Baby Blue Read online

“I’ll need more than that,” I said.

  He gave in, accepting defeat. A lock of grey hair – his hair had been grey for the twenty-odd years I’d known him – fell across his forehead. His scent was particularly strong, a mixture of mint and basil, but this was not part of the new look. Angelino had a thing about fragrances, and whenever he discovered a new one he liked he would literally douse himself in it, possibly to mask the stench of the square that clung to him.

  “Emma is going to take part in the Magic Olympics in Helsinki in six months’ time,” he told me.

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Oh, it’s big business. The winners appear in Vegas, New York, amusement parks in California, with amazing takings every night. By ‘magic’ they mean legerdemain, of course, but I’m not always convinced that what Emma does is not magic. She doesn’t explain most of her tricks to me. She shuts herself away in her room for days on end and comes out when she has perfected another unbelievable trick. There are two categories: stage magic and close-up magic, which happens right beneath your nose. That’s the one that Emma’s going to compete in.”

  “So everyone here is smelling the money?”

  “That’s why we’ve brought them.”

  “Have they got a strong sense of smell?”

  “I hope so. There’ll be more tomorrow, they’ve all been individually selected on the basis of their wallets. If they sponsor Emma in her campaign, we both stand to profit.”

  “When you say ‘campaign’…?”

  “We have to travel to festivals, network, show off some of her tricks – but not her best ones – all so that she can get onto TV shows abroad, generate interest, make a name for herself. Everything she does on tour has to be completely different from what she pulls out in the competition itself.”

  “Who will be travelling with her?”

  “Her agent, who lives in England, and me, her manager.”

  “So you will be sticking with the look.”

  “Maybe for a bit longer, then.”

  “What if she doesn’t win anything at the Olympics? If she doesn’t do well at all, what’s in it for the investors?”

  “Nothing. But that’s the wrong question. Only insecure people consider the worst-case scenario. The sort of people who even when they’re winning never stand out, never do anything exceptional. The sort of people who only play because they don’t want to lose. The right question is the one I asked you earlier: how many people in the world can do seven card changes in a row in the air?”

  “Not many, I suspect.”

  “Nobody can even do six. And I’m not even talking about right now. It’s never been done before. And she can do seven in the air plus another two on the table, before and after. I’ve brought in gurus from Europe and America – and they all tell me that Emma is the kind of talent that only comes up once in fifty years. Ah! I’m so happy you could make it,” said Angelino, suddenly changing tone.

  He had turned in the direction of a well-turned-out sixty-year-old investor who was approaching him with a smile so sardonic that if his eyes were to start blinking out dollars in the way they do in the comics, it would not have struck me as anything other than completely normal.

  5

  While Angelino was charming the investors, I decided to tour the building. Each room of the four on that floor was larger and more impressive than the last, with their painted ceilings with different designs giving them a distinct character and the heavy drapes, chandeliers and ornate mirrors completing the picture. All the floors were marble just like the staircase, which was broad enough to hold a large family on each of its steps. The main sitting room was different: its cream-coloured walls matched the deep-pile rugs, the antique clocks and long white curtains. In all the other rooms, the main colour was blue – even the paintings were inspired by the sea, or by Emma’s eyes. Unlike the eyes of most blind people I’ve seen, they weren’t unsettling. The only emotion they provoked was deep sadness at the misfortune in front of you.

  I was on one of the back balconies, looking down at the apricot, peach and palm trees in the back garden, when I heard footsteps behind me. I turned and saw Angelino and Emma. He was holding her hand.

  “You must be Stratos,” she said, looking straight at me.

  “Good evening. Nice show.”

  “Great show,” said Angelino, correcting me.

  “It was OK. I still need to work on a couple of details,” she replied.

  Her voice was serious and a bit nasal. She had already changed and was now in jeans and T-shirt underneath a white cardigan. Her hair was loose and she had cleaned off her make-up, which left her looking completely natural and as such, even more beautiful. The more I looked at her, the more convinced I was that I knew her from somewhere – but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  “We’ve been looking for you,” said Angelino. “Emma insists on telling you everything herself; she doesn’t want you to hear it all from me. Do you want to stay here, or shall we go to my office?”

  “Have the … left?” I didn’t want to say “the investors” because I wasn’t sure how the girl would take it.

  “The investors?” She supplied the missing word for me. Maybe she wasn’t especially sensitive to language.

  “Yes, I saw the last one out a little while ago,” said Angelino.

  “We’ll be fine here; we don’t need to go to the office,” Emma reassured him.

  She let go of Angelino’s hand and made for one of the three chairs in the room, completely independently. She knew the space off by heart, which meant that the hand-holding was less a sign of dependence and more a sign of affection.

  I moved closer and sat down opposite her.

  “How did you know where I was when you walked in? Can you see?”

  “I haven’t seen a thing since I was eight years old. Up till then I could make out a few colours.”

  “Then how?”

  “I sensed there was another presence in the room, and Angelino had told me that you were wandering around up here. I guessed your position from your smell, I mean your lack of smell. I couldn’t smell you, which meant that you had to be quite far away from the door, so logically, you would have been on the balcony.”

  “A rough guess, then.”

  “When you can’t see, you’re forced to guess a lot of things based on probability, and hope that you’re right.”

  I thought to myself that that’s pretty much how it works when you can see.

  “Do you want me to stay?” asked Angelino.

  “If Stratos doesn’t mind being alone with me, I’d prefer it if you left us for a while.”

  If Stratos doesn’t mind being alone with me. I found this so funny, coming from a teenage girl. I had to smile.

  “Just make sure you don’t make him disappear like those aces,” said Angelino and walked noiselessly out of the room, closing the door behind him.

  A homeless businessman with a sense of humour. A sense of humour that Emma did not appear to share. She remained serious, silent, almost frozen. I couldn’t tell whether this was because of a sudden drop in adrenalin now that the performance was over or whether this iciness was a permanent accessory.

  I don’t generally mind silence. The fact that I don’t say much probably encourages it. But silence can help you see how the other person looks at you. You can gauge the temperature and the light of their gaze. But with Emma I couldn’t do that. Silence, I discovered, when you’re sitting opposite a blind person, was the definition of awkwardness.

  “I’m all ears,” I said after a minute or so had passed.

  “Sorry about the silence. I just wanted to test your patience. Most people when they’re around me feel the need to say something right away so that they don’t feel uncomfortable.”

  “I didn’t know I was going to have to pass a test.”

  “Don’t take it too seriously. Angelino tells me that you’re the only person who can help us. But this is an old case, and if you take it on, you will n
eed a lot of patience.”

  “What case?”

  “Tell me, is it true what Angelino’s told me about you?”

  “Only the bad stuff.”

  “He told me he trusts you completely. I’ve never heard him say that about anyone.”

  I didn’t have an answer to that, so I kept quiet.

  “Are you still here?”

  “I’m not going anywhere until you’ve finished.”

  “How come?”

  “Angelino and I have been through a lot. I owe him. We’re not friends, if that’s what you’re asking. But he’s right; he can trust me completely.”

  “Good. I’ll give you the short version now and the details later. Stop me at any point if you want to ask me something. Agreed?”

  It felt like I was talking to a forty-year-old CEO, someone who had learnt that every second counts in business and that nothing else is of any interest.

  I nodded, before realizing she couldn’t see me. I would have to do more talking than usual.

  “Agreed,” I said.

  “Three years ago, my dad was murdered. He wasn’t my real father, but he rescued me from the orphanage. He just turned up and took me away – I was three and already struggling with my eyesight. He brought me up, so he was my actual dad. He was found full of bullet holes. They tortured him before they killed him.”

  She kept a steady voice the whole time. Her tone was like that of a TV presenter, trying to relay the bare facts without any emotion. She was so controlled that she reminded me of my younger self when I had to talk to the social workers who would turn up suddenly at our house and had to hide from them the fact that my mentally ill mother had disappeared once more into the streets of Athens. I listened to the perfect balance in her voice, which never faltered, but I could hear the cracks inside her.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. Because there was nothing better to say. Because there never is when somebody has lost someone.

  “I want you to find out who killed him. And I’ll pay you; I have money. And I’ll get more.”

  “Aren’t you getting ahead of yourself? I haven’t agreed to anything yet. What you’re asking me to do is police work.”

  “The cops couldn’t care less about us.”

  “Us?”

  “We were living on the streets. We were homeless after Themis – my dad – left his job. Cops don’t care about street people. ‘One less to worry about’ is what they think, and what they say. Once I saw a homeless man ask them where he was supposed to go when they kicked him off the park bench he was sleeping on. They told him to go to hell.”

  “They’re not all like that,” I said. I knew one who really did care. But apart from him, I couldn’t come up with many other examples.

  “It’s been three years now, but they closed the case after only a few days. They’re all the same. They only take an interest if they want to catch you.”

  “Did Angelino try to help?”

  “Angelino has been taking care of me for over two years. Like family. The only family I’ve had since Dad. He takes me to doctors, shrinks, he sits and talks to me for hours whenever I ask him to, even though I know he would rather be out on the square. He took on this building to make a home for me, so I’d be comfortable and have somewhere to work on my tricks. And he buys me DVDs of American magicians I can listen to … He did everything he could to track down the killer. But he didn’t find him.”

  Angelino’s network covered the entire city. If he couldn’t find out who did this, this was going to be tough. And the fact that three years had passed would make it twice as hard. And the fact that Emma’s dad was homeless – with no fixed points of reference – made the whole case look like a joke.

  “I think there’s been some kind of misunderstanding here. I don’t think Angelino has told you what kind of work it is that I do.”

  “He’s told me exactly what kind of work you do.”

  “Then you’ll know that I don’t —”

  “You owe him,” she interrupted. “You said so yourself.”

  The forty-year-old CEO was steering the conversation once more. I was glad she was, because she stopped me from getting carried away by the sympathy this young girl provoked in me.

  “I see. And how long were you living on the streets?”

  “Five years. From when I was six. From when Dad left his job till I was eleven and they murdered him.”

  Which meant that she was now fourteen. Even younger than I had first thought.

  “How did you get by?”

  “We had this act we would perform around various squares. Chaplin’s Tramp.”

  That’s where I knew her from. She was the girl I’d seen so often in Omonia, Syntagma and other squares in the city, performing comic and dramatic sketches in the style of the Tramp. All their acts attracted big crowds and were inspired by The Kid – a film I loved for its melancholy spirit, despite the fact that it wasn’t noir. Of course, the “kid” of the title is a boy, so Emma had her hair cut short then, and it had been really hard to tell that she was a girl. I remembered now that all the other parts were played by the Tramp character and Emma had played the adopted son who was always having to run away from the police and everyone else who was trying to separate them. I couldn’t get over how much she had grown up. Nor that the child, who even did acrobatics with the Tramp, was blind and nobody in their audiences had had the slightest clue.

  “I’ve seen it,” I told her.

  “Yes. Dad said we drew big crowds. I sensed it from the sound of the applause. Dad had a thing about that film; he really loved it.”

  “Those acts would have been tough for any kid to pull off; how did you —”

  “That’s not important. We’re here now so that I can give you whatever information you need about the murder.”

  “You don’t know what information might be useful to me. Neither do I. That’s why I’ll ask the questions, so I can see what I can use. If I decide to get involved, that is.”

  “OK,” she said in that disdainful way teenagers have.

  I decided not to repeat the question for the time being. I’d get back to it at some other point.

  “So where did you usually stay?”

  “At different shelters, and in the time just before the murder, on Filopappou. There are lots of homeless people living up there on the hill. It’s a small community for anyone who wants to join it.”

  “Any idea if he had any enemies?”

  “No enemies. No friends. It was just the two of us. We were a team. ‘The pack’, he used to call us. We’d have the occasional conversation with other homeless people so that we could see how we could help each other out with everyday stuff. But that was it. We were never really true members of the community there.”

  “When he was murdered …”

  “I found him.” Her perfectly composed voice was suddenly thrown off balance, so I didn’t insist on details. Angelino would be able to fill me in. There was no reason to make her cry in front of me.

  “You mentioned that he left his job eight years ago. What did he do?”

  “He was a journalist. Newspaper and TV reporter. He wanted to change the world,” she said, full of pride, the balance in her voice now restored. That’s what pride does; it helps you forget. For a while.

  “Where did he work?”

  She gave me the names of some of the best-known newspapers and TV channels.

  “What about the orphanage? Did he take you from there alone? Wasn’t he married?”

  “He’d come to report on it. The orphanage was not funded properly and was in danger of closing. The management was trying to raise awareness through a TV programme. As soon as he turned up, the other children started doing what the nurses there had trained them to do. They threw themselves down on the floor and started shouting, ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ They told us to do that whenever anyone arrived, and that was the trick to get a home and some parents. I didn’t do it. I didn’t like asking for things. I’d already had
a bad experience when I was younger the one time I had done it and the other children had thrown me down and pushed me to the side so that they could get a better position. Dad was aware of the trick and didn’t fall for it. He was struck by this child who held back, playing alone. He started talking to me, came back the next day, and the next, asked about me, wasn’t put off by my problem and eventually abducted me.”

  “He abducted you from the orphanage?”

  “Yes.”

  “Without causing a commotion?”

  “He had a friend there, Hara, the social worker. It was Hara who called him about the funding. Hara supposedly made a home visit and saw how happy he was with his fiancée. He didn’t have a fiancée, of course, so they put down a false name and some signatures on the form and reported that the house was perfect for bringing up a child in. She also put in her report that Dad had started to learn Braille so that he could teach me how to read and write. That part was true. It’s one of the hardest things to learn, especially for an adult, but he did it. For me.”

  For the first time she smiled. I couldn’t tell whether I felt more relieved that I had confirmation that she could smile, or that her smile was so bright that it seemed that it was trying to balance out the endless, definitive darkness inside her eyes.

  “Through some of his connections, it all went through the courts quite quickly and in just six months he had officially adopted me. It usually takes over a year; some children wait as long as two years with all the delays. They can’t go to live with the parents who want them, so the parents have to keep coming to the orphanage to see them and say goodbye again when they leave in the evening, when both the children and the parents burst into tears. But he left with me on the first day. I never had to go back.”

  I noticed how she said “they have to keep coming to the orphanage”. Present tense. As though a part of her was still there.

  “Do you know why he left his job?”

  “He said it didn’t fulfil him any longer. Too much dirt everywhere.”

  “But you said he wanted to change the world.”

  “Yes. I don’t know. I think he realized he couldn’t.”