“Shit,” he said.
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
“I need to find her. I need to make sure she’s safe, even if she doesn’t want me to. And you need to discover who’s after her. I’ll pay for anything you need.”
“If she doesn’t want your help, you can’t force her to come back.”
“I can, until she’s no longer in danger.”
“And then what? You’ll hold her against her will, until she stops hurting herself – which could take forever?”
“No. Once I know she’s not in danger from others, she can do what she wants. I’ll have done all I can for her. Maybe she’ll appreciate it, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”
Each time we met I became less certain about the kind of guy he was and what he really wanted.
25
Maria called to ask me if it was a good time to come downstairs – she immediately added that she had come across something that could be of interest to me and Drag. It was close to midnight, I was exhausted, I needed to get some sleep as soon as possible, and most of all I was upset by her comment. It meant that she wanted to make it very clear that nothing else could or would happen. I told her to come right down.
She arrived a couple of minutes later, wearing a blue shirt over her white nightgown. I had probably seen more beautiful sights in my life than her just standing casually in front of me, but I just couldn’t remember them. What if I disregarded the unspoken rules between us? I wanted to believe she was fed up with Sotiris and ready to leave him. Maybe she just couldn’t find the courage, and needed me to convince her this time it could work for us. Maybe deep down she wanted me to take her in my arms right there and then. Or maybe if I made a move I would cross the line and lose her for good.
“You look tired,” she said.
“You look radiant,” I replied.
“That’s not fair.”
“What isn’t?”
“You can’t respond to ‘you look tired’ with a compliment. Now you make me feel bad.”
“Nothing to feel bad about. I’m intentionally looking tired. It’s part of my new rugged look.”
She smiled mischievously and I did nothing and the moment was gone.
“Do you know about Tor?” she asked me quickly, probably to make sure that it wouldn’t return.
“Thor? The comic superhero?”
“Tor, the anonymity network.”
I didn’t know it. I knew there was something called the Deep Web, containing parts of the Internet that are not indexed by conventional search engines. I knew there was a subsection of it called the Dark Web, which many people in my profession frequented. I preferred to remain a Luddite.
“Yes, and it is thousands of times larger than the regular Internet. Tor software is the main way to connect,” Maria said.
“The Dark Web has a bad reputation – what is a nice girl like you doing there?”
“I seem to be attracted to things and people with a bad reputation,” she said and smiled again, that smile that still gave me sleepless nights. She quickly got back to business.
“There’s a lot of inspiring stuff, for my work, there. Truly great artists who like to share and discuss their work only in these forums.”
“Where they can meet with wonderful drug dealers, paedophiles and sex traffickers.”
“And journalists trying to find hidden truths and activists working against dictatorships and wounded people looking for a place to rant.”
I didn’t reply. When she was feeling passionate about something, it was a good idea not to challenge her. Mainly because you’d lose.
“So, I was browsing around and thinking about you and Drag and Aliki and all that. I tried a new engine for deep searching through Tor’s images. And I came across this.”
She gave me the USB flash drive she was holding. I stuck it into my laptop and double clicked on the single file it contained. It was a photo with a text. The text read: “Look at the little whores, how they’re all over each other. Fucking lezzies, I’d make you straight in one fuck.”
You wouldn’t call that the cultured web.
The women the text referred to did indeed look to be very close and their embrace, in the bar where they’d been photographed, seemed more than friendly. They were gazing at each other lovingly, not knowing that someone was taking their picture. They were both exquisitely beautiful – one of them naturally, the other thanks to plastic surgery. The two women in the picture were Aliki Stylianou and Elsa Dalla. Who “were polite to each other, nothing more”, according to Peppas, the TV director and the other actors in their show.
The text included the hashtag “Stylianou” and the search engine Maria had used picked it up.
Another wrinkle to the case, if the photo was genuine. And there was something in it that made my spine tingle. Something that Maria couldn’t have noticed, because she knew nothing about that story.
A couple of yards away from Aliki and Elsa, there was a really big guy having a drink and looking straight at the camera. He seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. Obviously he hadn’t a clue that before long he’d be lying dead in an empty warehouse.
The man in the picture was Linesman.
26
My mobile rang again at 4.30 the next morning. Maybe it was a new custom I hadn’t heard of.
“I’ve got news.”
It was Drag, this time. I’d left him a message, and he decided to phone me at dawn. I had barely fallen asleep, after spending hours thinking about all those unanswered questions. Aliki, Vassilis, the role of Makis, Rizos and Elsa Dalla… I was pretty sure that there were connections that I was overlooking completely, missing links that I had to find out about. Maria’s photo seemed to indicate a close relationship between Aliki and Elsa – or maybe it was just the two of them getting friendlier after a few drinks and being caught by someone taking pictures with their phone. “I don’t like to disappoint beautiful people. Why should I deny my body the pleasure?” she had told me about women flirting with her. If Aliki and Elsa really had something going between them, this could explain Elsa driving Aliki’s car, although that didn’t explain who shot her and why. And what about Linesman? How could he have sneaked into the picture, so close to them? Was it planned, or just a coincidence? My head was buzzing, and I found myself remembering a walk with Maria years ago, when she was still with Drag. From Thissio Square towards Apostolou Pavlou Street and then, through Eptahalkou, a narrow street with houses so low that you could jump up and touch their roofs. I remembered the expression on Maria’s face and her guilty smile when I caught her looking at me with the same longing I had for her.
“News that can’t wait?” I asked Drag.
“That kind, yes.”
“Papi’s?”
“In half an hour.”
We couldn’t meet at my place because of the risk of bumping into Maria. It’s one of a long list of issues that are silently agreed between us. His only visit, back when he got excited by my new security system, had taken place when Maria was away for a couple of days.
I couldn’t go to his place because it was infested with reporters wanting him to comment on the case. Drag’s boss, without consulting him, had given a sketch artist my description, which had been passed to the media. It was indeed perfect, as Drag had told me. Not being a major suspect, I was only somewhere between pages three and five in the newspapers, and a short item on TV, but the publicity I was receiving was already more than enough.
“Aren’t you going to at least tell me what it’s about?” I asked Drag on the phone.
“Dalla. Before becoming Regoudis’ girlfriend, she was having an affair with Vassilis Stathopoulos.”
Whatever time I went to Papi’s, Papi was always there. It was as though he never left the place.
“Maybe he never sleeps,” Drag had suggested, when we’d first discussed it.
“You mean, never?”
“Yes, like Hawk.”
I hadn’t asked the ob
vious question because I didn’t want to give him the pleasure. Drag loves to pepper his conversation with literary references as much as I love talking about film noir. I was sure that Hawk was the hero of some book Drag considered everyone should have read, and I knew he’d lecture me on it. So I said nothing, and after a few seconds of silence, Drag couldn’t stand it.
“You do know who Hawk is?”
“Nope,” I’d said.
“You don’t know Hawk?”
“Only the bird.”
“He’s one of Robert B. Parker’s most famous characters, Spenser’s sidekick.”
“Parker the mystery writer?”
That I knew from another conversation with Drag, which had begun: “You don’t know Robert B. Parker?”
“‘The mystery writer’? The giant, you mean,” Drag said.
“Is he tall?”
Drag gave me a pitying look.
“‘The mystery writer’. That’s like calling Diego Armando Maradona ‘a footballer’.”
Besides Parker, Drag is also a huge fan of Maradona.
“Tell me about Hawk.”
Like most quick-tempered people, Drag quickly forgets his anger if you ask him to talk about something he loves.
“Hawk is the invincible muscle who’s always there to help his friend Spenser when needed. He can be called at any time, is always ready, and always lethal.”
“He must feel very tired.”
“No, he just doesn’t feel the need for sleep.”
“Then he has a lot of free time to use his muscle.”
“Exactly! Exactly!” Drag had shouted, so enthusiastically that a couple in their seventies, nearby, almost spilt their coffee.
“Drag…”
“That’s Hawk!” he’d shouted again, with even greater fervour.
I knew that Drag would be in a good mood at half past five in the morning at Papi’s. Not happy and smiling – the last time I’d seen him smile was when I’d taken him to Lake Beletsi. I had discovered it during one of my lonely walks at the foot of Parnitha, from the side of Afidnes and the housing estate of Ippokrates’ Politeia, just a few hundred feet from a small church. The trees still standing on one side of the mountain, after the Parnitha’s forest fire, were filling our lungs with oxygen, and the calm I felt around the water made me remember my adolescent dream to live on an island one day, in a hut by the sea. When two fawns appeared behind the bushes and stared at us in bewilderment, as we were ready in our underwear to dive, I saw a smile on Drag’s face that I hadn’t seen in years, probably since he and Maria were a couple. We spent hours by the lake, in silence, with the mild north-eastern wind caressing us. At some point, Drag wondered how it could be possible that this oasis, just twenty minutes off the National Road, was unknown to most Athenians. The obvious explanation is its distance from the city – when you spend a few hours commuting every day, the idea of driving another forty miles back and forth to find yourself close to nature isn’t necessarily appealing. And you can’t discover something beautiful if you don’t know it exists.
So, Drag would be in a good mood, in the sense that he’d be fully alert and on the scent. The weather outside wasn’t sharing my friend’s good mood. Torrential rain lashing down. Angry. As if it wanted to scour the place clean. When rain-soaked, Athens seems vulnerable. Almost human.
Drag was already having a drink when I arrived. I was wearing a thick pair of glasses, hadn’t shaved and was going to let my hair grow. I also had a stick in the car so that I could pretend to be lame, if necessary, since the description given by the waiter and doorman at La Luna both mentioned that I was an impressively well-built man.
Papi brought my drink without showing the slightest reaction to my appearance. A treasure.
“So?” I said.
“The less important stuff first. I spoke to three psychiatrists from the list that Vassilis gave us. All of them confirmed that Aliki had confessed that she cuts herself, that she hates him for loving her, that she wants to do him harm. And whatever he told us about the murder attempts is accurate: the Bulgarian motorcyclist, the spilt oil, everything. It seems our friend was telling the truth.”
“On this occasion.”
“On this occasion. Now for the good stuff. I spent hours with Regoudis, at his mansion in Ekali. Total kitsch. The PhD on the wall was the most tasteful thing there.”
“I thought he kept that in his office.”
“That’s where his office is. He likes working at home, he told me, and to go around barefoot. He hates wearing shoes; they don’t allow him to be in contact with the earth and feel its vibrations.”
Total kitsch. I wasn’t sure that I could trust Drag’s aesthetic judgement, but I didn’t raise the matter. Especially since he quickly passed on to a subject more interesting than Regoudis’ bare feet.
“He’s taken it personally; he’s really set on finding the murderer. He told me that if it is a matter of money, however much, he’ll pay.”
Regoudis too was ready to splash money around… As if we were still living in that other Greece, when money seemed to grow on trees that everyone grabbed for. But a few hard facts would be more useful than money.
“The day before yesterday Regoudis couldn’t see me because he was shattered by the murder – he had to be sedated. Not that he was much better yesterday. He asked Elsa’s family to come to Athens for the funeral tomorrow, but they all declined. ‘I’ll be alone at her funeral,’ he told me. ‘She didn’t even have any work friends. All alone. Almost as if she never existed.’ He kept repeating it as he downed pills with whisky. I told him that if he kept on like that not even he would get to the funeral. Or he would be the guest of honour at the next one.”
Drag, the perfect companion for a time of mourning.
“He said that’s what he fears might happen, now he’s lost her; that he’ll be on his own like she was. He has a permanent staff of twelve in the villa – a Romanian and eleven Greeks – and he’s asked them to come and talk to him to keep him company. The Romanian has been his right-hand man since their student days. Regoudis said that with such corruption everywhere the immigrants are the country’s only hope, the only ones who are at all like the wonderful Greeks of the sixties.”
“On pills and drink and yet he managed to do a social critique for you,” I observed.
“When you have a PhD… The critique seemed to take his mind off his problems for a while.”
Made sense. Someone who devotes a whole wall to his vanity wouldn’t miss the chance to show how wise he is. He’ll find time for pain later.
“Did he have anything more important to say?”
“He told me that he’s put his own detectives on the case.”
Journalists, detectives… Barnum and Bailey’s Circus. The party was getting bigger and bigger.
We took a break as Papi brought us coffee and croissants. He’d gone to the jukebox and put on Louis Armstrong’s Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now. I exchanged looks with Papi who smiled and nodded. A treasure with a sense of humour.
I got out my mobile and showed Drag the snapshot of Aliki and Elsa. He seemed to enjoy the sexual implications, and said we’d have to look into that as well. But he had no more idea than I did about the truth of their relationship or the presence of Linesman right next to them.
“Maybe he’d just discovered photobombing,” Drag said.
Then I told him that Maria had found the photo and the smile froze on his face. He recovered by telling me the reason he’d called me.
Elsa Dalla had come to Athens ten years ago, from her village, Rodia, just outside Grevena in north-western Greece. She wasn’t particularly good-looking. She wasn’t particularly smart. She didn’t even have an artistic-sounding name – she was still using her real one, Evanthia Markantonopoulou. She also didn’t have the foggiest idea about acting and had never in her life been to the theatre. But she did watch TV in the village: soap operas. She never missed an episode and knew them all by heart, foreign and Greek.
And it seemed to her that what the actors were doing was easy. Being an actress would be so much better than becoming a nurse and wiping old people’s bottoms, as her family were pressing her to do.
She failed her exams and took a night bus from the village to Athens. With little money in her pocket, she took a job in the first taverna she saw, to be able to pay the rent and eat for free. She had an affair with the taverna owner to get him to cover the drama school fees. Then she made the acquaintance of a handsome young actor who’d appeared in soap operas. She fell head over heels in love with him but kept up her affair with the taverna owner, as he was her financial support.
But the handsome young actor followed her one evening, discovered what she was up to and decided to go to the taverna and meet his rival face to face. Unfortunately for him, his rival wasn’t the most principled person in the world. Sitting at the cash register with his stomach resting on the desk, the taverna owner listened carefully as the young actor cursed his mother, father and all the rest of his extended family, grabbed hold of his collar and threatened to beat the hell out of him if he didn’t leave his girl alone. The taverna owner looked at Elsa, who didn’t even dare breathe, and said: “Fine, friend. She’s all yours.” That statement had exactly the effect the taverna owner wanted: the actor relaxed for a couple of seconds, enough for the taverna owner to shift his stomach, open the drawer, take out a revolver, whisper: “No one insults my family” and send the young man to his grave. The funeral took place the next day, and that’s where Vassilis Stathopoulos came in. The murdered actor, in spite of his love for the girl, was also having a relationship with a sixty-year-old who was a shareholder in one of the big TV channels – she was the one that had got him the soap opera part. After learning about the murder, she got straight on to Vassilis and asked him to make sure that the murderer was deported to one of those states in America that still has the death penalty. When Vassilis explained to her that it wasn’t possible, because the crime had happened in Greece, she demanded he ensure that the murderer would grow old in solitary confinement, and never again see the light of day. Then she learnt that the cause for the murder wasn’t just a drunken row, it was over a girl with whom her lover was involved. She phoned Vassilis again and insisted, with even more passion than before, that he get the taverna owner acquitted – she would cover all expenses.
Athenian Blues Page 9