Athenian Blues

by Pol Koutsakis

  “Why was Dalla in Aliki’s BMW?” Drag asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Her earlier relationships?” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “A connection with someone from her past life?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t… know. When the first attempt happened we’d already been married two years. Is it possible? Wouldn’t they have acted sooner? Who would wait so long to get revenge?”

  For a lawyer he seemed quite ignorant of how long people can nurse a desire for revenge. Or that’s how he wanted it to appear.

  “Do you know the people she dated?” Drag demanded. “I mean, before you got married. Let’s say, going back to a couple of years before you met.”

  “I don’t know anything about her love life before I met her. It doesn’t concern me.”

  Nothing, except for that little video with the banker Aliki had told me about. I didn’t say anything. I hadn’t even mentioned it to Drag – call it professional confidentiality.

  “Why doesn’t it concern you?” Drag insisted.

  “I’m only concerned with information I can use. The names of my wife’s former boyfriends would merely make me feel uncomfortable if I should meet them. At worst, I would start imagining her in bed with them. I’d rather not know. I explained it all to Aliki when we decided to get married but she saw things differently. She insisted I had to be open about my past and write down the names of all my former lovers. I continued to believe in the power of ignorance, and learnt nothing at all about hers.”

  “Why the jealousy, then?”

  “I told you that my jealousy didn’t last long. And it was a jealousy about the present, not the shadows of the past.”

  As Drag didn’t say anything, I stepped in.

  “From what you say about the murder attempts, you need a bodyguard for your wife. Which I am not.”

  “I don’t want you for anything like that. I’ve got Makis for a bodyguard.”

  I glanced at the still-unconscious body stretched out on the sofa. Three murder attempts by guys who may, or may not, have been joking. He wasn’t much good even as a bodyguard.

  “The reason I want to employ you, Mr Gazis, is that I no longer have any faith in the people I’ve been paying to help me with this case. I don’t think they’re up to it, whereas you, I’ve heard, are the best – which my recent experience bears out.”

  He paused. Aliki’s voice echoed in my mind: “I’m scared, really scared… they killed that girl… thought it was me… he killed her.” If I was certain Stathopoulos was the one trying to kill Aliki, I’d have no problem killing him myself, when Drag wasn’t around. But I wasn’t so sure any more as to the wrongs and rights of the case. Aliki wanted me to kill someone who was prepared to pay me to save her. Something about the story felt wrong. Plus, I hadn’t been paid yet.

  “I will pay you whatever sum of money. Whatever,” Stathopoulos said. “You name it. I mean it, Mr Gazis. I want you to find out who is trying to kill her. If you can also discover why, that’s even better. I will pay whatever you ask to find him and take care of him.”

  Nobody ever said the life of a conscientious caretaker was easy. It could, however, be quite profitable.

  17

  Apart from my three close friends, people who know me either want to employ me, or are my victims. I wondered which of my former employers had told Stathopoulos about me. Whoever it was knew about Drag as well, which made the list of candidates shorter. But Stathopoulos refused to tell me. He just said he’d started making enquiries when Makis showed him a photo he’d taken of Aliki and me from a hiding place in the restaurant’s kitchen. Maybe he wasn’t altogether useless. I’d asked Stathopoulos for a couple of days to think about his proposition. To help me think, he had opened up his safe and given me sixty 500-euro notes. Thirty thousand. No need to return them, he said, if I were to refuse. It was payment for my thinking time. Or a down payment, if I accepted. He didn’t stop there. Immediately after, he took out his chequebook, wrote a cheque and put it in my pocket. The amount was blank. If my thoughts led me to undertake the case, he said, I could put in any sum I liked and he would sign it. Any sum, he stressed again. I told him that I didn’t take cheques; if I undertook the case he would have to deposit the required amount in an account in Zurich. He insisted that I take it, as a sign of his goodwill. Then he went on to give Drag the names of all the private detectives he had hired to investigate the attempts on Aliki’s life. He even tied up the Rottweiler that was his most effective security guard. As we left, he told us he wasn’t too worried about Aliki – she had phoned him the day before to tell him that she was alright but in hiding after what had happened. He tried to trace her call, but got nowhere. At least one of them was lying. Maybe they both were. I had started to doubt anything said by anyone involved in this case.

  I kept on trying to phone Aliki. I was a professional, and I owed her that much. But she didn’t answer, which meant I still couldn’t be sure who I was supposed to kill.

  18

  Maria came down to bring me the morning papers. I like to hold the paper in my hands, to smell the ink, even if it makes me look like a time traveller from the Stone Age. On the screen, the newspaper is weightless, like most of the stories that morons make up in the hope it will become viral.

  As Maria descended the stairs, the sensors were activated one by one, flashing in lights above my door. I wanted to know exactly where my visitors were at any one time, in case they were uninvited. Aliki, Elsa and the BMW were spread across all the front pages. The journalists were in full cry and Drag had been named as the officer in charge of the investigation. He and I would have to be even more careful about meeting in public.

  I was discussing this with Maria when she touched me. We have an unwritten, unspoken rule. I never touch her first. It only happens when she wants to. At first everything was perfect between her and Sotiris – his wheelchair seemed invisible. But as his multiple sclerosis started to take hold, the wheelchair became a fixture in the background. Not that it’s ever become an issue – they love each other too much to let it.

  The only thing they’re missing, the one that his illness has robbed them of, she looks for in me, though much less frequently than I’d like her to. She knows that she can rely on me, and that I’d never create a problem for her and Sotiris who, I suspect, knows what’s going on. I don’t ask Maria because it’s none of my business. And neither Drag nor Teri knows anything about our encounters, Drag for obvious reasons and Teri because she doesn’t think there’s a problem. The last time we discussed the subject, before Maria had even met Sotiris, Teri said to me: “Stratos, can I ask you something?”

  “Ask away.”

  “Aren’t you in love with Maria?”

  “Yes.”

  “But she’s also in love with Drag.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who you also love.”

  “Mmm.”

  “And he loves you.”

  “I believe so.”

  “So you love each other in a circle.”

  “I never thought about it like that, but… yes.”

  “Why don’t you live together?”

  “Who?”

  “All of you – it would be more convenient for me than having to visit each of you separately.”

  “We should live together to make your life easier. That’s what you’re proposing?”

  “To make things easier for yourselves.”

  “In what way?”

  “You’d be together.”

  “All of us?”

  “Yep. You with Maria, Maria with Drag, Drag with you – OK, you and him will just be friends, though believe me, you don’t know what you’re missing… If you live together, the three of you, you’ll rid yourselves of all those hang-ups that take up so much of your time, and you won’t have to worry about hiding who you love from each other.”

  “According to your logic, since all of us love you…”

 
; “At last! I thought you were never going to ask. Where should we stay? This is going to be so great! The four of us will get on brilliantly. And if it bothers you I won’t bring many customers home, just those who don’t moan too much.”

  The idea of having just one partner had never been part of Teri’s world view, until she recently fell in love herself.

  When we make love Maria never makes loud noises. My flat is soundproofed anyway, but I think she feels that her voice would somehow validate what we are doing, while silence would allow it to go unnoticed. She doesn’t make loud noises but she often quietly cries; from the moment we lie naked in bed she cries and pulls me closer to her and I don’t say anything, I just hold her tighter and make love to her with a passion I hope will silence her or make her tears flow forever when she’s in my arms.

  When we’d finished, Maria stroked my nose.

  “How many times have you broken it?”

  “Many.”

  The last person who’d broken it was Linesman. He got his nickname from waving a flag on the sidelines of local football games – that was his hobby. He had a body like his idol Dolph Lundgren and worked as muscle for whoever hired him. Drag told me Linesman attended meetings of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, who wanted to rid Greece of all immigrants. Their supporters regularly attacked Middle Eastern and African street traders, wherever they tried to sell their goods. Linesman was probably paid for terrorizing the immigrants – the party came third in the recent elections and was funded handsomely from the federal budget.

  Linesman and I had a relationship of mutual respect, until I woke up in an empty warehouse, tied to a chair, and Linesman kicked me in the head. “Don’t take it personally, it’s just work,” he said, and proceeded to give me a good beating with his fists as well as chains. He’d been hired by the owner of a club whose brother I had taken care of. The brother was a coke addict who took underage whores to his house and killed them after having cut up their faces. One of the very rare cases I had worked on for free. “Word on the street is you’re the best,” Linesman said. “But if you were really the best, would you be here?”

  He’d waylaid me earlier that evening, at an old stone-built coffee house in Chalandri belonging to someone I knew. For years the place had been in a state of deadlocked antagonism with the high-class boutique that had opened next door, the outcome of which would determine the character of the neighbourhood. Then the crisis came, the boutique evaporated in no time and I became a regular, smitten with the shop’s fantastic Greek coffee. So many coffee houses around me in Psychiko and I had to make the half-hour journey to and from Chalandri. Linesman ambushed me – the owner had let him hide behind the bar and made sure I sat with my back turned to him.

  “It’s a good thing you aren’t enjoying it,” I told him after I had stopped spitting blood, during one of his rest breaks. Breaks were necessary, he told me, because he still had a lot left to do to me while waiting for his employer to turn up to witness me being killed. Burnt alive, to be exact. This delay was what saved me. “It’s a good thing because…,” I continued, diverting his attention just enough for Drag to burst into the warehouse through the window, shattering the glass and rolling to one side to avoid becoming an easy target. Linesman had nothing on him, besides the chains. His gun was on the table, out of his immediate reach, which was why he went straight for Drag, his chains raised ready to strike. Drag shot him twice in the chest, but it didn’t seem to have any effect. Drag is the coolest customer I know, but when he saw Linesman take a third bullet without collapsing, he frowned and shot him in the head. That stopped him for good.

  “Could you just tell me what you were doing all that time outside?” I asked Drag.

  “I needed to work out the right angle of collision with the window,” he answered earnestly. Drag the geometry expert.

  Maria didn’t know about Linesman or about the killings of his employer and the coffee shop owner that I carried out later that night. She also didn’t know – because she doesn’t need to worry more than she already does – that a couple of weeks after that night Drag found out from one of his informants that Linesman’s lover was looking for those responsible for his death. We never heard from her or anyone she hired, and we didn’t lose any sleep over it. Our line of work gives us so many things to be concerned about that we can’t be bothered with threats from unknown amateurs.

  However, in order to help her worry less, I told Maria about Drag’s newest gadget, the pea-sized transmitter, which fitted under the sole without you even feeling it. It was that transmitter that had saved my life. What made it extremely useful was that if it received pressure in a particular sequence of shorter and longer duration it sent an SOS to a prearranged list of recipients. Drag’s list and mine were as short as it got, comprising just us two.

  “I saw Drag on the news. A photo, that is. They said that he was in charge of the case,” Maria said, after getting dressed.

  “Mmm.”

  I never know what to do when she mentions Drag’s name, so I speak even less than usual.

  “He’s their top man,” she said.

  “He’s good. Really good.”

  “His raincoat looked awful, though.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Seems like he has no one to look after him.”

  I kept looking at her. I never mentioned anything to Drag about Maria and Sotiris’ life together and nothing to Maria about Drag’s love life – not that there was anything to say. That was my silent agreement with the two of them.

  “Tell him.”

  “Tell him what?”

  “To find someone to look after him.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I just nodded.

  “Say it’s your own idea. Don’t mention me.”

  I nodded again.

  “Tell him.”

  I poured her a coffee. Neither of us spoke for a while.

  “How are things going with the case? Are you getting anywhere?”

  I wanted to tell her that at that moment, having just made love, I couldn’t care less if we were getting anywhere. Neither could I care if Aliki Stylianou was being mistreated by her bastard husband or if she was a crazy fantasist. I didn’t care about the money or about the corpse of Elsa Dalla, whose open eyes seemed to be full of questions. What mattered was that I was with Maria. What mattered was the next time she came down to my room. Touched me. Showed that she wanted me.

  Instead, I said: “Drag will sort it all out in the end. For sure. Always does.”

  “What about you?”

  “I hope that I’ll sort it out myself, and that I’ll do it just before he starts arresting people, so that I can earn my wage and pay the rent. You have no idea what a bad lot my landlady is. She doesn’t like me one bit; if I don’t pay her on time she’ll chuck me out.”

  “I, on the other hand, think you’ve won her over. Years ago.”

  Saying that, she kissed me on the cheek and stroked my eyes before leaving. Sometimes you watch the door closing, the same door you’ve seen close thousands of times, and suddenly something gets so tight inside you that you suspect you might still have a heart.

  19

  “I need to see you.”

  Aliki. Calling from a payphone. Her voice low and even more frightened this time.

  It was 4.30 in the morning but she didn’t interrupt my sleep – I don’t sleep easily after spending time with Maria.

  “Where are you?”

  She gave me the address of a fast-food joint in Zografou. I told her I’d be there in fifteen minutes. Made it in ten. It was on the ground floor of one of the gazillion apartment buildings in the area, many of them new and costing twice as much as those in similar districts in Athens. Tens of thousands of students vying for a rental near the university. Demand. Keeps the market going, never mind the crisis.

  A young couple were making out in a corner of the shop, minding their own business. They were the only customers apart from Aliki. She sat at a table near the side
entrance, huddled over her mobile, a beanie on her head. She looked pale, and even more beautiful without makeup, the azure of her eyes heightened by the dark circles that clouded them. I thought of her husband, when they first got married. When they were still in love, or believed they were. I imagined what it would be like to have this woman in bed with you. I imagined him thinking that he might lose her, that he might never kiss those dimples again.

  “You’re here,” she said and grabbed my hand.

  Her fingers were cold and trembling. She was still wearing the same clothes as the last time I saw her.

  “Couldn’t make it yesterday – I had a run-in with your husband.”

  “You did? And?”

  She sounded hopeful. Looked it, too. If I was still standing, maybe I had already delivered?

  “And nothing, yet. What happened the other night, with your car? How was that girl…?”

  But she wasn’t listening – pulled her hand from mine.

  “He tried to win you over, didn’t he? Told you it’s all my imagination.”

  “On the contrary, he very much believes you’re in danger.”

  “Yes, from him!”

  “He says not. He wants to hire me to protect you.”

  She laughed, then grew angry.

  “And you fell for that? How much did he offer you to betray me?”

  To betray her. She seemed to have blocked out the fact that I wasn’t hers to begin with.

  “I want to help you. But I haven’t agreed to anything with you, or him, yet. Tell me what happened with Elsa Dalla – how come she was driving your car?”

  Her incredible eyes suddenly widened.

  “You bastard, you brought them here!” she said.

  I followed her gaze and saw Makis burst through the front entrance. She leapt over her chair and ran out of the side door. Makis started towards her, but saw me get up and stopped. He may have thought of pushing past me but decided against it, running back the way he’d come in. When I went out, Aliki had vanished, as I’d expected. Makis was looking left and right, trying to decide which way to give chase. If he were smarter, he would have driven round the block to see if he could catch her running. That’s what I did. I went round and round, while trying to get her on the phone. I couldn’t spot her anywhere and her phone was switched off. Makis, too, was gone, as if the darkness in the street had swallowed them both. Half an hour later I was back at the fast-food joint, in case she’d left anything that might help me find her. The guy behind the counter was half-asleep and useless. It would have been good if Makis were still around. I’d make him tell me how he found us. While driving to Zografou I’d made sure that no one was following me, so how did he know where Aliki was? I could drop by my new friend Vassilis and ask him and Makis both. Although I’d probably have to hear Vassilis’ stock response that he was concerned about her and wanted to make sure she was safe. I had just sent Aliki a text to reassure her I had nothing to do with Makis’ appearance, when someone behind me said: “You’re Stratos, right?”