‘Me, why?’
‘Because all the sales and purchases contracts for Balkan Prospect are drawn up by you. We know that from our investigations.’
I had him with his back to the wall and all he could do was jump to his feet and start shouting. ‘This is nothing but a damnable plot! Accusations are being made against the executives of a business firm, accusations are being made against a public notary company that has a history going back to 1930, that was founded by my father, just because some lousy Russo-Pontian crook is resorting to blackmail to get back money!’
‘No one is being accused of anything yet,’ I replied calmly. ‘As I told you, this is an unofficial investigation and our aim is to close the case quietly. There’s a very simple way for doing that. Give me the particulars of the seller and provided that he confirms that he did, in fact, receive the forty-five thousand euros, the case will be closed immediately.’
He became more and more distraught and hostile. ‘That, unfortunately, is something I am unable to do.’
‘Why?’
‘Because by doing so I would be revealing an illegal transaction and I would be compromising both the seller and the real-estate agency.’
‘I told you, I’m not a tax inspector.’
‘Agreed. And that may be enough for me, but it won’t be enough for the other two parties.’
‘I can get the particulars from the land registry.’
He hesitated a moment and then said with resolve: ‘That’s another matter that doesn’t concern me. I’m not interested in where you get the particulars, provided it’s not from me.’ His refusal confirmed my suspicions, but I kept this to myself. ‘In the past, the police would give those good-for-nothings a pasting and threaten them that if they persisted it would be the worse for them,’ he said almost complainingly as he gave me his hand.
He knew that only too well, coming as he did from a historic company. I let it go by, so he could make of it what he wanted.
I stopped at the first cardphone I came across and phoned home. I told Adriani to put Koula on the line.
‘I want you to go straightaway to the land registry office and find the Russo-Pontian’s file,’ I told her. ‘I want the particulars of the seller. It’s urgent and I don’t want any delay because of cookery lessons.’
She was silent for a moment and than answered gravely: ‘I’m on my way.’
I found her very likeable, but if I left her in Adriani’s hands, I ran the risk of her getting the better of me.
22
How quickly can a file disappear from the land registry? It depends on what clout the person who wants it to disappear has. And Balkan Prospect had, so it seemed, plenty of clout. When Koula arrived at the land registry, the file didn’t exist. It had been mislaid somewhere and they couldn’t find it so she should leave a phone number for them to contact her or pass by again in a few days’ time.
In the end, her cookery lessons cost her dearly, because she was forced to spend a whole afternoon in Larymnis Street in order to find the seller’s particulars. Just as she had started to get frustrated, she came across an old woman who had paid the bills for the flat before it was sold and she found out that the former owner was an Eirene Leventoyanni, who lived in Polydrosso.
Myself, I spent a whole evening listening to eulogies. Not to the Virgin, but to Stefanakos. And not in church, but on the TV. But apart from the eulogies, it had further interest. The programme was on Sotiropoulos’s channel, not the one on which the suicides had taken place. And it was presented by Sotiropoulos himself. His guests began with a round of adulation. The Minister and other politicians spoke of Stefanakos’s ethos and character, said what an experienced parliamentarian he had been and how Parliament would be the poorer without him. The two left-wing politicians took a stroll down memory lane, recalling the common struggles during the Junta, the student rising in the Polytechnic School and the torture that Stefanakos had been subjected to in the cells of the Military Police. But perhaps the star attraction was a Balkan minister, who appeared on satellite link-up, and whose mouth dripped honey about Stefanakos: he was the one politician who worked behind the scenes, and on a daily basis, for friendship and cooperation between the Balkan countries; he was a true friend who had helped in the economic revival of his country after the fall of socialism, acting as a bridge between his country, the Greek government and Brussels. He was a politician whose loss the entire Balkans would grieve.
Sotiropoulos allowed them to speak virtually without interruption and then, once they had vented their feelings, he dropped his first innuendo. How close had Stefanakos been with Favieros? I took my hat off to him and thought what a fool I was. It was the very first question I should have asked. The leftists were categoricaclass="underline" certainly they knew each other from their student years as they moved in the same circles. The other politicians minced their words. Yes the two men had known each other from the time of the Junta, but they were not sure whether they still saw each other. Besides, they were both involved in numerous activities and it was doubtful whether they kept in contact.
Just as they were trying to come to some conclusion as to whether they were still in contact, Sotiropoulos dropped his second innuendo: was it just coincidence that the two of them had committed suicide in the same way? And if it wasn’t, then what might be behind this double suicide?
It was at such moments that I realised just how effective Sotiropoulos’s aggressiveness could be, even though it got on my nerves. The others were completely nonplussed and began to stammer, trying to find some convincing answer, but Sotiropoulos didn’t let up. He asked them if they thought that there really was some scandal behind the suicides, as the newspapers were claiming. He had managed to break their unanimity and get them bickering among themselves. The Minister together with the leftists rejected the claim with abhorrence. The former because he would put the government in a difficult position if he were to answer ‘yes’, and the latter because they would be compromising their two former comrades if they were to accept some such thing. The only ones not to exclude the possibility were the members of the opposition. The Minister put forward the same theory as Petroulakis: that this was the work of the extreme right wing, just as they themselves had admitted. At that point, I started to suspect that this bullshit was slowly becoming the government line. I was expecting everyone to break into laughter, but, as usual, I was mistaken. The leftists fervently supported the same view. Only the opposition politicians were bold enough to say that the theory was a bit far-fetched, but they were attacked by the Minister, who accused them of vote-mongering from the extreme right and the eulogies very nearly turned to curses.
As I was listening to all this, I remembered Zissis. Zissis was an old leftist whom I’d met when he was a long-standing prisoner and I was a rookie copper, who had been sent for on-the-job training to the torture cells in Bouboulinas Street. Afterwards, I lost track of him and forgot about him until I bumped into him one day in the corridors of Security Headquarters. He had gone to get a certificate that would entitle him to the pension given to members of the resistance. They were messing him about and I helped him to get the piece of paper he needed. Since then we had kept in touch on and off and on a strictly personal basis. I hadn’t even told Adriani about it, perhaps because I was ashamed to admit that I had dealings with a commie. I was fairly sure that Zissis hadn’t admitted it to anyone either, perhaps because he was even more ashamed to say that he had dealings with a copper. So, our mutual shame led to mutual respect, even though it wasn’t something we ever admitted to each other.