Trueish Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel Read online

  “Michail,” she said in a blunt tone.

  “Katerina?”

  My grandmother could pack a lot of meaning into one itty-bitty word. For instance, now, when she said my name, what she really meant was, ‘Katerina, it’s entirely probable that your father’s body parts are in this box, therefore you need to go and stand waaaaay over there so you don’t go Brad Pitt in Se7en when we open this box.’

  To which I replied, “Grandma,” knowing full well she understood what I meant was, ‘Over any number of dead—well, not dead, because killing is bad, but let’s go with critically injured, with the possibility of a full recovery—bodies am I going anywhere except right here. Now somebody open the box.’

  Xander was still holding the box, only now he was holding it in the air, where neither Grandma nor I had a chance in hell of reaching it.

  “My Virgin Mary!” Aunt Rita rolled her eyes and tickled Xander. He folded, leaving me to pick the low-hanging fruit out of his hand.

  I stood there slightly stunned for a moment, shocked that I’d won. Aunt Rita took advantage of the blip in my programming and snatched the box. In seconds she sawed through the twine with her teeth and threw aside the brown paper.

  Grandma glared at her youngest child.

  Aunt Rita looked at her. “What?”

  “We are here to pick up garbage,” Grandma said, “not make more.”

  I picked it up and folded the paper carefully, in case we needed it later for clues. Meanwhile my aunt was inspecting a plain white gift box. It had been fastened together here and there with bits of tape. She hacked through those in a jiffy with her manicured nails.

  “Huh,” she said, peering into the flimsy cardboard box.

  We all craned our necks—except for Xander—to take a look.

  It was a wooden puzzle box, with a combination reel. Letters, not numbers. Eight across. The entire English alphabet on each reel. Right now they were spelling out gobbledygook. Or rather, gobbledy.

  “That looks German,” my aunt said, reading the reels. She pulled out her smartphone and began Googling the letters.

  “English,” I said, saving her the trouble. “It’s part of a word. Gobbledygook.”

  “Gobbledygook?”

  “Gibberish.”

  “Gibberish?”

  I hunted around for the right Greek word. “Anoisies.” Nonsense.

  “I do not know what is inside, but I know who made it,” Grandma called out. She had lost interest in the box’s contents and wandered off, which was weird, because it was now about five hundred percent more interesting. Anyway, she was showing her disinterest by climbing into the SUV, and Xander was holding open one of the back doors, waiting on me to join her.

  It was a no-brainer: There was a cold wind blowing, and I intended to shove my face in front of the vent to catch it, so I climbed into the backseat. Aunt Rita jumped in the other side.

  “Who?” I asked.

  Grandma sniffed. “An old bastard I used to know.”

  “Why did he make you a puzzle box?”

  “I think this is his way of telling me he knows who has Michail.”

  My heart began to boogie. It was a lead—our first real lead since Dad had been escorted from our Portland, Oregon home. My inner child kicked the driver’s seat. She could be kind of a problem child, which was weird, because aside from a rash of underage drinking, I had been the good girl all my life.

  “What are we waiting for? Saddle up!”

  Grandma glanced back. “We cannot go to see him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he is in a maximum security prison.”

  Chapter 2

  TEN MINUTES later I was tugging open the screen door to Grandma’s house. If you could call it a house—and I wasn’t sure I could. It had all the prerequisites of a house: walls, roof, floor, rooms, but with fifty or so years of neglect tacked onto its life sentence. Grandma’s house was going places, and the places it was going were all city dumps. It was a dog leg-shaped hovel, a one-story death trap, a throwback to the days before building codes were implemented. The garden was approaching jungle status, an amazing feat for a garden that existed entirely in red pots. This hovel was the centerpiece of a palatial compound, one of those family heirlooms that was passed down from eldest child to eldest child, in the Makris family. Which meant I was in the inheritance zone, whether I liked it or not.

  But the compound …

  My family’s compound could have kicked the Kennedy compound in the misshapen consonants.

  The air was coolish in Grandma’s house. The shutters were hugging the windows, keeping the sun out. The gloom was punctured here and there by the occasional ray squeezing through a gap. The kitchen had one table, several chairs, and a plastic tablecloth, which was apparently a Greek thing. Cloth tablecloths were only trotted out for good company. According to my aunt, family couldn’t be trusted not to spill food, while guests knew their reputations hinged on whether on not they were sloppy eaters. The appliances were old school, old-fashioned, and—in the case of the refrigerator, which had a lift-and-pull handle—just plain old. The painted windowsill was peeling. The ceiling wore oil stains from a half-dozen generations of Makris. Nothing below waist level could be called a cupboard. Grandma kept her pots and pans behind flowery curtains.

  Grandma’s kitchen currently had two occupants.

  Papou, who despite being called “Grandfather” was no one around here’s grandfather, was at the kitchen table, peeling an apple with a pocketknife. Papou’s face suggested that it used to be a planet, but had experienced an unfortunate collision with a meteor shower and lost. He was so old it was a wonder Lord Elgin hadn’t hauled him back to England with the rest of Greece’s marbles. He rode around in a wheelchair with a mounted rack for his shotgun. Fortunately, no one would give him any shells. Papou was Grandma’s advisor, what the mob back home called a consigliere.

  There was a man seated across from him. A stranger. He was olive-skinned, mid-thirties and reminded me of barbed wire. He wore a wife-beater with dress pants. His elbows were on the table, his head in his hands. He looked like a man with one problem too many. Like, say, my family.

  “You have a visitor,” Papou said to Grandma, who was right behind me. “Did you know Katerina was in the newspaper?”

  I pulled the front page out of my pocket, flattened it on the table. “It’s true.”

  “I knew,” Grandma said. “Who is this?”

  “A dead man with a pulse,” Papou said. “He’s here because of the newspaper. Everybody knows she is here, and now certain parties are not happy. They want her to leave or die, so one of them hired this vlakas.”

  A vlakas is a Greek idiot. It’s a special Hellenic brand of stupidity.

  My hands and feet went icy cold. “To make me leave or make me die? Because there’s a difference …”

  Grandma was staring at me, as though she wasn’t so sure I was her blood.

  “Really?” Aunt Rita asked. “That’s what you wear to an assassination?”

  The man looked up at my aunt. “What are you? Because I don’t talk to whatever it is you are. What if it’s catching? I could wind up in Mykonos, dancing in a cabaret, selling my kolos to sailors.”

  My aunt flicked his ear. “Oww,” he howled.

  “Should we call the police?” I asked.

  “No,” everyone said in unison. They all went diving for the nearest red object, which was an apple in the fruit bowl. Greeks have superstitions out the wahzoo. Touching red cancelled out the bad juju that came with two or more people saying the same thing at the same time.

  After everything died down, Grandma spoke.

  “Today you are a lucky man. Do you know why?” She settled into the wood-and-straw chair at the head of the table. She didn’t wait for his answer. “Listen and I will tell you. Today, here at my table, you are a man with choices. You can tell me who you work for, or you can stay quiet. They are both valid choices.”

  “I choos
e quiet,” he said.

  “Are you sure? Because that is the bad choice.”

  He shot us all nervous glances. “Why? What happens if I don’t tell you?”

  “One door leads to the castle.” I leaned against the kitchen counter, squelching the desire to sit on it and swing my feet. “And one leads to certain death.”

  “Castle?” He looked confused. “What castle?”

  “There is no castle,” Grandma said. “But there is certain death.”

  His gaze bounced between us. “And telling you who my employer is, which one is that?”

  “Castle,” I said. “Although that should be obvious.”

  “What happens if I give you the name?”

  “Certain death,” Grandma said.

  “Wait.” I looked at her. “They can’t both be certain death. That’s not right or fair.”

  “The death is certain,” she said. “The hand dealing the death is different. When his employer discovers his treachery he will be killed.”

  The man began to blubber. “I don’t want to die.”

  “Assassins,” my aunt said. “They don’t make them like they used to.”

  “How did they use to make them?” I asked her.

  “Clever and better dressed.”

  “It’s not fair,” the wannabe assassin wept. “I’m a guy trying to make a living. Time are hard, you know?”

  No one said, ‘Hey, there are other jobs,’ because there weren’t. Greece was starting down the barrel of a twenty-six-percent unemployment rate.

  “What’s with the outfit?” I asked.

  “This?” He tugged at the white wife-beater. “I was trying to fit in.”

  “With who?”

  “The farmers.”

  “We have farmers?” I asked Grandma.

  Papou scoffed, but there was humor behind the sound. A laughing at me, not a laughing with me. “Who do you think picks all the fruit and raises the sheep you eat?”

  “Kindly elves?” I wasn’t serious, but this was me trying to cope with the knowledge that I was on yet another hit list. It was the second time in as many weeks. I wondered if I could expect fifty more.

  Grandma shook her head. “You are your father.”

  Except not a former mobster or a current giant question mark. When Grandma had drugged me and shot me back to America—a temporary problem; I boomeranged right back on a commercial flight—I had discovered a cache of, well, cash, alternate identities, and a gun. All the passports had Dad’s face but different names. He was Alessandro, he was Pierre, he was Ivan, he was a lot of people I’d never met. So far I hadn’t said a word to Grandma. It was a Dad and me problem. A father-daughter failure to communicate. And I didn’t know who I could trust here. Worse, I didn’t know who I couldn’t trust.

  “Think of this as an opportunity,” I said, ignoring her observation. “If you tell Grandma who hired you, then you get to extend your life, for …” I glanced at the others, hoping someone else would supply the answer.

  Aunt Rita was the benefactor. “For as long as he can run very fast.”

  “See? If you’re a good runner then you might get to live another fifty or so years. Cheer up,” I said. “It’s not all bad news.”

  “I can’t run fast. I took a bullet in the knee.”

  We all made Yikes, that’s too bad faces. His blubbering gained momentum. I reached over to where Grandma kept a box of tissues and dumped them in front of him. Watching a grown man cry is never pretty. They do it even uglier than women because they have so little practice after the age of four.

  “There has to be a middle ground,” I said. “A way he can keep his life and tell us what he knows.” I wasn’t saint material, but I liked to think I was a fundamentally decent human being. I had never committed a crime, other than the underage drinking. Well, there was the time, about a week ago, when I stole Xander’s car, but it was more like borrowing than stealing, seeing as I had every intention of forking out for a carwash before returning it. And there was the whole leaving America, entering Greece, then reentering America illegally, but that wasn’t my fault either. At the time I was incapacitated by something Grandma had brewed up. When I left the America the second time, the TSA had treated me to a groping, an interrogation, and they’d made everyone empty out their pockets. But they wore badges that said they were allowed to be the bad guys, so I did the legal thing and played along. And I had come this close to being a murderer, but Xander saved me the trouble by blowing the bad guy’s head off at the last second. In my defense—and Xander’s—the man had been about to kill me.

  Bottom line: I wasn’t cut out to be a criminal, especially not a career criminal. Grandma had revealed plans for me that included catapulting me into her seat when she went to have a sit-down with God, but there was no way. Once Dad was safe and sound I was going home, back to a new job that I didn’t have yet. It would be a cool winter day in hell before I became the head of a criminal organization.

  Crime was in my blood but it wasn’t in my hands, where it really counted.

  “What would you do, Katerina?” Grandma asked.

  Every head swiveled my way. She’d dumped me in the hot seat.

  Think. Try not to go full-on deer in the headlights.

  “He could …” I look to them for confirmation that wasn’t coming. “… give us his employers name, then he could pretend to be hunting me?”

  “I could do that,” the guy said quickly. “I always wanted to be an actor.”

  I nodded enthusiastically. “See? Then while he’s creeping around, pretending to hunt me, we could send someone to negotiate with his employer.”

  Grandma looked dubious. “Negotiate.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Look at how Don Corleone did it. He was a diplomat first and foremost.”

  “You want me to be like a character in a movie?”

  “It was a book before it was a movie.”

  “Yes, but the movie was superior.”

  She had me there. “It doesn’t matter which was better. But you should negotiate first.”

  “This person wants to kill my only granddaughter, and you expect me to negotiate?”

  Aunt Rita, Papou, and the hitman were bouncing back and forth, watching us.

  “It’s a starting point,” I told her. “If it doesn’t work you can do it your way.”

  We both looked at the hitman.

  “Is death certain?” he asked.

  “Eventually,” I said.

  * * *

  THE HITMAN, whose name turned out to be Elias, worked for a tinpot gangster named Fatmir the Poor, an Albanian who had fled his country when their economy collapsed in the early 1990s. No longer poor, Fatmir kept the name as a reminder of what he had once been.

  “Do you know him?” I asked Grandma, when we were alone in the kitchen. She was moving things around behind the counter, staying busy without accomplishing anything tangible. It wasn’t like her to avoid baking in these situations. Normally baking was her go-to method of thinking, dealing, and procrastinating. What was she really up to?

  “I have heard of him. He is a …” She pointed to her head.

  “A king? Balding? A headless horseman? A Pez dispenser? Wait—is he a patient at a psychiatric facility? Because that would explain why he wants me killed.” I expected charades from Xander, not Grandma.

  “A muslim.” She spoke the word as if it were a hand grenade wedged in her mouth.

  “So?”

  “He wants to build one of his churches in Athens.”

  “So?”

  “Greece has no room for a mosque.”

  Grandma was part of a generation that clung to its -isms. If it wasn’t Greek-born, and Greek Orthodox, it was immediately suspect. If the golden oldies released their grip the whole country might unravel. All those Turkish and Persian invasions throughout history had made them twitchy about which sorts belonged and which sorts should get back on their boats and paddle.

  “Okay,” I said. “But I w
ouldn’t say it to Fatmir’s face when you speak to him. Not if you want me to live.”

  She didn’t look up from her task, which seemed to be a ritualistic form of dithering. “I will not be going to speak with him.”

  My brain flopped around, hunting for the right question. What it came back with was, “Huh?”

  “Rita and Takis will be going as my emissaries.”

  I crunched the numbers. The total was in the negatives. “So you want me to die?”

  “This is not the first time either of them have negotiated on my behalf. Takis looks like an idiot, yes, but he is a good tool.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. Takis was a tool.

  “Why don’t I go?”

  “No.”

  Subject closed. Sealed with wax. Chained shut. Good thing my personality came with a crowbar, for emergencies.

  “It’s my life. I should be allowed to bargain for it.”

  “No.”

  Okay, so I had the crowbar, she had the sledgehammer.

  “What about the puzzle box?”

  “I will deal with that later.”

  “But it’s our only clue.”

  Xander knocked on the screen door and entered. He said nothing, just stood there, but the kitchen was suddenly too small. I had a sudden premonition, an inkling of where he and Grandma were going. When the Baptist was holding me captive, he had mentioned Grandma had cancer, something she was keeping secret from us all. Except … Xander knew. Someone had to be ferrying her to and from her appointments, and it was no secret that Xander was one of her most trusted confidantes.

  Grandma lifted her head. She nodded to Xander and he vanished into her bedroom. He returned a moment later holding a small travel bag.

  “We will talk when I get back.” Her words were cool but she touched my face with a warm hand.

  “When will that be?”

  “Soon.”

  * * *

  IN THE OLD DAYS—a couple of weeks back—I would have been content to sit around the compound, watch TV, swim, and generally maintain my status as a couch potato. But times had changed.

  I had a clue. I didn’t know what it was—true—but I had one. Grandma had left the puzzle box at the bottom of her stocking drawer for anyone to find.