"I went to flush it, but the button won't budge," Sotiris said.
"And what would you have me do, call a plumber?"
"Go on, you try," he insisted.
I was ready to give him hell, but something in his expression made me pause. I pressed the button, and it wouldn't budge. Something was stopping it. I tried again, using more force this time, but nothing happened.
"The mechanism has jammed."
Without answering, Sotiris removed the top of the cistern and put his hand inside. First he pulled out a big stone, then dipped his hand inside again. This time, his hand came out with a cellophane packet, in which were wrapped five-thousand-drachma notes. I stood there, staring at the notes with my mouth wide open.
"I told you we'd find money, but you didn't believe me." He was trying to put one over on me, and he made no effort to conceal his smugness.
"You didn't find anything because you didn't look properly. When I said you wouldn't find any money, I meant in the mattress, not in the whole house. If you'd been a bit more methodical, we'd have found it the first time."
The smile faded from his lips, and his exhilaration melted like a lollipop. Serves him right. He tried to make it seem like my fault, and now I'd shouldered him with the omission, whereas normally I'd have given him credit for finding it. He had to learn that mistakes are always the fault of subordinates. Superiors never make mistakes.
"Count it!"
He went on counting and counting. "Five hundred thousand."
Speechless, I gazed at the heap of notes and remembered the report I'd written. I tried to recall a point in it where I could fit this new evidence, albeit at the last minute, without Ghikas finding out and screaming that we hadn't done our job properly.
CHAPTER 6
The families on Karadimas Street were condemned to live both together and alone. Because the street itself was no more than three meters wide and the houses were arranged on either side of it. Whoever sat at the window saw into the opposite house, talked into the opposite house, lived in the opposite house, whether wanting to or not. The houses were arranged without rhyme or reason: Three houses were stuck close together, then there was an empty lot, then a house with a tiny garden beside two other houses stuck together like Siamese twins. On one side of the street was a haberdasher's and on the other a grocer's. Most of the houses were single story and only occasionally was there a two-story one. Some of the roofs had TV antennas, others had iron uprights sticking out of the concrete; some straight and others now bent, but anyway signs of hope that one day there would be a second floor added. For the time being, the hope had been abandoned, and many of the houses were so narrow that you didn't need a tape measure to calculate their width; you could do it with your arms. The poorest houses had nice wooden doors, painted blue, red, and green. The more imposing ones had wroughtiron doors with patterns recalling fossilized flowers or branches from a burnt forest.
The house where the Albanian couple lived was at the end of the street, next to an abandoned timber warehouse. Whereas almost all the houses looked into each other, no one could see into the Albanians' house. I stood outside with Sotiris, facing the empty lot across the way, and I cursed my bad luck. Back to the beginning with the questioning, the door-to-door inquiries, one person telling you one thing, another something different, and all you're left with is a headful of nothing, as my father used to say.
"You take one side, and I'll take the other," I said to Sotiris. He understood and headed toward the haberdasher's. I made for the grocers.
The grocer had a slab of Gruyere on his counter, and he was slicing it down the middle. He trimmed the edges, nibbling the bits. He looked up and remembered me immediately.
"About the Albanians again?" he said, as he placed half the slab of cheese inside the fridge.
"Do you know whether they lived here all the time? I was told that they came here for a while and then left" My mind was more on what the chubby woman had told me than on the five hundred thousand.
"All I know is that the woman came here twice to shop. The first time she bought a packet of spaghetti and a tub of margarine, the second time a packet of beans."
"That's some memory," I told him, mainly to flatter him so that he'd come out with more.
"Not memory, slack business. People here buy so little that you remember it like the national anthem."
"Presumably, if they lived here all the time, they'd shop more often"
"Pardon me for saying so, but you know nothing. They can get by for ten days on a packet of beans."
"Did you happen to see anyone strange going in and out of the house?"
"Strange?"
"Anyone not from around here."
He'd begun to grow impatient, I could see it in his look. "Listen, Inspector," he said, "far be it from me to tell you your job, but why all this fuss about two Albanians? You've got the one who murdered them, what more do you want? After all, with two fewer Albanians and another one in prison, Greece is a better place."
"If I'm asking, it means that I have my reasons. Do you think I'm doing it for fun?" I turned and was heading for the door when behind me I heard him say, "One evening, must be a month ago now, I saw a truck parked outside their door."
I stopped dead. "What kind of truck?"
"One of those hard-top ones. You know, what are they called? Vans ... but it was dark, and I can't tell you what make it was"
He said all this as he was arranging things in the fridge. Arranging not a lot, given that it was as empty as a bachelor pad. A whole salami, a cut of ham, half a slab of Gruyere, and some round boxes of Ayeladitsa cream cheese. And on the wall, where a bachelor would have stacked his books, he'd stacked dozens of jars of mixed pickles.
"Not that it's of any importance, it might just be a coincidence," he went on, "but I told you anyway because I don't like people leaving my shop with empty hands."
"Do you eat so many pickles around here?"
"No, I got them at cost price. But no one buys them."
"So why bother with them if no one wants them?"
"If I didn't make that kind of mistake, I wouldn't be a grocer in Rendi, I'd have my own supermarket," he said, leaving me with nothing to say.
The last house on the right side of the street, the one at an angle to the Albanians' house, had a green door and a square window, a small one, only just big enough for a head to poke through and gaze up and down the street. But on the inside, it was covered with white linen curtains, embroidered with tiny bonbons. They were parted in the middle to form two curves and tied back at the bottom.
"Can I offer you some of my orange preserves?" said the old woman. She was about eighty, short and bony. She dragged her feet as she walked, as if her skin were stuck to her bones and her feet to the floor. She was wearing a dressing gown with clovers embroidered on it, and her face was wizened, like crumpled paper that you open out again, because you've noted something on it.
"No, thank you. I won't be staying long," I said, to keep it short.
"Do try a spoonful. It's homemade," the old women insisted. I humored her, though I hate preserves, and I swilled it down with water so it wouldn't stick in my throat and also to wash the taste from my mouth.
"My daughter sends it to me from Kalamata. Bless her. And she sends me oil and olives, too, every year. Last New Year's, she bought me a television."
And she pointed to a seventeen-inch television on a small table. There was a cloth covering on the table, also white, but embroidered with little flowers. Whenever I see embroidery like that, I think of my mother, who never left any surface in the house uncovered and was always warning my father and me not to dirty them. He with his cigarette ash, me with my dirty hands.
"But she doesn't want me living with her," the old woman said, a note of grievance in her voice. "Not her, that is, but her husband. He won't hear of it; doesn't want his mother-in-law getting under his feet. When you're a young woman, it's your mother-in-law who doesn't want you; when you're
old, it's your son-in-law. The best age is between forty and fifty. It's the age when they want you, but you don't want them."
"The Albanians, can you tell me anything about them, Dimitra?" I hastened to cut her off before she began on her second cousins.
"What can I say, Inspector? Quiet people, without a hope in the world. Though the way things are today, it's only the frightened ones we call quiet."
"And which were they, quiet or frightened?"
She looked at me and smiled. As her mouth twitched, all her wrinkles concentrated in her cheeks like pine needles. "What would you say about me?" she asked me. "Quiet or frightened?"
"Quiet."
"That's how I might seem, but I'm not." She sat in her chair and looked me in the eye. "You see the phone?" She pointed to the telephone beside the television. "They put it in for me last year. Till last year, I was all alone and without a phone. If I'd died, the neighbors would only have found out from the stench. By rights, what I should do is give my daughter a talking-to for living in the lap of luxury and leaving me in this hovel. I don't mean that she should have me live with her, since she can't, but they sent my granddaughter to university here in Athens and bought her a two-room flat in Pangrati. Would it have killed them to buy a bigger one so I could have moved in with her? I should tell my daughter all that to her face, but I cross myself and keep quiet. And do you know why? Because I'm afraid of angering her in case she stops sending the oil, the olives, and the eighty thousand she sends me-every month she says, but it's more like every two. You see me quiet because I'm afraid. But inside, I'm fuming."
"Are you saying that they seemed quiet, but that they might have been afraid?"
"I don't know. You saw them coming and going, and it made you wonder."
"Why did it make you wonder?"
"Because they'd leave as if someone was after them, and they'd come back like thieves in the night. It was always late at night. You'd wake up in the morning and they'd be here. One evening, I'd switched off the television, and I was sitting at the window. Me, I sit in front of the television from three in the afternoon, and I watch everything. It's only when they start with politics and love stories that I get bored and switch it off. When it's politics, because I don't understand a word they're saying. And when it's love stories, all the lies get on my nerves. I watch them pining, suffering, arguing, and when I grow tired of swearing at them, I switch it off. I lived forty years with my husband. We argued about food, about money, about our daughter, but never about love. You don't think that my daughter married this fellow in Kalamata out of love, do you? She wanted a good life for herself, and he wanted to get her into bed. But the little vixen wouldn't even let him hold her hand. He wouldn't give up, and so, to get her into bed in the end, he married her."
"And what's that got to do with the Albanians?"
"Don't be in so much of a hurry," she said. "Everything is connected, because if that love story hadn't been on that night, I wouldn't have been sitting at the window and I wouldn't have seen them coming in that limousine."
"What limo?" I said, remembering what the grocer had told me about the van parked outside.
"I call it a limousine because I don't know a thing about cars. Any how, it was a huge car with a hard top, must have held a good ten people. He got out with the girl. They hurried into the house, and the vehicle drove straight off. Before long, the light from the gas burner was on-they didn't have electricity. It all took less than a minute or so. They didn't have any bags with them or anything. The girl had a bundle with her, that was all." She looked at me, and her smile once again produced the pine needles on her cheeks.
I thought about the dried shit in the lavatory and the five hundred thousand in the cistern, the food in the diaper box, and the van that brought them there in the night. And if that wasn't enough, there was the Albanian murderer, about to be sent for the official hearing. How was anyone to find the thread that linked all this nonsense together?
I left the old woman's house and cursed those young policemen who make such a mess of things by trying to wrap it all up with a few quick questions. If, when we'd carried out our first investigations, someone had been patient enough to sit down with this old woman and listen to her grievances, we'd have known all this before we'd even taken the corpses to the mortuary. You could say about us, it seems, what homosexuals say about their own kind: It's one thing to be gay and another to be a pansy. Similarly, it's one thing to wear the uniform and another thing to be a policeman.
CHAPTER 7
"Out with it, you louse-ridden bum, or I'll make mincemeat of you and send you back to Korytsa so your own kind can have something to eat!" The Albanian was shaking because exactly what he had most feared had happened to him. He'd confessed to find a bit of peace, and now we were turning the screws.
"Where did those good-for-nothings get hold of the five hundred thousand? Out with it!"
"I not know ... not know anything," he said, looking up fearfully at Thanassis, who was standing over him.
Thanassis grabbed him by the anorak and lifted him off his feet. The Albanian's legs dangled in the air. Thanassis swung around and pinned him against the wall. He held him there, a good foot off the floor.
"Be very careful what you say, because you'll blow it, you bastard!" he screamed, his face so close to the Albanian's that you didn't know whether he might kiss him or bite him. "You won't get out of here alive!"
One second he was holding him tight, and the next he let go of him. For an instant the Albanian remained in the air, but as soon as his feet touched the ground, he collapsed in a heap, quivering with fear.
"Get up!" Thanassis barked at him, just as he'd barely touched the floor. The Albanian flattened himself against the wall, of his own free will this time, and began crawling up it like a caterpillar. He managed to pull himself upright, and the climbing stopped. Thanassis immediately took hold of him again and sat him down in the chair.
"Out with it! Now!" he shouted. "Out with it!"
"I not know anything," the Albanian insisted. "I go for Pakize."
He kept a terrified watch on Thanassis, ignoring me. I'd done right to bring Thanassis with me. And I was wrong to have stopped him in the morning when he'd started getting rough with the Albanian. I should have let him get on with it. We might have learned the truth there and then, and I wouldn't have had to send a halfbaked report to Ghikas.
"What dealings did you have with Pakize's husband?" Now I was the one to get rough. "Thefts? Drugs? You quarreled over sharing the loot and you murdered him! But you didn't find the money because he'd hidden it in too safe a place!"
He latched on to what I'd just said and looked at me meaningfully. "Mehmet, husband Pakize, maybe robbery, maybe drugs," he said, "I, no. I work building, work Rendi, vegetable market. I not know Mehmet. Know Pakize only."
"You mean to tell me you were creeping around outside their house all those days and you didn't ever see them coming home in a van?"
Thanassis looked at me in astonishment. I hadn't told him that detail. He was hearing it for the first time.
"A neighbor saw a van or a very big car dropping them off outside their front door. Late one evening, in secret," I explained and turned back to the Albanian. "Who was it who brought them in the van? What's his name? Where is he? Tell us!"
"When I go, Pakize home," he said shaking. "I no see van." Then he had an idea and rapidly said: "Pakize clean houses, take care kids. Maybe boss take her in van."
Thanassis grabbed him by his collar. "You're asking for it," he threatened. "You've given us nothing, and you're going to pay for this."
"No, no!" the Albanian cried out in alarm. "I kill Pakize and husband. But not know anything."
Thanassis let him fall back into the chair. If we went on like that all night, we'd still get nothing out of him, I thought to myself, starting to tire of it. He'd confessed that he'd killed them; that was clearcut. That didn't necessarily mean that he knew about the five hundred thousand and the
van. The most probable scenario was that we were dealing with a crime of passion, and that it was only by accident that we'd come up with something else, without the two things being linked. After all, we'd found the five hundred thousand, but we'd found no drugs or stolen goods or guns. They must have had some other hideaway. All that about trips to Yannina and Albania was bullshit. But how was anyone to discover what other dirty business was behind all this? Besides, it didn't concern us. Given that they were both dead, all proceedings would come to a halt.
"He's telling the truth. He knows nothing," I heard Thanassis say as he stood beside me in the lift, as if wanting to confirm my thoughts. So Thanassis, this self-confessed moron, agreed with me, and I took refuge behind that simple statement and felt relieved. The only thing still bothering me was that I had yet to alter my report.
I left Thanassis on the third floor, and I went up to the fifth. I stood and stared at the plaque: NIKOLAOS GHIKAS-CHIEF OF SECURITY. I read it maybe ten times while trying to think of some excuse for getting my report back without arousing suspicion. In the end, I put on a big smile and opened the door.
"Hello, Koula," I said cheerfully. The mannequin in uniform was sitting at her desk. She furtively bundled the mirror and tweezers she was using to pluck her eyebrows into a drawer.
"Hello, Inspector Haritos!" She had forgotten her usually cold look and was being nice because I'd caught her red-handed. "You can't go in, I'm afraid. He's busy," she said in an apologetic tone.
"Again? Ah, poor Koula, I'm amazed at how you manage with so much coming and going in here."
"You can't imagine, I don't have time to draw breath."
I was about to tell her that I could see that, that she didn't even have time to pluck her eyebrows, but instead I said: "I don't know what he'd do without you. And not only him, but us too. Everything goes through your hands."
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