The Taint of Midas

by Anne Zouroudi

  Without hesitation, Petridis took the bag.

  ‘Many thanks,’ he said. ‘My aunt makes excellent soup.’

  ‘Tell her to beware of the spines. Skorpios is a crafty fish, even when dead.’

  ‘You’re right there,’ said Petridis. ‘My cousin caught one once, and it got him right in –’

  ‘Never mind that now,’ said Gazis, shortly. ‘Go and find somewhere cold for your fish. Ask them in the canteen if there’s space in the fridges. Give me the keys. And be quick. We’re already late.’

  As he left them, the fat man caught Gazis’s eye.

  ‘He’s a good lad, truly,’ said Gazis.

  ‘Perhaps a word,’ suggested the fat man.

  ‘Perhaps. Now, if you’ll excuse me.’

  ‘Of course,’ said the fat man. ‘You’ve work to do. You’ll get in touch, if there’s any news, if there’s anything I can do?’

  ‘I’ll be glad to,’ said Gazis.

  Gazis turned away towards the police station, but the fat man stopped him.

  ‘I want to thank you,’ he said, ‘for the interest you are taking in this matter. I’m not a fool, and I know to all you busy men Gabrilis Kaloyeros is just another file to be processed, another case to be either solved, or shelved. But to me, he was much more than that. Over the years, I have lost many good friends, and that has made me value those remaining all the more. Gabrilis had virtues which are, these days, quite rare. He was generous, and humorous, and gentle. I miss him deeply, and so I place great value on your assistance. I’m pleased to have you as my ally.’

  For a long moment, Gazis looked into the fat man’s eyes, and felt he saw there the pricking of many griefs.

  ‘You may trust me,’ he said, ‘to do my very best.’

  ‘And I am grateful,’ said the fat man.

  Now Gazis left him. The fat man made his way back across the busy road, and for some time wandered alone along the promenade, watching the mighty ships far out at sea.

  Petridis was gone some time. Gazis waited in the car, engine running, windows tightly shut to hold in the coolness from the air conditioning. The short-wave radio was almost silent, crackling intermittently with units reporting their positions and intentions.

  Gazis was eager to make use of this quiet hour. They were booked to check security at a factory where two break-ins had been reported; more important to Gazis were the petrol-station visits he and Petridis planned.

  For the fourth time, he checked his watch. The patrol car parked beside him pulled away, its driver and his partner too deep in argument to acknowledge him, and Gazis smiled: he knew the men, and knew the argument would concern basketball.

  When the town hall clock struck the half-hour, he was ready to go and find Petridis; but Petridis appeared in the staff doorway, and headed towards Gazis across the car park, moving slowly in heat that was already debilitating.

  Petridis took his seat beside Gazis. His face was pale beneath its tan.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ asked Gazis.

  Petridis held up his right thumb; its upper joint was wrapped in a neatly tied bandage.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Gazis. ‘Skorpios.’

  ‘One of the motherfuckers got me. The girls in the canteen wanted to see what I had in the bag.’

  ‘I’ll just bet they did,’ said Gazis.

  ‘I’m in terrible pain, sir. The girls say you’ve to take me to the clinic for a painkilling shot.’

  ‘Those skorpios are tricky little bastards, aren’t they?’ said Gazis, starting the engine. ‘What was it doing, playing dead? That’s one of their best tricks. Didn’t they teach you anything on that island of yours?’

  ‘It was dead enough,’ said Petridis. ‘Gutted. Eyeless, too. But the spines were sticking out through the bag.’

  ‘Have you got them out?’

  ‘One of the girls used her eyebrow tweezers. She made me suck the poison, and she put some iodine on it. She said it might get infected.’

  Gazis slipped the car into gear and moved it towards the road.

  ‘I’m told,’ he said, ‘that the pain is worse if the fish has been eating crabs. What do you say, Petridis – had your skorpios been eating crabs?’

  ‘A steady diet since birth.’ Petridis lifted the edge of the bandage to inspect his wound. ‘It’s swelling up; the girls say I’ll need antihistamine. There’s a clinic on Mavrokopoulos Street. That’s the closest.’

  On the radio, a call for service came through: a collision between a motorbike and a pick-up carrying eggs. The dispatcher sounded amused.

  ‘Responding units, take a frying pan,’ she said.

  ‘Tell her we’ll take that,’ said Gazis. ‘ETA three minutes. Put the lights on.’

  ‘What about the clinic?’

  ‘If you asked your grandmother, she’d tell you to piss on your thumb,’ said Gazis. ‘Sometimes, the old cures are the best. Anyway, a bit of suffering builds character. Learn from it. You’re lucky it’s only skorpios that’s bitten you. There are sharks that bite far worse than that in this job, believe me. Look out for the sharks, son. You’ll find them in the least expected places.’

  As Gazis pulled out into the traffic, Petridis turned on the blue lights.

  ‘You can put the siren on, if it’ll cheer you up,’ said Gazis.

  Petridis flipped the switch.

  ‘What about the bad luck it’ll bring me?’ asked Petridis. ‘What’s the cure for that?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Gazis, raising his voice above the siren. ‘In my experience, if there’s any bad luck coming to you, it’s only what you’ve brought on yourself.’

  All morning, Paliakis waited for Alfieris’s call, until, impatient and tired of waiting, he called Alfieris’s office. He’d called there a dozen times before; but this time, something was different. The direct line to Alfieris’s desk did not ring out; instead, Paliakis heard the clicking of redirection, and a computerised female voice asked him to hold the line. Tapping his foot in irritation, he waited.

  As he was about to hang up, a young woman answered.

  ‘Parakalo?’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘This is the Planning Office, Chartomeni speaking. How may I help?’

  ‘I want to speak to Mr Alfieris. Isn’t this his number?’

  ‘Mr Alfieris is out of the office today.’

  ‘When will he be back?’

  ‘I don’t have that information.’

  ‘Where is he, then? Where can I contact him?’

  ‘I can’t say.’

  ‘This call is urgent. I need to get in touch with Mr Alfieris today. Now.’

  ‘I’ll put you through to his department. Maybe someone else can help you.’

  ‘It’s a personal call.’ He hesitated before the lie. ‘I’m his cousin.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘So where is he?’

  ‘You say you’re his cousin.’

  ‘Second cousin.’

  ‘Then I’m surprised you didn’t know. Mr Alfieris called this morning to say his mother’s been taken ill. He’s gone to be with her. He may be gone some time; a stroke, apparently. If you’re family, I expect you’ll have the contact details.’

  Paliakis didn’t thank her, or say goodbye. Hanging up the phone, he placed his elbows on his desk, and gripped his temples with his forefingers, as if his head was aching badly.

  The barber’s directions were clear and, parking near by, the fat man found the address he sought quite easily, on a quiet street in the inner suburbs, where old cobbles showed through worn tarmac and the grounds of the great houses stretched an entire block. The street itself lay in the shade of mature trees whose roots lifted the pavements; the gardens were hidden behind high stone walls crowned with spiked iron railings. In the past, the street had been, no doubt, the home of wealth and privilege, and a sense of genteel colonialism still endured. But the grandeur was faded. Where the pavements met the walls, the dead leaves of last winter still
lay in drifts, the flaking paint on the railings was yielding to rust, a garden glimpsed through a gate had run amok, its wildly blossoming beauty overwhelming its planned geometry.

  The gate to Paliakis’s house stood half-open, but not, the fat man judged, because some recent visitor had left it so. The same dried leaves that littered the street lay behind it and in front; clearly the gate was stuck, yet no one had troubled to oil its hinges or clear away the winter’s debris so it could be opened wide and unobstructed.

  The fat man pushed through the half-open gate, where a narrow flight of stone steps led upwards. Crushing dead leaves beneath his feet, he climbed between fortress-solid walls supporting steep banking, where the overhanging limbs of shrubbery left the stairway in dimness that chilled.

  At the stairs’ head, the ground levelled into an expansive lawn of frail and fading grass, crossed by two stone paths set in a crucifix. Where the paths intersected stood a marble fountain – a figure of a once-splendid Poseidon, who clasped the upright body of a huge fish, its mouth gaping to emit a surge of water. But no water splashed over the fish’s carved scales into the fountain’s basin; the basin was cracked, and the fish’s scales were crusted with dry, yellowing lichens and mosses. Poseidon’s hand had lost one elegant finger, and the only sign of water was the fresh green of the grass around the fountain’s base, where somewhere underground the plumbing leaked.

  The fat man followed the path, first to the fountain, then towards the front of an imposing house, whose door was framed by pillars inspired by Rome. Its windows, too, were classical in proportion, designed for maximum light; but all – except for two on the ground floor – were covered with louvred shutters sealed with cast-iron bars. Flanking the doorway were two tall planters in the shape of urns, but the earth in them was hard-baked and barren, with no sign at all of flowers or greenery.

  Beneath the portico, the fat man applied the lion’s-head knocker, its banging echoing through the house as in the high halls of museums. There was, for a short while, silence; in his pocket, the fat man touched the small key on its slender chain. Then the door opened.

  The fat man’s most genial smile was, fortunately, ready; it hid his surprise at facing a priest. He was tall and gaunt, with long hair fastened in a knot at the nape of his neck and shiny with grease where it was pulled tight on his scalp. From his face, the fat man thought him somewhere in his thirties; but some medical condition affected his skin, drying and dusting it with powdery whiteness, and giving him the fine lines of an older man; in places – on his forehead, in the hollows of his cheeks, on the tops and lobes of his ears – the skin was red and flaking, and slick with ointment. His grey summer cassock was clean and pressed; around his neck a wooden cross hung on a leather thong.

  The priest held the door with his hand, where his condition was, apparently, worse, and the irritated skin was scratched in scab-lines spotted with fresh blood. The disfigurement was unfortunate; without it, his hands were elegant as the stone Poseidon’s.

  ‘Oriste?’ he said.

  ‘Kali mera sas,’ said the fat man. ‘I’d like to speak with Mr Paliakis, if I may.’

  ‘Mr Paliakis is not at home.’

  ‘Mrs Paliakis, then.’

  The priest hesitated.

  ‘May I ask your business?’

  ‘Would you please tell Mrs Paliakis I have some property of her husband’s that I would like to return?’

  The priest moved silently down a hallway furnished with an ornate chest and carved chairs, dated as the furniture found in cheap, rented rooms, but polished and cared for. The fat man studied a monochrome photograph framed on the opposite wall: a handsome man with an expression of great self-importance stood behind a plain, unsmiling woman, a proprietorial hand on her shoulder; the background was the façade of this house. There were fly-spots on the glass covering the photograph, and the hallway was dark with gloom; dust-motes descended through the sunlight let in by the open door.

  Soon, the priest returned, beckoning the fat man across the threshold and waiting outside the room he was to enter. The fat man closed the front door behind him and crossed the black-and-white-tiled floor; the priest stood back to let the fat man pass, his arm extended in the manner of a gracious host.

  The fat man stepped into a salone in the old-fashioned style. The ceiling was high, with a chandelier at its centre, and the coving was ornate with moulded patterns; but the ceiling plaster was ruined at one corner by water, the damage a penetrating stain in varied shades of brown. The polished floorboards were covered by a hand-knotted Turkish carpet, intricately patterned and clearly of some age; but in places, where well walked on, the wool was worn away, exposing the sack-like fibres of its backing.

  On a long sofa (a match, the fat man noticed, to the out-of-date hall chairs) sat a woman; she faced an unshuttered window with a view towards the faded lawn and the neglected fountain. She did not stand to greet the fat man, but held out the back of her pale hand to be taken (or, in an earlier age, politely kissed). Her chin was raised in what seemed an accustomed pose of haughtiness, or vanity. If vanity, thought the fat man, the vice was justified; though fading now, her face retained a quite remarkable beauty, a feminine loveliness not commonly seen, a little blighted by the appearance of fragile health the fat man suspected was of nervous, rather than physical, origin. Over her shoulder, she wore her glorious hair, black and silver, brushed and gleaming, looped through itself in a loose knot on her breast and ending in soft tapering on her lap.

  As seemed to be required, he took her fingers carefully in his own, released them and, placing his feet together, gave a small bow.

  ‘Madam,’ he said solemnly, ‘thank you for receiving me. I am Hermes Diaktoros, of Athens. I came hoping to return some property to your husband; but the pappas tells me Mr Paliakis is not at home.’

  Beside her, a chessboard spread on a low table held the pieces of a game at an early stage. The priest picked up a paperback book – Moves of the Masters – from the arm of a chair and, sitting, held the book as if reading; but his eyes, the fat man noticed, did not travel along the lines of print, and the priest himself was very still, and listening.

  Mrs Paliakis touched the sofa seat beside her.

  ‘Please, sit, Mr Diaktoros,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t wish to intrude. If I had known you had a guest, I would have called another time.’

  She gave a smile that swept the coldness from her face.

  ‘Father Babis’s visit here is extended,’ she said. ‘It would be difficult to find a time when he’s not with me. Please, sit. Can we get you something cold to drink?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the fat man. He sat. The sofa was hard, packed with horsehair; the bones of its frame dug into his back.

  ‘Babis,’ she said to the priest, ‘would you fetch us some iced tea? And some of those almond biscuits from the bakery.’

  The priest looked warily at the fat man, and hesitated for a moment before rising from his chair. As he left the room, he made no noise at all.

  ‘Father Babis and I are united in our faith,’ she said, ‘in our belief that God will reward us in the next world for our sufferings in this one. He is my very good friend. Of course you are thinking it is a strange household where the mistress keeps a tame priest, and you would be quite right. But my husband makes no objection, because my husband is very rarely here. I’m afraid your journey was wasted. You’d do much better, always, looking for Aris at his office. Babis will write down the address for you.’

  ‘A journey to find myself in such lovely company could never be wasted, Mrs Paliakis.’

  She laughed, her delight in his compliment as great as her amusement.

  ‘You’re a flirt, Mr Diaktoros,’ she said. ‘Happily, Babis isn’t here to see it. He takes the matter of my honour very seriously. And please, call me Ourania. I like to be reminded of the Paliakis name as little as possible.’ The fat man’s eyebrows lifted a degree. ‘Don’t be shocked. The disaster of my marriage
is common bar-talk in this town. They embroider and embellish it, of course, and can’t resist including impropriety between myself and Babis; but the basic facts can be obtained quite easily, in any ouzeri.’

  The fat man smiled.

  ‘There would be no point at all, madam, in running after bar-room gossip when one is taking tea with the horse’s mouth. Though a mouth less like a horse’s would be hard to picture. If you’ll forgive another compliment.’

  She returned his smile; her beauty seemed quite perfect.

  ‘Was that a compliment?’

  ‘It was. I, too, am mindful of your honour. If I were not, I would leave you in no doubt that a compliment was very much intended. With regard to the gossip, you put me in a difficult position. I confess to a growing interest in your husband, and as such would be intrigued to know about your marriage. But to ask a lady about such private matters is, of course, a gross impertinence, and if I did so, you would be quite entitled, in my view, to throw me out.’

  ‘I wouldn’t throw you out,’ she said. ‘Visitors – interesting visitors – are rare here, so we must be careful to hold on to those we have. And, as I’ve said, the state of my marriage is common talk. If you are going to take an interest, I’d rather you had the facts from me.’

  ‘You haven’t asked me why I have an interest.’

  ‘Having no interest in Aris myself, I’m sorry, but your reasons don’t interest me.’

  ‘But you have no idea who I am. I might wish him harm.’

  ‘In what way, harm? Plainly you’re not a thug who’d put him in physical danger; you’re not a man, I’m sure, who’d use your fists. If you are the police, or the tax man, or a creditor, then I assume you have good reasons for digging into his background. There’s no doubt in my mind that, if Aris is in trouble, he’s brought it on himself.’