Disorganized Crime Read online

  And every suite had cable TV and Internet, or so the kids had told me. Grandma was generous with the family. If this family was what I thought it was, I suspected generosity wasn't so much a benevolent move as it was political tactics. Keep family happy and they stay loyal. There would always be one or two waiting to squeeze Grandma for more, but they were outliers. The bulk of the family could be kept loyal through the adequate and regular dispersal of luxury items.

  Translation: Shiny things buy loyalty.

  Right on. Because I was thinking that right now indoor plumbing could purchase me as a friend for life.

  I knocked on Stavros's door.

  "Who is it?" His voice was muffled.

  "Katerina."

  Some distance away, behind the white paneled door, he let out a string of colorful curse words. Something about engaging in sexual atrocities with the Virgin Mary, someone's mother, and a donkey. "Come back later."

  "I can't."

  "Why not? Everybody can come back later if they really want to."

  I leaned against the jamb. "Are you watching porn?"

  He spluttered. "No! What is wrong with you? Who watches pornography?" The door opened. He peeked through the crack. "Okay, I was watching pornography. But do not tell Baboulas, okay?"

  "Your secret is safe with me. I need some help." I gave him an expectant look.

  He glanced over my shoulder, probably for trouble and other spies. "What help?"

  "I have questions. I need answers." He opened his mouth. "Honest answers," I said firmly.

  "Heh."

  "I mean it. Otherwise …" I peered past him. "Baa-baa."

  The door slammed, a chain rattled, then the door swung open. Clad only in boxers, he reminded me of a bear with mange. Unlike a bear, he was managing to scratch his head and nuts at the same time.

  His suite was blue. Blue paint, blue furnishings, blue art. The mostly naked women on the walls wore shreds of blue bikinis and lingerie. Only his electronics and appliances ignored his color palette. They were white.

  "What do you want to know?"

  "Who do you think has my father?"

  He dropped onto the couch, leaving me to perch on the arm of one of two matching armchairs. Head in hands he said, "Nobody wants to know what I think. Baboulas doesn't pay me to think."

  "What does she pay you to do?"

  "Follow orders, same as anyone else."

  "So who does the thinking—besides Baboulas?"

  "Papou, Rita, sometimes Takis and Xander. Papou is her advisor and your aunt Rita is the family accountant. All of them, and your uncle Kostas in Germany, they report directly to Baboulas." He looked at me wide-eyed. "Do not tell her I call her that, okay?"

  "She already knows, remember?"

  He gulped.

  "I think she kind of likes it," I added. "It makes her seem more fearsome. Wait—I have an uncle in Germany?"

  "You didn't know?"

  I flopped into the chair, slumping like a sack of potatoes, wondering if I'd ever be able to get the hell out of Wonderland. "I don't know anything."

  He sat up, pointed at me. "That's a good attitude. Stick with that."

  "But I want to know everything."

  He sank again. "And that attitude will get you killed."

  "Give it to me straight. Is our family the Greek mafia?"

  He nodded.

  My mind was officially boggled, and horrified, and somehow not that surprised. I knew it, but I was glad to have the words said aloud.

  "I was hoping the family was just weird. Or maybe in a circus."

  "No circus," he said in a sad voice. "Just organized crime. You know, I never wanted to be a gangster."

  "No kidding? What did you want to be?"

  "A stay-at-home father."

  "You'd be good at that."

  He perked up. "You think so?"

  "Sure, why not?"

  When I got back to the kitchen, Grandma, Aunt Rita, and Papou had their heads together over the kitchen table. Plotting dastardly deeds, no doubt.

  "I'm staying right here," I announced, "and I'm not leaving Greece until I find my father—alive."

  "Oh you are, are you?" Papou asked.

  I glanced at the shriveled old nut in the wheelchair. "Yes."

  "What if Michail is dead?" he added.

  Unthinkable. "I'll bring him back to life somehow. I'll … go to Hogwarts or offer Hades my Jeep. Whatever it takes."

  On the far side of the table, Grandma smiled like she knew it all along.

  I was predictable—rats!

  "Take her with you," she told Aunt Rita. "She will be a surprise."

  My glance slid from face to face. "A surprise? Where are we going?"

  Aunt Rita's laugh scraped past her Adam's apple. "Dina will kaka her pants."

  We parked at the foot of a narrow street with an incline that had once aspired to be a ninety-degree angle, but collapsed and dropped dead before it reached its goal. No blacktop, just cracked and thirsty concrete. Heat rose in rippled sheets off the ground. A grill cook could throw together most of the IHOP menu out here. Houses clung stubbornly to the hill. Greece and its necessary obsession with earthquake-proofing told me the homes were sturdier than they looked, that the tectonic plates could bump fists and high five but these residents and their homes weren't going anywhere.

  Aunt Rita had filled me in on the way over, while Xander drove. Dina was Dad's temporary squeeze before he fled Greece, and she was nutty enough to believe he'd return for her someday. She was obsessed, my aunt told me, so if someone had snuck Dad into Greece, there was a minor chance she'd know, on account of how she had stalker potential.

  Sun lashing our backs, the three of us hiked up the hill. The clock called it early evening, but the sun was determined to flog Greece until the moon got around to kicking it out of the sky. Which, in July, would be around ten o'clock.

  "It's not so bad today," my aunt said. "August is worse."

  Good times. With luck I wouldn't be here to find out. Dad and I would be at home in Portland, counting down to rainy season.

  Dad's ex girlfriend lived in a white bungalow, in a row of nearly identical white bungalows. They were all flat-topped with television antennas and washing lines as their hat decorations of choice. Each yard was metal fenced, and gardens consisted of various arrangements of potted plants, most of them in red pots.

  "What's with all the red pots?" I asked my aunt.

  "They are red for luck."

  "Really?"

  "I don't know. But it sounds good, doesn't it?"

  It did sound plausible, especially for a group of people as superstitious as Greeks. When they weren't spitting to ward away the evil eye, they were crossing themselves, hoping God would ride to the rescue.

  "There's no bigger martyr on the planet than Dina," Aunt Rita continued. "You have to know that before we go in there."

  "Do you think she knows something?"

  "Probably not. But I wouldn't die of surprise if she kidnapped your father and hid him in her closet."

  "You think she'll let us in?"

  "Honey, she'll let us in. If there's one thing she loves it's an audience. A martyr can't be a martyr unless someone is watching."

  I was curious about Dad's ex. He never mentioned her in my earshot. "What's she like?"

  "She's a mouni," she said, matter-of-factly.

  We dressed in our business best, which for me was jeans and a T-shirt. My cousins forgot to pack for those twenty-one days out of the month when I didn't bleed. I'd need clothes and I'd need them soon. Aunt Rita made up for it, though. She was dressed for a spring day circa the 1940's, in a long pencil skirt and one of those little hats perched on her head like a pet monkey. Xander had managed to locate a T-shirt to go with his shorts.

  We sidled up to the gate with every intention of ringing the doorbell, but Dina—I presumed—was already outside, broom in hand, sweeping the clean swaths of concrete that made up her front yard. Nothing green in sight. Not a s
ingle potted plant.

  Dad's ex was built compact and solid and boxy, like a German car. She was wearing a frilly black blouse tucked into mom jeans. Her cleavage rivaled the Grand Canyon, telling me she was blessed, or in bed with a surgical virtuoso who knew how to move mountains. Her dyed brown hair had that Farrah Fawcett flick.

  Aunt Rita tapped one of her big, gaudy dress rings on the metal gate and walked through. I followed her. "Who died?" my aunt asked.

  Dina glanced up. "I did, the day your brother left me. And now I am like that mosquito in amber from that dinosaur movie."

  Aunt Rita gave me a look that said this woman was cuckoo. "That was years ago."

  "And I have been dead since then, only somebody forgot to tell my body, so I keep sweeping."

  "All the time?" I asked.

  She looked at me the way I look at spiders. "Who are you?"

  My aunt filled in the blank for her, and if you ask me, she did it with thinly disguised glee. "This is Michail's daughter, Katerina."

  There was a horrified gasp as she clutched an acre of chest. The whisk broom clattered on the ground. "Since when does my Michail have a daughter?"

  My feathers ruffled. I puffed myself up to battle-size. "Since he married my mother and put his—"

  "Lies." Hands on hips. Chin jutting out. "There was only me."

  "Relax," my aunt muttered behind her hand. "Even in the old days when it was her, it wasn't just her."

  Dina shot her with hate rays. "I heard that. What do you want?"

  "We're looking for Michail," Aunt Rita said.

  Eyes wide, her glance bounced from Aunt Rita to me and back again. "He's missing?"

  "Something like that."

  "And you think he is here? Why would he be here?" Once more with the chest clutching. Joy, with a hefty side of crazy, plastered itself on her face. Thirty years of suppressed insanity in one facial expression. "It's a sign! He's coming for me at last, just like in my dreams!"

  Aunt Rita scoffed at that. "Nobody goes back to a meal they didn't want to finish thirty years ago."

  "Kolobaras."

  "Mouni."

  "At least I have one," Dina said.

  "I know, I've seen it, remember? Every male in our generation has stuck a sausage in that freezer between your legs—even me."

  Dina sucked in her breath, expanding her ribcage for the sole purpose of unleashing a slasher-worthy scream. If she did that, the whole neighborhood would come running, not to her aid—if Dad's stories about the pathological nosiness of his people were true (this from a man whose face doubled as one of those window stick-on toys whenever there was a strange noise in the street)—but to gawk. Greeks, Dad said, invented rubber-necking, long before Charles Goodyear invented vulcanized rubber in the late 1830s.

  So I kicked her in the shin. Not hard. Just enough force to diffuse her before she blew.

  "Skeela," she said.

  Aunt Rita slapped her around the ear. "Don't talk to her like that."

  These two. Jesus.

  "I need to find my father," I said, wishing there was a hose handy. A blast of water would shoo them back to their respective corners. "If you can help …"

  Hands on denim hips. "Maybe he ran away from you, did you consider that?"

  Nope. Because men who ran away from their families usually did it alone, without the mobster entourage escorting them out of the house.

  "If you know anything, it would really be helpful." I prepared to slather it on thick. Sorry, Mom. "Dad would be grateful, I know. Really, really, grateful."

  She was considering the delicious possibility, the gleaming potential of a penitent and obligated Dad, when her gaze slid past us, bumping into Xander on the other side of the fence. "A henchman?" she said panicking, all signs of cooperation evaporating in Greece's relentless heat. "Why did you bring a henchman to my house? Help!" She glanced from side to side. "Help!"

  "I thought you were already dead," I said.

  "Dead, yes. But I can still feel torture."

  "Relax," I assured her. "Xander isn't going to torture you. He's our ride."

  She bolted up the steps, slammed her front door. "Help," she said in a much dimmer voice.

  There I was, standing my father's kooky ex's yard, blinking at my aunt and Grandma's hottie henchman.

  "Huh," Aunt Rita said.

  "Anyone have a pen and paper?"

  She went mining in her structured handbag, its loops nestled in her elbow's crook. She dug up with a lipstick in violent red. No paper.

  The front door was still closed—and locked, I was willing to bet.

  "Thanks. What's Grandma's phone number?"

  She reeled off a short string of digits. One at a time, I painted them on the front door in MAC's Ruby Woo.

  "Help! Vandals!" the woman inside hollered.

  "Jesus. Is she always like this?"

  Aunt Rita scoffed. "No. This is a good day." She dropped the lipstick back into her purse, then Xander drove us back to the family compound, where Grandma was pounding the life out of something with a marble mortar and pestle. Smelled like garlic, looked like grits.

  She didn't bother looking up when we trudged in. "What did Dina say?"

  "Nothing," Aunt Rita said.

  "You know how Dina is. Maybe she knows something, maybe not."

  "Want us to pick her up?"

  Grandma thought about it for a moment. "No. We know where she lives."

  I rubbed my hands together. "Who are we going to see next?"

  "You will never find Michail knocking on doors," Grandma said. "Our enemies are smart. Maybe they will answer questions, but they will not tell the truth. They have no honor." Because the head of one of Greece's organized crime syndicates is a reliable moral barometer. "For now you must be patient. Whoever has him, they will make their demands soon."

  "And if they don't?"

  "The skordalia is ready." She poured the garlic goop into a bowl, sealed it with plastic wrap and stuck it in the fridge. "Tomorrow I will fry fish."

  What else could I do? I wasn't exactly bad-guy material, despite the distinctive bend on one side of the family tree. Threats and torture weren't my way. At work my catchphrase was, "Can you pay this past-due bill at this time?" not, "Pony up the goods or die." Although I have heard stories about people in my line of work who stoop. Can't pay the three cents you owe? No problem. We'll come over and snatch your firstborn this afternoon.

  As soon as she shuffled outside to crochet and gab with the wives, I grabbed the phone and called the only non-Family—capital F—member I knew in Greece.

  Detective Melas picked up. "Are you calling on the home phone again?"

  "Yes. Don't hang up—please!"

  Big sigh. "What do you want?"

  "Information." I told him about my visit to Dad's ex's house, told him what Grandma had said about her enemies and knocking on doors. Then I begged him to give me something—anything."

  "No," he said. "Forget it. I'm the good guy. What kind of good guy would I be if I helped you get yourself killed? You want my help? Let me drive you to the airport."

  "No. Staying. Even if I had a passport I'd stay."

  "Lady, you've got a death wish."

  "La la la. I can't hear you. Does that sound familiar?"

  His voice dropped to an agitated whisper. "Your father isn't one of the good guys, Katerina. When he lived here he did bad things. I'm not telling you anything else. It isn't worth my life or my job. But the offer for a ride to the airport is always open. We can stop by the US Embassy in Athens and get you a passport."

  I dumped the phone in its cradle, then went in search of my cell phone. Thirty minutes—and a minor skirmish with a customer service rep that I, by some miracle, won—later, I called him back.

  "Melas," the detective said.

  "It's Katerina."

  "Ready to go to the airport?"

  "Not going. I'm calling you on my cell phone. It's safe. Talk."

  "Jesus," he said, "You're gonna g
et me killed. Okay. Jesus." He went silent for minute. "They say your father did wet work for your grandmother. You know what that is?"

  "Who said?"

  "Everyone. Old cops. Retired and dead."

  I wondered how dead cops could say anything, but I didn't ask in case there was a blindingly obvious answer. "What's wet work?" It didn't sound good, whatever it was.

  "What's wet?" he asked me.

  "Water."

  "Blood," he said. "Blood is wet. Wet work is murder. Assassination. Anything where blood is spilled. That's what your father did."

  The room spun. My ears went all buzzy. "He's a truck driver."

  Through the sudden static in my head Melas said, "Maybe he is, maybe he isn't. But he wasn't always a truck driver."

  "Oh boy." Where the ceiling used to be there were now hundreds of black spots zinging into each other the way bumper cars do when they're being steered by drunks. "When you said he was Grandma's right fist I assumed you meant he did paperwork."

  "That's Rita's job."

  I chewed on my lip while I did some fast thinking. Whatever Dad used to do, he was still Dad. "Doesn't matter. I'm not going home until I find him."

  "There's no record of his entry. He might not even be in Greece."

  "If not Greece, then where?"

  "He could still be in America. Why is your family so sure he's here?"

  "Wait—how do you know there's no record?"

  "Your grandmother had us check."

  "Isn't that against some kind of good-guy code or something?"

  "Just because we're on opposite teams, doesn't mean we don't sometimes borrow a cup of sugar."

  "What about the ex girlfriend?"

  "Dina? Forget her," he said. "She's a fruit."

  I considered the angles—all two of them. "Maybe he went into protective custody. A witness protection thing."

  "You believe that you'll believe anything." There was a pause. I pictured him scratching his head. "You're taking this well."

  "Window dressing. On the inside I'm totally crazy."

  "You give good window." He sounded dubious.

  "So what do you think? Give me something, Detective Melas. Anything."

  He sighed again. I'd pushed the guy into using up his yearly allotment of exasperation. "I think someone wants something and they're going to use him to get it. And I think he's in Greece, but he came in via a backdoor, same as you."