by Alex A King
“Come on, Katerina.” Her voice was moving away. So I took a step down ... and was instantly transported away. I jumped back up onto solid ground.
Yikes!
Further down, Grandma cackled in the dark. “It is an escalator. Do they not have escalators in America?”
“They have them, but they keep them in light places. They’re funny like that.”
“You have a point. Let there be light.”
Then just like that, the light ... I wouldn’t say flooded in ... let’s go with trickled. Light trickled in, all of it emanating from a long tube on the wall that had seen better days ... during the cold war.
My jaw dropped.
Grandma glanced back up at me. “You look like you have seen a ghost.”
“Did you just do ... magic?”
“No. It takes a few seconds to kick on. The bulb is old.”
“Hmm ...” I wasn’t completely convinced Grandma couldn’t work some kind of freaky Greek folk magic. If I turned into a frog I’d know where to point my webbed finger.
Now that the lower space was filled with bluish light, and I was convinced there weren’t crocodiles at the bottom (not that I’m scared of crocodiles—I’m not. But they’re crocodiles; everyone should have a healthy respect for something that can eat them) I stepped onto the escalator and began to descend. It wasn’t far. I could have fallen without breaking a hip. At the end of the escalator a tunnel had been burrowed into the ground. It was narrow and gloomy, like pretty much every tunnel ever, and stopped at a metal door with a keypad above the handle.
I raised an eyebrow. “Is Bilbo Baggins home?”
“Who?”
So Grandma wasn’t versed in the ways of Tolkien. Funny, the way Dad talked about her you’d think Sauron was modeled on Grandma.
“Never mind. No retinal scan?”
“I am thinking about it.”
Before she had a chance to press the code into the pad, the door swung open, and a beehive-topped body appeared.
“Katerina, my love!”
I was instantly enveloped in a cloud of Poison, my Aunt Rita’s signature fragrance. Aunt Rita was all woman, even if her original parts had been male. She had big hair—today, at least—long legs, boyish hips, and a rack that could hold a half dozen wine glasses. She had wiggled it all into a short swingy dress straight out of the 60s. If the geometric print didn’t blind you, the white go-go boots would. Only a few weeks had passed since I’d met my Aunt Rita (Dad took secrecy to a new level when it came to his family), but already she was beginning to feel like home. We hugged and jumped around, and then she grabbed me by the hand and tugged me through the open door.
“Come see our dungeon,” she said.
And just like that I was standing in a dungeon straight out of classic fiction from the 1800s. Gray stone ominously stained. Shackles. Lots of bars and iron separating the cells. All that was missing was the straw on the floor. When I mentioned this, Grandma and Aunt Rita looked at me like I was three udders short of a dairy cow.
“This is Greece,” my aunt said. “We don’t have enough grain to waste straw on prisoners.”
“I just thought there would be straw. Or hay.”
“No. No hay.” Aunt Rita pinched my cheek. “You are adorable.” She shimmied over to a door in the far wall—this one worn iron with a peephole—and held it open for us. Male voices filtered through. They were arguing about ... spelling?
“It is war in here,” Aunt Rita said darkly.
The raised voices dropped dead when Grandma swooped through. My aunt tilted her head and I followed.
I swung my gaze around the new location, which looked in no way affiliated with the other one. This had a pleasant sort of galley kitchen with a narrow hall radiating down the right-hand wall, into which several doors with slots about eye-height had been cut. The doors were steel, but other than that it all looked quite homey. No one was screaming, bleeding, or otherwise suffering aloud.
In the kitchen sat a table, red and white checked tablecloth thrown over it. Plastic, of course. Greece was addicted to plastic tablecloths. In the center of the table was a Scrabble board, Greek words zigzagged across its cardboard face. The table was set for three players, two of whom were at the table, mid-battle over the correct spelling of some obscure word. My Greek was decent, but it wasn’t Scrabble-level.
I gawked at Detective Melas, who was working his way up to an eleven with the addition of stubble to his look. He was in cargo shorts and a sleeveless shirt that was somehow affecting my breathing. He didn’t appear injured, just pissed that he was losing at Scrabble to an Ancient Greek relic. Papou, Grandma’s advisor, was his opponent. Aunt Rita, I guessed, was the third point on this triangle.
“You’re supposed to be in the hospital,” I said to Melas.
He smiled up at me. “Supposed to be in a grave, but I got lucky.” He looked me up and down. “You look good.”
“I doubt that,” I muttered. Suddenly I was filled with regret. Regret that I hadn’t changed out of my baggy old jeans and T-shirt. Regret that I hadn’t found time to shower and coax a brush through my hair. Regret that I had a ton of makeup, but the only one wearing it was a dead cop back in Portland. “Who’s in the hospital bed?”
“Long story.”
“Make it short.”
His smile sprawled, made itself at home. “One of your cousins.”
“That’s a heck of an ending. I can’t wait to hear the beginning.”
“It started with a stakeout.”
“So I gathered. Were you really shot?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
That grin evolved into one of those smirks that’s gotten many a woman into trouble. If he kept it up, I’d wake up in a hotel room, looking for my missing underwear, wondering whether the tattoo of his name on my butt was the real deal or temporary.
“Want me to show you?”
Papou snorted. “Malaka, the bullet grazed your side. We put a plaster on your ouchie and now you are fine.”
Melas laughed. “You heard the man. But it’s not just any plaster, it’s Mickey Mouse.”
“Mickey Mouse, my kolos,” Papou muttered.
Another voice joined the conversation, one that wafted down the hall from the cells. “We got a visitor? Oh boy, we got a visitor.”
“No,” Papou yelled. “No visitor.”
The voice snorted. “Sounds like a visitor to me. I know all your stinking Makris voices, but I don’t know this one. Ergo, visitor. Hey, visitor. Down here.”
Papou eyed me. “Ignore him if you know what is good for you.”
Did I? The jury was still out. Greece had already led me off the good-for-me path and dragged me into the weeds.
I shrugged, trotted down the hall, until the voice said, “Well, look at you.”
“I just got off a plane.”
“You couldn’t fix your hair before you came to visit me?”
“I didn’t come to visit you.”
Papou, Grandma, and Aunt Rita laughed. “She got you there, you old poutsokleftis,” Papou said. Greek insults cracked me up; they made ‘dick thief’ sound almost like a term of endearment.
“Who are you?” I said.
“Eh, who remembers?” He moved away from the door. “I forget.”
I tentatively peered through the rectangular slot, getting my first look at what was considered a dungeon cell around here. Marble floor. Walls white enough you could lick them and feel good about not contracting some rare form of Greek Ebola. The bed was a single but the mattress and pillows looked plump and the linens high thread count. There was a fully loaded bookcase, a desk and chair, and a poster of Anna Vissi tacked to the wall.
(Anna Vissi is what happens when you throw Madonna, Jennifer Lopez, and talent into a blender.)
I raised an eyebrow, shot an inquiring glance at my family (and Melas) bunched around the table. “Marble floors? Really?”
“Easier to clean blood off marble than concret
e,” Aunt Rita said, rearranging the letters in front of her. ”All you have to do is wipe. With concrete you have to scrub if it dries. Who has time for that?”
That made a disturbing amount of sense.
Back to the slot. The prisoner was sitting on the bed, gripping a book in one hand, glasses poised on the end of his fist-sized nose. He had a monobrow that didn’t so much as dip in the middle; it was what it was and didn’t pretend it had any aspirations toward division. His eyes were dark and hooded. I pegged his age as north of sixty, south of a hundred. Something about him was oddly familiar.
“Who is he?”
“Makria’s only homeless person,” Grandma said.
“So you put him in the dungeon?”
“He can leave any time.”
“It’s true,” the man said. “Any time.”
“Why don’t you give him a job or something? Maybe you need someone to ... I don’t know ... clean something.”
He made an offended noise. “Why do I want to work for a living when I can stay here for free?”
“You see what I am dealing with?” Grandma said. “A bum.”
More snorting. “If I am such a bum, why are you always down here, talking to me, eh?”
“I feel sorry for you,” Grandma said. “My conversation is charity.”
“What about the baklava?”
“I made too much. It would be a sin to throw it away.”
He shifted his attention back to me. “You look like a Makris. I thought I knew them all.”
“Katerina Makris,” I said. “With an S.”
“Ah, you are the long-lost granddaughter.”
“You’re not lost if you know exactly where you are.”
He laughed. “Come talk to me sometime, eh? And bring loukoumi—the rose one.”
I made polite, vague noises, but didn’t make any promises I wasn’t sure I could keep. This trip to the dungeon might be a one-time deal.
“Wait,” I said, wandering back to the Scrabble game that was in danger of getting deadly. It’s never a stellar idea to play board games with anyone carrying—concealed or otherwise. “Are you ... hiding out in Grandma’s dungeon?” I asked Melas.
The detective flashed me a grin. I tried not to melt, which was relatively easy, given how comfortably cool it was down here. Greece should seriously consider moving underground for the summer.
“For now,” Melas said.
“It’s one of the safest places in Greece,” Aunt Rita said.
“What about earthquakes?” I asked her.
“Earthquake-proof,” Grandma told me. “It does not meet the codes—it exceeds them.”
Of course. I should have known.
I leaned against the kitchen counter, arms folded. Too many pieces of this puzzle were missing, and no one had bothered to show me the picture on the box. “Can someone tell me exactly what’s going on?”
“Come back to my room and I’ll tell you all about it.” Melas looked me over as he said it.
Grandma gave him one of her best stink-eyes. “Tell her without using your penis or your hands.”
I wasn’t sure that was possible. Cut off a Greek’s hands and you’d be halving their ability to communicate. All that hand waving, they were fighting obesity one conversation at a time.
It wasn’t until I got a load of Melas’s mouth tugging at the corner as he stood that I realized the graze Papou mentioned was more than just a scratch. What the hell had happened on that stakeout?
The detective slung his arm around my shoulder. “Help a wounded cop,” he said.
Grandma glared in his direction. “What did I say about hands?”
We were in a kitchen. With knives. If I were Melas I wouldn’t be risking my hands for a quick feel that could never go anywhere.
“Maybe we should go upstairs, get some fresh air and sun,” I said.
He jerked his chin up once for No. “Can’t risk it.”
I followed him down the short hallway to his temporary quarters, which looked just like homeless guy’s, with fewer books and the addition of a widescreen television. Grandma kept her prisoners and other assorted ‘guests’ in style. He motioned for me to sit on the bed, while he took the office chair, wincing slightly as he sat.
“Did they shoot you in the ass? Because the faces you’re making it looks like they shot you in the ass.”
Watching him lift his arm was like waiting on the Broadway Bridge back home to open and close its span. He moved slowly, making no sudden moves, and not because he was worried about Grandma and knives. “It’s just a flesh wound—not much worse than a scratch. But it hurts like someone shot me.” He smiled at his own joke.
At least one of us was amused. “Melas,” I said, resisting the urge to slap his arm.
“I’ve been through worse.” His eyes went soft and gooey. “I like it when you worry about me.”
I didn’t like it. His job made me scared for him, and being scared for him wasn’t my place.
“Just tell me about the stakeout.”
He lowered his arm almost as slowly as he’d raised it, leaned back in his seat, arms folded. “We got a tipoff that some Germans staying in Agria were in possession of contraband. Counterfeit Euros, counterfeit papers, passports that kind of thing.”
The bottom fell out of my stomach. “Huh.”
He gave me a funny look. “Normally counterfeiting is a federal matter, but they’re stretched thin and we were there, so ...” He rubbed his head with his good arm. “It’s been a tough summer. Got a lot of people in the country who shouldn’t be. They’re all flooding north to Macedonia, using Greece as a stepping-stone. Refugees from places like Syria, mostly. They’re on their way to places like Germany to make a better life. So these Germans set up shop in Agria to profit from the desperate. It’s perfect. Coastal, a busy tourist town.”
I could see that. A village seaside village like Agria, nobody looked too closely unless you were a local. Tourists came and went in relative anonymity. Unless you had the bad sense to get drunk and make sweet love to a chicken, you could pass through undigested.
“How many Germans?”
“Three. Two men and a woman.”
The sirens went off in my head. I wished they’d shut up so I could think. “So what happened?”
“We watched, we listened, and when the time was right, we went in. They were waiting for us, with guns. The woman escaped. We got one of the men, and the other one is dead. The guy won’t talk—in any language.”
I shook my head, to clear the fog, mostly. “So ... why is there a pretend Melas in the hospital under guard, and why are you in Grandma’s dungeon?”
“The answer to the first part of your question is: bait. We think the woman or someone connected to them will come back to finish me off.”
“How would they get past the guards?”
He looked uncomfortable. “They have ties to a German crime syndicate. Close ties.”
“As in, they’re actually part of German crime syndicate?”
“Yes.”
My uncle Kostas, who I’d never met, was about to become the head of his own organized crime family in Germany. Which I’d interpreted as him currently being part of another syndicate. Raw sewage began to slop around in my stomach. There was a nasty metallic taste on my tongue. First my Dad’s disappearance, then the counterfeit euros, a safe full of fake-o passports, real money, a gun, and now this. Things were looking grubbier by the minute.
“Is my uncle involved?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Baboulas thinks your uncle Kostas wouldn’t be stupid enough or disrespectful enough to piss in her territory. But the syndicate he’s been working with is muscling in. Could be they believe Baboulas will step back if she thinks this is her son’s call.”
So my uncle and the counterfeiting were connected. “What do you think?”
“I think they don’t know Baboulas.” He tried to smile, but failed miserably. I knew the feeling. If my uncle was involved then this could b
e war. And somehow, Dad was tangled up in this—I just knew it.
I could have told him then and there about what I’d found in Dad’s safe and about my suspicions, but I didn’t. Up until a few weeks ago I was a law-abiding citizen without so much as a parking ticket. But things had changed; I was changing. And I had to do whatever it took to protect Dad, to get him back in one living piece.
“And now you’re down here so no one knows you’re not in that hospital bed, in case they come to finish you off.”
His face contorted. “This is the worst part of a gunshot wound. Itchy back. Can’t reach.”
“Have you seen a bear? They rub up and down trees. You could use the doorframe.”
He looked at me with puppy dog eyes. “Or you could scratch it for me.”
“Grandma might cut off your hands.”
Grandma’s voice came floating through the wall. “I am sharpening the knife right now.”
“Show an injured policeman some compassion, Kyria Katerina,” Melas called out.
There was a short pause. “Okay, but remember the knife.”
He swiveled in his chair so I could get a clear shot at his back. “You’ll have to lift my shirt,” he said in a low voice. “I can’t, and it’s better on bare skin.”
I sighed like it was killing me, which it kind of was. Touching him would be like shoving him at a land mine and hoping for a good outcome. Grandma was the land mine in that metaphor. He leaned forward so that the hem of his shirt rode up. I lifted slowly. Didn’t want to accidentally brush the fabric over his wound. Then I got a good look at what he was hiding under his clothes.
My eyes bugged.
His back was a jungle of scar tissue. Twisty limbs of silver and gold that wandered across his skin and back again. It was eerily reminiscent of Xander’s back. Did I say reminiscent? I meant borderline identical.
I swallowed and said nothing. Melas had mentioned they had known each other while they were serving in the military. Greece had compulsory national service, nine months’ worth in the army, navy, or air force. But these scars weren’t exactly the kind of thing you got from some kind of hazing, or whatever they did in the army. This looked like a major ass kicking by a teppanyaki chef.
“Whereabouts?” I said in a voice that sounded paper-thin.
