Petros Markaris - Deadline In Athens

A book in the Inspector Costas Haritos series, 2004

Translated from the Greek by David Connolly

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.