by Alex A King
Aunt Rita and Takis were gone. Grandma and Xander were gone. Which left me with Papou and the rest of the Family. If Grandma knew who had sent the box, maybe her advisor did, too, seeing as how they were from the same geologic period.
I found him at the back of the compound, between the building and the wall, blowing smoke like the Little Engine That Could. When he saw me he dropped the cigarette on the ground, then he burst into curse words, most of them involving unnatural acts with animals.
“I saw that on the internet once,” I told him. “I was looking for a pot roast recipe. What are you doing back here?”
“Not smoking, that’s what I’m doing.”
The ground in the compound was a neat arrangement of flagstones. It was interrupted here and there for the gardens Grandma tended herself. Each was an explosion of color and scent and green stuff, some of it pointy. Papou had planted himself by a sprawling oleander, and judging from the small nest of cigarette butts at its base he did that a lot.
“I don’t care if you smoke, and I’m not going to squeal. It’s your funeral.”
“I hate cigarettes,” he said. “They stink and they taste like a Turkish hooker’s ass. I smoke to die.”
Papou had a half-hearted death wish. He was taking the long, slow, scenic route to Hades.
“If Grandma sees all those cigarette butts you’re a dead man.”
“Pick them up,” he said.
“You want me to pick up your mess?”
“That’s the idea.”
I leaned against the wall, folded my arms. The wall surrounding the compound was a tall stack of stone slabs, held together with tough mortar. Jericho wished it had a wall this strong. An army could blast trumpets here for a thousand years and it wouldn’t budge. Although, someone in the Family was bound to open fire on them after the first five minutes of tuneless trumpet-blowing.
“I’ll pick them up if you help me with something.”
He stared at me. Hard. It was easy to picture his head orbiting a sun somewhere before meteors knocked it out of rotation. His face split into a big smile.
“All right. I will help you. But only because you remind me of your grandmother before this life had its way with her.”
I nodded once. “Someone sent Grandma a puzzle box. Wood, with a combination reel. English alphabet. Grandma said she knew who it was from, and that the sender was telling her they had information about Dad’s disappearance.”
A lie skittered across his eyes. “I don’t know who that could be.”
“Grandma also said the sender was in a maximum security prison.”
“The Family knows a lot of people in prison. Could be any of them.”
“Lying.”
“Who is lying? No one, that is who.”
“Still lying.”
He slapped the air. “Bah. Show me your box.”
* * *
PAPOU BLINKED AT THE BOX. Granted, things were dim in Grandma’s kitchen.
“Is it jogging your memory?”
“I can’t remember what I ate for breakfast. How am I supposed to remember someone I have not seen in fifteen years?”
I hung him on my sharply raised eyebrow.
“Fila to kolo mou!” he swore, which translated to kiss my ass. He pointed at me. “You are tricky. I will have to watch you.”
“So who is he?”
“An animal and an idiot.” A satisfied smirk made itself cozy on his face. “If you can open it I will tell you who sent it.”
“That’s not fair.”
“You made me a deal, I make you a deal. Figure out the combination. After you do that, and pick up the cigarette butts like you promised, I will tell you.”
The old guy had snookered me.
“How am I supposed to figure out the combination? I need context, a place to start.”
He rolled out the front door, chair clanking as it maneuvered the single step. “You can do it. I have faith in you. Okay, maybe not faith, but something like faith, only smaller.”
Over by the fountain a man was pretending to prune a tree that didn’t need pruning, mostly because it wasn’t there. I faked not seeing him and he faked not seeing me. Already Elias the Assassin and I had a functional—even amicable—relationship.
I sat under one of the wide-brimmed umbrellas scattered around the courtyard. Each came with a table and chairs, and it was here that the family—and the Family—spent their evenings after siesta. The courtyard was also home to overhead trellises with grape and other vines slowly clambering across the wooden frames, but underneath the light was filtered and patchy. I wanted full blackout. It was slouching toward noon so the place was deserted. Time for lunch and a nap. Not for me; I wasn’t Greek enough to snooze in the afternoons, guilt-free.
I plonked the puzzle box on the table and scratched my head. Without context it would be close to impossible to figure out the combination. I spun the dials and contemplated how many eight-letter words were in the English dictionary. That’s if it was even a word. For all I knew it was a random combination, designed to foil Scrabble pros.
It was a game.
My goat wandered over with his canine posse. The lop-eared ruminant had appeared by magic on my borrowed bed a couple of days after I’d arrived in Greece. Nobody recognized him, and I hadn’t discounted the idea that he was some kind of Trojan goat; although, you’d be hard pressed to fit even a sixteenth of a soldier in its four stomachs. That’s without armor. Even a goat would balk at bronze. He was brown-and-white, and so far he’d decided to stick around. Who could blame him? The menu here was varied and plentiful. He had quickly bonded with the compound’s pack of dogs, primarily lurchers, with a penchant for long naps, dropped food, and cuddles.
He nuzzled my hand, looking for crumbs, and then went to work on a nearby bush.
“Does it have a name?” Elias called out.
I shook my head. “No name.”
“You should give it a name. Everybody will be less inclined to cook him if he has a name.”
“Really?”
“Sure. It’s always harder to kill someone you know by name.”
He would know. “I’ll think about,” I said.
He saluted me and went back to his mime.
I slumped on the table, both eyes on the box. It mocked me silently.
“Know what I would do if I were you?”
Elias again.
“About what?”
“The box.”
“What would you do?”
“Kids,” he said. “They can open anything, even if it doesn’t want to be opened.”
His thought was in the right place, but he was stabbing it from the wrong angle. Kids can open anything, especially if it doesn’t want to be opened.
* * *
IT SEEMED impossible that Takis had caught Marika and conned her finger all the way into a gold ring. On the outside they were a mismatched pair, and probably on the inside, too. If he was a tool, she was a soft, comfortable sofa in flowery prints. They occupied the roomy apartment on the top left corner of the compound.
Takis’ wife had long hair she normally kept caged in a tight bun. It was black with a natural hint of blue. When she rushed toward me, it brought to mind the inevitability an oncoming train, when your shoe is caught in the tracks and you’ve had ten swigs too many from the Boone’s Farm bottle.
“Katerina!” she said, pulling me into her arms. We exchanged hugs and continental kisses, as was customary around these parts. All the kissing Greeks did, they’d be the first to fall if there was a worldwide pandemic.
Marika was a woman who sprinkled her sentences with exclamation points. She used up her yearly quota in every conversation. “You have come to visit! Let me make coffee!”
My mission would be temporarily interrupted if I let her navigate me into the living room. One didn’t drink coffee and go; there would be food, there would be gossip, there would be two hours gone.
“I’d love to sit here and drink coffee with
you, but I can’t.” I held up the puzzle box. “It’s a clue about Dad. I think. I was wondering if your kids might be able to work it out.”
Marika looked dubious. “My boys?” She and Takis had a handful of boys, semi-wild, part simian, with a dash of mad professor. They were good-natured kids who’d either rule the universe some day, or lay waste to the whole shebang. “The way they open a box is with fire or an axe.”
I was afraid of that.
“You should ask Litsa.” Her hands engaged in a simple form of flagless semaphores. “Her Tomas can break into anything. He has a bright career ahead of him as a safecracker.”
In some families—decent ones—that would be considered a minus, but in this one it was a huge plus. The criminal gene was filtering down through the generations. The other genes didn’t stand a chance—not when they were mugged and supplanted in utero.
I tried to smile, but my face got stuck on the way there.
“It will be okay,” Marika said, beaming. “This family … it takes time to get used to how they are. No one in my family has ever committed a crime. Not so much as a stolen piece of fruit, yet look what I married. You get used to it. Here.” She reached into her apron pocket, retrieved what looked like a Twinkie’s Greek cousin, pushed the plastic-wrapped cake into my hand. “Don’t tell Baboulas I gave you a store-bought cake, okay? She would flip.”
Her secret was safe with me, and I told her so. After pocketing my cake, and asking for directions to Litsa’s and Tomas’ apartment, I was on my way.
I stepped sideways.
Litsa’s door flew open. I looked at her; looked back at the fist I hadn’t had a chance to use yet.
“Katerina! Could be I heard what Marika told you.”
Could be. “Is Tomas in?”
She nodded and ushered me inside, while simultaneously screeching, “Tomas!”
Litsa was in her late thirties. She and her husband, whose name I couldn’t recall with her voice stabbing my eardrums, had three boys. She was the kind of woman who worked hard at looking cheap, and she succeeded beautifully. Her nails were real acrylic, her ponytail was clip-on, and her boobs had arrived in individually wrapped containers, before the surgeon stuffed them into her chest. The apartment was almost as spacious as the one next-door, but there was more fake gold and less good taste.
“Sit,” she said, steering me into the living room. Litsa didn’t do things old school. Unlike generations before her, she didn’t keep a room for entertaining visitors. But then Grandma didn’t either. Her house didn’t have the space … or a toilet in her bathroom.
Tomas Makris wandered into the room in Spiderman underwear and Transformers slippers. He had the family nose and black hair shaved close to the scalp. In his slippers he was about three-and-a-half-feet-tall, which seemed normal for a five-year-old. He looked at me with wide, dark eyes.
“What’s it like being a foreigner?”
My brain spluttered, but my mouth made up for it. “Foreign.”
He nodded. “I figured.”
“Are you in school yet?”
“No. Kindergarten is keeping me back. I failed finger painting.”
“Really?”
“No.”
I looked at his mother. “Does he know he’s thirty?”
She shrugged somewhat helplessly.
“What’s that?” His eyes were glued to the box in my hand. “Is that for me?”
To crouch or not crouch, that was the question. On the one hand, he was five. On the other, he was thirty. I crouched, hoping it was the right move.
“It’s not for either of us, but I was hoping you might be able to open it.”
“English alphabet,” he said, inspecting the puzzle box. “Eight letters.”
“Do you know English?”
“I know puzzles and combinations. I can open anything.”
“So I heard.”
“I can also burp the alphabet. Want to hear it?”
“Maybe later. It’s a pretty big achievement, though. I know grown men who can’t do it.”
“It’s all in here.” He pointed to his diaphragm. “And you have to gulp a lot of air between letters.” He gave me a quick alpha, beta, gamma to demonstrate.
I won’t lie: I was pretty impressed.
“Let’s go,” he said. “I think better when I’m in my fort.”
“I will bring coffee,” Litsa called after us.
The boy’s fort was made of pillows, sheets, and a couple of traditional Greek chairs. It was a good fort, and he beamed when I told him so. He ducked under the sheet and held it up for me to join him.
“Is it true you’re going to be Baboulas someday?” he asked once we’d both settled beneath the fort’s cotton roof. He dropped the “door.” Instant comfort. Nothing bad could touch me here. Not even the Goblin King or the boogeyman.
“Not if I can help it.”
You will be,” he said, with absolute certainty. “If Baboulas wants you to be, you will be.”
“If I don’t want to be, then I don’t have to be.”
He considered my words. “That’s not how it works.”
“That’s how it works in my world, unless you have a tiger mother.”
“What’s a tiger mother?”
When I explained about tiger mothers, and how they’d claw out your heart if you got less than an A-plus in a test, he frowned. “Greek mothers are more like sea turtles. Except Baboulas. She’s more like an elephant.” He twiddled the dials. There was a small click. He handed it back to me.
“Baboulas,” I said, reading the word.
“They weren’t even trying.” The poor kid sounded disappointed. He brightened up. “What’s inside? Is it chocolate?”
I lifted the lid and peeked inside. “YOWZA!” I slammed it shut. “Definitely not chocolate.”
Chapter 3
“THAT’S NOT A FINGER,” Papou said.
“Usually they send a finger,” Stavros said. He had joined Papou in his smoking nook, but he wasn’t smoking. He was sitting on the ground cross-legged, doing cross-stitch. It was an eerily accurate recreation of Theophanes the Greek’s Transfiguration of Jesus … in teeny, tiny x’s.
“It’s definitely not a finger,” I said. I wadded up my fear and nausea, shunted them to the side. Unfortunately, I couldn’t quit glancing sideways at the emotional mess. If what was in the box was part of Dad, I was going to implode. There would be a burst of tears, a loud pop, then I’d vanish. “Grandma told me you guys don’t send body parts.”
“As proof of life.” Papou scraped a match on the wall. It burst into flame. Greeks didn’t believe in safety matches. They figured they went to the trouble of stealing fire from the gods, so why take the red phosphorus out of matches and stick it on the side of the box? Fire, they believed, shouldn’t be smothered with rules. “But we’ll send anything as proof of death.”
“I remember one time we sent an ear,” Stavros added.
“That’s no ear,” I said.
Papou cackled around the damp end of his cigarette. “I know what it is, eh? I have one myself.” He made a V with his hands, pointed at his crotch. It was an obscene Greek hand gesture that he’d toned down to merely informative. “And like this one, it doesn’t work.”
I pulled out my phone, dialed Aunt Rita, who was on her way to Athens with Takis.
“Ela,” she said, answering the phone the way Greeks did, with a ‘Come’ instead of a ‘Hello.’
“I have a penis,” I said.
“Me too,” she answered.
“This one’s in a wooden box.”
There was a long pause, but not a silent one. Music and howling stuffed itself into the gap in our conversation. Wherever she was, someone was in pain.
“Jesus,” I said, “is that Takis?”
She made an affirmative noise. “He calls that singing. I would threaten to shoot him in the face but he’s driving.”
A death sentence for both of them, for sure, if she fired. Greeks don’t kno
w the meaning of drive slowly. They hurtle from one location to the next, pictures of saints propped up on the dashboard, crucifix dangling from the rearview mirror. God is their insurance company.
“He’ll have to stop eventually,” I said.
The baying quit abruptly. “I heard that!”
“Is the poutsa in the puzzle box?” my aunt asked.
“Yeah, in the puzzle box. Litsa’s youngest opened it for me.”
“That boy is going places,” she said. “With luck none of them will be prison.”
“I doubt they’d be able to keep him inside for long.”
I could feel her nodding. “Whose is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it Michail’s?”
Papou was looking at me. Stavros was looking at me. Although there were miles between us, I could feel my aunt looking at me.
“How should I know?” I squeaked. “He’s my father. I shouldn’t know what his Oscar Meyer Wiener looks like!”
“What is an Oscar Meyer Wiener?” Stavros asked.
“It’s a sausage,” I explained. “A hot dog.”
“Ah, a xot donk! We have those here, too.”
My stomach growled. The two men looked at me in horror.
“My belly is stupid,” I said. “All it heard was ‘hot dog.’ “
I moved past the hunger. An idea was beginning to unfurl in my head. “There’s someone who might know,” I said slowly.
“Who?” Papou asked.
“Dina,” Aunt Rita and I said at the same time.
She gasped. “Touch red!” There was a squeal of tires, and Takis yelled, “Gamo ti putana, you stupid skeela!”
Which loosely translated to: Engage in intercourse with a woman of negotiable affections, you stupid she-dog.
I closed my eyes. “What did you touch?”
“Vromoskeelo!” Aunt Rita screamed back at him. Huh. As far as insults went ‘dirty dog’ wasn’t too bad. “I touched the pimple on his nose. That thing needs its own area code. Go see Dina,” she told me. “She will know.”
I ended the call. Stavros and Papou were watching me.
