Disorganized Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel (22 page)

My father was a great guy—I loved him more than anything in the world—but this was too much of a good thing. Dina's place was a shrine to his awesomeness. She even had a room dedicated entirely to Dad, including a crocheted doll with brown button eyes. It was sitting on her pillow.

"Look at this," Aunt Rita called out.

I wandered into the living room. The couches were plastic-covered. The pictures were iconic. Lots of gold, lots of saints with Dad's face. Draped across the coffee table was a rectangular tablecloth embroidered with his name. She'd bunched it up in the middle, holding it in place with vase so that a triangle of wood was visible. It looked neat and intentional.

My aunt sniffed. "Everybody does that here with tablecloths. I don't know why—I only know we do it. I do it, too."

I pointed out the embroidery. "I guess she was serious about Dad."

"He must have a magic penis."

Ugh. There are some things you just don't want to hear, you know? I trotted to the kitchen, opened the swinging door. Galley-shaped. Floors and counters clean enough to eat off. On the counter was a tray of tulle wedding favors.

I gagged. My hand shot up to cover my nose. I backed up—fast—smashing into Aunt Rita.

"My Virgin Mary, what is that?"

Crap, and lots of it. And it said something about my aunt—I wasn't sure I wanted to know what—that she wrinkled her nose and made a disgusted face instead of shielding her nose.

"Dina made special
bonbonieres
," I said.

"Jesus. Who does that?"

"Dina, apparently."

"That woman's got big problems in her head. Speaking of Dina, she's not here—dead or alive. Come on. Let's sit outside and wait for her. If her house wasn't filled with
kaka
we could hide in the shadows and scare her when she comes home."

We traipsed back outside to the barren yard. Before we had a chance to get comfortable, a face came at us over the fence. The old man had Dumbo's ears, a nose that could open cans, and eye whites the color of lemons. Looked like his liver had retired to one of the islands without forwarding the address to the rest of him.

"You looking for Dina?" he asked.

"Maybe," Aunt Rita said. "Have you seen her?"

"Earlier she was here."

"When was that?" I asked.

"Before she went out."

My aunt leaned over, muttered, "This is like pulling toenails, but with less screaming."

I shuddered. "When did she go?"

He took his sweet time deciding on an answer. "Before you came. What do you want with her?"

"She won something," I said.

"What did she win?"

Think fast, Kat. "A year's supply of bread."

He pondered that for a moment. "That's a good thing to win."

Didn't I know it? Greek bread was amazing. Hot, fresh, none of those preservatives nobody can pronounce. "It is pretty good," I admitted.

He sucked air through his teeth. "What happens if she doesn't claim her prize?"

"Why wouldn't she? Who wouldn't want a year of bread?"

"Somebody on a low-carb diet," my aunt said. She had a point.

"I could use a year of bread," the neighbor said. "The pension isn't what it used to be."

"Non-transferable," Aunt Rita said.

He scratched behind his ear, creating a blizzard of dry, dead skin. "Could be she's be dead."

We both looked at him.

"How do you figure?" I asked.

The old man shrugged. "That's what happens on the TV. People come around, wanting to give somebody a prize, but then it turns out that person is dead or kidnapped."

"Did Dina look dead or kidnapped?"

"No. She looked angry. But that's how she always looks."

Aunt Rita nodded. "That's Dina all right. Anything else you can tell us?"

"She sings a lot," he went on. "Always Jenny Vanou songs."

I looked at my aunt. I wasn't up-to-date on Greek singers.

She clued me in. "Sad, dramatic songs."

"Like torch songs?"

She nodded. "But without the fire."

"Sometimes there was fire," the neighbor said. "She was always burning effigies. But she was a good neighbor. She never stole firewood and she kept the
tsiganes
away."

Tsiganes
.
Yiftes
. Gypsies. Roma. Romanies. Greece had a Roma problem. Or—depending on who you asked—the Roma had a Greek problem. For years, the government had been trying to integrate the two people, but both parties had long memories and the ability to pass on a grudge through their DNA. Greeks remembered when Romanies used to come knocking on their front doors, begging for money, and the Romanies remembered when the Greeks gave them rude hand signals and threatened to beat them with brooms. Nothing short of a memory wipe was going to smoosh them into one happy patty anytime soon.

"How did she do that?" I asked.

"By being creepier than they are," he said.

Romanies didn't strike me as creepy, but what did I know? I was one small step up from a tourist. I thought their color-clashing outfits were daring and fashion-forward.

We waited around a long time, sitting in Rita's chairs. Okay, so once or twice I went back inside to use the bathroom, where there were, thankfully, no monuments to Dad's greatness. It's possible that a couple of Dad's pictures ended up in my pocket. I'd send them back after I had them copied.

Neighbors walked back and forth, going about their business and everyone else's. Some of them stopped and stared. Others were more discreet about it: they did their staring while they walked.

I wondered if Takis and Stavros were enjoying themselves. They'd parked at the end of the street, several cars away from the Peptomobile. If this was their idea of discretion, they sucked at their jobs.

Aunt Rita and I eventually abandoned our posts. Dina wasn't high priority. She was more like an annoyance, a fly my aunt wanted to zap. On the way back to the safe house we stopped to grab pizza, Greek-style. Which meant it had an oilier crust, more sauce, and less cheese than pizza back home. The cheese was a mix of a mozzarella and cheddar.

"Mama knows you're in Greece." Aunt Rita grabbed the pizza and we trotted back to her car. "So do you want to ditch the safe house and come back to the compound?"

"So she can drug me again? Forget it."

"She won't drug you again."

I gave her a look and she shrugged. "Could be she'll put you in the dungeon."

My cousins followed us to the not-so-safe house. We knew they were there, and they knew we knew. With that much knowledge whizzing around, they abandoned all pretense and took up tailgating.

When we arrived at the safe house, Aunt Rita and I sat on the car's pink hood, inhaling pizza, while Stavros and Takis cast sad puppy eyes in our direction.

No sympathy. If they wanted pizza they could buzz off and get their own.

T
he night was
one noisy SOB in the olive grove. Goat bells clanged. Wind stage-whispered. Boy cicadas serenaded the girls. I contributed with my occasional, "Get off my front lawn!"

The sun beat me up by about two hours. Thanks to the crowd of olive trees shading the safe house's aluminum roof, it couldn't reach in and slap me out of the sack, so I indulged. Dad's status as an abductee, and the knowledge that my time on this earth was possibly even more limited than my high school biology teacher led me to believe, ultimately shoed me outside. The pump water was frigid, and something was snuffling around inside the outhouse—probably Greek giant hornets—so I changed clothes and took the scooter for a spin, desperately seeking a McDonalds or a similar establishment where the bathroom had hot water and a bug-free commode.

The scooter puttered along the coastal road. Eateries went where the money was, and where the money was was on the beachfront roads, where tourists flocked to their establishments in between bouts of sun.

I was cruising when I spotted a familiar face on the steps of a tired old beach house. Penka, the Slavic dealer of prescription drugs, was peddling pills with a colleague. Her sidekick was spaghetti thin, a redhead with an upper lip in dire need of wax. The hair wasn't natural but the mustache was homegrown.

I watched as Penka swapped a foil packet for a wad of euros. Her customer was respectable, clean. He looked like a school teacher.

"Hey! You're not in jail," I called out, waving. Her customer pocketed the foil and hurried away.

"Always they arrest me but they never keep me."

"How does that work?"

She shrugged, almost popping out of her tank top. "Luck. And maybe I threaten to put Bulgarian curse on them."

That would do it. Greeks took curse threats seriously. Dad was always sending me off to school with a black and blue eye pendant pinned to the inside of my shirts. He tucked garlic between my mattress and the springs. Occasionally, when Mom wasn't looking, he spat on me.

Penka waved me over. "You looking to buy? Because I no sell hard drugs." She said
drugs
in English but pronounced it
droogs
. "You want sisa, you go find Russian whore."

"Screw you," the hairy-lipped friend said. "Russia shits on Bulgaria."

Penka rolled her eyes at me. "Tasha is Russian."

Evidently. "Does she sell sisa?"

"She sell all the things, including her holes."

Tasha shrugged. "I am smart businesswoman. I diversify."

I glanced around, scoping the traffic to see if I had a tail this morning. If I did, they were Grandma's A team, because they rocked at hiding. The other guys could take lessons, maybe learn something.

Back to the dealers. Tasha was glassy-eyed, obviously sampling her wares, checking it for defects. No need, I wanted to tell her. Looked like it was working fine, zapping synapses, turning her skin to pizza. Not Penka, though. She was clear and razor sharp. Probably the cops cut themselves on Penka all the time, which is why they shook her loose not long after they reeled her in. The two women were on the streets where things got dirty, which made me wonder if they knew the Baptist, in or out of uniform.

"I'm looking for someone," I said. "Maybe you've seen him?"

"Do I look like I see anybody? I am blind." Penka closed both eyes and felt around to prove her point.

"Great acting. I almost believed it."

"Really?"

"No."

"Too bad. I want to be actress. Go to Bollywood."

"You mean Hollywood?"

"No, the Bollywood. I like dancing." She shimmied on the step. The stoop shook with her.

"Keep trying," I said. "Maybe get a dog to help with the act."

She sighed like she was gunning for an Oscar. "Who you look for?"

"A guy they call the Baptist."

Tasha leaned forward, pressed her elbows into her knees. Her breath was sour and her pits had tufts of hair like a troll doll. "Is he lost?"

"I don't think so."

"Then why you look for him?"

"Do you know him?"

"Maybe I do." She shrugged one-shouldered, losing a strap. "Maybe I don't."

"They say he's an ex cop."
They
was Melas, but I didn't tell them that. I was loyal-ish to a fault. "He ever come around?"

The Russian woman shrugged. "Not here. He eat higher up food chain."

"What if he did come around?"

"I would give him what he want," Tasha said. "Anything."

"I hear he kills people. Criminal people."

"Greece is not so safe now," the Russian dealer told me. "I come Greece to run away from violence. And what happens? Violence. I come just before country turn to shit. Lucky me."

Penka was focused on the beach behind me. "Not me," she murmured. "If I saw him I would run. I know what he does and how he does it. The police, they let it go because he was one of them. He does their jobs." She spat on the ground, the wet flecks boiling away before they had a chance to dampen the concrete. "Our last boss was his victim. the Baptist drown him in rain puddle."

My stomach churned. I lost all feeling in my fingers and toes. "What happened?"

"What do they do? Nothing. The police come, take the body, then nothing is what they do. At doing nothing they are genius."

"Enough," Tasha said. "You go too far."

"I tell her nothing she does not already know." Her gaze scraped itself up off the concrete and crashed into mine. "Yes?"

My answer was a nod. I saved the words for a warning, for all the good it would do out on the streets. "Be safe out here."

I fired up the scooter and zipped away, wind slapping my face. The fast-moving air sharpened my edges, but that made things worse. My heart's tachometer was spiking into the red zone. No way did I want to wind up facedown in a puddle, with the local police caring only that another piece of trash was off the streets, without them having to lift a finger or gun. I wanted a look at Greece's other face, because this one was a real bitch. She was cruel, callous, and corrupt. I wanted the sparkling water, the pale sandy beaches, the buff waiters in skimpy clothing, the man walking his donkey.

What I wanted was the postcard.

I was loaded for bear. And the bear was Detective Melas and the Volos Police Department. I killed the engine. Kicked down the stand. Barged through the police department's open doors and past the stacks of bricks. Stormed through the building like I was Hurricane Katerina.

Melas shoved back his chair and stood, his mouth loaded with protests.

I shoved my hand in his face, not giving a rat's ass if I was rubbing metaphorical crap in his face or calling him on his jacking habits. "Talk to the hand," I said in Greek. Translating drained some of the punch out of it, but he got the hint and backed down.

His desk quaked as I jumped up. I kicked aside the open folder, the stack of paperwork, the flat metal baskets marked Inbox and Outbox, and addressed the sweaty masses. They didn't look too worried about my wrath, just curious. They weren't sheep—they were goats. Sheep would have run.

Hands on hips. "My name is Katerina Makris," I told them in my outside voice. "If that name is familiar, it's because I'm Katerina Makri's granddaughter. Yes, that one." Now that I had their attention, I shot a lot of pointy eye-daggers. "There's someone trying to kill me and I know he's one of yours—or he used to be. I get it, he takes out the garbage you're either all too chicken or lazy or incompetent to handle, so maybe you sit back with your eyes closed and let him do his psycho thing. But I've never broken the law. Until a few days ago, I had no knowledge of my family or what they do. None. I was a debt collector, for Chrissake."

I paused for a second, mostly for effect, and partly because who's never wanted to smash a debt collector's knees? Probably I should have kept that part to myself.

"Yet because of what my family does, he's painted a big target on my back. I'm not garbage. So what happens when he kills me? You just going to shrug and mutter about how I had it coming? Does the Prime Minister know how corrupt you are? The President? The media? I bet they'd love a story about police corruption."

"Chicken?" someone asked.

"It's an American expression," I explained. "It's like … like … like calling someone an
adelfi
." A sister. Call a Greek guy a sister, he knows you think his Y chromosome is a lie.

Melas cleared his throat. He was standing beside his desk, hand outstretched.

"I'm not done," I said.

"Yes, you are. Come on."

His hand was warm, his voice hot chocolate fondue, lulling me into a false sense of security. It would all be okay. The police would help. Soylent Green wasn't really people. Mankind wouldn't be conquered by apes. Darth Vader was not my father.

Melas lead me through the building, down a hall in dire need of paint, into a room with two holding cells.

"You rat dropping," I said, as the dime circled the wishing well in my head and plopped in. "I hate you."

"I can live with that."

"You say that now," I muttered. Fighting was pointless. He didn't see me as any kind of threat, and he was right. To him I approximately as dangerous as one of those shivering, yapping dogs celebrities tote around in handbags. He shoved me into the holding cell, bag and all.

"What are you going to do with me?"

The door clinked shut. "Deport you."

"You don't have the authority."

Maybe he did, but technically I was a Greek citizen. All you need is one Greek parent or grandparent and they've got you for life. Mom did all the paperwork years ago so I'd have choices.

Melas grinned. "Who said I was doing it the legal way? I'm calling your grandmother."

I reeled off a string of colorful words in two languages. Farm animals, religious figures, and Mrs. Melas might have been involved in various configurations. Melas leaned against the wall, arms folded, grin sprawling.

"I like your imagination," he said when I was done. "Except the part with the animals and my mother."

"Funny. That was my best work."

His grin died a quick, painless death. "Look, this is for your own good."

"You mean for your own good. No way do you want me running to the media."

"You think I want you to wind up dead? I don't. My job is to keep you alive."

"But you won't give me a lead on the Baptist. I need to find him."

He shoved away from the wall, stormed over to the cell door, pushed his face up to the bars. Too bad he was on the outside—they suited him. "You're a girl. You're a civilian. You're a bill collector. You're … you're … pretty. And you're on his radar. Your grandmother and me, we want to get you off it."

"Could you
be
more sexist?"

The grin returned—sort of. "This is one of my better days."