In the morning I still hadn’t found any answer to the question and I woke up with my head swimming. In the end, these kinds of dilemmas always come down to the more colloquial ‘between the devil and the deep blue sea’, so I decided to have a shot at it, despite the limited chances of success, rather than allow Yanoutsos to get the better of me.
Koula phoned me while I was still having my coffee and started talking to me in coded phrases: ‘I’ll bring the package over tomorrow, Inspector Haritos. Unfortunately, I don’t have time today. I need to take care of some details.’ She reminded me of my late father, who used to talk in coded language when he wanted to say that there was some order from above and he didn’t want anyone else to understand. ‘There’s a personal order from his nibs.’ And he meant the Prime Minister. Anyhow, I understood that she would take up her new duties the next day. In the meantime I could start alone. It was a pity to let the day go wasted.
I drank the last of my coffee and got up to go. At the front door, I bumped into Adriani who was returning from the supermarket.
‘Are you going out?’
‘Yes. Don’t wait for me for lunch. I might be late.’
When I went to work normally, that remark was superfluous. I never came home at midday. Now that I was starting again, after a two-month lay-off, I was obliged to make it clear in order to emphasise that we were returning to the old routine.
‘I see. Old habits die hard,’ she said, going into the house.
Her vexation was understandable as I had told her nothing of the threat of Yanoutsos. If I were to tell her, she would have jumped for joy. For years she had been trying to persuade me to put in for a transfer to a quieter department with regular hours. ‘As they don’t promote you anyway, why kill yourself at work on top of everything?’ was her foolproof argument, which would have convinced every rational person.
I decided to make my first call of the day at Favieros’s residence. I was certain that none of my colleagues would have thought of bothering his family over the suicide, so it was only right I should begin from there. From the TV news reports that have become a kind of contemporary encyclopedia for us all, I found out that Favieros’s family lived in Porto Rafti, and so I set to thinking about the best route for getting there. I had no intention of paying for a taxi out of my own pocket and if I were to take the bus I’d get there in the afternoon just in time for tea and cake. In the end, I decided to combine all the forms of public transport that Athens has: I would take the trolley to Syntagma Square, from there take the underground to Ethniki Amyna and then get the intercity bus to Porto Rafti.
Half an hour later, I was going up the escalator in the underground, leaving behind the station’s marble mausoleum with its artificial shrubs growing out of granite, its grandiose announcements and its classical music that makes me feel like a European for ten minutes or so. Above, on my right, was the Ministry of Transport and, on my left, the Ministry of National Defence. In between, in the middle of the road, was a line of bus stops and a bustling crowd of people, everyone ready to elbow the other out of the way when the bus appeared so as to get on first and secure a seat. Back in Greece, I thought to myself, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
My own bus was half an hour in coming, but fortunately I didn’t have to start pushing and shoving, as it was an intercity bus and there were plenty of empty seats. The fat woman sitting beside me was balancing a plastic bag between her legs and in her arms she was clutching an enormous handbag, half the contents of which were spilling over into her lap. If we exclude some congestion from the Greek Broadcasting Company building as far as the junction at Stavros, the traffic was moving normally. As we approached Porto Rafti, I asked the fat woman whether she knew where Favieros’s house was located. Suddenly five or six people, men and women, leaned over to my window to show me what was evidently one of the area’s main attractions.
‘Get back, I’m the one he asked,’ said the fat woman, forcing them back and making them respect her priority. She waited for order to be restored and then turned to me. ‘You should get off at Gegos’s,’ she said.
‘Who’s Gegos?’ I asked, puzzled.
‘The supermarket. It’s the next stop. Then turn left towards St Spyridon’s. When you come to the bend in the road, you’ll see it on the slope, to the left. It’s a big house with a huge garden.’ She turned back and shouted to the driver: ‘Prodromos, stop outside Gegos’s so the gentleman can get off.’
All the people on the bus had turned round and were staring at me with a strange, inquisitive look on their faces. As I was getting off, the fat woman voiced the collective question:
‘Are you a reporter?’
‘If I were a reporter, would I be coming here by bus?’
My reply reduced her to silence. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, blushing, as though she had insulted me by thinking I was a reporter.
I turned left and after about half a kilometre I saw the house before me. It was just as the fat woman had described, except that she had been reserved about the size of the garden, which must have covered more than an acre and led up to a two-storey villa with balconies of various sizes and a patio in front with tables, chairs and awnings all in white, rather like a private cafeteria belonging to the Favieros family. The entire complex was protected by a wall mounted with closed-circuit TV cameras. The interior was visible only through the tall gate.
A gardener was watering the lawn.
‘Can I ask you something?’
He heard my voice, turned off the water and came over to me.
‘Inspector Haritos. I want to speak with Mrs Favieros or with one of the children.’
‘Not here,’ he replied abruptly.
‘When will they be back?’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘They on boat somewhere.’
His accent showed him to be a foreigner, though he obviously wasn’t Albanian.
‘Russian-Pontian?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’ When they’re not one, they’re the other.
‘When will your employers be back?’
‘Don’t know. Ask Mr Ba up in house.’
‘Open the gate for me.’
‘Can’t. Press button, open from house.’
I pressed the button as he told me.
‘Yes?’
‘Police,’ I said sharply
When you’re dealing with foreigners, the best thing is to use the magic word ‘Police’. They either open up for you straightaway or start shooting at you. As the latter was rather unlikely in Favieros’s house, the gate began to slowly open from the middle. I looked around for some sort of golf buggy that would take me up the acre of land to the house, but there wasn’t one to be seen anywhere and so I was obliged to climb the steps that were on the left side of the garden. Halfway up, I stopped to catch my breath because I had stiffened up with the sedentary life imposed on me by Adriani and my legs trembled at the slightest effort.
Smart chap that Favieros, I thought to myself as I climbed the steps. He didn’t go and build a villa in some expensive suburb like Ekali so he wouldn’t be accused of selling out to the system or of turning into a profiteer, but he built it in Porto Rafti so that he would preserve his progressive profile and at the same time get this huge plot of land for peanuts.
Up above, on the patio with the private cafeteria, I was met by a short, swarthy Asian.
‘What is it you want?’ he asked in a shrill voice.
‘Are you Ba?’
‘I am Mr Bawan, the butler,’ he replied in a formal tone. And again: ‘What is it you want?’
How about that? Favieros even had a steward though he went around unkempt, with a beard, crumpled jacket and jeans. Of course, this Thai might have given himself the title of butler just to increase his standing.
‘What is it you want?’ he asked again, giving a sample of his Asian persistence.
‘Are your employers away?’
‘Yes. Mrs Favieros, Miss Favieros and Mr Favieros Junior left on the yac
ht immediately after the funeral.’
‘And when will they be back?’
‘I have no knowledge.’
He had a foreign accent, but he spoke Greek correctly, as though he were holding a grammar book and searching to find where to put the subject, verb and object. I thought of asking him where I could find Favieros’s wife, but I rejected the idea because it might alarm her and lead her to call the police, and my secret mission would go up in smoke. I decided to limit myself to the staff and take it from there.
‘I want to ask you a few questions.’
‘I am unable to answer. I have no permission.’
I ignored his objection and continued.
‘Did it seem to you that Mr Favieros had changed in any way of late? Was he worried or in low spirits?’
‘I am unable to answer. I have no permission.’
‘I’m not asking you to reveal any secrets. Only whether he seemed different, nervous, let’s say.’
‘I am unable to answer. I have no permission.’
I reached out, grabbed hold of him suddenly by the arm and started dragging him with me.
‘Where are you taking me?’ he asked in alarm. ‘I have a green card, work permit, health insurance. I am not illegitimate.’ He meant illegal. It was his first mistake in Greek. ‘I’m taking you to the station for questioning,’ I said to him calmly. ‘And if you don’t want to answer because you don’t have permission, you’ll stay locked up in the cells till your employers come along and give you permission.’
‘Mr Favieros didn’t change,’ he said with all the willingness in the world, as if nothing had happened previously. ‘He was as he always was.’
I kept hold of his arm so as not to lose physical contact with him. ‘Did anything else change? His routine, for example? Did he start coming home later?’
‘He always returned home between eleven and eleven thirty. Later? But …’ he added, suddenly stopping as though remembering something.
‘What?’
‘He left later in the morning. At around ten.’
‘What time did he usually leave?’
‘Half past eight … Nine …’
What might that mean? Who knows? He may simply have been tired and have needed more sleep. ‘Who else is in the house now?’
‘Two maids. Tania and Nina.’
‘Bring them here. I want to talk to them.’
He went to the patio door and shouted out the two names. In less than a minute two blonde girls appeared: the one extremely tall, the other of average height, both wearing light-blue overalls and white aprons. It was blatantly obvious that they were Ukrainians. If, in Favieros’s house, the staff represented half the United Nations, I thought to myself, who knows what was the case at his building sites.
I asked the Ukrainian girls the same questions I had asked the Thai and I got the same answers. That meant, at least at first sight, that nothing had changed about Favieros that the domestic staff had noticed.
‘What time did Mr Favieros leave home to go to work in recent weeks?’ I asked the maids.
‘I told you! At around ten,’ said the butler, intervening, seemingly annoyed that I might doubt him in front of his subordinates.
‘Work’d here,’ the one of average height replied.
‘And how do you know?’ asked the butler as though scolding her.
‘I sweep upper floor and see,’ answered the Ukranian. ‘He work computer.’
‘Show me,’ I said to her. Not that I was expecting to discover anything, but it was an opportunity for me to take a look around the rest of the house.
The Ukranian girl led me through a living room with expensive marble and with little and modern furniture. We went upstairs by way of an interior staircase and at the top she opened one of the doors facing us. The study was spacious, with a large window that looked on to the garden. Here too there was scant furniture: the desk with his chair and two other chairs in front of it. Two walls were lined with books. Looming on the desk was a huge computer screen that gaped pitch black. The desk’s surface was an exact replica of Ghikas’s desk: completely empty, without as much as a piece of paper on it. I glanced at the books on the shelves and saw that Favieros had remained somewhere between the Greek Communist Youth and Rhigas Ferraios. There were books on history, philosophy, a large edition of the collected works of Marx and Engels in English, histories of the labour and communist movements and many books on economics. There were no files or folders.
I went back down the interior staircase and found the Thai standing waiting for me at the bottom. The tall Ukranian maid had gone and the other one had remained upstairs. I headed towards the private cafeteria with the Thai at my heels. He saw me descending the garden steps and was at last convinced that I had decided to leave.
The gardener was still watering. ‘Didn’t Favieros have a driver?’ I asked as I got up to him.
‘No, he drove himself. A Bimmer convertible.’
‘Bimmer?’ I asked puzzled.
‘BMW,’ he answered, casting a contemptuous glance at me for my ignorance.
10
I arrived at the bus station in Porto Rafti at around noon. Since I wasn’t going home for lunch, I had time to go on a second little trip that day and visit Favieros’s construction site at the Olympic Village. I asked the station superintendent where the buses to Thrakomakedones stopped and he looked at me as though I’d asked him how to get to the Norwegian fjords.
‘Try Vathis Square,’ he told me. ‘All those Third World contraptions start from there.’
As I was walking down towards Vathis Square, I felt my stomach rumbling and I realised that I had gone from my convalescence back to work without celebrating my return. In Aristotelous Street I came across a souvlaki joint and I ordered two souvlakis with all the trimmings. I ate them standing up, leaning forward so they wouldn’t drip on me, and I felt myself at last getting back into the work routine. I couldn’t care less if I smelled of tzatziki to the builders.
The stop for Thrakomakedones was in the square, but the bus standing there had its doors and windows closed. The driver was chatting with the superintendent and neither paid the slightest attention to those waiting.
‘When does it leave?’ an elderly woman asked the driver.
‘You’ll have to wait, there’s another one coming,’ was the curt answer.
The other appeared after about twenty minutes and after the five passengers waiting had become fifty. I had to use what I still remember from the Police Academy concerning crowd dispersion in order to get on and secure a seat for myself.
The bus set off but stopped every twenty yards either because of traffic lights or because of the congestion. When it was neither of these, it was because someone wanted to get on or off. Somewhere around Kokkinos Mylos, my eyes closed and I dozed off. The voices around me merged into a low droning sound and I dreamt I was still in my sick bed, in the hospital, all wired up and wearing an oxygen mask. I opened my eyes and saw Adriani leaning over me. ‘What was I thinking of when I married you,’ she said in an angry tone. ‘I’ve known nothing but worry and disappointment since I’ve been with you! If you were a big shot I could understand it. But you’re a copper. Some jackpot!’
I was woken by the jerk of the bus stopping suddenly and I had no idea where I was. ‘Are we there?’ I asked the man beside me, as if he knew where I was going.
‘Next stop is the terminus,’ he replied. I breathed a sigh of relief.
I didn’t know where the Olympic Village was exactly and I decided to take a taxi so as not to end up searching all over the place.
‘Where to?’ said the driver as I got in beside him.
‘The Olympic Village.’
He braked suddenly before we’d even set off and opened the door for me.
‘Not on your life,’ he said. ‘I’ve just come from there and I was lucky to get the car out in one piece with all the rubble and potholes. Find another taxi, I’ve been through that no-man’s-land once t
oday.’
Eventually, the third one that passed left me at the border between the Olympic Village and the rest of the world. From close up, the picture was far less inviting than that in the brochure published by the Workers Residence Organisation, that encouraged us to put our names down for one of the flats that would house ten thousand Athenians after the Olympic Games. When Adriani had seen it, she had taken a shine to the idea, but I quashed it there and then. Firstly, because I wouldn’t have been able to stand the daily nightmare of commuting between Thrakomakedones and Ambelokipi and, secondly, because the Greek public sector had far more than ten thousand political favours to repay and consequently we would be left looking on. With hindsight, I understood the taxi driver’s reluctance. From close up, more than half the places seemed in an embryonic state and the roads were non-existent. Everywhere there were mounds of rubble, excavations and potholes.
I asked a truck driver where the building site of the Domitis Construction Company was. He pointed to some tricolour houses about a hundred yards away. Their corners were ochre, their walls pink and their balconies light blue.
The site’s offices were in a caravan behind the houses. I entered without knocking and saw two men: a young man of around thirty, who was sitting at one of the two desks, and another, around forty-five, standing up. They were talking heatedly and paid no attention to me. They evidently took me for a supplier come to sell them prefabricated concrete or bricks and so left me waiting.
‘Don’t load it on me,’ said the elder one heatedly. ‘I’m not the one who chooses the workers. That’s your job. I work with whoever you give me.’
‘Can’t you steal a couple of days for zone three?’ asked the other in a conciliatory tone.
The elder one shot me a glance that was full of contempt. ‘If I steal a couple of days, it will hold up the laying of the sewer system. They bring you straight from university to the site and you think it’s like you were taught in the classroom.’
Che Committed Suicide kj-3 Page 7
