Maria stood up. Kouros jumped to his feet, but she held up her hands. “I think better on my feet.” She turned and walked toward the door, shook her head, and turned around to face Kouros.
“My girlfriend got a call from a friend. The friend said she and another girl had a sweet deal lined up involving two tsigani on Tinos and they wanted us to do it instead of them.”
“What sort of deal?”
“To entertain the tsigani for a couple of days.”
“How much did the deal pay?”
“Four thousand euros for each girl. Two thousand up front, two thousand after.”
“That’s a lot of money for just ‘entertaining’ two guys. There had to be something special involved.”
“The job required them to leave immediately for Tinos and the tsigani weren’t expecting them. They’d have to be seduced. But that wouldn’t be a problem. Even if they were gay we could have worked something out.”
Kouros scratched his cheek. “Like I said, ‘there had to be something special involved.’”
Maria walked back to her chair. “The final payment depended on us getting the tsigani hooked on gas.”
“Didn’t that seem kinky to you?”
“Laughing gas? Kinky? If you think that, you have no idea what kinky means.” She sat down.
Kouros hoped he hadn’t blushed. “How’d you get them to do the gas?”
“It wasn’t hard. We told them it gives you better sex than drugs.”
“Where did you get the gas?”
“It was already inside the place the girls told us to stay.”
“That was it? You got high with them and walked away? And for that each of you got four thousand euros? Don’t try hustling me unless you’re in a hurry to get back upstairs.”
Maria bit at her lip. “On the last night we only faked taking gas. We held our breath. Got them to keep doing it until they passed out.”
“Why did you do that?”
“The other girls told us to. They said the instructions were that if we didn’t we wouldn’t get paid.”
“What were you to do after they passed out?”
“Nothing. Just make sure they were out cold and leave them there.”
“Where?”
“At the house where we found the gas. The girls said the place came with the deal.”
“Where was it?”
“No idea. It was some white house out in the middle of nowhere. I had an address for it written on a piece of paper and gave it to a taxi driver in the port. He took us there.”
“How’d you get around?”
“Another taxi driver took us to the bar where we picked up the brothers. I had the address for the bar on the same piece of paper. After that, the brothers took us everywhere on their motorbikes.”
“Got a name for any of the taxi drivers?”
“No.”
“Where’s your girl friend now?”
“No idea.”
Liar, thought Kouros. “Where did you go after the brothers passed out?”
“We took their motorbikes and went to the port. We had tickets on the first boat in the morning to Athens.”
“Why did you take both of the bikes unless you knew the brothers wouldn’t be needing one to get out of ‘the middle of nowhere’?”
“The instructions were to take them both if we wanted to get paid.”
And remove evidence linking the victims to the house. “How did you get the rest of the money?”
“It was left in an envelope at the purser’s office on the boat. We just had to give him the name on the envelope.”
“What was the name?”
“Alexander Ypsilantis.”
Kouros didn’t have to ask who that was. “How did you get the upfront payment?”
“We didn’t. The other girls kept it. The deal was we got to keep the back end money.”
“Which brings up the obvious question, Maria. Why did the other girls decide to pass on the opportunity of making another two thousand euros each?”
“They had a better deal. Some Arabs were taking them on a Mediterranean cruise for a week, all expenses paid. Those guys pay really big.”
“When was that?”
“The day we left for Tinos.”
“Where are they now?”
“Don’t know, haven’t heard from them.”
“That just might make you the lucky one. All you got was arrested.”
Maria shrugged.
“Got a name on who hired your girlfriends for the Tinos job?”
She gestured no.
“Was it a male or a female?”
“No idea.”
“Did whoever hired them know you’d be going instead of them?”
“No, the girls told us the deal would be off if that got out.”
“Why?”
“The person who hired them did not want Greek girls involved.”
“Your friends weren’t Greek?”
She gestured no. “Ukrainian.”
“Names please.”
She gave them.
“Anything else?”
She swallowed hard. “Yes, you promised not to send me back upstairs.”
Kouros nodded. “A deal is a deal. I’ll get you transferred.”
Maria’s eyes welled up with tears. “Thank you.”
Chapter Nineteen
“I tell you, Chief, if she wasn’t telling the truth she deserves an Academy Award. I don’t think she had a clue about what was going on, or even who Ypsilantis was.”
“At least it explains why Greeks suddenly ended up in the middle of this mess. The hookers who took the Carausii brothers away from the Polish girls were supposed be metanastes,” said Andreas. “And it’s making Lila’s theory on Filiki Eteria look pretty good. Either that, or someone has a freaky, coincidental sense of humor.”
Alexander Ypsilantis was the leader of Filiki Eteria at the start of Greece’s War of Independence in 1821.
“It also means another dead end,” said Kouros.
“Maybe. But get over here on the next boat. I want you running down those taxi drivers. Maybe you’ll get lucky again.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“And tell Maggie to see what she can come up with on the two Ukrainian hookers who were supposed to be on Tinos instead of the Greeks. See you this afternoon. Bye.”
Andreas put his cell phone down on the table and picked up his coffee. “Did you hear?”
Tassos nodded. “I wouldn’t bet on finding those two Ukrainian girls before August 15th. If they’re still breathing its probably under a lot of different guys. You’d think they’d know better than to go off on a ship with strange johns. Foreign ones no less.”
They were sitting in a taverna at the foot of Megalochari Avenue, across from where pilgrims began their long crawl up the hill to the Church of Panagia Evangelistria.
“Any luck with your local cop buddies finding those two Polish women I spoke to in the metanastes bar?” said Andreas.
“No word yet. They know where the girls live, but if they’re not at home it’s anyone’s guess where they are. We might have to try catching up with them at the bar.”
Andreas pushed back from the table. “Let’s take a walk up the hill. Maybe we’ll find some inspiration there.”
“I haven’t spoken to Eleni about your card.”
“We can do it now,” said Andreas.
“I thought you might be thinking that.”
“Such a good detective. Let’s go.”
Megalochari Avenue was wide enough to accommodate two-way traffic, one line of parked cars, and a narrow lane partitioned off from the rest of the roadway by orange and white traffic cones for those choosing to crawl. Shops at the base of the hill sold whatever one might need for completing a pilgrimage; candles running from a few inches to several feet in length, metallic shapes called tama symbolizing the purpose of the pilgrimage, and everything else up to and including knee pads.
The thirty-five degree grade up the one-half mile hill was steep enough to have Tassos pausing at each of the half-dozen intersecting streets.
“Perhaps you’d like to crawl a bit?” said Andreas.
“You think that’s easier in this heat? It must be a hundred degrees. Look at those poor women. I don’t see a man out there trying it today. We’re all wimps when it comes to that sort of thing.”