Athenian Blues

by Pol Koutsakis

  “Can you start at the beginning, I’m confused,” Maria said.

  “OK.”

  It was three o’clock in the morning. Quite normal for a night bird like Maria. She doesn’t sleep till she sees the sun rise.

  “Stylianou found you through Teri and you met at La Luna. Drag was waiting for you outside.”

  It was good that she could say his name. For a long time Drag and Maria couldn’t bear to mention each other. The reason why Maria and I had separated was much simpler. Though we’d fallen in love when we were young, we’d discovered two things. The first was that we loved each other a lot and weren’t going to stop feeling that way; the second was that we couldn’t bear to live together as a couple.

  A Bronx Tale was right. It just didn’t specify that the woman of your life may not be the one you spend your life with.

  It took Drag a long time before he dared make his move. First he cleared it with me; stammering and stuttering, as if he needed my permission. Then he told Maria how he felt – in a letter, because he couldn’t bring himself to do it face to face. They stayed together for five years and separated for reasons I’m still not sure about. Drag withdrew into himself more than ever. Then Maria met Sotiris, a very intelligent, funny guy. His wheelchair didn’t deter her at all. They got married after a few months and I know that they are still very much in love.

  “So was La Luna crowded?”

  “Not an empty table.”

  “So much for the financial crisis. And you and Stylianou left separately so that her husband’s spies wouldn’t see you together,” continued Maria.

  “It was her suggestion.”

  “And the next thing is Teri phones Drag to say that Stylianou had called, terrified, pleading for help and telling Teri where she was.”

  “Yes.”

  “Drag was off duty. You hadn’t agreed to do the job but, even if you had, you’re not Stylianou’s bodyguard. So, why did you go?”

  Like Drag and Teri, Maria has no objection to my work. She thinks it’s useful – “noble” she called it once – the way I operate. She may be influenced by the fact that, twenty years ago, one of her uncles raped her teenage sister, screwing her up so much she’s been in and out of institutions ever since, and has to live on her parents’ pension – whatever’s left of it. The uncle was sent to prison for a few years and Maria was just waiting for him to come out so that she could kill him with her own hands. His heart attack, the day before he was due to be released, robbed her of justice.

  Why did we go? Maria always asks the right questions. For me the answer was relatively simple: I got too close to Aliki Stylianou that evening to ignore her call for help. A woman who only has someone like me to turn to, who is so desperate she phones Teri, a transsexual prostitute she’s never met, is a woman so alone even I could bend my professional rules. Being a very beautiful woman also helped. Yet, despite all that, I’m not sure I would have gone if I hadn’t been with Drag. And what I couldn’t tell Maria without hurting her was that, ever since they separated, Drag is never really off duty. He’s become indifferent to life, outside work. That’s why he raced to the junction of Favierou and Mayer when he heard Teri on the phone.

  “So? If it was none of your business, why did you go?” Maria repeated, seeing my hesitation.

  “Professional perversion,” I replied, putting on a – hopefully persuasive – grin.

  10

  Maria quickly made me an omelette and left the kitchen to help Sotiris with his bath. They stay up late together, having epic chess and draughts battles, listening to music, watching films, trying to beat each other’s scores on their iPads. Sotiris’ parents have properties that they rent out in and around Athens, and are sufficiently well-off to ensure he’d never have to work if he was a little careful with his money. Maria works occasionally as a graphic designer and consultant for an English publisher. They love her work, but she only takes jobs when she feels like it or needs some extra cash. Sotiris trained as a teacher but he doesn’t teach. Not because he’s an invalid. He just prefers spending all day with Maria. I don’t blame him.

  Sotiris knows that I’m one of Maria’s old friends, that I make enough to get by, and that I keep myself to myself, which is why I don’t invite people home. We get along alright. Just.

  As I was eating, I kept gazing at my mobile phone. Still no news from Drag. I went to the sink to wash the plates. From Maria’s kitchen window you look straight into the flat opposite where, every night, in the small hours, a fat middle-aged man and a haggard dark-haired woman make love with the curtains open and lights blazing. Perhaps they don’t think anyone’s watching at that time of night, or would be interested. The ugliness of their entwined bodies has a richness you don’t get in romantic films, with their body-perfect actors.

  I left them to it and opened the back door, which leads by a long flight of steps into the storage room. I went down the first eight, stopped at the mezzanine between the ground and first floor, bent down and felt around the bottom of the wall. The button I was searching for was small and white, and like the door of my flat, practically invisible. I pressed the button and the electronic device I had installed in place of a door handle appeared. I put my hand in the proper position on the device, waited five seconds for it to recognize me, and the door opened. It’s the only way of getting in. Maria has allowed me to arrange my place to cater for the demands of my profession. Security. A very expensive story. I would like to have more windows than just the one in my flat, to be able to throw them all open and let the air sweep through, to strip naked and feel it on my body, like I did as a kid, my mum chasing me with my clothes. But it would make the flat vulnerable. The area outside my only window is full of sensors that warn me of any irregular movement. For years I have been making sure that nobody knows where I live, with the exception of my friends. Even the address I declare in all the official papers under my new name is different. I don’t want to put Maria in danger. If anything happens I have to be ready.

  I shut the door behind me and experienced the sense of relief I always feel, seeing the room clean and tidy. Every room I’ve occupied since I was a boy has been neat and uncluttered. Order helps me think.

  My phone was still mute. There were two choices. The first was to wait for news from Drag. By morning the dead girl would have been identified and the cops would be looking for Aliki, the owner of the BMW. The second choice was to phone Aliki herself. To ask her what happened, if she was OK and still wanted to go ahead with our arrangement. It would show her I was interested.

  Been to the hospital twice with fractures. He only hits me on the body, so that he can palm off my injuries as some kind of accident.

  Two choices, one obvious answer.

  If someone needs you they will find you. Don’t take useless steps.

  And never, never, get close to a client.

  I looked at the mobile phone.

  I waited.

  11

  I was more tired than I thought. In my dream, Maria came to help me take a bath and was amazed to discover that my legs had healed. She called me Sotiris and I thought that I ought to put her right but I didn’t because it didn’t bother me; she could call me any name she wanted as long as she stayed with me. Just as we were getting together in the bath to celebrate, her face changed into that of Aliki. It was terribly scarred and out of her swollen mouth came the mutilated word “help”. Then she gave me a bitter smile that hurt worse than the most heart-breaking tears. As the smile became wider and wider, the scars on her face seemed to multiply. Luckily, at that point, my mobile rang and woke me. Luckily, because such dreams have tortured me ever since I realized that I’ve never stopped being in love with Maria and made a terrible mistake in letting her go.

  It was Teri on the phone, her annoyance crackling over the line.

  “I want a word with you.”

  “That’s six already.”

  “Am I your secretary now?”

  “What’s the matter?
”

  “Stylianou phoned back. I was with him.”

  He was Nikos Zois, the guy Teri was recently crazy about. I hadn’t met him yet, but she couldn’t stop gushing about what a great guy he was, as well as being a hunk.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You are sorry? He had just an hour between meetings and came to see me, and…”

  “Tell you anything important?”

  “Nikos?”

  “Stylianou.”

  “Ah… yes. She said she was alright, she’s hiding somewhere, and that she wanted to talk to you. She sounded shit scared.”

  12

  “Elsa Dalla, thirty-two years old,” Drag said.

  It was midnight on a melancholy, pitch-black night, and I had suggested we drop by the Serbetia café in the Psyrri district, to talk while eating chocolate-orange pie with vanilla ice cream. He insisted that we should go to our usual haunt, Papi’s, a coffee bar close to my place, open 24/7. Drag had the results of the post-mortem: the ballistics report showed that the bullets were from an AK-47, as expected, and there were no witnesses, as expected. What we didn’t expect was that the La Luna waiter would have such a good memory. The description he gave of my face to the guy who did mugshot sketches was perfect, Drag told me. I was one of the last people to see Aliki before Dalla’s body was found in her car. So the police needed a statement from me, and if they couldn’t find me they’d release the sketch to the media, asking for anyone who knew me to come forward. I wasn’t a murder suspect. Aliki wasn’t the victim and we had left separately, as the doorman at La Luna testified. However, Drag advised me to lie low while they were combing Athens for evidence – and forget eating chocolate pastries around Psyrri. You never know who might claim to have seen me.

  The chairs in Papi’s seem to be from the seventies – retro style, scratched wood, torn covering. The decor is brown and white – it may have started white, but decades of smokers have darkened it. Papi, the owner, fits right in – his Greek father got to know his African mother while visiting Congo in the 1940s to find a mining job and they stayed together till she died. Papi, who was born on the day the Second World War ended, looks like a pygmy, barely five feet tall. Under his snow-white hair he has a funny face with little eyebrows, pop eyes and bulging cheeks, which becomes even funnier when he frowns, realizing that he’s mixed up the orders again. He is very discreet, though, and Drag and I feel at ease there. We don’t hide the fact that we are friends, but we do understand that our public appearances together don’t exactly improve either Drag’s professional image, or mine.

  Apart from his discretion, Papi’s major attraction is a jukebox, an imposing grey Seeburg M100B Select-O-Matic circa 1950, the first model to play 45s and the first to be so well designed that it allowed discs to be played vertically, extending the choice of songs from twenty to 100. Papi tells most people that it cost a fortune to get it sent from America, but to us he confided that he found it up for auction on eBay and discovered that the guy who owned it was an old friend who owed him a big favour from their time in the Congo. That’s how favours are, like cats; however far they stray they find their way back home. Drag and I happened to be there when it was delivered. Papi stroked it tenderly, then went to turn it on, only to discover that it only took American five-cent coins, a fact his Congolese friend had forgotten to mention. Papi spent weeks searching for nickels, but he got there in the end. We were the guests of honour at the machine’s inauguration. We were also the only guests. Papi is even more of a loner than we are. His first choice, once the jukebox had swallowed his five cents, was Sinatra’s Moonlight Serenade. As he listened, with rapturously closed eyes, I could have sworn that he grew several inches taller. After the song finished, he unlocked the machine’s cashbox. Anyone who wants to use the jukebox has to collect their nickels from Papi.

  Drag and I disagreed violently over what was the most moving performance ever of a blues song. Drag nearly wore down the needle playing Ella Fitzgerald’s Every Time We Say Goodbye, while I couldn’t stop playing Cry Me a River by Dinah Washington. I think we overdid it one day, because Papi presented each of us with our preferred disc “as a present”. While Drag and I were trying to imagine what our life in Papi’s would be like without Ella or Dinah, Papi went to the jukebox and put on I’m a Fool to Want You, sung by Billie Holiday – who only lived forty-four tortured years but managed to change the way in which people listened to jazz. On Papi’s disc her voice is worn by the rape and beatings she received from the men in her life, by booze and drugs. You almost can’t recognize it. And from the first phrase, what remains of her voice becomes greater than it had ever been. It was the most moving performance Drag and I ever heard. We put down our own discs on the table, stopped bickering and listened to Lady Day, dead for fifty years, filling that shabby old coffee bar in Athens.

  “Elsa Dalla? Sounds like a fake name to me,” I told Drag.

  “Like you have a good ear.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Maybe you should have been a musician.”

  “A maestro.”

  “Actually, do you know why the Venetians named a wind the ‘maestral’?”

  “I don’t think about winds that often.”

  “Because it is the master-wind. Maestro. Not to be confused with the French mistral wind, which is very different,” he said.

  “Is that relevant to our case?”

  “Not at all.”

  “OK, then.”

  Drag loves to share with his friends any information he picks up, anytime it pops into his head.

  “Her real name was Evanthia Markantonopoulou.”

  “I’m not surprised she changed it.”

  “‘Elsa Dalla’ was dreamt up by the director of her TV series when she was brought to him to get her a part.”

  “Brought to him?”

  “She was sleeping with the producer.”

  “Well done, Evanthia. What’s his name?”

  “Tassos Regoudis. Haven’t seen him yet. The Chief said he’s too big a name to be hauled in for questioning.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “I spoke to one of his lawyers. He announced that Dr Regoudis would see me at twelve o’clock tomorrow, at his house.”

  “Doctor?”

  “He has a doctorate in biology from some Romanian university. He’s had the certificate blown up and framed in his office and insists on people calling him doctor.”

  “And you got to know all that from…?”

  “The director. The one who thought of the name ‘Elsa Dalla’. A certain… Peppas. Hermes Peppas. Apparently he was about to resign because of the constant pressure Regoudis was putting on the writers to make Elsa’s part bigger.”

  “At least he won’t have to worry about that any more.”

  “He’s keen to cooperate, in case I make him a suspect.”

  “Do you suspect him?”

  “Probably not. He’s an artist.”

  “Artists can be killers. But what about Stylianou? What’s she got to do with…?”

  “Nikolidaga.”

  “What?”

  “Aliki Nikolidaga. Her real name. Seems like nobody in showbiz sticks to their real name.”

  “Right. While you, Drag…”

  He shot me a look. I went back to the murder before he got angry; when you stir Drag up it’s like a tidal wave that comes and goes.

  “So? What did Stylianou, whose real name is Nikolidaga, have to do with Dalla, whose real name is Markantonopoulou?”

  “Besides the fact they look very alike I don’t know yet. I’ve had a word with Peppas and with five of the actors. They all told me that Dalla and Stylianou were polite to each other, nothing more. They never went around together, nor did they bitch about each other. There was no reason for jealousy because Aliki had a very small part in the series. But I can’t get hold of her or her husband. Their mobiles are switched off, nobody answers at their house, and if I actually asked them to come to the station and mak
e a statement, I’d be transferred to the Greek–Turkish border in no time. If they warned me to treat Regoudis gently, think what would happen with Stathopoulos… All I’ve found out is that Aliki doesn’t have any close relations. She’s an only child, whose parents were killed in a road accident some years ago, close to their home in Patras. So the only thing I’ve got, so far, is an ambitious but little-known actress, playing a bit part in a TV series, professionally bumped off in a car belonging to a model who’s just started her acting career. Any ideas, Mr Caretaker?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  Not far from us, Papi was sitting reading a newspaper. On the jukebox, Louis Armstrong was singing that life was a cabaret. Not for Elsa Dalla it wasn’t.

  13

  There’s always a fine line in the relationships between best friends, and it grows even thinner when your professions aren’t exactly compatible. For example, when we work together as a team, Drag and I are more or less invincible. But if I had told him that I knew where Aliki Stylianou was hiding and that I was going to meet her later, then Drag would have felt obliged to get to her before I did. And I never betray a client, unless they betray me first.

  Aliki Stylianou hadn’t betrayed me.

  I’d phoned her immediately after speaking to Teri. She hadn’t picked up the phone, but called me back when I was with Drag at Papi’s. I stood up casually, to avoid alerting him, and moved to the back of the bar, where he couldn’t hear me.

  “Stratos,” I said.

  I heard a sigh of relief from the other end.

  “Thank God it’s you. Can you come?”

  “Where?”

  “I’m scared, really scared and I can’t…”

  She gave a sob, then pulled herself together.

  “I don’t know what to do, where to go… They killed that girl… thought it was me… he killed her…”

  Drag was staring at me. I put on a smile.

  “Your husband?”

  “Yes. Now I have proof.”