Neither looked at the other.
'Drop me at home.' Andreas needed a shower and a few hours' sleep. He stared out the windshield. There was a paper on the dash. It was a police vehicle-impound form. Kouros had shopped for his ride there, too. 'Anything you want to say?' Andreas said it flatly, still looking straight ahead.
'No, sir.'
Andreas looked at him. 'For Christ's sake, Yianni, say something.'
'She was the greatest piece of ass I ever saw, and you're not the first cop to stumble.'
Andreas didn't respond, just turned his head and looked out the side window. What was there to say? That he didn't have sex, just listened to a hooker tell her life story? To a cop that would sound worse, at least dumber, than whatever Kouros was thinking. No one would believe him anyway. He couldn't believe it himself.
'Besides, you're my boss, what the hell do you want me to say? That 'every crooked politician, influence peddler and bad guy in Greece would kill for proof of what you just did. You'd be their forever get-of-jail-free card. Or ruined.''
Andreas nodded but kept looking out the window. 'In other words, if I weren't your boss, you'd say I must be out of my mind.'
'No, sir, 'out of your fucking mind,' sir.'
'Well, thank you for not saying that and-' turning to look at him, 'for watching my back.'
Kouros nodded. 'I spoke to the other Angel Club employees, but they gave me nothing.' A few seconds later he added, 'So, Chief, did you get anything interesting tonight?'
Andreas gave him a sharp look, then a grin. 'Cute, very cute. Yes, as a matter of fact I did. Our likely killers aren't Greek, but probably from one of our Balkan neighbors. I think someone from one of the places she works set her up. She waitresses at coffee shops over by the Polytechnic University.' He pointed out the window.
'Those places where anarchists and communists merrily plot away together at creating their grand new world?'
Andreas nodded. 'Yes, those. Never quite understood how anarchists and communists find common ground. One's dead-set against government, other's all for it.'
'That's easy, Chief, they share the same public tit.'
'Now, now, Yianni, let's not let our personal feelings enter into this.' Andreas was smiling.
'Yeah, you're right, Chief, I should be honored at the opportunity to bust my ass at this job every day so that some asshole who passes a national exam can stay in university forever and the state pays for it, even if the bastard never passes a course or goes to a single class.' He was worked up, but then again, so were a lot of people on both sides of that issue.
'Yianni, whoa. Not all of them are like that.'
'Yeah, but I'm still paying for the ones who are… and the ones whose deep fucking thoughts get them thinking up new reasons to riot and throw rocks and Molotov cocktails at us.' He was squeezing the steering wheel. 'Then they run back to their universities to hide, so we can't grab their asses.'
That part bothered Andreas too. A law, enacted as the result of Greece's experience under the dictatorship of 1967 to 1974, provided that police could not enter university grounds, no matter what the reason. Needless to say, a lot of folks, students and others, some literally wearing masks, took advantage of that sanctuary for many varied and at times violent criminal purposes. They'd do their business in cafes and bars bordering universities, then scoot like rabbits back to campus when police showed up. And they got away with it, just like the veteran of the 1973 demonstrations legend had, still living in the basement of the university where it all started, producing Molotov cocktails for new generations of demonstrators.
'Relax, we have to be nice to those guys. They're our only chance of getting anywhere with this.'
Kouros squeezed the steering wheel twice more, then let out a breath. 'So, what about Anna?'
'What do you mean, 'What about Anna?''
'Chief, she's involved in the murder. Shouldn't we bring her in?'
'And achieve what? Keep her locked up so she can't get away? Fine, if we want a quick collar for the newspapers, sure. But what's the charge going to be? I don't see any kind of murder conviction in this for her, do you?'
Kouros gestured no. 'Not on what we have now.'
'Right, we need more. And if we arrest her, she's not going to give us any more than she already has, and everyone tied into this will disappear off the face of the earth. If they haven't already. As long as she's walking around there's a chance someone might show up.' He stared straight ahead. 'But have someone keep an eye on her. She's our best link so far to the two who probably killed the boy.'
'Who should we use?'
'Check with the office to see who's available.'
'I'm available nights.' Kouros grinned.
Andreas did not return the smile. He wanted the subject to go away.
Kouros stopped in front of Andreas' apartment building.
As Andreas was getting out he said, 'Pick me up tomorrow morning at eight. Don't eat breakfast. We have a lot of coffee shops to visit.'
Kouros nodded. 'Hopefully with ugly waitresses.'
Andreas slammed the door. Maggie wanted to hide from the phone. It hadn't stopped ringing all morning. Someone tipped off the press that Chief Andreas Kaldis had assumed personal charge of the investigation, and now every journalist in Greece wanted to speak to him, not some anonymous talking head out of media affairs. It had been years since so many suitors were after her favors, and their general approach for getting her to give up her boss was almost the same as that once aimed at her virtue: 'I promise to be gentle.' They had no more success now than then.
She had spoken to Andreas twice this morning, and his instructions were firm: 'All inquiries must be directed to media affairs, no exceptions.' Still, she wondered if she should call him a third time, because now Greece's most watched, vicious, scandal-mongering, and feared television journalist, Marios Tzoli, wanted to speak with him. What concerned Maggie was that he personally placed the call. Big television egos didn't call for routine interviews. She'd better warn Andreas that Marios must sense blood in the water or sex anywhere. So far that morning they'd had two breakfasts, but Andreas couldn't tell you what he'd eaten if you asked him while he was chewing it. He and Kouros didn't say much more than 'pass the sugar.' Sort of like an old married couple dining alone with nothing left to say on any subject. The only interruptions were two calls from Maggie.
It was a little before eleven, the heart of morning classes at the university. That meant local coffee shops filled with students who knew better than to corrupt their original thinking with some lecturer's old ideas and historical biases. Whatever they might need to supplement their innate understanding of the world could be found elsewhere, like online. After all, it was life that mattered, not classes. Besides, if teachers really knew what they were talking about, they'd be doing something else.
Andreas and Kouros approached the front door of the third of Anna's places of employment. They'd also stopped at two where she didn't work, to keep anyone from wondering why only her jobs attracted cops. There was no time for an undercover operation, and so they took the opposite approach: two bull-in-a-china-shop cops looking for a quick score off a couple of drug dealers, a regrettably routine pastime for some of their not-so-honest brethren on the force. So far, their performances netted them only blank stares when they flashed the photo of two guys partially blocking the logo of a notorious drug-trafficking nightclub.
It was a nondescript place in a nondescript building filled with young men trying in the most nondescript way to look anything but. A coffee house of the post-World War II beatnik era as envisioned by twenty-first-century youth: pale orange-yellow walls with chair railings — unusual for Athens — wooden floors, unmatched hardback chairs for twenty-four, and scraped and burned two-top wooden tables covered with coffee, cigarettes, and cell phones. After dusk, there was barely enough lighting to see.
Kouros held the door open for Andreas. Every eye in the place fixed on them. They were about as obvious and welcome as tigers at a tea party.
A carefully framed poster of Che hung behind the service counter alongside a six-foot-long by three-foot-tall unframed mirror. The mirror gave the place a look of greater size than it had, the poster an impression of greater meaning. What looked to be the artistic contributions of its customers occupied the other walls, with no discernable curator or standard for what could be posted. The only apparent rule was not to cover over a colleague's
