Baby Blue

by Pol Koutsakis

  “What customers?” he said, dashing my hopes yet again.

  “The ones who are going to come,” replied Papi, with the sober certainty that had been typical of him since the first time we met him. He disappeared to make our drinks.

  Papi’s had been struggling to get people through the door for a long time now. In the past, couples of all ages used to come here, especially in the early hours, and also for morning coffee. The crisis had sent these couples back indoors, but you could never tell what might happen in the future. This new cocktail might do the trick. I ordered it, hoping that Papi would still be able to remember the order when he got back to the bar. Every time he serves you it’s a surprise, a game of chance; each order is made more to make Papi feel good about himself than anything else. I wasn’t sure that this helped keep customer numbers up.

  “They’ll be sending everything we’ve got on Raptas through to my phone in a minute.”

  “Tell me about this case you’re on. The stuff I don’t get from the news.”

  “OK,” he said, remaining silent.

  “No developments?”

  “Journalists have got so many sources in the force that we get to hear things at about the same time they do – if not after they do.”

  “In other words, you haven’t got a clue.”

  “None. No idea who the perpetrator could be, or whether there was another motive, apart from the obvious. The worst part is I don’t give a damn what his motive was. Whatever it was, I’m sure he had a good reason. And if he finished someone off who he shouldn’t have, then yes, I would look into it.”

  About six months before, a small private TV station had started broadcasting a weekly show called Among Us, whose purpose was to expose paedophiles. The presenter got information from police files and was naming and shaming them on-air, complete with full names, photographs, details of their activities as well as updates on the progress of all their trials: the delays, who had got off because of insufficient evidence, and details of the personal lives of those still facing charges as well as of those who had done their time. They would then send reporters after them with hidden cameras, pretending that they wanted to speak to them about some job or other – a different one each time – and then they would ask how they felt about the children they had raped. Some would play the innocent, some would curse, some would burst into tears and ask for forgiveness and others would swiftly take off, with the reporter and cameraman hotfooting it breathlessly after them. The broadcasting authority and the data protection people were very slow to pick up on the show and therefore slow to put a stop to it, and when they finally did, it was too late. Among Us was hotly debated all over the country. Videos from the show got the most views on YouTube – several million each, with thousands of comments underneath, all of them baying for the blood of the child molesters. The presenter made a big deal about the social function the show was fulfilling by alerting parents to the fact that their neighbour was an animal and enabling them to protect their children. “When the police won’t do anything about the animals living among us, somebody has to do something, don’t they?” she would ask, trying her best not to smirk triumphantly before she got to the end of her sentence.

  The judges who ruled on the interim measures requesting the immediate suspension of the channel’s licence, sought by three government ministries, decided that the public had a right to be informed as this was a matter of child protection. The TV station enjoyed ratings it had never dared dream of, and advertisers were queueing up for those crucial spots during the show. It was obviously in its interest to keep broadcasting and just pay the first, the second and the third fine without a quibble even if all the noise around it started to ease off.

  It never did.

  That was because the wishes of all those people posting comments on YouTube for the past month or so had started to become reality. The paedophiles who had been featured on the show were starting to turn up dead, about one a week, with the same MO: ten bullets at close range, the corpses covered in bruises and cigarette burns. The Avenger, as the media had baptized him, had already got rid of three of them, and the only piece of evidence the police had was that the perpetrator had used a lock-picking gun to force a swift entry. That was it. No notes left next to the bodies, no online announcements. He hunted them, found them wherever they were – one had been in Athens, one in Halkida and the third in Thessaloniki – and executed them. The publicity brought in massive sums of money for the channel, which at this stage was broadcasting exclusively on YouTube through subscriptions. People were paying to watch this and to speculate about who the next victim would be. With all the noise it was making, it wouldn’t be surprising if people started placing bets on it.

  “One thing’s for sure – it’s a very professional job. Sure the Avenger’s not you?” Drag asked me.

  “He’s that good, is he?”

  “Yes, he is. I mean, he’s not bad,” he said without smiling, but then again, Drag doesn’t smile much.

  “If it was me, wouldn’t you know?”

  “You might have decided to do it for free, and then be too embarrassed to tell me.”

  “If I was doing it for free, that would mean that nobody else cared enough to sort it out.”

  “You mean enough to pay?”

  “That’s the only way that genuine interest in anything is ever shown. In payment – either money or effort.”

  “It seems that someone does care – and not just some angry random type. This one’s been trained. Doesn’t put a foot wrong. No witnesses, no evidence, nothing.”

  “Not bad, then.”

  “Well … the question is, did someone hire him or is he acting on his own? They did some experiments recently in Switzerland to show that most people, given the opportunity to take revenge, take it. Brain scans showed that when they do, the area of the brain associated with rewards is activated. We are wired to feel pleasure when we take revenge.”

  “Amazing conclusion. If this hadn’t come from Swiss scientists, I never would have believed it,” I said.

  “Swiss gravitas is important.”

  “Crucial.”

  “Definitive.”

  “Serious.”

  “Of the utmost seriousness.”

  “Nothing better came to mind,” Drag said.

  “So that’s why you were hanging around outside my house.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Because the work of the Avenger looks professional, your ego is pushing you to try to find him and arrest him. Prove that you’re better than him. But all that conflicts with something you believe to be right: the paedo witch-hunt. There’s a part of you that doesn’t want to get in his way. So you want to stay up with me to see if we can work out what the best thing to do is.”

  “I just wanted a drink,” said Drag defensively. When he saw I wasn’t responding, he carried on. “But if we come to a conclusion, I’d be fine with that too.”

  Whenever we came to Papi’s we ended up talking about whatever was on our minds and we were never entirely happy with our conclusions. Just happy talking things through. Maybe there aren’t any conclusions that are completely satisfactory, completely clear. Perhaps the only thing that is clear is the feeling you get from spending time with a close friend.

  Papi brought my cocktail over. In a moment of rare inspiration he had come up with a name: Papi’s Cocktail. He also had some draught beer for Drag, who had ordered scotch on the rocks, but we said nothing. We clinked our glasses and drank under Papi’s watchful eye as he waited anxiously for the verdict.

  “Very nice,” I said.

  “Honestly?” asked Drag once a delighted Papi was out of earshot.

  “I’ve never tasted anything so terrible in my life. I think the roof of my mouth is burning off.”

  As I attempted to recover by downing a glass of water in one, Marlon Brando’s voice was heard coming out of Drag’s mobile, saying “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” That was hi
s message alert. The message contained a link to Raptas’ file. He opened it and started skimming through, and then gave me a look that was even more electrifying than Papi’s cocktail. He turned the screen so that I could read it.

  The first paragraph contained various details, details of the way the coroner’s examination was carried out, the coroner’s details, the victim’s details. The second paragraph was where it started to get interesting. Emma told me that her father was found full of bullet holes and that before he was killed he’d been tortured. What she didn’t tell me was that there were ten bullets, and that his body had been covered in bruises and cigarette burns.

  Three years ago, Themis Raptas was murdered in exactly the same way as the paedophiles the Avenger was killing.

  8

  A barefoot chief coroner, Iakovos Martinos of the Forensic Science Division, was waiting for us in the tiny flat in Exarcheia he had converted into a studio. Iakovos was getting on for fifty, and it showed; at the end of each year it seemed he was twenty pounds heavier than the previous one. The last time Drag and I saw Martinos, I remember him saying, “When it’s my turn to die, I want to give the coroner plenty to look at.” Coroner humour.

  His long hair, pulled back into a ponytail, had only recently begun to turn grey. He wore wedding rings on both hands without ever having been married. Drag had asked him once why he wore them, and Martinos had told him that he wore them to remember “the love affairs that almost made it”. This time he welcomed us with a blue scarf round his neck, a pair of XXL shorts and a tight black T-shirt with a half-naked Amazonian warrior woman emblazoned across it. The air conditioning was on full blast as usual and the temperature inside the studio must have been edging thirty. The minute you stepped in, you started to dream of the moment you’d leave.

  Martinos knew me as someone who worked with Drag, and had never shown any interest in finding out more about me. To be fair, he didn’t really show any interest in anything apart from painting and the great talent he thought he had for it, if only he could find enough time to develop it. As soon as we came in, he walked us over to his latest creation – a swan in pink that was about to sink.

  “What do you think? I call it Painting as an Extension of Rhyme.”

  “Words fail me,” I answered.

  He told us once that his ambition was to produce a painting that would rival his favourite, Munch’s The Scream, in value. Fortunately, Drag, who was capable of demolishing a man’s dream in a single sentence without giving it a second thought, also believed in Martinos’ talent. He genuinely did.

  Zigzagging through the canvases, we made our way to the kitchen where Martinos kept his computer permanently hooked up to the coroner’s office. He had to, because sometimes he took a break from his painting to assist in the arrest of murderers. The kitchen walls were painted black to go with the yellow of the main room, the colours of Martinos’ favourite football team, AEK.

  “I remembered the case as soon as I got your message,” he said to Drag. “I remembered it because it was unbelievable the way that forensics messed the whole thing up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “OK. Let’s say we find a body in the forest. We need to ask how it got there. We need details about the path the murderer followed; we examine the body, looking for soil, pollen, leaves – anything that’s caught in the clothing – so we can compare it with the vegetation of the area the body’s found in. They found Raptas’ body up on Filopappou, where most of the trees have dried up but there are still a lot of bushes, as well as olive trees and cypresses and a bit of soil above the limestone. All things you can make use of. And if you can draw any conclusions about the path, you can then start looking for hairs, threads, anything that could have fallen from the murderer, any prints. And blood, of course, saliva, any kind of biological material.”

  “And they found nothing?”

  “That would be a generous way of putting it. The body had been there for at least three days – apparently the other homeless people up there were too scared to call the police because they thought they would automatically become suspects and didn’t want to be moved on. After three days, decomposition is well under way and the body leaves various fluids on the ground, a bit like fertilizer. The soil then changes its texture and colour, albeit a tiny bit. Some shrubs turn yellow in these circumstances and start to look like artificial plants. Nature tells you very clearly where to look. But you need to have the mind of a hunter who makes use of every single piece of evidence he sees to bring him closer to what he’s looking for. The team that worked on this found nothing. Nothing at all. Unbelievable. They must have missed countless pieces of evidence. They worked like rookies – but they weren’t.”

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  “Maybe they weren’t bothered. It happens in a lot of cases that seem to be unimportant. As if they were going to waste their time on some homeless guy. It was also about then that they started cutting salaries and everybody was miserable and not in the mood to get into a car and go and look at dead bodies. I was on leave, and by the time I read their report it was too late. Before I forget, they did find a lot of white hairs on him, but they were his own – we tested them. Raptas had gone completely white around the temples.”

  He pulled up some photos of the hairs. I looked at them closely and failed to come up with any profound conclusions that could lead me to the murderer.

  “They also found two or three female hairs, but they were discounted as random, considering Raptas’ lifestyle. When you live and sleep outdoors, all sorts of hairs can be found on your clothes; they could be from anywhere. If they’re in insignificant numbers, we ignore them.”

  “May I remind you that on the phone you said you had something that would be of interest to me?” Drag said abruptly, with his usual discretion.

  “Yes. I don’t need to tell you that when you hold your weapon next to the skin and shoot, apart from the wound, the bullet is going to leave a circular burn mark around the opening in the flesh. The paedophiles had ten of these, one for each bullet, but only Raptas had three marks, looking like tattoos, around his gunshot wounds. That means that those three wounds were inflicted by shots fired from an approximate distance of between four inches and three feet; the murderer only subsequently planted the other seven in him, from close range.”

  “What about the bruising and the cigarette burns?”

  “I wanted to talk to you about those too. While all the paedophiles were beaten and burned in the same places, Raptas’ bruises and burns were on other parts of his body.”

  “So what you’re telling us is —” began Drag.

  “I’m not telling you anything. You’re the ones who are investigating here. I’m just a simple artist,” interrupted Martinos.

  “Simple artist.” He’d hit the jackpot with that. Zero out of two for self-knowledge.

  What Martinos told us without actually saying as much was that there were two possible scenarios. The first was that the close similarities between Raptas’ murder three years ago and the paedophile murders were coincidental. The second scenario was that we were dealing with a copycat crime; someone who knew how Raptas had died was deliberately taking out paedophiles in the same way, as though he was trying to tell us something.

  9

  Maria never managed to look as beautiful in my dreams as she did in reality. I was always aware that something was missing from my dreams as I lay there tossing and turning my way through the early hours. What was missing was the warmth of her green almond-shaped eyes when they suddenly came to rest on me after she had examined everything around her. At that moment I felt as though I was the centre of the universe and that it was very natural that I should; it was as though that had been my place for centuries but nobody had noticed until the moment I was illuminated by those eyes.

  I had often thought about telling her that it was unfair that people couldn’t enjoy their dreams, but I didn’t. I let her take the lead to see if she just wante
d to talk, or if she needed a hug or something more. I’d never really felt that she belonged completely to me, which is why I was quite happy playing a supporting role when I was with her. I didn’t want to scare her by listing everything I felt. Better for her to understand how I felt without saying anything, even if it meant she didn’t understand at all. It didn’t really matter. A client once told me that the stronger partner in a relationship is the one that loves more deeply. And I wanted to believe this was true.

  It was eight in the morning when I opened the door to let her into my flat, and once more the dream I’d been having only minutes earlier paled in comparison to the real thing. I hit the button that turns off the lights activated at the door by the sensors I had connected on each step. In my line of work, you have to know the exact position of everyone who comes down into your flat. Ignorance could kill.

  I sat down next to her on the bed. “How’s it going?” I asked, pointing at her belly, which for the first time in twenty years distorted her very athletic body. And it managed to make her even more beautiful.

  From the moment I found out about the baby, the urge to stroke Maria’s belly grew stronger and stronger every day. Should I tell her how much I’d been missing her these past few days when we hadn’t seen each other? Every day I found myself hating the codes we used to communicate and everything that was left unsaid between us. But I have learnt to live by various codes. Without codes, there is no discipline, no method. Without method and discipline, you die. You die, someone you love dies, your relationships with other people die. If you just do what you feel like all the time, you end up blowing your life to pieces. Codes offer stability. I stuffed my left hand between the sheets to stop it from touching her.