"Listen, Lambros. Karayoryi may have been ambitious, but she was no fool. She had a fat file on him with information that it would have taken us a year to amass. For her to be investigating him to that extent means that she'd discovered something."
"Are you sure she was investigating Pylarinos and not someone else in his company?"
The photographs that Karayoryi had taken came into my mind. The one with the group of men in the nightclub and the other with the two men talking in the cafeteria.
"Let's go for a drive," I said to Zissis.
"Where to?"
"To my office. There's something I want to show you."
"Don't even think about it," he said, as if he'd been bitten by a snake. "I'm not setting foot in security headquarters. I almost lost my pension because for three whole months I was thinking that I had to get a certificate from your people and I kept putting it off. I said I'd help you, but let's not overdo it."
"Let's split the difference," I said, laughing. "We'll go as far as the entrance. You'll wait in the car and I'll nip in to get something that I want you to see."
"If I can stay in the car, okay," he said and immediately got up.
It was after eleven and the traffic on the roads had cleared. From Amerikis Square at the point where Patission Street widens, we weren't held up by any traffic lights, and in twenty minutes we were at the security headquarters. On the way we talked about other things. He asked me about Katerina, how she was doing with her studies. He'd never met her, but he knew she was studying in Thes saloniki. I began to tell him how upset I was that she wouldn't be home for Christmas, and, without wanting to, I came out with all my bitterness about her hunk. Zissis listened to me without interrupting. He realized that I needed to talk and he let me.
He remained in the Mirafiori, while I got the two photographs taken by Karayoryi. I showed him the one from the nightclub first.
"That's Sovatzis," he said as soon as he looked at it, and he pointed to the man with the plastered hair and the constipated smile.
"Who's Sovatzis?"
"The party member that they put in place beside Pylarinos to watch him."
"And the other two?"
"Foreigners, for sure. I don't know this one at all. The other one sitting next to Pylarinos looks kind of familiar, but I can't remember where from" His finger rested not on the pudding-faced one with the fringe, but on the one sitting next to Pylarinos. Suddenly he cried out. "Of course, it's Alois Hacek! One of the top men of the party in Czechoslovakia! You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes. He was the party official responsible for finances and he came to Greece to check up on Pylarinos." I showed him the date, to the bottom right. He seemed surprised. "November 14,1990," he muttered. "The party was already dissolved and he's taking a trip to Greece?"
I took out the other photograph, the one with the two of them talking in the cafeteria. He looked at the date: 11/17/90. He put the photographs side by side. I said nothing. I let him think in his own good time. He shook his head and sighed.
"Do you want to know what happened in Athens on those two dates?" he said. "I'll tell you, and I don't think I'll be far off." He stopped to collect his thoughts and then said: "Toward the end of 'eighty-nine, when the socialist regimes collapsed, the party leaders lost everything. The people were wringing their hands. The high positions were gone, the dachas were gone, the limousines were gone. Everyone was out of work. Except that it wasn't exactly like that. Because these people had had a monopoly on power for more than forty years. They were the only ones who knew anything about ad ministration, the only ones to have any contacts and connections with the rest of the world. And they made use of them. From being party members, they became businessmen. Once they had talked politics; now they talked business. Alois Hacek belongs to that category. Obviously he had the evidence that Pylarinos had been financed by the party in Czechoslovakia. So in November 1990, he came to Athens to find him. `Which would you prefer?' he probably told him. `I give the information I have to the new government to lay claim to your business, or do we become partners?' What would you have done in Pylarinos's shoes? You would have made him a partner rather than risk losing everything."
I turned to the two photographs that were propped against the windscreen. Pylarinos was looking at me with his glass raised. He wasn't drinking to my health, of course, but to the success of his collaboration with Hacek.
"But there's a catch." Zissis's voice brought me back to earth.
"What's that?"
"The other two. I told you that the party mechanism operated on the basis that everyone covered each other. Sovatzis watched Pylarinos, and the other man, the one sitting beside him, watched Hacek. It was these middle members who took the brunt of the state's collapse. No one needed them, and they ended up on the garbage heap. Except that with Sovatzis and the other, things weren't so simple because they knew. What could Pylarinos and Hacek do? They gave them a few crumbs to keep their mouths shut. But the other two weren't content. Their smiles say it all. Their whole working lives they'd done the legwork, and now other people were getting the tasty bits and leaving them with the bones. So they decided to set up their own operation. They met three days later to discuss it. That's what the second photograph is about.
"What kind of operation?"
"How should I know? That's your job to find out."
I looked at the two seated side by side. The one with the plastereddown hair, the other with the fringe, both with the same sour smile. "Two operations. The one operating inside the other," I said to Zissis. "The first one legal, the second illegal but making use of all the mechanisms of the first, along with the security it affords, because who would think of investigating Pylarinos's business for any dirty work?"
"That reporter woman did," Zissis reminded me.
"Karayoryi…"
"Karayoryi wasn't investigating Pylarinos-she was investigating Sovatzis."
I remembered where I'd seen Sovatzis's face. In the newspaper clippings, behind Pylarinos. All the pieces were falling into place. The photographs, in all of which Sovatzis appears, the map, the lists, everything. From the beginning, something just didn't fit with regard to Pylarinos. I thought it highly improbable that a businessman of his stamp would be dealing in dirty money. But what didn't fit in the case of Pylarinos did fit in the case of Sovatzis. I felt a burden removed from me, because Pylarinos was outside it all and everything had thereby become easier.
"Do you happen to know Sovatzis's first name?"
"Demos."
That was the only thing that didn't fit the puzzle: the letters from the unknown N. They couldn't have been from Sovatzis. But who was to say that the letters had to do with Karayoryi's investigation and not some other matter altogether?
"Does the name Eleni Dourou mean anything to you?"
"Dourou… no." He opened the door. "Anyway, I've clued you in and now I'm going to get some sleep," he said, pleased with himself.
"I'll take you."
"No need for you to go out of your way. I'll get a taxi."
"Why pay for a taxi? Come on, I'll drop you off."
"Do you know how many times I've done it on foot because I was broke?" he said. "At least I have the money to pay now."
As he was about to get out, I reached over and took hold of his arm. "Why do you help me, Lambros?" I asked him.
What was I expecting him to say? That he did it out of friendship? Out of love? Out of gratitude?
"When you don't have anything left to believe in, you believe in the police," he said with a smile filled with bitterness. "You're as low as it gets. I got that low and we found ourselves together. That's all."
He started to get out, then he changed his mind. "I also do it because you're all right," he said.
"What have I done to be all right?" My mind immediately went to Bouboulinas Street.
"I heard on the radio about that Kolakoglou. You did more than all right."