The Messenger of Athens: A Novel (4 page)

“Pleased to meet you,” said the simpleton.

The fat man took his hand and shook it.

“Pleased to meet you,” he said. Beaming, the simpleton stumbled back to his seat. The fat man looked again over his shoulder to where the proprietor had not moved.

The man who had not yet spoken raised his glass with a trembling hand and sipped at the wine. He leaned towards the fat man.

“You’ll have to shout,” he slurred. “He’ll stand all day, pretending he doesn’t know you’re there. Jakos! Customer!”

The proprietor withdrew his reluctant eyes from the horizon and came to the doorway. He looked resentfully at the fat man, and raised his eyebrows in question.

“Greek coffee, please, no sugar,” said the fat man. “And a bottle for the gentlemen.” He indicated the old men, and the proprietor tutted his disapproval as he turned to go inside. The simpleton jumped up, and grasped the proprietor’s arm.

“Jakos, pleased to meet you, pleased to meet you!” The simpleton held out his hand, but the proprietor ignored it and, wrenching his arm from the old man’s grasp, went scowling to the stove.

The simpleton, dejected, sat down.

The third man drank again from his glass and, squinting, viewed the fat man. His eyes were deeply lined, as if the squint were habitual to him—perhaps through myopia, perhaps from the irritation of cigarette smoke: one
cigarette, freshly lit, burned between his nicotine-stained fingers, while a forgotten second was a still-smoking, ashy remnant in the foil ashtray before him—or perhaps he was trying to pick the fat man’s true image from two or three which split and swam before him. His rail-thin body was wasted from long-term abuse; the hand holding the cigarette shook.

“You’ve a friend for life, now you’ve shaken his hand,” he said, clapping the simpleton hard on the back. “But you’ll struggle to get much out of him except, ‘Pleased to meet you.’ He’s an old fool. I say that as one who’s known him man and boy. When he was young, he was a young fool. Now he’s old, he’s an old fool, and a pain in the arse. Still. We’re all what God made us.”

“Indeed,” said the fat man.

“You’ll be from Athens.” The old man spoke triumphantly, as if he expected to impress the fat man with his perception. So the fat man put on a look of surprise, which made the old man smile. “I went to Athens once,” he said.

But his companion contradicted him.

“You’ve never been to Athens, you lying bastard. You’ve never been further than St. Vassilis.” He named the monastery and its hamlet five miles away, at the far side of the island. This man had a curious disability, a fusing of the vertebrae at the top of his spine. Unable to turn his head, when he spoke, his eyes swiveled towards the target of his remarks, but his torso remained rigidly facing forward. It made him both comical and grotesque, yet he might once have been an attractive man.

“I might’ve been to Athens,” protested the smoker. But, anxious not to pursue the matter, he decided the moment was right for introductions.

“Thassis is the name,” he said to the fat man. “Thassis Four-Fingers.” He held up his left hand to show the stump where the index finger should have been. “This is my friend Adonis”—the fat man’s eyes widened at the irony of the deformed man’s name—“Adonis Spendthrift they call him. Tight as a nun’s cunt on Good Friday. And this,” he gestured towards the simpleton, “is Stavros Pleased-to-Meet-You.”

Stavros, beaming, jumped up.

“Pleased to meet you,” he said, and the fat man shook his hand.

The proprietor placed a glass of water and a small, white china cup before the fat man; the tarry coffee had the caramel scent of burned sugar. He nicked the cap off a bottle of retsina beaded with condensation and stood it at the center of the old men’s table, then leaned his shoulder against the doorframe and looked out to sea.

Thassis Four-Fingers seized the cold wine and held up the bottle to the fat man.

“Thank
you
, sir,” said Thassis, “and good health to you, sir.” He splashed cold wine into their glasses; all three raised their glasses to the fat man, and drank.

The fat man sipped at his coffee.

“You’ll have business here, I expect,” said Adonis, twisting his eyes towards him.

The fat man bent down to his holdall, unzipped it and fumbled inside. He pulled out a bottle of shoe-whitener.
Like a dancer, he pointed his left foot, then his right, inspecting his tennis shoes. Removing the plastic cap, he dabbed the sponge applicator carefully on a scuff mark on the toe of the right shoe, and on a small splat of mud on the left. He twisted his feet, first the left, then the right, examining the shoes for further blemishes. Finding none, he replaced the cap, placed the shoe-whitener inside the holdall and zipped it up.

In fascination, the old men watched him. They had forgotten Adonis’s question when the fat man sat back in his chair and answered it.

“I’m here to investigate the death of Irini Asimakopoulos.”

The proprietor brought his eyes back from the far horizon.

“What’s to investigate?” he asked. “Fell off a cliff, didn’t she? Could happen to anyone.”

Laughing, Thassis spluttered into his drink, but the fat man said nothing.

So the proprietor asked him, “What’s your idea, then?”

Adonis, a shrewd man, smiled.

“He thinks somebody pushed her,” he said.

“Who’d push her?” said the proprietor, derisively, and immediately from his uninhibited drunkenness Thassis provided an answer.

“Theo Hatzistratis’s wife would!” he said. And he laughed again.

No one joined him in his laughter. Digging him with his elbow, Adonis turned his eyes towards the vegetable
stall, where a woman was complaining at the number of caterpillars in the cauliflowers.

“What’d I say?” asked Thassis.

Silently, the proprietor disappeared into the back of the café.

“Why would Theo Hatzistratis’s wife want to push Mrs. Asimakopoulos off a cliff, Thassis?” asked the fat man.

“Why’d you think?” asked Thassis. He dropped his head, suddenly maudlin. “Women. All the same. I’d sooner put my hand in a bag of snakes than trust a woman.”

“Are you saying that Mrs. Asimakopoulos was having a relationship with Theo Hatzistratis?” the fat man asked Adonis.

“I’m saying bugger all,” said Adonis. He emptied his glass and banged it down on the table.

There was silence for a while. Thassis began to hum a tune, a morbid song of a man’s doomed love for a faithless girl; his humming grew louder until he broke into song, then shouted the lyrics at the top of his cracked old voice.

The fat man walked inside and paid what he owed. When he wished the old men goodbye, he received no reply.

F
rom the sea, the island of Thiminos showed exactly what it was: rock, one huge rock, so undercut by the salt water of the southern Aegean it seemed to float free, rising and falling in the swell. Mostly, the cliff faces of its coasts were sheer; where the slopes were gentler, they were all thin dirt and stone. There was little else: a few black pines rooted into the mountainsides at improbable angles; thorny, run-down shrubs between the boulders. And yet, here and there, it held a colorful surprise—on an empty beach, a tiny, white chapel in a garden of fresh, fuchsia-blossomed evergreens.

It was an island with no beauty of its own, but around its shores, where the sea ran the gamut of all blues—turquoise and lapis lazuli, sapphire, ultramarine and cobalt—the water and sunlight changed it. Gray rocks on the beach shone silver; there was gold in the dull soil on the mountain slopes. Fool’s gold. Tricks of the light.

There was one way in and one way out: by sea. Five nautical miles adrift from any shipping lane, from the island’s shores even the great tankers heading for the oil-
rich nations of the Arabs were only micro-silhouettes. At night, their distant lights were strings of diamonds, slipping slowly away over the edge of the world.

O
ne year before the fat man came to Thiminos, Andreas Asimakopoulos prepared for sea.

“For certain,” he said, untying the oily rope that moored the boat to the jetty, “I’ll be back with you by Wednesday.”

Irini caught hold of his arm, and he brushed her cheek with dry lips; the odor of fish was about him already, even before he cast off.

“Take care,” she said. “Good fishing.”

She watched until the boat was out of sight, around the headland; in the moment when he disappeared from view, she waved once more, for luck. Whenever he left, she wished he would stay; his absence rubbed salt into her loneliness.

Then Tuesday night brought storms. She lay alone in bed, listening as the wind tore through the branches of the eucalyptus trees along the road and the rain pounded at the windows. She wasn’t worried for his safety; he took care of his safety very well. She worried they would lose some roof tiles, and there was no one to replace them; she worried that a tree would come down on the house, and she would die alone. At midnight, she warmed a glass of milk and sweetened it with honey; propped up amongst the pillows (his and hers), she sipped, and drifted into dreams.

W
hen the night was over, she went walking, away down the empty road to the sea. The wind was still high; as she passed beneath the shimmying branches of the pale-barked eucalyptus, their limbs groaned, like souls racked.

And the wind was cold. It passed straight through her jacket, and through all the layers of her clothing. It gnawed her fingers, and drew the blood of her face to the tip of her nose, leaving her cheeks drained and pale. When she reached the seafront, even within the arms of the crescent bay the waves were whipped up and frosted with foam. To the right, where the shingle beach was narrowest and the road surface low, each seventh wave flowed smooth as cream across the road, up to the church wall, and the wall’s base had become the terminus for the sea’s flotsam: driftwood and plastic, shells, skeins of weed, bottles and rusting cans. Where the bus should stop, a deep pool had formed, and at its edge lay a tangle of yellow fishing-net, matted with sand and the white blade-bones of squid. With the toe of her boot she turned the net, releasing a small green-backed crab, which, frightened by the light, scuttled towards the in-running sea.

The church clock struck nine. Overhead, rain threatened.

She had known he wouldn’t come. At the jetty, there were no boats. Beyond the bay’s shallows, the mast of a solitary yacht dipped towards the water’s surface, to port, to starboard, like the blade of a metronome, a corner of its furled sailcloth flapping loose.

She walked the road around the curve of St. Savas’s Bay, watching the headland at the bay’s mouth, just in case he still might come; he still might, and she still might have company tonight. The few white-painted houses were shuttered, their doors—head-on to the sea, a rope’s length to the moorings—were closed. On the terrace of the small hotel, a woman swept languidly at wet leaves blowing from an overhanging almond tree; in the shelter of a ramshackle chicken coop, a rooster crowed over a run of shivering hens.

By the boatyard, the beach was crowded with boats, veterans hauled from the sea to pass the winter. Out of their element, the curves of their flanks seemed flat, the flow of their forms rigid; their paint was salt-bleached and cracked, their varnish lifting and peeling like dry, callused skin. Between their hulks, the shingle was stained with spent oil and diesel.