In Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel

by Alex A King

Jeez.

  Nothing about his plan sounded reasonable, but I crouched down and slunk off in the direction of his pointer finger. Disrespecting my elders didn’t come easily to me. Guilt is hardwired into Greek DNA. We’re like Jews and Catholics that way. Even my American half couldn’t cancel out the guilt gene. I’d let Papou down once; I couldn’t do it again. Hence the sneaking.

  The night thickened. The trees huddled closer together and took turns poking me. Were they Ents? Because I thought they could be Ents. Regular trees aren’t out to get you unless you’re in a fantasy novel or a fairy tale. Whatever they were they didn’t feel friendly, what with their jabbing me in the eyes and other soft places. If there was someone out here—and I had my doubts—maybe they were having better luck with the trees.

  A twig snapped, and it wasn’t my fault. Either there really was a person out there, or there was an animal big enough to make twigs snap audibly. Did Greece have bears? I didn’t think so, but you never knew. Greece had a lot of Russian immigrants, of the legal and illegal kind. And Russians were known for their dancing bear habits. Or was it Romanians and Bulgarians? Whatever. The whole region was filled with people who got their kicks out of dancing bears. My imagination didn’t have to stretch far to picture all kinds of once-shackled bears roaming through Grandma’s orchards, eager for payback.

  I did what any sane person would do. I stopped and held my breath and waited for the bear to eat me. Climbing a tree wouldn’t help, and running doesn’t work on bears either. Bears can climb and run better than twenty-something Greek-American women.

  Another twig snapped. Bigger this time. Leaves whispered as someone shoved them aside. Movement came from my left.

  I really needed to pee.

  Then a black comet shot from somewhere beyond my back, rocketing toward the source of the sound. There was crashing. Shouting. Maniacal laughing. Then there was a lot of cursing.

  Me, I didn’t stick around. I scurried back to Papou. Papou had a gun. What did I have besides an overactive imagination and a full bladder?

  “What is wrong with you, eh?” Papou wanted to know.

  “Bear,” I said, out of breath. “At least I’m pretty sure it was a bear.”

  “Bear.” He shrugged. “I suppose it is possible.”

  “Because of the Russians and Bulgarians?”

  “Are you crazy? Greece has bears. Brown bears.”

  “That’s not a euphemism for plus-sized hairy gay men, is it?”

  His hand shot out. He slapped me on the back of the head. “You have problems in your brain. Who was out there?”

  “Just me,” a voice said. “And the other malakas.” The black comet I’d witnessed crashing through the orchard had been Elias. “I almost had him,” he said, panting, “but he was too fast.”

  In a flash, Papou had his shotgun in hand, the bang-bang end pointed at himself. He clobbered Elias around the back of the knees with the non-lethal end.

  My bodyguard yelped.

  “What kind of monkey does Katerina hire these days? What good are you, eh? In my day I would have hunted down the intruder and shown him what we did to attractive men in the navy.”

  The night was a dark one, but I could tell Elias and I were looking at Papou with the same horror.

  “Moving on,” I said, “maybe it was the same guy who was watching me down at the waterfront.”

  “When was this?” Papou wanted to know.

  I told him and he grinned. “Baboulas sent you to see Dora Makri? Ha! I could tell you a story or fifty about Dora Makri.”

  Elias and I waited. “Well?” I said finally. “Are you going to tell us a story?”

  “I would,” Papou said sadly, “if I could remember them.” Before we could react, he sat the shotgun in his lap and wrapped his mouth around the barrel. The trees muffled the click, rendering it flat and dull.

  I sighed with relief and pulled the shotgun away from him.

  “It is not loaded,” he said. “It never is. And no one will buy ammunition for me.” He gave us a hopeful look. “Will you buy ammunition for me?”

  “Forget it,” Elias said. “Baboulas would kill me.”

  “She really would,” Papou said sadly. “Oh well, it was worth a try, eh?”

  Elias took the shotgun from me, mounting it back on its rack.

  “What about Yiorgos?” I asked.

  The old man eyed me—or at least I fancied he did. It was dark out there. Facial expressions got lost in translation.

  “My bird is broken. I don’t know what to do.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Tailing someone turned out to be difficult with an entourage. My entourage dressed in black, but where my disguise whispered, “Widow,” theirs screamed, “Secret agent ninja henchmen Navy Seals.” At least their discreet distance was even more discreet than my discreet distance.

  Boy, they were good at this. I was just learning. Hopefully this thing with Hera would be the only lesson I’d need before I quit crime entirely and retired to an island with a gorgeous Greek man and our three children.

  I shook my head. Where had that come from? I didn’t want the island, the Greek man, or the three children—not yet on the children anyway. Maybe one day when I grew up and figured out what I wanted to be. Some nice, harmless, crime-free career that wouldn’t end in a prison sentence sounded ideal.

  It was the following morning, and Hera didn’t seem to be in any hurry to regroup with her posse. She slunk out of her Volos apartment around nine o’clock to buy a magazine from a nearby periptero, then vanished back upstairs again. At ten she wandered out wearing a short, tight skirt suit with man-killer heels. She set off down the street to a salon that specialized in manicures, pedicures, and waxing places that don’t normally see a lot of sunlight. Which is funny because Brazil has an overabundance of sun.

  “Oh boy,” Marika said, popping up out of nowhere and planting herself beside me outside the produce store. I’d been checking out melons for a while now, and the shopkeeper was getting twitchy. “Is that a Brazilian wax place? I have heard about those. We should get them. An adventure is just what we need. We have not had one in a while.”

  Evidently she’d forgotten about our impromptu trip to Naples. “You know they rip off your pubic hair with wax, right?”

  She made a face. “I had not heard that part.”

  I wondered which part she’d heard, because to me the ripping and the wax was the important part. “And that’s not the only hair they take off.”

  She looked at me. I looked back.

  “No,” she breathed.

  “They make you get on your hands and knees, and then a little Southeast Asian woman ...” I mimed the waxing, the ripping, the owie face.

  Marika turned pale. “I do not think we have little Southeast Asian women in Greece. Probably that is a job for tsiganes or Albanians.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  She shrugged, the horrible, hairy reality of Brazilian waxes dissipating. “My job. I like stakeouts. Stakeouts mean coffee and snacks.”

  “There’s no coffee and snacks on this stakeout. And it’s not really a stakeout. Mostly I’m just following Hera.”

  “To see if she is sleeping with Melas?” She hugged me with one arm. “I would be worried about that, too. I bet her mouni has teeth.”

  I pulled back. “The other day you said he’d never touch her again.”

  “That was then. My mood changes a lot these days.”

  “Hormones,” I said.

  “If I do not eat often enough I get bitchy.” She glanced around, taking stock of the nearby stores. The city was ratcheting up to full capacity as the morning went on. Clouds of pollution silently assaulted pedestrians clogging the sidewalks. “You want a coffee and maybe a little cake?”

  “I thought you were helping me watch Hera.”

  “I am, but I can do my job better on a full stomach.”

  Marika stormed a nearby bakery. She came back with a steaming koulouri—a soft pretzel
covered in sesame seeds—a loaf of bread, and a roast chicken.

  I eyed the feast. The roast chicken did smell good. “Where did the chicken come from?”

  “Bakery. Somebody forgot to pick up their chicken, so I took it.”

  Greek bakeries put the empty spaces in their wood fire ovens to good use. For a nominal fee they’ll throw in your uncooked main dish and pull it out bubbling.

  “Did you take the chicken or did you pay for it? Because there’s a difference.”

  She ripped into the paper surrounding the loaf. “Who knows? My blood sugar is too low. My memory does not work so well when my blood sugar drops.”

  Pregnancy was turning Marika into a certified loon, and she hadn’t been standing on completely stable ground to begin with. Anyone who married Takis on purpose was suspect.

  I reached for the bread but Marika yanked it out of my way. “No bread for you—you did not want any.”

  “That was before I smelled food.”

  “Concentrate,” she said, waving her hand in the salon’s direction. “What is the beast doing now?”

  The beast, I assumed, was Hera. It was a character assessment I could agree with wholeheartedly. “She’s inside.”

  “Still?” A quarter of the loaf vanished, along with a drumstick. “I guess she has a lot of hair on her kolos.”

  That thought warmed the cockles of my heart. Yes, I’m a brunette, but it’s not a forest up in there.

  An hour later Hera still hadn’t emerged. No offense to Aunt Rita’s skills, but black wasn’t turning out to be the best color for following anyone in early September. I eyed the roast chicken’s carcass and saw my destiny in the remnants of its crispy skin.

  Down the street, Elias was hiding behind a newspaper. Xander was hunched over his phone, sipping on a frappe, looking iceberg cool. Black didn’t seem to be bothering them, probably because they were one hundred percent Greek. My Oregonian genes preferred rain and mildew. They longed for a whiff of mold. I wondered who was watching over Grandma if her favorite bodyguard was monitoring my every move. Probably Uncle Kostas, who I trusted as much as a rubber check.

  Marika put down the last chicken wing then said, “I should have bought dessert.”

  She hopped up from the bench and was this close sprinting to the nearest sugar shop when I spotted Hera. Funny, I’d expected her to be limping, but instead she was swinging her hips the same old way. Probably getting your short n curlies yanked out doesn’t hurt if you’re hell spawn. I pictured the NIS agent cackling as the technician got to work with the hot wax.

  We followed Hera back to her apartment. Fifteen minutes later she appeared downstairs again, this time in leather pants and a top made of strategically placed strings. The whole thing looked liked a risk no insurance agent would take.

  Where was she going trussed up like a Thanksgiving bird?

  I was hot. I was tired. I was this close to not caring, when Hera hopped into the car snugged up to the curb and inched away. Traffic was moving at the speed of bureaucracy this morning. The Greeks trapped in the slow-moving flow had to be gnashing their teeth.

  “How did you get here?” I asked Marika. “Car?”

  “Bus.”

  We both looked at Aunt Rita’s moped. Aunt Rita’s moped wasn’t an ambitious vehicle. It knew it was a glorified bicycle built for two, provided one or more of the two wasn’t built like a sofa.

  “Probably you should ride with Elias and Xander,” I said.

  “How can I guard your body if I am in the car with those two? Body. Guard.” She ticked the two words off on her fingers. “That means I have to guard your body, which means I have to stay close to you.”

  I looked at her.

  “Very close,” she added.

  “Still ...”

  She nodded in the moped’s direction. “Those things are bigger than they look.”

  Maybe they were, but were they stronger?

  #

  “Horse crap.”

  I knew exactly where we were.

  “What is it?” Marika peered over my shoulder. She reeked of chocolate cake and chicken. “That looks like a firehouse. Why would that snake come to a firehouse?”

  Down the road a short way, Hera flipped her bouncy shampoo-commercial hair over her shoulder, then set off to either make or break a man’s day. It could go either way, I decided. You just never really know with men.

  “Former firehouse,” I told her, sweat trickling down and across my chest. My bra was a paddling pool; the girls were drowning. “Detective Melas lives there.”

  “Ooh la la,” Marika said, lifting her sunglasses to get a better look. “What do you think she is doing here?”

  I could hazard several guesses, and all of them involved nudity and the fireman’s pole. I knew that pole intimately. Once, we’d been handcuffed together.

  “I don’t care,” I lied. “I’m trying to find out what she knows about Dad’s kidnapping. She said she knew something, then she took it back.”

  Marika gathered up her handbag. “We should peek in the windows.”

  I grabbed her arm. “Wait—we can’t. She’ll know we’re there.”

  “Leave it to me.”

  That sentence wasn’t in the least bit reassuring.

  The moped rocked as she climbed off. Further back, Elias and Xander waited in air-conditioned comfort, Rembetika music rattling the glass.

  Air conditioning was nice, but it wasn’t that nice.

  I watched Marika bustle along the razor narrow sidewalk to the house directly across the street from Melas’s repurposed firehouse. She pushed through their gate. Hammered on the front door. Turned around and flashed her teeth at me.

  Nope. Still not reassuring.

  A spaghetti thin woman decorated with banners of faded black fabric came to the door. She and Marika exchanged a flurry of words, then Marika waved for me to join her.

  Heat rose in dense, damp waves. That same excessive warmth also dropped out of the sky like a falling piano. Still dressed in my widows’ finest, I kept my head down as I hurried along the shimmering sidewalk and through Melas's neighbor's garden.

  “This is Kyria Kalliope,” Marika said, introducing the woman. Kyria Kalliope’s complexion was cratered and lined, a map that had been hastily stuffed into the glove compartment and forgotten for three decades.

  “Despinida Makris,” she said, sniffing. Her steel gaze made a round trip from my head to my shoes. “I am sorry for your loss.” She leaned forward as though we were co-conspirators in grief. “Did your grandmother have him killed?”

  “Have who killed?”

  “Your husband. The newspaper did not say anything about a husband, but your clothes ...”

  “It’s a disguise,” I said, the penny dropping. “Grandma hasn’t killed anyone lately ... I don’t think.”

  Kyria Kalliope crossed herself. “Come. You can see into policeman’s house from upstairs.” She didn’t waste time with the usual Greek niceties like iced coffee and cake.

  We followed her through a hoarder’s paradise, then upstairs to the bathroom. The toilet was an in-ground affair, and Kyria Kalliope had set up a comfortable chair and an occasional table in front of the window. I peered out. Sure enough, she had a direct view of Melas’s whole upstairs.

  “You,” she said suddenly, pointing at me. “Now I know where I have seen you before, besides the newspaper. You were the one handcuffed to the pole.”

  “That wasn’t me,” I said.

  “I never forget a face. Of course that day you looked much angrier and also hungry. I thought about bringing over a little food, but some of the policeman’s women bite.”

  Yikes!

  Marika looked interested. Too interested. “How many women are we talking about?”

  Kyria Kalliope made a face. “His bedroom is like the parades on Ohi Day. Women march through, sometimes two or more at a time.”

  Ohi Day (No Day) is a Greek public holiday. Every October 28, the whole country celebrat
es the day Greece’s Prime Minister—and dictator—said, ‘Hahahaha-No’ to Mussolini when the Italian Supreme Douche-Bag demanded Greece allow Italian forces to set up shop in strategic locations around the country. At three in the morning, the Prime Minister delivered his one-word rejection. Two and a half hours later, Italy attacked the border, dragging Greece into World War II.

  “Huh,” I said. It was the most normal sound I could manage. I’d kind of figured Melas wasn’t exactly a monk. He was bad-boy hot with a legitimate reason to own handcuffs—what wasn’t to love? But the idea that his bedroom had a revolving door stung me in places normally covered with clothes.

  “Apart from his mother, the only woman I have seen keep her clothes on in his bedroom is you.”

  I’d have to tell Melas to latch his shutters or invest in heavy curtains.

  “Do you watch him a lot?” I asked. The binoculars on the occasional table indicated that yes—yes, she watched him a lot.

  “I am old,” Kyria Kalliope said. “My family never visits. I have no friends except the other old buzzards in the neighborhood. What else do I have to do? I sit at this window to do my crochet and I watch. Even when nothing is happening it is better than TV.”

  Across the street in Melas’s bedroom, Hera appeared. We all watched as she wandered about the room, touching things with her talons.

  “Do you see her a lot?”

  Melas’s neighbor squinted through the window. “Not for a long time. She is a skeela. One morning on the street she did not say ‘yia sou’ when I stared at her. When I said her parents needed to spank her for her rudeness, she threatened to have me audited. Who does she think she is?”

  “NIS,” I said.

  “I hezo on the NIS,” she said, painting a gross—but very European—picture. “It is not Greek to creep around, gathering secrets.”

  Actually, it was totally Greek. Greeks love other people’s secrets. She or he who knows the most secrets wins. The more sordid the better.

  I made a face.

  Kyria Kalliope was all over that. “Is it the baby?”

  Marika received the full brunt of my dirty look, but she remained oblivious.

  “There’s no baby,” I said.