When Sonia Verika, a former actress who takes solace in alcohol and isolation, is pulled from the fire, her body is burned almost beyond recognition. The house she shared with a retired director and a small family of African refugees is entirely destroyed, and she is the only survivor. For her ex-lovers, Police Inspector Chronis Halkidis and Simeon Piertzovanis, a failed lawyer and the landlord of the gutted property, her fate is a heavy reckoning. Reflection gives way to guilt, and then to a fanatical desire to uncover the truth behind the blaze and hold those responsible to account - by any means necessary. But with corruption rife throughout the force, Chronis soon finds his investigation shackled from within. Fuelled by their need for revenge, and by their twin addictions to alcohol and cocaine, Simeon and Chronis must resort increasingly to violence if they are to unmask a conspiracy that unites church and state against the interests of justice. A classic noir thriller, Ashes is unflinching in its examination of the violence and extortion bred by corruption, but at the same time tender in its treatment of human weaknesses, of guilt, addiction and regret.
Release date:
July 1, 2011
Publisher:
MacLehose Press
Print pages:
277
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It’s windy, really windy. They’ve smashed that streetlight again. Not kids this time; it was those people, the people who carry the darkness inside them. Better ring City Hall tomorrow. No, not tomorrow; tomorrow’s Sunday – first thing Monday. They’ll get on to it at once; they’re always bending over backwards to make everything safe for the people who live in the nice parts of the city. I always hated those dark Saturday nights and always liked the matinées; they meant I could beat the dusk and the heavy sadness of the sky, and afterwards, at night, the city would light up and Leoforos Alexandras would smother both the darkness and the silence. God knows how many years I’ve been in love with Ippokratous – that street, it’s like a knife slicing right through the heart of the city. What was his name again – the one who lived in the penthouse on the corner of Kallidromiou? The artist. No, he wasn’t an artist – an architect, maybe. He used to like poking his tongue through the gap in my front teeth: the gaps between your teeth drive me crazy, my love, he would whisper. What was his name? Something Byzantine – not Konstantinos, of course. I was doing Anya in “The Cherry Orchard” at the time. So what was it?
I’ll have some more wine and turn on the television, on mute so I don’t wake them. It’s probably very late. I’ll have the wine first. Perhaps I should open the vodka that dear boy Noni brought me last week, completely ignoring that old tyrant’s prohibition. Anyone would think he was Simeon the Stylite the way he carries on – still hopeful that I’ll get off the drink one day, still believing that he can get off it himself. But when I started begging Noni, like a little girl, he took pity on me and turned up later with a bottle of Stoli. In return I gave him a photograph of me playing Medea – awful production in a basement theatre, genuine tragedy. I am still embarrassed just thinking about it, even more than I am about that “Yerma”. Total fiasco – directors and their bloody special effects. Luckily I did “Betrayal” straight after – that shut most of them up, but even so, I don’t like to think about it. Who does like thinking about betrayal, after all? No-one. I’m getting cold again. I’ll get that vodka, fight ice with ice. Here I go, stumbling, talking to myself. Someone’s left the window open. What was that play with the billowing curtain, remind me – a white curtain? I had to worry that someone might climb in, about being invaded, the end. I always cried on the last night, always, no matter how fed up I was by then after fifty, one hundred, two hundred performances. That’s a lot, it ends up being too much, how can you escape the lie? That’s why I prefer vodka. I’m going. I’m going to carry on, and the curtain can billow all it likes – who’d want to come in here anyway? Who’d want to get their hands dirty here in this wretched refuge of ours? No-one. No-one, my love. Now, when have I said that before?
Fight ice with ice. Let me break your seal, Stoli, my love. My red beauty, come here, give yourself to me, transparent like all my mistakes, dense as, oh damn you! Why are you doing this, you miserable fool? Why isn’t anything coming out? Why isn’t your liquid treasure pouring out? Come on, baby, drip, drip, drip – that’s right – whoa! Not too fast. That’s right, I’m holding you, not one tiny drop will escape me, my little darling. Who was it who called me that – “my little darling”?
There’s light in the garden. That’s good. That bloody wine has done me in. Spotlight falls on my almond tree. Another one, I don’t feel good, damned wine, it’s all your fault. Armchair – prepare yourself. My sweet throne, I’m coming, I’ll get rid of all those shameless special effects in our peaceful garden. Who’s that creeping around outside – who’s after my vodka? It burns, the bitch. Shadows, I can see shadows, I can hear them walking, where’s the door? It burns like hell: fight ice with ice, fire with fire, it’s cold outside, shadows on the other side of the fence, I’ll give up the drink, my love, you’ll see, I’ll stop drinking and I’ll get well, and I’ll come back to you, I’ll be yours, I’m leaving now, but I’ll be back so I can truly be yours. Who’s doing the lighting? It’s too soon, we haven’t started yet, no, no, that’s far too bright, why are you burning the almond tree? No! My face is burning, don’t, why won’t you listen to me? No, please, fire is never real for us.
25.i–26.iSunday, 1.50 p.m.
Chronis Halkidis’ son wants to switch to the channel with those deafening video clips; Halkidis begs him not to because the midday news is about to start. “Come on, father, it’s Sunday. What are you so anxious to find out, anyway – the number of deaths on the National Road?” He snarls and stomps out of the sitting room in search of comfort from his second coke of the day. Two years tops, and he’ll be as tall as I am, thinks the head of Internal Affairs of the Hellenic Police, suddenly noticing his son’s broad shoulders. The boy stays over every other weekend, but he had only recently worked out what was really behind all the tension: having a policeman for a father is downright embarrassing. Halkidis lights up and settles into his armchair. Sod him. He’ll understand soon enough. The boy will eventually get sick of his mother’s brainwashing and at some point he’ll no longer be forced to buy his son’s affection by cultivating the ridiculous, fake camaraderie between a forty-five-year-old and a sixteen-year-old yob. At some point the promise of freedom masquerading as vulgar over-familiarity will become redundant, and they will not feel obliged to greet each other like N.B.A. players every other Friday when he picks him up, and he will not have to lay on endless supplies of coke, pizzas and beer, money and free tickets to basketball derbies, and he won’t have to turn a blind eye every time the boy borrows porn under his name at the local video club. Surely, at some point love will take the upper hand?
Plastered in make-up, wearing a studied look of horror, the justshort-of-attractive woman who ensures his direct line to all the news stories recorded by her channel every Sunday afternoon had never quite learned to conceal her schadenfreude when describing the various disasters that befell other people: The house burned to a cinder; there was nothing left after the fire – only ashes. Everybody inside the house burned to death. There is only one survivor. A woman, now fighting for her life in Intensive Care.
A photograph of Sonia flashes across the screen, searing his face.
Sunday, 1.50 p.m.
Simeon Piertzovanis wakes up in completely unfamiliar surroundings, an incomprehensible wet dream etched onto his consciousness. The slats on the window slice up the icy grey winter light, the grey of silence and despair. It only takes a few seconds before he realizes he is at the Hilton and that the woman who had joined him in that most ancient of pastimes with such consummate skill was gone, and languishing in his inside pocket was a cheque for 3,000, a souvenir of one of those rare evenings when all the queens, kings and aces had collectively decided to reward him for his long-standing loyalty.
The sheets are suffused with a delicate scent, the time on his watch is 1.50 and the note on the bedside table reminds him with chilling clarity of the age of his nocturnal companion:
Nice one, granddad – didn’t think u had it in u!!! Call u Monday! R.x
He crumples up the note in disgust and aims it at the champagne bottle which is still sitting on top of the room service trolley. Missed. He lights a cigarette and scans the room for the remote.
Sunday, 2.30 p.m.
Halkidis strides into the hospital flashing his I.D., barging his way through everyone from journalists, cameramen and nursing staff to the merely inquisitive. He finds the head of Intensive Care in a state of panic, hiding from the hordes of press in a tiny office. When confronted with the police I.D., his expression modulates to something approaching disgust.
“How is she?”
“Forty-six per cent third-degree burns.”
“Will she make it?”
“Nothing’s impossible.”
“Her face? What about her face?”
Sunday, 2.30 p.m.
The photograph of Sonia flashing across the screen burns his eyes. The room starts to close in on him, the voice of the reporter disappears into a dark tunnel, the horror grabs him by the arm and drags him into the past, a past he had thought securely sealed, into a “then” he had secretly been proud of, to a painful but courageous elsewhere, to a landscape of shattered emotions and the sweetest kind of suffering.
The photograph on the screen gives way to another, and then another – each so similar and yet so different – two eyes which had been submerged in countless centuries, two lips which had contrived magical whispers, which had produced forgotten cries, which had given him . . .
Simeon screams her name.
He does not make a sound.
Sunday, 3.30 p.m.
He parks his ancient Golf behind a 4×4 belonging to the fire brigade. The young man at the wheel is busy texting. The sight of police I.D. startles him and he quickly takes Halkidis to the Fire Captain despatched by the investigating magistrate. He is a tall, thin, thirty-five-year-old with tired eyes and a warm voice. Halkidis at once realizes that the man is in shock.
“We’ve got one woman in a critical condition and two dead – an old man and a black woman, around thirty.”
“Black?”
“Yes. The man was probably disabled; we found a wheelchair inside the house.”
“How did it start?”
“We’re still looking into it. Want to take a look?”
The captain takes him on a comprehensive tour of the scene of horror, and clears his throat loudly in an attempt to distract from his faltering voice. Outside there is an ancient burnt-out Hillman, two blackened fir trees, and a carbonized almond tree. The house was not big: a small living room overlooking the garden, three bedrooms, and a small laundry room round the back which was used as a storeroom. The black woman was found on the bed, burnt to a cinder; the man was outside her bedroom door, on the floor next to the wheelchair. The destruction was total.
“What about the other woman?” says Halkidis.
“Just say she was fortunate in her misfortune. She managed to get out . . . but not quickly enough, it seems, judging from her burns. She ran out onto the street and was seen by a passing driver.”
“Was that who made the call?”
“As luck would have it, he turned out to be the only person in Greece who does not own a mobile phone. He rang the bells of a couple of houses a bit further down from here, but they’re empty. He had to go all the way out onto the main road, Leoforos Pentelis, and stop another car. It was that driver who made the call. Valuable time was lost.”
“Where did the fire start?”
“In the garden. You see that car, the almond tree, and the fir trees? In the small veranda at the front we found the remains of three canisters, which maybe contained petrol. There was an old stove inside the house.”
Halkidis lights up. The captain rubs his eyes and continues:
“One of the fir trees was touching the outside wall. The window was open, so the curtain would have gone up just like that. It was a really old house, with dried reeds laid directly beneath the roof tiles. The beams in these old buildings stick out. Wooden floors, wooden ceilings, an open window to let the oxygen in. Wouldn’t have taken more than a few minutes.”
“How did it start?”
“Give us three hours to file our report and the house is all yours. Till then, I can’t say anything.”
“Any chance we’re talking arson?”
The captain shakes his head. There’s a strange sadness in his voice.
“Between you and me, in the majority of cases when a fire spreads from the outside in, it usually is. Especially in winter.”
“Has anyone been talking to the press?”
“My job, Officer, is to save lives. That’s what I do. That’s what I know. I’m not good with words.”
Halkidis gives him his mobile number, shakes his hand and hurries back to his car.
Sunday, 3.30 p.m.
A 50 note slipped to some miserable porter and a green surgical gown open the door to Intensive Care. Two security officers in the waiting room are sipping frappés and talking in low voices. The porter says something incomprehensible to them, opens a door, pulls a surgical mask over Halkidis’ face and some protective plastic covers over his shoes and beckons him to follow. They negotiate a forest of tubes and machinery and stop next to a bed where the stark white of all the bandages floods his eyes, blinds and chills him. The porter has to steady him.
“What about her face?”
Sunday, 4.05 p.m.
“Yannis – you have to let me have this case. I’m sure it was arson.”
The Chief of Police is sceptical.
“Why is this so important to you?”
“It’s personal.”
“Absolutely not, Chronis, I need you here. Forget it.”
“You owe me, Chief. Remember?”
Silence.
What the Chief of Police owed Halkidis was his job. Two years ago, it had been on the line when some of his so-called friends, officers who had very bright futures after the recent elections and the inevitable reshuffling of the public sector – and who also enjoyed cosy relationships with various celebrity journalists – found out about the Chief’s affair with a beautiful young woman from Moldova he had met at a sleazy bar owned by a retired colleague. They grassed him up to Internal Affairs, letting it be understood that if the Chief could not see his way to doing them a few favours, they would feed the story to their scandal-hungry reporter friends. Halkidis investigated the case and closed it at once, after the girl in question told him that the Chief had rescued her from the traffickers who had brought her into Greece. She carried on the affair with the policeman, who for his part had set divorce proceedings in motion, intending to marry her as soon as he retired. The officers involved promptly withdrew their complaints when Halkidis warned them that Internal Affairs had a few queries of its own regarding their handling of funds allocated for the payment of informers.
“Come on, Chronis!”
“Yannis, I swear to God – this is a matter of life and death to me. She’s a relative. A close relative.”
“And how the fuck am I supposed to explain this to the top brass?”
“Since when did you feel obliged to explain yourself to them, when only last year they were —”
“O.K., O.K.,” he cuts him short, feigning irritation.
“Thanks, Chief.”
“As of tomorrow you’re at H.Q. on Leoforos Alexandras. I expect daily bulletins.”
“Of course, Chief.”
“Just make sure for your own sake that you handle those journalists with care. If this actress really is as famous as you say she is, all hell’s going to break loose.”
“Don’t worry, Chief.”
“I’ll make the call now.”
“Who will you speak to?”
“To that old junta-socialist – the cabinet secretary’s best man.”
Relieved, he replaces the receiver. “Junta-socialist” was the least offensive nickname for Attica’s Police Chief, a commander who, after gorging on half a suckling-pig washed down with ten litres of beer, would often argue that the only politicians who had genuinely cared about the country were Andreas Papandreou, the founder of the socialist P.A.S.O.K. party, and Giorgos Papadopoulos, one of the three colonels who engineered the ’67 coup. His boss had often to keep him on a short leash because outbursts of this sort made the sweet pill of modernization he had been chewing for the last few years stick in his throat.
Halkidis lights up and sets to work. He bumps into one of his assistants out for a stroll with his in-laws round the Mikrolimano area of Piraeus, and tells him to get to the office in a hurry. The assistant is on his first coffee of the day and his hoarse voice betrays the excesses of the weekend. Halkidis instructs him to get hold of the preliminary fire report, orders himself a coffee and notices that the traffic down on Leoforos Syngrou is very light. He sits there trying to ward off the moment when memories and guilt will force him to open the engraved wooden box locked in the bottom drawer of his desk.
Sunday, 4.05 p.m.
The taxi is making its way up Leoforos Kifissias. The radio is tuned to Era Sport: violent clashes at a match in Thessaloniki.
“All that match fixing! Whichever way you look at it, it stinks.”
“Why don’t you turn it off, then?”
“Got to listen to something, mate, haven’t you? Got to listen to something; silence does my head in.”
Simeon decides instead to admire the new architectural marvels gracing the avenue.
“You get along with it alright, do you mate – silence?”
“What?”
“Silence – do you like it?”
“I’m on medication.”
“What kind of medication?”
“Silencing drugs.”
“What?”
He stood waiting for her outside the theatre, glancing at the magazines at the kiosk to kill time. She crept up behind him without a sound, and put her hands over his eyes. Her palms smelled of talcum powder.
“Guess who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your evening dose, stupid.”
The taxi driver will not let it go.
“I didn’t know they had drugs for stuff like that?”
Simeon turns up the collar of his overcoat, leans his head against the window and closes his eyes.
Sunday, 4.20 p.m.
The coffee stain across the coroner’s rushed draft forms a circle around the words “extensive third degree burns with”.
Halkidis looks at his team, who are, quite reasonably, at a loss to understand his agitation. At the same time he thinks how lucky he is that the Assistant Director of Internal Affairs, an incompetent P.A.S.O.K. lackey, the minister’s snitch, is on sick leave after a skiing accident on Parnassus.
“Kourkouvelas, take a team from Forensics down to the burnt-out house. Don’t overlook anything you find. Dedes, you do the rounds of the neighbourhood. The house is isolated, but there are dozens of old houses within a 500-metre-radius of it. I want statements from all the neighbours and when I say all of them, I mean everyone from the five-year-olds to the deaf-mute grandfather. Ask at the nearby petrol stations if anyone has been in buying heating oil in jerry cans lately. But be very clear – not a word about this to anyone – that includes your bathroom mirrors. I’ll take care of the woman.”
The woman who survived, he was about to add, but something stopped him.
“Sir, may I ask what this fire’s got to do with Internal Affairs?”
“You may not.”
Sunday, 4.20 p.m.
The house is still smouldering. He steps over the orange plastic tape and walks across the fallen garden gate. A fireman calls out something to him. Simeon ignores him and slowly makes his way through the charred garden. The almond tree and the firs are no longer there. The sight of the burnt-out Hillman momentarily transports him to Thessaloniki, deep within two green eyes. There are fragments of pots holding geraniums scattered everywhere across the terrain of his childhood, smelling of death. The windows stand open like gaping wounds, and the roof with the swallows whose temporary flight used to grace the autumns back then with their magnificent cries, the wonderful red roof with that absurd chimney stack was gone. His knees start to cave in. He leans against the charred wall and his head is filled with images: Morenike laughing with the little one who is dipping her fingers into Noni’s ice cream; Sonia with old Manthos, dizzy from all the wine and laughter, trying in vain to teach the little one a few words of Greek: petalouda – butterfly; kryo – cold; zesti – hot; vrohi – rain; karamela – sweetie. But the truth blazes in front of him, a truth which hurls him back into the past against his will.
That damned house was lost again, but this time for good. The first time was in the spring of ’67, when his father left for a “holiday” on the prison isle of Gioura, indefinitely, and his mother rented it out, moving herself and her eleven-year-old mummy’s boy in with her sister. The boy failed to understand why he suddenly found himself cooped up in a flat in downtown Plateia Amerikis, losing all his friends, the empty building lots where they would graze their knees, and leaving behind Klaras, the three-legged mongrel he had rescued from the dried-up riverbed next to the house.
His father returned from the island in 1970 to find his son much taller, much thinner and much angrier. His wife, instead of waiting patiently for him, had opted for the embrace of a well-to-do Citroën dealer somewhere in the Peloponnese. As she packed, she told her son she had a few things to see to and that she would be back soon. She told him to be sure to do his homework and never to take up smoking. Not one of those three things ever came to pass. His father did not even bother to go and look for her. “That’s love for you, my boy. At some point, it passes.” That was all he ever said on the subject. He retreated into the gloom of the accounts office at some paper mill and sank into depression. He lasted a surprisingly long time, until 1990, when he hanged himself in the Pedion tou Areos municipal park. His only friends, Loukas Marselos, a lawyer, and Lilis, a notary, fell out over which of them should assume the guardianship of the prodigal son. Piertzovanis was thirty-four years old by then, with a law degree he had never found any use for and a brain half-eroded by alcohol. Loukas won the argument and made him a partner in his firm. He muddled through, making slow progress until 1995 when a third heart attack finished off Loukas and the disappearance of a green-eyed, raven-haired beauty finished off Simeon. At least he had shown enough wit to make Achilleas, an ambitious young lawyer who did all the hard work at the office, his partner. That was how he could afford the luxury of an arrested adolescence, honing his skills at the card table, increasing his consumption of alcohol and attaching himself to unsuitable women. Then in ’98 his mother turned up out of the blue, found Lilis and instructed him to transfer the deeds of the old house to her little boy. She held on to the usufruct, probably on the advice of the sage notary who feared that her little boy might simply hand the property over to a developer and lose all the money at the poker table, exactly as he had done with the small flat Loukas had left him. She did not ask to see him. He did not make any attempt to see her either.
A year later he met Sonia.
“That’s quite a bit we lost today, Sir.”
“Is there a quiet bar anywhere along Stadiou where they’d sell me a bottle? My treat.”
“A bottle of what?”
“Paddy’s.”
“What’s that?”
“Irish whiskey. Hard to come by these days.”
“I’d rather have a yellow tequila.”
“I’ve got credit too.”
She looks at him and smiles.
“I’m sure you’re aware that the old s. . .
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