by Alex A King
My mind boggled. “... All of it?”
He shrugged. “All the words in the 1971 edition of The Oxford English Dictionary, because that’s the only one I could find.”
“And ... Lopez still didn’t answer you?”
“No,” he said in English.
“God, I hate that guy,” I muttered. “How did he get out, any idea?”
“Instruction video on YouTube,” Tomas said. “Everything is on YouTube.”
Yes—yes it was. “Oh boy, Grandma is going to freak. I can’t even imagine where he’s gone.”
Tomas moved his bishop across the board, swiping one of his opponent’s pieces. “I know that, too. Want me to tell you?”
“How about you just assume I want to know everything.”
He nodded. “He was talking to someone on the phone, and that person told him he had to find a way out. The American wasn’t happy.”
“Was he angry?”
Tomas tilted his chin up. Tst. “He had the same look my brother gets when Mama makes us eat okra. He thinks it looks like dead sea monsters and they’re going to come back to life and attack his face.”
“They do look like dead sea monsters.” They tasted like it, too. So Lopez looked scared. That was interesting ... and perplexing. “Was he speaking English?”
Tomas nodded. “He said something else—I don’t think I can say it.”
“Why not?”
“It was a bad word. I’m not allowed to say bad words.”
“A bad Greek word or a bad English word?”
“English.”
I chewed on my lip a moment, mulling it over.
Homeless Guy came to the rescue. “It doesn’t count if it’s a foreign word. Do your parents even speak English, beyond the basics? I bet they don’t. They probably wouldn’t even know it’s a bad word.”
Tomas nodded, but I could tell the little guy was worried.
I had a plan. “I’m going to say a bunch of words, and you nod if I say it, okay?”
He nodded.
I started with the big gun, the F-word. He didn’t nod. Then I moved down to the list. Technically, the C-word was the biggest gun, but there was no way I was uttering that syllable within hearing shot of a child, unless someone’s life was in imminent danger.
“Shit?”
He waggled his head. Not exactly a confirmation. Not a denial, either.
“Like that, but ...”
Think, Kat. Think.
Porta potties. Dad’s workplace that wasn’t his workplace. The dope who had fed me a line of bullshit that I gobbled right up because I was a rung dopier than the ham-head dope.
“Shitz,” I said. “Did he call the other person Shitz?”
Nod.
I went hot, cold, and annoyed all over. “Oh boy,” I said, slapping my forehead. What did Lopez have to do with the owner of Shitz-U? I was missing pieces along with my marbles. And how was Dad tied to all this. I knew he was—I just couldn’t see the strings tying this all together.
“The American told the man with the bad word name he was going to Sesklo.”
“Sesklo,” I said. “What’s Sesklo?”
“I know this one,” Homeless Guy chimed in. “It is one of two Neolithic settlements outside of Volos. There is nothing there of interest unless you like old things and have a good imagination. Me, I go there I see stacks of rocks lined up in neat lines, and I think, So what? My dog—if I had a dog—could do this, line up these rocks and pile them on top of one another. Someone with an imagination goes there and they see people and houses and life. Eh, it is just dead things. And rocks. Mostly rocks.”
I leaned against his door. “How can a voracious reader have no imagination?”
“That is a mystery to me, too. But I am a man with no imagination, no vision, and no ambition beyond acquiring some of that rose loukoumi.”
“Check,” Tomas said.
The door flap opened. The man inside peered out and down at the chessboard. “You little bastard, you are getting good.”
“I know,” Tomas said.
I left them to it.
~ ~ ~
Grandma was still in the yard when I slouched back, steaming. In my absence, Papou had rolled in, eagle perched on his shoulder. All he needed was an eye patch and a peg leg and he’d look like an over-brined pirate.
“Did you hear we’ve got a runaway?” he said. “That American malakas walked right out of here.”
“Yeah, I just heard,” I said.
Grandma rolled her eyes at the heavens. “He did not walk, he sneaked.”
Papou shrugged. “Walked ... sneaked ... what’s the difference?”
“A man who walks goes out the front gate,” Grandma said. “This one crouched down and stayed in the shadows, then he climbed the wall.”
It wasn’t that hard to climb. Although with that gut of his any climbing he did was bordering on miraculous.
“I told your grandmother to shoot him, but she refused.” He looked at Grandma. “I remember when you used to be fun.”
“Run,” she said, “and I will have someone shoot you. Then I will have my fun.”
He looked hopeful. “Really?”
“No.”
“Just as well. I have Yiorgos to look after now.”
“Back up,” I said. “You know Lopez escaped?”
“We watched him,” Papou said.
“Downstairs,” Grandma said.
Of course. Directly below us was the compound’s control room. It was the eyes and ears of this place ... and several other places, including more than one police building that I knew of. I’d never told Melas his place of employment was bugged. I didn’t think he’d take it well.
“And you didn’t stop him?”
“What for?” Grandma asked. “I wanted him to go.”
“Why?”
“Because the good little donkey was following a carrot. And where there is a carrot there is somebody waving the carrot. Policemen do not usually follow a woman across the world when all they want to do is ask her questions.”
“I knew that,” I said, then had a change of heart. “No, I didn’t. So why did they follow me?”
“The question is: Why did they come here?”
“And the answer is ...?”
Grandma shrugged. “I do not have the answers, only the questions.”
I chewed on the inside of my cheek a moment, processing. “He’s going to Sesklo. Meeting someone, I think. Which means I’m following the little worm there.”
“Little. Ha!” Papou slapped his leg. “That belly of his could eclipse the sun. They could roll him in front of a cave and keep Christ inside. Even the son of God could not move that one.”
“You are not going anywhere,” Grandma said. “Too dangerous.”
Papou broke off a piece of baklava, offered it to his bird. The eagle turned his beak up at it. “Let her go.”
“It’s not like you can stop me,” I said. Then I remembered who I was talking to. This was Baboulas. She had an army, a dungeon, lots of guns. She had a killer baklava recipe that she could use against me. One foot out of line ... no more baklava for Katerina. It would be a low blow only my hips would thank her for. “Well ... you could, but Lopez is my problem to solve.”
Grandma rose from her seat. She tottered to her front door. At the last moment, she looked back at me. “Xander and Takis are on their way out front now. If you run you can catch them.” Her attention shifted to Papou. “You want coffee, you old malakas?”
I bolted.
~ ~ ~
“Crap!”
There was nothing left of Grandma’s henchmen except a settling sepia cloud. I jogged over to the garage, where a couple of the young cousins were slopping soap bubbles over the limo’s elongated hood.
“I need a car,” I said. “Can I have one that’s not mine, please? It’s too yellow.”
“The last one was stolen,” one of the cousins said nervously.
“You’ll get it back.”
I crossed my fingers. “And it wasn’t stolen. More like ... temporarily requisitioned by law enforcement.”
He glanced at his compadre, who nodded. “We have to get permission first.”
“Okay. But can you hurry?”
I jiggled to subconsciously hurry him up, kind of like running water when you want to invoke someone’s need to pee. After civilizations rose and fell, he backed a black Fiat out of the garage and slapped the keys into my hand.
“Stay away from cops this time.”
I thanked him and asked which cousin he was. A river of relatives ran through this place, and it was almost impossible to separate them into orderly piles. It didn’t help that almost everyone had the same nose.
“Stavros.” He nodded to his companion. “Stavros.” At the guard booth: “Stavros.”
“Can I just give you guys numbers?”
He threw back his head, laughed, and then stopped abruptly. “No.”
“Worth a shot.” I jangled the keys. “Thanks.”
I didn’t have clue one where I was going, but the dash had GPS. I punched in Sesklo and followed the instructions down the long driveway. No talking map for me—that thing was obnoxious, passive-aggressive, and bitchy. At the end of the driveway, Elias was waiting, chewing on a stalk of something green. I stopped alongside him. He looked like a stick of licorice in his Stavros-approved black.
“Need company?”
“Do I have a choice?”
He grinned. “Not really.”
“Better get in then.”
He angled into the Fiat’s tight passenger seat and buckled up. “Sesklo?”
I glanced sideways at him. “Do you know everything that goes on around here?”
“Mostly it’s a need-to-know thing. If you’re going somewhere, I need to know about it. So someone makes sure I know.”
Sesklo was located south of Volos and west. The landscape was a brown bag with the occasional green crayon squiggle. The trees were mostly olives. Olives are like that one old man who refuses to shift when the city plans a bypass through his property. An olive tree digs its roots in, and unless you’re an earthquake, it’s not going anywhere. August was tough, but it was no earthquake.
We parked at the bottom of the hill behind a clump of olive trees. They had their backs to us, branches bending toward the hill, gossiping about how the view wasn’t what it used to be. It wouldn’t surprise me if they began clawing at the ground, running that pesky hill out of town, so they could get a better look. A smattering of other vehicles and a couple of tour buses blotted the area. Sesklo, the Internet told me, was a tourist attraction for people who liked to ooh and ahh over rock foundations and nice views. Americans loved it; but then ours was a civilization with a brief, bloody backstory and no old relics other than the Confederate flag. We had fossils, but mostly they were in politics. Europe was full of old stuff.
No sign of Takis and Xander. No sign of Lopez, either. Had he hitched a ride to Sesklo or commandeered a vehicle? He’d left the moped at the compound. Even he wasn’t ballsy enough to storm the gate with his wannabe motorcycle.
Elias jumped out. He wandered over to the sign at the bottom of the hill.
He came back looking puzzled. “I thought we were going to Sesklo.”
“This isn’t Sesklo?”
“Map says it’s Dimini.”
I rushed over to check. Sure enough, we standing at the bottom of the ruins in Dimini. According to the map there was supposed to be someone here dishing out electronic maps, but it was crawling toward dark and no one was manning the booth. Sightseeing isn’t nearly as popular when there’s no sight to see.
“I hate you,” I told the GPS. “You suck.” Then I apologized. GPS was one short evolutionary step away from a terminator. Last thing I wanted was GPS lady telling me she’d be back, then hunting me relentlessly with a rocket launcher. There was enough of that in my family already.
We jumped back in the car and zipped up the street—more or less—to Sesklo.
“I don’t get it,” I said when we stopped. “They look pretty much the same.”
Elias scrolled down his phone. “The other one had the Mycenaean and Neolithic settlement. This one just has the Neolithic settlement.”
“So ...” I squinted at the landscape. “... If you were a turncoat American cop, where would you be?”
“On a beach in Hawaii, drinking fruity drinks with the little umbrellas.”
“You have beaches here, and the fruity drinks.”
“Yes, but it’s not the same. Hawaii is exotic. Greece is ... eh ... it’s Greece.”
He was jaded. I got it—I was getting jaded, too. Greece was pretty on the surface, but her underbelly was snails, puppy dog tails, donkey manure, and razor wire.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s climb this thing. If I was meeting someone here I wouldn’t bother hanging around in this ... can we call it a car park?”
He took stock of the area. “Field.”
Sesklo was the same deal as Dimini, except here there were no cars in sight other than the Fiat. I scooted it up under some olive trees and hoped the oncoming night would do the rest of the work for me. The trail was Greece’s usual blend of dirt and rocks, winding around the hill. I stooped down to pick up a few pebbles and stuffed them in my pocket. We passed low arrangements of stones set in basic geometric shapes, remnants of a civilization that fled when Greece's temperatures soared. Granted, their village was on fire at the time. Back in those days they couldn’t blame the fire on Vulcan. He and the rest of the Greek gods weren’t a thing a yet. For five centuries post-burning, the area had been uninhabited, until some Late Neolithic people settled on the mound. Unfortunately for them, history didn’t consider their civilization nearly as interesting as their predecessors. They were barely a footnote.
Elias tapped my elbow, nodded up ahead. I followed his gesture further up the hill, not far from what was supposed to be Sesklo’s megaron, which was just a cool Greek word that meant ‘great hall’. Lopez was framed in shadows. He was stabbing at the ground with a spade, muttering.
“Couldn’t have just handed it to me like a man. Had to get all fancy, make me work for it when I already worked my tail off for it.” The spade clanged against metal. “Ha! Gotcha!” He crouched in the dirt, tugged on something buried in the ground. Given that this was a historical site of some cultural significance, and given Greece’s paranoia about foreigners making off with their antiquities, Lopez was skating on highly illegal ground.
There was no sign of Xander and Takis. If they were here they were lying low, swathed in shadows and dirt. Earlier I’d tucked the only weapon Grandma allowed me, my father’s childhood slingshot, into my back pocket. I loaded up one of the stones I’d pocketed a few moments ago, and pulled back on the elastic until it was taut and eager to take a bite out of the cop’s backside. I had my vindictive moments, but it wasn’t that time of the month, I’d ingested plenty of coffee this morning, and my blood sugar was just fine, so I aimed for his leg.
Lopez shrieked as the stone connected with his calf. “Fuck!” Then in a quieter voice: “Fuckity, fuck, fuck.” He grabbed the spade, and whatever he’d pulled out of Greece’s zit, and backed up into a shadow.
“Who’s there?” he called out.
“You left without saying goodbye.”
“Katerina, that you?”
“What are you doing, Lopez?”
He laughed, a belly-shaker with a thin web of nerves. “You alone out there?”
“I haven’t been alone since I arrived in Greece. It’s kind of driving me crazy.”
“I know the feeling. I just want to get what I came for and go. How’s that sound to you?”
“What about Bishop?”
“What about him? Not my problem.”
“He’s your partner.”
“Yeah, let me tell you about my partner. Eugene Bishop is a dickwad. Did you see those pants he wears, the attitude? Asshole doesn’t know if he’s black or white.”
“I figured that was part of the job, like a Halloween costume he forgot to take off.”
“Ha-ha. Naw, Bishop went in too deep. When he came back out he was all fucked up. Went in a white boy, came out just as white, only he don’t know it.”
“Still no reason to not give a damn that he’s missing.”
“He’s not missing, he’s just in escrow with the others. That fucking dumb kid and that fat drug dealer you’re friends with.”
“Escrow?”
“It’s like when you buy a house—”
“I know what it means,” I said. “They’re kidnapped. What for?”
He was still in the shadow, but there was enough light for me to see the edge of him shrug. “I don’t know. Not my business. I did my piece and now I’m out of here.”
“What piece was that?”
“Keep an eye on you. Figure out what you do and don’t know about your old man. Get the hell out of Dodge. That’s the part I’m working on now. It’d be in your best interests just to let that part happen, natural-like.”
I thought about it a moment. My question-answer sheet was seriously unbalanced. “Can you do the whole villain reveal thing? You’d really be helping me out.”
“I ain’t the bad guy here. I’m like ... think of me as a screwdriver or a wrench. I came in, got a job done, and now I’m going back in the toolbox.”
“You are kind of a tool,” I said.
He laughed. “Sticks and stones. How’d you know I was playing for the other team?”
“Penka. You let her nationality slip. Only way you could have known is if you’d met her.”
“Shit,” he said. “This is why I suck at undercover work. I gotta work on that.”
I saw his shadow move, heard the pop of a metal lock opening. “Who’s in the motherfuckin’ money?” The man was so happy his voice was wearing a big, shit-eating grin. “That’s right—me, Oscar Lopez. See ya, suckers.”
Money. His payment for a job done; Lopez didn’t seem like a guy who did jobs well.
“Thought you were meeting someone here,” I called out.
“So did I. Last minute change of plans, I guess. What do I care? The money is where it’s supposed to be.”
A thought came to me. “US dollars?”
“Euros. Spends the same as American money, and it’s worth more.”
