The Full Catastrophe (15 page)

“How do you determine who comes to this café and who goes to the others?” I said to the men sitting close to me under the tree.

“That’s where the retirees go,” said one of them, pointing to the other cafés. It took me a second to realize that the man, who looked like an older Willem Dafoe, was joking. I then told him he looked like the actor, but he’d never heard of the guy.

“How does this village sustain itself economically?” I asked the group.

“Germany sends us loans,” one squinty-eyed man said from behind a cloud of cigarette smoke.

After my coffee arrived, I worked up the courage to ask Willem Dafoe if he had known the murdered mayor.

“Of course we knew him,” he said. “He used to come down and drink coffee with us.”

“Was he a good guy?” I asked.

“He was very social,” said Willem Dafoe.

“We’re all good people here,” said another man with a bitter-looking grin. It was unlikely I would hear any criticism of the mayor. In addition to the fact that it was his hometown, Greeks tend to abide by the maxim “A dead man is always right.” Reproach is instead reserved for the living.

“Did you know his killers?” I asked the group.

No one said anything. One man tossed his
kombolói
and looked pained. “They’re from other villages,” he said. “They’re of different races.” I didn’t quite understand at the time what he meant. Were people in these mountain villages so tight-knit that they considered their neighbors racially dissimilar? I later realized he was referring to the shooter’s Pontic origins. Often, Pontic Greeks are unfairly stereotyped as thuggish in Greece, a regrettable circumstance I was reminded of when I went to a regional courthouse to pick up a file on the murder case. There, a courthouse clerk told me that Pontic Greeks have “criminality inside their blood.”

The comment about the killer’s origins was followed by more silence. The old men did not want to talk about the murder, at least in front of one another. I finished my coffee. The waiter informed me that Willem Dafoe had already paid for me. I thanked him and started walking to my car. “Hey, American! Come here,” yelled someone from across the square. An old man from one of the competing cafés was waving to me. I changed direction toward him and wondered how my biographical details had so efficiently spread to the other establishment.

The old man had pale blue eyes and dyed black hair. Two
fingers were missing from the hand he reached out to me. I shook it and began to introduce myself, but he interrupted as if he’d already been fully briefed.

“Do you know what you should write in your book?” he said.

“No, tell me.”

“ ‘Fuck the Greeks!’ ”

A friend sitting across from him at the table, an octogenarian with a mullet, made a look of horror. “No! Don’t write that,” he said, doing the best he could to raise his faint voice.

“Okay, don’t write that,” said the man with the missing fingers. “Write, ‘We need to burn down this whole idiotic country and start with the government.’ ”

“No! Don’t write that,” said the octogenarian. “Write: ‘I can’t make sense of any of it.’ ”

The man with the missing fingers was Lambros Kotsikaris. He’d worked for forty-nine years as a “guest worker” in Germany, one of the hundreds of thousands of laborers from the Mediterranean rim who in the decades following World War II went to Germany to provide muscle for its booming economy. He’d left his fingers behind in a German auto parts factory, he told me. Kotsikaris complained about various matters of local governance that did not seem serious enough to warrant his outrage. He pointed to the row of empty flagpoles across the street. The municipality had once kept a nice row of international flags there. What the hell happened to the flags? He complained of the noisy engines on mopeds and motorcycles that local teenagers adjusted to make louder. He criticized the twenty-euro fee necessary to reserve a plot in the community cemetery.

He then casually mentioned that his nephew had provided the Uzi that the treasurer had used to shoot the mayor. The nephew, who was described by witnesses in the murder trial as unmarried and marginally employed, testified that he had found the Uzi in an abandoned quarry. “I know it was illegal, but I held on to it,” he told the court. “That weapon, I saw it and I had it. It looked
loaded.” The court found that the nephew provided the gun in exchange for the promise of a 5,000-euro payment, and sentenced him to seventeen years in prison for complicity in murder and for offenses related to the weapon. Kotsikaris didn’t have much sympathy for his nephew. “He and the others should be sentenced to a lifetime of hard labor,” he said.

“What about the fact that the two others are still on the municipal payroll?” I said. I thought, given his considerable anger over other matters, he’d have something to say about it. To my surprise, it was not among his issues of concern. “It’s a way of taking care of their families,” he said. “That’s the way I see it.”

“But is that the proper way to provide welfare to the families?” I said. “By keeping convicts on the municipal staff?”

“What’s proper in Greece?” said a heavy man who had come over, taken a seat, and lit a cigarette.

The octogenarian decided I needed to be reminded: “Write, ‘I won’t make sense of any of it,’ ” he said.

“People in Germany hear stories like this and ask, ‘Why should we send money down there?’ ” I said, thinking this might provoke a response from Kotsikaris, who at one point showed off his German with the thickly accented declaration:
“Ich spreche Deutsch.”
Kotsikaris said nothing. A butcher with a bald crown and a lazy eye who had until then sat in silence was inspired.

“Tell Merkel there’s nothing left to take,” the butcher said. “The cow has run off! We’re holding only the cowbell now.” This statement induced a round of laughs. Encouraged, the butcher went on, making a fist and grabbing his wrist in a manner of depicting a penis. “Merkel can come and take this!” he said. There were more laughs. The butcher then invited me to spend the night drinking ouzo with him, but I declined on account of having more work to do.

The octogenarian arose and looked as if the conversation had disturbed his peace. “Write: ‘I won’t make sense of any of it,’ ” he told me again, and then hobbled off.

A few days later, I returned to Nikisiani and stopped by the former town hall—which still functioned as a small municipal office—during working hours. One of the clerks was an affable, lanky man who sat at a desk filling out and stamping paperwork for a small group of gathered citizens. After he was done, he offered to show me the dead mayor’s office, which, he said, still looked like it did the day he died. We walked up a few flights of wood stairs and entered the office. On the wall behind the desk hung an imposingly large print of Leonardo da Vinci’s
The Last Supper
in between Greek and European Union flags. Scattered around were religious icons and a bust of Democritus, the ancient thinker who theorized the existence of atoms. On the wall hung a plaque with a saying attributed to the historian Thucydides: “The city runs well if the citizens are convinced by the rulers, and the rulers by the law.” The clerk told me that the mayor used to be his gym teacher. He was a friendly guy, the clerk said, and relations between the mayor and the treasurers had seemed good. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said of the shooting. “It all happened because of money.”

After I left the mayor’s office, I visited a man named Apostolos Tsiakiris in his tidy house near the former town hall. Tsiakiris, a retired municipal clerk, had been a friend and political associate of the mayor, and filled in for him for one year after the shooting. Tsiakiris sat on his couch in a pair of shorts under an icon of Mary and Jesus. He told me that when he was acting mayor, he’d stopped sending payments to the treasurers because they’d been jailed for the shooting. At the time, however, stopping their pay was illegal. Employees who couldn’t go to work due to incarceration were considered on “automatic holiday” and entitled to half their pay, pending the outcome of a local government disciplinary board decision. A lawyer for Saltouridis, the treasurer, therefore sued Tsiakiris for breach of duty, forcing the municipality to begin paying the prisoners again, and to make back payments. About six months after the killing, the local disciplinary board ruled that
the treasurers ought to be dismissed for “undignified behavior.” The lawyer for Saltouridis, however, appealed that decision, sending the case to a secondary disciplinary board in Athens. That meant the treasurers would keep getting their halved salaries at least until a decision on the appeal was handed down, which would take a very long time. This very much upset Tsiakiris. “You can’t be a murderer and keep getting paid,” he told me. “That doesn’t happen in any other government.” Before I left, I asked Tsiakiris what the mayor had been like. “He always tried to help,” he said. “He could never say no to anyone.”

On my way out of town that day, I stopped by the local cemetery. Triantafyllos Koukoudis’s grave was decorated with a large crucifix, plastic flowers, and three portrait images of him wearing a tie. On a plaque was written a message from his daughter: “I hope you are the closest star up there and your sparkle will hug the whole world as happened when you were with us. You are and will always be my angel.”

During their murder trial, Savvas Saltouridis and Ioakeim Monos told the court they never intended to harm the mayor, just to frighten him. “I learned from my parents, both of whom are lost, to not do harm to any person,” Saltouridis, the shooter, told the jury. “Never, never did I intend to do something like this.” Saltouridis testified that shortly after he was appointed treasurer, the mayor began asking him for municipal money. On the first occasion, Saltouridis testified, the mayor called him into his office and said: “Because we had elections, I had some financial exposures.” The treasurer, eager to please, said he forked over 50,000 euros. Over the next three years, the mayor’s requests for money kept coming, according to Saltouridis. He said he grew anxious over the growing financial gap, and suffered periods of trembling
and high blood pressure. His psychological state deteriorated, and he couldn’t play with his children. “I’m near death,” he said to himself at the time, according to his testimony. “I’m going to die. I’m certain.” In the summer of 2009, Saltouridis said, he reminded the mayor that certified accountants would be coming for a routine check of the municipal books. “Don’t worry,” the mayor said, Saltouridis testified. “Everything will fall into place.” Saltouridis said he complained to the mayor about the situation one day, but the mayor just lay down on his office sofa and began scratching his genitals. “I started to go crazy,” Saltouridis told the court.

Monos, the deputy treasurer, described himself to the court as a dedicated public servant. “I did what I could to serve the local citizens and to be okay at my job,” he said. “Whatever the mayor told me to do, I did it.” Monos said he gave the mayor “some amounts,” but added he did not have a complete understanding of the depth of the fiscal gap until November 2009, when Saltouridis informed him. At one point, the mayor called him into his office and asked for the titles to his house, Monos told the court. “But I don’t have anything to do with this,” Monos testified he told the mayor. “Do what you can to help,” Monos said the mayor told him. “Otherwise I will be destroyed, but I’ll destroy you both as well.” In December, as the visit from the accountants was imminent, Saltouridis proposed a plan to scare the mayor, Monos told the court. “If you think it will change something, let’s scare him,” Monos said he replied.

Saltouridis said he didn’t mean to pull the Uzi trigger that night; he was trembling when he removed the weapon out from under a jacket and said: “Mayor, please put back the money because I don’t know what will happen.” Saltouridis said he expected the mayor to be frightened by the sight of the gun. Rather, according to his testimony, the mayor said: “Stop, you
tsoutseki
”—an untranslatable, derogatory word thought to be derived from the Turkish for “flower,” or perhaps “dwarf”—and lunged toward
him, hitting the gun. Saltouridis said he then slipped backward and accidentally pulled the trigger. The gun was set to automatic and sprayed bullets, he testified. “I pulled the trigger once,” he told the court. “I regret it. Not once in a million times would I do something like this again. I couldn’t understand what I had done. I’m ashamed of it and I should be punished for what I’ve done,” he said. “I apologize one thousand times.”

The court did not believe Saltouridis’s version of the events. It found the gun was not set to automatic, but to fire one bullet at a time, and that Saltouridis intentionally and repeatedly pulled the trigger. One year after the shooting, the court convicted Saltouridis of intentional homicide “decided on and carried out in a calm mental state.” He was sentenced to life in prison. Monos, the deputy treasurer, was sentenced to sixteen years in prison for direct complicity in the murder, and one year for possession of the weapon. The court held that both men acted with intent to kill the mayor as part of a plan to pin on him the full blame for the missing money. At the time of my visit, both Saltouridis and Monos faced additional criminal charges of embezzlement, in which prosecutors said they acted jointly with the mayor to take more than 700,000 euros of municipal money, some 6,000 of which came from a public kindergarten fund. Lawyers for Saltouridis and Monos told me their clients were not responsible for the embezzlement and did not take any of the missing money for themselves. They were also appealing the convictions in the murder case, maintaining they had not intended to kill the mayor and that things had just gotten out of hand.

The mayor, of course, was not around to defend himself from allegations that he partook in the embezzlement or was responsible for it. The mayor’s brother testified that the mayor had used some 200,000 of the missing municipal euros to plug a temporary financial shortage elsewhere in the budget, the result of “some community program” being delayed. “That happens in municipalities,
that is to say, to use money on other projects,” the brother said. The other 500,000 euros, the brother added, was probably misappropriated by the two treasury employees.