by Robert Brown
“Aw, shit.”
“What?” Thalia asked.
“Adonis should have been worrying about his aim, not yours,” he said, pointing.
“The thieves gave you that.”
“That guy never got a chance to shoot me. If he had, we wouldn’t be talking right now.”
As they waited for the police to come, Adonis led Heinrich back to his vehicle, hidden on a dirt lane at the other side of the grove, and patched him up with a first aid kit. That made Heinrich even more annoyed. When Adonis saw the bullet graze and profusely apologized, Heinrich felt like punching the guy.
“Lambros is all right,” Adonis said as he bound the wound.
“Oh, right, glad to hear it.”
“Well, he’s alive, in any case,” the detective continued. “Sprained ankle, dislocated shoulder, and fractured wrist. Not bad considering the circumstances.”
“And the other car, the Lexus?”
Adonis shook his head. “It got away.”
“How the hell can two cars full of criminals kidnap a millionaire, shoot at a bunch of cops, and just get away?”
“We didn’t have enough backup. There was a big anarchist protest in the Exarcheia neighborhood. Idiots throwing firecrackers and setting fire to trash cans. They’re always causing trouble down there. Most of the officers were assigned to that. That one patrol car you saw, the one that went after the van, was the only backup we could get in time. At least they didn’t get hurt. Shot the car to pieces, though.”
“I’m thinking we’re going to get more resources after tonight,” Heinrich said.
“God, I hope so,” Adonis said with a sigh, packing away the first aid kit. He turned and looked at Heinrich. “So you’re still with us, even after what happened tonight?”
Their eyes met. “Especially after what happened tonight.”
Heinrich felt a tremble go through his body – a tremble that he couldn’t quite suppress. He hated the fact that Adonis saw it. When the asshole gave him a sympathetic smile he wanted to punch the grin right off the guy’s face. However, he couldn’t stop that little shiver.
He’d come close to death that night. He’d been close many times before, more times than he cared to count, but this time he’d seen his life all too clearly.
He’d seen the meaninglessness of it all, the emptiness.
Now he had another chance. He wasn’t going to screw it up.
CHAPTER TEN
The next morning, over breakfast at their hotel, all Thalia could talk about was that damn pretty-boy police officer.
“Wasn’t he wonderful?” the professor gushed. Her eyes shone with admiration.
“He did all right,” Heinrich mumbled, stirring his yogurt and honey. It was delicious. He wished he could appreciate it more.
“He followed you so expertly. They never had a clue we were behind them.”
Heinrich nodded. “True enough.”
“When he gave me that gun, I thought I’d have a heart attack! I’d fired a gun only once before. My grandfather had an old shotgun he let me fire at a target. I’m glad Adonis told me to fire away from all of you, though. I don’t think I could kill someone, not even in that situation, and I might have hit you.”
“Yeah, Adonis hit me instead,” Heinrich grumbled.
Thalia looked taken aback. “He was trying to save your life!”
“He did, and I’m grateful. Just like Lambros is grateful to me for saving his life. Or at least I assume he is.”
“Well, yeah, you did that,” Thalia said in an offhand manner.
Heinrich looked up at her and saw the face of all those women he’d never gotten for one reason or another. All those women who went after some better-looking guy, or some richer guy, or some guy with more social refinement. There was always some damn reason to pick another man over him.
He opened his mouth to speak, but then realized he had nothing to say. Instead he looked back down at his breakfast, stirring his yogurt.
“Adonis will be expecting us at the police station soon,” Thalia said.
“Yeah, let’s get going. Mustn’t keep Adonis waiting.”
Heinrich sat glumly through the taxi ride. Jan still hadn’t emailed him. It was time for his morning phone hour and Heinrich hadn’t been able to resist sending him a text, just saying hi and adding a snapshot of the Parthenon. He wasn’t sure if reminding the kid that he was in Europe was a good idea or not. Would that draw the kid out? Give him too many expectations, like the monitors had warned?
Heinrich had no idea of knowing because Jan didn’t reply.
His spirits lifted somewhat when they spotted Lambros sitting in the front waiting room. One arm was in a sling and he was on crutches. Heinrich wasn’t quite sure how that worked until Lambros sprang out of his chair, nearly toppling over. His Polish maid, who had been sitting unnoticed beside him, caught him. The maid grabbed Lambros’ crutches and helped him cross the room.
Lambros put a hand on Heinrich’s shoulder. The look of profound gratitude on the millionaire’s face made Heinrich wonder if he was going to get a fat reward.
I’ll have him donate it to Jan’s halfway house. They need a new rec room.
“So good to see you again!” Lambros said. “I can’t begin to thank you enough for what you did. You are a true hero.”
Heinrich made appreciative, humble noises as Lambros went on and on. The millionaire praised him up one side and down the other, but no offer of a reward came. Heinrich began getting angry at the millionaire, then angry at himself for thinking he would be treated as anything more than the help. That got him even angrier at Lambros.
Just before Heinrich lost his cool, Adonis walked into the room, looking as pretty as usual. He wore a new suit and walked with a confident, erect gait. It was obvious that among the four of them, he was the only one to have gotten a decent night’s sleep.
Thalia’s eyes lit up. “Any news on the case?” she asked in English for Heinrich’s benefit. That did nothing to help his mood. He could have understood that question in Greek just from the context.
Adonis gave a wry smile. “I’m afraid the police chief has me doing so much paperwork over the shooting, I haven’t had time to do much else.”
Heinrich had to feel for the guy. “I know some people on the NYPD. They’re buried under paperwork on a good day. A shooting only makes it worse.”
“Indeed,” the detective said with a chuckle. He grew serious. “How are you feeling?”
“All right,” Heinrich said. His face hadn’t looked good in the mirror that morning. The knife cut had been the worst. The cops had taken him to the hospital, from which he had emerged with fifteen stitches. “Not sure how I’m going to box with an arm like this. I look like Frankenstein.”
“I’m sure you’ll heal quickly enough,” Adonis said, clapping him on the shoulder. Heinrich hated it when people he hated got chummy with him. The detective turned to Lambros. “And how are you?”
“As good as can be expected. At least I’m alive, thanks to Mr. Muller. I’ll be forever grateful to him.”
Not grateful enough to offer me a reward, you rich fuck.
Adonis gave them both one of his winning smiles. Thalia moved closer to him.
“Well, I’d be grateful to the two of you if you could look through some photos of criminals,” Adonis said. “Neither I nor my two officers got a good look at any of them. I’m hoping you can make some positive identifications. Mr. Lambros identified one of his abductors from our previous list of suspects, but it was the one whom I shot at the storage facility, so unfortunately that doesn’t help us much.”
“What about the guy you iced in the field?” Heinrich asked.
Adonis looked confused. “Iced?”
“Made cold. Killed.”
“Oh yes. We identified him. A retired soldier, but he didn’t have a criminal record. Perhaps you can help us find someone more useful.”
The detective led them to a room and sat them at a computer. Adoni
s opened a large gallery of photos of convicts. They started clicking through them while the detective took Thalia out for a coffee.
Heinrich settled in to focus on the work. He had been in this position on a number of cases, going through reams of photos, looking for a match. Boring, often fruitless work. Necessary, though.
After an hour, the detective and the professor had not returned. Heinrich was beginning to think they’d gone off to a motel.
At least he and Lambros had found one match.
Niko Marinos, the guy with the AK who had survived. Ex-infantry sergeant in the Greek army. After his service, he had gotten into a string of brushes with the law, finally doing three years for assault after pummeling some guy in a bar fight. That was a long stretch for a fistfight, so the victim must have been in pretty bad shape. The year after he got out, Marinos had been found not guilty of robbing a wealthy home, tying up the owners, and ransacking the place. He’d gotten off for lack of evidence. The assailants had been masked. He had a current address in Athens, as he was still on parole.
Some more help came when Heinrich’s phone buzzed. Biniam had emailed him from an anonymous email account Heinrich had. Actually “George Soros” emailed him. One of Biniam’s pseudonyms. Eritreans had a weird sense of humor.
“Hey buddy. Your suspicions were right. It’s easy to hack into the online antiquities database. Off-the-shelf antivirus, a firewall full of backdoors, and no regular backups. I could have hacked into this drunk. Perhaps I should have tried. That would have been a cool challenge. Anyway, would you like me to implant a bot in the system so I can track changes? Very illegal but almost guaranteed to get results. If these guys are adding fake documentation for their stuff, they’re probably doing it pretty regularly. I’ll be able to trace them.”
Heinrich replied. “If it’s illegal, absolutely do not do it. This is a criminal investigation and we can’t break the law.”
That was a code phrase to give Biniam the green light. It was best to cover one’s ass and create deniability, even on an anonymous account. Biniam had taught him that. Being a refugee who would be executed if he returned to his native land, and who lived more on the Dark Web than in the regular world, Biniam had taught Heinrich a lot about paranoia.
By the time Adonis and Thalia finally returned—him looking smug, her looking dreamy eyed and a bit rosy in the cheeks—Heinrich and Lambros had gone through a few hundred more pictures, all to no luck.
“So where have you two been?” Heinrich asked. He winced as he heard the accusatory tone in his voice.
“Examining the confiscated artifacts from the storage shed,” Thalia said. “I’ve determined that some of the Corinthian ware was excavated recently. I’m sure it was taken during those unauthorized diggings a few months ago.”
“How can you know that?” Heinrich asked.
“A couple of the pieces bore marks from shovels. A professional archaeologist would have been more careful. We use trowels to scrape away layers of earth bit by bit. Those pieces had been dug up in an amateurish fashion.”
“Yes, but they all had documentation in the national database saying they had been dug up before independence and were therefore legal to buy and sell,” Adonis said, frowning. “It looks like the gang has an accomplice in the Ministry of Antiquities.”
Or they have a halfway decent hacker who added the records for them, Heinrich thought. He decided to keep his mouth shut, though, and let Biniam do his thing. The more of this case he solved himself, the more impressed Montaine would be. He had to get that European job.
“So what now?” Heinrich asked. “Pick up this perp we found in the photo lineup?”
Adonis’s perfect brow furrowed. “Perp? What is a perp?”
Heinrich suppressed a smile. “Perpetrator? Police lingo for a criminal.”
I’ll have to throw some more words at you that you don’t know.
“Yes, we’ll go after this ‘perp,’ as you say. If we’re lucky, he can lead us to the rest of the gang.”
Adonis laid the trap carefully. He sent a plainclothesman, one who had not been on the previous night’s disastrous mission, to sniff out the apartment where Niko Marinos was supposedly staying. It turned out that, as was usual with this type of criminal, he wasn’t living there anymore. A friend lived there and took in his mail, thus creating the appearance that this was Marinos’ home address. A few conversations with local informants got his real address. The plainclothesman cased the place and radioed back that Niko wasn’t at home, but at a bar just down the street.
By then it was early evening. Adonis was reluctant to make the collar in a public place and risk innocent people getting hurt, but he didn’t want to lose sight of Niko Marinos either. He decided to chance it.
“After last night, I’m amazed this guy hasn’t skipped town,” Heinrich said.
Adonis gave a wry smile. “He thinks he is safe with his false address. Plus, with our department so overstretched, we are lucky to have our informants to tell us what we need to know. If we had to do the search ourselves, it would have taken forever to track him down.”
“But they fired on some cops. They fired on you!”
Adonis gave a helpless shrug. “And those anarchists broke the jaw of an officer last night. And someone was murdered in another neighborhood. And a jewelry store got robbed at gunpoint last week. We are overstretched.”
“Sounds like you need more funding.”
Adonis snorted. “Tell that to the IMF and Western European governments. They are making us cut all services to pay our debt. Pensioners go without electricity while criminals run free.”
Niko’s neighborhood was a noisy working-class suburb of Athens. Concrete apartment blocks crowded in on one another, their ground floors given over to shops. Now that the sun had set and the temperature had cooled off somewhat, people thronged the streets. Families were out for evening strolls, teenagers were laughing and flirting, old men sat at cafes and played checkers while sipping ouzo or coffee. Music played from windows, mingling with the sound of street vendors and the babble of the crowd.
Heinrich smiled. This was the sort of life that New York City used to have before all the money moved in. Now the streets had lost a lot of their spark. In the evenings its was mostly hipsters and suits out for a night of conspicuous consumption, not real people enjoying their lives. New York in the Eighties had been a wonderland of diverse experiences, both good and bad. It had brought the world to him before he’d ever had the chance to leave the United States. Now it was dying. It had been dying since the Nineties and it was really on its last gasp.
Heinrich wondered if he would miss it, assuming he got the chance to move to Europe. He’d miss the guys, certainly, and the boxing gym, and a few old spots that the chain stores hadn’t wiped out. But would he really miss the city itself? Or was he clinging to the memory of what it had once been? He’d lived there all his life. Leaving would be a big step. But maybe he should have left years ago. A change might be just what he needed. At least Warsaw hadn’t been gentrified, although it had its own problems, like poverty and a growing far right movement. Europe had no shortage of bullshit, just like there was bullshit everywhere else.
He pushed those thoughts from his mind when they reached the right street. Thalia had been left behind in the hotel, and it had taken a lot of convincing for Heinrich to be allowed to come along. He and Adonis strolled along the street. The plainclothesman had radioed to tell them that Niko Marinos was still in the bar, out of sight of the street. A pair of uniformed officers stood within sight of the bar’s back door, making a show of speaking to a local shopkeeper. As long as no one else from the previous night was around, they’d be able to approach with safety, Adonis boasted, and Niko wouldn’t know what hit him.
After how things had gone the previous night, Heinrich didn’t share the detective’s confidence. His painkillers had worn off and the slash on his arm burned like a long, thin tongue of flame. The nick he’d gotten from Adonis’s bulle
t smarted pretty badly too. But he didn’t dare take any more painkillers. He had to keep his head clear.
They shouldered their way through the crowds and Heinrich spotted the plainclothesman from Adonis’s description—a nondescript young man reading a newspaper at a cafe across the street. As soon as he spotted Adonis, the officer put his newspaper on the table and strolled to the opposite side of the street to the bar—a low, whitewashed building with only one window, which was closed, and a doorway through which thumped rock music.
The idea was for the plainclothesman to make the collar just as Adonis and Heinrich came through the door as backup.
That was the plan, anyway.
The plainclothesman walked in while Adonis and Heinrich were still a few yards from the front door. For a couple of seconds all was calm. They approached the door and had almost reached it when they heard a shout and the sound of breaking glass, followed by the thump of a body hitting the floor.
Adonis yanked out his pistol and rounded the corner, Heinrich right behind him.
The plainclothesman lay on the floor just a few steps inside the door, surrounded by a halo of glass shards, his hands clutching his bloody face. Niko Marinos had just risen from a table in the center of the room. The bastard had thrown a bottle of ouzo at the cop.
“Stop or I’ll shoot!” Adonis shouted.
Considering all the excitement, Heinrich was impressed he understood the guy’s Greek.
Niko ducked to the side and into a tangle of old Greek guys gaping at the scene. Adonis cursed, unable to fire. The room was half full of people. He didn’t dare let loose in there.
Niko didn’t have such scruples. He pushed through the crowd of drinkers, gun drawn, already firing.
CHAPTER ELEVEN