“There’s one more thing I need,” I told Angelino when he had finished telling me about the Bulgarian.
“Go ahead.”
“Hermes Peppas, the TV director. Do you know him, or anyone who does?”
Angelino smiled, with that grin of his that you can never decipher.
“I know him.”
“Personally?”
“You could say so.”
“I’ve found out that he’s staying at the Hilton, but he’s difficult to get in touch with.”
“Yes, you have to be one of those arty-farty people. Or a cop. Or…”
“Or…?”
“Or I could give you a reference. Which will lighten your wallet by another five thou.”
“What kind of reference?”
“You know how it goes; first you agree then I explain.”
“I agree.”
“Tell him I sent you. That this way he’s paying me back.”
“That’s the reference?”
“It’s enough.”
“I’ll get the money to you next week.”
Angelino sent me. This is how you pay him back – 5,000 euros for ten words. Plus another 10,000 for the information on the Bulgarian. Knowledge is always a great source of power but Angelino had started to charge at Brazilian inflation rates. And the financial crisis only seemed to jack up his prices at a faster rate than supermarkets and hotels in Santorini. Oligarch.
“Before I leave, can you tell me why this place smells like The Body Shop?” I asked him.
“Gaultier’s latest. Good, eh? My friends have showered me with presents.”
“Very nice.”
“I wish I could say the same about your beard.”
He was right. It was awful, and it was already itching. Before I could think of something smart to say, my mobile rang. It was Drag. He asked me where I was and said that he was coming to pick me up since I didn’t have a car. They still hadn’t found Vassilis Stathopoulos, he told me. But they had found someone else. Dead, with a bullet in his head. Aliki’s trusted psychologist, Antonis Rizos.
32
People are not equal even in death. A well-known corpse remains more important than an unknown one. And if you were to add to the well-known corpses of Dalla and Rizos the suddenly notorious corpse of Makis and the disappearance of people as celebrated as Aliki and Stathopoulos, the case was starting to feel like a noose around Drag’s neck. A noose he was unable to unknot.
Drag reached Omonia Square in less than half an hour. He saw that I was with Angelino, and Angelino saw him. They gave a slight nod to each other and looked away. Angelino has a high opinion of Drag – he’s a fan of gifted people who work hard to develop their talents. Drag is also sympathetic to Angelino. But he has made it clear that if he finds him mixed up in a case that he is handling, Drag won’t hesitate to find him a nice prison bed. I happened to be present when they had that conversation. Angelino listened quietly to Drag, then turned away to watch the sun setting over the jagged Athens skyline. And he stood there gazing at the sunset until we left. Since then they just nod at each other, barely acknowledging each other’s existence.
I said goodbye to Angelino and got into Drag’s Nissan. He was in a foul temper and looked as if he hadn’t slept for days. He’d interviewed the investigators that Stathopoulos had hired, been through the police records of everyone involved in the story, questioned the cast members of the TV series in which Dalla and Aliki co-starred as well as Stathopoulos’ lawyers, and raided a TV production company, where the owner, a thirty-year-old swindler, was hiding. This swindler had been heard to say he would kill both Vassilis and Aliki after Aliki had turned down his offer to make another series, but it soon became clear that he was really in hiding from the father of some kid he’d knocked up. Dozens of actors and actresses who had had a nodding relationship with Aliki had also passed through Drag’s office. Most of them arrived voluntarily, all dolled up for the paparazzi, and, of course, their testimony contributed no new information whatever.
But Drag did have two lucky breaks. He first found Makis’ best friend, Vaggos. Once he had his name it wasn’t difficult, since Vaggos was in jail. He had been arrested for drink-driving, with performance-enhancing drugs in the back of his car. Vaggos, who stated his profession to be “personal trainer”, had claimed that the stuff was purely for personal use. Seeing there were four suitcases packed with the stuff, the judge hadn’t been convinced. Drag offered Vaggos a deal, if he could tell him something useful about Makis. He did and he didn’t. He said that Makis had boasted about fucking the brains out of a rich bitch he’d fallen in love with, after which he had cut himself off from all his friends. Not even Vaggos had been able to get near him recently. Drag’s second break was a phone call from a secretary who had been sacked by Rizos. She told him she was certain that the relationship between her former boss and Aliki was much more than purely professional. It seemed that, after all, Makis was not the only one with a strong personal interest in the case, as the late therapist had claimed.
Drag’s luck didn’t last long. An hour after he’d found out about Rizos’ relationship with Aliki, the therapist’s body was discovered by his new secretary. He had asked her to pick up some files; she found his door open, went in and there he was, holding the gun that had killed him. There was no note, which Drag explained by saying it wasn’t a suicide. “They’re running more checks in the lab, but Rizos was shot from a distance. The bullet only penetrated a couple of inches into his head, which means it couldn’t have been fired from up close,” Drag said.
“Could the killer have been somewhere outside the house?”
“Impossible. The windows on one side face a wall; on the other they look onto a flat that was full of people.”
“Meaning he was killed somewhere else.”
“Mmm… Must have walked into an ambush and then they brought him back to make it look like suicide.”
“Time of death?”
“Sometime yesterday; the pathologist can’t say exactly when yet.”
“So, Makis goes to Rizos’ office to get information from him any way he can. Rizos survives that, only to be killed a day later. But not by Makis, as he was dead by then. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“The way your mind works, I doubt it,” he replied.
I gave him a look. He produced a grimace that vaguely resembled a smile.
“You’re thinking that our friend Vassilis is behind all this,” he said.
I nodded.
“Remember what he told us about Rizos, the first time we went to his house? ‘She met him quite often. Maybe too often’,” I said.
“So maybe Vassilis suspected or knew about Rizos’ affair with Aliki. Maybe he sent Makis to kill Rizos, not just get information out of him.”
“And then what? He killed Makis in that theatrical manner and did the job on Rizos himself?” I asked. That made no sense to me.
“If it was Aliki who Makis was having an affair with…”
“You think she was screwing Rizos as well as Makis?”
“What, she’s too much of a lady for that?”
“But with Makis?” I insisted.
I could see her with Rizos. He was much older, yes, but a father figure who was helping her sort herself out. But Makis had nothing to offer her. Unless…
“Maybe she wanted to get him to kill Vassilis. He was right there, at his side every day; it would be easier for him than anyone else,” Drag said, articulating my thoughts exactly. That could be the reason why Makis hadn’t told Vassilis about Aliki being at the fast-food joint. Maybe he wanted to find her for himself. Maybe he wasn’t a hired gun looking to bring his boss’s wife back home, but a disgruntled lover. Which would give her extra reasons to flee, as she did.
“But why didn’t Makis kill him, then? If he had the motive and the opportunity, why didn’t he? Why did she have to come to me, a stranger?”
“Perhaps she couldn’t persuade him. She might not be
that good in bed,” Drag said, although it was obvious he didn’t believe what he was saying even as he was saying it. He tried another tack.
“Or maybe he did try to kill Vassilis. Maybe he tried yesterday, failed – not rare for him – and Vassilis killed him instead.”
“And hanged him from the chandelier? Why?”
“Because he found out Makis was sleeping with his wife. If he’s half as crazy as Aliki claims, it would be reason enough. Maybe Makis told him that Rizos was sleeping with Aliki as well. So he killed Makis and then went straight to deal with Rizos.”
“What about the hieroglyphs?” I asked him.
“If I had all the unpleasant answers, I’d be minister of finance,” he replied.
The trouble was, his theory wouldn’t hold water if the “rich bitch” sleeping with Makis wasn’t Aliki. Lena, maybe? No. She’d never get involved with someone like Makis. Vassilis did indeed seem to be our prime suspect. He hadn’t told us about his affair with Elsa. He was obviously lying when he said he didn’t care about Aliki’s past, and Lena had seen him behaving like a psychotic bully towards his wife. He had a motive to kill Rizos, a possible motive to kill Makis and, besides, who else could have been at his house killing Makis and leaving the door open for us to find the body? But why open the door? To taunt us, show us we can’t catch him? However much he lied to me, Vassilis seemed too organized, too much of a control freak to go on a murder spree like this.
I still had questions that could only be answered when, or if, we found Aliki and Vassilis. But Vassilis wasn’t the only one that had lied to us. I didn’t tell Drag what Lena had told me about Aliki and Hermes Peppas, about the director’s failure to remember, during Drag’s interrogation, that he and Aliki had been lovers. I was paying Angelino through the nose for the chance to talk to Peppas face to face, and I wasn’t going to miss it. Apart from that, I always had one basic advantage over Drag: I wasn’t accountable to anyone for my behaviour, especially if I discovered that someone was hiding information from me.
Drag wrenched the steering wheel and overtook three cars. Two of the drivers gave him the finger, while the third let out a stream of abuse.
“What did Angelino tell you?”
I gave Drag the names and addresses of the family of the Bulgarian who had been killed trying to murder Aliki. The police hadn’t even found out his name, though it had been child’s play for Angelino. He told me the Bulgarian’s parents and brothers worked legally and hard and had had no involvement with the police, nor did they want to. They were expecting to get their residence permits any day, which is why they hadn’t gone to the police to declare their relationship to the deceased, when they learnt what he had done. He was the black sheep of the family, and they didn’t want to endanger their future in their new country by becoming known as the relatives of a criminal. Only after months had passed and they had made certain that the graveyard wasn’t under police surveillance did the mother start to go, once a month, to light a candle over her son’s unmarked grave. Immigrants are like soldiers – they can only look forward to the next battle, they often don’t even get the chance to bury their dead. They would probably tell Drag everything they knew, however upset they might be. As long as he didn’t go in a police car, of course – they were living in St Panteleimonas, in the heart of Athens where if you see a policeman you just run – and he would have to reassure them that their permits wouldn’t be at risk.
Drag gave me a look, when I told him where in Acharnon Street he would find their house. Just a week earlier, we’d seen an Afghan woman there, calling in vain for someone to help her son who lay dying in the middle of the road, covered in blood. At St Panteleimonas everybody minds their own business. St Panteleimonas. The saint who has mercy on everybody. An area named by a godfather with a great sense of irony. Drag had put the siren on his car and kept his hand on the horn during the whole ride to the hospital, but the doctors hadn’t been able to save the kid. In the waiting room the mother kept looking at me, without speaking, with that insurmountable grief of those who keep staring disaster in the face. When Drag talked to his fellow cops of the Acharnon police department about the kid, they said, “we’ll check it out”. They never do. Why should they put their lives at risk for 1,000 euros per month when they are constantly understaffed? They know that they will always be surrounded by the immigrants’ shit on the train lines, by the gangs who run the area and are at constant war with each other, by the protesting Greeks who, instead of leaving for more fashionable neighbourhoods like so many others did, insist on living where they grew up. Although they feel like foreigners in their own country and are scared for their lives. Now St Panteleimonas is filled with Bulgarian shops and grocery stores. They do much better business than the Greek ones, because they speak the same language as their customers.
It took us three quarters of an hour to get to my place. We had already agreed what exactly each of us would do next. Aliki’s and Vassilis’ mobiles were still turned off. I opened the Nissan’s passenger door and froze. Drag never comes into the house in case he meets Maria, and the one time he breaks that rule, there she is right in front of us. She had just come out of the house, wearing jeans and a sweater, with little make-up, her hair loose and her deep green eyes trained on us. Drag, sitting next to me, seemed to have gone paler than my targets, when they see me and suddenly realize that their lives are about to end. I wasn’t doing much better than Drag. We were both paralysed. Until Maria started to walk towards the car quite normally. She stopped by my window.
“Hi there,” she said.
“Hi,” Drag said.
“Hi,” I echoed.
“Aren’t you going to ask me to get in?” she asked.
I turned and stared at Drag. He stayed silent.
“I was just about to get out…” I said, trying to save the situation.
“Of course, get in,” Drag said, breaking into one of his rare grins, before I could continue.
“Shall we go for a drive so that you can tell me your news?” Maria said, once she had got in, and for a moment I felt that we were teenagers again, all together at school. As though not a day had passed.
It turned out Maria was actually going to Teri’s house, to talk about Nikos Zois. Drag, who became more and more relaxed, drove us there, and they started to talk. As though not a day had passed. Occasionally I would chip in, mainly on the subject of Nikos, since I was the only one to have met him. But mostly I just looked at them. I felt like I had left my body and was watching from far away as the woman of my dreams and my best friend talked to forget the fact they couldn’t make each other happy. Like in a movie, I somehow hoped that they would end up together.
We got snarled up in traffic, so it took us an hour to get to Galatsi. Drawn up outside Teri’s house, none of us could stop talking. We wanted to keep hold of the moment forever. Finally, Maria said: “I should be going.” And, before we managed to answer, she caressed both our faces, whispering: “Be very careful, for my sake”, and got out of the car.
On our silent journey back to the house, Athens was covered by a mass of huge black clouds. The weathermen had forecast a deluge but it didn’t materialize. Instead there was a stifling, damp heat that kept the rain at bay, and stopped it washing away everything we couldn’t bear to think about.
33
I hurried into the Hilton and went towards the reception desk with the intention of asking them to put me through to Peppas’ room. I was sure that the answer they would give me would be the same as if I had phoned: that Mr Peppas had a list of people he would talk to, and if I gave them my name, they would check if I was on it. Like any star, he took precautions to safeguard his privacy; as for living in a hotel, he’d told one interviewer that houses need a lot of tidying and he doesn’t have time to waste on such trivial things.
I was about to introduce myself to the concierge as Angelino, when I saw Peppas, some distance away, dressed in a bathrobe and accompanied by a fat guy in a suit, with an enormous
head, going towards the solarium. There’s no better time than winter to get a tan. I went into the Hilton’s coffee bar, and took a seat from which I could see Peppas on his return from tanning. After exactly one hour, he reappeared, accompanied by his friend who reminded me of Oddjob, the murderous Asian with the guillotine bowler hat in Goldfinger. I had already paid for my coffee, which was good but not worth what they charged for it, and darted towards them. Luckily, they were walking slowly, and talking animatedly.
“Mr Peppas?” I said.
“Just a lookalike,” he answered, turning his back.
Very funny. “Mr Peppas…”
“Leave us alone, man, will you? He doesn’t give autographs,” the other guy butted in. His eyes were like buttonholes in a sea of fat. Taking Peppas by the arm, he led him away to continue their conversation.
“Angelino sent me,” I said.
Peppas turned and looked at me.
“Who?”
“Angelino. He said that you’d answer a few of my questions and that’s how you’ll pay him back.”
He asked me to follow him to his suite.
Once there, I discovered from their conversation about some new contract that the fat guy was Labis Louridis, Peppas’ manager. He was about to leave for Thessaloniki to finalize the deal they were discussing, and it was obvious he didn’t approve of my presence. I pretended not to notice, and gazed at the Parthenon, which was directly opposite the window. For a few minutes it was bathed in the light of a sun that quickly disappeared, dispelling hopes of a change in the weather. I was lucky that the haze was thin enough to allow me even a glimpse of the temple.
The window offered the only view of the real world. The suite was full of screens, innumerable TVs on which a variety of Greek and foreign channels were playing.
“Oof! Got rid of him!” exclaimed Peppas as soon as Louridis left.
Athenian Blues Page 14
