'That's how I might seem, but I'm not.' She sat in her chair and looked me in the eye. 'You see the phone?' She pointed to the telephone beside the television. 'They put it in for me last year. Till last year, I was all alone and without a phone. If I'd died, the neighbors would only have found out from the stench. By rights, what I should do is give my daughter a talking-to for living in the lap of luxury and leaving me in this hovel. I don't mean that she should have me live with her, since she can't, but they sent my granddaughter to university here in Athens and bought her a two-room flat in Pangrati. Would it have killed them to buy a bigger one so I could have moved in with her? I should tell my daughter all that to her face, but I cross myself and keep quiet. And do you know why? Because I'm afraid of angering her in case she stops sending the oil, the olives, and the eighty thousand she sends me-every month she says, but it's more like every two. You see me quiet because I'm afraid. But inside, I'm fuming.'
'Are you saying that they seemed quiet, but that they might have been afraid?'
'I don't know. You saw them coming and going, and it made you wonder.'
'Why did it make you wonder?'
'Because they'd leave as if someone was after them, and they'd come back like thieves in the night. It was always late at night. You'd wake up in the morning and they'd be here. One evening, I'd switched off the television, and I was sitting at the window. Me, I sit in front of the television from three in the afternoon, and I watch everything. It's only when they start with politics and love stories that I get bored and switch it off. When it's politics, because I don't understand a word they're saying. And when it's love stories, all the lies get on my nerves. I watch them pining, suffering, arguing, and when I grow tired of swearing at them, I switch it off. I lived forty years with my husband. We argued about food, about money, about our daughter, but never about love. You don't think that my daughter married this fellow in Kalamata out of love, do you? She wanted a good life for herself, and he wanted to get her into bed. But the little vixen wouldn't even let him hold her hand. He wouldn't give up, and so, to get her into bed in the end, he married her.'
'And what's that got to do with the Albanians?'
'Don't be in so much of a hurry,' she said. 'Everything is connected, because if that love story hadn't been on that night, I wouldn't have been sitting at the window and I wouldn't have seen them coming in that limousine.'
'What limo?' I said, remembering what the grocer had told me about the van parked outside.
'I call it a limousine because I don't know a thing about cars. Any how, it was a huge car with a hard top, must have held a good ten people. He got out with the girl. They hurried into the house, and the vehicle drove straight off. Before long, the light from the gas burner was on-they didn't have electricity. It all took less than a minute or so. They didn't have any bags with them or anything. The girl had a bundle with her, that was all.' She looked at me, and her smile once again produced the pine needles on her cheeks.
I thought about the dried shit in the lavatory and the five hundred thousand in the cistern, the food in the diaper box, and the van that brought them there in the night. And if that wasn't enough, there was the Albanian murderer, about to be sent for the official hearing. How was anyone to find the thread that linked all this nonsense together?
I left the old woman's house and cursed those young policemen who make such a mess of things by trying to wrap it all up with a few quick questions. If, when we'd carried out our first investigations, someone had been patient enough to sit down with this old woman and listen to her grievances, we'd have known all this before we'd even taken the corpses to the mortuary. You could say about us, it seems, what homosexuals say about their own kind: It's one thing to be gay and another to be a pansy. Similarly, it's one thing to wear the uniform and another thing to be a policeman.
CHAPTER 7
'Out with it, you louse-ridden bum, or I'll make mincemeat of you and send you back to Korytsa so your own kind can have something to eat!' The Albanian was shaking because exactly what he had most feared had happened to him. He'd confessed to find a bit of peace, and now we were turning the screws.
'Where did those good-for-nothings get hold of the five hundred thousand? Out with it!'
'I not know ... not know anything,' he said, looking up fearfully at Thanassis, who was standing over him.
Thanassis grabbed him by the anorak and lifted him off his feet. The Albanian's legs dangled in the air. Thanassis swung around and pinned him against the wall. He held him there, a good foot off the floor.
'Be very careful what you say, because you'll blow it, you bastard!' he screamed, his face so close to the Albanian's that you didn't know whether he might kiss him or bite him. 'You won't get out of here alive!'
One second he was holding him tight, and the next he let go of him. For an instant the Albanian remained in the air, but as soon as his feet touched the ground, he collapsed in a heap, quivering with fear.
'Get up!' Thanassis barked at him, just as he'd barely touched the floor. The Albanian flattened himself against the wall, of his own free will this time, and began crawling up it like a caterpillar. He managed to pull himself upright, and the climbing stopped. Thanassis immediately took hold of him again and sat him down in the chair.
'Out with it! Now!' he shouted. 'Out with it!'
'I not know anything,' the Albanian insisted. 'I go for Pakize.'
He kept a terrified watch on Thanassis, ignoring me. I'd done right to bring Thanassis with me. And I was wrong to have stopped him in the morning when he'd started getting rough with the Albanian. I should have let him get on with it. We might have learned the truth there and then, and I wouldn't have had to send a halfbaked report to Ghikas.
'What dealings did you have with Pakize's husband?' Now I was the one to get rough. 'Thefts? Drugs? You quarreled over sharing the loot and you murdered him! But you didn't find the money because he'd hidden it in too safe a place!'
He latched on to what I'd just said and looked at me meaningfully. 'Mehmet, husband Pakize, maybe robbery, maybe drugs,' he said, 'I, no. I work building, work Rendi, vegetable market. I not know Mehmet. Know Pakize only.'
'You mean to tell me you were creeping around outside their house all those days and you didn't ever see them coming home in a van?'
Thanassis looked at me in astonishment. I hadn't told him that detail. He was hearing it for the first time.
'A neighbor saw a van or a very big car dropping them off outside their front door. Late one evening, in secret,' I explained and turned back to the Albanian. 'Who was it who brought them in the van? What's his name? Where is he? Tell us!'
'When I go, Pakize home,' he said shaking. 'I no see van.' Then he had an idea and rapidly said: 'Pakize clean houses, take care kids. Maybe boss take her in van.'
Thanassis grabbed him by his collar. 'You're asking for it,' he threatened. 'You've given us nothing, and you're going to pay for this.'
'No, no!' the Albanian cried out in alarm. 'I kill Pakize and husband. But not know anything.'
Thanassis let him fall back into the chair. If we went on like that all night, we'd still get nothing out of him, I thought to myself, starting to tire of it. He'd confessed that he'd killed them; that was clearcut. That didn't necessarily mean that he knew about the five hundred thousand and the van. The most probable scenario was that we were dealing with a crime of passion, and that it was only by accident that we'd come up with something else, without the two things being linked. After all, we'd found the five hundred thousand, but we'd found no drugs or stolen goods or guns. They must have had some other hideaway. All that about trips to Yannina and Albania was bullshit. But how was anyone to discover what other dirty business was behind all this? Besides, it didn't concern us. Given that they were both dead, all proceedings would come to a halt.
'He's telling the truth. He knows nothing,' I heard Thanassis say as he stood beside me in the lift, as if wanting to confirm my thoughts. So Thanassis, this self-confessed moron, agreed with me, and I took refuge behind that simple statement and felt relieved. The only thing still bothering me was that I had yet to alter my report.
I left Thanassis on the third floor, and I went up to the fifth. I stood and stared at the plaque: NIKOLAOS GHIKAS-CHIEF OF SECURITY. I read it maybe ten times while trying to think of some excuse for getting my report back without arousing suspicion. In the end, I put on a big smile and opened the door.
'Hello, Koula,' I said cheerfully. The mannequin in uniform was sitting at her desk. She furtively bundled the
