by Alex A King
Marika peered in the rearview mirror. “That? My youngest was bigger than that when he was born.”
Mr. Happy got a sudden sad-on. “Bitches,” Donk said. “Always keeping men down.”
“You are not a man,” Marika told him. The kid sank into the backseat like punched dough.
I grinned at her. “You’re good.”
“He’s nothing compared to Takis.”
“Who’s Takis?” Donk asked.
“My husband. And he does bad things.”
Donk unclipped his seatbelt, scooted closer. “What sort of bad things?”
“I do not ask, but I pray. Every day I go to church to pray for him.”
Takis was a weasel but he got the job done. I was about ninety-nine percent certain he chopped off the Baptist’s head with an axe and stuffed it in a jute sack after Xander blasted the former cop’s cerebellum out of his skull. But I wasn’t about to tell his wife or the kid in the backseat. Takis didn’t seem like he was down with the whole caring and sharing thing. Mobsters, in their own way, were like cops. There were parts of the job they couldn’t take home.
“Prayer.” The kid scoffed.
For a moment I thought Marika was going to reach back and slap his head again, but she settled into the seat.
After a while she said, “There’s someone following us in one of Baboulas’ cars.”
“That’s Elias, my assassin. Grandma let him have one of ours.”
Donk scooted forward again. “You’ve got an assassin? What does he want?”
“Not too bright this one,” Marika said.
“To kill me, mostly.”
“Why doesn’t he shoot your tires out or something?”
“Because he’s not going to kill me. He’s following me around, making it look like he wants to kill me.”
“Why?”
“To placate his boss while negotiators talk him out of the contract.”
“He’s a double-agent?” The kid flopped back. “Cool,” he said in English.
Marika’s head swiveled on its stalk, in my direction. “Who did Baboulas send to negotiate?”
My brain stuttered. I couldn’t not tell her the truth, could I? Marika and I were on our way to being friends. We were on an adventure together—an adventure that might be dangerous. You have to be honest when you’re on a dangerous adventure together. It’s in the unofficial rulebook.
“Aunt Rita,” I said.
“Who else?”
“Maybe Grandma sent Takis, too.”
“To negotiate? My Virgin Mary! He can’t even discipline our children, how can he negotiate for your life?”
“I kind of wondered the same thing,” I said. “He’s not exactly subtle.”
“He is as subtle as an avalanche of minotaurs.”
“As subtle as a swimming pool filled with spiders.”
“As a bag of Zeus’s thunderbolts,” she said.
Donk tossed his two cents in. “As subtle as triple-D tits.”
“Nobody asked you,” I said.
“You’re boring. Even that fat Bulgarian drug dealer was more fun.”
“Going on an adventure is good.” Marika adjusted her sunglasses and rested her arm on the open window. We had the top down, breeze blowing back our hair. “It’s about time someone else in my family had some fun. This is a new beginning, I can feel it.”
The village of Kalabaka was a white and red rug thrown over Meteora’s feet. It was quaint, charming, and all of those adjectives that suggested this was a place that liked to look good on a postcard but hated unwed mothers. Towering over the village, a pudgy gargoyle on its stone perch, was the Monastery of the Holy Trinity.
Marika clutched her chest. “Meteora! When we were courting Takis promised to bring me here, but we never came. The minute we were married—bam!—the babies came and the romance was dead.”
“There was romance?”
“In the beginning. He used to steal flowers from Baboulas’ garden, until she threatened to chop off his hand for stealing.”
We cruised through the streets of Kalabaka. I’d come here with nothing but a vague reference to a place that may or may not exist.
“How are we going to find this place?” I mumbled.
“You’re worse than boring,” Donk said. “You’re a boring idiot.”
I stopped the car. Beside us, dozens of pairs of shoes were lined up on the sidewalk. Alongside them, on metal racks, cute handmade bags and jewelry caught the sunlight and flung it in my eyes. A wrinkled leather sack in a black dress zoomed in on us.
“You want new shoes? For you, cheap!”
“Thank you,” I called out, “but I don’t need new shoes.”
“Everybody needs new shoes,” the old woman said.
“Except me.”
“What about them?” She nodded to my passengers. “They look like they need new shoes.”
“They don’t need new shoes either, but thank you.”
“Take your ‘thank you’ to the devil! And move that car before I call the police.”
“Wow, you really know how to make friends,” Donk said from the backseat.
I hooked a thumb in his direction. “He needs new shoes.”
“Fuck you,” he said. “I don’t want some old goat’s shoes! I wear Air Chordans.”
The old woman slammed her hands down on her hips. Her chin and chest went into defense mode. “What’s wrong with my shoes, eh? You don’t like?”
“Your shoes stink. They’re for girls and poustis.” Girls and gays.
“What you say?”
Aaaaand … the old woman went straight from defense to offense in under five seconds. She hefted the whiskbroom leaning against the rack.
“Donk,” I said.
The kid didn’t know a warning when he heard one.
“I said your shoes smell like ass, old lady. Do I look like a pousti?” Mr. Puniverse beat both fists on his chest. “I’m the Donk! I’m all about the mouni!” He stood as best he could in the backseat of the Beetle and grabbed his crotch. I didn’t have the heart, or the inclination, to tell him that he had his reproductive organs mixed up.
“Mouni, eh? Who teach you to talk like that?” She looked at me.
“Hey!” I squeaked. “He’s not mine. Or hers.”
“No,” Marika assured her, “he does not belong to either of us.”
The old woman’s scowl sagged another inch. “Disgusting! What is wrong with you women? Why can’t you find a man your own age, eh?”
Marika elbowed me. I hit the gas.
“I could have taken her,” Donk said. He was puffed up like a twig.
“She’s an old woman.”
“So?”
“Respect your elders.”
“Old people,” he muttered and slouched back down. “What’s in the cooler?” He tapped his fingers on the lid. “Any snacks?”
“Nothing for you,” Marika said.
“Stop somewhere, eh? I’m hungry.”
What the heck, I needed directions anyway. My cellphone connection kept flaking out and there was no public Wi-Fi that I could find. So I pulled over outside a row of shops and darted into a souvenir shop for a map of the nature-made towers.
* * *
WE DROVE A WHILE. The pillars seemed close on a map but the proximity was a lie. And I couldn’t get a bead on which one was this Eagle character’s home base. Asking around the village hadn’t helped.
I said, “I didn’t expect them to be so spread out. They look more … clustered in photographs.”
We drove some more.
“Are we there yet?” Donk asked.
“No,” Marika and I said at the same time. We both scrambled to grab the first red thing. Only we were all out of red things.
“Great,” Marika said. “Now we will fight. Do you think we should do it now to get it out of the way?”
“That’s probably a good idea.”
“What should we fight about?”
We mulled it over
and came up empty-handed.
“Got any food?” Donk asked.
“Are you hungry again?” I said, incredulous. The kid was a walking garbage can.
“What do you mean again? That was an hour ago!”
Damn it, the little weasel was right. We were driving and driving and getting nowhere, except lost and confused.
I pulled over. Turned in my seat to look at Donk. “Call your uncle. I need to know where I’m going.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because I’ll buy you lunch if you do.”
He made faces as he crunched the data and worked his way toward a decision.
“Okay. Deal. But I want a xambookar.”
His English made me wish for an icepick to drive through my eardrum.
“Make the call.”
* * *
BABY DIMITRI CAME to the rescue. He knew a guy who knew a guy who thought he knew which tower was the eagle’s nest. The Godfather of the Night and Espadrilles made sure I knew I owed him. My intangible debts were racking up.
Anyway, we were on the move again, this time toward a definite blip on the map. It wasn’t long before I was parking at the foot of the shortest tower. You’d never know it from the bottom. It rose into the air like a giant wiener. This was where Greece overcompensated for being a smallish country.
We emptied out of the car.
Hand shielding my eyes, I stated the obvious. “I don’t see any steps. Do you see any steps?”
“No steps,” Marika said. “Footholds, yes, but no steps.”
“Aren’t there supposed to be steps?”
“Maybe the monastery was abandoned before they built steps.”
Probably that was it.
I stood there scratching my head. “There has to be a way up.”
Marika said, “If only we had a helicopter.”
“Grandma has a helicopter. We should have brought that.”
“Whoa,” Donk said, clearly impressed. “You’ve got a helicopter?”
“My grandmother does.”
“That’s kanksta. You should see this,” he said, wrestling with his phone. “There was a prison break yesterday. They used a helicopter.”
Crap … “Huh. Interesting.”
“It’s amazing. Watch.” He thrust the phone under my nose. Marika and I stood there and watched Grandma maneuver the bird into position over the prison roof.
“You know it is funny,” she said, eyeing me sideways, “that sounds like Stavros.”
“You think so?”
“And the woman, she sounds like you.”
“She sounds like a woman.”
“And the car is yellow.”
“Huh.”
“The same yellow as your car. And you and Stavros were gone yesterday afternoon.”
“We were at the beach.”
“Then where is your sunburn?”
“Okay,” I said. “Maybe we were there.”
“And that man on the ladder, he looks like Xander.”
“That’s what Detective Melas said.”
“You were at the Larissa prison?” Donk asked.
“Only if you’re not recording this,” I said.
He raised his hand. “Xi fife!”
Marika smacked his head. “Put your hand down. You know better than that.”
“But it’s an American thing. Xi fife!”
“This is Greece,” she said. “No moutsa!”
The mousta was one of the Greece’s favorite obscene hand signals. The flat palm, fingers spread, the upright hand, all combined that meant either you were rubbing poop in the recipient’s face, or calling them a frequent visitor to Rosie Palmer’s house to pay a sticky visit to her five daughters.
“What were you doing at the prison?” Donk asked. “Visiting all your friends?”
“Checking out your future home,” I said. “Animal control won’t take you.”
“Really?”
“No. I was following up on a clue.”
“What clue?”
I looked him in the eye. “A severed penis.”
He turned white, passed out on the dusty ground.
“Detective Melas did the same thing.” I nudged him with my foot.
Marika scrunched up her nose. “Men are weak. Imagine if they had to push babies out.”
We stood there contemplating the horrifying logistics while Donk groaned on the ground. “I need a drink,” he said.
I popped the cooler open, expecting to find drinks, then slammed the lid back down. “There’s no drinks in there,” I said.
Marika had packed supplies, all right, but not the food and beverage kind. All the Greek necessities: jackets, in case it got cold—in July!—slippers, in case we lost our shoes, various icons of saints I couldn’t name, and guns.
Did I say guns? I meant submachine guns or assault rifles—I didn’t know the difference. Those small, wonky, T-shaped weapons that spit projectiles and had the ability to kill a lot of people, and fast.
Drinks, though? Nope.
I tried not to whimper.
“Figures,” he said. “Good thing I scored some from the Bulgarian. She gave me a dozen bottles.” He waved a bottle at me and popped the lid before taking a long swallow.
“Jesus,” I said. “You sure you want to drink that?”
He looked at the plastic bottle. “Why?”
My head shook. “No reason.”
Ten seconds later he keeled over a second time.
This time Marika nudged him. “What’s wrong with him?”
“A Bulgarian drug dealer happened to him.”
“What did she give him?”
“I don’t know. Something Bulgarian?”
“My Virgin Mary!”
“He’ll be fine,” I said. “It’s nothing he can’t sleep off.”
We looked up at the stone tower. It was easy to imagine it toppling over, crushing us to death. A way up hadn’t materialized.
A throat cleared behind us. Elias had parked behind me in the black sedan. He’d stuck his head out the window. “There’s a rope ladder around the other side,” he called out.
I waved. “Thanks.” With my elbow I nudged Marika. “Let’s go.”
Elias was right, there was a ladder made of what looked like newish rope. Someone had been up here, and recently.
“I’m going up,” I said. “You should stay down here.” In case I needed a medevac, which out here could be a donkey. “If the rope breaks I don’t want your children to grow up without a mother.” I knew what that was like and it sucked, although Dad had done his best to fill in the gaps.
There could be a clue at the top of that rope ladder. There was no way I wasn’t going up.
Chapter 8
IT WAS FIVE MINUTES LATER.
“You need help?” Elias called out.
I shook my head. “We’re good.”
“You don’t look so good,” he said.
Don’t look down, Kat. Don’t look down.
I looked down. So far I was only about six feet up the ladder. Huh. It felt higher.
Don’t look up, Kat. Don’t look up.
I looked up.
The sandstone glared down at me. Was it my imagination or was it looming?
“I think this rock is alive,” I said.
“Rocks are not alive,” Marika said. “That is a children’s story.”
“There’s a children’s story about rocks coming alive?”
“My mother told it to me, and now I tell it to my boys.”
“Does anything good happen in the story?”
She shrugged. “Only to the rocks.”
That figured.
One at a time, I boosted myself to the next rung, then the next. They were floppy and they shifted as I adjusted my weight. What I’d taken for a gentle breeze was becoming a serious death threat as the ladder swayed.
I glanced down. Marika was hauling herself up behind me.
“You don’t have to come up,” I said.<
br />
“This is an adventure, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Then I am coming up! I am tired of sitting in the car while everyone else has fun.”
“If we fall?”
“Your assassin can call the ambulance.”
That seemed fair. Elias was turning out to be a helpful sort of guy.
My travel guide—aka: the Internet—told me the tower was close to two hundred feet. Wrong. It was at least ten thousand. That’s how it felt. My muscles burned. My gut churned. The wind was doing its best to blow my eyeballs out of their sockets. I imagined Dad’s old crony, Jimmy Pants, who was now a high school gym teacher, laughing at my lame level of fitness. I wasn’t sure there was a level of fitness this low. My level was subterranean.
Not Marika’s though. She was hauling significant ass up the ladder.
“It’s the boys,” she puffed as she passed me. “All day I run, run, run. Children are suicidal. It’s my job every day to stop them from killing themselves.”
There’s a scene in The Chronicles of Riddick, where the deadly sun sweeps across the planet and cremates every living thing in its path. Our sun had watched that movie, and now it had ambition and goals.
The good news was that the remainder of my peeling skin had evaporated. The bad news was that Sol was now blowtorching what was left of me.
I was nearly at the top. Marika had made it up a few minutes ago, and now she was tossing inspirational quotes at me.
You can do it. Don’t look down or you’ll die. How do you feel about wheelchairs? Never mind, if you fall you will die instantly—or close enough to instantly. Are you wearing clean underwear?
That sort of thing.
As I reached for the final rung I had a primal urge to scream, Khaaaaaan! What I lacked was ability. My breathing was ragged, my voice hit-or-miss.
“I didn’t die,” I said in loosely connected, randomly spaced fragments. Then I put my head between my knees and waited to feel human again.
When I lifted my head I was in Dresden, post World War II. What had once been a monastery was now a pile of haphazardly tossed blocks, resting on a foundation of tougher blocks. There were a few standing walls but they were slowly getting around to the business of sitting. A light rash of greenery had crept up the tower and spread itself over the ragged landscape. The sun was trying to burn it off but mountains do longevity better than anyone, and that’s where the roots were, deep in the shaded cracks.
