Trueish Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel (19 page)

There was no way around it: I needed to find Rabbit. If I turned him in then maybe they’d let Grandma go, putting an end to this nonsense about me taking over.

Starting point: Makria. I had BangBang to thank for that flash of inspiration. He—or she—had said the roots were deep, which I interpreted to mean someone in the village knew something useful.

All I needed was a metaphorical shovel.

Okay, and an X. I really needed an X. You can’t go digging without an X marking the spot. Ask any pirate—except those Somali guys. Everyone knows you can’t be a real pirate without a parrot. Without a parrot you’re a garden-variety terrorist and thief. I needed that X. And if I looked at a map of Makria carefully, it was shaped like one.

T
he crowd had grown
by two outside the gates. Only one of the faces was unfamiliar—a thin, pale man with an achromatic goatee and eyes the color of blue Gatorade. He was leaning against a grubby white car from a cold war spy movie.

“Who are you?”

He said nothing, pulled out a knife, ran his thumb over the bright edge.

Elias rolled his eyes. “That’s Vlad. He is a Russian poser.”

The knife’s tip pointed at Elias. “I have cut hundreds of men with blade.”

“It does not count when they’re already dead,” Elias said.

“They were not dead until I kill them.”

Okay, so another assassin. Great. “Who do you work for?”

“Boris the Bear.”

“A bear hired you?” Even the wildlife wanted me dead. Fabulous.

“Boris the Bear imports heroin,” Elias told me.

“The best,” Vlad said.

Mo made a face. “The best. Ha!”

Vlad turned those cold eyes of his on the Persian. “Where is camel? Did you fuck camel to death?”

“Your sister is unclean. I threw her out after she asked for money. Did you know she is a Russian whore? Like your mother, I bet.”

This was going to end in a disemboweling, or worse, so I stomped over to the other new arrival.

“Why didn’t you come in?” I asked Melas. He was in plainclothes, which amounted to shorts and a T-shirt. By the looks of it he didn’t skip leg day at the gym. That or he ran. Probably
away
from women like me.

“Can’t,” he said. “I’m supposed to be following you.”

“You’re not going to assassinate me, are you?”

“And ruin the view?” He grinned. “Wherever you go, those pinheads from Thessaloniki want me to go.”

“Well, that’s great.”

“Where are you going?”

The idea came to me like an unexpected flash of lightning. “To visit your mother.”

“Jesus,” he said.

“I have a feeling she’d scare Him, too.”

Cleopatra poked her head out the Renault’s window. “I can’t stay. Can one of you guys text me if anything exciting happens before I get back?”

Ugh.

“Sure,” Lefty said.

“Katerina!”

I turned around, spotted Marika waving. She was hurrying over in a pair of sneakers and loose gym wear. Draped over her shoulder was her oversized bag, carrying, no doubt, her insurance collection.

“Wait for me,” she said and picked up the pace. When she reached me she said, “Look, I dressed for adventure today. If we have to run, I can run.” She looked me up and down. “Why the dress and sandals? Can you run in those?”

“I’m not planning on running today.” Although the way my days went that could change at any moment. “I’m going visiting.”

“Who are we visiting?”

“Kyria Mela.”

She made a face. “Yeesh. That woman scares me.” She looked at Melas. “I am not even sorry for saying that.”

Melas’s mother scared me, too. “Maybe you can wait outside? Someone has to keep an eye on the goons.”

She scanned the newest arrival, made a small sniffing sound. “Who is the new guy?”

“Vlad. He’s Russian. Apparently he likes stabbing dead people.”

Hands on hips she fixed her attention on Vlad. “What is wrong with you, eh? What did the dead do to you?” She turned back to me. “Sick. I remember when Greece used to be civilized.”

My car took a hit when she vaulted over the side, no door required. She slapped on a pair of dark sunglasses. “I am ready for anything. Let’s ride.”

“Okay, so maybe I am not ready for this. You said I could wait outside, yes?”

Kyria Mela was in her front yard, dousing the entire place with water. If it could stand still it was getting the hose. I jiggled in case she didn’t realize I wasn’t inanimate. The day was already hot—surprise, surprise—but the water sucked out of Pelion’s springs was icy even in mid-summer.

Kyria Mela looked me over. “You are back.”

“You asked me to come for coffee.”

“I remember now. Who are these people?”

I lobbed out the introductions. “And you know Marika and your son.”

“What are they doing here?”

“Marika’s my friend.”

“And sidekick,” Marika said. “We go on adventures together.”

Kyria Mela gave her the hairy eyeball. “Hmm,” she said.

“And your son is following me because the policemen from Thessaloniki, who took away my grandmother, gave him orders.” I laid it on thick, with a trowel.

Mama Mela wasn’t impressed. “What is wrong with all of you? And you, Nikos? You follow this poor girl, too?”

“Orders, Mama.”

“Orders! Did I give you orders? Did God give you orders? Did your father?”

I grinned at him behind her back. I would be dead meat when he got me alone, but it was so worth the minor gloat.

“Mama,” he said in a quiet voice. “Police orders. It’s my job.”

“Always I am very proud of you, Nikos. But not today.” She grabbed my hand, pulled me into the shade of her hallway. “All of you stay out there.”

“I will stay out here, too,” Marika said in a loud voice.

“Oh, good, because you were not invited,” the older woman said.

When the front door slammed, I was on the inside, while freedom was on the other side. For a moment I wasn’t sure I shouldn’t make break for it.

“I suppose you want to see him,” Kyria Mela said.

I stood there blinking in the dim light for several seconds. Who did she mean? With four missing men in my life, it could have been any of them.

“Yes?” I finally managed.

“Your grandmother needed a place to hide Rabbit. I volunteered, of course.” She led me down the hall, to the room where Melas and I had sipped coffee the other day before she read my cup.

“Help me,” she said. Together we moved the table aside, then peeled back the patterned rug. For a country built on rock, people sure had a lot of basements around here. “This is temporary. He is moving on soon.”

“Away from Greece or away from life?” Because with Grandma’s crowd you never knew.

“All I know is what Katerina told me. She said he was moving on, and I was to help you if anything happened to her.”

Sure enough, Rabbit was in the ground, crouched in what was one small evolutionary step up from a spider hole. He was in sweatpants and a tank top that should have been a misdemeanor.

“Are we going now?” He squinted up at us. “Because this is worse than prison.”

“All he does is complain,” Kyria Melas said. “He is lucky to be alive and out of prison, and what does he do? Complain, complain, complain. I do not know how he got even one woman to sleep with him and have his child, let alone dozens.”

“Charm.” Dogas peered up at me. “My plane ready? You want some sausage before I go?”

“What plane?” I conveniently sidestepped his second question, the way one avoids cow patties, if they can possibly help it. “There’s no plane that I know of.”

“
Gamo ti Panayia mou
! Then what are you doing here?” He yelped when Kyria Mela clipped his ear with her shoe.

“I came for coffee.”

“She came for coffee,” he muttered. “I thought you came to move me.”

“I didn’t know you were here until now!”

“You did not know?” Kyria Mela asked me.

“I didn’t know.”

She patted me on the shoulder. “The cup knew, that is all that matters.”

Rabbit cleared his throat. It took a while. When he’d finally cleared the sticky debris he said, “Get me the hell out of here.”

“You shitweasel. I trotted out one of my favorite compound words. “My grandmother is in police custody because of you.”

“Did I tell her to break me out of prison? No. She did it on her own.”

“Yeah, because she believed you—or whoever commissioned that box—knew something about my father’s kidnapping.”

“Your father’s kidnapping.” He made a sour face. “He was a criminal. He is still a criminal. If someone kidnapped him it is because he did something to deserve it.”

“My father drives trucks. He moves bubble wrap and packing peanuts.”

That may or may not have been true, given that I’d discovered Dad was out of the country, posing as an Italian, on at least one of his alleged long hauls. But I wasn’t about to tell that to this clown.

Laughter rolled out of the old man. “Packing peanuts. Ha!”

A minute later I’d hauled him out of his hidey-hole and dumped him on the rug. It took a while, okay? I’m five-four and on the pathetic end of fit.

“Talk.”

He folded his arms. “What do you want me to tell you, eh?”

“What do you know about my father?”

“More than you will ever know.”

“Start with who kidnapped him.”

“That I don’t know. Could be anyone.”

“All that matters to me right now is who has him and how I can get him back.”

“You? Ha! You are a child. You cannot do anything if the people who have him do not want him to be found.”

“Sounds to me like you know them.” I looked at Kyria Mela, who was now holding a metal box that resembled a military-issue footlocker. “Does it sound to you like he knows them?”

“I think you are right,” she said.

He slapped the air with one hand. “I am old man and until a few days ago I was in prison.”

“Which is like the information hub for crime. Crime moves through prisons. Pull a string inside and people dance outside. I’ve seen movies,” I said. “I know these things.”

Kyria Melas had something to say. “This one will not talk, not without encouragement. He is too stubborn, too old. You want to open an oyster, you have to force it to open.”

“Huh?” That bit of eloquence was from me.

The old guy cackled. “Poor little Katerina, you are surrounded by crime. You do not even know what this woman is.”

“Used to be,” Kyria Mela said. “I left that life behind a very long time ago. But for you I could make an exception.”

“Crime is in the blood. It never goes away.” He nodded to me. “You are standing beside one of Greece’s finest torturers. The soviets tried to recruit her but she was too loyal. A Makris dog.”

“Huh?” None of this was making sense. Kyria Mela was in the crime game?

“It is true,” she said casually. “But that was before Nikos came along.”

He pointed at her with his thumb. “Biggest joke in history, this one’s son is a policeman.”

“We’ve met,” I said. My knees began to wobble. They’d been doing that a lot lately. “I need to sit.”

“On the floor—you cannot fall off the floor. Put your head between your knees,” Kyria Mela said.

Funny, I’d given her son that same piece of advice the other day.

My bones shook. I looked up at Rabbit, who had helped himself to a chair. “Who sent the boxes?”

Two palms up. “You keep asking, I keep not knowing. You see the problem?”

“I could pull one of his nails,” Kyria Mela said. “Or snap the little finger. Then he will sing.”

“No,” I said. “No singing.” Or screaming. Sitting outside in the yard were too many people with guns. Last thing I wanted was all of them blasting their way in here. And I didn’t want Melas to discover his mother’s secret the hard way. If she wanted to tell him, that was one thing, but no one likes hearing from a virtual stranger that their mother is secretly the tooth, nail, and waterboarding fairy. “Give me a name.”

“I gave you a name.”

“The Eagle.”

“And there was an eagle, yes?”

“There was an eagle with another box—one you said you didn’t make.” I chewed on a hangnail, until Kyria Mela pulled my hand away.

“I will put hot pepper on it. That is what I did to my children.”

No wonder they fled Makria.

Once more, with feeling: “Who commissioned the box?”

He opened his mouth. I held up my hand, five-fingered, not giving a toss if I was insulting him or not. “The real name.”

“A favor for a favor.”

“No favors. Give me the name—the real name—and I’ll see about getting you out of here. That’s it.”

Kyria Mela stepped forward with her metal box of what I suspected was mean tricks. “Go wait outside, Katerina. If it is important to you I will get you your name.”

I tried the standing thing again and failed. Dizziness washed over me. “Who commissioned the box, Kyrios Dogas?”

“He will kill me if I tell you!” the old man hissed.

Kyria Mela grabbed my arm. “Katerina, go.”

“There’s a policeman outside,” I told Rabbit. “If you don’t give me the name I’ll tell him where you are. The cops can have you.”

“Oh-ho-ho, already defying your grandmother, eh? What will she say about that?” His words were bold but his smirk was on shaky ground.

“She’s not here, thanks to you, and while she’s away I’m in charge. I don’t like it, but that’s what she wanted. So I’ll do things as I see fit, including giving you a one-way ticket back to jail.”

“She broke me out of prison for a reason.”

“Yes, and you didn’t deliver, so she did it for nothing. As far as I’m concerned, back you go. We have no use for you.
I
have no use for you.”

It was cold but it was true. If he knew nothing, he was worthless. I was okay with sticking him in a police car, sending him straight back to the hell he’d come from.

The problem was Detective Melas.

Rabbit was here in his family’s home. If I steered Melas toward the escaped prisoner, there was no way not to involve his mother.

There would be questions from higher ups. Difficult, potentially career-destroying inquiries.

I couldn’t do that to Melas. He was one of the good guys—the genuinely good guys. What kind of person would I be if I dragged him down with me? Not too many days ago he was part of a four-man team that had saved my life. No way was I about to thank him by ruining his career.