Athenian Blues

by Pol Koutsakis

  “Mr Dragas, is it true that you have trouble dealing with your subordinates? That’s what our information suggests and, if it’s correct, how can this case possibly proceed?” asked another journalist, getting in on the act.

  Drag never had problems dealing with his subordinates. It is with his superiors that he often has problems. They were the ones leaking stuff about him to the press.

  “Mr Dragas, we have information that links the case to drug-smuggling rings. Have you any comment?”

  “Mr Dragas, do you suspect that the disappearances are linked to the recent revelations of corruption in the judicial system?”

  “Mr Dragas, have you discovered what the symbols found on the body of Makis Zyridis mean?”

  “We’re investigating,” Drag answered.

  Drag had told me that the symbols had not led anywhere. They had been faxed to the Egyptian Embassy and when the specialists there threw up their hands, the fax was forwarded to the archaeological service in Cairo. There, they found someone who explained that there are around 5,000 known hieroglyphic characters, and most of the symbols inscribed on Makis’ body bore no resemblance to any of them. But the archaeologist happened also to have made a study of Mayan hieroglyphics and he believed that they could be from that culture. The problem was that when he deciphered them they apparently meant “good mountain baby now”.

  “Mr Dragas, could you confirm whether or not Aliki Stylianou belongs to an extremist religious group?”

  “Mr Dragas, really, do you have the slightest bit of information to give us about this case or are we completely wasting our time here?”

  You could hardly have fed Drag a better exit line.

  “I’d say you are wasting your time. Thanks very much,” he said, getting up and disappearing through the door behind him. The press conference had finished in fifteen minutes, instead of the scheduled hour. Drag’s bosses would be foaming at the mouth as they watched the reporters rush to their cameras to lambast the police in general and Drag in particular.

  “Do you know what you and Drag remind me of?” Teri said.

  “No, but I’m about to find out.”

  “A line from Kubrick’s The Killing.”

  I’d been more successful in influencing Teri’s taste in movies than her attempts to make me like Pretty Woman.

  “All these years we’ve been friends and we remind you of one line?” I told her.

  “It’s the only one that fits you two like a glove. Actually, the film would have been much more interesting if Kubrick had gone further in exploring that theme…”

  “Which line and what theme?”

  “The relation between a cop and a criminal. The hero of the film was Sterling Hayden. In 1941 Paramount advertised him as the handsomest actor in the world, did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, and in other adverts they called him ‘The beautiful, blond, Viking god’.”

  “Is this information really essential?”

  “No, but it’s great! Unfortunately, he was completely heterosexual, the dope – not the slightest hint that he might have been one of us. He married the same woman three times, can you believe it? And separated three times. How long does it take for him to get the message?”

  “Are you going to tell me the line?” I cut her off.

  “Yes… so… Sterling Hayden plays Johnny Clay, a thief who has been freed after spending five years in Alcatraz, and is planning to pull off a big one and steal two million dollars from a racetrack.”

  “I know the story. It’s the line I want.”

  “I’m getting there, Mr Patience. So, Clay is talking to Joe Piano, the manager of a motel, and says: ‘This afternoon a friend of mine is stopping by and leaving a bundle for me. He’s a cop.’ ‘A cop?’ asks the other. ‘Yeah, yeah he drives a prowl car.’ ‘Funny kind of a friend to have,’ Joe tells him. And Clay answers: ‘He’s a funny kind of cop.’ The whole film should have been about the relationship between Clay and the cop, or you and Drag, except you’ll never go to prison, but Kubrick blew it.”

  I remembered the film vaguely, though not that particular line.

  “Speaking of directors, have you heard of Hermes Peppas, who directed Aliki’s TV series?”

  Teri gave me a look. Maybe I should have heard of him? Drag hadn’t either; he’d referred to him as “a certain Peppas”.

  “You really don’t know him, or you’re pulling my leg?”

  “I really don’t. And neither does Drag,” I quickly added.

  “Ah, Drag, who has his finger on the cultural pulse of Greece,” Teri said.

  She had a point there. Drag didn’t know any celebrities, but at least he knew about Robert B. Parker and Maradona.

  “You two must be the only Greeks who don’t know the guy.”

  “And everybody else knows him because…”

  “OK. Film gossip for dummies.”

  I nodded.

  According to Teri, Hermes Peppas, forty-five, was one of the biggest stars in Greek show business because he’d done fabulously well in America before his career took a nosedive. He had been a child wonder. While still a twenty-year-old student he made two shorts, which won prizes at big international festivals. Then he worked for a year as assistant to a director of low-budget horror films, partly for the experience and partly for the half-naked beauties in torn clothes who always appeared in such films and screamed shortly before being slaughtered by a psychotic murderer. Having achieved his main aim, which was to rip off in private as many of these dresses as he could get his hands on, Peppas managed to persuade a producer to trust him as first director of a new horror film.

  The film’s main attraction was that it would be terrifying while made on a shoestring, thanks to Peppas’ screenplay, which he read out loud to the producer – the producer considered reading a waste of time. Peppas’ screenplay was itself a rip-off. He had taken a third-rate horror film from the seventies, and just changed the names. The producer agreed, with the proviso that Peppas would regularly inform a member of the production company how the film was going. This member was a woman who fell madly in love with the young director. On the first day of shooting, Peppas told the actors that certain changes were to be made in the script, dumped it in the bin and took out the copies of his real screenplay. He had written a spoof of the horror genre, mocking every stereotype and keeping to tradition only inasmuch as it included the torn dresses of the shrieking lovelies. The film did so well at the box office that the producer forgave Peppas for taking him in.

  His second film did even better, and was a real smash. Having hit his stride, Peppas wrote and directed two films within six months, which were among the top box office hits of that year. But the critics loathed the infantile comedies and horror spoofs he was making. “Do they improve people?” a journalist asked him once. “I’m not interested in improving anyone,” growled Peppas, “I just want people to have a good time.” His target group, aged between fifteen and twenty-two, concurred. But suddenly his rocketing career stalled. He made five films within four years, each worse than the last. He hit the bottle. He found a billionaire private backer who believed in him and made a dark psychological thriller, which would be his big comeback. The film floundered for about a week then sank without a trace. He continued to maintain that though the film had flopped in America, Europe would take it to its heart. In Europe the film tanked. It wasn’t even salvaged by the scandal that erupted when the backer discovered that Peppas was sleeping with his wife, and tried to strangle him. Peppas went on a talk show, ostensibly to discuss the attempt on his life, but he used the occasion to attack the great American public. He announced to the booing audience that he was abandoning America for good to take up residence in Paris, where he would make low-budget artistic films about human values, the type of films that his soul had always been longing to make, but couldn’t because he had been typecast, a slave of the system.

  He didn’t make any films. He spent two years in Paris spl
ashing out the last of his money on expensive hotels, expensive women and expensive drugs. Then an old friend of his, a Greek television producer, had a series that was dying in the ratings. He needed some publicity to make the public aware of it. He hired Peppas. Apart from the publicity, Peppas succeeded beyond the producer’s dreams. The Welter, an incomprehensible drama about three brothers with multiple secrets, was transformed by Peppas as screenwriter and director into an exciting thriller that regularly topped the ratings and was now going into its fifth season. Peppas told the press that his dream from the start was to return to his beloved Greece and help, with his artistic vision, his unjustly suffering country.

  “So why are you so interested?” Teri asked when she’d finished her story. “Is that prick a suspect?”

  “I wish I knew,” I told her.

  “You know what you’ve done? You’ve sidetracked me and completely missed the point.”

  “And the point is…”

  “That Nikos looks exactly like Sterling Hayden of course!”

  Of course.

  What followed was another seemingly endless monologue by Teri, but this time about Nikos Zois. I let it all wash over me, their stroll in the heart of Plaka, from the statue of Hadrian to the little alleys of Anafiotika, where Nikos analysed the Cycladic architecture of the neighbourhood while Teri looked at him in awe and could only think how to get him to bed again. I really wanted to seem interested. Teri was brought up by her uncle after both her parents had died of cancer a year apart while she was just a small child. Her uncle was very shy with women due to his lame leg and stayed single all his life – so Teri missed the feeling of belonging to a large family. Drag, Maria and I filled that gap. “Her brothers”. That’s what she called us. That’s why she got in a huff when we didn’t visit her. That’s why she wanted to give me every detail about her “Nicky”. So that she could feel that we, her family, knew everything and approved of him. So I pretended that everything I heard was of burning interest to me, while waiting for him to turn up. He phoned her to say that he was caught up in traffic – “you see how much he thinks of me?” Teri raved – and he really wasn’t very late. Hearing the doorbell, Teri leapt up and rushed to the mirror three times before she was ready to open the door. When Zois came in he gave her a tender kiss and a huge bouquet of red roses. She loved them.

  “You must be starving – have a seat on the sofa, I’ll be right back,” she told him.

  She came back almost immediately carrying a plate of dainty cheese pies – her own recipe, as well. His smile seemed familiar to me, but I couldn’t remember where I’d seen it before.

  After he’d eaten, Teri fell asleep on his chest. I thought of what she’d told me: Everyone has a chance, it’s there, waiting for us. So why not? Why not go for it? Watching them I wanted it to happen for them. I got up to leave, saying goodbye quietly to Zois so as not to wake Teri but she jumped up as I was going, and showed me out. She came outside with me. She trembled in the cold night air and I put my arm round her.

  “So?” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “What do you think of him?”

  “I’ve briefly met him twice. I can’t give an opinion.”

  “First and second impression?”

  “Good. Very good.”

  “Really?”

  “He seems to be the best of the whole bunch you’ve made me meet.”

  Teri looked ready to jump for joy.

  “That’s what I wanted to hear! And you said a sentence of fourteen words!”

  It’s frightening how easy it is to make someone in love happy. And equally frightening how much it takes to please someone who isn’t.

  31

  My next source of information was much less beautiful and much more interesting than Lena Hnara. The fact that I bothered to seek him out as early as midday impressed him – I am usually a night visitor. Omonia Square at night is like a madhouse. Never-never land. A place where anything can – and does – happen. If you have the necessary dough, of course. Or the desperate need.

  I couldn’t take the car. Knowing I’d never be able to park, I took the metro and emerged at the Hondos Centre, just a few steps from my source’s movable house, having enjoyed one of the greatest pleasures I’ve had since I was a kid. I love escalators. I used to wait impatiently for that day in the month when my mum would collect whatever savings she had and take me to the Minion department store, after warning me once again that I had to behave like a little gentleman. I had a whale of a time going up and down the escalators while she would buy something cheap for me and admire all the nice stuff we could never afford. And I never misbehaved. I just let the escalators carry me along with them.

  One of the hundreds of public works that had been needed for decades to make life in Athens bearable was the metro. Right from the eighties everyone knew how essential it was, and nothing was done. The government was too busy bribing voters with civil service jobs for life to fund anything else. And then, against all odds, we got to host the Olympic Games, and the metro was built with extraordinary speed. Of course, another 100 years will have to pass before it takes on the gothic romance of the London Underground, which had me captivated when I went there with Maria, years ago. I loved the astonishing variety of buskers begging for a few pennies, the combination of heat and unbearable humidity, the ceramics that portray the spirit of each station – particularly the profiles of Sherlock Holmes at Baker Street. I regarded myself as being in the same profession as Sherlock: hunting villains and bringing them to justice. That visit to London was the only time I’ve ever flown, overcoming, for Maria’s sake, my fear of aeroplanes. With her I felt that my feet were firmly on the ground.

  My Omonia source was Angelino, an ageless guy who has lived for ten years in the square, where everybody knows him. When you get to talk to him, you understand that he has about him something of the wisdom of the twenty-five centuries that look down on the city from the Acropolis. He has spent all these years living as a down-and-out when he could be living like a king. That doesn’t concern him. What does is that all those who know him show their respect. As I did, nodding to him and stroking Hector, his huge German shepherd.

  This skinny, grey-haired man, who won’t make any impression on you if you don’t look him in the eye to see how alert he is to everything that’s going on, is your best bet if you want to learn the city’s secrets. Nobody is so well informed about everything that takes place anywhere in Athens as Angelino. Some ignorant council workers once tried to evict him, bundling together his stuff and pushing him into a government-run home. He walked out, the council took him back, he simply walked out again. This wasn’t repeated a third time; people with influence talked to the authorities and made it plain that Angelino should stay where he chose. I don’t just have a business relationship with him, as do many others who pay him for the information they need. Angelino had looked after my mother when she lost her mind and started to wander the streets. I spent a lot of my time as a teenager going around different hostels and shelters trying to find her, often returning at dawn to an empty house, which would stay that way for days. I never lost my temper with her when she turned up again. She had given me such a great childhood that just remembering it made the house seem less empty. Every time I managed to find her and get through her blank, lost expression for long enough to persuade her to wrap herself up in the warm clothes I had brought her, and come back home with me, I felt that I was returning one moment of warmth for all the thousands she had given me. I felt like a man. The head of the family in the place of my absent father – Mum never wanted to talk about him and I never insisted on knowing about someone that was missing without me missing him. If it hadn’t been for my mother’s dementia, maybe I would never have got involved in this job and Greece would have lost its finest caretaker. I would never have risked breaking her heart by getting arrested for what people call criminal activity. But, in the end, she succumbed to the mysterious virus that had already des
troyed the minds of her mother and sister. During her last difficult five years, Angelino was always there for her. Because she was, in his words, “a remarkable lady”. Many times he tracked her down through his network of contacts. I would often find her playing cards with him on the pavement of the square, surrounded by cardboard boxes to screen them from passers-by. At the end she couldn’t tell us apart, calling us both “my child”. There couldn’t have been a better way of making me feel that he was my brother.

  However, brotherhood was one thing, friendship another. I was never friends with Angelino, because it was not what he wanted. He keeps people at a distance to make sure he’ll survive. When I ask for information, he names the price and I pay him. But he knows how I feel; whatever he needs from me he can have.

  I had called him the previous day and asked him to find out about the Bulgarian motorcyclist who tried to kill Aliki. As he started telling me what he had discovered, I watched Jordanis playing with Hector. Jordanis is the ten-year-old Albanian that Angelino unofficially adopted, sending him to the best private schools in Athens. Two years ago, after a bank robbery in which a policeman was seriously wounded, and after getting a lot of false information, the police raided the shack in Ilioupouli where the ten members of Jordanis’ family lived. As the police found out the following day, the robbery had actually been done by Greeks whose leader was the son of an MP. But none of the family had residents’ permits and, after interrogation, nine of them were arrested and summarily deported from the country. The tenth was Jordanis, who, on the day of the arrests, had disobeyed his mother’s orders and stayed out late playing football at a school playground. So the child was left on his own in a strange country – his parents were recent arrivals and didn’t even know enough Greek to explain that they had another child there. As their confession had been beaten out of them, they didn’t dare say a thing. Drag learnt all this when he questioned some of his “co-workers”, as he calls them through gritted teeth.