[Deadline in Athens is] unalloyed pleasure, with [an] intricate plot that satisfyingly unravels its secrets in well-timed surprises until the very last page.” –Kathimerini (English edition)

“The material is rich, the characters are drawn with depth, and Haritos himself is an intriguing find.” –Paul Skenazy, TheWashington Post

“A vivid, rough, abrasive novel with a dry humor, in the image of its main character, Inspector Haritos . . . The police intrigue . . . is remarkably done. But Deadline in Athens is most valuable for the portrait it paints of today’s Athens, quotidian and familiar. . . . one can only rejoice.” –Le Monde

Praise for Petros Markaris

“Thanks to Markaris’ pen, the reader is taken on a tour of the centre of Athens and its outlying neighbourhoods, its streets and squares, its expensive suburbs and its districts inhabited by the poor and unemployed. . . .Subtle irony and catalytic humour, together with a faint trace of bitterness, are the hallmarks of Markaris’ writing.” –Philippos Philippou, Ithaca

“While adhering to the conventions of the crime novel, the author also ventures further afield into the province of more overtly literary fiction. Markaris delineates and illuminates the society in which his tales are played out. . . . For crime aficionados who like nothing better after a long hard day than to jump into bed with a big, fat, juicy murder, Markaris’s crime novels are unalloyed pleasure, with intricate plots that satisfyingly unravel their secrets in well-timed surprises until the very last page. The villains are intriguingly varied and their motives spring as much from the nature of the society they inhabit as from their own characters. But the soul of the books, and the source of much of the rich vein of humor that runs counter to events both grim and mundane, is their hero and narrator–homicide squad chief Costas Haritos, a Greek incarnation of the hard-boiled cop.” –Vivienne Nilan, Kathimerini

They can’t all be high-flyers; you’re bound to get stuck with a few dimwits like Thanassis. He entered the police academy but quit halfway through. With a great deal of effort, he managed to get to the rank of sergeant, and there he stopped. He didn’t aspire to achieve anything higher. From his first day in the division, he made it clear to me that he was a moron. And I showed due appreciation, because his honesty saved him from difficult assignments, night duties, roadblocks, and car chases. I kept him in the office. An easy interrogation, filing, liaison with the coroner’s office and the ministry. But because we had a chronic shortage of men on the force and simply couldn’t deal with all the work, he made sure he reminded me every day that he was a moron, so that I wouldn’t forget and assign him by mistake to a patrol car.

I glanced at my desk and saw that the coffee and croissant were missing. His only regular assignment was to bring me these every morning. I looked up at him questioningly.

‘so, where’s my breakfast today, Thanassis? Have you forgotten it?” When I first entered the force, we used to eat biscuits. We’d wipe the crumbs off the desk while some murderer or robber or common pickpocket by the name of Demos or Lambros or Menios sat across from us.

Thanassis smiled. “The chief phoned to say that he wants to see you right away, so I thought I’d bring it to you when that was done with.”

He wanted to talk to me about that Albanian who had been seen lurking near the home of the couple we’d found murdered on Tuesday afternoon. The front door of the house had been open all morning, but no one had been inside. Who’d go into a decrepit hovel with one window missing and the other boarded over? Even burglars would turn up their noses at the prospect. Eventually, around noon, a neighbor who’d noticed the door open all morning with apparently no one around went to take a look. It was an hour before she contacted us because she had fainted. When we arrived on the scene, two women were still trying to revive her spirits by sprinkling water over her face, as if they were trying to make a fish look fresh.

A bare mattress was laid on the concrete floor. The woman was sprawled on it on her back. She must have been around twenty-five. Her throat had been slashed wide open, as if someone had cut her a bloody second mouth. Her right hand was clutching at the mattress. I couldn’t tell what color her nightdress had been, but now it seemed to be dark red all over. The man beside her must have been about five years older. He was sprawled facedown and lying over the edge of the mattress. His eyes seemed to be fixed on a passing cockroach. He had five stab wounds in the back; three in a horizontal line from the level of the heart to his right shoulder and the other two beneath the middle horizontal stab wound, one after the other, as if the murderer had been trying to carve a T on the man’s back. The rest of the house looked like the house of anyone else who leaves one hell to go to the next: a folding table, two plastic chairs, a gas stove.

Two dead Albanians is of interest to no one but the TV channels, and then only if the murder is sensational enough to turn the stomachs of those watching the nine o’clock news before sitting down to dinner. In the old days it was biscuits and Greeks. Now it’s croissants and Albanians.

It took us the better part of an hour to get through the initial stage of photographing the two corpses, looking for fingerprints, putting the few pieces of evidence in plastic bags, and sealing the door. The coroner didn’t even bother to come. He preferred to have the corpses delivered to the mortuary. There was no need for any investigation. What was there to investigate? There wasn’t so much as a cupboard in the house. The woman’s few rags were hanging on a hook screwed into the wall. The man’s were lying beside him on the concrete floor.

‘should we check if there’s any money?” Sotiris asked. He was a lieutenant and always did things by the book.

“If you find any, it’s yours, but you won’t find a cent. Either they didn’t have any, or the murderer took it. And that doesn’t mean that he killed them for their money. He’d have taken the money even if it was revenge. His kind wouldn’t find money and leave it.” Nevertheless, he poked around and found a hole in the mattress. No money.

None of the neighbors had seen anything. Or so they said. They may well have been hiding something for the cameras in order to make a little money for themselves. All that was left for us to do was to get back to the station for the second and final stage: a report that would go straight to the files, because looking for whoever killed them would be a waste of effort.

She popped up just as we were sealing off the house. Chubby-faced, wearing a sparkling blouse that looked about to burst open and her breasts spring out of it, plus a tight skirt that was shorter at the back because her backside stopped it from hanging properly, and with mauve slippers. I was sitting in the patrol car when I saw her approaching the two men boarding up the door. After she said something to them and they pointed to where I was in the car, she turned and came over to me.

“Where can I talk to you?” she asked, as if expecting me to make her a private appointment.

“Here. What is it?”

“Over the past few days I’ve seen a man snooping around the house. Every time he knocked on the door the woman would slam it in his face. He was average height, fair-haired, and had a scar on his left cheek. He was wearing a blue anorak, jeans that were patched at the knees, and tennis shoes. The last time I saw him was the day before yesterday. It was in the evening, and he was knocking on the door.”

“And why didn’t you tell all this to the officer who took your statement?”

“I needed time to think. The last thing I need is to be bundled off to police stations and courtrooms.”

How long did she sit and stare at the street, at the neighbors and passersby? Evidently, she made her bed in the morning, put the pan on the stove, and then took up her watch at the window.

“Okay. If we need you, we’ll contact you.”

When I got back to the office, my first thought was to have the case put on file. What with terrorism, robberies, and drugs, who has time to worry about Albanians? If they’d killed a Greek, one of ours, one of the fast-food and cr”pe-eating Greeks of today, that would be different. But they could do what they liked to each other. It was enough that we provided ambulances to take them away.

Who says we learn from our mistakes? I sure don’t. At first, I always say I’m not going to do anything, and then something starts needling me. Either because the office gets to me and I feel bored, or because, despite the routine, I still have something of the policeman’s instinct left in me, I’m overcome by an urge to take it a stage further. So I put out a call to all the other stations with the woman’s description of the Albanian. To be honest, you don’t need to carry out prolonged investigations. All you have to do is go around all the squares: Omonoia Square, Vathi Square, Kotzias Square, Koumoundouros Square, the Station Square in Kifissia, all the squares….The place has become an ass-backward zoo. They’ve shut up the people in cages, and the animals stroll around the squares staring at us. Even before I began, I knew that any efforts I made would come to nothing. Finding him was hopeless. And yet within three days, they’d sent him to me gift-wrapped from Loutsa.

The chubby woman came to see me wearing the same striking getup. Except that this time she was wearing shoes, old-fashioned ones with high heels that sagged under her weight so that the heels slid first inward, then outward, as if about to embrace each other, before changing their minds and going their separate ways. “That’s him!” she cried as soon as she saw the Albanian. I believed her at once and thanked God that she wasn’t my neighbor watching me from morning to night. He was just as she’d described him to me. She’d missed nothing that mattered.

This was why the chief wanted to see me. To ask how the case was going. And Thanassis hadn’t brought me my breakfast, because he was certain that once I heard that the chief wanted to see me, I’d drop everything and rush upstairs.

“Your job is to bring me my coffee and croissant. I’ll decide when I see the chief,” I told him angrily and leaned back into my chair to show him that I had no intention of budging from my desk all morning.

The smile immediately vanished from his face. All his assuredness went out the window. “Yes, sir,” he mumbled.

“Well–what are you waiting for?”

He turned on his heel and bolted. I waited a minute or two and then got up to go see the chief. I wouldn’t have put it past Thanassis to let it be known that the chief wanted to see me and that I was playing the smart alec. And the chief knew every trick in the book; you had to watch your back with him. Not to mention that he was a bundle of neuroses.

Chapter 2

My office was on the third floor, number 321. The office of the chief of security was on the fifth. The elevator usually took five or ten minutes, depending on whether it had decided to get on your nerves. If you got irritated and started pressing the button continually, it could take up to fifteen minutes. You heard it on the second floor, thought it was coming up, and then, without warning, it changed direction and went back down. Or the other way around. It came down to the fourth floor and instead of coming on down, went back up again. Sometimes I’d decide “To hell with it” and take the stairs two at a time, more to blow off steam than because I was in a hurry. At other times, I dug in my heels and reflected that since no one else was in any hurry, I’d have to be insane to rush. They’d even calibrated the elevator doors to open slowly, enough to drive you crazy.

All the big brains are on the fifth floor, either so they can think collectively or so they’ll be isolated before they ruin our brains too. It depends on how you look at it. The office of the chief of security is number 504, but he’s had the number removed from the door. He considered it demeaning to have a number on his door like in hospitals or hotels. He had a plaque put up in its place: nikolaos ghikas–chief of security. “In America, there are no numbers on the doors. Just names,” he went on saying crossly for a good three months. He said it again and again till he finally had the number removed and his name put in its place. And all because he’d spent six months on a training program with the FBI.

“Go straight in, he’s expecting you,” said Koula, the policewoman who did the job of his secretary but looked more like a supermodel.

The office was large and bright with a carpeted floor and curtained windows. They intended to give us all curtains, but the money ran out, so they limited them to the fifth floor. Just inside the door was an oblong conference table with six chairs. The chief was sitting with his back to the window, and his desk must have been all of three yards long. One of those modern ones with metal corners. If you want to get a document lying at either edge of the desk, you need a pair of tongs to reach it.

He looked up at me. “What more on the Albanian?” he said.

“Nothing more, sir. We’re still interrogating him.”

“Incriminating evidence?” Short sharp questions, short sharp answers; just the basics to show that he’s (a) busy as hell, (b) efficient, and (c) direct and to the point. American tricks, we told ourselves.

“No, but we have an eyewitness who recognized him, like I said.”

“That’s not necessarily going to get you a conviction. She saw him in the vicinity of the house. She didn’t see him either entering or leaving. Fingerprints?”

“Lots. Most belonging to the couple. But none to the suspect. No trace of a murder weapon.” The ass had me speaking in shorthand, like him.

“I see. Tell the reporters that there’ll be no statement for the time being.”

He didn’t have to tell me that. If there was a statement to make, he would have made it himself. And not only that, but he would have got me to write it all down for him so he could learn it by heart. I’m not complaining; it doesn’t bother me in the least. Reporters are always on my back. It’s just like the biscuits and croissants. Once it was newspapermen and newspapers; now it’s reporters and cameras.

Using the secretary’s telephone, I sent word for the Albanian to be brought to me for questioning. Interrogations take place in an office with bare walls, a table, and three chairs. When I entered, the Albanian was sitting handcuffed in one of the chairs.

‘should I remove the handcuffs?” asked the officer who’d brought him.

“Leave him and let’s see whether he’s cooperative or wants to play tough.”

I looked at the Albanian. His hands were resting on the table. Two calloused hands, with thick fingers and long nails, black around the edges; misery’s mark of mourning. He was staring at them as if seeing them for the first time, as if surprised. Surprised at what? That he’d killed with them? Or that they were rough and dirty? Or that God created him with hands?

“Are you going to tell me why you killed them?” I said to him.

He slowly raised his eyes from his hands. “Got cigarette?”

“Give him one of yours,” I said to the officer.

He looked at me in shock. He thought I was messing with him. That’s how sharp he was. He smoked Marlboros, whereas I’d stayed with the old Greek Karelia. I was giving the Albanian a Marlboros, to win him over. The officer put it in the suspect’s mouth and I lit it for him. He took a couple of drags, beaming with satisfaction. He held the smoke as if to imprison it, and then let it out as sparingly as possible, not wanting to waste any of it. He raised his hands and squeezed the cigarette between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.

“I no kill,” he said, and, at the same moment, his two hands moved like one lizard and wedged the cigarette between his lips, while his chest heaved to make space for the smoke. His instinct told him that I might take the cigarette away now that he hadn’t told me what I’d wanted to hear, and he hastened to inhale what he could.

‘don’t play with me, you lousy Albanian!” I yelled at him. “I’ll have you for every unsolved murder of Albanian lowlife on our files for the last three years, and you’ll go down for life times ten, damn your country and damn its leaders!”

“I not here three years. I come–” he stopped to search for a way to say “last year.” “I come “ninety-two,” he said, pleased with himself for having solved his vocabulary problem. Now his hands were stowed under the table, presumably so that I would forget about the cigarette.

“And how do you intend to prove that, dickhead? From your passport?”

I lunged at him, grabbing him and dragging him to his feet. He wasn’t expecting it; his hands banged hard on the underside of the table and the cigarette dropped to the floor. He cast a quick glance, full of concern, at the fallen cigarette and then looked at me anxiously. The officer stretched out his foot and stepped on the cigarette, while grinning at the Albanian. Smart kid, catches on very nicely.

“You entered Greece illegally. There’s no record of you anywhere, no visa, no stamp, nothing. I could dispose of you and no one would ever ask what happened to you. I’ve never seen you or heard of you, because you don’t exist. Are you listening? You don’t exist!”

“I go for woman,” he said in fear, as I shook him.

“Fancied her?” I let him sink back onto the chair.

“Yes.”

“That’s why you were creeping around the house all day. You wanted to go in and do her, and she wouldn’t open the door for you.”

“Yes,” he said again and smiled this time, enjoying the psychoanalysis.

“And when she didn’t open the door, you went crazy and broke in at night and murdered them!”

“No!” he shouted in alarm.

I sat in the chair facing him and stared into his eyes. I let some time pass. He grew anxious. Luckily he didn’t realize that I’d come to a dead end. What else could I do to him? Let him go hungry? He wouldn’t give a rat’s ass. He was used to eating one day in three and then only if he was lucky. Get two strong-armed boys from upstairs to give him a going-over? He’d had so many goings-over in his life that he wouldn’t think twice about it.

“Listen,” I said to him in a calm and friendly voice, “I’ll write down everything we say on a piece of paper, you’ll sign it, and you’ll have nothing more to worry about.”

He said nothing. He just looked at me with indecision and doubt. It wasn’t that he was afraid of going to prison; he’d simply learned to be suspicious. He did not have it in his experience to believe that suffering comes to an end somewhere and you find relief. He was afraid that if you accept one thing, you’ll have to face a second and third, because that had always been his fate. The poor wretch needed some gentle persuasion.

“After all, it won’t be so bad in prison,” I said to him in a conversational way. “You’ll have your own bed, three meals a day, all courtesy of the state. You won’t have to do anything, and you’ll be taken care of, just like it was in your own country back then. And if you have any brains, after a couple of months you’ll join one of the gangs, and you’ll make a bit on the side as well. Prison is the only place where there’s no unemployment. If you have your wits about you, you’ll come out with a nice little nest egg.”

He went on staring at me, except that now his eyes were glinting, as if he liked the idea, but he continued to say nothing. I knew he wanted to think about it, and I got up. “You don’t have to give me an answer now,” I said. “Think about it, and we’ll talk again tomorrow.”

As I was going toward the door, I saw the officer taking out his pack of Marlboros and offering him one. I made a mental note to get the kid transferred and have him work with me.

I found them all milling around in front of my office. Some were holding microphones, others pocket recorders. All of them with that greedy and impatient look: a pack of wolves hungry for a statement, soldiers waiting for their rations. The cameramen saw me coming and hoisted the cameras to their shoulders.

‘step inside, all of you.” I opened the door to my office, muttering under my breath, “Go to hell, you bastards, and leave me in peace.” They burst through the door behind me and planted their microphones with the logo of their TV channels, their cables, and their pocket recorders all over my desk. In less than a minute, it had come to resemble the stall of an immigrant vendor in Athinas Street.

‘do you have anything more to tell us about the Albanian, Inspector?” It was Sotiropoulos, with his Armani checked shirt, his English raincoat, his Timberland moccasins, and his spectacles with their round metallic frames, the kind once worn by poor old Himmler and now worn by intellectuals. He’d stopped calling me by name some time before and now just addressed me as “Inspector.” And he always began with ‘do you have anything to tell us’ or “What can you tell us,” in order to make you feel that you were being examined and graded. He believed, you see, that he represented the conscience of the people, and the conscience of the people treated everyone equally: no name or sign of respect, courtesies that only lead to distinctions between citizens. And his eyes were always fixed on you, wary and ready to denounce you at any moment. A modern-day Robespierre with a camera and a microphone.

I ignored him and addressed myself to them all as a body. If he wanted equality, he’d have it. “I have nothing to tell you,” I said genially. “We’re still interrogating the suspect.”

They looked at me in disappointment. A tiny, freckled woman wearing red stockings tried to get something more out of me, refusing to go down without a fight.

‘do you have any evidence that he’s the murderer?” she said.

“I told you, we’re still interrogating him,” I said again, and to let them know that the interview was over, I picked up the croissant that Thanassis had brought me, removed the cellophane, and bit into it.

They began packing away their paraphernalia, and my office recovered its normal appearance, like the patient who, once out of danger, is unhooked from the machines.

Yanna Karayoryi was the last to leave. She hung back deliberately and allowed the others to go out. I disliked her even more than all the rest of them. For no particular reason. She couldn’t have been more than thirty-five and was always dressed elegantly without being showy. Wide trousers, cardigan, with an expensive chain and cross around her neck. I don’t know why, but I had got it into my head that she was a lesbian. She was a good-looking woman, but her short hair and her style of dressing gave her something of a masculine appearance. Now she was standing beside the door. She glanced outside to see that the others had gone, and then closed it. I went on eating my croissant as if I hadn’t noticed that she was still in my office.

‘do you know whether the murdered couple had any children?” she said.

I turned, surprised. Her arrogant gaze was where it always was, and she was smiling at me ironically. That’s what irritated me: those meaningless questions that she suddenly came out with and that she underlined with an ironic smile to make you think that she knew something more but wasn’t going to tell you, just to annoy you. In fact, she knew nothing, she just liked to fish.

‘do you think there were children there and we didn’t notice them?”

‘maybe they weren’t there when you got there.”

“What do you want me to say? If they sent them to study in America, we haven’t located them, not yet at any rate,” I said.

“I’m not talking about grown-up children. I’m talking about babies,” she answered. “Two years old at most.”

She did know something, and it was amusing her to play with me. I decided to go easy, be friendly, try to win her over. I pointed to the chair in front of my desk.

“Why don’t you sit down and let’s talk,” I said.

“Can’t. I have to get back to the studio. Another time.” She was all of a sudden in a hurry. The bitch wanted to leave me wondering.

As she was opening the door to leave, she bumped into Thanassis, who was coming in at that moment with a document. They exchanged a look, and Karayoryi smiled at him. Thanassis averted his gaze, but Karayoryi kept hers fixed provocatively on him. She seemed fond of him. Truth to tell, she had every right to because Thanassis was a good-looking fellow. Tall, dark, well built. It occurred to me to get him to establish a relationship with her. That way he’d be able to answer both of my questions: whether she did, in fact, know anything about the Albanians and was hiding it from me, and whether she was a lesbian.

She waved to me, ostensibly saying good-bye, but actually it was as if she were saying, ‘sit there and stew, you dummy.” She closed the door behind her. Thanassis came over and handed me the document.

“The coroner’s report on the two Albanians,” he said. Karayoryi’s smile had embarrassed him, and his hand was trembling as he handed me the paper. He didn’t know if I’d noticed or how I’d react.

“Fine,” I said. “Leave it and go.” I was in no mood to read it. In any case, what could it tell me? Whatever the bodies had to reveal was obvious enough to the naked eye–apart from the time of the murder, but that was of no importance. It wasn’t as if the Albanian was going to come up with a convincing alibi that we’d have to disprove. And Karayoryi didn’t know anything. Like all reporters she was bluffing. She wanted to arouse my curiosity so that she would be the first I’d open up to and she’d be able to get more out of me. There were no children. If there were and we hadn’t found them, the neighbors would have told us.

Copyright ” 2004 by Petros Markaris. Translation copyright ” 2004 by David Connolly. Reprinted with permission from Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.