Signs of a Struggle

by Tony Kaplan

  “Don’t say about the body in the bridge to Michalis,” he says earnestly. He considers whether to tell me more. Then he decides. “The Communists are say it is his father.”

  ****

  The restaurant next door is, a bold sign in blue on white tells me, “The Sea View Restaurant, Bar and Coffee Shop.” All in English. No Greek translation. I notice ‘restaurant’, not ‘taverna’. Michalis Epistemos, the owner, is talking earnestly to the waitress with the ringlets I saw last night. When her hair catches the sunlight, its copper hues turn to gold. She smiles gently as if humouring him, says, “Nai,” and goes off, a spring in her step. He turns and sees me. His face opens into a wide grin. “Welcome!” he says exuberantly, “Come in. Sit. What can I get you?” He ushers me to a table with a glorious, unimpeded view of the bay. The beach is still empty, although there are towels reserving the few beach chairs under umbrellas there are in front of the restaurant. When the tar road gets here, the beach will no doubt be colonised by Northern Europeans and their essential sun-tanning accessories.

  Michalis is tall and broad-shouldered. The hand he offers me, by way of introduction, is large and meaty. His hair is golden and wavy, his lips are full, his nose flat and his eyes are sea-green and good humoured. He stands with his legs splayed, confident of his stature and his place in the world. “Where you from?” he asks. I tell him, and ask if he knows Lucy.

  “Sure,” he says, and looks furtively at a small dark woman sitting at a table at the back doing the accounts, waves at her, she grimaces and goes back to her work. Could that be his wife? He looks back at me smiling. Has he slept with Lucy? “She your friend? How is she? Still crazy?” he asks, grinning. “I have not seen her for a time.”

  I tell him I am trying to trace her – she is missing. I want to look on the internet to see if I can find out who she was working for. “I don’t know who she was working for,” he says, “but every day she was going to the new resort being constructed on the other side of the island. “The Poseidon”. Christos Papademos is the Developer. I know him. You want me to ask if he has seen her?”

  “Yes, please. Hey, gee, thanks,” I say. What luck.

  “The internet – you have to connect. Nitsa,” he says to the dark woman, “Switch on the modem. Let him use. Okay?” The dark woman, sighs and nods, and gets up reluctantly. “My wife,” he says with a look of ironic forbearance.

  “Did Lucy ever use your internet connection?” I think to ask.

  “Sometimes. Not a lot,” he says.

  At least now I know that Lucy could get online if she’d wanted to. So scratch that one off the reasons why she didn’t get back in touch with me and Irini.

  I follow Michali’s wife into an office, and thank her as she switches on the modem, takes the connecting cable I offer her and plugs me in. “Wait,” she says, “Is zlow.” I thank her again. “You pay now?” she asks/tells me, “Five euros for one hour.” I reach for my wallet and pay her. She examines me with brooding eyes, pockets the money and goes off. I hear Michalis shouting, and then he comes in. “You want breakfast? A frappe? A beer maybe?”

  I look at my watch. It’s only nine thirty. “Maybe orange juice? You have fresh?” I ask. My English is already simplifying to accommodate the locals. Somehow I think they will understand me better if I speak English like it’s my second language.

  “Sure,” he says, and goes out. I switch my laptop on. The screen lights up.

  I check my e-mails first. Nothing from Lucy. I check her facebook page. Nothing. I google ‘Wim war photojournalist’ and, after a brief pause, up pops his face, looking smug and world-weary. Wim Mueller. I find his facebook link and select. There is an entry from... yesterday - from the Congo - and the thread suggests he has been in Goma, embedded with the UNHCR for at least a month. Good. He hasn’t been here. Sucker! I sit back, relieved and stupidly victorious.

  The waitress with the ringlets comes in with my fresh orange juice. She bends down to put the glass carefully on the desk next to me. My entire view is taken up by her full breasts hanging perilously close to my face. I try not to look. I close my eyes. I breathe her scent in - orange rind and sandalwood. When I open my eyes, she is looking at me with an amused expression. Her eyes are a luminous green. Smiling to herself, she turns and leaves me to my work.

  She is plump but shapely. No doubt she is regarded with lust by the local Greek men, and probably takes this attention with good humour but I don’t expect she flirts back. She seems self-possessed. She is probably younger than she looks. She has, I suppose, a natural beauty... unaffected, unencumbered. She looks healthy, and handsome even. Not my type though. It’s almost a sign that I am not actually Greek, not properly Greek that I do not feel a sexual attraction to her. I get an urge to tell her I’m half-Greek – the wrong half, I’d quip - almost as an apology for not feeling sexual desire. But by the time I work all that out she’s already walking away and I think better of it. What would it matter to her?

  Back to my research. I type ‘Lucy Discombe’ into the search engine. All that comes up is old stuff about her previous jobs and speeches she has given at conferences which have been reported. Nothing about what she’s up to at the moment.

  I send an e-mail to Marsha at New World Order, pitching my idea for a series of articles on “Life on a Greek island – politics and culture”, as well as asking her for extended leave to do this work. I am pleased with the thrust of my proposal and hope she will interpret my enthusiasm as a sign of my indisputable instinct for a good story, and not as a decoy for a nice little paid holiday in the Greek sun. I don’t tell her about Lucy. She’s bound to be cynical. But I don’t know how long it will take me to track Lucy down. I may need more time.

  I send an e-mail to Irini, asking if she thinks it's okay for me to try get into Lucy’s laptop (I shall disregard her innuendoes and her disapprobation if I have to) and does she have any idea of what the password might be.

  I type into the search engine “Poseidon hotel resort”, and after it does its pondering (‘We are searching’… the wheel goes round and round for a good two minutes) up pops reams of offers of accommodation as far afield as Melbourne, Australia, reviews of at least three different Poseidon hotels, then eventually, on page three, a link to a news report of a failed appeal by an environmental NGO to the siting of the Poseidon Leisure Resort and Spa (Mythos) on what was previously designated protected land under something called the “Natura 2000” scheme. That’s it. That’s something which would have interested Lucy for sure. I download it as quickly as the internet speed will allow - that is to say, painfully slowly – and it freezes half way through and I have to start again, and only get it downloaded just before my hour is up. I’ll read it later, I don’t want to miss my lift into town.

  5

  We get into the port, the main town, Agia Sofia, by eleven thirty. It is busy with locals doing their shopping and tourists looking for souvenirs and beachwear. We park in the square. There are people, looking cross, chanting and waving placards in front of a squat, official-looking building. “What’s that about?” I ask Yiannis.

  “It’s the Communists. They want a statue to commemorate their ELAS comrades who died in the Resistance and in the Civil War,” Yiannis says. “It is the body in the bridge. It make them angry.”

  “They think the body is from then?”

  “No, no, the bridge wasn’t built then. But during the junta, the Colonels, in the late 1960s, the early 1970s, the Left suffered. People disappeared. The bridge was built then.”

  I study the protesters. Mostly old people, shabbily dressed. A few young people, mainly women. The young people are the ones making the most noise. The older people tend to be serious and silent. An older woman with her hair tied back raises a bull horn and shouts a slogan. The protesters chant a response in unison. The woman with the bullhorn, encouraged, yells her imprecation more stridently, now raising her fist into the air. The protesters shout back and pump the air with their fists.

&nb
sp; “Calliope Gavras,” Yianni says. “The leader of the Communist Party on Mythos. A strong woman!” He says admiringly. Then with a shift in tone, “I wouldn’t want for her to be my wife. Boy-o-boy! She too strong,” he laughs, “With muscles! Boy-o-boy! A wife, she must listen to the man. Calliope, she listen to no-one!”

  I take a couple of pictures on my phone. Maybe I could write something about this.

  “You come back …” (he looks at his watch) “… in two hours. The police is just there, around this building…” (he shows me with his hand cocked at a right-angle) “… next to the Town Hall – this one. Two hours I am back. I go to the bank – the crooks! They take all my money! – and to get for the taverna some things, to put a bet on Panathinaikos to win the Cup!” he grins. “Also, I will have a coffee with my friend. You get coffee too – around here lots of places,” he says with a sweep of his arm. “Endaxi? Okay?”

  He hurries away, shouting greetings to people as he goes. I head to the police station.

  The police station is two rooms - a front room with a wooden counter, behind which sits a young and handsome cop, bored and dismissive, behind him, behind a glass door, his senior, balding, with a huge belly behind a chaotically disorganised desk, talking loudly on the phone with rising tones of indignation and exasperation.

  “Yes?” says the young cop. He asks in English – he can tell I’m foreign.

  “I’m trying to get information about Lucy Discombe. You said you couldn’t give information over the phone?” I hand him my passport, which he examines disinterestedly, flicking the pages without making eye-contact with me.

  “What informations?” he asks.

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out. Is there information you have about where she is?”

  “What?” he says querulously.

  “Lucy – do you know where she is?”

  “Why I would know where she is?”

  Maybe there isn’t information after all. “Maybe you had a report? Maybe she came to report something to you? I don’t know…”

  “You her family?” he asks.

  “No. A friend - a colleague,” I tell him.

  “We can’t give informations to not-her-family,” he says peremptorily. He is pleased with his retort.

  “So there is information?” I press him.

  He scowls and sucks his teeth. “What you want?”

  “I want to report her missing,” I say. That could be a better way to go. Fucking cops.

  He looks behind him at the fat cop, still battling with the phone. “Ena lepto. You wait,” he says, signals to some chairs against the wall and searches out some papers so he can pretend he is very busy.

  There is a sudden swelling of people shouting, a man in a suit and an open-necked shirt leads the Communist Party leader, Calliope, into the room. He stops her at the door, signalling to her to keep the other protesters back. She turns and says something to the crowd. They shout back but stay where they are. She pulls an older man in with her. The man in the suit seems to accept this. The older man, who is not quite as tall as the Party boss, has a handsome face, with bushy white eyebrows and intelligent eyes. His hands are worker’s hands.

  The young cop gets up and is deferential to the Suit, who shouts at him, then shouts at Calliope and points for her to put on the counter the paper (is it a petition?) she has in her hand. She narrows her eyes at the Suit, he apologises and touches her arm reassuringly. She sets the paper down, with a look of withering contempt at the young cop.

  The fat cop comes out of the back office and greets the Suit with friendly familiarity. “Mr. Mayor!” he says in heavily accented English and laughs. The Mayor (the guy in the suit is the Mayor it seems) has no time for conviviality, shakes the fat cop’s hand in a business-like way and ushers Calliope out. She shouts something over her shoulder at the policemen, who both wave her away.

  The young cop says something to his senior, hands him my passport and points at me. The fat cop looks at my passport quickly, then approaches me, his face widening slowly into a lugubrious smile. “Come into my office, Mister,” he says.

  The sign on his desk tells me that he is Chief of Police Panagiotis Valoudsakis. He shows me where to sit – there is not a choice – and squeezes himself into the chair behind the devastation of his desk. The office smells of stale sweat and nicotine. The leather on the armrest of his chair is worn. Behind him is a poster of a benevolent Prime Minister and a map of the island surrounded by advertisements.

  “My friend,” the Chief says, examining me, “you are looking for dhespeneedha Discomber? Why?” He makes a show of reading my passport.

  I explain that she tried to contact me three weeks before, but since then no word from her and I haven’t been able to get in touch with her.

  He looks at me coolly. He is disguising his suspiciousness, his mistrust. “Maybe she don’ want you to find her?”

  I am affronted that he thinks I’m some kind of stalker or abusive boyfriend. I swallow my indignation and tell myself to stay calm. He’s only doing his job. I tell him Lucy’s good friend, my sister, Irini, hasn’t been able to reach her either and we’re both worried. I’ve been to her house. Her things are still there. There was stuff in her fridge, as if she was expecting to be around for a while.

  He appraises me as he considers his options. He settles for having a conversation with me. “Okay. She ever do this before? Maybe get an idea, and…?” He snaps his fingers.

  I hesitate. Well, yes. But I don’t want to tell him that.

  The Police Chief sees that I have doubts, he identifies with what he takes to be my realisation that maybe she’s just flaky and what can you do? Men suffer by the whims of women. I read all of this in his resignation. “Okay, I’ll tell you this – it can do no harm.” (To him or to Lucy? I wonder.) “Kosta!” he calls to the young cop. He says as an aside to me, “My son,” and shakes his head, then in his authoritative voice, “Kosta, did Lucy say to you maybe she was going to the big island sometime to get something?”

  Kosta shouts something back. His father, the chief, berates him in rapid-fire Greek.

  Kosta answers his father in a surly juvenile tone.

  Valoudsakis Senior turns to me with a long-suffering smile. “He agrees. Maybe she has gone to collect informations. Maybe she go on the ferry? You ask in the harbour,” he says, and nods reassuringly and hands me my passport back.

  Mmm, maybe, but… “No, I don’t think so. Her laptop computer was still at her home – she wouldn’t have gone off without it,” I tell him, “I think I know her well enough to know that. It has all her work, all her data. She wouldn’t leave it.”

  “Mmm,” he says, waggling his head. He sees my point but is still not convinced. He reaches for a notepad. “Endaxi, give me your number. I will call you if I hear anything. Because you have a worry, even I will ask with the airport,” he says grudgingly. “OK?”

  I take the pad and scribble down my number. “What business did she have with you - with the police?” I ask.

  “My friend,” he says with exasperation, “I have already told you I cannot say.”

  “She was doing some work at the new resort, ‘The Poseidon’,” I say.

  “I know already,” he says. He gets up and offers his hand. The meeting is over.

  “Was it something to do with that?” I ask.

  The fat cop gets up and, smiling, points to the door behind me. As he has indicated already, the meeting is over. “You go now,” he says.

  ****

  I just know they will do nothing. But there was something. They know her and she clearly had dealings with them. I’m also sure it has something to do with the Poseidon. Maybe Michalis will have some news from his friend, the developer of the new resort, Papademos I think he said, somebody Papademos. (Or was it Papageorgios? Something like that anyway.) I must ask Michali when I get back. Maybe she’s at the Poseidon – he could call and ask.

  I suppose I should check at the harbour. Just in case. D
on’t want it to be embarrassing, even though I think it’s very unlikely… But not impossible, I have to concede. I don’t know Lucy that well. Maybe she doesn’t take her laptop everywhere. That’s what I do – I can’t assume she’s the same as me. Maybe she uses her Blackberry for sending stuff out - I don’t have one, so I don’t know what its limitations are. Perhaps she relies on a notebook and pencil - old-school. Could be. Lucy is pretty old school - virtuously lo-tech as I remember it. Still…

  The young girl at the ticket office is probably just out of school or even still at school, and is, not like the cops, against my expectations, quite helpful. She looks pleased to have something to do. There is only one ferry a day, so not much to do, but probably the Union has organised for her to be there the whole day so she can earn a decent wage. Good for her, I think, why not? Her family are no doubt poor, and she is their hope – an educated girl, with a good job. She can help her family. Her mother is probably asthmatic and crippled by arthritis, her father is…

  She looks up and interrupts my reverie. No Lucy or Discombe on the travel list in the last two weeks. She is disappointed, apologetic even. But she says she only has the list of passengers who bought tickets on the day. My friend may have bought a ticket through a Travel Agent. I’d have to ask them. She tells me there are three travel agencies in the port. I thank her and leave. In my bones I feel it’ll be a waste of time - Lucy is almost certainly still on the island. She is probably going to show up suddenly and laugh at her wimpy friends, worried by her taking off on an adventure. She’ll gleefully tell me that the story she’s got will make it all worthwhile. Then we’ll fall into each other’s arms… I put off the idea of checking the travel agencies. It would put me in a bad mood to find out that Lucy had fucked off and that I’d come here for nothing.

  I find a coffee shop which offers “Internet Free” and order a sandwich and a regular coffee. I have to use the shop’s own computer, which is a surprisingly modern Dell. The owner has an American accent and a Wall Street haircut. A recent returnee? I guess that with all the money coming in from the EU, a lot of Greeks who left for American jobs before, are coming back. I could check that out – that would make a good story. I’ll pitch it to Marsha, see what she says. “The Returnees – Why Greece is Now Better than America.”