Petros Markaris - Deadline in Athens

Every morning at nine, we would stare at each other. He would stand in front of my desk with his gaze fixed on me, not exactly at eye level, but somewhere between my forehead and my eyebrows. "I'm a moron," he would say.

He didn't say it with words; he said it with his eyes. I sat behind my desk and looked him straight in the eye, no higher and no lower. Because I was his boss and could look him in the eye, whereas he couldn't do the same with me. "I know you're a moron," I'd tell him. No word escaped me either; my eyes did the speaking. We had this conversation five days a week, every week of the year, excluding the two months that we were both on leave. From Monday to Friday, without our saying as much as a word, just through our eyes. "I'm a moron"-"I know you're a moron."

Every division has its share of losers. 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. Chubbyfaced, 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 crepe-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, Koumoun- douros 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.