by Alex A King
"This is Yianni Papagalos," Grandma said, making introductions.
Papagalos, for the record, means parrot.
The old man beamed. "Papagalos, eh? Do you squawk squawk like the papagalos?" He tucked both hands in his pits, flapped his new featherless wings. "Hey," he called down the table. "Who has a cracker?"
Grandma's lunch guest didn't look happy. "They never found the last man who offered me a cracker."
Was Papou worried? Nope. He tore a small chunk off his bread, pitched it at the new arrival's head. His oily scalp accelerated its fall.
"You were supposed to catch it with your beak," Papou said, sounding disappointed.
"My Virgin Mary," Aunt Rita said, crossing herself again.
Yianni Papagalos ignored them both. He fixated on me. Just my luck.
"Is this her?" he asked.
Like I was a car or something. Was Grandma throwing in steak knives, too?
"Yes, this is my granddaughter Katerina. Sit, sit," Grandma said, ushering him to my side of the table.
He reeked of rubbing alcohol and he was invading my personal space.
Grandma started her sales pitch. "Yianni is in exports. He had a wife—two wives—but they died." Someone tittered at the far end of the table. She ignored it, but I could see the writing on that particular wall. It read: For now.
Yianni turned to me. "What do you do?"
I picked at my bread. At the rate I was going I'd be able to build a pretend snowman on my plate. "Customer service."
"You work with people?"
"Over the phone."
"She's a debt collector," Papou said. "She bullies people into giving her money."
Was it my imagination or did Yianni like that idea? His mouth settled into an approving line. Not quite a smile, but he'd make it so if I confessed to kicking puppies. I would never kick a puppy, but if this guy oozed any closer I'd consider elbowing a parrot.
"Not anymore," Grandma said. "There was a fire. Very unfortunate, but also lucky. Now she can get married."
Married? No. Hell no. "I'm not getting married any time soon. First I have to find my father, then I'm going back home to find another job."
"I think Katerina should stay here and be one of us," Papou crowed. "She already beat the Baptist this morning. And she survived one of Baby Dimitri's firebombs."
Every eye was on me. But did I look up? Nope. I squished the breadcrumbs together, made a head and a body, reached for a couple of toothpicks to give my breadman arms.
"You met the Baptist?" Yianni asked, incredulous.
"Not on purpose," I muttered.
"Katerina, why not tell a joke or something," Grandma said quickly.
Yianni looked at me. "I like jokes."
"I don't know any jokes," I said. "But Takis does. In fact, he told me one a few minutes ago. How did it go?"
Takis's laugh wobbled out. "What is she talking about? I don't know."
"Sure you do," I said, dunking him in the proverbial hot water. "Something about why a woman's holes are so close together."
He tugged at the neck of his shirt, his eyes shifty. "Heh. You are funny."
Yianni pulled out a gun, laid it on the table next to his fork. It was a big, shiny thing. Silver-plated. What was he hunting with that thing, werewolves?
"No guns at my dinner table." My grandmother said it in one of those commanding voices, very Moses and the Red Sea-like. Yianni picked up the gun, passed it back to a member of his entourage. The recipient was one of five. Same faces. Same black suits. Same black glasses. All of them pressed out of one piece of dough, using one cutter. The effect was spooky. I'd never seen that much blandness outside of an Abercrombie & Fitch.
"Speaking of guns," I said. "Can I have one, please?"
Yianni said, "Why do you want a gun? What does a woman need a gun for?"
Grandma was staring at me through narrow slits. There was thin ice and I was skating all over it. "Yes, Katerina, tell me. Why do you want a gun?"
That should have been obvious, but I humored her anyway. "So I can shoot things. Or at them, at least. Or near them. I'd prefer not to kill anyone, so a Taser would be okay, too."
"No," my grandmother said. "No guns for you. No guns for anybody who does not already have a gun."
"I used to have a gun," Papou said. "Then I got old and it stopped working. Now, I have to get pills from the doctor when I want to shoot something."
Grandma looked up at the heavens, crossed herself. "Yianni, eat."
"Give the girl a gun," Aunt Rita said. "How else is she going to protect herself from the Baptist?"
"Protect myself from the Baptist? Wait." I looked around. "Is he going come back for me?"
Silence.
"He always comes back," Yianni said. "That's what he does."
A lot of shivering happened—most of it from grown men.
My aunt dropped her fork on the plate. "No one else has balls enough to tell you, but I do. What happens at a baptism?"
I drew a blank. "Greek Orthodox?"
"Any baptism."
"They dunk you in water."
"And they give you your name," she explained. "But the Baptist, he doesn't give names, he gives numbers."
"What kind of numbers."
"Sequential numbers. If he gives you a number you're on his list. His death list."
Yikes. Good thing he never gave me a number. I would have remembered that. I think. I mean, who can really say? I was all caught up in freaking out at the time.
Pop Rocks fizzed in my stomach.
Grandma's mouth pursed up. She managed to pry it open wide enough to say, "Stop filling the girl's head with stories."
Yianni was staring at me, fear on his face. "Did he give you a number?"
"No." Probably not. Maybe not.
But he didn't look convinced. He pushed back from the table, shot his cuffs, tugged at the neck of his tightly-buttoned shirt. "I remembered I have somewhere to be." His face was waxy and the color of mashed potatoes.
"But you just got here," Papou said, grinning. "Stick around. We have birdseed."
"No, no, I have to go. I have a thing."
"What about my granddaughter?" Grandma demanded.
"Uh …" He glanced around for a handy excuse. "She'll be dead soon. I want to be a husband, not a widower for the third time."
"See," I said, appealing to the family. "I need a gun."
The family said nothing. They were all watching Yianni the Parrot scram, entourage dogging his heels.
Lunch wasn't a complete waste, even though it didn't end with a betrothal to the Parrot. The food was excellent (I covered the beady fish eyes with bread), the talk was interesting. I learned that there was an armory in the compound, but no one would say where. Grandma was so busy throwing out dark looks and threats that soon all talk of armories and giving me a gun sputtered to an early death.
Good thing there was more than one way to skin a cat, although I firmly believed a cat should never be skinned in the first place. Who does that?
I thought about it for a moment. Probably my Family—capital F. They didn't seem like cat people, although I'd seen a few very alive cats sunning in the courtyard.
Lunch over with, I did my share of dishes and cleaning up, then ducked into my room, where there was a goat standing dead center on the bed, chomping on a curtain. It was a brown and white lop-eared beast, and if it hadn't been chowing the furnishings I'd be going, Awwww, look at the cute goat!
I shut the door. Went back to the kitchen where Grandma was wiping down the spotless counter.
"There's a cute goat on my bed. It's eating the sheers. Did I mention it's cute?"
"A goat? How can there be a goat on your bed?"
Funny, I wondered the same thing. "Do you have a goat?"
"No. But it sounds like you do."
I went back to the bedroom. The goat was still there, still chewing.
"Get off the bed, stupid cute goat!"
The goat dropped the cu
rtain, skipped across the bed, landing at my feet. It snuffled my pockets, then—finding nothing—went back to sheers.
No way could it stay. What if it went after the sheets next, or my clothes? I eyed the goat. It really was cute. Maybe even adorable. A goat like that had to belong to someone, but I was running out of steam fast. This jet lag thing really had me whooped. Times and dates felt fluid. I was in a lava lamp, that's where I was, with time rising and falling in big waxy blobs. Was it bedtime, was it playtime? I didn't know. All I knew was that Dad was still missing and I had an adorable goat infestation.
I went back to the kitchen without the goat. "Any ransom notes or calls?"
"No."
"Anyone delivered a severed finger or any other body part?"
Grandma looked at me. "Who does that?"
"You?"
"Nobody accepts a finger as proof of life. It could be anybody's finger. For torture … cutting off a finger is nothing. You want to hurt somebody, pull out their fingernail."
Bile churned in my stomach. "Good to know," I said. "I was just checking. What should I do about the goat?"
"Put it outside. It will go home when it is ready."
The goat was going nowhere, and it was taking its sweet time doing that. I pushed, I pulled, I pleaded. I also might have tried to sing it out of the room.
"Is that you or the goat?" Grandma called out.
"The goat!"
In the end, I lured it out with tissues. The cloven beast seemed happy to relieve me of my pocket pack of Kleenex, and from the look in its slitted eyes when we got outside, it had big plans for Grandma's potted garden.
Back in the kitchen I said, "Don't you think it's weird that a goat was in the house?"
"No. I saw a cow in a kitchen once."
Greece isn't a country with a lot of cattle. Most of the terrain is better suited to more nimble-footed ruminants.
"How did that happen?"
"It came in through the door and got stuck inside. We had to make it walk backwards, and cows, they do not like to walk backwards."
I pondered the weirdness of cows in the kitchen and goats in the bedroom. "If security here is so amazing, how did a goat get into the compound?"
"A goat is not a person. How dangerous can it be?"
Seriously? Had this woman not heard the one about the Trojan Horse? Brad Pitt and company seemingly sailed away, abandoning their giant-sized wooden horse. The Trojans—relieved the Greeks were gone—went, "Whoa! Free horse! Score!" That free horse was kind of like gratis food on the streets of Bangkok: concealed inside was a nasty surprise. That Grandma would blow off a goat was mystifying. There could be anything inside. Not Greek soldiers—they wouldn't fit. Maybe something smaller.
But what did I know?
I was in bed with Google, trying to decide who was in the numero uno spot, now that the original placeholder had gone to Hades's giant underground olive factory. It wasn't easy. Would have been nice to have some help sorting the bad guys into piles, from most to least likely.
That's what I was thinking when I stumbled across the Crooked Noses Message Board, which claimed to specialize in information and the history of—you guessed it—organized crime. Topics were squared away in tidy sub-forums, divided by organization. The Cosa Nostra sat at the head of the class. A quick scan showed that everything was sorted according to publicity. Who had the most movies produced about them, the most novels, the most headlines in the newspapers.
The Greek Mafia was hanging near the bottom of the list, along with several of its equally unheard-of cronies.
I tapped. Maybe I'd never heard of the Greek mafia back home, but the sub-forum was active.
Greek Mafia Princess Comes Home.
Tap.
Gasp!
The thread was about me. And there were pictures.
In one I was stepping off the plane, looking dazed and in dire need of a hairbrush. Another showed me standing outside Baby Dimitri's shoes and souvenirs shop, watching Xander's motorcycle fry. In the third I was tucked under Xander's arm, moments before I yelled at him and Melas in the alley behind the Kefalas Olives factory. I didn't mind that one so much. My butt looked good and you couldn't see my face.
The comments were loaded with useful and benevolent suggestions. They wanted me to (in no particular order) die, burn, spend eternity in prison, and sleep with the fishes—if sleeping meant shoving seafood up my butt and uploading the video to PornTube.
It wasn't all bad news. A few dissenting voices had proposed a wait-and-see approach. I had—they decided—no history of legal or illegal shenanigans (they admitted to running a background check), so they'd give me a free pass—for now. But I had the feeling if I even looked sideways at a joint they'd nail me to an upside-down cross.
Someone calling themselves Sonny Schlong had started a thread about Dad's kidnapping, where speculation ranged from wildly deranged to merely ridiculous. But an avatar of a smoking gun adjusted the record until it sat more or less straight. Dad had been escorted unhappily from his Portland, Oregon home by two men. And so far, the gun said, no demands had been made.
I signed up immediately for an account, selecting a preset avatar of the goddess Athena, and called myself FarFarAwayGirl, because why not? Then I shot the smoking gun (username: BangBang) a private message, thanking him or her for being the voice of reason. BangBang lobbed a reply while I was perusing old threads, hunting for a Greek mafia pecking order. I discovered that Greece was packed with crime lords and criminal organizations, not all of them Greek mafia. The Bulgarians and Russians had their own mafia presence in the country, along with rumors of up-and-coming Serbian cartels. That was without touching on Greece's Romani population and their low-level racketeering.
Nobody ever stuck all that on a postcard.
Just calling it as I see it, BangBang wrote. These are people who think the moon landing was fake. They can get carried away.
OMG, I typed. The moon landing was real?
There was a long pause, then he or she threw me a winky face. You seem interested in facts. What's your story?
You tell me your story, I'll tell you mine.
I'm nobody, BangBang wrote. Just a nobody who's been around, seen a thing or two.
I'll remember that.
Don't remember it too hard if anyone asks.
No winky face.
Outside, the goat was chewing on my grandmother's roses. The chomp-chomp of molars grinding was unmistakable. I unhooked the shutters, flung them wide, poked my head out. Sure enough, the roses were death-spiraling.
"Hey, I'm trying to save your life here. Help me help you. Start with not eating the plants, okay?"
The goat kept on chewing.
Gah! I had no authority here, even as the granddaughter of one of the country's most feared—according to the Crooked Noses Message Board—women.
The night was inching up to its midpoint. Sleep wasn't happening. Back home it was mid-afternoon and my body was gearing up for happy hour. Never mind that I rarely went to a real happy hour; my own personal happy hour took place a little later, with chips and whatever I was currently glomming on Netflix.
I snatched up one of my grandmother's koulouraki, pitched it out the window. The goat quit chewing roses long enough to snarf down the cookie, then returned to its original plan.
Then came the footsteps.
Heavy things, each one laid down with precision. My Spidey sense went haywire, despite the flaw in logic. This place was a compound. Lots of guards. And this house was the heavily fortified heart, or so Grandma had said. Unauthorized feet had no business getting this close, and these feet sounded like they hadn't stopped for a little name tag at the front gates.
The goat skittered away. That was all the confirmation I needed to do the same.
I jerked the shutters back into their frame, slapped the hook into place, shoved the bolts into their holes. On the other side of the blue wood slats someone was breathing, a thick, deliberate sound. My back flattened
against the wall to the left of the shutters, and my breathing temporarily quit so I could hear over the sound of my protesting heart. It knew I was screwed and wanted to evacuate, whether the rest of me was willing or not. My legs were on my heart's team, but my brain was too busy running in circles like a decapitated chicken to shoot them any signals.
A mocking laugh wafted between the slats. I squeezed my eyes tight and wished for a grenade launcher, but my fairy godmother was busy making princesses out of pumpkins, and God—if there was one—was doing His eye-for-an-eye party trick in someone else's yard.
"Katerina … I forgot to give you a number. You want a number, don't you?"
I'd heard that voice before, earlier today, during a nightmare of sorts. Words scraped over shattered glass. the Baptist.
My insides liquified. I suddenly had the solidity of water in a thin balloon.
"Help," I whispered.
"Shh …" Like he was mollifying a kitten. "There's no help coming this time. You're safe in your yiayia's house where nothing can hurt you except the Baptist."
To date, there had been very little reason to be genuinely frightened in my life—at least of strangers. When you've lost your mother to cancer, and spent sleepless nights freaking out that you might lose your father too, stranger danger doesn't seem so scary.
Aside from the losing Dad thing, my only other rational fears—as opposed to my minor phobias, listed earlier—had been limited to opening mail from the Internal Revenue Service and standing in line at the Post Office in mid-December. Violent crime wasn't on my radar. Murder, rape, carjackings: they were things that happened outside my bubble. Portland wasn't exactly Baltimore.
But right now, the hot churn in my gut and the ice cream in my veins had put their heads together, and they were telling me I was scared close to shitless, but not quite all the way there. Which was a plus, because the outhouse was, well, outside with the psychopath.
"I've got to give you a number, Katerina," he said in his slow, methodical way. "It's how I do business. Are you ready? Remember your number when I tell it to you. Five-oh-three. Do you like that number? It's my new favorite number." There was a short, pregnant pause—about the length of a mayfly's gestation period. "I'll be back, Five-oh-three. Got business with Five-oh-two." Crazy laugh. The kind a psychotic clown makes. Very Tim Curry in the sewer, laughing about how they all float down there.