“I’m not interested in telling the world how we live up here. The world isn’t interested either. They’ll read what you write over coffee, and they’ll shake their heads like they get it. But they don’t get it. They never will. They don’t need to.”
“We can try to explain it to them, though,” I said, playing the journalist even though I knew she was right.
“Yes. I suppose some of them might be moved by it and cry. From their eyes.”
“From their eyes. What do you mean?”
“The only crying you should take seriously is the sort that comes out of the mouth. The rest is just for people who think they are sensitive. It makes them feel better before they turn to the next page. But I said I would talk for Antonis’ sake. So, what do you want to know?”
“Why don’t you go to one of the rehabilitation centres?”
“Because I don’t want to go to a rehabilitation centre. They have rules there. Up here, I make the rules. Next question.”
“Do you like it here?”
“Have I got a choice? Next question.”
“Do you live alone?”
“Yes.”
Her face hardened when she said this. And she didn’t try to move me on to my next question this time. But I did. I asked her a series of anodyne questions of a very general nature before I brought the conversation round to Themis.
“I do remember Themis. Not him exactly, but yes. Details of his face. His eyes. They were very watery. Very human, even though he was living like an animal.”
“Do you remember anyone he’d talk to – on a regular basis? A friend? I’m looking for someone who knew him well, so I can talk to them about that routine he had – the Chaplin Tramp one?”
“There was someone who would come and see him. Yes – Vaios was his name. Strange character, but at least he took the trouble to come. Most people here haven’t got anyone.”
I asked her to describe him for me; her description was just as vague and general and useless as Argyris’. But at least I had a name now.
“I remember the girl too. She would sometimes play with —” She cut herself off, pursing her lips. “Will there be anything else?” she asked, as though she wanted to banish her sadness.
“How long have you been living alone?”
“Since it became necessary.” Her answer was sharper than a knife freshly off a whetstone.
“Sonia …,” said Antonis, his voice barely audible. Anyone standing at any distance from him wouldn’t even have realized he had said anything. Sonia took a deep breath, scratched her face with her chewed fingernails, looked straight through me as though I was no longer visible to her.
“Since it became necessary. Since I took them to the orphanage.”
There are some people who you can almost feel breaking down in front of your eyes. They say one thing, and even if they don’t start crying, even if they give nothing away, you realize that at that moment they are beginning to evaporate. Just like Sonia was doing now. If you saw them literally melting away, or being burned alive, it would make perfect sense. I felt ashamed for making her go through all this, but I had to stay in role and be the journalist who really wanted the story.
“What do you mean?”
Sonia repositioned me in her field of vision. “Let’s get this straight. No details. You can use my name. Sonia’s not my real name anyway. But you will not mention the ages of my children; you will not describe me; nothing. You will not put anything in there that could help anyone identify me.”
“Agreed.”
“It was two years ago. A boy and a girl. Seven and six. I said I was their aunt and that their mother had died and I couldn’t take care of them. I had primed them to say the same thing. I went to see them one time after that – from a distance, and made sure they couldn’t see me. They looked happy. They were playing and laughing. So I never went back. Some things are just too painful. At first, when we started living on the streets, at the beginning of the crisis, I had them up here with me. I still sent them to school and they never told anyone that we were living in a cave. They kept their distance from the other kids, so no one ever asked. I still had some friends back then who would let them shower at their place in the morning on their way to school so they wouldn’t smell. They got them all the books and pencils and things they needed, but they’ve all left now. Gone abroad to find work. They couldn’t keep it together here. In the end the children started fainting from hunger at school. The headmistress found out that the phone number I’d given her didn’t exist. She told them to tell me that she would call social services if I didn’t go to the school and talk to her. What a bitch. What a cow, I thought back then. I didn’t send them in for a week. But then I thought about it and realized she was right. I was keeping them with me without being able to feed them. Why? What kind of love is that? So I made up my mind and took them down to the orphanage. I did all the paperwork too, giving my consent for their adoption if the right people came along. They’re lovely kids. They never once complained through all of this. But they begged me not to take them there. They promised they’d never ask for anything, not for food, not for nothing. When I left them there I told them they’d grow up into fine young people, beautiful and strong and that I would visit them all the time. And if I got a job, I would come and get them. I lied. I don’t want them to see me again. I want them to forget I ever existed.”
17
Sitting in the back seat of a taxi on the way back to Galatsi, I tried to come up with answers: answers for Emma, who would want to know when she’d be able to visit Angelino; answers for Drag about what was going on with the paedophile murders; and answers for myself. Who had Themis Raptas been, and who had Angelino been so scared of that he had taken all those security measures to protect himself? And answers for Maria, about our future. I tried to convince myself that I shouldn’t let this complete inability to come up with anything worry me too much. The first step was to understand the questions. If you understand the questions, the answers inevitably follow. They have to.
The more I listened to homeless people talking, the more convinced I became that taking a young child to live with you up there is not something you’d do out of some romantic notion or other, or some knee-jerk rejection of so-called civilized society or a wish to discover the meaning of life. You wouldn’t even do it if you were desperate and couldn’t find work. You’d only do it to try and escape something. My problem was that the only thing that could possibly explain why Themis Raptas had done what he did was pederasty. We had our suspicions, but not a shred of evidence, and very little chance of finding any.
I arrived at Teri’s at eight. Babis opened the door for me, looking uninterested as ever. To be fair, I think he always looked like that, whoever he was with. It was just that when he was with me, he made a real effort to look even more bored, just to make me feel like an intruder. He wasn’t happy about my relationship with Teri because he couldn’t believe that somebody could be friends with Teri without having an erotic interest in her. In his eyes, she was the ultimate woman, so much so that he, who had never lifted a finger to help anyone in his life, had turned into Teri’s man Friday, helping the unaccompanied minors at the detention centre in Amygdaleza. They worked tirelessly trying to get other charitable organizations on board and to get doctors and psychologists involved, seeing that the state had given up and these children were forever trying to escape from the centre. And most of them would end up in prostitution. Twenty of them had already been transferred from Amygdaleza to the newly painted house on the west side of town, thanks mainly to the efforts of Teri and Babis. Babis visited them regularly to check that things were slowly improving for them. After all, these were children who had seen their parents and siblings die in Syria and Pakistan and were often self-harming or refusing to walk. Teri never visited the children who left. She took care of the ones that were still there, in what was supposed to be a refuge but resembled the worst kind of prison: no mattresses, no pillows, no bas
ic toilets or showers – and no hope for the future.
“Teri’s in the guest room with the girl,” Babis said.
I nodded and went through, after first making sure to leave my shoes in the entrance hall, one of Teri’s non-negotiables. She’s not an obsessive but hates doing housework. The living room, like the rest of the place, was covered in fitted carpets, a relic of her grandmother, who had left her the place. As I crossed the living room, which was full of tiny glass sculptures, past Teri’s bedroom to the guest room, I felt the exhaustion of the day getting the better of me. I was sweating. My legs were beginning to protest at all the walking they’d been doing that day, and this together with my irritation at how slowly this case was progressing, clouded my judgement to the point where the only thing I didn’t want to do – that is, interrogate Emma – seemed to be my only hope.
The door was closed. I knocked gently. There was no answer. I’m completely at home in Teri’s house, so it didn’t occur to me to walk away. I opened the door and found Teri hugging Emma the way a mother hugs her child.
“It’s Stratos, Emma,” said Teri to reassure her.
“Er … yeah,” I said, unable to think of anything better.
“Can’t you see we’re busy here? Go on, shoo! Out!” Emma laughed. She laughed out loud. I had never heard her laugh, even slightly. Hearing her laugh like that, I quickly forgot at least half the tiredness I was feeling, and my guilt over the questioning I was going to subject her to doubled.
One of the reasons why Babis never felt comfortable with me was the fact that I always kept a change of clothes and an old pair of pyjamas at Teri’s because I would often crash there after all-nighters, with or without Drag. The long hot soak I had in some of her exotic bubble bath made me feel much better, as did the feeling of clean clothes against my tired body.
Teri was waiting for me outside the bathroom, sitting cross-legged on the pouffe she had in the hall. She was in a pink dressing gown which only just covered her smooth, hairless calves.
“I’ve explained about Angelino,” she said.
“And?”
“I could see how excited she was about visiting him, and I had to put the brakes on it. I told her that we have a mutual friend, this super cop. He’s a real diamond, but can be a bit of a shit as well. And that if she goes anywhere near the hospital, he will take her in for questioning and take you in as well. And how on earth would you explain who you are? Everything would be such a mess. So until Angelino gets better, it’s not a good idea to visit. That’s what I told her.”
“Did she understand?”
“Why shouldn’t she? She’s not stupid. She knows how to listen. That’s why we’ve got two ears and only one mouth. So that we listen more than we speak.”
“Is that one of Hermes’ too?”
“Zeno. He was an ancient philosopher. I save that explanation for the ignorant. But my Hermes might have mentioned it too.”
“Does your Hermes know about Babis? That he’s been staying here?”
“Hermes isn’t the jealous type. Jealousy is beneath him.”
“Yes, but does he know?”
“No, he doesn’t. Jealous or not, I’m not going to go looking for trouble.”
I smiled.
“Is something funny? So how’s your relationship going?” she asked, clearly annoyed.
That was below the belt and completely uncalled for. She realized it too. I could see it in her eyes. But she didn’t apologize. So we left it there, exchanging looks for a while, trying to work out what had got into us all recently, but we couldn’t.
“So Emma understood? She’s fine with it? She’s not asking to see him?” I asked, trying to get the conversation back on track.
“Yes. Of course, I did tell her that Angelino would soon recover completely. I know I’m taking the risk of turning out to be a big liar in her eyes, but how much reality can a child take all at once?”
“You were hugging her in there. I saw you.”
“Yes. We were having a heart-to-heart. Nothing that you would find useful. I’d tell you.”
They were having a heart-to-heart. So Teri had managed in her own unique way to do something that seemed impossible to me. For some reason the first thing that occurred to me as I listened to her was that here was yet more evidence to prove that I would be a terrible father.
“You know, sometimes I really admire you.”
“What do you mean ‘sometimes’? What do you do the rest of the time?”
“The rest of the time I see you in that robe stepping on the purple carpet and I have my reservations. Can I go and talk to her?”
She nodded, and told me she hadn’t been able to track down that teenage girl who’d been in the porn films. Apparently the girl had vanished and her friends feared the worst. Teri went into the living room to chat to Babis, or rather observe him as he gazed at her in adoration. I left them to it and went to see Emma.
I knocked, waited for her to tell me to come in and opened the door to find her on the edge of the bed, in the same spot I’d seen her with Teri a few minutes earlier. She was in a white sweater, blue tracksuit bottoms and slippers and had laid out a deck of cards on the bed next to her. I thought about everything she had been through, what she was still going through. My own adolescence had been tough enough but at least I’d had a home and a mother, whatever her faults had been. I had my terms of reference. Emma didn’t. She had been rejected by her own parents the day they left her at the orphanage, she had lost Themis, and now she was fighting to hang on to Angelino. Although she couldn’t be with him, I could feel – or I wanted to feel – that they were fighting this together. Suffering. That was the word that came to me. Emma was suffering. Her blindness was the least of her problems. And I could do nothing to take away her pain. That was the problem with this world. You often feel so much anger towards it, but no matter what kind of gun you have at your disposal, you have no idea where to shoot to solve the problem.
“Shall I show you my new trick? Only Angelino’s seen it so far, and only once.”
“Yes, go on.”
She stood up and sat on a high chair at the small desk. “It’s called ‘Jack Sandwich’. I’ll need your help, so pay attention, OK?”
“OK.”
She picked up the deck, shuffled the cards, placed them all in her right hand and started to feed them into her left. She told me to stop her whenever I wanted. I let a few seconds go past before giving the signal. She showed me the top card in her left hand, told me to remember it and returned it to the pile. Her movements, as always, gave no sign at all that her beautiful eyes were not guiding her through this. She placed the cards from her right hand on top of the cards from her left and straightened out the deck.
“Now I’m going to move my thumb and forefinger together like you do when you’re tapping out the rhythm of a piece of music, and as soon as I do, you will see the card I showed you.” She clapped her hands twice and spread out the deck. As she did so, two cards appeared in the middle, face up. They were the two black jacks of the pack.
“Oh no! I’m so sorry. That wasn’t your card, was it? Those must be … the two black jacks,” she said without even touching them. With her dead eyes wide open, devoid of any expression, she stared at me as though trying to discover something within me.
“That’s right,” I answered.
“How could I get that wrong? OK. I want to correct this, so I’ll send those two jacks to go and find your card.”
She took back all the cards that were on top of the jacks and put them at the bottom of the pack. Next she spread out the jacks along with a few other cards from the top which were still face down so that the jacks stood out. She straightened the deck again and with her right hand touched the two black jacks. She cut and then asked me to cut, and cut for a third time. Once I had, she slammed her hand on top of the deck as though giving an order.
“Please spread out the cards slowly, one by one, so that you can see them.”
&
nbsp; I did what she asked, and in precisely the middle of the deck, the deck I had cut not once but twice, were the two black jacks, face up, yet again. Only this time, sitting in between them, was the card I had been shown, the card I had been asked to remember.
“Good, isn’t it? Especially the bit where I pretend to make a mistake.”
She tried to force a smile, but instead she burst into tears. When she cried, her eyes became animated; as though they wanted to prove that life meant pain. I took her hand; I didn’t feel comfortable hugging her.
“It’s my fault,” she said.
“Don’t be silly.”
“It is my fault. Whoever takes me under their wing risks getting killed.”
“Listen to me. You’re fourteen years old, and like most teenagers believe that you’re the centre of the universe. But you’re not.” Sometimes being a bit harsh can work. If I tried to comfort her; she would probably keep crying, but this way, challenging her like this, made her switch gear for a while. Having started on this tack, I had to keep going. Tears can be cathartic, but they don’t bring any comfort in themselves. My job was to get my hands on hard evidence, not to babysit her.
“I still don’t know who attacked Angelino or who shot Themis. But from everything I have found out so far, there is nothing, nothing that points to you as the reason in either case.”
“So what have you found out?” she asked me, now very serious. The honest answer would have been “almost nothing”, but watching the tears stream down her face, I decided against honesty.
“Quite a lot of things – nothing that hangs together yet, but a lot to go on. I do have a few questions for you, and you’d be helping me out a lot if you could answer them.”
“OK.”
Baby Blue Page 12
