He would have, too, since he always honored his sources. Only events didn’t unfold as he expected them to. Georgiou’s mentor was a man by the name of Vatidis, whose connections and influence were universally recognized, who held entire administrations in the palm of his hand. When Vatidis found out about his young protégé’s new passion and, more importantly, about the material he had in his possession, he made it clear that resolving that case wasn’t among the newspaper’s immediate priorities, much less those of the country. Georgiou got the message loud and clear.
A year later, Georgiou was promoted to editor. He deserved it, of course. He worked like a dog, anyone with eyes in his head could see that. What they didn’t see were the boxes of suppressed evidence in his basement. Even he forgot, eventually — after all, he’d made his choice. Though when Minas took on the project, for a moment his father felt tempted.
Just for a moment, and then it passed.
In the amphitheater that day, he listened as his son ran through the possible scenarios, some crazy, some unsupported, others with evidence to back them up, and still others that were fairly obvious. Two decades earlier he had known them all, down to the smallest details. In the silence Soukiouroglou imposed during the ritual of the presentation, Tasos watched Minas anxiously. His boy had grown up.
When the applause died down, he ran down the stairs two at a time, grabbed his son by the shoulders and shook him.
— Good job, kid.
That’s all he could say. Then he kissed him on both cheeks.
Teta didn’t share her husband’s excitement or the emotions of his response. But then she had never bowed before necessity, and had no boxes hidden in the storage space.
DINOPOULOS
Grandpa Dinopoulos’s shoes were pinching him. He’d asked Elena to leave the laces undone, but she thought that unbefitting a formal appearance. And now his bunions were paying the price. At least the pain made him aware of his feet — that was something, he comforted himself. Besides, his whole getup made him uncomfortable, from head to toe: his wool suit tickled him, and the way it rubbed against his thighs was a torment.
Evthalia had complimented him on his appearance, though: Look at you, decked out like a groom, she said. He could detect no accusation in the phrase, just a gentle jab at ancient history. That’s how Evthalia was. She’d make a mountain out of a molehill but swallow a skyscraper without complaint.
Like the time she stopped him in the street to congratulate him on his marriage. He’d started to cross over to the other sidewalk, he knew he hadn’t been straight with her, even if he never made any promises.
But there she suddenly stood before him. May you live long together, she said, swinging her ponytail. You suit one another, she hastened to add, which bothered him, because he knew she believed it. And may you have wonderful children, she said, and Dinopoulos reddened, thinking of the activity that would inevitably precede a child — an activity he would gladly have undertaken with Evthalia.
All that seemed so close at hand, even if whole decades had passed since that day. He could feel Evthalia’s breath on his shoulder. Today, in the discomfort of his tight shoes and itchy wool, that breath was a comfort to him.
EVELINA
Evelina held her breath. It was an exercise she’d learned from her mother’s yoga book. She concentrated all her energy on her belly-button, which wasn’t easy, dammit. That asshole Soukiouroglou had found a fine time to assert his authority. Minas stood there, limbs dangling awkwardly, staring at the teacher. He’d gone into battle without so much as a knife, with just his bare hands.
Minas was handsome, tall and lanky, slightly hunched as if he were embarrassed by his height. She’d fallen in and out of love with him twice during grade school, once in first grade and again in fifth, both times in spring, when her mind wandered to such things. Then it passed, thank goodness. That’s how she was, her crushes never lasted long, even if her mother praised her emotional constancy.
She could have kicked Soukiouroglou. The only thing she and that idiot Spiros had in common was their disgust — fine, call it skepticism — for the teacher.
Soukiouroglou played this game with his voice, like a snake charmer. He would drag out sentences, let his voice drop, and then it would suddenly explode. His voice was his toolbox, his winch and his blade, which carved out the emotions of adolescents, and ruled over parents as well. He chose his sentences with the care of an entomologist; he knew how to use pauses and silences to best effect. His rhetorical abilities were the school’s invisible monument: quotes from his lectures got passed down from generation to generation.
When you spend hours every day with a teacher, you stop speaking like a normal person and end up sounding like him. It sounds like an exaggeration, but it isn’t. Sooner or later Souk pulled them all into his orbit; even the ones who never did their homework were transformed into little Soukiouroglous.
Evelina watched as Minas tried to hold on to his own personality, to keep beating his own drum, to keep his out of the teacher’s force field. She liked how stubborn he was. He dug his own grave with dignity. He never took a step backwards.
She’d met many ambitious law students, but none was as bright as Minas. They could memorize a legal code, sure, but there was no ingenuity in their thinking. They spoke in paragraphs; they were predictable to the point of despair.
Soukiouroglou’s voice thundered in the audience. Up on stage, the student tugged at his already shapeless shirt and stood his ground.
TETA
Teta had no idea what made things snap back into place. Someone must have done something, it couldn’t have just happened on its own. She lit a candle of thanks to the Virgin, great is her grace, as Evthalia taught her to. Her son handed his Xbox over to his grandmother — not to his mother, that would have been going too far — and said he was going to attempt the experience of the exams. And that was that. He set himself to studying, according to a schedule of his own devising. He calculated the days, pages, and hours of work that would be required, divided it all up and taped the resulting schedule over his bed, in place of Gris’ photograph, which he took down but didn’t throw away. Now he used it as a bookmark.
Teta didn’t comment on the new state of affairs, she was afraid of destroying the delicate balance. Minas lived like a monk in his room. He subsisted on wafer cookies and grilled cheese; she would find them half-eaten under his bed, among dirty socks and chewed-on pencils.
Evthalia took charge of quizzing him. Time is of the essence, she told her daughter, and she was right. Sending him to cram school would just waste time on the back-and-forth, and he had his grandmother, he didn’t need the faint lights of some recent university graduate to show him the way. Eventually Minas more or less moved into his grandmother’s house, and the two of them celebrated with a meal of roast pork and fried potatoes, thin and crunchy, the way he liked. While he was setting the table, Minas recited his history book back to his grandmother, from from page 45 to page 67, as she followed with one finger on the line of text, mixing the salad with her other hand.