Kouros nodded. “Could be that you’re right.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“What does that mean?”
“Because the dying will end with him. I’m really not all that different from my father. I see no need for vendetta once the problem is solved. If he killed my father and did it alone it will end with him. His family is spared.” He smiled. “Including his young lady.”
“Stella?”
“Who else? Hope she decides to hang around and run the taverna. She’ll draw a hell of a lot more business than that nasty-minded motherfucker of a boyfriend ever did. She might even get you back here to visit more often.” Mangas smacked Kouros on the arm.
Kouros reached for his phone. “I’ve got to get police out to where your friends found Babis’ body.”
Mangas smiled. “Don’t worry. That’s who you were talking to, our local chief of police.”
“Fuck,” said Kouros.
This time Mangas reached over and patted Kouros on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, cuz. You’ll see. He did it to himself.”
Don’t we all, thought Kouros.
***
Kouros found Babis’ car parked along a ridge overlooking the sea a hundred yards from the remains of a Spartan temple to the god Poseidon, and a mile away from the lighthouse marking the literal end of mainland Europe. A police van sat behind Babis’ car. A small crowd had gathered but the local police kept them away from the immediate vicinity of the car. Obviously, the police chief took Mangas’ instructions seriously. Kouros’ check of the car showed no signs of a struggle or anything suspicious.
“Are you ready?” said Mangas.
“For what?”
Mangas nodded. “The cave’s that way.” He pointed at a sign and the bay beyond the temple.
Kouros followed his cousin down a narrow rocky path through prickly brush to a small cove, across a beach, and up onto a similar path leading south. Halfway to the entrance to Hades they saw two cops and two men with a stretcher on rocks down by the sea.
They left the path and began making their way down to the others.
“Someday, I want you to tell me how you figured out it wasn’t an accident, and that Babis killed my father.”
“I never said anything like that.”
Mangas waved his right hand in the air. “Yeah, yeah, I know. I just want to know how you figured it all out…as a matter of professional curiosity.”
“Professional curiosity?”
“Yeah, I don’t ever want to make the same mistakes that dead dumb bastard Babis did.” Mangas laughed.
Kouros shook his head. “Let’s talk about something else.”
“His girlfriend, Stella?”
“Something else.”
“Great ass.”
“Like I said, something else.”
Mangas laughed again. “Well, cousin, here we are.”
Kouros stared for several minutes at the body floating facedown in the water. Its hands and feet were free. On the shore he saw nothing but gear of the sort you’d expect to find with someone fishing from land. Kouros used his camera to photograph the body and every inch of the scene he could reach within a thirty-yard radius of the body. Fish had started nibbling at the corpse. No way they could leave the body in the sea until the coroner got there in the morning. He called Andreas who suggested they take the body to the coroner’s office in Sparta, about a two-hour drive away.
It took a bit of acrobatics and the strength of three men to pull the boulder, rope, and body out of the sea and onto the stretcher in the same configuration as they’d gone in, and all six men shared turns lugging the stretcher back to the police van. The answers to who, how, when, where, and why about his uncle’s murder might lay with that body, and Kouros wasn’t about to let it out of his sight. After arranging for his cousin to get his mother back to Athens, and for a uniformed cop to follow in his car, Kouros jumped in the van taking Babis’ body to Sparta.
If this were truly the suicide it appeared to be, and his cousin meant what he’d said, the risk of vendetta ended with Babis’ death and there would be no war in the Mani.
That was the good news.
Actually, as Kouros saw it there really wasn’t any bad news, just disappointment on his part that he never had the chance to ask Babis one question: Why did you send my uncle such a weird death threat?
Chapter Fourteen
Andreas usually got to work each morning by eight, a bit before Maggie and way before Kouros. Today he found company sound asleep on his office couch. He slammed the door shut. “Rise and shine.”
Kouros shifted slightly on the couch. “Humans aren’t meant to be up this early.”
“Maybe, but you don’t fit the profile. You look like shit.”
“Nice to see you too, Chief.”
Andreas sat behind his desk, picked up the phone and dialed. “Morning, it’s Kaldis….Yes, the usual, but double the order, I’ve got company.” He hung up.
“What’s for breakfast?”
“Enough coffee to make you bear a closer resemblance to those ‘humans’ you’re rambling about.”
Kouros swung his legs off the couch, sat up, and stretched out his arms. “By the time I got back to Athens from Sparta it was almost sunrise and I figured if I went home I might oversleep.”
Andreas nodded. “And being the dedicated public servant that you are you decided to crash on my couch.”
Kouros nodded. “Precisely.”
“In other words, no clean laundry at home.”
Kouros yawned and waved an open palm in Andreas’ direction.
“You did some good work, Detective. Your family should be proud.”
“Thanks, Chief. My cousin Mangas actually sounded relieved when I told him the coroner concluded there was no question Babis had killed himself. He said it would make it easier to convince his sister.”
“What’s there to convince? The local cops found candle wax in the kitchen and a vial of the poison that killed your uncle hidden in the storeroom. Open and shut that he did it.”
Kouros nodded. “I know. But Mani women with their instincts can be quite difficult to convince with just facts. Especially my cousin Calliope.”
“Trust me. It’s not just Mani women.”
Kouros smiled. “And she doesn’t even know about the death threat on the back of my uncle’s newspaper. I still can’t figure out why Babis wrote something like that if he was pissed off at my uncle for screwing his girlfriend.”
“Yeah, it bothered me, too. Remind me what the note said.”
“‘Your father took his sister’s and her lover’s lives to preserve our ways. We shall take yours to save our Mani. You have one week to change your plans or die.’”
“Sounds like the sort of radical bullshit notes we get from Molotov cocktail-tossing anarchists around Parliament. I didn’t know they were active in the Mani. Thought that was royalist country.”
“Maybe Babis did it to give himself a cover story if after the murder it came out that my uncle had been sleeping with Stella. Without that note and the follow up SMS, he’d be a prime suspect.”
“Too bad for Babis your uncle kept the note and SMS to himself.”
“And I’m not about to tell anybody about them now.”
“It all fits. With you breathing down Babis’ neck and the vendetta story nowhere to be found, he checked out rather than risk your cousins doing it for him.”
“But what still doesn’t fit is that Babis needed my uncle’s protection from the crew he’d crossed up in Pirgos. So why would he kill him and risk losing that protection?”
Andreas shrugged. “Maybe he thought they’d given up on going after him or jealousy overran good judgment. Happens all the time, especially where a woman’s involved.”
Kouros nodded. “It just bothers me.”
“Would an all-out war in the Mani bother you less? Everyone’s satisfied we have the killer. Let’s leave it at that.”
Kouros stared at Andreas. “This doesn’t sound like you.”
“Of course it does. You’re just too close to the situation.”
Kouros’ stare turned into a glare.