Disorganized Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel (7 page)

"Who will you talk to next, Katerina?" Grandma asked.

My eyes cut from face to face. A lot of them resembled the woman I saw in my mirror and other reflective surfaces. Yes, they were men, but so what? A nose is a nose. It can sneeze just as well on a woman's face as a man's.

"Give me a name." I waved to the rest of my family. One by one, introductions happened, kisses were dispensed on both cheeks. A lot of repetition in the first names department, on account of how Greek kids get their first names from their grandparents. Originality when naming children is frowned upon. If you want to smash your parents' hearts, go ahead, give your child some fancy name that sounds better to your loveless, betraying ears. Do it. See how fast they write you out of the will. Better to give your child that same old recycled name as his or her other cousins if you want to stay good with the family.

I was pretty sure mine was one of those families you wanted to stay good with.

By the time the first round of introductions were over my face felt slimy from all the kissing.

"Give you a name," Takis said. "Ha! Baby Dimitri went easy on you. Some of the others, they would have spared the motorcycle and set you on fire."

"Really? Just for asking if maybe my father is in their basement?"

"This is Greece," Takis said. "We almost never have basements. The ground is too rocky."

"Their attics, then."

"We almost never have attics, either."

"So …" I tilted my head, doing a passable impression of the
RC Victor
dog in front of the gramophone. "… where do you keep stuff you're not using?"

"We are not American, we don't buy things we don't need."

Stavros turned to him. "What about that big TV you bought? You already had a big TV."

"That was different. One was plasma, the other was LCD."

"What's the difference?" Stavros asked.

Takis said it slowly this time. "One is plasma, the other is LCD."

I rolled my eyes. "Can we not pick on my people?"

"We are your people," Takis said. "Blood is blood."

Hot stars crowded into my eyes, some of them dancing along my eyelashes. If I didn't take preventative action now, they were going to storm the dam. They'd never take me seriously if I cried. Look at Grandma. That wasn't a woman who did crying. She kept the remnants of her dead husband in a can in the kitchen, for Chrissake. That wasn't sentimental, that was crazy. And also potentially problematic for anyone who didn't know about Granddad in the oil can. What if someone mistook him for salad dressing? It could happen.

"Okay, so if I can't use diplomacy on these clowns, what can I use?"

Glances passed from face to face. I was nuts and their expressions all said so.

"A kidnapping means we must wait until the kidnapper reveals themselves. Then we will be at point of diplomacy."

"If that doesn't work?"

"Then it will be time for guns," Grandma said. "And maybe knives. Possibly poison."

"And that will get my father back?"

"Not if he is already dead."

Black dots obscured my vision. I plopped down on the flagstone driveway. The hot stone seared my skin, but the pain didn't last long. Nerve damage, probably.

"Shit," I said. "Shit and piss."

I cried anyway. Everyone kind of looked at each other like,
Crying? What do we do about crying
?

"My Virgin Mary," Takis said. "My wife does this when I come home bleeding." Murmurs of assent wafted through the family.

My nose began to twitch. Somebody was cooking, and whatever was on the menu smelled better than barbecue. Meat—definitely meat—and there were hot coals and exotic herbs and spices involved.

The tears subsided. "Is that lunch?" I asked, suddenly jacked up on hope.

T
hat worm Takis
wasn't lying, his wife was a large woman. Her flowery summer dress was doing it damnedest to cover all of her, but it was fumbling with the buttons. Marika rolled over him to get to me. "Katerina!" she cried, before bombing my cheeks with kisses. She had a kind, sweet face and she smelled like vanilla beans. "Come," she said, "We have made a party for you. A surprise party!"

Not anymore. "A party for me?"

"Of course! Most of the time we have parties for no good reason, but now here you are! Opa!"

I'd never heard anyone "
Opa
!" outside of a movie before. Was someone going to smash plates? Because plate smashing looked like fun. Suddenly, I was craving a good plate smashing.

The courtyard had morphed into party central. Long tables set up in rows. Chairs everywhere. A handful of men were sitting on a small stage, tuning instruments. They were family, too, by the looks of their noses and ears.

Marika introduced me to the other wives and children. I lost track fast. A family this size, name tags should have been compulsory. They were all excited to meet me and had a million questions about everything from shopping to politics. I had answers, but before I had a chance to speak, there was a new question, then another, then another. Soon I was drowning in inquiries about everything USA.

Too bad circumstances weren't different. I liked these people, I wanted to know them, but every minute that ticked by was another minute Dad was missing. I needed Takis and Stavros to throw me back into the family plane and rocket me back to Portland.

Instead, Marika was thrusting a plate into my hands and piling it with food as she chatted.

"This is lamb," she told me. "One of ours."

The lamb in question was skewered on a steel pole over hot coals, giving us all the slow rotating hoof as one of the cousins turned the rotisserie's handle. Both eyes were still in its head, and a chunk of meat was missing off its rump.

A dim part of my brain—the part that occasionally had trouble distinguishing truth from fiction, but only when I'd been kidnapped or awake for three days straight—wondered if the sheep was going to jump down and offer itself for the eating in a
Restaurant at the End of the Universe
moment.

"Poor sheep," I said.

Takis had snuck up on us. He grinned at my sudden pallor. "If God did not want us to eat animals, then why are they so delicious?"

Marika slapped him around the ear.

"Ow!"

He wandered away, muttering.

Marika pointed to each thing on my plate, told me its name. Some of it I was familiar with already, but others were total mysteries. I pointed to a blob of pink goop. "What is that?"

Because how bad could anything pink be?

"
Taramasalata
. Fish eggs," she said.

"And this?" I picked at a delicious slice of crispy meat that wasn't lamb.

"
Kokoretsi
…"

Ooo, it sounded great!

"It is hearts, lungs, kidneys, liver, tied with intestines." She kissed her fingertips. "Delicious!"

We had different standards, clearly. But I didn't want to offend people who could kill me and stuff my corpse in a bridge, so I picked around the icky bits and promised the mingling hounds that I'd share at the first opportunity.

The introductions kept on coming. I was hopelessly lost, and I couldn't get Dad off my mind.

"I need to get home," I said, but no one was listening.

"
T
his is Papou
," Grandma said, sometime later.

Papou
. Grandfather.

Papou had a face like a war-torn African nation. He was on the north end of eighty, and he got from A to B in a custom wheelchair that included a rack for a shotgun and a pouch for his drainage bag. His smile was toothless, his eyes yellow, and he smelled like lemonade.

"Papou is what those Sicilians call a consigliere," Grandma told me. "He is my
symvoulos
."

Her adviser.

"Is he really your grandfather?" I asked.

"He is nobody's grandfather, which is a good thing."

The old man spoke. "A Nazi pig shot off one of my balls during the war."

"That's awful," I said, trying to be sympathetic. "I'm sorry.'

He nodded. "It was my favorite one, next to the other one." He looked up at Grandma. "What are you going to do with her?"

"What can I do? Keep her here until we find Michail."

"Nuh-uh." I shook my head to punctuate. Hopefully they'd get the message. "I'm going home. There's no evidence Dad left the country—alone or with anyone else. There I've got the police and the FBI. They'll know what to do."

"The FBI," Papou muttered. "There is a problem we need."

Grandma explained. "A family like this, we want the law enforcement to stay far, far away from our business."

"Unless they are ours," the old man said.

"You have law enforcement?" I asked, wide-eyed. "You mean like health inspectors?"

The two of them laughed. Grandma patted me on the arm. "I will be back. Enjoy yourself, Katerina. This is for you." She hoofed it back to her yard, where Xander was waiting with a phone in his hand. He gave her the phone, then followed her inside while she chattered to whoever was on the other end. A business call. I could tell by the way her soft, wrinkly face turned to stone.

The old man wasn't done with me yet. "Come, Katerina. You can get me something to eat."

"What would you like?"

"Everything except vegetables. Meat only. I want to die soon, so I am clogging my arteries with fat."

"Some diets claim a high fat diet is better for you."

"Really?" He thought about it for a moment. "Then which diet is the worst?"

"Probably the baked goods diet. Something with lots of carbs and sugar."

"Okay." He nodded to the plate I'd just picked up. "Load it up with desserts. Do not skimp or I will shoot you."

I looked over the desserts lined up on the table, each one begging for one shot at giving me diabetes.

"If you want to die, why not shoot yourself?"

"Your grandmother will not let me have ammunition for my gun."

"So," I said, thinking about it. "Theoretically I could put vegetables on your plate and there's nothing you'd be able to do about it?"

In a flash, the shotgun was in his hand. The barrel slammed into the backs of my knees. "Oof," I said as my scaffolding temporarily collapsed. It took me a moment, but I pulled myself upright. "Hey, old man, hit me again and I'll make a completely ineffectual threat."

"What kind of threat?"

I thought about own worst fears. "I'll push that chair of yours into quicksand. Or roll you into a cage filled with geese."

"Geese are evil," he said. "I wouldn't wish them on an enemy."

"They really are. It's a surprise there aren't more horror movies about geese."

"I know people in the Greek movie business. I will let them know."

"Great," I said, already scratching that movie off my must-see list.

He hit me again, not as hard this time. "Where's my cake?"

A
fter the party
, the drinking, the dancing, the food, everyone napped. Everyone except Grandma and me. We were in her kitchen. She was baking and I was watching her weave magic with simple carbohydrates and fat.

"Am I really the first woman born in the family since you?"

Grandma glanced up at me from the hairy stuff she was slicing.
Baklava
's hirsute cousin by the looks of it. "Where did you hear that?"

"Detective Melas."

"Melas, eh? What was he doing?"

"Investigating the fire."

She grunted. "He has a big mouth."

"What's the big deal?"

"Eh, nothing. He is right, you are the first. Nobody has made a girl—even me—except your father."

"What about Aunt Rita?"

Grandma's expression turned constipated. "I wanted a daughter. Rita is what I got. A man who wears women's clothes."

"Hey," I said, "if Aunt Rita calls herself a woman, she's a woman, as far as I'm concerned."

"America has made your brain soft. Your parents should have raised you Greek. Your Aunt Rita has three sons with his second wife."

"She's married?"

"Three times. Number Three—already I forget her name—is doing sex with one of the cousins."

"And you're okay with that?"

Grandma shrugged. "She is not my wife. If she were my wife …" Her sentence fell off a cliff, into what I suspected was a pit full of very sharp things.

Time to change the subject. Behold, my smooth transition.

"You said we had to wait on the kidnapper to make their demands before you could do anything. I'm going to wait at home, just in case they call there."

"No. Your family needs you and you need us."

"What do you need me for?"

"When there is trouble—and there is trouble—family is the only thing you can trust."

This was a woman who hadn't seen the
Jerry Springer Show
, or
Maury
, or that balding, grinning Texan. Or any of the reality TV shows plaguing American television. Fact was, sometimes family was the last thing a person could trust. Every American knew that.

"Did you know Baby Dimitri didn't have Dad?"

"Yes."

"So why send me there to make a fool of myself?"

"I knew he did not have Michail, but that does not mean he did not take him."

"You mean you suspected someone outsourced the muscle to Baby Dimitri?"

"At first I thought yes, but now I do not think it was him. Are you a brave woman, Katerina?" she went on. "I think you are. You stormed into Baby Dimitri's shop like an avenging angel."

More like a smart-ass, with a mouthful of checks my body couldn't afford to cash. I was hot-stuff with Xander as backup, fixated on his phone, and at the time I had been amped up on a cocktail of jet lag, desperation, fear, and confusion.

Come to think of it, I still was.

"Not so much brave as deluded."

"Bravery is not something you feel. It is something you do. I have been brave many times, but not once have I felt brave. In this family we need brave people, or the family will not survive."

I
slept for a week
. Or maybe twelve hours that felt like a hundred and sixty-eight. When I got up it was slowly. I ran a hand down my legs to make sure I hadn't gone Rip Van Winkle. Slight stubble but not a full forest. Phew!

After losing fifteen minutes to a shower, I wandered into the kitchen and found my aunt but no Grandma. She was drinking brown sludge and daintily picking at the hairy stuff I'd watched Grandma bake.

She blew me a kiss. "The best thing about being a man under the hood is that I can eat more without gaining weight."

"You're so lucky," I said, sliding into the seat across from her. I wanted coffee, the kind with foam and milk and a squirt of vanilla syrup, not engine sludge. "Where's Grandma?"

"In the gardens. She does all the gardening herself. I keep telling her to hire a gardener or two, but does she listen?"

"No?"

"No."

Stubborn. Or maybe she just really got her kicks doing the gardening.

"So what's the deal with Xander, does he ever speak?"

"Xander, Xander.
Oooh la la
. He is a tasty dish. Very sad history, that man. Very sad. Tragic."

I looked at my aunt, both eyebrows raised—the international expression of,
Just hurry up and tell me before I explode
.

Aunt Rita wasn't biting. "I am not one to gossip. But his story is very sad."

Argh! Why wouldn't people here just speak plainly? Just one question answered in a straight line; question leads to satisfying answer. But no. Ask a simple question and they gave me alternate routes, codes, and detours leading to nowhere but frustration and confusion.

The screen door opened and Grandma shuffled in, no sign that she'd been playing with compost and worms. "Are you ready, Katerina?"

"What for?"

"Church."

T
he massive garage
doors had retracted, showing off the family's car collection. No limo for us today. The cousins who kept the motors running around here had parked a shiny black SUV in front of the fountain, where Thetis the sea nymph, and goddess of water, was pouring a bottomless jar of the wet stuff into a marble pool.

Grandma hoisted herself into the passenger side, then reached across and flung open the driver's side door. "You drive," she said. "I do not have a license."

Hadn't stopped her the other night.

I climbed in. The SUV came equipped with running boards but it was still a struggle to heave myself into the driver's seat without flopping around like a walrus. How Grandma was so limber and spry was a mystery. The vehicle's seats were leather, the dash fully loaded, and when I turned the key there was a grating, peppy voice asking me where I wanted to go. I'm not a violent person, but I wanted to karate chop her throat. For the record, everything I knew about karate I learned from
The Karate Kid
. The original, of course. Not that remake I tell myself never happened.

Anyway, Grandma seemed to be okay with the inquisitive computer woman. "GPS," she said, beaming. "Her voice is always so cheerful, it makes me happy." She leaned forward like she was about to kiss its shiny black buttons. "Makria."

The screen set into the dash came to life. The tiny woman stowed in the computer began to nag. I knew it. She wanted me to turn left and she wanted me to do it now—in a sweet, electronic voice.

Grandma jumped in on the act. "What are you waiting for? For the Turks to come back? Turn left!"

The SUV crawled across the paved ground to the iron gates. The man in the guardhouse—a different one today—pushed a button and I nudged the SUV forward until we were clear.

Grandma rolled down her window and stuck her head out. "Give my love to your mother," she said to the guard.

"I will. Thank you,
Nouna
." Godmother.

"Are you actually his godmother?" I asked, once we were on the move again.