by Alex A King
“I heard you need a ride.” His forehead wrinkled up like a paper bag. “At least I think that’s what your pal was saying.”
“Someone borrowed ours. We could use a ride to Grandma’s house or a taxi stand.”
Lopez turned to his partner, who was retying his do-rag. “What do you think, should we help out a damsel in distress?”
“She don’t look too distressed.”
“Let’s go,” I told Elias. “We’re walking.”
“Sure thing, boss,” he said, completely without sarcasm or mockery. That was mildly disturbing. I’d never been the boss of anything before. We took off on foot in what I remembered as being the right direction. A quick check of my phone’s GPS said my inner navigator wasn’t as hopeless as I thought. Slowly, I was getting used to Greece, or at least its not-that-mean streets.
Behind us, the Renault did a slow U-turn. The tie rods groaned. Something under the hood whined. Total failure was imminent. Lopez nudged the piece of crap until it was pacing us.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Lopez muttered over the top of Bishop. “Get in the fuckin’ car.”
I ignored him. Which would have been easy if not for the constant growling and gagging from the engine. I could have called someone for a ride—Marika, Stavros, Takis—but Grandma had told me to stand down and do girl stuff. Her people would be the first to rat on me. Well, Takis would. Stavros would keep my secret right up until someone threatened to steal his precious hoard of white truffles. Marika ... she wouldn’t blab on purpose. But accidents had a way of happening when her mouth was involved. She’d doom me with the best of intentions.
There was no one else. Apart from family, I was friendless in Greece. It wasn’t much better at home, to be a realist about the situation. My old group of friends had drifted away. We were living our own separate lives, raising children, working forty-plus hours per week, avoiding serial killers and mobsters in Greece. A bittersweet feeling settled over me—more bitter than sweet.
No ... that taste in my mouth was exhaust fumes. The Renault was singlehandedly turning this street into a miniature Beijing.
I stopped and turned to face Portland’s least finest. “Could you scram? This was a decent neighborhood until you wheeled that beast in here.”
Lopez made a face. “Couldn’t lease anything else, could we? Not after your pal blew up the other one. Anywhere else he’d be in a cell right now on terrorism charges. But you freaks treat him like he’s a valued member of the community. What’s up with that? Even the firefighters and cops didn’t blink when we pointed him out.”
I laughed, shook my head. “Do you know what that shoe and souvenir shop is?”
He shrugged behind the wheel. “I know I wouldn’t buy shit there. The place is a dump.”
“The man who owns it is a mobster. The guy who blew up your car is one of his ...” I wasn’t sure what Laki was, exactly. “... Let’s go with ‘buddies’. Law enforcement isn’t going to touch him.”
“Why the fuck not?”
“Did the cops march up and arrest Al Capone? They had to get him on tax evasion. Thing is, in Greece everyone evades taxes. It’s the national sport. So they can’t get them that way.”
“Fuckin’ mob,” he said. “They’re everywhere—even here. Who knew?”
A loud, clanging voice in my head said he didn’t know—about me, about Dad, about Grandma and the Family. So what was the Portland Bureau’s angle?
“I think Laki gets his kicks blowing up cars, not hurting people.” Which may or may not be true, but it seemed true enough.
“Yeah, and now we’re driving around in this piece of shit ‘cause no one will loan us anything better.”
I looked the rattrap over. “Suits you guys.”
“You’re mouthy,” Lopez said. “A lot mouthier here than you were stateside.”
Was that true? Probably. Going back home, I’d felt the anonymity creep over me like Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak. I was just a regular American, doing regular American stuff. Okay, getting my grandmother’s henchman to stash a body somewhere far, far away wasn’t exactly regular, but at home nobody knew who my family was—or cared. Greece was small. Even with the influx of immigrants—refugees, illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, and Russians—Greece was still the size of Ohio in terms of warm bodies. Grandma was a regular fixture in the newspapers, and now they were flashing my face around, too.
“It’s late,” I said. “I’m tired. Now fack off, as the local graffiti says. I’m going home.”
“Thought America was your home. You don’t sound too patriotic.”
I grabbed my hair, pulled. “Christ on a canoe, if we get in the car will you shut up?”
“Naw, homes,” Bishop said. “But the talking will be over quicker.”
“I wouldn’t bother with a canoe if I could walk on water,” Lopez said.
“Canoeing is the bomb,” his partner said. “You ever been?”
“When?” Lopez raised both hands off the wheel. “Who has time? I don’t got time.”
“You need to chill, man,” Bishop said, bobbing his head to an inaudible beat. “Get yourself a canoe and take it down to the Columbia.”
“Sure. As soon as I retire, that’s what I’ll do.”
Bishop shook his head. “You know what you are? You a pessimist.”
I got into the car. Elias angled in next to me. We would have buckled up but there weren’t any belts to buckle. This heap predated auto safety. The Renault coughed and spluttered as Lopez pulled away from the curb. Smoke chuffed out of the tailpipe. Someone in the neighborhood yelled, “Ai sto dialo. Sou xezo!”
Elias and I snickered in the backseat.
Lopez glanced back, suspicious. “What did they say?”
“They want to crap on you and send you to the devil.”
“Kinky,” Bishop said.
“Kinky, my ass,” Lopez said. “That’s nasty, that’s what that is. And not in a good way.”
“Greeks fling insults the way other people breathe,” I told him. “It’s what they do.”
“I can’t wait to get back to America. We’re crazy, but we’re not this level of crazy.”
“So go,” I said.
“Can’t. See, we think you and your daddy got something to do with our dead guy.”
“Check with Homeland Security. I wasn’t in the country.”
Lopez shook his head. “We did that already. Checks out. But we still think you know something.”
“And where’s your old man?” Bishop said. “We ain’t seen him for a long time now.”
“ ‘For a long time’? What does that mean?” I asked.
“Could be we know Mike. Could be we know him real well,” Lopez said.
“Not that well,” Bishop said.
“Well enough,” the Latino pumpkin said. “For our purposes.”
I considered strangling them so they'd stop running me round in circles. “What purposes are those?”
Lopez tapped the phone in his hand. “Hey, we go left or right up here?”
“Left,” I said. We were almost at the mountain road. If this piece of crap made it up to the compound without dying or careening over the edge, maybe I’d help them out as much as I could. If I gave them something maybe they’d pony up some more information. Questions were piling up. I wasn’t a fan of questions unless I could easily Google the answer. Documentaries with commercials drove me crazy. Would the lion eat tonight? Could an organism really turn ants into zombie slaves? What if Lincoln had decided against the theater that night? All those questions would be answered ... after the commercials. Right now I was trapped in an endless commercial break. To skip the ads I might have to get up and snatch the remote.
I leaned back in the seat and closed my eyes.
The Renault didn’t die, and before long I heard the now-familiar crunch of vulcanized rubber rolling over Grandma’s long pebbled driveway.
“You can let us out here,” I said, waving a hand at the guardhouse. The
security guard was watching the Renault hard. I knew there was a red button near his hand that would set enough sirens off to blast the whole Family out their beds and probably wake up my dead grandfather in his oil can. I also knew he had serious firepower within arm’s reach. He could vaporize the hunk o’ junk and its passengers. But he wouldn’t do it unless provoked, because otherwise the police would have questions. Still, better to be safe than sorry. I stuck my head out the window and waved.
The guard relaxed. “Katerina!” He took in the rustmobile, made a face. “I thought you left in a real car. Who is driving this thing?”
“A couple of American cops. They don’t speak a word of Greek, except maybe souvlaki, Socrates, and Sparta.”
“This is Sparta,” Lopez said, seizing on the one word he understood.
“See?” I told the guard, who was, in some loosely connected way, a cousin.
“That was a good movie,” the guard said.
Elias came around and opened my door. Unnecessary but sweet—although I thought he was still fretting over performance reviews. I didn’t think Grandma did performance reviews. Either you did okay or you screwed up and she killed you.
“Hey.” Lopez stuck his head out the window. “You not gonna invite us in?”
“Nope.”
“I thought we was getting to be friends.”
“You gave us a ride, that’s all. We’re just not that into you.”
Soft laughter dusted the night. It was coming from the other side of the gate. Somewhere in the shadows, Xander was lurking. And where there was Xander there was usually Grandma. Maybe not here in the dark, but probably in the compound somewhere.
“What is this place?” Lopez squinted through the windshield. “Looks like some kind of palace. Didn’t know Greece had palaces and mansions and whatnot. Figured it was all resorts and shacks.”
“Greece used to have a king.”
“Greece still has a king.” Grandma’s voice cut through the night like a machete. Accented English with a hint of contempt. “He was gone for a long time, but now he is back. He lives in Portocheli now.” The smaller gate for foot traffic opened, and out came Grandma, with Xander lurking behind her like a second wall. Maybe it was the night, but she looked like someone had sat on her head and squashed her down a couple more inches—and the woman didn’t have a lot of height to begin with.
Lights flashed in my head. Some of them even stayed on. The pot cookies. The cookies were for her, to help the nausea after chemo. That was the business that took her away today. And Aunt Rita, Papou, and I had almost gorged on her treatment—although to be fair, at first we didn’t know. Drugs had never been my thing. When the doobie passed by I always waved it on without inhaling.
“Grandma,” I said. “You’re back.”
She switched back to Greek. “It is late. Where were you?”
I could have told her the truth, but I didn’t want her to worry ... or chop off my head for insubordination. So I made something up. “You told me to do what girls do. So I did.” I winced on the inside. That was the best I could come up with? I really needed to work on my excuses. “We were in Volos.” That part was true.
“What are these two doing here?”
“Human sacrifice?”
Xander snorted behind her.
Her attention shifted back to the two baboons in the Renault. “Last time I saw them they were in a better car. What happened?”
“Laki.”
Lopez’s neck was getting a workout as he bounced back and forth between Grandma and me. “Lucky? Is someone getting lucky?”
“Excellent,” Bishop said.
Hands on the car door, I peered through the open window. “Shut up, Ted.”
“Whoa,” he said in a dumb voice.
Grandma wasn’t done with me. “Katerina?”
“You know I’m an adult, right?”
“Where is your car?”
“In the garage.”
“The other car. The one you took tonight.”
“A friend borrowed it.” I wasn’t about to say the M name, not with other people in earshot. She stared at me with the intensity of an x-ray for a moment, then flicked off the switch.
“Okay. I am going to bed now. Say goodnight to your friends.” She shuffled up to the car, peered inside. “Tomorrow I am making a big party. You should come, both of you.”
“That’s real decent of you,” Lopez said. “Should we bring anything?”
“Leave the gun,” I said. “Bring the cannoli.” Everyone looked at me. “What? Cannoli is delicious.”
“Yeah, cannoli is pretty good stuff,” Lopez agreed. He looked like he knew.
Chapter 11
Grandma was one of those people who bustled effortlessly. Me, if I bustled I wound up out of breath. Grandma bustled all the way back to her shack before turning on me with her pointy finger.
“What did I say?”
“Which time?” I asked. “Because that makes a difference.”
“The most recent thing.”
“ ‘What did I say?’ ”
“What? Are you on the drugs, Katerina?”
My joke had flown right over her head and crash landed in the baklava. I let out a big, dramatic sigh. “You told me to leave the German thing alone.”
“Good news: your memory is excellent. Your ability to follow an order is where it becomes a big problem.”
“I can follow orders,” I said, helping myself to a piece of baklava at the end of the row. What could I say; it looked lonely stuck out there on the edge. “I just didn’t want to.”
“Because Melas shook his poutsa at you?”
The mental image of Melas waving his dong in the air was a disturbing mixture of appealing and comical.
“Technically, I was the one doing the shaking.” She opened her mouth to issue a hit on Melas’s life. “Not shaking that,” I said. “I was curious about the guy at Baby Dimitri’s. After I mentioned it to Melas, he got curious, too. Then it sort of snowballed from there. Next thing I knew, Melas was 1980’s Bret Michaels and I was driving him around town while he tried not to split Aunt Rita’s leather pants. Then I broke into his house. With his permission,” I added quickly. “Then Melas showed up and took the car. But lucky for me, the two amigos were following me, so Elias and I didn’t have to walk back here.”
“I will have to speak to Elias about putting you at risk. He should have made them get out of the car.”
“You mean carjack them?”
She made a face. “If that is what you want to call it.”
“Hey, I’m not the one calling it that—it’s definition of carjacking. And I couldn’t. They would have been stuck in a foreign country without a vehicle or any clue where they were. I’m not that mean, even to them.”
“If they have a phone then they are not lost. GPS is magic.”
Damn Grandma and her impeccable logic.
“So, those koulourakia were tasty.” I squinted at her. “Weren’t they?”
“Are you trying to change the subject?”
“Yes.”
“Xander told me you ate them.”
“Yeah, before we knew what they were. I thought it was spinach.”
“Who puts spinach in koulourakia?”
“Papou thought it might be oregano.”
“Virgin Mary,” she said, rolling her eyes at the ceiling. “Papou ate them, too?”
“They were good. Everybody likes stuff that’s good. Maybe you should bake some things that aren’t good next time.”
She looked at me like I’d lost my mind. Maybe I had. Could be I was just tired. Jumping time zones made me loopy.
“Stay away from Baby Dimitri and his friends, Katerina.”
“Okay,” I said. “Melas is on it. And I’ve got my own problems anyway.”
“What problems?”
“The Portland Police Bureau rejects, for one, and my missing father. You haven’t forgotten about him, have you?”
“I forget noth
ing. Do not make the mistake of assuming that just because you cannot see it, nothing is happening. The Makris Family is big, powerful, and I have people everywhere. I am doing everything to find Michail.”
“Did you have chemo?”
I threw it out there, onto the plastic tablecloth. The truth wriggled around for a moment, while we twitched uncomfortably.
Finally, Grandma said, “Yes.”
“You could have told me—about the cancer and the chemo.”
“Most days I lie to myself and say I am not sick. My plan was to be immortal. I have not planned for death as much as I would have liked.”
“That’s everyone, I think,” I said. “Nobody really expects it to happen to them. They might say they do, but they don’t. Mom was sure she’d beat it right up until the end.”
“The chemotherapy is a recent decision. At first I was not planning to have it.”
“Why not?”
“I thought your father would be here to take over. I believed he would change his mind and come home.”
“Maybe if you’d told him you were sick ...”
“He knew.”
Gears clicked in my head. “When did he know?”
“Not long before you came to us.”
I didn’t come to them; Takis and Stavros drugged and abducted me. I’d woken up mid-flight on Grandma’s plane with no real luggage and my handbag stuffed full of tampons.
“Now you’re having chemo so you can live longer and groom a different successor?”
“I am having the chemotherapy so maybe I can live longer and spend some time with my only granddaughter ... and hopefully convince her to take over the family business when I leave for my private island to enjoy my immortality in peace.”
“And Dad?”
“If he is alive I will find him.”
“He’s alive. I’d know if he was dead.”
Grandma had put all her energy into the bustling. When she lowered herself on the chair, it was with the caution of a woman about to sit on a dozen eggs. “I think I would, too.”
“I’m not taking over when you die.”
“You say that now, but you will.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I used to be you.”
