Trueish Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel (26 page)

“I thought you were a kid.”

“I was a kid. I was seven.”

“And you were smoking?”

Two palms up, cigarette trapped between his teeth. “What?”

I shook my head. “Never mind. I’m sorry about your mother.”

“That’s life,” he said.

T
he dentist was in Volos
. It was a neat, clean building in one of the nicer parts of the city, surrounded by upscale shops, businesses, and apartments with bold-colored awnings hunched over the windows. There was a grinning decal goat on the window, huge, sparkling teeth chewing a toothbrush.

The rest of the sign told me the dentist’s name was Antonis Katsikas and he specialized in pediatric dentistry.

Tony Goats.

How about that, he really was a dentist. Take that, Detective Nikos Melas, oh ye of little-to-no faith. He’d tried to convince me that Dad’s old gang was made up of dirt bags and criminals. When I’d spoken to them at the wake of Dad’s former best friend, they’d all come across as mostly normal older guys with regular jobs.

I opened the door, scooted Tomas inside, tried to ignore the universal odor of dental clinics, a scent that, if pushed to describe it, I could only think of as synthetic mint green. As far as dental clinics went this one was swanky. Lots of toys for kids. A couple of widescreen TVs blasting Disney movies dubbed in Greek.
O Vasilis ton Liondarion
, I noted, didn’t have the same ring as
The Lion King
.

The receptionist had one tiny smile and she gave it to Tomas. She was a low-key kind of pretty, hair in a sedate low ponytail that curled over one shoulder like a ferret. She was skating toward her mid-thirties, and she didn’t look happy about the journey so far.

Dentists here did things differently. There was no mountain of paperwork or myopic scanning of the insurance card—there wasn’t an insurance card, period. Yeah, Greece had private insurance for healthcare, but who needed it when good healthcare was free and they had God and folk medicine as backup plans?

The waiting room door opened. Tony Goats ushered out a girl and her mother. He beamed when he spotted me hovering near Tomas. Tony Goats was Dad’s vintage. Like Dad, his hair was still black, except for a light frosting of gray at the temples. In his pristine, white coat he reminded me of an actor playing the role of Professional Dentist in a commercial hawking toothbrushes.

“Little Katerina Makris!” he cheered. “This handsome young man can’t be yours!” He grabbed me by the shoulders, kissed both my cheeks.

Tomas giggled. “She’s my friend and cousin.”

“Litsa couldn’t be here,” I told the dentist.

“She never can,” he mouthed over the boy’s head. Then out loud he said, “Tell me, any news of your father?” He steered us both through the open doorway, down a short hallway, and into a consultation room. It was outfitted with a big chair, lots of lights, and an overabundance of cutesy animals on the walls.

It was like being assaulted by Disney.

“Not yet. I keep hoping …”

“Mikey’s a survivor,” he said. “He could eat his way out of an oubliette.”

I tilted my head. My only frame of reference for oubliettes was
Labyrinth
. I was having trouble reconciling Dad with Hoggle. Or was I Hoggle?

More importantly, who was Jareth the Goblin King?

“One time, we buried your father and Cookie alive, did he tell you?”

Cookie was Dad’s former best friend. He’d faked his death over and over, until the Baptist finally made it stick; the place he’d made it stick was in Grandma’s swimming pool.

“No, he never said much about his life here, except when it was disguised as a fairy tale.”

He pulled over the wheeled stool, perched on its edge, hands resting on his knees. The moment he started talking, they started moving with him, the way appendages always did with Greeks.

“We were boys … fourteen, maybe fifteen … and we had a test in school. History. Mikey and Cookie, they didn’t want to take the test—and they said so in class. The teacher, he was an old goat. In hindsight a good man, but in those days he was one more nemesis, another person who wanted us to be children when we knew we were already men.” He chuckled quietly. “Young people are stupid,” he told Tomas. “I know because I remember being young. Our teacher, he told the guys that unless they were dead they had to take the test. Well, what do you think your father and Cookie did?”

“Faked their deaths?” I said.

His head bobbed with the enthusiasm of a parrot spying an oncoming cracker. “They faked their deaths. The rest of us, we helped them do it. But we were stupid—it was our first time staging a death. We forgot the part where there were supposed to be bodies, and a coroner, and all those things that come naturally with death.”

Tomas was wide-eyed, the little sponge.

“Why don’t you go into the waiting room and, uh, watch a movie or something,” I suggested.

“No. This is more fun than cartoons.”

I considered pressing the issue, but he was a Makris; the poor kid was doomed to a life of crime. He may as well learn how
not
to stage a death, which was where this conversation was headed.

Tony Goats patted him on the arm, then made a fist in the air. “You’ll be fine, won’t you, Tomas? You’re strong like your father.”

The boy’s head bobbed. Tony continued where he’d left off.

“What we did was jump straight to the burial. We snuck into the cemetery in the middle of the night carrying two coffins we had stolen—“

Both of my brows took a fast hike north. “You stole coffins?”

“In those days we stole a lot of things. Those, at least, we intended to give back.”

Oh. Well. That was different, wasn’t it?

(No. No, it wasn’t.)

“We took hose, drilled a hole in each coffin—“

That’s exactly what I was meant. Secondhand coffins couldn’t be a legitimate thing. Once you’ve put something—or someone—in one, there’s no room for anyone else, no matter if it empties out along the way. No one wants death cooties, not even the dead. And not their living relatives. Maybe in other countries, if you hated your deceased family member, but not in Greece. It wouldn’t be … done. The gossip would rub out every other act of benevolence for the rest of your life.
There goes the cheapskate who put their grandfather to rest in a refurbished coffin. Where is the respect? Nowhere, that is where.

“—Then we dropped the coffins into holes that had already been excavated. And lucky for us, too, because we were lazy when it came to hard labor in those days. You wouldn’t know it to look at Jimmy now—all he does is run, run, run. But back then? We were lazy kids. We only did physical things that were fun. So we lowered the coffins, and then Mikey and Cookie jumped down and slammed the lids on themselves. Then we covered them up.

“The next day—the day of the test—the rest of us went to school, and our teacher asked, ‘Where is Mikey, where is Cookie?’ and we told him they were dead. He didn’t believe a word of it, probably because he knew us.” Tony Goats chuckled. “He walked us from each one of our houses to the other—not everyone had a phone in those days—and asked if they heard about the very convenient deaths. Our parents had not, and to Baboulas and Cookie’s parents it was a huge surprise. They made us eat wood—fourteen-year-old boys!—and made us take them to the cemetery to get Mikey and Cookie.

Eating wood sounded cruel, unless you’re a beaver, until I remembered it meant getting corporal punishment of the spanking kind.

“We got there and they were gone! The graves were empty, the coffins lying at the bottom still with their breathing tubes.” He leaned forward, whispered, “But there was no sign of Mikey and Cookie.”

“Where did they go?” Tomas asked. The little guy was entranced. Okay, so I was, too.

“We didn’t know it at first—not until after we found them—but it was that
malakas
Pistof—the man you knew—“ He nodded to me. “—as the Baptist. He had followed us out there and saw what we did. So he blocked the breathing tubes with sticks and leaves. Mikey and Cookie had no choice but to dig their way out. It was that or die. And they weren’t about to die, so they had to dig. When they got out, Pistof was gone and they were filthy, so they walked to the beach in Agria. They spent the day swimming, picking up girls, and then they ran into one of the girls we knew from school—“

“Was it Dina?” I asked.

He looked surprised. “Dina, yes. How did you guess?”

“We’ve met. She has issues.”

His eyebrows rose. “Still?”

I was this close to telling him about the Dad shrine that was her entire house—minus the bathroom—when I decided Dina’s quirks were her own private business. I didn’t like her much, but she’d pulled through for me in a tough situation.

“Still,” was all I said. His stare was loaded with expectation, his breath bated, but I wasn’t spilling. Eventually he realized that I wasn’t Greek all the way to the bone, so he moved on.

“Dina took them home, fed them, washed their clothes properly. Meanwhile everyone was looking for the boys.” He hooked one foot on the stool’s footrest, jiggled his knee. “When normal parents are looking for their children there is chaos. When mob families are searching for their children they take guns, hunt down their enemies, accuse them of kidnapping. The two families weakened the already-weak peace that day. I suspect that is why now Baboulas hasn’t marched on her enemies and flattened them.”

That did explain a lot. It was the whole boy-crying-wolf thing. If Grandma accused anyone of kidnapping her son, they’d say, ‘
Remember what happened last time? He was holed up with some piece of tail. Probably he’s on an island somewhere with a mountain of blow and twenty hookers. Have you checked the Maldives? By the way, say “Yia sou” to our little friends—and our big ones, too.
’

“How did they find Dad and Cookie?”

“They went home that night, back to Baboulas’ place. Went to bed, slept the night away while everybody was searching for them. The next morning they got up for coffee and cigarettes, like they always did.”

“Coffee and cigarettes?”

“It was a typical Greek breakfast in those days.” He wagged a finger at Tomas. “No smoking or coffee for you. Bad for your teeth.”

“What about candy cigarettes?” Tomas asked.

“Bad.”

“Which part is bad, the candy or the cigarettes?”

“Both.”

Tomas hung his head. “Sometimes being a kid stinks. I can’t wait to be—“ He looked up at me. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“—I can’t wait to be twenty.”

Tony Goats went on. “When Baboulas discovered the boys at the compound she had them locked up in the dungeon. You know about the dungeon?”

“Sure, but I haven’t seen it.”

“I saw it,” Tomas said. “Sometimes my brothers sneak down there to poke sticks at the prisoners, when there are any.”

Interesting …

“Are there prisoners down there now?” I asked him.

“No. Papou was down there but now he’s not. But he wasn’t really a prisoner. He yelled when my brothers poked him, then he chased them in his chair. He’s fast.”

So that’s where the old stinker had been. Obviously the way down was well-hidden. “Where’s the entrance?”

“I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell you,” Tomas said, his little face serious. “Baboulas might get angry.”

“Don’t look at me,” Tony Goats said. “I don’t know either. But what I do know is that somehow your father and Cookie broke out. It took them two days, but on the third morning Baboulas woke up to find them in her kitchen, smoking and drinking coffee.”

“They never said how?”

His chin went up-down. “Never. We were all friends, but those two were tighter than—“ He looked at Tomas, went hunting for a G-rated metaphor. “—than Greek plumbing. But mark my words, if there is a way out of wherever Mikey is, he will find it. If you can claw your way out of a grave and break out of Baboulas’ dungeon, almost nothing can keep you in.” He nodded to Tomas. “Ready?”

Tomas looked up at me. “Can you stay?”

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

He nodded solemnly and climbed into the chair.

T
omas’s mouth
was a cavity-free zone. Tony Goats gave us each a sticker. Tomas was a Star Patient and mine was a Special Award for Bravery. That seemed fitting. Dental equipment made me woozy.

The receptionist jotted down a new appointment date, six months from now. She smiled at Tomas, but me, I was a real pane: she looked right through me.

I tried not to stare at her on the way out. I had a feeling she had two faces, and this was only one of them.

A
unt Rita had more
fun and games planned for me when we arrived back at the compound. She reminded me of one of the Apple Store “Geniuses” as she slid her finger around the iPhone’s screen. “You have an appointment in five minutes. You’ve got enough time to pee and grab a
koulouraki
.”

I spent thirty of those seconds debating which was more important: my bladder or my stomach. My bladder won, but I made it fast, that way I had time to snatch a couple of Grandma’s cookies out of the container on the counter. I slid into home base—aka: the table under the grapevine trellis—as Aunt Rita was striding through the arch alongside a man who could have been George the Sheep Lover’s brother.

“This is Spiros the Kreopolis.”

Spiros the Butcher.

“Katerina,” I said, offering him my hand. “Are you the
kreopolis
in Makria?”

His head bobbed. “Yes.”

“Some tourists were looking for your shop the other day. I gave them directions.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I know, I remember them.” He glanced around, his face pensive.

“Are you okay?” I asked him.

“Kyria Katerina and I usually do this in the garden.”

“I don’t do gardening,” I said.

“What about baking? Sometimes she does that.”

“I don’t really bake either.” His face fell. “But I’m working on it,” I said in a hopeful voice.

“It’s not the same.”

I patted him on the shoulder. “I know. I’d rather she was here, too.”