Athenian Blues

by Pol Koutsakis

  “Mr Gazis?”

  “Mrs Hnara.”

  She gave me an up-and-down look. Her curiosity was natural: you don’t meet a professional caretaker every day. I appraised her too. Although she wasn’t a classical beauty, Lena Hnara immediately attracted your attention. Shoulder-length, raven-black hair, shining in the overcast light, mocking its dullness. A glow to her skin like that of a teenager, discreet touches of make-up, a confident step as she approached my table. The knee-length skirt and the turtleneck silk shirt she wore under her leather jacket hinted at a very fit body. It was only her face that lacked proportion – small eyes, round cheeks, a tiny nose with a bulge that made her nostrils look even tinier, a plump lower lip that almost eclipsed her upper one. As if she was the offspring of a bulky boxer and a tiny Chinese. She had the hair as well as the air of a model. Distant. Even when she ordered a green tea from the waiter it was as if there was an invisible wall between them. I remembered one of my old employers who had a thing about short, busty women. “Women are like houses,” he told me. “The higher the ceiling the more impressive the house. But they don’t keep the heat like the low-ceilinged ones.” I had come across plenty of exceptions but Lena Hnara seemed to fit the rule. Every little detail about her told me immediately that she was alert to everything that was going on around her, but not part of it. Someone who wasn’t cut off from the world but who was afraid of opening up to it, who kept themselves to themselves. I call them “observers”. There are more and more of them. Lena Hnara looked like an observer who had been obliged to take an active part in her friend’s life and suddenly found herself mixed up in a very strange case. Which disgusted her. Involvement. The worst, the most repugnant word for any observer. She glanced at the newspaper I had left open on the table. The headline was of course the disappearance of the Stathopoulos couple but I had already read the main article, which had absolutely no new information, and had gone on to the centre pages. Lena looked puzzled, as if it was inconceivable that I could have an interest in the stock exchange. She was right, I didn’t. I had found the newspaper on the table and had just been riffling through as I waited for her.

  “Well…” she said.

  I waited.

  “You must be the…”

  Her tone was condescending.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Why did you insist on this meeting? What do you want?”

  Abrupt. No manners. I missed Vassilis and his professional courtesy.

  “Some answers.”

  “I already told you over the phone that I’m very concerned about the whole situation but I really don’t know where Aliki is, and I want you to leave me alone. I don’t like having dealings with people of your sort.”

  “Dealings like hiring me?”

  “That was for Aliki.”

  “It’s for her sake I wanted to talk. And here you are, regardless of your feelings.”

  “The only reason I’m here is that Teri is an old friend of mine and…”

  “You owe her.”

  “I owe her, yes.”

  “I want you to answer some questions… To help me help Aliki.”

  “Out of pure altruism, I suppose.”

  I had begun to suspect she didn’t particularly like me.

  “Not at all. I took on her case. I want to finish the job, collect my fee and scram.”

  This wasn’t true, at least not yet, but I had to present myself as an ally.

  “How do I know that you’re not mixed up in it? That you’re not the one who kidnapped her? Your face is everywhere, you’re the last one to have seen her.”

  “If I’d done her some injury, why would I want to talk to you?”

  “To get more money, if you didn’t manage to persuade Aliki to pay what you wanted. Maybe to threaten me…”

  “Teri’s your friend as well as mine. She wouldn’t have set you up.”

  “Maybe you’ve fooled her as well.”

  She didn’t know how close I was to Teri. She was off in some fantasy she didn’t know how to get out of.

  “Maybe you sold her some fairy tale that you want to help just to get me here to blackmail me because of my involvement…”

  “Listen,” I interrupted, “that’s not what we’re here for. You’re in no danger from me. I’m just trying to find out what happened to your friend.”

  “Me too,” she said, after a short pause. It seemed to me that she’d decided to be a little less defensive.

  The waiter brought her tea, together with a big bowl full of different kinds of sugar and a jar of honey. Lena put all the sweet things on the next table, maybe to avoid temptation. She glanced at her watch.

  “Go ahead. You’ve got exactly ten minutes.”

  “Very well, officer.”

  “I didn’t come here for fun.”

  “I didn’t come here to entertain you.”

  There was a rougher edge to my voice that startled her. She softened slightly.

  “I have another appointment, in ten minutes…” she said, hesitantly.

  “So you’ll have to do some fast talking. Which will help us get to the truth and you to the next appointment. Do you know where your friend is?”

  “No.”

  “There’s been no communication between you at all after what happened with the car?”

  “None. I keep trying to phone her but her mobile’s switched off.”

  For a few seconds she was quiet. I just stared at her. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t. This time it didn’t. The only time anyone seemed genuine in this case was when they were describing how messed up the others were. Lena stared straight back at me, without blinking.

  “Aliki told me, when we met, that you were going to lend her the money to pay me,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Because…?”

  “I had it.”

  “Are you used to paying for such things?”

  “Of course not.”

  “And you’re not used to finding the right kind of person for this type of job?”

  “No.”

  “It wasn’t just a simple favour she asked you. Which means that you agreed with what she wanted to do.”

  “Yes.”

  “Usually, I’m the one who keeps his trap shut. But compared to you I’m a chatterbox.”

  She took a quick breath and burst out, “The guy’s a bastard, understand? A real monster. A slime-bag.”

  “All the more reason to tell me the truth. It’s your friend’s husband you’re talking about, right?”

  We were surrounded by people, so I avoided mentioning names. Especially when the names were well known from the papers and TV.

  “Correct. I told her I didn’t like him right from the beginning.”

  “Strange. He’s very popular.”

  “I know a lot of popular people. The reason they stay popular is that people don’t know what they’re really like. And him… he’s the worst of all.”

  “What is it about him?”

  “His eyes. Hazel eyes can be beautiful in women, but in men – they’re like wolves. I’ve never met a decent man with hazel eyes. Sorry if…”

  She opened her palms and gestured towards me. She wasn’t really sorry – I was perfect proof of her theory.

  “No offence taken,” I said.

  “His eyes aren’t quite like yours, but… I can’t describe them… Have you ever seen him close up?”

  “Yes.”

  “When he looks at you, he’s half-angel and half-devil. That’s the best way I can describe it. The only way.”

  “But you can’t judge him just by his eyes.”

  “He treated her really badly. Abusively. When we were with our friends, Aliki’s and mine, without his acquaintances around – I don’t say ‘friends’ because he doesn’t have any – he was polite and didn’t care if Aliki showed her ignorance or talked nonsense. He would laugh and seem at ease, caring, he’d take her in his arms and explain what she’d got wrong. That was the a
ngelic look, the one that made you think that Aliki was the luckiest woman in the world to have found him. But, if one of his acquaintances was there, oh, he was scary. Many times I’ve been there when he put her down because he didn’t like what she was saying, treating her like some worthless bimbo, not his wife. He could be so sarcastic that people just stared at him, their smiles frozen, not knowing how to hide their embarrassment. One evening I was at their house and Aliki said something – I don’t remember what – to a theatre director, one of those artistic snobs who puts on plays for an audience of five. I think that Aliki had been to one of her productions and was politely telling her what she thought when Vassilis turned, in front of everybody, and said loudly, ‘What do you expect from a model who thinks she’s an actress?… Aliki, my dear, I’ve told you a thousand times your views are like cosmetic surgery: best kept to yourself.’”

  “At least he said ‘my dear’.”

  “She ran upstairs and I followed to comfort her. She cried for an hour and didn’t come down again, but when I told her yet again that she should come and stay with me, she wouldn’t listen. That same evening the bastard beat her up, just for leaving him alone with the guests.”

  “Did you actually witness one of those beatings, or any other act of violence?”

  “Of course not. He kept that private.”

  “So, you only know about the beating from Aliki. And you believe her because of the way he generally treated her.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I believe. Aliki had so many scars that… I suppose you spoke to him or one of his lackeys and they told you that nonsense he gives to the psychiatrists; that she did it all to herself.”

  “He’s not the only one who said so. She confirmed it too.”

  “Where? To whom? To his psychiatrist friends? What else could she say? She was scared that if she told the truth they would all gang up against her, have her certified insane and shut up in some madhouse. To avoid that she’d confess to anything. But she told the truth to her own therapist. That’s what she needed – a psychologist, not a psychiatrist. For a long time I listened, but in the end I persuaded her to go and see someone qualified whom she could trust.”

  “Antonis Rizos.”

  “Yes.”

  She paused for a second, a bit surprised. Maybe I wasn’t just a dumb hired gun, after all.

  “He’s my psychologist as well. Antonis and I are the only people Aliki confides in. At the start we went to him together, several times. It was his suggestion, to help her open up. At first she was a bit wary of confessing to a stranger but when he earned her trust he helped her a lot, restoring some of her confidence, despite what was happening at home.”

  “Did you ever advise her – you or Dr Rizos – to get a divorce?”

  “Antonis, never. A therapist can’t suggest anything like that without first speaking to the patient’s partner, and that was naturally out of the question because if Vassilis found out that Aliki had told the actual truth… there’s no telling what would happen.”

  “And you?”

  “I tried. I tried my best to get her to split from him. She was too scared. She knows how powerful and ruthless he is. Aliki has no one to turn to, except me. Of course, I told her that my husband and I would protect her. But in our circle everybody knows each other – Vassilis has even appeared in court on behalf of my husband. That was some time ago, and he lost the case, by the way. Though the media have created this image of him as the lawyer who never loses. Anyway, Aliki doesn’t believe it’s possible for anyone to really protect her or that anyone would put themselves out for her. Only me, and she didn’t want to put me in danger, because she knew that his threats were no joke; the guy’s a psycho.”

  “Doesn’t hiring me put you in danger? What will happen if things go wrong and he finds out?”

  “You’re supposed to be very good at your job. So it wouldn’t come to that.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  I offered her a cigarette.

  “Disgusting habit,” she said, and looked around in annoyance to see more than half of the customers smoking. Laws in Greece are only written to be broken.

  I lit my own cigarette and prepared to continue the questioning, but she got in first.

  “So you’ve actually met him?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And… why…?”

  “Why didn’t I do the job…? Nobody’s paid me anything yet.”

  Actually, I had received Vassilis’ down payment, but I kept that information to myself.

  “Does he know?”

  “He knows that Aliki approached me to do the job. He didn’t say anything about you, though.”

  She shivered suddenly. It might have been the air conditioning. Or it might have been that Vassilis terrified her.

  “And where is he now?” she asked.

  “He doesn’t tell me his movements.”

  “Because they say on the news he’s disappeared… do you think he’s alright?”

  “Obviously you hope he’s not. What are you not telling me?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Maybe you and Aliki have approached someone else to do the job. To be doubly sure.”

  “Hiring you was a big enough involvement for me.”

  And involvement was something she usually avoided.

  She rubbed her eyes, took a deep breath. I drank the last swallows of the espresso to give her time to pull herself together. She didn’t succeed. She was close to tears.

  “This can’t be happening to me. I’m a… normal person. This isn’t… isn’t… this happens to criminals in the movies, not… I never imagined my life… like this.”

  As if anyone ever imagined their life as it turned out to be. I let her take a few more deep breaths, which seemed to do her good, because she came back with a question.

  “What do you think has happened?” she asked. “How can they both disappear?”

  “I told you, that’s what I’m trying to find out. I don’t have any theories. Logic tells me that either one of them has polished off the other and is hiding, or that someone else has harmed both of them. Unless they’re both involved in something and hiding away together. And of course there is just the possibility that their relationship improved so much that they walked off into the sunset.”

  “But what about the murder of the bodyguard? I read about it… I mean, how could Aliki ever do something like that? She hasn’t got it in her, she could never…”

  Hang him on the chandelier, she meant, but couldn’t say it. She didn’t want to put words to the image she’d only read about.

  “That’s why I asked you whether you had hired anyone else.”

  “No, no… That is, I can’t say for certain, but I do know Aliki. No chance… She’s so good-hearted, even when we talked about getting someone… you, that is… it was such a struggle for her, we’d been discussing it for months. It was only after the second attempt on her life that she started to realize that there was no other way, and when she saw that his behaviour was getting steadily worse she finally decided. But if you are right and one of them has killed the other… and since Aliki can’t be the one who killed the bodyguard…”

  She bent her head, pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes. She didn’t want to follow that train of thought any further. To tell the truth, neither did I.

  “Tell me about the murder attempts,” I said.

  Her account was the same as Aliki’s. Almost.

  “You should have seen him when he was jealous… One night Aliki and I got back late. We’d been to the theatre and he knew that she was with me but instead of going straight home we stopped off for a drink, to catch up on each other’s news. Knowing how he could be, she’d phoned to let him know but couldn’t get through to him and then he kept calling her but her battery was flat. As we were standing on their doorstep saying goodbye he threw open the door, grabbed her by the arm, pulled her in and slammed the doo
r in my face. He thought that I was helping her have an affair, Aliki told me when I next saw her, a week later – he beat her up and kept her in the house for days.”

  Parallel universes. The phrase was spinning around in my brain all the time I was listening to her. I’d seen it on the back cover of a detective novel Drag was reading. I don’t know what it was about, but that phrase stuck with me: “Parallel universes”. Aliki and Lena, on the one hand, and Vassilis on the other. At the beginning I had thought that someone – maybe more than one – was telling lies. Now, though, it seemed as if they were living in different worlds in which they associated with the same people, but behaved totally differently in each one.

  “When I talked to Vassilis he admitted that at the beginning, he’d often been really jealous. But he said that once he saw the problems Aliki had had, he got over it,” I told her.

  “She didn’t have any problems before she met him. He was her problem. Before she married, Aliki was the happiest kid in the world. Literally, a kid. She really enjoyed life and playing around.”

  “Playing around with people?”

  “Meaning?”

  “She told me it didn’t matter to her whether someone she was attracted to was a guy or a girl.”

  Her mouth snapped shut again.

  “What are you getting at?” she asked.

  Until she asked, I wasn’t getting at anything. I was just fishing for information. But after her question, I had something to get at.

  “First of all, I wanted to see if the idea of her having a girlfriend shocked you. I see it didn’t.”

  “So?”

  “So, I’ll lay it on the line.”

  “Lay what on the line?”

  “You’re not stupid.”

  “Big compliment – from a murderer.”

  I don’t like that word. “Caretaker,” I corrected.

  Her reply came in the form of a sarcastic look. I stared back at her. “And the difference between the two is…?” she asked, contemptuously.