Dante was sort of helping Rosa with the dishes-she washed, he dried what didn’t go into the dishwasher- when he got his idea. He’d already poked into Gounaris’s business life at Atlas Entertainment; maybe he could poke into his private life a little also, in ways that would shake him up without bringing another stinging letter from St. John as head counsel for Atlas.
“You know that Greek movie festival over in Berkeley at the Pacific Film Archives you were talking about? Who goes to something like that?”
Rosa laughed. “Me, for one thing. Maybe you-have you forgotten you said you wanted to-”
“I mean, do a lot of Greeks go?”
“Mostly Greeks.”
“Prominent ones?”
She looked at him shrewdly. “Okay, big boy, what’s going on? When you start treating me like a witness to a murder…”
So they sat on the couch and talked. Through the wall from the bedroom where Tony was supposedly studying came the beat of an album called Rembrandt Pussyhorse by an obscure vile punk band he had chosen to shock his folks with, the Butthole Surfers. The Surfers actually weren’t too bad, but Dante always objected very conscientiously to whatever band Tony chose; he didn’t want to deprive him of the joy of blowing his parents’ minds.
Dante told Rosie about the Interpol reports.
“Gounaris had to get investment capital from somewhere to buy his first freighter, then to expand. He wasn’t going to get it from the World Bank, that’s for damn sure.”
“So if the American cloth buyer was Mafia…”
“I’d have the connection I’m looking for. It’s so thin that if it turns sideways you can’t see it, but it fits the other facts I have right now. If Atlas Entertainment is a mob front, there has to be some earlier point of connection between them and Gounaris-they didn’t pick him off the street.”
“Will he be at the Greek Film Fest? Probably, at least for some films. The Greek community is pretty cohesive, and this is a big event.” She clapped her hands. “Of course! 1922! He’ll have to go to that one. He’s a Greek from Turkey, and 1922 is a film about the extermination of the Greek colony in Smyrna after the Greek Army was withdrawn. Those who didn’t get on the boats were sent on a death march through Asia Minor. Almost all of them died. It’s showing this weekend.”
The theater at the Film Archives was intimate, its banks of seats steeply angled so there was no trouble seeing the screen over the heads of the people in front of you. Also no trouble seeing the people coming in through the curtained doorway to the right of the screen
They sat with Anna Efstathiou, who taught Rosa’s dance class, and Nikos Xiotras, Anna’s lifelong friend and associate in Greek dance instruction. Anna was a tall, quick-moving woman with utterly black hair and huge, beautiful, penetrating eyes in a strong and unforgettable face. She and Nikos were almost constantly waving, calling, laughing, chatting over the recorded bazouki music.
Then Gounaris was there, moving easily through the entering throng, shaking hands and flashing white teeth in his dark face in a practiced smile. Dante, seated on the aisle, stood up abruptly.
“Be right back,” he said to Rosa.
He angled his way through the patrons coming up the stairs, and was right in front of Gounaris as the tall Greek was about to move down a row of seats.
“Mr. Gounaris! Pleasant surprise,” Dante said in a totally unsurprised voice.
Gounaris started back, a startled look on his face. He had been scanning the crowd for faces he knew before taking a seat.
“Our attorney sent you a letter about harassment-”
“This is just social.” Dante winked at him. “Hope you took my advice about those porn houses in the Tenderloin.”
He went back up to his seat, Gounaris’s stony eyes on him for a long moment before the Greek turned away to find a seat the others in his party were holding for him. Rosa was regarding Dante with shrewd disapproval.
“Gounaris, I take it.”
Dante grinned, pleased with himself. “In the flesh.”
“You had to do it, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Handsome devil,” she said, and gave her little giggle.
The houselights went down and the film started before he could respond. It was powerful and wrenching, leaving the audience drained. Greek memories of Turkish atrocities were long, their lists of dead relatives longer still. At the end of the film, Dante looked for Gounaris, but he had slipped away during the film. Ruined your evening, thought Dante exultantly.
Afterward the four of them strolled across the avenue to Henry’s in the Hotel Durant for ice cream sundaes and coffee. The talk drifted to Greece. Almost every year Anna leased a yacht to take a group of Americans on a guided tour of the Greek islands.
“Usually the Aegean is very kind to us, very smooth, the food marvelous, the weather great, the people wonderful, the yacht terrific.” Her voice was soft with memory, but then her black eyes snapped like firecrackers. Her mother had fled Smyrna by boat just before the withdrawal, so the film had aroused a lot of memories for her. “But one year we stopped in Smyrna. We went into a Greek barbershop, and the man made us speak to him only in English. He said if the Turks knew we were Greek, we could get into a lot of trouble.”
“Even though you were American citizens?” asked Rosa.
Anna spooned more hot fudge over her ice cream. “Just speaking Greek would be enough.”
“The Armenians were killed first,” said Nikos. “Then the Greeks. Men, women, children-you were killed or you were marched out. Kill the men, rape the women, then kill them too.”
Nikos was a short, strong-looking man with a mustache and curly gray hair; like Anna, he was American-born but Greek-speaking. He had been in the American Navy during World War II, and American, Greek, and world history were his meat and drink. His blue eyes were filled with passionate outrage.
“When you think of all the gifts and talents destroyed! Doctors, lawyers, teachers-who knows, maybe one of them would have cured cancer or found the key to world peace!”
Rosa asked, “Are there many Anatolian Greeks in the Bay Area?”
“Certainly! A lot of them were in the audience tonight.”
“Ari Onassis was from Smyrna,” said Anna. “And Kosta Gounaris was from Constantinople.”
“He was at the film tonight,” said Nikos. “He left before the end of 1922. Dante seemed to know him.” There was little that Nikos’s quick eyes missed. Dante waved a dismissive hand.
“Interviewed him as a witness in a case a while back.”
“I didn’t see him,” said Anna in an almost offended voice, as if anyone prominent in the Greek community who didn’t greet her was not to be tolerated. Then she added, eyes gleaming with speculation, “I wonder why he would leave early?”
I could tell you, Dante thought; but he knew he wouldn’t. He didn’t want to involve them, even peripherally, in his case. And not just for him; for their sakes, too.
“A good-looking man!” said Anna with relish. “I remember him dancing the zembeikiko during the festival at our church in Castro Valley. He dances it like a Greek.”
“He’d drop to the floor, then leap into the air like an eagle,” said Nikos. “And he has to be over fifty years old!”
“Remember Georgios Stefanatos, used to come to dance class until his knees gave out?” asked Anna. “Didn’t he captain a Gounaris freighter at one time?”
“Haven’t seen him in years,” mused Nikos. “I wonder if he’s still living over in Marin?”
Anna laughed. “Do you remember the time he…”
Rosa joined in; Dante could tune out their reminiscences without being rude. Damn, he loved being a detective! There was a rhythm to it: he’d needed a window into Gounaris’s early life; but not being able to find one, he’d settled for coming to the Greek Film Festival in hopes Gounaris would see him there and be jarred into doing something ill-considered.
Gounaris had left before the end of the film, so his departure was noted. But there was more. Because Dante
