Che Committed Suicide (24 page)

The fifty-year-old woman in reception recognised me
immediately
. She was still not wearing any make-up but was slightly more cheerful and had a hint of a smile.

‘They’re expecting you, Inspector. Just a moment while I inform them that you’re here.’

Favieros’s photo was still hanging in the same place, but without the black ribbon. Also absent were the wreaths on the floor.

It wasn’t Aristopoulos, Koula’s informant, who came to take me, but a blonde girl of around twenty. We went up to the third floor, crossed the bridge of sighs and arrived at Zamanis’s office.

In contrast to the fifty-year-old woman in reception, the
fifty-year
-old number two, Zamanis’s private secretary, was noticeably cool. She greeted me with a faint nod of her head and opened the door to her boss’s office to allow me in.

Unsmiling, Zamanis held out his hand to me without getting to his feet. On the contrary, Yannelis smiled at me. Yet, despite the smile, the whole atmosphere, from the secretary outside and all the way to Zamanis, was overcast indicating stormy weather. Zamanis told me to take a seat and my weather forecast was confirmed.

‘When you came to see me, Inspector, you told me that you were carrying out a discreet and unofficial investigation into the reasons behind Jason Favieros’s suicide.’

He was looking down and reading from a sheet of paper.
Evidently
, he had had his secretary write down what we had said in order to be able to remember it. The paper, his upright bearing and his suit made me think of an interrogator about to pin me to the wall on the basis of my previous statement.

‘Precisely,’ I answered calmly.

‘You told me the same thing,’ Yannelis added.

‘That’s right. I told you both the truth.’

‘And do you believe that the reasons behind Jason’s suicide are to be found in the Balkan Prospect estate agencies?’

I shrugged. ‘When you’re searching in the dark, Mrs Yannelis, you leave no stone unturned. Naturally, sometimes you discover things you weren’t expecting, but it’s precisely for that reason that you look under every stone.’ I had a little dig myself, but neither of them seemed particularly impressed.

‘You won’t find anything,’ Zamanis said, continuing in the same tone of voice. ‘All you have succeeded in doing is to upset various people without reason and create a stir which is highly damaging.’

‘The stir may be damaging, but the various people have every reason to be worried. What has come to the surface, entirely by chance, is a series of suspicious property deals.’

‘Only a sick mind could find those deals suspicious. Neither Jason’s background as a leftist, nor his standing as a businessman would allow him to involve himself in suspicious dealings.’

He was making a frontal attack, using his heavy artillery to demolish my arguments. Jason Favieros was a committed leftist and consequently he couldn’t possibly be involved in scams at the expense of poor immigrants. Jason Favieros was a businessman of high repute and consequently he wouldn’t risk getting involved in suspicious property deals.

‘I didn’t say that Favieros was personally involved in suspicious property deals. Perhaps certain executives in his estate agencies had been making money on the side. At least in the case of Leventoyanni, there had undoubtedly been some collusion between the manager of the estate agency and the public notary. Who knows what I may find if I dig a little deeper.’

‘You won’t find anything involving Balkan Prospect,’ Yannelis said, interrupting. ‘I explained that to you when you came to see me. Our network is an extremely loose one. The local agencies make their own decisions concerning the transactions. Balkan Prospect bears no responsibility.’

‘But you told me that you examine the contracts.’

‘Only as to the legal side of the transaction, not the money exchanged. And apart from that, I don’t see how any of this can
possibly
be connected with Jason’s suicide.’

It wasn’t, and because it wasn’t, I was fishing in the hope of finding a lead somewhere else so that Yanoutsos wouldn’t get his hands on my job.

‘Don’t waste your time trying to understand, Coralia,’ Zamanis said ironically to Yannelis. ‘The Inspector is not interested in
discovering
the reasons behind Jason’s suicide. All he wants is to tarnish his name. That’s always been the favourite sport of the police.’

In other words, to tarnish the reputation of leftists. That’s what Zissis used to say and I respected his opinion. But Favieros was not Zissis.

Yannelis took over: ‘I’m curious, Inspector. Why did you decide to investigate the offshore company and its real-estate agencies?’ she asked.

‘As a result of reading a biography on Favieros published after his death.’

At the word ‘biography’, Zamanis leapt to his feet. ‘That idiot has done nothing but harm,’ he cried.

‘Come on now, you’re exaggerating,’ Yannelis said smiling.

‘Do you know him?’ I asked them.

Zamanis erupted once more. ‘No, I don’t know him and I don’t want to know him! It simply makes me mad that he’s exploiting Jason’s suicide in order to make money.’

‘You’re mistaken. The biography was written and submitted to the publisher long before the suicide. We’ve looked into it.’

They both turned and stared at me in astonishment. ‘Then you’ll know who the author is,’ commented Yannelis.

‘No and I doubt whether he even exists. At least with the name Minas Logaras.’

I explained to them the whole story concerning the search for Logaras and how I had come to a dead end. ‘Anyhow, the address he had given was close to the Yorgos Iliakos Real Estate Agency,’ I added, before concluding.

‘What are you trying to say, that the estate agent wrote it?’
Yannelis
asked with a hint of irony.

‘No. But Favieros himself may have written it and submitted it under a pseudonym. Just consider for a moment. He’s made up his mind to commit suicide, but before doing so he writes his
autobiography
and sends it for publication.’

I seemed to have managed to surprise them, because they stared at each other trying to take it in.

‘Impossible,’ said Zamanis conclusively. ‘Jason was
continually
on the go with the Olympic projects. He was rushing around all day from the construction sites to the ministries and to the Olympic Games offices. He had no time to spare for writing
autobiographies
.’

‘His private secretary told me just the opposite,’ I said,
countering
him.

Now it was Yannelis’s turn to be puzzled: ‘What exactly did she tell you?’

‘When I spoke with her, she told me that Favieros would shut himself up for hours in his office. And when she once asked him, jokingly, if he was writing a novel, he replied that he had already written it and he was simply working on the corrections.’

They glanced at each other. Zamanis was hesitant for a moment, then he pressed the button on his intercom and said to his secretary: ‘Tell Theoni I want to see her, will you?’

Lefaki came in with her gaze fixed on Zamanis, ignoring me
completely
. The rumour that I was working to tarnish Favieros’s name was still limited to the third floor and hadn’t yet acquired epidemic proportions, I thought to myself, given that the woman in reception greeted me politely and with a smile.

‘Theoni, when the Inspector came to see you, you told him that you had once asked Jason if he was writing a novel and he had replied that he had already finished it and was doing the corrections. Do you recall?’

‘Of course! It was a Friday. The phone had been ringing all
afternoon
with people looking for him, but Jason had shut himself in his office and had forbidden me to put his calls through or to bother him.’

‘And when exactly did you ask him if he was writing a novel?’ Zamanis seemed to be enjoying giving me evidence of his
interrogation
skills.

‘At around eight in the evening when he came out of his office to leave. “What are you doing all the time shut up in your office? Writing a novel?” I said, teasing him. And he answered quite seriously: “I’ve already finished it and now I’m working on the corrections.”’

‘Do you remember how long this was before his suicide?’ I asked her.

She directed her reply to Zamanis as though he had asked her. ‘It must have been around three months.’

I made a mental note to check with Sarantidis, the publisher, when it was that he received the manuscript, but the dates coincided more or less.

‘Can I please ask you to stop your investigations into Balkan Prospect?’ Zamanis said very formally as soon as Lefaki had left. ‘Firstly, because its dealings are completely legitimate and, secondly, because you’re not working for the Fraud Squad.’ He paused briefly and added meaningfully: ‘Unless, that is, you want to go to your superiors for approval.’

Although I’ve been years on the Force, I still can’t understand why it is that every loudmouth who thinks he has some clout considers it proper to end the conversation by bringing up the threat of my superiors.

‘Let me tell you what will happen if you were to talk to my superiors,’ I said. ‘They will have to talk to me, but they won’t be the only ones to hear what I have to say. From then on, it’ll only be a matter of time before it reaches the ears of the reporters, who even know when we in Security go to pee.’

Before he had had time to swallow what I’d said to him, I had said goodbye and was outside the neoclassical building. The centre of Pangrati was chock-a-block with traffic and it took me the best part of half an hour crawling bumper to bumper and making liberal use of the horn to get away. Fortunately, the temperature had fallen and I didn’t end up drenched in sweat.

At home I was met by an unexpected sight. Sitting before the computer was Koula’s cousin, who had come with her on the day she and I had begun working together. Koula was sitting beside him. They heard me come in and turned round. The young lad limited himself to a plain ‘hello’. Koula, however, jumped up and, full of enthusiasm, said:

‘I don’t know where to begin! We found a way into the records of the Ministry of Trade and got the information we wanted about Stathatos’s company! Do you know who’s a partner with a forty per cent share in the company?’

‘Favieros!’

‘No. His wife, Sotiria Markakis-Favieros.’ I remained silent for a moment to let it sink in, while Koula went on with the same
enthusiasm
: ‘I went to the Ministry just as you told me, but I had to deal with some dolt who didn’t listen to a word I was saying. When I told him I was a police officer, he gave me an arrogant look and told me to send my superior and preferably with a warrant from the public prosecutor. That was when I thought of Spyros, my cousin.’

Sotiropoulos hadn’t realised that his guests were talking about Favieros’s wife and not Favieros himself.

‘And there’s something else, but I’m afraid that you won’t like it,’ Koula continued, handing me a magazine from the coffee table. ‘Spyros brought it and I came across this while I was thumbing through it.’

It was a full-page advert:

There was a photo of the cover and underneath, the name of the publishers: Europublishers. It was the simplest solution. Logaras had sent the second biography to a different publishing company.

This new development automatically put an end to my theory about Favieros’s autobiography that just an hour previously I had served up to Yannelis and Zamanis as my
specialité
. I imagined their smiles when they saw the advert, but this was the least of my worries.

The second biography had appeared in a much shorter time than the first. The first had taken ten days, the second barely a week. That meant that someone had gathered information about the two
suicides
, then sat down to write the biographies and sent them to the publishers before Favieros and Stefanakos had committed suicide. So there was a mastermind behind all this; someone who had planned the suicides and who had the power to make them happen. Except that I didn’t know who, how or why. Just as I didn’t know whether there would be another victim. In other words, I knew nothing.

Logaras certainly couldn’t be classed among the biographers in the plural. Firstly because Favieros and Stefanakos didn’t belong to the category of orators, philosophers, poets et al., as stipulated by
Dimitrakos
. And secondly, because his biographies were by no means short. In fact, the second was much longer than the first, being 350 pages in length. Apart from that, the publication itself was more handsome that the previous one. It had a matt paper cover, with dark blue lettering on a grey background, and in the centre was a recent photograph of Loukas Stefanakos making a speech. It had obviously been lifted from some newspaper or magazine.

This time I went about things differently. I made sure I got hold of the biography in good time so that I would be able to read it comfortably in the afternoon and not have to spend another night in the armchair burning the midnight oil. The visit to the
publishers
could wait. I was sure that Logaras – whoever he was – had gone down the same road with the second publisher as with the first, one that would no doubt lead me once again to the uninhabited house in Nisaias Street.