Petros Markaris - Che Committed Suicide

I put the computer on the back seat of the Mirafiori and then sat for a moment behind the wheel to collect my thoughts. Favieros and Stefanakos had both exhibited the same two-sided behaviour. The foreign workers swore by Favieros, who helped them, but, as well as helping them, he made a pile of money on the side through the houses and flats that he sold them at bloated prices. As for Stefanakos, his voters sent flowers to his office to honour his memory, but he offered them only crumbs while using all the means at his disposal to make sure his wife’s businesses got preferential treatment.

Suddenly an idea came into my mind, but instead of filling me with delight, it sent a shiver through me. What if the suicides had no connection with scandals? What if someone knew what Favieros, Stefanakos and Vakirtzis were up to behind the scenes and decided to punish them in order to render justice?

‘Computer: n. mod .: 1. clerk subordinate to an accountant, assistant accountant. 2. esp. naval, title of finance officer corresponding to chief petty officer or warrant officer. 3. rec . intellectual, thinking person who computes or calculates.’

Of course, I didn’t expect to find in Dimitrakos’s Lexicon, published in 1954, the contemporary sense of the word ‘computer’. Besides, the first ‘computers’ that circulated in Greece were actually calculators. When the real computers arrived, we didn’t call them computers but rather ‘calculators’. In other words, there was neither rhyme nor reason to it. Anyhow, it seemed to me that the first sense of the word given by Dimitrakos, ‘clerk subordinate to an accountant’, was closer to the modern computer. Nine times out of ten, I encountered it as an assistant accountant at the chemist, at the garage, at the service station and so on. ‘The computer is the cleverest moron you’ll ever meet,’ I’d once heard from one of the forensics experts. ‘It all depends how you use it.’ Because I knew how I’d use it, I kept it at a distance so as not to have a moron getting under my feet.

In any case, Dimitrakos had provided me with a sense of the word that suited Vakirtzis, ‘intellectual, thinking person who computes or calculates’. At least so it seemed at first sight.

Koula, with the help of her cousin, Spyros, had been trying to find the businesses owned or jointly owned by Vakirtzis in the Ministry of Trade records, but they still hadn’t come up with anything. I got them to stop because in the meantime I had brought home Stefanakos’s computer and I wanted them to search through that first.

I was sitting in the kitchen on hot coals, trying to contain my impatience by thumbing through Dimitrakos while they were doing a first search of Stefanakos’s computer. The kitchen stank of vinegar because Adriani was cooking okra and she was of the opinion that if you first soaked them in vinegar, they didn’t turn ‘gooey’.

I looked up from the dictionary at the sound of Koula’s footsteps as she came looking for me to inform me of the results of the search. Her cousin had pushed the screen belonging to Koula’s computer to one side and was bent over Stefanakos’s laptop.

‘You explain, Spyros. You’re better at it than I am.’

Spyros didn’t even bother to look up from the screen. ‘Well, he had a cleaning program.’

‘What program?’

‘Cleaning.’

All his answers were abrupt and he kept his eyes glued to the screen. I found it irritating, but I restrained myself because I didn’t want to upset Koula and also because he was helping on a voluntary basis.

‘Listen, when I hear the words cleaning program, my mind goes straight to the housecleaning,’ I said calmly. ‘Can you spell it out for me?’

He lifted his head for the first time and stared at me with an expression somewhere between surprise and contempt. But he saw Koula standing beside me and bit his lip so as not to come out with anything rude.

‘When you delete something from the computer, it’s not permanently deleted,’ he explained to me slowly and patiently. ‘It remains on the hard disk and there are various ways that you can retrieve it. There are some programs, however, that clean the disk and permanently delete what’s written on it. You can run them when you want or you can programme them to start up on their own. When one of these programs is installed, you can retrieve what hasn’t been deleted on the disk before it starts up again.’

‘And Stefanakos had one of these programs on his computer?’

‘Yes, and it was set to clean the disk every three days.’

‘So you’re telling me that with the frequency that it ran, we won’t find anything?’

‘Looks like it.’

Disappointed, I turned to Koula. ‘Zilch!’

She didn’t appear to share my disappointment because she grinned. ‘Not exactly. We did come up with a few things that may be of interest.’

‘Such as?’

‘The good thing about Stefanakos is that he kept notes on everything. Read for yourself.’

She pressed a few keys and a series of squares with notes opened up before me. It reminded me in reverse of the boxes of Ethnos cigarettes, on which my father would note down what he had to do. Every so often, he’d bang his head and say, ‘Oh no, I’d written it on my cigarette box and I’ve thrown it away!’ Since then Ethnos had gone bust, cigarettes were now in packets and computers had become cigarette boxes. I was slowly starting to understand a little. I leaned over and read the notes one by one.

What A is asking is absurd. L doesn’t even want to discuss it. He says he’s already paid M in gold. He’s right.

The good thing was that they were all dated. This one was dated May 10th, when I was still in hospital. In another one, dated May 12th, he wrote:

I spoke to M. He says one thing and A another. I have to speak to K.

Another two or three followed that at first sight seemed irrelevant, then on May 20th:

K won’t even discuss it. He says his position is at stake.

And on May 22nd:

I heard A’s programme last night. He’s blackmailing me openly. I’ll have to talk to his station and persuade some journalist to interview me so I can reply.

Again, there were a few irrelevant notes followed by two successive ones on June 2nd and 3rd:

Where did he sprout from? And what does he want? He says he has irrefutable evidence. It’s probably just hot air.

And on June 3rd:

He’ll send me the evidence and what he’s asking for is outrageous. The world’s gone mad. J told me that he can’t refuse to call M. A knows too much and he’s scared of him.

I reread all the notes and tried to see what I could make of them. There was no doubt in my mind that ‘A’ was Vakirtzis. ‘L’ was most likely Lilian Stathatos, Stefanakos’s wife, and ‘J’ had to be Jason Favieros. I had no idea who ‘M’ and ‘K’ were. That said, there were more or less three main conclusions: first, Vakirtzis was putting pressure on Stefanakos to facilitate him with his businesses, and Stefanakos, in his turn, was putting pressure on his wife and on ‘K’, who was quite probably someone high up in the government, perhaps even a minister. Secondly, Jason Favieros was scared of Vakirtzis because he knew too much. Third, and more important, Vakirtzis was blackmailing Stefanakos on his radio programmes to force him to succumb. The only blank was the note of June 3rd. It was evidently referring to someone unknown who had irrefutable evidence. What evidence and about whom? About Vakirtzis? It wasn’t at all unlikely. Anyhow, from the way the note was written, it didn’t give the impression that Stefanakos was collecting information about Vakirtzis. Probably this unknown person was offering his services. And evidently at a price given that Stefanakos had noted that what he was asking for was outrageous.