Disorganized Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel (26 page)

"No, you didn't."

"Okay, maybe I didn't. Go on."

"Maybe your father was an asshole in school, maybe he stole the boy's
tiropita
money—who knows?" He shrugged, palms up. "I don't know. But he hated your father. And he hated him even more when they were both grown up and on different sides. During the early 80s, the Kefalas family approached your grandmother to join them in pressuring the Prime Minister, Andreas Papandreou, out of office. Kefalas was a capitalist, a businessman, and Papandreou was a socialist. He was bad for Kefalas's business. Your grandmother is many things, but always she is for the people. What's good for the people is good for her and the Family. Back then, Papandreou was good for the people, so she told Kefalas 'No.' Kefalas was not happy. He sent a cousin to kill her as she was coming out of church, but your father was faster. He killed Kefalas's cousin. Lots of witnesses, all from Makria. But nobody would say a word to the police. One of the policemen was your friend, the Baptist. It drove him crazy that your father—a man he hated—committed a murder in daylight and nobody would speak out against him."

"Why didn't they? Were they scared?"

Because I'd be scared but I like to think I'd do the right thing.

He tapped his noggin with one finger. "Because the people they remember what this country was like in the 60s and 70s, when Papadopoulos and the other colonels were running Greece. It was an ugly time in Greece's history, but my Family, your grandmother's Family, and some of the others, we helped people who were targeted by the regime. We helped people escape. We fed their families. Hid them when the government came to take them away. Greeks are loyal. They remember who helped them. Kefalas—" He shook his head, mouth sour. "—he never helped them. The police did not help them. Your grandmother, she helped them. To her they were loyal; they saw nothing, said nothing."

"And then my father ran away."

Two palms up. "And then he ran away to America to avoid the Baptist and the rest of the police."

"So …" My mind drifted toward the water. It seemed like a nice place to do the mental gyrations and calculations. When it came back with its wretched answer, I said, "The Baptist wants me as bait to get to my father, doesn't he?"

He clapped. "Give the girl a free pair of shoes, or maybe one of those little statues with a huge
poutsa
."

Laki left his chair, went inside, returned moments later with a squat wooden statue of a crouching man with a chin-skimming meatsicle. He thrust it into my hands.

"Wow," I said. "I'd love to take it home with me, but I can't accept gifts from crazy people."

"Keep it," Baby Dimitri said. "They are cheap."

I glanced inside, took stock of the goods. "How about you swap the figurine for a bag of marbles?"

"Marbles? What for do you want marbles?"

"I like marbles."

"Keep the statue. Laki, give her the marbles, too."

"I'd be happy to pay for them."

He made a
tst
sound. "Take the marbles."

Like I was born yesterday. "What's it going to cost me?"

His lips peeled back from his teeth. Big scary smile on the wolf's face. "We will see."

G
reat
. I was double bait. Everyone wanted me to be a critical part of their plan. I plopped down on the pebbled beach with my bag of marbles in one hand, Woody Woodenpecker in the other. "I want a time machine," I said. "Because this really sucks."

I looked at my phone. No text messages.

I guess Melas thought this sucked, too.

D
etective Melas pulled
up behind me when I stopped outside the compound's garage. He was carrying flowers and a couple of paper-wrapped
souvlakia
.

"Please tell me one of those is for me," I said.

"I don't know, I could eat two."

"I could have you killed like this." I snapped my fingers. "At least I think I could."

He slapped one into my hand. "Don't think this means I'm susceptible to bribes. You're getting it because I like your ass."

The flower arrangement was big and bushy. Lots of roses and carnations, strawflowers filling out the gaps. "And those?"

"They're for your grandmother, for letting me use her granddaughter."

The expression on his face said he was serious. Lucky for him, his words contradicted his face. Or so I hoped.

Melas fell into step beside me. The compound was hopping. Family all over the place. Kids diving into the pool while their mothers sat in clumps and chatted. Every so often, one of them would glance over at the children and screech an empty death threat.

Melas said, "Reminds me of my childhood."

I wondered if
she
was here, Melas's former lover and family snitch. There were a few mildly curious glances shot in our direction, and a lot of, "
Yia sou, Katerina
,
Nikos!
" going on, but none of the interest stuck.

"Any sign of our water-loving friend?" Melas asked.

"Not yet."

"What the devil were you doing chatting to criminals?"

"They're the only people I know here."

"Jesus," he said. "You need some regular friends."

"I'm not staying long enough to make friends. As soon as I find Dad I'm going home, back to my life. Do me a favor," I said. "Don't ask Penka to be an informant, at least not until the Baptist is locked up."

"That's not how it works."

I gave him a look loaded with sharp metal objects.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. But a woman's character is her fate."

"Who said that? Because it doesn't sound like you."

"Heraclitus."

I snorted. "I wouldn't have picked you for a philosopher."

"I'm not. That's why I'm borrowing someone else's words."

We fell silent for a moment, me pondering his hidden depths and his penchant for obscure philosophers. After Mom died and I flipped off God for spending more time worrying about Kardashians than my family, I turned to philosophy for answers. It's also possible I lit candles and offered my soul to anything out there that could bring my mother back as something other than an oozing zombie. But mostly I turned to long-dead philosophers and their ideas about life and death. Which is why my next question was: "Did you know about my father and his history with the Baptist?" and not, "Who the heck is Heraclitus?"

"I remember hearing about the attempted hit on your grandmother."

"Does he have a real name?"

"Yes."

I didn't know the Greek word for 'elucidate,' so I just let my eyebrow do the asking.

"Forget it," he said. "The less you know the better off you'll be."

We had reached Grandma's hovel. She was in her garden, bent over a red tub of gardenias, a mile of dimpled and sagging thigh showing. Papou was keeping her company, cleaning his fingernails with what looked like a tenpenny nail.

Melas did the gentlemanly thing and averted his eyes.

"Are you checking out my
kolos
, Nikos?" she asked without turning around. The woman truly did have eyes in the back of her head.

Papou snorted. "Even a blind man wouldn't want to look at your
kolos
these days."

Grandma straightened up, one hand pressed to her lower back. "Xander? Takis?" she called out over the fence. "Take him to the pool. If he says a word, push him in."

The old man puckered up and smacked his lips. "At last! Peace!"

"Bad day?" I asked her.

"It is always a bad day when the police use my granddaughter for bait." She pointed to the flowers. "Are those for me? Because I think my day would be better if you brought me flowers."

Melas handed them over. She took a long sniff then passed them to me. "Put them in the kitchen."

Melas followed me inside. I sat the flowers in the center of the kitchen table. The tablecloth was plastic—no chance of water marks. I grabbed two plates and a handful of napkins. I poured cold water into two glasses.

Then I ripped into my souvlaki like a rabid wolverine. Melas watched me sink my teeth into the meat-stuffed pita, his expression pained.

"Jesus Christ."

I swallowed. "That bad?"

"That good."

I sank my teeth in again, hamming it up Meg Ryan-style.

"Keep it up," he said, "and I'll violate all of your grandmother's rules."

I tried not to blush. It happened anyway.

"So what do you think? Am I bait times two? Does the Baptist want to use me or kill me?"

"Both. Use you then kill you."

"What happens now?"

"Keep doing what you're doing." He kicked back and grinned. "While I sit here and watch."

W
e ate
, and I cleaned up while he went out to talk to my grandmother. By the time I was done he was gone.

"He left already?"

"Nikos went to see his parents," Grandma said. "They live in Makria."

"So you know them?"

"I know everybody in Makria."

I remembered the plate I still hadn't returned. "I've got one of his mother's plates."

"Not for long. Nobody takes her plates."

I was afraid of that.

T
he sirens went
off just after midnight, ripping me out of a dream where Melas had been violating my grandmother's rules—repeatedly and with vigor. I leaped out of bed, bolted into the hallway, heart hammering against my ribcage.

Not all the extreme heart palpitating was the alarm's fault. Grandma was charging toward down the hall with a shotgun in her hands, the business end pointed right at me.

That unnatural screeching? Me.

"Behind me, Katerina" she hollered. The front door banged open and Aunt Rita pushed her way in with the same cannon she'd along brought to rescue me from Melas's old firehouse.

"Where is Xander?" Grandma demanded.

Aunt Rita pointed up.

The three of us burst through the door. Beside us, something—or someone—hit the concrete and quickly unraveled to its full height.

Xander. He looked like he was here to put the hurt on anyone who needed serious hurting. No lie: yeah, I was a panting, sweating, close-to-wetting-myself mess, but his intensity was kind of hot.

Where was I?

Panicking, that's right.

Footsteps pounding ground everywhere, beneath the scream of the alarm. No fire, no smoke, no oncoming tornado, no Unidentified Flying Objects waving
To Serve Man
in our faces. So what the hell was going on?

That blabby big-mouthed voice inside me said, her voice pure valley girl attitude, that this was what was supposed to happen when someone unauthorized stepped onto the family's property.

Grandma barked orders. "Xander, Rita, into the cellar with Katerina!"

"Wait—what? No!" We couldn't leave her up here alone.

Xander's arm snapped like a steel band around my chest, holding me tight against him. Aunt Rita fell into position beside him, and the ground beneath us began to fall away. We sank maybe seven or eight feet, deeper than a grave, then stopped. All three of us stepped off the concrete pad—although it's more accurate to say Xander stepped me off—into the darkness. The floor was cool, the air dry and lightly refrigerated. The concrete square jumped back into position, ready to fool intruders.

Someone had broken the perimeter, and my grandmother was up there fighting. It wasn't right. We should be up there, too. What if she got shot—or worse? The universe had dangled more family in front of me and now it wanted to yank it away? Not cool.

"I'm going back up."

I didn't know how, but I was going.

Except I wasn't, because Xander had me by the scruff of the pajamas, and I was doing that cartoon air-walking thing. Again. It was becoming a habit I wanted to quit.

Bulbs flicked on. Bright white light flooded the cellar.

I blinked. Could anyone really call this is a cellar?

It was more like the control room of a giant robot or battleship. Directly in front of me was a wall of monitors—one large, at least two dozen smaller—all switched on. Compound front, compound back and sides, pool, the house above, hallways, and several places I didn't recognize.

Oh, and several police stations, including the one I'd visited twice already.

I'd bet Detective Melas didn't know about this room.

Laptops booted up along a row of tables. An office chair sat in front of each. The captain's chair rose up behind them on a shortish pedestal. It had a footrest and a side pocket, currently filled with yarn and knitting needles. On each side of the room were two doors—four total. None were marked.

Aunt Rita pointed to each one. "Bathrooms, kitchen, sleeping quarters."

"What's behind the other one?"

"Warehouse. Food, water, weapons. Whatever people keep in warehouses."

"What's that big, red button?" I asked.

The big, red button was under a see-through dome on a control panel in front of the captain's chair.

"Don't touch the button," Aunt Rita said. "Nobody touches the button."

"What does it do?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. All I know is not to touch it."

"I bet it does something terrible," I said. "Red buttons usually do."

"If you want to make Baboulas very angry, push it."

"I won't push it." My inner child wanted to—desperately—but I smacked her fingers.

My aunt slid behind one of the computers and began clacking frantically, at a nail-breaking pace. To her credit, not one of them snapped.

"It's an intruder," she said. "He or she is out the front by the garage."

She tapped a key and the front of the compound came into focus in that one big center screen. She tapped another key and the camera moved. There was my shiny, new yellow Beetle. And there was Detective Melas with his hands up, his expression somewhere between pissed and contrite.

They had him surrounded, dozens of guns pointing in his direction. Grandma marched into the circle, looking like the fearsome creature featured in Dad's bedtime stories.

Just kidding. She looked like a little old grandma. With a huge gun.

"Nikos," she said, "what are you doing? It is the middle of the night. Time for respectable people to be sleeping. Why did you wake me up?"

"I was visiting my parents—"

"You are a good son, but your parents do not live under Katerina's car."

Aunt Rita swung around, eyebrows raised.

"Don't look at me," I said.

"It is rude to slide under a woman's undercarriage without permission," my grandmother continued, unaware that several feet beneath the ground she'd been interrupted.

One of Melas's hands dropped. He held it out, palm up. Showed her a small black box.

"Transmitter," he said. "I couldn't put it on her car until I knew what she was driving. I forgot earlier so I figured I'd do it on the way home."

"Wait," I said. "Why was my car out there? Shouldn't it be in the garage?"

Not Melas, though. He didn't find that strange at all.

"You guys left my car out there on purpose, didn't you?"

"Maybe," my aunt said. I looked at Xander, but he was busy checking out the other monitors.

"And where's the guard? Melas shouldn't have been able to march right past the guard—right?"

"That's a good question." She hit a few keys and another scene came up. A view of the guardhouse. It was empty now, but she hit rewind. When she stopped, the guard had his smartphone in one hand and Mr. Winky in the other.

"Hmm," my aunt said. It was a terrible sort of
hmm
, the kind one hears just before a judge sends a man to the firing squad.

"Okay," I said. "Nothing to see here. Just a cop doing something stupid that almost turned him into a human sieve, and a frisky guard. In his defense, it is the middle of the night, and there's a limit to how much Solitaire a person can play on their phone." I headed towards the square in the ceiling, expecting the way in to double as the way out.

Maybe it did, but not tonight.

"Xander," Aunt Rita said, "can you take Katerina back upstairs, please?" She did a
come here
motion with both hands, so I trotted over. She dropped a kiss on each of my cheeks. "Get some good sleep, eh?"

"You, too."

"Katerina?" Not my aunt this time. It was Grandma, and she was looking up at the camera. "Katerina, are you wearing shoes?"

I wiggled my naked toes. And even though she couldn't hear me I said, "Yes."

T
he way
out was through the galley kitchen (shiny, modern appliances) and along a narrow low-ceiling corridor that soon split in two. When we found ourselves at the crossroads, Xander veered to the left. I couldn't see the end point of the right corridor. Greece and Grandma were good at dangling mysteries under my nose; I wanted to know where the path led. Maybe the dungeon Aunt Rita mentioned. But for now, I had to be satisfied with discovering what was behind door one.

And it was … drumroll …

A ladder, of sorts.

Metal bars fastened to the concrete. At the top was a steel trapdoor with a keypad set into the side.

Xander was up there in a flash. I tried not to notice how great his butt looked in black cargo pants, or how climbing a ladder did amazing things to his substantial arms. It felt vaguely sleazy to go from a triple-X-rated dream featuring Melas to leering at Xander's ass. Luckily I could blame the flushed cheeks I was sporting on Melas's nocturnal shenanigans—of the clean kind—and no one would be any the wiser.

He tapped a sequence of numbers into the keypad. Waited for the click. Then punched the metal slab with his palm. It swung up and stayed open. He vanished through the hole, then his head appeared, followed by his hand.

I was pretty sure that was the international signal of, '
It's safe. Come on up
.'
So I scrambled up the ladder, glad there was no one below to gawk at my lightly pajama'd rear.

When I reached the top, he hauled me up the rest of the way, depositing me on a cool marble floor. The lights were off, but I could make out the shape of a queen-sized bed and a big-screen TV.

"Where are we?"

I think I asked Xander questions hoping that one day he'd answer. When I was a kid, I overdosed on old episodes of
Mister Ed
. I spent weeks sitting in front of my hamster's cage, begging him to talk. I even went so far as to set up our video camera in my room, hoping to capture him in an unguarded moment. We wound up with nothing but hours and hours of Tootsie hauling ass on his wheel.

Xander was like Tootsie on that plastic wheel.

He flipped the switch on a lamp. Pale yellow light chased the shadows into the corners, but it performed its task in an amiable way.

The bed was big. The sheets were bachelor-style black. The furniture was decent quality, and the computer on the desk was a sleek MacBook Pro. No pictures. No art. Nothing on the walls except off-white paint. Probably the paint had a fancy name like
Handful o' Blanched Almonds
or
Winter in Beijing, Before All the Smog
. The room came with an en-suite, a small living room, and a kitchen, where a sleek steel refrigerator was quietly humming the same old cool song.

"Is this your place?"

He nodded once, then unlocked his front door and waited for me to take the hint. I was good with hints, and the adrenaline was rinsing away anyway, leaving me feeling like a balloon seven days past a birthday party. Somewhere out there was a waiting bed; it wanted me back.

His room turned out to be on the bottom floor of the compound, in the room closest to Grandma's house. Family and well-paid friends were trickling back to their beds. We exchanged 'Goodnights' as we passed each other, and I hoped they didn't hate me too much for the drama. Without meaning to I'd shaken up the family—and the Family—just by being here.

But they'd shaken up my life, too. Now we were all trying to contain the fizz.

I
drove back
to the beach, parked a ways down from where Penka was flipping through a magazine, when she wasn't selling Ritalin to moms. I couldn't see the Beetle from here, but it was wired out the wahzoo, thanks to Melas's midnight adventure. After everything died down my grandmother had grudgingly allowed him to stick his transmitter to my undercarriage.

Which—coincidentally—he also did in the dream I had afterward. Different chassis, though.

"Hey," I said.

The big Bulgarian drug dealer looked up like it was a chore. "What you do here?"

"I don't have any friends in Greece. You're it."

"Not my problem."

"Who said it was a problem?" I asked how she was doing, under the circumstances.

She grunted. "I no complain. You should go. I never sell drugs with you sitting here. You look too clean. Come back when you look like junkie."

"I've seen your customers. They look even cleaner than me."

"They dress clean, yes, but they want a dealer to look like junkie whore. It makes them feel better about themselves."

I guess that made sense. "Selling drugs will get you killed. Have you thought about handing in your notice?"

"Life gets you killed."

Couldn't argue with that. Life came with a guaranteed death sentence. Some of us just put it off longer than others, that's all. That's what those long-dead philosophers taught me.

"When's Tasha's funeral?"

"Day after tomorrow. I must find belt for her. Is Russian funeral tradition."

I jotted down my cell number, passed it to her. "If you need company, call me and I'll come with you. Unless I'm dead by then."

"A good chance you will be."

"Most likely," I admitted.

Yesterday I'd never made it to the beach, so this morning I made good on my promise. I unrolled my mat, stripped off, and let the sun broil me for a couple of hours—sixty good minutes on each side—while I watched kids hauling themselves onto the brightly colored boats. The boats' owners didn't go for any of those sissy pastels or cool whites, they went big and bold and blinding. Stare at any of these boats too long and you were going to fry those rods and cones. Maybe it was a new, innovative way of fishing: stun the seafood out of the sea.

Watching the kids dive made me want to be young again. I wanted to be in that water, with my parents standing on the pebbles, screeching my name.

The hole in my heart widened another inch.

My phone rang. It was Melas.

"What's with the dental floss?"

"Huh?" The sun had me feeling woozy and not entirely capable of forming coherent sentences.

"That thing you probably call a bikini."

"What about it?"

"You're almost naked."

"Who died and made you the fashion police?" I hung up, slightly peeved.

The sun's slap didn't feel like much now, but I was going to be praying to major and minor gods later to take away the pain, so I packed up my show and took it on the road, all the way back to the Beetle. I jumped in, hit the button to seal the lid on this baby, then froze when I glanced in the rearview mirror.

"Katerina Makris," the Baptist said, pulling himself upright. "The prodigal son's brat."

Clank, click
went the top.