Baby Blue

by Pol Koutsakis

“Did Themis know anyone, have a friend maybe, called Vaios?”

  “Yes. What’s he got to do with —”

  “I don’t know yet. Possibly nothing. Like I said, I’m still trying to piece it all together. I need to find this Vaios, talk to him and see what he knows. What do you remember about him?”

  “They didn’t know each other that well. I don’t think Dad had any close friends really, especially after we went to live on the hill. Vaios would come up to see him maybe once a month, something like that. I do remember one time, though. It was September and we had just bought all the books for the school year. Every year Dad would get me all the books they did at school in Braille and teach me. All of it. Then Vaios arrived and Dad went out of the cave to talk to him and they started fighting.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “No. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I would always stay in the cave and play when Vaios came over. I’d imagine the next trick I would learn. That kind of thing. But I did ask him why they were shouting, and he told me that sometimes that kind of thing happens between friends.”

  “Anything else you remember about him?”

  She thought for a while. She was looking extremely serious, something that did not sit well on such a young face, but it made her look even sweeter.

  “No.”

  “You said earlier that your father didn’t have any close friends after you went to live on the hill. What about before?”

  “While he was a journalist?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was very little. But I do remember that lots of people would come to the house and that it was always filled with voices.”

  “Angry voices?”

  “No. People talking. About his work. But later, up on the hill, it was always quiet. I liked it better like that.”

  “Were the voices you remember adult voices, or were there children there too?”

  “Sometimes his friends would bring their kids over. They always wanted to play games I couldn’t join in because I couldn’t see anything, so they quickly lost interest in me and played on their own while I played on my own.”

  “Did they ever come to the house alone – children? Or with their parents who left them and came back later?”

  “No. Most of the kids didn’t want to come back because we couldn’t play together.”

  “What about Themis’ work? Did he write mainly for adults or for children?”

  “From what I remember it was all for adults.”

  There was no way I could come out and ask her directly if she ever suspected that her father was sexually aroused by children. I would have to make do with the answers she had given me, at least for now.

  “What kind of things did he write about?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what kind of reporter was he? Did he do politics, culture, sport, social affairs? What was his specialist area?”

  “Social issues, maybe. But he didn’t limit himself to one thing as far as I can remember. Wherever he sniffed dirt, he would try to expose it. I told you – he wanted to change the world. That was until he decided that he couldn’t and walked away from it all.”

  “When you say ‘it all’, was he seeing anyone, a woman?”

  I thought I saw her blush, but it might just have been my imagination. Then again, this whole thing might be my imagination, this entire case one horrendous dream which I would wake from and find myself lying in Maria’s arms, cradling our baby. And Angelino expecting me in Omonia, together with Emma and Themis, alive and well on the hill or somewhere else.

  “Er … when we lived at home I remember there were a couple of women who would leave the house early in the morning, just when I was waking up. So I suppose they must have slept over, you know. Spent the night. But later, on the hill – I don’t think so. There were a few times when he would go off on errands, or so he said, but he would always come rushing back because he didn’t like leaving me there on my own, so I don’t think he could have been seeing someone. We were together almost all the time.”

  I was wondering what else I could possibly ask her: did Themis like bathing her, or touching her, if there had been anything sexual about their relationship. But questions like that could be potentially very damaging. The most likely thing would be that she would say no, retreat into herself and never trust me again. And there were thousands of reasons to suggest that their relationship was not like that at all. He might not have been a paedophile at all; if he was one, he might have had a preference for boys; he might have liked girls but not Emma – not in that way; he might have kept all his sexual activities separate from his relationship with Emma, which he held sacred, so I told her I didn’t have any more questions about the case.

  “Did you ever ask Themis about your birth mother and father?”

  “No. I didn’t care about them. They obviously didn’t care about me, so why should I care about them?”

  My phone rang. I looked to see who was calling and thought that since it wasn’t bringing me any closer to Maria, it was the most useless piece of kit I’d ever owned. It was Pavlis. I apologized to Emma and left the room.

  “Hey – I’ve got some news. One of the homeless guys stole some fish from the market today. He wrapped it up in an old newspaper and smuggled it out. The paper was from a couple of days ago. There was an article in it about the attack on Angelino.”

  “Right. So they know what happened. They’re scared and don’t want to give out any more information?”

  “Quite the opposite. The paper carried the photos of the two dead guys from the house in Chateaubriand Street. Both Argyris and Sonia recognized the guy in charge of the attack. It was Vaios. Themis’ friend – the one who used to visit him up on the hill.”

  18

  “Hold on. Can we just run through this one more time, because my little brain is having a hard time with this,” said Drag.

  “I bet it is.”

  We were at Papi’s and I had just told him what I’d found out about Vaios. I’d run a check on him from the online news outlets and his real name turned out to have been Michalis Vaiopoulos. Drag was sitting next to me, playing Pac-Man in his enormous white trench coat, which looked like it had been made for some six-foot-six-plus NBA player; he had to watch his step so he didn’t tread on it. Under it, he had thrown on a pair of white jeans and a white linen shirt and could easily have been mistaken for the neighbourhood milkman out on the tiles. It wasn’t cold, but the temperature had dropped four degrees in one day, which was all the excuse he needed. Papi’s latest thing, apart from the mouth-burning cocktail, was the installation of vintage 1980s electronic games in the bar. Whether this was in keeping with the general vibe of the bar or not was evidently something that did not worry him unduly. He had brought them in the night before and, like his jukebox, all of these games only took the old nickels, which meant that he had to supply his customers with the right money and make sure everyone was letting everyone else have a fair go. “Everyone” consisted of me, Drag and a guy in his thirties who was sitting at the other end of the bar. He looked like a throwback to the fifties, complete with wide grey suit, white shirt, blue tie, and braces to hold his high-waisted trousers. When he walked into the bar, he removed his grey hat, exposing his short haircut and carefully groomed sideburns. I reckoned that if he didn’t change his dress sense quickly, he would spend the rest of his life being that guy who sits on his own in bars.

  Drag was on the fifth level of Pac-Man and had just lost one of his three lives from a stupid error, which had left him fuming like one of those cartoon characters that has smoke coming out of its head. Just before that he’d informed me that the song “Pac-Man Fever” had got to number nine in the charts in 1984. For some reason he felt that I needed to know this. Then he went on to tell me that this was unfair and that the song should have done better. That was when he lost the life, trying to eat all the little ghosts instead of finishing the course. He fell silent.

  At t
hat moment the 1950s guy put Ella Fitzgerald’s version of “Ten Cents a Dance” on the jukebox and Drag quickly abandoned the game.

  “Sacred moment,” he explained, though there was something in his eyes that told me he felt bad about leaving Pac-Man to the mercy of all those monsters who were closing in on him. I took a sip of the dry white wine I had ordered, still recovering from the coincidence between my order and what Papi brought me. And although it wasn’t much of a wine, my palate received it gratefully while Ella admitted for the second time in the chorus that sometimes she thinks she has found her hero but then discovers that it’s a queer romance with the men who come to her to learn how to dance, ten cents a time.

  “So what you’re saying is Themis Raptas’ friend, the only person who ever went to see him while he was living on the hill, was a professional killer who, three years after Raptas was killed, broke into Angelino’s house with two other pros to kidnap the girl from her new father, killing anyone who got in their way?” asked Drag as soon as the song was over.

  “Your little brain’s on fire tonight.”

  “Have you got a logical explanation for all this?”

  “No. I was hoping you would have found out who Vaios and his friends were working for.”

  “Not yet. The focus is on the paedophile murders now. And then we’re getting in more requests every day from all these MPs and ministers for protection after every vote they take in parliament, so I just haven’t got the manpower for this case at the moment. I’ve got one man looking into it and he’s only part-time. What happened to Angelino is being treated as a settling of accounts, at least for the time being. And you know what the police think of those.”

  “Yes, yes. Leave them to it. Don’t get involved.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ll see what I can dig up on Vaios too.”

  “Good idea.”

  He paused for a while. I suspected that he wanted to ask me again about interviewing Emma and wondered whether he would send me to the devil again when I said no. He sighed, the words refusing to come out of his mouth. When they eventually did, I understood why.

  “Have you heard from Maria?”

  “No.”

  “I phoned her too. She didn’t answer.”

  “She wants to be alone. Did Teri tell you …?”

  “She told me that things are bad between the two of you, that she’s left. Nothing else. She told me to ask you if I wanted to know more.”

  “Maria’s pregnant.”

  He froze. He didn’t move. He didn’t breathe.

  “It’s mine,” I clarified. “And she’s taken off because she doesn’t know what to do. And neither do I.”

  Drag rubbed his eyes and took a sip of Papi’s cocktail. “Tell me,” he said.

  “Can I ask you something first?”

  “I thought I was the cop here.”

  “Why did you and Maria split up?”

  “Why …? What do you mean? Back then?”

  I nodded. He choked. We’d never talked about this, for one good reason. This kind of thing made us both feel uncomfortable. It would be much easier for us to face a bunch of bastards pointing guns at us.

  “Didn’t she tell you?”

  “I never asked,” I told him.

  “It was because she was still in love with you.”

  Brilliant timing.

  “She loved me too, of course. Which is why she decided it was a mistake to be with either of us. She wanted a break.”

  “I was under the impression that you’d had a horrible fight. You suddenly stopped even mentioning one another’s name.”

  “I didn’t take the break-up very well. It’s not easy to know from such an early age that you’ve lost the love of your life.”

  Neither of us said anything for a while.

  “So tell me: how did you manage to fuck everything up between the two of you?”

  I told him everything. He really didn’t have much advice to give me, either about Maria or on the subject of the baby.

  “Looks like she needs to be alone for a while, so don’t put pressure on her. But when she gets back, don’t let her out of your sight. Not for Emma, not for Angelino, not for the good Lord himself.”

  “What if she doesn’t come back?”

  “Perhaps it’s time to stop feeling sorry for yourself and start acting like you’re worthy of her.”

  Drag – the expert in human relationships, with his condescending comments and his biting answers. So he knew what Maria needed, did he? Whatever it was, one thing was certain: she didn’t need him. In which case, he might like to shut up. She didn’t need me either, it seemed. And I could feel so much anger rising inside me towards my best friend. I didn’t send him to the devil, but after a few minutes of silence we agreed that we had a lot to do and needed to get on.

  As we walked away from Papi’s I decided that I’d go back to Teri’s and spend the night there instead. It would help me feel like I belonged somewhere. The house in Psychiko was less welcoming to me than a hotel room. Teri made up the bed in the small bedroom on the first floor. Babis did his best to give me a stern look. It didn’t suit him, but I didn’t point this out. I asked Teri to lend me her laptop, and she told me that she’d bookmarked some pages from various porn sites, and I should have a look to see if I could learn anything from them. I looked at her, expressionless, until she burst out laughing and said goodnight.

  I spent the next two hours trawling the Net, trying to see if I’d missed anything about Themis Raptas. I found nothing. Maybe someone had said to him – like Maria had said to me – that they wished he was “invisible and non-existent” and he had decided to oblige. Or maybe, like Sonia, he’d been so full of guilt that he’d made the decision to disappear. But none of this made any sense; he had loved Emma. He lived with her and then took her into hiding with him. It seemed impossible that while they were living together like tramps on Filopappou he was also erasing his entire digital footprint at the same time.

  I needed evidence, and I needed it now. But because I didn’t have any I spent the best part of the night coming up with scenarios in my head, trying to make sense of what had happened, none of which stood much scrutiny – but it all helped me get to sleep.

  19

  Teri made me an omelette with four eggs, bacon and feta cheese. The relish with which I devoured it reminded me that I hadn’t eaten since the day before. It was 7.30. Babis and Emma were still asleep.

  “How long have you had those?” asked Teri, pointing to my beige-and-green striped pyjamas. The top had a yellow dinosaur on it.

  “Maria bought them for me in 1999.”

  “They’re so last century.”

  “I like them.”

  “Oh, God.”

  Teri returned to the tea she was drinking, the same herbal tea she had every morning in the hope it would reduce her cholesterol. “She’s a good kid, you know.”

  I nodded.

  “She can stay here as long as you like. There’s no problem.”

  “Thanks. I’ll tell her,” I said, got up to stretch and was about to go and get ready.

  “About Maria,” she said.

  “Yes?” I managed to mumble, hoping that she would at last be able to give me some information.

  “Look – I’m not going to tell you two how to live your lives; I’m just telling you to live them together.”

  “That’s what I want too.”

  “Then be there for her.”

  “She won’t let me.” I thought about telling Teri about the “invisible and non-existent” episode but I didn’t want to have to listen to the words.

  “I think she’ll let you in the end. She’ll have no choice. But you’ll have to support her, whatever decision she takes.”

  I considered telling her that this all sounded very unfair. I should support Maria. I had been doing nothing else ever since I was a teenager. And I fully intended to carry on supporting her, so long as we could find an answer to the q
uestion of how we were going to raise our baby. But I said nothing, and just nodded.

  “Good. And take it easy with Dora, won’t you?” she said, and announced she was off to load the washing machine. Dora was her make-up artist friend. I was due to see her that afternoon.

  “I’ll try,” I said and started to do the washing-up, but something on the small TV screen above the fridge caught my attention. It was the face of the latest paedophile murder victim. I turned the volume up:

  “… now bring you this morning a State Television exclusive. A letter arrived at Attica Police Headquarters a short while ago and seems to be signed by the killers of the four child abusers who were exposed on a television programme. The message reads:

  “Paedophiles are not humans – they are monsters. The despicable Hellenic police have decided to provide protection to these monsters. Congratulations. We’re really happy that we’ve managed to make a fool of them. We hope that they appreciate what a mistake they’re making, because if they don’t they’ll have us to answer to. Make no mistake, we will go on. Not just the paedophiles from the programme, but all of them. These aren’t the first scum we’ve got rid of. We’ve done it in the past. We call on the Greek people to join us in celebration of the fact that there is one less monster out there.”

  “The statement was signed ‘The Executioners’. The Hellenic police are treating the letter as genuine and it is now with forensic teams. Stay tuned for further developments in this case.”

  I thought I should ring Drag but decided to get dressed first, into the spare change of clothes I kept here. Then, as I was getting ready, I realized that I had no real desire to ring him, and there wasn’t much point in doing it either. I knew he’d be feeling the same way about me.

  The statement from the Executioners seemed to be trying in every way it could to steer the investigation towards previous unsolved murder cases of this kind – which amounted to precisely one – in case the police had not spotted the similarities between Themis’ murder and these other ones. Three years after his murder, someone still had it in for Raptas. And if hunting down the dead wasn’t enough for them, they were out to get his daughter too. Unless, of course, we were dealing with two different sets of people. This case was getting more and more complicated – and more difficult to explain.