‘Your opinion of him coincides with that of others. The family name I know, but this particular Paliakis has built himself up in my absence.’
The daisy she was working on completed, she unwound more cotton thread from the ball, and began to form the centre of the next.
‘Of course you remember the name. Around here, the Paliakises are famous; the family fortune’s given much to talk about, over the years.’
The fat man frowned.
‘There was an interesting story, wasn’t there?’ he asked.
‘Indeed there was. Of a fortune that went missing, and was never found.’
The fat man smiled.
‘Remind me,’ he said. ‘But if this is going to be one of your longer tales, Kokkona mou, let me light a cigarette before you start.’
He reached into his pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes – an old-fashioned box whose lift-up lid bore the head and naked shoulders of a forties starlet, her softly permed platinum hair curling around a coy smile. Beneath the maker’s name ran a slogan in an antique hand: The cigarette for the man who knows a real smoke. Producing a slim gold lighter, he knocked the tip of a cigarette on the table, lit it, and laid the cigarettes and the lighter beside his empty plates.
‘I’m ready,’ he said. ‘Let the story begin.’
‘Time was,’ she said, laying her crochet work in her lap, ‘that Paliakises were pitied. Then there was a time Aris was admired for his success. Now, most won’t give him the time of day. It doesn’t bother him. The balance of his bank account is all he cares about.’
‘Why did people pity him?’
‘It wasn’t only him they pitied, it was all of them. The family was for years a laughing stock. Though it should have been otherwise. His grandfather on his father’s side made money. He was an Aris too, with this Aris being named for him, of course. And true to his grandfather’s memory, he keeps both name and spirit alive. Their love of money is in the blood, and Aris is his grandfather’s disciple.
‘Now some say different, but I say this: the way his grandfather made his money was very simple. He had a store on the edge of town – long gone now, of course, knocked down for new development. He sold feed and farm implements. Anything you needed, old Paliakis would supply, from a bag of corn for your chickens to a wheelbarrow or a saddle for your donkey. My grandmother would take me there as a girl, and I remember all sorts of odds and ends – cheese strainers and rope and buckets, fence posts and ointments for your goat’s mastitis.
‘The villagers were all shepherds and small farmers, but Paliakis had a businessman’s mind. And happily for him, he had a monopoly, too – for miles around, no competition for his store. So everything he sold, he sold at a premium price, and made a little extra profit on each item. And bit by bit, he salted his profits away. You’ll hear, maybe, he bought this bit of land, or that, but I don’t think so. There was nothing so grand. There didn’t need to be.
‘For some years, Paliakis kept his money in the bank, in the way most people do. In those days, my grandmother’s neighbour was cashier at the National Bank, so it was common knowledge what he was worth. And by middle age, it was plenty; by today’s measures, not much, perhaps, but believe me, Paliakis was very comfortable. Or should have been. You may have guessed by now, the money wasn’t for spending. A dry stick he was, and tight as tight could be. Money in the bank there was, but his kids went about dressed almost in rags, and the family lived on lentils and oranges, same as the rest of us.
‘And then, one day, Paliakis and the manager of the bank had a disagreement, and the disagreement grew into an argument. Maybe Paliakis believed the manager was cheating him; the reason they fell out was never clear. The manager refused to talk about the matter; not even my grandmother’s neighbour knew what had been said. But whatever the reason, old Aris Paliakis marched home, marched back to the bank with a stout wooden box, demanded all his savings, piled the cash into the box and took it away.’
The fat man drew on his cigarette, and flicked the ash from its end. He seemed thoughtful, but kept silent.
‘Now, what happened to that box was the subject of speculation for years,’ went on Kokkona. ‘Paliakis’s children claimed they didn’t know; so did his wife. In the kafenions and the tavernas and the churches, they discussed its whereabouts endlessly. Some said it was under the bed, some said under the floorboards, some said buried in the garden. But no one doubted he would keep the box close by. That was the nature of the man.
‘Years went by, the children grew up, and Paliakis became an old man. But he still opened up the shop every day, and he still made a few drachmas extra on everything he sold. And still the mystery of where those profits went remained. What people said was in that mysterious missing box! Gold, jewels, the deeds to all kinds of property – in the folklore of the village, it grew and grew, until it was a box no longer, but a treasure chest!
‘And then, very suddenly, Paliakis died. Young Aris was still at school, and suffering badly. The whole family was teased about Grandpa’s fortune, taunted because they saw none of it. But Aris always hit back at his tormentors by saying he knew exactly where the box was; Grandpa, he said, had told him. Well, if he had, young Aris kept it to himself; and if he hadn’t, no doubt the old man meant to tell them all one day. But he left it too late. Without warning, he was gone; caught out in a storm, he took the only shelter he could find, beneath a pine tree and – pouf! – a flash of lightning took the tree, and him with it. Folks made plenty of that, of course, him being taken by fire. The devil, they said, had come to take his own.
‘So then the treasure hunt began in earnest. Of course Paliakis’s children – Aris’s father particularly, being the eldest – turned the house upside down. They ripped up floorboards, they smashed cupboards; they went down the well and drained the cisterna; they took the plaster off the ceilings to check the roof timbers and dug up the garden foot by foot. Nothing. The box wasn’t there.
‘Still, to this day, it’s never been found; and the not finding of it was a tragedy in itself. Paliakis’s father believed all his life he’d find it; he believed it so strongly he never bothered to make anything of himself. Everywhere he went, they called after him, Hey, lucky, found that box? He didn’t care, until he ran out of places to look for it. He took to drink, and went to an early grave, destitute; from a young age it was the grandchildren who paid the bills, and took care of their mother. I remember the mother. She was a miserable woman. You can’t spend wishes, she used to say.’
Kokkona picked up her crochet work.
Finishing his cigarette, the fat man ground it out in the ashtray.
‘So where did our Aris Paliakis get his start in life?’ he asked. ‘To build his empire, there must have been seed money. A little capital, at least.’
‘Now that,’ she said, ‘is a mystery, too. He made it somewhere, though not round here. He disappeared for a while, and came back with his pockets lined: not stuffed, you understand, but with enough to make a start in a small way.’
‘And did no one ask him where he’d made this money?’
‘Oh, you can ask a Paliakis all you like, but if they’re not telling, you waste your breath. Old Grandpa Paliakis taught them that.’
‘He has a family, I believe.’
‘He has a wife who suffers with her nerves, a highly-strung, difficult woman. And two sons. One he put through university, made him a lawyer to cover his backside. The other’s another matter. He had it in mind to be a racing driver – not those proper racing cars, but rally cars – and as a hobby, it proved expensive. He took himself all over the place – Italy, France – to take part in the races; but there were no wins, only repair bills. This past year, I hear, Paliakis refuses to pay, and Kylis has joined the family business. Though what his contribution is is hard to say.’
The fat man picked up his box of cigarettes and opened the lid, as if considering lighting another, but he closed the box without doing so. As he slipped the box and his lighter b
ack into his pocket, his fingertips touched the key the barber had given him.
‘I read a story in a newspaper recently,’ he said. ‘It came from Thessaloniki, and as a cautionary tale, you’d be hard-pressed to invent a better one. A second-hand dealer hunting for antiques found his way into a house scheduled for demolition, and found a mummified body in the bedroom. The dead man was elderly, and quite forgotten by relatives and neighbours; the pathologist believed he’d been dead for eighteen months. When police searched the house, they found, in drawers and cupboards, the evidence of wealth – bank books and bond certificates, with holdings worth, when they were added up, two million euros. Clever enough to make himself a fortune, he wasn’t smart enough to make sure someone in the world cared if he lived or died. I can foresee a similar end for Aris Paliakis, if he doesn’t take care.’
For a few minutes they sat in silence, and the fat man watched the honey bees, busy even in the heat around the delicate spikes of lavender and the blush-pink roses of which he was so fond.
‘I think,’ he said at last, ‘it’s time for my siesta.’
He made his way around the house, to where a hammock was stretched between two evergreen oaks, whose deep-green foliage gave shade cool as a cavern. With some agility, he bounded into the hammock; and soothed by the cicadas, made drowsy by the beer, with his hands folded on his ample stomach, in no time at all he was peacefully dozing.
Thirteen
One hour after dawn broke over the placid sea, the sky’s pale pink was yielding to strengthening blue. At the harbour, the fishing boats had tied up; the fishermen in their sterns were red-eyed and unshaven, dirty with oil and blood. Repairing yellow nets, tinkering with engines and greasing seals, replenishing fuel tanks with diesel, they called to one another as they worked, exchanging banter, bumming cigarettes, swapping tales of the ones that got away on last night’s sea.
The fat man strolled along the moorings, half-listening to the fishermen’s stories: a dolphin floating dead at Ayios Yiorgos (The only good dolphin’s a dead dolphin, fish-thieving bastards every one), a shoal of fat sardines caught by someone’s cousin, rumours of an unlicensed boat confiscated by the limanarcheio, the coastguard – Koproskila! – up the coast. They watched him, but with only half an eye, not curious enough to comment on him when he’d passed.
The fat man walked close to the boats, scanning their modest catches: a few long-nosed garfish, slender as rope, some silver-scaled bream and a good haul of shrimp, one or two octopuses, slimy and slithering, half a bucket of whitebait, a leopard-skinned conger eel. And, in the last boat on the line, the fat man saw what he needed: three scorpionfish, vermilion and dangerous, clear, round eyes bright, and still staring as in life.
The fisherman at the prow was naked to the waist and tanned to leather; he was hauling up buckets of seawater, swilling it over the deck planks to keep the wood from shrinking. His manner was surly, his breath smelled of alcohol and aniseed. A cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth, and his eyes were narrowed to slits, from smoke, or from the sun, or from mistrust; but when the fat man drew out a banknote, he flicked the cigarette overboard, and offered a sly smile.
But, knowing the price of fish, the fat man bargained hard. With his purchases tied up in a carrier bag, he wished the fisherman kali mera, and made his way along the harbour-front to where stone steps led down to a narrow, pebbled beach.
Sitting on the steps, the fat man took out his penknife and, one by one, dealt with the fish. The guts he threw out to sea, then he rinsed his hands in the shallow water, rubbing in citrus-scented ointment from the bee-embossed tin to take away their stink.
At the kafenion Aktaion, the waiters, puffy-eyed from hot, sleepless nights and too much ouzo, swept the street-dust from beneath the tables and laid out the napkin-holders, the laminated menus, the glass ashtrays still wet from rinsing. Dressed in fresh, white linen with his hair still damp from combing, the cook leaned on the counter turning the pages of Taste magazine; at his feet, the stock delivery – fruit juice and bottled water, salted peanuts and a tray of sticky baklava – waited untouched for his attention.
On FM107, the 8 o’clock pips signalled the news, and the cook turned up the volume on the radio. The headlines were of the heatwave stifling Greece.
Passing the counter with a broom, one of the waiters called out to him.
‘What are they saying, Chef? Rain before lunch, snow by evening?’
The cook grunted, and slapped away a fly crawling on his hand.
‘More of the same,’ he said. ‘Thirty-nine degrees, and the power stations all out. Too much demand for air conditioning. Used to be when it got hot we all left town.’
On his way outside, a second waiter paused to listen.
‘Another easy day for you, though, eh?’ he said. ‘What are they saying, only fruit and water?’
‘Fruit and water, my backside,’ said the cook, turning the pages of his magazine. ‘It’ll be coffee all day, as usual, and they’ll still want to eat. It’s not in their nature to take good advice.’
‘Ten dead nationally, I heard,’ said the waiter, ‘and a little child in Navplio. That’s tough.’
‘Yes,’ sighed the cook, ‘that’s tough on someone. Why didn’t they just take the kid to the beach? When you’ve finished sweeping that terrace, you can give me a hand carrying this delivery out the back.’
The radio slipped into a melancholy ballad, and the cook looked with sad eyes towards the sea, as if the song brought to mind someone too far away but not quite forgotten.
On the kafenion’s terrace, the fat man surveyed the four customers already seated. All were at separate tables, all had briefcases and wore the summer uniform of businessmen: plain, short-sleeved shirts, pale cotton trousers and loafers on bare feet. But though the uniforms were identical, one man was unique in his current occupation. Three of the men had spread papers on the table and, with the anxious energy of the self-employed, talked fast and loud into mobile phones, already brokering deals. The fourth man sat quite relaxed in his chair, his legs stretched before him and crossed at the ankles, reading this morning’s Ethnos and smoking a pungent cheroot. His head was shaved bald, his moustache was flamboyant and waxed, precisely trimmed over the lips, twisted into sharp, sabre-curved points at the sides of his mouth.
The fat man took a seat at the table beside him. Hanging the knotted bag containing his fish on the back of his chair, tucking his holdall beneath his feet, he laid his cigarettes and a matchbox on the table, and picked up the menu.
Outside a small electrical shop across the street, an aged lorry rattled up to the kerb. Leaving the engine running, the driver jumped down from the cab and sauntered into the shop, a clipboard tucked under his arm. The noise from the truck was loud; every panel on its body rattled, and its exhaust pumped oily, noxious clouds towards the kafenion, soon overcoming even the smoke of the moustached man’s cheroot. Theatrically, the fat man waved a hand before his face to disperse the fumes, glancing sideways to catch his neighbour’s eye; but the moustached man seemed oblivious, absorbed in an article in his newspaper.
The street was narrow, with no room for traffic to pass. Soon, a taxi carrying a smartly dressed matron rounded the corner, and pulled up behind the lorry. Only a few seconds passed before the taxi driver blew his horn. There was no response. The taxi driver turned to his passenger and spoke, then blew his horn again. Again, there was no response, and so he blew his horn a third time.
Then, the taxi door burst open, and the driver – a florid, obese man in a heavy sweat – stood in the street, hands on hips and cursing viciously. He looked up at the lorry’s empty cab and along the street; seeing no lorry driver, his eyes settled on the owner of a periptero, who sat, arms folded and interested, on a stool behind his counter, waiting for a drama to develop.
‘Where is this malaka?’ demanded the taxi driver, jerking his thumb at the lorry.
With a Judas smile, the periptero’s owner pointed to the sign over the el
ectrical shop, just visible above the lorry’s roof. The taxi driver moved quickly, gut wobbling, between his taxi and the lorry’s rear end, and disappeared; his matronly passenger, well-coiffured and made-up, but in very dated style, called after him.
‘Where are you going, kalé? Twenty minutes, didn’t you say? You’ll make me late!’
Raised voices from the electrical shop – the angry voices of two men – stopped her complaints. The fat man’s eyebrows lifted slightly at the language; the moustached man laid down his newspaper and looked, frowning, across the street.
‘What in God’s name is going on?’ he asked the fat man.
‘A dispute over parking,’ said the fat man. ‘Nothing more.’
The shouting within the shop was reduced to one voice, and the taxi driver, face purple and murderously set, reappeared behind the taxi. At his counter, the cook had forgotten his magazine, the waiters had stopped sweeping and, standing together, leaned smiling on their brooms. As the taxi driver passed his passenger’s window, she reached through the open window to grasp his arm.
‘Ela, kalé!’ she whined. ‘My sister’s waiting to be taken to the boat! If it sails without us, what will we do?’
But the taxi driver heard nothing above the lorry’s rumbling and rattling. Marching past his car, he hauled himself into the lorry’s cab, and slammed the door shut. Finding the right gear with difficulty, he released the brakes and moved the lorry slowly up the hill, leaving its space at the kerbside vacant.
As its wheels began to turn, the shouting from the electrical shop abruptly ceased, and in a moment a bewildered shopkeeper and the lorry driver, red-faced with rage, appeared. The lorry driver threw his clipboard to the pavement and ran shouting after his lorry, which was indicating and making a right turn into an alleyway, where, once off the street and with only its back-end visible from the kafenion, it braked with a hiss of air, and stopped. Immediately, the taxi driver jumped down from the cab, and disappeared at a run along the alleyway.
The Taint of Midas Page 12