Baby Blue

by Pol Koutsakis

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Aren’t you going to get some sleep?”

  “Now that I’m looking after her, no. When this whole thing is over, don’t worry, you’ll get the bill for all the extra face creams and eye moisturizers I’ll need to make myself battle-ready again.”

  “What battle are you fighting?”

  “The battle of my life. In the war against wrinkles.”

  I hadn’t slept either. I had also tossed and turned for hours, and when I finally did drift off, I’d dreamed that a baby was being pursued by two arms, my arms, I swear they were mine, and they were desperate to reach the baby because it was being submerged in pitch-black water; I couldn’t work out whether it was a lake or the sea. It was completely dark, the only light guiding me was coming from the baby itself, which seemed to be getting further and further away from me. Some battles you win simply because you can’t afford to lose them: I caught up with the baby, took it in my arms and held it as though I had been holding it for years. And slowly, my arms began to lift the baby out of the water. It was a large baby, a girl, with closed eyelids. It was calm and had relaxed into my arms as though it had no sense that it was drowning, as though the water was its natural environment, and the moment that it emerged above the surface, the moment that its eyes opened to look at me for the first time, I woke up and could smell Maria’s body lying next to me, and hear her breathing. Of course, she wasn’t there. But her presence was so overwhelming I was convinced that I could not have dreamed it. The baby, yes, that was a dream. But now I was fully awake and could still smell Maria next to me, and I even started to think that she had somehow got into the flat and had left again. I ran outside like a madman, leaping up the stairs three at a time, and went into her room. She wasn’t there, and there was absolutely no sign that anyone had been there at all. She was probably at her parents’ house. With her child. With our child. And miserable. She should be with her parents. She should be with someone. She should be with me, with me beside her. With me, who had got to the point where I was hallucinating about her. I tried her mobile for the hundredth time. Switched off. I did have her parents’ number. Yes. That would go well: “Hello, this is Stratos, the caretaker. Yes, that’s right – Maria’s old school friend. The one who didn’t know that the child she’s carrying was his. Could I speak to her, please?” I didn’t call. When you can’t put something right, you have to try to make sure that you don’t make it worse. Better to sit up all night waiting for daybreak thinking about how and why you managed to make such a mess of everything.

  “Tell Emma I’ll be over this evening. And that Angelino is getting stronger by the hour and we’ll soon be able to visit him. Is anyone else round there at the moment?”

  “Babis, of course.”

  Babis, also known as Big Babis, has been in love with Teri for years; he would do anything for her, despite the fact that there has never – as far as I know – been anything romantic between them. Teri puts him up occasionally when he’s between relationships and needs a shoulder to cry on, which was obviously the case now. I had found him asleep on her sofa when I took Emma round there. Teri says that the best way to cheer him up is to sit and play board games with him until they both drop. Big Babis is a nickname he got because he’s the same height as Teri – five foot five – and if he was a wrestler, he’d be in the featherweight category.

  A few years back, Teri transitioned, and with that Lefteris became Teri. It took us a while to get used to it. I don’t believe that Drag has ever really come to terms with it, even now. For some reason he could deal with a gay Lefteris, a very effeminate gay Lefteris, but the surgery was something he couldn’t cope with. He seemed able to accept the vagaries and mistakes in nature, but not any sort of human intervention to correct them. He went to great lengths to avoid using any gender pronouns when talking to or about Teri. If he called me and I said “I’m having coffee with Teri,” he would reply, “Say hi,” rather than “Say hello to her.” Aware as I was of how slowly Drag came round to situations that he didn’t naturally feel comfortable with, it was unlikely that he would ever adjust to Teri, not in this lifetime. What had cost him more than her transitioning was that we hardly ever got together any more, the three of us, to play cards and have all those petty arguments they used to have when they were friends of the same sex. That familiar cycle of getting together, fighting and making up, helped them feel that nothing had essentially changed since they were teenagers, and that the passing of all those years hadn’t touched them at all. They were immortal. Indestructible. Even I’d fallen for it.

  “How come you’re up at this hour?” she asked.

  “I thought we could go for a coffee. Lock Emma’s door, and if she wakes up and wants something, tell Babis to give us a ring.”

  “One of those silent coffees?”

  “They’re not silent. You talk. Non-stop,” I said.

  “Ah. That hurt. If I didn’t open that sweet, sensual mouth of mine occasionally, even the flies in that café would drop dead from boredom. What time?”

  “What are you doing now?”

  “I was going to wash my hair.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Shampoo. Conditioner. Then a long soak. Shall we say three hours?”

  “We’ll say one hour.”

  “Tyrant. Come and pick me up from the Varvakeio market. I need five minutes with Miltos.”

  Teri’s five minutes never approximate to anyone else’s concept of five minutes. People are always so excited to see her and have such a good time with her that they don’t let her leave – to be fair, she doesn’t try very hard either. I suspect that some people there wanted to do more than talk to her, but the community inside the covered market is a small one and it’s very hard to get away with much more than flirting inside there. It was particularly tricky trying to get away from Miltos in his canteen. Miltos was drowning in debt – he hadn’t paid any rent to the municipality since 2013 – but that was the least of his problems. Teri went down there as often as she could and gave him enough money to buy himself a bit of breathing space. It was supposedly a loan. At 0% interest. Because he was a friend, and because he had two small children, and because Teri had the money. Teri had been pretty loaded since her new love interest, a married intellectual, had demanded that she would be his and his alone. If Miltos shared my obsession with noir cinema, perhaps he would have used Robert Mitchum’s line in Angel Face, “You know something? You’re a pretty nice guy, for a girl.” But because he didn’t share my obsession and because he wanted to show Teri that he was grateful, Miltos would insist on giving her everything on the menu every time she turned up. And crisis or no crisis, he would produce over ten different cooked dishes every day, the first smelling better than the next. All the single men in the neighbourhood swore by Miltos’ delicious legendary bekris mezes and his moussaka – and by his tsipouro. Miltos, with his stomach hanging over his white apron, would brag that his tsipouro came straight from Mount Athos, from the same monastery that had first started distilling the drink back in the fourteenth century.

  It was ten o’clock by the time Teri decided to leave Miltos. Three young men who had been out all night – students, maybe – were sitting at the table next to ours, putting away their second helping of offal soup, adding healthy doses of chilli flakes to their bowls, the kind that you only ever find in Miltos’ restaurant these days. They didn’t look like they were in any hurry to leave. One of them shouted out an order for beef stew while stealing a glance at Teri.

  “Who’s up for another bowl of soup, then?” asked his neighbour, winking and grinning.

  “Make that two, Miltos!”

  We walked past the rows of fishmongers, greengrocers and grocers until we emerged from the market. I was wearing a woollen sweater and the weather was already ridiculing this choice by flooding the city in sunlight. Teri was in three-inch heels and a fitted red satin crepe dress, chosen apparentl
y because she didn’t like to be overdressed so early in the morning.

  “Where do you want to go?” I asked her.

  “Look, handsome, I was born for Kolonaki.”

  “And nowhere but Kolonaki.”

  “Ooh. Do I detect the subtlest note of irony? A small attempt at humour? Nowhere but Kolonaki. It’s absolutely dead there now. Not that there aren’t a lot of people around, and some of the cafés and bars still manage to fill up, sort of, but it just doesn’t have that je ne sais quoi about it any more. You know, that tacky new-money snobbishness. Feels like most of them are feeling so guilty for having coffee at Da Capo that they resist all malicious gossip. There’s a sadness hanging over the Athens of nothing, so much so that it might turn it into something.”

  “Did you come up with that?”

  “Course not. It’s one of Hermes’ lines. I just deliver it better than he does, and it sounds original, doesn’t it?”

  Hermes is Teri’s intellectual boyfriend. A professor at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences. He had once been a customer of hers – she was a very pricey call girl. He fell madly in love with her and stuck with her. Teri liked him, without being crazy about him, because he treated her like a princess. She said to me once, half-jokingly, that as soon as she had saved up enough money, she would hire me to get rid of Hermes’ wife so that she could replace her. “And because you’ve got that thing where you insist on justifying it all to yourself, I’ll root out some flaw or sin or whatever and pin it on her so that you’ll feel better about the whole thing,” she added.

  “Nice. Will you please tell me where you want to go?”

  “I want us to stay round here, or maybe somewhere in the direction of Monastiraki and go people-watching. There are always people around here. No matter how miserable they are, they’ll always come out and try to sell something or buy something at a bargain price. And they even manage to smile occasionally. Smiling isn’t taxed, EU scumbags!”

  Teri was virulently anti-austerity.

  “OK. Let’s go to the flea market,” I suggested.

  “Mmm. You’re actually brighter than you look. But then again, how hard can that be with a face like that?”

  We set off, walking down the same streets we had crossed hundreds of times since our childhood, streets which if you looked down on them from above would all look the same, just as busy as ever. But the life that filled the streets on our way was a very different life. The lives of people from different races, speaking different languages, would briefly intersect with the lives of Greeks when migrants stood on the street corners selling soap, candles, knock-off designer sunglasses, cheaply made children’s toys, pirate CDs, garlic ropes and cinnamon sticks to the locals and the foreigners who crowded round them to see what was on offer and to bargain down the price – many more than went into the local shops these days.

  “Do you know when these guys lose out by haggling?” Teri asked me, pointing to one of the African sellers, who had dozens of lighters set out in front of him.

  “When?”

  “Never! They are all brilliant salesmen. A salesman’s talent shows when he’s buying, not selling. You see, they pay so little for this stuff; the haggling is just a big act to make the customers feel they’ve got themselves a real bargain. However low the salesman goes, he’s still making a very tidy profit.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “One of my regulars told me, a couple of years ago.”

  “OK. OK. Spare me the details.”

  “You did ask. Anyway, if it was evening, I’d suggest going to Kolokotroni Street. Since nobody has any money any more, all those snooty shops with the designer labels have closed down and a whole world of bars of all sorts has sprung up in their place. Everybody can find enough cash for a drink. Have you been to Piazza, the one that’s just opened – with those gorgeous spicy cocktails and the even spicier barman?”

  “No.”

  “Ugh. You’ve always been such a killjoy – ever since we were young. I can’t for the life of me imagine why I love you so much.”

  I turned and smiled at her.

  Abyssinia Square in Monastiraki is one of the loveliest places in Athens. It took its name from the Ethiopians who lived there at one point. What makes it so attractive is the fact that you can enjoy your coffee with uninterrupted views of the Acropolis instead of all those massive high-rises you see from so many other cafés in the city, or you can walk through the side streets hoping to catch a glimpse of the Parthenon from the gaps between the buildings. For decades the square has hosted a Sunday bazaar, known to locals as the Yousourum, named after one of the old Jewish second-hand furniture dealers there, one of the first to set up in the square. A clever chap, around thirty years old and an eternal student at the Athens Polytechnic, sick of being supported by his parents, opened the café there, usurping the square’s name, and it turned out never to have an empty seat in it. Before we climbed the marble steps leading into the café, we walked round the square, where you can still find used furniture, clothes and shoes, along with the antique shops and stores selling musical instruments. Teri smiled at all the traders, standing there with blankets at the ready in case the heavens opened suddenly in the way they were forecast to do later that afternoon, commenting to me through her teeth that everything looked like a pile of old tat.

  “Let’s get a balcony table – how romantic is that?” she said teasingly as I sat down at one of the indoor tables, ducking to avoid colliding with one of their dangerously low-slung pendant lights.

  She laughed. Teri’s laugh sounded like gurgling water, and it was impossible not to smile. I asked the young pregnant waitress to bring me a hot chocolate, and Teri, after giving the matter a great deal of thought, eventually ordered a freddoccino special and commented to the waitress on how sexy she found the painting hanging next to us of the nude couple making out in the bathtub. She did manage to keep quiet long enough for us to take in the sight of the Observatory emerging between the cypress trees, and I promised myself that I would visit it one day soon. Till my next visit to the Yousourum, when I’d probably make the same promise again.

  “Spit it out. In detail. I want the whole story. When you brought Emma over, you effectively told me nothing.”

  I told her everything. While we were talking, I noticed the rest of the crowd in there – mostly couples, and a group of young men. I thought about how mundane their conversations would be. How normal. How removed from the story I was telling Teri.

  “Themis Raptas. I vaguely remember him, by sight, but it’s been a while. I can’t remember anything in particular about him; I think he’d done a piece on corrupt politicians that had upset a lot of people. Yes, that was him. But I wouldn’t stake my life on it. So you’re telling me that three years ago they had him killed, this Raptas man, and then for three years, nobody, and then they kill three more in the same way he was murdered?”

  “Mmm. And if we suppose that the cases are connected, what links Raptas, with his clean criminal record, and a bunch of paedophiles?”

  “But if they are not connected, isn’t this a bit too much of a coincidence? Just because someone has a clean record, it doesn’t follow that they are innocent. All it means is they’ve never been caught,” she said.

  “And then there’s Angelino, suddenly bumping up his security since he’s had Emma with him, and the attempted kidnapping – or murder – in his house.”

  “And don’t forget Raptas suddenly deciding to disappear and fall off the radar for so many years. One hell of a coincidence. I’m not sorry that all those paedophiles died, but something is going on here.”

  I nodded.

  “Are you sure it was the girl they were after?”

  “They weren’t interested in Angelino. He was only shot because he got in the way.”

  “So they might have killed Raptas to get at Emma?”

  “I did consider that, but it makes no sense. Raptas and Emma moved around in open public
spaces, so if anyone wanted to find her they would have done. But now, with Angelino, she was hidden and protected.”

  “So the target the first time was Raptas, and now it’s Emma?”

  “Yes. And because I haven’t got a clue as to why, I’m going to need your help.”

  “Are you telling me you didn’t invite me for coffee solely for the pleasure of my company?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  “You filthy dog; what do you want from me?”

  “I need to make use of all your contacts in the media.”

  Five minutes later and Teri had already made me an appointment with a make-up artist friend of hers at HighTV, Raptas’ old channel. Teri had worked in make-up herself for many years before reaching the conclusion that she could do a lot better in the oldest profession in the world, and had kept up with a few of her old friends from that time. Though she didn’t have any other contacts at the station, and I’d been hoping that she could put me in touch with some bigger players there, she did assure me that Dora, her ex-colleague, was in on all the gossip, and if there was anything to know about Raptas, she would know it.

  The waitress brought up our order and slowly moved away. Her belly was already swollen, and the job must have been a struggle for her. I looked at her and thought about Maria and how her belly was growing, and that I wasn’t with her, and that she didn’t want me to be.

  “She’s looking a bit like a meatball, that one,” said Teri, who was also watching her.

  “Yes, yes, she is,” I said, deep in thought about Maria.

  “Did you know that the female polar bear puts on about four hundred pounds in pregnancy?”

  “Oh, you’ve picked up Drag’s little fetish for throwing irrelevant facts into the conversation at the most random moments.”

  “Of course I have. Each of us carries the other three around inside us. All the time. Which means that somewhere inside you is a very happy, post-surgery woman, even if you don’t realize it.”