by Alex A King
CHAPTER 13
Unbeknownst to me, Grandma had set up extra security so that nobody could breathe in her shack without security recording the whole thing.
One of my cousins explained this to me in the yard, while two others stood on the far side of the fence, grinning. The second I screamed they’d dispatched a security team to check out the situation.
The situation was an unexpected encounter between me and Yiorgos, Papou’s eagle. Papou had decided I’d be more inclined to talk to the eagle expert if the eagle was in my custody.
Apparently this was h-i-l-a-r-i-o-u-s. Which it would have been if it hadn’t been captured on hidden camera ... and if it had happened to someone who wasn’t me.
The eagle in question was hunched on the back of a chair, expression decidedly indignant. Unblinking, he stared at us through the screen door, trying to decide if we were a big breakfast or a light lunch.
I inched toward the gate.
Takis arrived next. He cackled when the cousins brought him up to speed. “You should put a blanket over his head,” he said, peering through the screen door. “That way he will think it is night and go back to sleep.”
I glanced at the bird through the screen door. “Do you think that’ll work?”
“Sure. I saw it on TV. Would they put something on the TV if it was not true?”
Somebody didn’t know about American cable news channels. “Can’t we just put him in a cage or something?”
“Cage? What cage? Who puts an eagle in a cage?”
“I have to get him to the pet shop somehow.”
Takis and the other cousins stood around, trading quips and grins—all of them at my expense.
What would Grandma do?
“I need a cage,” I said. “Can someone please get me one?”
Their conversation continued without me.
“It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again,” I muttered. I could have yelled it and they wouldn’t have listened. Grandma, being an avid gardener, kept a hose coiled in her yard at all times. Nobody noticed when I reached for the hose and turned the tap to full. Probably they thought I was going to water the flowers.
A full second later, the compound came alive with the sound of squealing men.
“What’s the matter?” I called out over their shrieking. “It’s just a bit of water!”
“I’m going to kill you,” Takis shouted.
“Try it and you’re a dead man,” came a voice from up high. I turned around and gave my cousin on the rooftop two thumbs up. He gave me one back. I knew firsthand what he could do with a sniper rifle.
I turned off the hose, curled it up in neat bundle, and set it back where it belonged. There was a slow clapping from the other side of Grandma’s fence. Predictably, there was a body attached to the clapping hands. Male. Late forties maybe. Skin that had seen a light dose of childhood chickenpox. Verging on six foot, but not quite crossing the line. Hair cut into a basic, stylish shape. Well-dressed in a narrow-lapelled suit. The guy knew European fashion and wore it well.
Takis grinned. “Malaka, what are you doing here?”
“Checking on Mama,” he said. It was all very manly the way they shook hands, hugged, and slapped each other's backs. The new arrival repeated the gesture with the other cousins, then he turned to me, arms open.
My eyebrows rose. “Uh, hello?”
“You don’t know who I am, do you?”
“You’re not another one of Grandma’s blind dates, are you?”
“My Virgin Mary,” he said to Takis, “is Baboulas trying to find her a husband already?”
Takis shrugged. “Better to do it now before Katerina chooses someone unsuitable.”
“Hello.” I waved my hands at them. “I’m standing right here.”
The new guy flashed his double row of off-white pearls at me. “Come and give your uncle a hug, eh?”
My uncle Kostas? The ground lurched under my feet.
This was my infamous Uncle Kostas, the one who was all tangled up in counterfeiting and Winkler’s dirty laundry? He was downright fashionable and reasonably good-looking. What was he doing here?
Dazed, I offered my hand. He enveloped it in his, laughed, and reeled me in for a big, back slapping hug. Then he held me at arms length and kissed me on both cheeks.
“Very pretty,” he said. “You must get that from your mother because your father was always ugly.” Ho-ho-ho. Funny guy that Uncle Kostas. “Feel better after some sleep and a shower?”
“Uh, yes?”
“How is the rash?”
“Mostly gone.” And my head was back to its normal non-blimpish size.
He peered over my shoulder. “I don’t suppose Mama left any desserts inside before her tabletop incident.”
I glanced back at the closed screen door. “There’s an eagle in there. Probably best if you stay out here.”
He looked surprised. “An eagle?”
“Caw-caw.” Takis flapped his arms.
“That’s a crow,” I said.
“Eagle.”
We were going around in circles again. Meanwhile, my alleged uncle was standing there watching us, a big grin smeared across his face. There was something familiar about him, which was to be expected. He had the family nose, and every so often I glimpsed bits of my father in him. Not Aunt Rita so much, but then she buried her face under a mountain of expensive cosmetics before tackling the day.
“Have you seen Grandma yet?” I asked him. “Are you staying here at the compound?”
He looked puzzled. “We saw her yesterday together. You don’t remember?”
Italy must have shaken me up more than I realized. I looked him over and tried to shove puzzle pieces into other puzzle pieces.
Then it hit slapped me upside the head.
“The Armani Hobo! You’re the Armani Hobo?”
He winced. “You couldn’t have come up with a different name?”
Beside me, Takis cackled. “Armani Hobo. That is funny.”
Uncle Kostas slapped him upside the head. Takis winced but he kept on laughing.
“I didn’t know you were my uncle when I gave you the name, but it’s not so bad when you think about it,” I said. “You were following us around Naples, peeing on everything. It could have been so much worse.”
“The Pissing Armani Hobo,” Takis said, cracking up again. “Marika told me how he was peeing on this, peeing on that. You need some antibiotics, Kostas? That’s what happens when you stick your poutsa in bratwurst.”
My uncle shook his head. “Maybe a little boy like you can fit yours in a sausage, but a grown man can’t.”
Takis pinkened when the other cousins laughed at him.
My uncle offered me his arm. “Walk with me, Katerina. We have much to talk about.”
#
I yawned.
Whether it was my uncle’s company or the slow meandering through the cool orchard, I couldn’t say.
My uncle didn’t notice. He was too busy enjoying the sound of his own voice to pay attention to little things like other people. He was babbling about Germany and how he was going solo with his own gang—my word, not his—and how it was going to be the best. The most successful ever. According to my Uncle Kostas they were going to conquer the world. I wondered if Grandma knew about his plans for global domination. A normal parent wants bigger, better things for their children, but Grandma wasn’t a normal parent. She wasn’t a normal anything. Even as far as criminals went, she was an odd duck.
I was busy not listening when the subject switched to me.
“I know Mama. She’s worried about whether or not you’ve got what it takes to lead the family.”
“I don’t want to lead the family,” I said.
“What Baboulas wants, Baboulas gets. One way or another.”
“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”
“Maybe not immediately. But if you make it thirsty—thirstier than it has been in its lif
e—then it will drink. Me, I’m good at making horses thirsty. Very good at making horses thirsty. Mama, she’s good at making horses thirsty, too.”
Note to self: check on any horses in the vicinity.
“Is that what’s she doing, making me thirsty?”
“What makes you think I am privy to Baboulas’s plans?” He clapped me on the shoulder. “I’ve been in Germany a long time. My life is there now. All I hear are the highlights.”
“Do you know anything about Dad’s disappearance?”
“No. If I knew anything I would tell Mama.”
Excuse me if I didn’t exactly believe him. He’d done nothing to win my trust so far ... except sort of save my bacon a couple of times. Not divulging his identity back in Italy struck me as sneaky, underhanded, and pointless.
“What’s Dad’s connection to Winkler?”
“Michail and Winkler?” He shrugged. “No connection. Why?”
I told him what little I knew, that the company Dad had been working for all this time existed in name only—a name that was owned by Winkler.
My uncle’s face gave nothing away. “And you discovered this ... how?”
“It wasn’t difficult. In fact, it was so simple a child could do it.”
A child had done some of it. Little Tomas, one of the cousin’s kids, was in the right place at the right time. He’d told me what he’d heard, enabling me to do a smidgen of basic math.
“You’ve got brains—that’s good. But do you have guts? That’s the big question. Anyone who takes control of this family when the time comes will have to have guts and balls. It’s easy to tell people what to do, but if you can’t follow through then you will be dead within a day. Good people earn respect. People like us—” He clenched his fist “—we have to seize respect. We’re good at seizing respect. You? You’re family, but nobody knows you. Not really. You want this family to continue to be great? Show them you are strong. Give them something to respect. Seize respect from them, whether they want to give it or not.”
He was wrong—dead wrong—and I told him so. “Ask anyone in Makria about Grandma and respect. She earned every drop they give her. And she wouldn’t expect me to shoot someone to prove myself, but she would be pleased if I could think outside the box, which is what I try to do.”
We’d reached the edge of the orchard, where flora met fauna. Fauna around here meant sheep, goats, and the sinus-punching stench of chickens confined to a coop. Flies buzzed happily around a steaming pile of animal poop; Greece’s future was in jeopardy, but these insects knew exactly where their next meal was coming from.
“Is this the family farm?” I asked.
“You are only here because Xander and I rescued you.”
Non sequitur or narcissism? “And I was only on the beach because you told me I had to shoot a man for no good reason.” Okay, and maybe because I was escaping.
“Mario is shit.”
“Because our family smells like flowers? Right.”
“You lost a chance to have people respect you on that beach. It was a good opportunity.”
“Does Grandma even know what happened?”
He smiled. “Who do you think Aldo appealed to? He could not go to the Sicilian Mafia or the Camorra, so he outsourced. Baboulas handed down the order for you to shoot Mario. She wants to gauge how much of her is in you, to test your mettle.”
All that iron in my body suddenly became useful; I knew there was a reason I popped supplements, when I remembered. I pulled my shoulders back and put every ounce of that iron into my eyes. “I am not my grandmother,” I said. “And I don’t intend to be her. I stink at being a meanie, for starters.”
#
After my cheerful reunion with my long lost-to-me uncle, I found myself in a serious snit. What I needed to untangle my thoughts and offload some of this anger was a drive. My Beetle was in the compound’s massive garage, freshly detailed and waiting for me to show up.
I loaded Yiorgos the eagle into the passenger seat, restrained temporarily in a cat carrier one of my cousins had scrounged up.
“Wait for me!”
I looked up to see Marika hurrying across the compound, children nipping at her heels. “Go away,” she hollered at them. “Mama has to work!”
They broke away at the fountain, splintering off in different directions, presumably to wreck havoc on the world. This probably came close to how the Titan Cronus saw his unruly offspring.
“Did you tell Takis yet?”
“Tell him what?” Marika yanked the Beetle’s door open and reared back when she caught sight of the cat carrier. “What is this?”
“Papou’s eagle.”
She burst into tears. Fat, wet beads rolled down her chin. I went diving into my bag, pulled out a travel pack of tissues. As she sobbed, I dabbed her eyes, but it was the Amazon river up in there, and these tissues were made for toddler-sized leaks.
“I cannot believe you have replaced me with an eagle,” Marika wailed. “An eagle! It cannot even use a gun.” She fixed her damp gaze to my face. “Can it? Because if you had an eagle that could use a gun, we could make a lot of money.”
“I haven’t replaced you. I’m just taking him to see an expert.”
Or at least somebody I hoped was an expert. Even if the pet store guy only knew about parrots and finches that was more than I knew, and certainly more than Papou knew. Papou was a man who flung mice at people and told the eagle to fetch, so the bar was scraping rock bottom.
“You haven’t?”
“No.”
“So can I come with you?”
“If you want to.”
“It is not that I want to,” she said, tears miraculously drying up, “but being your bodyguard is my job. How else will I send my boys to college?”
“They want to go to college?”
“No, they want to join the circus.”
That sounded about right. Little Tomas and his brothers were fans of the circus, too. Or was it the jungle? Something with animals and knife throwing, I remembered that much.
Marika stared at me.
“What?” I asked her.
“Are you going to move the bird?”
“Can you put the cage on your lap?”
“What if it bites me? Put it in the back.”
I glanced back. It wasn’t a space problem holding me back, it was empathy. The poor bird was this close to a nervous breakdown as it was. The backseat could easily toss him over the edge.
“Can’t you sit in the back?”
The waterworks flared up again, and Marika wasn’t one of those pretty criers. We’re talking red, blotchy face, puffy eyes, a ski slope of glistening snot.
Basically she was me.
“You have replaced me,” she wailed.
My cousins working in the garage ignored us. It was obvious they didn’t want to be called on for comforting purposes—or worse, listening to Takis’ wife talk it out.
Jeez. I grabbed the cat carrier and sat it on the backseat, then I changed my mind and wedged it on the floor between the seats and threw a towel over the top in case there was something to what Takis had told me. Maybe the bird would feel safer in a moving vehicle if there was a towel over his head.
“There. Better?”
The tears stopped again. “I suppose so.”
“Are you okay?”
She sat in the passenger seat. The Beetle listed slightly. “I do not know what is wrong with me. I keep crying over the stupidest things. Replace me with a bird? Ha. That would never happen. Not only am I your bodyguard but we are also friends.”
Speaking of bodyguards, Elias was buckling up behind us in a sporty black coupe. It was small, fast, and nimble enough to jump a curb if necessary. Good thing Grandma wasn’t a James Bond fan or she’d equip all our vehicles with rocket launchers and bulletproof glass.
“Marika, about that test ...”
“What test?” She looked startled. “Do the boys have a test today?”
“The pre
gnancy test.”
“Oh,” she said in a small, very unMarika-like voice. “That test. I do not want to talk about it.”
“Have you told Takis?”
“Takis who? Takis is dead to me right now. Hurry up—that bird does not sound too happy back there.”
Takis must have told her about the strip club. I fired up the Beetle, and soon I was waving goodbye to the guard at the front gates in his security booth. All traffic in and out of the compound came through or past the booth. Mail was checked—not read, but tested for explosives and metal—and nobody came through unless they were family, allies, or invited.
Fifteen minutes later we were cruising along the Volos street, hunting for the exotic pet store I knew was along here somewhere.
Thirty minutes after I spotted it we were cruising around the block, searching for a parking space that didn’t require parallel parking. There was no such animal, apparently, so Marika was forced to suffer through another ten minutes of me backing up, angling in, cursing loudly, and pulling out.
“I am going to die of old age,” she muttered. “I could already be a grandmother and I would not know it because I am trapped here. What year is it?”
“Here’s an idea. Why don’t you do it?”
“Do not get crazy on me. Look, there is a zaxaroplasteio over there. I am going to get a little snack while you park. Do you want anything?”
“I could go for one of those chocolaty cake things wrapped in plastic.”
“You mean a chocolate cake?”
“That’s the one.”
Now that I no longer had an audience (unless the cluster of laughing Romani across the street counted), I managed to park the Beetle. So what if I was a foot away from the curb and had my doubts whether I could get back out again.
Elias zipped into a space several car lengths back. He came around to the passenger side and whistled low. “Wow.”
I winced. “Wow good or wow bad?”
“You don’t want to know.”
He was right—I didn’t. “You could have helped.”
“I could have but I was busy recording.”
“What?” I yelped.
“Takis made me do it. I have to record all the funny things you do.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I just do as I’m told.”
