The Messenger of Athens: A Novel (17 page)

In ones and twos, the workmen drifted off, to building sites and cargo boats, to sweeping roads and painting houses. As the last workman left the
kafenion
, Jakos picked up his empty cup and well-used ashtray and carried them inside. The fat man heard the rattle of china in the stone sink, but then Jakos returned to the doorway, and, leaning on the doorpost, gazed out across the sea, as if his heart and thoughts were very far away.

“What do I owe you?” asked the fat man.

Jakos turned his eyes towards him, and raised his chin.

“Three hundred,” he said. “Just give me three.”

The fat man placed a five-hundred–drachma note beneath his saucer.

“Maybe you can help me,” he said. “There’s someone I need to find.”

“Who might that be?”

“One Thodoris Hatzistratis. You’ll know him, I’m sure.”

“I know Theo,” agreed Jakos. His eyes returned to the distant horizon, where the pale sky met the sea. “But he won’t be pleased to see you. He has a carpenter’s shop, opposite the chandler’s. Close by the taverna where you ate last night.” The fat man understood his meaning; the grapevine’s sources had been at work. “You’ll find him there, about now. But don’t let on it was me who told you where he was.”

“I never disclose my sources,” said the fat man. And, wishing the café owner good morning, he set off in search of his quarry.

H
e found the carpenter’s shop without difficulty. It occupied the ground floor of a dilapidated building; the workshop windows were opaque with dirt, and lengths of timber—some blond and freshly cut, some weathered gray—were stacked against the walls. Its doors were craftsman-carved, but years unpainted and black-spotted
with the holes of woodworm; an ancient lion’s-head knocker snarled over a huge and ornate keyhole.

The fat man pushed at the doors, and found them locked. He stepped up close to the window; with the tip of his index finger he rubbed a small, clean circle in the grime and put his eye to it.

“Can I help you?”

The fat man stepped back sharply from the window, and turned to face the man who stood behind him. He was dark-complexioned, with the heavy eyebrows which suggested Arab blood; he might have been handsome, but his face had been spoiled by the lines of perpetual frowning.

And he was frowning now.

The fat man gave him a genial smile, and held out his hand.

“Might you be Theo Hatzistratis?” he asked.

The younger man didn’t take his hand. He held an antique key whose shaft was the length of his palm and whose loop end was so large, it made a key ring for a dozen others. He inserted this key into the ornate keyhole, and turned it.

“What’s your business with me?” he asked.

The fat man dropped his hand.

“My name is Diaktoros, Hermes Diaktoros. I’d like to speak to you, if I may.”

“About what?” Theo pushed open the workshop door. From within, the fat man smelled sawdust, and varnish, and the cloying must of damp.

“I’ve been sent from Athens,” he said, “to investigate the death of Irini Asimakopoulos.”

Theo stood for a moment with his back to the fat man, looking into the workshop. When he turned, his face wore a puzzled smile.

“So why do you want to speak to me?” he asked.

The fat man was feeling unwell, and had no appetite for diplomacy, or being messed with. So he laid it on the line.

He said, “Because she’s dead, and you were having an affair with her.”

The smile left Theo’s face.

“That’s a damn lie,” he said, coldly.

The fat man took a step closer to Theo. “Where’s the lie?” he asked. “She’s dead, isn’t she? Undeniably rotting alone up there in the cemetery. Isn’t she?”

Theo turned away from the fat man, and pulled the workshop door closed.

“I think she was in love with you,” persisted the fat man. “Maybe very much in love. And I think you might have been in love with her. Maybe you still are. Are you, Theo?”

Theo turned the ancient key to lock the door and removed it from the keyhole.

“I didn’t even know the woman,” he said. “So I suggest you take your investigation elsewhere, and stop troubling innocent citizens like me.”

And, slipping the keys into the pocket of his jacket, he sauntered away.

I
t was the fat man’s experience that nothing settles an abused and angry stomach better than the smooth, sweet softness of a custard slice.

At the baker’s, he chose an almost perfect example, heavily dusted with icing sugar and cinnamon. He ate with relish, powdered sugar falling on his lapels and down the front of his shirt. He folded exactly in half the paper bag his confection had been supplied in, and tucked it in the front pocket of his holdall for later disposal, then took a blue, paisley-patterned silk handkerchief from his top pocket and used it to flick the sugar off his clothes. He put the handkerchief away, picked up the holdall, and, closing his eyes, squinted as if thinking hard, or trying to recall something to memory. Opening his eyes, he set off purposefully towards Jakos’s
kafenion
.

Theo was there, alone at a table for two. The fat man sat down at his table. Theo stared off to one side, pretending, like a child, that the fat man was invisible.

The fat man leaned forward, and spoke low.

“I don’t care, Theo,” he said, “if you look at me or not when I’m talking to you, just so long as you listen. I have a job to do. That job is to find out who killed Irini Asimakopoulos. She may have killed herself. Or you may have killed her. Or someone else may have done it. I will find out. But it won’t end there, because I don’t just want to find out who killed her. I want to know
who was responsible for her death
. Which is not necessarily the same thing.
Responsibility is the key here, Theo. So I’m going to leave you alone for a while to think long and hard about your part in this tragedy—because I
know
you played a starring role, my friend—and the next time I see you, we’ll have a proper heart-to-heart.”

He stood up from his chair.

“A word of advice,” he said. “Don’t piss me off. I get nasty when I’m pissed off.”

The fat man walked away, whistling, in the direction of the bus stop.

I
n a hundred different ways, she gave herself away. It was in the time she took to style her hair, and put on the make-up she had rarely worn before; it was in the money that she spent on lotions for her face and body. It was in the dowdy clothes she threw away, and the new, more flattering outfits she bought to take their place. It was in the way she neglected all the chores, and didn’t care what food was on the table; it was in the time she didn’t spend with him, and in her absence when his boat returned to port. It was in the way she went earlier to bed, so she could feign deep sleep when he came to join her, and in her disinclination to be touched, or kissed, or held, at any time of day. But it was clearest in her eyes, and their expression; they showed her love for him was fading, that her emotion was being channeled to a newer passion, somewhere—someone—else. It was, for him, the cruelest cut: to see affection shrink, and be replaced by cold indifference, and contempt.

W
hen Love began to show her ugly face, Irini failed to recognize her, and so allowed her in. In her quiet life,
the spark generated by the interested smile of an ordinary man—a man of no consequence—assumed a disproportionate importance, and Love, scenting opportunity, quick as a rat nipped through the open door.

It was hard to determine when or where the shift took place. Somehow, though, this man became sole occupant of her thoughts: first thought, when she awakened; last thought, before she slept. Slowly, lingeringly, she lost her heart, and all her freedoms—freedom of thought, freedom of action. Over herself, she had no control.

Failing to heed old Nikos’s wise advice, she unwrapped the pretty, shining gift brought by the stranger in her dream. The comfortable armchair of her marriage was abandoned. All those quiet, dull—peaceful—days when she had walked, sewn, baked, complained of nothing to do—they were a memory now. Her time was taken up in sitting at the window, waiting for him to pass, afraid to move, afraid to miss the moment.

Pandora-like, she lifted the lid on Love’s Box of Delights, and discovered that the flavors of Love are many. He met her eyes and smiled; she dipped into Ecstasy and Euphoria. How sweet they were, how she came alive at their taste! Her step was light; there was magic in the morning. He turned his head, pretending he did not know her in the street; she tasted bitter Despair and Devastation, and descended into blackness. Life was not worth the living, because he did not love her.

She tried Hope and Delusion, the brightest-shining offerings in the box of fool’s gold. One day they would be together, she knew they would. Their love would last
forever, of course it would. Their lives would be happy ever after; they would go away together, and start a new life. Of course they would.

She tasted Dreaming, that potent soporific. Dreaming led her gently to her chair near the window and abandoned her there, gazing out, for hour upon hour, watching, waiting. Dreaming sat next to Compulsion and Obsession in the box, and, taken together, they were a fatal combination; they rendered her inert. Compulsion and Obsession gave her neither rest nor peace, chaining her in the grooves of new habit until Hope left her late at night, releasing the sentinel to her bed.

But not to sleep. For there, in the deepest, darkest corner of the box, was the largest of the Delights, glowing red like hot coals. But this coal would not be cooled with water. This delight would have to burn itself out; Time and Habit are its only remedy.

It was Passion, dangerous and despicable, uninvited and presumptuous. Passion travelled straight to her groin and lodged there, glowing, a hot stone demanding the cooling touch of ice only one man could bring. Its heat spread through her body until she was on fire with the desire and need and longing to be touched, licked, shafted by him, only him, a longing so intense that soon it wiped out all the other delights, spreading through her existence like a virus, like rampant weeds in an untended garden, until she was no more than hot, lustful flesh demanding to be sated. In the night, she burned.

Andreas, not a complete fool, smelled the rottenness which had invaded their home. He was not to blame, he
knew, for the changes in his wife. He himself had not changed.
She
was changed. Love, playing its dirty tricks, made her more attractive to him; she dressed well, wore perfume, had a light in her eyes which was not there before. But when he wanted her, she would not open her arms to hold him; like a port whore, open-eyed and uninvolved, she let him go through the motions, and afterwards left him alone in the bed, lonely and degraded.

He knew who was responsible; he named the offender, and made accusations which she laughingly denied. He had no proof. It drove him mad. When he began to shout, she curled her lip in distaste, and turned away.

“
W
here are you going?” Andreas’s low voice came from the dark doorway of the room where she thought he was sleeping.

“Out.”

“What for?”

“There’s no milk.”

He nodded very slowly, watching her, his lids low over his eyes. Lifting his hand to his mouth, he cleared his throat; the hand was shaking, vibrating with too much whisky and too little sleep. He looked disheveled, unkempt. His face had the red imprint of creases from the blanket he had used as a pillow; his shirt was crumpled, and stained, the fly of his trousers was part-unzipped.