I spent another sleepless night. The insomnia was my worst torment. I dreaded the moment when I turned off the light. Fanis told me that this often happens during convalescence and recommended that I take half a sleeping pill before going to bed. I refused to take as much as a quarter, because if you get used to sleeping pills, you can never do without them. I spent half my nights with my eyes wide open, tossing and turning in bed.
The previous night’s insomnia, however, had none of the usual symptoms: neither exasperation nor counting backwards from a thousand nor the midnight itinerary of kitchen-sitting room-verandah. On the contrary, each time I felt sleep coming on, I threw some water over my face to stay awake. I couldn’t for the life of me work out what it was that had driven Jason Favieros to commit public suicide. I could have accepted his suicide in the office or at home. His business wasn’t going well, he had psychological problems, his wife was cheating on him, he was involved in some major scandal and he preferred suicide to the shame of it. It was the public part of it that I couldn’t understand. Why in public? Why would Jason Favieros want to make a spectacle of his death? The likes of Favieros hate fuss and move in places far from the public eye, in offices lined with thick carpets to stifle the sound. And suddenly, one of their kind causes the TV ratings to rocket through his death? The possibility that he may have simply flipped could be excluded. He had gone to the studio prepared, with the pistol next to his wallet. Consequently, the public suicide served some purpose; he wanted to reveal something.
Beside me, Adriani was sleeping with that constant, muted, snoring of hers, like a cistern filling all night long. I usually bite the pillow in exasperation, but that night I had hardly heard her. It was the first night of insomnia for months that I didn’t want to end and that I revelled in.
For the past month, getting out of bed in the mornings had been a veritable odyssey. I thought of the day before me, the strict programme, without any novelty or deviation, and my feet refused to touch the mat next to the bed. That day, however, I was snug in bed by choice, because I was enjoying it. I had spread my dictionaries around me and was skipping from one to the other. I found the best documented entry in Dimitrakos’s Lexicon.
‘Suicide: 1. By one’s own hand, perpetrator: Aesch. Suppl., 592 This father; by your own hand, Lord, you planted our stock; // gen. executioner, perpetrator: Soph. Antig., 306 If you don’t find the same man whose hands dug this tomb, do not appear before my eyes; 2. partic. one who kills himself intentionally, self-inflicted killing: Soph. Antig., 1175 Haemon is gone. He drew his blood himself // mod. Only act or instance of killing oneself, murderer; 3. Soph. Oed. Rex., 231 If he knows the murder, another, from foreign parts, let him not keep silent;’
‘Are you all right?’ She poked her head round the door and fixed her eyes on me in concern.
‘I’m fine.’
‘Why don’t you get up?’
‘I thought I’d have a bit of a lie-in.’
‘You don’t feel out of sorts, do you?’
‘No. Nor strain from too much work.’
She stared at me, surprised at my somewhat ironic tone, which of late had faded together with the post-operational symptoms. The truth was that I, too, wondered what was the cause of my unexpected recovery. Was it the brainwashing by Ouzounidis the previous evening? Was it Favieros’s suicide? Most likely the latter. Something wasn’t right about that suicide, something had been bothering me from the moment that I saw his brains sticking to the huge aquarium on the set, and it was this that had dragged up the policeman, half-drowned and gasping for breath, from the watery depths back to the surface. I told myself it was just bullshit every time my thoughts led nowhere. I was creating crossword puzzles to pass the time. But I knew deep down that there was more to it. Favieros’s suicide had something of a show about it that simply didn’t add up, and it was this that was bothering me.
I hate idling in bed. In the past I had feelings of guilt about it because I thought I was taking up valuable time from the Force. In the state I was in, it made me feel even more down. I got up and started to get dressed with my mind still on Favieros. When I had finished dressing, I realised that for the first time in months I had put on a suit and tie. I looked at myself in the mirror on the wardrobe door. In appearance, at least, I again saw a police inspector and the sight did me the world of good. The one jarring note was my unshaven face. Shaving is a kind of certification. It certifies that you are healthy and working. On the contrary, an unshaven face means that you’re ill, retired or unemployed. For the previous two months I had belonged to the second category and had only been shaving every third day. I took off my jacket and went into the bathroom. Shaving that day was my first brave attempt to move back into the first category. When I had finished, I put my jacket back on and left the dictionaries lying over the bed. It was one of the little privileges allowed me by Adriani following my being shot. Not having to tidy things up, not even my dictionaries, which she loathed and which infuriated her whenever I left them lying around. But now she didn’t say even a word, because in her opinion, I mustn’t tire myself during my convalescence. Nevertheless, I usually tidied them up myself because Adriani would arrange them higgledy-piggledy as if exacting revenge on them in this way.
She was sitting at the kitchen table and scraping courgettes. She lifted her head mechanically, certain that she would see me in my pyjamas. She remained with her knife in the air and her eyes bulging, staring at the well-groomed version of me, as though seeing a ghost from the past.
‘Where are you off to?’
‘To get the newspapers.’
‘And you’ve put your suit on to get the newspapers?’
‘Actually, I was going to wear my official parade uniform, but I didn’t want to overdo it.’
Adriani was nonplussed and tossed the courgette into the rubbish instead of into the bowl of water. I slammed the door behind me so that the noise would wake her up after I had gone.
On coming out of the lift, I bumped into Mrs Prelatis.
‘Now you’re a sight for sore eyes, Mr Haritos,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘At last, you’re back to being the Inspector that we all know.’
I could have kissed her. With all the foreseeable and unforeseeable consequences. I remembered, however, that Adriani and Mrs Prelatis had a mutual dislike of each other. So she might have been saying that as a dig at Adriani, who hadn’t let me out alone for such a long time.
My suspicions dissolved when the newsagent confirmed Prelatis’s enthusiasm. ‘Hale and hearty, Inspector, hale and hearty,’ he shouted. ‘First time for a long time that I’ve seen you looking so well. What can I give you?’
‘The papers.’
‘Which one will it be today?’
He asked me because each day I would get a different one, either for a change or simply to confirm that I found them all equally boring. I’m still not sure.
‘Give me all of them, except the sports papers.’
He stared at me in astonishment, but then his face lit up. ‘The suicide, right?’ he said, full of satisfaction that he had found the solution to the riddle.
‘Yes. Why, do you know anything?’
‘No, heavens no!’ he replied with the instinctive fear of the ordinary citizen who doesn’t want to get involved. ‘But from what I saw with a quick glance, the papers don’t know anything either.’
He again expressed his delight at seeing me so well and tossed the newspapers into a large plastic bag. I went down Aroni Street and arrived at the little square of Aghiou Lazarou. It had a corner café that had been upgraded into a coffee bar. I chose one of the tables in the shade and took the pack of newspapers from the plastic bag. The waiter was an unaccommodating fifty-year-old who came over and took my order with a curt ‘So what’s it to be?’ I ordered a sweet Greek coffee, which was met with a scowl tantamount to a stream of abuse, evidently because the Greek coffee downgraded the coffee bar back to a corner café.
All the newspapers had Favieros’s suicide as their front-page story. Only the headlines differed. ‘Tragic Suicide By Jason Favieros’ and ‘Mystery Suicide On Camera’ were the headlines in the more serious newspapers. From then on, it was all downhill: from ‘Favieros’s Spectacular Suicide’ and ‘Suicide Exclusive On Camera’ to ‘Big Brother Live’. All the papers had a photograph in the middle of the page, showing the same downhill direction. The most serious had a neutral photograph of Favieros shaking the Prime Minister’s hand. Two more showed Favieros with the pistol in his mouth. One of the tabloids preferred a photograph of Favieros after his suicide with the blood-splattered aquarium.
I sipped the coffee, which was like water, and read the reports one by one. They were full of questions and conjectures, which meant that no one knew anything and they were all fishing for the answers. One claimed that Favieros had major financial problems and was on the brink of bankruptcy. Another that he had some incurable illness and had chosen to put an end to his life in this spectacular way. One leftist newspaper successively analysed the acute mental problems that Favieros had been left with following his torture at the hands of the Junta’s Military Police. It actually presented an interview with a psychiatrist who always features in similar cases with erudite psychological portraits of the victim or perpetrator that leave you wondering why he’s not with the FBI. The newspaper with the headline ‘Big Brother Live’ came up with the idea that, because of some incurable illness, Favieros had struck a deal with the TV channel to publicly commit suicide in exchange for a huge sum that he would leave to his family. Finally, another gutter-press rag, full of colour photos, insinuated that Favieros was gay, was being blackmailed, and preferred public suicide to public scandal.
They knew as much as I did, I thought to myself. In other words, nothing. I glanced at my watch. I had been engrossed in the papers for a full two hours and it was long past lunchtime in my private clinic. I left the two and a half euros they charged for the thimbleful of coffee on the table and headed back home. I was halfway down Aroni Street when it suddenly crossed my mind to call Sotiropoulos, a reporter who for years had been a thorn in my side and with whom I had a love-hate relationship, with the emphasis on hate. I bought a phone card from the kiosk and called directory enquiries to get the number of the channel where Sotiropoulos worked.
‘Haritos, what a surprise!’ The title ‘Inspector’ had been dispensed with long ago. ‘So, you’re fully recovered?’
‘More or less. It’s all a matter of time.’
‘When will you be back with us?’
‘I’ve another two months’ sick leave.’
‘You’ll be the end of me!’ he exclaimed disappointedly. ‘That Yanoutsos who replaced you is driving us crazy. Getting information from him is like trying to get blood out of a stone.’
I chuckled with glee. ‘Serves you right. You used to accuse me of keeping you all in the dark.’
‘No, it’s not that he doesn’t want to reveal his cards; it’s that he’s unable to put two words together. He writes his statements in a notepad and reads them out as though there were no full stops or commas.’
I almost dropped the phone. ‘You mean Ghikas lets Yanoutsos make statements to the press?’ I asked flabbergasted. Ghikas, Head of Security, guarded press statements like he did his wallet; he gave them to no one. He had me write them for him and he learned them by heart for the reporters. And now he was handing over his wallet to that blockhead Yanoutsos, who wore his bulletproof vest back to front like a straitjacket?
‘Rumour has it that he does it on purpose,’ said Sotiropoulos, breaking into laughter. ‘He dislikes him so much that he has him garble the statements to compromise him.’
That’s something Ghikas is quite capable of.
‘I want to ask you a question, Sotiropoulos. Purely out of personal interest. What do you know about Favieros’s suicide?’
‘Nothing.’ His answer was direct and categorical. ‘No one knows anything. All as black as pitch. Perhaps his family knows something, but they’ve shut up shop.’
‘And all the talk in the papers?’
‘You mean about financial and psychological problems and the like? Hot air, Haritos. When reporters have nothing to go on, they simply dredge the drains to see what they might come up with, and what we usually come up with are old shoes, plastic bags and various refuse. Anyhow, as things stand, that story doesn’t have much of a life because there’s simply nothing for us to write about.’
I thanked him and he told me he couldn’t wait for me to get back on the job.
Adriani didn’t hear me entering the house because she was talking to our daughter on the phone.
‘Do you realise he’s been out wandering the streets for three hours now?’ she said to her. It was clear she was talking about me and so I had every right to eavesdrop.
‘Three hours, do you hear, Katerina?’ Her voice was full of concern. ‘Without telling me where he was going, he just opened the door and walked out.’ She paused to hear what Katerina said and then went on, even more tensely: ‘What harm will he come to? Are you joking? He might have had a dizzy spell and fainted. He might be in hospital right now! I’ve pleaded with him to get a mobile phone, but he won’t hear of it.’ This time the pause was cut short with indignation. ‘Naturally, it’s me who’s to blame again!’ She felt angry and when Adriani is angry, there’s no point in trying to get a word in yourself. ‘Fanis, Fanis! Fanis isn’t here all day to see how I’ve rescued him from the hands of death! What I should do is get the police onto it because he’s been gone three hours now and I’ve no idea where he is!’
‘I’m here,’ I said, appearing in the doorway to the sitting room.
She was taken aback because she hadn’t heard me come in, and an expression of relief spread over her face.
‘Here’s your dad, you wanted to talk to him and here he is,’ she said to Katerina with all the cheek in the world. ‘Your daughter,’ she said, handing me the receiver.
‘How are you doing, dear?’
‘Me, I’m fine. It’s Mum who’s not all right. You frightened her out of her wits and she was about to send out a search party for you,’ she said laughing.
‘I know. She’ll have to accept it.’
There was a short pause. ‘Can I assume that your chat with Fanis yesterday had some effect?’ she asked cheerfully.
‘That and the suicide.’
‘What suicide?’
‘Favieros’s. Last night on the TV. Something suddenly clicked inside me.’
She burst out laughing.
‘A bit macabre, but a shock like that usually does the trick.’ Then she became serious. ‘She does it out of love, you know. So don’t go now to the other extreme,’ she said to me.
‘Don’t worry! We’ll get back on track again.’
We said our goodbyes and hung up. Adriani had gone into the kitchen to get the meal ready. Before going after her, I made a stop in the bedroom and took hold of Apostolides’s Lexicon of All the Words in Hippocrates. Katerina had bought it for me when I’d gone into hospital after a heart attack.
I opened it at the word ‘recover’ and went into the kitchen. The table was laid and the food ready: boiled courgettes that she had been preparing in the morning and three meatballs. I went up to her holding the dictionary and read the entry out to her:
‘“Recover: regain health after illness; become cured. Some recovering their health after medical treatment.” I belong to the “some” of Hippocrates who have recovered their health,’ I told her. ‘In fact, I feel so healthy that I’m thinking of cutting short my sick leave and going back to the Force.’
‘Costas, for heaven’s sake, let’s not make any hasty decisions!’ On the one hand she was beseeching me out of fear and on the other she was reminding me that it wasn’t my decision alone but that we would make the decision together. ‘And when all’s said and done, you pay a fortune for health insurance. Now that you’ve an opportunity to get back some of what they’ve been taking from you all these years, are you going to pass up the chance?’
She smiled at me triumphantly because she had found the argument that no Greek can counter. Any Greek who doesn’t believe that the state is stealing from him and doesn’t feel the need to get his own back is either mad or a communist.