Z, 50th Anniversary Edition

by Vassilis Vassilikos

  The reporter nodded. “Drink your coffee,” he said kindly. “It’s going to get cold.”

  Dimas drank it down in one gulp. Then he took out a cigarette and offered it to the reporter.

  “Thank you, I don’t smoke,” said Andoniou.

  “Well then,” said Dimas, “I’ll go on. The last time we were rounded up was during de Gaulle’s visit. Looking back on it now, I can see that that meeting was a sort of general rehearsal for the later incidents. All of them were there at the Ano Toumba branch of the Security Police. The Commissioner divided us into groups of ten; each group had a leader. My group leader happened to be Hitler. Then they handed us little pins with yellow, green, or red plastic heads. We were supposed to stick these into our lapels, to recognize each other by.”

  “Pins?” asked the reporter, jotting down this detail in his notebook. “We could call it the Affair of the Colored Pins.”

  “That’s an idea. I still have mine,” said the dock worker. “I should have brought it with me. Anyway, to get back to the meeting, someone asked why we had to guard de Gaulle. And a cop in plain clothes told him that de Gaulle’s life had been threatened by the Communists. He’d played a dirty trick on them during the war and they were looking for a chance to bump him off. Once, he said, they’d peppered his car with machine-gun bullets, but the windows were bullet-proof. The Greek government didn’t want any trouble with the Big Powers. Besides, the Bulgars weren’t very far away, they could easily slip past the guards at the frontier and join in the hunt. So keep your eyes open, he told us, and above all, watch the windows in the houses. They stationed me in front of the Electric Company, where there wasn’t any houses at all. I had to stand there from eight in the morning till seven-thirty in the evening, without a bite to eat. When I got back home I took it out on my wife. As if it had been her fault, poor thing! But I swore I’d be smarter next time and find some excuse to get out of it.”

  “Now tell me something—and this is between you and me: were you there at the incidents that evening?”

  “I’m going to speak frankly, Mr. Andoniou, because I like the truth. I’m in a tight spot. If you work at a job and live in a neighborhood where everything depends on the kind of pull you’ve got, it’s pretty hard to keep your hands clean. About six o’clock the night before the incidents just as I was getting off the bus on my way home, one of the hoods came up and told me the Commissioner had ordered us to be outside the Catacomb Club at five the next afternoon, to break up a meeting. I was mad as hell. De Gaulle had barely left town and here they were with another crappy idea! I told him flatly that I wouldn’t and that he could tell the Commissioner what I said. ‘Michalis,’ he said to me, ‘don’t be a dope. If I tell him that, you’re done for. Say that you’ll go, let him see you there, and then play it cool. When you get a chance—beat it.’ I took his advice. I’ve been playing the nincompoop too long, I thought. It’s time I wised up. Next day I left the dock at two in the afternoon—I hadn’t made a drachma. It was one of those bad days—lucky they don’t come very often—when being unemployed really gets you down. Maybe that was why I decided to go. My wife was set against the whole business, so to get out of the house at five I had to lie. I told her I was going to get some paper bags from the printing office, I hadn’t had time at noon. My wife needed the bags for her job. She works in a fertilizer factory. She reminded me that it was Wednesday and the shops were closed. I told her the printing offices stayed open illegally. And so, with this excuse, I got out of the house. Going along in the bus, I saw the Commissioner’s limousine outside the local police station. That seemed funny. And I couldn’t have been wrong about it, because there isn’t another car like it in the neighborhood. I know that car very well. When I got off the bus, I ambled over toward the Catacomb Club and the first thing I saw was Yango punching a woman. Later I saw him tear down the poster and jump into a taxi, which went down one lane of Aristotelous Street and came up the other. It went past me, but I didn’t see where it was going. I went to the printing office and got the paper bags. On the way back I passed the building where the meeting was to be held, and there they were, all of them—Bonatsa, Xanalatos, Baron, Kyrilov, Jimmie the Boxer, Hitler—yelling, throwing stones, clubbing people. The Commissioner saw me and I pretended I was yelling too; and after that I managed to sneak away and went home. There was something appalling about that night. And I wasn’t surprised when I learned the news next day. I had seen the mob in action. Not one of them was missing. But once they’d locked up Yango and then that other louse Vango and finally that bird-brain Baronissimo, I took courage and began speaking my mind. It was then that they began making threats about getting rid of me. And when this incident I told you about at the beginning happened, I asked myself what I should do. ‘Go to the newspaper reporter who tracked down Baronissimo,’ I said to myself, ‘and tell him the whole story.’ But I’m afraid, Mr. Andoniou. I don’t know what’s happening in Toumba now.”

  “In your opinion, it was the Commissioner who gave the order to liquidate Z.?”

  “I can’t say that. It was the Commissioner who rounded them up. But where the orders came from, I have no idea.”

  “Good. Now I’m going to tell you what you must do. Tomorrow morning, go to the public prosecutor here in Athens and tell him everything you know about this mob. Tomorrow afternoon we’ll both leave for Salonika. Is it clear? I’ll take you in my car, there’s nothing to be afraid of. You’ll go to the Investigator, who seems to be a very honest person, and you’ll tell him everything. All right? From here on in, you’re under my protection.”

  Michalis smiled. “Yes, but how am I ever going to get any work at the docks again? That’s my big worry. They might let a pulley drop on my head and say it was an accident.”

  “You won’t have to work for a while. Consider yourself my employee.” And he gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder.

  “Thank you, Mr. Andoniou.”

  “Well, come around tomorrow morning. The Court of the Areopagus is close by. I’ll drive you there. And at two-thirty we can be under way.”

  Dimas left. Andoniou headed for the office of the editor-in-chief. He found him in the middle of a telephone conversation with Salonika.

  “It’s chaos up there,” he said when he hung up.

  “We’re going to put some order into it,” Andoniou replied enigmatically. “I’m on the trail of the instigators. An ex-member has just confessed. I’m going north tomorrow. Keep the front page open Friday. We’re going to call it the Affair of the Colored Pins.”

  “What’s that?” the editor-in-chief asked, smelling a scoop.

  “You’ll see. Just be patient for one day.”

  “Splendid,” the editor said. “But be careful.”

  “It’s only the driving that’s dangerous,” said the young reporter as he left.

  The next day at 2:30 the reporter’s Fiat was humming along the National Highway from Athens to Lamia.

  Chapter 10

  From the reporter’s car, Michalis Dimas watched the newly paved road with its white markings like tracer bullets scarring the air race past beneath the wheels. He had never before taken such a long trip in a private car. He loved it. The security of the little car was increased by his friend’s presence at the wheel. He was going back with a good escort. He had nothing to fear from anyone.

  They talked very little. In Lamia they stopped and had a cheese pie. Then the reporter turned on the radio. At seven there was a news bulletin. “The Court announces that the visit of the royal couple to London will definitely take place … Mr. Rallis, the Minister of the Interior, has taken up headquarters at the Ministry for Northern Greece in Salonika to keep in closer touch with the Z. case. Mr. Rallis has stated once again that the government did everything in its power to save the injured man, that it has entrusted the judicial and administrative aspects of the case to high magistrates and taken all calculated measures to facilitate their task. Moreover, Mr. Rallis added, the government has on this
occasion laid no restrictions on freedom of the press or freedom of worship, and has even permitted the political exploitation of the affair, whereas the opposition, for partisan purposes, has basely exploited the death of a man, issuing false news reports, distorting events, suborning alleged witnesses, defaming our country in the foreign press, and systematically impeding the course of justice … By decree of the Minister of Agriculture the minimum price of green cocoons for the current year has been set at 33 drachmas per kilo … Foreign news: At the White House, President Kennedy received the congratulations of the press corps on his forty-sixth birthday, with his usual good humor. ‘Somehow you seem a bit older today!’ the President exclaimed, taking the representatives of the press by surprise before they had time to wish him Happy Birthday. Apart from this brief ceremony, President Kennedy observed his usual working day … Bulletin: The General Association of Three-Wheeled Public Vehicle Owners of Attica has energetically protested the allegedly unfair tendency of a large part of the press to discredit all three-wheeled vehicles on the ground that Deputy Z. was mortally injured by such a vehicle, whereas the offending vehicle was privately owned and had no connection whatsoever with the peace-loving Association of Three-Wheeled Public Vehicle Owners … Weather forecast …”

  Andoniou turned the dial to another station. Dimas was silent, looking out the window. Night had fallen, and in the blackness the car lights shone yellow. He saw the dark shape of an overturned truck in a ditch. After Larissa, he began feeling a lump in his throat. They were getting near. It was too late to turn back. The closer they came to Salonika, the more his feeling of panic intensified. The radio was playing music. Andoniou at the wheel was fighting off sleep. Once, when they stopped at Tempe to pay the highway toll, Dimas had the impulse to open the door of the car and disappear into the night. To go anywhere at all, as long as he didn’t have to return to the misery of Ano Toumba, the poverty, the plumbing, the gutters full of garbage. So long as he’d never again have to walk past Chinky’s Café, the mobsters’ hangout.

  The reporter assured him once again that he had nothing to fear. When at last the city came into sight, its lights reflected in the bay, the dock worker thought it looked like the monstrous claw of a crane. A claw that, no matter how much mud it dredged from the floor of the sea, would never succeed in making the waters of the bay any deeper.

  Chapter 11

  The Investigator summoned all those whose names had been given him by Dimas. A miserable order of human beings vegetating in a quagmire, like frogs. What was worse, they had no interest in getting out of it, for the simple reason that they had nowhere to go. None of them, according to their statements, had been present at the incidents.

  “Me?” said Bonatsa. “I was at Stroumtsa’s grocery that day. I sometimes help out there when I don’t have work down at the docks. Since the shops are closed on Wednesday afternoon, I stayed with the boss to put the stock in order. We pulled everything off the shelves and cleaned things up. I even scrubbed the floor. Then we put everything back in place, the tubs of olives, the oil, the feta cheese, the dried beans, the canned goods. The grocery store doesn’t have any windows, so for two days I’d been trying to make one in the back. Well, that night I saw the hole was big enough to allow some louse to climb in and loot the store, so I put some iron rods across it. After that, I sprinkled rat poison and insecticide around, then I threw the cat out and pulled down the iron shutters. By then it must have been about nine-thirty. I was all in, and I hit the hay as soon as I got home. When I’m tired I snore something awful, and my wife told me next morning she hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep all night.”

  “Me?” said his brother. “As soon as I finished work at the dock, I went and had a good shower in the barracks the company fixed up for us. When you work in cement like I do, you look like a snowman at the end of the day. It must have been about seven o’clock. I took the bus from Egnatia Street and went to Toumba. I didn’t take the bus from the Aristotelous Street stop but from the terminal on Venizelou Street, because I was afraid I might not be able to find a seat and I wanted to sit down, I was all in, that night. I’d spent the day loading sacks of cement on a ship that was sailing for Volos. Since the earthquakes they’ve been doing a lot of building at Volos. When I got to Toumba, I went to Chinky’s tavern. There’s a jukebox but it wasn’t working and I bawled out the proprietor because I couldn’t get my coin back. I had a couple of drinks with the guys and about nine-thirty I went home, dead tired.”

  “Me?” said Xanalatos. “I didn’t have anything to do with the incidents. I left home at five o’clock and went to the Mimosa Café and played cards with Vassilis Nicolaïdis till about seven-thirty. I kept winning and he didn’t feel like playing any more. Then I got up and went across the street, where my friend the tailor was playing backgammon with the neighborhood dentist outside the tailor shop. The dentist filled five teeth for me last month and I still owed him for two of the fillings. I sat down and watched them play till ten. I get a big kick out of watching them. I bet the dentist the price of one of the two fillings I owed him that he was going to lose. And I won. So now I only owe him for one. At ten o’clock I went home.”

  “As for me,” said Hitler, “I wasn’t at the incidents either. I was home, fixing a leak in the water pipe. Toward evening I went to the football field, where the AETOU—the team I’m treasurer for life of—was having a practice session. Sunday we were playing the Progress Team of Kalamaria, and I wanted to see what shape our players were in. They’re scared of me, and since I didn’t want to get in their way I sat up in the bleachers a good distance away. That’s when I met Stratos Metsolis. He is divorcing his wife and I’m going to be a witness at the trial that’s coming up, and he gave me the latest news about the case. To drown his sorrow—he loves the bitch and she can’t stand the sight of him—I took him to Chinky’s joint. We sat down and ordered something to drink. After a little while, in came Baron with fresh figs from Michaniona. There were a couple of other guys there too. We left at ten.”

  “I, Jimmie the Boxer, not only did not hit Pirouchas but, on the contrary, came to his aid, along with a second lieutenant from the army whom I didn’t know. We took him to the first-aid station. I spent the whole evening at the Housing Association of Dock Workers, the St. Constantine office, because we also are trying to get a roof over our heads, and I was talking with the labor big-shots. When I came out, I saw someone lying flat on the sidewalk, at the intersection of Ion Dragoumis and Mitropoleos Streets. Not knowing what was up, I tried to get the man to his feet with the help of the second lieutenant—who, like me, just happened to be passing by—and we saved him. It’s too bad Pirouchas was out like a light, otherwise he’d remember me and he wouldn’t be accusing me of beating him up. ‘When you try to help the other guy, you only get it in the neck yourself.’ That’s what my grandmother from Batum used to tell me when I was a kid.”

  “I, Mitros, am a baker by trade and I always sleep after lunch, because I get up at three in the morning to bake bread. My job is exhausting, especially in the summer heat. I work when everybody else is sleeping, like a night watchman. So that day I went to sleep at three in the afternoon and woke up at eight-thirty, like I always do. Then I went to the café to meet my friends Phoscolos and Gidopoulos, and we were together till a quarter to ten. I never drink, I’m sorry to say, on account of my liver. And now you come along and tell me I was at the incidents! How do you like that! When you work like I do, you don’t have time for anything. Z.? Never heard of him. Never wanted to hear of him.”

  “I, Kyrilov, am a marked man, no matter what I do. I spent eight years in jail with Autocratosaur for collaborating with the Germans and I’m branded. But that night when I left the dock I remember very well that I went past the old post office on my way to the shoemaker’s in the alley. The sole of my shoe had come unglued and I wanted to get it repaired. His shop was closed, and so since I was only a couple of steps away I stopped by to say hello to my brother’s widow. She has a
newsstand in front of the Strymonikon Hotel on Kolomvou Street. I asked her how business was going. She said business was all right, but she was scared to death of the cars racing by, because the stand was on the edge of the sidewalk; she was sure she’d be smashed to pieces one day. She said she’d rather rent the stand to somebody else even though it meant sharing the profits. I said goodbye to her and went off to take the bus for Votsi, where I live. On the way I saw a crowd and heard some shouting, but I didn’t stop. Politics! Don’t mention that ugly word to me. That stuff’s for the crackpots who don’t know any better. I went home and my wife and I went over to see a neighbor, Kyria Zoe, who’d just got out of the hospital, where she had a hernia operation. The day before, May 21, was St. Eleni’s day—her little girl’s name-day—so we were killing two birds with one stone. There were some other neighbors there, and her relatives. We left at ten.”