Like an octopus from its lair, tentacles extended to enfold the lobster—thus Hatzis imagined the work of the Investigator and the Prosecutor. The lobster was whatever or whoever hid in the recesses of the crime. Lobster had always had the aura of wealth for him; he’d never tasted it. Whereas sun-dried octopus was his favorite mezes with ouzo. The lobster might well be armored: breastplates and thorny knobs protected a tender, vulnerable body inside. Once the octopus managed to wrap itself around the lobster, it would suck its flesh effortlessly. But how was that point to be reached, by what play of tentacle? That was the question.
Up to a point he’d been optimistic. The evening the newspaper extras came out, stating that the four police officers had been placed in custody pending trial, he’d gone and got drunk for joy. He went to the fair and saw the fireworks bursting in the sky, writing his name. But there you were, hardly fifteen days had passed when these same officers, “by virtue of an intervening decision,” were temporarily released from prison. The cage was opened and the blackbirds allowed to fly away. Then the Council convened to issue the final verdict on the crimes of that night. On this three-man council were the Investigator and two of the judges who had acquitted the four blackbirds. Two against one. Things looked bad. Then Pirouchas and Z.’s widow had appealed to have the two judges withdrawn. But the General also made haste, now that he was free, to appeal for the withdrawal of the Investigator, “on the grounds of prejudice against myself.”
One day these appeals were all discussed together. Hatzis was still in Salonika then. He’d gone to court. They were all there. Yango and Vango, handcuffed to each other, Baron, Autocratosaur, and the Commissioner. Vango, seeing a press photographer crouch to snap his picture, rushed at him (Hatzis knew Vango hated seeing himself in the papers), forgetting he was chained to Yango. And Yango, with the sudden lurch of his koumbaros, lost his balance and almost fell. But Baron caught hold of him. Hatzis noticed that Baron had become much thinner; once a symbol of strength, he now looked helpless in his bulkiness, a big surface laid bare to the enemies’ darts. Autocratosaur, though arrogant as ever, seemed drained, squeezed dry. Only the Commissioner was smiling, cheerful, greeting the plain-clothesman at the door, who’d greeted him first. Since the bullies had invaded the courtroom, the question of the withdrawal appeals was discussed “behind closed doors.”
As Hatzis later learned, the withdrawal appeal against the judges was based on ten points. First, these two judges—who had released the police officers and were now to pronounce the final verdict—had shown in the intervening decision “an ironical frame of mind toward the assassinated deputy Z.” Second, they had taken a biased stand in everything that concerned the “peace movement.” Third, their reactions to the eyewitnesses were highly skeptical, considering their testimonies as “aiming at the inculpation of the police.” Fourth, they believed that Z.’s appeals for protection had been made for propaganda reasons, and half an hour later Z. had fallen to the ground, assassinated. Fifth, they had not said a single word about the injury to Pirouchas and about the attack on him in the ambulance. Sixth, they had excluded the possibility that the counterdemonstration had been planned, a view implicitly supported by quite a few of the accused themselves. Seventh, they had doubted the testimony of the two prosecutors that the police hid Yango in the police station. Eighth, they had refused to accept the testimony of one witness, on the pretext that his political views had not been examined first. Ninth, they had pronounced the odd opinion that “arrest or non-arrest of criminals falls within the discretional authority of the police.” And ten, one of the judges was a Mason, of lesser rank than the General in the Masonic hierarchy, and so could not possibly be objective toward his superior. In the end, despite all these factors, the withdrawal appeal was rejected, as was the other appeal, the General’s for withdrawal of the Investigator.
And so they had proceeded to examine the accused, who, as always, maintained that it had been a “traffic accident” caused by intoxication. The others stated that they had not been at the site of the accident that night; and the policemen referred to their own original statements. Pirouchas insisted that the investigation be continued and that the court proceedings be returned to the Investigator, new factors having come up in the meantime, such as the Ministry report concerning the “Counteractions of the Communist Challenge by the National-Minded Organizations,” which had been dispatched to the Secretary General twenty days before the crime. However, not even this proposal was immediately accepted. “And following this, the Prosecution walked out of court on the grounds that all three withdrawal appeals had been rejected, whereas the Penal Code clearly calls for the removal of any judge who so much as arouses suspicion among the litigants, in order that judicial impartiality be upheld. In this case, not only had suspicions been roused, but specific acts of partiality had been denounced; yet neither of the judges (out of whatever vestigial sense of dignity) considered himself offended.”
They just went on and on, harping on the same old thing, reflected Hatzis. He had almost transformed himself into a self-taught lawyer, so avidly did he observe events at close hand. He read everything connected with the affair in the newspapers. He borrowed law manuals from a student and studied them on his own. At this time (Hatzis was still in Salonika, which had relapsed into its familiar lethargy now that fair and festival were over), the newspapers were full of the Hloros Report. This document dealt with the pressures brought to bear on the Investigator and the other judges by the Grand Judge of the Areopagus. “Just listen to Mr. So-and-so; he’s very, very good.” The report confirmed all the charges made in Parliament several months previously by the Assistant Judge of the Aereopagus, concerning the “innate difficulties” and “the tragic difficulties involved in conducting the investigation.” The contents of this report were known only to a very few people, who were now eager to make it public. In a panic, the right wing began accusing Hloros of going to Salonika expressly to influence the judges. The answer came like a sledgehammer: “I have never been adept,” Hloros said, “at corrupting, confusing, or in any way influencing the opinion of persons inferior to me in rank. Others no doubt have this ability! Others no doubt particularly value this ability.” Which made the Prosecution cry unanimously: “Mr. Hloros’s report must be published!”
Ultimately the final verdict was pronounced, disappointing everyone, including of course Hatzis. That day he read every available paper. Each interpreted the verdict according to its own interests. The most optimistic commented that now the investigation must turn on “high-standing persons.” Others seized on only one point of the verdict: “whether in actual fact Z.’s skull had been crushed with a club.” Others rejoiced “that no order has been issued to return the accused to custody,” which meant definitive acquittal of the Investigator’s original charges. (However, “all persons already in custody were to remain there.”) Others went further and blamed the Investigator, saying that, “throughout the investigation, testimony had been falsified and the truth corrupted.” The fact was, this verdict created a judicial precedent favorable to the four accused, so that in the trial that would take place some day—if ever—they would be referred to the tribunal charged with “transgression of duty” rather than with “complicity in premeditated murder.” The verdict proposed that the investigation be continued, but exclusively along these lines: 1) Whether Z. had been struck not only by the three-wheeled pickup truck but also with an iron bar. 2) Whether the counterdemonstration was spontaneous or organized. 3) Whether Pirouchas’s injury had occurred in an area under police control or not. 4) That the responsibility for disturbance of law and order be defined. In other words, concluded Hatzis, the verdict granted the case a vague afterlife, dragged it out, thus weakening it, robbing it of its vital public interest, surrendered it to endless procedural delays, office to office, law court to law court, until something new, something more stirring came along and buried it altogether.
And Tiger was impatient. He wanted it to end. He
wanted to present himself before the court and say all the things he’d told the Prime Minister; at long last, to see his act bear fruit. Just then the Hloros Report was finally published, falling like a stone on waters temporarily smooth as from the oil fishermen scatter mixed with sand, as Hatzis knew, in order to see deep into the spot where they harpoon the octopus. A few days later followed the memorandum of the Grand Judge of the Areopagus to the Minister of Justice, which unequivocally confirmed the Hloros Report. Without denying its accusations of him as a prejudiced intervenor, the Grand Judge merely interpreted them according to his lights. He denied neither his attempt to direct the Investigator “toward a new explanation of Z.’s death” nor his suggestion that the investigation be divided into four separate categories: the actual perpetrators; the behind-the-scenes perpetrators; the police; and the counterdemonstration. If the Grand Judge had had his way, Yango and Vango would have spent a few years in prison as the actual perpetrators; Autocratosaur and Mastodontosaur as the behind-the-scenes perpetrators; the police for transgression of duty (unrelated to the crime); and the counterdemonstrators (likewise unrelated to the crime) for disturbing that evening’s peace. Thus no “high-standing person” would have been caught in the investigation’s noose. Later they would pardon Yango and Vango, and since those two would never open their mouths, the whole case would be buried with ecclesiastic pomp. None of this was denied by the Grand Judge of the Areopagus. He simply interpreted it in his own way. But he made the blunder of going further still, and stated that it was untrue that Nikitas had been struck and the student had had his hair cropped by the police. He also mentioned an “unholy political exploitation” and castigated “the untrammeled publicity in the press of every piece of relevant information.” Yet the reporters were the very ones who had helped the investigation, reflected Hatzis. Why would they not print what they had unearthed? With any other investigator, the case would have been closed long before. But this investigator was a hard nut to crack and he spoiled their game, just as he, Hatzis, had spoiled it at the very first, by jumping on the pickup. And so the whole thing had backfired. The young Investigator had raised himself high above his superiors, both in position and in experience. They were like the medals, Tiger thought, which generals wear into battle, medals which hide their cowardice, nothing else. The brave man goes forth from the battalion; it’s the sergeant major or the lieutenant or the simple soldier who falls under fire, and the others share his glory. In the end, charged with having broken his judicial oath, the Grand Judge of the Areopagus was given a six-month suspension by the Minister of Justice. “An unprecedented crisis is lambasting our society,” an old legal expert wrote. “The inexorable struggle surrounding one of the major crimes of the century. Who will win out? Justice or the collaborators? Gentlemen …”
At this point Hatzis had come to Athens. After the first tributes they paid him, they seemed to forget him altogether. The holidays were drawing near. The shops were laden like frigates. The streets were decorated with many-colored lights. The blind beggars with accordions multiplied. The mountaineers came down with Christmas trees to sell. The cold tightened its grip and Tiger wandered about, ever more of a stranger among strangers, ever poorer among the poor. His protectors began avoiding him. They didn’t give any more money. They said they could find him work, if he liked, at a blacksmith’s shop. But Hatzis could not go back to his old ways. He felt that he had been marked by history. And his protectors had heard it told too many times: how he’d jumped on the pickup, what had happened with Vango, the pistol, the club, Yango, the fireman’s legs. Life was going on its way and he sat still at an intersection.
He frequented the square near the post office. There every morning he saw the plasterers and the house painters with their long brushes held high, waiting for a day’s wages. They knew him and teased him and offered him coffee. Some gray winter mornings they were gloveless in the stinging cold. The hot-salepi vendor made them take a detour on their way from Omonia Square.
One such morning he met a woman coming out of an old hotel on Athinas Street. Some time had passed since he had left his city. He spoke to her.
“I can’t get it out of my head I’ve seen you somewhere before,” the whore said.
They went to bed. Afterwards she made him some coffee. “Where are you from?”
“The North,” he said. “Big Mama Poverty.”
“I’ve got lots of good customers from up there,” she said. “At one point, when I was younger, I used to go up to the fair. I had my beat at Ladadika, back of the dock. Maybe that’s where I ran into you and can’t remember you from.”
“Maybe you know me from somewhere else,” he said. “I’m Hatzis, the one who jumped on the pickup and caught the assassins of Z.”
“The doctor!” exclaimed the woman, tying her purple bathrobe. “The doctor who treated poor people free!”
She told him about an aunt of hers in Piraeus who every year, on the fifteenth of August, would make a pilgrimage to the Miraculous Virgin of Tinos. She had spent all her money on votive offerings and was never cured. In the end, Z. had cured her for nothing in two months. She had set his photograph among her ikons.
“But why did they kill him? Such a good man …”
That was all Tiger needed. He told her the whole story, how he’d jumped on the pickup, what happened with Vango, the pistol, the club, Yango, the fireman’s legs.
Athens seemed endless to Hatzis. A beautiful city, full of surprises. One day a rich lady who lived in Kolonaki invited him to her house. She was left wing, because her husband (who was also dirt-rich) was right wing, and she always wanted to antagonize him. She liked simple men of the people, who for all their poverty cared about ideals. Her chauffeur picked him up at his hole. Hatzis was seeing this district of Athens for the first time. A different sort of people. Lots of pastry shops. Where he got out, he saw a shop window full of baskets of tiny sleeping dogs. Dogs of the same breed greeted him at the lady’s apartment when the maid opened the door. Hatzis was staggered. He’d never seen such a house before. High up on the sixth floor, he could see all Athens as on a platter. The hostess was wearing a purple dress. She shook his hand warmly. A strong scent of cologne made him dizzy. When they sat down to dinner, she asked him all about it.
Hatzis kept drinking water till he almost burst, to keep from talking. Before he left, the lady found a way to slip him an envelope. When he got outside, he opened it and saw that it contained some money. He sent this money home for the holidays and so for a little while was spared his mother’s nagging.
Soon the time came when he was hungry again. He missed the hot bougatsa, the cheese pie, the piroski, the souvlakia, the pork-tripe soup. When it’s cold, one has to eat. So he bought himself a kit, got some brushes, shoe polish, cut a piece of velvet off a seat in the Rosie-Clair Cinema, and set himself up outside the Municipal Hall. The other shoeshine men poked fun at him.
“The democracy sure needs you, man!”
“Bravo, Tiger! You’re a hero! You don’t accept help from anybody!”
“You made the snake come out of its hole and they stuck you in its place!”
“Hatzis, our hero, you chased out Karamanlis!”
Till one day someone in a dark overcoat came and said he wanted to talk to him. He took Hatzis to a restaurant and treated him to a meal.
“Well now,” he said over a cigarette, “let’s come to the point. I’ll explain things simply to you, because you should know them. You’re a Communist. And I’m a Communist. But the EDA party is rotten. It’s a bourgeois party. Whenever it’s a question of making someone a hero, they prefer to make a bourgeois the hero and not a man of the people like you. Z. was a bourgeois, he didn’t care about Marxist dialectics. He was a good man and a humanitarian, but not the person to base the whole youth movement on. Do you understand? There’s a great schism in the international Communist movement. I’m with the Chinese. The Russians, the more they move, the more bourgeois they grow. They’re getting so
ft. They give in. They no longer believe in revolution. And they’re right as far as their own situation goes. They’ve won their revolution. Now let other people fight things out tooth and nail. In Greece, though, things are the way they were in China. Poverty, hunger. Radical measures are needed, not all compromises and combines. I’m telling you all this just to say you should have become the hero and not Z. But you don’t suit their purposes. You don’t have the qualifications, the bourgeois-liberal background of Z. That’s why they got rid of you. I know what went on behind the scenes and I’m telling you all this first-hand. We believe in the common people and in revolution. EDA believes that in a bourgeois regime you have to fight with bourgeois methods. We believe that in a bourgeois regime you have to use revolutionary methods. There’s the difference. You’re with the pro-Chinese, not the Khrushchevians. And look how you end up! Shining shoes! You! The Sing Nou Me of New China!”
“Don’t you go insulting what’s sacred to me,” Hatzis replied. “I don’t know much about politics. Z. I love. I believe in him. He’s my leader.”
The winter was hard on Hatzis, bitter. When spring came, things seemed to improve. Once in March he went up with a truck-driver friend to see his people in Salonika. He found his mother older, his children bigger, his wife a stranger, his neighborhood smaller. What was he doing down in Athens? There was nothing to fear any more up here. His house seemed like a prison. “Now that you got famous, son,” his mother nagged, “why didn’t you get rich too and take us out of our misery?” In vain he tried to explain that in his case these two things were unrelated. The old woman just couldn’t understand. She wanted money. She thought her son had made good. She told him to give her greetings to the Prime Minister when he saw him again, and to remind him of the penury pension she’d been waiting for all these years. This was all so unpleasant that he eagerly went back to Athens.
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