Trueish Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel (13 page)

“You’re a creep!”

“I’m not creepy. You’re jealous.” She dry-spat several times to shoo away the evil eye. The evil eye is what wafts around Greece, latching into babies and attractive, accomplished people. Compliments are generally served with a side of spit—fake or real—because the evil eye, like sane people, hates being spat on. I kind of wanted to spit on her, too, but not for the safety of her soul.

If she even had one.

I stomped back to my car, where Marika was leaning against the side, a big shoulder bag obscuring most of her middle.

“Is that Cleopatra?

“Yes.”

“Why is Baboulas letting her sit there on her property?”

“That’s a good question.” The three assassins I understood. Grandma knew the score and she was tolerating them for my sake. But Cleopatra? I wondered if she had some kind of in.

We trotted over to the guardhouse, where the day guy was leafing through a paperback novel.

“Why is she out there?”

“She who?”

I pointed. He stared at the car. “Oh. Her. I don’t mind her being here. Brightens up the scenery.”

Yeah, the way glitter brightens up a stripper.

“I need my slingshot,” I said.

Marika lit up. “Are you going to shoot them?”

“Just her. She’s a pain in my butt.”

“No.” She hoisted up her big bag. “I will speak with her.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“I have five children—four sons and a husband. I can handle the Queen of Egypt.”

Marika stormed over to the car, bag swinging.

I’d seen how Marika handled her menfolk. With a loud voice and the kind of hand waving that could command a large orchestra. “It’s okay,” I called out. “I’ll get rid of her myself.”

She pulled one of those fun-sized machine guns from that huge bag of hers and opened fire on the hood of the Renault. BAM! BAM! BAM!

The three assassins leaped out of their cars, weapons waving. They exchanged embarrassed glances when they realized they were witnessing a very short catfight. Inside the guardhouse the guard answered his phone. He fired off a few words and hung up.

“Baboulas wanted to know about the gunfire,” he said, “so I told her.”

I trotted out to where the gun was still smoking.

Cleopatra stuck her head out the window, bared her teeth in an approximation of a grin. “Your friend is stupid. The engine is in the back.”

“Stupid, eh?” Marika stomped around the back and unleashed another deafening volley. “Who is stupid now?” she yelled. “Who? You are stupid, that is who!”

“You shot my car!”

Marika dropped the gun in her bag. “I did nothing. I was standing here, enjoying the day.” She strolled back through the gates to the Beetle.

“You shot up her car,” I said.

“It was an accident. My finger slipped and her car was in the way when it happened.”

“That’s a pretty good story,” I said.

“Every one of my sons, and Takis, has told me that story when I caught them picking their noses and eating the boogers. Always it is an accident, their finger slipped.”

The TMI (Too Much Information) was strong in this family.

“Where are you going today?” Marika asked me.

“I have to pick up Donk, then I’m going to see a veterinarian.”

“What happened to his scooter?”

“He didn’t say.”

“I have never met a veterinarian before.”

I looked at her.

“Maybe he will use some big Greek words you don’t know.” She gave me a meaningful look.

“I … guess you could come with me?”

“Today is your lucky day because I am free. Come.” She climbed into the Beetle’s passenger seat.

“It’s not really an adventure,” I said.

“I am a stay-at-home mother. Everything that does not involve snot or
skata
is an adventure.”

“You won’t need the gun.”

“Okay, but I will bring it anyway. Takis says you never know when you will need insurance.”

D
onk glared at Marika
. “When do I get to sit in the front seat?”

“Never, that is when. We should see about getting him a car seat,” she said to me. She turned around to face the teenager. “You look young enough to still need a car seat.”

“I’ll sit in a car seat when you go on a diet.”

Marika turned back around. “I think he is going bald. Does it look to you like he is going bald?”

I glanced in the rearview mirror. “Hard to say with that hat on.”

“Hats make you bald,” she said with absolute conviction.

“I’m not going bald!” He swiveled the brim around to its intended position, slouched in the seat, defeated. Poor kid, Marika had likely set up a new neurosis. It made me wonder which way she made her offspring twitch.

My phone jangled. Melas was on the other end.

“Find any body parts lately?” he asked me.

“I bet you say that to all the girls.”

“Only the crazy ones.”

This from a guy who had boned a mobster’s wife and knocked her up.

“Hanging up now,” I said.

“Okay. I won’t tell you what I know.”

“I’m listening.”

“We found a dead guy behind one of those roadside shrines on Pelion. A sheepherder called it in. He’s missing a … a body part.”

“Which body part?”

“The one you found.”

“Which one?” I said on automatic. What could I say; my brain was busy processing the part about a dead body.

He launched immediately into cop-mode. “You found another one?”

Oh boy. Why hadn’t I kept my mouth shut?

“I didn’t find anything.” I lowered my voice. “It … fell out of the sky. In a manner of speaking.”

“Fell out of the sky.”

“An eagle dropped it.”

There was a pause. A long one, during which I fancied he debated the merits of dumping me on the next America-bound boat.

“Meet me at the Volos morgue,” he said.

“Do I have to?”

The line was already dead.

“Change of plans,” I told my passengers. “We’re going to the morgue.” A moment passed. “Where exactly is the morgue?”

T
he Volos morgue
was in the belly of the hospital, and it was close to overflowing. I had left Donk in Marika’s custody. She was circling the block because parking was non-existent. My assassins couldn’t find parking either, so they were following in her tire prints, chomping at the bit because I’d told her to drive at the speed of snow melting in February. By some feat of magic (I suspected she’d used sexual favors) Cleopatra had nabbed a disabled parking space by the front doors.

“Don’t worry,” I had told her on the way past, “the moment they look at you they’ll know you belong there.”

Back in the morgue, with its walls the exact ghostly shade of green they use to paint phosphorescent star and planet decals, I was listening to the morgue attendant bitch about the guests who wouldn’t leave. He was a little schnauzer of a guy, whose expression teetered on the edge between laughter and tears.

“It’s the economy,” Melas told me. “People can’t afford to bury their dead, so they dump them here.”

Yikes. “What happens to them?”

“Prison food.” The attendant glanced back at me. “Joking. Sorry, morgue humor. Some we have to keep indefinitely. Others … we manage to get permission from the government to bury them. Did you bring the organ?”

“I didn’t realize I was supposed to. Nobody—“ I glanced pointedly at Melas. “—asked me to.”

“Where is it?” the detective asked.

“Refrigerator.” They looked at me. “What? Where else would you put it? In this weather it’s the fridge or the freezer, and I figured you wouldn’t want it to get freezer burn. I was being considerate.”

They were somewhere between horrified and entertained.

“Let’s go look at your guy,” the attendant said.

It was wall-to-wall meat lockers like on TV. The place reeked of disinfectant and broken dreams. Probably the latter belonged to the attendant. He looked like he’d rather be at the beach, knocking back
frappes
, instead of sliding a dead man out of a vault.

The body was covered in a sheet.

I wondered where it had begun, this ritual of covering the deceased. Were we hiding our dead from the boogeyman by stashing them under bedclothes?

The attendant to the dead said, “You okay with this?”

I nodded. It was that or pass out in a puddle of my own puke.

Melas moved closer so that his words brushed my ear. “All you have to do is say if you recognize him or not.”

Deep breath. Let it out slowly. “I’m fine. Show me.”

Down went the sheet.

Dark hair. Olive skin. Pre-death he’d been cultivating stubble. Average build. Maybe forty-something. Spider tattoo on his neck.

I shivered.

“Don’t know him.”

Up went the sheet. Slam went the locker.

I excused myself and slid out the door. Melas followed.

Gastric acid was making noises about how it wanted to see the light. I closed my mouth, tried to think. Out there somewhere was a Frankenstein, chopping bits off bad guys and sending them to me.

Well, Grandma. But I was taking it personally.

“I’m sick of Greece,” I said to Melas. “Greeks probably kidnapped my father. Someone is always trying to kill me. Everyone I know except you is a criminal of one kind of another. And I’m slowly getting used to that. Now, it’s not so weird that I’m surrounded by killers and dealers and money launderers. It should be weird. It should be horrifying.”

His hard cop face softened. “It
is
horrifying. But right now your brain is trying to cope. It’s pushing all the weirdness aside so you can do what needs doing to find your father.”

“You think so?”

He leaned against the wall and slung an arm—his, thankfully—around my shoulder, and snugged me up to him. “I think about it a lot. He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.”

“Nietzsche. Look into the abyss long enough, the abyss looks into you.”

“I don’t do this job for the monsters,” he said. “Locking them up is a byproduct. What I do is help people. That’s what I concentrate on when the darkness gets too thick and deep. You’re not getting accustomed to the darkness—you’re doing what has to be done to find your father.”

That—I wanted that to be my truth.

“Do you guys have any leads about the body in there?”

He shook his head. “We’re spread thin—and getting thinner. We’re down a bunch of informants after Pistof blazed through them. Others are either afraid to come forward or they want to be paid. The department doesn’t have spare cash. That … thing from the box is the only lead I’ve got. I don’t suppose you guys took fingerprints?”

“I don’t think they do that.”

Notice the clever way I changed
we
to
they
? I wasn’t one of them. I didn’t want to be. Once I found Dad I was out of here, back to where the biggest crime happening in my vicinity was a speeding ticket, maybe shoplifting. I wanted to be around people who could honestly say they’d never killed anyone.

That wasn’t too much to ask, was it?

And here came the now-predictable tsunami of guilt. The Family was the only family I had besides Dad, and I wasn’t sure I had him anymore. The voice noodling around inside my head told me he was still alive, but there was another voice in there, too, and it had a ‘glass is half-empty’ kind of personality. It said Dad was dead and this family was all the family I’d ever have, so I’d better not screw it up.

“You’ll let me know if any more body parts show up, right?”

“Sure,” I said. “Why did you call me?”

“He had a picture of you in his pocket. One from the newspaper.”

Melas walked me out of the hospital. He was parked in the emergency bay; being a cop came with perks. Not many, if you were a Greek cop, but some.

Cleopatra jumped when she saw me. She had been slapping some more paint on her face.

Melas stopped to gawk at her car. “Are those bullet holes?”

I squinted. Shrugged. “Could be. Who can say?”

He shook his head. “Where’s your car?”

“No parking. Marika had to drive it around the block a few times. Sure enough, here came Marika, my Beetle screaming to a stop as she hit the brakes. Behind her, several sets of brakes squealed as the assassins tried not to plow into one another.

Obviously snow melted fast here in February.

“Circus?” Melas asked.

“Entourage.”

“You have an entourage?”

“I have Marika, Donk, the walking blowup doll back there, and three assassins.”

“That’s some entourage. All three trying to kill you?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Something tells me with you it always is.”

“The only thing complicating my life is Greece. I used to be a couch potato.” Judging by the look on his face, something got lost in the translation. “Lazy,” I said. “I like TV and potato chips.”

His face went through the motions of processing my words, then he nodded.

“I’ll follow you.”

“Wait—follow me where?”

“Your place. Those organs are evidence.”

A
nother day
, other party. When I pulled up outside the garage the bouzouki music was already going. A bouzouki is the bastard offspring of an acoustic guitar and a banjo. It’s downright twangy.

These bouzouki players were live and they were family, so there was no switching them off. Rembetika—Greek folk music—and I don’t get along. It’s like listening to twenty cats expressing ennui over a sardine.

“I did not know Baboulas was making a party today,” Marika said. “If I had known I would have stayed behind.” The way she said it I knew she knew, and she’d had no intention of staying behind. She was digging the adventure too much.

Donk brightened up. “Party?”

“Don’t get excited,” I said. “It’s not your idea of a good party.”

“Can’t you drop me off at a strip club?”

“No. For starters, I don’t know where one is.”

“I do.”

Marika shut him up with a look.

My phone rang. The second I answered, Takis barked, “Is my wife with you?”

“Sure she is, Booger Eater.”

“Heh,” he said. “Who eats boogers? Pigs, that’s who.”

I oinked.

“I cannot believe she told you those lies! She is a monster!” He went silent for a minute. “Tell her to come home, or I will change your lights.”

Translation: I’d better send his wife home or he was going to put the hurt on me.

“Already there,” I said and disconnected. “That was your husband,” I told Marika. “He wants you to come home.”

“Poor little Takis,” she said. “Nobody to wipe his
kolos
.”

I wasn’t entirely sure that was a metaphor, so I left it alone.

“Come on,” I told her and Donk. “My nose says there’s good food happening.”

My nose was right. Once again they’d trotted out the giant rotisseries, and now a sheep was busy rotating over glowing coals. I tried not to look deeply into its dead eyes.

Unlike Harry Harry, it still had both of them.

Long tables had been set up with chairs. Not a formal sit-down lunch, but more of a buffet and choose-your-own-seat when you get hungry. Aside from the meats, every Greek side dish and appetizer ever had been magicked onto a couple of tables. It was a miracle the legs didn’t buckle under the weight of all the food.

“
Kokoretsi
! All right!”

Melas had caught up to us, and he sounded way too excited about Greece’s most deceptive dish.
Kokoretsi
looked like the best thing you could put in your mouth. The meat crisped to a golden crust as the hot coals worked their food voodoo, and it smelled like the kitchen of a five-star steakhouse. But under the hood it was lungs, kidneys, hearts, and other gross things tied onto the spit with intestines.

You couldn’t pay me to eat it, but I was happy to sit here and breathe.

“You’re a sick man, Melas.”

He rubbed his flat belly. “What I am is a hungry man.” He grabbed a plate and began constructing a skyscraper of food.

My stomach was making noises like it could eat, but I kept having flashbacks to the morgue. I left Melas and the others to their party and went back out to where the three assassins and Cleopatra were parked.

“You guys can come and eat, if you like. Looks like there’s plenty for everyone.”

“Is that
kokoretsi
?” Elias asked. I nodded and he jumped out of his car, reeled in by the scent of cooking organs. Lefty followed.

But not Mo. He stood there, staring at some point beyond my left ear. As far as I knew he still didn’t know his employer was dead.

“Tell the Yankee pig I do not want her food.”

Nobody told me anything, on account of how there was nobody there to tell him anything. Except Cleopatra, and she was busy picking at her teeth in the rearview mirror.

“It’s not my food,” I said.

His gaze fixed itself to a point beyond my left ear. “Ask the pig if there is pork.”

“No pork,” I said, mostly sure that was true.

He slouched off after the other guys. Which left me and Cleopatra.

She got out of the car and stretched, revealing an ocean of bare midriff.

“I guess I could eat,” she said.

I stopped her with my hand. “No. No food for you. You can stay here.”

Jaws grinned. “I don’t think so. I was invited.”

The guard. I was going to kill him. Okay, maybe not kill, but we’d be having words, and most of mine were scheduled to be loud.

I hoofed it back to Grandma’s house with every intention of curling up with a book. After the morgue I wasn’t in the mood for fun or socializing. As soon as the chilled body parts were in Melas’ custody, I’d excuse myself without excusing myself, that way no one would have chance at talking me out of it.

That was the plan.

The kitchen was empty. The countertops were clean. I lifted the fridge’s handle, yanked open the door.

Blinked.

Two somethings were missing. The penis and heart were gone. Not a sign of the plastic containers Grandma had put them in.

I checked the freezer. Nothing except ice cream and some regular meat. Checked the garbage. No Mr. Winky. No heart.

Ohmigod. We had been robbed.

I called Melas, wailed, “We’ve been robbed!”