The Messenger of Athens: A Novel (2 page)

E
arly morning, and a somber sky. The sea, stirred to sand slurry by a bitter wind, had turned opaque. The tires of the slow-moving garbage truck spread wide the pools of overnight rain; water ran through rusted guttering onto the steps of the National Bank and dripped onto the tables of the deserted fish market. On the café terrace, a stooping woman swept at wet leaves falling from a plane tree; in the church tower, a solitary bell tolled for mass. The small boats at their moorings rocked and tipped, pulling at their ropes. Beyond the headland, the horn-blast of the approaching ferry was lost in the rain-heavy squall.

On the upper deck, leaning on the railing which overlooked the stern, was a stranger, a fat man. He had stood there since the dim dawn had given enough light to show the dark sea passing beneath them, watching the foaming wake rise and fall away, waiting for the first view of their destination. From time to time, he took a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of the raincoat which flapped around his thighs, and smoked, the cigarettes burning
down fast in the gusting wind; to every vessel he sighted he raised a friendly hand, as if acquainted.

As the boat docked, he did not join the small, impatient crowd waiting below for the ramp to drop, but waited, watching, as the passengers pushed onto the quayside.

A crewman, probing with a screwdriver into the workings of an anchor winch, called out to him.

“End of the line, friend.”

The fat man smiled.

“Good day to you, then,” he said, and, picking up the holdall at his feet, made his way down the iron staircase and onto the quay below.

H
e stood apart, sheltering from the rain under the portico of a butcher’s shop. He smelt blood, and chlorine bleach. The crowed thinned, shouting greetings and goodbyes, carrying away its strapped-up suitcases, its bags of groceries, its badly behaved children, its crates of fruit. Then the crowd was gone, and he was alone.

He stepped out from the shelter of the portico into the rain.

He had, at first, no clear idea of where he would find them; but they gave themselves away. At the harbor’s end, in the lee of the high sea wall, a dozen vehicles were haphazardly parked; amongst them, almost hidden, was a car in their distinctive livery. As he drew close, the car’s white signage became clear:
Astinomia
. Police.

The stone face of the building to his left was alive with flourishing, pale-trumpeted convolvulus; and there,
wrapped around with tendrils, obscured by greenery, he found their sign—
POLICE
—and an arrow angled upwards, following the long line of a slender stone staircase.

The fat man ran, quite lightly, to the top of the steps, where he faced a heavy, unmarked door. He pulled it open and walked through.

Their office, grand in its proportions, was austere. The plaster coving beneath the lofty ceiling was ornate; but the unvarnished boards of the floor were bare, and dotted with hammer-bent tacks, as if some covering, carpeting or linoleum had been ripped out and not replaced. They might have moved in only yesterday, or be leaving tomorrow; or they might have been there for years, without caring or noticing that there were no blinds to cover the cracked panes in the high, narrow windows which looked out across the sea, no lampshade on the naked light-bulb swinging from its long length of cord in the draft from the door, no filing cabinets, no procedural manuals, no posters or notices pinned to the pale walls, no chairs for visitors to sit on as they made their complaints.

He stood at the center of the room and placed his holdall carefully at his feet, as if it might contain something fragile. The three policemen watched him, silent and unwelcoming, as if he had intruded at a crucial moment on some private conversation. The undersized man at the utilitarian, steel-topped desk behind the door (whose uniform, too large, diminished him further) tapped the lead of a blunt, chewed pencil on the desktop, setting a slow rhythm for the lengthening silence. His eyes moved from the fat man to the door, as if he planned to leave the
moment an opportunity arose; the contents of his desk—a stapler, an ink-pad, a rubber stamp, nothing more—did not suggest there was anything to detain him here. Across from him, a broad-set man, bull-headed, heavy-jowled, with thick, white hair and comical, dark eyebrows, leaned his elbows on a similar desk, similarly empty: three ballpoint pens, all neatly capped, two opened letters in their envelopes, and an ancient Bakelite phone, whose plaited cord ran down between his feet and out through a hole drilled through the skirting at his back. His wet, red lips were slack, implying a bovine slowness and plodding wits. When the fat man entered, he shifted so his jacket’s upper arm—embroidered in silver with a sergeant’s chevrons—was forward, towards the fat man, ensuring that his rank would not be missed.

And at the back of the room, so far from the windows that the light was weak and the room was left in shadow, sat the third. He stretched his slender legs, crossed at the ankles, through the knee-hole of a capacious antique desk, between two ranks of small, brass-handled drawers with tiny locks. To left and right the desk held stacks of paperwork—cardboard files, blank forms, forms filled out and signed in duplicate and triplicate, applications for licenses, parking tickets, violation-of-permit notices, summonses, dockets, memos, letters, business cards, candy-striped computer printouts—and on the floorboards all around his feet were piled more files, their spines bearing dates, or numbers, or names. At the center of the desk, lying on the worn, gold-tooled leather, one file, closed, with a name handwritten in dense, black capitals:
ASIMAKOPOULOS
. And from between the stacks of paperwork, like a rat peering out from a hole, he watched the fat man, the skin of his face eerily pale in the shadows, the deep black of his narrowed eyes and clipped moustache stark as ink drawn on white paper.

The dark eyes looked the fat man up and down, taking in his bulk, admiring his suit—both the cut of it, which flattered his bulk, and the cloth, a fine, gray mohair of such quality that, as the fat man moved, it shimmered with a lavender sheen. The eyes approved of the sports shirt the fat man wore beneath the suit—rich purple, with a small, green crocodile over the left breast. They noted that the waistband of his trousers was belted with Italian leather. But the gray curls of the fat man’s hair were too long, and the prominent frames of his glasses were unfashionable, and dated. And his shoes, his shoes were baffling. For who but an eccentric, with such a marvelously tailored suit, would wear tennis shoes—old-fashioned, white canvas tennis shoes?

The fat man looked around at them all, and smiled.

The sergeant sat up straight in his chair, and shook the sleeve of his jacket so that the stripes lay flat on his arm.

“May I help you, sir?” he asked.

“I’m here to see the Chief of Police.” The fat man’s accent was clear, and well-bred. All his words were beautifully enunciated, like newscaster’s Greek; such clarity of speech told them he was not from these islands, nor from anywhere within two hundred miles of their boundaries.

“I am the Chief of Police.” The man in the shadows
spoke quietly, but with arrogance. He pulled his legs in beneath his chair, and he too sat up straight.

The fat man stepped over his holdall and crossed the room to stand before the overladen desk. He held out his hand. His manicured fingernails were filed square, whitened at the tips and buffed almost opaque.

“My name,” he said, “is Hermes Diaktoros. I have been sent from Athens to help you in your investigations into the death of Irini Asimakopoulos.”

The constable behind the door dropped his pencil. It rattled on the floorboards, then rolled, as if making its escape, towards the door.

The Chief of Police, leaning forward to take the fat man’s hand, hesitated. The undersized constable jumped up from his chair to pick up his pencil, and the Chief of Police glared at him. Then he took the fat man’s hand, and shook it, firmly, and pursed his lips as if about to speak. But he said nothing.

So the fat man went on. “I expect you’re surprised at my name: Hermes Messenger. My father’s idea of humor. He was a classical scholar.”

The Chief of Police still didn’t speak. He had no idea what the fat man was talking about. The constable, back in his chair, tapped his pencil on his desk.

“I call these my winged sandals.” The fat man pointed to his tennis shoes, beaming at the joke. There was silence.

“I’m sorry,” said the fat man to the Chief of Police. “I didn’t catch your name.”

“Panayiotis Zafiridis,” said the Chief of Police. He
indicated the bovine sergeant: “Harris Chadiarakis”—and the undersized constable—“Dmitris Xanthos.”

“A pleasure,” said the fat man.

The Chief of Police leaned forward across his desk.

“Why are the Metropolitan Police interested in Mrs. Asimakopoulos’s death?” he asked. “It was in no way suspicious. I’m afraid you have wasted your time coming all this way. Perhaps if you had telephoned first I could have saved you the journey.” He shrugged, and put on an expression of regret. “Your problem, now, is there’s no ferry out till tomorrow.” He hesitated as if thinking, then pointed to the phone on the sergeant’s desk. “Maybe we could requisition the coastguard launch to take you to Kos this evening. There is someone in their office who owes me a favor. You’ll get a flight to Athens from there with no problem at all. Harris, get me the Port Police Office.”

The sergeant’s hand went to the phone’s receiver, but the fat man turned to stop him.

“Just a moment, please,” he said. He looked back at the Chief of Police. “Where is the body?” he asked, in a low voice.

The pencil tapping became faster.

The Chief of Police reached, frowning, for a notepad and a plastic ballpoint pen.

“Who has informed the Metropolitan Police of this death?” he asked, scribbling with the pen until the ink began to flow. He sounded concerned. “I believe we should take action in this matter. Wasting police time is a serious offense.”

The fat man stepped forward and, placing the fingertips
of both hands on the Chief of Police’s desk, leaned towards him.

“We were talking about the body,” said the fat man. “I’d like to see it as soon as possible. Then I can get on with my investigation.”

The pencil tapping ceased. The Chief of Police considered for a moment, then spread his hands.

“She was buried yesterday,” he said. “There was no reason to delay. As I’ve said, the death was in no way suspicious.”

“It matters not,” said the fat man, easily. “I’ll make do with the autopsy report.”

Simultaneously, the sergeant and the constable opened drawers in their desks, found pieces of paper there and began to read.

“May I sit down?” asked the fat man, politely.

Sighing, the Chief of Police stood, and from the darkness of the corner behind him, lifted out a cane-bottomed chair.

“Thank you,” said the fat man, placing it at an angle to the policeman’s desk and sitting down. “I wonder if you might have an ashtray I could use?”

Opening one of the brass-handled drawers, the Chief of Police produced a heavy, cut-glass ashtray already half-f of gray ash and butts stained brown with filtered smoke.

The fat man reached into his pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes incongruous with these late years of the twentieth century—an old-fashioned box whose lift-up lid bore the head and naked shoulders of a 1940s
starlet, her softly permed platinum hair curling around a coy smile. Beneath the maker’s name (
Surely
, thought the Chief of Police,
they went out of business years ago?
) ran a slogan in an antique hand:
The cigarette for the man who knows a real smoke
. Taking out a matchbox and shaking it, the fat man frowned when there was no answering rattle from within. He placed the matchbox on the desk and searched again in his jacket pocket. Producing a slim, gold lighter, he knocked the tip of a cigarette on the desk, lit it, and replaced the lighter in his pocket.

“The autopsy report,” said the fat man, exhaling smoke as he spoke. “I’d like to have my own copy, for reference.”

The Chief of Police smiled and leaned back in his chair.

“You know,” he said, “here in the islands, we do things a little differently from the way things are done in the city. We like to take a more personal approach. Being that much closer to the community we serve.”