Trueish Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel (9 page)

We looked up at the stone tower. It was easy to imagine it toppling over, crushing us to death. A way up hadn’t materialized.

A throat cleared behind us. Elias had parked behind me in the black sedan. He’d stuck his head out the window. “There’s a rope ladder around the other side,” he called out.

I waved. “Thanks.” With my elbow I nudged Marika. “Let’s go.”

Elias was right, there was a ladder made of what looked like newish rope. Someone had been up here, and recently.

“I’m going up,” I said. “You should stay down here.” In case I needed a medevac, which out here could be a donkey. “If the rope breaks I don’t want your children to grow up without a mother.” I knew what that was like and it sucked, although Dad had done his best to fill in the gaps.

There could be a clue at the top of that rope ladder. There was no way I wasn’t going up.

I
t was five minutes later
.

“You need help?” Elias called out.

I shook my head. “We’re good.”

“You don’t look so good,” he said.

Don’t look down, Kat. Don’t look down
.

I looked down. So far I was only about six feet up the ladder. Huh. It felt higher.

Don’t look up, Kat. Don’t look up
.

I looked up.

The sandstone glared down at me. Was it my imagination or was it looming?

“I think this rock is alive,” I said.

“Rocks are not alive,” Marika said. “That is a children’s story.”

“There’s a children’s story about rocks coming alive?”

“My mother told it to me, and now I tell it to my boys.”

“Does anything good happen in the story?”

She shrugged. “Only to the rocks.”

That figured.

One at a time, I boosted myself to the next rung, then the next. They were floppy and they shifted as I adjusted my weight. What I’d taken for a gentle breeze was becoming a serious death threat as the ladder swayed.

I glanced down. Marika was hauling herself up behind me.

“You don’t have to come up,” I said.

“This is an adventure, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Then I am coming up! I am tired of sitting in the car while everyone else has fun.”

“If we fall?”

“Your assassin can call the ambulance.”

That seemed fair. Elias was turning out to be a helpful sort of guy.

My travel guide—aka: the Internet—told me the tower was close to two hundred feet. Wrong. It was at least ten thousand. That’s how it felt. My muscles burned. My gut churned. The wind was doing its best to blow my eyeballs out of their sockets. I imagined Dad’s old crony, Jimmy Pants, who was now a high school gym teacher, laughing at my lame level of fitness. I wasn’t sure there was a level of fitness this low. My level was subterranean.

Not Marika’s though. She was hauling significant ass up the ladder.

“It’s the boys,” she puffed as she passed me. “All day I run, run, run. Children are suicidal. It’s my job every day to stop them from killing themselves.”

There’s a scene in
The Chronicles of Riddick
, where the deadly sun sweeps across the planet and cremates every living thing in its path. Our sun had watched that movie, and now it had ambition and goals.

The good news was that the remainder of my peeling skin had evaporated. The bad news was that Sol was now blowtorching what was left of me.

I was nearly at the top. Marika had made it up a few minutes ago, and now she was tossing inspirational quotes at me.

You can do it. Don’t look down or you’ll die. How do you feel about wheelchairs? Never mind, if you fall you will die instantly—or close enough to instantly. Are you wearing clean underwear?

That sort of thing.

As I reached for the final rung I had a primal urge to scream,
Khaaaaaan!
What I lacked was ability. My breathing was ragged, my voice hit-or-miss.

“I didn’t die,” I said in loosely connected, randomly spaced fragments. Then I put my head between my knees and waited to feel human again.

When I lifted my head I was in Dresden, post World War II. What had once been a monastery was now a pile of haphazardly tossed blocks, resting on a foundation of tougher blocks. There were a few standing walls but they were slowly getting around to the business of sitting. A light rash of greenery had crept up the tower and spread itself over the ragged landscape. The sun was trying to burn it off but mountains do longevity better than anyone, and that’s where the roots were, deep in the shaded cracks.

Marika was turning in a tight circle, hand shielding her eyes. “The view,” she said, “it never stops.”

I took a deep breath. Tried to picture myself standing on flat ground, within inches of sea level. The edge was something I was determined to avoid until it was time to leave. But even sitting I could see the world was infinite here. It went on and on and on and on, a bit like the recently converted.

“What are we looking for?” she asked me.

“A clue.” I dragged myself up off the ground.

“What does a clue look like?”

No idea. Which was why I was inching around the rocks, squinting at everything, and trying not to fall and die.

“Rabbit said the Eagle commissioned the box with the penis.”

She crossed herself. “I thought you said that to scare Donk.”

“No, there really was a severed penis. Someone sent it to Grandma. I traced it to a man named Rabbit in Larissa’s prison, and he told me he made it for the Eagle.”

“Are you sure that is what he said?”

I thought about it. “Yes.”

“And this Eagle person is here—are you sure?”

Good question. One I should have asked myself sooner, before zipping away on a road trip.

“No, I’m not sure. That’s why I’m here.”

Overhead, the sun was laughing at me. I plopped down on a rock. Sitting struck me as sturdier. You never read about a guy who fell off the ground and snapped his spine.

I brainstormed out loud. “That rope ladder was fairly new, so someone has been up here recently. All the TV I’ve watched, you’d think I’d know what to do next.”

On TV there was always a clue, which lead to another clue, which lead to a solution. Up here we had rocks, blocks, a killer view, and all the fresh air we could swallow.

“Why do you believe there is a clue here? Maybe this Eagle was here, but now they are not. If I cut off a
poutsa
I would hide.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere in the middle of nowhere.”

I looked up at her, disbelieving. “We are in the middle of nowhere, on a tower of rock.”

“Oh,” she said. “I forgot.”

I wanted answers and I wanted at least one of them to be here and now. Dad’s trail was cold and only growing colder.

I stood. Brushed myself off. “Okay, let’s go.”

But I wasn’t going, was I? My feet were taking me on one last look around the jagged rooftop. Old bricks, outlines of rooms ascetic people used to fill. Lots of bird crap. Nothing fresher than the ladder. It had been tied to the deepest roots.

“We should go,” I said.

“Home?”

“There’s nothing here.”

“We could visit the monasteries,” she suggested slyly.

“Don’t we have to be covered up?”

We both looked down at the white town. From up here it looked like spilled milk.

“I guess we could go shopping.”

“An adventure in between adventures!”

Marika’s enthusiasm for life was catchier than crabs at a 70s key party. We returned to the ladder, which was where Marika ran into a big problem: herself.

“My Virgin Mary,” she wailed. “I cannot climb down there.”

I patted her shoulder. “It’ll be okay. Do the same thing you did to climb up, only do it backwards, and try not to fall. Be Ginger Rogers!”

“Who?”

“She was a movie star and dancer.”

“You are not helping!”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “You scrambled up like a mountain goat.”

“Up is different. Down is the problem. Look how far away the ground is!” she cried.

It was pretty far.

“Okay,” I said, “let’s troubleshoot this. We’re up here and the ground is down there. We need to get from here to there, and all we have is this ladder. So the ladder is it—our only way down. Troubleshot. Bam!”

She shook her head so hard the flyaways from her bun lashed her round cheeks. “I think I will stay here. It’s not so bad, and the view is wonderful. Do you think someone can airlift food up, and maybe some television?”

She must have missed the part where there were no electrical outlets. “What about your boys? Don’t you want to climb down and see them?”

“They will survive without me.”

“What about Takis? Who’ll make his fries and pray for him?”

“His mother is dead, but he has a father. Let him do it.”

“Takis has a father?” It seemed more likely that he’d sprung out of a carbuncle on someone’s butt, kind of like Athena did with Zeus’s head.

“His father is a jackal.”

That made sense. Takis
was
kind of a watered-down Antichrist, but less evil and more douche.

“Okay,” I said. “I guess I could call Grandma and have her bring the helicopter.”

“No! You cannot call Baboulas! She’ll be angry.”

“She’ll get over it.” I pulled out my phone.

“No, I’ll climb down!”

F
ive minutes later
, Marika was on the ground, shouting inspirational messages, once again. I could do it, she told me, the woman who’d been a shivering mess ten minutes earlier.

She was right: I could do it. And I could do it a lot faster if she’d shut up and let me climb down.

Finally, I was able to let go and fall the last couple of feet. I landed with a gymnast’s flourish.

Elias was still there, but now he had a friend. The new guy was more beard than man. His eyes were jet beads peering out over a humpbacked nose. A dense, black forest surrounded it all. His build was slight, his height average, and he was wearing Jesus sandals.

My assassin hooked a thumb at him. “This is Mo.”

“Mo.” I nodded. “Nice to meet you.”

“Do not talk to me,” he said, “Yankee female dog.”

I looked at Elias. “Friendly guy.”

“Mo is shit—Iranian shit. But he’s a good assassin.”

“Persian,” Mo barked. “The best subset of Iranian.”

So, Mo was Persian, and he had the rug tucked under his arm to prove it.

“Wait,” I said, double-taking. “You’re an assassin, too?”

Mo said nothing.

Elias turned to him. “She’s asking if you’re an assassin, too.”

“Tell her I am the best assassin in Greece.”

“But—“ Elias started.

“Tell her.”

Elias rolled his eyes and looked at me. “Mo says he is the best assassin in Greece, but that is not—“

“Silence!” Mo shouted. “Infidel. Tell the Yankee dog she must kneel while I cut off her head.”

“You’re not cutting—“ I started.

Mo looked up at the sky. “Tell her!”

Elias sighed. “Mo would like you to kneel while he—“

“I would not
like
it,” Mo said. “It was not a request, it was a command. Kneel.”

“A-ha,” I said. “You spoke to me.”

“Tell her I did not speak to her.”

Elias said, “He did not—“

I held up one hand, careful not to make a
mousta
out of it. “I got it. Tell him I won’t kneel.”

“She won’t kneel,” he told Mo.

Mo pulled a big, scary sword out of thin air. It had curves like a banana. “Ask her if she will kneel now.”

“Cool,” I said. “It’s an Aladdin sword!”

He looked horrified. “It is a shamshir. Excellent for cutting off heads and hands. It was my father’s father’s father’s father’s great-great-grandfather’s sword.”

“Was his name Xerxes?”

He looked at Elias. “Why is she speaking to me?”

I let out a long, exasperated sigh. “Why is he trying to kill me?”

“Don’t take it personally,” Elias said. “It’s work. It’s not like we do this for fun.”

“It is a little bit fun,” Mo said. “Especially when their heads bounce and a hawk swoops in and steals it.”

We all looked at him in horror.

He slapped his belly, laughing. “It happened one time, the funniest thing I have witnessed in my life. The hawk came down and carried the head away, seconds after I cut it off.” Tears streamed down his cheeks and went missing in his shrubbery. “We never did find that head.”

“Who was he?” I asked.

“A thief. I was supposed to cut off his hand, but I missed. Memories!” Then he paled. “Shit,” he said. “I talked to you again, unclean woman!” He unrolled his carpet, dropped it on the ground, and faced what I presumed was east. He dropped down on the carpet and began to chant.

“Who does he work for?” I asked Elias.

“Don’t you tell her,” Mo called out, before resuming his chant.

“A Pontic Greek named Harry Harry.”

A Pontic Greek was a Greek who hailed from Pontus, now a part of northeastern Anatolian Turkey.

“Harry Harry is not the boss of me,” Mo flung over his shoulder. “But yes, he wants her to die.”

“And he wants me dead … why?”

“Tell her I do not ask why. It is my job to cut, that is all, and take her face back on ice so he can make mask for his gallery.”

“You can’t kill her,” Elias said. “She’s my kill. This could make me.”

My stomach turned. “My face? Jesus.”

“Jesus was a prophet, nothing more,” Mo said casually.

People have wanted to bust my kneecaps, rip off my head and shit down my neck—their words, not mine—anything to get out of paying their debts. But back home those threats had been limited to baseless gauntlets thrown down the phone line. In Greece people legitimately wanted me dead, and they had the means to hire assassins to do it. Other people I knew who had visited Greece never had these kinds of problems. But then their families weren’t Greek mafia, were they?

“Here’s the thing,” I said. “I don’t want you to kill me.”

Mo didn’t look up from his carpet. “Tell her that is too bad.”

“He said it’s too bad,” Elias said.

“I got that part. In fact, I’m getting all the parts. Tell him I want to talk to his employer.”

Mo sat back on his haunches. “What did she say?”

“She wants to talk to your employer.”

“Harry Harry does not talk to Yankee pigs.”

I snatched the phone out of his back pocket, turned it on, began scrolling through recent calls.

“You cannot do that!” Mo wailed.

Marika folded her arms. “Funny, because it looks to me like she’s doing it.”

I hit dial, dancing out of the way as Mo swung his Aladdin sword.

“Smiling Panda Massage,” a woman’s answered. “You will leave with a smile, guaranteed.”

I hung up, dialed the next number.

“Happy Happy Massage.”

End call. Next on the list.

It rang and rang as I leaped around, staying one swing away from the blade.

Donk sat up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “I had a dr—ARGH!” He rolled under the Beetle. “There’s a crazy Arab with a knife!”