“Angelino told me that your sense of touch is almost supernaturally sensitive.”
“Not supernatural. That’s going too far. Hypersensitive, yes. Whatever exists and whatever happens in nature is natural, so it can’t be supernatural, can it?”
There were probably other things besides card tricks she could teach me. She seemed to know so much more than I did about everything.
“As my eyesight got progressively worse, my sense of touch got more sensitive and I started to register the tiniest of changes in the feel of the objects, which for most people just didn’t exist. My fingers are essentially my eyes.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I pick up a card” – she picked up half the deck in her left hand and placed it in her right – “I can feel the exact thickness of the card to the nearest millimetre as well as the differences in the humidity of the surface and of the ink used. When I touch a card I can see if it’s a picture card and which one it is from tracing the print outline. I’m not saying I don’t use all the old tricks that everyone uses to fool an audience; I do. But my sense of touch is what makes all the difference. Angelino bought me a special lotion for my hands to keep them very soft, and I’ve got much better.”
“So why did you do that Tramp routine and not card tricks?”
“My dad … he thought that my gift was very special and that it was too good for the streets. It was meant for greater things, for the future, he used to say.”
As she spoke about Raptas, I thought about the time of his death. There was no way he could have carried all that blackmail money he got from Paraschos. From what Paraschos said, he must have collected more than one hundred and fifty thousand euros in total during those years when they were living on the streets. A lot of money. Enough to cover the tuition at a private special school in New York, perhaps? The simplest thing for Raptas to have done when he realized that the net was closing in on him with the child abuse was to take off and leave Emma behind. A blind child doesn’t only make it harder for you to get around but also makes it easier to identify you. He did everything he could to keep her with him. It occurred to me that I should examine the case from the opposite perspective: I shouldn’t assume that all the negative information I had on Raptas would necessarily unlock the mystery of who he was. Because I had seen so much filth in my life, it was certainly worth considering that a man who brings up a child like Emma might not belong to the dark side, and worth taking the trouble to see if my hunch was right.
OK, I thought. Let’s say for argument’s sake that Themis was prepared to betray all his principles as a journalist just so that he could get enough money off Paraschos to make his dream for Emma a reality and see her get the education she deserved. Of course, none of this meant that he wasn’t a paedophile. That was still an open question. And I still hadn’t the faintest idea who killed him.
Drag had already established that there were no accounts held in Raptas’ name at any Greek bank. Neither had there been any transfers in his name or Emma’s to any bank abroad. Where was all that money? Maybe it was with the evidence he had about Paraschos’ dealings. But where? I asked Emma if she and Raptas had any money stashed away in some hiding place. She didn’t know. The little cash they did have they’d kept hidden under a rock in their cave, but on the day of the murder Raptas had taken almost all of it to lend that other homeless man who needed it.
“Shall I show you the trick now?”
As if there was any way I would turn her down. She showed me a trick that card sharps use – a classic, she said. They start off dealing from the second card from the top instead of the top card. She demonstrated it five times. I understood it every time but just couldn’t pull it off myself, which I thought was quite funny. Emma remained serious, almost offended by the failure of her pupil. After my second failure she took my hand and showed me once more exactly how it was done. I felt the urge to take her hands, kiss them and reassure her that I would sort everything out. That no matter what happened, I would uncover the truth. But I didn’t. I kept trying to master the trick and on my twentieth or so attempt, I had just about got it. She then made me promise to practise by myself, and try to improve.
It was 11 p.m. when Drag phoned. He was on his way back from the nightclub on Kifissias Avenue where Vaios’ ex, Tania Gourka, was singing. Her name could easily have been Greek, but it wasn’t. Tania was Ukrainian; she’d arrived here at the beginning of the last decade as an agency bride sourced for some sixty-year-old from Larissa who was planning a lovely long retirement and old age. As it turned out, his long retirement was cut short and after less than two years Tania was widowed. She would spend half the year in Greece and the other half back with her family in Ukraine. As she confessed to Drag, she kept on drawing the pension of her deceased husband and would send the money back home. She begged him not to report her to the Labour Ministry, who investigated pension fraud, and in return she would tell him everything she knew about Vaios. At some point, because she had always dreamed of becoming a professional singer, she decided to put out some feelers in a nightclub in Larissa, and within two seasons she had become such a huge success on account of her vocal and other talents that a club owner in Athens offered to have her transferred to the capital. The move didn’t go that brilliantly for Tania; she never made it as anything like a headline act, she had to share her tiny dressing room with two other women and she was forced to wear next to nothing to keep the customers happy. Her relationship with Vaios was getting worse all the time. He couldn’t stomach the fact that she wasn’t interested any more and beat the two men she slept with after their break-up to a pulp.
“I won’t say that I’m glad he’s dead … but the way he was coming after me, I was about to ask for protection,” she said to Drag in the dressing room, having chucked out the other two in a volley of abuse.
“Police protection?”
She burst out laughing. “I don’t want to be rude, but that kind of thing isn’t on offer to the likes of us, my boy.”
My boy. To Drag. She was lucky to have escaped one of his legendary headbutts.
What he did discover was that in his efforts to get Tania back, Vaios had started to promise her the world. “He didn’t go into detail. He just said that he had struck gold with this new job and that very soon we would be very, very rich because he was earning a really good salary, plus all the extras. And if I wanted, he could set me up with connections in TV and I could sing on any show I wanted, and get the exposure – as long as I got back with him.” Drag was struck by her Greek; there wasn’t the slightest trace of an accent in it.
“Are you surprised?” I asked him. “She’s received a proper Greek education.”
“What – in the third-class bouzouki joints?”
“Are you aware of a purer form of contemporary Greek expression?”
“Yes, gossip.”
“I can feel my horizons widening when I talk to you. Do you think she was telling the truth?”
“She had no reason not to. She didn’t kill Vaios, as we both very well know. So why would she feel the need to go making up outlandish stories? The point is whether or not Vaios did have this amazing job and was in a position to make all those promises, or whether he was just stringing her along.”
Drag was right to be cautious. It was quite possible that Vaios was telling Tania a pack of lies to get her back into bed. But it was also possible that he wasn’t. If he was, we had no evidence. So we would assume that he wasn’t. That’s how investigations work: few leads and a lot of speculation. And then you just have to hope that one of your theories will turn out to be right.
“The problem is that even if we take our best scenario, the one that gives us something to go on, we’re still dealing in very general terms here. Vaios could have been working for any number of TV executives. What are we supposed to do? Investigate them all to find out which one he was working for?”
I could have sworn I heard Drag smiling through the silence on the
other end of the line. “You forget who you’re talking to. I’ve already found out. I called an old friend of mine in the National Intelligence Service, who’s also a friend of Angelino’s. They’ve got a recent photo of Vaios climbing into the back of a limo with his new boss: Lazaros Vayenas. The owner of HighTV.”
24
Drag was bouncing up and down on the waterbed. “It’s not too bad here,” he said.
We were in a massage parlour in Piraeus, in one of the roads off Trikoupi Street. A brothel by any other name, specializing in Asian girls, shift workers. Judging by the takings from wealthy clients all over the country, these girls were very popular with sections of the male population of Athens, Piraeus and beyond.
Drag, apparently without any sense of shame, was wearing a pair of maroon cords, brown leather shoes and a yellow pullover, and had left his white raincoat on the bed. His outfit couldn’t have cost more than a single thread of one of the bokhara rugs which were covering every square inch of the wooden floors.
“Are you thinking of moving in?” I asked him.
“Not really to my taste,” he said, getting down off the bed.
“And without any money in your pocket, I doubt you’d be to theirs either.”
“Great. That’s my dilemma solved,” he replied, and began to examine the whip he’d discovered in one of the drawers together with another sex aid, which, however hard we tried, neither of us could figure out how to work.
Drag was fired up by the fact that we had at last got a serious suspect. This was understandable when you think that the only success he’d had so far in this case was arresting a group of twenty-something gym junkies who had come together to help the Avengers get the job done even though they didn’t know them personally. When, on instructions from Drag, the police arrested them, they found them planning the execution of more paedophiles who’d been exposed on that TV show, as well as some local homosexuals. “Paedos and gays? I don’t get it. What’s the connection?” I asked Drag.
“Don’t ask me. Ask them. Ask their local bishop.”
He had clearly tired of playing with the whip and started to look at the pictures of semi-naked Asian women covering the walls instead, and when he’d finished with them he returned to the waterbed.
“He’s late,” he said, looking up at the red clock on the wall above the door, which in the place of numbers bore Chinese characters. Clearly its job was to let the girls know when to get rid of their clients.
“He’s here!” I said. Drag leapt off the bed and went across to the window to see Lazaros Vayenas’ limo pull into the parking space outside.
We both knew the drill. We’d been rehearsing this for days now: Vayenas, just as he did on all his visits to the parlour, would try to enter the building unnoticed by getting in through the lift round the back. He would then get out on the second floor, which the madam cleared of girls beforehand so that the only person who would actually see him was his beloved Meifeng. Her name meant “beautiful wind” and he was crazy about her. The only difference was that today Meifeng, on her madam’s instructions, wouldn’t be turning up for work. In her place Vayenas would find me and Drag. Drag had made all the arrangements with the madam, persuading her that if she didn’t do what he asked of her, the following day her business would close and she would be left to rot in prison. This had brought the negotiations to a swift conclusion. He’d then instructed her to keep the ground floor functioning as normal so that when Vayenas arrived nothing would arouse his suspicions.
We’d got our information about Vayenas’ weakness for Meifeng from that same friend of Drag’s and Angelino’s in the Intelligence Service. The Service had been following him for some time so that they would be able to intervene in case of a terrorist attack. Vayenas was on the list of the ten richest Greek businessmen. As well as the TV channel, he owned two radio stations, as many newspapers, shares in foreign companies and even more shares in state-owned businesses that had undergone forced privatization by the EU. That was how they became aware of his little trips down to Piraeus. It looked as though Chryssa, the girlfriend I’d seen outside the TV station, wasn’t enough for him. Who could blame him? A red-blooded young man like that in his seventies …
Vayenas stepped out of the limo accompanied by two bodyguards who couldn’t have looked more different. One of them, who had also been driving, was even taller than me and twice my size. He had short black hair and walked in the laboured way a hypnotized hippo would. The other guy was small and thin but looked very muscly. Drag stared at him.
“That’s Ramon.”
“From?”
“Don’t know.”
“Friend of yours?”
“He’s a little piece of shit. Been arrested for five or six murders and we had to let him go each time. Witnesses were either disappearing or changing their stories. I’d lost track of him recently. Didn’t know who he was working for.”
“Now you know.”
“They say he’s one of the fastest guns in town. And one of the best shots.”
“Better than you?”
“No,” he replied, curtly and with his usual modesty.
The two of us hid in the en suite. The madam had warned us that Mei’s instructions had been to wait for Vayenas in the bathtub. We left the door ajar and waited.
We heard the bedroom door open and close. From the gap in the door I could see that Vayenas was alone. He always came alone, according to the madam. His thugs were outside.
“Mei!” Vayenas was in a good mood, his voice clear, masculine and metallic.
“I think it’s you he wants,” whispered Drag.
Vayenas walked into the bathroom to find not Mei but my gun waiting for him, stuck under his nose. He was wearing a blue shirt, red tie and black woollen trousers. His hair was dyed black, raven black. He had very dark skin and a relatively small stomach for his age and size. His small brown eyes opened wide in surprise for a moment, but within a second were back to normal size.
“Who are you?” he asked us, commandingly, as though he was the one holding the gun. Perhaps when you are so used to being in charge, you don’t let go, not even to say “good evening”. You never relinquish control, not for a second. Without saying a word, I motioned to him to sit down on the toilet seat.
“Who are you?” he repeated, already showing signs of irritation at our insubordination.
“Bennie and Lennie,” said Drag.
“I know you,” replied Vayenas, clearly recognizing Drag from his TV press conferences.
“Yeah. I’m Bennie.”
“Sit down,” I said.
He took a surreptitious look outside the bathroom door. He was thinking of shouting for his bodyguards, but decided against it. He reckoned that the two doors between him and his men were two too many for them to be able to help him if we decided to kill him. He sat down. The bathroom was a bit of a squeeze for three, but better than the bedroom from where his minders could get wind of something much more easily and enter uninvited.
“We want to tell you a story. Feel free to chip in at any point, fill in some of the blanks,” said Drag.
“And if I don’t want to?”
“Oh, you will,” I said.
He smiled ironically and turned to Drag to avoid meeting my eyes.
“What story?”
“Eight years ago, a journalist working for your station, Themis Raptas, discovered that the Achelous River was experiencing the greatest environmental disaster Greece has ever seen. That thousands of people, children too, living in areas surrounding the river and close to factories were being poisoned on a daily basis.”
He made a face, declaring his ignorance.
“Oh, you understand all right,” said Drag.
“The disaster is on a par with a radioactive leak into the environment,” I said, joining in the conversation. That was the initial assessment made by the team of English scientists Themis had been in touch with after they had examined the evidence he sent them.
“Why should I care about all this?”
“You see, that’s just the problem. You don’t care. You don’t care about the environmental disaster or the people. Just as long as the factories are doing well. Because you’re the main shareholder of almost every single factory in the area and now you are building some more there.”
“You’re insane.” Vayenas answered with absolute confidence.
But we knew he was lying. Mimis, one of the six bright young things Drag had put on his team, had been a hacker in a previous life. When he was fifteen he would sit in his bedroom on the island of Samos and hack; he hacked into NASA, but the Americans got wise to this six months after the event. He was arrested, but escaped prison because of his age. When he was a bit older, he decided that he would rather be on the right side of the law than the wrong one. Mimis told Drag that the main shareholders of the industries along the banks of the Achelous were listed as offshore companies. But for someone who can get into NASA, finding the lists of shareholders is child’s play. All those labyrinthine journeys through ownership of companies led us to this immensely powerful man who was sitting on a toilet seat in front of us now.
“Insane,” he repeated for the sake of clarity.
“You haven’t seen me when I’m having one of my bad days,” replied Drag.
“Raptas discovered what was going on. But you found out that he had found out,” I said.
He continued to avoid meeting my eye. Perhaps Drag seemed more manageable, more familiar. Televisual. Surely two men from the world of television could come to an understanding?
“Raptas wasn’t like the protesting residents. You can cut them out, deny them airtime, block all media exposure. But Raptas would have brought it to light, on your channel or another, through the press, the networks, somewhere. He had the power to do that. So you decided to stop him. Is there anything you’d like to add up to this point?”
Baby Blue Page 18
