To go from the First Cemetery to Vranas at midday is not the easiest thing in the world. I racked my brains trying to decide which was the shortest way, but there was only one: from Kifissias Avenue to the new Athens ring road. It’s easy to say, but not at all easy to do, because the journey from Vassileos Konstantinou Avenue to Kifissias Avenue is an ordeal in the sweltering heat. At the section in Psychiko where the new flyover was being built, I ran into an endless traffic jam. While crawling along I passed the time reading the billboards: Maroussi-Metamorphossi in three minutes via the Athens ring road; Yerakas-Koropi in four minutes via the Athens ring road. Athens was, due to circumstances, truly the most Christian city in the world: you had to pass through fire and brimstone before entering paradise. You have to spit blood on the roads of Athens, which are either being dug up, are blocked off or are full of potholes, before attaining the paradise of the Athens ring road. I stepped on the accelerator and let rip, which as far as the Mirafiori was concerned meant fifty miles per hour maximum. The wind hit my face, but the freshness it brought was more psychological than anything, because the air was scorching.
The journey to the junction at Spata was, relatively speaking, a delight, but from the moment I turned into Marathonos Avenue, I left paradise behind and entered hell once more. In total, I had been driving for over two hours and by the time I reached Vakirtzis’s three-story villa at Vranas, all I wanted to do was jump fully-clothed into the swimming pool. I resisted the temptation and climbed the steps leading to the terrace. It was baking quietly and tidily, with its swing seats and tables beneath umbrellas. There were no signs of the turmoil from the night on which Vakirtzis had committed suicide. It was as if it had never happened.
I walked into the sitting room and came upon a chubby woman of about forty, wearing a T-shirt and white shorts. Her hair was dyed auburn and her shorts revealed legs that would have been the envy of any footballer or even wrestlers.
‘What do you want?’ she asked as though talking to a house-to-house salesman.
‘Inspector Haritos.’
My name must have rung a bell with her, because she came out with a ready smile. ‘Ah, yes, Inspector. I’m Charoula Vakirtzis, Apostolos’s er… widow.’
She took me by surprise, because I knew that Vakirtzis was separated. As her appearance had nothing of the look of the distraught widow, I dispensed with the condolences.
‘From what I understood, Apostolos Vakirtzis was separated,’ I said, more to needle her and see how she would react.
‘Yes, we were living separately, but we weren’t divorced.’ She stressed this last phrase in order to justify the legality of her presence there. ‘As I’m sure you can understand, as soon as I heard the tragic news, I rushed straight over. Besides, Apostolos has no family and someone had to tidy the place up.’
In other words, not only am I here legally, but I am also his legal heir, given that he didn’t get a divorce. The more time went on, the more she was starting to get on my nerves.
‘On the day of the incident, I spoke to a young woman…’
‘Ah, his little floozy!’ She cut in. ‘The slut got her things together and took off when she heard I was returning. She’d had plenty out of him. Eventually the freebies come to an end.’
‘Where are my assistants?’
‘On the third floor, in Apostolos’s study.’
I took to my heels, not out of fear but so as not to lose my temper with her. I climbed the stairs and in one breath reached the third floor, where Apostolos Vakirtzis had his study. Koula was kneeling down in front of the desk. She had opened the second drawer and was searching through the cassettes that I had seen on the night of the suicide. Spyros’s eyes were still glued to the screen.
‘Why did you call me urgently?’ I asked Koula, who jumped to her feet as soon as she saw me.
She didn’t reply, but went over to the desk, took a pile of papers and handed them to me without a word. I took one look at them and almost dropped them. In my hands, I was holding Vakirtzis’s biography, the same copy that Logaras had sent to me.
It took me a moment to recover from the shock and think more clearly. So before sending the biography to me, Logaras had already sent it to Vakirtzis. Evidently, this had been part of the plan, but why? I had been taken aback and couldn’t think straight. I decided to leave it for later and asked them whether they’d found anything on the computer.
‘The guy simply had it for show,’ Spyros cut in. ‘At most, he played the odd game of patience or surfed the internet once in a blue moon.’
‘Why do you say that?’ I asked him. ‘Because he didn’t have a cleaning program?’
He turned round and gave me an ironic look. ‘Not just because of that. When you turn on a computer, you can tell straightaway whether it’s still set up as it was in the shop or whether it’s been changed because it’s been used. This one is like it was delivered this morning!’
‘Did you come up with any other information?’
‘No, but that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t any.’
He’d got me confused again and the way my head was spinning at that moment, I was ready to give him a clout round the ear. ‘Spell it out for me slowly, will you, because I’m not with you.’
‘Sometimes messages are sent to a computer together with a little program that automatically deletes them after a short while. Then there are others that come with a program that automatically returns them to their sender. So if there were any messages with programs like that attached, we won’t find them.’
‘And the biography? Why wasn’t that deleted or returned?’
He shrugged. ‘How should I know? Maybe they left it longer because the guy would need time to read it.’
I gradually started to understand what it was he was trying to explain to me. Logaras had sent other stuff to Vakirtzis too, but only for him to read. Once he had read them, they would be deleted or returned. He’d left the biography longer because it would take time to read it but also because it would be published in any case so there was no point in deleting it.
As there was no hope of our finding anything else on the computer, I turned my attention to more prosaic and humble hiding places, such as the drawers.
Did you find anything?’ I asked Koula.
‘From what I’ve seen, they’re tapes of Vakirtzis’s programmes.’
I leaned over and took hold of one of the cassettes. Written on it, like on all the others, was the date of the programme. I began looking for the programme of May 21st, the one on which Vakirtzis had blackmailed Stefanakos, according to what Stefanakos had written in his notes, but it wasn’t there. My eyes fell on the bottom drawer with the security lock. It was still locked
‘I searched, but I couldn’t find the key,’ Koula said.
‘Go and bring Vakirtzis’s wife here.’
‘That’s it. There’s nothing else here,’ said Spyros.
He switched off the computer and went over to the TV. He picked up the remote control, switched on the TV and planted himself in the armchair facing it. Forget the trees, forget the swimming pools. The only view that interested him was the view of a screen.
Koula came back with Mrs Vakirtzis. It seemed propriety had got the better of her because she had put on a pair of slacks.
‘I’m looking for the key to this drawer, do you happen to have it?’
‘No. Apostolos always carried it with him.’
Consequently, it had melted when Vakirtzis had set fire to himself and we would never find it.
‘I have to open it.’
She shrugged indifferently. ‘Open it if you want.’
‘Call Ghikas and get him to send over a locksmith from Forensics,’ I said to Koula.
I went down to the terrace to wait till the locksmith came. I sat down in the shade of an umbrella and tried to focus my thoughts. The fact that Logaras had sent a copy of his biography to Vakirtzis meant that he had most probably sent their biographies to the other two as well. They may have been deleted, but that didn’t change anything. The question is why he sent them. If we excluded a few insinuating remarks here and there, the biographies were exceptionally flattering about the two men. Consequently, the only logical explanation was that Logaras wanted to convince the men that their reputation was safe. But what need had Favieros, Stefanakos and Vakirtzis of any posthumous reputation when they were top names in Greek society anyway? Would they have committed suicide in order to enter the pantheon on the basis of a biography by a certain Minas Logaras, a complete unknown? Unless their reputation was linked to something else. And that something else may have been hidden in what Spyros had told me upstairs. Together with the biography, Logaras had sent them various other documents that either deleted themselves or were returned to the sender. And what documents were they? We would never know, but they certainly must have had some connection with the biography. That’s why when I’d read Stefanakos’s biography, I’d had the impression that it was concocted, manufactured.
Another idea, of the kind that comes out of the blue, suddenly struck me. What if the public suicides had to do with the biography? What if the condition that their reputation would be saved was that they had to commit suicide before an audience? The explanation was plausible, but that still didn’t answer the question why they agreed to this. What had motivated them?
No matter from what angle I looked at it, I could find no answer to the question. I got up and went down into the garden. In less than two minutes my head was like a hot brick. I walked past the pool and went to the place where Vakirtzis had set fire to himself. The traces had completely disappeared. The ground where his body had been and the burnt grass around had been dug over and freshly planted. Whether it had been planted with flowers or cucumbers I didn’t know, because nothing had sprouted yet.
I heard the sound of a motorbike approaching in the distance. It was the locksmith from Forensics. He came to a stop a little way off, opened the box on the back of the bike and took out a smaller box with his tools. I waited for him beside the terrace steps.
‘Good day, Inspector. What is it you want me to open?’ he asked, coming up to me.
‘A desk drawer with a security lock.’
We went up together to the third floor. Spyros was still sitting in front of the screen. Koula had put all of Vakirtzis’s cassettes on top of his desk and she was arranging them.
‘This drawer here,’ I said to locksmith, pointing to it.
He glanced at it. ‘Child’s play.’
True enough, the second key he tried opened it. Koula and I looked inside it with anticipation. It contained just five cassettes. One was the one from May 21st that we had been looking for. The others were dated October, December, January and February, but without the year. It didn’t take a great deal of imagination for me to realise that this was where Vakirtzis had hidden the tapes of those he had been blackmailing for favours.
‘Take them and have them transcribed,’ I said to Koula.
‘I’ll take all the others with me too.’
‘Take them, but have these five transcribed first. They’re the ones with the goods.’
Beneath the cassettes I found two envelopes. I opened the one and found a copy of the letter of protest to the Minister that Komi had shown to Favieros just before he committed suicide. Beneath it was a photocopy of a cheque for the sum of forty million drachma, around one hundred and seventeen thousand euros in today’s currency. The cheque had been made out to cash and had no stamp, so it must have been one of Favieros’s personal cheques. It wouldn’t be too difficult to discover who had cashed it, but it would be more difficult to discover who was behind whoever had cashed it. That blackmailer Vakirtzis wouldn’t have kept a photocopy if it wasn’t a cheque for greasing someone’s palm or buying someone off. Beneath this were photocopies of three property contracts. In all three, the public notary was Karyofyllis. So Vakirtzis knew about the network of real-estate agencies owned by Favieros and how they operated. That’s why Favieros was scared of him.
The second envelope was on Stefanakos. But the only thing that related to Stefanakos was the draft law on the cultural identity of Albanians in Greece. Everything else concerned his wife. A quick glance revealed three photocopies of approvals for large amounts of funding from the EU. For Vakirtzis to have hold of them, they must have been granted to Stathatos as a result of her husband’s political intervention. I also found another one, in English, that I would have to have translated, as my English wasn’t up to it. Underneath all this, I unearthed another cheque for three hundred thousand euros. However, this one wasn’t drawn on a Greek bank but on a bank in Bucharest.
If Vakirtzis had been murdered, we would have had Favieros and Stefanakos at least as accessories before the fact. He was blackmailing them and they had him killed. But the blackmailer had committed suicide too. This was where it all got complicated and you started to tear your hair out.
The locksmith was the first to leave. He was most likely swearing at us under his breath for having made him come all this way in the scorching heat for something that was child’s play, but that was one of the joys of the profession.
It was the first time that we actually had our hands on some tangible evidence, even if we didn’t know where it would lead.
‘Well done, you two. You did a good job,’ I said to Koula and Spyros, as we walked past the pool.
‘I told you,’ said Koula full of enthusiasm, ‘Spyros is a whiz kid when it comes to computers. They’re in his blood.’
‘Yeah, okay, don’t overdo it,’ Spyros commented indifferently, because with today’s generation modesty is usually expressed as indifference.
‘You know, Spyros is thinking of going into forensics,’ Koula went on, unabashed.
‘Cut it out, Koula. Enough, for fuck’s sake! All that was just between us, because I’m still toying with the idea. You’re acting like a cop and it gets up my nose, damn it!’
‘Hold on a bit, it’s just a friendly chat. It’s not an official interview!’ I said, cutting in. ‘All I want to ask you, and you don’t have to answer, is why you want to enter the Police Force.’
‘Okay then. If it means studying computers like I want to and having a job waiting for me on top of it, it’ll be a real gas.’
My generation spoke about a ‘golden opportunity’, today’s speaks about a ‘real gas’, but they’re just as concerned to get themselves set up as we were.
‘Think it over in your own good time. And if you decide, let Koula know. We’ll take care of the rest.’
After all, Ghikas owed Koula a favour. And it wasn’t a very big favour to put in a good word for her cousin. We reached the front gate. I saw Spyros getting on Koula’s bike and Koula climbing on behind him. Before they set off, Koula turned and winked at me. I realised she was doing it to let Spyros show off.
I had parked the Mirafiori in the shade of a tree, so it wasn’t like an oven inside, as usual. Whether it would get me to Athens without the radiator boiling over, I had no idea.