Jeffrey Siger_Andreas Kaldis 02

by Assassins of Athens

  Demon walked to the station. It was only a few blocks from the university, and he wanted time to think. He had a plan; it just required a bit of ingenuity and he’d supply that. He’d leave the muscle to the guy he was meeting. He bought a ticket at the kiosk in the square by the entrance and followed the rush hour crowd into the station and down onto the platform. It was five minutes to five. His contact should be here any minute. Demon walked to the far end, leaned against a pillar, and waited.

  “What’s so important?” It was a voice behind him. Demon didn’t turn around, just turned his head so that he was looking at the pillar as he spoke.

  “He’s still in the country.”

  “So?”

  Demon didn’t like the tone, but kept his own in check. “He was supposed to leave. That was the point of the message.”

  “The point of the message was to get him to pay.”

  Demon felt his anger rising, but kept it out of his voice. “Yes, but also to get him to leave.”

  “That’s not our concern.”

  “Of course it is. My people, the ones who select the ones whose assets you get to purchase, don’t want him here. You profit when they’re happy. And they’re not happy.”

  The man’s tone didn’t change. “We do all the dirty work. That’s why we get to buy the assets. If they don’t like the arrangements, tell them to find someone else to do their persuading.”

  “Is that the message you want me to pass on? Do you really want to start a war with these people?” The man didn’t know who they were, just that they were among the most powerful in Greece.

  The man hesitated before answering. “Tell them we’re not going to do anything to him now. He’s negotiating with us.” The man sounded like he was talking through clenched teeth.

  Demon’s face tightened but his voice didn’t show it. “He must be taught a lesson. Now.”

  “We’re talking about a lot of money here and a lot of complicated asset transfers. Do I have to remind you why we never killed the one who had to sign the papers? Once he’s dead it’s in the hands of Greek probate courts, and we get nothing. We’re not going to blow a once-in-a-lifetime payday because your…” he paused, obviously grasping for a noncurse word, “people are pissed that this guy’s showing some balls. Tell your people we’ll take care of him in good time. But not now.”

  Demon knew this was going nowhere. But he couldn’t let the Old Man down. There was too much at stake for him. He must give the Old Man what he wanted; Kostopoulos out of Greece. He needed to find other muscle. That was a very dangerous risk to take. He’d been working with this mob for years; since its early drug-dealing days in Exarchia. If they ever found out he’d gone behind their back… He walked away from the pillar without saying another word. It wouldn’t have mattered if he had; the other man already had left.

  ***

  Andreas’ drive back to the old harbor covered five miles and five thousand years. The granite-strewn mountainside above the Kostopoulos house probably looked much the same to whatever gods once played there; nothing but nature on that slope. Aside from the Hummer, of course. On the other side, back down along the way he came, were signs of the presence of humanity: stone walls and huts of an agrarian past out of antiquity; a magnificent, seventh-century fortified conical hill, the Palaiokastro, built by invaders trying to protect themselves from a similar fate; the graceful, eighteenth-century Palaiokastro convent nestled on a hillside above Panormos Bay; and the outskirts of the once quaint farming village of Ano Mera, where a two-lane paved road connected to modern Mykonos and all its cruise ships, hotels, mega-million-euro private villas, and legendary nightlife.

  But all Andreas wanted was coffee in the old port. When he reached the entrance to the town harbor, a rookie cop sitting next to a guardhouse put up his hand to stop the Jimny. During tourist season, only taxis and authorized vehicles were allowed into town. Unless, of course, you were local or had a good story. Andreas showed his ID and the rookie jumped up and waved him on with a salute. Andreas had planned on making a big entrance, but that was a little much.

  He drove along a stone-slab road beside a tiny beach at the northern edge of the crescent-shaped harbor into the taxi square and parked next to a port police SUV. He didn’t walk ten steps before locals started yelling, “Andreas, Andreas.”

  For over an hour he bounced from taverna to taverna hearing stories and complaints covering everything from the plight of fishing, undeserved parking tickets, and age-old property disputes to the predicted end of the world as we knew it, caused, of course, by the political party in power. Andreas just kept nodding agreement, expressing concern, and offering regrets that he no longer was in a position to help.

  Almost everyone asked why he was there. He said he missed the island and decided to come over for the day. He wasn’t sure they believed him, but everyone said they understood how getting out of Athens to Mykonos, even for a day, made perfect sense.

  He kept refusing offers of ouzo, beer, and all sorts of other booze, claiming he needed a clear head if his office called, but his resistance was fading. There was a certain rhythm to this place that did that to you. He was contemplating an ouzo when a hand touched his shoulder and he heard a familiar voice. “Hi honey, I’m home.”

  It was Lila.

  The look on Andreas’ face fell somewhere between shock and horror.

  “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friends?” Lila smiled and, with her hand still on Andreas’ shoulder, nodded to the six other men at the table.

  He said nothing but several of the men asked her to join them. One got up and took a chair from the next table while the others scrambled to make room for her to sit.

  “No thanks, we’ve got to go.” It was Andreas speaking.

  Two men asked, “What’s the hurry?” The others didn’t say a word, just exchanged grins and tried sneaking knowing nods and smiles to Andreas. He quickly stood and offered to pay, but didn’t insist when they refused. After a fast thank-you, he pushed her out from under the taverna’s awning onto the harbor front road in what anyone watching would think a cutesy gesture. Lila probably knew better.

  They walked south along the harbor, the sea to their right. He smiled and waved to a mix of people calling out his name, but his voice was angry. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Put your arm around me so they get the right idea.” She seemed to be having fun with this.

  “Sure, honey.” He reached behind her and gave a long, visible squeeze to her ass. She jumped. “What do you think you’re doing?” Now the anger was hers.

  “Just making sure they get the right idea.” He smiled, leaned over, and kissed her on the cheek. Then put his arm around her waist, gripped like a vise, and dragged more than directed her forward. “Like I said, what are you doing here?”

  She practically had to skip to keep up. “We had a deal, remember?” There was a different anger in her voice.

  He mumbled something Lila couldn’t hear.

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to talk about this here.” He turned their bodies toward an opening between two jewelry shops. It was one of many twisting paths that opened onto the harbor from the maze known as the old town of Mykonos. Most lanes weren’t much wider than six feet, many narrower. Each was paved with island-quarried flagstones outlined in white and ran between two-story, all-white buildings accented by bright blue, green, or red doors, banisters, and window frames.

  At a sandwich shop about thirty yards from the harbor, Andreas made an abrupt right onto a smaller path. He still didn’t let go. A few turns later the path opened up into a tree-filled square lined on the east by four small churches snuggled together in a row. He stopped, dropped his arm from her waist and pointed to a low wall flanking three steps leading up to the first church. “Sit there.”

  She was wearing a scoop-neck white peasant-style blouse over straight-leg designer jeans, and dark brown Tod’s—the shoes with little bumps for soles and heels.
Her hair was in a tight bun, and large Chanel sunglasses covered her eyes. She wore only a hint of makeup, and a dark-blue Longchamp tote bag probably held whatever she thought she might need for the day. Andreas wondered if she considered this her I-can-blend-in look.

  Lila sat on the wall as if waiting for him to join her. Instead, Andreas stood a few feet in front of her, staring up at the church. Then he looked at her and told her what he was thinking.

  ***

  “You’re the only person in the world I can trust.” He kissed her.

  Anna didn’t respond.

  “I’d do anything for you and the baby, you know that.”

  She didn’t answer. Demon didn’t care. He’d come to her place for a reason and didn’t have time to fuck her. She’d just have to stay moody.

  “I need a telephone number for that old friend of yours, the one from Sardinia.”

  She flinched. “Efisio?”

  “Do you have it?”

  “Why?”

  Demon touched her cheek and gently stroked two fingers back and forth along her jaw line. “Don’t worry, my love, it’s not about you.”

  Efisio was her exboyfriend and the first to pimp her out. They’d met in her home country. He fled there to escape the Italian police. A year later she fled to Greece to escape his beatings. In an intimate, misguided moment of after-sex trust Anna confided her story to Demon, and he became the second. He didn’t beat her. He had more insidious ways of controlling her.

  She shook her head. “I can’t. If he ever finds out where I am…” her eyes moved toward the baby’s crib, “where we are…”

  Demon fingers kept moving along her face. “He’ll never find out. But I must find him. It is very important. Please, help me.”

  She shook her head and said, “No.”

  “Please, I don’t want to have to go to Sardinia.”

  This time he felt her flinch. “He’s not there, he can’t go back.”

  “Yes, yes, I know but he has family there, and they must know how to reach him.”

  He felt a twitching begin in her cheek.

  “What is the name of his village?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  He kept stroking. “That place in the mountains. In north central Sardinia.”

  She said nothing and turned her eyes away from him.

  “Ah, yes, Mamoiada.”

  She jerked away from his hand.

  “My love, please, I don’t want to have to go that village. You know how dangerous those people are. You’re the one who told me. They’ll start asking why I want to find him, how I know him—”

  She locked her eyes on his. “You miserable bastard.”

  “I’m not trying to harm you. But you’re leaving me no choice than to bring up your name. Otherwise, they might kill me. But, if you find him for me he’ll never hear your name. There will be no reason to tell him.”

  She stared at the floor.

  “If I wanted to harm you, do you really think I’d need to call your old boyfriend?” He touched her cheek. “Besides, you know I’d never harm you. You are my love.”

  When she looked at him there were tears in her eyes. “Please, don’t make me do this.”

  Demon said nothing, just kept stroking her cheek. The tears now touched his fingers.

  “I don’t have a number for him.” Her lip was quivering. “I’ll have to find someone who does.”

  “That’s my girl. But please, try to find it before tomorrow morning. My plane for Italy leaves at noon. I don’t want to go if you can get me the number.” He kissed her on the forehead and left.

  Demon never heard the tearful string of curses, in several languages, that followed his departure. But Kouros did.

  ***

  “I can’t trust you.” Andreas didn’t move.

  Lila didn’t say a word.

  He waited for her to speak but all she did was stare. Or at least he thought she was staring. He took a step forward and lifted her sunglasses onto her forehead. He wished he hadn’t, her eyes were filled with tears.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She shook her head, and reached into her bag. “Nothing.” Out came a handkerchief. She patted at her eyes. “Absolutely nothing.”

  Andreas knew he was losing ground fast. This was not the sort of response he expected. His immediate instinct was to console her, be her rescuing knight. Perhaps she knew that too. He better be careful. There was too much at stake, and too many intrigues.

  He wanted to sit next to her but didn’t move. “Let me know when you want to talk.”

  “When I want to talk? Perhaps I’m missing something here, Chief Kaldis, but you’re the one who should be doing the talking. Or are you expecting me to try to convince you to trust me?” She jumped up, grabbed her bag, caught her sunglasses as they fell off her forehead and pointed them at Andreas. “Fuck you!” And stormed-off down the narrowest of the four paths out of the square.

  Andreas let out a breath and walked over to a foot-high white-concrete wall encircling a large eucalyptus tree at the edge of the square. He lit a cigarette and put his right foot on the top of the wall. He stared down the path she’d taken and looked at his watch. Three minutes had passed since she left.

  “So, are you going to come out, or stay in there all night?”

  He heard a muffled word that he was pretty sure was “bastard.”

  “Lila, you took one of the only dead end paths in town. Consider it a sign. Come out and let’s talk.”

  Another minute passed. He first saw the feet. She’d been sitting on the steps of a house about fifteen feet down the path. The rest of her body swung out into the lane and marched straight at him.

  She swung her bag into his belly. “Carry this,” and continued on out of the square down a path to the left.

  Andreas followed, carrying the bag. He couldn’t help but smile.

  The path connected to others leading to Little Venice, perhaps the most popular part of the old town. It was a good choice. More tourists than locals came there. Not likely to run across paparazzi there, either. She stopped at the doorway to a bar with a rainbow painted on the door frame. “This seems nice.”

  He looked in. It looked like an English pub. Two young-looking men, one blond and one dark, were behind the bar talking to a large woman on the other side. “It is. It’s a piano bar. But once the music starts, it gets busy fast and attracts a lot of locals. Athenian society types too. I have a better idea.”

  He led her around the corner and up a flight of stairs to the veranda of a bar overlooking the sea, the windmills, and sunset. Many thought it the most romantic view in Mykonos. That wasn’t his reason for coming there. He came because it was filled with tourists. He chose a table in the easternmost corner of the place; that way everyone would be looking away from them at the sunset.

  “Are you ready yet to tell me why you’re here?” He was looking at her eyes; her sunglasses were off.

  She looked back. “I kept calling and leaving messages at your office. I wanted to know our plans for coming here. You never called back, and when I called your secretary, all she said was you were unavailable and she wasn’t sure when you’d be free to return my call. I left two more messages on your phone. One, that I’d been captured by terrorists who threatened to cut off my toes if you didn’t call back immediately, and another, that I’d meet you at the usual place and please wear black leather.

  “You never check your messages, do you?” Anger was in her eyes.

  Andreas grumbled something unintelligible.

  “I figured you decided to go to Mykonos without me, or were too busy to be bothered talking to me. Either way, my decision was easy. I caught the Sea Jet from Rafina and, voilà, I’m here. If you’d called back, I’d say, ‘Surprise, I’m here, where are you?’ and if you didn’t, big deal. I’d spend a day or two on Mykonos. I was sure I’d find someone on this island who wouldn’t mind my company.” The anger now was in her voice.

  He shrugged. �
�What do you want me to say? There are too many coincidences involving you.”

  She started to get up. He thought she was going to walk out again. Instead, she sat back down, shut her eyes for a few seconds, and opened them. “You mean bumping into you in the harbor. I just got off the Sea Jet. Check the schedule.”

  “That’s one.”

  “Okay, what exactly are you talking about?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  She patted the table with her right hand. She nodded. “Can’t tell me.” She nodded again, drew in and let out a breath. “Andreas, you owe me. I expect you to tell me why you don’t trust me.” Her voice was calm.

  He swallowed. “Okay. One example. Within an hour after you told me that Kostopoulos was on Mykonos, someone told the bad guys the same thing.”

  He could tell she was struggling to restrain herself. “And you think I told them?”

  His face tightened. “That’s possible. Though I want to think it’s more likely you mentioned it innocently to someone, and that’s how it got back to them.”

  “I see. I’m a dumb, gossiping bimbo who doesn’t realize hat she’s saying?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Or does just the fact that I’m a woman mean the same thing to you big, strong, all-knowing, macho Greek men?”

  Andreas decided not to answer.

  Lila reached over and patted Andreas’ arm; it wasn’t an affectionate gesture—more like an enough-of-your-crap one. “Andreas, you have a lot of serious ‘trust issues,’” she flashed quotation marks with her fingers, “but that’s not my problem. I’m not your shrink…or your girlfriend.” She paused. “What upsets me is that you’re judging my character based on your hang-ups. I’m trying to help, no more no less. You came to me. Remember? And I didn’t want to help. Remember? Unless you think I’m a magnificent actress playing out a part in this conspiracy, you have absolutely no reason to lump me in among the ‘not to be trusted.’” Lila flashed her fingers on each of her final four words, dropped her hands to her lap, and stared out to sea.