“What a can of worms you’re stirring up now. Better let it rest,” she said. I didn’t ask her anything else on the phone. I pressured her to let me visit, saying that it would be better for her to talk to someone who wasn’t a cop, that I would be completely discreet, that I was a friend of Aliki’s from another case I’d helped her with and I believed she was alive and in hiding and I wanted to help her out. It took time to persuade her but my bluff of going to the police worked. According to one of the surveys that Teri is always reading, an overwhelming majority of people, when asked, say that they would do anything to avoid making a statement at a police station.
“How much do you know about Thanos?” she asked me, after we sat down on the sofa and she offered me the baklava she had just prepared.
“Not as much as I would like,” I told her.
Her home was very simply furnished, and what furniture there was in that matchbox of a living room was old but well-preserved. She lived entirely off the alimony paid by her ex-husband. In the corners there were all kinds of children’s toys: balls, dolls, board games.
Seeing my interest she explained, a fond smile on her lips: “The neighbourhood kids… they come here, play hide-and-seek, leave their stuff all over the place. Some of them have parents who work all day, or maybe they’re not yet fluent in Greek, so I help them with their lessons. I never managed to become a mother so I try to be good auntie Roula.”
Her eyes reminded me of something… maybe a tired version of Aliki’s, when she’d said “to our health” in La Luna, right after “he’d thrash me once again”. I wasn’t sure. For the most part Roula didn’t look like her niece at all. Maybe I’d seen those eyes and that smile somewhere else.
“Tell me about Thanos,” I said.
“A very intelligent child. Really, extremely intelligent. His teachers all said the same. Even Zachos, my brother, seemed to soften when he talked about him. And Zachos almost never allowed himself to soften; he was a very hard man… unbelievably hard with everyone except Thanos. He had those under him in the army trembling… I don’t know how he turned out like that. Our parents… they were the sweetest people you’d ever meet. Zachos had no respect for them, he considered them weak. If you didn’t have connections in the right places my brother wouldn’t give you the time of day. He left home at eighteen, never came back to see them. He didn’t even go to their funeral – he was stationed in Evros, at the border, and sent me a letter saying that he couldn’t ask for leave because he’d just been promoted. I should have cut him out of my life then, as I threatened, but I always had such a weakness for him… It seemed that the harsher his behaviour towards us was, the more I felt I had to be there for him, in case he needed me. By the time he returned to Patras, many years later, he was a brigadier, the youngest in the army, as he kept telling everyone. He was very proud of himself. He had connections with both the main political parties. Members of parliament and ministers were always ringing him up. He believed that it wouldn’t be long before they’d appoint him as head of the army, at least, maybe of all the armed forces. But then the whole thing with Thanos blew up.”
She stopped and sipped some tea.
“Thanos was Zachos’ pride and joy. Aliki did well at school and was very pretty, like her mother, but Zachos regarded women as purely decorative. He didn’t have to say it; you could see it in the way he behaved. He wanted his wife and daughter to shine on every public occasion, but that was it. If either of them dared to open their mouths and he didn’t like what they said, he’d humiliate them.”
Exactly the way of behaving that Lena Hnara had attributed to Vassilis. Had Aliki set out to find a man who was exactly like her father?
“While Thanos… Whatever he said, from the time when he could only babble, his father listened to it like a papal pronouncement. He adored, he simply adored him. Until the day he came home and found Thanos in bed with a boy, one of his classmates. He beat both of them and threw Thanos out of the house. Without clothes, money, anything… A boy of just sixteen – out on the streets. Worse than what he had done to our parents.”
She halted, tears in her eyes, and put her hand over her mouth to stop herself from sobbing.
“And… his wife?”
“Pleaded with him frantically, night and day. To no effect. So she set out on her own to find Thanos, without results. Someone told her he’d seen her son catch the bus to Athens, but that was it. She kept up the search for years. On the rare occasions we met she told me that some detectives had raised her hopes but ended up cheating her, and she had to hide her efforts from Zachos, who had forbidden her even to mention his son’s name again. She began to take pills, then to spend periods in the psychiatric hospital… God help me for what I’m going to say, but dying in that accident was a release for her. And as for Zachos… When he threw Thanos out, he lost the last of his humanity. He had nothing to give or get from anyone. Only military decorations.”
“Are you sure it was an accident?”
It was as if I had suddenly slapped her.
“What… what do you mean… the police had investigated… an accident, for sure, they’d assured me…”
“So, nobody knows where Thanos is.”
“Nobody cares enough to find out any more. Not even me. I wish him well, but…”
But I’ve had enough pain in my life without going searching for more, she meant but didn’t say.
“And Aliki? What was her relationship with Thanos?” I asked.
“Good, I think. Very good. I didn’t see them very often, though… I told you… my brother didn’t think I was important enough to get close to. But they seemed to love each other.”
“Didn’t she stand up to her father when he chucked him out?”
“There are people you simply can’t stand up to. I guess it was also the shock – all that coming out of the blue. I can’t remember how she reacted. She was always locked up in herself, a very quiet child. I think that she just accepted it. What else could she do? She was very young then, only eleven, still at junior school.”
A long silence followed. Grief had enfolded her, isolating her from her surroundings. I coughed, just to let her know I was still there, thanked her for the information and asked her to show me some photographs of Aliki’s family. She picked up an album from a shelf on the little table on which she had put our drinks.
“I keep them here,” she said, with a smile that for a moment seemed to forgive everything at the sight of those she had learnt to call “her own”, even if they weren’t.
I took the album from her hands and looked at the photograph. “1994” was written under it. I saw a smiling Aliki, her father, mother and her brother. I saw them and the biggest shiver I had ever felt shook my whole body.
“Are you alright?” Roula asked.
She must have seen the blood leave my face. I think that I managed to thank her as I rushed out of the house and ran to my car, as fast as my legs could carry me.
37
Ten years later, in the same city, and yet again just a photograph was enough to completely change my view. Then it was of dead animals. Now it was of a man who had died but had been resurrected. A very dangerous man, who was officially missing. A man like me.
I now had almost the whole picture of what had happened. Something had gone wrong many, many years ago. And now nobody could put it right. I could only do my best to rescue the innocent. I drove like a maniac down the motorway, with my foot flat to the floor – other drivers pulling their cars over to avoid me, sounding their horns in alarm and anger. I called Drag again and again. He had chosen the worst time not to pick up.
The only thing I couldn’t work out was the motive. Not for the killings. For getting me involved in the case. I racked my brains without getting anywhere as the car rattled over potholes. Could they have picked me at random? Maybe they were just looking for someone in my field of work and stumbled across me? It wasn’t improbable, but luck is always low on my list of possible explanations.
I was at the toll collection booth, eighteen miles outside of Athens, when I got an idea. A far-fetched idea, given the long list of people I had confronted in my life – whoever was after me could have been connected with any number of my old cases. I called Angelino and told him it was a matter of life and death. He called back in twenty minutes, confirming what I feared.
An hour and a half later, I was outside Teri’s house. She hadn’t answered the telephone either. Nor had Maria. All kinds of nightmarish scenarios had passed through my mind as the Peugeot ticked off the miles. You spend all your life training yourself to keep cool in the most difficult situations then you discover how inadequate your training was.
I drove up to the house at normal speed so as not to arouse suspicion. The windows and the curtains were shut, and out in the road Drag’s Nissan was parked. My mobile rang. I saw Drag’s name on the screen and picked it up with relief.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“He’s right here, with your friends Teri and Maria. Get out of the car without hanging up. You’ve got thirty seconds to reach the front door, or you’ll listen to them die.”
It was Aliki.
38
Anything is allowed in dreams. Faces and bodies blend in improbable ways, sometimes disgusting you and sometimes making you frustrated that you woke up before the dream was over.
I opened my eyes to see Aliki kissing someone whose face looked a lot like hers, but who had the muscular body of a man. Nikos Zois lifted her effortlessly from the floor, while greedily kissing her, his tongue in her mouth.
I didn’t know how much time had passed since I’d run to the entrance of Teri’s house to find Maria, Drag and Teri handcuffed to chairs and Aliki holding a gun to their heads. She’d ordered me to drop my gun and Zois had knocked me out with a blow to the back of the head.
Now all four of us were sitting in Teri’s living room, with our hands cuffed behind our backs. Drag seemed to be in a bad state, with blood on his face. Not, however, as bad as the savagely beaten and unconscious Vassilis Stathopoulos, who was bound hand and foot on the floor.
I blinked, but it wasn’t a dream.
They had turned now and were smiling at me. Aliki and Zois. The siblings from hell. As I was driving like a maniac on the motorway, I had figured out that they were accomplices. But I never imagined they were lovers.
“Hello, Aliki. Hello, Thanos,” I said, trying to contain the buzzing in my head.
Zois and Aliki exchanged looks. Aliki seemed uneasy, he merely smiled.
“Very impressive!” he sneered.
“I do my best.”
“What else do you know?”
In such situations, it’s a good idea to play for time, in case help arrives. Except we couldn’t expect help from anywhere. Our only hope was that our captors might momentarily lose focus and give us a chance to act. Though what action we could take against two armed lovers who’d handcuffed us to chairs was another question.
“I know the basic facts. About your father, about how much you and he loved each other, about murdering your parents and making it seem like an accident…”
“Our poor old mum and dad… Such a shame…”
They laughed. Both him and Aliki. In a macabre way that made Aliki, in particular, seem transformed, her beauty distorted by the veil of madness I was seeing for the first time.
“Is that all you know? Nothing else about Daddy?”
“I know that he threw you out of the house when he caught you buggering a boy. But seeing the two of you now, I think he found you with Aliki.”
“Excellent! Who have you been talking to, my aunt in Patras? Roula has a big mouth. I should have shut it, really, but I couldn’t be bothered – she knows so little of the truth that it’s not worth it. Well done, though. I thought you were much dumber. Well done.”
He had got close to me as he was talking and he suddenly pistol-whipped me across my face. Maria let out a cry and Teri said something – probably a curse – that I couldn’t understand. Sometimes pain overwhelms you, but though I felt as if my head was ready to detach from my neck, this wasn’t one of the times when I could let the pain win. I closed my eyes, trying once more to rein it in. I failed. When I opened them again, Zois had walked round my chair and approached his sister. He grabbed her by the waist and kissed her again. Aliki pressed herself to him, returning the kiss with the same fervour. I noticed that both their guns had silencers.
If looks could kill, Teri would have made Zois evaporate. Maria was looking down, as if lost in thought. I had warned her, when she had allowed me to live in her house, that sometime violence could come knocking on our door. “We’ll throw it out together,” she’d responded. I don’t know if she’d been fully aware of what she was saying; if she’d really believed that she would ever go through an experience like this.
“So, this was to take your revenge on your father? Sleeping with Aliki?” I asked Zois.
Aliki smiled at the question. A demented, twisted smile – so how could it still appear so radiant? She looked at her brother. He nodded.
“I don’t blame you. Most little people, like you, can’t understand,” she said. “This has nothing to do with revenge. Revenge is complicated. Revenge is dirty. This… this I pure,” she said, looking at him with adoration.
“Pure incest. There’s a new one,” Drag said.
“Pure love. Purer than any other kind,” Zois almost shouted. “People spend their whole lives trying to understand their spouses, because they don’t know them, and they never will. No one really ever knows who you are, except the person you grew up with. Only she knows and loves you for life.”
“That’s your proposal? That we all go fuck our brothers and sisters?” Teri said.
“I understand fucking is the only thing you know, freak, but it is irrelevant here. This is love, it has no other name. Incest is what he did to her.”
“Freak”, he had called her. She’d fallen head over heels for his act, and now she had to listen to this.
“Your father?” I asked Zois, trying not to think how Teri must have been feeling.
“Daddy,” Aliki said.
“Aliki developed very early. When she was ten years old, the first one to notice and take an interest was the brigadier,” Zois said.
“So very pleased that I was acquiring the body of a woman.”
“Every evening – every evening he would go to her bed to stroke and caress her.”
“Then he’d get me to caress him. First through his pyjamas, then inside them. His back, his chest, then down and down. And I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind at all what I learnt. I wanted to learn, however disgusted I was by my teacher. I asked him to show me more, so that I could learn to satisfy him completely. So that I could put into practice what I had learnt with the man I truly loved.”
She stood on tiptoe and licked Zois’ cheek. If love and showing off were connected, those two were very much in love.
“Until, one day, dear Daddy came in and caught us making love. He went bananas,” Zois said, enjoying the feeling of her tongue.
“After beating up Thanos he said that he would kill him if he found him anywhere near me again.”
“To be exact, what he said was: ‘You fucking pervert, I’ll cut you into pieces if you lay your hands on her again.’ He knew I liked boys, he didn’t approve but basically he didn’t care. What he wanted was exclusive rights to Aliki. The same man that I used to worship when I was a kid,” chuckled “Zois” – I still thought of him by that name.
“Well, aren’t all good daddies demanding?” said Aliki.
“Next time he found us together he threw me out of the house, supposedly to stop me from smearing the family name because I was a gay pervert. He even got one of his connections in the registry office to delete any record of my birth. He wanted to wipe me out, erase all evidence I’d ever existed.”
“And your mother did nothing,” I said to Aliki who, despite everything, seemed to be slightly more huma
n than her brother. I don’t know why; maybe the fact that she looked like an angel and acted like a devil created a picture, the shadows needing the light to emerge. Or, maybe, looking into her blue eyes I saw not what she was but what she might have been.
“Took a couple of pills and slept through to the following morning. That’s the way Mummy tackled all her problems.”
As Aliki was talking, I noticed that Vassilis was the only one of us who was tied with rope rather than handcuffs. And, in spite of the mess he was in, he was trying, as unobtrusively as he could, to untie his bonds. I didn’t know what he could do if he managed it, but there was hope – the strength of despair always carries surprises. I had to continue to divert their attention as best as I could. Aliki and Zois held all four of us hostage. They held my whole life hostage. As Reno Smith says in Bad Day at Black Rock, “I believe that a man is as big as what’ll make him mad.” The idea that something might happen to Drag, Maria and Teri was what made me mad. The only difference was that, unlike in film noir, we couldn’t afford any losses.
Teri spoke before I did.
“Yeah, stick with each other. You’re a great couple. You’ll have great babies, too!” she said.
“Shut up, freak!” Aliki shouted, slapping her.
And I thought she seemed slightly more human.
When Teri raised her head again, she was ready. She spat with the accuracy that was well known to us and got Aliki right in the eye. My friend may have changed gender, but still had some of her manly skills. In reply, Zois gave her a punch that jolted her back in her chair, which crashed to the ground. Teri lay still, unconscious.
Athenian Blues Page 18