The Greek Wall

by Nicolas Verdan

  “Why such a scenario?”

  “Don’t complicate things. Just be satisfied with the spy story, and take what comes. You’re getting off easily, after all.”

  “Is that all?”

  “No, you know as well as I do that it’s a matter of politics. Germany will exert pressure, and Greece will make a gesture.”

  “And the wall will be built in the meantime, won’t it?”

  “Ah, now you’re beginning to see the light!”

  “A Greek wall, built by Greeks.”

  “The costliest wall.”

  “The costliest wall, built with European funds.”

  “Yes, Nikos. But tell me, did you ever discover the name of your rival?”

  “My rival?”

  “The individual who was awarded the contract for the wall.”

  “No, but it must be someone influential.”

  “Yes, someone extremely influential.”

  Epilogue

  My name is Evangelos Montzouris. I was born in Athens, on 14 December 1952. I don’t know what came over me, but tonight I decided that from now on I would be the one telling this story, though until a moment ago I wouldn’t have sworn it. When I arrived at my office on Alexandras Avenue in the late afternoon, nothing was further from my mind. But by the time I turned out the light, at nine that evening, I understood that I mustn’t weasel my way out of things any more. To start with, I went for a beer at the Batman, in Neos Kosmos, on the other side of town, where I’m a regular. I was at the bar when my mobile vibrated in my pocket. It was my daughter. I went out into the street to answer, for the music was too loud inside.

  “Dad,” Andromeda told me, “you know, I’ve given a lot of thought to this.”

  “To what?” I answered.

  “To the little one’s first name. I think I’m going to break with tradition.”

  “But that’s excellent, Andromeda.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes, I don’t know what your mother thinks about it, but I doubt she’ll be upset if you don’t give the little one her maternal grandmother’s first name. And since the other grandma is no longer with us…”

  “I’m glad you understand, Dad.”

  “Are you surprised? Aren’t I partly responsible for bringing you up like that?”

  “Yes, you’re right. But I wanted to know if maybe you had a suggestion about what to call her.”

  “Me? It’s nice of you to think of that, Andromeda, but it’s up to the two of you to choose. Your husband must have a preference.”

  “Yes, he wants to call her Natasha, but I don’t like it; and anyway, I think it’s the name of one of his old girlfriends.”

  “I see.”

  “So?”

  “So what?”

  “What name would you give her?”

  I answered with no hesitation, “Zoë, ‘Life’, that’s what I’d call her!”

  And I think she liked that a lot. She sent me a text message to tell me that her husband rather liked the suggestion too.

  Then I went into the bar to get my coat, and set off on foot. I came to Kallirois Avenue, crossed at the lights to the island with the Fix building, and then along Syngrou Avenue, to Falirou Street.

  There was something in the air, I don’t know what, but I felt on top of the world. Moisture was seeping everywhere, the camber of the road gleamed in the semi-darkness like the back of a black caiman on the surface of a stagnant pool. I can’t say why, but what I could see on Falirou Street told me that I had nothing to blame myself for. I went past an old garage with a pointed roof, like a castle straight from the early days of the combustion engine in Athens. The traffic, in fact, wasn’t moving this evening, though it’s true there’s nothing surprising about that when it’s parked along the street. But how can I put it? Seeing the cars quite still, as if they were in no hurry to be driven again, their dark bodywork absorbing the orange rain that was falling slowly under the street lights: that was the precise image that made me think I could start to write.

  The fact is, I was walking through a desolate streetscape, but inwardly I was elated. I greeted No. 60, the century-old house I’d forgotten about, standing neglected among the post-war apartment buildings, a leprous bourgeois lady of poisonous beauty. The farther I walked along Falirou Street, the deeper became my sense that this was where I was from. I felt it most acutely in front of No. 42 with its mutilated garden, its palm tree triumphant over its sawed-off trunk that pokes out from the neoclassical debris.

  Music poured from No. 47, where a salsa school now occupies the two top floors, its windows wide open this evening. I could hear the music, but I didn’t listen to it; I was walking under a moonless sky, and told myself that whatever happened never has the meaning we usually attribute to things. I thought especially of my military service under the Colonels.

  Sitting at my table I reflect too on my work as an intelligence agent employed by interchangeable ministries, on this democratic regime in which terrorized political families who are always on the defensive succeed and resemble one another. I think about all that, and I can find no plausible explanation for it apart from the ceaseless movement that carries me along and is leading me to the present moment on Falirou Street, sad and chaotic but beautiful as well, head held high despite the poverty, dignified in its filth, a nocturnal trajectory which brings me back to the city where, this evening, I am being reborn.

  And if by some chance as I go along the Alpha Bank’s icy exterior my way seems a dead end, I carry on, stepping out, and find myself almost at home, at the intersection with Veikou Street. I live a little farther up, on Makriyanni Street (named after one of our heroes, a man of war and of letters whose military feats have marked our history, which exists only rewritten in his new prose). I can see my apartment building opposite, reflected in the windows of the Acropolis Museum. In the evening I sometimes await the moment when the guard turns out the lights in the gallery where the Parthenon friezes slumber. Looking at it every morning, I come to doubt its presence above on the rock.

  I recall Lazaridou’s face, the Athenian woman I questioned recently, Nikolaus Strom’s lady friend. There’s nothing to add to this bizarre story apart from her face, which remained completely blank when I told her that her Nikos would be tried for espionage. She didn’t believe it. She knows he’s innocent. Theirs is an innocent love.

  I didn’t tell Strom that in a way he owed it to Barbaros that the charges for Batsis’s murder were dropped. Initially, of course, Barbaros was bent on eliminating him. When he found out that a German was trying to make the Greek government an attractive offer for the construction of a security wall, he lost no time in creating obstacles for him. His first step was to get Strom involved with one of his trusted henchmen, Colonel Alecos Papadopoulos. He knew he could count on Papadopoulos to put a spanner in Strom’s works. And it was also a way to sound out the intentions of this mischief-maker, this potential competitor who had emerged from nowhere. When he understood that the German really did have the potential to snatch the contract for the wall from under his nose, without a moment’s hesitation he set about disposing of him. Barbaros is the head of one of the largest industrial groups in the country, with 2,600 employees. His shops have supplied half the Greek population with their mobile phones. This prestigious status doesn’t prevent him from having several unsavoury thugs on his payroll; in their eyes he is the fairy godfather who got them out of jail long before they’d served out their official sentences. Batsis, who had been sentenced for the murder of a shipyard worker in Eleusis, had been working for him for years.

  Without informing Colonel Papadopoulos of his intentions, Barbaros merely asked him to arrange a false meeting with Strom at the Eros, a spot near the frontier that could hardly fail to attract his competitor, and where nothing or nobody should have been able to prevent Batsis from dealing with Strom. The police would have considered it an underworld killing: a foreigner murdered in murky circumstances in a brothel on the Turkish bord
er. But the sudden eruption of the terror-stricken Polina, still half-crazed by the hallucinogen administered during the Frontex orgies, had ruined the plan.

  When he learned that his hitman was dead, Barbaros grew concerned. The inquiry into Batsis’s murder, with all the publicity that would have surrounded it, could well be disastrous for him. Eventually, his name would have been dragged in. So Barbaros decided to pick up his phone. Someone who enjoys his degree of influence finds it easy to contact government ministers, even past midnight. As usual, he was able to obtain a hearing. It was a matter of covering up a murder in the Evros region, he told a powerful individual. The interests of the Greek government, and accordingly of the entire country, were at stake. A decapitation on the strategic frontier zone of the European Union would put Athens in an impossible situation in the negotiations with Brussels to agree to share in financing the wall. His message didn’t fall on deaf ears.

  There remained the problem of Strom gadding around the countryside and quite likely to mention his links to the colonel. But Barbaros found a way to turn the situation to his advantage. First, the police would have to get hold of Strom. Then they would open his interrogation by accusing him of Batsis’s murder. He would certainly deny it and complain loudly about the injustice. But the cards were stacked against him: his presence at the Eros on the evening of the murder, his attempt to hide the victim’s body, his flight in the company of a vulgar little Russian whore who’d accused him of decapitating Batsis before her very eyes, and, finally, his attempt to escape from Greece, constituted damning evidence. With Strom in such a weak position they would only need to offer him a deal: if he pled guilty to a charge of economic and industrial espionage, and trespassing in a prohibited military zone, the police would drop the murder charge. Then the media would only have to be brought into the loop, and Germany would find itself, unexpectedly, in an embarrassing position. And for a good reason: one of its nationals had been arrested on the frontier with Turkey. Under questioning by the intelligence services, Strom would finally admit to being employed by German companies hoping to win an exclusive contract of one and three quarter million euros to build a fence to bar clandestine migrants from entering the Schengen Area. Berlin could protest as much as it liked. The espionage case, despite the denials, would weaken the German government and leave it unable to prevent an allocation of European funds to assist the Greeks to construct the security wall themselves. And since Barbaros would be the one to roll out the barbed wire along the frontier, he would end up with the profits. So things had turned out exactly as Barbaros had orchestrated them.

  This evening, on Falirou Street, I feel unburdened of my need to learn the truth. Now I know that our existence is just a fiction. Barbaros is a creation, our creation, the creation of us Greeks. It is we who have given birth to this monster who hungers after power and wealth, this man who acts in the shadows, whose invisible omnipotence is our ruination, the ruination of Greece.

  But we still have the power to rid ourselves of him, if we really want to…

  My motorbike is in its usual place, on what is now a pedestrianized street. I get into the saddle, and for once put on my helmet. In normal circumstances I carry it on my arm; that’s how it is. But not tonight. I button my coat, take my pistol from its holster and put it in my belt, where it is easily accessible. It is loaded (I checked again as I was leaving the office).

  It takes me a few seconds to reach Amalias Avenue. I get green lights all the way, and I’m already on Syntagma Square, in front of the parliament buildings. A bus from the riot squads is parked on Sofias Avenue, opposite the French embassy. The evzones, standing stiffly in front of their sentry boxes, don’t bat an eyelid. Now I can feel the moist, freezing air whip my face, but I don’t lower my visor. Not yet. At this hour of the night there’s not much traffic. It takes me barely eight minutes to reach Ekali.

  Now I’m passing through Ambelokopi. My eyes are stinging. The acrid smoke of burning wood floats in mid-air above the lower streets, where it has become too costly to heat homes with oil or electricity. I traverse the well-heeled neighbourhood of Psychiko, the big Hygeia Hospital, and the Olympic stadium, I speed past the monsters of glass and steel planted in the former orchards of Maroussi. In Kifissia, the streets are empty; there are still Christmas decorations on the balconies.

  In Ekali, high above the Attic plain, on the only slopes of Mount Pentelikon where trees still grow, silence reigns. People must sleep soundly in these family strongholds. The smell of burning wood is not as acrid here. Smoke from fireplaces spices the mountain air.

  I am on the other side of the street, opposite his house, out of range of the CCTV. The gate is closed, but the lights are on. Behind the wall surrounding the property I can see through the laurels that the lights are on throughout the entire house. Near a window there is a sofa and a low table. The master of the house is expected any minute now. His plane landed an hour ago. He is returning from London. His chauffeur went to fetch him from the airport. Barbaros will arrive very suddenly. He will be unsuspecting, and this evening, according to information received, he has no bodyguard.

  The gun feels light in my hand. It’s odd: I have a sudden feeling of déjà vu. There’s also something of that in the writing I’ve started – as if everything that has happened to me since the evening I was told about the severed head has already been written down. But until now, someone else has told my story for me. From now on, I’ll be the one speaking, the one writing in the first person.

  That’s what he thinks.

  Yes, that’s what he thinks, because Agent Evangelos’s mobile is vibrating in his coat pocket. It’s his daughter. Why does she have to call right now? He answers. She is angry with him; they’re waiting for him at her house, he’s very late as usual, but this time she won’t forgive him, so he had better come right away.

  Agent Evangelos mounts his bike once more, and heads back into Athens.