Read an Excerpt
Chronis Halkidis’ son wants to switch to the channel with those deafening video clips; Halkidis begs him not to because the midday news is about to start. “Come on, father, it’s Sunday. What are you so anxious to find out, anyway – the number of deaths on the National Road?” He snarls and stomps out of the sitting room in search of comfort from his second coke of the day. Two years tops, and he’ll be as tall as I am, thinks the head of Internal Affairs of the Hellenic Police, suddenly noticing his son’s broad shoulders. The boy stays over every other weekend, but he had only recently worked out what was really behind all the tension: having a policeman for a father is downright embarrassing. Halkidis lights up and settles into his armchair. Sod him. He’ll understand soon enough. The boy will eventually get sick of his mother’s brainwashing and at some point he’ll no longer be forced to buy his son’s affection by cultivating the ridiculous, fake camaraderie between a forty-five-year-old and a sixteen-year-old yob. At some point the promise of freedom masquerading as vulgar over-familiarity will become redundant, and they will not feel obliged to greet each other like N.B.A. players every other Friday when he picks him up, and he will not have to lay on endless supplies of coke, pizzas and beer, money and free tickets to basketball derbies, and he won’t have to turn a blind eye every time the boy borrows porn under his name at the local video club. Surely, at some point love will take the upper hand?
Plastered in make-up, wearing a studied look of horror, the justshort-of-attractive woman who ensures his direct line to all the news stories recorded by her channel every Sunday afternoon had never quite learned to conceal her schadenfreude when describing the various disasters that befell other people: The house burned to a cinder; there was nothing left after the fire – only ashes. Everybody inside the house burned to death. There is only one survivor. A woman, now fighting for her life in Intensive Care.
A photograph of Sonia flashes across the screen, searing his face.
Sunday, 1.50 p.m.
Simeon Piertzovanis wakes up in completely unfamiliar surroundings, an incomprehensible wet dream etched onto his consciousness. The slats on the window slice up the icy grey winter light, the grey of silence and despair. It only takes a few seconds before he realizes he is at the Hilton and that the woman who had joined him in that most ancient of pastimes with such consummate skill was gone, and languishing in his inside pocket was a cheque for 3,000, a souvenir of one of those rare evenings when all the queens, kings and aces had collectively decided to reward him for his long-standing loyalty.
The sheets are suffused with a delicate scent, the time on his watch is 1.50 and the note on the bedside table reminds him with chilling clarity of the age of his nocturnal companion:
Nice one, granddad – didn’t think u had it in u!!! Call u Monday! R.x
He crumples up the note in disgust and aims it at the champagne bottle which is still sitting on top of the room service trolley. Missed. He lights a cigarette and scans the room for the remote.
Sunday, 2.30 p.m.
Halkidis strides into the hospital flashing his I.D., barging his way through everyone from journalists, cameramen and nursing staff to the merely inquisitive. He finds the head of Intensive Care in a state of panic, hiding from the hordes of press in a tiny office. When confronted with the police I.D., his expression modulates to something approaching disgust.
“How is she?”
“Forty-six per cent third-degree burns.”
“Will she make it?”
“Nothing’s impossible.”
“Her face? What about her face?”
Sunday, 2.30 p.m.
The photograph of Sonia flashing across the screen burns his eyes. The room starts to close in on him, the voice of the reporter disappears into a dark tunnel, the horror grabs him by the arm and drags him into the past, a past he had thought securely sealed, into a “then” he had secretly been proud of, to a painful but courageous elsewhere, to a landscape of shattered emotions and the sweetest kind of suffering.
The photograph on the screen gives way to another, and then another – each so similar and yet so different – two eyes which had been submerged in countless centuries, two lips which had contrived magical whispers, which had produced forgotten cries, which had given him . . .
Simeon screams her name.
He does not make a sound.
Sunday, 3.30 p.m.
He parks his ancient Golf behind a 4×4 belonging to the fire brigade. The young man at the wheel is busy texting. The sight of police I.D. startles him and he quickly takes Halkidis to the Fire Captain despatched by the investigating magistrate. He is a tall, thin, thirty-five-year-old with tired eyes and a warm voice. Halkidis at once realizes that the man is in shock.
“We’ve got one woman in a critical condition and two dead – an old man and a black woman, around thirty.”
“Black?”
“Yes. The man was probably disabled; we found a wheelchair inside the house.”
“How did it start?”
“We’re still looking into it. Want to take a look?”
The captain takes him on a comprehensive tour of the scene of horror, and clears his throat loudly in an attempt to distract from his faltering voice. Outside there is an ancient burnt-out Hillman, two blackened fir trees, and a carbonized almond tree. The house was not big: a small living room overlooking the garden, three bedrooms, and a small laundry room round the back which was used as a storeroom. The black woman was found on the bed, burnt to a cinder; the man was outside her bedroom door, on the floor next to the wheelchair. The destruction was total.
“What about the other woman?” says Halkidis.
“Just say she was fortunate in her misfortune. She managed to get out . . . but not quickly enough, it seems, judging from her burns. She ran out onto the street and was seen by a passing driver.”
“Was that who made the call?”
“As luck would have it, he turned out to be the only person in Greece who does not own a mobile phone. He rang the bells of a couple of houses a bit further down from here, but they’re empty. He had to go all the way out onto the main road, Leoforos Pentelis, and stop another car. It was that driver who made the call. Valuable time was lost.”
“Where did the fire start?”
“In the garden. You see that car, the almond tree, and the fir trees? In the small veranda at the front we found the remains of three canisters, which maybe contained petrol. There was an old stove inside the house.”
Halkidis lights up. The captain rubs his eyes and continues:
“One of the fir trees was touching the outside wall. The window was open, so the curtain would have gone up just like that. It was a really old house, with dried reeds laid directly beneath the roof tiles. The beams in these old buildings stick out. Wooden floors, woodenceilings, an open window to let the oxygen in. Wouldn’t have taken more than a few minutes.”
“How did it start?”
“Give us three hours to file our report and the house is all yours. Till then, I can’t say anything.”
“Any chance we’re talking arson?”
The captain shakes his head. There’s a strange sadness in his voice.
“Between you and me, in the majority of cases when a fire spreads from the outside in, it usually is. Especially in winter.”
“Has anyone been talking to the press?”
“My job, Officer, is to save lives. That’s what I do. That’s what I know. I’m not good with words.”
Halkidis gives him his mobile number, shakes his hand and hurries back to his car.
Sunday, 3.30 p.m.
A 50-euro note slipped to some miserable porter and a green surgical gown open the door to Intensive Care. Two security officers in the waiting room are sipping frappésand talking in low voices. The porter says something incomprehensible to them, opens a door, pulls a surgical mask over Halkidis’ face and some protective plastic covers over his shoes and beckons him to follow. They negotiate a forest of tubes and machinery and stop next to a bed where the stark white of all the bandages floods his eyes, blinds and chills him. The porter has to steady him.
“What about her face?”
Sunday, 4.05 p.m.
“Yannis – you have to let me have this case. I’m sure it was arson.”
The Chief of Police is sceptical.
“Why is this so important to you?”
“It’s personal.”
“Absolutely not, Chronis, I need you here. Forget it.”
“You owe me, Chief. Remember?”
Silence.
What the Chief of Police owed Halkidis was his job. Two years ago, it had been on the line when some of his so-called friends, officers who had very bright futures after the recent elections and the inevitable reshuffling of the public sector – and who also enjoyed cosy relationships with various celebrity journalists – found out about the Chief’s affair with a beautiful young woman from Moldova he had met at a sleazy bar owned by a retired colleague. They grassed him up to Internal Affairs, letting it be understood that if the Chief could not see his way to doing them a few favours, they would feed the story to their scandal-hungry reporter friends. Halkidis investigated the case and closed it at once, after the girl in question told him that the Chief had rescued her from the traffickers who had brought her into Greece. She carried on the affair with the policeman, who for his part had set divorce proceedings in motion, intending to marry her as soon as he retired. The officers involved promptly withdrew their complaints when Halkidis warned them that Internal Affairs had a few queries of its own regarding their handling of funds allocated for the payment of informers.
“Come on, Chronis!”
“Yannis, I swear to God – this is a matter of life and death to me. She’s a relative. A close relative.”
“And how the fuck am I supposed to explain this to the top brass?”
“Since when did you feel obliged to explain yourself to them, when only last year they were —”
“O.K., O.K.,” he cuts him short, feigning irritation.
“Thanks, Chief.”
“As of tomorrow you’re at H.Q. on Leoforos Alexandras. I expect daily bulletins.”
“Of course, Chief.”
“Just make sure for your own sake that you handle those journalists with care. If this actress really is as famous as you say she is, all hell’s going to break loose.”
“Don’t worry, Chief.”
“I’ll make the call now.”
“Who will you speak to?”
“To that old junta-socialist – the cabinet secretary’s best man.”
Relieved, he replaces the receiver. “Junta-socialist” was the least offensive nickname for Attica’s Police Chief, a commander who, after gorging on half a suckling-pig washed down with ten litres of beer, would often argue that the only politicians who had genuinely cared about the country were Andreas Papandreou, the founder of the socialist P.A.S.O.K. party, and Giorgos Papadopoulos, one of the three colonels who engineered the ’67 coup. His boss had often to keep him on a short leash because outbursts of this sort made the sweet pill of modernization he had been chewing for the last few years stick in his throat.
Halkidis lights up and sets to work. He bumps into one of his assistants out for a stroll with his in-laws round the Mikrolimano area of Piraeus, and tells him to get to the office in a hurry. The assistant is on his first coffee of the day and his hoarse voice betrays the excesses of the weekend. Halkidis instructs him to get hold of the preliminary fire report, orders himself a coffee and notices that the traffic down on Leoforos Syngrou is very light. He sits there trying to ward off the moment when memories and guilt will force him to open the engraved wooden box locked in the bottom drawer of his desk.
