Petros Markaris - Che Committed Suicide

Coralia Yannelis made me wait. Her excuse was that I had come without an appointment and that she had to deal with a serious professional matter. I was over half an hour in reception, like a patient waiting to see his GP or a voter waiting to see the MP for his constituency. I felt uneasy and I shared this feeling with Yannelis’s secretary, who didn’t much like having a copper hanging around her office. I could have left and called her down to Headquarters, but my kid-glove tactics had proved effective so far and I didn’t want to change them now that there was some light at the end of the tunnel.

She received me after about an hour, but she didn’t ask me to sit down. ‘This business has got to come to and end, Inspector,’ she said in a cold and annoyed tone. ‘You’ve visited me on numerous occasions, you’ve asked me the most irrelevant questions about the companies in our group and without any authority whatsoever. I answered your questions because we’ve nothing to hide and because I’m a law-abiding citizen. Whichever you prefer. But I’ve no intention of going on with this game. Next time you want to question me, send an official request and I’ll come with my lawyer.’

She finished protesting and waited for me to leave, but I didn’t move from the spot.

‘I haven’t come to talk about your companies,’ I said very calmly.

‘But?’

‘About your father, Thanos Yannelis.’

I was banking from the beginning on the element of surprise and I wasn’t wrong. ‘Is this some new business?’ she asked, taken aback.

‘No. It’s old business, going back to the Junta and the resistance organisations of the time.’

She considered whether it was worth abandoning her hardline approach, decided that it was and told me to take a seat.

‘During the period of the Junta, your father was a member of a resistance group known as the Che Independent Resistance Organisation.’

I waited to see how she would react before proceeding. She looked at me and smiled calmly.

‘In 1967, I was twelve years old, Inspector. Do you imagine that my father would discuss resistance organisations with me?’

‘No, but he might have discussed them with you later, after the fall of the Junta.’

‘My father never talked about his activities. He did it to protect us. He used to say that no one knew how things would turn out and the family had to be protected.’ She had regained her composure and smiled calmly.

‘Favieros, Stefanakos and Vakirtzis belonged to the same organisation as your father.’

‘It’s the first time I’ve heard that.’ She appeared to be surprised, but she may have been playacting. You never knew with Coralia Yannelis.

‘So your father never spoke about the resistance. Didn’t you hear anything from Favieros either?’

‘Only once, when he was about to hire me. He told me that he had met my father during the period of the Junta.’

‘And didn’t you ask him where and how?’

She shrugged. ‘No. So many people knew my father that there was no point in my asking every time. Perhaps his acquaintance with my father played some role in Jason’s decision to hire me. All of those in Jason’s close circle go back to the Junta and the student struggles. Not only Xenophon Zamanis, but also his private secretary, Theoni, and Zamanis’s secretary, and a whole group of others, mainly engineers and lawyers.’ She paused for a moment and then added: ‘All I remember from that time is the day the Military Police came to arrest my father.’

‘There’s another common element from the past: your father’s suicide.’ She said nothing. She nodded her head resignedly. ‘When did your father commit suicide?’

‘In the early nineties.’

‘And now the other members of the organisation are all committing suicide in turn.’

She stared at me as though not believing what she had just heard. ‘What are you saying?’ she asked astonished. ‘That the suicides of Jason, Stefanakos and Vakirtzis have some connection with that of my father?’

‘I can’t prove it yet, but nor can I rule it out.’

‘More than ten years have passed between my father’s suicide and those of the other three.’

‘Yes, but there were at least ten members of the organisation. Apart from those who committed suicide, we’ve tracked down another two. The one died of natural causes and the other is living abroad. But we don’t know who the rest were. There may have been other suicides that we don’t know about.’

She propped her head up on her hands and closed her eyes, as though she were trying to revive the images in her memory.

‘My father was a very unhappy man, Inspector.’

She said it without emphasis, but categorically, as an indisputable fact. Then she opened her eyes and looked at me.

‘He lived his life in the movements and the illegal political organisations. That’s what he knew. He had close ties with Castro’s regime and he worshipped Che Guevara. We moved from Bogotá to La Paz just before Che started his guerrilla war in Bolivia. When my father was deported from Bolivia, we returned to Greece. Then came the Junta and he was back in his element, till the day they caught him.’ She paused again, trying to order her thoughts. ‘The period after the fall of the Junta was a disaster for him. From one day to the next, he found himself on the scrap heap. No one wanted him and he didn’t have any way to make a living. He made a trip to Cuba, but conditions had changed there, too. He returned, and from then on he began to waste away. When the communist regimes fell, he realised that it was the end and life no longer had any meaning for him.’

She stopped to get her breath, as though the effort had exhausted her. What she had told me was totally logical. There was nothing irrational or outrageous about it. All that was required was to compare her father with Zissis. Despite his bitterness, and the anger that he vented every so often, Zissis had endured. Yannelis hadn’t and that was the only difference.

‘My father committed suicide quietly in his room and we found him three days later. He didn’t die in front of the cameras or in his villa or in Syntagma Square.’

It was the first time that she had voiced anything resembling a reproach concerning Jason Favieros and the others. It was also the first time that she had lost both her smile and her composure. She had put it all in place and it all appeared totally convincing, but was it? What if there was something behind all this linking the recent suicides with Yannelis’s? And there were others in the group we didn’t yet know about and who might, therefore, be in danger? They might include ministers, government officials, scribes and Pharisees, whatever you could thing of. What could we do? Announce in the press and on TV that anyone who was once a member of the ‘Che’ organisation should contact the police?

‘What did your father live on?’

‘He had a small pension as a former member of the resistance. He didn’t have any other income.’

‘Didn’t you help him?’

She was silent for a moment and then added, without hiding her sorrow: ‘My father was a proud man. He wouldn’t accept help from anyone.’

‘You have a brother, isn’t that so? Kimon Yannelis.’

‘Yes.’

‘Does he live in Greece?’

‘No. From what I know, he has a fishing business in South Africa.’ She saw that I was perplexed by her answer and added: ‘My brother and I never got on, Inspector. We’ve not had any contact for years now.’ Her smile reappeared, even though it was a little affected. ‘And because I’m sure you want to know about my mother, I can tell you that she died in 1970, shortly after our return to Greece, of acute meningitis.’