Trueish Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel (3 page)

I had a clue. I didn’t know what it was—true—but I had one. Grandma had left the puzzle box at the bottom of her stocking drawer for anyone to find.

Aunt Rita and Takis were gone. Grandma and Xander were gone. Which left me with Papou and the rest of the Family. If Grandma knew who had sent the box, maybe her advisor did, too, seeing as how they were from the same geologic period.

I found him at the back of the compound, between the building and the wall, blowing smoke like the Little Engine That Could. When he saw me he dropped the cigarette on the ground, then he burst into curse words, most of them involving unnatural acts with animals.

“I saw that on the internet once,” I told him. “I was looking for a pot roast recipe. What are you doing back here?”

“Not smoking, that’s what I’m doing.”

The ground in the compound was a neat arrangement of flagstones. It was interrupted here and there for the gardens Grandma tended herself. Each was an explosion of color and scent and green stuff, some of it pointy. Papou had planted himself by a sprawling oleander, and judging from the small nest of cigarette butts at its base he did that a lot.

“I don’t care if you smoke, and I’m not going to squeal. It’s your funeral.”

“I hate cigarettes,” he said. “They stink and they taste like a Turkish hooker’s ass. I smoke to die.”

Papou had a half-hearted death wish. He was taking the long, slow, scenic route to Hades.

“If Grandma sees all those cigarette butts you’re a dead man.”

“Pick them up,” he said.

“You want me to pick up your mess?”

“That’s the idea.”

I leaned against the wall, folded my arms. The wall surrounding the compound was a tall stack of stone slabs, held together with tough mortar. Jericho wished it had a wall this strong. An army could blast trumpets here for a thousand years and it wouldn’t budge. Although, someone in the Family was bound to open fire on them after the first five minutes of tuneless trumpet-blowing.

“I’ll pick them up if you help me with something.”

He stared at me. Hard. It was easy to picture his head orbiting a sun somewhere before meteors knocked it out of rotation. His face split into a big smile.

“All right. I will help you. But only because you remind me of your grandmother before this life had its way with her.”

I nodded once. “Someone sent Grandma a puzzle box. Wood, with a combination reel. English alphabet. Grandma said she knew who it was from, and that the sender was telling her they had information about Dad’s disappearance.”

A lie skittered across his eyes. “I don’t know who that could be.”

“Grandma also said the sender was in a maximum security prison.”

“The Family knows a lot of people in prison. Could be any of them.”

“Lying.”

“Who is lying? No one, that is who.”

“Still lying.”

He slapped the air. “Bah. Show me your box.”

P
apou blinked at the box
. Granted, things were dim in Grandma’s kitchen.

“Is it jogging your memory?”

“I can’t remember what I ate for breakfast. How am I supposed to remember someone I have not seen in fifteen years?”

I hung him on my sharply raised eyebrow.

“
Fila to kolo mou
!” he swore, which translated to
kiss my ass
. He pointed at me. “You are tricky. I will have to watch you.”

“So who is he?”

“An animal and an idiot.” A satisfied smirk made itself cozy on his face. “If you can open it I will tell you who sent it.”

“That’s not fair.”

“You made me a deal, I make you a deal. Figure out the combination. After you do that, and pick up the cigarette butts like you promised, I will tell you.”

The old guy had snookered me.

“How am I supposed to figure out the combination? I need context, a place to start.”

He rolled out the front door, chair clanking as it maneuvered the single step. “You can do it. I have faith in you. Okay, maybe not faith, but something like faith, only smaller.”

Over by the fountain a man was pretending to prune a tree that didn’t need pruning, mostly because it wasn’t there. I faked not seeing him and he faked not seeing me. Already Elias the Assassin and I had a functional—even amicable—relationship.

I sat under one of the wide-brimmed umbrellas scattered around the courtyard. Each came with a table and chairs, and it was here that the family—and the Family—spent their evenings after siesta. The courtyard was also home to overhead trellises with grape and other vines slowly clambering across the wooden frames, but underneath the light was filtered and patchy. I wanted full blackout. It was slouching toward noon so the place was deserted. Time for lunch and a nap. Not for me; I wasn’t Greek enough to snooze in the afternoons, guilt-free.

I plonked the puzzle box on the table and scratched my head. Without context it would be close to impossible to figure out the combination. I spun the dials and contemplated how many eight-letter words were in the English dictionary. That’s if it was even a word. For all I knew it was a random combination, designed to foil Scrabble pros.

It was a game.

My goat wandered over with his canine posse. The lop-eared ruminant had appeared by magic on my borrowed bed a couple of days after I’d arrived in Greece. Nobody recognized him, and I hadn’t discounted the idea that he was some kind of Trojan goat; although, you’d be hard pressed to fit even a sixteenth of a soldier in its four stomachs. That’s without armor. Even a goat would balk at bronze. He was brown-and-white, and so far he’d decided to stick around. Who could blame him? The menu here was varied and plentiful. He had quickly bonded with the compound’s pack of dogs, primarily lurchers, with a penchant for long naps, dropped food, and cuddles.

He nuzzled my hand, looking for crumbs, and then went to work on a nearby bush.

“Does it have a name?” Elias called out.

I shook my head. “No name.”

“You should give it a name. Everybody will be less inclined to cook him if he has a name.”

“Really?”

“Sure. It’s always harder to kill someone you know by name.”

He would know. “I’ll think about,” I said.

He saluted me and went back to his mime.

I slumped on the table, both eyes on the box. It mocked me silently.

“Know what I would do if I were you?”

Elias again.

“About what?”

“The box.”

“What would you do?”

“Kids,” he said. “They can open anything, even if it doesn’t want to be opened.”

His thought was in the right place, but he was stabbing it from the wrong angle. Kids can open anything,
especially
if it doesn’t want to be opened.

I
t seemed
impossible that Takis had caught Marika and conned her finger all the way into a gold ring. On the outside they were a mismatched pair, and probably on the inside, too. If he was a tool, she was a soft, comfortable sofa in flowery prints. They occupied the roomy apartment on the top left corner of the compound.

Takis’ wife had long hair she normally kept caged in a tight bun. It was black with a natural hint of blue. When she rushed toward me, it brought to mind the inevitability an oncoming train, when your shoe is caught in the tracks and you’ve had ten swigs too many from the Boone’s Farm bottle.

“Katerina!” she said, pulling me into her arms. We exchanged hugs and continental kisses, as was customary around these parts. All the kissing Greeks did, they’d be the first to fall if there was a worldwide pandemic.

Marika was a woman who sprinkled her sentences with exclamation points. She used up her yearly quota in every conversation. “You have come to visit! Let me make coffee!”

My mission would be temporarily interrupted if I let her navigate me into the living room. One didn’t drink coffee and go; there would be food, there would be gossip, there would be two hours gone.

“I’d love to sit here and drink coffee with you, but I can’t.” I held up the puzzle box. “It’s a clue about Dad. I think. I was wondering if your kids might be able to work it out.”

Marika looked dubious. “My boys?” She and Takis had a handful of boys, semi-wild, part simian, with a dash of mad professor. They were good-natured kids who’d either rule the universe some day, or lay waste to the whole shebang. “The way they open a box is with fire or an axe.”

I was afraid of that.

“You should ask Litsa.” Her hands engaged in a simple form of flagless semaphores. “Her Tomas can break into anything. He has a bright career ahead of him as a safecracker.”

In some families—decent ones—that would be considered a minus, but in this one it was a huge plus. The criminal gene was filtering down through the generations. The other genes didn’t stand a chance—not when they were mugged and supplanted in utero.

I tried to smile, but my face got stuck on the way there.

“It will be okay,” Marika said, beaming. “This family … it takes time to get used to how they are. No one in my family has ever committed a crime. Not so much as a stolen piece of fruit, yet look what I married. You get used to it. Here.” She reached into her apron pocket, retrieved what looked like a Twinkie’s Greek cousin, pushed the plastic-wrapped cake into my hand. “Don’t tell Baboulas I gave you a store-bought cake, okay? She would flip.”

Her secret was safe with me, and I told her so. After pocketing my cake, and asking for directions to Litsa’s and Tomas’ apartment, I was on my way.

I stepped sideways.

Litsa’s door flew open. I looked at her; looked back at the fist I hadn’t had a chance to use yet.

“Katerina! Could be I heard what Marika told you.”

Could be. “Is Tomas in?”

She nodded and ushered me inside, while simultaneously screeching, “Tomas!”

Litsa was in her late thirties. She and her husband, whose name I couldn’t recall with her voice stabbing my eardrums, had three boys. She was the kind of woman who worked hard at looking cheap, and she succeeded beautifully. Her nails were real acrylic, her ponytail was clip-on, and her boobs had arrived in individually wrapped containers, before the surgeon stuffed them into her chest. The apartment was almost as spacious as the one next-door, but there was more fake gold and less good taste.

“Sit,” she said, steering me into the living room. Litsa didn’t do things old school. Unlike generations before her, she didn’t keep a room for entertaining visitors. But then Grandma didn’t either. Her house didn’t have the space … or a toilet in her bathroom.

Tomas Makris wandered into the room in Spiderman underwear and Transformers slippers. He had the family nose and black hair shaved close to the scalp. In his slippers he was about three-and-a-half-feet-tall, which seemed normal for a five-year-old. He looked at me with wide, dark eyes.

“What’s it like being a foreigner?”

My brain spluttered, but my mouth made up for it. “Foreign.”

He nodded. “I figured.”

“Are you in school yet?”

“No. Kindergarten is keeping me back. I failed finger painting.”

“Really?”

“No.”

I looked at his mother. “Does he know he’s thirty?”

She shrugged somewhat helplessly.

“What’s that?” His eyes were glued to the box in my hand. “Is that for me?”

To crouch or not crouch, that was the question. On the one hand, he was five. On the other, he was thirty. I crouched, hoping it was the right move.

“It’s not for either of us, but I was hoping you might be able to open it.”

“English alphabet,” he said, inspecting the puzzle box. “Eight letters.”

“Do you know English?”

“I know puzzles and combinations. I can open anything.”

“So I heard.”

“I can also burp the alphabet. Want to hear it?”

“Maybe later. It’s a pretty big achievement, though. I know grown men who can’t do it.”

“It’s all in here.” He pointed to his diaphragm. “And you have to gulp a lot of air between letters.” He gave me a quick
alpha, beta, gamma
to demonstrate.

I won’t lie: I was pretty impressed.

“Let’s go,” he said. “I think better when I’m in my fort.”

“I will bring coffee,” Litsa called after us.

The boy’s fort was made of pillows, sheets, and a couple of traditional Greek chairs. It was a good fort, and he beamed when I told him so. He ducked under the sheet and held it up for me to join him.

“Is it true you’re going to be Baboulas someday?” he asked once we’d both settled beneath the fort’s cotton roof. He dropped the “door.” Instant comfort. Nothing bad could touch me here. Not even the Goblin King or the boogeyman.

“Not if I can help it.”

You will be,” he said, with absolute certainty. “If Baboulas wants you to be, you will be.”

“If I don’t want to be, then I don’t have to be.”

He considered my words. “That’s not how it works.”

“That’s how it works in my world, unless you have a tiger mother.”

“What’s a tiger mother?”

When I explained about tiger mothers, and how they’d claw out your heart if you got less than an A-plus in a test, he frowned. “Greek mothers are more like sea turtles. Except Baboulas. She’s more like an elephant.” He twiddled the dials. There was a small click. He handed it back to me.

“Baboulas,” I said, reading the word.

“They weren’t even trying.” The poor kid sounded disappointed. He brightened up. “What’s inside? Is it chocolate?”

I lifted the lid and peeked inside. “YOWZA!” I slammed it shut. “Definitely not chocolate.”

“
T
hat’s not a finger
,” Papou said.

“Usually they send a finger,” Stavros said. He had joined Papou in his smoking nook, but he wasn’t smoking. He was sitting on the ground cross-legged, doing cross-stitch. It was an eerily accurate recreation of Theophanes the Greek’s
Transfiguration of Jesus …
in teeny, tiny x’s.

“It’s definitely not a finger,” I said. I wadded up my fear and nausea, shunted them to the side. Unfortunately, I couldn’t quit glancing sideways at the emotional mess. If what was in the box was part of Dad, I was going to implode. There would be a burst of tears, a loud
pop
, then I’d vanish. “Grandma told me you guys don’t send body parts.”

“As proof of life.” Papou scraped a match on the wall. It burst into flame. Greeks didn’t believe in safety matches. They figured they went to the trouble of stealing fire from the gods, so why take the red phosphorus out of matches and stick it on the side of the box? Fire, they believed, shouldn’t be smothered with rules. “But we’ll send anything as proof of death.”

“I remember one time we sent an ear,” Stavros added.

“That’s no ear,” I said.

Papou cackled around the damp end of his cigarette. “I know what it is, eh? I have one myself.” He made a V with his hands, pointed at his crotch. It was an obscene Greek hand gesture that he’d toned down to merely informative. “And like this one, it doesn’t work.”

I pulled out my phone, dialed Aunt Rita, who was on her way to Athens with Takis.

“Ela,” she said, answering the phone the way Greeks did, with a ‘Come’ instead of a ‘Hello.’

“I have a penis,” I said.

“Me too,” she answered.

“This one’s in a wooden box.”

There was a long pause, but not a silent one. Music and howling stuffed itself into the gap in our conversation. Wherever she was, someone was in pain.

“Jesus,” I said, “is that Takis?”

She made an affirmative noise. “He calls that singing. I would threaten to shoot him in the face but he’s driving.”

A death sentence for both of them, for sure, if she fired. Greeks don’t know the meaning of
drive slowly
. They hurtle from one location to the next, pictures of saints propped up on the dashboard, crucifix dangling from the rearview mirror. God is their insurance company.

“He’ll have to stop eventually,” I said.

The baying quit abruptly. “I heard that!”

“Is the
poutsa
in the puzzle box?” my aunt asked.

“Yeah, in the puzzle box. Litsa’s youngest opened it for me.”

“That boy is going places,” she said. “With luck none of them will be prison.”

“I doubt they’d be able to keep him inside for long.”

I could feel her nodding. “Whose is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it Michail’s?”

Papou was looking at me. Stavros was looking at me. Although there were miles between us, I could feel my aunt looking at me.

“How should I know?” I squeaked. “He’s my father. I shouldn’t know what his Oscar Meyer Wiener looks like!”

“What is an Oscar Meyer Wiener?” Stavros asked.

“It’s a sausage,” I explained. “A hot dog.”

“Ah, a
xot donk
! We have those here, too.”

My stomach growled. The two men looked at me in horror.

“My belly is stupid,” I said. “All it heard was ‘hot dog.’ “

I moved past the hunger. An idea was beginning to unfurl in my head. “There’s someone who might know,” I said slowly.

“Who?” Papou asked.

“Dina,” Aunt Rita and I said at the same time.

She gasped. “Touch red!” There was a squeal of tires, and Takis yelled, “
Gamo ti putana
, you stupid
skeela!”

Which loosely translated to:
Engage in intercourse with a woman of negotiable affections, you stupid she-dog
.

I closed my eyes. “What did you touch?”

“
Vromoskeelo
!” Aunt Rita screamed back at him. Huh. As far as insults went ‘dirty dog’ wasn’t too bad. “I touched the pimple on his nose. That thing needs its own area code. Go see Dina,” she told me. “She will know.”

I ended the call. Stavros and Papou were watching me.

“Anyone want to come for a ride?”

Stavros raised his hand. “Me. Pick me.”

“What about me?” the old man said.

“I guess you could come, too.”

“Forget it.” Papou flipped his hand at me. “You drive too slow. How is that going to kill me?”

“Are you going to tell me who sent the box?”

“Are you going to pick up the cigarette butts so your grandmother doesn’t find out I have been smoking?”

“Later,” I said.

“Then I will tell you later.”

Damn it, he had me.

D
ina was
Dad’s former girlfriend, the woman he’d been with before he jumped ship to America and married my mother. Thirty years later she was still devoted to Dad. Her entire home was a shrine to his awesomeness. Only her bathroom was exempt from the Dad-worship, because who wants their deity to watch them poop? She lived on a steep hill, where the houses were as stubborn as Greece’s people. If an earthquake came, a storm, the Turks, they weren’t going anywhere. They would stay right here on their incline, hugging Greek soil and rock for eternity.

Halfway there, I spotted company in the rearview mirror—company that wasn’t my assassin, Elias.

A cop car.

Detective Melas.

My mouth groaned, but my body yelled “Yay!” without a shred of sarcasm.

Big showoff, he flashed his lights and indicated for me to pull over. Defying law enforcement didn’t come naturally to me, despite the patterns in my DNA, so I snugged up to the next bare patch of curb, hopped out of the Beetle, tried to look like I wasn’t carrying around a severed wang in a box.

Stavros slapped the leather seat I’d vacated. “Are you okay?”

“Great.” Delivered with a side of sarcasm Stavros didn’t get. How could I be okay when I was possibly in possession of one of Dad’s body parts, without the rest of Dad?

“Because you’re standing the way I had to stand the time I pissed my pants.”

I had a comeback curled at the back of my throat, but had to swallow it when Melas swaggered over to me. He did it on purpose, walking the bad-boy walk. He was wearing jeans and a button-down shirt with the sleeves folded to his elbows. In another week his dark, wavy hair was going to need one-on-one time with clippers and a pair of scissors. His body was hard and trim. I’d seen glimpses of what was underneath, and it was delicious. Part of his face was hidden behind sunglasses, but I knew his eyes were warm, dark chocolate, and when he looked at me I felt like the only woman in the world … this week. I had discretely asked around. Melas had the kind of reputation that sunk a Greek woman, but elevated a Greek man to living-legend status.

He grinned. My stomach tied itself into damp knots. “Do you know you’re being followed?”

“Yes.”

“Who is he? I don’t recognize him.”

He was talking about Elias, who had cruised to a stop several car-lengths back. He was poised behind the wheel, waiting.

“Oh, he’s not one of Grandma’s. That’s Elias. He’s an assassin working for Fatmir the Poor. Do you know him?”

“Fatmir? Only by reputation.” He shook his head. “Jesus. Who’s his target?”

“You’re looking at her.”

“What did you do to him?”

“I guess he doesn’t like Americans.”

Melas looked at me like I was speaking French. My joke must have flown over his head and splattered on the hot road.

“I was in the newspaper,” I said, taking pity on him. “Apparently Fatmir isn’t happy Grandma thinks she’s got an heir.”

“In the newspaper?”

“Front page.”

“What were you doing on the front page?”

“Among other things, eating dinner with you. It was a fluff piece.”

“Slow news day.”

“Maybe the Greek mafia is a more cheerful topic than the economy.”

He nodded to the box in my hands. “What’s in the box?”

“A clue.”

“What kind of clue?”

“A penis-shaped clue.”

“Penis-shaped? What’s penis-shaped?”

“A penis.”

His skin had seen a lot of sun this summer, turning him to a deep, burnished gold, but as my words sank in all that color washed away.

“A real one?” I nodded. He glanced around. “There’s a severed …” The correct anatomical word stuck in this throat. “… In that box?” I nodded again. “Lady, you’ve got problems.”

“Hey,” I said. “It’s not like I chopped it off and sent it to myself.”

His color wasn’t looking any better. “Where are you taking it?”

I told him and he stared at me, blinking.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “This I’ve got to see.”

“You can’t come with us!”

“Why not?”

“It’s … It’s official family business.”

“Your family is the Greek mafia and I’m a policeman. That means your business is my business. Either I come with you, or we can take that … that box back to my office.”

“You don’t have an office.”

“My boss does.”

He climbed back into his police car, and I jumped back into my Beetle, zipping away before he’d had a chance to buckle his belt.

Stavros shook his head, clearly impressed. “The way he does blackmail, he could be one of us.”

The mercury had to be pushing a hundred. I parked at the foot of the narrow street in a patch of shade. When I stepped into the sunlight, the heat caved in on me like a cheaply built roof. The Beetle had air conditioning, but I hated to use it now that I was driving a convertible. I relied on fresh air and low speed. Back home I had a ten-year-old Jeep with air conditioning I ran all summer long.

A pang of longing crept up on me and tapped me on the shoulder. Home. My car. Dad. Part of him could be in this box. And if it was, where was the rest of him?

My gut clenched. There was a small balloon in my diaphragm that expanded and contracted as my fear levels rose and fell.

Melas crunched to a stop behind us. I took a deep breath and somehow—by the power of sorcery—managed to put on a smile that wasn’t wobbling.

“Let’s do this,” I told the two men.

Dina’s house was one white cake box set in two parallel lines of nearly identical cake boxes. The roofs were all flat, topped by TV antennas and washing lines. Unlike all the other yards in the neighborhood, Dina’s fenced-in space was a barren slab of concrete that she swept constantly, when she wasn’t inside paying homage to the memory of my father. If anyone who could tell me whether this was one of Dad’s bits it was Dina.

We found her in her yard—surprise, surprise—sweeping. Briefly, I wondered if she’d ever sought professional help for her issues. Last week she sent a tray of tulle-wrapped, poop-filled wedding favors to the local police department to show her appreciation for their complete failure to stop a serial killer from conning her. With a little help, she and I had ended his career in crime ourselves.

Dad’s former girlfriend had the kind of figure one could use to prop up a load-bearing wall. She was a lot of woman packed into a smallish container. Density had trumped mass.

“You.” She made a sniffing sound. “What do you want?”

I didn’t waste time—hers or mine. “I need you to identify a penis.”

“Are you calling me a
putana
? What makes you think I can identify it? You should ask your aunt.”

If Aunt Rita were here she’d zip off a smart comment about how Dina had become a born-again virgin after Dad split Greece. According to my aunt, the sugar had been licked off that candy repeatedly, and by dozens of different tongues, long before Dina and Dad became a thing.

“Ain’t nobody got time for this,” I muttered in English. Three faces looked at me. “Heh,” I said. “It’s an urban American prayer.” I held up the box, showed it to Dina. “See this box? There’s a penis in it. It might be Dad’s.”

“Why would it be in that box?”

I looked at her—hard—until the light bulb in her head exploded.

She gasped and clutched her chest. It took a while—the woman had a lot of acreage to cover. “My Virgin Mary, Michail!” Her brain and heart went to battle over her face. They fought long and hard for control of the muscles. In the end her head won. She blinked away any potential tears and put on her no-bullshit expression.

“Show me,” she commanded, fanning her face with her hands.

Everyone crowded around me. I lifted the lid, revealing the male appendage in all its glory—and gory.

Clonk
.

That was the sound of local law enforcement fainting. Melas had collapsed in a manly heap.

“It’s not that big,” I said.

“It’s pretty big,” Stavros said. “And that’s not fully extended.”

Stavros knew a lot about other guy’s dicks, on account of how he watched so much porn. Not all of it human, I suspected.

“It’s not Michail’s,” Dina breathed. “It’s not Michail’s.”

The bucket of relief was poised over my head, but I wasn’t about to let it splash Flashdance-style over me yet.

“Are you sure?” I prompted her.

“I would know it anywhere. His is bigger and it’s different.” She leaned in and poked at it with one sharp fingernail. “See this?”

“See what?” To be honest I wasn’t inspecting it too hard. If it was Dad’s, ogling his private part was horrifying, wrong, and upsetting. If it was someone else’s, then it was still wrong, horrifying and upsetting. A severed penis is a severed penis—ask Melas, who was still spread out on the concrete, groaning.

“Wait there. I will show you.” Dina vanished into her house.

I crouched down beside the detective. “Are you okay?”

“No.”

“Can you sit up?”

“Make it go away.”

To the best of my abilities, I pulled him into the sitting position, back against the fence. One at a time, I bent his legs. “Head between your knees,” I said. “It should help.”

“Don’t tell anyone I fainted. Please.”

“I won’t. But Stavros will.”

“It’s true.” Stavros bobbed his head. “I will tell Takis, and he will tell everyone.”

“How about you don’t tell Takis?” I asked.

“I can’t help myself,” he said sadly.