In Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel

by Alex A King

  “You mean bait.”

  “Worm, bait—same thing.

  “Forget it. I’ve done the bait thing before. Ten out of ten, would not recommend. Last time I almost died.”

  She shrugged. “Every mission has collateral damage.”

  “Still not interested.” I chewed on it a moment. “Who is the fish?”

  “I bet it is Baboulas,” Marika said beside me.

  “Don’t speak,” Hera told her.

  “Definitely not interested if this is about Grandma,” I said.

  “Good choice,” Marika said. “Because better people than this garbage have tried to bait Baboulas.”

  “Where are they now?” I asked Marika.

  “Nobody knows,” she said in a mysterious voice.

  “Huh.”

  Hera’s face flushed. “The fish is irrelevant.”

  “Not to me,” I said. “Tell me about the fish. Is it a goldfish? A clown fish? Are you trying to hook Nemo? Because I have to warn you, his father will find him.”

  “The worm doesn’t need to know the fish’s name. All you have to do is get on the hook and wiggle.”

  “Is this a sex thing?”

  “No.”

  “Pass,” I said.

  Hera said, “Would you do it if it was a sex thing?”

  “No.”

  She slapped a big grin on her face. “I was hoping you’d turn me down. The thing is, you don’t have a choice.”

  It’s Raining Men blasted out of my phone. Aunt Rita had chosen the 1970s hit herself as the tone for her texts and calls. Said she liked the idea of a world where it rained men, but only the sexy ones, because who wanted to be crushed beneath a bald guy with a beer gut?

  I adore my aunt. I wished I’d known her my whole life.

  Baboulas in the hospital. She is asking for you.

  My heart made a squashy sound, then it stopped temporarily. Grandma was in the hospital? She was sick, yeah, but just this morning she’d been in the family compound’s lush gardens, hauling out weeds with the energy of a preschooler.

  This couldn’t be happening. I needed to get Hera out of my hair and get to the Volos Hospital.

  “Hera, now is a bad—”

  In the seat beside me, Marika squeaked. She slumped over her gyro. To her credit it didn’t fall. Even passed out, the woman prioritized food.

  “You can’t do that! She’s ...” My voice trailed off. Telling Hera that Marika was pregnant would be a direct violation of my promise.

  “We’re the NIS—allegedly.” Hera grinned. She was like something out of the Brothers Grimm’s original tales—the ones without happy endings. “We can do anything.”

  There was a tiny buzz. Then my lights went out, too.

  CHAPTER 2

  I woke up next to a urinating hobo in an old Armani coat and baggy gray pants. The late middle-aged man wiped his nose on his cashmere sleeve, sniffed, and shuffled away, muttering to himself—probably about how there was no privacy in public places these days.

  I was in an alleyway, propped up alongside Marika, who had a death-grip on her gyro. There was no sign of the bag with the rest of our food.

  I elbowed her. “Wake up.”

  “I am awake,” she said out the corner of her mouth. “I was pretending to sleep in case of predators.”

  “We’re in an alley and there aren’t any predators.”

  “How do you know that?. What if there are rats? Everyone knows rats live in alleys.”

  “You know rats are small, right?” I held up my hands to show her exactly how small, but she wasn’t convinced.

  “They are like tsiganes, they travel in packs.”

  Tsiganes is a derogatory word for the Roma people. Amongst their other problems, Greece has a Roma problem. Greece wants the Roma to assimilate, but the Roma aren’t fans of the collective—not when the collective actively despises them.

  “There are no rats,” I said, possibly lying.

  There might be rats but they weren’t our immediate problem. At least with rats you know a pack of them can strip the meat off your face. Our problem was worse. We weren’t in Kansas anymore. Or Greece. A sign clinging to one of the back doors cut into the alley was most decidedly not Greek, English, or French. And I was pretty sure it wasn’t German.

  I peeled my backside off the ground and tried to ignore the stench of fresh and stale urine. “Wait there.”

  “As your bodyguard, I should go in your place.”

  “Do you want to look?”

  “No.”

  I raised my eyebrows at her.

  “I will be here if you need backup,” Marika said. She was a chicken, which made two of us. But I figured if she was here it was most probably my fault somehow, so I felt responsible.

  I trotted out of the alley, took a good look at our surroundings. Spectacular view of the ocean. Lots of colorful buildings, all the way down the steep hill to the water. A very Catholic-looking dome on the church.

  Huh.

  Back to the alley I went.

  Marika was ripping into her gyro.

  “Don’t eat that!”

  Reluctantly, she pulled it away from her mouth. “Why not?”

  “It might be bad.

  She stared at me. “Bad how?”

  “Old.”

  “How old?”

  “At least a couple of hours. Possibly more. Definitely more.”

  “Where are we?”

  I chewed on my lip. “Somewhere Italian.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Somewhere Italian where?”

  “Italy.”

  Marika’s frown turned upside down. Her eyes brightened. “I have always wanted to visit Italy.” Hand shielding her eyes, she took a good gander at our surroundings, which were on the filthy and stinky side. “Funny ... Italy is not what I imagined. Where is the pasta and gelato?”

  “I’m guessing they keep those in restaurants.”

  She rushed over to the nearest dumpster, pitched the gyro inside. “Who needs gyro when you have real Italian food? I am so glad you came to Greece. We go on the best road trips.”

  “I don’t think this is a road trip, exactly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Normally on a road trip you remember the road and the trip. How did we get here?”

  “I was sleeping. You drove.”

  “Guess again.”

  “Baboulas’s plane?”

  Not even close. “Hera. Hera happened. Hera and her band of stoic ninja dudes.” Given that I wasn’t familiar with the Greek word for ‘dudes’ I just went ahead and said ‘dudes’. “They knocked us out and dumped us in Italy.”

  “That skeela! I am going to kill her.”

  “First we have to get home.”

  “Then let us go. Where are my guns?”

  That was the moment I realized my bag was gone. I wasn’t the only one. The NIS had dumped us here with nothing except Marika’s gyro, and that was officially garbage.

  “No guns. No bags.”

  “Okay, we can do this without guns. I can use my hands to squeeze the stupid out of her. But can we eat first?” Marika asked.

  “Do you have money?”

  Marika eyed me for a disturbing amount of time. “What?”

  “I don’t have a purse or money. Do you?”

  “One of us will have to sell ourselves. I am a married woman and my husband will not like it, so you will have to do it. It is easy. Stand on a corner and look sexy.”

  It was scary how quickly she’d leaped from ‘we have no money’ to ‘prostitution’.

  “Relax,” I said. “We can call Grandma. She’ll send a plane or something. We can find a payphone and reverse the charges ... or something.”

  “Do you know the number?”

  She had me there. “No. Do you?”

  “I only know my phone number. Everything else is in my phone.”

  Smartphones were making us stupid. There was a time when I knew all my friends numbers; now I was strugg
ling to remember my own.

  “Why Italy?” I said to no one in particular.

  We left the alley and burst out onto streets of Italy. Late afternoon. Hot, but not as hot as a Volos scorcher.

  “Holy hell,” I said suddenly, knowledge from a hundred calendars seeping into my consciousness. “This is Naples.”

  “Naples!” Marika didn’t sound all that sad about our predicament.

  Naples. I would bet my life on it. Well, not my life, but definitely Hera’s. Now that I knew where we were, I could guess who the NIS was after. My uncle Kostas. It had to be.

  I’d never met Dad’s other sibling, but I knew he lived in Germany and was in the process of getting his own crime family off the ground. Currently he was working for a boss called Winkler, who—amongst a million other sticky things—had his fingers in the counterfeiting pie. Winkler had sent someone to the Naples area, which produced the best forgeries of the euro. Unfortunately this Winkler was also trying to muscle in on Grandma’s territory, not just with fake money but with drugs. Winkler and Grandma had recently struck a deal so that Winkler wouldn’t execute Melas for killing one of his adult kids. I’d spent too much time contemplating exactly how many concessions Grandma had had to make to get Winkler to back down.

  And I wondered what the fallout was for my uncle ... or whether he was an untouchable dirt bag. No one had a lot to say about the man, although in all fairness I hadn’t exactly done much poking around. But now I was in Italy with Marika, with no ears around to pick up any odd questions. Mind you, was it really odd that I wanted to know more about one of my nearest blood relatives? No. No, it wasn’t.

  “What’s Uncle Kostas like?”

  Marika made a face. “He is a piece of shit...”

  Well, there you go.

  “ ... A piece of charming shit, but he is family so I would never say that out loud.”

  Then it came back: Grandma was in the hospital. Fear did a tap dance across my chest, down through my intestines, then it fell headfirst onto my bladder, where it used the organ as a bouncy castle. I gasped.

  Marika grabbed my shoulders. “What is it? Are you sick?”

  I shook my head. “Not me.” I brought her up to speed—which was brief and patchy—about the Grandma situation.

  “My Virgin Mary,” Marika said, crossing herself like the good Greek Orthodox woman she was. “She will be fine. Baboulas can withstand anything, even death. Probably it is indigestion from eating a man alive.”

  Marika was wrong. Grandma was the kind of sick that only gets better a lucky percentage of the time, and up until very recently Grandma had shunned treatment for her cancer. It wasn’t until I showed up that she decided to take action against the invading force in her body. It wasn’t common knowledge throughout the family, and I wasn’t sure if Marika was in the know.

  “Does she normally eat people alive?”

  “There are stories,” Marika said darkly.

  Yes there were, and I’d heard a lot of those stories before bedtime on the nights Dad tucked me into bed when I was a kid. I wasn’t warped because of those tales. Much.

  Okay, so what now?

  Fact: We were stuck in Italy with no money, no phones, and no handy travel book full of useful Italian phrases, like Where’s the first train out of here?, and, How do I stowaway on a train anyway? Or, Where’s the nearest bathroom with a six-foot wide pipe that leads back to Greece?

  Fact: The NIS had dumped us here for a reason—a reason I didn’t give a rat’s hairy hiney about because I never agreed to be their bait.

  “We should go to the police,” I said, wondering if that classified as tattling. The NIS had basically abducted us, which had to be illegal on some level, even if they were supposed to be the good guys. Then again, it was a pretty common belief back home that the CIA was more Sith and less Jedi, so probably we got off lightly. Hera could have had us stuffed into a ditch. First chance I got I was going to snap her boney neck. No doubt there was someone in the Family—several someones—who’d do it for me, but I wanted the pleasure of doing it myself.

  Marika’s eyebrows took a quick hike up her forehead. Her mouth did this circle of shock like I’d just announced I was giving up prostitution for a nun’s habit.

  “The police? We cannot go to the police!”

  My forehead bunched up. “Why not?”

  “Because of who we are—especially you.”

  Was that an insult or a fact? I wasn’t sure. “So we don’t give them our names.”

  In the middle of that grubby, gummed-up sidewalk in Naples, Italy, as people shoved past us, and more than one pervert pinched my butt, I witnessed Marika experiencing a light bulb moment. It wasn’t a simple white globe, and it wasn’t alone. Her light bulb moment was a neon sign, worthy of Las Vegas.

  Her voice came out breathy and excited. “We could give them fake names!”

  “Sure, we could do that,” I said slowly, cautiously, aware that there was a potential land mine beneath my feet. “Or we could just not tell them our names.”

  “Okay, think.” She grabbed my arms, started at me hard. “What were the names of your first pet and the first street you lived on?”

  “Isn’t that how you get your porn star name?”

  “Maybe Americans do, but in Greece that is how we get our fake names when the NIS kidnap us and send us to Italy.”

  “Okay.” I crunched names in my head. “My goat doesn’t have a name yet.”

  I had a goat. It was nameless. So sue me, I was waiting on a goat-naming epiphany. Thus far I’d been too busy to spend hours mulling over a name for the adorable lop-eared goat that had helped itself to my room in Grandma’s shack and her sheer curtains. We’d faced death together, my goat and me, and still it didn’t have a name. A part of me was hoping it would choose its own.

  “You never had a beloved pet that someone in the family decided to kill because they believed pets were unhygienic for children?”

  I stared at her in horror. “No. Did you?”

  “Of course.” She said it easy breezy, like it was commonplace.

  “I never had a pet.”

  “Why not?”

  “Dad is allergic.”

  No siblings, no pets; I was starting to get the feeling my childhood hadn’t been all it could be.

  “Okay. Do you remember your first street?”

  “Cedar.”

  “What kind of name is that?”

  “A street name. It’s super common in Oregon.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It’s a kind of tree.” I hunted and pecked through my brain, searching for the Greek word. “Kendros.”

  She shook her head. “Americans are strange.”

  “Well what’s your new name then?”

  “I never lived on a street with a name before. A lot of small Greek villages have no street names. Everybody knows where everybody else lives—what for do they need street names?”

  And she thought Americans were strange.

  “So what was your pet’s name?”

  “Before my uncle killed my mouse, its name was Zeus.”

  “So that makes us Cedar and Zeus?”

  “Cher only has one name. Madonna only has one name. God only has one name. It works for them, yes?”

  “We can’t walk into a police station with only one name apiece,” I said.

  “Why not? This is Italy. They voted for Cicciolina, and she was a porn star. She campaigned topless and nobody cared. They will not care if we have twenty names or one.”

  How much worse could this day get?

  I tried not to worry about Grandma as we trotted along Naples’ streets, on the hunt for a police station. Marika’s gawking made it easier. My cousin’s cousin’s cousin’s wife was a natural tourist. She was the kind of person who ignored signs prohibiting flash photography.

  “What is in Naples that we have to see?” she asked me much too eagerly.

  “The exit.”

  “Come on, Kat
erina, we are in Italy. We should not waste the opportunity while we are here. How do we get to Vatican City? We should ask someone. Look.” She pointed a pair of Italian guys loitering on a corner. “They look like they know their way around Italy. You will have to ask them. My English is not so good and my Italian is worse. All I can do is order pasta.”

  #

  Marika peered into the alley. It was a different alley to the one where we’d started this adventure. Although, come to think of it, the whizzing hobo did look familiar ...

  “I do not think Vatican City is here,” Marika muttered in Greek.

  “That’s what I told you,” I hissed.

  “You should have said it louder.”

  The two men behind us laughed. “Give us your money, phones, and jewelry,” the dumpy one said in passable English. He had the physique of a fully loaded baked potato, sprinkled with gold and a double helping of black hair. His poor mother probably got hairballs just kissing his cheek. The second guy was buckteeth in a corn-dog body. I couldn’t say what the rest of his face looked like, not with those Chiclets hogging all my attention.

  Marika elbowed me. “What did they say?”

  Marika’s English wasn’t that bad. She’d studied the language in school like every other Greek school kid. But she had a way of becoming selectively language-deaf when the mood struck her.

  I told her.

  She laughed.

  In their faces.

  “What is she laughing at?” Beaver wanted to know.

  “A couple of bozos,” I told him. Like most Europeans under a certain age their English was good enough to rob someone at knifepoint but not good enough to understand slang beyond the common pantheon of swear words.

  Beaver looked confused. “Bozos?”

  “It’s American slang for Italian men,” I explained.

  “Bozos. Heh. I like that. Bozos.”

  Oh boy. “My friend here has issues.” I nodded to Marika.

  His forehead scrunched up like a sheet of truck stop toilet paper. “Is she ...” He drew air circles by his temple.

  “You have no idea,” I told him.

  Baked Potato made a hurry up motion with his knife. The guy was weighed down with enough gold to open his own pawn franchise. “Money. Phones. Jewelry.”

  “We don’t have any,” I said. Okay, yes, Marika sported a boulder on her finger big enough to stone a man to death, but I’m usually a jewelry-free zone. Jewelry is something I do when I’m trying to make an effort. Portland tends to be more of a leisure-wear kind of place. If you wear jewelry it’s crafted with something weird and cool, like the inner-ear bones of your non-vegan enemies.