Now that he had secured my consent, relieved and with a big smile on his face, he got to his feet. I looked at him wondering which of us would come out on top in our future confrontation. Would it be him because he would tell me that he’d saved me my job or would it be me for ridding him of Yanoutsos?
We were at the front door when, suddenly, in an outburst of unprecedented cordiality, he gave me a friendly pat on the back instead of his usual formal handshake. ‘I’ve missed you, Costas,’ he said, ‘I’ve really missed you.’
I wanted to tell him that I’d missed him too, but it didn’t mean very much, because in my case I’d missed everything apart from my own home. So that included him too, but not him personally, he was just a part of the whole.
‘It’s out of the question!’ shouted Adriani, when later we were sitting with Fanis at the table eating our oven-roasted suckling pig with potatoes in a lemon sauce. ‘It’s out of the question for you to drive that old crock in your weak state.’
The old crock was my faithful Mirafiori that had so far managed to avoid the scrapheap and was about to celebrate, humbly and without any fanfares, its thirtieth year on the road. Adriani had digested the fact that she would have Koula round her feet all day long, but the Mirafiori for dessert was too much for her to stomach.
‘I won’t be driving it. Koula can drive,’ I said to appease her.
‘It’s out of the question,’ she yelled again. ‘No one can drive that old banger apart from you.’
‘She’s right about that,’ chipped in Fanis, who was thoroughly enjoying it all. ‘Why don’t you get a new car? With all the easy instalments that they offer today, you won’t have to start paying it off for at least a year.’
‘I’m not parting with my Mirafiori. It’s still roadworthy.’ I said it with assurance though I wasn’t at all sure that it would start up again after two months of sitting in front of the house.
‘Fine,’ said Adriani. ‘But if anything happens to you, I’ll be straight off to Thessaloniki to stay with my daughter and you can get Koula to take care of you!’ In a temper she diced the meat on her plate into tiny pieces as though she were going to feed the grandchild that she didn’t have.
‘Continuation: mod. & demotic, Uninterrupted process or succession, sequel, resumption: Arist.
‘Beginning: med., mod. & demotic, commencement, start. Plato
The same question had been going round and round in my head all night: was the mission that Ghikas had assigned me to be regarded as a new beginning or as a continuation of my old situation? Officially, I was still the Head of the Homicide Division on sick leave. Ghikas’s assignment meant neither change nor conversion. It was simply the continuation towards the embryo’s navel as Dimitrakos put it. As though I were a tax official who took care of a few friends’ books on the sly each evening in order to make a bit extra for my holidays.
On the other hand, however, it wasn’t at all certain that I would remain Head of the Homicide Division. Firstly, because suicide is an act, the success of which is enjoyed in full by the one committing the act and consequently there would be nothing for me to cash in on. Secondly, even if I were to manage to make black appear white and squeeze some mileage out of Favieros’s suicide, Yanoutsos in the meantime would have got a firm grip on my position and would pull every string not to have to give up my chair, with its worn leather armrests from which the foam rubber was bursting out. Looking at it this way, the mission assigned to me by Ghikas was a new beginning, which had all the ingredients needed to prove the saying ‘a bad beginning betokens a worse end’.
In the morning I still hadn’t found any answer to the question and I woke up with my head swimming. In the end, these kinds of dilemmas always come down to the more colloquial ‘between the devil and the deep blue sea’, so I decided to have a shot at it, despite the limited chances of success, rather than allow Yanoutsos to get the better of me.
Koula phoned me while I was still having my coffee and started talking to me in coded phrases: ‘I’ll bring the package over tomorrow, Inspector Haritos. Unfortunately, I don’t have time today. I need to take care of some details.’ She reminded me of my late father, who used to talk in coded language when he wanted to say that there was some order from above and he didn’t want anyone else to understand. ‘There’s a personal order from his nibs.’ And he meant the Prime Minister. Anyhow, I understood that she would take up her new duties the next day. In the meantime I could start alone. It was a pity to let the day go wasted.
I drank the last of my coffee and got up to go. At the front door, I bumped into Adriani who was returning from the supermarket.
‘Are you going out?’
‘Yes. Don’t wait for me for lunch. I might be late.’
When I went to work normally, that remark was superfluous. I never came home at midday. Now that I was starting again, after a two-month lay-off, I was obliged to make it clear in order to emphasise that we were returning to the old routine.
‘I see. Old habits die hard,’ she said, going into the house.
Her vexation was understandable as I had told her nothing of the threat of Yanoutsos. If I were to tell her, she would have jumped for joy. For years she had been trying to persuade me to put in for a transfer to a quieter department with regular hours. ‘As they don’t promote you anyway, why kill yourself at work on top of everything?’ was her foolproof argument, which would have convinced every rational person.
I decided to make my first call of the day at Favieros’s residence. I was certain that none of my colleagues would have thought of bothering his family over the suicide, so it was only right I should begin from there. From the TV news reports that have become a kind of contemporary encyclopedia for us all, I found out that Favieros’s family lived in Porto Rafti, and so I set to thinking about the best route for getting there. I had no intention of paying for a taxi out of my own pocket and if I were to take the bus I’d get there in the afternoon just in time for tea and cake. In the end, I decided to combine all the forms of public transport that Athens has: I would take the trolley to Syntagma Square, from there take the underground to Ethniki Amyna and then get the intercity bus to Porto Rafti.
Half an hour later, I was going up the escalator in the underground, leaving behind the station’s marble mausoleum with its artificial shrubs growing out of granite, its grandiose announcements and its classical music that makes me feel like a European for ten minutes or so. Above, on my right, was the Ministry of Transport and, on my left, the Ministry of National Defence. In between, in the middle of the road, was a line of bus stops and a bustling crowd of people, everyone ready to elbow the other out of the way when the bus appeared so as to get on first and secure a seat. Back in Greece, I thought to myself, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
My own bus was half an hour in coming, but fortunately I didn’t have to start pushing and shoving, as it was an intercity bus and there were plenty of empty seats. The fat woman sitting beside me was balancing a plastic bag between her legs and in her arms she was clutching an enormous handbag, half the contents of which were spilling over into her lap. If we exclude some congestion from the Greek Broadcasting Company building as far as the junction at Stavros, the traffic was moving normally. As we approached Porto Rafti, I asked the fat woman whether she knew where Favieros’s house was located. Suddenly five or six people, men and women, leaned over to my window to show me what was evidently one of the area’s main attractions.
‘Get back, I’m the one he asked,’ said the fat woman, forcing them back and making them respect her priority. She waited for order to be restored and then turned to me. ‘You should get off at Gegos’s,’ she said.
‘Who’s Gegos?’ I asked, puzzled.
‘The supermarket. It’s the next stop. Then turn left towards St Spyridon’s. When you come to the bend in the road, you’ll see it on the slope, to the left. It’s a big house with a huge garden.’ She turned back and shouted to the driver: ‘Prodromos, stop outside Gegos’s so the gentleman can get off.’
All the people on the bus had turned round and were staring at me with a strange, inquisitive look on their
