Che Committed Suicide (10 page)

The stop for Thrakomakedones was in the square, but the bus standing there had its doors and windows closed. The driver was chatting with the superintendent and neither paid the slightest attention to those waiting.

‘When does it leave?’ an elderly woman asked the driver.

‘You’ll have to wait, there’s another one coming,’ was the curt answer.

The other appeared after about twenty minutes and after the five passengers waiting had become fifty. I had to use what I still
remember
from the Police Academy concerning crowd dispersion in order to get on and secure a seat for myself.

The bus set off but stopped every twenty yards either because of traffic lights or because of the congestion. When it was neither of these, it was because someone wanted to get on or off. Somewhere around Kokkinos Mylos, my eyes closed and I dozed off. The voices around me merged into a low droning sound and I dreamt I was still in my sick bed, in the hospital, all wired up and wearing an oxygen mask. I opened my eyes and saw Adriani leaning over me. ‘What was I thinking of when I married you,’ she said in an angry tone. ‘I’ve known nothing but worry and disappointment since I’ve been with you! If you were a big shot I could understand it. But you’re a copper. Some jackpot!’

I was woken by the jerk of the bus stopping suddenly and I had no idea where I was. ‘Are we there?’ I asked the man beside me, as if he knew where I was going.

‘Next stop is the terminus,’ he replied. I breathed a sigh of relief.

I didn’t know where the Olympic Village was exactly and I decided to take a taxi so as not to end up searching all over the place.

‘Where to?’ said the driver as I got in beside him.

‘The Olympic Village.’

He braked suddenly before we’d even set off and opened the door for me.

‘Not on your life,’ he said. ‘I’ve just come from there and I was lucky to get the car out in one piece with all the rubble and potholes. Find another taxi, I’ve been through that no-man’s-land once today.’

Eventually, the third one that passed left me at the border between the Olympic Village and the rest of the world. From close up, the picture was far less inviting than that in the brochure published by the Workers Residence Organisation, that encouraged us to put our names down for one of the flats that would house ten thousand Athenians after the Olympic Games. When Adriani had seen it, she had taken a shine to the idea, but I quashed it there and then. Firstly, because I wouldn’t have been able to stand the daily
nightmare
of commuting between Thrakomakedones and Ambelokipi and, secondly, because the Greek public sector had far more than ten thousand political favours to repay and consequently we would be left looking on. With hindsight, I understood the taxi driver’s reluctance. From close up, more than half the places seemed in an embryonic state and the roads were non-existent. Everywhere there were mounds of rubble, excavations and potholes.

I asked a truck driver where the building site of the Domitis
Construction
Company was. He pointed to some tricolour houses about a hundred yards away. Their corners were ochre, their walls pink and their balconies light blue.

The site’s offices were in a caravan behind the houses. I entered without knocking and saw two men: a young man of around thirty, who was sitting at one of the two desks, and another, around
forty-five
, standing up. They were talking heatedly and paid no attention to me. They evidently took me for a supplier come to sell them
prefabricated
concrete or bricks and so left me waiting.

‘Don’t load it on me,’ said the elder one heatedly. ‘I’m not the one who chooses the workers. That’s your job. I work with whoever you give me.’

‘Can’t you steal a couple of days for zone three?’ asked the other in a conciliatory tone.

The elder one shot me a glance that was full of contempt. ‘If I steal a couple of days, it will hold up the laying of the sewer system. They bring you straight from university to the site and you think it’s like you were taught in the classroom.’

Without another word, he turned round and walked out, leaving the door of the caravan open behind him. The younger man turned his attention to me.

‘Yes?’ he said in a somewhat bored fashion.

‘Inspector Haritos.’

He was taken aback, as he’d thought me a supplier and I’d turned out to be a copper. He got to his feet quickly and closed the door. Then he stood in front of his desk and looked at me.

‘About the Kurds?’

Inside I felt thankful that he was taking me where I wanted to go. ‘Had you previously received any threats from the nationalistic organisation that claimed responsibility for the murders? I mean, were you ever asked to get rid of the foreign workers you employ here?’

The reply was categorical: ‘Never. We heard the name of the organisation for the first time on the TV.’

‘Do you know whether your boss had received any threats? Did he seem nervous or frightened to you in recent weeks?’

He reflected. ‘Nervous or frightened, no …’ he replied, but it was clear that there was something else he wanted to add.

‘But?’

He reflected again. ‘Worried … Preoccupied perhaps …’

‘Did he have any reason to be worried?’

He shrugged. ‘What can I say … If he had any personal concerns I’m not aware of them. As for professional ones, what worries might he have? All his contracts were handed to him on a plate.’

‘So you wouldn’t have said that he was on the verge of suicide?’

‘On the contrary. He was as smiling and as friendly as always.’ He paused for a moment, then added: ‘Favieros was on very good terms with the staff. Not only with the engineers on the site, but with the ordinary workers too. Whoever had a problem went directly to him to find a solution. He was concerned about everyone and everyone liked him. Okay, he may have put it on a bit, but he did help where he could … That’s the truth of it …’

‘You didn’t notice any change in his behaviour?’

‘No, other than what I’ve already told you … That he was a little worried … A little preoccupied. Though why, I can’t tell you …’

‘Where did the two Kurds work?’

‘The sewer system. With Karanikas, the foreman who was here when you came in.’ He had a hard time hiding his anger with the elder man.

‘Where can I find him?’

‘He should be somewhere between the second and third row of houses as you leave the caravan.’

What I had been told by the staff in Porto Rafti had been
confirmed
. Nothing had changed outwardly in Favieros’s behaviour. And yet, for him to resort to suicide, either he must have been receiving threats from the Philip of Macedon National Front or he must have had personal problems.

Between the second and third row of houses I came across a group of workers who were talking to Karanikas.

‘Inspector Haritos,’ I said as I got nearer to him.

‘Do you people come in waves?’ he remarked caustically, while his eyes told me that he would have liked to have thrown me out on my ear.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Two of your colleagues were here the other day and we lost a whole day’s work because of them. Now you’re here and from what I see we’re going to lose another half day. Will there be any more of you coming?’

‘What’s it to you? I don’t have to explain myself to you.’ He
realised
he had gone too far and backed down. ‘Those two Kurds, what sort of people were they?’

‘How should I know? I learned their names from the TV.’

‘Didn’t they work here?’ I asked surprised.

‘Yes, this is where they worked. But they have such
strange-sounding
names that you forget them as soon as you hear them. That’s why it’s much easier to call them “Albanian, Bulgarian, Kurd” depending on where they’ve come from.’

‘Do you have a lot of foreigners on the site?’

His ironic tone returned. ‘That’s a good one … Me, I don’t know why we don’t build the Olympic facilities in Albania or Bulgaria or Kurdistan. It’d be much simpler as they’re the ones benefitting from the Olympic Games. It’s provided work for them.’

‘Come on now, you’re exaggerating. You come out with things like that and you give fuel to all kinds of screwballs!’

‘Do you know how many Greeks work on this site? Two
engineers
and four foremen, six in total. All the others are either from the Balkans or Third World countries.’ Then, suddenly getting riled: ‘We’re a worthless lot, and we’re being made proper fools of! Why don’t our unemployed do something about it … come here and smash the place up? The only ones to do something about it was that Macedonian lot.’

‘Do you mean the Philip of Macedon organisation?’

‘Yeah, them. The Macedons.’

‘So you agree with what the organisation wrote in its
announcement
about Favieros’s suicide?’

He looked at me cunningly and smiled. ‘Don’t go putting words into my mouth,’ he said, as though reading my thoughts and
enjoying
it all. ‘I don’t know what it says in the announcement. All I know is that I have to do with Albanians, Bulgarians, Kurds and Arabs. They’re the ones building the Olympic Village and they’re building it like their own homes. What do you expect from builders who all their lives have used straw and mud to build their huts?’

I stared at him for some time, but he didn’t look away because he believed he was in the right so he didn’t feel at all uncomfortable.

‘You didn’t particularly like Favieros,’ I said to him.

He shrugged indifferently. ‘Life is like swimming,’ he said. ‘Some swim in money, others in deep water and others in shit. Favieros was swimming in money. Now, if they made him commit suicide or if he committed suicide out of remorse or because he simply got it into his head, I don’t know and I don’t care if I don’t find out. I mind my own business and I’m happy swimming in deep water, because tomorrow they’ll put some foreman from Tirana in my place and then I’ll be swimming in shit.’

He considered that our conversation was over and rushed off to oversee the sewer system, which might very well turn out to be his future swimming pool.

The doorbell rang at nine o’clock. I was having my morning coffee in the sitting room and searching for the entry under ‘washing’ in the hope of finding some interpretation of the phrase ‘brainwashing’. I couldn’t find anything, because in 1955, when the Dimitrakos
Dictionary
was published, brainwashing was evidently of no concern to anyone, whereas today it’s even found its way into our bedroom, where the previous night Adriani had done a veritable laundry job on my brain because I’d been late coming home and was back to my old ways and because I should be ashamed for letting Ghikas make a fool of me by having me cut short my sick leave and because all the good work that she had done for me in those previous two months, I would undo in two days, and … and …

‘You’re wanted!’

The sound of her voice, sharp and authoritative, came from the front door. As if I were back to my first years in the Force, when I’d hear someone in one of the offices shout ‘Haritos!’ and I’d jump up and rush to find who it was that wanted me.

‘Your new assistant!’

The front door was wide open. Parked outside was a van. Koula appeared at the side door with a computer monitor in her arms. She was followed by a young lad of around twenty-two who was carrying the computer.

‘Leave it, Spyros, and go and bring the table,’ Koula said to him.

I found myself having to deal with two surprises at the same time and I didn’t know to which I should give precedence. First of all, I hadn’t been expecting Koula to turn up with a computer, and,
secondly
, it was quite a different Koula I saw before me. She was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, had tied her hair back into a ponytail and was no longer the model in uniform that greeted me in the entrance to
Ghikas
’s office. She looked like a student or an assistant in a company.

I recovered from the second surprise to return to the first. ‘What’s this, Koula? The Chief’s given you a computer as well?’

She laughed. ‘Come on now, Inspector, you know him better than that! It belongs to my cousin Spyros, who’s studying
computers
. He had one spare and he’s given it to me.’

The Spyros in question arrived carrying the little table. ‘Put it down there, I’ll take care of it, Spyros,’ she said to him sweetly. ‘This is Inspector Haritos.’

The young lad shot me a quick look and mumbled a ‘Hello’. Then he went back to the van. It was quite clear that he had no liking for coppers. Koula looked behind her and burst out laughing.

‘He’s the son of my mother’s sister,’ she explained. ‘I had a hard job getting him to like me because I was on the Force.’ Then she pointed to the computer and table. ‘Is there somewhere we can put these?’

‘What do we need the computer for, Koula?’

‘Just think about it! We’re working under cover now. You won’t have any reports or statements or records. How are you going to remember everything you saw and heard from so many people?’

She was right in what she said, but I didn’t know how I was going to persuade Adriani to find us a place for the computer. She’d quite likely put it in the loft without so much as a second thought.

I found her in the kitchen washing the breakfast pots.

‘Where can we put a computer that we need for our work?’ I asked her.

She dried her hands on the towel and stormed into the sitting room. Without uttering a word, she pushed the carved wooden
armchair
with the embroidered cushions inherited from her mother to the right; then she pushed the shelves with the vase that I had
inherited
from my mother to the left, leaving just enough room between them for the computer table. Then she turned to go back into the kitchen. But in the doorway to the sitting room, she bumped into Koula, who was waiting for her with a restrained smile.

‘Good morning, Mrs Haritos. I’m Koula,’ she said.