The Whispers of Nemesis (19 page)

Attracted by a cover picture of a glazed and golden-baked courgette pie, the fat man picked out a copy of
Yevsi
– Taste – magazine from the racks, and from the newspapers chose that morning's
Ethnos
.

He wished the young woman
Kali mera
, but she gave no reply. There was no room for his intended purchases on the counter where the woman's magazine was spread, so the fat man instead held them out to her, showing their prices. The woman glanced at the magazine and the newspaper, but not at the fat man; eyes back on the pictures of expensive clothing, she stated a price.

‘I'd like cigarettes, too, please,' he said, with a smile. ‘Do you have any of my brand?' He took a box of his cigarettes from his pocket, and held it up so the woman could see the starlet's pretty face; by contrast, the woman's own face slipped into a scowl as she lifted her chin and tutted, ‘No.'

‘Perhaps if you looked, you might find a pack or two,' suggested the fat man, brightly. ‘Many people tell me they don't stock this brand, and then, when they look, they find a packet or two, hidden away.'

The young woman looked at him with contempt.

‘I don't have them, I tell you,' she said. ‘Twelve hundred fifty, for those.'

The fat man paid with exact change, and with his magazine and newspaper under his arm, made his way to the pedestrian crossing at the roads' intersection. As he waited for the traffic lights to change in his favour, he heard a bang and a clattering behind him, and the shriek of a woman's angry voice. All around him, pedestrians stopped and turned towards the
periptero
, where the newspaper rack had dropped from wall to ground, scattering dozens of newspapers as it fell. The young woman was moving quickly as she emerged from the kiosk's rear door, but the breeze was quicker. Riffling the light paper of the morning editions, it easily separated the pages of newsprint, and carried sheets of the nation's news high in the air, flying and flapping into the boulevard traffic.

 

Across the boulevard, the fat man found an Italian café, more appropriate to Milan than to a Greek city, yet somehow lacking an Italian city's style. He took a table with a street view, away from the draught caused by the door's opening and closing, and asked the blonde-haired girl who served him for a Greek coffee without sugar.

‘No Greek coffee,' she said, in Scandinavian-accented Greek. ‘Espresso.'

His eye had been caught by a display of cakes and pastries.

‘Could I trouble you,' he said, ‘to tell me what sweets you have on offer?'

She listed them with no interest, her pen held over her order pad to hurry his choice.

‘Denmark,' he said, as she finished speaking. ‘Am I right?'

‘Yes,' she said. She looked at him expectantly.

‘I have never been so far north,' he said, affably. ‘I am certain the weather would not be to my taste. Though I suppose it is something you could get used to, like the lack of light.'

‘Are you ready to order?' she asked. ‘If you want a minute, I can come back.'

‘No,' he said, ‘I'm ready. I think a slice of the lemon tart, with a little whipped cream on the side. It's not something you eat for breakfast every day, but a change of habit is healthy, once in a while. And I'll have one of the croissants too, whichever you recommend; I'm torn between the chocolate and the almond.'

For a long moment, she looked at him.

‘I'd have the cherry,' she said, ‘if you're asking my opinion.'

‘I am, and I will,' said the fat man. ‘Cherry it is. And since there are two courses to my breakfast, be good enough to make my espresso a double.'

She left him, and he unfolded his newspaper, reading the headline with little interest: political scandal, though with an original touch – not a minister's affair, but his wife's affair with a boy exactly the age of their own son. Amused, he turned the page, and saw a smaller headline there:
Death of the Lazarus Poet
. Skimming the article for its crucial points, a thought seemed to strike him, and he turned to the classified section in the paper's last pages, where, amongst trysts for illicit lovers, advertisements for deviant sex and a request for a baby to adopt, was a message:
Investigator please return to us urgently. AD
.

The waitress laid his coffee on the table, alongside a slice of lemon tart with a spoon, and a cherry croissant with a knife.

The fat man folded his newspaper.

‘Thank you,' he said, with a smile. ‘It is most fortunate I have ordered a decent breakfast; my day, it seems, is likely to be quite a challenge.'

 

The fat man found the address he had been given without difficulty: a white-walled office block on a quiet street, overhung by the branches of tall plane trees whose roots were lifting and splitting the road and pavements. The building was respectable but not opulent; it suggested modest earnings rather than great prosperity, a business making a comfortable living but not vast profits. A revolving glass door and a glass front on to the street showed a reception desk inside, where a woman typed. There was no sign on the front of the building to announce the offices' business, except for a polished brass plaque – partly covered by the branches of an oleander bush – engraved with the words, ‘Bellerophon Editions AE'.

The fat man checked his watch and found the time to be a minute before 10.30. Through the glass, he watched the receptionist pause in her typing to answer the phone on her desk and make a note in pencil before her fingers went back to the keys.

On the street, the three-wheeled blue wagon of a municipal street cleaner – a man whose sagging face told of one hangover too many – pulled up alongside a waste-bin secured round the trunk of a plane tree. Dismounting his vehicle, he tipped the bin's small amount of rubbish into the wagon's back, and as he did so, noticed the fat man and stared at him with curiosity, as if the fat man were someone he ought to know. The fat man gave him a broad smile, and raising his hand, called out
Kali mera
. The street cleaner responded with a nod, and drove away with his face still full of questioning.

The fat man found his cigarettes, and took one from the almost empty box. Lighting it with his gold lighter, he inhaled deeply. Inside the building, on the modern-looking staircase which curved down behind the receptionist, a man appeared. He descended at a run, his feet light and confident on the stairs; he seemed a man of energy, and as he strode past the receptionist, did not stop but spoke to her in passing, raising his left hand in farewell as his right hand pushed on the revolving door.

The fat man drew again on his cigarette, and watched the man as he emerged. Well built, and not dissimilar in stature to the fat man, his posture was less commanding, his shoulders stooped and somewhat rounded. His appearance was untidy; though his navy suit was well tailored, it was in need of cleaning and pressing; his white shirt was not fastened at the collar; and though his silk tie was a shade of blue the fat man would have admired, it was stained with a double dribble of coffee. He approached the fat man with his hand outstretched, and there seemed about him qualities of openness and cordiality, although he wasn't smiling now. Instead, his expression was wary.

‘
Yassas
,' he said. ‘I assume you're the gentleman who phoned me?'

‘I am,' said the fat man, offering his hand. ‘I am Hermes Diaktoros, of Athens. Thank you for agreeing to see me.'

The man's handshake was firm, his hand warm.

‘Yorgas Sarris,' he said. ‘Please, walk with me. I've an appointment for which I daren't be late.'

He led the way down the uneven pavement, under the branches of the plane trees.

‘So,' said Yorgas, as they walked; his walk was brisk and the fat man happily matched it. ‘What brings you to my door?'

‘To be truthful,' said the fat man, ‘I am not entirely sure. Before we go any further, I should ask you whether you have seen this morning's papers.'

‘Newspapers? Pah!' Yorgas threw his head back in a gesture of disgust. ‘I publish some of the world's finest writers,
Kyrie
Diaktoros. I don't spend my time reading the third-rate drivel that passes for writing in those rags.'

‘I respect your point of view,' said the fat man. ‘But there is something in this morning's editions which I really think you should see.'

With reluctance, Yorgas stopped walking and glanced at his watch. The fat man took his copy of
Ethnos
from under his arm, and placing his holdall on the pavement, turned to page three and held it out to Yorgas.

As he read the headline, Yorgas's face showed confusion and disbelief. He looked up from the page to the fat man.

‘What does this mean?' he asked. ‘How can they have found Santos's body? Santos has already been dead four years!'

The fat man's eyebrows lifted in doubt.

‘Apparently not,' he said.

‘Then what the hell's going on? Please, tell me what you know.' Yorgas turned around, and saw a low wall along the front of a shop selling baby clothes. ‘Here, let's sit. You and I must talk.'

‘Your appointment,' said the fat man. ‘You'll be late.'

Yorgas waved his hand.

‘The hell with that,' he said. ‘Sit.'

They sat down, side by side, showing similarities between them which suggested kinship.

‘I should start,' said the fat man, ‘by being honest with you, since I hold honesty in such high value. I obtained your phone number by slightly devious means, through a trick my cousin taught me; the detail of it is not important, but it relates to counting the seconds as a phone dial spins and so calculating what number is being called. Attis does not know I have contacted you. I am acquainted with him because he has asked me to look into the matter of – well, at the time it was the matter of Santos's missing corpse. There was an unpleasant turn of events at his exhumation – perhaps you have already heard? The papers have hold of it now, and so it is in any case public knowledge. I'll leave this paper with you, and if you can overcome your distaste, you may read their version of events for yourself, in full. In summary, the family's belief was that someone had robbed Santos's grave of his remains, and placed there instead the bones of a pig.'

‘A pig? That's despicable!'

‘Despicable indeed. Understandably, the family wished the matter to be hushed up. Of course there was talk of witchcraft in the village; now it seems the explanation is more obvious. Santos's bones were not in his grave because, for the last four years, Santos Volakis has been very much alive.'

The publisher shook his head.

‘What you are telling me – it beggars belief!'

‘It does indeed – it's an extraordinary tale, even without its twist. Which is, as you may or may not know, that there was a clause in Santos's will tying up his estate until – I quote, or misquote –
my bones see again the light of day
. That, it now seems, has not happened. So the people who have waited four years for their inheritances may now have another long wait to collect their money.'

‘But I don't understand! What does it all mean?'

‘Perhaps you can shed some light on that. When Attis phoned you – and I have to admit, I eavesdropped on that conversation – he was offering you something for sale, was he not?'

The publisher looked hard at the fat man.

‘Before I answer that question,' he said, ‘you'll forgive me,
Kyrie
Diaktoros, if I ask at this point for more clarification on where you come into this.'

The fat man smiled.

‘You're a businessman first, of course, and no doubt you're afraid I'm a rival for the goods Attis Danas is offering for sale. I assure you I have no interest in acquiring them. I am employed by the authorities to investigate a wide range of injustices, and I am currently, in what you might call a spot of freelancing, employed by Attis to investigate a matter which has already turned out differently to what we expected. To put it plainly, Attis hired me on the family's behalf to find out what had happened to his client's remains, in order to help them in gaining access to money left to them by Santos in his rather unusual will. That brief, as far as I am concerned, has now changed. I am travelling back to Vrisi this afternoon, and my job, as I now see it, is to discover why Santos has been found dead at a roadside, and – simply because I am interested – I want to know where he has been and what he has been doing these past four years. Someone, somewhere, has been playing a strange game of hide and seek, both with our poet and with his money. And, if I am not mistaken, his work too. Attis has offered you some poems, has he not?'

Yorgas seemed reluctant to answer. The fat man produced his cigarettes.

‘Smoke?' he asked, offering them to Yorgas.

‘Not for me,' said the publisher. ‘I gave it up two years ago. And still not a day goes by I don't miss it.'