Trueish Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel (16 page)

Cleopatra sidled up to us. The heat had melted her into a snack-sized Robert Smith. Her dress was a black pillowcase.

“Can I stand with you two?” she asked me.

“Uh, no? Go away.”

She glanced around like a small animal pushed into an unfriendly corner. “I don’t know anybody here.”

Interesting. I had figured her for a career criminal, like the rest of them.

“So go back to your car. Or mingle. Meet new people. Make friends.”

“It’s a wake, not a party.”

“You’re dressed for a party,” I said.

Marika checked her out, her nose wrinkled. “What she is dressed for is a street corner.”

Cleopatra didn’t look happy. “I heard that.”

“You were supposed to.”

A thought popped into my head. “I guess you can stand with us, but you have to work for it.”

She narrowed her eyes. With all the goop on her lids I wasn’t sure she’d be able to open them fully again. It was some seriously risky behavior. “How?”

“Ask around, find out why Fridas had my photo in his pocket.”

She glanced around at the wake’s other attendees. We weren’t exactly swimming in reputable waters. Too many shiny suits, too many women with dead eyes, who looked like they knew the most soluble brand of body glitter.

“Was he a criminal?”

“What do you think?” I asked her.

“I think I’m going to stand by this wall until you leave, then follow you.”

“Thanks for nothing,” I said.

She flashed her teeth. “Anytime.”

Kyria Frida was over by the refreshment table, scanning the crowd for anomalies. I tried to look like I belonged, but I guess I’d gone too tasteful on the makeup because she lifted her arm, pointed her finger right at me.

“You!” she commanded.

Either she was a witch with very little power or people didn’t care, because there was no parting of the sea as everyone stopped to gawp at me. They went on with the business of doing business. Funerals and wakes seemed like a good place to gather businessmen of a certain kind in one room. Melas had commented on the phenomenon at Cookie’s wake.

Still, I froze in place. My feet were disobeying my head again—it was screaming at them to run fast, that a way.

“You,” she said again. This time her voice seemed to be traveling from a shorter distance.

“Sweet Baby Jesus,” I said. “She’s coming over, isn’t she?”

Marika looked her over. “Who is that?”

“The deceased’s mother.”

“She does not look happy to see you. What did you do?”

“Nothing,” I squeaked.

“Uh-huh. I know what nothing looks like, and it does not look like something that would interest a charging bull. Don’t worry, I have supplies, remember?”

I remembered. They were a last resort. As Kyria Frida cut her way between the bodies, like a battleship navigating the Panama Canal, I felt all the other resorts evaporate.

“You!” she said, planting herself in front of me. “The
putana
from my son’s bed.”

Marika opened her mouth to protest on my behalf, then the words sank in. “Bed? What bed?”

“There was no bed,” I said.

“Lies!” Kyria Frida pointed to one of her Shar-Pei eyes. “I saw you myself. You had that man on top of you.”

“Man? What man?” Marika asked me.

“There was no man.” I tried to give Marika a tell-you-later look but I wasn’t sure the message was penetrating.

The old woman squinted at me. I was a bug on a pin. “Now that I am seeing you, I know your face from somewhere else. Where have I seen it?”

“Nowhere,” I said. “I’ve got one of those faces.”

“How did you know my son, eh?”

There was a spot and I was standing on it. All that was missing was the bright light.

Hands on hips I said, “It’s a secret, but I can tell you I’ve seen his penis.” No point mentioning it was in a box at the time, nowhere near his body.

“Probably that is true. I bet you have seen a lot of them.”

Marika threw her two cents in. “I have not seen his penis, but I heard about it.”

Cleopatra materialized beside us. “I heard it was big enough to feed a whole family.”

I raised my eyebrow and paired it with a stink-eye. She gave me a tiny shrug. Her face was serious but I wasn’t fooled—she was grinning like Cheshire Cat on the inside.

The old woman shook her head. “He was not his father’s son,” she said sadly. Her face hardened again. It looked like a bag of decorative lava rocks. “Who are you?”

I pulled a name out of thin air. “Dina Manoli.”

“The Manoli family in Kala Nera or the Manoli family in Agria?”

“Thessaloniki.”

She tilted her chin up then down. “Never heard of them.”

That’s because they didn’t exist—at least not with me dangling from their family tree. Moving right along … I was here for a reason, and that reason was fact-finding. So far I hadn’t discovered a single useful fact.

“I’m sorry about your son,” I said, putting on my best mourning face. “I can’t imagine anyone wished him any harm.”

Her serpentine eyes narrowed to dangerous slits. They had a lot of help from the heavy load of wrinkled laundry above them. “My boy was the head of a gang. Everybody wished him harm.”

“So … no suspects?”

“Everybody is a suspect.”

My body wanted to shuffle and squirm, but I gritted my teeth together and pressed on. “If you had to guess?”

“Everybody. Him.” She nodded to the nearest black-clad back. “Him. Her. That man. His wife.” She was nodding in a circle. “When you are important people want you to live or they want you to die—and that changes depending on how they will benefit. Maybe you killed him, eh? How do you benefit from his death?”

“She gets to live,” Cleopatra said.

It was like watching a solar eclipse. As the moon slid between the sun (her) and the earth (me), her anger unpacked and pinned itself to her face.

“You are the American!” she hissed. “My son wanted you!”

A couple of mourners glanced over, but their interest evaporated fast. All the good drama was scheduled to happen tomorrow, graveside.

“Now would be a good time to go,” I whispered to Marika.

“Do we need the supplies?”

“Not yet.”

“Are you sure? Because the old woman does not look happy.”

“No supplies,” I said. “Not unless they flaunt their supplies first.”

The old woman pulled a gun out of her black apron. She pointed it right at me. “My son had one last wish.”

Yikes!

“Okay, now we need the supplies,” I told Marika.

Marika opened her bag, began rifling through its contents. Metal and plastic clanked together. “Fully automatic or semi automatic?”

“What’s the difference?”

She slapped a handgun on my chest. “Speed.”

“Where I come from wishes are for sick kids, not criminals,” I told Kyria Frida.

“My son was sick. Who else becomes a criminal?”

“Your son was a gangster who got his manhood chopped off.”

“He did not!”

“Yes,” I said, “he did.”

Marika helped the situation by miming scissors chopping air.

“There is nothing wrong with my son’s
poutsa
!” she screamed.

Instant cosmic mute button. Conversation died. Everyone stopped in their tracks. People in the hall shuffled in to check out the drama, and they, too, fell silent.

The four of us were standing off to the side, but we were the center of attention.

Suddenly, the room exploded with the sound of dozens of guns coming out of hiding. That mean girl inside me said,
Tag, you’re it
. I hated to say it but she was right. Every last muzzle was homed in on me.

The lump in my throat was boulder-sized. It took a serious gulp to knock it aside. “Whoever killed him cut it off.”

“Why would they do that?” she demanded. “What kind of monster does that?”

Probably her son had been the kind of monster who did that all the time.

A man pushed his way into our tense quartet. He had a face like the dead man, only not so dead. “What’s wrong, Mama?”

“These
putanas
, they say your brother’s murderer cut off his
poutsa
.”

“Because it’s true,” I said.

“If that was true the police would have told us,” he said. “Wait—I know you.”

I wasn’t about to tell them this case was linked to the murders of other heads of criminal organizations, or that they all tied back to my family in some way. If the cops hadn’t shared that information I figured there was a good reason.

“I was in the newspaper,” I said.

“He is right there,” Marika said. “Go look. See for yourselves.”

Our heads swiveled to check out the casket sitting serenely in the center of the room.

“It’s not like the casket is closed,” I said reluctantly, hoping Marika and I could glide out the front door before they unveiled the dead man’s crotch. It wasn’t that I disbelieved, but I knew a good mortician could work magic with putty and paint.

The room held its breath.

Kyria Frida waved her gun as us. “You, you, and you. The three cheap
putanas
. You first.”

“Who are you calling cheap? She’s cheap.” I pointed to Cleopatra. “But we’re high-end.”

“She does look cheap,” the old woman said.

“Hey,” Cleopatra said.

The brother waggled his eyebrows at her. “You need a job? We can make you disappear from Greece and reappear on a rich man’s yacht in the Mediterranean. We can even give you a new name. How do you feel about … Aurora?”

“How do you feel about snakes?” she asked him. The look on her face said that any second now she was going to shake her asp at him.

The crowd parted as we moved en masse to where Petros Fridas lay waiting on everyone in the room to show him respect. Greek Orthodox custom was to kiss the dead goodbye after they’d already hopped on the ferry to Hades.

Fridas had come a long way since yesterday morning, when he was chilling out at the morgue. No longer waxy and gray, he had a lifelike flush. His cheek was covered in lipstick. There was a lot of it in this room, most of it in non-standard mourning colors. There were places for fuchsia; a wake usually wasn’t one of them. His suit was a severe gray with that criminal sheen. His shirt was black. His tie was a lesser black. Someone had fastened a gardenia to his lapel with a gold pin.

“Who is going to check?” the brother asked.

Everyone moved closer. At the same time, no one stepped up.

“You do it,” his mother said.

He jerked his head up and down so violently that he could have been a Pez dispenser. “I don’t want to look at his
poutsa
. What if it makes me gay?”

Yeah, that wasn’t how it worked. “There isn’t one to look at,” I said.

“We will see,” Kyria Frida said darkly.

“I’m not part of this, so I’m going—“ Cleopatra started. Several guns turned to face her. “Never mind. I guess I will stand right here.”

A bead of sweat squeezed itself out of a pore on my forehead. It went for a smooth roll down my nose before ski jumping off the tip. The Fridas family had money—illegally gained—but it hadn’t invested in air conditioning.

My jaw clenched. There was nothing useful to be learned here—not now that the cats had all escaped the bag. Anyone who knows cats knows that if you want to keep them in you put them in a box, not a bag. Cats can’t say no to boxes. It’s a lesser law of the universe. “Somebody look.”

Mother and son stared at me.

“No,” I said. “Not a chance in hell.”

“You have seen it before,” the old woman said. “You said so.”

In a box—but I didn’t say that. There would be questions, and I wasn’t in an answering mood. I wanted to go back to Grandma’s and hit the shower, preferably with a hammer.

I turned to Marika. “You’ve got four sons and Takis. You could do it.”

“I do not touch criminals,” she said. “I mean, I do not touch criminals if I’m not married to them or related by marriage.”

“Don’t look at me,” Cleopatra said. “I don’t trust the things. They always go off when you least expect it.”

I blinked. The movement was one of my brain’s lesser processing mechanisms.

“We are in a room full of working girls,” Marika said. “Get one of them do it.”

Before the room had been silent. What it was now was devoid of breath. A great vacuum had sucked out all the air, and the person holding that vacuum was Marika. I had a sudden sinking feeling that the women I’d mistaken for hookers and strippers were girlfriends and wives.

My elbow nudged her elbow. “I don’t think they work for anyone.”

“What? Look at them! I know prostitutes when I see them. I am not judging,” she said, hand on heart. “Times are hard right now, and maybe you have children to feed, and who knows where their fathers are? On a ship? In the army? Who knows? A woman has got to do what she has to do to survive.”

“Marika,” I said.

“What?”

“They’re not what you think they are.”

Her mouth formed a perfect O. “My mistake. It happens. My vision is not so good.” She reached into her big bag. “Where are my glasses?”

“Forget about the glasses,” I said.

“Good,” she whispered. “Because I don’t wear glasses. Imagine if I had to produce them.”

“I will look,” Kyria Frida said, ignoring her. Her gun traveled around the room in a wide arc. “You are all a bunch of sisters.”

Which was the Greek was of saying we were effeminate men. Never mind that minutes ago she’d tried to foist the job off on someone else.

“Open the bottom half,” she barked at her younger son.

He jumped to do her bidding, pushed up the lower section of the coffin. Whoever had dressed Petros Fridas had shunned formal footwear and shoved his feet into monster’s foot slippers. They were big, they were fluffy, they were purple with black toenails.

His mother took a deep breath. She shoved the gun back into her apron pocket, hitched up her dead son’s jacket before tackling the zipper. She peered inside. Zipped him back up. Rearranged his suit jacket. Dropped the lower half of the lid.

“Either someone chopped it off,” she said, “or somewhere along the way my son became my daughter.”

T
he boys were still fighting
when we traipsed outside. The sun, not to be outdone, did its share of slapping me around. It was in cahoots with the pavement, which was pelting shimmering sheets of heat at me from ground level. Across the street, the water was quietly sloshing against the concrete wall. Even it looked tired of summer. We collapsed against the wall in a half-hearted patch of shade.

“That went well,” Marika said. “All things considered.”

“I told them.”

“You did tell them. I heard you.”

“People always want to disbelieve before they get to the believing.”

“That is human nature. Believing is hard work. It requires faith.” She poked me with her elbow. “Who were you on the bed with last night?”

“Nobody.”

“But—“

“Xander,” I said. “It was Xander.”

“You and Xander?” she asked.

“No. No me and Xander. We were looking for clues.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Okay, I won’t tell anyone.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“That’s not what I heard.”

“You heard it from a gangster’s mother! We’re not talking about a reliable witness here. There’s no me and Xander.”

“Okay. If you say so then I believe you.”

Ack!

We slogged over to the cars, where Mo had Donk in a headlock.

“Let him go,” I said.

“Let who go?” Mo glanced around, one hand shading his eyes. “I do not see anybody. I am standing here, thinking about how I will spend the money after I kill you.”

The other three yelped, including Donk.

“Ugh,” I said. “Get in your cars and let’s go.”

I
t was
impossible to miss the flock of helicopters. They were big, black blowflies, hacking the air into buoyant chunks, moving in the direction of Mount Pelion.

“Looks like they are going to see someone important,” Marika said.

Or closing in on the bad guys.

A horrible thought filled my head. There were a lot of bad guys on Mount Pelion, most of them concentrated in Grandma’s compound.

“I have never been in a helicopter before,” Marika was saying. “Do you think they would let me take ride? Would they let me jump out on one of those ropes?”

“Remember what happened at Meteora?”

“That was different. There was no rope.”

“There was a rope ladder.”

“Look,” she said, changing the subject. “Sheep!”

There were sheep, a sea of lanolin tripping across the road, prodded periodically by a shepherd. Both ways, traffic had ground to a halt. Scads of tourists were leaning out a bus window, cell phones in hand. This was one Greek photo op they weren’t going to miss. I jumped out of the car, snapped my own pictures, immediately sent them to everyone I knew who wasn’t Greek. Before Takis and Stavros had drugged me and thrown me onto a plane I’d never been anywhere. Now I was somewhere, and I wanted to brag about it a teensy bit.

When we arrived at the compound, the helicopters were on Grandma’s doorstep. Two had settled on ground outside the wall. My entourage, five cars strong now, crept along the dirt road behind the Beetle. They were probably wishing they’d signed up to kill someone with less baggage and fewer connections. The security guard was pacing back and forth in front of the open gates, muttering to a couple of brick-headed men in head-to-toe black. Black cargo pants, black boots, black T-shirts. There were white letters stenciled on the backs, but I wasn’t down with Greek law enforcement acronyms. For all I knew they were an unimaginative circus troupe.

Melas’s cop car was parked out front, too.

“Oh-la-la, Nikos is here,” Marika said. “That man has the best
kolos
in Greece. Don’t tell Takis I said that.”

Didn’t I know it? Still, his being here couldn’t be a good thing, not with these helicopters in tow.

I followed Marika through the gates, glancing sideways at our security guy. He was talking a mile a minute, pushing his hands through his hair as he paced. The words were flying out so fast it was like trying to pick musical notes out of a blender’s whizz.

Aunt Rita was standing by the fountain out front, hands on hips. She was deep in conversation with another couple of black-clad cops. The garage doors were down—unusual for daytime. Melas was leaning in the cool shade of the arch, unreadable behind dark sunglasses, watching my aunt and the men talk.

“Hey,” I said to him. “What’s up?”

One of the guys broke off the pair to look at me. “Who are you?”

“Nobody,” Melas said, pushing away from the arch’s smooth wall. “I know for a fact she’s got nothing to do with any of this.”

Fear flitted across Marika’s face. “Takis?”

“He’s fine,” Melas said, in a low voice. “They’re asking him some questions, that’s all. They’re talking to everyone.” Marika hurried away. Melas curled his fingers around my elbow. “Come on, let’s go for a drive.”

“Is Baboulas okay?” I asked Aunt Rita, over my shoulder. Probably not a good idea to call her Grandma in front of the law enforcement goons. Someone in the family might need to bail everyone out—and that someone might be me.

“She’s okay,” Aunt Rita said. “These apes have questions, that’s all.”

My heart was going wild, and my adrenal gland was shooting streamers. What was happening? Was this about Dad or was the Family in deep doo-doo?

“Any hints?”

She pursed her lips, shook her head. The bricks glared at me.

“Let’s go,” Melas said, steering me away.

A wave of heat cut through the fear. My body was an idiot who didn’t know when to save the lust for a more convenient time … and an appropriate target.

“I want to know what’s going on.”

“Drive first,” he said, “then talk.”

My bottom half gravitated toward the Beetle but my top half went the other way. Melas’ fingers were strong.

“My car,” he said, the big bossy boots.

The assassins, I noticed, had fled, probably because they killed people for money, which didn’t go down well with law enforcement. Only Cleopatra was hanging around, buffing her nails behind the wheel of her bullet-ridden Renault.

I stuck out my tongue. She mimed turning a small handle and raised her middle finger. Some gestures are universal; this one happened to originate in Greece.

Melas yanked open the passenger door. “Get in.”

“Where are we going? It better not be jail. You already tricked me once.”

“It’s not jail.”

My eyes narrowed. “It better not be your mother’s house, either.”

He paused.

“Oh, God,” I said. “You were going to take me back to your parents’ house? Are you insane?”

“She likes you.”

“She likes seeing me uncomfortable. There’s a difference. You know what else does that? Cats. Right before they kill something.”

“Mama’s not that bad.” There was a short pause during which I fired hate rays at his head. “Okay, she can be difficult.”

It’s possible I muttered, “Difficult is the least of the adjectives I’d nail to her forehead.”

Melas shook his head, but there was a small smile hanging around his mouth, so at least he was aware his mother was a walking nightmare. The only thing more frightening than a monster is a monster with alleged powers of foresight.

There was movement by the arch. Several more law enforcement thugs had joined my aunt. None of them looked happy, or even capable of joy.

Melas swore under his breath. “You can get in the car or you can stay and answer questions.”

I stared at him.

“Five … four … three …”

“What happens when you reach one?”

“I put you in the damn car myself.”

I slid into the car, buckled the seatbelt, while my eyes combed the compound’s exterior for … I don’t know what. Melas kicked over the motor. He eased the cop car down the dirt road, out onto the main vein, threaded around this part of Mount Pelion. He took a left into the village of Makria and parked in the roadside parking lot, next to his parents’ brown Peugeot.

He unlatched his seatbelt, leaned back in his seat. “They know your Grandmother busted Dogas out of prison.”

My gut plunged into my feet. If they knew, Grandma was in major league trouble. But if it was a suspicion there was hope. Grandma wasn’t a dummy.

“Know or suspect?”

“Know.”

“Informant?”

He shrugged. “Every organization has someone willing to sing.”

“Is it her?”
Her
being his former paramour.

“No. I don’t know who it is. Whoever they are they aren’t one of ours. These guys are from Thessaloniki. That’s why they have fancier toys.” His smile was wry. “They can’t do too much unless they have proof—which is why they’re there: to find proof.”

“What about the video?”

“Too low quality to be definitive.”

The mercury had to be closing in on a hundred, but my hands felt like they’d been plunged into a bucket of water, fresh off the plane from Antarctica.

“Will they find proof?” he asked gently.

Would they? I didn’t know. Rabbit had been at the compound, but I wasn’t privy to his itinerary. Maybe he was on the run in Turkey by now. Grandma had told me nothing—and now I understood why. A person who knows nothing doesn’t have to lie. The trouble was, I didn’t know nothing. I was in possession of enough knowledge to toss Grandma and Xander into a volcano if the Hellenic Police squeezed me the right way.

Not to mention—although here I was thinking about it—if the police had any smarts they’d be digging into the origin of the video floating around in the Internet. To say it had gone viral was like saying the Spanish flu gave a few people the sniffles.

For now, Melas had asked me a question, and I didn’t know the right answer: the lie or the truth? How far could I trust him? More than he could probably trust me.

I took to my inner fence, and sat. “I don’t know.” It was partially true. Grandma had sprung Dogas out of prison, and she had harbored him at the compound, but for all I knew she’d scrubbed away every trace of him before shooting him off to wherever criminals go after they’ve been busted out of prison. Maybe Turkey, maybe Jamaica. I hadn’t ruled out the possibility that he was in the dungeon that was apparently buried under the swimming pool.

“I was hoping for something more definitive, like a
no
.”

“Look on the bright side,” I said. “At least it wasn’t a
yes
.” That didn’t inspire a vote of confidence, I could tell. The lines on his forehead were forming a bold V.

“I don’t know what to do,” Melas said, “and that bothers me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Law enforcement is my life. I’m sworn to stop the bad guys, and your Family is the bad guys. But they’re also decent people who’ve done good things around here. And then there’s you …”

“Forget about me,” I said. “I’ll be gone as soon as I find Dad.”

He nodded once. “Right.” He didn’t look happy.

“I went to the Fridas wake,” I told him, attempting to change the subject.

He groaned, smacked his forehead. “What did I tell you?”

“Which time?” I flashed him a grin I didn’t feel.

He shook his head. “Man … I bet you were one of those little kids, the ones who touch the stove even when their mother tells them it’s hot, because they have to know for themselves if it’s hot or not.”

My turn to shake my head. I hadn’t yet picked up the Greek affectation of jerking my head up to indicate a negative. How long would I be here before I did?

“I was a good kid.”

“I didn’t say it was bad.”

“I wasn’t one of those kids. It’s a new thing. I didn’t even know I had this … rebellious streak. I think it’s different when everything is at stake.”

“Your father?”

I nodded.

“We’ve had this conversation,” he said. “Your father would want you to stay home, where it’s safe.”

The laugh blurted out of me. It was dry, painful, not a shred of humor in the thing. “He was taken from our
home
. The bad guys came to
where we live
and
took
him. Tell me, how is that safe?”

I didn’t mention the secret stash behind the medicine cabinet in the master bathroom. That would complicate the situation. It wouldn’t be long before men and women wearing TLAs like FBI, DHS, DEA, and maybe even CIA, descended upon Mom and Dad’s house. If they tore apart my home, chances were they’d break something that mattered to
me
in an attempt to find something that mattered to
them
.

“It’s not safe anywhere,” I continued, since he wasn’t picking up what I was putting down—as they used to say, back in the ‘hood where I never lived. “So whatever you say, there’s a good chance I’m going to nod my head and agree until your back is turned. Then I’m going to do whatever I think can potentially lead me to my father. Nod once if you understand.”

He stared at me.

I stared back.

“Was it worth it, going to the Fridas wake?”

“Undecided. We left empty-handed, but they let us live. I still don’t know why Fridas had my picture in his pocket. His mother said he wanted me, but she didn’t say why or how.”

More staring. Then he said, “I need coffee.”

“I could use some coffee.”

“Not me—I
need
it. You’re giving me a headache and a pain in the ass.”

“You should see a doctor about that second one. I don’t think coffee wields that much magic.”

Words were failing him, I could tell by the arrow his eyebrows had formed. “You’re going to drive me to the bottle.”

We got out of the car. What should have been a thirty-second walk took five minutes because everyone stopped to greet and grill Melas. He was a local boy in law enforcement, which meant he was in possession of interesting stories and possibly gossip, which is the lifeblood of Greek villages. They had questions for me, too, mostly about how Grandma was doing, and whether or not my father had been found. Slowly, they were absorbing me into their tribe. Oregonians were friendly, but even in the suburbs everyone was aware they were part of a larger, city-sized whole. Inquiries were friendly but they weren’t personal. Here they were personal, fact-finding missions, designed to dig up your secrets and analyze your character.