Baby Blue

by Pol Koutsakis

  I was so happy for her. Raptas was clean. But I still hadn’t found his murderer. That is, assuming Vayenas had been telling me the truth. But I couldn’t share any of this with Emma. This good news was irrelevant to her as she had never for a moment pulled her father down from the pedestal she kept him on, and I didn’t feel like discussing my incompetence at catching his killer. I hoped I would be able to correct this, though. Emma had warned me during our first meeting that I would need to be very patient in dealing with this case. At the time I’d had no idea just how patient.

  Emma knew nothing about Themis’ investigation into the environmental catastrophe. She told me that she was working on a really impressive new trick involving two decks and that she would give me a demonstration when it was ready. She sounded excited. Emma was a professional who derived strength from her work, which was not something I could say about myself lately. I think I managed to say goodnight before I fell asleep.

  I dreamed about Themis Raptas. He was dressed as the Tramp and was doing his routine with Emma in one of the Athens squares. But this Tramp wasn’t Raptas, it was Chaplin himself. The crowd was ecstatic. Word had got round and the square was filling up with eager and excited crowds dying to watch them. I couldn’t get close enough to see; I couldn’t get close enough to hear my own voice shouting out to warn them that they were in danger, that their lives were hanging by a thread, that I had come from the future and they needed to listen to me if they wanted to stay together. Themis Chaplin and Emma – happy together wherever they were.

  I was jolted awake by the anxiety that they couldn’t hear me. I had left the lights on. My head and my arm were in pain, my body was crying out for rest. I got up to take a couple of painkillers and turn off the lights but ended up on the computer instead of back in bed. I went onto YouTube and put on The Kid. I remembered Anna Kati saying how much Themis loved the symbolism of everything and that he had loved this film to the point of obsession. All the routines he and Emma performed were taken from it.

  A film about two street people who accidentally come together and grow to love each other. Just like Themis and Emma.

  A film in which the Tramp gets through despite unbelievable difficulties and brings the Kid up, always with a smile. Just like Themis.

  A film which, from start to finish, conveys a melancholy about the mother who abandons the child, just like Emma’s mother, who had left her at the orphanage. A film in which bad people try to hurt the Tramp and the Kid but they always manage to escape. Just like Themis and Emma.

  A film in which, at the end, the penitent mother reconnects with her child after so many years. She takes both the child and its adoptive father with her, the man who had stood by the child for so long and raised it through all the hard times.

  Impossible? Why not?

  I kept staring at the last frame, with the door closing behind the three of them, now happily inside their home.

  “He loved her!” I said out loud to the nobody who was keeping me company, the nobody who had now permanently taken Maria’s place in my life. I thought about it for a while and became even more convinced, partly encouraged by my drunkenness and my exhaustion. When you are sure of something, it is easy to relax: you don’t have to bother yourself with alternate scenarios and solutions. Especially when you have run out of alternatives.

  “Bloody hell. He loved her. Themis loved Emma’s mother!”

  I got no reply. I took it as a sign of agreement.

  26

  Drag was struggling. The Chief was livid. He was demanding evidence “here and now”. Ministers and MPs were all leaning on him horribly while the media, TV stations as well as newspapers, were leaning on them horribly in turn, and they for their part were under horrendous pressure of debts and had to find a way of getting a scoop. The Chief was barking at Drag, telling him that Vayenas’ death needed an immediate and convincing explanation. Ramon and Giotis were expendable, but a dead Vayenas was a potential bomb under the Chief’s chair. Drag’s account of how he was acting in self-defence when the armed heavies burst into the room was problematic because Drag would have to explain what he was doing in that room in the first place. Vayenas’ severely disfigured face from all those blows was something else that had to be explained away. It was probably unwise for Drag to call me – his best friend the caretaker – to explain the situation. The statement made by the immigrant father that Vayenas had persuaded him to make false accusations against Raptas to his colleagues did not count against Vayenas, not even as a misdemeanour. The search the police carried out at Vayenas’ office had turned up nothing that could connect him to the paedophile murders. Everything else that Vayenas had told me was proving awkward to confirm now that he was dead. Drag, despite all this, took it all to the Chief as his own information. Unsubstantiated as it all was, the Chief dismissed it out of hand. He then advised Drag to take extended sick leave until further notice, with immediate effect. Drag slammed the door behind him on the way out and went to instruct his crack team of six to go and find any associate of Vayenas’ who knew anything at all about the paedophile executions.

  I asked Drag if I could help in any way at all.

  “Haven’t you done enough?” came the voice down the phone. He was still speaking to me – just – but as some sort of unavoidable irritation. This was the first time I had managed to sabotage one of his cases. He had wanted to arrest Vayenas once he had gathered enough evidence against him. He told me that he was on the way to see Anna Kati, to see if she could remember any of the details of Themis’ Achelous investigation and to ask whether it was possible to reconstruct the research.

  That wasn’t the only evidence we were missing. We still didn’t know anything about the identity of Emma’s biological parents, and after my idea the previous evening, I absolutely had to know who they were. I phoned the orphanage and told the secretary that I wanted to speak to Hara, their social worker whose surname I had unfortunately forgotten.

  “Kyriazi. Hara Kyriazi.” She very helpfully supplied it for me.

  “Yes, that’s it,” I answered, and by the time she connected me, I had hung up.

  According to her online profile, Hara Kyriazi, social worker at the Happy Home orphanage, who had given Themis so much help with Emma, lived in Michael Boda Street. I got there at two in the afternoon. It was a listed building in the neoclassical style but looked like it was only one step away from dereliction. I had already walked across the front garden and rung the bell, but when no one answered I came back out and stood outside, waiting for her to return. As I had nothing better to do I looked round at all the old buildings in the street, some of which made Kyriazi’s house look almost palatial in comparison. I looked at all the acacias on either side of the street, which in about one month’s time would flower and fill the pavements with an amazing scent. Many of the people moving around were foreign and looked like they felt foreign too. They were either alone or in twos, wrapped up and bent over, and when they did talk, they did so in whispers. It was not surprising that they were nervous. Just last week two migrants had stabbed the owner of a mini-market on the corner of Boda and Agiou Meletiou Street. A robbery gone badly wrong. The local residents had staged protest marches and formed vigilante groups who had told the media that they were armed and that the useless police were welcome to ask them why, if they dared. Some of them were taking the opportunity to carry out daily attacks on every foreigner who walked around the neighbourhood, smashing the shop windows of all foreign-owned businesses. Children weren’t spared either if they had the wrong skin colour.

  Hara Kyriazi got home a little before five. She found me outside her house eating a chocolate croissant I had picked up from the nearest kiosk. She had short dark hair, small eyes, an even smaller mouth and a snub nose. She was wearing round glasses and looked about fifty years old.

  “Good evening.”

  She gave me a strange look. Perhaps a little frightened, too. Lots of people get like that when they first see me, and Kyriazi,
who can’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds, at around five foot two was more than a foot shorter than me. She looked drawn and insubstantial.

  “Good evening,” she replied, hesitating on the final syllable.

  “My name is Stratos Gazis. Private detective. I’d like to talk to you about a case I’m working on – Themis Raptas and his daughter Emma.”

  I hadn’t even got to the end of my sentence before I noticed that she was standing there with her mouth wide open in astonishment.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Emma is with me. I’m taking care of her. With some other people. She’s fine.”

  She grabbed hold of my jacket, as though she needed the support. Her head was angled to one side and I couldn’t see her face.

  “Are you all right?”

  She took a step backwards and I saw that she had teared up.

  “Come inside,” she whispered.

  “Hara!” came a voice from behind us.

  Kyriazi turned to face the bulky sixty-year-old man who had appeared from the house next door carrying a rifle.

  “Minas. Good evening!” she said with a sudden burst of forced enthusiasm, which gave him the necessary encouragement to approach. The rifle was cocked but was pointing to the ground. My right hand was already on the Smith & Wesson in my jacket pocket while I carried on eating my croissant with my left.

  “Do you know this gentleman?”

  “Yes, yes. He’s a friend,” she answered as she rummaged in her handbag for a packet of tissues to dry her eyes.

  “Are you crying?”

  “Oh no, it’s just that he’s an old friend. I was just really moved to see him again.”

  “Ah. I noticed him waiting for you. For ages. I wasn’t sure if you were in any danger.”

  “No. Everything’s fine.”

  “Look, I’m sorry. These are strange times we’re living in,” said Minas.

  “Not at all. It’s just as well you’re around,” I told him, releasing the grip on my gun.

  Hara shared the neoclassical building with a plump white cat called Zouzou. Zouzou didn’t take to me and disappeared the minute I appeared, which meant that Hara had to follow her into the bedroom and stroke her and reassure her. While she was away I took the opportunity to look over the photographs that were plastered from one end to the other of the sparsely furnished sitting room. In every single photo there was Hara, cuddling one child or another. In some of them the children were clearly happy; in others they looked more reserved. Some of the photos included other adults of different ages. They could be the families Hara had helped to adopt. But I didn’t really care who they were. I had come for a very specific reason.

  “I just went to wash my face, to help me stop crying, but …” she said when she came back. She was still weepy. “Emma is fine. Emma is fine. I keep telling myself that, ever since you said it.” She crossed herself in front of me. “Thanks be to God! Do you believe in God, Stratos?”

  “I believe that evil exists. As for whether God exists or not, I’m undecided.”

  “I left an offering in church – to find out that she was safe, or to see her. If she was OK. Can I see her some time?”

  “If she wants to see you.”

  “Yes, of course, if she wants to. Of course. She’s fine! You’re still standing. Sit down. She’s fine. It’s unbelievable. I’m so happy. I left the offering – just so that she’d be OK. To make sure she was OK. Oh, my God!”

  Suddenly she was down on her knees praying, with her head touching the floor. Absolute humility. The tears kept coming. I couldn’t work out whether it was the shock of the good news or whether this was normal for her. I suspected the latter. I stood there, hoping that she would pull herself together long enough for me to get the information I needed. I waited quietly for her to finish whatever it was she was doing.

  As soon as she got to her feet she said, “I killed Emma. I mean, I tried to, I tried to. But because there is a God, I failed,” she said, her voice intensifying to a point of near ecstasy. I was at a loss. She was completely insane. Maybe it was she who had scared the cat, not me.

  “What do you mean? Emma said that it was down to you that Themis was able to get her out of the orphanage so quickly.”

  “Yes.” She had suddenly slipped into one-word answers. Her eyes were shining and she looked at me without seeing me.

  “So …?” I said, trying to keep her going.

  “Yes. I did help back then,” was all I got.

  “Have you got Emma’s file, by any chance? It’s missing.”

  “From the Happy Home. Of course it is, because I stole it. And I erased the file on her from our system.”

  “Why?” I asked, without being at all sure that she was listening.

  “Did Emma tell you that she came to find me at the orphanage after Themis was killed?”

  I had deliberately avoided asking Emma about the time after the murder when she was alone on the streets. I reckoned that it had no immediate bearing on the case and I was wary of opening old wounds. That had been a mistake. Everything had a bearing on this case. And in all the cases I work on I never let anything go, however trivial it seems. Drag was right. In my efforts to protect Emma, I had damaged the investigation. But if the path to truth intersects with the heart of a child, you either have to stay on the path or blow it to pieces.

  “No, we didn’t talk about that.”

  “She did. She had no choice really. She had only ever known us and Themis. I have no idea how she found us in her state, but find us she did. She had walked. Alone. I remember the day and the time very clearly. It was three years ago now. Midday. Boiling hot. So that my sin took place in front of the light of the world. I was standing by the entrance, I remember. I told her we were full and had no beds. Of course, we did have some beds available, but I said we didn’t. I told her to come back the next day and in the meantime I would try to find her a space at another orphanage. Naturally, she took off and never came back again. She went straight back to nowhere. Just because I had been paid off. Bribed. It was a lot of money. I was having to help my father pay off his gambling debts at the time. He didn’t pay them, of course. However much I gave him, there was never an end to it. He killed himself last year. Not surprising really. I looked down at him in his coffin and said so out loud. All the family were staring at me because I just kept saying it, again and again, ‘Why aren’t I surprised?’ You can’t save lives with dirty money. I sent Emma back onto the streets. I, the same woman who had given her to my friend, who had thrown her a lifeline, was now taking it back. You can’t know how happy I am to hear that she is well. Nothing else matters. I don’t care what punishment I get. I betrayed them, her and Themis. As long as she’s all right – that’s all that matters.”

  “Who bribed you?”

  The question seemed to scare her. “Shh,” she said. “Shh. Don’t ask ‘who?’. Ask ‘what?’ Who is for people; what is for monsters. One moment …” She stood up and walked over to a dresser and opened the bottom drawer. She rooted around inside for a while and then pulled out a white document wallet, the kind with ears and a ribbon, and pushed the drawer shut again. “Take a look.”

  There was a printed label on the outside: Emmanuela Raptas. Emma’s full name after her adoption. I opened it, and there on the first page was the name of her birth mother, a name I didn’t know. Hara was pointing to it. “For monsters,” she repeated.

  I would normally have paused the reading and asked her what she meant, what it was that made Emma’s mother a monster. But I didn’t, because I had already seen what was written underneath. There it was in black and white, so there could be absolutely no doubt however many times you read it, however many times you blinked and read it again: the name of her biological father. I looked at it and felt as if I had a heart, because what else but a heart was I feeling sinking to my stomach, looking for a bottom that didn’t exist?

  Emma’s biological father was Themis Raptas.

/>   27

  Drag and his crack team were working round the clock getting statements from Vayenas’ employees across all areas of his business activities. They were trying to establish who was involved in the paedophile executions. They failed. They also failed to uncover any other meaningful evidence. Anna Kati explained to him that it would take months to rebuild the Achelous files from Themis’ investigation. She asked him if he had any explanation for why Themis had reformatted her hard drives. Drag passed on the two explanations that I had for it. The romantic view was that Raptas was trying to protect her; by making it impossible for her to continue the investigation, she would not be in any danger from Vayenas. The practical view was that he simply didn’t trust her enough and wanted to have full control over the evidence, and this would cement his negotiating position with Vayenas. Take your pick. The dead aren’t touchy.

  While Drag was suffering and Anna was looking for explanations she would never get, news came through from the hospital. Angelino had come out of his coma and although it was early days, the doctors were optimistic for a full recovery with no lasting damage. Emma was there when he woke up. Angelino insisted that he had woken up not while she was there but because she was there. Drag didn’t waste any time getting over to the hospital to get a statement from him. Angelino explained that the reason he always went around armed before the attack in Chateaubriand Street was that he had noticed some suspicious activity in the neighbourhood. He couldn’t be sure at that point whether it was anything to do with his sniffing around the Raptas case, or with another case – Angelino was active on several fronts – so he hadn’t said anything to me.