by Alex A King
“And if I tell you to not to do it and delete what you’ve got?”
“Would you put snakes in my bed and kaka in my food?”
“No.”
“Takis would,” he said sadly.
He had a point. “But I’m your boss, damn it.”
“Technically Baboulas is my boss. She pays me. But I am grateful to you, and loyal, except when Takis threatens to put kaka in my food. There is no telling where he would get it, you understand ...”
Puffing out little clumps of curse words strung together in biologically and physically impossible ways, I snatched up the cat carrier and stormed into the pet store. In the reflection I saw Elias look both ways then park himself outside the shop door.
“Look at this,” Marika said, squeezing past him to join me. She opened a white paper bag. “Little mice made of marzipan. I would trade my children for marzipan. They do not know how lucky they are I had money.”
I reached for the paper bag. Marika yanked it away.
“Not even one?”
“Not even a sniff,” Marika said. “These are my marzipan mice.”
The exotic pet store wasn’t what I’d expected. The word exotic implied certain things, made certain promises. Island paradises. Weird and wonderful doohickeys. Tall, dark, handsome strangers. A little guy yelling about zee plane.
The shop had nothing of those things. What it did have were an overabundance of glass-front enclosures where things slithered and crawled. Greece’s idea of exotic and my idea of exotic was not the same thing.
We marched up to the counter, where somebody’s kid was manning the counter. He was facedown in a comic I didn’t recognize. From the way his jaw twitched periodically he had a mouthful of gum. When he ignored the usual polite greetings, I cleared my throat.
He took his sweet-ass time ripping himself away from the comic to shoot eye lasers at me.
Huh. What do you know—the kid wasn’t a kid. He was somewhere around the three decade mark. Dark red hair—auburn, I guess you’d call it—brown eyes like someone’s new puppy.
D’awww, he was adorable.
“What?” he snarled.
Maybe not so adorable. I held up the cat carrier. “I’ve got an eagle.”
“So?”
“It’s not really doing what eagles are supposed to do. Is there someone here who can help?”
“What’s an eagle supposed to do?”
I peered past him. “Is your bird guy here?”
“A snake ate him.”
Marika and I stared at him. “Really?” she asked. “A snake can do that?”
“Big snake.”
My eyes narrowed. “I don’t believe you.”
“Hey, believe what you want. A snake ate him or it didn’t.” He went back to his comic book.
I dumped the cat carrier on the counter, covering his precious reading material. He made an indignant little noise.
“Comics are for kids,” I said.
“He looks like a kid,” Marika said. “Look at his little hands. I bet he has tiny feet, too. Can we look at your feet, little man?”
He looked her up and down. “Cool whale. Better get it back to the water fast.”
Marika surged. “Why, you little—”
He vanished for a moment, then came hurting around the counter. Behind the counter he was a small guy—maybe five-one or five-two. He must have been standing on a stool back there, because he’d shrunk to the size of a preschooler. He slammed his foot down on the top of Marika’s foot then disappeared behind the counter again. When I blinked he was five-two again, and trying to retrieve his comic from under the cat carrier.
Marika hopped around, hand wrapped around her foot. “I forgot to bring my guns,” she said, “but I will not forget when we come back later.”
“Hey,” I said to the little guy behind the counter. “You in the Baby Reeboks. Be nice. We’re paying customers.”
He looked up again. “You want some of what I just gave your friend? Because there’s plenty more where that came from.”
“Where are my mice?” Marika said suddenly. She upended the empty paper bag.
I looked around. No sign of the mice. Not even an almond crumble.
“Hmm ...” she said, “maybe I ate them. I need more.” She trotted out of the store, leaving me with Grumpy.
“Come on.” I nudged the cage. “Have a heart. I’ve got an eagle here that needs help.”
He sighed like I was busting his balls. “Lady, I don’t do eagles. Look around, what do you see? I’ll tell you. Reptiles. Amphibians. Exotic pets. A lot of my stock I don’t keep here because ...” His eyes went shifty. “Because reasons, that’s why. But what I don’t do are birds of prey.”
“Why not? Eagles are exotic.”
“They bite.”
“And—” I looked at his stock and gulped “—snakes don’t? Just look, okay?”
“Fine. Gamo ton Christos. If that will get you out of here, show me.”
Sheesh, someone was touchy. I yanked the blanket off the cage. He peered at the bird, crossed himself, then vanished.
I looked over the counter. “Are you okay?”
“I fell off the stool. Sometimes that happens. Now take that bird and go.”
“Wait—why?”
“I know that bird and I know who it belongs to.”
“You know Papou?”
“Papou? Woman, I don’t know who your grandfather is but that eagle isn’t his.”
“As of a couple of weeks ago it is. It was an inheritance, of sorts.”
He was silent as he hoisted himself back onto the stool and dusted himself off. “The Eagle is dead?”
“Crazy psychopath? About this tall?” I held my hand up. “Name of Periphas Dogas? Not dead—just back in prison. Do you know him?”
“Nope. Never heard of him. In prison, you say? That won’t last long. Then he’ll be coming back for his bird.”
Luckily it didn’t take a genius to see he was full of crap. He knew Periphas Dogas. I didn’t know how—and really it didn’t matter, as long as he helped with the bird.
“So can you do anything for the eagle?”
“What eagle? I don’t see any eagle.”
“If you know Periphas Dogas, then maybe you’ve heard of Katerina Makri.”
“Everybody has heard of Katerina Makri.”
“I’m her granddaughter.”
He turned pale. “Are you going to kill me?”
“I haven’t killed anyone yet.”
“I’m very attached to my arms and legs.”
“Then help me with the eagle.”
We stared each other down.
“Please,” I said.
He eyed the cat carrier. “What’s the problem?”
I sketched out the facts as I knew them. He winced when I told him about Papou and his recently acquired mouse-tossing hobby.
“Vlamenos!”
He was right; Papou was kind of an idiot when it came to the eagle.
“It’s a bird of prey, not a dog,” he went on. “No eagle wants to have his dinner thrown on the ground. It’s undignified. An eagle wants to hunt. Tell him to take bird out into the woods and let it pick out its own rabbit. It’ll be fine.”
“Papou is kind of in a wheelchair. I think his days in the woods are over.”
He threw the blanket back over the cage. “Then you do it.”
“Did he help?” Marika was back with a fresh bag of marzipan mice. Like its predecessor, she tucked it into her shoulder bag. I pictured her sitting on the floor of her closet shoveling marzipan mice into her mouth while she hid from her sons.
“Kind of not.”
“Maybe he’s worried the eagle will take him away. I saw a video on the internet of an eagle swooping down and carrying away a small child. Snatched him right of the ground, and ... whoosh!”
“Don’t you have a planet to eat?” he said to her. Clearly he had a death wish.
She poked around in her bag. “No, b
ut I have these little mice ...” Her voice trailed off. “I know I put them in here. Did anyone see me eat them?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“I try to avoid mealtime at the aquarium,” the shrimp said.
Marika shot him in the face with a steel look. “You—I am going to shoot you. But you will have to wait. Something is taking my marzipan mice. Now that I think about it, I know I did not eat them. My mouth does not taste like sugar. She looked around. “A lot of snakes in here,” she said. “And other creepy things.”
“Exotic pets,” the little guy said.
Marika opened her bag again and stuck her hands inside. “You say exotic, I say—MY VIRGIN MARY’S KOLOS!” Surprisingly spry for a big, comfortable woman, Marika leaped two feet off the ground and ran for the door. In the same moment, Elias barreled through the open doorway, gun drawn. They collided. Elias squeezed out two shots. Glass shattered.
“My shop!” The little guy grabbed his head. “Tis mana’s sou mouni! What is wrong with you people?”
“Snake,” Marika muttered, shuddering. “Snake.”
“Snake,” I said helpfully. “Wait—where?”
Elias and Marika tried to untangle themselves, but that just made the situation worse. The leather strap of Marika’s bag was wrapped around their ankles.
For a moment they didn’t move.
The bag did.
I shrieked and leaped up onto the counter next to the cat carrier. “Snake!”
Tiny cast a rueful glance at the bag. “There shouldn’t be any snakes out.”
“Well, apparently there are.”
He trotted over to the bag on his little legs—no baby Reeboks, just tiny Converse—and reached for the strap.
Marika’s hand shot out and yanked his ankle. “Stop, thief!”
“I’m looking for my snake, you crazy elephant!”
“My Virgin Mary, I am going to kill him if the snake does not kill me first.”
Untangled at last, Elias jumped up off the floor. He grabbed the bag and shoved it at the little guy, who—much to everyone’s horror—thrust his hand inside.
“It’s okay,” the itty-bitty pet guy said, “she’s not venomous. OUCH!”
Blood drained out of my face. Marika shrieked.
The little guy laughed out loud. “I was kidding. You should see your faces. You’re all ...” He made a horrified face then cracked up again. “Aww, it’s just a little snake. Come to to Baba.”
Little snake my left foot. It was as thick as my wrist and as long as my arm. And I could tell from the sizable bump in its throat exactly where Marika’s marzipan mice had vanished to.
“Tell me that thing did not eat my marzipan mice,” Marika said through gritted teeth.
“Are you trying to make her sick?” the little guy demanded. “You average-height people are stupid. They put a zaxaroplasteio in next door knowing I had a shop full of exotic animals, can you believe it? Now they complain whenever Aliki here gets into their shop and eats the sweets. She always goes for the mice, but she’ll eat anything else with sugar after she’s sucked those down. You should see her trying to eat a black forest cake whole.”
I pictured that and gulped. “Can’t you keep it locked up?”
“Her, not it. You people stink. Everyone is so prejudiced against ophidian Greeks.”
“Ophidian?” The days where I tripped over a Greek word I didn’t know were becoming fewer and fewer, but this was a new one.
“Ophidians. Snakes. Aliki loves sugar, but it clogs her bowels. You don’t want to be around after a snake has had a laxative.”
We stared at him in horror.
Aliki’s jaw unhinged, mouth stretching to an alarming width. “Heh,” the little man said, “she is trying to give me kisses.”
Was he crazy? That snake could easily devour a person—particularly a little person.
I grabbed Marika and Elias. We inched towards the door.
“Hey, you gonna pay for all the damage?”
“Send me the bill,” I said.
“If you are really Baboulas’s granddaughter, forget it. She will stuff me in a barrel and roll me out to sea.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “Just bill Katerina Makris—with an S—and I’ll take care of it.”
“You don’t look like a man, but what do I know. People these days, you just can’t tell if they’re freaks or not.”
“Aren’t you in no position at all to judge people?” I asked.
He folded his arms. “What are you talking about?”
“She is saying you are a nanos,” Marika said.
“Did you just call me a nanos? That’s derogatory. You’re a bad person.”
Nanos—Greek for midget.
“I will take it up with God on Sunday,” Marika said. “He can judge.”
The little guy lowered his sugar-eating snake back into its glass enclosure and fastened the lid. Then he climbed up on the stool and reached for the cat carrier’s handle. He wasn’t even close. He jumped once. Twice. Three times. Then he gave up with an exasperated sigh. No lie, I was really glad Takis and Stavros weren’t here, otherwise this guy would be on YouTube.
“One of you giants want to help me out here?”
Elias and Marika didn’t exactly leap to help him, so I sighed and hoisted the cage off the counter. Inside, Yiorgos let out an indignant squawk.
“You have to go. You can’t be here,” the little guy said. “Take your bird and get out.”
“Do you sell any eagle vitamins or anything I can give him if the hunting thing doesn’t work out?” I asked.
“My advice: let the bird go. Now get out. I don’t want your family to kill me.”
“Why would they kill you?”
“If they don’t kill me they’ll get me killed. I know what you people are.”
“Now who is prejudiced, eh?” Marika demanded.
I grabbed her arm, steered her out of the pet store, not stopping until she was buckled comfortably in the Beetle’s passenger seat. When I was sure she wasn’t going to launch herself back into the store, I stomped over to where Elias was fiddling with his phone.
I took a peek at the screen. “What is that?”
He held up the phone and showed me. “The nanos was too funny, so I recorded him. Now I’m sending it to Stavros and Takis for their YouTube channel.”
“They have a channel?”
“Sure.”
“What do they put on it?”
He looked somewhere beyond my left ear, face flushed. “Things. Funny things.”
Oh, hell no.
CHAPTER 14
Some people are sheep. Others are sheepherders. Stavros was a sheep with a ring through his nose that Takis liked to pull as he barked orders. I could have gone to Stavros, pled my case, asked him to take down the YouTube channel. Stavros and I were cool. But Takis? That little shit-weasel would twist Stavros’s arm, and the channel would be back online in no time.
I fought weasel with weasel, cutting out the poor sucker in the middle.
I went to Grandma.
“Ha-ha-ha,” she said when I walked into her hospital room. “I saw you on the Internet, standing on a chair, yelling about sex. I also saw you trying to park your car. Very funny. Who taught you to drive?”
“Your son,” I told her. “Who taught him to drive? Was it you?”
“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t.” Her eyes were darting about, all shifty.
“Michail could already drive by the time you gave him lessons,” my uncle said from the corner of the room, where he was sifting through a stack of newspapers. I guess somebody didn’t know about smartphones and the internet. “He stole a car and taught himself. He was a good driver. A very good driver. Not as good as me, but very good.”
“Was?” I said, seizing on the tense issue. Dad wasn’t past tense. Not to me. Not yet.
“I’m sure Michail is fine,” Uncle Kostas said changing directions without a hitch. “He’s a survivor. We are all survivors
. It’s what we do.”
Grandma laughed harder. Someone was sucking down green-flecked cookies again. “He stole a car? That little malakas. I am going to make him eat wood when he comes home.”
Eating wood isn’t a sex thing. It’s a spanking thing. And not a spanking sex thing either. It’s punishment, often doled out with a wooden spoon. If anyone needed to eat wood it was Takis.
“Don’t you think it’s bad for family if Takis keeps posting these ... blooper reels?”
“It’s good public relations,” Uncle Kostas said. “Shows the family as human, like everybody else.”
I was aghast. “You’re organized crime! You want good public relations, the best thing you can do is quit the business and ... and ... pretty much do anything other than what you’ve been doing!”
Uncle Kostas and Grandma laughed.
My eyes narrowed. “Have you been eating Grandma’s happy cookies, too?”
“No, you are just very funny.” He turned his attention to Grandma. “She’s like her father.”
“Funny?” I said.
“Funny, and always trying to convince us to quit the business. You don’t walk away from the business,” he said.
My gaze slid to Grandma, who was breaking a koulouraki into pieces on a paper napkin. She was watching my uncle, and if I had to guess I’d say her expression was thoughtful. Sometimes it’s hard to tell when there are that many wrinkles involved. Old age is an excellent mask.
“Well I think it’s bad for the family, if your goal is for other people in your, uh, business to take you seriously.” I addressed Grandma. “What if Takis had recorded your little table dance and posted it on the internet?”
“He would not dare.”
Probably she was right. Takis was a moron but he wasn’t stupid.
“Kostas,” Grandma said. “Get out.”
His head performed a cartoon-worthy double take. “But, Mama—”
“There is the door, and I want you to use it. But only one way until I say you can come back in. Go.”
I knew a beaten man when I saw one, and right now I wasn’t seeing one. Uncle Kostas wasn’t beaten; he was merely acting like someone who’d been on the wrong end of a whip. He bowed his head reverently and slouched toward the door. As he passed me, he winked. I wasn’t his biggest fan but I almost smiled. Greece was a country that produced charming bastards by the bushel.
