The son decided to break into the conversation. "I don't understand, Inspector. It can't be against the law for my father to go on a trip?"
I picked up the photocopy of his bank statement and handed it to him. "Can you tell me where all these deposits of 200,000 and 300,000 came from?"
I don't know whether he heard me because he was poring over the statement. "Where did you get this?" he asked after a while, as if not believing that it was his.
"Don't worry about that. We looked into your account quite legally, with permission from the public prosecutor. I want you to tell me about the amounts."
He turned and looked at his mother, but she was busy admiring her rings. He saw that he wasn't going to get any help from there and so was forced to answer himself. "The 250,000 is my salary. The rest is-extra."
"Extra?"
"Jobs I do on the side."
I picked up Mrs. Hourdakis's statement and handed it to her. "And where are these amounts from? From a fashion house?"
"My mother gives them to me," she answered immediately. "She lives with us and pays her share of the housekeeping."
"Your mother also has deposits of 200,000 and 300,000 in her account, but I don't see any regular withdrawals or transfers to your account."
As soon as they saw that I also had the statement belonging to Hourdakis's mother-in-law, they didn't know what to say and clammed up. I started to get tougher with them. "Take a look at your husband's statement. Put it beside the others!" I said to Mrs. Hourdakis. "The amounts went into the four accounts with only a few days' difference. If you add them up, they come to a million drachmas each time. How did your husband, a customs officer on a reduced pension, earn all that money? I'm waiting!"
"We don't live on his pension alone. Lefteris does other jobs, too," she mumbled.
"And does he get so much from all those jobs that you're able to put millions in the bank and have a huge house in Milessi? Tell me the truth or I'll have the whole lot of you locked up!" I turned back to the son. "You'll be discredited and you'll lose your job. Your parents will lose their house and you will all, most certainly, end up in prison!"
At which, the son turned to his mother. "I told him so!" he screamed. "I told him I didn't want him putting money in my account, but he's stubborn, he never listens to anyone!"
"Quiet," his mother whispered, terrified.
But the son wasn't willing to sacrifice his life and his career for his father's sake. He preferred to talk and come clean. "I don't know where my father got the money from, inspector. All he told me was that he wanted to put some amounts in my account and that I could give it back to him bit by bit. You can see that I withdrew small amounts of fifty thousand regularly. That's the money I paid back. He did the same with my mother and grandmother."
I took back the statements and examined them. That much was true. After two or three months, they all showed withdrawals of sums of fifty thousand or sixty thousand.
"And you never thought to ask your father where all this money was coming from?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"I was afraid to ask," he said.
I couldn't hold them with no more than the evidence I had. I told the woman to tell her husband that I wanted to see him in Athens immediately and I let them go.
"Take out an arrest warrant for Hourdakis," I said to Sotiris, when we were alone. He nodded and made for the door. "Didn't you catch on to the trick with the accounts?" I asked him just as he was going through the door.
"No, I didn't think to compare them."
I called down to the cells and told them to bring Dourou to me. She was in a state of some disarray. Her dress was wrinkled, her hair out of place, and she seemed to have had a bad night. Only her expression hadn't changed. It was calm and provocative.
"I asked to see you to inform you," I said, "that you had visitors at the nursery."
A ripple of concern clouded her expression, but she kept her eyes fixed steadily on me and asked skeptically, "What visitors?"
"A couple. We told them you weren't in, and they showed great interest in one of the children in the playpen. They picked him up, made a fuss of him, and played with him."
She tried to read some kind of guidance in my face, to see where I was leading, but I remained expressionless. In the end, she decided to smile. "They must have been his parents," she said. "Which is what I've been telling you. They must have come to see him."
"They must have been Albanians who'd studied in Oxford. From what I was told, you could have mistaken them for English."
"They were Albanians," she insisted. "Because your people only know pidgin English, they took them for English. Simple as that."
She didn't know that she'd insulted me personally with what she'd said. "My dear Eleni," I said, insulting her in my turn, "the puppet show is over. Why don't you tell us the truth, so we can start getting somewhere? As long as you tell us nothing, we'll keep looking, and in the end, we'll hang a lot more on you."
"They were Albanians and they were the child's parents. You probably scared them and they took off. Do you understand what you're doing to me? You're ruining my business!"
Obviously it had been arranged that the couple should talk only to her and she knew they wouldn't come back. That's why she was so cocksure.
"Did you speak to your lawyer?"
"Yes.
"Didn't he tell you that it was in your own best interests to tell us the truth?"
"The truth is what I keep telling you. I told the same thing to him."
"And what did you have to tell him about your friend Gustav Krenek?"
"He's not my friend. He's a friend of my brother's. I saw him once, that's all. When he was in Athens."
Her confidence was back. I stood up.
"Do you want me to send someone to bring you a change of clothes?"
"Why would I want that?" she asked, alarmed.
"Because I can see you being in here a long time," I said and walked out.
I could have rounded up all the foreign couples from the hotels and had them brought in for questioning, but I knew that Ghikas wouldn't give his approval. He'd only tell me that we were searching in the dark without any concrete evidence. We'd have all the foreign embassies on our backs and do damage to our tourism.
CHAPTER 38
We were both sitting facing Ghikas's desk. Pylarinos was poring over Karayoryi's two lists: the one with the patients wanting transplants and the other with the refrigerator trucks and the arrivals. He was holding them side by side even though there was no connection between them and was examining them. His hair was white and thinning; he was wearing a striped suit, light gray shirt, and a dark tie. I was sitting beside him with Karayoryi's file open on my lap and observing his reaction.
Ghikas had arranged the meeting the previous day. He'd phoned me at home at nine-thirty, while I was trying to kill time watching a comedy on TV, one of those that gets you laughing for a week. I usually give them a wide berth, but it was the first night that I'd been alone in the house. It was one thing to have quarreled with your wife and not be speaking, and another to be all alone. The former was a game, a counter-lull, "calm, tranquility, serenity," according to Dimitrakos. The latter was a killer, particularly when you've been married for twenty years and you have no life of your own. Not to mention that I'd been thinking how Adriani would be chatting away with Katerina, which had plunged me even deeper into despair. Such despair that I hadn't even felt like opening a dictionary. I'd sat there watching the box. Half of the female prosecutor, who was now all lovey-dovey with her husband, the businessman. Mercifully, I missed the second half because Adriani and Katerina had phoned. Then I watched the nine o'clock news with the rerun of the report concerning Dourou's arrest and, further down, the news that Hourdakis was wanted by the police. And finally, I'd watched the comedy. It was toward the end of this program that Ghikas had phoned to tell me that the meeting with Pylarinos was at eleven the next morning.