Trueish Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel (12 page)

“Xander,” Grandma said. “Check and see who else—if anyone—is dead. There is a pattern here and I do not like it. Harry Harry, Fatmir, and who else? The bodies do not match the body parts.”

“I guess now we sit and wait for eyes and a body to go with that …” Papou wiggled his little finger.

T
he family descended
upon the courtyard as the sun began to slouch out of the sky. The courtyard was wired with strings of fairy lights, invisible by day, delightful by night.

While the children played—at least I thought they were playing; from the sounds it was possible they were killing each other—their parents and other adults slow-walked around the compound, not unlike the way people did at the promenade.

Rabbit was there. Already less gaunt, he’d rustled up civilian clothes and managed not to look like he was a former inmate. He was sitting in Grandma’s front yard, arms folded, spinning a bullshit story about another prison break at the Korydallos prison that had also involved a helicopter.

“True story,” he said. “Only they caught the
malakas
. It was his second botched prison break.”

Papou was there, too. He was ignoring Rabbit as hard as he could. His back was to the man, which was the less damp way of spitting in a Greek’s face.

“Bad planning,” Grandma said. “And stupid friends.” Then she turned the tables on him. “How many boxes?”

“Eh?”

“The boxes. How many did you make?”

“I have made hundreds, Katerina. You know this as well as I do.”

“Playing stupid does not suit you.”

Papou lobbed some words over his shoulder. “Who says he’s playing?”

Rabbit jumped up. When he grabbed his crotch, it was with a velocity that suggested he’d woken suddenly from a bad dream and wanted to make sure his bits hadn’t been relocated to a sizzling skillet. “Eat it,” he said to Papou.

“Did someone offer me a toothpick?” Papou said without turning around. Bitchy was something he did better than a closet full of swishy men.

Grandma had a look on her face like she wanted to shove them into separate corners and spray them with bullets. “In recent history, Stelios.”

Rabbit sat. “One. Why?”

“We have two.”

“Impossible!” He blasted out of his seat, hovered momentarily, then crash landed back onto the wood and varnished straw.

“Oh, then if you say so it must be true,” Grandma said.

He didn’t relax. He knew the axe was coming, and from the droop of his mouth it seemed as if he’d decided that being born wasn’t his best idea.

“I made one box. One.” He scurried around in his own head, hunting for excuses. “Maybe someone else made the second box.”

“The box was identical, except for the size.”

He tugged on the hem of his new shirt. “Let me see.”

“Katerina, bring the box.”

I didn’t want to touch the thing. Too bad Grandma didn’t look like she was in a negotiating mood. I got the box from the kitchen, set it on the table. The contents of both boxes had been stashed in the fridge in plastic containers.

Rabbit eyed it suspiciously. “What was inside the second one?”

Grandma told him. His face stayed passive, unreadable.

“Hmm,” he said. He shuffled his chair closer to the table, examining the box from every available angle without touching a single surface. Maybe he was afraid of catching death cooties. He leaned back, arms folded. “Not one of mine.”

“Are you certain?” She said it in the kind of voice that suggested her real words were,
Is that your final answer
?

“Of course! I know my own boxes.”

Papou grunted. “Looks like one of your boxes to me, but what do I know?”

“
Skasmos
, old man,” Rabbit said.

“Why are you here? You don’t belong in this place.”

Rabbit settled back in his seat. A smile hoisted the edges of his lips so that it was a pale parody of mirth. “I have an invitation. Ask Katerina.”

My mouth opened to deny everything, until I realized he was talking about the other Katerina—Grandma.

“He is my guest,” Grandma confirmed. “For now.”

There was a death knell if ever I’d heard one. Only Grandma could make two normal words sound like an impending air embolism.

“Looking at your face make me want to vomit,” Papou said.

“So go.”

“No,” Papou said. “I do not trust you.” He touched his eye. “My eyes fourteen.”

Which was the Greek way of saying:
I’m watching you
.

I was starting to get the feeling these two had history. History like Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn; Leonidas and Xerxes; Zeus and everybody.

“If you want to fight, do it in your own time,” Grandma said. “Are you sure about the box?”

Rabbit slapped his fake-o smile back into place. “I would bet my life on it.”

“You might have to.”

The smile died. “I am telling you, it’s not mine. The work is shoddy, unprofessional. Look at the edges? Rough. The varnish is not perfect. You can see the brush strokes. See?” He pointed to the side. “A bristle. I would rather die than leave a bristle on one of my boxes. Whoever made this, he had no pride.”

“Who ordered the first box?”

“I told her, it was the Eagle.”

Grandma looked at me. “You said this box was delivered by an eagle.”

I nodded. “There was a guy with an eagle at the monastery. When we got back to the car the eagle swooped down and dropped the box.” I watched Rabbit as I spoke. No reaction. He was good or he was ignorant. Money wasn’t something I’d bet either way.

“You did not say there was a man,” she said.

“You didn’t ask. He was a creepy guy with an eagle on his shoulder and mirrored sunglasses.”

“Did he say anything?”

“No. He was busy hanging out with his bird. And I didn’t see a box.”

“Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”

“If he had an eagle on his shoulder and those sunglasses, sure.” Because the bird was one hell of a distraction. A parrot, I could have seen past that, but eagles ... That’s not something you see every day, even in Greece where old women tote chickens in sacks onto buses.

“Katerina,” she said, shaking her head. Then she zeroed in on Rabbit again. “When did he come for the box?”

Arms folded high and tight on his chest, he shrugged. “I don’t remember the date. There are two dates that matter in prison. The day you arrive and the day they let you leave. In between, the days are all the same day.”

She kept her gaze cool and level. “You know I can find out who came to visit you, eh? Every person for fifteen years.”

“Do your fingers still stretch that far, Inspector Gadget?” He laughed at his own joke—which made one of us. A joke needs breathing room to be funny. There was none here. Grandma had filled the atmosphere with her chilly countenance.

Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.

Nobody wanted Smaug to think they were going to lunge at the gold.

Suddenly, the wind changed direction. Grandma’s face melted until she was any other old lady with a complexion like a fast food bag.

“Would anyone like spanakopita? I have some fresh.”

A
unt Rita
and Takis slouched home close to midnight. Takis splintered off at the fountain, dragging himself up to the apartment he shared with Marika. My aunt sagged into one of the yard’s chairs.

“Tell me something good,” she said to me. It was the two of us now. Grandma had wandered off to bed an hour ago. Papou and Rabbit had skulked back to their respective corners; and I could hear the slow splashing in the pool as Xander did laps. It was all I could do not to shove my nose up to the fence behind the outhouse and gawk.

“Grandma made
kourabiedes,
” I said.

“That
is
good.” She vanished inside, returned two minutes later with a couple of Greek butter cookies doused in powdered sugar. She plopped down beside me, looking every day of fifty.

“You okay?”

“Today I feel old,” she said. “Have you ever seen a man with his heart cut out?”

“Only in the second Indiana Jones movie, and that was more like snatched out.”

“How about eyes gouged out of their sockets?”

“Not recently. Or ever.”

She nodded slowly as she broke off a chunk of cookie. Powdered sugar drifted through the air.

“I have seen things,” she said. “Terrible things. Seeing someone with body parts removed is more ugly than normal murder. It’s perverted—not sexually, but in the head.” She listened for a moment. “Is that Xander in the pool? Never mind, I am too tired to look at him. What happened to the assassins?”

“Elias is working for us now. He’s watching Mo, who is watching Lefty. And there’s a woman following me.”

“The one from the photograph?”

I nodded. “I forgot to ask about the lipstick.”

“Eh, we can always have someone snatch her purse.” Her lips lifted at the edges. She was pulling my leg. Maybe. “Does the Persian know his boss is dead?”

“Not yet—not that I know of.”

“With luck that will be one fewer pair of eyes on you.” She stood with the plate, kissed the top of my head. “If you decide to go back to America, I will miss you.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere yet.”

“When the time comes, if you want to go—go. Don’t let Mama force you to be someone you don’t want to be.”

Grandma’s voice wafted out between the shutters. “I heard that, Rita.”

Aunt Rita winked at me. “Ears like a dog.”

“That I heard, too.”

O
n the other
side of midnight I crawled between the sheets in my tiny, temporary room. Grandma’s second bedroom no longer seemed strange to me. I was used to the cramped space and the fifty-year-old furniture. This space was becoming more mine every day. My clothes were in the drawers. My suitcase had been banished under the bed. On the small dresser sat the wooden statue Baby Dimitri had given me. The little guy had a dick that was reaching for the stars. It had made it as far as his chin.

Before clocking out for the day I checked on the Crooked Noses, to see if there was anything new. Mafia activity was their meat and potatoes, but the Greek sub forum was small enough that they welcomed reports of potentially related crime. Sure enough, they’d picked up the Fatmir and Harry Harry threads, and now they were trying to determine if, and how, they were connected. So far none of them pointed back to me. With luck it would stay that way. I didn’t want to be involved.

I checked email, scrolled through Facebook’s feed, but everyone’s updates seemed bland, surreal, as though they were fabricated: Here is an advertisement for how the average newsfeed should look. Day by day it was becoming less relevant.
They
were becoming less relevant.

Or maybe I was the one drifting away. The lone balloon cut away from the bunch.

I thought about what Baby Dimitri had said about the kind of friends I was making here. I didn’t want my only friends to be the kind of people I might have to visit in prison someday. I didn’t want to bring muffins to be people who’d be shanked over apple and cinnamon. Normal was what I needed. People who would ground me. People who couldn’t buy and sell cops, who didn’t think Ambien was something you should be able to buy at the beach.

Soon—I hoped—I’d be home. Back to normal. Back to where my friends were paying for cable and refilling their prescriptions at Rite Aid and Walgreens.

But for now I had to dig deeper into the weirdness.

Eagle Guy. He was the one. His bird dropped the package, after he’d all but run away from me.

Had he followed us up to the monastery, or had we unwittingly followed him?

How could I find him again?

Grandma must have been reading my brain waves from the next room, because next thing I knew she was tapping on my door. I cast the sheet aside, peered out through the door. She was in a black, billowing nightgown, all her bits untethered. Gravity and time had had one hell of a party at Grandma’s place. Looking at her I saw my future, if I didn’t invest in good foundation underwear.

“Are you okay?” I asked her.

She waved my concern away. “I am sending men to Meteora to see if they can locate this man with the eagle.”

“What happens if they find him?”

“They will bring him here.”

“And if they don’t?”

She gave me a funny look. “Then they will not bring him here.” She shook her head at me and shuffled back to her room. I flopped back on the bed.

If Grandma’s men came back empty-handed I had some ideas. That bird of Eagle Guy’s had to come from somewhere.

What I knew about eagles was limited to the correct spelling of eagle and their penchant for rodents, but there had to be places out there that accommodated those who had to have a cool and unusual pet. Maybe he’d read too much Harry Potter and couldn’t score an owl. Maybe he had an unhealthy attachment to his character in a computer game. Regardless, he had to ply his bird with an eagle-sanctioned diet and provide it with healthcare. What I needed was a professional bird nerd, someone who could tap a few keys and spit out a list of individuals who regularly purchased an unusual number of mice.

I scrounged up the name of a nearby vet who knew birds. Tomorrow morning I’d go see him, see if he could point me in the right direction.

C
leopatra was sitting
around in a white Renault. She wasn’t even trying to hide.

Not far from where she was parked were Elias, Mo, and Lefty, in their respective vehicles. It was a weird tableau, all of them in what was basically Grandma’s front yard, but right now my issue was with the wannabe queen of the Nile.

“You can’t park here,” I said.

“Apparently I can.”

“This is trespassing.”

“So call the police. All I’m doing is sitting here, enjoying the Greek sunshine.”

I glared at her. “I don’t think you are.”

Cleopatra rolled her windows down. “Take a look. Do you see anything other than a glamorous, beautiful woman enjoying the day?”

“I see a fossil from the 80s done up like a dog’s dinner.”

She blew me a kiss.