The Greek Wall Read online

  Agent Evangelos believes Polina Zubov, he knows she’s telling the truth, but it’s a truth of interest to no one in Athens, a city that is ever prey to fresh “episodes”, to a popular upsurge against fresh economic measures, while his superiors create a diversion with the Frontex affair.

  On the other hand, he isn’t especially convinced by that other fact uttered by the young Russian woman:

  “There was a man outside, he was tangled in the sheets hanging out to dry, I don’t know what he was doing there. I’d got dressed to escape from that place. I wanted to run away, I’d seized the opportunity while the guard was absent, the one who kept watch on us. On my way out, I found an axe, and thought I could use it to defend myself, if I had to. And when I saw this guy standing there, tangled in the sheets, for a moment I took him for another guard, a new one, like the ones that came from time to time, but then I saw him, the other one, the jerk, the one I’d seen over the previous days, always looking at us with his filthy expression, a dirty bastard who slapped me all the time when we had to take part in those orgies, I saw him appear out of the shadows, behind the one caught in the sheets. Then I raised the axe and rushed at them, at the two of them, I must have been yelling, I think I was yelling. But that’s when everything goes black inside my head. I can see the stranger taking me by the arm and shouting, ‘No! No!’ And I was trying to strike the other one, the jerk; I was trying to hit him with the axe. The stranger shouldn’t have tried to stop me, he shouldn’t have but that’s the way it was, that’s how it happened, he shouldn’t have, because that bastard that used to slap me, a regular in the brothel, he rushed at the stranger, shoved him to the ground and picked up the axe, for I’d dropped it, and tried to hit him with it; it looked like he wanted to kill him. But the stranger fought back; he grabbed the madman holding the axe by the leg and pulled him down. The jerk was on the ground, he was wild with anger, he tried to break loose, and then I saw them struggling, rolling one on top of the other in the sheets, on the terrace, and suddenly the dirty bastard stood up, and he was holding the axe, and he raised it to hit the guy on the ground. That’s when I kicked him in the back, and it threw him forward. The other one took his chance to grab the axe, and struck him with it.”

  “Do you know if he was deliberately aiming at his neck?”

  “I don’t know. I just remember that the head didn’t come off right away. It was later,” says Polina, “when we were dragging the guard’s body to the little path beside the brothel. There we were, that man and me dragging the body, and that’s when the head came off, and I just know that the stranger had blood all over his clothes. He said something to me, it was in Greek, yes, I think it was Greek, he spoke to me, and I didn’t understand at all; he pointed at the head, I can see myself there, I was scared, so was he, and he waved to me to run. He went on dragging the body without its head, he pulled it along by the feet, like a sack of potatoes. I followed him to the river, and that’s where he abandoned the guard’s body in a ditch, and then both of us walked very fast across the fields, to a little disused railway station. We waited there a few hours, until dawn. When the sun – well, you know, the light, the morning – that was when the man said to me in English, ‘Wait! Wait!’ I was supposed to wait for him, he said something like ‘Hotel, hotel,’ but I didn’t see him for a few hours, and then he came back looking for me. He’d changed his clothes. We returned to the road, where his car was parked. We drove to the outskirts of a little town where he’d booked two rooms in a motel, the Europa Motel, I’m sure of the name because the next night I looked at the neon sign flashing right in front of my window.”

  “Who was this man? Tell me what you know about him.”

  “He was nice, he never touched me, he didn’t want anything from me, and he brought me things to eat during the few hours we spent there waiting. I was in shock, and so was he. He told me he was German and Greek.”

  Polina then pronounced a name that Agent Evangelos lost no time in communicating by text message to Lieutenant Anastasis: “Nikolaus, a German of Greek origin, suspect No. 1.”

  Polina continued talking.

  “The man spoke to me, he told me he was thinking, that we’d leave the country together, but I didn’t understand anything that was going on, I slept all the time; I had a fever. He went out the next morning. He told me to wait there, still speaking English. He’d come back, he said, he just needed to find another jacket, different clothes, and then we would leave in a rented car. He’d forgotten his mobile. At one point a text message came on it. I read it, and that was how I worked out his name was Nikolaus, because the message began with his name and ended with a question mark. That evening, seeing he wasn’t coming back, I became frightened, and because I couldn’t stand being shut in any longer either, I went outside and the night was pitch-black, and I walked, and that’s how the police found me.”

  So that was how the police found Polina, and now Agent Evangelos believes her story because it hangs together neither better nor worse than all the ones reported on the TV news and on the front of the news stands, like the story about the debt, or the Frontex affair, or the ones about migrants – he has seen them, entire families in front of the Orestiada police station every morning.

  ‘What can you believe in nowadays?’ wonders Agent Evangelos. The legend of Orpheus, his head borne along by the waters of the Evros, still mourning his Eurydice? And who could believe that Evangelos had done his military service under the flag of the Colonels’ Greece? Or believe that his grandmother had been thrown overboard from a ship at sea off Smyrna, in 1922? Or that an arms dealer named Barbaros finances every one of the Greek political parties in exchange for Athens renewing certain major arms contracts with Germany? Right now, Evangelos is sure of only one thing: he’ll tell Andromeda, his daughter, that she shouldn’t feel she’s obliged to name the little girl after her two grandmothers, Eleni and Elena. Why does history always have to repeat itself? What if she gave her a different name?

  The sky is cloudless over Attica, and if it weren’t for all those lights around the airport the moon would stand out in the sky, but almost all that remains to draw attention to her are the distant flanks of Mount Hymettus. The last train to Corinth is leaving the station in front of the Sofitel; there’s no more Metro, for tomorrow public transit will be on strike. Drivers are waiting in their yellow cabs. A plane from the United States has just landed; they’d like to smoke, but smoking is forbidden, and that’s why they don’t even listen to Greek music on the radio any more.

  Tomorrow evening Agent Evangelos will be on a flight back north. He’s going to get to the bottom of this case. Thanks to the information provided by Polina, he should be able to get his hands on that Nikolaus very soon. Even better, Lieutenant Anastasis has just sent him a message saying that he has found the fugitive’s mobile in the hotel room where he’d gone to earth with Polina. The first name of the owner of the phone number is the one provided by the girl: Nikolaus, his full name is Nikolaus Strom. Anastasis mentioned something else: the last call received by Strom was from a certain Christina Lazaridou, a resident of Athens. Agent Evangelos will summon her to his office as soon as he has seen Polina onto the Moscow plane. It will be in Lazaridou’s best interest to tell him everything she knows about Strom. It won’t take Agent Evangelos long to locate the fugitive on the map of the Evros delta. When he does find him, they’ll have a little chat together, and only then will Evangelos be able to return to the Batman for a drink. In the meantime, no one has claimed the dead body yet. That’s odd! He’ll have to phone the mufti. And tell him what, exactly? That his dead body isn’t a good Muslim. If it was up to him, Agent Evangelos would pack the corpse back to Sidiro without further ado. He’ll suggest it to Lieutenant Anastasis.

  From the heights of Ekali, north of Athens, the capital is just a dull rumble borne on the roar of a motorbike along a fast road, somewhere on the plain of Attica. Sitting with his back to the half-open window of his office, Panos Barbaros doesn’t even hea
r it. In his irritation, his entire attention is focused on the owl’s cry.

  When he decided to build his house in the middle of a formerly remote pine grove, Panos Barbaros didn’t have the trees cut down, unlike his new neighbours, who are now too numerous in this upscale neighbourhood. Surrounded by trees, his house has remained shielded from prying eyes. Having been spared by wildfires, his property has always been inhabited by nocturnal creatures, among whom the owl reigns supreme. Its eyes, like the surveillance cameras dotted along the wall surrounding his vast domain, detect the slightest movement.

  This evening, the bird’s regular cries have been unable to calm Panos Barbaros’s agitation. Something has upset him. It calls for an immediate reaction on his part. A man has died. And, unfortunately, he wasn’t the one meant to die. Now the country is under threat. And since he, Panos Barbaros, is responsible for the security of Greece, it is up to him to act. This situation is even more irritating in that for some time now there have been a lot of red lights: Brussels doesn’t want a wall on the Evros. Berlin continues to repeat that if Athens wants to strengthen its border security it will just have to pay for the means to keep out clandestine migrants itself.

  Panos Barbaros is disappointed in Germany. Since the end of the Second World War his family has always maintained a special link with that country. His father, a doctor, a communist and member of the Epirus resistance, had been a Germanophile despite everything. Didn’t he say to his son, “Don’t confuse the Nazis with the Germans”? During the 1950s, when the hunt for communists in Greece became intolerable, his father moved the entire family to Berlin, where they lived until the end of the Colonels’ regime in 1974. Among his German patients, Panos Barbaros’s father counted numerous dignitaries, including a certain Erich Honecker. Ancient history, no doubt, but a history that still counts for something today.

  Panos Barbaros completed his studies at the Athens Polytechnic nine years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He already owned twelve shops selling electronic equipment in the major Greek cities. Ten years later he was the foremost provider of mobile phones in the country. And when he built a factory to manufacture batteries in the north of the country it was natural for him to start doing business with the Germans. It was equally logical for him to facilitate links between Athens and Berlin to enable the purchase of German military equipment by Greece. But since Angela Merkel came to power things had no longer been the same. Panos Barbaros had lost his direct line to the Ministry of Defence. His special contacts had been transferred to different departments, and it was as if, at a single stroke, the Greeks were no longer welcome in Germany. Otherwise, how could one explain Berlin’s reticence towards the construction of the Greek wall? Panos Barbaros still can’t get over it. Why would the Germans be opposed to European financing of a security measure for which the entire material would be supplied by companies belonging to his group? Berlin knows very well the considerable influence he wields in Athens. If Greece defends its eastern coastline with German submarines, it’s thanks to him, Panos Barbaros. If Athens has never queried the arms contracts with Germany, it’s not by chance. Who had persuaded successive Greek governments to buy German torpedoes? During election campaigns Panos Barbaros has always supported both the left and the right. Political campaigns are costly, and his discreet generosity has always been appreciated. In exchange for his support, Panos Barbaros has had no difficulty in extracting guarantees of military cooperation with Germany from the parties in power. Can Berlin have forgotten the services he has rendered?

  But time is short. At this moment, a man who should be dead rather than another man is gadding about the country. He won’t get far. ‘But even after the police get their hands on him,’ reflects Barbaros, ‘he’ll still be a threat to my wall.’

  Outside, the owl has fallen silent. The moon is obscured by large clouds from off the sea. Panos Barbaros closes his eyes. However, he isn’t sleeping. He is trying to visualize the frontier formed by the River Evros. He locates the spot where the river makes an elbow. That is where he is to unroll kilometres of barbed wire fitted with ultra-sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment. That is where a steel wall will be built, at whatever cost. No one is going to rob him of his wall.

  An idea occurs to him. It isn’t complete yet. But it will take shape eventually. He’ll set some kind of trap. They’ll all fall into it: the fugitive, the Germans, the Europeans – everybody who stands in the way of his security fence. By the morning, when the sun’s first rays skim the pine forest, his plan will be clear. At seven he’ll call the minister on his mobile. His instructions will be extremely precise.

  Episode IV

  That day, when he spoke her first name over the phone, Christina Lazaridou felt that soon she would be only a memory for him. When he said, “We can’t go on,” she wasn’t surprised. At that precise moment, she could still have cut the ground from under him by answering, “If that’s what you want.” He’d have replied, like in the past, “Oh! But not at all! It’s what we want, the two of us, we talked about it and you agreed.”

  Perhaps they’d have left it at that, and none of what followed would have occurred. Nikolaus – Nikos, as Christina calls him – wouldn’t be in this mess. And she wouldn’t have heard his name, Strom, spoken this morning, along with an urgent summons to meet the police. She wonders what he can have done. They had found her number on Nikos’s mobile. They said her name was the only one listed on the speed dial. ‘Has he kept our text messages?’ she wonders. She’s sure they’ve read the lot. She doesn’t even know where Nikos is. And even if she did, she wouldn’t tell them. ‘If they accused you of something,’ she thinks, ‘I’d tell them it’s impossible. You wouldn’t harm anyone, and I don’t see what you can be accused of.’

  A year ago she had said nothing when Nikos told her he would be in Athens in three days’ time. “In three days,” he’d repeated, “and we must say goodbye, once for all, for all the times we’ve already tried, without really believing in it.” She’d said nothing.

  Christina goes over the scene in her mind. ‘I could feel he was leaving. I let him go.’ They would never have reached such a point if she hadn’t remained silent. Christina had said nothing. For too long, she hasn’t spoken. Words take time to come to her, and by the time they reach her lips they’re already ineffectual. So she remains silent, as always. When she met Nikos, she remembers, ‘he talked to me, he talked and talked, it was an uninterrupted stream, a developing narrative that he reeled off to me as if it was already written down and the time had come to recite it. We were on that balcony in Piraiki, and I was listening to him rather than seeing him.’ Christina drank in his words, surprised to find she understood them. Only Nikos was talking. Already, true to form for her, she was saying nothing. But she must have been smiling, and in her smile he could read the only words that mattered right then. They wanted each other, and no translation was needed for them to understand.

  He German, and she Greek, but the German so Greek – though a bit German nevertheless.

  She can still hear him saying, “It’s over between us!”

  ‘And it’s true,’ she recognizes today. ‘That was what we decided, and yet we knew very well it was only beginning.’ Now it’s all starting again. He is leaving her, and she is left to confront her silence.

  Since Nikos’s departure she has been trying to find the words she should have said. Then there are the ones she blames herself for uttering without thinking. Like that summer, in her grandfather’s house, in their holiday home on Spetses. She had previously rejected the idea of bringing him there. She has never felt comfortable between those stone walls, in the neighbourhood overlooking the old port and the remnants of the naval dockyard that had enriched the island several centuries ago. The figure of her grandfather haunts the place; everything brings her back to those long August evenings when he would order his daughter, her mother, around. “So, what’s become of that coffee? And what about the Turkish delight? And cut up the fruit, t
he oranges and the apples with cinnamon, you know I like them properly peeled, you know that, don’t you?”

  Her grandfather, born in Istanbul, with his dark glasses, now back in Greece, arriving one fine day bag and baggage from his city, accompanied by his new wife and their daughter, a voluntary exile at the age of seventy, having sold his property and disposed of the shops in Pera. A Greek native of Constantinople who for years had been unable to decide to leave his homeland, Turkey. She remembers how they went to Hellinikon Airport to welcome him to the family. It must have been in 1978 or 1979 – how old had she been? It was 1978. Her father, wearing a suit, carried her sister in his arms, and her mother, weeping, was in black. Her grandfather’s first words were “A black dress? But we’re not in mourning, daughter!” – and she doesn’t even know if he embraced them. They had gone directly to Faliro, where a brand-new apartment with a sea view awaited him. He had finally decided to spend his last days in Greece. That was just the way it was, and he never discussed his decision. In front of her grandfather the sun sank behind the roofs of Mikrolimano, bristling with antennas.