The Scapegoat Page 6

  The girl was struck dumb. She didn’t understand what all that could have to do with the case.

  —It’s all relevant, the police chief said sharply. If I’m asking you, it’s relevant.

  He offered her a cigarette. He filled it, brought it to his mouth, ran his tongue along the paper, and then held out his hand in a gesture of goodwill. Zouzou didn’t even look at it; that was the last thing she needed, to lick the old man’s spit.

  The police chief smiled. But inside he was annoyed: this snotty kid thought she was calling the shots. If she thought the Americans would take her side, she was sorely mistaken. He’d heard what the American officials had to say on the subject: generals and diplomats alike were hoping to get Zouzou off their backs, particularly now that she had an American passport. That’s why they were taking their sweet time with her visa. After all, she was no longer a spouse but a widow, so what business did she have going to America?

  But Zouzou was no pushover, as Tzitzilis quickly realized. A wisp of a girl, sure, but she turned them all inside-out with her eyes and their expression of innocent wonder. Her clothes were more suited for a dance than for mourning. She walked around shamelessly with arms bare to the shoulder. Her sweet perfume alerted them each time she walked into the station; the scent trailed her down the corridors. She threw all the men into an uncomfortable state, and they lowered their eyes when she passed, as if they were her lackeys. And that’s just how Zouzou treated them, too.

  Only Tzitzilis was unaffected by her wiles. He heard the snap of her high heels at the front door and her smell burned his nostrils. It was, he thought, the smell of a woman of the world, who knew how to open her legs, to move her hips expertly. He knew her kind inside and out, her tricks had no effect on him, he’d laid his hands on his fair share of society women. He wasn’t interested in silk slips and perfumed armpits, he knew what a girl like that had under her skirts. Tzitzilis was more interested in whores, working girls who washed with clean towels. Smiling and obedient, grateful for a customer who finished quickly, particularly if he might tip.

  Zouzou was full of dreams and caprices. How tiresome, Tzitzilis thought every time he had to question her. Only an American would get involved with her, or an over-educated dupe. Though he had to admit, the girl had spunk. Sure, her eyelashes fluttered like butterflies in spring—but on the inside she was sharp as a razor. She cut right through you, never bowed her head. The police chief quickly realized that the hypothesis of a crime of passion wouldn’t hold water, either. He needed to look somewhere else.

  So he turned his suspicions on Antrikos. Everyone knew that journalists were jealous and competitive. They would tear one another to pieces for a scoop, and were always trying to get the upper hand. Antrikos was a Greek reporter, which meant he lived in Jack’s shadow. There wasn’t much to be done about it, he’d simply had the misfortune to be born in a weak country, and would thus never have his moment in the sun. Whereas everything had been handed to the American, ever since he was a child.

  This theory seemed to hold up, but Antrikos was related to the prime minister—yes, the same prime minister who had taken personal responsibility for the case—an inconvenient fact that created significant obstacles for anyone wanting to pursue that line of inquiry. Tzitzilis called him down for questioning several times, and Antrikos was always unbearably specific and unremittingly precise. Almost insolent. He surely sensed where Tzitzilis was heading, and didn’t leave him the slightest margin. He answered questions with questions, lit cigarettes without asking permission, showed that he knew perfectly well who had the upper hand. Tzitzilis soon realized he was wasting his time.

  Antrikos had joined forces with Zouzou, and together they bombarded the Ministry of Public Order with complaints. Back in Athens, when she saw the reporters swooping down like vultures to pick apart her daughter’s reputation, the widow’s mother grabbed them by the collar and dragged them into the house, straight into her bedroom.

  —Look, she told them. This is the girl you’re ringing doorbells and loitering around on sidewalks for.

  Zouzou was silently crying. She wasn’t the worldly widow they’d been hearing about, she was just a child, a little girl sobbing in her mother’s bed. She looked more like an orphan than anything else, a tiny, bird-like body, all bones.

  Meanwhile, Thomas Tzitzilis was starting to worry. Every theory he’d come up with had crumbled before his eyes. The witnesses were unwilling to cooperate, no one wanted to get involved, most of them refused to open their mouths. But he had promised God and his superiors that he would solve the case. And so he would close the file. The Americans would get their perpetrator, his head served to them on a silver platter.

  And if we don’t have a perpetrator, well, some Greek will have to sacrifice himself for the cause. It wouldn’t be a terrible blow, if it meant saving the rest of the country. Those were the kinds of thoughts that ran through his mind, though he didn’t admit them to anyone else, even if he knew he was right in his thinking. The case had taken on greater dimensions. The Americans kept forming committees, poking their noses into everything, sending generals and judges to the embattled country. Congress was up in arms, newspapers and radios buzzed in New York and Washington. U.S. taxpayers weren’t going to keep sending money to these barbarians if they were going to respond by murdering American citizens.

  And so they threw the blame on the Greek government. Even the kindly disposed, who openly supported the Greeks for having declared a holy war against the communists within their own borders, expressed reservations.

  Amid the chaos, with everyone beating his own drum yet cursing the government in unison—and the Greek police even more—for stalling and possibly covering up its own sins, Tzitzilis steadily sought the guilty party. The inhabitants of the city saw him in the churches of Agia Sophia and Agios Dimitrios, patron saint of Salonica, and in the Church of the Virgin Acheiropoiitos, praying with damp eyes to the All-Powerful, seeking the enlightenment he needed in order to overcome American insults and Greek idiocy alike. To find a solution that would prove acceptable to all.

  An American general was dispatched by Congress. He barged into Tzitzilis’s office without knocking and let forth a stream of sailor’s curses, as he might have cursed a lackey or an underling, not a Major of the Gendarmerie and head of the Security Police. The American had no sense of protocol, that’s precisely why they’d sent him to bare his teeth, to tell Tzitzilis how things stood, without fancy prologues or arguments. Officer to officer, brass to brass. The American knew that when it came down to it, the Greek was his subordinate. So he treated him as such. And Tzitzilis swallowed the insult.

  The General insisted that the crime had been committed by that hussy, Jack’s widow, who had been seen dancing in jazz clubs in Athens a month after the unfortunate event. He’d heard that Tzitzilis had abandoned that obvious solution and begun to investigate the case as a political murder. Tzitzilis had in fact called a meeting behind closed doors with his most trusted men, though the possibility that it had been a political crime had been raised even before that. It suited the government, would shut up opponents, offered a ready explanation. To Tzitzilis it was clear as day that the commies wanted to discredit Greece, to bring the country’s leaders down and drag them through the mud, to pressure the Americans to pack up and go home. But the investigation was still in its infancy, the evidence still a confused mess. All the different pieces would have to be brought into line if they were to convince anyone.

  The General huffed.

  —Your department is not doing its job, he said, pounding his fist on Tzitzilis’s desk. The American people demand you find the guilty party. And in a matter of days, he ordered, and left without saying goodbye.

  Whoever seeks will find.

  A reporter who spoke English, former member of the communist insurgency. The last person to see Talas alive, according to witnesses. Of course the meeting only lasted five minutes, but no one cared about such details. A communist plot was
an acceptable solution.

  Gris had no police record. He was a calm, quiet man, almost suspiciously so. He took care of his mother and supported his sisters. He didn’t spend money on things he didn’t need, apart from his four packs of cigarettes a day. Sometimes he forgot and lit a new one with the old one still burning. He would hold both between two fingers and inhale them together. As tough as they come, though he didn’t look it.

  Tzitzilis had no intention of wasting time on preliminary questioning, corroboration, modification. This version would stick, and it was high time they were through with the case, for the good of the country.

  All those who expressed doubt and distrust of the hurried proceedings—suspicious characters, the lot of them, and anti-Greek, in Tzitzilis’s estimation—quickly learned to hold their tongues. Military tribunals took place even on weekends. Blood flowed freely. Everyone on both sides of the political spectrum had seen enough death.

  The country’s citizens might have learned to keep quiet, but the numbers spoke volumes. On May 3, 1948, a total of 152 communists who’d been condemned to death were executed, a fact that seemed entirely logical to the side doing the killing. Some whispered that the executions were in retaliation for the assassination of Ladas, the Minister of Justice, by the Organization for the Protection of the People’s Struggle. Ladas had been the one who decided to revoke the citizenship of communists en masse. He was also the one who signed orders of execution. But the communists, too, killed indiscriminately. The two sides competed in harshness and barbarism: they burned people alive, decapitated corpses, stoned and bludgeoned and raped.

  There was no end to the evil. Some executed, and others executed the executioners. Heroes became traitors and traitors heroes, depending on who was speaking. No one escaped, the traps had been set. People were condemned according to what they believed, not what they had done. Of course everyone said it was a sad state of affairs. Yet the killing continued apace. In the end political neutrality became a dangerous position. The country was ruled by paroxysms of fanaticism and intolerance. Whoever had a dissenting opinion learned to keep his mouth shut.

  Those on the outside, even those who were bankrolling the slaughter, were revolted by the photographs that circulated abroad. Greece had become front-page news. One image in particular had been seen all over the world: a man on horseback with the heads of three female guerilla fighters hanging from his saddle, tied by their braids. The prime minister made some neutral comment about it being an old Greek custom, and promised the incident wouldn’t be repeated—at least not with the heads of women.

  The foreign journalists turned out to be some of the most easily shocked, and expressed their horror from a safe distance. Their mothers hadn’t been slain, their sisters hadn’t been hacked to pieces, their houses hadn’t been torched. They urged people to remain calm, rattled off declarations of human rights, promoted humanistic ideals. They wrote articles, took photographs. And then they boarded their airplanes and left, and flew home to sleep easily in London or distant Oklahoma.

  Perhaps it was just bad timing: the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. But now things were settled summarily and speciously. The case couldn’t be dragged out any longer. They were walking on hot coals, so they might as well dance.

  SCHOOL YEAR 2010–2011

  “WE’RE THE KIDS OUR PARENTS DIDN’T WANT US TO HANG OUT WITH”

  MINAS

  They won’t give me money for the class trip. 629 euros for six days is way too much, Mom says. What she means is that it’s way too much for someone who isn’t going to university. He who has ears, let him hear, says Grandma, who doesn’t let a fly shit without comment. Fine, fair enough. It’s your money. Next year, when I’m an adult, we can talk again.

  I don’t even bother bringing up the Air Jordans, since I already know the answer: In Africa kids run around barefoot, and you have three pairs of shoes. We don’t have money to waste on nonsense.

  In our house Mom gets to decide what’s nonsense and what’s not. It’s pretty much a dictatorship. They used to try and trick me into thinking we made decisions democratically. There were three of us, so we voted. I don’t need to tell you the score. At some point I figured it out. You guys always agree, I’ll never get my way, I complained. It was my first lesson in majority rule.

  —The glory and the weakness of the democratic system, Evelina once commented in class, pointing at me, is that his vote counts as much as mine.

  I can just picture her studying law. She’ll rise to the top, no doubt about it. I mean, she’s killer.

  Last year she showed up at the debate tournament with a stack of notes and her father’s Mont Blanc. She was bossing everyone around, giving orders. But when they asked her a question about the stock market crash of 1929, she froze. It wasn’t in our history book. She doesn’t care about anything that won’t be on the Panhellenic Exams.

  In the twenty minutes our group was given to prep, I went over the whole history from the crash to Lehman Brothers. It was one of the few times in her life when Evelina shut up and took notes. She was epic, though, I have to admit. She went up to the podium and pretty much smoked all the private school kids. She had her usual expression on, the one that suits her best: a German shepherd with a job to do. She didn’t let anyone else finish a sentence.

  —I’m sorry if I’m getting a bit competitive, she apologized, smiling at the judges.

  They smiled right back. Dumb as bricks. She had them in the palm of her hand right from the start.

  Evelina isn’t going on the class trip, either. It’s too close to Easter, she can’t afford to lose even a day of studying. I’m sure she talked her dad into putting the money aside for her, so she’ll be able to take a trip this summer instead, to celebrate.

  No Prague for me, I might as well accept it. I won’t see the old clock tower with the statue of Death, won’t retrace Kafka’s steps, won’t go to that club I found on the Internet. I won’t get to see what airplane food is like: goulash, boiled vegetables, chocolate cake. I’ll just rot here in Thessaloniki. Kamara to Diagonios to Aristotle Square—the entire city center by foot in fifteen minutes. My whole life spent in a tiny speck on the map. Nine hundred steps along the sidewalk of Tsimiski Avenue. I counted.

  Dad hates this city, but Grandma adores it. She’s an old-time Thessalonian, she grew up on Plato Street, her balcony looked onto the Church of the Virgin Acheiropoiitos. On Good Friday she would go down and buy her votive candle as soon as the bells started ringing. For Grandma all that really counts as Thessaloniki is the part of the city inside the Byzantine walls. Everything outside the walls was just muddy fields in her day: Don’t be fooled, dear, by all the apartment buildings they’ve built out there, back then when it rained the whole place was one big mud pit. Anything east of the White Tower is a foreign country as far as she’s concerned, Toumba’s a suburb, and Panorama up on the hill is countryside. Western Thessaloniki is a parallel universe she reads about in the paper, in the articles Dad edits.

  Grandma always does her hair in that poofy old-lady style. She paints her nails and smokes thin cigarettes. She has more memories than you would believe. The other people in her apartment building call her the principal, even though she was only ever a teacher. Whenever anyone goes out shopping they stop by her place first to see if she needs anything: a loaf of bread, some tsipouro, marinated anchovies. Grandma is a foodie. She drinks her glass of tsipouro every afternoon with the TV on. She goes out for coffee with her endless girlfriends, whom Mom describes as tough old broads. They talk about politics, about the city’s lost splendor, about the latest movies. Grandma’s a movie junkie, says Dad, who has a soft spot for her. You couldn’t exactly call her a cinephile, since she loves detective films and thrillers. She and Dad always place bets on the Oscars. Nine times out of ten Grandma wins, and Dad buys her pirated versions of the winning films from the African street vendors.

  —You’re a godless man, she scolds him. How many times have I told you
not to buy from them? Their knock-offs are going to ruin my DVD player.

  Grandma considers Dad an unrepentant socialist. Too welcoming of foreigners, an armchair activist with a philanthropic theory handy whenever it’s time to discuss the downtrodden. She has no patience for his kind of tolerance. In her view all black people stink, no matter what Dad says about non-Western diets and spices.

  —They’ve turned the Rotonda into a gypsy camp, you can’t walk anywhere without stepping on their handbags. I can’t understand why nothing’s been done. Is the mayor blind?

  Dad smiles but doesn’t reply. Grandma considers herself his ears in the city, because if he tried to get any real news from his lefty friends, he’d be waiting a long time, she says, shaking her head.

  It’s true, though, Grandma actually is his political barometer. She’ll vote for PASOK to get New Democracy to clean up its act, or for New Democracy to punish PASOK.

  —It’s not that Evthalia can’t make up her mind, Dad established early on. It’s that she’s an actual undecided voter. It’s her kind who determine the final outcome. If we all had her balls, we wouldn’t just vote for the same party year in and year out.

  He made sure to take it back right away, though, so Grandma wouldn’t use it against him.

  Dad is a displaced lefty who used to believe that PASOK would save the country. Even now, no matter how enraged he gets with the socialists, he always comes through at the ballot box. He can’t bear to vote for anyone else. If you think about it, it’s pretty stupid to vote for a single party your whole life long, but Dad considers it political consistency.

  No one at school reads the newspaper, and whatever news they watch is just STAR or sports results. The other day Souk blew up in class. Someone at the back of the room was talking, and he got us all out of our chairs. Souk never yells. His method is to turn the volume down, not up. It’s incredibly effective, I wonder why it never occurred to anyone else.