by Alex A King
“Geese hate everybody. That’s the whole point of geese.”
Downstairs, Xander was in panther mode, sneaking out the front door. He stopped when he saw me trotting down the stairs.
“Where are you going?”
He showed me his phone. Grandma had given him a shopping list.
I grabbed my coat. “I’m coming with you.”
He did nothing at first, then he nodded.
Across the street, my new neighbor was marching round the block. With her head down she power walked up the driveway and let herself into her house.
Xander watched her for a moment, then he inclined his head at the black van around the corner. Like a pair of chickens, we crossed the road.
He stopped.
“Oops,” I said. “I guess the Tire Fairy didn’t magically fix your tires while we were out.”
He sighed. We went back to the Jeep.
Again, I took the wheel. But since I was feeling benevolent, and because I wanted answers, I let Xander ride shotgun.
I started backing down the driveway. The front door flew open. Marika galloped out, clutching her big bag. Normally her handbag held an assortment of guns and snacks. Today I hoped she was only toting snacks. I was pretty confident she didn’t have a license to conceal anything stronger than chocolate.
“This looks like an adventure,” she said as she climbed into the back. The Jeep lurched sideways. “I like adventures.”
“We’re just going to the supermarket.”
“That sounds like an adventure to me.”
So much for getting Xander to talk.
I couldn’t help noticing Elias slip out of the house and into his nimble Ford. Stavros tagged along, too. Grandma had brought the big guns, possibly literally. No way had she come just for Christmas. Did she know about the notes I’d been receiving before our rendezvous in the mall? Probably not. Her surprise over the notes had been genuine. So why was she here?
I drove to Fred Meyer, the closest store that would have everything on Grandma’s list. I went to grab a shopping cart. Xander nudged me out of the way and took over.
“Control freak.”
He said nothing but the twinkle in his eye said he was totally a control freak about things with wheels. Fine. Let him have his petty victory. At least the cart didn’t come with a sound system.
In no time at all we gathered the groceries. Xander steered the shopping cart toward the checkout. Marika fiddled with her phone.
“Not yet,” she said. “I want to look for toys for the boys.”
Say what? Her passel of boys swung from trees and staged mock battles against other monkey tribes. The world and all its weapons were their toys.
“Your kids play with toys? I figured you just let them loose in the armory and prayed they’d come home with the same number of limbs and organs.”
The family compound came with an armory—an armory Grandma kept off limits to me. I was starting to think she didn’t trust me with a gun, which was probably smart given that I’d shot some people, including her great-nephew.
“That is exactly what I do, but I was thinking toys for the baby. There is still hope for her. My boys … po-po, they are their father, but with my kolos.”
That was a good thing. Takis’ butt was so flat walls all over Europe were envious.
We made a beeline for the toy department, which was clogged with desperate, clammy parents feverishly gawping at the few remaining toys on the shelves. Santa Claus was coming to town and Amazon was almost all out of delivery days, so this was their last resort. Marika squeezed past sweating parents. She went up aisles. She went down aisles. Glares pinged off her without penetrating. Greece did things to women. It made them capable of surviving anything, even the toy department before Christmas.
Xander, Elias, Stavros, and I waited for her off to the side. It was safer amongst the furniture.
“Now I want to look at dresses,” she said when she was done and the rest of us were close to desiccating.
We looked at dresses. All the dresses. Followed by all the underwear, cosmetics, and pet toys.
“You don’t have a pet,” I pointed out.
“Not yet. What if my daughter wants one, eh? I need to be prepared. What do you think of this?” She held up a large Kong. “I could stuff Takis’ tiganites inside and keep him busy all day.”
“Can we go now?”
She checked her phone again. “Is there somewhere nearby that sells priceless art? How about a museum?”
I looked at her. “Museums don’t really sell art. If you’re good enough at theft you could say they practically give it away though.”
“We could do that. It would be an adventure. Or we could get a pedicure. I have always wanted to get a pedicure.”
“I hate pedicures. Too ticklish.”
“I would like a pedicure,” Stavros said.
Marika beamed. “Then Stavros and I will get pedicures.”
“Great. You can ride home with him and Elias later,” I said. “Xander can come with me.”
“No, no, we need you.” Marika waved her hands. “What if we order the wrong thing?”
“They might wax my kolos,” Stavros said. “I do not want my kolos waxed. I have a lot of hair.”
We all made the same face. Stavros did have a lot of hair. Someone in the family tree had performed unspeakable acts with a Sasquatch.
An inkling had started to form in my head. My inkling didn’t waste time calculating basic math. My inkling leaped directly to warp speed. Someone—and by someone I meant Marika—was trying to prevent me from running home. Why would she do that?
Grandma.
What was my only living grandparent up to?
I folded my arms. Hard. So Marika would know I meant business. “What’s going on?”
She pouted. Her pout was fake and dramatic enough to have its own reality TV show. “We are trying to get pedicures and you will not help us.”
“We thought you loved us,” Stavros said.
Liars, the pair of them. “That’s not what I meant. You’re trying to keep me away from the house. Why?”
“What? No. You are imagining things.” Marika pulled her foot out of its black shoe. “Look at this. It needs rubbing and lotion and those metal files that do that thing so that the skin from my feet looks like a pile of Italian cheese.”
“Parmigianino-Reggiano,” Stavros said.
“You do look like you need a pedicure,” I admitted. “Wait a minute, you’re still trying to distract me. I know you’re up to something.”
Marika went all shifty eyed. She sucked at keeping secrets.
Time to apply a little pressure.
“You know you want to tell me,” I said in a singsong voice.
“I do …”
“Just do it, Marika. Do it, like Nike says.”
“I cannot …”
“Grandma won’t kill you.”
“She might kill me.”
“Not until after the baby is born.” I considered the possibilities. They potential outcomes had changed since I discovered Grandma wasn’t all the way evil. “It’s not a surprise party, is it? I hate surprise parties.”
“Maybe it is a surprise party,” Marika said.
“Grandma doesn’t strike me as the surprise party type.” I hauled my phone out of my bag and dialed someone who would tell me the truth, someone who wasn’t, as far as I knew, on American soil. Although for all I knew he’d tried to smuggle himself into the country in a box filled with Greek dirt.
Chapter 10
I called Papou.
“You,” he wheezed. “What is wrong with your people? They would not let me bring my eagles into America. This from a country that uses the eagle as its symbol. Do you know what America’s symbol should be?”
I wandered toward the store’s exit. “Something that isn’t an eagle?”
“My kolos. Who would not want my eagles? Just the other day a woman came here to ask me if she could buy them. How do
you like that, eh?”
“A real woman or an imaginary one?”
“Bah! I am old but I still know a woman when I see one. She was big, yes, but she had pointy vizia like a pair of rockets under her shirt. What do you want, eh?”
“Why is everyone here, and why are they trying to keep me away from my house?”
He cackled. Wheezed. Coughed up a lung. Farted. Cackled some more.
“Even for a stupid person you are stupid. Think. Why would you keep someone away from their house?”
“So they can organize a surprise party?”
“Party? What party? There is no party. If you are keeping someone from their home it is so you can put something in or take something out.”
“I don’t have anything for them to take unless it’s the garbage, and what would they put in? Xander has been living in my roof for the past month and he already put up my Christmas tree for me.”
“Christmas trees … what a world we live in. In my day we burned old shoes to keep demons away. We ate Christ’s bread. We kept a bowl with a wire across the middle, and tied to it was basil on a cross. If we were good we got roasted chestnuts.”
“What about presents?”
“No presents. What we got was no beating that day. Did you get any smarter yet? And they say you are like your grandmother. Po-po ... the only thing you have in common is vizia.”
Now that stung. “Mine are still on my chest!”
“For now.” That dire warning triggered a fresh round of cackling.
An alarm went off in my head, annoying and reminiscent of my middle school dismissal bell. I did have things for Grandma to find—no, singular: thing. The tape I’d pilfered from my cousin Viktor Sokolov’s tape deck. It was in a super secret hiding place, in the house with nooks and private crannies I had known my whole life. But Grandma was a master.
I took the call outside.
“The tape,” I said. “She’s looking for the cassette tape, isn’t she?”
“What cassette tape?”
There was a pause, the long pregnant kind. The kind that gave me enough time to realize I’d potentially shoved my foot down my throat, dug my own grave, and screwed several pooches.
Papou started to laugh. “I know what you did,” he sang. “Maybe you are smarter than you look.”
“So are you saying Grandma isn’t tearing my house apart right now, hunting for the tape?”
“Why are you asking me? Nobody tells me anything. They sit me in the corner like a potted plant and make fun of my eagles.”
Ha. This from a man who was Grandma’s symvoulos—her consigliore. What he didn’t know about Grandma’s business could fit on the head of something smaller than a pin. Although he played the idiot, Papou knew all.
“If you tell Grandma I have the tape—the tape that probably isn’t even the tape—I’ll know you told her. My revenge will be slow moving and toothless because I’m terrible at revenge. I suck so hard at revenge that I didn’t kick my ex fiancé in the balls when he asked me for relationship advice this week.”
“You are the worst,” he said.
“I know.”
“And you are boring so I am hanging up now.”
The call ended before I could tell him no one hangs up anymore.
I hoofed it to the Jeep, where no one was waiting because I hadn’t bothered to let them know I was leaving. I whistled as I pulled out of the parking lot. Not a melodic whistle, more like the sharp squeal a cat makes if you step on its tail. Grandma was searching my house right now, I’d put good money on it—if I had any. While I was waiting on this butthead in front of me to turn left, my paternal grandmother was rifling through my things, hunting for the cassette tape I’d pilfered from Viktor’s boombox. Grandma being Grandma, she’d no doubt enlisted Takis and Aunt Rita to help. Probably they were knocking walls down, tearing up planks at this very moment.
The phone rang.
“Did you forget something?” Marika asked.
“Like what?”
“Your bodyguards.”
“I thought you were just my friend now.”
“I am more like the bodyguard supervisor.”
“What happened to spying?”
“Spies work for someone else. I think I would prefer to be my own boss. I am better at giving orders than taking them.”
I couldn’t see the others, but I knew they were crossing themselves at the idea of Marika supervising anything, let alone henchmen with guns.
“I’m in a hurry. I’ll meet you back at the house.”
“We are right with you,” she said.
Sure enough, Elias’s zippy compact cut into the lane behind me. I glanced in the mirror. Everyone waved, except Xander. Waving wasn’t really his thing.
“Do me a favor,” I said.
“Anything,” Marika said.
“Don’t tell Grandma I’m on my way back.”
“I already called her,” Stavros said in a guilty voice. “What? Nobody told me I was not supposed to.”
Grandma was in the kitchen making milopita, Greece’s version of apple pie. “Katerina,” she said, as innocent as that pie. “Did you get my groceries?”
“You know we did.”
She pulled off her apron and threw it over one shoulder. “The pie is for you for a little snack. Eat a piece before bed. Right now I am going home.”
“Greece?”
“The house around the corner. It has been a long day and I am not as young as I was yesterday.”
I held up my finger. “Don’t go anywhere yet.”
I did a quick circuit of the house. If Grandma had spent the evening hunting out nooks and crannies, it didn’t show. Everything appeared to be untouched, including the cassette tape’s hiding place. What was Grandma up to?
“What is the problem?” she said when I returned. “You look here, you look there, you come back with nothing like a crazy person.”
“What did you do?”
“About what?”
“While I was out, what did you do to my house? I know you did something.”
Her face didn’t move. “What you are talking about? I know nothing. I come here, I cook, I leave again.”
Maybe that was true, maybe it wasn’t. My money was on the second one, but the thing about Grandma was that you never really knew. She was full of secrets and surprises, not just recipes. I stared at her like the lines on her face were guts and I was trying to read my fortune. The lines didn’t tell me much except that I should double my sunscreen and hit the anti aging lotion now if I wanted to avoid looking like battered luggage in my molden years.
“My marbles,” I murmured.
“What marbles?”
Did she know about the cassette? Didn’t she? Grandma’s face was as unreadable as the Voynich manuscript. She pulled a spectacular innocent-little-old-lady routine when it suited her.
“Never mind,” I said.
She kissed me on both cheeks. Aunt Rita did the same, but with bone crushing hugs and clashing perfumes.
“I will see you in tomorrow, and stay off the roof. You will catch cold,” Grandma said.
“You know about the roof?”
“I see everything.”
“You mean Xander saw everything because he’s been living in my crawlspace.”
Grandma touched a finger to her falcon-sharp eye. “That is the same thing, yes?”
At last, the house was quiet. Marika and the menfolk had flocked back to the house behind me. Elias went with Grandma and Aunt Rita. From the front window he had a perfectly clear view of the house. Xander was tucked away in the spare bedroom, but his presence sent ripples through the house. I wanted to knock on the door to see if he wanted anything, like maybe another shower.
But no, I was part chicken.
Instead of showering with a hot man I curled up on the couch with Netflix on mute and moseyed on over to the Crooked Noses to see what was happening in the world of organized crime. Did they know Grandma was in town?
Nobody knows, BangBang wrote.
Knows what?
That Katerina Makri is currently in the United States, visiting her one and only granddaughter.
Wait—how do you know?
It’s my job to know.
I figured it would be all over the board by now.
No. I made sure it wasn’t.
Why?
Didn’t want to put you in more danger than you’re already in. You’re not the only one with a keen interest in the Makris family and its movements.
I’m in danger?
You’re always in danger. Have been since before you were born. Goes with the lineage.
That was cheery. So who else is keeping track of the family’s movements?
Government or civilian?
Yikes. Let’s go with civilian.
Seeing as how Grandma was the government.
In the Makris family or outside? BangBang asked.
People in the family read these boards? Do you know who?
Including your grandmother or not including your grandmother?
So it was like that. I should have known one of Grandma’s fingers would be in the message board pie. She had a lot of fingers and the world was filled with pie.
My stomach growled. Phone in hand, I wandered in to the kitchen to hunt for leftovers. Grandma’s milopita was sitting on the counter under a glass dome. I cut a big slice and plopped it on a plate.
Xander was upstairs without pie. No man should have to be upstairs alone without pie. Feeling benevolent, I cut a second slice and filled a glass with milk. I carried both upstairs and knocked on the spare bedroom’s door with my foot.
No answer. Was he asleep? Even Xander had to sleep sometime, although the man often seemed like he was a machine with few needs except regular showers and terrible music.
Could be he was doing his silent act.
“It’s just me,” I said through the door. “I’m alone.”
“Come,” he said from inside the spare room.
My foot could knock but it was lousy at operating doorknobs. Unlike Daniel Day Lewis, my left foot lacked any real talent. “My hands are kind of full.”