by Alex A King
“You were having fun. I wanted to have fun, too, so I called your wife.”
Right on cue, Marika came trotting over. She had abandoned her usual flowery dresses for a pencil skirt and a white shirt. The pencil skirt was struggling to contain her lower half. The shirt buttons were holding on for dear life. She’d scrounged up a pair of mirrored sunglasses.
“New threads?” I asked her.
“I asked Baboulas if she would pay me and she said yes,” Marika told me.
Grandma must have had a change of heart ... or a belly full of pot. “When did you ask her?”
“Half an hour ago, so I went to get changed. You like?”
Takis looked her up and down. “You look like a fucking waitress.”
“Bodyguard,” Marika said.
“Bodyguard?” Takis scoffed. “Whose bodyguard?”
Oh boy, why me? “What was she doing when you asked her?”
Marika shrugged. “Cuddling some cats.”
“And you didn’t think that was strange?”
“Of course it was strange, but who questions Baboulas? Nobody, if they want to live.”
“Bodyguard?” Takis was still saying. “I thought you were Katerina’s sidekick.”
The mirrored glasses slowly turned to face him. “And now I am her bodyguard.”
“Uh, I already have a bodyguard,” I said. “But I could really use a sidekick.”
“Sidekick is not a paying position,” she said.
“It could be,” I said.
“Sidekick. Ha,” Takis said, grinning. “A sidekick is just another name for a friend. You have to pay people to be friends with you, eh, Katerina?”
“At least I have friends,” I said.
He covered my face with his hand. I licked it, but he didn’t pull away. Eww. “You cannot be Katerina’s bodyguard. People legitimately want to kill her.”
“Which is why she needs another bodyguard,” Marika said.
“I really don’t need another one,” I said, voice muffled.
Takis pulled his hand away, wiped it on my cheek.
Lopez picked that moment to jump into the conversation. “What are you saying? Is it about us?”
“Is it about me?” Takis said in a singsong mocking voice. “Me, me, me.”
“Enough.” Marika slapped him on the arm. “This man is a policeman. Show respect.”
“I show him my ass,” Takis said in English. To Lopez: “You want to see my ass?”
Lopez leaned back, took a good gander at Takis’s back. “You Greeks keep offering to show me your asses. Must be true what they say about Greeks.”
Takis’ eyes narrowed. “What do they say about Greeks?”
Lopez didn't take the bait. “It don’t look to me like you’ve got an ass. How do you sit?”
“On your mother’s head. Look! Here is my other ass. Stavros!”
Stavros came trotting over with his plate. My second cousin was the shape of a P whose loop had dropped. “Are these the American cops?” he said in English. “Is it true they make American cops fail an IQ test before they let them join?”
“Now wait a minute,” Lopez said, puffing up.
“Wait for what?” Takis folded his arms. “Can you do magic tricks? Show us. I like magic tricks.”
Lopez turned his back on Takis, waved his wine bottle at the compound’s main building. “What’s your family do, anyway?” he said to me. “They in some kind of business? Must be good at it if they can afford this place.”
“Old money, in a way,” I said.
“Old money ...” He bobbed his head, took another pull on the resinated wine. “How’d they make it, the old ones?”
“Olives.”
“What a coincidence,” he said. “I like olives on my pizza.”
“Can you believe this guy,” Takis said in Greek. “ ‘I like olives on my pizza’, like he is Greek or something.”
He and Stavros cackled together and did some kind of bottle-bumping thing I didn’t understand.
An eagle cried behind us, and Papou rocked up in his wheelchair. Yiorgos the eagle was clinging to Papou’s shoulder. The bird didn’t look happy. Basically it looked like a bird.
“Say the hello to my little friend,” Papou said to the two cops in mangled English. As far as I knew, he was stretching his English vocabulary to its short limits.
Lopez nodded to the bird. “Is that an eagle?”
Papou stared at him for a moment, then his eyes shifted to me. “What did the fat malakas say?”
“He wants to know if that’s an eagle.”
The old man grinned. “Tell him it’s his mother’s mouni.”
“I’m not telling him that!”
“Tell him. Tell him or I will tell my eagle to bite off your face.”
“Let him bite it,” I said.
He looked at the bird. “Yiorgos ... her face. Eat it.”
“Hey—you said bite, not eat,” I said. “Eating is different.”
“Wait.” Papou went digging in his pocket. He writhed and wriggled for a moment, before tugging out a gray mouse by the tail. He held it up in the air. The eagle blinked. “Fetch,” Papou said, and then he flung the very-much-alive mouse in my face.
I screamed and slapped the air and stomped around. Marika joined me. Whether it was out of solidarity or a substitute for screaming at her husband, I wasn’t sure. The mouse bolted in the direction of the arch, where all the cats were hanging out.
Yiorgos, apathetic eagle, did nothing.
“My eagle is broken,” Papou said sadly. He looked up at me. “This is your fault.”
“Me?”
“You gave me a broken eagle.”
“Oh no. He belonged to your crazy nephew. Don’t you dare pin this on me.”
The cops were laughing their stupid heads off. “Man,” Lopez said, “I’d hate to see Christmas in this joint. Your family is crazier than a bag of snakes. Wish I would understand what they’re saying.”
Papou made a face. “What’s the fatty talking about? Can you imagine the dumps this guy takes? I bet they are the size of my arm.” He held up his forearm, fist closed. He was this far away from making an obscene Italian gesture. “Takis, what is the English word for mouni?”
“Va-gkeen,” Takis said.
“Vagkeen-a,” Stavros said, trying to help.
“Vagina!” I yelled. “The word is ‘vagina’!”
Everyone looked at me.
“Technically,” Takis said in English, “it is more like pu—”
I whirled around, shoved my finger up under his nose. “Say it and I will cut you.”
He looked around at the others. “Katerina is riding the cotton donkey.”
Marika flicked his ear. “Nobody talks to Katerina like that—not while I’m on duty.” She swiveled her head my way. “Want me to hurt him more?”
“No, but maybe you could spit in his food for me.”
“That would not be the first time,” she said.
I thought about stomping off and leaving them all to it. Standing around here making small talk with two American cops and my family wasn’t exactly finding Dad or getting to the bottom of the German situation.
“Hey, there’s that girl.” Lopez gestured in the direction of the main building with his bottle. “Didn’t know she was coming here or we’d have given her a ride.” He smirked like a ride in his piece-of-crap rental car wasn’t the ride he had in mind.
The fat cop was one of those guys who pinned the ‘girl’ label to everyone in a skirt, unless she was old enough to be his mother. Then the girls became broads. Predictably, the girl in question wasn’t a girl, she was a woman in her twenties or so. Fair hair in a sock bun. Feet in black Dr. Martens. She wore big sunglasses and a leather coat that fell mid-thigh. Looking at her made me sweaty.
“Who is she?” I asked him.
“Some girl we saw hitching at the bottom of the mountain. Would have picked her up but I couldn’t be bothered stopping.”
&nbs
p; “No ass,” Bishop said. “No tits. No ride.”
Charming guy. Solid priorities.
“Wasn’t that.” Lopez took another slug out of the bottle, cracked a grin. “I was starving. Couldn’t stop thinking about free, home cooked food. Have to say, definitely worth not stopping.” He burped and set the bottle down so he could dump another helping of guts and goo into his maw.
No one else was looking at the new arrival, but there was something off about her. Who wears a leather coat on an August day in Greece? Someone who’s got something to hide. Process server? No. Maybe. Probably not. One of her arms was wrapped around her middle—a middle that looked thicker than it should have on a woman her size. Maybe someone in the family knocked her up and here she was, looking for restitution or a father for her unborn child.
Conspiracies and lifetime movies played in my head. I blamed it on the Greek genes.
Then my brain kicked its own butt and my memory jerked awake. The missing German woman. I recognized her from Makria, moments before she and her two buddies passed bad money off as good.
I grabbed Takis’s arm. “Get everybody out of here now. And if you can’t get everybody out, get the children out.”
Takis glanced around, confused. “What?” He had no idea what I was talking about.
“The woman.”
He turned to look at her. Took in the long, roomy coat, the hot summer day. A river was wending its way down her temples and still she clung to that coat. He was thinking what I was thinking, that she was carrying a big gun.
“Fuck the Virgin Mary and some goats,” Takis muttered.
“As long as Marika’s okay with that and you get everyone out of here, sure. Whatever floats your boat.”
But he’d already moved into henchman mode. He had his phone up to his mouth, Greek words spitting out of his mouth. He walked away from the girl, not wanting her to catch on to what was happening.
I stood there for a moment stuck on stupid, oblivious conversations going on around me. Then I snatched a couple of bottles of retsina off the nearby bed of ice and carried them to the woman, big, welcoming grin on my face. She was attractive in a bland sort of way. The kind of pretty you see on an imported candy bar wrapper, holding up a couple of milk jugs.
“Hi! Welcome to the party. You want a drink?” She looked at me blankly so I repeated myself in English.
It took her a moment but she shook her head slightly. “No. I’m not here for drinks. Is Katerina Makri here?”
I held up the bottles. “It’s your lucky day. I’m Katerina. And you are ...”
“Not looking for you,” she said coldly. “Where is the other one, the old lady?”
“We’ve got a saying back home, and it’s perfect for this situation. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar—wouldn’t you agree?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh for crying out loud.” I raised one bottle and brained her with it. She stumbled backwards, hand clutching her head. Lucky for her, the bottle bounced off. Funny, in movies the bottles always smashed. Maybe Greek bottles were tougher. Her coat fell open, and I gasped. She was wired out the wahzoo, like she was about to walk into a marketplace in the West Bank.
“You fucking bitch,” she said, dazed and clutching her head. “You hit me.”
“Huh.” I stared at the explosives strapped to her everything. “I figured you had a gun.”
“Don’t worry, I have a gun, too.”
“I wasn’t worried, but I do like to be right.”
“You fucking bitch.”
“You said that already.”
“You stupid fucking bitch.”
My heart was wigging out. My adrenal gland was spraying adrenaline in foamy bursts like it had just flipped the cork out of a champagne bottle. Terrified? You bet. But I also wanted to smack her again with the second bottle. I was vaguely aware that she was calling me names because her plan was falling apart. The Family and its guests were melting away in the opposite direction, pouring through the back gate and to—hopefully—safety.
“Do you know any other words? ‘Stupid’ was a good effort, but I’ve heard it before. Same with ‘bitch’. What about ‘twat’—do you know that one? Add it to your vocabulary. Thank me later when you win friends and influence people.”
Her eyes went all squinty. “What are you talking about?”
“We’ve met before, do you remember?”
She shook her head. I was slightly miffed that I was so unmemorable. Mind you, today I was all dolled up in the black dress I’d bought for funerals and other solemn Greek occasions. That day in Makria I’d been sweating like a hog in a blanket. Okay, I was sweating now, too, but I was doing it with more makeup and better hair.
“In Makria, the village up the street, you and you two buddies were looking for a meat market.”
“I remember,” she said slowly. “That was you? I remember you as fat.”
“Marika isn’t fat—she’s big and comfortable.”
“In Germany we call that fat.”
“In Germany you had Hitler.”
“Like your people never voted for the wrong person.”
I glanced behind me. The courtyard was already empty. Takis knew how to evacuate a crowd quietly and efficiently. They should hire him someplace where they needed shitweasels with ninja skills.
Okay, not completely empty. When I turned back around I glimpsed a shadow under the archway, the approximate size and shape of Xander. My heart rate slowed, but not too much. It knew when I was screwed better than I did. If the bomb went off I was going down. Well ... up first, then down. In pieces.
“Now I’ve got a fucking headache,” she said.
“You should probably have an MRI.”
“No point. It will all be over soon.”
“So what’s the plan?” I asked her. “It looks to me like it’s just the two of us.”
“I didn’t think that far ahead.”
“Do you need a minute?”
“Do you mind?”
“Be my guest. You want something to eat? A drink?”
“Too nervous. I can’t eat when I’m working.”
“I hear you. Did someone order you to do this?”
“Don’t they always? No one straps on a bomb and decides to kill some people. Okay, maybe some people do, but they are crazy. I am a good employee, that's all.”
“Is your boss going to give you a raise? Because if that bomb goes off you won’t get to enjoy it.”
“Not me—my family. I have a little brother with a condition.”
“Really?”
“No. I’m an only child. I do my job or I am the one who dies. Either way, I die. This way I choose.”
Clearly she was pro-choice. “Who are you working for?”
“I don’t know. No name or face, only money and orders. I suppose I could kill you,” she said after a moment. “You seem annoying. I bet there are people out there who would be grateful.”
“Probably. Do you want to take a minute to update your Facebook status?”
She shook her head. “I already said Tschüss. If I go back now and say it again they’ll think I’m an attention whore.”
“I’m not going to update mine. Most of my Facebook friends are family, and they all ran away so they wouldn’t die.”
“You could have run, too.”
“In these heels? There’s no way.”
She looked at them. “Nice.”
“Thanks.” I slipped off my very nice shoes one at a time. “You want to try them on? We’re about the same size, I think.”
“Really? Maybe you are not so bad.”
“Actually, I’m just stalling so he can shoot you.”
She turned her head just as Xander pulled the trigger on a big gun. I bolted in the opposite direction as fast as my dress and bare feet would allow. The dress was tightish, so I couldn’t get up as much speed as I’d normally like when running away from crazy, German suicide bombers.
The
n the world exploded. Or maybe it was just the German woman. A giant whoosh shoved me to the ground. Something hard and metal cracked against the middle of my back. I landed face first in one of Grandma’s small pocket gardens.
And that’s how I died.
Chapter 12
There was light. Lots of eye-searing, yellow-white light. Looked like sunshine, now that I was thinking about it.
Strong hands peeled me off the ground.
“I’m sorry for all the bad stuff I did,” I babbled, “especially that one thing. And I didn’t mean to swear so much. Most of the time it’s just automatic, you know? I talk without thinking. Is that a sin? I know it’s not one of the Ten Commandments, so do you think we could maybe negotiate on the swearing thing?”
The hands turned me around until I was facing Xander.
Hey, Xander was dead, too. And the afterlife looked just like the courtyard at the Family compound. Maybe we were in limbo ...
“Can you talk now that we’re dead?” I asked him.
He raised his eyebrows.
“We’re not dead are we?”
He tilted his chin up then down.
“Forget everything I just said or I’ll smother you in your sleep, okay?”
Shrug. He feigned nonchalance but the depths of his eyes sparkled.
I brushed off my dress, tried to fix my hair. “What hit me in the back?
He held up his hand. In it was the German woman’s handgun.
“The woman ... is she okay?” I tried to peer past him, but he spun me around so my back was to the front of the courtyard. “Forget it,” I said. “I need to see this. She’s dead because ... well, not because of me, but she’s dead, and a few seconds ago we were having a conversation about Facebook and shoes.”
His fingers relaxed and I broke free.
And wished I hadn’t.
She was dead and broken, pretty much what you’d expect under the circumstances. Nobody could survive a blast that sprayed half their insides on the ground and all over what was left of that nice leather coat. Globs of blood and tissue slid down what used to be a white stucco wall.
Poor stupid woman, it didn’t have to end this way. She could have tried on my shoes, accepted a drink, ponied up more information about her employer. Instead, she pushed the button and went BOOM.
“Xander ... Did she actually blow herself up or was it one of those reflex things when you shot her?”