Baby Blue Read online

He realized he couldn’t. Just like in Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night, when Mae Doyle says to her brother, “What do you want, my life’s history? Here it is in four words: big ideas, small results.”

  “Did he try to get another job, or did you go straight onto the streets?”

  “I don’t think so. I was very young and I don’t really remember. And then afterwards we never talked about it because we were having such a good time.”

  “On the streets?”

  “Yes.”

  A calm, full, abrupt “yes”. The tone we reserve for things we refuse to discuss. Things that are a given. A reporter working for a big newspaper and TV channel deciding to give it all up and become a vagrant. After all, what could be more normal than that?

  “When you were performing, especially in the early days, didn’t people recognize him, people who’d seen him on TV?”

  “I can’t remember. I don’t remember anyone saying anything to him. I imagine that when he was dressed as the Tramp they wouldn’t have recognized him.”

  “So what do you want now? You want to find the murderer and see him put behind bars? Is it justice you want?”

  “I’m only out for revenge. Justice disappeared the moment he died.”

  Not fourteen. Not forty. When you have seized on such a basic truth as that and are still standing, you are ageless. Forgetting myself again, I nodded.

  “All right,” I said.

  I was the man for the job.

  6

  Emma directed me to Angelino’s office on the floor above, but before I even got as far as the staircase, I saw Jimmy’s chest flash past, closely followed by Jimmy himself. He threw me a quick sideways glance and turned to his boss, who had just reached the top of the staircase.

  “Shall I get the others?” he asked, opening his mouth and appearing to shriek more than speak.

  “Yes. Give me a couple of minutes with Stratos first,” replied Angelino and Jimmy disappeared.

  Angelino came down the stairs quickly. Inside his now buttoned-up jacket I saw a pistol resting inside a shoulder holster. I’d never seen him carrying a weapon before; the ability to get hold of information, however deeply buried, had always been Angelino’s weapon.

  “I’m sorry, but we’ll have to do this some other time. A friend of mine has been hurt and is in hospital. Did you and Emma talk?”

  I nodded. It was a relief to be able to revert to gestures again.

  “Good. Anything else you want, we’ll talk again later tonight – or maybe better the same time tomorrow – there are some things I need to tell you. I’ll be here all day. We’re expecting a second round of investors.”

  I said goodbye, and as I was walking towards the door I found myself face to face with Jimmy again, who was standing smack in front of me, blocking my exit as though he wanted a confrontation.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you,” he said. At least that’s what I thought he said, but I couldn’t be sure.

  “Then you’ll know who you’re dealing with,” I answered and waited patiently for him to step aside.

  He stayed there for a while, giving me hostile stares. He was trying to communicate something with his expression, and perhaps he thought he had managed it. Maybe he felt vindicated – but while Jimmy was standing there feeling better about himself, I was standing there thinking what a massive idiot he was. But he did know a thing or two about professional orientation. He had found the perfect fit between his talents and his chosen line of work.

  I made it onto the last train, got back to my car at 12.30 and rushed home to see Maria, hoping she’d still be awake. Her days as a night owl were long gone, and with the pregnancy she was usually in bed before midnight.

  The pregnancy had changed everything.

  By the time I’d turned into my street in Psychiko I was already on my second cigarette. About thirty yards in front of me, I spotted a very familiar black Nissan parked. The tall, thin, fair-haired guy in the driver’s seat, posing as its owner even though he was still trying to pay it off, happened to be the most competent cop in the Athens Homicide division. His name was Kostas Dragas, but ever since our schooldays everyone had called him Drag. He was my closest friend.

  It looked like this really wasn’t the night for me and Maria to talk.

  I jumped into Drag’s car. I saw at once that the weather had forced him to leave the tragic, ancient white trench coat he loved so much at home. But when I looked closer I saw that this had not in any way improved his dress sense. The khaki trousers and the electric-blue shirt did not work together, not even in the wildest dreams of the most perverted designer, and the fact that both garments looked like they’d only ever had the very loosest relationship with an iron didn’t do anything to improve his image. And the man wondered why he had no social life.

  For a while we just sat there, without him even looking up from his Scandi detective novel.

  “Excuse me, sir, this is a patrol car,” he said, eventually deigning to acknowledge me.

  “Papi’s? My shout?”

  “In view of your generosity, the car is at your service.”

  In the last crime novel he’d read, the main character had been an English aristocrat, and it looked like Drag’s admiration for its hero was having a worrying influence on the way he spoke.

  “I’ve just come back from —” I started.

  “Shh … I was listening to that!” he said and turned up the volume on the radio, releasing the horrible, impulsive voice of a young singer, who was being marketed as laïkos because nobody in the country knew how to tell good popular folk music from tragi-kitsch rubbish any more. He was already a headline act at some nightclub in the city, and, judging by the frequency with which I saw his face on the Net, took every opportunity to make profound statements to the media.

  “Tell me you fancy this,” I said.

  “Of course I do. I keep changing stations to catch him.”

  “You – fancy – this.”

  “Worship him.”

  “That thing.”

  “When someone with such a bad voice can sing something as terrible as that with so much passion, you’ve got to admit that’s pretty remarkable. You have to admire him – for his self-confidence, if nothing else.”

  “Back to the question I wanted to ask you.”

  “The chorus – the chorus. Listen!”

  I spent the next few seconds filling my thoughts with Maria. I had promised to be back as soon as I could and had left again before I’d even got back inside the house. Maria’s house – my studio flat is in the semi-basement of her house. I imagined her waiting up for me in the kitchen, struggling to keep her eyes open so that we could talk. Her divorce from Sotiris was very recent and very painful, so much so that she’d said we shouldn’t see each other for a while, just while she worked out how she was feeling.

  But Drag would have been waiting for me for a reason. Even if he wasn’t, I couldn’t just leave him and go inside; and I couldn’t ask him in, either. I should have, but couldn’t. It’s a bit awkward when your best friend happens to be the love of your lover’s life. When you don’t know which one of you is the baby’s father, since Sotiris couldn’t be, given his condition. And when your best friend has no clue that Maria is pregnant.

  Drag seemed satisfied with the song, turned the volume back down and turned to face me again.

  “Now I’m listening.”

  “What are you doing outside my house?”

  “Waiting for you.”

  “Why didn’t you call me to see where I was?”

  “I was really getting into my novel.”

  “What if I had been home? What if I’d been out and wasn’t coming back till the morning?”

  “Maria might have come out. Or I might notice some suspicious movement around the house and check on it. The worst thing that could have happened was that I would have got to the end of my novel and had a kip in the car. All those options are more attractive than the shitty case I took on yesterday.” />
  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” he said, shaking his head in disappointment.

  Drag approaches every murder case like a falcon in relentless pursuit till it spots its prey and swoops down on it without any inhibitions and without mercy. He will go to any lengths to catch a perpetrator, and neither the letter nor the spirit of any law can hold him back. It was this drive that had led to a conviction rate greater than that of any other policeman in the capital and had earned him minor celebrity status, which irritated many in the force immensely – not least himself. I’d given him a hand with some of the cases his fame had been built on. And in one of them, a year ago, we had come closer than ever to death. So had Maria; and Teri, our other close friend from school.

  The most recent case that had revived the media interest in Drag had all been his own work: the successful arrest of eight Bulgarian lifers who had escaped from prison in Thessaloniki and spread death and terror across the whole of the north of Greece for a whole month was justly credited to my friend. He had installed himself up there and spent days studying their movements on the map, along with all the evidence from the six young officers, the best around, that he had recruited to his team. They were the only people he trusted in the entire force. Whenever a colleague asked him what they should do, he would answer, “Shut up! I’m thinking,” and would argue with his superiors both in Athens and Thessaloniki, who believed that the lifers would keep going north-east so they could cross the border back into the fatherland.

  Drag threatened to walk if things weren’t done his way. He put up a roadblock and thermal-imaging cameras in the Pindos National Park, convinced that the fugitives were heading for Albania instead. The following day five of them were caught by special forces in the forest. The other three were following a different path; they had crossed the Arkoudorema gorge three times and were climbing up to the Valia Kalda, hoping to get to the lakes on Mount Flega. That’s where they bumped into Drag, who had worked out that it was the only possible escape route for anyone who had the balls to make the journey through the blizzard at the time, but he didn’t really expect them to make it. Drag told me that “Valia Kalda” was Vlach for “Warm Valley”, and that the place had either been named by someone with a keen sense of irony in view of the horrendously low night-time temperatures or by someone who had only visited it during the day, in summer, when it is hot. When I asked him how he knew all this and how he knew so much about the geography of the area, he complained that he had spoken to me about it a long time ago – this mountaineers’ oasis inhabited by imperial eagles, Lanner falcons and all kinds of rare birds and animals. His brain is basically a database of useless information picked up on his various adventures, which he is very keen to share in great detail with his friends. Unfortunately, he is not as keen on sharing the details of the adventures themselves, like the one up in Grevena. As I discovered from the news websites, the three escaped convicts were found with their Kalashnikovs and hand grenades on the ground beside them; they hadn’t had time to fire a single bullet.

  The opposition party probably struggled to believe that Drag was so fast and accurate – in the parliament café where they sit around eating and drinking, they’d never seen him pull a gun. They demanded a full official inquiry on humanitarian grounds, to satisfy themselves that Drag had given the Bulgarians a chance to turn themselves in. Some journalists (sworn enemies of his ever since they had worked out that he deliberately fed them misinformation so they in turn would mislead the suspects in various difficult cases) jumped at the chance to cause him embarrassment and got their own back by writing some inflammatory articles. The inquiry took place, Drag refused to turn up to give evidence and the matter was closed after the government promised the opposition that Drag would not be made assistant chief of police. When the minister broke it to him, sugaring it with a great many apologies, and statements to the effect that “you are amazing, you are our strength, and we have such faith in you, but you know how it is,” Drag asked him if he could recommend any good pet shops. The minister, an animal lover, immediately reeled off the names of three or four, and told him to feel free to mention his name to the owners so he would get better service and a fifty per cent discount. After that, he asked what kind of pet he was looking to buy.

  “A crocodile, so you can shed your tears together,” Drag replied.

  Even in those rare cases my friend hasn’t been able to solve, he still maintains the same dogged approach, and never stops chewing over them even while he is reading his favourite crime thrillers. There are very few serious crimes that Drag doesn’t think are within his competence. And unfortunately for him, he’d just taken on a whole job lot of them.

  “The new chief – that short stumpy one – he can’t stand me. He knew I didn’t want this case. That’s why he’s put me on it.”

  “Drag, your last chief – the one who was six foot five – couldn’t stand you either. Nor could the one before that.”

  “That’s because I’m ridiculously handsome. They’re jealous.”

  “That must be it,” I said. And we drove on as far as Papi’s, searching through the stations for some decent music.

  All in vain.

  7

  It’s a relief to know that you can jump in your car and in three minutes be in a place that resists the stranglehold of cacophonous commercial radio. The music at Papi’s never lets you down, whether it comes out of the sound system or out of the grey Seeburg M100B Select-O-Matic, the sixty-something-year-old jukebox he bought online and watches like a hawk. On this occasion the only thing playing was a selection of film soundtracks picked by Papi himself.

  It is a relief that we came close to losing, last year. Papi had a heart attack while reading the newspaper in the bar at five in the morning when the place was empty. Fortunately, I had been struggling to get to sleep that night after an evening with Maria and decided to pop down to Papi’s for breakfast. If I hadn’t, our friend would have been history. While Papi was fighting for his life, Drag was back in the neighbourhood like one possessed, hunting down some kids who had attacked Papi the day before because they didn’t like the colour of his skin. They had backed him up against the outside wall of the bar and told him to close up and leave the country, otherwise they would close down the bar for him. Papi told us later that he didn’t turn the Glock 26 he always carried for protection on them because those kids were so wet around the ears that he was embarrassed to: “Whatever they did to me, they’ve got their whole lives ahead of them to regret it, unlike me.” Those kids, with their whole lives ahead of them, had spat at him, kicked him, thrown him to the ground, ripped his shirt and carved the letter N for “nigger” into his shoulder. When Papi came round in hospital, he told Drag it was nothing – that he’d lived through things that were ten times worse as an adolescent in the Congo. In 1959 supporters of Youlou had cornered him and forced him to shout out that he loved the French occupiers. He reassured Drag that the heart attack had nothing to do with the other attack.

  “Then what did cause it?”

  “I had a bet with a friend of mine to see who could eat the most,” replied Papi.

  “I don’t suppose the fact that you live in the bar and never sleep has got anything to do with it?” I asked.

  Papi frowned, emphasizing the wrinkles in his forehead.

  “But of course not,” he answered in his impeccable Gallo-Greek accent.

  As soon as we walked into the bar, Papi handed each of us an American nickel from 1950 for the jukebox, just like he does to all his customers. He then disappeared for ten minutes to be discreet, before coming back to take our order. He does this even to us, his oldest customers. In that ten-minute slot, Drag used his nickel to listen to “Angel Eyes” by his beloved Ella Fitzgerald. I told him I didn’t much like the song. We wasted three minutes arguing about it and calling each other “ignorant” and “pitiful” at every opportunity. After that I told him everything about Emma and Angelino.

  “Do you want me
to pull all the information we’ve got on …”

  “Raptas. Themis Raptas. I thought you’d have done that already. Are you getting old and losing your touch?”

  While Drag was on the phone chasing this up, I went over to the jukebox and picked a song. On the way back to my seat I passed two clapped-out sofas and matching velvet armchairs and noticed once again the oil paintings and sketches on the walls of jungle scenes, gorillas and elephants from the Congo. The faded carpets and the wooden fireplace at the back were a perfect fit for the walls, which were yellowed with smoke, but less so with the mural behind the bar of a blonde mermaid with a half-open mouth, leaning forward so that she could show off the scorpion tattoo on her left shoulder.

  I went past Papi too, who, standing at just four feet nine, looked like he was sitting down. He hadn’t taken his white hair to the barber’s for ages, and it was sticking out in different directions as though searching for an escape route. As soon as the intro was over, he winked at me, satisfied. After a minute and half of pure music, the voice of Billie Holiday, long before it collapsed, began to caress the notes alternating between piano and sax in “Pennies from Heaven”. I closed my eyes and imagined I was in a Harlem club in 1936, listening to her singing about how every time it rains, it rains pennies from heaven, about how those in love shouldn’t run under trees when they hear it thunder. This is the biggest pleasure that Papi’s has to offer; it makes you feel like it exists beyond time and you can belong to any era you like when you’re there.

  “That’s not fair. We agreed that there’s no competition as far as Billie Holiday is concerned,” said Drag as the song came to an end. I’d seen him come off the phone very suddenly and sit down to enjoy the song.

  “Drag, not everything’s a competition. I just wanted to hear that particular song.”

  “Oh, OK.”

  “You shouldn’t feel bad just because your choice was so inferior to mine,” I smiled.

  Before Drag had time to get annoyed, Papi came smiling up to the table to take our order. He told us about a new cocktail made with rum, rosemary and chillies he was expecting to be a hit with the customers. When he heard this, Drag looked round and saw that, apart from us, there were just two dogs in the bar: Papi’s Bullitt, who had even whiter hair than his master, and a female dog that Bullitt had recently installed and was not in a mood to leave alone. Papi did not seem to be able to read Drag’s expression and I was hoping that my friend would be able to restrain himself just this once, keep his mouth shut, and not say out loud whatever it was that was going through his head. Just this once – I wasn’t asking for much. I shot him a look, hoping to make him understand.