Trueish Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel (5 page)

“Sold them,” he told me. “It was that or toilet paper.”

“I bet the prisoners appreciated the paper.”

“Wasn’t for them.”

He left me alone in the room. Before long, I began wondering if I should sing prison songs. The only one I knew was that Sam Cooke song, but everything except the chorus was hazy. I tried to recall inspiring lines from
The Shawshank Redemption
, but nothing was happening except boredom.

After too much time had passed, the blob rolled back in with a coworker and a lanky old man wearing handcuffs and a uniform straight off a zebra’s back. He had a complexion like the Grand Canyon, thinning gray hair, and a pair of rubber slip-on shoes that were two sizes too big.

His gaze felt me up. His mouth settled into a leer.

“Who are you?” he asked as the guards shoved him at the chair on the far side of the table, and chained him to the table’s loop. Then the guards made a big production of leaving the room.

Ha! I wasn’t fooled. They were listening in, guaranteed.

“Katerina Makris.”

“I know Katerina Makri. You are not her.”

“Little old lady?” I held my hand up to my chin. “About this tall?”

“She was not so old the last time I saw her.”

That was the thing about prison: Put a man behind a wall and the rest of the world marches on without him—sometimes all the way to a cliff. A lot had changed in Greece during the past fifteen years. When they’d tossed him inside, Greece was saving up for an Olympics it couldn’t afford. The government had still been faking a happy marriage to the European Union. People were collecting money that was scheduled to evaporate in a few short years.

“That was a long time ago. Sometimes people go for years without looking older, then—BAM—the years gang-bang them. Maybe that’s what happened to Grandma.”

“You are Michail’s girl.” He shifted in his seat. The leer didn’t quit. “Now I see it. What do you want? A little …” There was nothing ambiguous about his hand gesture.

“Dream on, old man,” I said. “Papou warned me about you.”

He spat on the ground. “That
malakas
. I shit on his head.”

That was going to be tricky from prison, unless his aim was stellar and he had rocket-fueled bowels. I sat in the chair the guard had left for me, and hoped he wouldn’t spit in my direction. I wasn’t programmed with the kind of disrespect required to slap an elderly man, who was only several naps away from the big sleep.

“You sent Grandma a puzzle box.”

“Did I? What was inside?”

“You don’t know?”

His face was blank. “Who knows? I don’t know.”

“
W
ait
—what? How can you not know? You sent Grandma the box.”

“I made the box, yes, but I did not send it. I’m not responsible for what’s inside.” He leaned forward, winked. “What was inside, my baby?”

Ugh. “Grandma said it was a clue. A message.”

“What message?”

“Now would be a great time to quit playing dumb.”

“You could show me what’s under that shirt. What happened to dresses? In my day women used to wear dresses.”

“I could leave,” I said.

“But you won’t. Because you want something from me, or you wouldn’t be here.” He swished his hand through the air. “Forget it. I’m too old and tired for games. I don’t know anything. All I did was make the box. I had no choice.” He did a little head wag as he weighed his words against the fate of what was possibly his eternal soul. “Okay, I had a choice, but I wanted a
tsibouki
and a carton of cigarettes. You don’t know what it’s like in here. No women. Not enough men who look like women from the back if you squint until everything is blurry.”

The thought of him on either end of a blowjob was horrifying. Where was the mind bleach when I needed it?

“Who did you make it for?”

“I don’t know. A guy. I have made many boxes for many people—ask your Grandmother. I made many for her so she could send messages to her enemies”

Questions balled up at the back of my throat, but I only let the pertinent one pass. “What guy?”

“A guy.”

“Did he have a name?”

“Everybody in Greece over the age of three months has a name.”

That was true enough. Up until a Greek Orthodox baptism at three months, every baby was named
Moro
—Baby. Never mind that there are no surprises what the child’s name will be. Every kid gets a hand-me-down name from one grandparent or another. Only risk-taking parents, who are obviously cruising for disinheritance, veer off the beaten-to-death path.

“So what was it?”

He leaned back. His smile had the illicit gleam of an ivory dagger. “If I tell you, if I do you this favor, then you owe me a favor, yes?”

My debts were stacking up. First Baby Dimitri, the Godfather of the Night and Cheap Souvenirs, had coughed up an item in his store in exchange for a, thus far unredeemed, favor. Now Rabbit wanted to swap my something for his something. An even trade? Somehow I doubted it. But he had me over the figurative barrel. He had information—information I needed. Somebody had commissioned him to make that box, and that somebody wanted to send a message to Grandma.

“A comparable favor. One of equal value. Nothing more, nothing less.”

The ivory dagger unsheathed itself another inch. “Deal.” He tapped the table between us with flat palms. “The name you want is Eagle.”

“That’s not a name, it’s a nickname.”

Two palms up. “That’s what I have.”

“What does he look like?”

“What does any man look like? That’s how he looks.”

A vein throbbed in my temple. “Can you be more specific?”

“Not without some kind of restitution.”

“What do you want?”

His fingers tapped out a rhythm on the tabletop. His eyes wiped their smutty selves all over the top half of my body like he wanted something of a sexual nature. Which meant I’d be leaving here without a description.

“Souvlaki,” he said after he’d spent way too much time trying to engage his x-ray vision for a peek under my shirt.

My breath whooshed out in a relieved stream.

“Sure,” I said. “I can do that. If the guards are okay with me bringing in food.”

The door opened. The human meatball stuck his head in. “The charitable thing to do would be to bring some for everyone.”

“The whole prison?”

“No. Who cares about the prisoners? Most of them are on a hunger strike anyway. I’m talking about us.” He glanced at Rabbit. “And that guy, I suppose.”

My nest egg shuddered. “How many?”

“On this shift, twenty.”

I tried not to gawk. “Twenty for this whole place?”

“Times are hard.” He pulled me aside, out of Rabbit’s hearing range. “See these guns?” He patted what on a smaller person would have been a hip. “No ammo.”

“What if you need to shoot somebody?”

He shrugged. “This is why we fry fish on their lips, so they do not have strength to revolt.”

To fry fish on someone’s lips was the charming Greek way of saying they got their kicks tormenting prisoners.

“There a souvlaki place around here?”

“Down the street.”

I went back to Rabbit. “You want anything to go with that souvlaki?”

“
Patates tiganites
!” the guard called out from the other side of the door. Fried potatoes. French fries.

“You heard the man,” Rabbit said. “Hey, do you know why they call me Rabbit?”

“Papou said it’s because you’ve got a hundred kids.”

He wagged his eyebrows at me. “We could make it a hundred and one.”

Ugh.

‘Down the street’ wasn’t down the street. At least that’s what my phone said. And I believed the latest technology over the hungry guard. It was down the street, two over, and down five more streets.

Stavros was backing out of the parking spot when I heard something rumbling in the distance. I squinted.

“That sounds like a helicopter,” I said.

“It is a helicopter.”

Definitely a helicopter. A nimble black one.

“Think they’re bringing in a new prisoner?”

Stavros shrugged. “Could be.”

“We should watch,” I said. “The souvlaki can wait, right?”

The bird buzzed closer, lower.

In the pilot’s seat was a horrifyingly familiar figure. Wearing black wasn’t a fashion statement to Grandma—it was a billboard. She was devoted to my grandfather, despite his premature departure some thirty years earlier, and she made sure the whole world knew it. Nowadays his remains lived in an olive oil can in the kitchen.

I said, “That looks like Grandma flying it.”

“That is Baboulas flying it.”

A cable slithered out the side, its end tumbling to the prison roof. A second figure zipped down the cable.

“And that guy jumping out of it looks like Xander,” I said.

“They could be twins.”

“What are they doing?”

“If I had to say, I would guess that they are attempting a prison break.” Stavros had his phone out in a flash. “Takis will want to see this.”

“You’re recording it?”

“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

“Evidence of a crime?”

He shrugged. “It’s not the worst crime I’ve recorded.”

I was suddenly curious. “What was the worst?”

He opened his mouth to tell me, but then all hell broke loose. Sirens began to howl. They knocked the other four senses out of whack. Guards who’d trained for this stumbled around with their combat gear. Inmates, who’d been hoping for some excitement in their day, tore around like chickens.

Xander had acquired a guard uniform from somewhere. He scaled down a drainpipe, cut through the unruly crowd—easy when you’re part wall—barged in through front doors.

My breath caught. Grandma and the helicopter were hovering above the building, line dangling. My gaze slid all over the place, hunting for predators. The guard towers were—miraculously—unmanned.

When I mentioned it to Stavros he said, “Austerity measures. They cut funding and jobs. The prisoners are lucky to get food. There is a rumor that the kitchen cooks rats. In Korydallos there are two hundred inmates for every guard. They say it’s standing room only in some of the cells.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Our prison system stinks, too, but it’s not that bad. Yet.”

I watched with a fascinated sort of horror as guards battled the prisoners. The meatball hadn’t been lying about the bullets. One guard hurled his handgun like a boomerang. It came back when a burly prisoner snatched it up and beat him with his own weapon.

A rope ladder unraveled over the side of the helicopter. Xander appeared on the roof with a slight, graying figure.

Rabbit.

He shoved Rabbit up the first few rungs, boosted himself up behind the old man. They scrambled up and into the helicopter.

Then Grandma buzzed off in what I assumed was a borrowed bird.

I slumped in the passenger seat. My heart didn’t know what to do with itself. Skip beats? Run laps? It looked to my head for help, but my thoughts were jangled. We had witnessed a prison break, conducted by Grandma and Xander, which had to be some kind of major league felony.

Stavros was still recording.

“Did you get all that?” I asked him.

He pushed the red button. “Uploading to YouTube right now, then I will send Takis the link.”

“You can’t do that!”

He looked puzzled. “Why not? The file is too big to email.”

“Because the cops will see who did it!”

A pause happened. Stavros’s head did some slow addition. “I didn’t think of that.”

We both looked at his phone.

“Oh,” he said. “It finished uploading.” A moment later he said, “It has five hundred views already.”

“Take it down!”

“Okay, okay.” He fiddled with the phone some more. “I took it down.” More diddling and face-making. “Too late. Somebody already copied it and put it on Reddit.”

“Maybe you can’t see their faces.”

He perked up. “Maybe my hand was shaking and it’s too blurry to incriminate anyone.”

I grabbed his phone, found the video, hit the triangle to make it play.

Our chatter crackled out of the speaker. It was the perfect accompaniment to Grandma and Xander’s prison break.

“Dippy doodles shit on a stick,” I breathed. Grandma was screwed, Xander was screwed, and Curly and I were bent over the hood of this car, getting screwed. Stavros had handed the police everything they needed to nail my family through the forehead for this crime.

An argument could be made that we only recognized Grandma and Xander in the video because we knew them, but it was thin and wheezing. The police could probably zoom in on their faces, swivel the bird around onscreen and nab the license plate number.

“Do helicopters have license plates?”

“In Greece sometimes even cars don’t have them.”

My phone rang. We both looked at it. There was wild fear on Stavros’s face, and I knew mine was its mirror.

“Don’t answer that,” he said.

“I have to. It’s Grandma.

“She’s going to kill us and have Takis bury us in Turkey.”

“You recorded it—not me!”

“She won’t care,” he said mournfully. He buried his head in his hands.

I answered the call. “Hello?”

The silence wasn’t completely empty. There was crackling, the sound of Grandma’s hellfire under our feet.

“Katerina?”

“Grandma?”

“Tell Stavros I want to see him as soon as you get back to the house.”

“Okay.”

“When I am done with Stavros I will deal with you.”

Gulp
.

Stavros didn’t lift his head. “What did she say?”

“I think you’re right about Turkey.”

W
e drove back
toward Volos in a horrified silence. I wondered if she’d let us have a last meal.

“Does Grandma let people have a last meal?”

“No. No last meal. Whatever you ate last, that’s it.”

I was afraid of that. “What did you have?”

“A croissant with Camembert, roast turkey, red onions, and cranberry sauce. I roasted the turkey breast myself, and I baked the croissants.”

Even though I was about to be killed, that sounded great. “You cook a lot?”

“I took a course.”

“I had a piece of Grandma’s spanakopita.”

“That’s a good last meal.”

“Yeah, but I don’t want to die on an empty stomach. Do you?”

“No,” he said slowly. “I don’t.”