Athenian Blues

by Pol Koutsakis

  “Then you can go to the police. We’re not talking about his threats any more. With the murder, they’ll listen to you.”

  “No, no, not the police, it’ll never get to court, he’ll destroy me, he’ll turn everything upside down and get them all behind him, no…”

  What she said next was unintelligible. She was hysterical. I waited. At first her words were muffled by sobs but gradually sense began to emerge.

  “I… I phoned him… from a shop… said I was alright but… scared because of what had happened, and… and that I was going to… to hide. Then I… took a taxi… got as far from there as I could… I… I w… wanted him to think that I didn’t know – that he was behind it… that I was frightened of an unknown killer.”

  “What happened after you left the restaurant? Why was that girl in your car?”

  “I’ll explain… when you come. You’ll come, right? I need… protection… Please, please…”

  I told her I’d be there in an hour. Had to show no sign of urgency, to put Drag off the scent. When I returned to the table and he asked who was on the phone, I told him it was Maria. That ended that conversation.

  I drive a blue Peugeot 206, which, for security reasons, officially belongs to a senile older cousin. One of my accounts in Zurich is also under the same name; it’s the one where I get my clients to deposit their payments, if they have accounts abroad. For those restricted by the capital controls, I am willing to take cash. I got into the car, turned on the light, and looked through the newspaper to see which pharmacies were open that night. In my job that’s useful information if I get injured away from home. My flat is equipped like a small hospital to deal with any emergency.

  Driving towards my meeting with Aliki, I searched the radio for some good jazz. Nothing. I made do with pop songs from the eighties and nineties, the ones my generation grew up with. At least they weren’t in short supply.

  A few minutes later I noticed a car tailing me, at a distance. It wasn’t difficult to recognize Drag’s black Nissan.

  14

  I jammed the car into the first space I found in the narrow road. Drag did the same, 100 yards behind. The street lights were dim – very dim for such a dark night. The municipality was short of cash, or someone was embezzling it. Or both. I took my mobile phone out of my pocket and called Drag. He answered on the third ring.

  “Hey.”

  “How stupid can you be?”

  “Very.”

  “At least you admit it. Get your arse over here.”

  “You get yours here – right now,” he said.

  His tone convinced me that something was up. Maybe it was nothing – Drag could be temperamental, or maybe he’d suddenly had an idea he wanted to talk about – but it never hurts to be prepared. The Sig Sauer was on the seat next to me – even in my shoulder holster it was heavy, so I decided to leave it where it was. I had a leg holster with a Smith & Wesson 642. I took out the gun and stuffed it in my jacket pocket. Then I slowly walked towards Drag’s car. If everything was OK he would get out, light a cigarette, and wait for me. A simple code between friends who have been through a lot together. Drag didn’t get out. I kept my hand in my pocket and approached the passenger door. Drag was looking annoyed. Annoyed, not frightened, in spite of the gun pressed to the bottom of his skull. The gun was held by one of two people sitting in the back seat, a big solid man with cropped hair, prominent cheekbones and cold green eyes. He looked a bit like me. I remembered an exchange in White Heat, where Roy Parker asks Cody Jarrett whether he would kill him in cold blood. “Oh, no,” says Jarrett. “I’ll let you warm up a little.”

  One glance at the guy with the gun was enough to know he didn’t share Cody Jarrett’s sense of humour.

  The gunman’s boss was sitting next to him with a slight smile on his face. He had dark features and a full head of hair, impeccably styled and just touched with grey. I wouldn’t have called him handsome, but he’d stand out in a crowd. It’s a quality I lack and am a little jealous of. This guy was known all over Greece. Despite that, he introduced himself.

  “I’m Vassilis Stathopoulos,” he said. “Let’s talk.”

  15

  “Mr Gazis, there are many things you don’t know.”

  “About life?”

  Our happy little company had been transferred to Stathopoulos’ mansion in Voula, following his polite proposal. When someone’s holding a gun to your head, you have a tendency to accept their proposal, polite or not. Stathopoulos’ politeness was worthy of note, as was his good taste in furniture and decoration. His living room was modern without resembling the operations room of the Starship Enterprise, as the houses of some of my wealthy clients do. I wondered who was responsible: Stathopoulos, Aliki or some expensive interior designer, one of those hired by people astute enough to know they lack taste.

  During the whole of the forty-minute trip across town, from north-west to south, neither Stathopoulos nor the gunman whom he introduced as “Makis” had made a single mistake. There were no slip-ups when they ushered us from the basement garage to the living room, no opportunities for Drag and me to turn the tables. Makis had taken my gun, but where Stathopoulos was a watchful amateur, Makis struck me as being only semi-professional. Which didn’t make him harmless – such types are trigger-happy. But it meant that sooner or later he would make an error. And as soon as we got our chance I meant to make him and Stathopoulos curse the milk they sucked from their mother’s tits.

  “About life, I don’t know, though you seem to be a man who already knows quite enough. About this particular case, however, you are missing a lot of important information, Mr Gazis.”

  There was that “Mr” again; both he and his wife liked addressing me formally.

  “Which case do you mean?” I asked.

  Drag and Makis stayed silent, one of them out of choice and the other because that was his job. Makis had put us in armchairs next to each other and sat himself opposite to watch our every move. He was still holding the Glock 40 he had introduced me to in the car, and pointed it at us. Drag was staring at Stathopoulos, who was sitting next to Makis, but I knew that all his attention was really focused on the gunman.

  “Let’s be frank, Mr Gazis. My wife has hired you to kill me. As for Mr Dragas, I know he has the reputation of being the best and most incorruptible officer in Athens, but I must confess that I don’t know what part he plays in all this.”

  “Neither do I,” Drag said, breaking his silence.

  I tried to keep a straight face, but I couldn’t help smiling.

  “My feeling,” said Stathopoulos, “is that as childhood friends, you cooperate with each other to the extent that you don’t get under each other’s feet. If I am mistaken, please correct me.”

  He was well informed, at any rate. Even Drag looked surprised for a second, but his grim expression quickly returned. When I’d asked him how stupid he could be and he had answered “very”, I was talking about his failure to follow me without me noticing, but of course he was referring to his capture.

  “My assumption is correct? Excellent. It’s good for each of us to know how the other works,” Stathopoulos continued, the smooth smile never slipping. “And on that score, you should know that Makis is here only as my bodyguard. I want you to listen to me, even if you have agreed to kill me.”

  “Can we have something to drink?” I asked to distract him.

  He was probably telling the truth about not wanting to kill us, at least not immediately, or he wouldn’t have brought us to his house. There are always places and gunmen for that kind of work. Still, I didn’t feel at all comfortable with Makis’ Glock staring me in the eyes. It was too ugly a companion. I just needed a bit of time.

  Stathopoulos looked at Makis, who nodded me towards the bar. I got up, carefully. Maybe he was just there to stop his boss getting killed, but I couldn’t be sure. Drag knew immediately what I was planning. The bar contained just about every drink imaginable. I poured myself a Johnnie Walker Blue
Label – always choose the best, when it’s for free. Even if it’s going to waste.

  “Can I get you one?” I asked Stathopoulos, raising my glass in a toast. I didn’t wait for his reply. I threw the whisky in his face before Makis had a chance to turn his gun on me. Drag jumped up and headbutted Makis, who fell to the ground. I grabbed Stathopoulos and held a three-inch Gerber to his throat – luckily, Makis had missed it in the inside of my waistband when he searched me.

  At school, Drag was the worst football player ever, when the ball was on the ground. His legs were so uncoordinated he couldn’t dribble round a statue. But his head was phenomenal. Each time he took a header in the penalty area, his team members started celebrating even before the ball had gone in. Over the years his head had got hard enough to shatter breeze blocks. Which is why I almost felt sorry for Makis. Almost.

  Everything happened in less than ten seconds, in silence. In a real fight, you don’t often hear a groan. That’s why I like the old noir films – the writers understood that when someone is battling for his life he hasn’t even breath to waste.

  I put my mouth close to Stathopoulos’ ear.

  “Now let’s talk,” I said.

  He didn’t seem perturbed. The smooth smile seemed even broader.

  “I think I’ve found the right people to help me,” he replied.

  16

  Makis had served in the Special Forces and had black belts in various martial arts. If Stathopoulos had been impressed by his qualifications, he was even more impressed by the way Drag dealt with him. Playing by the rules on soft mattresses bears little relation to real life. We laid Makis out on the sofa. I took back my gun and searched him for other weapons. Now we’d got things under control, I called Aliki. I was two hours late for our meeting, and her phone was off, but at least she didn’t have to worry about being attacked by her husband, not while Drag and I were with him. The living room was full of photos of the two of them, from all over the world. Aliki was dazzling, especially in her wedding photo. Happy. Different from the Aliki I had met. Stathopoulos didn’t look bad as a groom, either. I knew from Teri’s gossip that the wedding had taken place on his fortieth birthday. He didn’t look like he had aged a day. In one of the photos, he was lying on their bed, laughing, with his tie undone and his shirt unbuttoned, looking into the lens. In the large mirror behind him, Aliki’s hair and her hand taking the picture were visible, but her other hand was covering her exquisite face.

  Seeing me staring, Stathopoulos said, “We got married three years ago, after we’d known each other only a month. Until then I’d never had a lasting relationship. Every woman I’d met ended up getting on my nerves over stupid little things. With Aliki even that first month was unnecessary; I knew she was the one right from the beginning, since her first breath beside me. Have you ever been in love like that, Mr Gazis? Mr Dragas?”

  I wasn’t about to explain that it had happened to us, with the same woman. Drag and I didn’t talk about it. For us, best friends know when not to discuss something.

  Getting no response, Stathopoulos continued, “It was her dream, to go to Cuba. That’s where we spent our honeymoon. Do you know how marvellous it feels to realize a dream for the person you’ve dreamt about? I didn’t. I discovered it then for the first time. But that wasn’t all that I discovered…”

  He paused and sighed. As if he had to summon up courage for what he was about to say.

  “That was when I first saw the blood.”

  Another pause. Another sigh. His voice even broke as he spoke. He was either a brilliant actor, or genuinely moved.

  “Aliki likes… has a habit of… she cuts herself… self-mutilation. When you met her in La Luna I’m sure that she either showed you her scars or promised to. The scars she claims I gave her, by hitting or cutting her or whatever. Am I right?”

  Drag glanced at me. I said nothing. I looked again at the photo. Something about it seemed strange to me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Stathopoulos had probably never met with such a lack of response to one of his courtroom speeches.

  “I confess that I was a very jealous husband at the beginning. How could I not be? You’ve seen what she looks like, and she enjoys having men drooling over her. I’ve done some things I’m not proud of… shouted at her… got angry… frightened her. Over trifles, I know. Blind jealousy, when all she did was a bit of harmless flirting. But that’s how it is – when you’re already forty and you’ve never felt this… this crazy about someone and you can’t stand the idea that she might leave you, you lose it… you totally lose it. Because you know you’re not going to get another shot at crazy love like that again. Either you keep hold of it or you’re finished. I felt ready to die… and… to kill… Even a few months after the Cuba incident, when I thought she had got over it, we had a stupid fight, a big one, when I saw her laughing too much at an actor’s jokes… Until she started to cut herself again, with anything she could get her hands on. That put an end to my madness – her sickness healed mine. The only thing I could think of was to help her recover. I’ve taken her to the top psychiatrists in Greece, England and Switzerland… Always the same story… At the beginning she tells them what she probably told you – that I do these things to her body but not the face to make it look like an accident – but, after a few sessions she ends up in tears, saying that I’m her only love and she hates me for loving her so much because she doesn’t deserve it, which is why she wants to get back at me.”

  “She hates you enough to want to kill you?” I asked.

  “That’s what she said to one psychiatrist. That only when I’m dead will she feel free to kill herself, as she wants.”

  “I thought psychiatrists were sworn to confidentiality,” Drag said.

  “Not exactly, Mr Dragas. Not if I pay them to tell me what she says. But it turns out that I needn’t have purchased this particular piece of information. Three months ago, she took an overdose. I came back from work and found her there in the living room, covered in vomit, and rushed her to hospital. It was her vomiting that saved her – otherwise, the stomach pump wouldn’t have been enough. When she opened her eyes and realized that she was still alive the first thing she told me was that she was going to kill me for not letting her die.”

  I thought of Aliki Stylianou at the restaurant. Bright, enticing, a goddess… Stathopoulos seemed to be describing a completely different person. I thought of her waiting for me, at the meeting place she’d arranged earlier. Feeling lonely and frightened, not knowing what was going on. Could the picture I had of her be so wrong? It wouldn’t have been the first time. The older you get, the more you can be sure of just one thing: you’ll never really understand people.

  “I let her choose her own therapist after that. Antonis Rizos is his name. She seemed to have made some progress with him, seemed healthier these past couple of months, met him quite often. Maybe too often. And I didn’t interfere, didn’t want him to tell her – I checked him out; he’s a leftist, an idealist, all about not doing his job for the money. Wasn’t sure if I could bribe him. But after what happened yesterday, I’ll pay him a visit to find out what he knows.”

  Planning his next move, already. As if he had nothing to fear, after the stunt he pulled on us. Maybe he thought Drag’s presence would keep him safe from me. Maybe he wasn’t totally wrong.

  “Perhaps you think I’m just telling you all this to stop you from killing me?” Stathopoulos asked, at last.

  “The idea did cross my mind,” I said.

  I hadn’t yet received a penny to take care of him but when someone puts a gun to my head I’m prepared to waive my principles and take care of him for free.

  “I’m telling you because I want to employ you, Mr Gazis. And you too, Mr Dragas, if you work together.”

  “We don’t work together and I’m not for hire,” Drag said, curtly.

  The second half was true.

  “Employ me to do what?” I asked, since I was for hire.

  Even when some
one has stuck a gun in my face, I feel obliged to examine every professional proposition carefully, wherever it comes from.

  “Yesterday, the murderers of the girl…”

  “Elsa Dalla?”

  However good Drag is at his work, he can’t rid himself of that habit all cops have of asking obvious questions to get obvious answers.

  “Yes. It wasn’t her they were after. They thought they’d killed Aliki.”

  “And how would you happen to know that, Mr Stathopoulos?” Drag asked.

  It seemed ridiculous to me that after all that had happened, they kept calling each other “Mr”. Maybe they were more polite than I was.

  “Because it wasn’t their first attempt to murder Aliki. They’ve tried twice before.”

  He described both attempts, in exactly the same way as Aliki had described them to me.

  “Both times Aliki had miraculous escapes but she persuaded herself that they were just accidents, refusing to accept that she had been the target.”

  That’s what she told you, I thought.

  “Why should she do that?” Drag asked.

  “I don’t know. The police got nowhere with the faulty brake, and the motorcyclist – a Bulgarian – skidded on some spilt oil, just missed Aliki and slammed into a lorry. No papers. Security had nothing on him.”

  “Who would want to kill her?”

  “I don’t know that, either. Enquiries into the identity of the motorcyclist drew a blank. The bike was stolen and he had nothing except a shopping list in Bulgarian. No fingerprints in the system, the Bulgarian police couldn’t help… You can check the archive, Mr Dragas. Aliki only has friends; I can’t think of anyone who has a grudge against her. I have hired so many people to look into it since that first attempt and they’ve come up with nothing. Nothing at all.”

  “From what you’ve told us, they could just wait for Aliki to make a good job of it on her own,” Drag said.

  However long I’ve known him, I still can’t fathom how Drag comes out with such things. Discretion is one of the few virtues he lacks. He never beats about the bush, says just what’s on his mind regardless of the audience and the circumstances. Stathopoulos looked at him coldly, but didn’t say anything. He needed us – if he was to be believed.