Baby Blue

by Pol Koutsakis

“Are you a trained kindergarten teacher?”

  “Yes, I am. I somehow managed to pass all the modules within the space of ten years. But the main thing was that I wanted to go somewhere where I could make a difference.”

  “I see.”

  “Here, with the children, I feel that I’m somehow managing to do something worthwhile. Give something back. Restore some kind of balance after what he did to those other children. I don’t know if I’m making any sense.”

  “I get it. I do.”

  “There aren’t that many jobs left in Greece that leave you feeling human at the end of the day. Most of the time people have to cheat and steal just to survive, whether it’s from the state, your colleagues, your employees, your boss – there’s always someone. If you don’t, you don’t survive. But with the kids, you’re free of all that.”

  I nodded and quickly moved on to the next question. After all, we only had ten minutes. “So there’s no doubt in your mind that he was guilty?”

  “None. Loukas showed me the evidence he found after Themis disappeared. I spoke to the girls’ parents afterwards too. Besides, what kind of innocent man with Themis’ connections disappears like that? If he was innocent, don’t you think he would have stuck around to clear his name? He had fought so many battles to get at the truth as a journalist. Wouldn’t he do the same for his own reputation?”

  “What do you make of the fact that he spent so many years living like a tramp on the streets with his daughter?”

  “Weird.”

  “Can you rationalize it?”

  “I don’t know. He might have thought he was doing the right thing – paying for what he’d done. He could be a bit odd sometimes. He’d get hung up on the symbolism of everything – saw it in everything, and if it wasn’t there, he would create it. But realistically, he was probably worried he’d get arrested either here or abroad if he decided to try and leave the country.”

  “But the girls’ parents didn’t end up filing a complaint.”

  “Yes, but there was no way he could have known that. He might have thought that they had gone ahead. Or would if he ever showed his face again. He also knew that Loukas and I had found out. The lesson he was always trying to teach us was never to spare anyone guilty. And there was no way we’d spare him. Not over something as sick as this.”

  “So after he disappeared, did you never hear from him again?”

  “Never.”

  “What about before? Were you working together right up to the end?”

  She nodded and her bottom lip came up to her top lip, as if to say that it was a pity. “Yes, we were. We weren’t just working together, but were on the verge of – I mean he was on the verge of; I was just helping – breaking the biggest story of his career.”

  “Which was what?”

  “You know that almost all our rivers are polluted by industrial and urban waste?”

  I didn’t know, but thought it was a given and therefore should have known more about it, so I nodded.

  “The only important river that can claim to be clean is the Achelous.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Ever heard of orphan waste?”

  “No.”

  “Many factories dump their dangerous waste wherever they find a convenient place for it: in wells, rivers, streams, landfill sites – without undertaking any kind of processing at all. We’re talking tonnes and tonnes of carcinogenic toxins. They don’t even bother to send reports on their waste management to the Ministry and there are no penalties. Everyone is in on it, you see. The Ministry turns a blind eye, especially now with this crisis. They’d say they couldn’t possibly justify closing down industries and causing more redundancies at the moment, and they don’t have enough qualified manpower to oversee it properly. So what we have in terms of checks and controls is a tiny questionnaire that the factories fill in – if they want to.”

  “In other words, it’s a free-for-all.”

  “Exactly. Themis found out that there were unnaturally high incidences of cancer in the populations living in villages around all the tributaries of the Achelous, which were close to big factories. He had gathered up medical files from the last thirty years plus. They weren’t freely given – we had to steal quite a lot of them. He sent the files to a university in England because he didn’t trust the ones here; he was worried that they would fall into the hands of snitches who might blow the whistle on our investigation. His English contacts were going to come over and collect hair and nail samples to test for the presence of heavy metal build-up and to assess the children’s physical and intellectual development. Themis was footing the bill for the whole thing – that way he could keep it quiet and would be able to go public with it when he was ready and before the factory owners had time to react. All the evidence in the files suggested a large-scale medical disaster. But we needed more new readings.”

  “But why aren’t the people affected shouting about this?”

  “They are. Screaming. Shouting. But they can’t get the airtime. If they try to get the papers to publish an announcement, it always gets buried in a tiny column in the back pages. Some of my colleagues – what colleagues? Look at me! I still haven’t got used to this. Some of them dismiss them as nutjobs while others suspect that they want to halt the development of the country with all these superstitions, and it goes without saying that the industrialists are throwing their weight around too.”

  “You mean …?”

  “I mean that they have the power to do that, and the means.”

  “What about the evidence from the investigation?”

  “I used to have some of it. Themis had all of it, but when he disappeared he took off with everything: computers, notes, everything. And he did something very strange. The evening before he vanished he was working alone in the office and just wiped the whole lot, his hard disk and mine. Everything. He even reformatted my back-up disk.”

  “How do you explain that?”

  “I can’t. Not seriously. The only thing I’ve been able to come up with is that perhaps, in his sick mind, he thought that Loukas had given me everything he had on Themis and he believed that if he erased everything from my computer all that would be wiped as well.”

  “Yes, but it’s not that easy to erase data. Loukas would still have it,” I said.

  “Of course. I told you, I don’t have a good explanation.”

  Our allotted ten minutes had obviously elapsed, as the lovely principal appeared, cawing to Anna to get back to class. I thanked her and left.

  Whatever Themis Raptas was, I would eventually have to tell Emma. But there were still so many gaps. The name of his murderer, for a start. Who was still after him and Emma so many years after his death? Who had attacked Angelino? Was the attack something to do with Emma or not? Before I could answer these questions, I was not intending to say anything; I wasn’t going to tell her half the story. That was what I was thinking as I hurried back to my car; the rain, which had been threatening to appear for days now, finally arrived and minute by minute was growing from weak drizzle to heavy drops. Just as I reached my car, my phone rang. The screen showed “Unknown Caller”, and my first thought was that it was one of the mobile phone companies touting their latest deals. That’s what they were, about eighty per cent of the time. But this wasn’t one of them.

  “Mr Gazis?” It was a deep, elderly male voice.

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Fotis Paraschos.”

  The big name, according to Markos. I should probably be flattered that he was calling me. I squeezed my swollen ego into the car.

  “Hello.”

  “Before I start, I want you to know that obviously I am not phoning just because Markos has asked me to.”

  Obviously. Interesting.

  “Markos mentioned that you work together,” I said.

  “Markos is a piece of shit. I don’t work with shit. He keeps trying to go into business with me.”

  His voice was a voice of absolute calm
, as though he were talking through his shopping list. Markos is a piece of shit. So what did that make Paraschos, the pharmaceuticals thief and smuggler for all those cancer patients and hopeful parents?

  “In that case, why are you calling?”

  “Because I owe you. I’m not doing you any favours. I’m doing it to settle my debt.” There was a change in tone. But that’s what debtors did, they tried to be on friendly terms with their creditors.

  “But I don’t know you.”

  “Sometimes we end up owing people we don’t know.”

  “Such as?”

  “Nikos Dermatas was like a brother to me. His family was like my own.”

  A few years back, a Russian, Yevgeni, had tried to become the main player in the protection rackets controlling the clubs and bars in the city centre. Nikos Dermatas owned a very profitable bar, and was the first to refuse to pay. One day Yevgeni and his people brought his wife and five-year-old daughter into the bar and forced him to watch for hours as they raped and tortured them before finally killing them. Then they blew up the bar, with Dermatas and all his staff inside. After that, a group of other bar owners in the area hired me to take care of their problem. And I did, with a little help from Drag at a critical moment.

  “I spent a lot of time trying to find out who it was who had done what needed to be done,” Paraschos said.

  “I see. Can I ask you a few questions?”

  “First tell me who you’re working for on this case.”

  I could have answered that in many ways: the first answer would have been, “For a fourteen-year-old girl”; the second answer would have been “Angelino”. But I gave him a third, one that covered the others.

  “For myself.”

  “OK. Ask away.”

  “Was Vaios working for you?”

  “Not recently. He did work for me for about eight years. Until last year.”

  “What was his connection to Themis Raptas?”

  “He would go and find him once a month, on my behalf. Wherever he was. Filopappou mainly, that’s where they used to meet. To give him his monthly payment.”

  “What monthly payment?”

  “Raptas had dug up some information about me during one of his investigations. Instead of going public with it, he decided to blackmail me.”

  He was amazingly relaxed telling me all this, which convinced me that he was calling from an untraceable number.

  “How much?”

  “Three grand a month.”

  “For how long?”

  “It started when he gave up journalism and went on until he died. Almost five years.”

  “What I meant was how long was the agreement for?”

  “There was no end date. I don’t think he ever intended it to stop. That’s why he didn’t want me to give him a lump sum.”

  “Did he have that much on you?”

  “He was a good journalist. Irritatingly good. He had connections all over the place, even with people in our circles. They would feed him information – and then there was everything he dug up himself. Unfortunately, there are loose tongues everywhere, especially in my line of work.”

  “Do you know why he gave up journalism?”

  “No. I asked Vaios to find out. Raptas told him to just bring the money and mind his own business.”

  “Wasn’t he frightened of you?”

  “He told me from the start that two of his trusted people had all the information on me and that if he turned up in a ditch one day, or if anyone laid a finger on his daughter, the information would go straight to the police. And I believed him. He wasn’t bluffing.”

  “In other words, you had nothing to do with it.”

  “Not only did I not kill him, but when I heard he’d been murdered, I was prepared for a massive fallout. In the end, one of the two people who had the information, a lawyer, came to see me straight afterwards. I paid him off, he handed over the evidence and left.”

  “What about the other one?”

  “I’m still trying to find them.”

  “No contact, no blackmailing?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “So you’re worried that it still might all come out?”

  “I would really appreciate it if you’d bring it to me if it falls into your hands. I’m always here at our Alimos offices. The fact that nothing has surfaced yet doesn’t mean it won’t. My competitors aren’t exactly fond of me.”

  “Why did Vaios try to kidnap Themis’ daughter?”

  “I don’t know. Vaios was beginning to get ideas above his station. Long before he left me. He wanted to work for the big bosses, get more money, more action. He thought we were small fry. Inert. At some point, I got rid of him because he was violent to some of our associates for no reason. His behaviour was beginning to hurt business. I don’t even know who he’d been working for recently. Or why he tried to kidnap the daughter. Whatever he was doing, it had nothing to do with me.”

  “Don’t you think it’s a bit of a coincidence?”

  “Athens, Stratos, is a much smaller city than it thinks it is. This is especially true of its underworld. The same old people going round banging their heads against each other, working for different bosses. So no coincidence seems that big to me. Vaios was not sent by me. Whatever he did had nothing to do with me.”

  “What if he’d wanted to sell you his services? If he found the girl, thought she had the information, found it and brought it to you, maybe you’d take him back?”

  “I don’t take people back. Ever. Associates, women, nobody. If you leave me, you’re gone for good. Everyone knows that.”

  I thought that another explanation could be that Vaios was after the evidence so that he could blackmail Paraschos himself. But he had no way of knowing whether Emma had it, and the risks – taking on Angelino and his men, me, the police if they got there on time – were too big to be ignored when he had no guarantee that he would find anything.

  “Anyone you can think of who could tell me more about Vaios?”

  “He was with this singer for years, Tanya … Tanya Gourka. I don’t know where she performs these days.”

  We talked for a while longer, but it was soon clear that Paraschos couldn’t tell me anything else. I thanked him and hung up.

  On top of all the information about his child abuse, I had just found out that Themis Raptas was using the research he had uncovered in an investigation to blackmail rather than to expose. This was a far cry from the image of the redeeming angel that Emma had of him. To be precise, it was the absolute opposite. It was also a far cry from the image of the great and dedicated investigative journalist his closest associates had. Unless he suffered from a multiple personality disorder, there was something very wrong with the information I was getting. Usually when something like this happens, it’s the positive information that bears no relation to reality.

  23

  It was the afternoon and I was at Teri’s. I had phoned Drag earlier to brief him about everything I’d found out from Sofianos, Kati, Markos and Fotis Paraschos. I told him we’d have to find out who Vaios was working for now – who had sent him to kidnap or kill Emma.

  “I’ve been listening all this time, wanting to say thanks,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For going to all this trouble, albeit with a few days’ delay, to tell me what you’ve been up to. I’m truly humbled that you’re thinking of me.”

  I didn’t rise to it. I could have mentioned the fact that very often he doesn’t tell me what he’s doing. He would answer that he does fill me in on the basics, and always on things that I can help him with. And then he’d say that he had the impression that this particular case was one we were supposed to be working on together. There was no point in thrashing all of this out. I listened; he was already wound up. I could just see the vein at the base of his throat pulsating away rhythmically. I also realized that I didn’t really care. I hadn’t forgotten our conversation about Maria.

  “You’re
taking this case far too personally; you’ve taken the whole thing on yourself and are shutting me out completely.”

  It wasn’t that he was trying to start an argument – well maybe he would have if I had been too – it was more that he sounded sad, as though I had let him down.

  “You’re right,” I said. Because he was.

  “As always,” he said before hanging up and going to look into what we had agreed on.

  While I was waiting for him to get back to me, I went to Emma’s room because she was wanting to show me a new trick and we’d need peace and quiet away from the game of Scrabble Teri and Babis were playing in the sitting room and the noisy disagreements that periodically flared up on the subject of the rules of the game and of the Greek language. When I saw them earlier, Teri had been hitting Babis over the head with an open copy of the Greek dictionary.

  Emma was sitting at her desk. She was wearing some baggy sweatpants and a light-blue cardigan, the colour of her eyes. The pink slippers weren’t quite the best match, but then again, Teri had bought them and she insisted that there always had to be something pink in every woman’s outfit. I should introduce her to Martinos’ pink swans and pink circles. She’d love them.

  “My hands are really rough. I don’t know if they’ll be able …” I began.

  “Everyone can do this trick. It just takes practice,” she answered. Words of encouragement to the beginner.

  “Some tricks even benefit from rough hands. Not many, but there are some. The trick is to turn your disadvantages into advantages,” she continued as she shuffled the deck. “You know, in my case, being blind is a huge advantage in the work I do.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked her – a serious pupil trying to learn from his experienced teacher.

  “People want to feel that what they are seeing is really magic. So if an illusionist starts off with a very complicated trick before the audience has had a chance to warm up, the show is unlikely to go well. You see, they don’t want to be impressed by skill and dexterity; they don’t want technicians. They want to believe that the laws of nature no longer stand. My dad taught me that. He went and researched it as soon as he realized that I had these special skills with my hands. That’s why some jugglers allow some of the balls to drop at the beginning of the show – to keep up the suspense. I don’t need to do that. As soon as they realize I’m blind, they think that I have this handicap from the start and that just by virtue of me being me, the laws of nature no longer stand. Whatever I do after that will amaze them, and if I go on to do something a little bit more complicated, they’re blown away.”