Baby Blue

by Pol Koutsakis

  “That you’re both very entertaining, but I am a busy man and don’t have time to waste.”

  “Neither do I,” I said and slapped him.

  We expected that a man like Vayenas would be quite hard to break, even with a gun pointing at him. Maybe things would have taken a different turn if we had used extensive violence, but Drag had ruled that out on account of his age. Besides, a confession at this point was pointless: if we used a bug, how would Drag be able to justify my presence when the recording on the wire was played back?

  What we wanted was for him to find out that we knew and to annoy him enough that he would decide to kill us. If we became targets, we could catch whoever he hired to take us out and get him that way. A lot of ifs, of course. But we had nothing else and still didn’t know the truth about a lot of what had happened. So this plan was better than nothing. Drag and I had arranged it so that I would come across as extremely impatient with Vayenas and then hit him on some pretext. When I did, Vayenas changed colour many times before our very eyes. He was not used to being on the wrong end of a beating, except perhaps in the games he played with Meifeng. It probably seemed unconscionable that someone would ever raise a hand to him. He looked at us with deeper hatred than seemed possible to fill sixty square feet. Drag went on talking as though nothing important had happened, as though this was just the first of many that we were willing to give him.

  “I got very tired,” said Drag.

  Vayenas was staring at him fixedly.

  “I got very tired trying to work out why Vaios wanted to get hold of Raptas’ daughter. But the answer was simple: You wanted to get hold of the evidence from his investigation, the investigation her father hadn’t been able to finish – evidence that would leave you burnt. You think the girl has it, and when you discovered all those years later where she was living, you decided to try to get your hands on it. I got really tired of trying to work out what was going on with all those paedophiles. Who the hell suddenly decides to eliminate them all? Then I found out about all those rumours about Raptas. That he was a paedo. And I talked to everybody, one by one, who had talked to his colleagues, making claims against him. First I found the original family who accused Themis of abusing their little girl. Now here’s a coincidence: the father, despite having zero education, has been working in a senior management position for years, and even though he’s on the payroll, nobody has ever seen him work there. And the other one might be registered unemployed, but he’s the flushest man in his neighbourhood. Everyone comes running to him when they’re short of cash. He’s like the goose that keeps on laying those golden eggs.”

  “Do you realize that what you’re doing is kidnapping and that tomorrow morning you’ll be out of the police force?” said Vayenas.

  “Are you feeling the cold in here?” Drag asked me. “Or is it just the fear that’s giving me this chill?”

  “I’ll have both of you thrown into jail!” shouted Vayenas, who was about to get to his feet. I was standing over him and pushed him down by the shoulders, forcing him back down onto the toilet seat, groaning. He coughed repeatedly.

  “Go on,” I told Drag.

  “It’s assumed that Raptas knew all these other paedophiles. That he shared material with them. Well, I found the emails with the material. The address wasn’t his. It looked like it was, but it wasn’t. Simple trick. Sofianos, the journalist, fell for it. The paedophiles who supposedly knew Raptas back then are still on trial, after all this time. Their trials keep getting delayed and now they’re walking free because eighteen months have passed since they were taken into temporary custody and there’s been no trial. It’s as if some invisible hand is protecting them. And I intend to prove that that hand belongs to you.”

  Vayenas coughed again and again, even more loudly. He looked exhausted and was trying to loosen his tie as he coughed. “I need … my pills,” he said. “In my jacket; it’s on the bed.”

  Drag stayed with him while I went to get the jacket from the next room. Vayenas searched in the inside pocket, pulled out a pill, and, as he was swallowing it, we heard a loud thud from the bedroom. Vayenas’ thugs had just kicked in the door; perhaps Drag and I weren’t the only ones wearing transmitters.

  I grabbed Vayenas by the collar and watched Drag, who had already burst through into the bedroom. The two heavies were already inside, ready for action, and looked at us both – especially at me, because I was holding their boss.

  The lizard-like, less well built one of the two laughed. “Drag,” he said.

  “Ramon.” Drag returned the dry greeting.

  Everyone’s weapons were already drawn but it would be much trickier for them to shoot, seeing that we had Vayenas. I noticed Ramon was holding a 9 mm Sig Sauer, and was holding it so steadily that he appeared to be frozen.

  “Giotis …” he said, motioning to his friend to put down his gun.

  And he would have done if Vayenas had not assessed the situation perfectly and said suddenly, “They’re not going to shoot me. Kill them.”

  He was right. That’s exactly what Drag and I had agreed, that we’d give him a hard time and then let him go, making sure he wasn’t in any danger. He was our main suspect for everything: Raptas’ murder, the paedophile executions, the attack on Angelino. We needed him, and we needed him alive.

  Before Vayenas even finished his sentence, Ramon had fired a shot at Drag and at that exact same moment Drag had fired one at him. The only difference was that Drag had dropped to his knees to shoot so Ramon’s bullet ended up in the wall while Drag’s lodged itself between Ramon’s eyes. Ramon might have been a very fast and a very good shot, just not fast or good enough.

  Of course, I only caught all this out of the corner of my eye, as I had to keep my focus on Giotis. And because he couldn’t shoot straight at me without endangering Vayenas, he decided to throw himself on me instead. These guys who look like they have walked off some catch wrestling ring seem to think that the lunge is foolproof. I pushed Vayenas to one side and fired two shots at Giotis, in the sternum, but he kept coming at me as though nothing had happened and then grabbed me by the throat. He was strong as a horse and his grip immediately shut off my breathing. I tried to push him off me with one arm and used the other to shoot at him again, this time in the stomach. It made no difference. No groans, nothing. He must have been wearing a vest, there was no other explanation; I tried to angle my gun and aim for his neck, but it was impossible. His strength was otherworldly, superhuman. He was choking me and there was nothing I could do about it. I dropped my gun and tried to pull his hands off me with my own but failed, so I landed an uppercut on his chin but not forcefully enough. I heard a noise and saw Drag beating him over the head with his gun. He wasn’t going to stop. Giotis was not going to stop. This went on until he suddenly turned and grabbed Drag and they both fell to the floor. I tried to draw some breath as my lungs were desperate for air. Giotis had climbed on top of Drag and had him in some kind of hold. His black sweatshirt was full of blood. He wasn’t wearing a vest. I had almost been killed by a man with three bullets inside him. And now he was trying to do the same thing to Drag, only this time his strength was deserting him. He was losing the battle. I spun round, looking for Vayenas. He’d gone. Drag was now holding on to the edge of the bed and kicking Giotis in the face. I ran out. To the right of Meifeng’s room was the lift, and a little further along was the staircase. No one was using the lift. I pressed the button and saw that it was still on this floor. Vayenas had chosen the stairs for his escape; they gave him more options. They led to the first floor, where I could hear a lot of shouting going on. It could have been Vayenas causing commotion or it could simply have been panic at the sound of gunfire, making everyone flee the building in their underwear. I turned left after the lift to go after him and a split second before it reached me, I saw a knife coming towards my throat. Instinctively I raised my arm to push it away and felt the blade plunging into me, just below my shoulder. Vayenas was acting shrewdly; he reckoned quite
rightly that it would be tricky for him to outrun us, even with a head start. His men had the car keys, so he had no getaway. Instead he had decided to wait on the staircase to surprise the first one of us to come after him. But killing with a knife, unlike a gun, takes technique.

  I gave out a small shout of pain and grabbed Vayenas’ hand with my right. The knife fell to the floor. I then twisted his arm behind his back and with one upwards thrust dislocated it. The crack was loud but Vayenas’ screams were louder. He tried to kick me in the balls. I took a step back and let go of his arm. Despite the pain, he started to run. I caught up with him only a few steps down and hurled him against the pink walls. He really had no idea how unmanageable I was.

  “You can start by …” I said. I picked him up by his collar and his belt and whacked his head against the wall. And then I did it again. And again. “Talking.” I was about to slam his head into the wall once more when he raised his hand in weak surrender. “Now,” I said.

  He sat down on the bottom step of the flight leading to the first floor. His face was full of cuts, and when he first attempted to stand up he fell back down again as though he couldn’t work out that he should be using his weight to counteract the fall.

  “I must be getting rusty; I used to be in the special forces,” he said, spitting blood.

  “You were out to get Raptas. From the word go. To stop it all coming out.”

  He nodded.

  “Not like that. Speak!”

  “Yes.”

  “And you concocted the story that he was a paedophile.”

  “Yes.”

  “Your idea?”

  He nodded.

  “So he wouldn’t publish his report?”

  “He wouldn’t listen to reason. Nor to threats. I called him into my office, told him I wanted him to put the brakes on the investigation. I didn’t say that the factories belonged to me – just to drop the case. I think his words were ‘No way!’”

  “And?”

  “When someone is about to go to war with you, you have to strike first.”

  “And you did. You made sure that the false accusation of child abuse did the rounds of all his colleagues so that they could finish him off for you.”

  “I was one step ahead. He hadn’t finished the investigation yet, but I had all my witnesses lined up.”

  What kind of innocent man with Themis’ connections disappears like that? I remembered Anna Kati’s question. The answer was now clear: an innocent man who is dealing with someone with a thousand times more powerful connections than his, someone who’s willing to do whatever it takes to get him out of the way.

  “Not witnesses,” I said. “False witnesses.”

  An expression travelled across his mouth which might have been a smile, despite the great pain that any kind of facial movement would have caused him. It looked like he had decided that there was no point in even trying to get up and had made himself comfortable on the floor.

  “In the end, the truth is just what most people believe,” he said.

  Spoken like a true man of the media. It then occurred to me that the police would have been called when the shots were fired. Time was short. And where had Drag got to? I had left him fighting with Giotis.

  “Nice theory. Very convenient. So Raptas disappears because he’s scared he’ll get arrested?”

  “Mmm. And that cripple he dragged around with him would have to go back to the orphanage. You know, in war it’s not the best side that wins; it’s the side with less to lose. If the report had come out, I would have been in and out of court for the next ten years. If the child abuse had come out, Raptas would have lost his daughter; a paedophile, adopting an underage child? I don’t think so.”

  That cripple he dragged around with him.

  “So even if he had published the evidence, you would have had enough time to destroy his reputation. His report would have been completely discredited and been buried under the noise of the sex scandal.”

  “You’re smart. Do you want to come and work for me?”

  “You’re doing exactly the same thing now. You’re having these paedophiles murdered because you’ve heard that someone is investigating Raptas’ murder. You were worried that this someone has or would get hold of the evidence and publish it. So you started killing paedophiles just like you had Raptas killed so it looked like they were connected.”

  “You’re smart, but I think you take me for an idiot. Raptas was tortured to death. Why would I want to torture him?”

  “So he’d give you the evidence he’d gathered against you.”

  “If I had known he was up on Filopappou, I wouldn’t have needed to go to the trouble of torturing him. All I would have had to do was take the girl and he would have handed all of it over.”

  He was right about that.

  “So you’re telling me that you didn’t know where he was?”

  “All I knew was that he was still phoning some of the factory workers occasionally and was still digging around for more evidence, wherever he was.”

  Raptas remained a true journalist, even when homeless and living on the streets.

  “I looked everywhere for him. I preferred to find out what it was that he knew rather than have to resort to neutralizing him. When I hired Vaios years later and he told me all the time I had been looking for Raptas he had been living up on Filopappou and that he’d been seeing him once a month, I thought someone was playing a joke on me.”

  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. Paraschos’ words.

  “I had people turning Athens upside down looking for him but he always eluded them, every time we thought we were getting close. It was as though someone was tipping him off.”

  While Vayenas was talking, almost on autopilot and defeated, I thought everything he was saying made perfect sense. The paedophile executions were a little different from Raptas’, but that was because we were dealing with a different murderer. But then if someone else had murdered Raptas, who was that someone and why had they done it?

  Vayenas finally made the decision. He slowly got to his feet, his eyes on me the entire time as he tried to work out what I was going to do to him. I had to keep reminding myself that we needed him alive.

  It was just the two of us. We were a team. “The pack”, he used to call us, Emma had said.

  “One more question,” I said.

  Such was the silence on the staircase that each one of our words sounded like hailstones. Vayenas seemed to be on the point of collapse again. His head was leaning on his shoulder, on the side that had taken the brunt of the wall.

  “If Vaios had pulled it off. If you’d managed to get hold of Emma. What would you have done to her?”

  “Nothing. We only wanted the evidence,” he said, and shrugged in a bid to be more convincing.

  I’m only out for revenge. Justice disappeared the moment he died. I recalled Emma’s words from our first meeting.

  Revenge. Even if he was telling the truth and had not killed Themis, Vayenas was single-handedly responsible for the fact that Emma and her father had been forced to leave their home and to live on the streets.

  “And then what? After you’d got the evidence?”

  There was Angelino too, whose life was in the balance because of Vayenas. I saw my mother’s face now. Clear as day, just before she died. With Angelino taking care of her. With her smiling at him. Revenge.

  “I’d have let her go,” he replied.

  “Why am I not convinced?”

  I raised my pistol and dispatched him to where he could keep company with Themis Raptas, complete with a bullet in his head.

  Drag turned up about a minute later, at about the same time as the first sirens sounded in the distance. His lips were swollen, his eye in a state. Giotis, with the three bullets inside him, had proved to b
e a real beast of a man before he finally died of internal bleeding.

  “What have you done?” asked Drag when he saw Vayenas’ corpse. “What have you done?” he repeated, this time noticeably louder. “Get out of here quick,” he said, taking my gun out of my hand and slipping it into his holster.

  25

  Back at home and still fully clothed, I collapsed on the bed, exhausted, starving, with my arm in a bandage and slightly drunk – it helps with the pain. I thought about Themis Raptas, a man who was “irritatingly good” at his job, as Paraschos had put it, but in the eyes of his closest colleagues and friends carried a stomach-churning stigma, the stigma of the child abuser. It doesn’t get worse than that. A man who knew his life was in danger and at the same time had to fight on the streets on a daily basis for his own survival and for the survival of a blind child. And then to fail, after sacrificing the integrity he prided himself so much on, by blackmailing Paraschos to get money for Emma.

  Then I thought about Emma. I closed my eyes and just lay there like that for ages. At one point I thought I saw lights all around me. I got up with a bit of difficulty and staggered into the sitting room. She had to move around the city streets like this, but I was in a flat I knew like the back of my hand. How difficult could it really be? I kept knocking into things – furniture, walls, doors. I feared every step. I put my good hand out in front of me to protect the injured one from further knocks. I had to touch everything very carefully to work out what it was. I was scared. I opened my eyes and looked at my watch. Six minutes of blindness. Six minutes. For Emma it had been a lifetime.

  I phoned Teri and gave her the briefest of summaries of what had happened. I explained that the police always try to cover for their own but that there were some irregularities that were too glaring to cover up. It would be impossible to cover up Drag’s presence at the massage parlour in Piraeus today where he had left behind three dead bodies, supposedly on his own. And it was also impossible to cover up the fact that one of those dead bodies belonged to Lazaros Vayenas. Drag was now in serious trouble, and it was down to me. We had nothing concrete on Vayenas. I asked Teri not to say a word to Emma and to put her on so I could talk to her.