Che Committed Suicide

by Petros Markaris

  ‘Do you know whether Yannelis had any children?’

  ‘No idea.’ He paused and looked at me. ‘How much of all this can I use?’

  I didn’t take the wind out of his sails. On the contrary, I thought about what he’d said. What gain would there be for us if he were to come out with anything I’d discovered so far? For example, the connection with Thanos Yannelis and with his suicide? It might alert Logaras to the fact that I saw Yannelis’s suicide as the starting point for the case, forcing his hand, making him reveal something more or go on playing cat and mouse with me until he tripped up.

  ‘If you want, you can talk about the “Che” organisation and question the connection between Yannelis’s suicide and the recent suicides.’

  His face lit up. ‘At last, a start! I’m on my way!’ he called enthusiastically as he rushed out of my office.

  I didn’t share his enthusiasm, but I couldn’t rule out the possibility that something may come of the ruse. I called my three assistants in to find out whether there’d been any new developments in the investigation. The indirect scolding of the previous day had worked because Vlassopoulos and Dermitzakis had begun to acquire chivalrous habits. They opened the door for Koula and let her come in first. All three sat down in front of me and waited in expectation.

  ‘Do we have anything new?’

  ‘Nothing on the Che T-shirts yet.’ Vlassopoulos was the first to speak. ‘It’s crude work, but nevertheless. In a couple of days at most, we’ll know who’s manufacturing them.’

  I decided to leave Koula till last, because I’m something of a masochist and I wanted to prolong my agony, so I turned next to Dermitzakis.

  ‘Did you find out anything about the three names I gave you?’

  ‘Nothing about Stellios Dimou yet. Anestis Tellopoulos went abroad to study after the Junta and settled in Canada, where he’s a university lecturer. I got the information from his mother, who lives in Sparta. Vassos Zikas died two years ago.’

  ‘How?’

  They saw my alarm and stared at me in surprise. Koula was the only one not perplexed because she knew the reason behind it.

  ‘Of a heart attack, while at the wheel,’ Dermitzakis said.

  ‘Right. Make sure you find out about Dimou.’ I turned to look at Koula.

  She was holding a large desk diary, which she opened. ‘The name of Coralia Yannelis’s father is Athanassios. Her mother’s name is Vassiliki.’

  Could that, too, have been a coincidence? It was highly unlikely. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘She was born in 1955 in Bogotá, Columbia. Athanassios Yannelis lived in Columbia from 1953 to 1965 and then moved to La Paz in Bolivia. He returned home in 1967.’

  So that’s it, I thought to myself. There was no doubt that Coralia Yannelis was the daughter of Thanos Yannelis.

  ‘There’s a son, too,’ Koula added. ‘Kimon Yannelis was born in 1958, in Bogotá. He left Greece in 1978 and never came back. His whereabouts are unknown.’

  ‘And the mother?’

  ‘Vassiliki Yannelis, née Papayannidis, from Nigrita, Serres. Born in 1935 and died in 1970.’

  ‘Find out if there’s any biography of Thanos Yannelis or any other book about him.’ I turned to Vlassopoulos. ‘I want you to find me the manufacturer of the T-shirt, at all costs. And I want to know what happened to Stellios Dimou,’ I added, looking at Dermitzakis.

  When they had left, I phoned Ghikas to inform him that we had established beyond a shadow of a doubt that Coralia Yannelis was the daughter of Thanos Yannelis and that there was also a brother whose whereabouts were unknown.

  He asked me the classic question: ‘What do you propose to do?’ From the tone of his voice, however, I could tell that he was pleased.

  ‘First, I’ll talk to Coralia Yannelis, and take it from there.’

  He agreed. In less than ten minutes I was down in the Security Headquarters garage. I didn’t take Alexandras Avenue, but went along Alpheiou Street into Panormou Street and turned into Kifissias Avenue at the lights by the Red Cross building in order to avoid all the traffic. Fortunately, it was almost the start of July. The school exam period was over and the traffic was moving at an acceptable pace. It took me just fifteen minutes to reach Aigialeias Street and I parked outside number 54.

  49

  Coralia Yannelis made me wait. Her excuse was that I had come without an appointment and that she had to deal with a serious professional matter. I was over half an hour in reception, like a patient waiting to see his GP or a voter waiting to see the MP for his constituency. I felt uneasy and I shared this feeling with Yannelis’s secretary, who didn’t much like having a copper hanging around her office. I could have left and called her down to Headquarters, but my kid-glove tactics had proved effective so far and I didn’t want to change them now that there was some light at the end of the tunnel.

  She received me after about an hour, but she didn’t ask me to sit down. ‘This business has got to come to and end, Inspector,’ she said in a cold and annoyed tone. ‘You’ve visited me on numerous occasions, you’ve asked me the most irrelevant questions about the companies in our group and without any authority whatsoever. I answered your questions because we’ve nothing to hide and because I’m a law-abiding citizen. Whichever you prefer. But I’ve no intention of going on with this game. Next time you want to question me, send an official request and I’ll come with my lawyer.’

  She finished protesting and waited for me to leave, but I didn’t move from the spot.

  ‘I haven’t come to talk about your companies,’ I said very calmly.

  ‘But?’

  ‘About your father, Thanos Yannelis.’

  I was banking from the beginning on the element of surprise and I wasn’t wrong. ‘Is this some new business?’ she asked, taken aback.

  ‘No. It’s old business, going back to the Junta and the resistance organisations of the time.’

  She considered whether it was worth abandoning her hardline approach, decided that it was and told me to take a seat.

  ‘During the period of the Junta, your father was a member of a resistance group known as the Che Independent Resistance Organisation.’

  I waited to see how she would react before proceeding. She looked at me and smiled calmly.

  ‘In 1967, I was twelve years old, Inspector. Do you imagine that my father would discuss resistance organisations with me?’

  ‘No, but he might have discussed them with you later, after the fall of the Junta.’

  ‘My father never talked about his activities. He did it to protect us. He used to say that no one knew how things would turn out and the family had to be protected.’ She had regained her composure and smiled calmly.

  ‘Favieros, Stefanakos and Vakirtzis belonged to the same organisation as your father.’

  ‘It’s the first time I’ve heard that.’ She appeared to be surprised, but she may have been playacting. You never knew with Coralia Yannelis.

  ‘So your father never spoke about the resistance. Didn’t you hear anything from Favieros either?’

  ‘Only once, when he was about to hire me. He told me that he had met my father during the period of the Junta.’

  ‘And didn’t you ask him where and how?’

  She shrugged. ‘No. So many people knew my father that there was no point in my asking every time. Perhaps his acquaintance with my father played some role in Jason’s decision to hire me. All of those in Jason’s close circle go back to the Junta and the student struggles. Not only Xenophon Zamanis, but also his private secretary, Theoni, and Zamanis’s secretary, and a whole group of others, mainly engineers and lawyers.’ She paused for a moment and then added: ‘All I remember from that time is the day the Military Police came to arrest my father.’

  ‘There’s another common element from the past: your father’s suicide.’ She said nothing. She nodded her head resignedly. ‘When did your father commit suicide?’

  ‘In the early nineties.’

 
; ‘And now the other members of the organisation are all committing suicide in turn.’

  She stared at me as though not believing what she had just heard. ‘What are you saying?’ she asked astonished. ‘That the suicides of Jason, Stefanakos and Vakirtzis have some connection with that of my father?’

  ‘I can’t prove it yet, but nor can I rule it out.’

  ‘More than ten years have passed between my father’s suicide and those of the other three.’

  ‘Yes, but there were at least ten members of the organisation. Apart from those who committed suicide, we’ve tracked down another two. The one died of natural causes and the other is living abroad. But we don’t know who the rest were. There may have been other suicides that we don’t know about.’

  She propped her head up on her hands and closed her eyes, as though she were trying to revive the images in her memory.

  ‘My father was a very unhappy man, Inspector.’

  She said it without emphasis, but categorically, as an indisputable fact. Then she opened her eyes and looked at me.

  ‘He lived his life in the movements and the illegal political organisations. That’s what he knew. He had close ties with Castro’s regime and he worshipped Che Guevara. We moved from Bogotá to La Paz just before Che started his guerrilla war in Bolivia. When my father was deported from Bolivia, we returned to Greece. Then came the Junta and he was back in his element, till the day they caught him.’ She paused again, trying to order her thoughts. ‘The period after the fall of the Junta was a disaster for him. From one day to the next, he found himself on the scrap heap. No one wanted him and he didn’t have any way to make a living. He made a trip to Cuba, but conditions had changed there, too. He returned, and from then on he began to waste away. When the communist regimes fell, he realised that it was the end and life no longer had any meaning for him.’

  She stopped to get her breath, as though the effort had exhausted her. What she had told me was totally logical. There was nothing irrational or outrageous about it. All that was required was to compare her father with Zissis. Despite his bitterness, and the anger that he vented every so often, Zissis had endured. Yannelis hadn’t and that was the only difference.

  ‘My father committed suicide quietly in his room and we found him three days later. He didn’t die in front of the cameras or in his villa or in Syntagma Square.’

  It was the first time that she had voiced anything resembling a reproach concerning Jason Favieros and the others. It was also the first time that she had lost both her smile and her composure. She had put it all in place and it all appeared totally convincing, but was it? What if there was something behind all this linking the recent suicides with Yannelis’s? And there were others in the group we didn’t yet know about and who might, therefore, be in danger? They might include ministers, government officials, scribes and Pharisees, whatever you could thing of. What could we do? Announce in the press and on TV that anyone who was once a member of the ‘Che’ organisation should contact the police?

  ‘What did your father live on?’

  ‘He had a small pension as a former member of the resistance. He didn’t have any other income.’

  ‘Didn’t you help him?’

  She was silent for a moment and then added, without hiding her sorrow: ‘My father was a proud man. He wouldn’t accept help from anyone.’

  ‘You have a brother, isn’t that so? Kimon Yannelis.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does he live in Greece?’

  ‘No. From what I know, he has a fishing business in South Africa.’ She saw that I was perplexed by her answer and added: ‘My brother and I never got on, Inspector. We’ve not had any contact for years now.’ Her smile reappeared, even though it was a little affected. ‘And because I’m sure you want to know about my mother, I can tell you that she died in 1970, shortly after our return to Greece, of acute meningitis.’

  At the end of my previous visit, she had given me her companies’ balance sheets. Now she was giving me the details of her mother’s death without my having asked. It was her way of saying: we’re done, on your way.

  ‘All in all, I think I prefer it when you ask me about our companies,’ she said as I reached the door. ‘What you asked me today was far more difficult for me.’

  It was difficult for me too, because I couldn’t get it out of my mind that her father’s suicide was the starting point for the other three.

  50

  I wasn’t superstitious, but there was definitely something strange about it. Whenever we formally invited Fanis round for a meal, I was always in a state. The last time, I had been suspended and the meal very nearly turned into a wake. Now, when his parents were coming to meet us, my mind was fixed on the suicides. So I was worried in case I got lost in my thoughts in the middle of their visit and they took it to mean that I was fed up and couldn’t wait for them to leave. That was what had happened during Fanis’s first visit and we were on the verge of a life-long misunderstanding till I confessed that I had been suspended and the situation was resolved. And, when you come to think about it, suspension was a life-long matter. But how was I going to convince anyone that the suicides of three sharks were as serious a matter. I couldn’t expect any support from anyone other than my daughter and Fanis. Adriani would be the first to crucify me.

  The said Adriani had spent her day between the supermarket, the butcher’s, the greengrocer’s and the stationer’s. She had been shut up in the kitchen all afternoon. At that particular moment, she had laid out in front of her about a dozen scooped-out tomatoes, rather like empty piggy banks, and half a dozen headless peppers that she was getting ready to fill. That was the first dish: stuffed vegetables in the traditional way. In other words, not à l’orphelin or without onions, as she had made for me during my convalescence so that I wouldn’t suffer from indigestion. The main course was a dish she made rarely, which is why she was anxious: veal à la jardinière. Veal loaf with vegetables, wrapped in greaseproof paper and baked in the oven. She had been running all over the previous afternoon trying to find greaseproof paper, which is hardly used any more as it brings back memories of a poor old Greece, and everyone had advised her to use tinfoil, which is just as good. In the end, she tried the stationer’s and found exactly what she wanted.

  Katerina was against all this. She thought that there was no reason for going to all this trouble and that we could just as well have invited Fanis’s parents round in the afternoon for tea and cakes. The conversation was over in less than five minutes with Adriani exercising her veto.

  ‘I was brought up differently, Katerina,’ she said. ‘In our house, the parents of the bride had to invite the parents of the groom for a meal.’

  ‘Mum, I’m not the bride and Fanis isn’t the groom. Can you get that into your head!’

  ‘Ask your father,’ Adriani went on, unperturbed. ‘Would his parents have been pleased if they’d gone round and the bride hadn’t cooked for them?’

  Katerina didn’t ask me. She preferred to swallow her anger and to go for a walk, but Adriani wouldn’t hear of it.

  ‘I think you could help me, Katerina, so I don’t have to do everything myself.’

  So, there were two hotplates next to each other in a kitchen no bigger than five by eight. Adriani was worried that everything wouldn’t be ready in time and was impatient with Katerina, who, it had to be said, wasn’t exactly a star in the kitchen. On the other hand, Katerina was ready to storm off and take Fanis’s parents out for ice cream, but she gritted her teeth and held back so as not to seem ungrateful to her mother.

  I decided to heed the popular proverb about too many cooks spoiling the broth and I went for a walk in Katerina’s place, out of fear of getting caught in the crossfire and of having to assume the role of mediator. Whereas, if the hostilities erupted in my absence, the two of them would hide it from me when I got back so as not to upset me.

  My first thought was to go to the little square of Aghiou Lazarou. I rejected this ide
a immediately, however, because on Saturday afternoon, the café would be full of people and the square full of kids. So I changed direction and headed towards the park and my familiar bench. At that time on Saturday in the summer, people would still be at the beach or sleeping or lazing somewhere with an iced coffee or an ice cream.

  It was as I expected, because only the cat was there waiting for me. It had come down from its usual place and was sprawled on the sunny side of the bench. It heard me approaching and half-opened its eyes. It saw who I was and closed them again, indifferent to me.

  The park was quiet, not a soul around, apart from me and the cat, so it was an ideal place for thinking, provided that you had some ideas. I didn’t. I was at the recycling stage, but the recycled product hadn’t appeared yet. I had managed with Logaras’s help – the word ‘lead’ was an affront to my ego – to arrive at the original suicide by Yannelis. I could understand his daughter’s objections and I could accept that there were real differences, which were not confined to the ‘public’ and ‘private’ nature of the suicides, but to something else: Yannelis wasn’t wealthy, nor was he involved in businesses in Greece and the Balkans. He lived on his meagre resistance pension. Perhaps his children had helped him financially, but given the image of the proud revolutionary that I had gleaned from Coralia Yannelis’s description of him, that was something I ruled out.

  I was aware of all these counter-arguments but my gut feeling told me that, nevertheless, there was some thread linking Yannelis’s suicide with that of the other three. What this was I didn’t know and there were only two ways I would find out: either Logaras would lead me to it step by step, as he had done so far, or I would have to uncover another member of the group who would tell me what it was. I didn’t imagine that they would cover my travelling expenses to visit Tellopoulos in Canada, nor was I crazy about the idea if the truth be told.

  The sun had moved and the cat woke up. It stretched, sat back on its hind legs and yawned magnificently. Then it turned its gaze to me and gave me a curt miaow. It was the first time after an acquaintance of several months that it had spoken to me directly and I wondered how I should react, but it wasn’t necessary. It noticed the sun, which was now on the edge of the bench, curled up in its rays and shut its eyes again.