Baby Blue

by Pol Koutsakis

  Before I could so much as smile at this, she was off again.

  “Maria carries all of us, apart from you, who she’s got a double dose of.”

  I was struggling to breathe.

  “Have the two of you spoken at all?” I asked Teri, and I didn’t recognize my own voice, the way it emerged from my throat.

  She shook her head. She was no longer feeling so chatty. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Since Maria couldn’t speak to either me or Drag, she would have spoken to Teri.

  “Where is she?”

  “Oh, drop it, will you? ‘Where is she?’ If she wanted you to know, she’d have picked up the phone all those times you rang her. She’s fine. OK? That is all that I’m licensed to say.”

  “You don’t get how important —”

  “Right – I don’t get how important it is that she’s carrying a child that has become a millstone! I’m that stupid that I don’t understand, while the rest of you are pure geniuses! Drag called me as soon as we’d finished talking this morning and asked me if I knew where you were hiding Emma. This is really important to him. So are you saying I should betray your trust and tell him? To hell with the lot of you!”

  She was probably right, but I was seeing red. There was no way on earth I was about to leave that café without finding out how Maria was, without Teri picking up her phone and calling her and putting me on to speak to her myself. I felt the darkness descend on my face and Teri must have noticed it too, even though she stayed calm in the conviction that she was right. I have no idea how our coffee would have ended if at that moment a familiar face hadn’t sprung up on the screen of the small TV that was suspended at an angle from the wall in the Yousourum: it was Drag. And he did not look happy.

  15

  The TV was on mute, so I strode over to the waitresses’ station and took the remote. Three or four customers turned round, possibly in irritation, when I turned the sound up, but the second they registered my build they abandoned all hope of complaining and resumed their conversations.

  Drag was in his same old trench coat thrown over a yellow sweater, and almost provocatively crumpled. He hadn’t combed his hair, which looked in urgent need of a cut, especially now that it was thinning out at the temples, which did nothing to flatter him. He stood in front of a sea of impatient reporters, all waving microphones under his nose. He had the look of a man who would be ten times more comfortable if confronted by the same number of sub-machine guns. The reporters were consumed by hysteria, all shouting at the same time, at an even faster tempo than usual, pushing and shoving each other, and judging by the wobbly picture, the cameramen were as well. They gave the impression that something really important had happened. But what?

  What was Drag doing all the way out in Anavyssos at this time of the morning? Assuming that the headline “Anavyssos: Live Now” flashing across the bottom of the screen of the breaking news bulletin was correct on points of time and place.

  “Superintendent – would you like to comment on this latest murder?”

  “Can you confirm that the victim was also a paedophile?”

  “Is the Avenger too clever for you?”

  “Superintendent – did they leave a note this time?”

  “What are you going to do to protect future victims?”

  “Everything,” said Drag, ignoring all the questions that preceded it.

  “Do you believe that these people are worthy of police protection?”

  “Everybody deserves police protection.” Drag was quick to reply but did so in the same lugubrious voice I remember him using at school when reciting pages from our history textbook before a test.

  “Even paedophiles?”

  “The law does not discriminate.”

  “Even against paedophiles?” asked another.

  “Is there an echo here?” asked Drag, looking around him with affected confusion.

  “So are we your problem now?” asked the target of his irony.

  “Is it true that you’re getting a court order to ban the broadcast of Among Us again?”

  “Yes.”

  “But there are court decisions permitting it to be aired.”

  “There are.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that they exist.”

  “Superintendent – are you mocking the Hellenic justice system?”

  “The Hellenic justice system doesn’t need anyone to mock it; it manages just fine on its own.”

  That’s what they were waiting for, as they had briefly lost their rhythm. Like bees synchronizing their wing movements, they erupted into a deafening chorus of “What do you mean?” and “Do you mean to say that the justice system makes a mockery of itself through the judgements that it makes?” and “Is this a direct attack on our judges?”

  And with that, Drag had successfully deflected any further questions about the investigation.

  “Are you attempting to blame the incompetence of the police on the courts?” shouted one of the drones, managing to be heard above the rest of the swarm.

  “The police will solve this case too,” said Drag.

  “After how many victims?”

  “We believe that this will be the last.”

  “Didn’t you believe the same thing before this murder?”

  “We did.”

  “So how can the public have confidence in you now?”

  “Because I’m so good-looking.”

  Utter mayhem. There’s no other word for what happened next. The deadpan delivery and the unsmiling face only made it worse.

  “Are you mocking us now?”

  “Do you consider your behaviour appropriate? Let’s go – he’s ridiculing us.”

  “What have you got against the media, Superintendent?”

  “Right now you’re mocking the Greek taxpayers too, who will be watching and doubting they can expect the full protection of the police.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I am not making fun of the taxpayer.”

  “Doesn’t your new recommendation to the chief prosecutor to ban the screening of the show amount to an admission that you can’t catch this murderer?”

  “No.”

  “Does this not amount to a clear violation of the freedom of the press?”

  “No.”

  “Are you not in breach of the respective judgements?”

  “No.”

  “Then what are you doing?”

  “Making a recommendation.”

  “Do you at least have some evidence that gives you cause for optimism?”

  “The existence of God,” he said, and got to his feet.

  “You’re now mocking God, as well?” screeched one of the reporters who had yet to speak.

  “God doesn’t need anyone to mock Him; He manages just fine on his own.” And with that Drag marched straight into the crowd of reporters, forcing them to step aside so that he could carve his way through them.

  “How do you feel now that our best friend is famous?” asked Teri.

  “Much better about it than he does, that’s for sure.”

  The image from the breaking news item shifted to the studio where the newsreader was reminding her viewers that the body of the man who had been found the day before in the coastal area of Anavyssos belonged to fifty-year-old Dimosthenes Daniil, one of the paedophiles exposed on the show Among Us. He had been arrested for possession and distribution of child pornography online, images involving children up to four years of age. He had successfully used the insanity defence and was serving out his sentence in a psychiatric facility, from which he was released on a regular basis, and had been on his way home yesterday.

  I phoned Drag. No answer. It was possible he’d be busy. It was certain he’d be angry. He had been using Daniil as bait, but the Avenger had managed to kill him without falling into Drag’s trap. Defeat – one of the words Drag despises the most.

  My meeting with Antonis Pavlis, Angelino’s icon-painter friend, was at
two o’clock in Stadiou Street. That left me with over an hour after I said goodbye to Teri. I didn’t get the chance to talk her round about Maria because Babis phoned to say that Emma was awake and Teri leapt at the chance to take off. Before she did, she told me that she knew a young girl who had once been forced to do porn films. She knew her from the days when she worked at the support centre for abused children, and was still in touch with her. The girl had suffered a great deal and was willing to share all she knew about her abusers. Teri would ask her if she knew anything about Raptas and the paedophiles to see if she had anything interesting to say. As I had nothing better to do I decided to kill time by walking through Thisseion and Kerameikos, past the ancient Athenian cemetery, the marble-paved squares, the Byzantine Church of the Agioi Asomatoi, the Museum of Islamic Art and the part of the old city walls of Athens down at the Benaki Museum. I nipped into the Museum of the Ancient Agora, housed in the Stoa of Attalos, to see what I could remember from my previous visit to the shopping mall that dominated the lives of Athenians twenty centuries ago. I had to admit that of everything I saw, the only thing that really made an impression on me was a young girl I saw in Thisseion who plunged her arm inside a dustbin searching for something to eat, and I wondered what this rich cultural heritage could possibly mean to her. Perhaps I’m just uncultured.

  Further on, a couple of buskers were packing up and leaving. The atmosphere was unsettled – a march was on its way, demonstrating about the death of an illegal immigrant, a street seller, who had been so terrified when the police arrived to arrest him that in his efforts to run away he stumbled, fell onto the railway tracks and was electrocuted. For some reason, none of the protestors were paying any attention to the girl by the bin. She was standing right there next to them. I reckoned that if she actually died, they would very quickly organize a protest march, but help her while she was still alive? No chance.

  I decided to turn back in the direction of Stadiou Street, and was outside a place advertising Turkish baths when my phone rang. Maybe it was Maria, sensing my despair. Or feeling desperate herself. Maybe she’d thought the whole thing through and had found the answer that had eluded me. By the time I had pulled the phone out of my back pocket, I had managed to convince myself it was her. But it wasn’t. It was Drag.

  “Have you heard?”

  “Teri and I were admiring you.”

  “He did a runner. Daniil, the paedo. He got wind of the fact he was being followed and gave our man the slip.”

  “Well that didn’t turn out well for him, did it?”

  “Nor for us. Now we’ll have to wait for the next attack. There was nothing on the victim’s body we can use.”

  “What about the execution style? The same?”

  “Yes. Only this time they chucked the body into the sea.”

  “They? Plural?”

  “That’s right. There’s no way that the Avenger can be working alone. Our evidence shows there must be two of them. At least.”

  “Why would they throw the body in the sea?”

  “I don’t know. For effect? I have no idea.”

  “But you will have.”

  “That’s the only certainty here. As for those three louts who broke into Angelo’s house, I’ve found past convictions as well as enough witnesses confirming that these characters would kill their own mothers if you threw a bit of cash at them. Pros, but not exactly premier league. I still haven’t found out who they were working for. I also had a word with the director of the Happy Home orphanage.”

  That was the orphanage where Emma spent the first three years of her life.

  “And?”

  “It seems that for the first time in the history of the orphanage, a file has gone missing.”

  “Emma’s.”

  “Mmm. And there’s no electronic record, either, of who her biological parents were?”

  Just as I had begun to think that this case couldn’t get any stranger, it did.

  “The director promised she would investigate.”

  “Do you think she’ll have any success?”

  “I do believe she has no idea what’s going on. What about you? What’s new?”

  “I’m looking into it. I’ll let you know tonight.”

  “I need to speak to Emma.”

  “Drag …”

  “You could be there too.”

  “No. In her mind, the police are the enemy.”

  “That’s her problem.”

  “Not just hers.”

  “Then we won’t tell her I’m a policeman.”

  “I won’t lie to her.”

  That wasn’t entirely true. I had already been lying to her about Angelino’s condition. Strictly speaking I should have said, “I won’t lie to her any more.”

  “If I don’t make a breakthrough soon, I’m going to have to ask you to do this as a favour to me.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I’ll wait to hear from you tonight,” he said and hung up. His tone was the one he used when he spoke to his subordinates. It was as though he felt that the pressure he was under was greater than mine.

  This case was beginning to resemble a rodent squeezing through holes wherever it finds them and slyly gnawing away, bit by bit, at my relationships with the only three people I had ever loved in my life.

  16

  Antonis Pavlis was waiting as agreed on the graffiti-filled corner of Stadiou and Korai Street a little further down from the Asty Cinema. He was in a white shirt, grey velvet trousers and black basketball boots. He stood at about five foot eight and was a slender, fit man who couldn’t have been over fifty, despite his white hair, which looked even whiter against his tanned skin. He was cleanly shaven, which meant that he didn’t mind if people saw the big scar on his left cheek, which looked like it had been slashed by a knife. He’d given me a very accurate description of what he was going to be wearing over the phone, so I knew that this was the man I was looking for. He was standing in front of a wall covered in graffiti. Amongst all those slogans I managed to make out one that said The Aegean belongs to SpongeBob.

  Ten yards away a group of parents had set up a makeshift open-air school for children with special needs and were holding banners protesting the lack of transport that would enable their children to get to school.

  “Stratos?”

  We shook hands. I thanked him for his help and couldn’t help noticing his aftershave, which was sweet and fruity.

  “Anything for Angelino. Any news? I went the day before yesterday, but saw that the police were grilling all his visitors, so I got straight out of there.”

  “He’s getting stronger all the time, but they’re keeping him in an induced coma to spare him all that pain,” I said, repeating the yarn I had been spinning to Emma. I didn’t know how he would react, or whether he would still want to help if I told him the truth about Angelino’s condition.

  “Shall we go before everything kicks off here?” he asked, pointing in the direction of the riot police who were crossing Stadiou Street and heading for the Ministry of Labour.

  “What’s going on?”

  “A demo on its way. People who’ve been laid off, demanding to see the minister.”

  That meant anything was possible, from basic chanting of angry slogans blasting through megaphones to a full-blown riot and tear gas. I turned and looked past the kids who were sitting there drawing and at their parents, who needed to get them out of the way, and quickly. I remembered Teri saying about a month ago, “I worry that I’m beginning to fall out of love with this bloody city.”

  Pavlis and I headed up the street towards Ianos Books. I explained to him that I was intending to ask around the homeless community in general about their lives and then bring the discussion round to the good times, great moments on the streets, for example the Tramp routines that I’d seen this guy perform with a kid, years ago. That way, if any of those people had already been questioned by Angelino when he was trying to gather information and had stayed quiet, they would
n’t suspect anything. And maybe we would find someone who had more to say than they had told Angelino. Pavlis thought my idea was good and added that we shouldn’t tell any of the homeless people we spoke to about the attack on Angelino.

  “If they find out, they’re not likely to want to open up to us – it will probably spook them even more.”

  “More than what?”

  “More than they already are – they live on the streets. Most of them who have been sleeping rough for a while have got used to it; it suits them, but they don’t want any more danger – they’ve had their fill.”

  The day Teri had expressed her changing feelings about Athens, Drag had been with us. We were playing stud poker. I was losing and the two of them were splitting the winnings, which is why they were managing not to fight. I remember asking him if he thought we had got so accustomed to danger that we couldn’t live without it. That we would feel that something was missing. He didn’t know what to say, and Teri answered instead, saying, “It’s not so much that you two have got used to it; you could never live without it in the first place.” And then she showed me her hand: royal flush. She had annihilated me.

  Giannis – that’s how he introduced himself to us – apologized for not getting up and coming out of his box. He was wrapped in a red blanket and was shaking. He must have caught a chill somewhere, he said. Must have left the window open. I laughed lamely. He smiled and told me to make sure I used his joke. He talked about himself a lot into the voice recorder I was holding. He whispered that he felt relieved that he didn’t have to worry any more about paying the bills, and he was enjoying his new spot because it was next to the bookshop and it helped him remember the time when he used to buy books himself. And he noted that there weren’t so many people around any more, since half the shops in Stadiou were boarded up. But he liked that. He liked the fact that even though he was in the centre of the city there were times when it went completely silent. As I listened to him, I thought about this street, the street in which three people including an unborn child had burned to death inside a bank during a petrol-bomb attack without causing much of a reaction. It seemed fair that the shops should die with them. The street had given up its right to life.