Petros Markaris - Che Committed Suicide

Vakirtzis wasn’t advocating nationalism, on the contrary, he attacked Stefanakos from the left. He set himself up as the voice of the unemployed. The reason, according to Vakirtzis, why unemployment was not falling even though the number of job opportunities was rising was because the new positions were going to the immigrants. The result was that Greek workers were being done out of their rights. The immigrants were preferred because they worked longer hours for below the minimum wage. If Stefanakos’s proposals prevailed, immigrants would become a permanent feature in Greece which would increase the prospect of unemployment for the Greeks. The parting shot crowned it all:

All right, Mr Stefanakos. I can accept that the issue of human rights has become a personal crusade for you. I can even ignore rumours that you do this purely for personal gain. Can’t you see, however, what cost your proposals entail? Are you proposing, then, that we keep all the Albanians, Bulgarians, Romanians and Serbs here and send our own people to Albania, Bulgaria and Romania to find work?

That question alone would have been more than enough to incite the Philip of Macedon nationalists to kill Stefanakos and all the members of the Greek Parliament along with him. The remainder of the programme confirmed this. The phone calls came one after the other from idlers of both sexes with streams of abuse about the foreigners who were stealing their jobs and ruining their wonderful country.

I was starting to lose interest from constantly reading the questions and answers between the listeners and Vakirtzis when, towards the end of the programme, Vakirtzis came out with another comment that I found intriguing:

Who doesn’t want to see our neighbours in the Balkans progressing? But a much greater service is done both to them and to us by those who create jobs and make investments in their own countries. If Stefanakos wants to help our Balkan neighbours, he should support those Greeks who are creating jobs there and not the foreigners who are taking our jobs in Greece.

That was the two-sided game that Vakirtzis was playing. On the one hand, he was making a scathing attack on Stefanakos that could only harm him politically, yet, at the same time, he was showing support for his wife, who secured EU funds and consequently jobs in the Balkan countries. So that was the message. He was making it clear to Stefanakos that he too was interested, using his brother as a front, in opening up in the Balkans.

Why didn’t Stefanakos take Vakirtzis to court? Given what he had said against him and, more particularly, the way he had said it, Stefanakos could have easily sued him for defamation of character. So why didn’t he? Out of a sense of hackneyed comradeship and belated solidarity, perhaps? I thought about it for a moment but rejected it. The answer was to be found in the envelope that Koula had left in front of me: in the photocopy of a cheque for three thousand euros drawn on a bank in Bucharest that Vakirtzis had had in his possession.

Stathatos had her eyes glued to the photocopy of the cheque drawn on the bank in Bucharest. Her problem wasn’t with the Romanian, but with how she might gain time while deciding how to confront its bearer, in other words, me.

‘Where did you find it?’ she asked me eventually.

‘In a drawer in Apostolos Vakirtzis’s desk. Together with other information he was safeguarding. Among which was a recording of a programme about your husband.’

‘Ah, the infamous programme,’ she commented.

An embarrassing silence followed. Stathatos didn’t know how to continue, nor I how to begin. I wondered whether I should come straight to the point or whether I should use a roundabout way. I decided upon the first approach.

‘Was Apostolos Vakirtzis blackmailing you?’

Almost mechanically, she adopted her self-confident and condescending expression. ‘Now, now, Inspector. You see conspiracies everywhere…’

‘I listened to the programme and the attack made by Vakirtzis on your husband. Were there any other motives behind it in your opinion?’

She shrugged. ‘No, that’s what he believed. Following the fall of the communist regimes, leftist nationalism became very fashionable.’

‘Perhaps, but towards the end of the programme, Vakirtzis came out with something rather interesting.’ I reached into my pocket and took out the sheet of paper where I had written Vakirtzis’s words and I read aloud: ‘“Who doesn’t want to see our neighbours in the Balkans progressing? But a much greater service is done both to them and to us by those who create jobs and make investments in their own countries.” That comment should make you sit up, Mrs Stathatos. He’s sending you a message that he regards what you are doing as something positive and he would like to be involved in it. If you take it in conjunction with the cheque we found among his papers, it says a lot.’

She was no longer in any mood to help me shed some light on the matter. She simply looked at me in silence.

‘I’ve said it several times, to you, to Mr Zamanis and to Mrs Yannelis, that we are not investigating your businesses or your dealings. All we are interested in is finding out the reasons behind the three suicides and for one reason alone: in order to prevent any others. This is our only concern.’

She continued to look at me pensively and let out a sigh. ‘You’re right. He was blackmailing us. Both Loukas and myself. And, naturally, we weren’t the only ones. Vakirtzis was blackmailing politicians, businessmen, publishers, not to get money out of them, but for favours and information that he then used against them.’

‘And you… what favours were you doing him?’

‘Business people want their peace of mind, Inspector. Vakirtzis was well aware of that.’

‘And?’

‘I secured two large projects in the Balkans for his company Electrosys. Also…’ She stopped abruptly.

‘It would help me if you were to tell me more,’ I urged her gently.

She shrugged. ‘Anyhow, it’s no longer of any importance. I secured him a fee for promoting a Balkan country on his programme. I’m not going to tell you which country, but the fee didn’t come out of the country’s funds. I paid it out of my own pocket.’ She smiled quite unexpectedly. ‘At least I’ll save on that now. But I’m continuing to support the projects undertaken by Elecrosys because, if anything goes wrong, I’m the one who’ll be compromised.’

She had been extremely honest with me and I didn’t want to be any less with her. ‘I can’t see in what you’ve told me any motive for your husband’s suicide or that of Jason Favieros for that matter and certainly not of Vakirtzis.’

She smiled with satisfaction. ‘I knew that from the start, but you wouldn’t believe me.’

‘Do you think they might have had some common secret from the past that could have led them to suicide? I’m asking because they knew each other, took part in the same struggles and had been locked up together in the cells of the Military Police.’

‘What can I tell you? I couldn’t say no with certainty. But I was studying in London then and I had no idea what was going on here. I met Loukas much later, after the fall of the Junta, when I returned to Greece.’

‘Would Mrs Favieros know?’

She let out a spontaneous laugh. ‘Good Lord, no. Ioanna kept out of all that and she got upset whenever Jason talked about the resistance.’ She reflected a moment. ‘The only person who might know something is Xenophon Zamanis, but even if he did, he wouldn’t tell you. He’s one of the old school and he still believes in the underground’s code of silence.’

I may have felt some satisfaction at finally having persuaded Stathatos to open up to me, but that was of little practical value, because she had told me nothing that would give me a lead.