by Alex A King
“Left shoulder blade.”
My nails connected with his skin, and he groaned.
“Jesus,” he said. “Down and right ...” My hand moved. “Oh yeah, like that.”
It took everything thing I had not to skate my fingertips across the silver-gold rivers. But I had the feeling I could do that all day and never find the real source.
“There. Better?” I tugged his shirt down.
“Yes ...” He grinned ruefully. “... and no.”
I returned to my seat on the bed, crossed my legs. I definitely didn’t glance at his back. Nope, not me. No siree. I was above that.
Melas was on to me. “You okay?”
“What’s more than okay? Whatever it is, I’m that.”
He settled back in the chair, resumed folding his arms. I tried not to think about how good and hard and warm he had felt.
“You going to ask about the scars?”
“No.”
“You can.”
“Don’t want to.”
He grinned. “I said you could ask. Doesn’t mean I was going to tell you.”
Rat bastard. “The German woman,” I said, changing the subject. “Any idea where she is?”
He switched back to the all-business channel, too. “If we knew we’d drag her in.”
“And the dead guy?”
“Volos hospital morgue. Why?”
I shrugged. “No reason.”
“Katerina ...”
“What? I’m just curious, that’s all.”
And I was curious, but that wasn’t all I was. I had to know if he was one of the three Marika and I had helped in Makria that day—one of the three who had paid for meat with funny money.
“I know that tone ...”
“No, you don’t. We only just met. You don’t know anything about me.”
He rolled closer, until his mouth was close to my ear. His breath was warm and it was making me happy down in my underwear. Stupid hormones.
“I know you liked my handcuffs.”
“Did not.”
“Yeah, you liked them. And I liked them on you. You should come over to play sometime.”
“No. No play. Grandma doesn’t allow play dates.”
He closed the infinitesimal gap between us, skimming my ear lobe with his lips. “She doesn’t have to know.”
“She knows everything.”
In sync, we turned our heads to look at the wall. Melas pushed back. “You’re right,” he said. “I like my hands on the ends of my wrists.”
“They stop your arms from fraying.”
“I don’t know what that means, but I like the way you say it.”
I jumped up before I picked up a shovel and dug myself a deeper hole. Man troubles I didn’t need—and Melas was trouble. He liked married women—well, one married woman, and she was a Makris. She’d had his son and was passing the boy off as one of Grandma’s brood. Both she and Melas would be dead meat if anyone ever found out. What’s that if it’s not trouble?
“I have to go,” I said. “I need a shower and ...” I thought of Grandma’s bathroom with its complete and utter lack of a toilet. What she had was an outhouse—heavy on the out. It was outside. In her garden. “... A shower, and some of whatever Grandma’s been baking lately.”
“You coming back?”
“Maybe.”
He laughed. “Come back later. We have Scrabble.”
“Greek Scrabble.”
“I have cards.”
“Tempting but ...”
“I’ll let you win.”
“Deal. And shave, would you.”
“You don’t like it? Or you do like it, and that’s the problem.”
“Yes.”
He grinned.
Chapter 7
It was still summer when I came out of the closet. I took a right at the exterior door, cut past the swimming pool, where the family’s kids were pretending to be monsters and superheroes. Some of their mothers were hiding under the shade of the various umbrellas and pergolas in the courtyard, and every so often they’d stop the gossip machine to pitch death threats and promises of extreme violence at their offspring. The kids didn’t care; they were kids and it was summer.
Grandma’s small yard was empty of people and filled with plant life, which meant I could duck into the outhouse without buckets of anxiety manifesting. Maybe I should have taken Grandma up on her offer to house me temporarily in the main building, but no ... I’d gone all sentimental after she wove a heartwarming story about visiting America behind Dad’s back and playing with me at the playground—a visit I didn’t remember. End result: I was still peeing in an outhouse, instead of indoors like a regular person with first-world problems.
After, I snuck out and put on my most casual walk. Who’d been peeing in an outhouse? Not me. Nope.
I ducked into Grandma’s should-be-condemned heap and scoped out the spotless kitchen. The refrigerator was as old as Grandma, with one of those lift-and-pull handles. The lower cupboards had flowered curtains for doors. My grandfather was in his usual place on the windowsill, his ashes at rest in an olive oil can. Until about ten years ago, cremation was anathema in the Greek Orthodox Church, so why someone had thrown him into a furnace, poured him into the tin, and taped a postmortem photograph on the front (to be fair, he looked alive, except for the closed eyes—which was like every driver’s license photo I’d ever had) nobody had said. And I was slightly afraid to ask. Someone might tell me. Knowing this family the truth could be more nightmarish than blissful ignorance.
The counter was holding a cornucopia of Greek sugary treats. The omnipresent baklava; kataifi, its hairy cousin; finikia, brown blobs of turd-shaped heaven soaked in honey syrup; and a galaktobouriko—custard pie—that was in the late stages of cooling. My stomach rumbled. I hadn’t eaten since the moussaka on the plane. Still, I was a travel-grubby, rumple-clothed mess. Clean first, eat later.
Fifteen minutes later I was back in the kitchen, forking a piece of everything into my mouth, one bite at a time. It was a hardship but somebody had to do it. If I thought about it, I was kind of a hero, taking one for mankind. If you wanted diabetes, Greece was a great place to start, followed by a trip to the Texas State Fair.
As I ate I tried to assemble everything I knew so far into something that didn’t look like the plot of a hackneyed mob flick. Deception, kidnapping, territory grabs. All that was missing was Martin Scorsese, a mountain of blow, De Niro, and answers. Dad was still missing. There had been a dead cop in our house. Vice cops had followed me across the world. Melas had been shot by—possibly—the same Germans who’d passed bad money in Makria. And my uncle was involved in God only knew how much of it.
I cleaned my plate, returned it to the cupboard, and shoved my feet into sandals that more or less went with the sundress I’d thrown on. With Grandma temporarily down in the dungeon I’d risked my reputation by walking around her house barefoot. Go barefoot in Greece and people assume you’re poor. You could roll in glue and euros but everyone would still peg you as a pauper if you were shoeless. All those stories Dad had told me when I was a kid, there was always some poor schmo who patched his Ancient Greek sandals with newspaper or cardboard so no one would know he was destitute. Dad's stories were a horrifying blend of mythology and real life, set in some indeterminate time period that could have been anywhen. My childhood self didn’t know enough back then to call him on it and say, Ha-ha! In Ancient Greece nobody wore shoes indoors, so your stories are obviously contemporary.
I hoofed it over to Marika and Takis’ second-floor corner apartment, pressed their doorbell. Hell was breaking out on the other side of the door. Demons were dragging themselves out of the pits, causing havoc, pain, and ungodly messes. There was suffering happening—loud suffering. Either that or the next generation wasn’t down with the news that their allowances weren’t about to be raised any time soon. I wondered if Stavros had made it out with his dignity intact. If so, he was probably hiding out in his own apa
rtment, whipping up a gourmet consolation dinner, or flogging the mortadella to the kind of porn that made even hardcore kinksters barf.
There was a loud thump, and then Marika yanked the door open. She grabbed my arm, hauled me in.
“Save me before I cut off their heads and stick them on pikes to scare off my enemies.”
“Wow, overkill,” I said.
“You say that now ... Go stand in the living room and wait five minutes. Then you will see. I will get the pikes ready.”
She vanished into the kitchen, leaving me with the devil’s troupe of flying monkeys. This batch of Makris boys was more like a science experiment between their two parents. They had their father’s gangly bodies and their mother’s face. Which was lucky for them; Marika was big and sturdy but she had the face of a slightly annoyed angel ... with a hairy upper lip problem that she kept at bay with a pair of tweezers. I hadn’t noticed at first, but then she whipped out the tweezers on the plane and began yanking out the weeds.
I looked at the boys, trying not to show fear. “Did you get your allowance raised?”
They hung their heads. “No. Baba beat us.”
I was outraged—quietly and using only my facial expression.
Marika saw it and laughed. “He beat them, yes, at their favorite video game.”
“Why’d you have to tell her that?” the eldest boy said, scowling. “We wanted her to feel sorry for us.”
“Takis is your father,” I said. “I already feel sorry for you.”
My gaze swung from Marika to her kids and back again. “I don’t suppose you want to—”
“Let me grab my bag,” she said, ripping off her apron.
~ ~ ~
We escaped. Marika had her big shoulder bag of (probably) guns and I had the car keys.
“Where are we going?” she wanted to know as we hoofed it to the car.
“Morgue.”
“Can I come in this time or do I have to wait in the car.”
“You can come in. Unless you don’t want to.”
“Are there dead bodies lying all over the place?”
“No.”
“Zombies?”
“Zombies aren’t real.”
“They are in Haiti.”
She had me there. “Not movie zombies, eating brains and stuff. Haitian zombies just sort of shuffle around and drool, I think.”
“Where is the fun in that? I packed a stake anyway.”
“That’s vampires.”
“Anything will die if you hammer a wooden stake into its head.”
She had me there.
Ten minutes later we were circling the hospital parking lot, hunting for a place to park. Half an hour after that we were trudging up the street, after parking on the street three blocks down. Traffic in Greece sucked; parking was Thunderdome. At least the hospital was air-conditioned. We stood just inside the door, air-con chilling us to room temperature, and then we descended to the hospital’s lower level in search of a dead German.
So I had kind of stretched the truth into a less gruesome shape when Marika asked about corpses. They weren’t sprawled out on the floor, oozing, but the Volos Hospital morgue was overcrowded with guests who had checked out but couldn’t leave—an unexpected side effect of the current economic woes. Somebody died, the family couldn’t afford to bury them, so they accidentally, maybe, sort of forgot to have their loved one picked up and buried. But Greece couldn’t afford to pay for a bunch of burials either, so the bodies stayed in the morgue until the hospital could get the government to spit up a few euros to slap them in the ground.
The attendant was an anthropomorphic terrier who always looked on the verge of tears ... or laughter. His name was Kafes (Coffee) and he gave the distinct impression that he’d rather be on a beach knocking back cocktails. Instead he was stuck down here with dead people, and he wasn’t happy about it.
He grunted when he saw me. “I remember you. Please tell me you have come to claim someone. Get them out of here. I need the space for five more.”
I smashed his heart by telling him we were there to look at the dead German.
He looked bereft. “I hate this job,” he said. “But the benefits are too good.”
“Greece still does benefits?”
“Barely. But as long as I work here they will bury my family and me for free if we die. These days that's a good deal.”
He led us down the hallway to a room filled with sheet-covered stretchers. The walls were the pale green of constant sadness, the scent was death with a hint of pine. I shivered. The temperature was Arctic.
“We have to keep the air conditioning extra low,” Kafes said when I commented. “We don’t have enough refrigerators.”
“Wouldn’t it be cheaper to bury the extras?”
He shrugged. “That is Greek bureaucracy for you.”
“I think that’s all bureaucracy,” I said. “It’s never anyone’s job to do anything you need done.”
He made an approving noise. “You ready?”
Marika was rifling through her big bag. “Wait. I did not bring holy water, but I have a cross and a stake.”
We looked at her. “It’s a dead body,” I said. “Not a vampire. We already covered this.”
“You never know,” she said darkly.
“Not until it leaps up and bites you,” Kafes said. “Then you know. But lucky for you we sprinkle holy water on all the dead, just in case.”
I felt my forehead wrinkle up. “Really?”
“No.” He yanked back the sheet. Marika screamed.
“Sorry,” she said, looking not at all sorry. “Reflex.”
In death, the German was the color of a fish’s belly. He was that hungry kind of lean, like a runner. His hair was sandy, his face stubbled, and there was a bloody crater in the middle of his chest.
“We haven’t had time to stitch him up yet,” Kafes said. “Bad, bad business. Now your detective friend is in the hospital. Who knows if he’ll make it down to see me?” He laughed. “Sorry—morgue humor. It’s all we have down here.”
I didn’t say anything. It didn’t seem smart to mention that Melas was fine and hiding in Grandma’s dungeon with a homeless guy and a stack of board games. My gaze wandered sideways to Marika. Did she or didn’t she know about Melas? I wasn’t about to ask. Anyway, she was engrossed in the dead German.
“I know him,” she said. “He asked me for poutsa.”
“That sounds like Germans,” Kafes said. “And the Japanese. And the Turks.”
My eyebrow took a hike. “You mean everyone who isn’t Greek?”
“I was getting around to include everyone who is not Greek,” he admitted. “And the Greeks who vote for the other guys.”
I snorted and tried to concentrate on the German’s face. It wasn’t easy with the gaping hellhole in his chest. Marika was right; he was one of the three from Makria, although they hadn’t been asking for penis. They had been looking for a butcher’s shop. Butcher and poutsa sound uncannily alike, especially if your mind leans toward sewer level.
“That’s the guy from Makria,” I said.
Marika sniffed. She seemed disappointed about the lack of undead in the morgue. “I wonder if he ever found his meat?”
Kafes brightened up. “So you know him? Great. Find his family and get him out of here, I beg you.”
“I know begging,” Marika said, stuffing the stake and cross back into her bag. “I have sons and a husband and I know begging. That does not look like begging.”
“I’m on my knees in my head,” Kafes said.
Marika nudged me. “Should we make him beg properly?”
“What? No. We’re not henchmen—we’re just ...” I hunted around for an answer. “... two curious women.”
“You are curious,” Marika said. “I want to shoot things, and maybe set them on fire.”
Kafes jerked his chin up. “We don’t have a crematorium. Budget restraints.”
I thanked him for his time, and swore on my
mother’s life that I’d find the German’s family and get him the hell out of the morgue. What I didn’t tell Kafes was that my mother was already dead, and therefore her life wasn’t in any danger if I failed ... or didn’t bother trying. Mom, wherever she was, would forgive me. She had been a practical woman. God, I missed her.
The sun had been waiting for us this whole time. It ambushed us with blister-inducing heat as we stepped through the hospital doors. The stench of pine immediately evaporated, replaced with the burning scent of carcinogenic exhaust fumes.
“What’s with all the violence?” I said to Marika.
She shrugged. “Repression. Now I have a chance to act out I am acting out. Ignore me and eventually I will stop.”
“That sounds like some kind of child psychology.”
“That is exactly it is. What do you expect, I am a mother.”
I’d always thought one day when I was a real grown-up I’d get married and have a family. Now, looking at Marika, I wasn’t sure. My one venture towards marriage had ended badly when I walked in on my fiancé getting stabbed in the throat with a boner. My record so far wasn’t good. What if I married a Takis and spawned demons? It could happen.
“What now?” Marika wanted to know.
Good question. I didn’t like what had to come next. It meant trusting in people I wasn’t sure I could trust. My grandmother was, after all, a mob boss. A semi-honorable one, if people were to be believed. But still a mob boss. They’re not exactly paragons of virtue and morality. Not to mention Grandma would be pissed that I had kept the counterfeiting issue to myself.
“I have to talk to Grandma about some things. I don’t want to, but I have to.”
“I know the feeling. Baboulas is scary. I want to talk to her, too, but I am afraid.”
“What about?”
“A job.”
“What kind of job?” Because I knew what kind of jobs Grandma had available, and I was sure most of them involved guns or drugs.
“Bodyguard.”
“Whose bodyguard?”
She looked at me.
“I already have a bodyguard.” I did have a bodyguard. His name was Elias and he was the former employee of a now-dead Albanian named Fatmir the Poor. He’d originally been hired to kill me, but he switched teams when I made him a better offer.
