Rigor Mortis

[DocHeart]

I often say I know Athens like the back of my hand, every nook and cranny; every congested junction, every cracked pavement, every mouldy back alley. I know every bar, every pool house, every night club and its accompanying back room where dirty cash is counted and shared out to characters who then redistribute it amongst themselves in silent, smoky poker games. Every junk food joint and every brothel. I know the good places too. The upmarket neighbourhoods. I know the tree-lined streets of high-walled villas in Marousi and Kifissia; I know which politician lives in what mansion in Kastri and Kefalari; I know the lawyers' and tax officers' beach houses in Voula and Kavouri. I know the whores and the countesses, the pimps and the CEOs. I know the hungry and the homeless and the despairing, and I know the vultures that circle above them...

When Detective Demou proposes a plan to disrupt the Athenian drug scene, his normally conservative supervisor is impressed. The involvement of ordinary drug users is crucial to the plan, and an operation is set up to select the best candidates for some unofficial underground work. But the plan goes wrong, placing a number of high-ranking police officers' careers in jeopardy...


***

Rigor Mortis will be posted here in three parts in the run-up to the new year. As always, I deeply appreciate your readership and critique.

Best,
DH

[DocHeart]

Every now and then it rains hard here.

Then the dust and the cigarette butts and the plastic bags and the rotting leaves and the broken glass are all swept down into the west end.

When the rain stops, the poor come out of their cement boxes and search the debris for anything remotely useful. Cans and bottles that can be recycled for five cents each at the machine next to the minimarket. Discarded clothes sodden with filth. Muddy trinkets. Syringes. Then, when they're sure they've got everything, they let the garbage trucks and the firemen come in.

If the west end folk don't want someone coming in, you see, they just don't come in. Not if they're garbage collectors. Not if they're firemen. Not if they're Jesus Christ.

Tonight the old, neglected sewers filled up with rain and debris. Many unpalatable things were thrown up to soil the streets. Excrement, urine, and dead rats.

"It's eh... a young lad. Might be Gerasimo. Right age, right clothes, right hair."

Of all the drug addicts that could have died tonight, Gerasimo is the only one who really shouldn't have. I feel a piece of ice in my stomach which doubles in size every time I think of the possible consequences. I know Mikeli is out of sorts, too. He doesn't let it show. Neither do I.

"You've IDed him already?"

"No, not positively, we're not sure. We're... eh..." Mikeli is getting old. He didn't use to have trouble walking fast. And his hair is now closer to completely white than ever. I slow down to allow him to keep pace.

"You haven't seen him?"

"I've seen him... He's just... He's got no face."

"No face?"

"No. Shot off. Very little of it left."

"What about prints?"

"Eh... Forensics are in there... already. They might have done it by now... finger-printed him, I mean." Mikeli has learned to use sentences which are short enough to allow him to breathe in-between. But his cough gets the better of him again. He stops and lets whatever nasty thing his lungs contain explode into his handkerchief.

"Have you had someone look at that cough?"

"Look at the cough? What for? It's age, Demou. Nothing doctors can do about it. Wanna go in and talk to forensics?"

"Who did you call?"

"What?"

"Who did you call from forensics?"

"Oh, don't worry. Not your ex-wife."

The scene is a defunct petrol station, big Shell sign still hanging off a pole over the pavement, posters on the pumps advertising 20%+ savings in drachmae. One of the hundreds of businesses in the area that closed long before the euro crisis, brought to their knees not by some incomprehensible monetary shortage but by mere abandonment, by straight-forward neglect. By a deliberate neglect, an obvious, brutal decision to leave certain neighbourhoods to rot with crime and become populated by people who will either be grateful for sihtty jobs that pay next to nothing, or just forget about decency and honesty and work for the drug industry. All good money for the fancy folks in the east end, who live in beach houses with heated swimming pools and get to exchange pleasantries with their local MPs during sunny weekend barbecues.

The corpse is sprawled on the floor of what used to be the station's mini-market. They've already placed lamps in each corner, and there's plenty of light, perhaps more than enough. One of the things you don't realize when you sign up is how brightly they light up the crime scenes. Sure, you get used to it. Or at least that's what cops say to each other. "I'm used to it."

It's Gerasimo. I could have known that even the only light in the room came from the flashlight of a key-ring.

Lambrou is here, and with him a couple of junior analysts who recognize me and give me a nod as I enter. They are examining the streaks of blood on one of the walls. Lambrou is talking into his dictaphone. "Low viscosity, low surface friction in all examined north wall samples." He then turns to look at me.

"Oh, look who it is. Demou, you bastard, you look great. What's your secret?"

"Cucumber over the eyes. What have you guys found?"

"Cucumber, eh? And I thought it was because you went on the wagon. Hey, don't look so offended. Just word on the street has it, that's all."

Lambrou has reason to be like that. I've got on his nerves in the past, pressured him too much, asked for too much information too quickly; made him stay in the lab all night. He is a short man, stout, dressed in jeans, unshaven, with some left-over hair left on his skull which he didn't bother combing after he was waken up to be called to the scene.

"It's a mess, Demou. What can I tell you. Only one point of origin, but boy did it spray around. Single shot, nearly took his whole head off. Shell as big as a flippin' tampon. Hunting rifle or something. Look, Demou, you're going to screw up my scene. Can you get out? We'll be done in half an hour or so."

"Sure. Understood."

I pick up the plastic bag containing the shell and examine it. The ice in my stomach doubles in size again. I can feel it up my chest now, and down my groin. This came from no hunting rifle. Damn me if it isn't from a Magnum BFR, and damn me once again if the average Athenian drug soldier has ever seen one.

"Hey, can you not handle the evidence, please? For fukc's sake."

"You finger-printed him yet?"

"Not yet."

"This guy had his head blown off by some kind of cannon, Lambrou. How much blood pattern analysis do you need to establish that?"

"Procedure, Demou. Procedure."

"What procedure? Listen, Lambrou, just take some finger prints, will you. I need to know if this guy is who I think he is."

"No, he's the headless horseman. Of course he's who you think he is. Now either hang around quietly like a good boy or get out and let us do our job."

I light a cigarette and stand still. He returns to examining the walls. "Alright guys, next one. Get alpha, beta and gamma impacts."

I stand there, blowing my smoke out noisily. I let a few seconds pass, then do it again. I know he feels me. I know I'm annoying him. I can see his shoulders getting tense. He turns, mumbling, and walks over to the body. Victory. He presses the pointer finger of the corpse on the scanner.

"Now fukc off outside and I'll come out in five minutes when they've sent me the results. Ok?"

"Thanks, Lambrou. I'm out of here. Sorry for the bother."

I step out. The rain has started falling again. A couple of drops bash my cigarette hanging from my mouth and extinguish it. I flick it in a sewer, there to swim with other dirty, useless small items. Daybreak sheds a milky light on the street and the buildings and the people. Everything looks even uglier.

"Hey Ari! Want a coffee?"

The shout comes from behind the CRIME SCENE ribbon across the street, and I recognize the voice immediately. Darvino. Ugliest crime columnist in Athens. Most annoying, too. To be exact, he's number one in my list of people I've always wanted to punch. He fancied my ex-wife long before I did. After getting shot down a couple of times, he compromised and decided to play the male "friend". Hang around her whenever he could, talk to her, be seen with her. Male friend my arse. Unfukcable pathetic git never stopped dreaming of nailing her. Stupid, too. As though a woman like Julie would ever take her knickers off for a weedy, cross-eyed, moustached sod like him.

In seconds, he has ducked under the ribbon and caught up with me.

"Hey Darv."

"Ari, you're going to tell me anything today?"

"Like what, Darv?"

"Like a few juicy bits of what's going on in there? Who's the boy?"

"It's Jesus Christ. Good Friday has come early this year."

"Come on Ari. Just give me the basics."

"Go to the press conference."

"Press conference is going to be in the bloody afternoon, Ari. Have mercy, man, I want to go home and get some sleep. Give me something that will give me the day off. Please?"

"Darv, stop degrading yourself like this. Go to the press conference."

"Oh, Jesus, Ari!"

"Go back behind the ribbon, Darv, or I'm going to get an officer to escort you there."

He skulks away. A small, weak, unlucky person, entirely and solely defined by his professional role. One of those people who, if you took their job away from them, would be nothing.

"Darv." He stops and turns, a hopeful smile lighting up his moustache. "Male in his mid-twenties, shot in the head, no positive ID. Almost certainly drug-related."

"Ari, you're the best, man! See? That wasn't so tough!"

I spot Mikeli talking to a young officer, two paramedics eating pastries inside an ambulance, waiting for the all-clear to bag the body. A small crowd has gathered around the area now; they murmur assumptions of what's happened, unexcitedly, listlessly. In the streets around, car doors can be heard shutting, engines starting. And the poor neighbourhoods of Athens are awake once again, moving with the slowness of absolute and irrevocable resignation.



***

Gerasimo. The young, bright software engineer just a few months away from presenting his PhD work at the NTUA. I don't know much about computers, but they say he was one of the best. He said so himself. He said if anything had any sense in it, even just the tiniest bit of logic, he could code it. I wasn't sure exactly what that meant, and frankly, all I cared about right then was to find out who he shopped from. You see, he had developed a coke habit. He was caught drunk driving and had words with the traffic cops. They found a small bag of top-notch powder in the glove compartment.

Operation Sisyphus had been my idea. Of course, everyone thought it was Stergo's idea. That's what happens whatever your line of work is, I guess. It's the boss that gets the credit. But now that it's all gone to hell it's gonna go back to being my idea. That's the bothersome thing.

The plan was simple. Dozens of kids caught smoking joints or snorting coke or popping pills in parties that were too loud for the neighbours to tolerate are paraded down the station every day. Instead of slapping them around the head and calling their parents before we let them go, we could systematically identify the ones that could help us make a few more worthwhile arrests. The average users could only lead us to small-time dealers who also snatch purses from old ladies, but then we could use them to climb up one step further. Sure, it would be a long way to the upper echelons of the Athenian drug scene. But if we played it right, we could score a few good hits, upset the system. With elections coming up, catching a few guys the Commissioner could boast about in press conferences would be welcomed by many important people in many important ways.

Our collaborators would have to help us get our hands on hard evidence, however. Testimonies don't count for much, especially with Greek lawyers being more intelligent, more versatile, better funded, and much more street-wise than Greek cops. Recordings. The pusher's voice saying things that prove he's a pusher. Then the bigger pusher's voice saying things that prove he's a bigger pusher. And so to one of the big names -- Three Eyes, or Yianni Tsoga, or Mitropoulos. Unless, of course, our partners were found out. Then they'd probably get badly hurt, and all of our progress would go down the drain.

"Like rolling a boulder up a hill only for it to slip away and tumble down to the valley again," Stergo said, looking out his office window to Alexandras Avenue.

"Like Sisyphus," I agreed.

Spotting the ones that would fit the scheme was an important part of the job. That was Mikeli's part. He stood in during interrogations and graded everyone's suitability from zero to five. They had to be casual users, not junkies. They had to have above average intelligence. And they had to have something to lose and be too scared to lose it, but at the same time be brave enough to wear a wire and go shopping. You see, snitches get stitches. That's what they say down in the west end.

After the first twenty or so disappointing candidates, we were staring to run out of steam. But then Gerasimo was brought in, and Mikeli gave him five stars. As I sat there across from him doing my usual routine of good-cop-bad-cop all in one person, I could tell I was dealing with a brain much heavier than mine. Even his hair, red, curly and unruly, seemed to be affected by it in a way that made it light up in the dark. He possessed a good deal of bravado, and expressed it with some wit. But I could also feel his fear.

"You got any cigarettes?"

"Sure. Want a coffee, too? I'll go get us two mugs. Don't go away."

"Cop with a sense of humour. I bet you like jazz and have a brown raincoat."

"As a matter of fact, I do."

He sipped slowly, as if enjoying a cup of the finest Brazilian harvest and not the 20-cent black water that came out of the machine in the corridor. He enjoyed his cigarette, too, inhaling deeply and blowing rings of smoke towards the ceiling. His t-shirt read "Undefined", stamped in red typewriter-style letters on the black cotton.

"So you're going to tell me where you get your stuff from."

"I'm not sure that I'm going to."

"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. I'm sure there was no question mark at the end of my sentence there."

"Yea. I still don't know. I think I might just call my lawyer."

"Sure. I can arrange that. Wanna use my phone? Here."

He looked at the phone, then at me. "Shove it."

"Now watch it, sonny."

He fixed his eyes on me and tried to stare me down. In the end he looked away and took a long drag off his cigarette. "I'm just trying to work the whole thing out."

"The whole thing is that you're looking at 6 months in the nick."

"Yea. That's not the thing I'm trying to work out."

"What is it, then?"

"Well, you know. You. Well, actually, not so much you - you're just a cop. Rather, your plan. Your intention. No, what I'm trying to calculate is what you'll do to my career if I don't snitch on my supplier. Because, other than that, you can do siht. I had on me - what - five grams? No previous convictions, gainfully employed, and all that other-mother jazz. Six months my arse. Any half-decent lawyer would get me off with a couple of weekends' community service. But that record thing... That's bothersome."

"You're a bright lad."

"Don't call me lad. I'm an electronic engineer and a member of MENSA, cop." He threw his cigarette on the floor and stepped on it. "I get the stuff from Short Loui. Fukc him. I don't care. I don't give a siht about these people. Fukcin sub-humans."

"Now we're making progress."

"Am I off the hook?"

"No. There's more you need to do for us."



***


"They delivered a note."

Stergo is a tall, imposing man. In his impeccable white shirt, his shoulders look wide like a superhero's, and his gray head of hair makes him look as respectable as a newly appointed Assistant Commissioner should look. We go back, Stergo and I. Matter of fact, we've been swimming in the same pool of excrement for exactly the same number of years. Hell, we graduated together and even partnered for a spell. But I can live with the fact that he got his own office down HQ and I'm nowhere near that status. I bear him no grudge. He's a family man.

"A note?"

Stergo sips coffee from a plastic cup. "Fukc, Demou, you got any fags on you?"

"No."

"Don't give me that. Sure you have. Come on, I don't need no mothering from you. Getting enough of that from my wife. Give me one."

I obey. In truth, I don't really want him to give up smoking. It's something I'd never manage.

"Give me a light, too, for god's sake." He inhales sharply, the nicotine hit contorting his eyebrows. "Yep. DHLed to you personally."

"What?"

"Lay low, pig cop Demou, or you're next."

There are moments in life when saying "damn" or "siht" or "fukc" does nothing. Sometimes these words have a strange power: they help one avoid panic. When seeing that the other guy was holding three aces and two queens, for instance, after you've called him on a bet you couldn't afford to lose. If you say "damn" or "siht" or "fukc" right then, it does something. It externalizes shock, it helps you deal with the fear of the forthcoming consequences of your actions. But these words are no good right now.

"You look stupid when you're scared, Demou."

"I'm not scared."

"Aren't you? I am. If the kid's told them about you, he's probably told them about me, too."

There's a knock on Stergo's door accompanied by a loud, chesty cough, and Mikeli comes in. He sits down on the chair next to mine slowly, mindful of his sore joints. He's changed his clothes from a couple of hours ago, but even in jeans and trainers he looks 90 years old. Stergo frowns with concern. He looks at me. I shrug.

"You really look like siht, Mikeli. I'm sending you for a medical evaluation."

"I suppose that's up to you, sir."

"And don't sir me. You said you'd go to your own doctor. You promised months ago."

"I'll go. Is that what you wanted to see me about? Next time I'll know to bring my colonoscopy results."

"No. No, that's not what I wanted to fukcin see you about. How the hell did we end up receiving death threats from west-end scum? How the hell was he found out not two weeks after we had him in that interrogation room over there? How did he not even get the chance to set up an appointment we could get him wired for? Five stars? In a matter of days the kid opens his mouth and names half of Athens' police force. Eh? Five stars out of five? Who were the other candidates, Laurel and Hardy? Jesus. And you, Demou, you..." He pauses to draw hard on the cigarette, inhaling sharply. "You... Operation Sisyphus my arse. You have some stupid ideas some times, I'm telling you."

It's nice to get credit.

Mikeli sits still, taking the telling-off. I get up. "You know it was a decent plan, Stergo. Stop nagging. It went wrong. Fine. Let's focus now. I need to talk to people who knew him. Friends, family, people over at the NTUA. We need to find out who he was babbling to. And I want some guys to go and get Short Loui for me."

"Oh! Now you're coordinating? Get Short Loui? Really, now! That's what we're doing, is it? We're doing nothing of the kind, Demou. Now you listen to me. You both listen to me now, and listen real carefully..."

Up until now I was thinking like a cop talking to another cop, thinking we were going to discuss how to get the people who did this, plan a murder investigation. But I should have known. This is no such situation. This is crisis management. Damage limitation. Politics.

"We're not getting lumped with the kid's death when we were just trying to do our job, Demou, and you know that's how this'll end up if we're not smart about it. And I'm not getting lumped with your death, either."

My head hurts and my hands are shaking. I recently promised myself that I'd stay quiet during moments like this. Swallow my anger and keep it down. I head to the door.

"Where do you think you're going?"

"To the john."

We will proceed no further; inquire no more; leave all stones unturned. We, the Police Force of the Hellenic Republic, have caused a young man to have his head blown to crumbs. Yet, not only will we not take responsibility, we will also bury the case. Will we erase traces too? Probably. Find out who might know about it and make sure they for ever hold their peace one way or the other. In the meantime, business as usual down the hood. The market will continue to operate smoothly.

I close the door behind me and stand above the toilet. It's quiet in here, calm. I take the flask from my inside pocket and empty it into my throat. The whisky slides down my insides burning them, soothing them. The burn silences my anger for a few seconds. Then, I feel shattered, desperate: it's coming back up to the surface, the urge to grab Stergo by the neck and hurl him out the window.

No. I will not. Of course I will not.

I flush the toilet, just in case anyone saw me coming in and is wondering about me actually using it.

"Give me another fag."

"For god's sake, Stergo. Get your own damn fags. You haven't given up, you're just scrounging. Here."

"Those people down there wouldn't stand a chance without us, Demou. We're going to be responsible about this. We're not little boys. We don't let guilt get the better of us. We don't let any emotion get the better of us. We're practical, focused, responsible professionals. Go to the university and do some fishing. Talk to his supervisor and his mates. He's got a sister, too. Go suss them out."

Mikeli coughs.

"And you, Mikeli, you go talk to a fukcin doctor."



***


The NTUA campus is one of the few places in the city I've never been to.

I often say I know Athens like the back of my hand, every nook and cranny; every congested junction, every cracked pavement, every mouldy back alley. I know every bar, every pool house, every night club and its accompanying back room where dirty cash is counted and shared out to characters who then redistribute it amongst themselves in silent, smoky poker games. Every junk food joint and every brothel. I know the good places too. The upmarket neighbourhoods. I know the tree-lined streets of high-walled villas in Marousi and Kifissia; I know which politician lives in what mansion in Kastri and Kefalari; I know the lawyers' and tax officers' beach houses in Voula and Kavouri. I know the whores and the countesses, the pimps and the CEOs. I know the hungry and the homeless and the despairing, and I know the vultures that circle above them.

It dawns on me that perhaps I don't know enough of what's in-between. I suppose there isn't enough action in-between. Not much for a cop to do. And not that much left in-between these days, anyway.

The campus sprawls over many acres at the foot of Mount Immitos. There's a noticeable difference in temperature between here and downtown. I feel it as I walk towards the building where the faculty of Electronics is housed. A cold, razor-like breeze. I walk past a three youngsters with long hair and beards sitting on a bench, smoking and talking. I see no other people around. It's Wednesday morning and I expected the place to be busier. Inside, the reception is unmanned. I follow old signs smudged with obscene graffiti down a corridor and reach Professor Kesvoukis' door. This is my man's room, alright. I expected to be walking around a lot longer before finding it. But it turns out I'm even luckier than that: he's in.

When I show him my ID he becomes unsettled; worried, perhaps, that I'm here for something which involves him directly, some research funding scam or such like. He's one of those jeans-clad academics who try to look younger than they are, possibly because this way they feel they fit in more with the undergrads, but thinning grey hair and an incredibly wrinkly face make the attempted optical illusion fail miserably.

"I'm here to talk with you about Gerasimo Mendis. You're his supervisor, right?"

He looks puzzled, then relieved. "That's right. What about Gerasimo? Is he alright?"

"I'm afraid Gerasimo is dead. He was murdered."

He stares at me in what seems to be genuine shock. He looks away then, out of his window, shaking his head. "I knew he was in trouble."

"How did you know?"

"He had become distant... and kind of careless with his work. Reckless. He was sending milestone code to the commission without sending it to me for approval first. He was brilliant, of course, and he knew it. There was never a problem... the code was perfect. Always perfect."

"Did you know he did drugs?"

"Who doesn't around here. Most of these kids are on something." He gets up from his chair and walks around to a bookcase at the opposite end of his office. He shifts some binders and produces a bottle of vodka and a tumbler. I can see his shoulders shaking. "I'm sorry," he mumbles, "forgive me." He's sobbing. The display of raw emotion strikes me as odd. I would expect Gerasimo's father to cry like this; his girlfriend, perhaps. Then again, maybe it's me. Maybe I've lost faith in people so much that I can't accept that some still have feelings.

"Would you like a drink, officer... I'm sorry, what did you say your name was?"

"Demou. No, thanks, a little early for me." Actually a drink would be great. But I don't do vodka.

"His PhD work was brilliant. Ground-breaking. Just ground-breaking. He'll never finish it now." He wipes his eyes with his hand and turns to face me. "I could never have guessed he was so deep into that stuff... What was he doing, selling it?"

"No. We don't think he was selling it."

"Why did they kill him?" He brings the tumbler to his mouth and empties the contents in one shaking gulp.

"Who were his friends at the university? Who did he spend time with?"

"Gerasimo?" He shakes his head and refills the tumbler. "He didn't much care for his colleagues here. Never bothered with them. He was a hell of an electronic engineer, through and through."

"A loner, then?"

The professor nods. "Did you police people get him killed? Are you responsible?" He has regained his composure, it seems, and says these words with a calm and steady voice. They cut me like a knife.

"Why would you think that, professor?"

"No reason," he says, staring at me. "No reason."

"I'm afraid he got himself killed."

He nods again, emphatically. Almost ironically. "Well, then," he mumbles, and returns to his chair. "I doubt that his father will be of any use to you. He and his mother divorced long ago. He's somewhere in Salonica, from what I know, remarried. Mother died last year. Cancer, I believe. But do see his sister. Three or four years his junior. He sounded like he had quite a soft spot for her. 'My Tina', he used to say whenever he spoke about her. 'My Tina'."



***



Part II: A sudden, shocking, massive sound is coming tomorrow night, Sunday, December 30.

[Steven Hunley]

[QUOTE=DocHeart;1195498][SIZE=2]I often say I know Athens like the back of my hand, every nook and cranny; every congested junction, every cracked pavement, every mouldy back alley. I know every bar, every pool house, every night club and its accompanying back room where dirty cash is counted and shared out to characters who then redistribute it amongst themselves in silent, smoky poker games. Every junk food joint and every brothel. I know the good places too. The upmarket neighbourhoods. I know the tree-lined streets of high-walled villas in Marousi and Kifissia; I know which politician lives in what mansion in Kastri and Kefalari; I know the lawyers' and tax officers' beach houses in Voula and Kavouri. I know the whores and the countesses, the pimps and the CEOs. I know the hungry and the homeless and the despairing, and I know the vultures that circle above them...


When Detective Demou proposes a plan to disrupt the Athenian drug scene, his normally conservative supervisor is impressed. The involvement of ordinary drug users is crucial to the plan, and an operation is set up to select the best candidates for some unofficial underground work. But the plan goes wrong, placing a number of high-ranking police officers' careers in jeopardy...


***

Rigor Mortis will be posted here in three parts in the run-up to the new year. As always, I deeply appreciate your readership and critique.

I am sooo excited about this. If there's one genre you shine in, Doc, it's noir. For sure I will read on.

[liza]

Darvino. Ugliest crime columnist in Athens. Most annoying, too. To be exact, he's number one in my list of people I've always wanted to punch. He fancied my ex-wife long before I did. After getting shot down a couple of times, he compromised and decided to play the male "friend". Hang around her whenever he could, talk to her, be seen with her. Male friend my arse. Unfukcable pathetic git never stopped dreaming of nailing her. Stupid, too. As though a woman like Julie would ever take her knickers off for a weedy, cross-eyed, moustached sod like him.


Demou is a little bit pathetic I think:banghead:

[Steven Hunley]

Doc, this was so satisfying to read and know there was more coming. It's the hard-boiled characters and situations and dialogue. To me, along with authentic details about Greece--- thoroughly engrossing.

[MANICHAEAN]

Dear DocHeart
A good gritty read. Touches of Ed McBain about it I thought, especially with the interspersion of dark humour cop dialogue. I especially liked the introductory piece akin to an all seeing Greek god looking down on Athens, or on a more mortal plane, a writer who has the indispensable attribute of being a watcher.
The story also evoked an element of sadness in its portrayal of a section of Greece expressed in your words “I know the hungry and the homeless and the despairing, and I know the vultures that circle above them.”
It is indeed sad if this is what it has come to in the reality behind the tale. I know well the shady parts of the port of Piraeus as a young man in the 1960’s but it still had at that time a compassion and a spirit which transcended it’s material demise.
I look forward to reading further installments. I’m a strong fan of your work and wish you would contribute more.
Very best regards.
M.

[DocHeart]

Thanks for reading, everyone!

Manichean, thank you especially for your kind words. I don't think we've met before, so cheers!

I wasn't alive in the 60s, but I know that Greece was a very different place back then. Hell, it was different in the 80s, when I *was* around. Is it as bad as Inspector Demou makes it out to be these days? Well, depends how sensitive one is, I suppose. Some people still like to see the glass as being half-full. But not this character. He's doing his damnest to sound hard-boiled, you see. :)

Regardless. Time for Part II.

Best,
DH

[DocHeart]

The Mendis' home is a flat in one of the thousands of blocks in downtown Kypseli, built with the characteristic abandon of the 1970s boom. I was only a kid back then, but I remember how two-storey houses with gardens with lemon trees started being replaced by blocks of flats. First, the bulldozers would come in and shatter tiled roofs and big sunny windows. Trees would be uprooted and taken to the dumps up north. Then, massive cement skeletons would rise up. Soon families that had sold their farms for a song to come to Athens would occupy the flats. Construction. What a fast buck. What a deal. A ten-acre piece of farmland for a city flat - who could resist? Anyone who said back then that the city would become a filthy, massive prison if we kept building it up like this would have been dismissed as a backward peasant.

Now, whenever you enter a downtown block of flats, you need to hold your breath to stop yourself from choking. And with no more room to build anything on, construction businessmen have diversified and altered their core sphere of activities. They all run pest control companies now. Not as lucrative, granted, but cockroaches and rats are hardy enough to provide a steady market.

I knock on the door, but the music (or, at any rate, a grinding, thumpy, dysrhythmic sound that passes as music among the young) blaring out from inside the flat makes it improbable that anyone hears me. I raise my fist to give the door a real bang when, surprisingly, it opens.

"What?"

Tina is every little bit her brother's sister, with red curly hair and green eyes that shine and sparkle and pierce. She's wearing a white t-shirt covering her chest and her upper abdomen and not much else, long, toned, youthful legs and small red knickers in full display.

"What do you want?"

I show her my badge. "Can I come in?"

"A cop? What do you want? Did something happen to Ger?" Her eyes open wide and fill with concern. I stand still, holding my badge up, keeping well clear of her emotions and the knock-on effect they could have on mine. I'm quite good at this when I want to be.

"Yes. Can I come in, please?"

I follow her inside. The living room is spacious, but almost devoid of any furniture. There's an armchair, a sofa, a TV set. The huge speakers of the stereo system are almost vibrating with the cacophonic beat. She throws herself in the armchair and curls up on it, closing her eyes.

"I'm Inspector Ari Demou. You must be Tina."

"My name is Christina," she says without opening her eyes. "Only my brother calls me Tina. Is he dead?"

"Mind if I pause your music for a second so we can talk?"

"Do what you like."

I switch off the stereo. Without its noise, traffic from the street below is audible. A large motorbike is heard approaching, causing the windows to rattle. The girl is hiding her face in her hands. Then, before I have time to say anything, she jumps up and disappears into what must be a bedroom. Drawers open. Their contents are moved about, items are taken out. She returns with nail varnish and a bag of cotton, sits back on the armchair and starts working on her toes.

"How did he die?"

"We suspect it's drug-related. You sound like you expected him to die."

She stares at me with her mouth half-open, frowning, in what might be disbelief. After a few seconds, she nods and goes back to her toenails, applying the red varnish with care.

"You never knew with Ger. You never knew what he was up to."

"He told you anything the last couple of weeks?"

"Like what?"

"Like a secret."

"He used to tell me lots of secrets."

"Did he tell you we had him on possession?"

This surprises her enough to stop applying varnish for about half a second. "No, I didn't know." She restarts. "So he spoke to you about his suppliers and then they found out and they killed him. Is that what happened?"

I hesitate. For a moment there I'm almost considering telling her the truth. That her brother was working with us, that he had agreed to do much more than just name dealers. But I'm here to do my job. My job is to find out how much she knows. Not to tell her the truth.

"That's what we assume happened."

"Was it Short Loui?"

"You know Short Loui?"

"Do I know Short Loui? Where do you think I get my stash from?"

Is she calm? Is she one of those people who have absolute mastery of their emotions - the kind that comes after life has slapped you across the face so many times that you can say "what the hell" to anything? Isn't she too young for this to be the case? Or perhaps she's just unable to take in too many ideas right now - unable to realize that they'll probably come after her, too.

I light a cigarette and think how I could help her if things weren't as they are. I could take her down the precinct to keep her safe over the next few hours and get a proper statement from her. I could then arrange a hotel room to be guarded around the clock and hide her there, before sending her off to the countryside somewhere to wait on tables or to attend a polytechnic. But things are the way they are. The only real option is to leave her to her own devices.

"They'll kill me, too, won't they?" She is now focused on the smallest toe of her left foot, pedicure almost half-way through. "I've got some stuff in the house. If I show it to you, can you get me on possession and put me in prison? I'll probably be safer that way."

What sihtheads we cops can be sometimes. Trusting a user to become a reliable collaborator and informant. Stergo, you damn fool. Mikeli, you damn fool. Five stars my arse. Demou, you damn king of fools. The crisis got to us all. All this talk about "working smart", "finding new ways to be productive", "not being afraid to take calculated risks", all the political, diplomatic, euphemistic bulslhit they've been forcing down our noses got to us. Job insecurity got to us. My ex-wife's jibes got to me. My thick, stupid, proud, stubborn head got to me, the idea of going up to her flashing a brand-new Assistant Commissioner badge and rubbing it in her face got to me, saying to her you thought I was no good, didn't you, you said I'd never make it, didn't you.

Wait. Cool it. The important thing is she doesn't know.

"I wouldn't think so, Christina. They've no reason to believe you're a threat. They don't know you just told me that you also buy from them."

"Yea, but they won't take a risk, will they. They'll expect you guys to come and talk to me, and they'll be worried I'll name them just like my brother did."

"They'll know we're watching over you. They won't try anything."

"But will you?"

"Will we what?"

"Be watching over me?"

Oh, right. Tears. Wait, let me look again. Yes. That's a definite tear rolling down her left cheek. Almost as if she realizes that I'm trying to ascertain its existence, she takes her eyes off her toenails and stares at me. I can see it clearly now. A well-defined shiny stripe all the way down the left side of her pale, child-like face. So easy for women to open the faucet whenever they feel in a tight spot. Always amazed me how easy it is for them.

Someone in a movie once said, guilt is like a bag of bricks. All you have to do is set it down. And I have reason to set it down. It's called not being kicked off the force.

"Well, inspector. Will you?"

And now there is the sudden, shocking, penetrative, massive sound of a machine gun, and glass shattering, and bullets smashing on walls and ricocheting off radiators and whistling, and then another round, and more destruction, and more ricocheting, and then (only then) do my reflexes kick in, and I fly right into her and throw her off her armchair onto the floor, and I pull my Ruger out to give them some back and fire through the hole where there used to be a window, and they rattle some more off and bits of wall explode, and the TV is smashed up into at least a dozen pieces, and the stereo too, and the noise, oh my word, what a noise! And her armchair is now full of holes, and as I lay beside her on the floor and start dragging her towards the door while firing a couple more shots towards the general direction of the aggressor, more and more (endless!) bullets fly around us, and I don't know if she's hit, but I know how lucky I've been so far, and I know that every fraction of the second that passes I could hear her gasp with sudden, piercing pain, and she could get seriously injured and be unable to continue moving towards the door, or she might just die instantly and become a heavy, unresponsive, undraggable lump, or any of the above could happen to me, my next breath could be my last, the next square metre of the floor on which we land might be where I die, and bullets fly, and bullets whistle, and I need to reload to fire at them again and win a few seconds while they duck and so be able to reach the door, and by the time I've done it we've reached the door and we're still alive, and the room has filled with smoke and dust and debris, and I have to lift myself up to reach the door handle without any of the flying, whistling, ricocheting, squealing, howling bullets hitting me, and we're out on the landing, and I lift her up and we run down the stairs, and when we reach the building entrance the firing has stopped, and I push her in a corner, and I run to the entrance and see two men carrying Kalashnikovs running out of the block of flats across the street and jumping on a huge motherfukcer of a Kawasaki, and as they race off I fire twice but I miss, and there are two women outside the bakery, screaming, and a kid carrying a basketball who was about to cross the street before becoming frozen in place, so I shoot no more.

First Gerasimo is shot in the face with a gun that could bring down a fighter jet. Then they bring out the machine guns to kill the girl, or me, or the girl and me. Talk about out of proportion.

I go to the girl. She's sat where I left her, hugging her knees.

"God almighty," she whimpers.



***


Absurdity and guilt are a potent, nasty mix.

A barrage of what-ifs assaults me. What if I hadn't thought of this stupid plan. Then Gerasimo would still be alive. But then again, what if he hadn't been so stupid as to start babbling about it left, right and centre? No reason why he should have died then, either. Which what-if is stronger? Who's entitled to being stupid in a situation like this? A cokehead geek or an experienced cop? And what if the use of the Magnum is not as out-of-place as I think it is? Maybe it's the new modus operandi of the drug scene. What if they simply decided to start playing harder? They felt their business was under threat, they chose the way of the hardass. They'd hardly send out a press release about it.

This is called losing one's bearings. It happens. Everyone gets confused sometimes, finds it hard to focus. Become afraid. In such times, we yearn for a fixed point on the horizon. Something that doesn't move and doesn't change.

"Hi."

"Ari. How are you?"

"Not so bad. How are you?"

"I was sleeping."

"Good. Good. Early to bed and early to rise, and all that."

"What do you want, Ari?"

"Well, we haven't spoken in a while, and I thought we could catch up. You know, have a drink or something."

"It's half-past midnight."

"Well, sure - I mean, I don't mean tonight. Tomorrow."

"Why, Ari, why would we do that?"

"What do you mean why would we do that. Because I'm me and because you're you. Because we're me and you. Remember, Julia?"

"You're drunk."

"I'm not drunk. I never get drunk, no matter how much I drink. You know this about me."

"Can we talk some other time?"

"Oh really? Some other time? When? I've called you a thousand times, Julia. You tell me, Julia, you tell me. You tell me when you can talk, set a date and time, like the 25th of November 2019 at 11 am, and I'll write it in my diary."

"Ari, please. I don't want to hang up on you, but you're going to make me."

"Mikeli says you've told him to make sure we don't meet at work."

"What? What the..."

I hear my voice. My words come out all funny, distorted, wavy. But they make sense to me, in a drunk, nasty, violent way. If Julia was across from me right now I would hit her. Yes. I would slap her senseless.

"How come it was Lambrou and not you this morning? Eh? You were supposed to be on last night. Something fishy about the whole thing, Julia, something just doesn't sit right. Weird reactions from people all over the place, weird, weird situation. Fukcin guy with his head blasted off with a missile because he talked to me? What is this, a fukcin samurai movie? I speak to the guy's sister and she's this nineteen-year old who tries to wise-crack me, and she's telling me she doesn't know anything and I'm supposed to trust her. I need to speak to someone, dammit, and the only person I can share this with, the only person I feel safe talking to is you. I apologise for any fukcin incovenience, alright? Fukc it, you know what, she's begging for it, Julia, she's gagging for it, and I've a good mind to give it to her. You don't give a siht anyway. Go on, say it. Say you don't give a siht. Say, like you always say, you're free to see anyone you want, Ari, you can do whatever you want with your life, Ari, go on, say it."

But the line's been dead for ages.

So this is it. You can't have a person who'll do that for you. You can't rely on a human being to always be there, no matter what. Human beings hang up the phone. Human beings get lawyers to call you and tell you that the papers need to be signed.

But what about booze and cigarettes?

Booze and cigarettes are very easy to find in this glorious city of ours. No matter what day it is, no matter what time it is, you can always go to a wine shop and get all the alcohol you need and all the packs of Camels you need. Two minutes, in and out. That's why I don't understand these kids that do proper drugs, 'cause you have to go out of your way to get proper drugs. You have to find a source. You have to set up an appointment. If you run out in the middle of the night -- and believe you me, it's in the middle of the night you most often need that fixed point on the horizon, what then? You have to wait till the next day until your source has got out of bed, or you have to go banging on his door, hoping he's carrying. It's unreliable. It's not a fixed point.

But booze and cigarettes, yes. Now, these guys are reliable. These guys are true fukcin stalwarts.

One more scotch. Tina still asleep on the sofa, amazingly, despite my heated call with my ex. Lips parted slightly. Breath shallow and slow. Someone naive would say she looks like an angel. But women who look like angels are usually not. Not anywhere, and especially not in this city.

"Why do you drink so much?"

Not asleep after all. See what I mean?

"Why do you snort coke?"

"It makes me feel good."

"Well, there you go."

"You don't sound like you feel good."

"Why don't you go back to sleep now, huh?"

She looks twelve years old in the tracksuit I bought her. The socks are also a load of sizes too big for her, her feet lost in them, the wool flopping about around them. She's crying silently again, tears running out of eyes tightly shut onto the cushion. I'd like to comfort her, but I've got nothing to say to her that will give her any real hope. Current arrangement has her signing a statement down the station as soon as day breaks, then off she goes on a flight to Salonica to stay with her father. That was the best deal I could strike with Stergo, who initially didn't even want to pay for this hotel room.

"I will kill them," she sobs. "In time, I'll find a way to get a gun, then I'll come to Athens and find them and kill them. All of them."

"You have better things to do with your life."

"Yea? Like what?"

"Work. Men. Travel. It's all out there waiting for you."

"Yea. Waitress of the Year, that's gonna be me."

"You're young enough to do whatever you want."

"Now you sound like him. Like Ger."

"Well, great minds."

She sits up, liquid from her eyes and her nose all over her face. She takes a cigarette and lights it.

Everybody is scrounging off me today.

I feel old sitting in here with her. Ancient. Fossilized. The front of her tracksuit top is half-way unzipped, and I get a glimpse of the swell of her left breast underneath. I imagine the skin warm and smooth and soft. I imagine the difference in texture between the nipple and the rest of the breast. I haven't slept in ages and I've drunk more than I should, again, but I feel desire - no, I feel downright horny. My mind runs away and paints dangerous pictures, anarchic images of sexual intercourse, missionary, all fours, sideways. I imagine taking her vagina into my mouth, sucking on her with my hands on her chest, feeling her breaths and her moans and her heartbeat.

"You know what else Ger used to say?"

Good. I'm glad she spoke. I join her in smoking.

"He used to say we should stop doing it."

"Stop doing what?"

"You know. Coke. Give it up. Go clean. He said when his PhD work was finished he would never come near it again."

I nod. She's been crying or almost crying since I met her this afternoon, so I'm finding it hard to tell how close she is to starting again. For a minute I wonder what she looks like when she's happy, carefree, laughing. She must be gorgeous.

"And what about you, Christina?"

"Me? Give it up? Yes, I'm considering it. Especially now that... You know. I think Ger would like me to. But I sure wish I had some right now."

Her expression changes into something that initially looks like a big grin, but then she gasps, her shoulders shake, then her whole body enters a series of breathless convulsions followed by moans of pain and anguish.

Ok, now she's definitely crying.

"Why do they have to kill us, Ari, why must they kill us? I won't let them kill me, Ari, I won't let them..."

She gets up and comes over to me, throwing herself in my arms, shivering and moaning. Helpless. I hold her in my lap as she lets tears flow freely onto my chest. Within seconds my shirt becomes soaked. I place a hand on her head and my fingers become entangled in soft curls that smell of orange-flavoured shampoo.

"I won't let them kill me..."

The police will do nothing for this girl. We will tell her that everything is alright and then leave her exposed and vulnerable, only hoping that the drug dealers and their bosses will let this go now and they won't go after her and kill her and dump her in another petrol station.

But it's alright, really, because she's an addict, right? And a poor one at that. Poor addicts don't vote. Poor addicts don't have trade unions. Poor addicts don't get together to form pressure groups. They don't pay their taxes and they don't pay their national insurance contributions and they generally do not contribute towards the upkeep of the State. So the State will let her burn, burn to cinders in her two-sizes-too-large tracksuit and her flopping socks.

She looks up at me. "If I tell you everything, will you get them for me?"

And then incredible truths pour out with her seemingly endless tears, and they fall on my head like fragments of a shattered sky, instilling, no, smashing perfect, impeccable sense into everything. The BFR bullet pulverizing Gerasimo's head; the professor's tears; the threat note; the machine-gun attack. Things that make me realize chaos truly is upon us, and that journalists will have to find new, more powerful words to describe the situation in my city if they want to remain sufficiently sensational.



***


Part III: The Slowing of the Heartbeat will be posted here on New Year's eve.

[miyako73]

I like the edgy tone, the dirt and grit. The darkness. The smoke. So textured and alive. I like your writing style. Your literary voice sounds or seems to me like that of a brilliant, complicated writer high or drunk and manic. Just curious. Is this induced by something? I want to try. Hehehehe.

[DocHeart]

Thanks for reading and for your comments, Miyako.

I'm actually clean these days. :)

Best,
DH

[DocHeart]

Okay, I've got midnight and the New Year fast approaching in this part of the world, so I'd like to wish everyone all the best for 2013. Keep reading and writing.

I know you're all out there drinking champagne somewhere, but third and final part is going up in a few minutes anyway. Thanks in advance for your readership.

Best,
DH

[DocHeart]

Never to bed, and early to rise. I'm at headquarters at half past four, approaching the gate with my cell phone glued to my ear. I think one of the guys on guard duty is called Petro, but I'm not sure. I will take my shot regardless.

He salutes me, then opens his mouth to verbalize the greeting, but I signal him to be quiet, as if I've got the president himself on my phone. I stand there for a full minute, palm open towards him, a constant command to remain silent. He and his colleague look puzzled, they look at each other a couple of times, but no sound comes out of them. Then I put the phone on my chest and whisper to him.

"Petro, who's the officer in charge tonight?"

"Ehm, it's Lieutenant Karioris, sir."

"Karioris? Well go tell him I'm out here and I need a surveillance kit. A two-piece one. Kevlar for underground agent, UDC connector for the receiver. If he's in a drunken stupor, just get me the kit anyway. Quick. Batteries, too. Make sure they're the right ones. Big stake-out, Petro. Million-euro poker game up in Kefalari. They're about to stop for breakfast, I need to have been there five minutes ago and wire my man up - can't record anything on my cell. Sign my name on the log, I don't want to go inside, I'll lose signal. Go."

I place the phone back on my ear and bend forward, squinting, listening intently to absolutely nothing. I watch the guard walk hurriedly into the building. It's only a couple of minutes before my helper re-emerges. I put my phone away and stretch my neck.

"Here you go, sir. I - I signed your name, just like you said. Lieutenant said it's fine."

"Good job, Petro."

"It's Stefano."

"What?"

"My name is Stefano."

"Wait... aren't you... don't you have a brother called Petro down at Vice?"

"No, sir."

"Well, never mind. Thanks, Stefano. Keep it up."



***

Day breaks. The fog and the car fumes and the poisoned steam of the factory chimneys mix to fall upon the city like translucent khaki-coloured vomit. We drive past vast hospitals, banks, office blocks, their endless high-rising cement line every now and then interrupted by blocks of flats with colourless facades and crumbling balconies. I may be still drunk from the night before, or my belief that I'm the only one who could get hurt here is right.

"My school used to be here," she says as we're waiting at a red light. "Just over there, where that Toyota place is now. Wasn't big at all."

"You haven't lived your whole life in Kypseli, then?"

"Oh no. We only moved there after my father fukced off. He owns a house here, just up the hill. Or at least he used to. Maybe he's sold it. Who gives a siht, anyway. Ari, is this thing going to hold? I feel it kind of loose." She fumbles with the wiring on her chest.

"Just don't touch it. It's fine."

"It feels loose, though."

I sigh and place my hand under her shirt. I feel her bra over her ribcage and her breast, and reach inside it to test the tape's sturdiness.

"It's fine. Find a way to slow your heart down, though. Mic will fall off if it keeps getting hammered like that." She blushes and smiles. First smile of hers I ever see. It penetrates the fog and makes the sky shine. At least to my sleepless, hungover eyes.

The light changes and we drive off. "Run me through it again, Tina."

"I go in and tell him I need his help. I tell him they're after me and they're wrong to be after me because all I want is to go on with my life. Couple of cops did come, but they left me alone soon enough. That's what I tell him. And then, - "

She pauses. Stops breathing. She closes her eyes and frowns, imagining herself going ahead with this, standing there opposite Kesvoukis, playing the part.

"And then?"

"And then... And then I tell him I really need to get hit, and can he give me some because there's no way I'm going to Short Loui because he'd probably just kill me, god these guys are so paranoid from all the siht they're doing, can you help me out, professor, can you help me out? Can you talk to them? Can you let them know I've said nothing? They'll listen to you, professor, can you talk to them, please, please, pretty please?"

"And if he says yes?"

"I take the coke and then ask him if I can continue doing what my brother used to do for him, 'cause I've got no other income, I'm desperate, I need to survive. And I can do it well 'cause I know all of my brother's mates, but he'd have to talk to Short Loui."

"First and foremost."

"Yes. Short Loui, first and foremost."

"It's Short Loui you're worried about the most, you fear for your life. That's your number one concern. Remember, he probably hopes you're dead. You go to see him to keep you safe. Coke comes second."

"That's it."

"And what if he plays it as though he doesn't know what you're talking about?"

"I beg. I cry. I fall to his feet."

"And if you feel that he suspects you're wired?"

"I cough four times and say 'Jesus Christ' and beg him for coke again, and then I get angry and say it's pointless and say that I regret even asking him, and walk out. But you'll be listening in, right? You'll understand if the whole thing is going to siht, right?"

"Of course I will."

"Ari?"

I take my eyes off the road and look at her. She stares at me with wide open, concerned eyes; their greenness fills the background of everything I see, and for a moment it's as though the city has taken on a bright emerald hue.

"You'll be there, right? 'Cause I'm kind of scared."

But her bravery shines through those frightened eyes so brightly.

"I promise you, Christina. I give you my word."

"Thanks, Ari. You're a good sort."

A good sort. Yea. And I've got Camels.

"I'd kill for some meth."

"You want a pick-me-up now? I really don't think you'll need it in a few minutes."

"Guess so. Are we nearly there?"

"Nearly. Just one quick stop we need to make to pick a friend up. Someone who will help us."



***


"Where the fukc are you, Demou? And most importantly, where the fukc is the girl?"

"Jeez, you sound like siht, Stergo. Sore throat, eh? You should lay off the Camels. Especially my Camels."

"What are you doing, Demou? And what's this number? Where are you calling from?"

"Phone booth. Listen. I've found some things out. It's nastier than we thought. I've wired her up and I'm putting her on the field."

"I'm taking your badge, Demou. I really am. I'm giving you fifteen minutes to get her down here before I call the Commissioner."

"Yea, I thought you'd say that, Stergo, or something to that effect, so I've got someone here who wants to say hi. Hold on."

I pass the phone to Darvino. His eyes are shining with so much excitement that he looks kind of pretty. His moustache bounces up and down like an electrified worm as he speaks.

"Hello, Assistant Commissioner? It's me, Darvino. How are you? Yes, Darvino from Athens Voice. Yea, long time no speak, how... Yea, listen, I'm here with Ari, Ari Demou, and he's been kind enough to give me an exclusive here, and..."

"Enough." I grab the phone and listen to see if the line has gone dead. Stergo is still there, however. Silent. Probably shocked. Probably white as a fukcin ghost. But still there.

"Stergo?"

"You've fukced us all up, Demou. All of us. All of the work we've done all these years, you've blasted it to bits."

"Yea. Like rolling a boulder up a hill and all that, right Stergo?"

"You'll be a traffic warden till the day you retire, you stupid fukc. You useless, good for nothing drunk."

"Stergo, listen. I need a couple of police cars on Katehaki, just outside the National Technical. Not too close. Say about five hundred metres from the main entrance. Actually the metro station would be perfect. Tell them to pick a nice new frequency and let me know. And I need another car going to Kesvoukis' house to find a Magnum BFR. Well, I think that's it. Anyway, lovely catching up. Must go."

"Wait, you fukcer! What have you found out?"

"Stergo, we need to go to the in-between places sometimes, too. Not just the mansions and the brothels, man, like back in our day. The in-between places. That's where crime happens these days. Senior academics used to rig government tenders for roads and bridges and railway lines and hospitals to chosen applicants and get a hefty share of the revenue, which wasn't really our business, though it should have been, but whatever. Anyway, that's all gone now, pal. That's all gone now. No more government tenders. Can you blame them? They had to diversify, Stergo."

"You're totally fukced up, Demou, you know that? Do you even have any evidence for what you're talking about?"

"No, but I'm about to find some. Get those cars out here, will you."

I hang up.

Darvino has been standing still, squeezed into me inside the phone booth, with a massive grin on his face.

"Get moving, Darv. You're blocking the door."

"Yes, sir, Inspector!"



***


"Twenty-four and niner, update on location."

"Twenty-four is at station and ready."

"Niner is at station and ready."

"Radio silence now until further notice, acknowledge."

"Twenty-four acknowledging radio silence."

"Niner acknowledges."

"Give me a cough if you can hear me, Tina."

She does.

"Good. On you go. I've got your back. I'll be silent now unless I must give you an instruction. If I do, you must follow it immediately. Cough if you copy."

Confirmation arrives.

Ford. Airbag on. Km/h. 40mi Charge PT. +3 Surplus. Cruise. On/Off. Set +. Set -. Auto. A/C. Max A/C. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. R.

Now I'm listening to the rustling of the mic against Tina's clothes and the squeaking of her trainers on the floor. I'm staring at various bits inside the car. I can't see outside. I have to allow the downpour to hit my windscreen without the wipers on. I'm parked outside the Faculty. Maybe Kesvoukis is already in his office, maybe not. If he arrives now I don't want him spotting a parked car with its wipers on.

I move onto the stereo system. Sony. Tune +. Tune -. Source. Sound. CD. Tuner. MP3.

Or maybe he won't come in at all today. I don't know whether his associates have reported back to him, or what they reported if they did. But if he knows or suspects that Tina is still alive, he might just lay low and stay home for a few days. Or he might already be on a plane soaring above the Aegean, on his way to somewhere with comfortable access to his Swiss bank account.

Gearstick: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, R.

Darv opens his pack and offers me a cigarette. That's a welcome change.

Then Tina knocks on the door. Three times, just as I instructed her. My heart and my stomach feel like someone put them in the blender together.

"Come in."

Sound of door opening.

"Hi."

"Hello."

"I'm... I was wondering if I could have a minute?"

"Eh... y - yes, by all means. I'm sorry - are you in one of my classes?"

"No. I'm Tina. Ger's sister."

"Ger... Oh, I see, oh of course. Tina."

"I'm sorry to just show up like this."

"Tina - no, not at all... Do have a seat."

"Thank you."

Rustling. A pen is put down on the desk.

"We have met before, haven't we, yes, I remember Gerasimo introducing us some months ago."

"Yes. Yes we did meet back then."

"Would you... Would you like... Can I order you something?"

Sound of telephone receiver being picked up.

"I - ah, no thanks."

"You sure? Coffee or anything..."

"Thanks, I'm ok."

Telephone receiver put back down.

"Terrible, what happened to your brother. Quite terrible. I haven't slept since, I keep tossing and turning. How are you holding up?"

"Not so good."

Pause.

"Well I can understand that."

"Yep."

"It's just... utter tragedy. It's affected me quite profoundly, I can't even imagine how you must be feeling, child."

"Thank you. I..." Tina sniffs loudly and clears her throat. "I need your help, sir." Either she's very good at this, or she's really weeping.

"Oh dear..."

Sound of drawer opening. Sound of an object being placed on the desk.

"Here."

Sound of kleenex being pulled.

"Thank you."

"Anything, my dear. Anything at all. What is it I can do for you?"

"They tried to kill me, sir. Yesterday."

"Who -- really? Oh my goodness..."

"Yes. Short Loui and his gang. They came to my apartment and they tried to kill me, they shot at me like a thousand times, oh my god, oh my..." She lets sobs come out freely now, just like she did last night. I know that she's not acting. That's fine, as long as she doesn't become confused.

"Who -- who is... Have you gone to the police? Goodness! That shooting in Kipseli, it was all over the news! No details, of course... But that was... that was your place? Christ!"

"I'm not going to... I'm not going to the police, you know they can't protect me from them, professor, please, you must help me. You."

"Well, my dear, I - ah, I don't see how I could -"

"I know everything. Ger told me everything. Ger always told me everything. And I wish he hadn't, I really wish he hadn't, 'cause now they wouldn't be trying to kill me if he hadn't, professor... Oh my god... Please help me."

Only Tina crying. Complete silence from Kesvoukis. I guess Gerasimo didn't strike him as a guy who could keep a secret. Well, Mikeli sure thought so. And now the good professor knows she's still up and about and that, despite his prayers, she probably knows as much as Gerasimo did, is taking some time to consider his options.

"And I need coke... or meth... or something... I need to get up."

"Fukcin hell, the kid is absolutely brilliant. She's breaking my heart," Darv says, with the cigarette dangling between his lips. I signal him to be quiet.

"Tina, I - I'm completely taken aback by what you are suggesting here, and I -"

"Professor, I know. I'm telling you I know. I know about Short Loui and Ger and you, and I know you're in charge of the operation here at the NTUA, and I even know what percentage you're taking. Stop playing games, goddammit! Help me! Don't let them kill me."

Silence again. Prof must be feeling the stickiness now. Either he continues to play it cool and risk letting her out in the open with all that info, or he tries to strike a deal. Tight corner. I really don't know what I would do in his shoes.

"Look, all I want to do is live, I don't want a cut, I don't even want the cut that Ger was taking. I'll go on doing his job for you, alright? I'll do the shifting and all I want in return is my life and ten grams a day, ok? Please. Please call them. And then please, for god's sake, please, give me something to get me up. Anything. I've been dry all night."

Seconds pass. The lack of sound is only broken up every ten seconds or so by deep, breathy sobs. Prof's large brain has been at work for too long. I don't like him thinking. I don't like all this time we're giving him.

"Tina, I don't want you to say anything else until he's spoken."

Darvino is staring at the rain coming down on the windscreen, his eyes and mouth wide open. He turns and looks at me. He shakes his head. Then he turns to the windscreen again. Tina continues to sob. Hang on in there, kid, don't let him stare you down. Just keep sobbing quietly.

Sound of getting up from chair.

"Fine."

Bingo.

"Come with me, then. I don't want to talk in here."

"Wh - what... Where..."

"Come. I've got some coke in my car. It's just out in the parking lot. You can get up, then we can go somewhere to talk."

"In your car?"

"Tina, no. Tell him you want him to call Short Loui right now, then you'll go."

"Come, then. Let's go."

"No. I want you to call Short Loui right now, right here. Put him on open speaker, I want to hear him agree that he'll leave me alone."

"Don't be silly, Tina. I'm not going to call from in here."

"Tell him to call him from his cellphone."

"Call him from your cellphone, then."

"You must come with me, or I can't help you, Tina."

"Niner and twenty-four proceeding to scene to prevent 207A."

"No! Niner and twenty-four stay at station, he hasn't incriminated himself yet, he can claim he was agreeing with her to take her to a hospital, now stay right where the fukc you are!"

"Negative, attempted kidnap is in progress, Demou. Get the girl out of there."

"Stergo, you keep those cars right where they are, you stupid son of a bicth!"

"Come. We need to get you straight, then we can talk. Couple of lines."

Tina coughs. Then she coughs again. Then a third time. And a fourth.

"Jesus Christ," she says. "What's with the gun?"

"What's with the cough?"

And then there is loud rustling sound, and Tina letting out a shriek. Then a steady, low hiss fills my ears.

"Twenty-four and niner, proceed to scene immediately, we've been compromised and we have a 207A and a 417. I repeat, 207A and he's got a gun."

"Demou, you stupid bastard, there's no way I'm covering your arse on this one. Whatever happens to the girl, you're responsible, you hear me? Not me, not the Greek police, just you."

"Stop thinking about your goddamn career for a minute and just get to the fukcin' scene, Stergo. Darv, stay in the car."

"What? Stay in the car? Yea, right."

I walk up the steps to the Faculty's entrance, gun pointed forward, with Darvino following me, camera in hand.

They say you have to ask why five times to get to anywhere near the real cause of a situation. If you do this in this case, you reach only one statement, with mathematical accuracy: because I thought up Operation Sisyphus. I am the cause of all this.

No matter what, Darv gets his exclusive today. I hope he treats me nicely in it.

Inside, the receptionist sees me and lets out a yelp, putting her hand on her enormously fat sternum. The professor's door is open, and the office is empty. I run back out to the lobby. She is still frozen in place, hand over heart.

"Police. Where's the back exit?"

"I - it's..."

"Where's the fukcin back exit, lady?"

"It's - It's down the stairs. Down the stairs, left, through the corridor."

"That where the staff parking lot is?"

"Y-yes. Just outside."

"Have a nice day."

I hold onto the railing and run down the stairs, climbing down two, three at a time, using the railing to twist myself around every time I reach a landing. The bottom floor exits into a lawn, beyond which I see unkempt lawn, then rows of cars, and amidst them, in the pouring rain, Kesvoukis dragging Tina along. It's over for him, but the instincts of self-preservation are very powerful in people like him. Criminals, that is, who hold high office. Burglars and purse snatchers will put their hands up and let you cuff them without much fuss. Their lives are broken and miserable anyway. But people like Kesvoukis will fight to the death, as hard as they can. For the throwaways of society, prison is sometimes a relief. Regular routine. Guaranteed meals. Detox regimes. For Kesvoukis, it's losing his job, his family, his nice home, his money, his social status. He'll go all out.

I push the door. It's locked. I take a couple of steps back and shoot it. Then run at them. I'm faster than he is, I'm not dragging a woman about. I catch up easily.

"It's over, Kesvoukis. Drop your gun and let the girl go."

He stops. He has a grip on Tina's wrists behind her back, holding them high up near her shoulders as she hunches forward. A wind has got up, a wind that makes the thick raindrops fall like nails, making everyhting and everyone a shade of grey lashed with diagonal off-white stripes. In the distance, I can hear the sirens and see the blue flicker of my back-up. I walk nearer.

"Let the girl go, Kesvoukis."

He turns around to face me. Tina groans with pain. "Here's how it goes, Inspector. You and me and her get in my car. We all take a nice drive together all the way to Bulgaria. If the weather clears up a bit, we'll be there by this evening. Then I let you two go. That's the deal. You take another step towards me without dropping your gun, I kill her. Your colleagues come anywhere near me, I kill her. Better get on that radio."

See what I mean? All out.

"Twenty-four and niner, we have a hostage situation. I repeat, 207A is now a hostage situation, I'm at the scene conversing with captor, hold short."

"Roger."

"Don't fukc up, Demou."

"Shut the fukc up, Stergo."

Behind me, I hear repeated clicks of a camera taking photos. Darvino never dreamt of this.

"Ok, I've told them to stay back. It's just the three of us now, professor."

"Drop your gun, Inspector."

"Professor, don't be silly now. If you cooperate with us you'll be out in eighteen months. So far nothing's that big a deal. Drugs aren't that big a deal. You said it yourself, who doesn't do drugs these days. You let the girl go, we take you in, you cooperate, you have no previous convictions, later you get a good lawyer to help you claim ill health. But if you take her hostage, it's going to become a big deal. If you take me hostage, it's going to become an even bigger one. And if you kill either one of us, well, what can I say. That would be you completely fukced. Come on. I'm asking you to work with me here."

He opens his mouth to speak, but falters. He's wavering. I can hear Tina breathing heavily and moaning with pain. Massive thunder breaks incredibly huge and drowns everything else out, lasting, it seems for ages.

"I'm not a criminal, Inspector. The law says I am, but I'm not. There's the law, and there's what's truly right. Do you know the difference? I bet you don't. If it weren't for what I do, this department would have closed last year, did you know that?"

"No, I didn't know that."

"Well, know it. You think those bastards running this country have left anything for education? No. They've taken it all, Inspector. All of it. To pay for civil servants that do nothing but vote for them. To pay for parasites. Research money during the crisis? Ha! They couldn't give a damn about it to begin with. I've been begging governments for research funding since 1982, Inspector, and I'm telling you, it's always been like this. Always. Education always came last. Because that way they could keep the natives thick as pigsiht and pleasant and charming. Go to any school. Go to any university. Ask the kids what this country did during World War Two. They won't know. Ask them when the civil war happened. They won't know. Ask them when the junta came to power, and when they were brought down. Ask any IT student what COBOL is, what a database is, they'll just give you answers they've memorized straight out of textbooks. How these things work and why they're useful and how to put them to best practice, they won't have the faintest, Inspector. And now, with the euro and the banks and the fukcin IMF -- now, they have the chance to make this perfect for them. Cut the funding. Close down departments. Make sure the ten million who live in this country are a piece of cake to control and direct. You know what our boy Gerasimo was working on, Inspector? Brace yourself for a long one now. Artificial intelligence in fraud detection in digital medical prescriptions. Have you any idea how much money his work and mine would have saved? What it would mean to this country? And what does this country do? Eh? It catches him with a pouch of coke and drags him to an interrogation room. It degrades him. It humiliates him. And to all effects and purposes, it stops him from helping to save it. And me, too. Damn me to hell if I wanted this money for myself. I wanted it to keep the department running. If you don't believe me, ask the PhD students. Ask them if their bank statements say their salaries come from the National Bank of fukcin Greece, or if they come from my very own, personal account. Ask them."

And now, all I can see in the lashing rain, is the image of a snake swallowing its own tail. And the snake is my country, and its tail is its people.

"I hear you, professor. Even I understand, and I'm just a cop. My friend Darv over there who's a journalist has more education than me, and he understands it all much better. Juries will also want to hear this. And judges, definitely. I'm asking you to let your voice be heard. Let the girl go, and drop your gun."

His grasp on the girl's wrists loosens, and she falls on the ground. She crawls towards me on all fours, at first, then stands. She walks towards me hurriedly, crying.

"Drop your weapon immediately."

The phrase comes from a loudspeaker just a few metres behind Kesvoukis. Yes, it's the police getting it all wrong again, and deciding to sneak up behind the captor, then deciding to order him to disarm just as he's letting Tina go. It's Greece getting it all wrong again. When will I get used to it?

The sound of the professor's BFR is muffled by the rain which is now smashing on cars and concrete and people. Tina falls on her face. More shots are heard, four, six, a dozen, and Kesvouki's body spasms and flails, again, and again, and again, before finally collapsing.

I rush to the girl and turn her around. The bullet from the BFR has made her abdomen nothing more than a reddish-black hole, Her eyes pierce my heart again. She coughs blood.

"Thanks, Ari."

"Hey, you."

"How did I do?"

"You did great. You did a great job."

"I managed to slow my heartbeat down, just like you told me."

"I know. You were brilliant."

"You did a great job, too."

"Well, I have my moments."

"You're going to get them all now, aren't you?"

"Yes. All of them."

"And I'm going to be alright, yes? I mean, this doesn't even hurt."

"I know. Well, there you have it. You're going to be just fine."

Then, she dies.



***


I like these records this youngster plays in this joint.

He played three or four Brubeck songs after I came in, then Monk, then a bunch of Sonny Clarke's. Now he's got Dear Old Stockholm on. If you decide to look at the glass as being half-full, or at least still containing a few drops of liquid, you could say that Athens has lots of places that play good jazz. Maybe jazz works like that. Maybe it becomes more popular in tough times.

I've been fighting with scotch over the last month or so, but tonight I'm letting it win. Around me are mostly young people, some of them having a good time, a few of them even laughing. I don't like being the miserable loner in the corner stool. I wish Mikeli would finally show up.

As if my wish was fate's command, I see him entering. He looks short and thin. He smiles and shakes my hand.

"Good to see you, Demou."

"Yea, you too. How are you?"

He shrugs. "Well, you know. It is what it is. Operation went well, chemo went well, radio is going well, so I'm just waiting to die."

"What will you have?"

"Oh, I'm not staying. I just came in to say hi."

"Sit down. Have a bloody drink."

"Well, tell him to bring a short glass, just for chin-chins. You know why I really came, don't you."

"To give me the latest down the precinct?"

"To give you the latest down the precinct... How the fukc should I know? Last time I was in was two weeks ago."

"Ok. Then no, I don't."

"Well, what do you think? I came to find out what you're doing. Your leave is ending next week. I'm finding it hard to imagine, you know, you working under Stergo again. Have you requested a transfer?"

"Nope."

The bartender, practically running, slams a shot glass in front of Mikeli, and skips away. I fill it from the bottle of Haig beside me.

"Cheers."

Mikeli raises his glass. "Here's to Ari Demou, the brain behind Operation Sisyphus, the daytime nightmare of the Athenian drug scene, the --"

"Shut up. Drink. I'm actually retiring."

Mikeli barely manages to hold his drink in his mouth. "What?"

"You heard me."

He stands there staring at me with fool's eyes for a few seconds, then smiles. "You're retiring?"

"If you keep asking me the same thing you're going to be here all night, Mikeli. Which I don't mind. I like a bit of company. So go on, ask me again."

"Well, what are you going to do? Farm sheep?"

"No. I'll still work the red-eye."

"Privately?"

"Yep. Want another drink?"

"No. Well, I say... Ari Demou, private investigator. Well, one thing's for sure, PIs pull more pussy than state cops."

"Do they?"

"What's the matter, you've never been to the movies? Hey, listen. I'm going. Come here." He grabs me and hugs me and slaps my back, many, many times. "Just make sure you stay alive, son. Life's good no matter what siht it makes you eat. Take this from an old-timer."

"I'll do my best. Take your meds properly now, you hear?"

"And you make sure you respect your wife's restraining order. These things are sent to you for a reason, you know. You want a PI license, you'd better be a good boy."

I watch him walk away through the crowd, knowing it's the last time I see him. The first time was a couple of decades ago. Showed me the ropes. Almost like a father. I remember Tina's green eyes and can't help but wonder what they'd look like in a place like this, how the dim purple lights would affect them. I imagine they would be like diamond beacons of light, improving the atmosphere and the mood of this joint tenfold. But these are self-indulgent, useless thoughts. Life is what it is, and it has its rules. There ain't no breaking those rules, no matter how smart, clever, efficient, rich or beautiful you are. What's worse, there ain't no true and thorough understanding of them, no matter how many times you've been forced to examine them.

I pay and instruct the barman to jot me down for half a bottle in the bank. Away from the noise of the bar, the city is moving slowly for a Friday night, with the weight of every nasty thing happening to it holding it back, unable to gather pace like it once used to, when young construction workers, binmen, waiters and trainee lawyers on their night off would hit the streets with money and optimism in their pockets, looking for giggling groups of carefree young girls. Traffic moves sluggishly; rubbish pile up. Couples stay in watching TV. This is a city in rigor mortis, and its nights hold less and less mobility, less and less excitement, and more and more slow and careful movements in the shadows, executed by those who must not be seen lubricating its mysterious ethical - unethical machine.

This is my city.

[DocHeart]

Bumpity-bump.

I would particularly like feedback on (a) the action scene in part II, and (b) the face-off in part III.

These are parts that were particularly hard to write.

Regards

[Jack of Hearts]

Part I kicked ***, Doc! Some especially interesting stuff was how Demou interacts with Darv. He describes him as pathetic, weak, defined by a professional role- and yet Demou seems to have failed every way except professionally, and he's already one foot toward that... so he empathizes with the weak, pathetic man because they're the same kind of men.

Going to continue reading this. This is really great stuff.








J

[islandclimber]

DocHeart. I like this. There's a grittiness to it that is alive. I can feel the depths of the grime, the smoke, the dark sense of melancholy that have descended like a fog over the city. For me, I see the narrator hunched over a typewriter in some stark room, chain-smoking clouds into existence, and bottles of scotch strewn across the floor. This would make an excellent film noir. With narration in the background. It would be quite delicious.


I like these records this youngster plays in this joint.

He played three or four Brubeck songs after I came in, then Monk, then a bunch of Sonny Clarke's. Now he's got Dear Old Stockholm on. If you decide to look at the glass as being half-full, or at least still containing a few drops of liquid, you could say that Athens has lots of places that play good jazz. Maybe jazz works like that. Maybe it becomes more popular in tough times.

I've been fighting with scotch over the last month or so, but tonight I'm letting it win. Around me are mostly young people, some of them having a good time, a few of them even laughing. I don't like being the miserable loner in the corner stool. I wish Mikeli would finally show up.

This might be my favourite part. I love the brief surmise that maybe Jazz becomes more popular in tough times, into this idea that maybe a few of the denizens of this bar contrary to his depressed corner status, are even laughing.

And then, this monologue of sorts. This rant. It breaks up the brevity of the majority of the dialogue in this piece. It almost seems out of place at first, but this interruption of brevity for long-winded ranting worked, and really well. I like its uniqueness in the piece.


"Well, know it. You think those bastards running this country have left anything for education? No. They've taken it all, Inspector. All of it. To pay for civil servants that do nothing but vote for them. To pay for parasites. Research money during the crisis? Ha! They couldn't give a damn about it to begin with. I've been begging governments for research funding since 1982, Inspector, and I'm telling you, it's always been like this. Always. Education always came last. Because that way they could keep the natives thick as pigsiht and pleasant and charming. Go to any school. Go to any university. Ask the kids what this country did during World War Two. They won't know. Ask them when the civil war happened. They won't know. Ask them when the junta came to power, and when they were brought down. Ask any IT student what COBOL is, what a database is, they'll just give you answers they've memorized straight out of textbooks. How these things work and why they're useful and how to put them to best practice, they won't have the faintest, Inspector. And now, with the euro and the banks and the fukcin IMF -- now, they have the chance to make this perfect for them. Cut the funding. Close down departments. Make sure the ten million who live in this country are a piece of cake to control and direct. You know what our boy Gerasimo was working on, Inspector? Brace yourself for a long one now. Artificial intelligence in fraud detection in digital medical prescriptions. Have you any idea how much money his work and mine would have saved? What it would mean to this country? And what does this country do? Eh? It catches him with a pouch of coke and drags him to an interrogation room. It degrades him. It humiliates him. And to all effects and purposes, it stops him from helping to save it. And me, too. Damn me to hell if I wanted this money for myself. I wanted it to keep the department running. If you don't believe me, ask the PhD students. Ask them if their bank statements say their salaries come from the National Bank of fukcin Greece, or if they come from my very own, personal account. Ask them."


Also in Part III I like the use during the one conversation of what seem close to sound directions for the stage. Sound of this, sound of that. It's excellent.

I suppose my only minor issue with sections of parts II and III would be the dialogue. There are just parts where it seems a little stultifying. However there are excellent lines that work so well in this story, such as:


"Jeez, you sound like siht, Stergo. Sore throat, eh? You should lay off the Camels. Especially my Camels."

This section of dialogue however, left me feeling detached from the story. I'm not entirely sure why... It just seems superfluous to some extent, this call to Julia, too cliché, the drunken late night call to the ex-lover... Although maybe it works just because of the cliché...


"Hi."

"Ari. How are you?"

"Not so bad. How are you?"

"I was sleeping."

"Good. Good. Early to bed and early to rise, and all that."

"What do you want, Ari?"

"Well, we haven't spoken in a while, and I thought we could catch up. You know, have a drink or something."

"It's half-past midnight."

"Well, sure - I mean, I don't mean tonight. Tomorrow."

"Why, Ari, why would we do that?"

"What do you mean why would we do that. Because I'm me and because you're you. Because we're me and you. Remember, Julia?"

"You're drunk."

"I'm not drunk. I never get drunk, no matter how much I drink. You know this about me."

"Can we talk some other time?"

"Oh really? Some other time? When? I've called you a thousand times, Julia. You tell me, Julia, you tell me. You tell me when you can talk, set a date and time, like the 25th of November 2019 at 11 am, and I'll write it in my diary."

"Ari, please. I don't want to hang up on you, but you're going to make me."

"Mikeli says you've told him to make sure we don't meet at work."

"What? What the..."

All in all though, this is an excellent hard-boiled detective piece that doesn't confine itself to only the stereotypes of the genre. I quite like it.

[miyako73]

There's no major fault I can pinpoint... except your unrestrained use of "is" and "are" in descriptive parts. It sounds lazy sometimes.

Example:

"Without its noise, traffic from the street below is audible." "is audible" is not as interesting as saying "drills and buzzes". I think.

[Jack of Hearts]

Doc,

Litnet is a great place. But your writing is strong, especially in this genre, and maybe you should let it exist somewhere other than some backpages on the internet.

Two cents. Will probably find more time to keep reading this tomorrow.






J

[DocHeart]

Thanks so much, Jack!

I feel confident on my keyboard these days, and full of ideas. What I certainly need to improve is my discipline and my planning. I can't just put in an hour at 11pm every other day if I'm ever going to be half-serious about this. This was 3 months in writing: a couple of times I nearly trashed it, and the plot changed at least twice, too.

Enjoy the rest of the story!

Best,
DH

[DocHeart]

There's no major fault I can pinpoint... except your unrestrained use of "is" and "are" in descriptive parts. It sounds lazy sometimes.

Example:

"Without its noise, traffic from the street below is audible." "is audible" is not as interesting as saying "drills and buzzes". I think.

This is an interesting and useful remark, Miyako. Thanks!

DH

[DocHeart]

All in all though, this is an excellent hard-boiled detective piece that doesn't confine itself to only the stereotypes of the genre. I quite like it.

Thanks so much for your detailed reading, islandclimber. I have my own reservations about the role of the ex-wife in the piece. On reflection, she doesn't serve much of a purpose and I reckon the central character can sound justifiably gloomy without an "obligatory" divorce. I'd still want to give him something very painful in his past, but I will have to think up something more original which influences his behaviour and beliefs more directly.

Best,
DH

[Steven Hunley]

Okay, I've got midnight and the New Year fast approaching in this part of the world, so I'd like to wish everyone all the best for 2013. Keep reading and writing.

I know you're all out there drinking champagne somewhere, but third and final part is going up in a few minutes anyway. Thanks in advance for your readership.

Best,
DH

Thanks Doc. This writing is first-rate. By George, it's award-winning quality if ya look at the poles and all. These scenes and characters are all plausible, and the dialogue is as snappy as anything produced by Warner's Brothers in the 30's. It ain't Sinner's Holiday, but then again... you ain't Cagney.............. But close, in a literary preview of talent sort of way.

[DocHeart]

Thank you for your kind words, Steven.

For you and everyone else who enjoyed this piece: Aris Demou will return. :P

All the best.

[Steven Hunley]

Doc- I read somewhere above that you'd like a response on the action sequence.

Here it is so I can refer to it without paging back.

"And now there is the sudden, shocking, penetrative, massive sound of a machine gun, and glass shattering, and bullets smashing on walls and ricocheting off radiators and whistling, and then another round, and more destruction, and more ricocheting, and then (only then) do my reflexes kick in, and I fly right into her and throw her off her armchair onto the floor, and I pull my Ruger out to give them some back and fire through the hole where there used to be a window, and they rattle some more off and bits of wall explode, and the TV is smashed up into at least a dozen pieces, and the stereo too, and the noise, oh my word, what a noise! And her armchair is now full of holes, and as I lay beside her on the floor and start dragging her towards the door while firing a couple more shots towards the general direction of the aggressor, more and more (endless!) bullets fly around us, and I don't know if she's hit, but I know how lucky I've been so far, and I know that every fraction of the second that passes I could hear her gasp with sudden, piercing pain, and she could get seriously injured and be unable to continue moving towards the door, or she might just die instantly and become a heavy, unresponsive, undraggable lump, or any of the above could happen to me, my next breath could be my last, the next square metre of the floor on which we land might be where I die, and bullets fly, and bullets whistle, and I need to reload to fire at them again and win a few seconds while they duck and so be able to reach the door, and by the time I've done it we've reached the door and we're still alive, and the room has filled with smoke and dust and debris, and I have to lift myself up to reach the door handle without any of the flying, whistling, ricocheting, squealing, howling bullets hitting me, and we're out on the landing, and I lift her up and we run down the stairs, and when we reach the building entrance the firing has stopped, and I push her in a corner, and I run to the entrance and see two men carrying Kalashnikovs running out of the block of flats across the street and jumping on a huge motherfukcer of a Kawasaki, and as they race off I fire twice but I miss, and there are two women outside the bakery, screaming, and a kid carrying a basketball who was about to cross the street before becoming frozen in place, so I shoot no more."

So it's a sequence of events close-packed in time so you've constructed one long sentence. In order to string it together, there are many conjunctions (and). In some places they're needed and in others they aren't so important. I understand you arranging it this way, I did a long sentence myself once to imitate a rambling road. Mine worked a bit, but not as effective as I wanted. With this piece the style of hooking it together with ands, and breaking it up in digestible pieces with commas draws too much attention to the style of fashioning it, and away from the action. Go ahead, break it up, if you can-without creating a lull, that's the challenge. You may want to use some sort of device to string it together sequentially that will take place of the 'ands'. But I'm sure you still intend to show the chaos in it too. You have your work cut out for you, and I appreciate the work you've put into the piece.
""And now there is the sudden, shocking, penetrative, massive sound of a machine gun, and glass shattering, and bullets smashing on walls and ricocheting off radiators and whistling, and then another round, and more destruction, and more ricocheting, and then (only then) do my reflexes kick in, and I fly right into her and throw her off her armchair onto the floor" ( I don't know how to use that quote thing)

Try:

Suddenly a shocking, penetrating, massive sound of machine gun rips through the room. Glass shatters, bullets smash on walls, ricochet off radiators and whistle over our heads. Another spray of rounds, more destruction, more ricochets, and then, only then, my reflexes kick in. I tackle her like a full back and throw her off the armchair and onto the floor. A house turns into a battle zone.

Writing is so pragmatic! If this works for you then it works. It's just one man's opinion. Since this is gunfire there may be a natural halting to it in places.

[DocHeart]

This is great advice, Steven! I've now added this paragraph to my list of mini-projects. I'm going to play around with your suggestions a bit. I think what you say about the style distracting from the action itself is key.

Many thanks,
DH

[AuntShecky]

A new cop show spin-off: CSI: Athens.

This is certainly well-written and the features I find objectionable might be the conventions of the police procedural genre itself rather than this individual story. For instance,why do almost all detective stories start with the dead victim and work their way backward? Why is the detective himself almost always a "maverick" coping with alcoholism, or some other kind of addiction, smoking (or trying unsuccessfully to quit smoking -- the "Google" ads on the top of your thread indicating that they've read this story, too), a veteran cop on the verge of retirement, and last but not least, the inevitable "ex" (with varying degrees of hostility.) This divorce motif is so much associated with police stories, that on those rare shows where the lead character is a female detective, even she will have a former husband (as on the outstanding series, The Killing, which also had a child custody issue thrown in.)

This is something of which you yourself are aware, with this slyly funny bit, almost a
"throw -away" line:


"Cop with a sense of humour. I bet you like jazz and have a brown raincoat."

"As a matter of fact, I do."


As I say, it's not entirely your fault that you follow the conventional story elements; indeed, you are to be commended for making an effort to give the reader something more in alluding to the up-to-the-minute current economic conditions in Greece. Not only that, your style seems to strike the right colloquial note-- neither overly formal such as one would find in drawing room mysteries to the down-and-dirty underworld slang of a latter-day Mickey Spillane.

Your characters "sound" real, I'll give you that, and the good-natured give-and-take dialogue shows the natural camaraderie between co-workers. On the other hand, there are spots where the chit-chat goes on a little too long and the threads of conversation are spread out too thinly. ("Brevity is the soul of wit"-- an adage that yer ol' auntie needs to remember as well.) Additionally, the long passages of dialogue containing expository material could use shortening.

Just a few more quibbles:

I wonder why the verb tenses shift from present to past and back. I realize that you're trying to distinguish more recent scenes from those that supposedly occurred earlier. It's a little distracting, and in my increasingly-humble opinion your writing is much smoother when you stick to the past tense.

I also wonder why the journalist character is introduced and then suddenly dropped. He would provide a good foil for Ari, because of their past "bad blood" or so Ari seems to perceive. I would suggest either to develop the columnist's character or drop him entirely.

Even though your narrator provides a plausible explanation for Tina's disaffected reaction to news of her brother's death,having her calmly paint her toenails seems a little over-the-top -- it's bizarrely unnatural even for a troubled, drug-addled,disadvantaged young lady. But then she's redeemed, when you allow her to indulge in tears -- but only after Ari, the detective has left. Actually, now that Ive taken the time to think this through, you actually handled this scene extremely well!

And finally, one quick thing near the end: "Athens voice"? Did you mean "Athens vice"?

That I'd prefer to read your story rather than work on my own LitNet project should tell you something, Doc. But I've put it off long enough. Now it's time to tackle the next installment of "The Lyin' King."


(Belated) Happy New Year Wishes!

Auntie

[Volya]

I suck at constructive criticism and stuff, so all I can say is this is a pretty awesome story Doc :)

[DocHeart]

Thanks so much for your comments, AuntShecky. I'm particularly grateful that you took the time to read this, as I recall that you don't usually read this kind of story (I remember your thread "You know I'll stop reading when..." :) ).





This is certainly well-written and the features I find objectionable might be the conventions of the police procedural genre itself rather than this individual story. For instance,why do almost all detective stories start with the dead victim and work their way backward? Why is the detective himself almost always a "maverick" coping with alcoholism, or some other kind of addiction, smoking (or trying unsuccessfully to quit smoking -- the "Google" ads on the top of your thread indicating that they've read this story, too), a veteran cop on the verge of retirement, and last but not least, the inevitable "ex" (with varying degrees of hostility.)



Why indeed! As an afficionado, I've at times been both perplexed and frustrated by how formulaic the genre is. In Raymond Chandler's essay "The Simple Art of Murder", I have elected to interpret a couple of paragraphs towards its conclusion as a plausible explanation. First, he relates what role, to his mind (and obviously to the minds of most celebrated hard-boiled writers and directors) a realistic murder story should be like:

The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the fingerman for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of moneymaking, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practising; a world where you may witness a hold-up in broad daylight and see who did it, but you will fade quickly back into the crowd rather than tell anyone, because the hold-up men may have friends with long guns, or the police may not like your testimony, and in any case the shyster for the defense will be allowed to abuse and vilify you in open court, before a jury of selected morons, without any but the most perfunctory interference from a political judge.


Then, just a few lines further down, he paints the detective's portrait:

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. [...] He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. [...] He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. [...] He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.

If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.

Putting the two paragraphs together, I think I can see an implicit and indirect answer to why detective fiction writers refuse to (or, perhaps, are afraid to) break the mold: a detective who hasn't got his own weaknesses, his own demons to confront, doesn't belong to the world he lives in, and therefore his range of awareness doesn't come across as real.

But even if this is the answer to the $64m question regarding the almost static shape and form of the genre which has persisted for a good many decades, one may still ask: why alcohol, why nicotine, why divorce? Can't writers come up with other ways their "real", nasty world can affect the detective in order for him to look sufficiently a part of it? How about -- I don't know -- sex addiction? Why can't we have a detective who's addicted to call girls, for instance? Corruption? Being "on the take"? Why not someone who is violent to his family? Why not a lying philanderer?

But I recall Chandler again:

He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.


The reader and the audience must be able to forgive our hero for his inevitable, unavoidable weaknesses. But these weaknesses must be a result of his situation, of his frequent brushes with the underworld, with political and social corruption, and they must harm himself worse than they harm those around him. Otherwise, they would be impossible to forgive. A painful divorce might be the result of his dedication to duty; booze and cigarettes, even gambling or drug abuse, might have followed. Certainly, these are flaws that can harm his loved ones as badly as anything. But it seems that audiences and readers have been willing so far to give him the benefit of the doubt to this extent. If the world and his work in it had instead turned him into someone who accepts bribes or beats his wife, they wouldn't have.





As I say, it's not entirely your fault that you follow the conventional story elements; indeed, you are to be commended for making an effort to give the reader something more in alluding to the up-to-the-minute current economic conditions in Greece.




Actually, I'm fully to blame. :) Not only did I not try to be original, I took care that all the "essentials" were there. The booze, the smokes, even the obligatory ex-wife. The ex-wife herself doesn't sit right at all with me now, and I'm thinking about cutting her out. But at the same time I'm thinking of finding a more effective, relevant way to include her. This may be a somewhat conservative attitude. But I really don't think I'm accomplished enough to conceive of such a departure from norms, let alone write it.

Moreover, I have always felt that the "noir" detective story is a wonderful vehicle for social and political commentary. At the times we live in (and I'm not talking just about Greece here), I think the genre should take advantage of its timeless allure to do just that: to give a voice to the hard-done by, and in fact to make us aware that there are no real "baddies", but simply people who don't know how to and cannot deal with the massive stresses of an economic depression.




I wonder why the verb tenses shift from present to past and back. I realize that you're trying to distinguish more recent scenes from those that supposedly occurred earlier. It's a little distracting, and in my increasingly-humble opinion your writing is much smoother when you stick to the past tense.



My verb tenses shift from present to past and back because I'm stupid. When I finish a story, I re-read a few times and try to at least carry out some rudimentary editing. "Mind the tenses" is always in my mental checklist, and I always forget it. I do like to use the present tense for making narration more immediate, but then I get carried away and forget to use it, or I use it in parts where I should have used the past tense.




I also wonder why the journalist character is introduced and then suddenly dropped. He would provide a good foil for Ari, because of their past "bad blood" or so Ari seems to perceive. I would suggest either to develop the columnist's character or drop him entirely.



I did re-introduce him in the third part, and in fact he plays an important role in Ari's plan: without Darv, his supervisors would have been in a position to deny everything and just bury the whole affair. Maybe you mean something else here. Do elaborate if you feel like it, but only after The Lyin' King is finished -- I'm half-way through it and hoping to read the rest of it (all the way to the end) this weekend. :)





And finally, one quick thing near the end: "Athens voice"? Did you mean "Athens vice"?



"Athens Voice" is what I meant. It is an actual Athenian English-speaking newspaper, kind of leftish. I'm concerned that it's not clear that it's a newspaper I'm talking about there, and will consider using some other name, like "Athens Herald" or something.





That I'd prefer to read your story rather than work on my own LitNet project should tell you something, Doc.



And that you took the time to read it despite your generic objections to the genre tells me something even more. Thank you so much for your critique, it did me the world of good.

A healthy, happy, and productive New Year to you. :)

Best,
DH