Deadline in Athens (8 page)

"Lend a hand to lift up the mattress," I said.

We got hold of it at both ends and doubled it up. Three cockroaches raced out, scampering in alarm over the bare concrete floor. One was a bit slower than the others, and I succeeded in stamping on it. The other two escaped. So this was all we had to show for our search: one dead cockroach, two at large.

"Let's be off," I said to Sotiris in relief and dropped my side of the mattress. If we hadn't found anything, there was nothing to find.

"Just a minute. I need to use the toilet."

"Careful not to touch anywhere with your willy. You'll be asking me for sick leave when you end up with an infection."

I opened the door and went out. The chubby woman was standing there. "So you're still looking for something, huh?" she asked me in a familiar tone, ready to invite me in for a coffee to learn the rest.

"What business is it of yours, missus? Go back into your house," I said curtly, in part because I was irritated at the thought of having to drive back through the center of Athens. After the compliments and praise she'd received in my office for being so observant, this took her aback. She gave me a nasty look, turned, and began walking away with as much speed as an overloaded truck can muster.

Suddenly I had an idea. "One moment!" I called to her.

She pulled up, undecided, with her back still turned. Then she swung around and came back to me, still looking offended.

"Would you know whether the Albanians had any kids?"

"Kids?" she parroted, and the question seemed to make her forget the insult. "No ... whenever they came here, I never saw them with any children."

"What's that supposed to mean?" I said. "Are you saying that they didn't live here all the time?"

"They'd be here for a couple of days, leave, and turn up again after a week or so. When I asked the girl, she told me once that she'd been to stay with her in-laws in Yannina, and another time she told me she'd gone back to Albania because her father was ill ..."

That's why we hadn't found any other clothes, because sometimes they stayed here, sometimes elsewhere, exemplary vagrants. I was considering what might be behind all this when I heard Sotiris calling from inside the dwelling.

"Sir, can you come for a minute?"

I went back inside. Sotiris was standing in the middle of the room. As soon as he saw me, he went toward the toilet without saying a word. I found him standing in front of the lavatory. My nostrils suddenly started burning from the stench, and I began to sneeze. The bowl was bare, without any plastic seat. A pile of dried-up shit in the shape of a cone was stuck to it right in the middle. There were shoe prints all around the top of the bowl. Those who'd relieved themselves had climbed onto it and squatted there, Albanian style. The cistern was one of those cylindrical ones that look like a tiny boiler, with a button that you press upward.

"I went to flush it, but the button won't budge," Sotiris said.

"And what would you have me do, call a plumber?"

"Go on, you try," he insisted.

I was ready to give him hell, but something in his expression made me pause. I pressed the button, and it wouldn't budge. Something was stopping it. I tried again, using more force this time, but nothing happened.

"The mechanism has jammed."

Without answering, Sotiris removed the top of the cistern and put his hand inside. First he pulled out a big stone, then dipped his hand inside again. This time, his hand came out with a cellophane packet, in which were wrapped five-thousand-drachma notes. I stood there, staring at the notes with my mouth wide open.

"I told you we'd find money, but you didn't believe me." He was trying to put one over on me, and he made no effort to conceal his smugness.

"You didn't find anything because you didn't look properly. When I said you wouldn't find any money, I meant in the mattress, not in the whole house. If you'd been a bit more methodical, we'd have found it the first time."

The smile faded from his lips, and his exhilaration melted like a lollipop. Serves him right. He tried to make it seem like my fault, and now I'd shouldered him with the omission, whereas normally I'd have given him credit for finding it. He had to learn that mistakes are always the fault of subordinates. Superiors never make mistakes.

"Count it!"

He went on counting and counting. "Five hundred thousand."

Speechless, I gazed at the heap of notes and remembered the report I'd written. I tried to recall a point in it where I could fit this new evidence, albeit at the last minute, without Ghikas finding out and screaming that we hadn't done our job properly.

CHAPTER 6

The families on Karadimas Street were condemned to live both together and alone. Because the street itself was no more than three meters wide and the houses were arranged on either side of it. Whoever sat at the window saw into the opposite house, talked into the opposite house, lived in the opposite house, whether wanting to or not. The houses were arranged without rhyme or reason: Three houses were stuck close together, then there was an empty lot, then a house with a tiny garden beside two other houses stuck together like Siamese twins. On one side of the street was a haberdasher's and on the other a grocer's. Most of the houses were single story and only occasionally was there a two-story one. Some of the roofs had TV antennas, others had iron uprights sticking out of the concrete; some straight and others now bent, but anyway signs of hope that one day there would be a second floor added. For the time being, the hope had been abandoned, and many of the houses were so narrow that you didn't need a tape measure to calculate their width; you could do it with your arms. The poorest houses had nice wooden doors, painted blue, red, and green. The more imposing ones had wroughtiron doors with patterns recalling fossilized flowers or branches from a burnt forest.

The house where the Albanian couple lived was at the end of the street, next to an abandoned timber warehouse. Whereas almost all the houses looked into each other, no one could see into the Albanians' house. I stood outside with Sotiris, facing the empty lot across the way, and I cursed my bad luck. Back to the beginning with the questioning, the door-to-door inquiries, one person telling you one thing, another something different, and all you're left with is a headful of nothing, as my father used to say.

"You take one side, and I'll take the other," I said to Sotiris. He understood and headed toward the haberdasher's. I made for the grocers.

The grocer had a slab of Gruyere on his counter, and he was slicing it down the middle. He trimmed the edges, nibbling the bits. He looked up and remembered me immediately.

"About the Albanians again?" he said, as he placed half the slab of cheese inside the fridge.

"Do you know whether they lived here all the time? I was told that they came here for a while and then left" My mind was more on what the chubby woman had told me than on the five hundred thousand.

"All I know is that the woman came here twice to shop. The first time she bought a packet of spaghetti and a tub of margarine, the second time a packet of beans."

"That's some memory," I told him, mainly to flatter him so that he'd come out with more.

"Not memory, slack business. People here buy so little that you remember it like the national anthem."

"Presumably, if they lived here all the time, they'd shop more often"

"Pardon me for saying so, but you know nothing. They can get by for ten days on a packet of beans."

"Did you happen to see anyone strange going in and out of the house?"

"Strange?"

"Anyone not from around here."

He'd begun to grow impatient, I could see it in his look. "Listen, Inspector," he said, "far be it from me to tell you your job, but why all this fuss about two Albanians? You've got the one who murdered them, what more do you want? After all, with two fewer Albanians and another one in prison, Greece is a better place."

"If I'm asking, it means that I have my reasons. Do you think I'm doing it for fun?" I turned and was heading for the door when behind me I heard him say, "One evening, must be a month ago now, I saw a truck parked outside their door."

I stopped dead. "What kind of truck?"

"One of those hard-top ones. You know, what are they called? Vans ... but it was dark, and I can't tell you what make it was"

He said all this as he was arranging things in the fridge. Arranging not a lot, given that it was as empty as a bachelor pad. A whole salami, a cut of ham, half a slab of Gruyere, and some round boxes of Ayeladitsa cream cheese. And on the wall, where a bachelor would have stacked his books, he'd stacked dozens of jars of mixed pickles.

"Not that it's of any importance, it might just be a coincidence," he went on, "but I told you anyway because I don't like people leaving my shop with empty hands."

"Do you eat so many pickles around here?"

"No, I got them at cost price. But no one buys them."

"So why bother with them if no one wants them?"

"If I didn't make that kind of mistake, I wouldn't be a grocer in Rendi, I'd have my own supermarket," he said, leaving me with nothing to say.

The last house on the right side of the street, the one at an angle to the Albanians' house, had a green door and a square window, a small one, only just big enough for a head to poke through and gaze up and down the street. But on the inside, it was covered with white linen curtains, embroidered with tiny bonbons. They were parted in the middle to form two curves and tied back at the bottom.

"Can I offer you some of my orange preserves?" said the old woman. She was about eighty, short and bony. She dragged her feet as she walked, as if her skin were stuck to her bones and her feet to the floor. She was wearing a dressing gown with clovers embroidered on it, and her face was wizened, like crumpled paper that you open out again, because you've noted something on it.

"No, thank you. I won't be staying long," I said, to keep it short.

"Do try a spoonful. It's homemade," the old women insisted. I humored her, though I hate preserves, and I swilled it down with water so it wouldn't stick in my throat and also to wash the taste from my mouth.

"My daughter sends it to me from Kalamata. Bless her. And she sends me oil and olives, too, every year. Last New Year's, she bought me a television."

And she pointed to a seventeen-inch television on a small table. There was a cloth covering on the table, also white, but embroidered with little flowers. Whenever I see embroidery like that, I think of my mother, who never left any surface in the house uncovered and was always warning my father and me not to dirty them. He with his cigarette ash, me with my dirty hands.

"But she doesn't want me living with her," the old woman said, a note of grievance in her voice. "Not her, that is, but her husband. He won't hear of it; doesn't want his mother-in-law getting under his feet. When you're a young woman, it's your mother-in-law who doesn't want you; when you're old, it's your son-in-law. The best age is between forty and fifty. It's the age when they want you, but you don't want them."

"The Albanians, can you tell me anything about them, Dimitra?" I hastened to cut her off before she began on her second cousins.

"What can I say, Inspector? Quiet people, without a hope in the world. Though the way things are today, it's only the frightened ones we call quiet."

"And which were they, quiet or frightened?"

She looked at me and smiled. As her mouth twitched, all her wrinkles concentrated in her cheeks like pine needles. "What would you say about me?" she asked me. "Quiet or frightened?"

"Quiet."

"That's how I might seem, but I'm not." She sat in her chair and looked me in the eye. "You see the phone?" She pointed to the telephone beside the television. "They put it in for me last year. Till last year, I was all alone and without a phone. If I'd died, the neighbors would only have found out from the stench. By rights, what I should do is give my daughter a talking-to for living in the lap of luxury and leaving me in this hovel. I don't mean that she should have me live with her, since she can't, but they sent my granddaughter to university here in Athens and bought her a two-room flat in Pangrati. Would it have killed them to buy a bigger one so I could have moved in with her? I should tell my daughter all that to her face, but I cross myself and keep quiet. And do you know why? Because I'm afraid of angering her in case she stops sending the oil, the olives, and the eighty thousand she sends me-every month she says, but it's more like every two. You see me quiet because I'm afraid. But inside, I'm fuming."

"Are you saying that they seemed quiet, but that they might have been afraid?"

"I don't know. You saw them coming and going, and it made you wonder."

"Why did it make you wonder?"

"Because they'd leave as if someone was after them, and they'd come back like thieves in the night. It was always late at night. You'd wake up in the morning and they'd be here. One evening, I'd switched off the television, and I was sitting at the window. Me, I sit in front of the television from three in the afternoon, and I watch everything. It's only when they start with politics and love stories that I get bored and switch it off. When it's politics, because I don't understand a word they're saying. And when it's love stories, all the lies get on my nerves. I watch them pining, suffering, arguing, and when I grow tired of swearing at them, I switch it off. I lived forty years with my husband. We argued about food, about money, about our daughter, but never about love. You don't think that my daughter married this fellow in Kalamata out of love, do you? She wanted a good life for herself, and he wanted to get her into bed. But the little vixen wouldn't even let him hold her hand. He wouldn't give up, and so, to get her into bed in the end, he married her."

"And what's that got to do with the Albanians?"

"Don't be in so much of a hurry," she said. "Everything is connected, because if that love story hadn't been on that night, I wouldn't have been sitting at the window and I wouldn't have seen them coming in that limousine."