Baby Blue

by Pol Koutsakis

  This sudden contact scared her even more. Her body spasmed but she did what she was told. I took the two knives from the worktop and two quick paces took me to the west door of the kitchen, which was the one closer to the gunshots. I opened it slightly so that if someone wanted to burst in they would be starting off at a disadvantage, not knowing what to expect on the other side. I peered through the crack in the door left by the hinges. Three masked men in black were crossing the living room and heading towards the kitchen. One of them was holding a big handgun, probably a .45 Colt. The other two were carrying Kalashnikovs with silencers. They looked nothing like Angelino’s other investors. His heavies were nowhere to be seen – neither was Jimmy. Given the shots that were fired, the most likely explanation was that they were no longer with us. But I couldn’t understand why they had opened the door to strangers, let alone masked gunmen. I wasn’t going to work that one out any time soon. In a few seconds they’d be in here.

  “What’s going on?”

  I could hear Angelino’s voice but couldn’t see him. I reckoned that he was probably at the top of the staircase on the first floor. The two masked gunmen swung round to pepper him with bullets. I watched his body come hurtling down the staircase and land motionless on the floor at the bottom.

  “The girl! I’ll wait here for the other guy,” snarled the third one – possibly their boss – and pointed to the kitchen door.

  “The other guy” was probably me. They obviously knew I was here, but didn’t seem to want to track me down. They weren’t interested in me so long as I didn’t get in their way. The same went for Angelino too, it seemed. Their boss didn’t even give him a second look. They had come for Emma. In the space of just a few seconds, all the alcohol in my bloodstream had been replaced by adrenalin. And experience. A blessed combination.

  I took Emma by the arm and placed her flush against the recess in the wall close to the door on the north side so that she wouldn’t be visible from the west. I ran through the options. There weren’t many. In any face-to-face encounter, whatever I did, it was three against one and they were much better armed than I was. There was only one way to deal with this. And that would mean putting Emma in danger. But anything was better than waiting here for them to come and kill us.

  “Do you know your way around this floor?” I whispered.

  She nodded.

  “Do you think you can make a run for it into your room and lock the door behind you?”

  “Yes.”

  “OK. When I tell you, run.”

  I was using her as bait. It was risky, but it was my only real chance. They would see her, if only for a second before the wall opposite would give her cover. If they were very quick, they might be able to shoot in time. That is, if they had been ordered to. I wasn’t sure that they had. But one thing was certain – they wouldn’t be expecting her to appear from there. They probably didn’t even know about the second door to the kitchen and were expecting to do all the work from the other door. The chance that they would hit her in their surprise was close to zero. The risk was small. And I had no choice.

  “Now!”

  She bounded out of the kitchen like a deer, her movements confident and fluent.

  “Over there!” came the voice of one of our visitors, followed immediately by the sound of footsteps as they ran after her.

  Nobody fired. Either they weren’t quick enough, or they had been ordered not to. I let the first one run past me, and the minute the second one appeared I grabbed him from behind and used the long-bladed knife to slice his throat with one clean cut, not letting him fall. Immediately after that I got the first one in the back of the neck. Luckily I’m a better aim with knives than I am with guns. The blade caught him at the base of the neck; in at the back and out the front. He moved briefly, giddily, from left to right, making gurgling sounds like bubbles bursting as he tried to draw breath. He attempted to grab hold of the knife and brush it off him as though it was some kind of annoying insect that was bothering him. And then he collapsed. The man I was still holding on to was well built and proved to be an excellent shield. Before I was completely sure that I had finished off the first killer, their boss had fired three shots at me, all of them landing on my makeshift shield. He didn’t have time to fire a fourth. I wrenched the Kalashnikov out of my shield’s hand, took aim above his neck to avoid any nasty surprises from bulletproof vests and sent the scum to join his friends in hell, which does not exist.

  The entire scene, from the point when Emma ran out of the kitchen, couldn’t have lasted longer than half a minute. I rushed over to Angelino. I found a pulse. He was unconscious, but there was a pulse. He was bleeding from the forehead, but the wound was quite a small one, probably caused by the fall. The problem was the bullets lodged inside him. His blue sweatshirt was drenched in blood. I lifted it up to see where they had entered. Four in the chest and ribs, all on the right side. Every breath he took inched him closer to death because the air he was breathing in through the hole in his chest would eventually cause his lungs to collapse. The air compresses the lung, stopping it from inflating normally. His pulse was quickening while his heart tried to maintain a stable arterial pressure. I then remembered seeing a box of cling film on top of the microwave in the kitchen.

  I always felt like this after a shoot-out: I was there and I wasn’t there. As though one part of me was observing from afar, spectator and perpetrator in one. I ran into the kitchen, grabbed the cling film and wound it round Angelino’s chest several times, hoping that way to stop any air from getting into his chest cavity. I turned him onto his side, over from his injured right side, before picking up the phone on the wall and calling an ambulance. I used my mobile to call Drag and hoped that the ambulance would arrive in the next ten minutes. If it didn’t, Angelino wasn’t likely to make it. There was nothing more that I could do to help him, and I had to get away with Emma before the police found us here. I pulled the masks off the gunmen’s faces. I’d never seen them before. Just as I’d suspected, they were all wearing Kevlars underneath their clothes. They were the real deal. Professional hitmen on serious business. I moved towards the front door and saw Jimmy’s body lying there next to one of the heavies. What I wasn’t expecting to see was the body of the other one, Zissis, apparently unharmed at the top of the staircase with his trousers down, looking like he’d just come out of the toilet. He stared down at his former colleagues and at me, standing over them holding the Kalashnikov. He looked at me in shock and raised his arms in surrender.

  “Put your arms down and pull your trousers up, for God’s sake!” I shouted. “I didn’t kill them.”

  He did what he was told and came down the stairs, slowly, nervously, as though trying to work out what was going on because he didn’t dare ask. As he came closer, I asked myself again how on earth they had got into the place. And why, when they knew Angelino and I were in the house, they hadn’t sent anyone after us but had gone straight for Emma. It didn’t make sense; they were professionals. Zissis was getting closer, still fiddling with his trousers, which seemed to be causing him some difficulty. Somebody must have been sent to take care of us, to make sure they wouldn’t have any trouble getting away. And somebody must have told them where Emma was, that she’d be downstairs. Zissis was now about thirty feet away from me, and was clearly working out what he was going to say. The whole thing reeked of betrayal. Someone had let them in and had gone upstairs to kill me and Angelino but hadn’t been quick enough. And now he was putting on this act to catch me off guard. I deliberately lowered the Kalashnikov a little more and leaned my body in towards the small table where the guns they’d taken off me earlier were lying, giving the impression I was relaxed and not expecting to be attacked. Zissis was now fifteen feet away.

  “Yes, but —” he started to say and whipped out a gun from his calf, from inside those supposedly awkward trousers.

  It all reeked of betrayal, and the traitor himself was now so close he was taking a load of bullets to the face. I
f he had any next of kin, they would struggle to identify him. I did not spare any expense with the bullets. Two or three of them went straight through his skull, lodging themselves with a dull smack into the door a few feet away. I rushed back to Angelino, who had lousy instincts when it came to hiring staff, however talented he was at sniffing out information. And he was paying for it. His pulse was even weaker now.

  I went over to Emma’s door and knocked.

  “It’s Stratos. All clear now,” I said as calmly as I could.

  She unlocked the door. “What about Angelino?” she asked, her blue eyes fixed on mine, penetrating my soul. How on earth do you tell someone who has already lost so much that they are about to lose their second father too?

  “He’s hurt. But he’ll be fine.”

  She took my hand. I looked at it. It was steady, and looked three times the size of hers. A death-dealing hand holding the hand with a magic touch.

  “You’re lying.”

  By “magic” they mean legerdemain, Angelino had told me. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe Emma was a real magician. Maybe she did know everything.

  “Take me to him.”

  I took her to him. Time was really tight. We should have already left, but I took her over to him anyway. She fell to the floor next to him, smelled him, caressed him, moving her hand lightly over the cling film I had wrapped round him. I gave her my hand to help her up. She was shaking.

  “He’s hurt, but he will be fine,” I said, stressing the last three words of that sentence with an emphasis so strong it resembled shouting, hoping in the process I’d convince myself too.

  13

  “How’s Angelino?” I was on the phone to Drag. He had told me the second I answered it that the cybercrime division had no records of Raptas, no evidence of paedophile tendencies or anything else.

  I knew Angelino was still in intensive care forty-eight hours after what the media had christened the Chateaubriand Street Massacre. He’d needed nine units of blood before they could operate, and while the transfusion was taking place they had cut open his chest and inserted tubes between his ribs to relieve the air pressure. The worst damage had been caused by a bullet that had entered through his right armpit and travelled a few centimetres lower down before hitting a rib and lodging itself three and a half inches into his right lung. This bullet had proved to be the hardest to remove. When they saw that it was lodged so deep, the doctors even considered leaving it there, and would have done so had they not judged that the risk of future infection from the fibres that had attached themselves to it was greater than the risk of surgery.

  But the blow to his head when he fell down the stairs turned out to be much more serious than I had initially thought, and much more serious than the bullets sitting inside him. Angelino’s body had responded brilliantly to surgery, but his brain had still not recovered. The doctors were completely unable to give any kind of prognosis – no idea when or if he would come out of his coma.

  That much I did know. I also knew the police were trying to find out who had killed the three murderers inside the house and that nobody had left any fingerprints anywhere. That’s because I had been careful to wipe the gun and the knife before I left. But I had to find out how Angelino was getting on so I could tell Emma. When I persuaded her to leave the house with me before the police arrived she had made me promise not to lie to her about Angelino’s condition. “Not about Angelino, not about anything,” I’d told her. I had no intention of keeping my word. I resolved to protect her from absolutely anyone and anything, including the truth if necessary. It hadn’t been that hard to persuade her to leave because Angelino had warned her that if anything ever happened to him, she should try to find me, and had given her my phone number. Emma had asked him what kind of thing he imagined might happen to him, and he had been vague and general enough in his reply to stop her from worrying.

  It might not have been difficult to get her to leave with me, but it was turning out to be almost impossible to get her to go to sleep until I reassured her after one whole day that Angelino was out of danger and they were keeping him sedated to reduce the pain after the operation.

  Drag gave me the lowdown. “It’s looking tough for Angelino, but there’s hope that he’ll pull through. The next few days will be critical. The doctors are saying that he’s made of solid stuff and they’re hoping his brain will respond.”

  “Life on the streets makes you strong.”

  “Hmm. Any idea how we’re going to proceed with this case?” he asked me.

  “None.”

  “This tends to happen to us often.”

  “But we break through in the end.”

  “Till some day we won’t.”

  “You think that day will come?” I asked him.

  “No. But my horoscope tells me to be modest these days. I also have an idea on how to proceed. I’ll speak to the girl as soon as you let me know where you’re keeping her.”

  He’d already asked me this and I had replied by asking him in turn about Angelino, knowing full well that he’d get back to the question that was eating him up.

  “Which part of ‘no’ did you not understand the first time?”

  “The part that tells me that suddenly you don’t trust me any more.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “No. First you get rid of your transmitter, and then you hide our key witness.”

  Drag was an excited child around gadgets. He was obsessed with them and always had to buy them. But owning them is not enough for him; he insists on using them as much as possible. A few years ago we both started using a microscopic transmitter, about the size of a chickpea. We wore them under our arches; they didn’t bother our feet and they transmitted our positions to each other. They could also send out an SOS if our footsteps followed a certain pattern. For the past two days mine had been lying in a drawer enjoying a well-earned rest.

  “Don’t forget I’m a key witness too. And I’ve told you everything I know, including everything that Emma’s told me, which is precisely nothing. She has no idea why anyone would want to kidnap her, or kill her for that matter.”

  “The more you talk to her, the more likely she is to come out with something useful. Protecting her like this is only harming the case. If we do get to the bottom of this, it will be through interrogations.”

  “Kostas – you’ll get nothing out of her. And you’ll probably put your foot in it and say something she shouldn’t hear.” I hardly ever used his Christian name, and only when there was a reason. This was a reason.

  “Me? Put my foot in it?”

  “Yes. You. Put your foot in it. You’re not the most discreet man alive, and I don’t want you talking to her about Themis or about Angelino.”

  “But she might know something that will unlock all these cases for us – or at least a few of them.”

  “I don’t even want you to try to persuade her to talk. She’s been through a hell of a lot – much more than anybody should ever have to. If there’s something you want to ask, ask me, and I’ll ask her myself if I get the chance.”

  “If you get the chance! Stratos, Athens is buzzing with this. You’ve left six dead bodies and one half-dead body behind you. The TV news is playing scenes from Scarface and talking about the mafia takeover of the city and the incompetent police force. Do you know I had the Prime Minister on the phone? The Prime Minister! Not his sidekicks. The Prime Minister, telling me how concerned he was and how much faith he had in me. That was just before he made that public statement trying to calm everyone down. He trusts me, even though I’ve swiped all her things you asked me to rescue from the crime scene and brought them to you. And after all that, are you really refusing to let me speak to the only person we have who might actually know something?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, what?”

  “Yes, I refuse.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever once in twenty-five years told you to go to hell,” he answered before the line went dead.


  14

  Before the phone really started ringing, Teri had answered it.

  “Teri Berry. Speed. Reliability. Quality. A very good day to you.”

  “‘Berry’ from Berikis?”

  “Berry from Berry Berry Good. And from Walter Berry, I always loved that guy, the way he ran around the court. Goofy reincarnated into a basketball player.”

  “How’s Emma?”

  My first thought as we left Chateaubriand Street was to take Emma to my flat. Maria was away, so I could sleep up there and Emma could use my bed. It was a pretty safe bet – the security systems I’d installed make it practically impossible for anyone to break into my flat. But there were two serious drawbacks: if Maria came home, I would have to tell her everything, and that would make her feel even more vulnerable about the dangers her relationship with me brought; the second was loneliness. Emma would have to spend big chunks of the day all alone while I was out trying to get to the bottom of who was behind the attack on Angelino, what had happened to Themis and whether the two cases were connected.

  My second thought was Teri. That would deal with the problem of loneliness, and as for security, I’d spent the past year turning her two-storey house in Galatsi into a mini fortress. That was after both of us had come within inches of our lives there when those two psychotic bastards came after us. The only real drawback was that Teri couldn’t let on to Drag that Emma was there. When we got to her house, while Emma was spending time slowly getting to know her new bedroom, I explained to Teri why Drag must never find out. “As if,” she said. “As if I’d let that idiot come round here and upset the girl.”

  That was a relief, because there was no Plan C as none of my business acquaintances were trustworthy enough; the only people I could trust were my three old school friends: Maria, Drag and Teri. And these days, two out of three of them weren’t exactly my biggest fans.

  “She wants to see Angelino. And you. She’s asleep. It hasn’t been long. Since about six this morning. I could hear her tossing and turning all night,” came Teri’s reply.