Che Committed Suicide (5 page)

‘You’re mad if you think I’m going to dive into that river with plastic bags for flippers,’ I told her.

‘You’re not the only one. Just look around you!’

And she pointed to one woman who was fording the river with plastic bags on her feet and one over her head.

‘Be thankful that I had the good sense to bring an umbrella,’ Adriani boasted.

The situation overcame all my resistance and in a minute we had crossed over, two pusses-in-boots struggling not to be swept away by the current.

In spite of the umbrella and the plastic bags, we were drenched and once home, we changed our clothes and got out the ointments. Meanwhile the rain had stopped as suddenly as it had begun and the sky in the west was clear and deep red.

This is the most boring part of the daily routine as I don’t know what to do to pass the time. I somehow manage to get by till midday by dragging breakfast out till ten and then with the help of the papers and my dictionaries. After lunch, I usually lie down for a while. I never sleep, but I shut my eyes and keep them closed for a couple of hours to fool myself into believing that I’m asleep. This is followed by my appointment with the cat. It’s from returning home to the evening news bulletin that there’s a black hole that I can’t find anything to fill. I thumb through the dictionaries for a bit. Then I pick up the paper, but I’ve already read it inside out. There’s always the crossword, but that only makes me even more irritated as I’m completely useless at it. Not to mention that I feel personally offended at not being able to find the right word after so many years delving into dictionaries. At the third attempt, I end up throwing the paper from the bed towards the door or from the sitting room into the hall, depending on where in the house I am. Then the next day at the same time I start again, a real sucker for punishment.

And that was the case then. I was looking at the squares and I felt more like playing at battleships, like at school, because I couldn’t find even one word. After ten minutes, furious with myself, I flung the paper into the hall.

‘Why do you bother racking your brains like that, when you know you can’t do it?’ I heard Adriani’s voice coming from the kitchen. She was the ever-vigilant eye in the house that sees all and misses nothing.

I was comforted by the fact that, because of the downpour, the news bulletin would at least be different from the usual and we’d see rivers, flooded basements and buckets, but my delight exhausted itself after four shots, as the afternoon deluge had lasted barely half an hour. By the time the camera crews had arrived, the rivers running down the streets had dried up. I prepared myself to hear for a third time the same news stories that I had read in both the morning and evening papers, but the bulletin was suddenly interrupted by advertisements.

‘What, now we’ve got to have adverts during the news too?’ said Adriani puzzled. ‘They should be ashamed!’

My first reaction was to get up and walk away. To wait for the adverts to finish just to hear news reports that I already knew was just a bit too much. But then I thought whether I had anything better to do. I didn’t so I sat down again. Extraordinarily, my patience was rewarded because the advertisements were interrupted suddenly and the woman newscaster reappeared on the screen. She was holding a sheet of paper and staring perplexedly into the camera.

‘Ladies and Gentlemen, just a few minutes ago, our channel received an anonymous phone call. A caller announced that he was phoning on behalf of the Philip of Macedon National Greek Front and stated that they claimed responsibility for the suicide of the businessman, Jason Favieros. The unknown caller said, and I quote, “Favieros did not commit suicide, it was we who forced his hand. The reasons we required his suicide are written on an
announcement
that we have left in a waste bin in the entrance to the channel’s offices.”’

The newscaster paused for a moment and stared into the camera. ‘In fact, Ladies and Gentlemen, the information given us by the unknown caller proved to be true. The announcement was found in the waste bin outside the entrance to our offices. This is it.’ She raised her hand and a sheet of A4 paper appeared on the screen with a logo showing the familiar helmeted head of the father of Alexander the Great with the following large black letters underneath:

There followed a sparsely written text. Even I could see that the logo and text had been prepared and printed using a computer.

The newscaster began to read the announcement, while at the same time the text appeared, covering half the screen, a method that divides the viewers into two categories: the deaf and the illiterate.

The newscaster looked up from the text. ‘That was the text of the announcement, Ladies and Gentlemen,’ she said. ‘The original has already been sent to Police Headquarters.’

I stared at the screen, dumbfounded. Of all the possible
explanations
for Favieros’s suicide, this was the only one I hadn’t thought of. It crossed my mind to phone Sotiropoulos to find out whether he’d thought of it, but I immediately dismissed the idea.

That night, it wasn’t Philip of Macedon I dreamt about but Bucephalus. He was pure white with a thick mane. He was standing in the middle of a meadow and had raised his head to the sky, like a cock that instead of crowing neighed.

It seems that God loves reporters of all kinds. Otherwise there’s no explaining how, every time that a story is about to fizzle out, manna falls from heaven and it rises again from its ashes. This time the manna went by the name of the Philip of Macedon National Greek Front and came to completely turn things on their head, without actually changing anything. Because this new line that certain nationalists had supposedly forced Favieros to commit suicide for the simple reason that he was employing workers from the Balkans and Third World countries in his factories and that he committed suicide in public in order to indulge their whims didn’t stand up even as the kind of cock-and-bull story told by aunt Lena, who, in any case, only had truck with good nationalists. On the other hand, however, it opened up a whole new ballgame for conjectures, theories and opinions and for all kinds of claptrap so that the news reporters would have plenty to discuss with the usual TV experts for the next ten days or so. This amazing combination where everything seems different, though nothing changes, can only be achieved by God and only with the help of Greeks.

The other thing that stuck in my mind was the name of the organisation. The Philip of Macedon National Greek Front. Where had I heard that name before? I racked my brains but I couldn’t for the life of me recall. And yet it kept echoing in my head.

The answer came with a phone call from Katerina, who was dying to discuss the developments in the Favieros case.

‘But do you seriously believe that they forced him to commit suicide?’ she asked.

‘It seems unlikely to me too, and yet the one sure thing is that Favieros committed suicide publicly. What we need to find out is why. There’s something we’re missing.’

‘I agree. Everything they’ve been saying and writing about his bad financial situation, about incurable illnesses and the like doesn’t have any basis in fact from what I can see.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘What then?’

‘Why would he commit suicide publicly? There’s no logical
explanation
for public suicide.’

‘So what are you saying then? That they told Favieros, who was on first-name terms with everyone in the government and even with the Prime Minister, to go to some TV channel and, in front of the camera, put a pistol in his mouth and blow his brains out?’

‘Don’t you find it strange that that’s exactly what he did?’

‘Of course, but I can’t believe he was made to do it by some puny little organisation like the Philip of Macedon National Greek Front.’

‘Have you heard of it?’ I asked surprised.

‘Come off it, Pops! They’re those cranks who every year celebrate the birth of Alexander the Great by blocking the traffic in the centre of Thessaloniki.’

That’s it, I said to myself, that’s who they are. I remembered how my colleagues in Thessaloniki raged and cursed each time because a mere handful of people created chaos in the city centre.

‘Tell me, Katerina, are we talking here about accessory before the fact?’

‘More like incitement to commit suicide, but who could you pin it on?’

‘The heads of the organisation.’

‘Some organisation!’ she said scornfully. ‘A dozen or so wackos and as many again who just go along to gawp. Do you know what the biggest gathering they ever managed was?’

‘No, what?’

‘When they turned up outside the Officer’s Club in Ethnikis Amynis Street to protest because at an academic conference someone had given a paper claiming that Philip II of Macedon was a
homosexual
and that he’d had a thing for Pausanius, his general.’

I laughed and hung up, but despite the laughter, my mind was working overtime. How could an organisation that only made an appearance once a year to cut a birthday cake for Alexander the Great force Favieros to commit suicide? Maybe because they
threatened
that they’d kill his whole family if he didn’t? So why didn’t he send his family to the Alps for an extended holiday?

All this led to the only conclusion that Favieros’s suicide was for other, still unknown, reasons and that the little group of nationalists had simply seized the opportunity for some free publicity. Perhaps this was the right explanation but it didn’t bring me even one step nearer to the reasons that led Favieros to his public suicide. And I would continue to torment myself with the ‘public’ aspect until some convincing explanation could be found.

I knew that all these thoughts were of no practical value, that it was just a crossword puzzle that I was creating for myself and trying to solve, yet I still preferred this a hundred times more to the
crosswords
in the newspapers that turned me into a nervous wreck at the first word.

The only way I was going to learn anything more was from the newspapers again. I decided to pop out to the kiosk and as I passed by the kitchen I saw Adriani stuffing tomatoes and peppers.

‘I could smell them even before you put them in the oven,’ I said to her jokingly.

‘All very well, but I’m warning you, they won’t be as tasty as usual because I’ve used very little onion. Don’t tell me afterwards that they’re not up to standard.’

She has had a complex about stuffed vegetables from the time that she was in competition with my mother and she trembles at the thought of not getting them right.

‘For a first step back to normality, it’s fine,’ I replied and she seemed relieved.

If someone were to ask me why, instead of turning right into Aroni Street, I turned left and from Nikiphoridis Street emerged into Formionos Street, I wouldn’t have been able to explain. Nor could I explain what was in my mind when I hailed a taxi and said to the driver: ‘Alexandras Avenue. Police Headquarters.’

Nevertheless, as soon as I got out of the taxi and crossed the road at the lights, my reflexes started to kick in. I decided to avoid making a stop on the third floor, where my own department was. I was in no mood to open my office door and see Yanoutsos lolling in my chair and reading the
Trikala News
. After thirty years in Athens, the only newspaper he reads is his village local.

The guard at the entrance was about to ask me for some
identification
, but my face was familiar to him and he hesitated.