farce.’
As I was replying to Adriani, I had a sudden flash of inspiration and I remembered Sotiropoulos. I called him on his mobile, praying that he would answer it. God left Adriani’s wish in abeyance and fulfilled mine. At the second ring, I heard his voice.
‘Sotiropoulos, listen to me and don’t interrupt.’ I told him the whole story with the biography. ‘Do you know where Vakirtzis might be now and how we might notify his family?’
‘Give me a minute to think.’ Silence followed. Then I heard his voice again, this time with a much more anxious tone. ‘It’s his name day today and he’s throwing a party at his place in the country. He invited me, but I have a TV programme and I couldn’t go.’
That’s it, I thought to myself on hearing this. He’s going to commit suicide at the party in front of his guests. There’d no doubt be at least one TV crew there that would record the scene and broadcast it as an exclusive on the news bulletin. For nothing to have been broadcast yet meant that he was still alive.
‘Can you inform anyone in his family?’ I asked Sotiropoulos.
‘I’ve got Vakirtzis’s mobile number, but I doubt if he’s going to answer.’
‘Don’t call him! If he’s made his mind up that he’s going to go through with it, he’ll only speed it up and we won’t be able to prevent him.’
‘I’ve no idea who else will be there.’
‘Where is his place?’
‘Somewhere near Vranas.’
‘Exact address?’
‘I don’t know, but I can find out.’ Suddenly, he changed his tone and shouted angrily. ‘And how the hell am I going to communicate with you when you don’t have a mobile phone?’
‘I’ll give you another number.’ I gave him Fanis’s mobile number.
‘You get going and I’ll be right behind you.’
That meant he would set off after first securing a TV crew. ‘You drive, please,’ I said to Fanis. ‘I don’t want to take the wheel. I feel too shaken.’
‘Okay.’ He turned and glanced at Adriani. She had remained in the middle of the sitting room, at a complete loss.
‘I’m sorry we’ve ruined your evening, but it’s not our fault,’ he said to her tenderly.
‘Never mind, Fanis, dear. It’s not the first time.’ She didn’t say it with spite, but rather with a sigh of resignation that made me go over to her.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘we’re not cancelling the trip to the island, just postponing it for a while. We still have the whole summer ahead of us. We’ll go for sure. I give you my word.’
‘All right, all right. Now go quickly so we won’t have another suicide on the screen.’
It was one of her good points. As soon as you acknowledged the sacrifice she was making, she stopped feeling sorry for herself and paid you back tenfold.
Fanis drove a Fiat Brava, a sort of great grandchild of the Mirafiori. I sat beside him in the front seat, holding his mobile phone in my open hand. I was waiting for Sotiropoulos to call and give us the exact address of Vakirtzis’s place in the country. But Sotiropoulos was delaying and I kept casting an impatient glance at the screen of the phone, which showed the time and simply increased my anxiety.
Fanis was of the opinion that we shouldn’t go via Stavros, but via Penteli, then drive down past the former pine forest and present-day charred forest of Dionysos to Nea Makri, from where we could continue on to Vranas. It had only been forty-five minutes since we had left the house and we were already driving up towards the forest at Dionysos. Fanis turned out to be right, because if we had followed the route Mesogheion Avenue-Aghia Paraskevi- Stavros, we would still have been stuck outside the ERT-TV building in Aghia Paraskevi because of the Olympic works underway at Stavros. Nevertheless, another idea began gnawing away inside me. Did Fanis know the way from Dionysos or would we get lost in the mountains and vales and Vakirtzis would commit suicide while we were still looking for someone to ask for directions? I saw him driving with great assuredness and that relieved me somewhat.
The phone rang just as we were starting our descent from the top of Dionysos.
‘No one has Vakirtzis’s exact address,’ Sotiropoulos said. ‘You’ll have to ask when you get to Vranas. Everyone knows his place.’
‘Okay.’
‘I’m leaving in fifteen minutes.’ There was a short pause and then he asked, somewhat tensely: ‘Have you talked to anyone else?’
‘Like who, for instance?’
‘To some other reporter. Have you?’
‘Do you think I’ve time to engage in chit-chat with your lot, Sotiropoulos?’ I said furiously and I pressed the button that Fanis had shown me in order to hang up.
By the time we reached the straight road leading to Nea Makri, night had well and truly fallen. There was virtually no traffic as far as the coast road, but at Zouberi we came up against an endless line of cars crawling bumper to bumper.
‘That’s it,’ I said to Fanis. ‘We’ll be lucky if we get there tomorrow.’
‘We’ve done well to get this far. Imagine if we’d come via Rafina.’
He was right, but it was no consolation. While we were trying to escape from a line of at least a hundred cars, Vakirtzis might have already committed suicide and have been laid out. My one last hope was that among so many guests someone might have stopped him. However, I knew from experience that in such cases people become paralysed when faced with the unexpected and, instead of doing something to prevent it, simply watch like pillars of salt.
Beside me, Fanis suddenly exploded and began pounding the steering wheel with his hands. ‘In summer they all go for fish, in winter for souvlaki and in between just for the excursion,’ he shouted angrily. ‘How are you ever going to find an open road?’
For a moment I forgot about the prospective candidate for suicide and tried to calm the prospective candidate for dangerous driving, but to no avail. He suddenly twisted the wheel to the left, pulled out into the opposite lane, which was empty given that no one goes in the direction of Athens for fish, put his foot down and started speeding like a man possessed.
‘Stop, you’ll get us killed!’ I shouted, but he wouldn’t listen.
In the distance I saw an intercity bus coming straight for us at full speed. Fanis quickly turned the wheel to the right and began honking at the line of cars to open up and let him back in. He managed it just as the bus whisked past us.
‘Are you crazy, you numbskull?’ shouted a man of about sixty from one of the cars. ‘And a doctor too. You should know better!’
‘He must be looking for custom,’ shouted a forty-year-old redhead at the wheel of a Honda.
‘That’s why we have more victims every weekend than the Palestinians!’ replied the sixty-year-old.
‘He’s right,’ I said to Fanis. ‘Do you think if we get killed, we’ll stop the suicide more easily?’
‘I’m a doctor!’ he yelled. ‘Do you know what it means when someone’s dying and you don’t get there in time?’
‘No. I’m a policeman and I always arrive there after the death.’
He was so absorbed in his thoughts that he didn’t even hear what I said. He was equally deaf to the comments and protests from the other drivers. It was the first time I had seen Fanis, who was always composed and conciliatory, beside himself. He went on with these guerrilla tactics for several more miles: swerving out into the opposite lane, overtaking three or four cars and then dodging back into the proper lane whenever something was coming in the opposite direction.
Despite the abuse we got, we at least managed to get away from Nea Makri and continue on the coast road towards Marathon, where the traffic was back to normal. When we eventually turned left towards Vranas, it was
