Chapter  9

His telephone rang. The voice on the other end sounded out of breath. At first the young reporter was on his guard.

“Who is it?”

“You don’t know me. My name’s Michalis Dimas, I’m a dock worker from Salonika. It’s important that I see you.”

The reporter thought it might be a trap. Since the arrest of Baronissimo, obscure threats had reached his ears.

“You’re the only person who can help me. I’ve got to see you.”

“Come over here to the newspaper office.”

“It’s the first time I’ve ever been in Athens. Where is it?”

“Where are you now?”

“In Omonia Square.”

“Fine. It’s very easy. Take Panepistimiou Street toward Syndagma Square. On your left you’ll see the sign with the name of the newspaper. Second floor, room 18.”

“I’m on my way.”

The reporter went out to tell the doorman that someone would be coming to ask for him shortly, someone who might be dangerous. “Watch out for him and look him over carefully,” he said.

Not that he was afraid. But since he had revived the investigation by uncovering Baron, he had reason to believe that efforts were being made to get him out of the way.

A few minutes later the man stood before him: about thirty-five, with deep-set eyes and the air of a hunted animal. He shook hands with the reporter and sat down. The reporter ordered coffee.

“Mr. Andoniou,” he began, “I’ve come all the way from Salonika to see you. I’ve been following your investigation in the papers, and though I don’t have much education, I want to congratulate you for your courage. But you’re somebody, I’m nothing. I’ve been forced to leave my neighborhood—I live in Ano Toumba; I’ve had to walk out on my wife and child to escape. It’s hell there. It’s gangland. Since the prize hoods got locked up, the rest are out for blood. No one dares speak. And if you don’t do what they tell you, it’s too bad for you. You’re done for. I can’t explain it very well but, you see, at night after I’ve locked and bolted the door I have to put the wife and kid in the back room and then go stay awake listening in case they raid the place. They did it night before last. I saw them ganged up in Chinky’s Café. I went in too, to have a little drink. ‘You’ve been playing the good little boy a little too much lately,’ said Hitler, slamming into me. Hitler is what we call Halimoudra, a guy at the dock, because he stops at nothing. ‘You finished Z. off,’ I said then, losing my temper. ‘Don’t think you can try it on somebody else.’ He jumped out of his chair and came at me. Luckily there were two or three other people around who aren’t part of the gang, and they stepped in between us. I didn’t want to be the first to leave the café. Why should I, do they own the place? I sat down again and drank down my retsina. Hitler kept looking at me with hate. He was plotting his revenge. He knows I know them all and can spill the beans. I left the café and went home mad. I locked and barred the front door and my wife and kid went to bed. A little later, I don’t know exactly when, I heard someone banging at the door. It was Hitler and he was shouting: ‘If you’re a man, get out here, Dimas, and we’ll have a talk. Come on out if you’ve got the guts.’ He must have been drunk. I couldn’t call the police; we don’t have a telephone. So I let him rave. My wife and kid woke up, scared as hell. They huddled up close to me. My little girl couldn’t stop crying, and she kept asking: ‘Who is it, Papa, who is it?’ Hitler kept right on banging. I’d have gone out, Mr. Andoniou, he’d cast a slur on my honor as a man, but to tell you the truth, I was afraid he might have his revolver. I’ve seen that revolver twice. The first time was at our annual election for the committee of the AETOU—that’s our soccer club. Hitler was treasurer of the old committee. He pulled out his revolver and put it on the table, as if to say: ‘If anyone wants me to account for anything, here I am.’ Of course, no one said a word and they reelected him treasurer by acclamation. They’re all petrified of him. The second time was when he was slugging Aglaïtsa. She’s a woman in our neighborhood who—well, she’s sort of a prostitute. Anyway, Hitler had grabbed her by the hair and was pounding her with the butt of his revolver. I made him stop. That was before Z.’s murder, so there wasn’t blood between us. You should have heard Aglaïtsa howling. She’s a good woman all the same. Her husband’s a sailor, he turns up once in a blue moon, and when he does come, he never stays more than a few days. He brings presents for everybody—last Christmas he even gave my daughter a little Japanese boat with lights that turn on and off. O.K., well, Hitler put his pistol away, he seemed pretty mad that I’d seen it. Then he shoved Aglaïtsa to the ground and spat on her. Aglaïtsa got up and said she was going to the police. She told him she’d have him in the clink in no time, since she had a witness. Hitler burst out laughing. One thing he sure wasn’t afraid of was that. He and Mastodontosaur were pals. He told her to go right ahead but she’d better be careful—he happened to have some pull with the vice squad, and if she didn’t watch out she’d be classified as a whore because she wasn’t married to the sailor. Aglaïtsa was so insulted that she fell into a faint. Hitler went off and I stayed there, trying to bring her to. That’s the kind of guy he is, Mr. Andoniou. That’s why I didn’t go out night before last. I was afraid. I knew that somewhere, in some corner—the streets in Ano Toumba are rat traps, you know, and there aren’t many lights—he was going to sneak up on me when I wasn’t looking. I haven’t wasted any time. I borrowed five hundred drachmas from my father-in-law and took the bus and came to you because you’re the only one, as far as I know, who can put them all in their place and keep them there. They’re scared because I know them, I was one of them before the crime.”

Andoniou smiled. “If I were public prosecutor,” he said, “I could do what you ask of me. Unfortunately I’m just a reporter and I can only write what I find out, and sometimes not even that.”

And he cast a significant glance at him. Dimas relaxed.

“Where’s the coffee I ordered?” sighed the reporter. He phoned the corner café. “Did it evaporate on the way?”

He turned back to his visitor, who was looking around the office with curiosity; he was shabbily dressed and kept tapping his fingers nervously on the table.

“Go ahead, tell me the whole story. This gang you mentioned—who are they? From whom do they take their orders? How many are there?”

“I work on the docks by the day. To have a regular, decently paid job, you’ve got to do a lot of pushing and a lot of ass-licking. The guys who run things at the port are the Bonatsa Brothers, Xanalatos, Yatras, Kyrilov, Jimmie the Boxer, and Hitler. Then there are others, like Yango, Baronissimo, and Vango, who are part of the gang but have different jobs.”

“I know about that.”

“Well, all these fellows get together in the Commissioner’s office, and he sends them out on various jobs. What sort of jobs they are, you know better than I.”

The coffees finally arrived. The waiter set them on the desk, took the coin Andoniou gave him, and left.

“If you want the particulars,” resumed Dimas, “these are the same fellows that beat up the woman deputy from the Center Union Party in 1961. She’d come to Ano Toumba to give a talk. That’s the kind of cowards they are. They even attack women.”

“And you—why didn’t you inform on them? Why didn’t you report them to the police, or to a newspaper?” Andoniou asked him.

The dock worker looked him straight in the eye. “Do you think I’m crazy, Mr. Andoniou? Don’t you think I could see that whatever was happening it had the blessing of the police? What do you think it meant that Yango’s best friend was Dimis, the police sergeant? Wasn’t I also invited to the Commissioner’s office for instructions? Do you think my job is secure enough that I can fight them in the open? When you work on the docks by the day you can be fired any minute. I’ve got a wife and kid! They’ve got you coming and going. But Z.’s assassination was the last straw. I lost my temper and told them off. That’s why they put me on the black list. After that it’s been practically impossible to find work. It’s only because of the spot I’m in now that I got the courage to come and tell you all I know. They all have one thing in common: they’re not afraid. And it’s not because they’re brave. No. They’re not afraid because they know the police are on their side. I was in seventh heaven when those guys got locked up. When the rest of them found about it, it was weeks before they believed it. They were certain it had been done to trick the public, and that Yango and Baron and Vango would soon be out again. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

The reporter nodded. “Drink your coffee,” he said kindly. “It’s going to get cold.”

Dimas drank it down in one gulp. Then he took out a cigarette and offered it to the reporter.

“Thank you, I don’t smoke,” said Andoniou.

“Well then,” said Dimas, “I’ll go on. The last time we were rounded up was during de Gaulle’s visit. Looking back on it now, I can see that that meeting was a sort of general rehearsal for the later incidents. All of them were there at the Ano Toumba branch of the Security Police. The Commissioner divided us into groups of ten; each group had a leader. My group leader happened to be Hitler. Then they handed us little pins with yellow, green, or red plastic heads. We were supposed to stick these into our lapels, to recognize each other by.”

“Pins?” asked the reporter, jotting down this detail in his notebook. “We could call it the Affair of the Colored Pins.”

“That’s an idea. I still have mine,” said the dock worker. “I should have brought it with me. Anyway, to get back to the meeting, someone asked why we had to guard de Gaulle. And a cop in plain clothes told him that de Gaulle’s life had been threatened by the Communists. He’d played a dirty trick on them during the war and they were looking for a chance to bump him off. Once, he said, they’d peppered his car with machine-gun bullets, but the windows were bullet-proof. The Greek government didn’t want any trouble with the Big Powers. Besides, the Bulgars weren’t very far away, they could easily slip past the guards at the frontier and join in the hunt. So keep your eyes open, he told us, and above all, watch the windows in the houses. They stationed me in front of the Electric Company, where there wasn’t any houses at all. I had to stand there from eight in the morning till seven-thirty in the evening, without a bite to eat. When I got back home I took it out on my wife. As if it had been her fault, poor thing! But I swore I’d be smarter next time and find some excuse to get out of it.”

“Now tell me something—and this is between you and me: were you there at the incidents that evening?”

“I’m going to speak frankly, Mr. Andoniou, because I like the truth. I’m in a tight spot. If you work at a job and live in a neighborhood where everything depends on the kind of pull you’ve got, it’s pretty hard to keep your hands clean. About six o’clock the night before the incidents just as I was getting off the bus on my way home, one of the hoods came up and told me the Commissioner had ordered us to be outside the Catacomb Club at five the next afternoon, to break up a meeting. I was mad as hell. De Gaulle had barely left town and here they were with another crappy idea! I told him flatly that I wouldn’t and that he could tell the Commissioner what I said. ‘Michalis,’ he said to me, ‘don’t be a dope. If I tell him that, you’re done for. Say that you’ll go, let him see you there, and then play it cool. When you get a chance—beat it.’ I took his advice. I’ve been playing the nincompoop too long, I thought. It’s time I wised up. Next day I left the dock at two in the afternoon—I hadn’t made a drachma. It was one of those bad days—lucky they don’t come very often—when being unemployed really gets you down. Maybe that was why I decided to go. My wife was set against the whole business, so to get out of the house at five I had to lie. I told her I was going to get some paper bags from the printing office, I hadn’t had time at noon. My wife needed the bags for her job. She works in a fertilizer factory. She reminded me that it was Wednesday and the shops were closed. I told her the printing offices stayed open illegally. And so, with this excuse, I got out of the house. Going along in the bus, I saw the Commissioner’s limousine outside the local police station. That seemed funny. And I couldn’t have been wrong about it, because there isn’t another car like it in the neighborhood. I know that car very well. When I got off the bus, I ambled over toward the Catacomb Club and the first thing I saw was Yango punching a woman. Later I saw him tear down the poster and jump into a taxi, which went down one lane of Aristotelous Street and came up the other. It went past me, but I didn’t see where it was going. I went to the printing office and got the paper bags. On the way back I passed the building where the meeting was to be held, and there they were, all of them—Bonatsa, Xanalatos, Baron, Kyrilov, Jimmie the Boxer, Hitler—yelling, throwing stones, clubbing people. The Commissioner saw me and I pretended I was yelling too; and after that I managed to sneak away and went home. There was something appalling about that night. And I wasn’t surprised when I learned the news next day. I had seen the mob in action. Not one of them was missing. But once they’d locked up Yango and then that other louse Vango and finally that bird-brain Baronissimo, I took courage and began speaking my mind. It was then that they began making threats about getting rid of me. And when this incident I told you about at the beginning happened, I asked myself what I should do. ‘Go to the newspaper reporter who tracked down Baronissimo,’ I said to myself, ‘and tell him the whole story.’ But I’m afraid, Mr. Andoniou. I don’t know what’s happening in Toumba now.”

“In your opinion, it was the Commissioner who gave the order to liquidate Z.?”

“I can’t say that. It was the Commissioner who rounded them up. But where the orders came from, I have no idea.”

“Good. Now I’m going to tell you what you must do. Tomorrow morning, go to the public prosecutor here in Athens and tell him everything you know about this mob. Tomorrow afternoon we’ll both leave for Salonika. Is it clear? I’ll take you in my car, there’s nothing to be afraid of. You’ll go to the Investigator, who seems to be a very honest person, and you’ll tell him everything. All right? From here on in, you’re under my protection.”

Michalis smiled. “Yes, but how am I ever going to get any work at the docks again? That’s my big worry. They might let a pulley drop on my head and say it was an accident.”

“You won’t have to work for a while. Consider yourself my employee.” And he gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder.

“Thank you, Mr. Andoniou.”

“Well, come around tomorrow morning. The Court of the Areopagus is close by. I’ll drive you there. And at two-thirty we can be under way.”

Dimas left. Andoniou headed for the office of the editor-in-chief. He found him in the middle of a telephone conversation with Salonika.

“It’s chaos up there,” he said when he hung up.

“We’re going to put some order into it,” Andoniou replied enigmatically. “I’m on the trail of the instigators. An ex-member has just confessed. I’m going north tomorrow. Keep the front page open Friday. We’re going to call it the Affair of the Colored Pins.”

“What’s that?” the editor-in-chief asked, smelling a scoop.

“You’ll see. Just be patient for one day.”

“Splendid,” the editor said. “But be careful.”

“It’s only the driving that’s dangerous,” said the young reporter as he left.

The next day at 2:30 the reporter’s Fiat was humming along the National Highway from Athens to Lamia.