Chapter Five

Yianni had been raised in Athens, amid its own form of driving insanity, but here on Mykonos virtual reality met bumper cars, and he never dared take his eyes off what was coming down the road. Afternoons in high season were a particularly treacherous time on the narrow mountainside roads winding down to the popular beaches. He often wondered why it seemed the more popular the beach, the narrower the road and the sheerer the drops.

Yianni was used to maneuvering the island’s potholed, uneven roads, but tourist season added a serious additional challenge to the Mykonos driving experience. Now you had to share the roads with drivers who’d never imagine in their wildest dreams behaving at home as they did here, regularly passing around blind curves, turning two-lane roads into one-way whenever it suited their direction, and treating stop signs and rotary rules as advisory only. Toss in drugs and alcohol—and officials who considered it bad business to destroy a vacationer’s blissful fantasy of invulnerability with reality—and you had summertime driving on Mykonos.

During Yianni’s ski-jump-like final descent toward The Beach Club, a crew of post-adolescents, too busy hanging every which way out of an oncoming Jeep Wrangler and shouting the island’s name in sing-song fashion to notice his marked police car, wandered into his lane. Thankfully, he saw them coming and made way for the party crew to pass.

At the bottom of the slope, he steered into a packed, football field-size parking lot. He pulled up to the main entrance and parked next to a row of palm trees directly in front of a large NO PARKING sign. The place had changed a lot from what he remembered of his off-duty, rookie-cop days bouncing from one beach party venue to the next. Then, too, so had his age, compared to that of the new round of youthful partiers discovering the island for themselves.

The palms hadn’t been there when Yianni was here last, but that was a few years back, and palm trees now were in fashion. So, too, were the high stacks of empty champagne bottles arranged pyramid-style around the bases of the trees bordering the entrance to the club. Most visitors took them as a sign of the abbondanza partying atmosphere awaiting them inside, but Yianni saw it as a cleverly improvised hide-in-plain-sight, bottle warehouse for champagne-counterfeiters.

Yianni headed for the entrance. Two of the club’s bouncers stood waiting for him.

The bigger one said, “Can I help you?”

“Yeah, I’m here to see Angelos Karavakis.”

“Is he expecting you?”

“No.”

“Well, could you possibly move your car away from the entrance? It’ll spook the customers. They’ll think it’s a raid or something.”

Yianni gave him his best I’m-in-charge look. “Are you suggesting there are illegal activities taking place in this establishment?”

The bouncer raised his heavily tattooed arms. “No, not at all. Cops just make people nervous.”

Yianni smiled, and patted the man’s shoulder. “I know. And we like keeping it that way. Where’s Karavakis?”

The bouncer stepped out of Yianni’s way. “In the office, through the door in the light-gray wall out behind the bar.”

Instead of heading directly into the club, Yianni circled around to the beachside entrance. Standing with his back to the sea, he had a panoramic, dollhouse view of everything going on inside the club. Well, almost everything.

He had to give credit to the entrepreneur owners behind clubs like this one. They knew how to create and sell the magic of the island to their audiences. It was more than simply the laser lights, deejays, nearly naked perfect bodies writhing all about you, and unrestricted booze and drugs...it was the irrepressible Greek ambience of the island.

Yeah, right. Yianni shook his head at the thought. Most of the kids in here probably couldn’t find Mykonos on a map. Some likely didn’t even know it was in Greece.

As he looked in, he couldn’t help but feel like any other anonymous beach-going tourist fascinated by the wild-eyed action and actors at play inside the club. It wasn’t yet packed but still crowded, noisy, and pumping. The deejay in his booth above the bar knew when to kick things into maximum party mode. With a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of the action in the club, and a panoramic view of what was happening on the beach, he was a master at managing the mob’s mood through his music.

As Yianni took in the scantily clad sun worshippers wedged in along rows of sturdy wooden sunbeds and macramé umbrellas, he realized that—in his dark trousers, pale blue dress shirt and black street shoes—he stood out like what he was: a cop at a bikini contest.

Yianni pressed his way toward the bar through a mix of barely clothed dancers lost in the beat of the music. He made it to the door in the gray wall and knocked.

“It’s open,” came a shout from inside.

Yianni opened the door and walked in, closing it behind him.

“Who are you?” said the man sitting behind a tiny desk in an equally tiny office. All Yianni could think of was barrels. Barrel head, barrel neck, barrel chest, and barrel belly, topped off in unnaturally barrel-tar black hair.

“Detective Yianni Kouros, GADA Special Crimes.” Yianni showed him his ID.

Yianni pointed at the wooden taverna chair in front of the desk. It looked purposely uncomfortable. “May I sit?”

“Of course.” Karavakis leaned back in a plush leather armchair and waited for Yianni to speak.

“I’m here in connection with the investigation into the murder of Colonel Aktipis.”

“A terrible tragedy.”

“To get right to the point, sir, I understand you knew the man who was with the Colonel the night he was killed.”

“Yes, Pepe. I’ve known him since we did our military service together, and later through the restaurant business. He’s always wanted to open a place on Mykonos.”

“Just like everyone else in Greece these days.”

Karavakis smirked. “That’s for sure.”

“So, why help the competition?”

“You’ve got to understand the business. No workable space on this island remains vacant. Someone will move in and try to compete with you. So, if you’re going to have competition, it’s better to be up against someone you know and who knows you. Someone you can work with on common problems.”

“Makes sense to me.” Yianni paused. “I understand he asked you for a recommendation on security for his new place.”

“Not exactly. I asked him how he planned to handle security and he told me he intended using his own people. I told him that wouldn’t work here.”

“Why did you say that?”

“Come on, Detective, don’t play naive with me. We both know how big the protection business is on this island. No way to avoid it. It’s pay or pray.”

“Did you tell him that?”

“That and more.”

“What more?”

Karavakis leaned across the desk. “I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, Detective, but I said, ‘If you don’t use the Colonel’s goons, you’re going to find your place shut down, burned down, or blown down.’ And that’s if you’re lucky. The Colonel’s attitude toward practically anyone doing any business on this island was, ‘If you breathe, you pay.’”

“What did Pepe say to that?”

“He didn’t believe me.”

“You expressly told him to use the Colonel?”

“Of course I did. Even the dumbest souvlaki-seller on the island knew that.”

“Why, then, did you suggest that Pepe speak to Mrs. Despotiko to get a recommendation from her husband?”

Karavakis shook his head and smiled. “Like I said, Pepe didn’t believe me. He probably thought I was getting a kickback on business I steered to the Colonel. If I hadn’t known Pepe for as long I did, I’d have told him to go fuck himself.” He shook his head again. “Anyway, Despotiko’s wife was at the next table, and when she asked my waiter who Pepe was, I saw a way to verify what I’d told him.”

“Pepe knew of Despotiko?”

“Please. Who doesn’t? Anyway, I told him, if he didn’t believe me to ask Despotiko’s wife for a recommendation from her husband. He did, and what happened after had nothing to do with me.”

“Are you saying Mrs. Despotiko told Pepe that her husband recommended the Colonel?”

“No. A few days later Mrs. Despotiko was in the club and asked my son to tell me that Despotiko had recommended Pepe use the Colonel, just as I said he would. So, I passed the message on to Pepe.”

“I assume he now trusted you to be telling him the truth?”

Karavakis seemed about to bristle, but didn’t. “I guess so.” He leaned forward in his chair. “To repeat, I had absolutely nothing to do with anything that went down after that.”

“Do you have any idea of anyone who might have been involved in the Colonel’s death?”

“Not a clue.”

Yianni stood up and extended his hand across the desk toward Karavakis. “Thank you very much for your time, Mr. Karavakis.”

Karavakis reached out to shake Yianni’s hand but did not get up from his chair. “Glad to be of assistance.”

Yianni turned toward the door.

“Detective.”

Yianni looked back over his shoulder. “Yes?”

“Be careful around Despotiko’s wife. She’s a real tiger, and whether or not she shows you her claws…” he paused, as if considering whether to go on, “…while showing you everything else, those claws are always there and at the ready.”

“Thanks for the advice.”

He left the office, and pressed through the dancing throng toward the parking-lot exit, wondering how much of their conversation Karavakis had recorded. After all, performances like that were meant to be preserved.

“You didn’t believe him?” said Andreas, tapping away on his desktop with a pencil in his right hand while holding his phone to his ear with his left.

Yianni sat in the police cruiser, engine and air conditioner running, at the far end of The Beach Club’s parking lot. “Let’s just say he was cagey. He tried to get me to bite on whether I’d interviewed Mrs. Despotiko.”

“How would he know?”

“She or your buddy Telly could have told him.”

“He might have assumed that since you were interviewing him you’d be interviewing her.”

“Or some combination thereof. He’s so used to lying to police, it’s second nature to him not to cooperate. My guess is he wanted to tell us only what he thought we already knew.”

Funny how cops and crooks so often think the same way, thought Andreas.

“So, where do I go from here, Chief?”

Andreas stared out the window at his building’s reflection in the windows of the neighboring building. “Not sure, but tomorrow’s Friday, and with any luck I’ll make it to Mykonos with Lila and the kids on the afternoon ferry.”

“Does that mean I’m on my own until then?”

Andreas smiled. “Try not to get into trouble.”

“I’ll remember that if I happen to run into any.”

“You’re not so bad at the cagey routine yourself.”

“On that note, I think I’ll say goodbye.”

“See you tomorrow.”

“Bye.”

Andreas hung up the phone, but kept tapping away on the desktop with his pencil.

It was never the big things that tripped up a perp; the little details tended to be their undoing. Trouble was, they were often so small that even cops missed them. Like now.

Instead of backtracking the way he’d come to the beach, Yianni took a narrow, roughly paved road twisting up through the rural heart of the island. He planned to make his way to Lila’s family’s home through the farming community of Ano Mera, the island’s only other town, five miles due east of the far-better-known harbor town that bore the island’s name.

With roots tracing back to 4500 BCE, Ano Mera had a proud history, but like so many other island places, the tourist boom had decidedly changed the agrarian world of its residents. Though the road still offered breathtaking switchback views of deep-green farmland edged in hillsides strewn with massive gray-beige boulders, rapidly encroaching patches of new construction had infected the scene.

At the crest of a hill, the road narrowed to wind between old homes and businesses massed at the outskirts of the old town. A bit farther along, it passed by the village square to meet up with the main highway connecting Ano Mera and Mykonos town.

From there, it took Yianni fifteen minutes to drive to Lila’s, most of it over one-time donkey trails with a hill on one side and a cliff on the other. As his police cruiser rocked and rolled along the washboard road, he wondered if Lila’s family purposely kept it that way to discourage the curious from impinging on their privacy. Whether intentional or not, it must have worked, because he’d yet to see another soul on the road. As he reached the top of a particularly steep stretch of road, a panoramic view of a virtually unspoiled part of the island’s north-central coast spread out before him. Below, at the very tip of a peninsula, sat his destination, a natural stone and stucco compound of gardens and broad terraces nestled up against the sea, with not a neighbor to be seen.

He wondered how long that would last.

Yianni stopped the cruiser, rolled down the windows, turned off the engine, and sat listening to the sound of the wind off the sea whipping up scents of wild rosemary and thyme over and around ancient stone walls lumbering up and across the rocky hillsides. This was a rare and peaceful moment, in a rare and peaceful place far removed from the craziness of the club he’d just left—and the life he led as a cop. He wondered if Andreas had similar thoughts when he came here. He must. How could he not?

Yianni started the engine. Enough daydreaming. Time to get back to reality. At least his reality.