Athenian Blues

by Pol Koutsakis

  “Your loss. We’ve got everything here. Everything.”

  He got up shakily, leaving the tiara on the coffee table, went to the fridge and took out a bottle of tequila. Slumping down in the chair he opened it and took a swig, spilling half of it over his naked body.

  “Oh, fuck! And Vanessa isn’t here to lick it off!”

  He began to laugh at his own joke. A real gentleman, the kind every girl dreams of. Or what every advisor puts up with: a prick with the white powder.

  “What kind of information do you want?”

  “Let’s start with an easy question. Do you know any of these guys?”

  I had the photos of Makis and Linesman ready on my phone.

  “Never seen them before. This one looks like one of those neo-Nazi fruits,” he said, pointing at Linesman.

  Coked out, but spot on.

  “What about Elsa Dalla?”

  “Never met her, never heard her name until she was killed.”

  “Vassilis Stathopoulos?”

  “Only seen him on TV. Poor sap. Hump her, yes, oh, yes. But marry her? Come on!” he sneered.

  “Moving on to any little detail you can remember: did she have a relationship once that left its mark? Someone who threatened her, someone she was afraid of? From what I’ve learnt she seems to be a girl of many secrets.”

  “You watch too many films, pal.”

  Well, that was true.

  “You make her sound like some femme fatale. She’s just a little slut, a beautiful little slut, of course, who doesn’t hesitate to screw anyone she needs to further her career.”

  He waved the photograph to emphasize his point. And he took another swig from the bottle, which he spilt as before. “If these girls weren’t so deluded how would we get the chance to screw them, eh? Everything turns out for the best in this life. Here’s to false impressions!”

  He laughed and drank again.

  I remembered what Lena Hnara had said about Aliki: 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 wondered if there was anyone in this case who really knew anything about the people around them.

  “Think a bit more,” I insisted.

  “Otherwise, what? I still don’t understand. If I don’t tell you something that’s worth your while coming here, what are you going to do? Send the photograph to the press, to create a fuss now that Aliki has disappeared?”

  “No, and I don’t have any other copies.”

  He stared at me, trying to work out if I was having him on.

  “Who’s got them?”

  “The guy who gave me the photograph.”

  “Are you… collaborating with him?”

  “No. He’s doing me a favour.”

  Vrettos took the photograph and looked at it, smiling. Then he tore it into two, four, eight pieces.

  “If our friend has a copy, then only he can threaten me. You got nothing to offer me. Show me another one of these and maybe then I’ll try to remember something.”

  “You don’t understand… I’m not threatening you with the photo.”

  “But?”

  Two quick steps and a reasonably strong – I thought – punch. Maybe a tad stronger than I’d intended, because I knocked him out of the armchair, which rocked for a while. He tried to get up, but was too dizzy. He stayed down.

  “You crazy? Do you know who I am? I’ll have your arse for break…”

  “… fast”, he wanted to say, but before he finished I kicked him towards the balcony door, which was tinted with a few weak sunbeams. “I know something better. I know what you are. You’re somebody who’s alive, but only for now,” I said.

  To make my point I picked him up and threw him back into the rocking chair. He hit it with such force he nearly turned it over.

  “What you have to understand is that I’m here on a friendly visit. I’m trying to find and help a girl with whom you’ve shared some precious moments. I believe she’s in danger, which is why we don’t have time to waste. You’re going to have to help me now, Takis, my friend.”

  He moaned, then coughed, spat out a tooth and looked at it in his hand, in disbelief. He wiped the blood from his upper lip.

  “Le… let me think,” he said, his voice shaking.

  He was smart enough to understand he should really be afraid. And for types like him, the fear of getting hurt was perhaps the greatest of all. Like Al Goddard, the character played by Alan Ladd in 1951’s Appointment with Danger, a film with so many great lines I never tire of seeing it. Goddard is speaking to Joe Regas, who tells him: “You look like you just lost your best friend.” Al replies: “I am my best friend.” And Regas says, “That’s what I said.” Takis Vrettos loved only himself and trembled for fear that something nasty might happen to his beloved.

  “I’m waiting,” I said. Then it all came rushing out.

  “Not much impressed me… apart from her body… Even a blind man – if he touched her – would see light… She thought she was very talented… she would do anything…to succeed… as an actress… modelling wasn’t… wasn’t good enough. All young broads in sh… show business are willing… I’ve met many… But few of them have that craziness in their eyes when they tell you about their plans… as if they are ready to swallow whoever gets in their way… Can I have a drink?”

  He pointed to the tequila. I nodded.

  “So, Aliki had the craziness?”

  “Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. But she didn’t show it to the world. When we were on our own and had drunk too much she would change completely… Lioness… she said she could tell me anything because I shared her craze… craziness to be number one… that’s why she was with me… she believed I was on the same track.”

  “Weren’t you?”

  “Depends how you look at it. From what I hear on TV she’s disappeared and might be dead. I’m shut up in this place until I persuade the bank’s board of directors that I’m clean…”

  He smiled weakly, spitting out blood.

  “Craziness aside, anything else about Aliki?” I asked.

  He bent his head, trying to remember. “Apart from the craze… nothing. She never talked to me about her past. She only spoke about the future: what she would do, how she would succeed, how I could help her become a household name… I didn’t tell her anything about my past, either. No reason. None of us cared enough. We were living the moment.”

  “But sometimes you weren’t living it alone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That you sometimes had company. And you made videos.”

  He wasn’t expecting that. “That’s something you didn’t get from Hermes.”

  If he expected me to reply, he was disappointed.

  “Generally, I don’t say no – you’ve seen that from the photo. It’s even better when I get two women in bed with me. Who doesn’t enjoy that? But we didn’t do it very often during the six months Aliki and I spent together, we didn’t want everyone hearing about it. So we kept it down to once or twice a month, with some eager little fan of Aliki’s or a chick I might be dating at the time.”

  “How old were the fans?”

  “What?”

  “You said ‘little fan’. How old were they?”

  “Didn’t ask them for ID.”

  “Were they underage?”

  “That’s relative.”

  “They were either over or under eighteen.”

  “Over fifteen a girl’s a woman.”

  The co-star of the video was underage. Aliki had forgotten to mention that.

  “That’s what you say. Some paedophiles say ‘over twelve’, others ‘over ten’. Once you’re on that road you make up the rules to suit yourself.”

  “I thought you came to find information about Aliki, not to make moral judgements.”

  “I don’t care what you thought,” I told him.

  “Are you here to kill me?” he asked.

  “You’re not importan
t enough. Have you ever been with the same fan twice?”

  “No.”

  “And how many of those occasions did you film?”

  “Every time.”

  “Did the girls know?”

  “No.”

  “Could they have found out about it later?”

  I felt tired even asking him about this. Another angle to the case? Someone wanting revenge for being exploited? Or maybe someone close to the exploited girls? There could be scores of suspects.

  “We didn’t circulate the videos, they were just for us.”

  “And the copies are…?”

  “In my cabinet. Except one I gave as a separation present to Aliki.”

  “A separation present?”

  “Yes. She’d met Stathopoulos. Bigger fish than me, and he seemed to be really interested in her. She came, we talked, she explained, we drank, we did a couple of lines and she left, with my best wishes.”

  “And the video as a present.”

  “Yes.”

  Takis, the big-hearted.

  “She did say something strange that evening, before she left. But she was so high by then, I didn’t pay much attention.”

  “What was it?”

  “She said that she really liked me because I never forced her to do anything. That I was almost as good-looking as the one man in the world she wanted to have amazingly beautiful children with. And when I asked her who this lucky guy was, she blushed and giggled and said it was her brother.”

  “Aliki hasn’t got a brother; she’s an only child.”

  “That’s what I thought, and that’s what she’d told me, but when I asked her that evening she went all giggly and said something like ‘You don’t know everything’, so I just assumed she was making things up.”

  “The video – weren’t you afraid that someone like her, who wants publicity, might do you harm?”

  “Harm me? No chance. She’s in it. And she wants to become a serious actress; she’d never release her own sex video to the press. And, at the end of the day, what my clients are after is money. As long as they keep making fortunes, they could hear that I killed my mother in cold blood and still no one, no one would leave Omikron.”

  His head suddenly flopped onto his chest. “I don’t know anything else. You’ll just have to believe me. Please,” he said.

  He was trembling. I told him that I believed him. I also told him that we had one more little problem. The problem was that I couldn’t trust him not to phone security the moment I left. He could phone the police later, of course but, with the amount of drugs in his room, he would probably refrain. Especially since he didn’t know who I was, and the most he could charge me with was beating him up a little. I explained that if I had to pay a return visit, I wouldn’t stop at beating him up. Of course he assured me that he wouldn’t go to the police and wouldn’t even think of phoning down to reception. And of course I didn’t believe him.

  I told him that the solution was simple. I would give him a tap on the head that would knock him out for ten minutes or so. By the time Vanessa returned I’d be long gone. Takis wasn’t that keen on the idea, but then he considered the alternatives and led me into his bedroom. “This OK?” he asked, turning his back.

  “Fine,” I told him.

  “I’m a bit nervous. Like at one of those water parks, when you’re at the top of the…”

  “Slides,” he was going to say, before he collapsed onto the bed.

  36

  It had been ten years since I last visited Patras. That was on business too. I had been hired by a very rich and very old lady who didn’t at all like the way dozens of animals were being killed in her neighbourhood. I was just twenty-five and had to accept some jobs that didn’t entirely meet my standards, making concessions, as we all do, in the hope that sometime we will reach the point where we’re our own master. I visited the lady in her country house, in the Rio suburb, where she had created a shelter to house about twenty cats, thirty dogs, five hares and a twittering of parrots and canaries. Her snow-white hair was like a wind-blown bird’s nest and her expensive clothes were in odd contrast with her long, dirty nails and the hairs that bristled on her chin. She seemed completely cracked but had money to spend, so I wasn’t bothered either by her crankiness or by the job she wanted me to do. She showed me photographs. Cats shot in the head. Dogs tied up and burnt alive, butchered or hung in trees, or all of them together. Suddenly she seemed a lot less crazy. She didn’t know who was responsible for what she showed me. She wanted me to find him and take care of him. I explained that usually my employer knows the target and leaves me to get on with it; that detective work was extra, and would cost her considerably more. She opened up the huge suitcase she had by her side. It was stuffed full of twenty-euro notes. She said that she didn’t know how much was in there but that I could have it all. As long as I accepted the job.

  It took me two weeks to find him, but find him I did. I caught him red-handed and it wasn’t difficult to get him to confess that it was he who had tortured all the other animals as well. Mid-thirties, no friends or family, working at home writing software. The walls of his room filled with photos of dead animals. Usually that type of person turns into a serial killer of people but he had taken a different direction. He told me that he’d give me a lot of money if I let him go. I explained how much I was getting paid. “For that kind of money, I’d kill me too”, he’d said, and tried to grab a knife from a drawer. Contrary to popular belief, human life is often greatly overrated.

  They found him after a few days, because of the stink coming from the rubbish bin. I didn’t expect them to find him, but the refuse collectors went on strike and he was stuck there for days. The old lady was so pleased with my choice of his penultimate resting place that she doled out another bunch of notes.

  Patras had only minimally changed since then. When I’d visited it last, its downward spiral had already begun. A city that lives off industry can’t easily learn to exist without it. The first wave of poverty resulting from the deindustrialization of the city was halted for a while in the usual Greek way, by the rural unemployed moving to Athens. The opening of the country’s borders, however, brought to Patras, as to much of Greece, a wave of Balkan immigrants who replaced the local poor. And now, with the newer wave of refugees from Africa trying to reach Patras in the hope of getting onto a ship leaving for Italy, things were going from awful to appalling. If there hadn’t been tens of thousands of students there, supporting the local economy, Patras would have been a dead city, without hope of resurrection.

  As I found out, it still kept the old custom of noncooperation between the municipal and state services. In Patras, if the electricity, phone, water or any other organization wanted to dig up the road to repair or upgrade their networks, they didn’t feel any obligation to inform the others. The same road is dug up again and again for months every year, creating a permanent traffic problem, which often makes Athens look comparatively efficient. A problem that I was reintroduced to when I arrived after two hours on the motorway, bound for the refugee area south-east of the city.

  The area didn’t get its name from the more recent wave of refugees, but back in 1922, when thousands of Greek refugees arrived in Patras from Asia Minor. At the beginning they found shelter wherever they could, in schools and warehouses, and then built their first houses. Illegal, of course, and outside the city plan, like at least half of the houses in Patras. All the new houses were two-storey dwellings, more-or-less identical, with one or two rooms per family, a yard shared by the whole block and a shared coffin, which after each funeral was returned to the church for the next. Even at the end, the poor never really get their own space on this planet.

  Maria had called on my mobile as I was driving towards Patras, to tell me that, after an exhaustive web search of old newspaper archives, she had found the website of a Peloponnisos collector. Peloponnisos is the oldest newspaper printed in Patras and this guy had scanned and posted on the web every single pa
ge of every single issue of the newspaper from the past fifty years. In a two-column article, the day after Aliki’s parents had their fatal car accident, Maria read that all possibilities, including that of a criminal act, which the police had found reasons to suspect, were being investigated. But in the next issues of the paper no further mention was made of the case. As soon as Maria had finished, Drag called, not with news about Aliki or Vassilis but about Nikos Zois’ factory – after all the praise I’d heard about him from Teri, I’d asked Drag to check him out, and it seemed that the factory was doing so badly it was one step away from bankruptcy. We would have to inform the love-struck Teri that her lover wasn’t exactly thriving in the way he’d told her.

  There are women whose wrinkles enhance their looks. Not many, which is why the way they conquer time is so striking. Usually these women weren’t beauties in their youth. Their lives beautified them. Just try to explain that to the hordes of middle-aged women who crowd the offices of plastic surgeons.

  Roula Siouti was still beautiful. She lived in a street of houses without numbers, which didn’t exactly help me to find her little two-storey house with the tiny garden that she had described to me on the phone. All the houses were similar constructions of stone and reinforced concrete, with roofs that seemed to have been thrown on any old how – remains of the refugee dwellings of the thirties. Today most of the people living there are foreigners who manage to cram their large families into one or two rooms. The houses in the street looked so alike that I had to stop and ask a group of kids playing football, who showed it to me.

  Roula lived alone on the bottom floor. On the doorbell was written “Siouti”, her married name. This wasn’t however the name that interested me but her family name, Nikolidaga. She was Aliki Stylianou’s aunt, her father’s only sister. After a lot of phoning around people with the same surname, I got through to a cousin of hers with whom she kept in contact.

  On the phone she had seemed calm. As if she were expecting the call, unwelcome though it was. I had introduced myself as Labis Louridis, private detective. I find it easy to change my supposed profession, depending on who I’m talking to, but I try to restrict the number of names I use in any one case, so that I don’t get confused when I’m addressed by them. She had told me that she’d cut off relations with Zachos, her brother, quite some time before his death and she hadn’t seen Aliki for years. I’d replied that it was her family’s past I was interested in. When I asked her how many children her brother had and she asked me why I wanted to know, I knew straight away that something was up. Nobody answers one question with another if they have nothing to hide “Didn’t Aliki have a brother?” I asked, to show her I knew what I was talking about – even if I didn’t.