by Alex A King
“If I had a hose I could stop them like this.” Marika clicked her fingers. “They are rolling around too fast for me to twist their ears.”
Ugh. I pivoted on one high heel and marched away. Let the children fight. If professional killing didn’t work out for them there was always pro wrestling—if there was such a thing in Greece. Although, knowing what I knew about Greek history, if there was wrestling it probably happened naked.
Marika jogged to keep up with me. It was a lot of work hauling that arsenal in her bag.
“Don’t go waving those guns around,” I told her. “No shooting unless they’re shooting at us.”
“Do you think they will shoot at us?”
“I hope not.”
“Oh.” The word was tinged with disappointment. “I have never been in a shootout before.”
Yeah, the freedom was definitely getting to her. Marika was shaping up to be an adrenaline junkie stuffed in a stay-at-home mom’s container.
“Me either,” I said.
“Not even one? Americans have gunfights all over the place.”
“Not even one. You went to Disney World, did you see any gunfights?”
“No, but Takis bought guns from a man under an overpass as soon as we left the airport.”
I stopped to stare at her, openmouthed.
“He is very protective of us. He wanted to be prepared.”
I blinked. She’d rendered me speechless.
“Do not worry, he sold them back before we left.”
I shook my head. “I wasn’t worried.”
We took the elevator up. Last night Xander and I had taken the stairs. Only a masochist would climb five floors in heels. What if I needed to run later and my feet hurt?
The elevator hummed to the fourth floor. Like the floor above, there was only one apartment. The door hung open. People dressed in black were smoking in the dim hallway. Some of them seemed respectable; but who was I to judge? If there was anyone respectable in my family tree I hadn’t shaken the branches hard enough to meet them yet. Inside the apartment someone was cooking up a feast fit for sending off a dismembered dead man.
I held my breath, lurched toward the open door, Marika on my heels.
People glanced at us but their interest didn’t stick. I had done my best to make sure I didn’t resemble the pictures in the newspaper. For starters, I wasn’t black-and-white, although my dress was black. I’d picked up the black sheath in the Volos outpost of Marks & Spencer for Cookie’s wake. It went perfectly with a pair of heels I could easily use to gouge out an eye—and possibly a heart—if necessary. My hair was slicked back into a bun, and I’d gone for my best no-makeup makeup. The me in the newspaper had been mostly barefaced, except for the dinner with Melas, when I’d dumped enough mascara on my lashes to sink a battleship. It hadn’t escaped my notice that if Fridas was carrying around my picture then he probably wasn’t the only one in his gang aware of my existence.
The apartment’s floor plan was identical—as far as I could tell—to the one above. The awning was down; the light was arm-wrestling darkness, and so for now they’d settled on maintaining a dense gloom, the winner to be determined at a later date. The living room was thick with mourners, none of whom seemed to be outwardly too upset by the elephant in the middle of the room, which, in this case, was a coffin. The furniture had all been pushed to the walls to accommodate the hulking casket. Florists around the city probably wished gangsters like Fridas died more often; all their flowers were here, clumped together in this one newly built botanical garden.
Cleopatra sidled up to us. The heat had melted her into a snack-sized Robert Smith. Her dress was a black pillowcase.
“Can I stand with you two?” she asked me.
“Uh, no? Go away.”
She glanced around like a small animal pushed into an unfriendly corner. “I don’t know anybody here.”
Interesting. I had figured her for a career criminal, like the rest of them.
“So go back to your car. Or mingle. Meet new people. Make friends.”
“It’s a wake, not a party.”
“You’re dressed for a party,” I said.
Marika checked her out, her nose wrinkled. “What she is dressed for is a street corner.”
Cleopatra didn’t look happy. “I heard that.”
“You were supposed to.”
A thought popped into my head. “I guess you can stand with us, but you have to work for it.”
She narrowed her eyes. With all the goop on her lids I wasn’t sure she’d be able to open them fully again. It was some seriously risky behavior. “How?”
“Ask around, find out why Fridas had my photo in his pocket.”
She glanced around at the wake’s other attendees. We weren’t exactly swimming in reputable waters. Too many shiny suits, too many women with dead eyes, who looked like they knew the most soluble brand of body glitter.
“Was he a criminal?”
“What do you think?” I asked her.
“I think I’m going to stand by this wall until you leave, then follow you.”
“Thanks for nothing,” I said.
She flashed her teeth. “Anytime.”
Kyria Frida was over by the refreshment table, scanning the crowd for anomalies. I tried to look like I belonged, but I guess I’d gone too tasteful on the makeup because she lifted her arm, pointed her finger right at me.
“You!” she commanded.
Either she was a witch with very little power or people didn’t care, because there was no parting of the sea as everyone stopped to gawp at me. They went on with the business of doing business. Funerals and wakes seemed like a good place to gather businessmen of a certain kind in one room. Melas had commented on the phenomenon at Cookie’s wake.
Still, I froze in place. My feet were disobeying my head again—it was screaming at them to run fast, that a way.
“You,” she said again. This time her voice seemed to be traveling from a shorter distance.
“Sweet Baby Jesus,” I said. “She’s coming over, isn’t she?”
Marika looked her over. “Who is that?”
“The deceased’s mother.”
“She does not look happy to see you. What did you do?”
“Nothing,” I squeaked.
“Uh-huh. I know what nothing looks like, and it does not look like something that would interest a charging bull. Don’t worry, I have supplies, remember?”
I remembered. They were a last resort. As Kyria Frida cut her way between the bodies, like a battleship navigating the Panama Canal, I felt all the other resorts evaporate.
“You!” she said, planting herself in front of me. “The putana from my son’s bed.”
Marika opened her mouth to protest on my behalf, then the words sank in. “Bed? What bed?”
“There was no bed,” I said.
“Lies!” Kyria Frida pointed to one of her Shar-Pei eyes. “I saw you myself. You had that man on top of you.”
“Man? What man?” Marika asked me.
“There was no man.” I tried to give Marika a tell-you-later look but I wasn’t sure the message was penetrating.
The old woman squinted at me. I was a bug on a pin. “Now that I am seeing you, I know your face from somewhere else. Where have I seen it?”
“Nowhere,” I said. “I’ve got one of those faces.”
“How did you know my son, eh?”
There was a spot and I was standing on it. All that was missing was the bright light.
Hands on hips I said, “It’s a secret, but I can tell you I’ve seen his penis.” No point mentioning it was in a box at the time, nowhere near his body.
“Probably that is true. I bet you have seen a lot of them.”
Marika threw her two cents in. “I have not seen his penis, but I heard about it.”
Cleopatra materialized beside us. “I heard it was big enough to feed a whole family.”
I raised my eyebrow and paired it with a stink-eye. She gave me a tiny shrug. H
er face was serious but I wasn’t fooled—she was grinning like Cheshire Cat on the inside.
The old woman shook her head. “He was not his father’s son,” she said sadly. Her face hardened again. It looked like a bag of decorative lava rocks. “Who are you?”
I pulled a name out of thin air. “Dina Manoli.”
“The Manoli family in Kala Nera or the Manoli family in Agria?”
“Thessaloniki.”
She tilted her chin up then down. “Never heard of them.”
That’s because they didn’t exist—at least not with me dangling from their family tree. Moving right along … I was here for a reason, and that reason was fact-finding. So far I hadn’t discovered a single useful fact.
“I’m sorry about your son,” I said, putting on my best mourning face. “I can’t imagine anyone wished him any harm.”
Her serpentine eyes narrowed to dangerous slits. They had a lot of help from the heavy load of wrinkled laundry above them. “My boy was the head of a gang. Everybody wished him harm.”
“So … no suspects?”
“Everybody is a suspect.”
My body wanted to shuffle and squirm, but I gritted my teeth together and pressed on. “If you had to guess?”
“Everybody. Him.” She nodded to the nearest black-clad back. “Him. Her. That man. His wife.” She was nodding in a circle. “When you are important people want you to live or they want you to die—and that changes depending on how they will benefit. Maybe you killed him, eh? How do you benefit from his death?”
“She gets to live,” Cleopatra said.
It was like watching a solar eclipse. As the moon slid between the sun (her) and the earth (me), her anger unpacked and pinned itself to her face.
“You are the American!” she hissed. “My son wanted you!”
A couple of mourners glanced over, but their interest evaporated fast. All the good drama was scheduled to happen tomorrow, graveside.
“Now would be a good time to go,” I whispered to Marika.
“Do we need the supplies?”
“Not yet.”
“Are you sure? Because the old woman does not look happy.”
“No supplies,” I said. “Not unless they flaunt their supplies first.”
The old woman pulled a gun out of her black apron. She pointed it right at me. “My son had one last wish.”
Yikes!
“Okay, now we need the supplies,” I told Marika.
Marika opened her bag, began rifling through its contents. Metal and plastic clanked together. “Fully automatic or semi automatic?”
“What’s the difference?”
She slapped a handgun on my chest. “Speed.”
“Where I come from wishes are for sick kids, not criminals,” I told Kyria Frida.
“My son was sick. Who else becomes a criminal?”
“Your son was a gangster who got his manhood chopped off.”
“He did not!”
“Yes,” I said, “he did.”
Marika helped the situation by miming scissors chopping air.
“There is nothing wrong with my son’s poutsa!” she screamed.
Instant cosmic mute button. Conversation died. Everyone stopped in their tracks. People in the hall shuffled in to check out the drama, and they, too, fell silent.
The four of us were standing off to the side, but we were the center of attention.
Suddenly, the room exploded with the sound of dozens of guns coming out of hiding. That mean girl inside me said, Tag, you’re it. I hated to say it but she was right. Every last muzzle was homed in on me.
The lump in my throat was boulder-sized. It took a serious gulp to knock it aside. “Whoever killed him cut it off.”
“Why would they do that?” she demanded. “What kind of monster does that?”
Probably her son had been the kind of monster who did that all the time.
A man pushed his way into our tense quartet. He had a face like the dead man, only not so dead. “What’s wrong, Mama?”
“These putanas, they say your brother’s murderer cut off his poutsa.”
“Because it’s true,” I said.
“If that was true the police would have told us,” he said. “Wait—I know you.”
I wasn’t about to tell them this case was linked to the murders of other heads of criminal organizations, or that they all tied back to my family in some way. If the cops hadn’t shared that information I figured there was a good reason.
“I was in the newspaper,” I said.
“He is right there,” Marika said. “Go look. See for yourselves.”
Our heads swiveled to check out the casket sitting serenely in the center of the room.
“It’s not like the casket is closed,” I said reluctantly, hoping Marika and I could glide out the front door before they unveiled the dead man’s crotch. It wasn’t that I disbelieved, but I knew a good mortician could work magic with putty and paint.
The room held its breath.
Kyria Frida waved her gun as us. “You, you, and you. The three cheap putanas. You first.”
“Who are you calling cheap? She’s cheap.” I pointed to Cleopatra. “But we’re high-end.”
“She does look cheap,” the old woman said.
“Hey,” Cleopatra said.
The brother waggled his eyebrows at her. “You need a job? We can make you disappear from Greece and reappear on a rich man’s yacht in the Mediterranean. We can even give you a new name. How do you feel about … Aurora?”
“How do you feel about snakes?” she asked him. The look on her face said that any second now she was going to shake her asp at him.
The crowd parted as we moved en masse to where Petros Fridas lay waiting on everyone in the room to show him respect. Greek Orthodox custom was to kiss the dead goodbye after they’d already hopped on the ferry to Hades.
Fridas had come a long way since yesterday morning, when he was chilling out at the morgue. No longer waxy and gray, he had a lifelike flush. His cheek was covered in lipstick. There was a lot of it in this room, most of it in non-standard mourning colors. There were places for fuchsia; a wake usually wasn’t one of them. His suit was a severe gray with that criminal sheen. His shirt was black. His tie was a lesser black. Someone had fastened a gardenia to his lapel with a gold pin.
“Who is going to check?” the brother asked.
Everyone moved closer. At the same time, no one stepped up.
“You do it,” his mother said.
He jerked his head up and down so violently that he could have been a Pez dispenser. “I don’t want to look at his poutsa. What if it makes me gay?”
Yeah, that wasn’t how it worked. “There isn’t one to look at,” I said.
“We will see,” Kyria Frida said darkly.
“I’m not part of this, so I’m going—“ Cleopatra started. Several guns turned to face her. “Never mind. I guess I will stand right here.”
A bead of sweat squeezed itself out of a pore on my forehead. It went for a smooth roll down my nose before ski jumping off the tip. The Fridas family had money—illegally gained—but it hadn’t invested in air conditioning.
My jaw clenched. There was nothing useful to be learned here—not now that the cats had all escaped the bag. Anyone who knows cats knows that if you want to keep them in you put them in a box, not a bag. Cats can’t say no to boxes. It’s a lesser law of the universe. “Somebody look.”
Mother and son stared at me.
“No,” I said. “Not a chance in hell.”
“You have seen it before,” the old woman said. “You said so.”
In a box—but I didn’t say that. There would be questions, and I wasn’t in an answering mood. I wanted to go back to Grandma’s and hit the shower, preferably with a hammer.
I turned to Marika. “You’ve got four sons and Takis. You could do it.”
“I do not touch criminals,” she said. “I mean, I do not touch criminals if I’m not married
to them or related by marriage.”
“Don’t look at me,” Cleopatra said. “I don’t trust the things. They always go off when you least expect it.”
I blinked. The movement was one of my brain’s lesser processing mechanisms.
“We are in a room full of working girls,” Marika said. “Get one of them do it.”
Before the room had been silent. What it was now was devoid of breath. A great vacuum had sucked out all the air, and the person holding that vacuum was Marika. I had a sudden sinking feeling that the women I’d mistaken for hookers and strippers were girlfriends and wives.
My elbow nudged her elbow. “I don’t think they work for anyone.”
“What? Look at them! I know prostitutes when I see them. I am not judging,” she said, hand on heart. “Times are hard right now, and maybe you have children to feed, and who knows where their fathers are? On a ship? In the army? Who knows? A woman has got to do what she has to do to survive.”
“Marika,” I said.
“What?”
“They’re not what you think they are.”
Her mouth formed a perfect O. “My mistake. It happens. My vision is not so good.” She reached into her big bag. “Where are my glasses?”
“Forget about the glasses,” I said.
“Good,” she whispered. “Because I don’t wear glasses. Imagine if I had to produce them.”
“I will look,” Kyria Frida said, ignoring her. Her gun traveled around the room in a wide arc. “You are all a bunch of sisters.”
Which was the Greek was of saying we were effeminate men. Never mind that minutes ago she’d tried to foist the job off on someone else.
“Open the bottom half,” she barked at her younger son.
He jumped to do her bidding, pushed up the lower section of the coffin. Whoever had dressed Petros Fridas had shunned formal footwear and shoved his feet into monster’s foot slippers. They were big, they were fluffy, they were purple with black toenails.
His mother took a deep breath. She shoved the gun back into her apron pocket, hitched up her dead son’s jacket before tackling the zipper. She peered inside. Zipped him back up. Rearranged his suit jacket. Dropped the lower half of the lid.
“Either someone chopped it off,” she said, “or somewhere along the way my son became my daughter.”
