Deadline in Athens (14 page)

"So far we've found nothing, but there is still her computer. Something might turn up there."

"I want you to keep me informed on a daily basis. And when I say informed, I mean that you tell me everything. Not write half in your summary and bury the other half in your report like you did with the Albanians."

"I write in the summary what I consider can be announced to the public. The rest goes in the report. That's why I send them to you together" I picked up the file and the photographs, and left feeling satisfied that I'd come out on top.

They were still waiting for me outside my office. As soon as they saw me, they blocked my way. I stood confronting Sotiropoulos.

"Let's start with you. You've been around longer than most and you knew her as well as anyone among you." Their question was answered. They realized that I'd kept them waiting there to be questioned and not to make a statement. Sotiropoulos glared at me. If I forced him to give in, the rest of the herd would follow.

"Are you coming?" I asked coldly. "Or should I have a writ issued so you'll have to present yourself within twenty-four hours?"

I opened the door and waited. He hesitated for a moment, then followed me into my office.

"Sit down." I pointed to the chair opposite mine.

"Shouldn't I remain standing, given that I'm a suspect?"

"So you take Karayoryi's murder for a laughing matter, do you, Sotiropoulos? She was your colleague, damn it. You should be the first to come forward so that we might get somewhere. Instead of which, you make an issue of the fact that we want to ask you a few questions."

My shot hit him right between the eyes. He may have hated Karayoryi, but he didn't want to show his delight that her job would go to some greenhorn who he'd have under his thumb. He sat down in the chair.

"So then ... fire away," he said, serious now.

"I'm not going to ask anything. You're the one who's going to do the talking. You're an experienced reporter. You know what might be of use to me."

I'd learned this approach from Inspector Kostaras, during the dictatorship, when I'd been assigned for a time to security headquarters on Bouboulinas Street. Whenever he was sent someone new, he'd put him for a couple of days with the prisoners being tortured, to scare the living daylights out of him. On the third day, he'd sit him down and say to him: "I'm not going to ask you anything; you know what you have to say to me. If I like what I hear, I might just take pity on you." And the poor wretch coughed up everything, just to be sure. My job was to escort the prisoners for interrogation. I stood in one corner, observing Kostaras and admiring his technique. Now I knew that it was all bullshit; he had absolutely nothing to go on and was simply fishing blindly to see what he'd catch. Good luck to him.

Sotiropoulos was staring at me thoughtfully. He was trying to decide what he should say to me. "There's nothing I can tell you," he said eventually.

I saw red. "What do you think you're playing at? Don't invoke that journalistic crap about not being able to reveal your sources. We'll end up very seriously at loggerheads, you and I."

"I don't intend to invoke anything," he said calmly. "I'm only telling you the truth. I can't tell you anything." He fell silent and was obviously thinking. It was as if he were trying to find an excuse, more for himself than anything. "Karayoryi kept to herself," he went on, slowly. "She never showed her cards to anyone, neither on a professional level nor on a personal one. Besides, none of us shows our cards in our professional lives. She lived on the Lycabettus bypass. Alone. And I emphasize the "alone," because I never saw her with anyone. Whenever a group of us went out for a drink, she was always on her own."

What he said put the idea into my head again. "Was she a lesbian, do you know?"

He burst out laughing, but his eyes, behind those little round Himmler-type glasses, fixed on me as if he wanted to send me to a concentration camp. "You police officers are all perverse, like all the petits bourgeois. As soon as you hear that a woman goes around alone, you call her a lesbian." Evidently, he was making a distinction between the police and himself, who wasn't a petit bourgeois. That much I understood. What I didn't know was where he placed himself, among the leftists or among the bourgeois proper, with their Armani shirts and Timberland footwear. Most probably, he was both. We used to get by with a little soup; now we feed ourselves on salads.

"If I'm to judge from what various people said," Sotiropoulos said, "she was most likely the very opposite."

"Meaning what, exactly?"

"A nympho. A slut." Then he saw that his spite had escaped its leash and he hastened to get it back under control. "But I may be doing her an injustice, because I know nothing definite. It was all just rumors."

"And what did the rumors say?"

"That she never had any steady relationships. That she went from one to the other. But she always chose men with clout. Businessmen . . . politicians ... mixed business with pleasure, as we used to say. But let's be clear, I've heard all this from others."

"Do you know if she was working on anything?"

"I can tell you, generally speaking, that she was never not investigating something. She was a ruthless little ferret. She poked around everywhere and stopped at nothing. She had a thing about bursting out with a story, so she never confided in anyone. Not even Delopoulos, who worshipped her"

"Was she a good reporter? I want your professional opinion, with no trimmings."

"Everyone disliked her, so she must have been good," he said. "A reporter's job is to be disliked. The more disliked he is, the better he is."

His definition applied as much to him as it did to Karayoryi. He succeeded in making me like him through what he'd said, which confirmed my opinion that he wasn't a good reporter. I kept staring at him in silence. He realized that I had nothing more to ask him and got to his feet.

"So what's going to happen? Will you make a statement so that we'll have something to tell the public?"

"What statement can I make when I don't have any evidence? All I know is what we found out last night. Be patient for a couple of days. Something will turn up."

As he was going out, the telephone rang. "Haritos," I said, faithful as ever to FBI protocol.

"This is Mina Antonakaki, Yanna Karayoryi's sister," said a broken voice. "When can I collect my sister's body for burial and from where?"

"In a couple of days, Mrs. Antonakaki, from the mortuary. But we have to meet first."

"Not now. I'm in no state to meet anyone."

"Mrs. Antonakaki, yesterday someone murdered your sister. We're trying to find the murderer, and we need information. I understand the state you must be in, but we do have to see you. If you'd prefer, I can come to you. But we mustn't delay."

She seemed to weigh this for a moment. "You'd better come around here. I'll be in," she said in a faint voice, and she gave me her address.

I still hadn't received any information from records, or the coroner's report, and I decided to run through the rest of the reporters so no one would depart feeling left out. No one could tell me anything more useful than Sotiropoulos had told me already. They knew nothing. Karayoryi confided in no one; she never revealed her cards.

When the last reporter had left, I tried to make sense of what I now knew. Outside, the rain was still torrential. The old woman opposite was standing at the balcony door saying something to the cat in her arms. I couldn't tell whether she was chatting with it or singing "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" to it, but the cat appeared to be enjoying it. I was so carried away by the cat's contentment that I didn't hear the door open. A discreet cough brought me back to my senses.

Standing at the door was a thirty-year-old woman, neither tall nor short, neither pretty nor plain. She was wearing boots and a beige raincoat belted tightly around the waist, perhaps in an attempt to look more sexy, but the result was lukewarm.

"Good morning, I'm Martha Kostarakou," she said with a smile.

I suddenly saw her in a different light. Kostarakou was my one hope of learning something specific-that is, if Sperantzas had been telling me the truth.

"As of today, I'm taking over Yanna Karayoryi's job." She said it with some difficulty, still smiling embarrassedly. "Mr. Delopoulos told me to come and see you. He also told me that you would keep me personally informed concerning the investigation into Yanna's murder, and exclusively so." Unconsciously, she let out a sigh, as if a burden had been lifted from her. She was the polar opposite of Karayoryi. Neither aggressive nor arrogant, but rather a demure young thing, the kind you feel sorry for and toss a bone to. Like a third world country that you give aid to and that can't thank you enough-until, that is, it discovers oil and tells you into which orifice you can insert yourself.

"Why did you dislike Karayoryi? What had she ever done to you?"

Her smile faded, her hands clutched at her bag, squeezing it tightly, and she stared at me, speechless. Just when she'd thought everything was going smoothly, I'd suddenly turned the tables on her, and now she was the one who was going to have to talk, not me.

"Who told you that?" she asked in a trembling voice. "Yanna and I were colleagues. We weren't exactly friends, but I didn't dislike her, and I certainly didn't wish her any harm."

"Do you mean to tell me that what she did to you was of no importance and you forgot it straightaway?" Like Kostaras, I was fishing blindly to see what I might come up with.

"Did what? That she got me taken off crime reporting so she could take my place and had me put on the medical reports? To be honest, I was better off there. There was less work and I didn't have to run around all day. Not to mention that I was dealing with scientists and not muggers and murderers."

"Who was behind her? From what I've heard, you're good at your job. So she must have had to pull a few strings to get you out of the way.

She understood that I was playing up to her vanity and smiled, ironically this time.

"Listen to me," I said, adopting a tougher tone. "You were responsible for the crime reporting. Karayoryi came along, took your place, and landed you with the medical reports. Don't tell me that it didn't bother you. You might not have said anything, but deep down you were furious with her. And suddenly, one evening, somebody murders Karayoryi. And the very next morning, you're back in your old job. You're the first to have something to gain from her death. Do you know what that means?"

She got the message because she jumped up and shouted: "What are you trying to say? That I'm the one who killed her?"

"No, I'm not saying that. At least not at the moment. Of course, I don't know what I'm going to come up with tomorrow if I start looking. But tongues will start wagging from today. And the longer it goes on, the more wagging there'll be. So the sooner we get to the bottom of it the better for you if you want to keep people's mouths shut tight. Tell me who was behind her. Was it Delopoulos?"

She laughed, as though what I'd said seemed genuinely funny to her. "Is that what they told you? That she did as she pleased because she was sleeping with the boss?" Her laughter stopped abruptly. "You're quite wrong. Yanna was smart and methodical. When she came to the channel, she undertook the medical reporting, but she wasn't particularly interested in it because there was nothing sensational, no hard-hitting news. Just the occasional mention at the end of the news bulletin. Inside a month, she'd got herself involved with Petratos, the news editor. It took her another two weeks to get her hands on my job. But I have to be honest with you. She wasn't only ambitious, she was talented too, much more talented than me. She came up with exclusive reports, delved into cases, unmasked people. She latched on to the Kolakoglou case and forced Delopoulos to give her the freedom to explore as she wished. Once that happened, she gave Petratos the boot. Of course, he took it badly. He would have been happy to have been shut of her, but it was too late, he couldn't say anything to her anymore." She fell silent and once again let out a sigh, as if relieved to have got that much off her chest. "No, Yanna didn't need to sleep with Delopoulos in order to have clout. She managed it with her talent. She used Petratos to get her chance, but everything else she did on her own."

I hadn't liked Karayoryi at all and I'd branded her a lesbian. Sotiropoulos, who also disliked her, and who in his Robespierre role defended all the people on society's fringes, preferred to call her a nympho and a slut. And now this half-baked girl had come along to put things in their proper place. I began to feel a certain respect for Kostarakou, but my instinct told me not to get carried away. What if her honesty was simply a front?

"Where were you last night between ten and twelve?"

"Alone at home, like every other night," she said calmly, almost sorrowfully. "First with a salad, then with a whiskey, and always with the TV on." She stopped, looked me in the eye, and added with barely perceptible emphasis: "Till eleven, when Yanna called me."

"Karayoryi phoned you at eleven?"

"Yes. To tell me that she had a report ready for the late-night news that would cause a sensation."

Who else had she told apart from Kostarakou and Sperantzas? If I found that out, I'd be getting closer to finding her murderer.

"She told me something else, too."

"What was that?"

"She told me to watch the bulletin, because if anything happened to her, I was to continue the investigation. To be honest, I didn't take what she said at face value. On the contrary, I thought it was spite, that she was saying it to provoke me, and I hung up on her. Perhaps because of the loneliness, perhaps because of my fury at what Yanna had said, I felt suffocated in the house. I got into the car and drove around aimlessly. It was about one o'clock when I got back home."

"Didn't she tell you what the report was going to be about?"

"No. All she told me was to watch the news."

"All right." I called Thanassis and sent her with him to fill out a statement. "Wait, don't go" I said as she reached the door. I took out the photograph of Karayoryi and the man she'd scrawled over. "This man here, do you know him?"