They walked south along the harbor, the sea to their right. He smiled and waved to a mix of people calling out his name, but his voice was angry. 'What the hell are you doing here?'
'Put your arm around me so they get the right idea.' She seemed to be having fun with this.
'Sure, honey.' He reached behind her and gave a long, visible squeeze to her ass. She jumped. 'What do you think you're doing?' Now the anger was hers.
'Just making sure they get the right idea.' He smiled, leaned over, and kissed her on the cheek. Then put his arm around her waist, gripped like a vise, and dragged more than directed her forward. 'Like I said, what are you doing here?'
She practically had to skip to keep up. 'We had a deal, remember?' There was a different anger in her voice.
He mumbled something Lila couldn't hear.
'What?'
'I don't want to talk about this here.' He turned their bodies toward an opening between two jewelry shops. It was one of many twisting paths that opened onto the harbor from the maze known as the old town of Mykonos. Most lanes weren't much wider than six feet, many narrower. Each was paved with island-quarried flagstones outlined in white and ran between two-story, all-white buildings accented by bright blue, green, or red doors, banisters, and window frames.
At a sandwich shop about thirty yards from the harbor, Andreas made an abrupt right onto a smaller path. He still didn't let go. A few turns later the path opened up into a tree-filled square lined on the east by four small churches snuggled together in a row. He stopped, dropped his arm from her waist and pointed to a low wall flanking three steps leading up to the first church. 'Sit there.'
She was wearing a scoop-neck white peasant-style blouse over straight-leg designer jeans, and dark brown Tod's — the shoes with little bumps for soles and heels. Her hair was in a tight bun, and large Chanel sunglasses covered her eyes. She wore only a hint of makeup, and a dark-blue Longchamp tote bag probably held whatever she thought she might need for the day. Andreas wondered if she considered this her I-can-blend-in look.
Lila sat on the wall as if waiting for him to join her. Instead, Andreas stood a few feet in front of her, staring up at the church. Then he looked at her and told her what he was thinking. 'You're the only person in the world I can trust.' He kissed her.
Anna didn't respond.
'I'd do anything for you and the baby, you know that.'
She didn't answer. Demon didn't care. He'd come to her place for a reason and didn't have time to fuck her. She'd just have to stay moody.
'I need a telephone number for that old friend of yours, the one from Sardinia.'
She flinched. 'Efisio?'
'Do you have it?'
'Why?'
Demon touched her cheek and gently stroked two fingers back and forth along her jaw line. 'Don't worry, my love, it's not about you.'
Efisio was her ex-boyfriend and the first to pimp her out. They'd met in her home country. He fled there to escape the Italian police. A year later she fled to Greece to escape his beatings. In an intimate, misguided moment of after-sex trust Anna confided her story to Demon, and he became the second. He didn't beat her. He had more insidious ways of controlling her.
She shook her head. 'I can't. If he ever finds out where I am…' her eyes moved toward the baby's crib, 'where we are…'
Demon's fingers kept moving along her face. 'He'll never find out. But I must find him. It is very important. Please, help me.'
She shook her head and said, 'No.'
'Please, I don't want to have to go to Sardinia.'
This time he felt her flinch. 'He's not there, he can't go back.'
'Yes, yes, I know but he has family there, and they must know how to reach him.'
He felt a twitching begin in her cheek.
'What is the name of his village?'
'I don't remember.'
He kept stroking. 'That place in the mountains. In north central Sardinia.'
She said nothing and turned her eyes away from him.
'Ah, yes, Mamoiada.'
She jerked away from his hand.
'My love, please, I don't want to have to go to that village. You know how dangerous those people are. You're the one who told me. They'll start asking why I want to find him, how I know him-'
She locked her eyes on his. 'You miserable bastard.'
'I'm not trying to harm you. But you're leaving me no choice than to bring up your name. Otherwise, they might kill me. But, if you find him for me he'll never hear your name. There will be no reason to tell him.'
She stared at the floor.
'If I wanted to harm you, do you really think I'd need to call your old boyfriend?' He touched her cheek. 'Besides, you know I'd never harm you. You are my love.'
When she looked at him there were tears in her eyes. 'Please, don't make me do this.'
Demon said nothing, just kept stroking her cheek. The tears now touched his fingers.
'I don't have a number for him.' Her lip was quivering. 'I'll have to find someone who does.'
'That's my girl. But please, try to find it before tomorrow morning. My plane for Italy leaves at noon. I don't want to go if you can get me the number.' He kissed her on the forehead and left.
Demon never heard the tearful string of curses, in several languages, that followed his departure. But Kouros did. 'I can't trust you.' Andreas didn't move.
Lila didn't say a word.
He waited for her to speak but all she did was stare. Or at least he thought she was staring. He took a step forward and lifted her sunglasses onto her forehead. He wished he hadn't, her eyes were filled with tears.
'What's wrong?'
She shook her head, and reached into her bag. 'Nothing.' Out came a handkerchief. She patted at her eyes. 'Absolutely nothing.'
Andreas knew he was losing ground fast. This was not the sort of response he expected. His immediate instinct was to console her, be her rescuing knight. Perhaps she knew that too. He better be careful. There was too much at stake, and too many intrigues.
He wanted to sit next to her but didn't move. 'Let me know when you want to talk.'
'When I want to talk? Perhaps I'm missing something here, Chief Kaldis, but you're the one who should be doing the talking. Or are you expecting me to try to convince you to trust me?' She jumped up, grabbed her bag, caught her sunglasses as they fell off her forehead and pointed them at Andreas. 'Fuck you!' And stormed-off down the narrowest of the four paths out of the square.
Andreas let out a breath and walked over to a foot-high white-concrete wall encircling a large eucalyptus tree at the edge of the square. He lit a cigarette and put his right foot on the top of the wall. He stared down the path she'd taken and looked at his watch. Three minutes had passed since she left.
'So, are you going to come out, or stay in there all night?'
He heard a muffled word that he was pretty sure was 'bastard.'
'Lila, you took one of the only dead end paths in town. Consider it a sign. Come out and let's talk.'
Another minute passed. He first saw the feet. She'd been sitting on the steps of a house about fifteen feet down the path. The rest of her body swung out into the lane and marched straight at him.
She swung her bag into his belly. 'Carry this,' and continued on out of the square down a path to the left.
Andreas followed, carrying the bag. He couldn't help but smile.
The path connected to others leading to Little Venice, perhaps the most popular part of the old town. It was a good choice. More tourists than locals came there. Not likely to run across paparazzi there, either. She stopped at the doorway to a bar with a rainbow painted on the door frame. 'This seems nice.'
He looked in. It looked like an English pub. Two young-looking men, one blond and one dark, were behind the bar talking to a large woman on the other side. 'It is. It's a piano bar. But once the music starts, it gets busy fast and attracts a lot of locals. Athenian society types too. I have a better idea.'