Athenian Blues

by Pol Koutsakis

  “A caretaker takes a job to correct something that’s wrong. Someone who carries out the other sort of job you mentioned just sees bodies in front of him. And you didn’t answer my question.”

  “I’m not obliged to answer anything.”

  “That’s right. You’re not.”

  For the next minute the silence between us was noisier than all the other tables put together. It was Lena who put an end to it.

  “Aliki and I are best friends. Just that. Nothing else. I do know about her preferences, yes – or rather, her lack of them. She likes beautiful people, without distinction. Once, when we’d first met – we were about eighteen – we were at a party together and we found ourselves alone in the kitchen. We’d had a bit to drink – she kissed me. I was so surprised I just stood there with my mouth open so she kissed me again. ‘To shut your mouth,’ she said. I still had no idea what to say, but I didn’t realize how surprised I really was. Are you ever truly unaware when someone’s about to kiss you? I don’t think so.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “The kiss? I’d be lying, if I said I didn’t. But that’s as far as it went. I liked it, but I didn’t want to go any further. And even if I did it would be against my conservative upbringing. But I didn’t. I’ve never felt any real attraction towards another woman. For Aliki either. So we just dropped the subject. I think that’s why we are so close, why she tells me everything. Maybe I’m the only person who doesn’t want to sleep with her. So she knows that I’m sincere in everything I say to her.”

  I noticed that she constantly spoke of her friend in the present tense. The possibility that Aliki was dead must have occurred to her, but she wasn’t accepting it. This could either mean she knew very little about her friend’s disappearance, or that she knew quite a lot, but was clever enough to hide it.

  “You asked me whether she played with people before she met him. Yes, she did, without being aware of what she was doing. I often told her that behaving like a kid might be fun for a while for whoever she was with, but when she dropped them they were destroyed. When Aliki was with someone she was lost. If we all went out together I often didn’t recognize her, she wasn’t the Aliki I knew. She somehow became whatever her new date wanted her to be. A chameleon. When I asked her about it she said that she just wanted to make them happy, that love was about giving, and she got a kick out of fulfilling someone else’s dream. It was also good for her, she said, because it allowed her to act and she had always dreamt of becoming an actress. I told her that behaving like that would prevent anyone from falling in love with her for what she really was, but she wasn’t convinced. ‘Even if they fell for what I was,’ she said, ‘how long would it last? Whereas if I’m their dream, they’ll put me on a pedestal and adore me forever.’”

  “Maybe one of those adoring people couldn’t stand losing her.”

  “You mean one of them could be behind all this…? No way. All her exes worship her. Even today. She keeps in touch with them all and no one’s ever said a mean word against her. I’ve never understood how she does it – dumps them and still has them at her feet, thankful that she was just walking out, not completely disappearing from their lives.”

  “You sound almost jealous.”

  “Not ‘almost’. I am jealous. I’ve never seen such charisma in anybody else. Aliki captures everyone around her.”

  I had an inkling of what she was talking about.

  “I asked her once how it was possible not to have had a fight with at least one of her exes; there must surely have been one unhappy guy who was truly maddened by their separation. I thought I knew a thing or two about the psychology of people in love but she looked at me, surprised, as if I was telling her something that had never crossed her mind, as if I were an alien speaking a language she didn’t understand. ‘Sex is a feast,’ she said. ‘How can someone hold a grudge against someone else if they’ve feasted so deliciously together?’ The mad guy turned out to be the one she married – and he’ll do anything to keep her.”

  I thought it was time to shock her with a surprise question. “What do you know about Vassilis and Elsa Dalla?”

  “I know they were lovers, once, for a while.”

  Her answer came so quickly I was convinced it was genuine. “Aliki told me,” she continued. “He liked to boast about his former exploits. Not in public – he’d never soil his name, but in private, with the boys, you know the kind of thing. I’ve heard about it from my husband who can’t stand them – the detailed way they describe their lovers: what they’re like in bed, what they’re like naked, what shape this has or that… And he was always the one who went into most detail. A slime-bag – I told you so right from the beginning. Aliki didn’t want to know anything about his earlier love life but he sat down and laid it all out in front of her, whether she liked it or not. Then he demanded that she tell him everything about herself in return. Luckily, though, it was one of the few things he didn’t manage to make her do. God help us if he had – the list is so long it would have plunged him into even deeper obsession. If that’s possible.”

  I remembered Vassilis talking about the same subject, at his house.

  She saw things differently. She insisted I had to be open about my past and write down the names of all my former lovers. I continued to believe in the power of ignorance, and learnt nothing at all about hers.

  So many different versions of the truth. Almost a joke. Good liars spice their lies with truth to make them more convincing. We were dealing with some pretty bad liars.

  “And how did Aliki feel about working with one of his former lovers?”

  “They didn’t exactly work together. They worked in the same studio, but it was rare for them to appear together in a scene. It bothered her. Crazy as it sounds, it did. She felt uncomfortable with Elsa. She’d give her just a formal greeting and leave.”

  Just a formal greeting. Yes, I’d seen evidence of the formality between Aliki and Elsa in that bar photo.

  “I often asked her why she minded. It would be great if Vassilis still wanted Elsa and she him, which was probably the case, judging from all the plastic surgery she’d done to look like Aliki. Let them go on to live in bliss together for the next 200 years, if only he would leave Aliki alone. Why did she mind? Even she couldn’t explain it: ‘How do I know? He’s my husband. He’s still my husband, whatever he’s done, and from the way he behaves he shows me that he wants me,’ she said. That’s the key, for her – to feel wanted by everybody. Just a kid, you see. A kid. With no idea what she’s doing. And it was great when she finally got over herself and decided that she definitely didn’t want to be with him any longer.”

  “During our talk, Aliki mentioned his behaviour towards her after the incident with the video.”

  “What video?”

  “The one with the banker.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Aliki never mentioned the relationship she had with a big-shot banker?”

  She thought a while.

  “No. Banker… no. I’m trying to think back if there might have been… but no. Unless… unless it was one of those one-night stands, one of those she was ashamed to tell me about… But a relationship… no. I would know about it.”

  One-night stands. I remembered Aliki telling me that she had slept with two or three people on the same day. But I remembered even better her telling me that she had a relationship with the banker on the video. So she did keep secrets from her best friend. Of course, if she didn’t tell Lena about her spur-of-the-moment lays, she had no reason to confess them to me; but there was also no reason why she should hide them from me, which is why she spoke so openly at La Luna. Plus, how easy would it have been to have a threesome with the banker and her fan, with the camera recording everything, if it was just a one-night stand? Such situations demand trust in the other two sexual partners. Or perhaps I was overanalysing. From the complete picture of Aliki Stylianou that I was starting to form, maybe everyth
ing was that simple for her, maybe sex simply didn’t cause her any worries. There are those who indulge themselves whenever the fancy takes them; maybe Elsa was also one of them. Parallel lives: Aliki and Elsa both came from the provinces; both were dazzled by the stage; both had had relationships with powerful men; they shared at least one lover. Maybe more, if the allegation that Athens is one huge bed is true – I’ve never put it to the test. Maybe Elsa and Aliki were lovers, but only one of them had been blessed with unbelievable natural beauty, while the other had sought the creative attentions of the plastic surgeon. The two looked so alike that one might have died in the place of the other, but the opposite could well have happened.

  “Just one more question,” I told Lena.

  She glanced at her watch.

  “It’s been a whole hour!” she exclaimed.

  “See, when you’re in the right company…”

  She tried to reassume her distant manner but quickly abandoned the attempt.

  “I didn’t really have an appointment.”

  “I guessed. Aliki had a steady relationship before her marriage – I suppose you know that.”

  “Yes.”

  “When and who with?”

  “For eight, maybe nine months, just before she got to know Vassilis. Very ironic, that.”

  “What?”

  “That she found herself working with her old lover after three years.”

  “Working where?”

  “Her old lover, the steady one, was Hermes Peppas. The director of the series she was acting in, with Dalla.”

  The one who’d assured Drag that Aliki and Elsa never went around together.

  “But they separated on very amicable terms. Hermes would never hurt her. They spent those few months together and then, though they wanted only the best for each other, they saw that as a relationship it just wasn’t working – he is very eccentric in his personal life. And when they met again during filming, Aliki told me that he behaved impeccably. Like close friends.”

  I tried to get my thoughts into some kind of order, but something told me that I still didn’t know the half of it. The relationships were hopelessly tangled and I still didn’t have a firm lead to follow.

  “Is that it, then?” Lena asked, taking out her purse to pay the bill.

  I gestured to her to put it back in her bag, “That’s it. Thanks.”

  She got up and put on her coat. It may have had a designer label, but I’ve never paid enough attention to distinguish one from another. “Will you tell me if you come up with any leads or will I have to watch it on the news?”

  “I’ll tell you.”

  “Promise?”

  She smiled.

  “I promise.”

  “This hour, talking here with you, was the strangest of my life,” she said as she was leaving.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” I told her.

  I wasn’t sure she’d told me all she knew, but it was a good start. I didn’t let on about how this case had affected me, either. For example, I didn’t tell her that I had started to sleep very little. I didn’t tell her that in the little sleep I got the night before, I’d dreamt of Aliki shouting for help. And I didn’t tell Lena, when we said goodbye, that even if what Aliki had told me was only a figment of her troubled mind, I really, really wanted to help her.

  30

  Teri seemed to have aged a decade since I last saw her, when I visited her that evening.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  She didn’t reply immediately. When Teri doesn’t talk, things aren’t good. When she’s expecting to meet her new love in a couple of hours and isn’t anxious about her new manicure, her highlights and extensions, and whether she looks like a goddess or merely an empress, things are even worse.

  “Six months ago, we got a call at the centre,” she said finally. She seemed to be on the verge of tears, but she wouldn’t let herself cry. “The call was from a six-year-old boy, Fanis. His mum was divorced, raising Fanis and his brother by herself. She’d been laid off from one of the big companies that fled the country and relocated to Bulgaria to escape the taxation. She started doing drugs before she was fired, and didn’t have the money to pay afterwards. She ended up living with her dealer, working as a hooker. The dealer hit the kids, more and more each day. They got on his nerves just for being around. Fanis’ brother was two and Fanis often got in the way to save him, took the beatings for him. One day he wasn’t quick enough. The baby was taken to the hospital, and barely survived. Their mum said the baby had fallen; it was an accident. Fanis called us to say it wasn’t. We called the police, persuaded the mother to go to rehab, took the kids with us to the centre. I spent weeks with the boys. The baby stopped having seizures from his brain injuries. Their mum got out of rehab and took them back two days ago, for a trial period. Today she killed Fanis, while he was sleeping. Stabbed him to death, for ruining her life.”

  I thought she might collapse. I moved to hug her. She hit my arms, kicked me.

  “No!” she shouted. She was as strong as an ox, but I was stronger. After a while, she stopped kicking.

  “We’ve got the baby. The baby is safe. Fanis would have been happy with that,” she said.

  For me, silence is the best medicine. For Teri, it was talking. I asked just enough questions to let her dump it all on me, telling me about the horrors she went through every day. You might have thought that being plunged into poverty would have brought you closer to your kids. But maybe it was the suddenness of the plunge that was the problem.

  “I think you should focus on killing child abusers,” she said. “I’m sure I could find the money to pay you. You’re already my hero for ridding the world of villains. Why not go further, and get rid of the worst of the worst?”

  After a while, she got up and brought me her special treat. She hadn’t made it for me – she wanted to impress Nikos – but I wasn’t complaining. Her speciality is a chocolate dessert made with biscuits. It sounds simple. It isn’t. It is the food of the gods – her own recipe, which she doesn’t give to anybody, however much they beg her for it. It takes her days to get the ingredients together because she has to order them from sources she won’t reveal. But once she’s made it, however self-controlled you are, you simply can’t stop wolfing it down till you’ve polished off the plate. Her lamb espetadas have nothing on this cake, and Drag is its greatest fan. He is always the first to sit at the table, glaring angrily at anyone who dares take a second portion. Once we attacked the cake so greedily that there was none left for Teri. Wanting to sample her own cooking, she reached out to take a mouthful from Drag’s plate. He stabbed her hand with his fork and carried on eating while Teri danced around swearing at the pain and smiling because her cake was a hit yet again.

  This time, Drag was with us though he didn’t know it, as we were eating the cake in front of Teri’s huge plasma TV. He seemed to be even more pissed off than the last time we were all together, when she stripped to the waist and danced in front of him. Now he had to face dozens of journalists waiting to interview him in a press conference broadcast live by all the major TV stations. It was timed to go out on the main news bulletins, and however much Drag hated publicity he couldn’t wriggle out of it this time. He was fast becoming a member of every Greek family who watched the eight o’clock news. He didn’t stand much chance of working undercover in the near future.

  “Let’s see if Mr Dragas will be more forthcoming than he was this morning,” the newscaster said. They had shown edited footage from Drag’s morning visit to the chief of police, when he was ambushed by a score of reporters. He’d tried to brush them aside but they clung to him like flies on a horse.

  “Do you have any clues as to the whereabouts of Vassilis Stathopoulos?”

  “We are investigating.”

  “Can you say whether he is safe, or whether he might be the victim of a criminal act?”

  “We’re investigating that as well.”

  “What do you have to tell us about
Aliki Stylianou?”

  “Nothing.”

  And then he dodged to one side, jumped over the TV cables, pushed a reporter out of the way, and made his escape.

  “But how can he walk around in that thing? Doesn’t anybody ever wash or iron it?” Teri exclaimed. It did look as if Drag slept in his raincoat.

  “One more unprecedented display of Mr Dragas’ disregard for the media,” a commentator said. One more unprecedented display. One more tribute to the Greek educational system that these TV commentators were so articulate.

  But this evening Drag couldn’t get away by jumping over cables. The journalists weren’t going to let him. Their TV stations and newspapers needed news and they needed it right away. The endless interviews with lawyers, actors and models who had at some point worked with Vassilis, Aliki and Elsa Dalla were OK to fill airtime, but Drag was the real deal.

  “Mr Dragas, every day we’ve been asking questions of burning interest to our audience, and it seems as though nobody has anything to say. Can you give us some meaningful answers? Can you give us any answers?” a particularly ugly reporter exploded. Seeing that Drag wasn’t in a hurry to respond, he tried again: “Because the obvious question is…” he paused dramatically. “The obvious question is how is it possible that a well-known actress could have been murdered in the car of a famous model and then for the model and her husband, one of the most prominent men in Greece, to simply disappear? Do you suspect that they have been kidnapped or murdered? How is it that the police have come up with absolutely no clues, and have absolutely nothing to say by way of explanation?”

  “That’s three questions,” Drag said.

  Teri punched the air and shouted “Give it to them, Rocky!”

  “Are you here to make jokes, Mr Dragas, or are you going to respond? How-is-that-possible?”

  “What you describe is what happened,” Drag answered.

  “Mr Dragas, could you confirm that you requested permission from the chief of police to conduct all the questioning yourself, because you don’t trust your fellow officers?” That was asked by a reporter from one of the tabloids who had offered Drag 20,000 euros to leak findings from the investigation, to which Drag had responded by spitting on his shoes. “So you want more?” the reporter had asked.