Whatever it was, a month had passed and I still hadn’t managed to find the person Emma and Angelino had originally asked me to find. And it didn’t look like I was going to either.
Fortunately, nobody seemed to concern themselves with my failure.
Emma and Angelino were just so happy to be together again. Angelino was making a full recovery and Emma was at his bedside night and day at the new house they had rented. She was doubly happy because while Angelino was in this condition, she was able to cover the rent with her own money, the money Themis had put aside for her. I resolved not to allow the slightest shadow to be cast on her joy and kept the truth of the identity of her biological parents from her. Themis had felt too guilty to tell her himself. So did I. There was no reason for her to mourn him all over again. The ashes of her file from the orphanage were now drifting through the Athenian smog.
Drag was far too busy to find time for us to talk about Themis’ murder. From the moment he released the evidence against Vayenas that we’d found inside the bank box, media figures, friends and other associates of Vayenas’ went to war with the police in general and Drag personally. Other outlets which were owned by the competition or outright enemies of Vayenas’ pursued him doggedly, trying to get interviews and statements and in general looking for any excuse to turn him into a hero. They got their chance when Drag managed to get one of Vayenas’ advisers to confess everything about the paedophile murders, along with the names of the heavies who had carried out the executions on behalf of the media baron. Two of these self-styled Avengers were Ramon and Giotis, the ones who had tried their luck with us back at the massage parlour.
Teri and Hermes were on holiday in the Maldives, where he was supposed to be attending some kind of symposium. They had already booked their next trip – January in Las Vegas, where Hermes was due to give the opening speech at a conference. “By the way,” she said, having called me to say goodbye, “did you know that January gets its name from Janus, the two-headed Roman god: one looking forward to the new year, the other back at the year that just finished?”
She was turning into Drag.
Then suddenly one morning in March, Maria was back.
I was on the balcony, watering her plants.
“Hi,” she said.
I felt something resembling a spasm in my throat, as though a scream was trying to escape, and I was desperate not to let it.
During the month that had passed I had made several attempts to find her and had even tried lying in wait outside her parents’ house, ringing their doorbell again and again in desperation. I’d called her dozens of times on her permanently switched-off mobile and sent her thousands of messages which remained unread and as many emails, which all went unanswered. And here she was, walking into the house with a simple “Hi”.
“Hi yourself,” I answered.
“Can we … talk?”
I didn’t want to talk. I wanted us to hold each other like the world was ending. To do something that would show the intensity of what we were feeling. Words can’t do that. They don’t measure up.
We sat down in the kitchen. She was wearing a loose red dress under her black coat, which rode up to her knee when she sat down and crossed her legs. I was tempted to tell her that she shouldn’t be crossing her legs in her condition but decided this was not the time.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about what I said to you.”
“That you wished I didn’t exist?”
“That, yes. And everything else. I think I was being unfair. In part. It wasn’t any more your fault than mine. And I couldn’t ask you to change for the sake of the child. It’s the only work you know – it’s who you are – it’s who I love. Just as you are. I’ve loved you since we were kids.”
I’d been waiting a lifetime to hear this. I might have known it, felt it, but I really needed to hear it. Except she was looking down as she spoke. As though she had just received a death sentence. Not the way you look when you are telling the person closest to you that you want to try again.
“Everything I said, about the child’s safety, about our future as a family, was right. So however long I’d been putting it off, however much I wanted to find an answer that would pull everything together, I knew, I know there is no answer.”
Her voice cracked.
“I knew I was facing a clear dilemma.”
She was still looking down. The longer I listened to her, the more I wanted to look down too, but I held my gaze on her.
“I had to make a choice: to raise a child alone or to stay with you. Without the child.”
Her voice cracked even more.
Now it was my turn to receive a death sentence.
“People like you can’t have children. And I’ve made the decision that I want to be with you,” she said.
Someone had just plunged something sharp right into my throat. Something long and very sharp. I pointed to her belly, my outstretched finger questioning her. I looked at it in a state of alienation: no part of me could ever ask such a question, would dare ask such a question, could ever bear to ask such a question.
“It’s already done,” she said.
The blade in my throat began to move up and down rhythmically, digging itself deeper and deeper into my flesh, gouging and gouging, determined not to stop until it had completely hollowed me out. I was happy to go along with it, and work with it. If I had had any voice, I would have told it to keep going.
“It was a girl,” she said, and suddenly slipped onto the floor and just lay there, doubled up, buckled and pitiful. I looked at her and could have sworn that I was seeing her for the first time in my life.
She stayed down there on the floor, but she wasn’t crying.
So Maria had decided to stay with me. Just like Nefeli had decided to be with Themis. Of course, the two weren’t the same. Maria had good reasons for not wanting the child to have me for a father. Of course, it wasn’t the same, but at the same time it was. She had denied me the chance to talk her round, to tell her that I would do anything, everything for her and the baby. Even change my life.
I thought of Robert Enke again. I thought about how lucky he was to have had those two years with his daughter. I thought about Themis Raptas, who missed those three years with Emma but after that enjoyed another eight with her, albeit under very difficult circumstances. I would have nothing with my child.
I looked out onto the balcony and thought it was strange that the door had been open all this time as the room was completely airless. I had to get out, quickly, before I suffocated.
“I would never have wanted anything more in life than you and that baby,” I said.
It took me an hour to pack my things and leave the house. Maria said nothing. She had stayed there on the floor, doubled up, where I couldn’t see her face and couldn’t get close to her. I’m not sure if she was even aware that I had left. But I was absolutely sure that there was nothing else I could do.
A month later I was standing next to my Peugeot outside HighTV when Dora approached with her signature walk, which I noted was almost as interesting to observe from the front as the back. “Are you waiting for someone?” she said, the smile she gave promising the world. But that wasn’t why I was there.
“I wanted to ask you something,” I said, the expression on my face instantly wiping the smile off hers.
“OK.”
“Get in,” I said.
“I’ve got my own car.”
“Get in.” Without another word, she did.
A few hours earlier, alone in my hotel room, I’d been feeling like one of those characters in the comics we used to read when we were kids, with those thought bubbles hanging over their heads and an idea swimming around inside it. But I needed Dora’s help to work out if I was right, since Drag and I hadn’t spoken after I told him what happened with Maria’s return. The way he’d reacted, I no longer recognized the man who had been my best friend for the last twenty-plus years.
30
Chry
ssa Georgala’s penthouse flat in Voula, at the address Dora had given me, must have been around fifteen hundred square feet. It had three bedrooms, a living room the size of a rugby pitch, two bathrooms, oak flooring and electronic shutters. The whole place was finished in very bad taste, from the furniture to the vases and candlesticks that decorated every last corner. At least there was a half-decent painting of the Iridanos River, the only surviving of the three rivers that had flowed through Athens in antiquity, the Kifissos and Ilissos having both fallen victims to the contemporary Greeks, who had covered them over as a token of their respect for their ancient heritage.
When Chryssa walked through the door she was in a foul mood, which didn’t improve when she saw me sitting in her living room with my gun pointing at her quite pretty face. I had made sure to draw the curtains so that the people in the building opposite wouldn’t have to watch us as they swam up and down in their indoor heated pools.
“What! What do you want?” she said, losing the blush in her cheeks.
Compared to the advertisement, where I’d heard her for the first time speaking in a whiny voice, she sounded much raspier, as though she had a cold. She was in a black dress which struggled to reach the top of her thighs. Spring was well and truly here and Chryssa wanted to put on a show for anyone who cared to see, and risking her health seemed a small price to pay.
“Sit down,” I said, pointing to a black rocking chair.
“Take it, you can take whatever you want and leave! I’ve got some money here too. You can have it all!”
She picked up her handbag and was about to open it; I don’t know whether she was planning to pull out a purse or a gun and I wasn’t going to wait to find out.
“Chryssa! Close your bag. Now,” I said and pointed to the chair again. When she heard her name, she went even paler. She went to sit down, coughing loudly.
“I’m not rich, if that’s what you think, I —”
“Be quiet. I haven’t come for your money. I’ve got some questions for you. You will answer when I tell you and you will stick to the questions. Got it?”
She nodded and curled up defensively in the chair. Good girl.
“What do you want?” she repeated, a slightly shriller tone overcoming the raspiness.
“I want to talk about Themis Raptas.”
This took her by surprise. It was written across her face almost as clearly as in that ad when her character realizes just how comfortable her new bra is. But then again, it could have been that her range was a bit limited.
“Come again?” she said.
“Not ‘come again’. You really don’t want me to come again. In fact, you don’t want me anywhere near you, so talk.”
“I don’t know. What do you want to know? What was the name? Themis who? What was the surname? Er —”
The “er” came out when she saw me get up and come striding towards her, and it turned into small cries of pain as I grabbed hold of her with my free hand, pushed her up against the nearest wall, threw her to the floor and pulled her along on her knees by her long blonde hair back to the chair.
“If you scream, if you try to resist, I will kill you. If you carry on pretending that you don’t know anything, I will kill you. Your only hope of getting out of here alive is telling me the truth.”
“Who are you?” she asked without moving from the chair.
“I’m listening.”
“What do you want to know?”
“I have a witness who places you with him on Filopappou Hill.”
“Doing what?” she said, and instantly realized that she had given herself away. “I mean, Raptas left HighTV years ago. What do you mean? What hill?”
“I’m running out of patience,” I said, raising my gun to the level of her head.
“No, please. Don’t! OK. We were together. Is that what you wanted to hear? We were together. We were in a relationship. Sleeping together – how else can I put it?”
In the hotel room where I had been sleeping for the past month in the company of my loneliness, I would occasionally turn on the TV and see that there were a lot of people out there who were in a much worse state than I was – the actors and the presenters, for example. Once when I was looking at an ad for tights on the telemarketing channel I realized that I’d already seen the blonde model they were using in two other advertisements, and then I also realized that not only had I seen her before but I had seen her in person a few days earlier outside HighTV climbing out of Vayenas’ limo. And then I remembered the homeless man who had spoken to Antonis Pavlis, the one that both Pavlis and I thought was crazy. He said he had seen Raptas getting it on under a tree with a gorgeous TV presenter, the one who was always on, day and night. They show her all the time. She’s always on, he’d commented to Pavlis. That’s the way it works if you happen to be the owner’s girlfriend. They’ll put you in everything. And if the owner is an old man you sleep with to advance your career, it’s natural that you will satisfy your real needs elsewhere with someone closer in age to you. Someone with charisma, someone who, according to Dora, everyone at the station was in love with. Pavlis had shown the homeless man photos of all the presenters on Greek TV without realizing that the man who was in and out of the shops begging had confused the model he constantly saw with a presenter.
“Lovely. We’re beginning to make some progress. What else do you want to tell me?”
“Nothing. Like what? I was in love with him, and at some point it ended.”
“It ended?”
“Yes.”
“Before he was murdered?”
“Yes, before, of course.”
“This flat belongs to you, does it?”
“What? Course not! I rent.”
“I’ve been here inside your home for five hours. I’ve already found the titles with your name on them.”
She said nothing. I said nothing. I was waiting.
“OK. OK. So it is mine.”
“Paid for with the sweat of hard labour – on top of Vayenas?”
Her green eyes looked at me with hatred. The little viper was trapped and was looking for a chance to expel its venom.
“I don’t get it. Are you from Vice? Are you checking up on my morals? Do you want a list of everyone I’ve ever slept with?”
“Vayenas was after Raptas. Raptas knew they were looking for him. Vayenas told me himself that it had felt like someone was looking out for Themis, tipping him off.”
“Vayenas said that? Did you …?” What she meant to ask was if I had killed him.
“You don’t ask the questions round here. It was you who used to tip Raptas off about Vayenas, wasn’t it?”
I said this with conviction even though I wasn’t quite sure. It was the only logical explanation, and I wanted to see if she would deny it. She didn’t. She started crying, or pretending to cry in the way that the heroines in TV dramas cry right on cue.
“You did, didn’t you?”
“I loved him!” she said.
That bit at least seemed genuine. But through the crocodile tears it was difficult to sort the truth from everything else. Perhaps she had the same difficulty herself.
“But as you said, Raptas had been long gone from the station. And he lived up on the hill with his daughter like a regular homeless person. Where did the two of you go when you wanted to be together?”
“Anywhere. We would wait for the child to fall asleep. Sometimes it would be in the cave, sometimes outside. It didn’t happen often. And even less after they started hunting him down.”
“How did you feel about it?”
“How was I supposed to feel? Horrible. I wanted to see more of him. It’s why we split up.”
“You broke it off?”
“Yes, of course.”
“But you just said you loved him.”
“What good is being in love if you don’t ever see the person?”
“You’ve got lovely hair.”
I would change the subject at regular intervals just to confu
se her and stop her from getting too comfortable. This last comment threw her; she tensed up even more.
“What are you going to do to me?”
“Not what you think. Are you a natural blonde?”
“Yes. What’s that got to do with anything?”
“I’ve already picked some hairs from your bathtub. Fortunately for you, you’re not much of a housekeeper, so I won’t have to cut any off. But I will if it comes to it. We’re going to pay a friend of mine a visit now. He’s a cop. Some blonde hairs were found on Raptas’ body. Something tells me yours might be a match.”
I wasn’t at all sure if I was right. The hairs that Martinos mentioned could have been anybody’s. Could have belonged to a passer-by and attached themselves to Raptas during the scuffle before the murder or when he fell to the ground. But that’s what investigations are: minimal evidence and a whole load of speculation. And you work through it all until you find the theory that holds water. Chryssa let out a sharp cry as she attempted to attack me head-on.
“You fucking —”
I threw a punch under her nose and pinned her to the floor. Then I called Drag and told him to come over and speak to her. The call lasted less than a minute as neither of us was in the mood to listen to the other’s voice for longer than necessary.
I never did find out who the second person Themis had trusted with his research was – apart from the lawyer. It was possible that there was no second person. Maybe he’d just told Paraschos that to put the fear of God into him. When I went to see Paraschos to deliver the evidence that related to him, he told me that he had taken a liking to me, and once again that he owed me.
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