‘No, other than what I’ve already told you … That he was a little worried … A little preoccupied. Though why, I can’t tell you …’
‘Where did the two Kurds work?’
‘The sewer system. With Karanikas, the foreman who was here when you came in.’ He had a hard time hiding his anger with the elder man.
‘Where can I find him?’
‘He should be somewhere between the second and third row of houses as you leave the caravan.’
What I had been told by the staff in Porto Rafti had been confirmed. Nothing had changed outwardly in Favieros’s behaviour. And yet, for him to resort to suicide, either he must have been receiving threats from the Philip of Macedon National Front or he must have had personal problems.
Between the second and third row of houses I came across a group of workers who were talking to Karanikas.
‘Inspector Haritos,’ I said as I got nearer to him.
‘Do you people come in waves?’ he remarked caustically, while his eyes told me that he would have liked to have thrown me out on my ear.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Two of your colleagues were here the other day and we lost a whole day’s work because of them. Now you’re here and from what I see we’re going to lose another half day. Will there be any more of you coming?’
‘What’s it to you? I don’t have to explain myself to you.’ He realised he had gone too far and backed down. ‘Those two Kurds, what sort of people were they?’
‘How should I know? I learned their names from the TV.’
‘Didn’t they work here?’ I asked surprised.
‘Yes, this is where they worked. But they have such strange-sounding names that you forget them as soon as you hear them. That’s why it’s much easier to call them “Albanian, Bulgarian, Kurd” depending on where they’ve come from.’
‘Do you have a lot of foreigners on the site?’
His ironic tone returned. ‘That’s a good one … Me, I don’t know why we don’t build the Olympic facilities in Albania or Bulgaria or Kurdistan. It’d be much simpler as they’re the ones benefitting from the Olympic Games. It’s provided work for them.’
‘Come on now, you’re exaggerating. You come out with things like that and you give fuel to all kinds of screwballs!’
‘Do you know how many Greeks work on this site? Two engineers and four foremen, six in total. All the others are either from the Balkans or Third World countries.’ Then, suddenly getting riled: ‘We’re a worthless lot, and we’re being made proper fools of! Why don’t our unemployed do something about it … come here and smash the place up? The only ones to do something about it was that Macedonian lot.’
‘Do you mean the Philip of Macedon organisation?’
‘Yeah, them. The Macedons.’
‘So you agree with what the organisation wrote in its announcement about Favieros’s suicide?’
He looked at me cunningly and smiled. ‘Don’t go putting words into my mouth,’ he said, as though reading my thoughts and enjoying it all. ‘I don’t know what it says in the announcement. All I know is that I have to do with Albanians, Bulgarians, Kurds and Arabs. They’re the ones building the Olympic Village and they’re building it like their own homes. What do you expect from builders who all their lives have used straw and mud to build their huts?’
I stared at him for some time, but he didn’t look away because he believed he was in the right so he didn’t feel at all uncomfortable.
‘You didn’t particularly like Favieros,’ I said to him.
He shrugged indifferently. ‘Life is like swimming,’ he said. ‘Some swim in money, others in deep water and others in shit. Favieros was swimming in money. Now, if they made him commit suicide or if he committed suicide out of remorse or because he simply got it into his head, I don’t know and I don’t care if I don’t find out. I mind my own business and I’m happy swimming in deep water, because tomorrow they’ll put some foreman from Tirana in my place and then I’ll be swimming in shit.’
He considered that our conversation was over and rushed off to oversee the sewer system, which might very well turn out to be his future swimming pool.
The doorbell rang at nine o’clock. I was having my morning coffee in the sitting room and searching for the entry under ‘washing’ in the hope of finding some interpretation of the phrase ‘brainwashing’. I couldn’t find anything, because in 1955, when the Dimitrakos Dictionary was published, brainwashing was evidently of no concern to anyone, whereas today it’s even found its way into our bedroom, where the previous night Adriani had done a veritable laundry job on my brain because I’d been late coming home and was back to my old ways and because I should be ashamed for letting Ghikas make a fool of me by having me cut short my sick leave and because all the good work that she had done for me in those previous two months, I would undo in two days, and … and …
‘You’re wanted!’
The sound of her voice, sharp and authoritative, came from the front door. As if I were back to my first years in the Force, when I’d hear someone in one of the offices shout ‘Haritos!’ and I’d jump up and rush to find who it was that wanted me.
‘Your new assistant!’
The front door was wide open. Parked outside was a van. Koula appeared at the side door with a computer monitor in her arms. She was followed by a young lad of around twenty-two who was carrying the computer.
‘Leave it, Spyros, and go and bring the table,’ Koula said to him.
I found myself having to deal with two surprises at the same time and I didn’t know to which I should give precedence. First of all, I hadn’t been expecting Koula to turn up with a computer, and, secondly, it was quite a different Koula I saw before me. She was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, had tied her hair back into a ponytail and was no longer the model in uniform that greeted me in the entrance to Ghikas’s office. She looked like a student or an assistant in a company.
I recovered from the second surprise to return to the first. ‘What’s this, Koula? The Chief’s given you a computer as well?’
She laughed. ‘Come on now, Inspector, you know him better than that! It belongs to my cousin Spyros, who’s studying computers. He had one spare and he’s given it to me.’
The Spyros in question arrived carrying the little table. ‘Put it down there, I’ll take care of it, Spyros,’ she said to him sweetly. ‘This is Inspector Haritos.’
The young lad shot me a quick look and mumbled a ‘Hello’. Then he went back to the van. It was quite clear that he had no liking for coppers. Koula looked behind her and burst out laughing.
‘He’s the son of my mother’s sister,’ she explained. ‘I had a hard job getting him to like me because I was on the Force.’ Then she pointed to the computer and table. ‘Is there somewhere we can put these?’
‘What do we need the computer for, Koula?’
‘Just think about it! We’re working under cover now. You won’t have any reports or statements or records. How are you going to remember everything you saw and heard from so many people?’
She was right in what she said, but I didn’t know how I was going to persuade Adriani to find us a place for the computer. She’d quite likely put it in the loft without so much as a second thought.
I found her in the kitchen washing the breakfast pots.
‘Where can we put a computer that we need for our work?’ I asked her.
She dried her hands on the towel and stormed into the sitting room. Without uttering a word, she pushed the carved wooden armchair with the embroidered cushions inherited from her mother to the right; then she pushed the shelves with the vase that I had inherited from my mother to the left, leaving just enough room between them for the computer table. Then she turned to go back into the kitchen. But in the doorway to the sitting room, she
