The Taint of Midas

by Anne Zouroudi

  ‘I’ll see to it immediately.’

  Ilias Mentis replaced the papers the fat man had given him in their brown envelope. In places, the envelope showed staining, and Ilias rubbed at one of the stains with his thumb.

  ‘Honey,’ said the fat man, in explanation. ‘Gabrilis’s hiding place was ingenious, but the wrapping was not entirely watertight. All things considered, the documents have survived very well.’

  Through the lawyer’s office door, a telephone rang, and the clatter of a keyboard stopped as his secretary answered the call. The secretary was the same efficient woman the fat man remembered – though she had aged a little – and he found it comforting so many things about this office were still unchanged: the same leather-bound volumes on civil law were on the bookshelves, the graduation certificates hung in the same places on the walls. But the photograph on Ilias’s desk was different; the picture of him with his arm around his mother’s shoulders had gone, replaced by a family group – Ilias with a pretty woman and two attractive children, a boy and a girl. Ilias himself was different, too: older, stouter, better dressed. The well-trimmed sideburns he had retained were showing grey; his smile spread lines of some depth around his eyes.

  Ilias glanced at the old-fashioned clock on the wall.

  ‘I could file the papers this morning,’ he said. ‘The government offices don’t close for a couple of hours.’

  ‘The sooner, the better,’ said the fat man. ‘There are people involved who will not want to wait.’

  He stood, and offered the younger man his hand.

  ‘I’m sorry about your father, by the way. May his memory be eternal. He did excellent work for me in years gone by.’

  ‘We had your wreath. I didn’t know where to get in touch with you to thank you.’

  ‘I’ve been travelling, as always. The practice seems to be flourishing, in your hands. Your mother, is she well?’

  ‘As one would expect. She misses him.’

  ‘Time heals,’ said the fat man. ‘Though often not quickly enough.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch,’ said Ilias, ‘as soon as there’s news.’

  At the door, the fat man hesitated.

  ‘A question, if I may,’ he said, ‘before I go. Do you perhaps know of a lawyer by the name of Paliakis? Pandelis Paliakis?’

  Ilias’s face showed curiosity, and a little amusement.

  ‘What’s your interest there, if I may ask?’

  ‘It’s a name I’ve taken an interest in, just recently.’

  ‘Don’t ask me to stand against him in court,’ said Ilias, ‘because we’d be unlikely to win. The man hasn’t lost a case in – four, five years. Some say he keeps a judge or two in his pocket, but I don’t think so. I think his success is due entirely to the brilliance of his mind, and to his dedication. He’s made the law his life. He had a reputation, in his student years, as a radical. He used to do a lot of work for free, for political causes. Fighting the system on behalf of workers’ rights, that kind of thing. An idealist, or perhaps just a little naïve. Rumour has it he was a staunch supporter of the Communist Party for a while, but I’m sure he’s not with them now; his father wouldn’t let him waste his time. His specialities are property, and tax. If you want an off-shore company in Liberia, he’s your man. But I doubt he’d work for you. He’s employed almost exclusively, these days, by his father; he works hard to keep the Paliakis empire within the law. Or if not within it, not so far outside it can be touched. If there’s a legal loophole anywhere, Pandelis is the one to find it.’

  ‘I find the Paliakis family more and more intriguing,’ said the fat man.

  Ilias laughed.

  ‘Then they’d better watch out,’ he said. ‘Your interest is something I suspect the Paliakis family would do better to avoid.’

  The town hall clock struck noon, ringing out over streets wretched with heat. At the traffic lights, a bus driver wiped his forehead on the napkin from his sandwich; a motorcyclist lifted the visor on his helmet and fanned air into his sweating face. On the promenade, the gypsy children – dark-skinned, barefoot, flamboyantly dressed – had given up pressing cheap necklaces on the tourists, and lay drowsy under the palm trees. The stallholders selling dried fruit and pistachios, postcards and ceramics, sat on stools beneath their canopies, sipping at water from coolers hidden in the shade, watching the quiet sea and the comings and goings of boats.

  Sostis turned the shop-door sign from Open to Closed. From tin boxes ordered from Turkey, he replenished the glass dishes of scented cachous and, taking a long-handled broom, began to sweep the fluff of cut hair into a yellow dustpan. Passing the switch for the air conditioning, he moved his hand to turn it off; but as he did so, the shop bell rang, and the fat man entered the shop.

  ‘Kali mera, barber,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I’m late. I intended to be with you earlier, but a matter of business took my attention. I see you’re ready to attend to more important matters yourself; but will you indulge me by delaying your departure and cutting my hair, since I’m here? In short, will you make an exception, and take a thirteenth customer today?’

  The barber smiled.

  ‘What are rules for, if not for breaking?’ he said.

  The fat man seemed cool in the heat. His suit – loose-fitting, yet beautifully cut of a close-woven, nutmeg-brown cloth, finished with deep-umber buttons – held no creases, and there was no redness in his cheeks. Removing his jacket, he folded it shoulder to shoulder, revealing a lining of fine Chinese silk, striped in pale lemon and mint-green. His shirt, a polo shirt with a small crocodile on the breast, was perfectly matched to the green of the lining. The barber found the fat man almost elegant, but his elegance was compromised by his footwear: old-fashioned, white-canvas tennis shoes.

  The fat man laid first his holdall, then his jacket, on the chairs where, earlier in the day, Costas and Vassilis had waited.

  ‘I wonder if, before we start, we might order coffee,’ he said. ‘I notice there’s a kafenion next door. If you’ll order, I’ll gladly pay.’

  ‘What’ll you have?’ asked the barber.

  ‘Iced coffee with milk, no sugar.’

  ‘I’ll join you,’ said the barber, and left the shop.

  The fat man crossed to the shelf beside the barber’s chair where, alongside the colognes, Sostis kept his products for male grooming – moustache wax, balms for inflamed skin and shaving rashes, brilliantine, hair wax and styling gels, and an unlabelled bottle with glue-like, tarry contents the fat man could not identify. He picked up the bottles and jars that most interested him, unscrewed their lids, read their labels and sniffed at them. Then, becoming bored, he moved to a poster pinned to the wall – a photograph of Norwegian fjords – and lowered his glasses from his eyes to study it, seeming intrigued by every detail.

  When the barber returned, the fat man pointed to the poster.

  ‘This is a remarkable picture,’ he said. ‘Quite beautiful. Quite foreign.’

  ‘A customer sent it to me,’ said Sostis. He placed two glasses of iced coffee on the counter before the mirror. ‘At least, I assume it was a customer. I cut the hair of foreigners from time to time. We don’t communicate much; I speak little English, or German, or whatever. But this poster arrived one autumn, with a note which said Thank you, and a photograph of a man and woman, both very blond, and an address in Trondheim. I didn’t recall them, but I drew my conclusions. When the weather grows hot, the picture goes up. Just to look at it cools you down, don’t you think? Even though the sky is blue, you can tell that the water’s cold as ice, that the air is fresh and crisp. And look at those colours! When I’m bored, between customers, I picture myself in a little boat out on that water, fishing with a rod and line, and all the great cold-water fish I’d catch. The water there must be deep enough to hold gigantic fish. That’s true even here, in our much warmer waters. For winter, I have a poster of Tobago I begged from the travel agents. White sand and coconuts. So you see, for me, the grass is always greener.’r />
  ‘You have plans to travel to these places?’

  ‘No, not me. I’m not a travelling man, these days. The truth is, for me, there’s no place like home.’

  The fat man sat down in the barber’s chair. The ring Sostis had found was, the barber noticed, still on the fat man’s little finger. The fat man sipped at his coffee through a straw; the thick foam at its top was pale and creamy, the coffee beneath was cold and rich, with floating ice cubes tinkling on the glass’s rim.

  Sostis threw a cape around the fat man’s shoulders and tied the black ribbons behind his neck.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘what’ll it be?’

  ‘A trim, no more,’ said the fat man. ‘You’ve an appointment I’m keeping you from. The fish don’t like to be kept waiting.’

  The barber placed his hands in the fat man’s hair and pulled it gently, extending the curls to show their true length. Their texture was soft, like the silky hair of children, and where it was still black the colour was glossy as crows’ wings. As he let the hair fall, it gave off a faint, nostalgic scent, of hay meadows, grass and flowers warmed by the sun; and the scent disturbed some memory in the barber, a happy memory just out of reach, which suddenly he regretted having lost. He spent a minute in trying to recall that time and place; but the more he reached out for it, the more distant the memory became.

  When he came back to himself, the fat man was watching him in the mirror. Behind his glasses, his eyes were large, the colour of them uncertain.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

  ‘You have very fine hair,’ said the barber, ‘which it would be a crime to lose. You’re not a short-back-and-sides man. I’ll take an inch off all over.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said the fat man. He sipped again at his coffee, enjoying its coolness. ‘Business has been brisk today, I hope? You were ready to leave in good time for the fishing, if I had not detained you.’

  ‘I had a prompt start,’ said the barber. ‘In fact with the gentleman – if gentleman is the right word – you and I discussed. Aris Paliakis. He was my first customer this morning.’

  ‘Our property-developing friend,’ said the fat man.

  ‘That’s him. He talked about his plans. There’s to be – if he gets his way – a whole village, it seems. A ghetto of villas for foreigners.’

  ‘I’m surprised,’ said the fat man, ‘that he’s considering more development, now that his current project has gone so badly wrong. I saw the local paper.’

  ‘The wall collapse? Work’s halted there, of course. An investigation’s in progress, they say; it seems to me none’s necessary. Ask any man in the street, they’d tell you the reasons for that disaster – corner-cutting, unlicensed gangs, cheap foreign labour. But old Paliakis, he doesn’t seem worried.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t he be worried?’

  The barber laughed.

  ‘You and I know, friend, how these things go. A lunch here, a gift there, a credit to a bank account or cash stuffed in an envelope, and papers get lost. The case will be forgotten. The same will happen with his new development. He’s got friends in the Chamber of Commerce, one in the Planning Office – they call him Alfieris, his first name I don’t know. The man is bought and paid for; he’ll speak up for Paliakis at the highest level. He’s another customer of mine, as charmless as Paliakis himself. Birds of a feather, the two of them. Cutting Alfieris’s hair is like cutting the hair of a snake, and as pointless; he has none to speak of, so what he has, he has me shave very short, so his baldness seems deliberate. It’s his moustache that is his vanity; the man is as in love with that moustache as he is with himself. Only a government officer would have so much time to spend preening. He’s a man you’d never trust, the kind of man who’d stamp on butterflies.’

  On the floor around the chair, cut curls lay in one-inch lengths, but the fat man’s hair looked no different.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked the barber. ‘Shall I take more off? You’d never know I’d touched it.’

  ‘Just as it should be,’ said the fat man.

  The barber removed the cape, and brushed a few stray hairs from around the fat man’s neck. The fat man drained his glass of coffee and, pulling on his jacket, took twenty euros from his wallet and handed it to the barber.

  ‘Keep the change,’ he said.

  ‘Many thanks,’ said the barber, smiling.

  ‘I’ll come fishing with you one day, if I may.’

  ‘My pleasure. You know where to find me, any day of the week.’

  The fat man picked up his holdall. As he opened the door, the shop bell rang.

  ‘Do you perhaps know,’ he asked, with one foot in the street, ‘where I might find Mrs Paliakis?’

  ‘A grand house, not too far from here.’ The barber gave the address. ‘Are you going there?’

  ‘That’s my intention.’

  ‘Then perhaps you could return Mr Paliakis’s property.’ Sostis picked up the key and broken chain from the counter, and held it out to the fat man. ‘This is his; he always wears it. I found it on the floor here this morning, after he left.’

  ‘My pleasure.’

  The fat man took the key and chain, and slipped them in his pocket.

  ‘When you go there,’ said Sostis, ‘beware of the dog.’

  The fat man raised his eyebrows.

  ‘The Paliakis family,’ he said, ‘does not strike me as being one for animals.’

  ‘Even so,’ laughed the barber, ‘be warned. The woman’s well guarded. You’ll find Mrs Paliakis keeps a most unusual pet.’

  Twelve

  As the fat man drove along the track to his villa, the early afternoon blazed hotter than midday. In the olive orchard adjoining his garden, the cicadas were in full voice; the orchard’s grass was dry and dead as straw, and of the same soft gold. A donkey tethered to an iron stake flicked ears and tail to rid itself of flies; the olive trees themselves were broad-trunked and twisted, riddled with hollows, and ancient enough, said the people of Palea Chora, to remember the days when Midas wore an ass’s ears himself. At the roots of the trees, an old woman cleared weeds from earth so dry it rose in puffs of dust at her hoe blade; she wore a wide straw hat against the sun, and against the adders, black wellingtons on naked legs and feet. As the fat man passed, she paused in her work and held both hands up to her eyes, like a mariner on the lookout for first landfall; recognising the fat man, she raised a hand to him in flat-palmed greeting.

  On the verandah, the table was spread with a blue cloth, and laid for lunch in the shade. As the fat man took his seat, Kokkona brought out Greek salad and a plate of squid fried golden-brown, a jug of water from the well and a bottle of Mythos beer, chilled so the condensation sat in drops on its shoulders.

  The fat man removed his nutmeg-brown jacket and draped it round the back of his chair.

  ‘Sit with me,’ he said. ‘Talk to me whilst I eat.’

  In the wicker chair she favoured, a piece of fine crochet work lay on the well-worn cushion. With fingers slowed by the first aches of arthritis, she worked on a string of daisies and a scalloped edge. In the distance, the sea was pale in the heat-haze, a line of subdued blue where the buff-coloured land came to an end. Beneath the olive trees, the donkey raised its head and brayed, lips pulled back over its monstrous teeth as though in devilish laughter.

  The fat man seasoned his food from a pot half salt, half rice grains to absorb the damp. Squeezing a segment of cut lemon, he dribbled juice over the squid. He poured wine vinegar on the salad, and olive oil the light, clear green of moss. From a still-warm loaf of bread, he tore off the crusty end, and began to eat.

  The tomatoes, picked from the garden, held both the sun’s warmth and the plant’s essence in their flavour; the feta was white and sharp, musky with sheep’s milk. The red onion was hot and pungent; the squid was crisp to bite, the flesh tender and succulent with the freshness of the sea. The bread’s crust was a pleasing contrast to its yeasty softness; the beer was cold and cooling, and ex
cellent refreshment against the saltiness of the food.

  ‘A first-class lunch, as always,’ said the fat man, choosing a piece of green pepper from the salad.

  ‘Spiros caught the squid this morning,’ said Kokkona. ‘He brought it here himself. He was sorry to miss you.’

  ‘I had business in town,’ he said. ‘One or two matters have come to light. It seems there’s someone with an interest in Gabrilis’s land.’

  She tugged at the crochet work with the hook, forming another petal on a daisy.

  ‘You surprise me,’ she said. ‘There’s little enough value to it. Gabrilis – God rest him – worked hard on it for decades, and it never gave him much of a return. It’s stones and dust, and all on a slope. If you know someone looking for farmland, my brother-in-law’s a piece he’d like to sell.’

  ‘Ah, but Gabrilis’s land has a feature that makes it unique, Kokkona mou – it boasts a wonderful view. And a view, these days, is worth much more than melons and honey. The gentleman with the interest thinks he can sell that view. He believes this coast would benefit from some new residents. He wants to build homes for foreigners – I presume, to keep them here permanently, and secure their income.’

  ‘A new crop, then,’ she said, shrewdly.

  ‘Indeed.’ He glanced at the old woman hoeing at the roots of the olive trees. ‘A crop you don’t have to weed or water; a crop that comes to you, and looks after itself. Quite a neat concept, don’t you think?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘That view’s been there, unspoiled, since time began. It isn’t for anyone to sell it off and profit from it. Besides, who’d think of ruining such a place?’

  ‘Aris Paliakis.’

  She laughed.

  ‘I should have known. Of course it would be Aris Paliakis who would come up with such a scheme. He’s a man who’d sell his own grandmother, if she were still amongst the living.’

  A wasp hovered at the neck of the beer bottle. The fat man wafted it away and refilled his glass, placing the empty bottle across the table. When the wasp returned to the bottle, he let it crawl there undisturbed.