Baby Blue

by Pol Koutsakis

  “Emma,” I said.

  “Yes. Do you know her?”

  “I know about her from the investigation.”

  “I loved her like she was my own. I went looking for her when I heard he was dead. Do you know where she is?”

  “No. What did you do with the accusation?”

  “At first I didn’t say anything to Themis. I told the Iranian I would be in touch in a few days and that the station would investigate. I then asked around about him, what sort of lowlife he was and who did he think he was going around making accusations like that about Themis, the best person, the best journalist I’d ever met. You know, there’s an old joke among us journalists that even the finest of us has killed his own mother. Themis, on the other hand, was, you know – cut from a different cloth. And Christ, we weren’t wrong there. He was cut from a different cloth. But a much worse one than the rest of us. I spoke to convicted paedophiles as well as others who were facing charges. I got to know a lot of them. They said he was one of them. Are you sure? I kept saying, again and again. Yes, they were sure. They’d been sending him material. He’d been sending them material. One of them, who had escaped prison on a technicality, showed me an email Themis had sent him. It was definitely his account – I saw it myself. He showed me all the photographs he’d been sending. Little girls, not even old enough for primary school, with two, three men at the same time. All I wanted to do was kill them all, there on the spot, but Themis first. And then a second father turned up with more accusations – another immigrant.”

  While Sofianos was talking, I was thinking of Emma and that I was going to have to tell her all this at some point. I was sick to my stomach, which had tied itself up in knots that didn’t feel like they would ever go away. I tried to focus. Think logically.

  “Since all the men you spoke to were either convicted or facing charges, the cybercrime unit should have confiscated all their files.”

  “I expect so.”

  “My sources tell me that they never found anything on Raptas.”

  “I can’t comment on that. All I know is what I saw with my own eyes.”

  “Did you talk to him? About what you’d found out?”

  “What do you think? Even when things hit rock bottom and what we find out makes us feel physically sick, we were old-school, and we always followed the line laid down by our mentors: everyone has the right to defend themselves and give their side of the story. All that old rubbish. I say rubbish because you’ve already worked out the truth long before you have interviewed every rotten bastard involved. Rubbish, but sacred rubbish nevertheless because without it, we’d be in the jungle. I asked him to meet me, but he said he was too busy. I pressed him and he still refused. It turned out that was the day when he packed everything up and disappeared. I came out with it and told him what was going on. He asked me if I really believed all that about him. I told him that if he was innocent he needed to go to the police and clear his name. He said that it was impossible. And that’s when I started to believe it. That he was this monster. My friend. My idol. A monster. I said, ‘What did you do to those children?’ And he replied, ‘I’m only responsible for one child,’ and hung up. We never spoke again. His neighbour found his mobile in the bin. But he had already confessed to all intents and purposes. I didn’t need anything else.”

  “What do you think he meant when he said that he was only responsible for one child?”

  “How should I know? Apparently it’s common when abusers are caught for them to try to make out that their victims are many fewer than they actually are. As if their crime is any less serious if they only destroy one child’s life.” His rage was palpable. Rage at the crime itself. Rage at the friend who had betrayed him. Rage at his inability to understand who this person who had been his friend for so many years really was.

  “How come it never got out?”

  “It was the parents of the little girls. They refused to go to the police. When they found out that Themis had done a runner, and days and then weeks and then months went by and there was no sign of life, they began to think of the effect it would have on the girls and they questioned what the point of it was if there was no perpetrator to stand trial. Don’t forget these people were foreigners. Their papers were all in order and everything, but they were foreigners nonetheless. They were scared at the thought of the police, of being interrogated in a foreign language. My friend knew what he was doing. But I also knew what I needed to do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have you tried to do an Internet search on Themis?”

  “Yes. Many times. There are hardly any traces of him there.”

  “After a while it became obvious that he wasn’t going to turn up, and I started talking to friends and other journalists. Old friends. I told them about the evidence I had. I told them what he’d done. I had a proposition for them – and they went for it. We decided that we would work together to erase all traces of him from the web. We are our digital footprint. If you erase the footprint, you erase the person. We had contacts with the managers of various websites, at newspapers and TV channels. We let them in on it – they were told as much as they needed to know. This was going to be our revenge on Themis. We’d wipe him off the map. You can’t find his articles anywhere online. We even erased his name from all those massive scandals he’d been instrumental in exposing. His name disappeared from everything.”

  “What do you mean ‘everything’? What was his most important work?”

  “Themis exposed the biggest players in the doping scandal at the Olympics, the cuts the politicians were taking on def— defence contracts. And the illegal trade in, in pharmaceuticals. We all worked together to get rid of it. To be fair, he wasn’t interested in taking the credit, but the important work had been his.”

  The more he talked, the slower his speech became. Some words were a struggle and he needed two attempts to get them out.

  “I recently found an old piece announcing that he was going to leave HighTV and go to another channel, and then a later one saying that he was going to go into business.”

  “He planted all of that himself to explain away his disappearance. He still had a few friends here and there in the press and we … we weren’t able to control everything. He still had some friends, the scum.”

  “So in other words you let him get away?” I asked.

  “Some people in the police knew about it and looked for him unofficially and also went after other statements that would incriminate him. But they couldn’t open an official investigation. Nobody was pressing charges.”

  “His emails to the other abusers? Didn’t that count as evidence?”

  “It wasn’t enough. The State Prosecutor would have to fight for years to get him put away on that, even for a short stretch of only a few months. And then he could take himself off to a hospital for psychological support and serve out the rest of his sentence there – and then he’d be out again. We needed more, and we didn’t have it. We wanted his scalp.”

  “Is that the only reason you let him go?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if word got out about such a prominent journalist, it would have damaged the reputation of the station and the papers he worked for.”

  This made him angry. He reddened and the veins in his head started to throb visibly.

  “You don’t know me. You have no idea who I am. How dare you sit there and talk to me like that? That’s not how it works. All of us who knew him, we never played it like that. We didn’t give a shit about the reputation of the station – or the newspapers. The man was fucking small children! And you think I was sitting there agonizing about Vayenas or any other media shark?”

  He came closer, looking like he wanted to take a swing at me. I stood up. “I’m sorry,” I said. Somehow my apology worked like a tranquillizer on him. He stopped in his tracks and for a moment fell silent.

  “OK. You’re investigating. I get it. I’ve been there so many times. It doesn�
��t make any difference what line of work you’re in. It’s all the same. You want to check everything – and you’re right to. If you like, go and talk to Anna Kati. She was his oldest colleague. They worked together before I met him. She knows all about it too.” He then jotted down her phone number for me and took another swig of the thermos. It seemed to bring him down and pick him up at the same time.

  “It still seems unreal, unbelievable to me. Sometimes, that is. I remember the times when we would go drinking together and he’d pour out his soul to me, about how he desperately wanted to get the money together so he could take Emma to the States, to a special school for the blind. He told me all about it, how it got the most out of those kids and sent them on to university, great careers – and left them with no disadvantages to speak of.”

  I shook my head and said nothing. I didn’t want to interrupt him because I didn’t want him to lose his flow. I wasn’t convinced that he would be able to find it again, and I began to wonder whether Emma or Angelino knew about this opportunity.

  “It’s in New York, I think. But it cost an absolute fortune. The money we were making back then, even in the really good times, wasn’t anything like enough to pay for it. When I heard about Themis and those little girls, that was the first image that entered my head – Themis, all teary, his voice shaking, talking about Emma. I just wanted to grab a gun and kill that moment and all the other times I had spent with him believing he was a good man – not the monster he was.”

  “Is there any way at all that —” I began.

  “That I’m wrong? That the whole thing is a pack of lies or a big misunderstanding? No way at all. If there had been a single ray of light here, believe me, I’d have found it. Pitch-black darkness everywhere. What did you say your name was?”

  “Stratos.”

  “Stratos. That’s right. The year before that was when I lost my leg. I swear to God that the pain was nothing compared to what came with the revelations about Themis.” He seemed to get a measure of relief from saying all this. His body relaxed a little into his wheelchair. He held the thermos without drinking from it and looked at me for a while.

  “So – have you got enough for your investigation?”

  “For now. If I need anything else, I’ll be in touch.”

  “I would have asked you more questions about the details of your investigation if it had been about anything else at all. But in this case, I’ve already spent many days being sick. Vomiting and crying. When you talk to child abusers you come face to face with evil, what we are taught to recognize as evil when we are children. Then as we grow older and get more blasé we dismiss the notion and start to insist that everything is relative, good and evil, both grey areas. That’s utter bullshit. Evil does exist. It lives inside those monsters, genuine, pure evil. It’s unbelievable how you mutate when you listen to them talk. Your mind and your body change, they build up layers of defence and try to convince you that you are safe. But these layers fall off, one after another. I’ve spoken to murderers. They’re completely different. Not the same thing at all as the sense of blood-curdling revulsion you feel when you’ve been talking to a child abuser. And that feeling never leaves you. You begin to despise your own existence after it has been in contact with theirs. You start to think that the only way you can protect yourself from this evil is by vanishing. They sit there and smile at you and all you can think of doing is beating them to a pulp. And then you get overwhelmed by disgust for not kicking the shit out of them. You come to hate your eyes for having looked at them and all you want to do is wash yourself and get rid of every trace of every second you spent with them. I can’t go through it all again. This is a game for younger people like you. Well, I do admire your nerve,” he said, raising his flask as though in a toast to me.

  He downed the rest in one.

  22

  I fell asleep slumped over my computer, watching The Kid for a second time. I wasn’t in the mood for real noir. After a strong dose of sad humour, I needed a happy ending. An ending where the kid finishes up surrounded by people who love her instead of discovering that the man she adored is a paedophile. I wanted to turn back the clock a hundred years and hear a note of false hope. The film might have helped, because I hadn’t slept as well as I did that night, slumped over my computer, for days.

  It was 8 a.m. when I was woken by my phone.

  “Stratos. It’s Markos.” He sounded just as terrified as he’d been when I left him at his HQ. “I’ve got … I’ve got the information you wanted. You see. Pretty quick. You don’t get faster than that.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Vaios was working for Fotis Paraschos. Do you know him?”

  “No.”

  “He owns a haulage company, apparently. At least, that’s his official line of work.”

  “And his real one?”

  “Black-market medicines. His network covers the Balkans and Turkey as well. Big business. Imports and exports. A lot of people work for him. He’s a big name.” Markos sounded impressed. “I’ve worked with him,” he said, full of pride.

  “Good for you.”

  “But I never met that Vaios guy. That’s how come I didn’t know he was Paraschos’ man. If I’d known, I’d have told you straight up.”

  “What kind of people has he got?”

  “All sorts. Take your pick: doctors, medical reps and of course people inside the industry who sort all his fake invoices for him so he can get expensive Greek medicines out to Bulgaria, Romania, Albania. Mainly cancer drugs, Viagra – stuff like that. They sell for a lot more abroad.”

  “Doesn’t this lead to a shortage here?”

  “Yeah. But you know what it’s like. Who’s going to go looking for them anyway?”

  Not the cancer patients who need them, that’s for sure, I thought.

  “He brings in drugs from Turkey too. For IVF. Nobody ever checks them. They’re much, much cheaper there. He likes me a lot. We’re about to make our business relationship more permanent. So when I told him you might be wanting to talk to him, he said yes right away. He might give you a call later on.”

  “I’ll be expecting it,” I said.

  “And Stratos? Are we OK now – you and me? I’ve told you everything I know and I’ve set up a phone interview for you. So we’re good, yeah?”

  “Yes. We’re good,” I said and hung up.

  It struck me as strange that even a slimeball like Markos should have such a strong submissive streak considering his exaggerated sense of self-importance. As far as Markos was concerned, Markos was a legend. Maybe I had scared him enough.

  Much as I had enjoyed sleeping at my computer, my back was protesting. I worked out for an hour, beginning with some basic back extensions and finishing off with sets of twenty one-handed press-ups to make me feel better. After that I spent half an hour in the bathroom, until I had used the last drop of water I had heated with Maria’s new boiler. I put on some warm clothes, cut myself two slices of bread and cheese and set off at around half past ten to meet Anna Kati.

  From my house to Papagou Town Hall takes ten minutes by car on a normal day. But today two enormous lorries, an almost immobile crane and one woman driver who had caused a pile-up on the way there all conspired with the narrow streets round Papagou to make normal seem like a fantasy and turn the ten minutes into forty. Fortunately, when we had arranged this visit the night before after I’d left Sofianos, Anna hadn’t specified a time. She’d just said that she would be at the kindergarten till 3.00 and I could drop by anytime.

  I parked behind the town hall and walked the last five minutes, going west, till I reached the entrance to a green building. However fresh the paint, it couldn’t conceal the age of the building. It wasn’t the only one. This neighbourhood was one the most built-up of the ones I had driven through, full of single-storey houses more than fifty years old.

  The kindergarten principal was at least as old as its building, but her exterior was not as fresh. She looked me up and down, a
nd with no attempt to be subtle asked me what I wanted. She went to get Kati and to sit with Kati’s kids while she was out of the classroom. Anna Kati was a tall, thin woman, about my age. She had extremely long hair, dyed red and caught in a ponytail. Her features were stern and there were bags under her eyes, bags of sleeplessness that no amount of make-up could hide.

  “Ten minutes. That’s it, Anna. I need to leave soon,” shouted the principal as she disappeared into Anna’s classroom. Anna didn’t answer, something which automatically raised my opinion of her. She suggested we sit down on a bench outside the principal’s office, which she had surprisingly found the time to lock. Maybe she was worried that I would try to steal something.

  “So, you’re a private detective?”

  I had told Sofianos I was, so I decided to be consistent. “Yes.”

  “Which firm?”

  “Self-employed.”

  “So you’ve got your own offices?”

  “I’m looking to rent at the moment.”

  “I’m sorry to ask all these questions. It’s a hangover from my years as a journalist.” There was a warmth in her voice which almost didn’t suit her.

  “You’re two in one now: journalist and kindergarten teacher.”

  “No. The journalism is over. Themis made sure of that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Loukas told me that you know the basics, so you know the truth about him. But we didn’t know. At least I didn’t. I’m speaking for myself now. I worked closely with him for fifteen years, give or take, from when I was doing the journalism course, and I didn’t have a clue. I was even with him when he interviewed those little immigrant girls he later raped. I was there. When you’re there, and you’re too blind to see what’s going on right in front of you, you’re forced to take a long good look in the mirror and make a dramatic career change. After a lot of throwing up.”