Z, 50th Anniversary Edition

by Vassilis Vassilikos

  “Give it to me,” said the Investigator.

  “It’s home but I can get it for you right away. Its emblem is a skull and crossbones. Autocratosaur …”

  And so Vango went to keep Yango company in prison. The Investigator had found a trail which could lead to the powers behind the crime.

  * The military branch of the Partisan front; the equivalent of FLN.

  ** The youth movement affiliated with the Partisan EAM front.

  Chapter 4

  He had been profoundly impressed by the confession of the principal witness for the Prosecution, after visiting him in the city hospital. “There’s something shattering,” the young journalist reflected, “about all these people who’ve somehow got mixed up in this sinister affair. Unfortunately we journalists can’t report everything we see and feel, because our readers don’t know all the facts. But if I ever do write up the conversation I had with Nikitas, I’ll have plenty to say. An outsider like him suddenly feels his conscience rising up like a sword and striking at the beast of the Apocalypse. Yes, the Apocalypse. For days now I’ve been hanging around this city with its dead harbor and its anything but White Tower, and I haven’t come to a single conclusion. Are the police involved? Of course they are, but to what extent?”

  Meanwhile, the investigation, like an icebreaker, was forging a path through the general indifference. A few people had taken the case of the assassinated deputy to heart; the rest were not only indifferent but definitely hostile. “Just why are you Athenians always so ready to criticize us? You don’t live in Salonika. You come as tourists, you find the food good and the people horrible. You like the Old City and detest the climate. You ridicule the New Theater and the film festival and then you go away, leaving an even greater void. We don’t need people to judge us. We need people to come here and live with us. We want to expand!”

  The young journalist understood all this, and up to a point he found it logical. What he couldn’t forgive was the way they were protecting their own class. For, of course, the people who were saying these things were members of the bourgeoisie. The others still had a long way to go before they could afford the luxury of chauvinism. For them, bread was bread, and a drachma was a drachma. The bourgeoisie refused to admit that a murder had taken place, because they were terrorized by the sudden surfacing of all this lumpenproletariat. In the evening at the Do-Re or some other café, the reporter saw people his own age—doctors, lawyers, merchants, bankers, salesmen—clam up as soon as the matter was broached. It amazed him. They refused to take sides. They wouldn’t discuss it at all. But why? What was there about it that bothered them? It didn’t take him long to figure it out. It was another layer of society that the case of Z. brought to the surface: the stevedores, the dock workers, the Yangos and the Vangos; the section of society that a bourgeois tries to ignore. He makes use of these people, but to him they remain invisible, without substance. Otherwise his own class would be in mortal danger. If he were to recognize that such unfortunates ought not to exist, he would have to question his own existence. The shock of their appearance at the very footlights made him evade all discussion. Z.—or to be more precise, the murder of Z.—was a stigma, a stain on the linen tablecloth. The solution was not to remove the stain but to cover it with a plate, a glass, a fork, to hide it from the lady of the house, to avoid that smile of silent accusation. So elementary.

  Notwithstanding, the investigation progressed. Each turned-up card helped him play the game of solitaire. Everything fitted together. Not a discordant note. Bit by bit, the sinister story crystallized. And the credit belonged to one person alone: the inspired young Investigator. As the reporter observed, all the people involved in the case were young. Z. himself had been a tyro, he had been on the political scene no more than two years.

  Once it transpired that Autocratosaur, the General, and the entire police force were the instigators of a bullfight in which the sacrificial animal, pierced with deadly banderillas, fell to its knees beneath the last thrust, the investigation had reached a crucial point. The young reporter decided it was time for him to take action. Aware of the dangers involved, but always bearing in mind the example of Polk—the young American journalist during the Civil War who had tried to reach Marko’s Communist Partisans up in their mountain strongholds and ended up instead in the muddy Gulf of Thermaique, before he had even digested the crabs (or was it lobster?) he’d eaten at the seaside restaurant, the Luxembourg—he threw himself resolutely into the breach. With a Kodak, from inside his car or from some concealing niche, he began to take secret photographs of persons linked to the extremist quasi-governmental organizations that flourished thanks to police connivance and the secret funds they received from the Ministry. He unearthed names and addresses in shady dives where his flashbulb resounded like the kiss of Judas. After all, even Judases help hasten the catharsis.

  And so the photographs piled up, in conspiratorial darkrooms which kept their secrets (guilty moments of his life, coins withdrawn from circulation, appreciated only by collectors, which others would consider terra incognita, moments beyond time and space, so unique we feel like thieves), rare photographs of an oppressed life within life, under the terrible pressure of monopolies. He had collected some sixteen of them when his camera was ruined. The thugs of Ano Toumba assaulted him and smashed it to pieces. It was a miracle that he himself escaped. As for the Kodak, it died honorably, having done its work to perfection. He took all sixteen to the AHEPAN Hospital and showed them to Georgios Pirouchas, the deputy who had survived the disaster. (Pirouchas was the tragic figure in the story, for he had longed to be in Z.’s place, holding that Z. had no right to die because his mission had not yet been fulfilled.) The sick man examined them attentively, until he saw Baronissimo.

  “Fine work, my boy! This is more than I dared hope!” he exclaimed. Yes, it was the same man. Pirouchas remembered every detail of that fearful night and had described his assailant to the reporter, who, with only Pirouchas’s description to go on, had located the man outside his stall in the Modiano Market—a small shopkeeper with the body of a giant. To avoid being seen by Baron, the reporter had snapped him from below and his legs looked huge, out of all proportion to the rest of his body. Legs like boulders, pylons, and between them, like great swollen testicles, a basket of eggs.

  The sick deputy groped for his glasses on the bedside table. He couldn’t believe his eyes: there before him in a photograph was the hound who had bitten him. He pressed the reporter’s hand. The feeling that he had survived by mistake had tormented Pirouchas horribly since Z.’s death. Strangely enough, he hadn’t wanted to get well. Today for the first time he found strength to fight. He was the only person who could speak on behalf of his dead friend. He took his pen from the table and, with a spasm of pain which the gauze bandages around his forehead did not conceal, he began to write for the first time since his injury. On the white margin at the bottom of the photograph, under the executioner’s enormous legs, he planted the grenade.

  “This is my would-be assassin. I would recognize him anywhere. He attacked me first in the presence of about fifteen policemen and later in an ambulance. I owe my discovery of him to a reporter.”

  He fell back on his pillow. This trifling activity had completely exhausted him. He took a heart stimulant to revive him. Thus labeled, the photograph would appear on the front page of tomorrow’s Athens Morning News. The journalists had made up for the deficiencies of the Security Police. They were the cops; the police were the robbers. But the Security Police had its tentacles everywhere. The AHEPAN Hospital, with its narrow corridors and silent separate cells, had been transformed into a labyrinth in which everyone was trying unsuccessfully to reach the lair of the Minotaur. The Security Police had got wind of the photograph. How? It was a mystery. Had they installed microphones in the walls? Had they bribed the nurses? Be that as it may, the Chief of Security Police in person visited the injured deputy only a few hours later, bringing with him photographs of individuals who
might possibly have attacked him. Pirouchas examined them one by one: burglars, drug pushers, pimps, who had no connection whatever with the events, for such people defy the law openly and do not ask the protection of the police, whereas the professional thugs are another category, and they were obviously missing among the photographs.

  “Unfortunately, I do not recognize any of them,” said Pirouchas, handing back the photographs.

  Chapter 5

  At daybreak they came and routed him out of bed. “They must want to foul me up again, the louts,” Baronissimo said to himself, cursing them. This time, however, instead of taking him to Mastodontosaur, they conducted him to another place in the center of town. The Chief of Security Police, who had visited Pirouchas the previous day, was there waiting for him.

  “Things are looking difficult for you, Baronissimo,” said the Chief. “An Athens newspaper is publishing your photograph today and saying it was you who attacked Pirouchas. Pirouchas himself has identified you. You’ve got to strike back. You’ll go to the AHEPAN Hospital, where he’s recuperating—pavilion 4, room number 32—and you’ll tell him straight from the shoulder that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, that you weren’t involved in any way in Wednesday’s events, and whatever else comes into your thick skull.”

  Baronissimo nodded his head stupidly. He hated being awakened so early.

  “Now pay attention,” continued the Chief. “Here’s the main point. You’re not to go immediately. You’re going to wait till ten o’clock. That’s when the Athens newspapers get here on the first Olympic airplane. Then you’ll go to the hospital. This will prove that you didn’t know about it before, that no one told you anything. You saw your photograph on the front page; you read, or you got someone else to read you, what was written in the caption, and ‘on your own’—pay close attention to that, that’s the key phrase—you came to make an indignant protest. Understand?”

  Baron was still nodding his head.

  He went back home. His wife made him some coffee. She noticed that he was out of sorts. “Where’d you go so bright and early?” she asked.

  “Business,” he told her laconically.

  The political opinions of his wife and his brothers were the opposite of his. But they weren’t too hard on him, they knew about his financial difficulties, the trouble he had getting the license for the stall and the money he had to pay to the proprietor’s widow.

  Around eight o’clock Baronissimo went to the Modiano Market. He kept his eyes glued to the clock across the way and as a result made mistakes in weighing out merchandise and counting out change. At exactly ten o’clock he locked his stall and took a bus to the AHEPAN Hospital. He asked to see the deputy, Georgios Pirouchas, pavilion 4, room number 32, but was told that the doctor was with him and he’d have to wait. Someone else was waiting in the anteroom for the same reason. Not knowing it was the Investigator, Baronissimo paid no attention to him; nor did the Investigator have any idea that the colossus was Baronissimo. The nurse came to tell them they could go in.

  Baronissimo made his entrance furiously protesting against the caption of his photograph published in today’s Athens newspapers.

  Pirouchas and the Investigator stared at him in amazement.

  “What newspaper?”

  “Some newspaper that’s just come from Athens. All I know is I look like a gangster with that basket between my legs. I don’t know how to read,” he went on vehemently. “I never got any further than the second grade and I can just barely make out the headlines. That’s why I never buy the papers. But today at ten a newspaper vendor showed me my photograph. ‘I didn’t know you were one of those hoodlums,’ he said to me. ‘What are you talking about?’ I answered. ‘Look at this!’ He took one of the papers from the pile he had under his arm, opened it out wide, and showed me my picture. I could hardly recognize myself! First time I ever saw myself looking like such a wreck. This guy, this news vendor, has a stand at the corner of Venizelou and Egnatia Street: I see him every morning and we say hello. Quick as a flash I rushed to my brother, who knows how to read. He advised me to go to the Security Police to see if they could tell me where to find you. So that’s what I did. And here I am. And I can tell you this is the first time I’ve ever laid eyes on your mug, Mr. Pirouchas. And you have the nerve to say you’ve seen me before!”

  The Investigator could scarcely conceal his agitation. He was dumfounded by Baron’s audacity. In the scene now being played he perceived a hidden, splendidly organized mechanism that functioned with clock-like precision. Except that one little spring had worked loose, which was going to spoil everything. A diabolical coincidence, of the kind that betrays otherwise perfect crimes, had upset the system. The coincidence was that, whereas ordinarily the Athens newspapers appear on the newsstands at ten o’clock, today was an exception. The Olympic plane had been delayed by unforeseen weather conditions, and the Athens papers were not yet in circulation. The Investigator knew this, because he had been asking for the Athens papers himself.

  “Well, do you recognize me?” Baron persisted.

  “I must have met you somewhere,” the deputy retorted ironically.

  “Take a good look at him,” the Investigator counseled the sick man, “because you won’t be seeing him again until the trial.”

  And he ordered the policemen in the corridor, Pirouchas’s permanent guards, to arrest Baronissimo and take him away for questioning. The colossus burst into tears. His body shook with sobs. He blubbered like a baby.

  “It’s me! It’s me! He recognized me!” he sobbed.

  But at the door of the hospital he found himself surrounded by reporters who wanted to photograph him. He raised his hands to the heavens and arrogantly declared: “No, it’s not me! He didn’t recognize me. He’s got things all balled up. It’s not me!”

  Then he asked them to give him time to pose, so he’d look his best in the photographs.

  The lawyer who was defending Yango and Vango now took him on too, and asked the Investigator for a forty-eight-hour delay to prepare his client’s defense. The man who appeared before the Investigator when this “delay was over,” was anything but the brash and arrogant Baronissimo charged in the indictment. He seemed miserably penitent, reduced to a passport-size snapshot of himself, pitiful, discouraged.

  His past was much less colorful than that of the other two. He was a small-time operator who hadn’t even a license for his stall in the Modiano Market, the license was in the name of his partner, Markos Zagorianos, with whom he’d worked eight years. His stall faced Ermou Street, between the central lane and the right-hand entrance. He sold eggs, fruit, and vegetables. Markos and he had shared the profits. Markos had been a good man, he never cheated Baron. Markos—God rest his soul!—sang in the church choir and was always quoting the Bible. He must surely be in heaven. Good people like him God summons to Himself. Nevertheless, Baronissimo longed for a license of his own. He’d applied for one three years ago—at that time the General was chief of police—but his application had been turned down. Two of his cousins were known Commies, and because of that the police probably thought he was a Red too. But no, he didn’t belong to any party! And did anyone think he’d asked for a license in order to open another stall? No! He’d merely asked the police for permission to share Markos’s license—with the consent of the deceased—so that he could have a little security. It was as if he’d known—again he was on the verge of tears—that poor old Markos would soon be giving up the ghost. The police never told him in so many words that his request had been refused: they simply renewed the license in the name of Markos Zagorianos. And then this year, on Good Friday, Markos had a heart attack right in church, just as he was singing a hymn with all his heart and soul. The license for the stall automatically went to his heirs, his mother and his widow, Zacharo. And that’s how it came about that Baronissimo was working for the two women. They were good women, religious, always dressed in black, always off to all-night vigils in the church, but they pockete
d half the money. Well, why shouldn’t they pocket it? Once again he tried to get the police to straighten it out, and once again the license was renewed in the name of Zagorianos’s widow. And he was slaving on the job without having any contract with Zacharo. She had the right—of course she’d never do it, she was too saintly for that—but she had the right to tell him to get the hell out any moment she chose. This was the truth about his life, and how could he be in cahoots with the police when the police kept putting spokes in his wheels?

  Autocratosaur? Yes, he knew him, but not very well. He’d never belonged to Autocratosaur’s organization, because it was his principle never to join any organization. They’d got acquainted because he, Autocratosaur, had taken an interest in his wretched financial situation. In what way? Well, one day Autocratosaur had come to his house and had seen what kind of foul hole he lived in, leaky ceiling and all, and said to him, “Baronissimo, I’m going to do everything I can to help you. I’m going to find you a better place to live. The whole trick is to get your name down on the waiting list. Your turn will come one day. Take the fellow who wants to work in another country. Doesn’t he first have to go to the emigration service to have his name put on a waiting list? Well, that’s what you’ve got to do, and I’ll help you any way I can.” Another time Autocratosaur had come and taken him to the office of the Welfare Center. Autocratosaur had a lot of connections; he was respected by the top people in society. Actually he hadn’t had to push; he just described Baron’s miserable circumstances to the head of the Welfare Center. That’s how he was able to get an apartment in the Phoenix, one of the lower-class housing projects in Votsi. He’d never gone to his meetings or for that matter to anyone else’s.

  Ah, yes. He must be objective. Autocratosaur had come to his help another time. This was going to be a little harder to explain. Baron had one passion: he collected songbirds. Yes, he knew it was hard to believe of anyone with his build. In the little courtyard in back of his house he had cages full of nightingales, chaffinches, thrushes, cardinals, magpies, robins, and sparrows. Some had individual cages. But the ones that went in pairs, he kept together. They warbled and sang, it was always springtime in his court. He trapped them with nets in the woods at Seïch-Sou, where the Ogre used to hang out. He’d had trouble with the police about that. He was also very fond of pigeons. It was a shame that he didn’t have enough room in his courtyard to raise them. But his sister had a little plot of land on the same street about five hundred yards away, and he’d built a dovecote there. After he’d built it, the man next door had lodged a complaint against his sister, claiming that his land was being trespassed upon. That was when Autocratosaur helped him again. How or by what means, Baronissimo didn’t know; all he knew was that the neighbor stopped complaining and the subject was dropped for good. This was the time of year when his pigeons had their young. You should see them come out of their eggs—completely blind! Their mother feeds them out of her beak, and later on they get special seeds. As for the big ones, you’d never believe how much they can eat, and they drink water until they’re ready to burst. My God, can they drink! Maybe the Investigator would do him the honor of passing by sometime to admire them. People say that pigeons are gentle and peace loving. It’s not true! They’re all out to eat each other! When you give them food, they spread their wings to cover as much space as possible and keep the others from getting near. They’re very jealous. They only act sweet to each other, cooing and all that, at mating time. Had he ever killed any? Such a thought would never enter his head! He kept them just for the fun of having them. He’d often let them out of the cages and watch them flying in the blue sky, playing with each other, perching on roofs in the neighborhood, and finally they’d come back to the dovecote, to sleep in their own nests.