Anna had reached the door when it opened and in walked Thanassis.
"I've brought you the report," he said.
His gaze fell upon Anna and he froze. He kept staring at her and couldn't take his eyes off her. She gave him a casual glance, said "Bye" to me, and went out.
"Karayoryi's niece," I said, once he'd closed the door, to help him recover from his shock.
"Her niece?"
"Yes. Her name's Anna Antonakaki and she's the daughter of Karayoryi's sister. Did you see the resemblance?"
It was as if he hadn't heard me. His eyes were still on the door. Eventually, he came over and handed me the report.
"Incredible," he mumbled.
He was still saying "incredible" as he went out of the office. The same thing had happened to me when I'd first set eyes on her.
CHAPTER 25
The file was tied with a double knot on three sides. Logic dictated that I put it to one side and get on with my report. If I sent it to Ghikas, together with Thanassis's report on Kolakoglou and Karayoryi's file, I'd show him that I hadn't been concentrating on Petratos in particular but had been carrying out three simultaneous investigations. The minister and Ghikas would have to eat their words. That's what logic dictated, but my instinct told me to let logic go to hell and to open the file.
I pulled it to me and began to unfasten the knots. On top was a Kodak envelope containing negatives. I held them to the light. They were images of people and various vehicles: buses and cabs, but I couldn't make out any details. Beneath it was a newspaper cutting with a photograph of Pylarinos. I suddenly felt proud of my instinct, which had guided me correctly once again. Christos Pylarinos was one of those businessmen who had sprung up from nowhere in the last decade. An old leftist, he had fought with Markos in the resistance and, following the defeat, had ended up in an Eastern European country. In '76, he had sent his application from Prague to be repatriated. He had turned up in Athens one fine morning and had bought a tourist agency that was on the brink of going bust. Within ten years, he'd opened branches of Prespes Travel throughout Europe, with coaches on regular routes abroad. And he hadn't stopped there. He'd set up Transpilar, an overseas freight company, with a whole fleet of refrigeration trucks. Now he'd become the leading name in tourism and in overland transport.
There were other clippings from the daily press and from financial magazines. The majority of them related to the successes of the "Py larinos Group," as if it were a soccer team that had won the championship.
Beneath the clippings was a map of the world, taken from a school atlas. Someone, using a red felt-tip pen, had marked almost all the main cities of the Balkans and Central Europe, as well as those of America and Canada. These had been connected using different colors. For example, seven green arrows began from Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, and Toronto and ended in Athens. Three yellow arrows linked Tirane with Prague, Sofia with Warsaw, and Bucharest with Budapest. A blue arrow linked Tirane with Athens.
I racked my brain trying to understand why Karayoryi had marked the map. Okay, the different colors referred to different activities; that was easy. The question was why she'd been gathering all that information about Pylarinos. What was she doing? Investigating him? Or was there something else involved? I remembered what Sperantzas had told me: that Karayoryi had friends in high places. She might have been having an affair with Pylarinos, or been in business with him, or maybe she'd had something on him and was blackmailing him. If I'd had her Filofax, I might have found some clue. First of all from her telephone numbers. She must have had the telephone numbers of Pylarinos's businesses, surely. But which number? The main switchboard? Or the number of one of the executives? Or Pylarinos's personal number? From that I would have been able to draw some conclusions.
My hopes that I'd find some paper or some notes of Karayoryi's that would enlighten me had begun to fade when I found a report sheet, like those I used, folded in two. I opened it and found a handwritten list:
It made no sense to me. The only things that matched somewhat were the dates: 6/20-6/22, 8/25-8/30/… The longest gap between two dates in the same line was five days. But for the rest, what connection was there between Tirane and London, Amsterdam, New York, and so on? What was going on? Surely tourists weren't coming from Tirane by refrigerator truck and continuing on an excursion or charter to Frankfurt or London? Or perhaps we were talking about goods and not tourists? Bullshit! As if the Albanians would have that kind of network for exporting goods! And even in the unlikely case that it were true, then the list should have recorded arrivals and departures and not two arrivals at the same time. Whatever it was that the refrigerators were carrying, it was intended for those arriving from Frankfurt, London, and the other cities-at least, that's what the dates indicated. That much was clear, except that the list didn't mention what was being carried.
I turned the report sheet over and found two more lists, which confused things even more.
The lists were undoubtedly connected, at least with regard to the dates. On 6/25/91 a coach left Tirane for Prague and on 6/30/91 someone by the name of Yannis Emiroglou also left for Prague. On 10/30 another train left from Bucharest for Budapest and on 11/5 Alexandros Fotiou also left for Budapest by air. More enlightening, however, were the trains that left from Sofia for Warsaw on 8/16/91 and on 6/12/92, together with the one that left from Tirane for Prague on 12/5/92. It seemed that Karayoryi hadn't been able to link these and had put question marks by them. But even so, I couldn't understand who the Greeks traveling to Prague, Warsaw, and Budapest were going to meet. And why didn't those who left Tirane, Sofia, or Bucharest come to Athens instead of making our people travel thousands of kilometers to meet them?
It was going to take a lot of digging before I'd be able to make any sense of it. Whatever the secret behind it all was, Karayoryi had taken it with her to the grave. What was clear to me was that if the murders were connected with the contents of the file, then the murderer had killed Karayoryi to stop her digging and had killed Kostarakou to get the file from her. But if he'd wanted the file so badly, then why hadn't he searched Karayoryi's house too? One possibility was that he didn't have enough time. Another was that it was only later that he'd found out that the file contained incriminating evidence and decided that he had to get hold of it.
I was itching to give orders to Sotiris to begin investigating, but I restrained myself. The best thing would be if I handed the file over to Ghikas. Let him make the decision. Anyway, I ought to be pleased that things had now taken a different turn and it seemed as if I would come out of it unscathed.
I had almost got to the end when I stumbled across another file; a thin one this time and blue, like the ones lawyers use. As soon as I opened it, my hand remained in midair holding the edge of it, while, thunderstruck, I stared at its contents. In it were photocopies of police reports, some of them ours and some from other stations that had come to us. The first concerned the disappearance of two babies from a maternity clinic in 1990. A nurse had been accused at the time, but nothing had been proved against her and the case had been put on file. The second referred to the case of illegal Bulgarian immigrants, who had attempted to cross the borders in a truck going to Thessaloniki in 1991, but they'd been caught and sent back. Among them were four mothers with their babies. This point had been underlined in red, obviously by Karayoryi. There were six more reports on file, all referring to the disappearance or selling of children. The most recent of them was my own report about the Albanian couple and the five hundred thousand that had been found in their cistern. This too was underlined in red.