He said all this as he was arranging things in the fridge. Arranging not a lot, given that it was as empty as a bachelor pad. A whole salami, a cut of ham, half a slab of Gruyere, and some round boxes of Ayeladitsa cream cheese. And on the wall, where a bachelor would have stacked his books, he'd stacked dozens of jars of mixed pickles.
"Not that it's of any importance, it might just be a coincidence," he went on, "but I told you anyway because I don't like people leaving my shop with empty hands."
"Do you eat so many pickles around here?"
"No, I got them at cost price. But no one buys them."
"So why bother with them if no one wants them?"
"If I didn't make that kind of mistake, I wouldn't be a grocer in Rendi, I'd have my own supermarket," he said, leaving me with nothing to say.
The last house on the right side of the street, the one at an angle to the Albanians' house, had a green door and a square window, a small one, only just big enough for a head to poke through and gaze up and down the street. But on the inside, it was covered with white linen curtains, embroidered with tiny bonbons. They were parted in the middle to form two curves and tied back at the bottom.
"Can I offer you some of my orange preserves?" said the old woman. She was about eighty, short and bony. She dragged her feet as she walked, as if her skin were stuck to her bones and her feet to the floor. She was wearing a dressing gown with clovers embroidered on it, and her face was wizened, like crumpled paper that you open out again, because you've noted something on it.
"No, thank you. I won't be staying long," I said, to keep it short.
"Do try a spoonful. It's homemade," the old women insisted. I humored her, though I hate preserves, and I swilled it down with water so it wouldn't stick in my throat and also to wash the taste from my mouth.
"My daughter sends it to me from Kalamata. Bless her. And she sends me oil and olives, too, every year. Last New Year's, she bought me a television."
And she pointed to a seventeen-inch television on a small table. There was a cloth covering on the table, also white, but embroidered with little flowers. Whenever I see embroidery like that, I think of my mother, who never left any surface in the house uncovered and was always warning my father and me not to dirty them. He with his cigarette ash, me with my dirty hands.
"But she doesn't want me living with her," the old woman said, a note of grievance in her voice. "Not her, that is, but her husband. He won't hear of it; doesn't want his mother-in-law getting under his feet. When you're a young woman, it's your mother-in-law who doesn't want you; when you're old, it's your son-in-law. The best age is between forty and fifty. It's the age when they want you, but you don't want them."
"The Albanians, can you tell me anything about them, Dimitra?" I hastened to cut her off before she began on her second cousins.
"What can I say, Inspector? Quiet people, without a hope in the world. Though the way things are today, it's only the frightened ones we call quiet."
"And which were they, quiet or frightened?"
She looked at me and smiled. As her mouth twitched, all her wrinkles concentrated in her cheeks like pine needles. "What would you say about me?" she asked me. "Quiet or frightened?"
"Quiet."
"That's how I might seem, but I'm not." She sat in her chair and looked me in the eye. "You see the phone?" She pointed to the telephone beside the television. "They put it in for me last year. Till last year, I was all alone and without a phone. If I'd died, the neighbors would only have found out from the stench. By rights, what I should do is give my daughter a talking-to for living in the lap of luxury and leaving me in this hovel. I don't mean that she should have me live with her, since she can't, but they sent my granddaughter to university here in Athens and bought her a two-room flat in Pangrati. Would it have killed them to buy a bigger one so I could have moved in with her? I should tell my daughter all that to her face, but I cross myself and keep quiet. And do you know why? Because I'm afraid of angering her in case she stops sending the oil, the olives, and the eighty thousand she sends me-every month she says, but it's more like every two. You see me quiet because I'm afraid. But inside, I'm fuming."
"Are you saying that they seemed quiet, but that they might have been afraid?"
"I don't know. You saw them coming and going, and it made you wonder."
"Why did it make you wonder?"
"Because they'd leave as if someone was after them, and they'd come back like thieves in the night. It was always late at night. You'd wake up in the morning and they'd be here. One evening, I'd switched off the television, and I was sitting at the window. Me, I sit in front of the television from three in the afternoon, and I watch everything. It's only when they start with politics and love stories that I get bored and switch it off. When it's politics, because I don't understand a word they're saying. And when it's love stories, all the lies get on my nerves. I watch them pining, suffering, arguing, and when I grow tired of swearing at them, I switch it off. I lived forty years with my husband. We argued about food, about money, about our daughter, but never about love. You don't think that my daughter married this fellow in Kalamata out of love, do you? She wanted a good life for herself, and he wanted to get her into bed. But the little vixen wouldn't even let him hold her hand. He wouldn't give up, and so, to get her into bed in the end, he married her."
"And what's that got to do with the Albanians?"
"Don't be in so much of a hurry," she said. "Everything is connected, because if that love story hadn't been on that night, I wouldn't have been sitting at the window and I wouldn't have seen them coming in that limousine."
"What limo?" I said, remembering what the grocer had told me about the van parked outside.
"I call it a limousine because I don't know a thing about cars. Any how, it was a huge car with a hard top, must have held a good ten people. He got out with the girl. They hurried into the house, and the vehicle drove straight off. Before long, the light from the gas burner was on-they didn't have electricity. It all took less than a minute or so. They didn't have any bags with them or anything. The girl had a bundle with her, that was all." She looked at me, and her smile once again produced the pine needles on her cheeks.
I thought about the dried shit in the lavatory and the five hundred thousand in the cistern, the food in the diaper box, and the van that brought them there in the night. And if that wasn't enough, there was the Albanian murderer, about to be sent for the official hearing. How was anyone to find the thread that linked all this nonsense together?
I left the old woman's house and cursed those young policemen who make such a mess of things by trying to wrap it all up with a few quick questions. If, when we'd carried out our first investigations, someone had been patient enough to sit down with this old woman and listen to her grievances, we'd have known all this before we'd even taken the corpses to the mortuary. You could say about us, it seems, what homosexuals say about their own kind: It's one thing to be gay and another to be a pansy. Similarly, it's one thing to wear the uniform and another thing to be a policeman.
CHAPTER 7
"Out with it, you louse-ridden bum, or I'll make mincemeat of you and send you back to Korytsa so your own kind can have something to eat!" The Albanian was shaking because exactly what he had most feared had happened to him. He'd confessed to find a bit of peace, and now we were turning the screws.
"Where did those good-for-nothings get hold of the five hundred thousand? Out with it!"
"I not know… not know anything," he said, looking up fearfully at Thanassis, who was standing over him.
Thanassis grabbed him by the anorak and lifted him off his feet. The Albanian's legs dangled in the air. Thanassis swung around and pinned him against the wall. He held him there, a good foot off the floor.