Royal Ghouls

by Alex A King

  I was four bites into the sandwich. It wasn’t bad but it was dinner.

  “The Triantafillou brothers? Yiorgos and Dimitri?” Kyrios Harry asked.

  Chewing, I nodded.

  He snorted. “Those two malakes. They wanted to buy my company for donkey archidia, and now they are giving my bread away.”

  Huh. Interesting. The brothers wanted to buy it for balls, which apparently weren’t worth much. The way men usually acted you’d think they were gold. “They wanted to buy Royal Pain?”

  “For nothing. For skata.”

  “When?”

  “Last month they made an offer. I told them to gamisou.”

  My gaze slid sideways. Toula’s kids hadn’t noticed his suggestion that the Triantafillou brothers go screw themselves.

  “How did they take it?”

  “They said they were going to destroy Royal Pain.”

  The Triantafillou brothers were greedy and they had managed to downgrade thrift from a virtue to a sin, but I’d never heard a whisper of a vindictive streak running through the Triantafillou family. They seemed content to be kings of all the groceries they surveyed.

  “But you made a deal for them to sell your bread here, yes?”

  “No. There was no deal. Not yet. I do not understand how they are selling my bread when there is no deal.”

  I stopped chewing. “When they said they were going to destroy Royal Pain, was that a joking thing between men? A friendly threat?”

  “Yiorgos and Dimitri Triantafillou have not been my friends for many years.”

  Neurons fired in my head. “Would you say … twenty years?” I said, mouth full of sandwich. My mother’s voice told me not to talk with my mouth full. Good thing my mother was on a ship, thousands of kilometers from here.

  “About that long, sure.”

  “What happened?”

  “We fought.”

  “Over Maria?”

  “Maria, yes. The Triantafillous expected me to control my employee.”

  “Why?”

  “Like I told you earlier, she did not like the way they treated their employees. She was vocal about it. And I did not like the way they expected me to discipline her for having thoughts and principles—principles I share. I know what people say about me, but they never say I am cheap. I always pay those who work for me a fair wage. She ran away and disappeared before I could tell her that I agreed with her.”

  “No.” A searing knife cut across my stomach. “She didn’t run away.”

  Then I vomited on the floor.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Leo didn’t pick up. His phone went to voicemail. Between retches, I left him a message. Merope wasn’t exactly the crime capital of the world. Most nights the police went home to their beds, relatively sure they could get a full night’s sleep. Leo had told me he was going to bed, so I staggered into the hallway, gripping the leftover loaf of Royal Pain bread and three and half sandwiches.

  Jimmy Kontos was sitting on the steps. His hair and beard were speckled with bits of greenery. Someone had been hiding in the bushes again.

  “She went out. Again. She goes out a lot.”

  Like I cared about Lydia and her whereabouts right now. Too busy dying.

  “Is Leo home?”

  “Why? You looking to get some?” He got up and squinted at me. “Hey, you don’t look so good.”

  The hallway tilted, or maybe it was me. “Leo? Where is he?”

  “He went to the store.”

  “Which store?”

  He shrugged. “One of them. Why?”

  “Which one?”

  “The More Super Market. He went to get Merenda because I ate the last of it. You people know there’s nothing Super or More Super about that place, yes?”

  I slapped my phone into his hand. “My sister’s kids are inside my apartment. Call Toula to come and get them. She’s in my Contacts. Can you do that?”

  “Is that the same Toula who used to give Leo—”

  “Don’t you dare finish that sentence. Just call her.”

  “Sure. Okay. You really don’t look good.”

  “I’m allergic to dwarves,” I told him.

  I stumbled down the stairs. A haze clouded my vision. Things weren’t looking good or clear. My future shrunk to the approximate length of a banana. I threw my leg over my bicycle, missed, tried easing it over, and set off for the More Super Market.

  Late. No traffic. Not this time of year. No one saw me when I stopped to throw up in a gutter. There was nothing left inside me except—for some inexplicable reason—carrots. That didn’t stop the pain grinding lower. Back on the bicycle, I wobbled toward the store, hoping to find Leo.

  At the More Super Market, the three-wheeler was still parked outside. So was Leo’s car. My bicycle fell against the wall. I staggered to the glass door and grabbed the handle.

  Locked.

  My fists were weak hammers. Really, they were rubber whack-a-mole mallets. Soft and ultimately useless. Why had I eaten that stupid bread? The Triantafillou brothers didn’t do philanthropy. I should have realized they would never give away something without expecting something.

  The something they were expecting was my death.

  But why? I was nobody.

  On the other side of the door, a shadow moved. It aimed a rictus grin at me. The door opened.

  “Kaloste,” Yiorgos Triantafillou said. “My brother and I were having a party with a friend of yours. He came looking for Merenda and so we offered him a free meal.”

  Sure enough, Leo was sitting behind the counter with Kyrios Dimitri. The counter was covered with food. Cheese. Meats. An open jar of Merenda. A stack of Royal Pain slices. Leo was eating his way through the pile. The succubi were there, watching him fork feta into his mouth. No bleeding. No choking. They were sighing happily and enjoying the view.

  “Allie?” Leo said. “What are you doing?”

  “Stop,” I said. The word sounded smudged. “The bread.”

  Leo’s features blurred. Was he frowning?

  I sagged against the counter. “The bread is poisoned. The bread is poisoned and they know it. They killed Harry Vasilikos and the Marias, and they killed Maria Petsini. Virgin Mary, I’m starting to think all the old people on this island are murderers.” Nausea squeezed my stomach. I dry-heaved.

  “Who is Maria Petsini?” Leo asked. He looked taller now. Was he standing? Something was in his hand. I couldn’t make it out. Phone. Maybe gun.

  Yiorgos Triantafillou held his hands out, palms up. “They were accidents.”

  I wiped my sleeve across my mouth. “Accidents?”

  “We never meant for anyone to die. They were just supposed to get sick and ruin Royal Pain when the news got out that people were getting sick from the bread. He refused to sell the company to us, and we really wanted that company. The bread is made so cheaply that it is a money-making machine.”

  “But they did die,” I said.

  “We never thought Harry would serve his own bread on his yacht, or eat it himself. Royal Pain bread is skata.”

  “It is skata,” Kyrios Dimitri said.

  “But you were here on Merope all this time,” I said. “How did you poison the bread?

  “There are always people willing to do a thing for money, even when that thing is crime,” Kyrios Yiorgos said.

  “They do ask for more money when it is a crime,” his brother said.

  Kyrios Yiorgos made a constipated face. “Too much money. Ten, twenty years ago, we could have saved ourselves the money and poisoned the bread ourselves. Now, we are too old. Who has the energy for crimes?”

  Their faces were fuzzy now. “What about Maria Petsini?” I prompted them.

  The Triantafillou brothers were on the move. Leo was herding them, arm outstretched. Gun. Not his phone. Kyrios Yiorgos opened a bag of bread. He offered it to his brother, then took a slice for himself.

  “Another accident,” Kyrios Yiorgos said. He stuffed the bread into his mouth and
reached for more.

  I braced my back against the counter. Leo had them pinned against the shelves of bread. “Twenty years ago, you pushed her off the cliff,” I said. “How is that an accident?”

  “She made us angry and we pushed her,” Kyrios Yiorgos said.

  “Angry?”

  “She interfered in our business, and we do not like people interfering in our business.”

  What motivated the Triantafillou brothers to do anything? Money. “Maria Petsini cost you money somehow?”

  “That malakas Harry Vasilikos brought her to Merope on his yacht. She worked for him, did you know? But he was in love with her, so he let her open her mouth and talk. Talk, talk, talk. All that woman did was talk.”

  “To our employees,” Kyrios Dimitri said.

  A picture was starting to form. A blurry picture. At the same time, I was starting to fade. I glanced sideways at Leo; he’d eaten the bread, too. We were going to die together. Every bit as unromantic as those two nitwits, Romeo and Juliet.

  “She used a word we did not like,” Kyrios Yiorgos said. “Union.”

  His brother nodded. “That woman said we were not paying our employees what was fair. She said we did not give them proper vacation time and decent hours. We told her this is Greece, where people enjoy working hard because they have families to provide for. She said nobody could provide for a family on what we paid.”

  “And Harry encouraged her. He liked that she spoke her mind. Who likes a woman who speaks her mind? Nobody, that is who. And a woman who was only his employee? Po-po …”

  Welcome to Greece, where it was often still 1840.

  “Harry was in love with the woman but she was not in love with him,” Kyrios Yiorgos said. “She was more interested in things like work and money and saving—for what, she never did say and we did not care. One night we asked her to meet us so we could discuss this union idea. When she arrived, we drove her up the hill.”

  “Where you pushed her,” I said.

  “Only a little nudge,” Kyrios Yiorgos said.

  Kyrios Dimitri nodded. “The falling part was her own fault.”

  The brothers were frugal, even when it came to murder. “How did you explain her disappearance to Harry Vasilikos?”

  They looked at each other. “Explain it? We did not explain anything. Merope did everything for us. Gossip, rumors, all the talk made Maria Petsini disappear—poof! like magic. One person saw her boarding the ferry to Mykonos, another saw her sailing to the mainland. Some swore she sailed into the sunset with a rich man who was not Harry Vasilikos.”

  “Merope takes care of its own,” Dimitri Triantafillou said. He ate another slice of Royal Pain’s bread-shaped maxi-pad.

  “We call that murder,” Leo said. “You’re both going to prison.”

  The brothers were aghast. “But we already told you, we only nudged her.”

  “The bread,” I muttered. Speech was harder now.

  “We already told you, someone else poisoned the bread,” Kyrios Yiorgos said. “How can we go to prison for murders we did not do?”

  “If you didn’t poison the bread on the yacht, who did?” Leo asked.

  Oh, oh, oh. Even my fog addled brain knew this one. “Eva Vasiliko.”

  Leo’s features smudged more. “Why?”

  “Because Johnny Margas told her to,” I said. “Their hired hand was Yiannis Margas.”

  “Johnny, Harry, we are all the same shit,” Dimitri Triantafillou said. “And Johnny was worse than most. He would do anything for a drachma.”

  We had euros now, but I didn’t correct him. I couldn’t. The Royal Pain bread was cutting my insides to ribbons.

  “Why did he do it?” Leo asked. Was it me or was he more pale now?

  “I know this one, too.” Pain slashed my midsection. I doubled over, arms around my middle, and looked up at Leo, who now had two faces Picasso would be proud of. “Two reasons. Johnny planned to get rid of his wife and hitch his donkey to Angela Zouboulaki. She owns Royal Pain’s closest competition, although she didn’t know until this week. With his wife dead and Angela in his bed, he would have his greasy fingers in two major bread companies. Lucky for Angela she discovered Johnny lied about his age … by twenty years. And Johnny was looking for an excuse to stick it to Harry Vasilikos. Years ago, Harry Vasilikos offered him a job Johnny thought was beneath him. I guess he’s been carrying a grudge all this time.”

  The Triantafillou brothers were stuffing bread into their mouths faster now.

  “Stop them,” I said. “I’m going to be seriously annoyed if they die before they do prison time.”

  Leo groaned, long and pained. Fell to his knees. From there it was a short tumble, so his face wouldn’t be too banged up if he survived—if. Somebody was crying. My face was wet so it was definitely me.

  The succubi crouched beside him. “Dying,” Bleeder said.

  “Definitely dying,” Choker agreed. “We have seen it before. We will see it again.”

  “And again.”

  “Don’t you dare die on me.” I fell on my knees beside him. “I can’t do this. Not again.” My fingers found his phone and Constable Pappas’s number.

  “Send everyone you’ve got to the More Super Market.” The phone clanked on the floor. I didn’t have it in me to end the call.

  There was a loud, ripping BOOM like a small bomb exploding. The stink of sewage filled the shop.

  Yiorgos Triantafillou groaned. “I think I kaka’d in my sovraka.”

  Not me and not my underwear. Thank the Virgin Mary.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Triantafillou brothers were good at murder but they sucked at suicide. Their poisoned bread had killed a boatload of people. Stuffing themselves with the same bread gave them the intestinal equivalent of norovirus, E. coli, and salmonella, all rolled up into one explosive nightmare.

  I wasn’t there to see or smell it. Nor was I there when the police from Thessaly marched in and took custody of the brothers. They wound up in a cell with Johnny Margas, who discovered slicing twenty years off his age in prison wasn’t a stellar idea.

  Everyone else was still dead, including Kyria Hondrou’s chickens. Apparently the Triantafillou brothers had needed test subjects, so they loaded up their three-wheeler and delivered a pile of bread to the Hondrou farm. Like most people, Kyria Hondrou got giddy over free stuff. End result: dead chickens.

  Leo and I almost joined the dead.

  Almost.

  What saved us was eating in moderation. Who knew nutritionists and doctors were right? Eating in moderation won us a two-night, all expenses paid stay in Merope’s hospital. One room. Two beds.

  Sleeping was impossible. For me, anyway. Ghosts roamed the halls, night and day, complaining about hospital food.

  Toula came. She cried a lot at my bedside. More than once, I caught her staring at Leo across the room. Who could blame her? He was nice to look at. She lectured me about the dangers of eating processed food, which Royal Pain bread clearly was. Then she hugged my neck until I couldn’t breathe and made me promise to never die.

  When our two nights were up, Leo drove us home. We didn’t talk; there was too much to say.

  Harry Vasilikos and the Marias were waiting.

  “It’s over,” I told them. “Yiorgos and Dimitri Triantafillou had Johnny Margas poison the bread. He outsourced to his wife.” I looked at the Maria who had lost her mother. Too bad I couldn’t hug her. Her face said she was in dire need of one. “Yiorgos and Dimitri Triantafillou was responsible for your mother’s death. She died trying to be a decent human being.”

  She sat on my couch and cried.

  Hugging her was impossible, but I could give her closure.

  “Do you want to see her?”

  Maria jerked her head up. Kyrios Harry tensed. Hope radiated from their faces. “Is she here?” she asked.

  “Come with me.”

  I walked them to the top of Merope, where we watched Maria Petsini fall. Like always, she r
eappeared, face turned to the sea.

  Her daughter stepped forward. She seemed younger now than ever. “Mama?”

  Maria looked up from the white swirl, her expression curious. “I know you.”

  “It’s Maria, Mama. It’s time to go.”

  I looked at Kyrios Harry. “Are you going to speak to her?”

  He tilted his chin up-down. “No. I love her, but she never loved me.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Maria is dead but she is still in the world, and that makes today a good one.” He turned to me. “I made you a promise, eh?”

  “You did.” I bit back tears. “Tell me.”

  “Andreas spoke to me. He said to tell you he never would have left you if there was any other choice.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “He will be, when he knows you are at peace. Andreas works in the Afterlife’s waiting room now, helping the newly dead cope with their situation when they are struggling to understand what has happened. He helped me. At first, I did not want to believe I was dead.”

  My laugh was damp. “That sounds like Andreas. He was a therapist.”

  Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy lead to sudden cardiac death that night in the Super Super Market. He never knew—we never knew—that parts of his heart were thickening, conspiring against our future. His death came out of nowhere, without warning.

  “He never came to see me. Why?”

  “If you pick at a wound it never heals.” He touched my shoulder. It felt like the sea’s fog. “You were loved, and you will be loved again. Soon, I think.” Kyrios Harry closed his eyes. “How do I do this, how do I leave?”

  “You have to want to go.”

  There was a soft poof!, like the popping of a bubble, and Harry Vasilikos vanished. Maria Petsini and the Marias followed not long after. Finally, I was alone on the cliff, with the cold Aegean Sea in front of me and the village at my back. No ghosts. No nothing.

  Inner peace came and went. My niece and nephew popped into my head. Like me, they could see ghosts.

  I called Toula.

  “Why did you go to see Leo? Tell me the truth. I need to know.”

  She sighed. “I don’t want to talk about this.”