Stavros gave me a small smile. His outer shell was a goober, but inside he was carrying around a heart of something better than gold.
“What’s better than gold?” I asked.
“Cocaine,” Takis said.
“Diamonds,” Stavros said.
“Women,” Melas said.
Takis scoffed at that. “You only say that because you’re not married.”
Whatever Stavros’s heart was made of I didn’t think it was women, although Takis would probably disagree, the little weasel.
Something caught on the edge of my senses. An anomaly. A sound that didn’t fit into the evening. No one else noticed the call of the eagle overhead. Not until it swooped low, then soared away again, toward Makria.
“Ohmigod,” I said. “That was an eagle! Follow the eagle.”
Melas knew exactly what I was talking about. He leaped back into his cop car and blew up a Category 3 tornado of dirt and stones as he peeled away. The bird was headed toward the main road. Melas must have let the others know what was going on because the sirens split into two groups. The cops followed Melas’s lead, and the ambulance eased on up Grandma’s crude road.
The eagle dipped low, then vanished between the treetops. A moment later, the sirens died. I couldn’t tell if the cars had stopped or a giant wormhole had opened and sucked them inside. Logic dictated the former, but Greece was weird.
Takis planted himself next to me, hands on hips. “What’s with the bird?”
“It belongs to the guy who’s sending us organs. The name is Periphas. Ring any bells?”
There was a long pause while we watched the paramedics load Lazarus onto a gurney.
“Dogas?” he asked.
I nodded. He threw back his head. Laughed. I was glad I gave good joke.
“First the Baptist, now Periphas Dogas? You are cursed.”
Right then that felt true enough.
* * *
THE MOON WAS SLOWLY EMERGING from its dark shell, and the stars were there to watch its coy act. Gardenias had pulled the green covers over their petals for the night. Now it was jasmine’s turn to squirt perfume all over the night. In places it was like stumbling through the mosh pit that was the ground floor at Macy’s. The paramedics had hauled Lazarus away a couple of hours ago; police had come and gone; the family had wandered back to their apartments and various corners of the courtyard. The mood was low-key, the air quiet apart from nature’s bleating and the burble of the fountains.
I heard Melas pull up to the gates then crawl to a stop this side of them. My heart picked up its pace. It was a mash up of desire to hear Periphas was back in his crate and, well, desire.
The day had taken its toll on him. His broad shoulders were slightly stooped and he pushed a hand through his hair like he really wanted it out of his way. He looked more bad night than bad boy.
“Nothing,” Melas said in response to what must have been my curious expression. He pulled out the chair beside me, dropped himself in it. “Sometimes an eagle is just an eagle.”
“Except when it’s not.”
“There was no sign of Periphas or the bird.”
I tugged on the Memories of TV Shows Past. “Not even tire tracks?”
“Too many tire tracks. It’d be like trying to untangle …” His mind wandered off to find a good metaphor but came back empty-handed. “There were a lot. The eagle was probably a coincidence.”
No way was I buying that. “Come on, we both know Periphas Dogas shot Lazarus. Who else is following me around, killing people?”
“Lately? Could be anyone”
I slapped at his arm. He trapped my wrist in his hand. I was already warm, sluggish, but his was a different kind of heat—his made me come alive.
“Let go.”
“Is that what you want?”
“Yes and no.”
His manacle unlocked. His hand fell back to his side.
“The longer you stay the more complicated this gets,” he said. “So what’s the plan, are you taking over the Family? Because to me it looks like you are.”
“Right now it’s a temporary thing, until Grandma gets back.”
“If she doesn’t?”
It was a good question. Too bad I had no good answers. Say they kept Grandma indefinitely, with no one else in the immediate Family who wanted control, what could I do?
Nothing. I was stuck until the cops released Grandma and Dad was found.
I nibbled on a hangnail. What if someone else in the family did want to slide into Grandma’s seat? All I had was her word, and her words were calculated with an engineer’s skill and precision. She used them as levers to move the family into their rightful positions, according to her blueprints. The Makris Family was her pyramid; she was building it to endure. There was no room for error—or for truth, if a lie was the more efficient tool.
“I don’t know.”
* * *
TAKIS DROPPED out of the archway’s shadow. He sauntered over to where I was standing, his face thoughtful, lips gripping a cigarette. We stood there in silence, watching the cop car’s lights jiggle as Melas maneuvered the dirt road. When the lights vanished, he turned to me.
“I hear you are taking Litsa’s boy to the dentist.”
“He asked. I couldn’t say no. What’s with his mother? He said she had a thing.”
“Litsa is Litsa,” he said cryptically. “Baboulas would take me to the dentist, too, when I was small.”
“Your mother didn’t take you?”
Puff, puff, blow. “She died when I was a boy.”
Guilt and sympathy stabbed me in the chest and gut. Here I was thinking Takis was an everyday dick. In reality, he was an everyday dick who had lost his mother, same as me. At least I’d had my whole childhood with Mom. Takis had been raised crooked by the mob.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “What happened?”
“She died taking out the garbage.”
“Drug dealers? Henchmen?”
“No,” he said, looking at me like I was nuts. “She
died taking out the garbage in winter. Whoosh! on the ice. Then she was hit by tsiganes selling watermelons. The pickup truck stopped quickly and watermelons crushed her head. I saw the whole thing while I was sitting on the front step, smoking.”
“I thought you were a kid.”
“I was a kid. I was seven.”
“And you were smoking?”
Two palms up, cigarette trapped between his teeth. “What?”
I shook my head. “Never mind. I’m sorry about your mother.”
“That’s life,” he said.
* * *
THE DENTIST WAS IN VOLOS. It was a neat, clean building in one of the nicer parts of the city, surrounded by upscale shops, businesses, and apartments with bold-colored awnings hunched over the windows. There was a grinning decal goat on the window, huge, sparkling teeth chewing a toothbrush.
The rest of the sign told me the dentist’s name was Antonis Katsikas and he specialized in pediatric dentistry.
Tony Goats.
How about that, he really was a dentist. Take that, Detective Nikos Melas, oh ye of little-to-no faith. He’d tried to convince me that Dad’s old gang was made up of dirt bags and criminals. When I’d spoken to them at the wake of Dad’s former best friend, they’d all come across as mostly normal older guys with regular jobs.
I opened the door, scooted Tomas inside, tried to ignore the universal odor of dental clinics, a scent that, if pushed to describe it, I could only think of as synthetic mint green. As far as dental clinics went this one was swanky. Lots of toys for kids. A couple of widescreen TVs blasting Disney movies dubbed in Greek. O Vasilis ton Liondarion, I noted, didn’t have the same ring as The Lion King.
The receptionist had one tiny smile and she gave it to Tomas. She was a low-key kind of pretty, hair in a sedate low ponytail that curled over one shoulder like a ferret. She was skating toward her mid-thirties, and she didn’t look happy about the journey so far.
Dentists here did things differently. There was no mountain of paperwork or myopic scanning of the insurance card—there wasn’t an insurance card, period. Yeah, Greece had private insurance for healthcare, but who needed it when good healthcare was free and they had God and folk medicine as backup plans?
The waiting room door opened. Tony Goats ushered out a girl and her mother. He beamed when he spotted me hovering near Tomas. Tony Goats was Dad’s vintage. Like Dad, his hair was still black, except for a light frosting of gray at the temples. In his pristine, white coat he reminded me of an actor playing the role of Professional Dentist in a commercial hawking toothbrushes.
“Little Katerina Makris!” he cheered. “This handsome young man can’t be yours!” He grabbed me by the shoulders, kissed both my cheeks.
Tomas giggled. “She’s my friend and cousin.”
“Litsa couldn’t be here,” I told the dentist.
“She never can,” he mouthed over the boy’s head. Then out loud he said, “Tell me, any news of your father?” He steered us both through the open doorway, down a short hallway, and into a consultation room. It was outfitted with a big chair, lots of lights, and an overabundance of cutesy animals on the walls.
It was like being assaulted by Disney.
“Not yet. I keep hoping …”
“Mikey’s a survivor,” he said. “He could eat his way out of an oubliette.”
I tilted my head. My only frame of reference for oubliettes was Labyrinth. I was having trouble reconciling Dad with Hoggle. Or was I Hoggle?
More importantly, who was Jareth the Goblin King?
“One time, we buried your father and Cookie alive, did he tell you?”
Cookie was Dad’s former best friend. He’d faked his death over and over, until the Baptist finally made it stick; the place he’d made it stick was in Grandma’s swimming pool.
“No, he never said much about his life here, except when it was disguised as a fairy tale.”
He pulled over the wheeled stool, perched on its edge, hands resting on his knees. The moment he started talking, they started moving with him, the way appendages always did with Greeks.
“We were boys … fourteen, maybe fifteen … and we had a test in school. History. Mikey and Cookie, they didn’t want to take the test—and they said so in class. The teacher, he was an old goat. In hindsight a good man, but in those days he was one more nemesis, another person who wanted us to be children when we knew we were already men.” He chuckled quietly. “Young people are stupid,” he told Tomas. “I know because I remember being young. Our teacher, he told the guys that unless they were dead they had to take the test. Well, what do you think your father and Cookie did?”
“Faked their deaths?” I said.
His head bobbed with the enthusiasm of a parrot spying an oncoming cracker. “They faked their deaths. The rest of us, we helped them do it. But we were stupid—it was our first time staging a death. We forgot the part where there were supposed to be bodies, and a coroner, and all those things that come naturally with death.”
Tomas was wide-eyed, the little sponge.
“Why don’t you go into the waiting room and, uh, watch a movie or something,” I suggested.
“No. This is more fun than cartoons.”
I considered pressing the issue, but he was a Makris; the poor kid was doomed to a life of crime. He may as well learn how not to stage a death, which was where this conversation was headed.
Tony Goats patted him on the arm, then made a fist in the air. “You’ll be fine, won’t you, Tomas? You’re strong like your father.”
The boy’s head bobbed. Tony continued where he’d left off.
“What we did was jump straight to the burial. We snuck into the cemetery in the middle of the night carrying two coffins we had stolen—“
Both of my brows took a fast hike north. “You stole coffins?”
“In those days we stole a lot of things. Those, at least, we intended to give back.”
Oh. Well. That was different, wasn’t it?
(No. No, it wasn’t.)
“We took hose, drilled a hole in each coffin—“
That’s exactly what I was meant. Secondhand coffins couldn’t be a legitimate thing. Once you’ve put something—or someone—in one, there’s no room for anyone else, no matter if it empties out along the way. No one wants death cooties, not even the dead. And not their living relatives. Maybe in other countries, if you hated your deceased family member, but not in Greece. It wouldn’t be … done. The gossip would rub out every other act of benevolence for the rest of your life. There goes the cheapskate who put their grandfather to rest in a refurbished coffin. Where is the respect? Nowhere, that is where.
“—Then we dropped the coffins into holes that had already been excavated. And lucky for us, too, because we were lazy when it came to hard labor in those days. You wouldn’t know it to look at Jimmy now—all he does is run, run, run. But back then? We were lazy kids. We only did physical things that were fun. So we lowered the coffins, and then Mikey and Cookie jumped down and slammed the lids on themselves. Then we covered them up.
“The next day—the day of the test—the rest of us went to school, and our teacher asked, ‘Where is Mikey, where is Cookie?’ and we told him they were dead. He didn’t believe a word of it, probably because he knew us.” Tony Goats chuckled. “He walked us from each one of our houses to the other—not everyone had a phone in those days—and asked if they heard about the very convenient deaths. Our parents had not, and to Baboulas and Cookie’s parents it was a huge surprise. They made us eat wood—fourteen-year-old boys!—and made us take them to the cemetery to get Mikey and Cookie.
Eating wood sounded cruel, unless you’re a beaver, until I remembered it meant getting corporal punishment of the spanking kind.
“We got there and they were gone! The graves were empty, the coffins lying at the bottom still with their breathing tubes.” He leaned forward, whispered, “But there was no sign of Mikey and Cookie.”
“Where did they go?”
Tomas asked. The little guy was entranced. Okay, so I was, too.
“We didn’t know it at first—not until after we found them—but it was that malakas Pistof—the man you knew—“ He nodded to me. “—as the Baptist. He had followed us out there and saw what we did. So he blocked the breathing tubes with sticks and leaves. Mikey and Cookie had no choice but to dig their way out. It was that or die. And they weren’t about to die, so they had to dig. When they got out, Pistof was gone and they were filthy, so they walked to the beach in Agria. They spent the day swimming, picking up girls, and then they ran into one of the girls we knew from school—“
“Was it Dina?” I asked.
He looked surprised. “Dina, yes. How did you guess?”
“We’ve met. She has issues.”
His eyebrows rose. “Still?”
I was this close to telling him about the Dad shrine that was her entire house—minus the bathroom—when I decided Dina’s quirks were her own private business. I didn’t like her much, but she’d pulled through for me in a tough situation.
“Still,” was all I said. His stare was loaded with expectation, his breath bated, but I wasn’t spilling. Eventually he realized that I wasn’t Greek all the way to the bone, so he moved on.
“Dina took them home, fed them, washed their clothes properly. Meanwhile everyone was looking for the boys.” He hooked one foot on the stool’s footrest, jiggled his knee. “When normal parents are looking for their children there is chaos. When mob families are searching for their children they take guns, hunt down their enemies, accuse them of kidnapping. The two families weakened the already-weak peace that day. I suspect that is why now Baboulas hasn’t marched on her enemies and flattened them.”
That did explain a lot. It was the whole boy-crying-wolf thing. If Grandma accused anyone of kidnapping her son, they’d say, ‘Remember what happened last time? He was holed up with some piece of tail. Probably he’s on an island somewhere with a mountain of blow and twenty hookers. Have you checked the Maldives? By the way, say “Yia sou” to our little friends—and our big ones, too.’