Baby Blue Read online

  Teri offered me her car, but I said no. If she had to take Emma anywhere at any point, she would need it. I went out into the street and hailed a taxi. I told the driver to leave me on Patission Street, by the University of Economics and Business. This would normally take six or seven minutes, but it took us twenty in the morning traffic. The driver, who had long fair hair and something that was trying to be a beard, was playing a CD of heavy-rock songs and was singing along in such a deafening voice that those twenty minutes felt like sixty. It was a muggy day; Athens was clouded over, reflecting the mood of her citizens. Outside the university, a group of street sellers were fighting with some policemen who were trying to move them on. Tempers were high, and things were already threatening to escalate when groups of students gathered round in support of the street sellers. I kept going, examining the marble slabs of the old Athenian pavements. Nowadays most of them were blocked by the kiosks, which sometimes swallowed the entire width of the pavement and would force anyone into the road who wanted to get past. Either that or you were sure to bump into public works of some kind or another which necessitated digging up what was left of the pavement. If you’re in a wheelchair, or a mother with a pushchair, you’re really taking your life into your own hands by going for a walk on the city’s pavements. Then there was the pollution, the stench of uncollected refuse, the ubiquitous graffiti, the filth. The concrete, the abandoned buildings, apartment blocks in disrepair, shuttered-up businesses, padlocks on cafés and bookshops, clothes shops, shoe shops. The unlucky ones have their windows covered in thick layers of posters, one glued on top of the other; the fortunate ones have been absorbed into the Athenian Arts Circle programme and temporarily converted into small galleries or exhibition centres displaying blown-up sepia photographs of Patission in the old days.

  Just before I reached the junction with Marnis Street opposite a two-storey building which had been lying empty for years, I turned right into an old apartment building. I walked straight through the lobby to the back of the building and pushed open the back door, which led onto a garden where, sitting on the bonnet of an old wreck with slashed tyres, smashed-in lights and its doors hanging off, were two men in their twenties. Another two blokes who were a little older were standing in front of them. My reception committee. Each of them was holding a bottle of beer and they were just too well built to look innocent. The guns they had hanging from their belts didn’t help either. When they saw me, they went quiet, not quite believing I was there. Their reflexes obviously weren’t up to much. The two that were on the bonnet stood up and the two who were already standing put down their bottles. Not much of a greeting. A fifth character appeared from behind the car. He was a bit older still and was holding a Remington 870, one of the guns the Anti-Terrorist Unit uses. From where I was standing, I reckoned it was the 12-gauge MCS model. It looked like it was fresh out of its box, which meant that he would have to fire it a few hundred times to break it in, but after that he would have the best weapon that money could buy. Just in case I didn’t understand that he meant business, he also had a Colt Python, the “combat Magnum”. But he wasn’t pointing either of them at me. Their barrels were pointing up and down respectively as though they couldn’t be bothered with me – unless, that is, I gave them cause.

  “Something wrong, mate?”

  His Greek was good, with just the slightest trace of an accent. He was about five nine with a few extra pounds on him, but they didn’t seem out of place because he had such a solid core. His voice was deep and powerful but his question sounded like it emerged almost mechanically from his mouth. He wore an open green shirt over a white vest, his left ear had more piercings than I could count and the enormous rings he had on each hand shone in the light. His head was completely shaven and seemed to have set the style for the rest of them. His friends were uniformly kitted out in black vests, grey tracksuit bottoms and trainers. At the bottom of the garden was a building that seemed separate from the rest of the block.

  “I want to speak to Markos,” I said.

  “No one with that name lives here,” said their leader.

  “My information says otherwise.”

  They looked at each other, smiling ironically. They wanted to show me how amusing they found me. Not so much that they didn’t keep an eye firmly on me to ensure that I didn’t make any sudden movements. When your opponent is obviously stronger than you and all your friends, this can be a worry.

  “Look – we told you,” said one of the others. “There’s no one here with that name. So there’s no reason for you to want to talk to him.”

  “Maybe you’d like to tell Markos that Stratos Gazis is looking for him?”

  “Maybe you’d like to get out of here while we’re still being friendly?” said their boss.

  “OK. I hope Markos will be as friendly when he finds out that because of you lot he’s lost a very lucrative contract. I’ll be off, then,” I said and turned to leave. As I did so I caught them out of the corner of my eye, looking very ruffled, especially the two loudest ones.

  “Oi!” shouted the leader.

  “Yes?”

  “Wait here. The boys will look after you. What did you say your name was?”

  “Stratos Gazis. He knows me.”

  I expected him to walk towards the house at the back, but instead he was coming towards me. He went straight past me and up the stairs. Despite his bulk he was back in less than two minutes. And he had good news.

  “Markos wants to see you,” he said, before ordering me to stand still so he could take my weapon off me. I then followed him back into the building. The last time I had seen Markos in this block, he was using the small house at the back and had use of the garden. Now it seemed he had taken over the entire building. He had clearly gone up in the world. As we climbed the stairs – apparently the lift was out of order – the top thug made me go in front of him so he could watch my every move. I read the graffiti on the walls. There were various slogans in Arabic. I didn’t understand any of them until I saw one which had been helpfully translated into English: The Arab Spring is Here.

  The penthouse apartment was on the third floor. Markos was waiting for us next to an enormous glass sliding door looking onto the garden. I hadn’t seen him for three or four years and the changes in him were not negligible. His appearance had improved along with his status. His previously prominent nose had been reduced by plastic surgery and he had shed around sixty-five of the two hundred and eighty pounds I remembered him as. Unfortunately, he had lost a lot of hair along with the weight and his straight brown locks had been forced into an unintentionally comic comb-over. The retainers he was wearing to straighten his very crooked teeth did little to rescue the overall impression, but his eyes, two tiny deep-set dull green holes, still emanated enough of an aura of rottenness to ensure that any temptation to laugh at him should be resisted. He was sitting behind a good-quality solid wood desk. Three mobile phones were laid out in front of him along with a tablet and a laptop; he was trying hard to give the impression of being a very busy man.

  “Stratos. Hi.”

  “Hi to you.”

  In every job, there’s best and second best. Second best always tries to be as good as best. Markos was second best here, always struggling to be Angelino in the place of Angelino – the best information collector in town. The only problem was that Markos would never be as good as Angelino. To succeed in this line of work took what the Americans call class. And Markos hadn’t a clue what that was. He’d started off as a minder for an arms dealer who had taken me on once to sort out a personal situation for him. It hadn’t taken Markos long to lose that job, or the two or three he got after that. But instead of seeing these serial failures as a sign of his own incompetence, he saw them as a chance to set up his own personal empire. One of life’s great optimists. To be fair, business was quite good, but a far cry from what he had fantasized about. He had a few clients who paid him to get hold of information, but it was nothing as lucrative as he had ho
ped, so he diversified and started selling drugs as a sideline. A bit of weed, some heroin to begin with, but then he got greedy and moved into coke and E. Why should you make do with 1,300 euros a kilo, or even 10,000 euros a kilo when you can make 80,000 from coke or five euros a pop for a tab of E?

  “Johnny here tells me you’ve got a job for me with a lot of money,” he said, motioning with his head in the direction of Johnny. I noticed that Johnny’s hand was full of calluses. Calluses were common with people who shoot a lot. They come from loading the magazine with bullets all the time and from pulling the trigger.

  “Have you heard about Angelino?” I asked him.

  “Sure.”

  “Do you know who did it?”

  “I can’t say I’ve looked into it. I like to keep out of the competition’s private business. It’s not healthy.”

  “I want you to look into it.”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “My friendship.”

  “Yeah, right. What else?”

  “I’ll owe you.”

  Markos burst out laughing and then said, “OK.”

  I had no comeback for that.

  “Look – I know you’re quite good, but don’t you think you’re pushing it a bit?” he said, but still in a very good mood.

  Quite good.

  “I mean you come here, stand here in front of me and say that you’ll owe me, like I’m meant to jump up and smash a couple of plates because I’m so fucking overjoyed. Why would I need you to owe me? I’ve got Johnny here and many other boys working for me. I’ve got it all covered.”

  “That’s what Angelino thought too. That he had it all covered.”

  That made him think for a moment before he replied, “I’m not Angelino. Now tell me about this job you’ve got for me.”

  “OK. But I’ve got to say, it’s a bit strange that you don’t want to know who went after Angelino and effectively left the field wide open for you to become number one.”

  “Stratos – I am number one.”

  “Markos – just between you and me: you’re not. You’re a failure. Pure scum.”

  Johnny, who’d been on the alert for a while now, whipped the Python out of its shoulder holster. He was fast, but not fast enough, because I had made sure I was standing very close to him all the time I was talking to Markos. All it took was a sudden whack with my left palm on his carotid artery for the blood supply to his brain to be cut off, and he fell to the floor unconscious. The Python felt relaxing in my hand and I turned to face Markos, who had not managed to react at all.

  “Shall I repeat the question?” I asked him.

  “Have you got any idea how many of my people there are in this building? All it would take would be one sound from me —”

  “If you make a sound, make sure it’s a pretty one, because it will be your last. And as for your ‘people’, don’t forget I’ve seen them. Just like I saw Johnny here. Which is why I’m so scared.”

  “What exactly do you want?”

  His attitude was verging on the blasé, which told me that he had decided to front this one out, even with a gun pointing at him. It wouldn’t be the first time that had happened, after all.

  “Who gave the order for Angelino?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “No idea,” I said moving in on him.

  “No. Honest.”

  I hit him on the side of the head with the handle of the gun. He fell to the floor with a loud thud, giving out a small shriek of pain. When he got back up after a few seconds, there was blood running down from his left eye. He noticed it too and the sight of blood intensified the sense of fear. All the bravado melted away from his face and he started making strange noises, a fusion of pain and sobbing.

  “I don’t know! Really! I haven’t a clue,” he repeated, over and over.

  “I’ll keep hitting you until you lose that eye completely, shall I?” I asked, calmly.

  “Please!”

  “Was it you? Did you try to have him killed?”

  “No! I don’t have the right people for that. You saw my boys downstairs. They’re my main men. Do you really think they could —”

  I raised my free hand to interrupt him and he immediately stopped talking.

  “But you know people who do have the right kind of people for that,” I said.

  “No! I had no reason to. And I don’t even know what it was all about, nobody knows, everyone is trying to find out but nobody’s talking, it’s been how many days now and nobody’s heard anything. Angelino was – is – a big player, and he has a lot of respect.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that they’re not from this turf. Or they could be older, with a completely closed unit so nothing ever gets out – ever. And I mean ever.”

  “Anyone in mind?”

  “No.”

  “OK. That brings us back to you. You stood to gain the most with Angelino out of the picture.”

  “Yes, but I intended to beat him fair and square – take his clients off him. You have to eat wild beasts standing up, alive. That’s the only way you get to be one yourself.”

  Markos was never going to become a “wild beast”. Beast, yes. He’d always be a beast, whatever he did. At least his theory was sound. He did know what he would have to do, even though he was incapable of pulling it off. But this was not the time to break it to him. I knelt down on the floor beside him and placed my clenched fist under his jaw, applying an upward pressure to it. He was groaning in agony.

  “I am going to find whoever did this to Angelino. And I will kill him. If I find out that it was you…”

  “It wasn’t!”

  “If I find out that it was you, I won’t just kill you. I will make sure you suffer – a lot – and then I’ll kill you.”

  “I swear! It wasn’t me!”

  “Michalis Vaiopoulos.”

  “What?”

  “One of the three who broke into Angelino’s house. Their boss. What do you know about him?”

  “Nothing. I just saw his picture in the papers.”

  “He went by the name of Vaios.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “You’ll find out, though. By tomorrow morning you will have called me and told me who he worked for and anything you can get on him.”

  “Tomorrow morning? That’s imp—”

  I made as if to hit him again. He flung his arm into the air defensively, hopelessly, to deflect whatever was coming at him. He started snivelling, snot running down his mouth.

  “All right! All right! Tomorrow morning. And if I can’t get it by the morning, I’ll keep looking. OK?”

  What a loser. Even when his life was on the line, there he was, begging for an extension.

  “By tomorrow. Call me on this number. If you set your boys on me on my way out, I’ll kill all of them for you and then I’ll come back and kill you. And if you don’t call tomorrow morning, consider yourself dead,” I said, scribbling down my phone number on his notepad. I gave him the one my clients and my acquaintances all have. The other I reserve for Maria, Drag and Teri. Lately they’d been using it less and less.

  20

  HighTV’s new offices were in Kifissias Avenue, and according to gossip websites which Teri had wasted no time in showing me, were nothing like their old offices in the Tavros district. The station’s efforts to win the ratings game by hiring the biggest names in the business and a whole slew of celebrities for their evening slots were reflected in the stratospheric upgrade of its premises, to the joy of everyone who worked there. I had asked Teri if what she was reading counted as news or was the station’s own press release. She told me I was a cynic and a whinger.

  I’d never been to the old premises so I didn’t have a personal opinion, but looking at the five-storey glass structure towering over me, I didn’t find it hard to believe that whatever they were in before, this was way better. And it also wasn’t difficult to believe that their employees were happier here. Word around Athens was
that the staff at HighTV were the only people in the business whose jobs were not under threat. The owner was Lazaros Vayenas, best friend of the previous government and new best friend of this current government, who were planning to issue only a limited number of operating licences for TV channels in the country. Any existing channel that did not succeed in being awarded one of these new licences would be shut down. According to all the pundits, the only licence that was considered a done deal, even before they were open for bids, was HighTV’s.

  There were three armed guards stationed in the doorway, poised for the outbreak of War of the Worlds. They asked me what I was doing there, and tempted though I was, I resisted saying that I had come to breathe the smell of money – that killer line from the vastly underrated Force of Evil. I simply told them I had come to see Dora Landrou.

  That was enough to get me through the door. Next stop was the security check and the metal detector. I had taken the precaution of stopping off at home on my way back from Markos to pick up the Peugeot so I could store my weapons in it. Even though the detector didn’t pick anything up they spent ages swiping me before sending me to the reception where I was told how to get to Make-Up. My appearance didn’t seem to fill them with trust. While they were searching me, I noticed a young girl, twenty years old at the very most, coming in without passing through security at all. She was wearing the tightest pair of white trousers I’d ever seen, and I saw little sign that she was wearing anything underneath them to disguise the perfectly toned hemispheres inside them. I toyed with the idea of complaining on the grounds of sexual discrimination, but looked at the security guards who had been staring at her as she walked away and suspected that I would not see justice done if I did, so I let them continue.

  Stepping out of the lift on the second floor, I found myself standing in front of a door with a metal sign on it reading “Make-Up”, which really made the directions the receptionist had given me, as well as his very existence, unnecessary. I knocked and heard a woman shout “One second!” After about half a minute, the main news presenter opened the door and came out, covered in several layers of make-up. He gave me a good look, probably weighing up in his head the possibilities that he knew me, decided he didn’t and went on his way without saying anything. Behind him, a few seconds later a smiling girl in her mid-thirties appeared, offering me her hand, saying, “Hi. I’m Dora.”