She was sitting at the kitchen table and scraping courgettes. She lifted her head mechanically, certain that she would see me in my pyjamas. She remained with her knife in the air and her eyes bulging, staring at the well-groomed version of me, as though seeing a ghost from the past.
‘Where are you off to?’
‘To get the newspapers.’
‘And you’ve put your suit on to get the newspapers?’
‘Actually, I was going to wear my official parade uniform, but I didn’t want to overdo it.’
Adriani was nonplussed and tossed the courgette into the rubbish instead of into the bowl of water. I slammed the door behind me so that the noise would wake her up after I had gone.
On coming out of the lift, I bumped into Mrs Prelatis.
‘Now you’re a sight for sore eyes, Mr Haritos,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘At last, you’re back to being the Inspector that we all know.’
I could have kissed her. With all the foreseeable and unforeseeable consequences. I remembered, however, that Adriani and Mrs Prelatis had a mutual dislike of each other. So she might have been saying that as a dig at Adriani, who hadn’t let me out alone for such a long time.
My suspicions dissolved when the newsagent confirmed Prelatis’s enthusiasm. ‘Hale and hearty, Inspector, hale and hearty,’ he shouted. ‘First time for a long time that I’ve seen you looking so well. What can I give you?’
‘The papers.’
‘Which one will it be today?’
He asked me because each day I would get a different one, either for a change or simply to confirm that I found them all equally boring. I’m still not sure.
‘Give me all of them, except the sports papers.’
He stared at me in astonishment, but then his face lit up. ‘The suicide, right?’ he said, full of satisfaction that he had found the solution to the riddle.
‘Yes. Why, do you know anything?’
‘No, heavens no!’ he replied with the instinctive fear of the ordinary citizen who doesn’t want to get involved. ‘But from what I saw with a quick glance, the papers don’t know anything either.’
He again expressed his delight at seeing me so well and tossed the newspapers into a large plastic bag. I went down Aroni Street and arrived at the little square of Aghiou Lazarou. It had a corner café that had been upgraded into a coffee bar. I chose one of the tables in the shade and took the pack of newspapers from the plastic bag. The waiter was an unaccommodating fifty-year-old who came over and took my order with a curt ‘So what’s it to be?’ I ordered a sweet Greek coffee, which was met with a scowl tantamount to a stream of abuse, evidently because the Greek coffee downgraded the coffee bar back to a corner café.
All the newspapers had Favieros’s suicide as their front-page story. Only the headlines differed. ‘Tragic Suicide By Jason Favieros’ and ‘Mystery Suicide On Camera’ were the headlines in the more serious newspapers. From then on, it was all downhill: from ‘Favieros’s Spectacular Suicide’ and ‘Suicide Exclusive On Camera’ to ‘Big Brother Live’. All the papers had a photograph in the middle of the page, showing the same downhill direction. The most serious had a neutral photograph of Favieros shaking the Prime Minister’s hand. Two more showed Favieros with the pistol in his mouth. One of the tabloids preferred a photograph of Favieros after his suicide with the blood-splattered aquarium.
I sipped the coffee, which was like water, and read the reports one by one. They were full of questions and conjectures, which meant that no one knew anything and they were all fishing for the answers. One claimed that Favieros had major financial problems and was on the brink of bankruptcy. Another that he had some incurable illness and had chosen to put an end to his life in this spectacular way. One leftist newspaper successively analysed the acute mental problems that Favieros had been left with following his torture at the hands of the Junta’s Military Police. It actually presented an interview with a psychiatrist who always features in similar cases with erudite psychological portraits of the victim or perpetrator that leave you wondering why he’s not with the FBI. The newspaper with the headline ‘Big Brother Live’ came up with the idea that, because of some incurable illness, Favieros had struck a deal with the TV channel to publicly commit suicide in exchange for a huge sum that he would leave to his family. Finally, another gutter-press rag, full of colour photos, insinuated that Favieros was gay, was being blackmailed, and preferred public suicide to public scandal.
They knew as much as I did, I thought to myself. In other words, nothing. I glanced at my watch. I had been engrossed in the papers for a full two hours and it was long past lunchtime in my private clinic. I left the two and a half euros they charged for the thimbleful of coffee on the table and headed back home. I was halfway down Aroni Street when it suddenly crossed my mind to call Sotiropoulos, a reporter who for years had been a thorn in my side and with whom I had a love-hate relationship, with the emphasis on hate. I bought a phone card from the kiosk and called directory enquiries to get the number of the channel where Sotiropoulos worked.
‘Haritos, what a surprise!’ The title ‘Inspector’ had been dispensed with long ago. ‘So, you’re fully recovered?’
‘More or less. It’s all a matter of time.’
‘When will you be back with us?’
‘I’ve another two months’ sick leave.’
‘You’ll be the end of me!’ he exclaimed disappointedly. ‘That Yanoutsos who replaced you is driving us crazy. Getting information from him is like trying to get blood out of a stone.’
I chuckled with glee. ‘Serves you right. You used to accuse me of keeping you all in the dark.’
‘No, it’s not that he doesn’t want to reveal his cards; it’s that he’s unable to put two words together. He writes his statements in a notepad and reads them out as though there were no full stops or commas.’
I almost dropped the phone. ‘You mean Ghikas lets Yanoutsos make statements to the press?’ I asked flabbergasted. Ghikas, Head of Security, guarded press statements like he did his wallet; he gave them to no one. He had me write them for him and he learned them by heart for the reporters. And now he was handing over his wallet to that blockhead Yanoutsos, who wore his bulletproof vest back to front like a straitjacket?
‘Rumour has it that he does it on purpose,’ said Sotiropoulos, breaking into laughter. ‘He dislikes him so much that he has him garble the statements to compromise him.’
That’s something Ghikas is quite capable of.
‘I want to ask you a question, Sotiropoulos. Purely out of personal interest. What do you know about Favieros’s suicide?’
‘Nothing.’ His answer was direct and categorical. ‘No one knows anything. All as black as pitch. Perhaps his family knows something, but they’ve shut up shop.’
‘And all the talk in the papers?’
‘You mean about financial and psychological problems and the like? Hot air, Haritos. When reporters have nothing to go on, they simply dredge the drains to see what they might come up with, and what we usually come up with are old shoes, plastic bags and various refuse. Anyhow, as things stand, that story doesn’t have much of a life because there’s simply nothing for us to write about.’
I thanked him and he told me he couldn’t wait for me to get back on the job.
Adriani didn’t hear me entering the house because she was talking to our daughter on the phone.
‘Do you realise he’s been out wandering the streets for three hours now?’ she said to her. It was clear she was talking about me and so I had every right to eavesdrop.
‘Three hours, do you hear, Katerina?’ Her voice was full of concern. ‘Without telling me where he was going, he just opened the door and walked out.’ She paused to hear what Katerina said and then went on, even more tensely: ‘What harm will he come to? Are you joking? He might have had a dizzy spell and fainted. He might be in hospital right now! I’ve pleaded with him to get a mobile phone, but he won’t hear of it.’ This time the pause was
cut short with indignation. ‘Naturally, it’s me who’s to blame again!’ She felt angry and when Adriani is angry, there’s no point in trying to get a word in yourself. ‘Fanis, Fanis! Fanis isn’t here all day to see how I’ve rescued him from the hands of death! What I should do is get the police onto it because he’s been gone three hours now and I’ve no idea where he is!’
‘I’m here,’ I said, appearing in the doorway to the sitting room.
She was taken aback because she hadn’t heard me come in, and an expression of relief spread over her face.
‘Here’s your dad, you wanted to talk to him and here he is,’ she said to Katerina with all the cheek in the world. ‘Your daughter,’ she said, handing me the receiver.
‘How are you doing, dear?’
‘Me, I’m fine. It’s Mum who’s not all right. You frightened her out of her wits and she was about to send out a search party for you,’ she said laughing.
‘I know. She’ll have to accept it.’
There was a short pause. ‘Can I assume that your chat with Fanis yesterday had some effect?’ she asked cheerfully.
‘That and the suicide.’
‘What suicide?’
‘Favieros’s. Last night on the TV. Something suddenly clicked inside me.’
She burst out laughing.
‘A bit macabre, but a shock like that usually does the trick.’ Then she became serious. ‘She does it out of love, you know. So don’t go now to the other extreme,’ she said to me.
‘Don’t worry! We’ll get back on track again.’
We said our goodbyes and hung up. Adriani had gone into the kitchen to get the meal ready. Before going after her, I made a stop in the bedroom and took hold of Apostolides’s Lexicon of All the Words in Hippocrates. Katerina had bought it for me when I’d gone into hospital after a heart attack.
I opened it at the word ‘recover’ and went into the kitchen. The table was laid and the food ready: boiled courgettes that she had been preparing in the morning and three meatballs. I went up to her holding the dictionary and read the entry out to her:
‘“Recover: regain health after illness; become cured. Some recovering their health after medical treatment.” I belong to the “some” of Hippocrates who have recovered their health,’ I told her. ‘In fact, I feel so healthy that I’m thinking of cutting short my sick leave and going back to the Force.’
‘Costas, for heaven’s sake, let’s not make any hasty decisions!’ On the one hand she was beseeching me out of fear and on the other she was reminding me that it wasn’t my decision alone but that we would make the decision together. ‘And when all’s said and done, you pay a fortune for health insurance. Now that you’ve an opportunity to get back some of what they’ve been taking from you all these years, are you going to pass up the chance?’
She smiled at me triumphantly because she had found the argument that no Greek can counter. Any Greek who doesn’t believe that the state is stealing from him and doesn’t feel the need to get his own back is either mad or a communist.
5
I had gathered momentum following my historic sortie and was flirting with the idea of cancelling my afternoon appointment with the cat. But, after careful consideration, I decided that there was more to be gained by my avoiding head-on confrontations and resorting to guerrilla warfare.
A quarter of an hour before the designated time for our little outing, I felt her shadow falling over me.
‘Aren’t we going to go for a walk today?’
I lifted my eyes from the dictionary and said with a wry smile: ‘We’ll go, but only if you promise me that tomorrow you’ll make me stuffed vegetables.’
‘I’d be happy to, but maybe they’re too heavy for your stomach just now, Costas.’
‘Not again? I’ve told you a thousand times that I have a bullet wound in my chest not an ulcer in my stomach, but you won’t listen.’
She thought about it for a moment and came up with a compromise to save face. ‘All right, I’ll use less onion so they won’t be too heavy.’
I was pleased with myself that my little scheme had worked and now the cat was sitting opposite me and staring at me with that same arrogant expression that my presence usually provoked. I got up slowly, stretched and went up to it. It was alarmed because my action was in breach of our silent agreement. It sat up in readiness and stared at me anxiously. When it saw that I kept on approaching it nonchalantly, it leapt down smartly from the bench so as to withdraw honorably with its tail in the air instead of being forced into a disorderly retreat. From then on, it would at least be on its toes whenever it saw me and I would be free of its arrogance.
Adriani hadn’t noticed a thing as she was engrossed in the newspapers that I had bought that morning.
‘As if he would commit suicide because of financial problems!’ she suddenly exclaimed.
‘Do you think it improbable?’ I asked, sitting back down beside her.
‘Where’ve you been hiding?’ she replied, as though I had just been repatriated along with the communists from the former Soviet democracies. ‘Even if he was heading for bankruptcy, his company might have lost out but not him. You can bet your life that he had his personal fortune stashed away in Switzerland.’
‘Why Switzerland?’
‘Because it’s not part of the European Union and they can’t check his account.’
I stared at her, dumbfounded. ‘Adriani, old girl,’ I said to her, ‘why don’t you go down to Headquarters and I’ll stay at home and make the stuffed vegetables?’
‘You see what you learn from TV?’ she replied with a triumphant smile. ‘You’re the only one who doesn’t learn anything because you can’t be bothered.’
‘Do they say things like that on TV?’
‘Are you joking? Do you realise what you can hear on the box? It’s a regular university.’
‘One door closes, another opens,’ I thought, remembering one of my favourite songs, and in the end it was the box that won out.
‘Let’s go, it looks like rain,’ said Adriani.
I looked up and, through the trees, saw the sky heavy with black clouds. The first big drops caught up with us at the exit to the park. There was no wind at all and the rain fell perpendicularly, like a barber’s curtain that doesn’t let you see more than ten yards in front of your nose. At the edge of the pavement, we were stopped by a current of water. In less than five minutes, Kononos Street had turned into a tributary of Filolaou Street that had itself become a torrential river.
‘How are we going to get across?’ I asked Adriani. ‘Just look at it.’
She grabbed me by the hand and pulled me into the entrance of an apartment block. ‘Wait here, I’ll be back,’ she said and ran off to the supermarket three doors away.
I was wondering whether she had gone to buy a child’s inflatable canoe when I saw her coming out with a handful of empty plastic bags.
‘Lift your leg up,’ she said, slipping one of them over my shoes and fixing it with a rubber band as though wrapping up a frozen chicken. Any resistance on my part was greeted with a ‘Shh, I know what I’m doing!’ and she moved on to the second foot.
‘You’re mad if you think I’m going to dive into that river with plastic bags for flippers,’ I told her.
‘You’re not the only one. Just look around you!’
And she pointed to one woman who was fording the river with plastic bags on her feet and one over her head.
‘Be thankful that I had the good sense to bring an umbrella,’ Adriani boasted.
The situation overcame all my resistance and in a minute we had crossed over, two pusses-in-boots struggling not to be swept away by the current.
In spite of the umbrella and the plastic bags, we were drenched and once home, we changed our clothes and got out the ointments. Meanwhile the rain had stopped as suddenly as it had begun and the sky in the west was clear and deep red.
This is the most boring part of the daily routine as I don’t know wha
t to do to pass the time. I somehow manage to get by till midday by dragging breakfast out till ten and then with the help of the papers and my dictionaries. After lunch, I usually lie down for a while. I never sleep, but I shut my eyes and keep them closed for a couple of hours to fool myself into believing that I’m asleep. This is followed by my appointment with the cat. It’s from returning home to the evening news bulletin that there’s a black hole that I can’t find anything to fill. I thumb through the dictionaries for a bit. Then I pick up the paper, but I’ve already read it inside out. There’s always the crossword, but that only makes me even more irritated as I’m completely useless at it. Not to mention that I feel personally offended at not being able to find the right word after so many years delving into dictionaries. At the third attempt, I end up throwing the paper from the bed towards the door or from the sitting room into the hall, depending on where in the house I am. Then the next day at the same time I start again, a real sucker for punishment.
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