The Greek Wall Page 5

  “Yes, but the migrants aren’t all poor, you know. Apparently there are even teachers and doctors among them. The Frontex guys told me they’d picked up an Iraqi museum director.”

  “Stefanos, how many times in the day do you brush your teeth?”

  “Morning and evening, why?”

  “This evening, are you going to brush them?”

  “You’re taking the mickey again, is that it?”

  “No, it was just to find out if you always go around with a tube of toothpaste in your pocket.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “What I’m saying is that anyone who has to pay people-smugglers to get him across the big river and into the Schengen Area most likely won’t even have rinsed out his mouth for weeks. And if you went poking around his teeth you’d see some remains of the doner kebab he ate for his last meal in Istanbul before he found himself freezing his balls off in an inflatable boat on the banks of the Evros, waiting for some nice people-smuggler to pack him off to the opposite shore with a good kick on the backside.”

  Stefanos shrugs.

  But there’s still something else, thinks Agent Evangelos, taking a crumpled twenty-euro note from his pocket and throwing it onto the soiled tablecloth.

  “There’s another thing…”

  Stefanos has stopped listening.

  ‘Yes, another thing,’ thinks Evangelos. ‘It’s the way the head was severed. The pathologist was positive. It wasn’t a clean cut, yet it caused the victim’s instantaneous death. The blade must have been very sharp, for no great strength had been required.’

  “Stefanos, are you listening? Whoever did that didn’t approach it like an execution. He didn’t cut the head off cleanly.”

  “He. Or she.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “What do we know? It could just as easily be a woman. These days…”

  Agent Evangelos could have said, I think it’s time for bed; you’re tired, and so am I. But he says nothing, so naturally Stefanos doesn’t answer, extricating a fragment of fish bone with a toothpick Made in China.

  Episode II

  That is where the head was found. It was there on the ground when it was discovered yesterday evening by the Finns from Frontex – in that precise spot, between the shed, which stands a little way back from the road, and the river. It was lying here at Lieutenant Anastasis’s feet, face to the ground, on the dirt path, a little before the first thickets indicating the presence of marshland, a few metres from the line marking the start of the military zone.

  ‘A shed, it’s definitely called a shed in the report by the young Orestiada police officer,’ Agent Evangelos repeats to himself, frowning. With a sudden movement, he turns up his jacket collar. It is almost midday and the sun still hasn’t showed itself above the plain. The entire Evros region is afloat in a uniform mist, laden with evaporation from the marshes.

  With Stefanos driving, it took over two hours. In Alexandroupolis, the dawn had been bright. Drinking an early coffee across from the station, where two Africans had just arrived on foot, exhausted by the night-long walk to the train that will take them to Athens if they can raise the twenty euros they need, a half-moon was still visible, suspended over Samothrace.

  But as soon as they were on their way, after crossing the railway track on the outskirts of town and a long stretch across a barren plain, once the main road began to run along the Turkish border, heading due north, the pale substance of the day had dissolved into the mingled vapours from river and sky. ‘And now you have to deal with a damp that seeps into your bones and strips you naked.’

  Stefanos is jumping on the spot to warm up. In his black leather jacket, Lieutenant Anastasis ignores the cold. He doesn’t look like a police officer, with his little beard and his thirty years. He smokes in silence, observing Agent Evangelos’s reaction, for he already knows what the intelligence officer will say: “It was you who signed this report, wasn’t it?”

  A murmured “Yes.”

  Evangelos continues, “The river is there, behind those trees, five hundred metres away, isn’t that so?”

  Clearing his throat, the lieutenant agrees. “Yes, behind the trees.”

  “And according to you that’s a shed?”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  Agent Evangelos turns abruptly towards the young lieutenant and points at a little red sign, planted in the middle of the field.

  “What does it say?”

  “Military zone. Keep out.”

  “So you do know how to read!”

  Stefanos, shocked, approaches and starts to say something. Agent Evangelos doesn’t give him the chance, and addresses Lieutenant Anastasis again: “If you’re able to read, tell me what’s written on your damned shed? I know it’s in Roman letters, but never mind, you’re a police officer, you went to school, didn’t you?”

  The lieutenant looks straight at Agent Evangelos, whose expression, as anger sweeps over him, no longer betrays his fatigue of the past few days.

  “I asked you a question! What’s written up there in pink lettering?”

  “Eros…”

  “And it’s even a Greek word! So what does it mean, can you tell me that?”

  “Please, sir —”

  “But for God’s sake why didn’t you mention the presence of a brothel in your report? Your damned shed is a knocking shop!”

  “I didn’t see why it was so important.”

  “Then either you’re an idiot, or you’re messing me about. A head is discovered fifty metres away from a brothel, and you take it on yourself to ignore that fact!”

  “Easy, Evangelos!” says Stefanos. “You know as well as I do what goes on here every day. Lieutenant Anastasis sees dozens of illegals coming ashore morning and evening, the guys from Frontex tramping through his office, Germans, French, Romanians, all in uniform, asking him for reports, with the Estonian patrol coming into the police station to turn their guns in to the armoury before they go back to their hotel rooms. Every week he has to submit a report to the army. That’s the reality we have to live with around here; people screwing in some goddamn shed in the countryside is irrelevant, we’re at war here, Evangelos, it’s an invasion! It’s high time you people in Athens understood what it’s like here on the Evros.”

  Evangelos shrugs. “Stefanos, your frustrations have nothing to do with me! And keep your comments about immigrants to yourself! Now, Lieutenant, tell me why you didn’t mention the presence of this brothel.”

  The young man doesn’t answer. The look in his eyes isn’t typical of a policeman. That’s not the kind of look the masked motorcycle police in Athens give people, thinks Evangelos, who hates the way they look at you these days, like under the Colonels. But in the lieutenant’s case it’s a different look in his dark eyes, something else, a quick glance that comes from somewhere deep down, a pair of eyes that go through you, a look not of fear, not of irony, not a challenging look, but one that turns you back on yourself; a reflection, that’s what it is, a shared look, the same unbending recognition of the new order of power.

  So Evangelos lets it drop; he understands why the young policeman didn’t mention the brothel’s presence. It was because he’d been given the order from higher up. It’s obvious, for the lad is intelligent and no one could have missed that pink lettering: Eros, Eros on the Evros, a pink neon sign attached to the first storey of a large cube of concrete and brick with two blind windows facing the river and a terrace on the first floor but no fence, a large sliding door facing the road, an entrance on one side with a white aluminium door, and those four enticing letters on the roof, visible from far off – Eros – less than a kilometre from the frontier, creating the only coloured vapour in the dense mist rising from the marsh.

  Welcome to Schengen! Bitch of a Europe, with her legs wide open at the water’s edge, and the illegals, chilled to the bone, crawling on the riverbank, looking for a way through the thickets to firm land, a slope to climb, a dark expanse to cross.
A field? Feet bogging down, the sharp points of the corn stalks. At last! A light, very close! Friend or enemy? Erotic massage, OWC, KWT, 69, toys, COF: go through customs here!

  “Right, so let’s go and see what we can find inside this building,” says Stefanos, cutting across the open ground towards the brothel.

  Agent Evangelos, barely able to contain his fury, follows at a distance, and the lieutenant falls into step. The exchange can continue. Something has passed between the two men: an identical feeling of impotence.

  “I imagine you already questioned the girls?” asks Agent Evangelos.

  “When I got here a military patrol was already on the spot. They were erecting lights around the crime scene and sealing it off. Naturally, I began by going to see if the girls had heard or seen anything, but everyone had left, and what struck me most was the chaos inside. There were broken glasses, bottles everywhere, sheets rolled up in a ball, overturned mattresses, ashtrays overflowing with butts. Anyway, you can imagine the scene. But then —”

  “A brothel, then!” Stefanos breaks in.

  “Go on, Lieutenant,” prods Agent Evangelos. “You were going to say something…”

  “But then what struck me was that they had left some of their stuff behind. Suitcases, two or three bags. I thought I should have carted it all away, but the captain told me it wouldn’t be any use to us, and that I was on the wrong track.”

  A few questions from Agent Evangelos: “You think it was all that activity that made them clear out?” “What made you change your mind?” “Oh, really?” “It could also have been the Frontex control that upset everyone, couldn’t it? I imagine all those guys in uniform mustn’t be all that welcome to the pimps?” “What makes you say that, Lieutenant?” “Wasn’t it you who put all that in that damn report, Lieutenant?”

  Lieutenant Anastasis’s answers:

  “I don’t know, anyway. It’s not they who decide their movements. Initially I thought it was the pimps who had given the alert when they saw the army jeeps arriving.” “It was the scene inside the brothel…” “You’ll see for yourself, I sealed off the building, but everything is where it was, like on the evening when the head was found along the path.”

  Evangelos says, “The way you present the facts suggests this whole business has a certain logic: the frontier, a crime, splendid Schengen guards paid for by Brussels…”

  The lieutenant doesn’t answer. The two men are now standing in front of the building. From afar, Agent Evangelos hadn’t noticed the little fence that runs three quarters of the way around the brothel, or the neglected garden in which a rust-eaten tractor has taken root. Two metres from the front of the building, protected by a wattle fence and a few chipboard planks, this partly covered space forms a kind of exterior passageway. It is actually the entrance, hidden in shadow. On the side next to the road is a gravelled area, also hidden from view behind some potted shrubs: parking for the customers. To the west of the building, a pile of coloured sheets is mouldering on the ground.

  Stefanos suddenly bursts from the little alleyway, quite breathless. “Someone has broken the seals!” Pushing Stefanos out of the way, the lieutenant rushes into the brothel. Agent Evangelos, shaking his head, steps after them, cursing the thick mist that now extends well beyond the Evros delta.

  In his career, and in his life as a man, Agent Evangelos thought he’d seen all there was to see about brothels: the sordid neoclassical houses in the Aigaleo district, the foul apartments on Filis Street, near Victoria Square, the “love hotels” near Syngrou Avenue, the skyladika nightclubs of his teenage years when Pamis would borrow his father’s Triumph to take his pals for a spin on the road to the north. But no, he’d never seen anything like this: a vast room oozing humidity, a foul, musty smell, and mattresses laid directly on a linoleum-covered floor stained and pitted with black cigarette burns.

  “I don’t believe it! It’s all been cleared away; there’s nothing left!” Lieutenant Anastasis is devastated. Evangelos hears him repeating, “It’s all been cleared away! They’d left everything behind, their stuff, their bags, their suitcases, everything!”

  Evangelos jumps on him. “And you didn’t think it best to take the whole lot with you that evening.”

  “As I told you, I got orders from above. I was told not to touch the brothel, it would be a waste of time, that’s exactly what the captain said.”

  Stefanos informs Evangelos that he is to meet the lieutenant’s superior officer that evening. “You can sort it out then! The captain couldn’t be here today. He’s across on the other side, in Turkey. He has a meeting with the chief of police in Edirne to discuss the illegals. They get on very well, apparently. They agree about everything, but they also have superior officers who block everything.”

  Evangelos looks at Stefanos and the lieutenant in turn. He can barely believe what he’s hearing.

  “Let me explain,” insists Anastasis. “When I went in I discovered an incredible shambles. There were overturned suitcases, undergarments everywhere, undergarments that had got singed on the electric radiators. The girls slept here, and entertained their clients upstairs. Though ‘clients’ isn’t quite the word… When they came in they could pick a girl by pointing at her bed.”

  “It’s a pigsty, this brothel,” exclaims Agent Evangelos.

  “Before the migrants came I had time to combat sex trafficking, it was my field, but no more. I’ve been working in Orestiada for seven years, and each year there are more and more illegals, so that’s all you have time for now: you register them at the station, you pass on the paperwork to Frontex, and in the meantime pimps and traffickers of every kind have free rein. I’d say this isn’t just any kind of brothel, as the girls who arrive for the first time in this pigsty have never done prostitution before; this is where they send the novices…”

  “The clients aren’t unaware of all that, I imagine?” asks Evangelos.

  The lieutenant is doing his best. “You’re suggesting that that’s what they’re looking for? The men who come here are participating in the…”

  “In the what, Lieutenant?”

  “They participate in breaking in the girls. Here, anything goes. The girls who refuse get beaten, raped…”

  “And not just by the pimps?”

  “Exactly. But as I was saying, when I saw what I’d found here I was thinking about hauling it all away. It was a gift! There were the girls’ bags, with telephone numbers, the addresses of hotels for the rest of their trip through Greece – but what do you know, I was instructed to concentrate on the head, and I barely had time to give the order to lock up the brothel and leave everything inside.”

  “Now where has Agent Stefanos gone?” Evangelos sees him coming down the metal spiral staircase leading upstairs.

  “Look what I found!” he says. “It’s really bizarre!” Stefanos is holding a bunch of wreaths woven from leaves.

  “But they’re… what’s it called?”

  “Ivy. They’re ivy wreaths,” the lieutenant explains, “and I’ve a bit of a theory about that; in fact, it’s the only thing they’ve left here, the shits, they’ve done a proper job.”

  Too many questions are jostling inside Agent Evangelos’s head. “You can tell me later about the ivy wreaths,” he says. “As for the rest, do you think it was the pimps who came back for the stuff?”

  “It’s possible, but they’re not the only ones who might want to eliminate every trace of the girls’ presence here.”

  “Tell me frankly,” sighs Agent Evangelos. “Have you finished playing your guessing game with me, Lieutenant?”

  The lieutenant is about to answer, but he catches a glance from Agent Stefanos, who has a bizarre look as if he were trying to confirm something of which he too was already aware. Lieutenant Anastasis has never had any confidence in the intelligence service, and for him Agent Stefanos personifies it. The other one, Evangelos, is a different matter; he’ll explain the situation to him later, about the ivy, and about the very special patro
ns of the Eros.

  Agent Evangelos is about to turn back to the lieutenant, but a call comes on his mobile. It’s Athens. He leaves the brothel; the others don’t need to hear. Seen from outside, the building looks like a barge adrift in the fog. Agent Evangelos can no longer tell the direction of the river. As he finally replies to the directorate, a cold, clammy hand caresses his cheek: the corner of a sheet still hanging on a clothes line, a malodorous sail soaked by the all-encompassing mist.

  From that side of the world comes distress. Every night it silently invades the course of the River Evros. Then, at dawn, it spreads its seeds across the fields, transparent in the light coming from the opposite bank. Towards midday, when the fog has finally lifted, it has reached the southern edge of Orestiada, where the town stops dead on the floodplain, at the precise boundary where graffiti-covered trains run, connecting with the Bulgarian town of Svilengrad and ignoring the older track that passes through Edirne, in Turkey.

  Agent Evangelos was in front of the police station when he saw the column pass through the railway station and come up Vasileos Konstantinou Avenue, unseen by the accustomed gaze of Orestiada’s inhabitants. Bearing the rumble of the Evros’s invisible current, conveying the river’s humours, reluctantly transporting a burden of silt, they come, the people from the high plateaus of the Pamirs, from the floodplains of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, from the Rif, along a single route which nowadays disrupts the very precise plan of Orestiada, conceived in 1922 to welcome other refugees: the Greeks of Asia Minor.

  Men, women, children, the elderly, they cross not only countries and borders. They also traverse bodies of water, never to return, driven westward by poverty, no matter its cause, provided it is left behind – all the world’s misery that they hope to forget once they have crossed the river.

  ‘That’s not counting fresh layers of misfortune that will be added to the six hundred euros handed over to the people-smugglers,’ reflects Agent Evangelos in the moment. ‘Whatever is needed to emerge from this disaster that sullies the threshold of the European Union, where, in 2010 as in 1945, the Greeks rummage in dustbins searching for some scraps to eat tonight.’