Jeffrey Siger - Target - Tinos

“Should keep him in shape,” said Andreas.

“What’s he look like?” said Tassos.

“He’s about five-feet six-inches tall, one hundred forty pounds, has long, curly brown hair and usually dresses all in black. Trust me, if you spend any time on the island, sooner or later Trelos will dance on by you.”

Tassos nodded. “Yeah, I’ve seen him. Just never knew his name.”

“He keeps to himself, make that his own world.”

“How long has he been on Tinos?” said Andreas.

“Since he was born. He’s probably in his mid-forties. His brother and sister take care of him.”

Tassos shrugged. “Well, it was a shot.”

“Sorry I couldn’t be of more help but there are hundreds of families on Tinos with an ancestor somehow tied into the Society. Any more questions?”

“Only one,” said Andreas. “If you were going to steal the most valuable thing on this island, how would you go about doing it?”

Kouros was on Tinos early enough in the afternoon to have spoken to what seemed every taxi driver on the island before finding one who said he recognized the Greek hookers.

The driver was about fifty and stood next to his cab staring at the picture of the two coming out of the bar. “Better believe I recognize them. I still think of them every time I do it with my wife.”

“How did you meet them?”

“They called my dispatcher looking for a taxi to take them to a bar.”

“What bar?”

“Some piece of shit tsigani hangout.”

“Have an address?”

“It’s not the kind of place that has an address.”

“How did you find it?”

“They had a piece of paper with directions on it.”

“Anything else on the paper?”

“Yeah, directions to where I picked them up.”

“How’d you know where to find them?”

“They read the directions to my dispatcher. It was simple. I took a left off the highway just past the first cutoff to Volax and kept going until I saw a house. Never knew one was there. People build in the damnedest places these days.”

“Any idea who owns the place?”

“Not a clue, but there was a ‘for rent’ sign on the front door. Looked like one of those places Germans build in the hope of retiring there some day. Probably rent it out whenever they can to cover expenses.”

“Was there a phone number on the sign?”

“Don’t remember, but there must have been.”

Kouros muttered, “damn” under his breath. “What are those directions again?”

The driver smiled. “Hop in, I’ll give you a good rate.”

The ride to the house took twenty minutes, during which Kouros heard in exhausting detail every word the driver had said to the women between picking them up at the house and dropping them off at the bar. Despite Herculean efforts on the driver’s part to convince them they would have a much better time partying with him and his friends than going to that bar, the women did not say a single word to him the entire trip. They talked between themselves as if he weren’t even there. Kouros almost felt sorry enough for the guy to tell him not to take it personally, it wasn’t about him; the women were on a mission.

The house was just where the driver said it would be, and virtually invisible from any road but the one they were on. There was a car parked by the front door and Kouros had the driver honk so as not to alarm whoever was inside. It turned out to belong to the owners. Not Germans, but a French couple. The driver had guessed right about the rental part though. They’d rented out the house for the week the two Greek hookers stayed there.

A woman had phoned them in France and said that she saw the sign on their house while trekking along a trail that ran by it. She wanted to rent it for a week, starting immediately. The rent was paid in advance through a cash deposit made directly into a bank account the couple maintained on Tinos. They didn’t know the woman but said she spoke French with a decided Greek accent. Her name was a strange sounding one, and the husband couldn’t remember it. The wife said she thought she’d marked it down somewhere and found it in her calendar. She showed the name to Kouros: Manto Mavrogenous.

It was a name known to every Greek. She was their country’s legendary female hero of the War of Independence; her father was a member of Filiki Eteria and her fiance the brother of Filiki Eteria’s leader, Alexander Ypsilantis. Manto Mavrogenous was aristocratic, highly educated, wealthy, beautiful, and dedicated to freedom for Greece. She had risked not just her life but her entire fortune for that cause. She also was among the first of Greece’s war heroes to pay homage to the Megalochari and, though her family’s roots were on Mykonos, for a while she’d made her home on Tinos.

This time on the taxi ride in from the house it was Kouros who said not a word to the driver.

“This is getting freakier by the minute,” said Tassos. “Now we’ve got male and female war heroes giving us grief.”

Kouros pointed across the taverna table at a bottle of water. “By the way, neither of them was born in Greece,” said Kouros.

“And Mavrogenous’ life didn’t have a fairy tale ending,” said Tassos. “Her home was destroyed by fire, her remaining fortune stolen, and her engagement broken off. She was never able to get the Greek government to reimburse her for all she’d contributed to the war effort and died penniless and in oblivion at fifty-four on Tinos’ neighboring island of Paros.” Tassos pointed due south in the direction of that Cycladic island.

Andreas put down his fork and handed Kouros the bottle. “Not sure what any of that means.”

Kouros took the bottle. “And just what part of all this are you sure of?”

“Good point.”

Tassos said, “I’ll get someone at the bank to see if there’s a way of finding out who put the money in the French couple’s account, but my guess is the odds of getting any where with that are between slim and none.”

“Looks like we’re back to trying to catch up with those two Polish girls,” said Andreas.

“After what happened to the Pakistani they might have taken off,” said Kouros.

“That would have been the smart move,” said Tassos. “But if they did, they didn’t take anything with them. The Tinos’ cops checked their place and everything seemed to be there, including their clothes.”

“I’ll take that as a sign that we have a shot at finding them tonight…” Andreas threw an open palm gesture at the ground, “or that Shepherd already has.”

As far as the cops sweltering in the rented van could tell, the heat of the day hadn’t realized how close it was to midnight and the Cycladic winds that generally made mid-August bearable had taken the night off. They were parked down the road from the turnoff to Petros’ metanastes bar in a spot that gave them a view of its entrance. They watched a man in a blue tee shirt park his beat-up motorbike as close to the front door of the bar as he could get it. He was wearing standard metanastes dress: tee shirt, jeans, and work boots. The man went into the bar and the cops put down their binoculars.

A fat man was sitting at a table just inside the doorway and an old-looking woman in a housecoat and slippers was doing something behind the bar. He walked past them and stood in the doorway to another room. His eyes moved from table to table. He turned and went back to sit on one of the stools in front of the bar.

“You looking for someone?” said Petros.

The man in the blue tee shirt gestured no.

“Do you want something?”

The man pointed at a beer bottle.

“You don’t talk much do you?”

The man gestured no.