Blood & Gold

by Leo Kanaris

  Sotiriou considered this. ‘I confess I had not thought of that,’ he said.

  ‘There are two names I would be particularly interested in.’ George took out his own notebook, found the page he had written yesterday afternoon in Father Seraphim’s room.

  ‘Vladimir Merkulov, a Russian businessman, and a photographer called Stelios.’

  ‘Surname?’

  ‘Doesn’t use one.’

  ‘Huh. Très artiste. Why those two?’

  ‘They were seeing a lot of Keti, helping her start a career in show business.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Paris Aliveris gave me their names.’

  ‘I see,’ said the Colonel, but he looked puzzled. ‘You don’t want to do this yourself?’

  ‘The sister has taken me off the case.’

  ‘Ah.’ He swirled the coffee in his cup. ‘So the urgency has gone out of it?’

  ‘Maybe for her,’ said George, ‘but not for me. I sense there’s something else going on.’

  ‘For example?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Something hidden. Just out of sight. There’s a battle between her and Paris.’

  ‘Over what?’

  ‘She was in favour of her sister’s move into show business, Paris was against it.’

  ‘That’s all over now. How does it help us?’

  ‘I can’t be sure. But I notice she’s very defensive.’

  ‘Normal in a battle.’

  ‘She won’t hear anything against the show business people.’

  ‘Is she connected with them?’

  ‘She doesn’t say. That’s another problem. I sense a hidden agenda.’

  ‘We can look into it. I’ll put our rugby-playing friend onto it.’

  ‘Good.’

  George was hungry and tired. He looked around for a waiter. ‘Excuse me,’ he called over to the bar. ‘Can you bring me a French coffee and a toasted cheese sandwich?’ He turned back to Sotiriou. ‘I drove from Edessa last night. I need a shot of something to stir myself up.’

  ‘Unquestionably,’ he said. Then, ‘Tell me about this fellow Kokoras. Is he as ridiculous as his name suggests?’

  ‘No. He’s far from ridiculous. You shouldn’t underestimate him.’

  ‘A man who calls himself the Cock is inviting a certain amount of amusement.’

  ‘Of course. But he runs Edessa. And the surrounding province.’

  ‘Really?’ said Sotiriou. ‘I would be surprised.’

  ‘I’m telling you what I saw. On the spot.’

  Sotiriou seemed unconvinced. ‘There must be other forces at work.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said George. ‘But Kokoras does the dirty stuff.’

  ‘Then he should call himself the Pig.’

  George was beginning to get irritated. ‘Never mind his name. He’s an ugly customer.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Sotiriou. ‘I get the picture. By the way, I did as you asked. His name is live on police files. You’re covered.’

  ‘I’m grateful.’

  ‘I should hope so. At some point I’ll have to back up the alert with evidence.’

  ‘You’ll get it,’ said George.

  He told the Colonel what he knew about Kokoras: the protection racket, the construction business, the hospital, the heavies.

  Sotiriou said, ‘He still sounds to me like a middle-ranker. There has to be money behind him.’

  ‘Of course,’ said George, and he mentioned the promise of more information from an unnamed source.

  Sotiriou said, ‘That’s where you’ll score. If your informant ever gets back to you. He may think better of it.’

  ‘I offered him cash.’

  Sotiriou nodded. ‘That should help. Who is this man?’

  ‘Someone who knows all the facts.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘He was once an official in the town hall.’

  ‘Senior?’

  ‘I’m not saying any more.’

  ‘Oh come on!’

  ‘No. I have to protect him.’

  ‘From me?’ Sotiriou seemed astonished.

  George frowned. ‘Yes, Colonel, even from you.’

  Sotiriou shrugged it off. ‘He must have been senior to know the facts. Easy enough for me to trace if I wanted to.’

  ‘I’m not saying any more.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ said the Colonel. ‘Trust no one, give nothing away. It’s the correct approach. A policy that has served me well in public service.’ He became distracted for a moment. Suddenly he snapped back into focus. ‘Edessa was useful, definitely. But the obvious place for what you want is not there.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Astypalea.’

  ‘I could have told you that.’

  ‘So? Do what you have to do! Go there!’

  George shook his head. ‘Mario’s wife has handed over his papers to the Town Hall. I can’t get at them because I’m not officially on the case. Unless we do this through the police or some other official channel we’re stuck.’

  ‘Forget that,’ said the Colonel. ‘An official approach is impossible.’

  ‘You never explained why.’

  ‘Some things cannot be said.’

  ‘Pressure from above?’

  The Colonel’s face turned to stone.

  ‘Too much to resist?’ said George.

  ‘I can resist anything. If I wish to spend the rest of my life writing haiku, on a microscopic pension. I have enemies enough without making more.’

  ‘But this is obstruction of justice!’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And you do nothing.’

  ‘Nothing until the right moment. When I have enough evidence to go for the kill, I shall swoop. Without mercy.’

  ‘Until then?’

  ‘Patience. You talk to your unnamed source. Think of a way of getting at Mario’s papers. You say his wife won’t help?’

  ‘She’s impossible.’

  ‘Any close family?’

  ‘Only Andreas, his brother.’

  ‘What’s he like?’

  ‘Makes enemies of everyone.’

  ‘Perfect! He can demand to see his brother’s papers.’

  ‘On what pretext?’

  ‘Financial, legal, it doesn’t matter. He needs to assess the size of the estate for the purposes of executing the will – something like that. A lawyer will give you the words.’

  ‘Andreas is a lawyer.’

  ‘Even better! Get him on the case at once.’

  ‘I wonder if I should go with him.’

  ‘No. Send your assistant.’

  ‘All this costs money.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘We’re still within the budget?’

  The Colonel looked pained. ‘Tell your man to stay in a cheap hotel.’

  ‘We know no others,’ said George.

  ‘That’s what I like to hear.’

  George’s toasted sandwich arrived. ‘Do you mind?’ he said.

  ‘Go ahead,’ said the Colonel mildly. ‘You must keep up your strength.’

  ‘Oh. You give health advice now?’

  The Colonel looked stern. ‘Eat,’ he said.

  29 Untouchable

  George rang Andreas Filiotis and asked him if he would consider a trip to Astypalea. The response was immediate. He had been looking for a reason to visit, he said. His brother’s estate needed investigating. It was too easy for things to get lost or swallowed up by greedy advisers. ‘Eleni will do something stupid. It’s inevitable. She’ll let some madman talk her into an investment scheme or a lunatic charitable cause. I need to get in there and stop her.’

  ‘I want you to take a man with you,’ said George.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My assistant, Haris Pezas.’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘You’ll need help.’

  ‘No I won’t.’

  George pointed out that there would be a huge number of documents to go through, too many f
or one man with only a few days at his disposal. Andreas countered that he was a lawyer and well used to finding what he wanted in mountains of papers. George vouched for the man’s intelligence and his surprising array of talents. ‘I promise you he will be useful,’ he said, ‘and in ways you won’t even imagine.’ Irritated more than convinced, Andreas grudgingly acquiesced, adding that he would send Haris back to Athens on the next flight if he turned out to be useless.

  George briefed them on what to look for among Mario’s papers and wished them a good trip. He would have liked to go along too, but recognised that Sotiriou was probably right to discourage it. He had plenty to do in Athens anyway. Feeling calmer than he had for months, he set off down the stairs for some lunch and his daily dose of news and gossip at the Café Agamemnon.

  It was a bright day, the air scoured by twenty-four hours of wind, the sunlight sharp and dazzling. Dimitri was cheerful, people walked purposefully by, you could almost forget the gloom of politics and the crushing atmosphere of cynicism and lost hope. George ordered a beer and a plate of souvlaki and salad which Dimitri called in from the taverna round the corner.

  Seeing no one he knew, George picked up the newspaper. This soon darkened his happy mood. Farmers were blockading main roads, civil servants planning new strikes, and the government still trying to sidestep the obligations of its reform programme. Meanwhile the Russians were bombing Syria and the number of flimsy inflatable boats crammed with refugees crossing the straits from Turkey had scarcely dropped since the end of summer. Cold weather had not stopped them. Yet the families who hazarded the trip were rapidly running out of places to go. Germany had taken as many as it could, Macedonia had closed its southern border. Greece was forced to look after them until a solution could be found.

  Who were these people? Not all, it seemed, were victims of the civil war in Syria. Many came from Iraq and Afghanistan. These, said experts in Europe, were ‘economic migrants’ with no right of asylum. Some could even be terrorists, using the humanitarian route into a society they had sworn to destroy. Most Greeks, however, felt there was only one decent response: to take them in. Whether their future was wrecked instantly by a bomb or slowly by a failed society, despair was despair. Distinctions between grades and speeds of personal disaster seemed callous, typical of observers seated in comfort many hundreds of miles away.

  Inside the paper he came upon worse news: ‘Ex-Mayor found dead in waterfall.’

  Next to the headline, a photograph of the waiter from Edessa. Not as George had met him, humbled and unsure of himself, but as he had once been, in his days of power, wearing a smart suit, smiling and waving to supporters. He read the short article about him. He had been found in the pool at the bottom of the waterfall, having disappeared at the end of his shift in the café at the top. A colleague said that he had seemed depressed recently. He left behind a wife and three teenage children.

  George was sceptical. Kokoras’s men could easily have noticed them talking. It would have been a simple matter to knock him into the river in the darkness. He was unable to stop himself visualising the grim spectacle: the man falling into the fast-flowing water, scrabbling for a grip on the slippery concrete sides of the channel, and then flung still conscious into space, electric with terror and the certainty of death. He pitied the man. Yet he wished he had managed at least a phone call before ending his life.

  Feeling guilty for this thought, he turned the page and tried to read an article about the state of the nation’s roads, where potholes were multiplying as fast as the government’s debts. A minute or two later he found himself staring at the print, seeing nothing, taking nothing in, while his mind worked over that waiter’s miserable death.

  He cast his mind back to the table under the trees, the way Kokoras had walked off, his lieutenants slouching in his wake. They had slipped away into the darkness and he hadn’t given them another thought. They could easily have stopped, turned, and seen enough to get suspicious. The sight of George handing over his business card would have clinched it.

  George took his phone from his jacket pocket and called Sotiriou. He told the Colonel to look at page three of today’s Kathimerini. The man described there, he added, would have been one of his most crucial informants. The Colonel said, ‘I don’t have time to waste reading newspapers,’ and hung up.

  Accustomed as he was to the Colonel’s filthy manners on the phone, he did not bother to take this as a rebuff. If the Colonel wanted to take note he would. If not, too bad.

  His food arrived, and he ate hungrily. Dimitri stood by, telling him the latest from the neighbourhood. The story of the week was the woman on the fifth floor, known to be slightly soft in the head, a believer in astrology and obscure ‘energies’ who had been evicted from her apartment by her own brother. This cruel man had no need of the rent or the space, but was simply exercising his rights. She had nowhere to go. Dimitri was trying to help. If George knew of anyone with a good flat to let, at a reasonable rate… Meanwhile Olga, who ran the kiosk on the corner selling newspapers, magazines, drinks, chocolate, batteries, crisps and cigarettes, had been told by the council that her rent would double in June. She too was packing up. Dimitri began one of his homilies on the state of society. ‘We need solidarity, but what do we see? People trying to destroy each other! No one wins by this. And it’s all done according to the law! Which does nothing to protect the innocent!’

  George nodded, agreeing. Dimitri was a Greek ‘Everyman’, an honest soul driven to fury by the rottenness of his country’s institutions. If he needed to blast off a salvo of anger from time to time, let him do it. One day, perhaps, enough of these good souls would gather and organise themselves into a political movement. Then something might change. It was, of course, precisely what Mario had been attempting.

  He finished his lunch while Dimitri, with perfect timing, wound up his speech. It ended, in the usual way, with an apology: ‘Se éprixa! I’ve bored you rigid.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said George. ‘You’re absolutely right. In everything you say. But now I’m going upstairs. I had a hell of a journey last night. I need to catch up on sleep.’

  George collapsed into bed and slept heavily for two hours. The ringing of the telephone woke him, a surreal rush of kaleidoscopic images spinning through his brain as he stumbled across the darkened bedroom to pick it up. The voice on the phone startled him. It was Anna Kenteri.

  ‘Who the hell have you been talking to?’ she demanded.

  ‘Sorry, I don’t understand.’

  ‘A friend of mine has been interviewed by the police.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘How did they get his name?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said George. ‘Why not ask them?’

  ‘I told you to stop working on this.’

  ‘I have stopped.’

  ‘But you’ve spoken to the police?’

  ‘I’ve done that from the start.’

  ‘Since we last talked?’

  ‘Only to tell them I’m off the case.’

  ‘You took Paris’s side.’

  ‘No. Just gave the facts.’

  ‘His “facts” are lies.’

  ‘That’s your understanding.’

  ‘What do you mean “my understanding”? I’m Keti’s sister! You think I don’t understand?’

  ‘I don’t think anything. The police and magistrates will make up their own minds.’

  ‘So you poison them with lies from Paris.’

  ‘No,’ said George wearily. ‘I just gave them the evidence.’

  ‘What is this evidence?’

  ‘The phone recording is part of it,’ said George.

  ‘That says it all!’

  ‘If it’s genuine.’

  ‘What do you mean? It’s obviously genuine.’

  ‘There is some doubt.’

  ‘Just from the fact that Paris denies it?’

  ‘No, there are other problems.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘I’m not
going to discuss this. I’m off the case, remember?’

  ‘Andonis is very upset.’

  ‘Who’s Andonis?’

  ‘My friend.’

  ‘If he’s not involved he’s got nothing to worry about. It’s a routine enquiry.’

  ‘You should tell them to leave him alone.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Of course you can!’

  ‘They’ll regard it as interference.’

  ‘They’ll get a lot more interference if they carry on bothering him!’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The police need to treat him with great respect.’

  ‘I’m sure they will.’

  ‘Don’t give me that horse-shit! He’s not a man to provoke!’

  ‘I don’t understand why you’re so worried.’

  ‘My God! Are you stupid?’

  ‘Could be. Why don’t you just explain?’

  ‘Oh come on! These are things which are not “explained”. If you know what you’re doing you don’t go near certain people.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because they are who they are!’

  ‘OK, so who are they?’

  ‘Don’t give me that, Mr Zafiris! You know what I’m talking about and don’t pretend you don’t!’

  George made an effort to remain calm.

  ‘I can’t see into your head,’ he said. ‘If I could, I wouldn’t need to ask. Just make yourself clear.’

  ‘Talk to the police,’ she said dismissively. ‘You’ll find out soon enough.’

  ‘Is he one of the night club people?’

  ‘Ah, the man’s brain works!’

  ‘That’s all you needed to say. Keti was involved with him?’

  ‘Only in the business sense.’

  ‘I see… And he’s dangerous?’

  ‘Only to people who cause him trouble.’

  ‘In other words he’s dangerous.’

  ‘Use any words you like.’

  ‘I want to make sure I’ve got this straight.’

  ‘Whatever!’

  George flared up. ‘No, not “whatever”! Either you’re trying to tell me something or you’re not. If it’s important, take a little trouble over it! But don’t piss me about with these stupid catchphrases.’