Deadline in Athens (6 page)

"The coroner's report on the two Albanians," he said. Karayoryi's smile had embarrassed him, and his hand was trembling as he handed me the paper. He didn't know if I'd noticed or how I'd react.

"Fine," I said. "Leave it and go." I was in no mood to read it. In any case, what could it tell me? Whatever the bodies had to reveal was obvious enough to the naked eye-apart from the time of the murder, but that was of no importance. It wasn't as if the Albanian was going to come up with a convincing alibi that we'd have to disprove. And Karayoryi didn't know anything. Like all reporters she was bluffing. She wanted to arouse my curiosity so that she would be the first I'd open up to and she'd be able to get more out of me. There were no children. If there were and we hadn't found them, the neighbors would have told us.

CHAPTER 3

Adriani was watching TV. She still hadn't noticed me, though I'd been in the living room for a good five minutes. Her hand was clutching the remote control; her forefinger was on the button, ready to switch channels as soon as the ads came on. On the screen, a wavy-haired policeman was yelling his head off at a redhead. He was on every evening, and he was either interrogating someone or he was suffering pangs of remorse. And in both cases, he was always yelling. If all police officers were like him, every one of us would be dead from a heart attack before forty.

"Why is he forever yelling, the moron?" I said. I added "moron" because I knew how cross she became when I showed contempt for the heroes in her favorite shows. I wanted to annoy her into giving me some attention, but it didn't work.

"Shhh!" she said curtly, while her gaze remained fixed on the wavy-haired actor in uniform. "What are you staring at, you fathead? Say something!" my father would shout at me, and give me a clip around the ear. I'd like to know what he'd do now that everyone stares instead of talking. Luckily for him, the old man's no longer around; he'd have a fit.

Every evening, I sought refuge in the bedroom and took Dimitrakos's Dictionary down from the bookcase. Bookcase? That was what we called it to make it sound grander than it was. In fact, it was only four shelves. On the upper shelf were all the dictionaries: Liddell & Scott's Greek Lexicon, Dimitrakos's Dictionary of Modern Greek, Vostantzoglou's Thesaurus, N. P. Andriotis's Dictionary of Koine Greek, and Tegopoulos-Fytrakis's Modern Greek Dictionary. It was my only hobby: dictionaries. No soccer, no do-it-yourself, nothing. If anyone else were to glance at the bookcase, they'd be shocked. The upper shelf was full of dictionaries. It was impressive. Then you moved down to the lower shelves and it was all Viper, Nora, Bell, Harlequin, and Bianca. In other words, I'd kept the penthouse for myself and left the three floors below for Adriani. On top, a veneer of knowledge, and underneath, degradation. A portrait of Greece in four shelves.

I lay on the bed with Dimitrakos. I opened it at "see." See = the power of sight. The mind sees and the mind hears, that is what my father used to say. Every night, half an hour before he'd come home, I'd open the books on the kitchen table and get down to studying to show him that I was doing my best. He'd come in wearing his sergeant's uniform, stand in the doorway, and stare at me. I'd make no sound. I was so immersed in my study that I failed to perceive his presence, as Dimitrakos might put it. He'd suddenly come up to me, take hold of me by the ear, and pull me from the chair.

"Only four again in math, you fathead," he'd say to me.

I'd have no idea. I'd find out the following day from the math teacher. He'd always know the day before.

"How do you know?" I'd ask, amazed.

Till one day I happened to be in his office in the gendarmerie, and then I understood that it wasn't that he was telepathic, but that, quite simply, the telephone rang. My father had once done the math teacher a favor, helping him to get a hunting license or some such thing, and the teacher, as a way of repaying the debt, would phone him as soon as he'd seen my exam sheet to tell him the mark. The strange thing is that most of the time I was sure that I'd done well, but all I ever got were fours and fives.

"Have you got your shoes on the bed again?" I heard Adriani's shrill voice and jumped up. That was the end of my daydreaming. What does a dream correspond to in terms of time? To a television show. The show ends and the dream with it.

"The moment you come home, you stick your head in that stupid book instead of talking to me, when I've been on my own all day. And if that's not enough, you dirty the bed with your filthy shoes."

"What do you want me to say to you when you're glued to the TV and you don't even say hello to me?"

"It had just reached a crucial moment. It wouldn't have hurt you to wait five minutes, would it? But you found an excuse to run to your creepy-crawlies! " "Creepycrawlies" is what she called the letters in the dictionary. "Aren't you tired of reading the same words over and over again for twenty years! I'd have learned them all by now!"

"And what do you expect me to do, woman? Sit and watch that brainless copper? If he were working under me, I'd have him sent to the storeroom to count bullets! Or should I wait for the second half with that old hen who plays the prosecutor and after six hundred episodes still can't decide whether she wants to do her husband?"

"Naturally," she replied scornfully. "You're just a slob, and you can't stand anything that's even faintly glamorous." She turned and stormed out. But she'd succeeded in rankling me because I had no idea what "glamorous" meant, or where she'd got it from to dangle before me like that.

I went over to the shelf and took down the Oxford English-Greek Learner's Dictionary, the only English dictionary I had. I'd bought it in '77 when I was in the drugs squad and we had to interrogate some foreigners who'd gone to India, supposedly in search of a guru, and had come back with saris, a load of trinkets, and half a kilo of heroin hidden up their arses like a suppository. It was then that I'd decided to learn half a dozen words in English for fear that some pasty-faced redhead might hit on me and come out with the odd "fuck you!" and I wouldn't know if she was cursing me or asking me for a cheese pie.

I searched for glamurous but found nothing. So I looked under glamourus and again nothing. The damned English write it using o and ou just to make life difficult. So: glamorous = possessing glamour, alluring and fascinating; beautiful and smart. Glamorous film stars. So that's what she'd meant-that I don't like what's alluring and fascinating or, by inference, film stars who are alluring and fascinating, because I'm a ragamuffin. It's taken you thirty years to graduate from biscuits to croissants and she calls you a ragamuffin because you can't stomach her stupid soap stars.

I put up the shutters and went to watch the television. It had already turned nine, and I wanted to listen to the news in case they said anything about the Albanians. Half the news was taken up with political issues, the situation in Bosnia, two junkies who'd overdosed and an eighty-year-old who'd raped and murdered his seventy-yearold sister-in-law. Just as I was feeling a sense of relief that we'd been left out, the newscaster put on a grievous expression. His face darkened, his hands rose slightly from the desk in a show of despair at the upset he was going to cause the viewers, and he gave forth a sigh that was barely perceptible. The words emerged disjointed, one by one, like the last customers out of a cafe just before it closes who scatter into the street. He always had that handkerchief in his jacket pocket. I kept expecting him to take it out and wipe away his tears, but he'd never done it. He should have kept it up his sleeve for when the ratings fell.

"And in other crime, ladies and gentlemen," he said, "in the brutal murder of the two Albanians, there have been no further developments."

Yanna Karayoryi appeared right on cue. She was holding the microphone and wearing the same attire that she'd been wearing that morning. It was hardly surprising, as she was speaking in the corridor with her back to my office.

"The police have no new evidence concerning the murders, other than the arrest of an Albanian, who is being held at Athens Security Headquarters. According to a statement made by the head of homicide, Inspector Costas Haritos, the interrogation of the Albanian is continuing. The police suspect that the couple had a child, who has not yet been found."

Furious, I lunged to grab hold of her on the screen. But she disappeared, and in her place appeared the chubby woman who'd identified him. She began spouting into the microphone about the Albanian and about how she had notified us. It was the third straight evening that they'd shown the same scene. With the woman saying exactly the same things, wearing the same eye-catching blouse and the same skirt hitched up at the back, not at all glamorous. And how would I explain to the chief the next day that this was a fabrication on Karayoryi's part and that everything was under control?

"Now, who's glued to the screen?" I heard Adriani's gloating voice from the kitchen.

"I have some news," she said, just as I'd put the fork with the moussaka to my mouth.

"What news?"

"Katerina phoned today," she said, smiling.

"Why didn't you tell me before?"

"I wanted to tell you over supper, to give you an appetite."

Rubbish. She kept it from me on purpose to get back at me for not watching TV with her. She knew what a soft spot I had for our daughter.

"She's coming for Christmas, after all," she said with a satisfied grin.

Katerina was studying law in Thessaloniki. She was breezing through her second year. Her aim when she finished was to become a public prosecutor. Deep down, I only hoped I wouldn't have retired, so I'd be able to send her plenty of defendants. And then I'd sit in the courtroom and feel a father's pride as she read the charge, questioned the witnesses, and addressed the court.

"I must send her some money for the airfare."

"Don't bother-she said that she'd take the coach, with Panos," Adriani said.

Of course, I'd forgotten about that hulk. Or rather, I was trying not to remember him. He wasn't a bad kid underneath; he was studying to be an agriculturist. It bothered me, though, that he was muscular, the athletic type, always in a sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers. The ones we had like that on the force were all dimwits. But it wasn't his fault; he was one of that fifties generation. Not the first post-war generation, but the one of today. I call them the fifties generation because their vocabulary extends to no more than fifty words. And if you exclude "fuck," "creep," and "asshole," you're left with a net taxable income of forty-seven, as the revenue people would say. I remember the period between '71 and '73, the events at the Polytechnic, the student demonstrations, the sit-ins at the universities, the slogan "Food, Freedom, Education," and I recall how they'd send us to keep them under control or even to break them up. Confrontations, chases through the streets, broken limbs, with them swearing at us and with us cursing them. How could we have known then that all the fighting was just so that we would arrive today at those fifty words? We might as well have all gone home, because it simply wasn't worth the effort.

"Do you have the money for the airfare, or did you intend to borrow it?" It sounded like an innocent question, but I could see the cunning in her eyes.

"No, I have it," I replied. "I've put a bit aside from the back pay we got."

"As you're not going to need it for the fare, why don't you give it to me so I can buy those boots I was telling you about?" She tried for a seductive smile, but it only gave her away.

"We'll see." I'd give it to her, but I left it open on purpose to rankle her and get a bit of my own back. The first stage of family life is the joy of living together. The second is children. The third and longest stage is getting your own back at every opportunity. When you get to that stage, you know that you're secure and nothing is going to change. Your kids are off on their own, and you come home each evening knowing that waiting for you is your wife, your meal, and those little opportunities to get your own back.

"Oh, come on, Costas. I haven't got any boots for going out in!"

"We'll see!" I said sharply, putting an end to the conversation.

In bed, she cuddled up to me. She put her arm around my waist and began kissing me on my ear and neck. I lay there motionless. She brought her leg up to my knee and began rhythmically sliding it up and down from my shin to my penis.

"How much do you need for the boots?" I said.

"I saw a really lovely pair, but they're a bit expensive. Thirty-five thousand drachmas. But they'll last me for years."

"All right. I'll buy them for you."

Her leg slid down for the last time, like the elevator from the third floor to the ground floor, and it stopped there. She removed her arm from around my waist. She gave me a kiss on the cheek and immediately withdrew into her own territorial waters.

"'Night," she said, with relief in her voice.

"'Night," I said, also with relief, and I opened my Liddell & Scott, which I'd taken down from the shelf before getting into bed.

But it was impossible for me to concentrate. My mind was on Karayoryi and the matter of the child she kept going on about. She couldn't have simply invented it, out of thin air; she was keeping something from me. It suddenly came to me: Ask the Albanian. He might know something. I'd ask him first and then worry about Karayoryi. If nothing else, I could do what I'd thought of that morning. I'd tell Thanassis to get it on with her and see what he could discover.

In my dream, I was in the home of the two Albanians. Except that their corpses were no longer there and the mattress was covered with a blanket. On the folding table was a bassinet. I leaned over and saw a baby. It was no more than three months old and was crying its eyes out. Standing by the gas stove, I saw Karayoryi warming the baby's bottle.

"What are you doing here?" I said.

"Babysitting," she said.

CHAPTER 4