Petros Markaris - Che Committed Suicide

‘And is that what happened in this case?’

‘I would suppose so.’

‘And what if the seller did only receive twenty-five thousand euros?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘If the difference didn’t go into the seller’s pocket…’

‘So who’s pocket did it go into? The estate agent’s?’

I left the question dangling in the air and changed tack.

‘Mr Karyofyllis, I want to be honest with you. I don’t have any interest at all in you personally. If I need to, I’ll call you into the station and I’ll do it without the slightest hesitation. The same is true if I need to arrest you. But the office of Yorgos Iliakos is another matter altogether. It belongs, so we were informed, to Jason Favieros.’

‘Who? The businessman who committed suicide?’ he asked innocently. ‘What connection does he have with the estate agency?’

I shot him a look as though my heart were filled with pity for him. ‘Come now. The Yorgos Iliakos Real Estate Agency and a very large number of other real-estate agencies belong to Balkan Prospect, which is a company owned by Jason Favieros. The tragedy that his family has suffered and the confusion that exists at present concerning the future of his businesses obliges us to be very cautious. You stand to benefit from that.’

‘Me, how?’

‘Because you were the one to draw up the contracts.’ I said it so definitively, as though I had verified it from ten different sources, and he didn’t dare deny it. ‘There are three possibilities, Mr Karyofyllis. First, that the Russo-Pontian is lying. If that’s the case, we’ll tweak his ear and send him home. Second, an employee in one of the estate agencies is working a scam to cheat the buyers, the sellers and their own bosses. Or third, there exists an organised network of officials and public notaries who are getting rich illegally in this way.’

‘The first possibility is the only reasonable one, Inspector.’ I had thrown him a lifebelt and he was clutching hold of it.

‘So what you’re saying is that the Russo-Pontian paid forty-five thousand euros and the same sum was received by the seller minus the estate agent’s fee, but that the contract stated twenty-five thousand for tax reasons. And now the Russo-Pontian is being clever and trying through blackmail to get twenty thousand back.’

‘Precisely, Inspector. Those people are uneducated and unreliable, just like every other sly animal. They bring the sum in cash, empty it onto your desk, and all they’re interested in is getting the key to the house,’ Karyofyllis went on. ‘Once they’ve moved in and are settled in the place, their sly minds start working and they try to find ways of getting back some of the money they paid.’

I restrained myself only with difficulty and agreed with him. Given that they allowed estate agents to rob them of so much money right under their noses, what else were they but animals?

‘You may very well be right. But what will happen if the Russo-Pontian is only the beginning and from tomorrow the complaints start coming thick and fast? Then the network will come out into the open, Balkan Prospect will be ruined, even if it’s not to blame, and so will you along with it.’

‘Me, why?’

‘Because all the sales and purchases contracts for Balkan Prospect are drawn up by you. We know that from our investigations.’

I had him with his back to the wall and all he could do was jump to his feet and start shouting. ‘This is nothing but a damnable plot! Accusations are being made against the executives of a business firm, accusations are being made against a public notary company that has a history going back to 1930, that was founded by my father, just because some lousy Russo-Pontian crook is resorting to blackmail to get back money!’

‘No one is being accused of anything yet,’ I replied calmly. ‘As I told you, this is an unofficial investigation and our aim is to close the case quietly. There’s a very simple way for doing that. Give me the particulars of the seller and provided that he confirms that he did, in fact, receive the forty-five thousand euros, the case will be closed immediately.’

He became more and more distraught and hostile. ‘That, unfortunately, is something I am unable to do.’

‘Why?’

‘Because by doing so I would be revealing an illegal transaction and I would be compromising both the seller and the real-estate agency.’

‘I told you, I’m not a tax inspector.’

‘Agreed. And that may be enough for me, but it won’t be enough for the other two parties.’

‘I can get the particulars from the land registry.’

He hesitated a moment and then said with resolve: ‘That’s another matter that doesn’t concern me. I’m not interested in where you get the particulars, provided it’s not from me.’ His refusal confirmed my suspicions, but I kept this to myself. ‘In the past, the police would give those good-for-nothings a pasting and threaten them that if they persisted it would be the worse for them,’ he said almost complainingly as he gave me his hand.

He knew that only too well, coming as he did from a historic company. I let it go by, so he could make of it what he wanted.

I stopped at the first cardphone I came across and phoned home. I told Adriani to put Koula on the line.

‘I want you to go straightaway to the land registry office and find the Russo-Pontian’s file,’ I told her. ‘I want the particulars of the seller. It’s urgent and I don’t want any delay because of cookery lessons.’

She was silent for a moment and than answered gravely: ‘I’m on my way.’

I found her very likeable, but if I left her in Adriani’s hands, I ran the risk of her getting the better of me.

How quickly can a file disappear from the land registry? It depends on what clout the person who wants it to disappear has. And Balkan Prospect had, so it seemed, plenty of clout. When Koula arrived at the land registry, the file didn’t exist. It had been mislaid somewhere and they couldn’t find it so she should leave a phone number for them to contact her or pass by again in a few days’ time.

In the end, her cookery lessons cost her dearly, because she was forced to spend a whole afternoon in Larymnis Street in order to find the seller’s particulars. Just as she had started to get frustrated, she came across an old woman who had paid the bills for the flat before it was sold and she found out that the former owner was an Eirene Leventoyanni, who lived in Polydrosso.

Myself, I spent a whole evening listening to eulogies. Not to the Virgin, but to Stefanakos. And not in church, but on the TV. But apart from the eulogies, it had further interest. The programme was on Sotiropoulos’s channel, not the one on which the suicides had taken place. And it was presented by Sotiropoulos himself. His guests began with a round of adulation. The Minister and other politicians spoke of Stefanakos’s ethos and character, said what an experienced parliamentarian he had been and how Parliament would be the poorer without him. The two left-wing politicians took a stroll down memory lane, recalling the common struggles during the Junta, the student rising in the Polytechnic School and the torture that Stefanakos had been subjected to in the cells of the Military Police. But perhaps the star attraction was a Balkan minister, who appeared on satellite link-up, and whose mouth dripped honey about Stefanakos: he was the one politician who worked behind the scenes, and on a daily basis, for friendship and cooperation between the Balkan countries; he was a true friend who had helped in the economic revival of his country after the fall of socialism, acting as a bridge between his country, the Greek government and Brussels. He was a politician whose loss the entire Balkans would grieve.