A drachma for your thoughts

The scent of baking melomakarona was supposed to fill Myrto Zervou’s small Kaisariani apartment. Instead, the air was thick with the acrid smell of cheap ink and her son’s frustration.

“I tell you, Mana, it’s a ghost!” Aris growled, his large carpenter’s hands smacking the counter. A crisp, new 50-euro note lay between them. “Old Man Pandelis gave it to me for fixing his balcony door. I tried to buy coffee at the kiosk. The machine spat it out. Twice. Katerina looked at it like it was a snake.”

Myrto, a monolith in perpetual black, adjusted her glasses. She picked up the note. It felt… greedy. Too crisp, with a slippery texture. The light caught the hologram strip. “A clumsy ghost,” she muttered. “Look. The stars on the EU flag are blobs. And the Greek ‘epsilon’ is too fat. Like it ate all the spanakopita.”

“So it’s fake?” Aris ran a hand through his sawdust-streaked hair. “Why would Pandelis, a retired postal clerk, give me fake money?”

“A man with a fixed door doesn’t ask how the hammer swings,” Myrto said, an old proverb she often used when motives were unclear. “Perhaps he didn’t know. That is the question.”

Her investigation began not with sirens, but with gossip. The next morning, at the local laiki (farmer’s market), she moved through the stalls like a black-clad shadow.

“Ah, Myrto! Your change,” said the tomato vendor, handing her a few coins and a folded 20-euro note. It had the same arrogant crispness.

“This is new, Vasilis,” she said, holding it up. “From a rich uncle?”

“Wish it was!” he laughed. “No, that foreigner in the nice coat bought three kilos of oranges. Paid with a hundred. That was my change.”

“What foreigner?”

“Tall. Cold eyes. Smelled of cigarettes and… chemicals, I think. Not from here. He’s been around, talking to the young guys who hang by the old paint factory.”

The old paint factory. A decaying relic on the neighbourhood’s edge, a place for stray dogs and lost hopes. Myrto’s mind, sharper than any knife, pieced it together. Crisp notes. Chemicals. A disused factory. A sophisticated operation wouldn’t be in the city centre. It would be here, in the forgotten places.

That evening, her daughter Mary called, worried. “Mama, Theo’s friend at the bank says there’s a wave of high-quality counterfeits hitting local businesses. The police are clueless. They think it’s coming from Piraeus.”

“The police look at the sea, while the fox drinks from the village well,” Myrto replied cryptically. “Don’t worry. How are my grandsons?”

After the call, she turned to Aris. “We need to see the factory.”

“Mana, no! That’s for the police!”

“The police knock on the front door. The truth sneaks in through the cat flap,” she said, already putting on her black shawl. “You will drive me. For a look.”

Under a bruised twilight sky, Aris parked his battered work van a street away. They approached on foot. The factory was a dark silhouette, but a single first-floor window glowed, its edges sealed with black tape. The hum of machinery vibrated through the still air. And the smell chemicals, sharp and toxic, masked by cigarette smoke.

Suddenly, voices. Two men emerged from a side door for a smoke. One was a local lout, Dimitris, whom Myrto had once scolded for harassing a shopkeeper’s daughter. The other was tall, with a gaunt face and the “cold eyes” Vasilis described.

“...shipment to Thessaloniki goes tomorrow,” Cold-Eyes said in accented Greek. “Then we scale up. This neighbourhood is perfect. Quiet, no eyes.”

“What about the old busybodies?” Dimitris sneered.

“What can they do? Complain to their priests?” Cold-Eyes laughed, a dry, rustling sound. “They are ghosts of the past. We are printing the future.”

Myrto’s blood, usually a slow, traditional river, boiled. Ghosts of the past? She squeezed Aris’s arm. “We go. Now.”

Back home, she was furious. “They are poisoning our wells! Not just money—trust! The baker will doubt the widow’s payment, the grocer will suspect the student. They are burning the village to cook their meat!”

“We call the police now, right?” Aris pleaded.

“And say what? We smelled chemicals? They’ll take days. We need the key.”

“What key?”

“Old Pandelis. He is the first link. We talk to him. Now.”

Pandeli’s apartment smelled of mothballs and loneliness. When confronted, the old man crumbled, tears in his eyes.

“He forced me, Kyria Myrto! Dimitris, that vlakas! He said if I didn’t pass a few notes, he’d tell my son in Germany I have dementia and have me put away! He gave me the fake money for your Aris’s work. My pension is late… I was ashamed to say I had no real cash.”

“The lion fears the cage more than the whip,” Myrto said, her voice softening. She patted his hand. “To undo this, you must help. Did Dimitris say where they work?”

“He bragged. The old factory office. The back staircase is rotten, but the fire escape to the printing room window… he said it’s loose. A child could get in.”

A plan, reckless and sharp, formed in Myrto’s mind.

The following night, Aris found himself on the rusty fire escape, a reluctant hero with a crowbar, while his mother stood watch below, a black sentinel in the alley.

“Mana, this is insane!” he whispered hoarsely.

“Sometimes, to fix the roof, you must climb in the rain,” she hissed back. “Quickly!”

With a groan of metal, the window latch gave. Aris slipped inside. Myrto waited, her heart a drum in the quiet night. Minutes later, Aris’s face appeared at the window, pale. He dropped a bulky digital camera into her waiting shawl.

The sound of a slamming door. Raised voices from inside the factory. “They’re coming up!” Aris gasped.

“The stairs! Use the front stairs now!” Myrto commanded.

As Aris bolted for the interior stairs, Myrto did the most unexpected thing. She stepped into the pool of light by the factory’s main door, raised the camera, and with a loud, clear voice shouted, “Dimitris! You good-for-nothing malaka! Smile for your mother! I’m sending this to your yiayia in the village!”

The door flew open. Dimitris and Cold-Eyes stood there, stunned by the apparition of a shouting widow. In that moment of confusion, Aris burst out of the front door behind them, yelling, “POLICE! I’VE CALLED THEM!”

Cold-Eyes swore, shoving Dimitris aside and sprinting towards a car. But Kaisariani’s alleys are a maze known only to its own. Myrto simply lifted her chin and let out a piercing, ululating cry—the kind that once summoned whole villages. Lights flicked on. Shutters opened. A burly neighbour stepped out, blocking the car’s path with a trash bin. The trap of community closed around the foreigner.

The police, arriving to chaos, found Cold-Eyes pinned by a fishmonger and a retired mechanic. Inside, they discovered a state-of-the-art printing press, stacks of uncut counterfeit notes, and chemicals worth thousands.

A week later, the neighbourhood was settling. Myrto was finally baking her melomakarona. Aris, still shaking his head, sipped his coffee.

“The Inspector said you cracked a national ring, Mana. They’ve been after that man for months. He said you have a ‘knack’.”

“Pfah,” Myrto waved a flour-dusted hand. “A neighbour knows when a pot is boiling over. It was about our home, not their nation.”

Mary visited, full of awe. “Mama, you were like a spy!”

“I was like a yiayia,” Myrto corrected, placing a honey-drenched cookie on a plate. “The fox may be clever, but the hen knows her coop.”

As her family laughed, Myrto looked out her window at the familiar, weathered faces of Kaisariani below. The economy was safe from their little corner, for now. The real currency, trust was, momentarily, secure. She smoothed her black dress, a small, satisfied smile on her face. The quiet, observant widow had balanced the books.

End

Kolonaki silence

The news of the robbery in Kolonaki spread through Kaisariani like smoke from a cheap grill, everyone got a whiff, and it left a bitter taste. In her small, immaculate apartment, Myrto Zervou heard it from her neighbour, Georgia, who heard it from the baker, whose cousin polished the floors in the policeman’s station.

“A clean job,” Aris said, wiping sawdust from his hands as he came in for lunch. At thirty, he still carried the scent of pine and varnish. “They say they took a small fortune. Like ghosts.”

“Ghosts don’t trip alarms, korí mou,” Myrto replied, not looking up from the pot of fasolada. She was a monument in black, a slash of obsidian against the white kitchen wall. “Only men with heavy pockets do. And heavy pockets make for light feet? I think not.”

Two days later, the case was cold. The police, baffled by the lack of fingerprints, the disabled security system, and the sleeping guard dog, had no leads. The prominent businessman, Mr. Karamanlis, offered a reward that made even the pious women of the parish raise an eyebrow.

Myrto’s involvement began, as it often did, with a misdirected errand. Her daughter, Mary, sent her to a specialist fabric shop in Kolonaki for embroidery thread. “They have the exact colour, Mama. Not like here.”

Navigating the hushed, elegant streets, Myrto felt like a crow among peacocks. As she passed the Karamanlis residence, a sleek, modern villa behind a high wall, she stopped. Not to gawk, but because her shoe lace was undone. Crouching, her sharp eyes, still 20/20 despite her sixty-plus years, scanned the pavement. Among the fallen leaves from a prized bougainvillaea, something glinted. A small, metallic disc, no bigger than a button. She palmed it.

Later, showing it to Aris under the weak kitchen light, he shrugged. “A washer. From a mechanic.”

“From a watchmaker,” she corrected. “Too precise. And smell it.”

He did. “Oil. But a sweet oil.”

“Gun oil,” Myrto stated. She placed it in a matchbox like a sacred relic. “A man who maintains a tool. A careful man.”

Her investigation was a slow, persistent osmosis. She didn’t interrogate; she gossiped. At the local kafeneio, where she went for Aris’s tobacco, she sat with the old men.

“This Kolonaki business,” she sighed, pouring her sugar-heavy coffee. “It makes you lock your doors three times. Even here! But a dog that doesn’t bark… a dog knows a friend, doesn’t it?”

Old Man Thanos, a retired bus driver, grunted. “Or knows a juicy steak when it smells one. They found a fancy meat wrapper in the alley. The kind from that boucherie on Skoufa Street. Fifty drachmas a kilo!”

The next day, Myrto took the bus to Skoufa Street. The boucherie was a temple of meat, all marble and chrome. She bought two expensive lamb chops for Aris, complaining loudly about the price to the young assistant.

“It’s the quality, Kyria,” he said, bored.

“Quality, yes! I suppose that businessman in Kolonaki thought so too, before they robbed him blind. He probably shopped here, no? A man of taste.”

The assistant, eager to prove his shop’s elite clientele, took the bait. “Actually, no. But his security consultant did. Big guy. A regular. Stopped coming after… you know.”

The puzzle pieces, dusty and scattered, began to drift toward each other. The metallic disc (from a man’s fine watch, or a precision tool), the drugged dog (with gourmet meat), the disabled alarm (by someone who knew the system).

“It’s an inside job,” Myrto announced that evening to Aris and Mary, who was visiting with her two noisy sons. “But not a servant. Someone who was invited in. Surveyed. Planned.”

“Who, Mama?” Mary asked, wrestling a cookie from her youngest.

“The police consultant. The ‘big guy’ who likes good meat. He studies the house, the routines, the alarms. Then, he hires the muscle. Professionals. But professionals,” she said, eyes gleaming, “are like hired donkeys. They do the job, but they grumble. And someone always has to clean up after them.”

Her break came from the cleaners. Not the police, but the actual cleaning lady for the apartment building next to the Karamanlis villa. Myrto knew her sister. Over a glass of soumada, the woman, named Dora, was venting.

“Those Kolonaki rich, they think we’re blind! A week before the robbery, a van from a boutique gym was parked for hours. ‘Mobile physio for the rich wife,’ they said. But the men… they didn’t look like physiotherapists. They looked like thugs. One had a tattoo on his wrist he kept hiding. A snake.”

“A snake?” Myrto’s pulse quickened. “Was it… eating its own tail?”

Dora snapped her fingers. “Yes! An ouroboros. You know it?”

Myrto knew. It was the logo of “Olympian Fitness,” a high-end gym in Glyfada owned by a former wrestler with a shady past. The kind of man who might know “big guys” who worked as security consultants.

The finale was not a chase through the rain-slicked streets, but a confrontation in a sun-drenched square. Myrto, through a chain of whispers that would make the ancient Hermes proud, had a message delivered: “The widow from Kaisariani knows about the snake, the meat, and the silent dog. She will talk to the police at five. Unless the consultant talks to her at four.”

At ten to four, in a quiet plateia near the National Garden, he appeared. Alexios Vorias, the security consultant. He was indeed a big man, but soft around the edges, his eyes nervous.

“You’re costing me a lot of trouble, old woman,” he said, sitting heavily on the bench beside her.

“Trouble is a nail in the sole of your shoe,” Myrto replied calmly. “The longer you walk with it, the deeper it goes. You planned it. You hired the muscle from your friend’s gym. The watchmaker’s tool to fiddle with the alarm panel, the gourmet meat for the dog. But you were too clever. You left a tiny piece of your world in the street. And you hired men with vanity tattoos.”

He stared at her, incredulous. “And what will you do? You have no proof.”

“I have the washer. I have the butcher’s tongue. I have the cleaner’s eyes. And I have a son who is a carpenter,” she said, smiling for the first time. “He knows all about weight and pressure. Right now, Aris is telling your gym-owner friend that you’re ready to name names to save yourself. How long do you think your hired donkeys will stay silent when the police, tipped by an anonymous widow, ask them about the ouroboros?”

Vorias’s face palmed. The structure of his arrogance, built like a house of cards, collapsed. Myrto’s method was not brute force, but the gentle, relentless application of social pressure, the true Greek tragedy.

“What do you want?” he whispered.

“I want you to sit here until the policeman who is having his coffee across the street finishes it. Then, you will walk to him and tell him you wish to clarify some points about the Karamanlis case. You will confess. A clean job, from start to finish.”

He followed her gaze to the uniformed officer sipping a frappé. Defeated, he slumped. “Why? For the reward?”

Myrto Zervou stood up, smoothing her black dress. “The wolf knows what the ill goat thinks,” she quoted. “I am not an ill goat. I am a widow who likes quiet streets. The reward money will buy my grandsons new shoes, and perhaps a swing set. But the silence after the storm? That is priceless.”

She walked away, not looking back. By the time she reached her apartment in Kaisariani, the news was already on the radio: a breakthrough in the Kolonaki robbery, a suspect in custody, more arrests imminent.

Aris was at the table, a proud smile on his face. “You did it, Mama.”

Myrto poured herself a small glass of tsipouro. “The fly does not trouble the boiling pot, korí mou,” she said, sitting down with a satisfied sigh. “It was already boiling. I just turned off the heat.” Outside, the Athenian twilight settled over the neighbourhood, warm and quiet, just the way she liked it.

End

The peach pit proverbs

The heat in Kaisariani clung like a second skin, a wool blanket of oven air. From her fourth-floor balcony, Myrto Zervou fanned herself with a week-old sports newspaper, her eyes, two chips of obsidian, scanning the concrete canyon below. Always in black, a monument to her Nikos for fifteen years, she was as much a part of the neighbourhood’s architecture as the crumbling plaster and tang of jasmine.

Inside, her son Aris, thirty-two and smelling of sawdust and honest sweat, was fixing the leg of her kitchen table. Again.

“It’s the weight of the world you put on it, Mana,” he grumbled, not unkindly. “Plates, pots, your suspicions…”

“My suspicions have better foundations than this table,” she shot back. “And they’re lighter.”

Her reverie was shattered by a sharp, theatrical cry from the square of Agios Georgios below. “Aman! Shameless! In the house of God!”

Myrto leaned over the railing. Below, outside the small bakery, old Mrs. Lembesi was wagging a bony finger at a young couple. The boy, thin as a reed, had his arm around a girl with hair the colour of fresh honey. They’d been holding hands. Maybe, Myrto squinted, there had been a quick, furtive kiss. A crime worthy of the Spanish Inquisition, apparently.

“Animals!” spat Mr. Karas, the retired policeman, from his kafeneio chair, not looking up from his backgammon game. “No respect.”

The couple, flushed with a mixture of shame and defiance, retreated, their lovely afternoon in tatters. Myrto’s mouth set in a thin line. This was the third such “reprimand” this week. A new wave of moral fever was sweeping the plateia, and it stank worse than yesterday’s fish.

Later, her daughter Mary called, voice taut with worry. “Mana, did you hear? They yelled at Tasos and Eleni today. For a kiss. Eleni was in tears. Since when is love a public disturbance?”

“Since boredom became a profession,” Myrto muttered. “Leave it with me.”

The mystery, however, took a darker turn that evening. A rock, wrapped in a crude note, was thrown through the bakery window. The note read: “FILTH BREEDS FILTH. CLEANSE OR BE CLEANSED.” The bakery was owned by the parents of the honey-haired girl from the square.

“Vandalism now!” Aris declared, putting down his drill. “I should go down there.”

“You should finish my table,” Myrto said, already tying a black headscarf under her chin. “A rocking leg is a bigger treachery. It attacks when you least expect it.”

She descended into the twilight streets. Her investigation was not of the fingerprint variety. It was conducted at street corners, in queues at the greengrocer, over offered sweets. She listened to the outrage, the gossip, the performed disgust.

She noted that Mrs. Lembesi, the most vocal critic, had recently taken in a boarder, a nephew from the village, a severe young man who stared at passing women as if counting their sins. She noted that old Karas, the ex-cop, had started playing backgammon with a new, fervently religious friend from the cathedral, a man with eyes that never smiled. And she noted that the attacks, the reprimands, the rock, only happened after this friend appeared.

The adventure peaked two nights later. Myrto, claiming her legs ached, sent Aris to the pharmacy. She then stationed herself in the shadows of the plane tree in the square, a small, dark statue. Just before midnight, she saw a furtive figure slip from the side door of the church. It was Karas’s friend. He moved not with pious purpose, but with the slick guilt of a fox. He didn’t go home. He went to the electrical box that controlled the streetlights on the far side of the square.

As he fumbled with the lock, Myrto’s voice cut through the dark, loud and clear as a bell.

“A thief who steals light is afraid of what might be seen in the dark.”

The man jumped, whirling around. “Who’s there? Old woman, go home! It’s not safe!”

“You’re right,” Myrto said, stepping into the dim glow of the one remaining light. “It’s not safe for those who play at being saints while planning sins. What’s in the bag? More rocks? Or perhaps the tools to leave young lovers in the dark, where you can frighten them more?”

Sweat gleamed on the man’s forehead. “You don’t understand! This neighbourhood… it’s become immoral! We must shock them back to purity!”

“Purity?” Myrto scoffed, advancing. “You mean fear. You and that foolish Karas, who misses having people to arrest, and that lonely Lembesi, who misses having a man to control. You stir the pot so you can taste the soup.” She quoted an old proverb, her voice like grinding stones: “The donkey calls the goat ‘horned.’”

Flustered, cornered, the man dropped his bag. It clinked with tools and a can of spray paint. The mystery wasn’t a crime of passion, but of pathetic irrelevance, a plot by the bored and bitter to feel powerful again.

The conclusive end came the next morning in the bright, unforgiving sun of the plateia. Myrto marched straight to the kafeneio where Karas and his friend were having a nervous coffee. A small crowd gathered, sensing drama.

“Congratulations,” Myrto announced, her voice carrying. “You’ve caught the immoral ones.”

Everyone leaned in. Karas paled. His friend stared into his cup.

“You have caught three ghosts,” she declared. “The ghost of your own uselessness,” she pointed at Karas. “The ghost of your loneliness,” her finger swung to a cringing Mrs. Lembesi, who had come to see. “And the ghost of a faith so small it fits in a bag of tools for cutting wires.” The final stare pinned the “religious” friend. “You want to cleanse filth? Start with the envy in your own eyes.”

The crowd murmured. The accused men spluttered, but under the collective gaze, their authority, built on whispers and disapproval, crumbled like stale bread.

That evening, peace had returned. The young reed-thin boy and his honey-haired girl walked through the square, hand in hand, unchallenged. From her balcony, Myrto watched, a satisfied glint in her eye.

Aris brought her a small glass of retsina. “Case closed, Sherlock?”

She took the glass, sniffed. “The case was never about kissing, agori mou. It was about a neighbourhood forgetting that life, not death, should be the loudest noise. A little love,” she said, taking a sip, “is just life refusing to whisper.” She looked at the young couple below, now sharing a slice of peach from the bakery, laughing. “And that is a mystery even an old woman can solve.”

End

Kaisariani codex

The Athenian sun, aged and weary as the concrete it beat upon, filtered through the lace curtain of Myrto Zervou’s small balcony. Inside, the air was thick with the scent of strong coffee and simmering gigantes beans. Myrto, a permanent silhouette in widow’s black, her hair a tight steel-grey bun, peered down into the dusty courtyard of her apartment block in Kaisariani.

“Three hours,” she announced to the empty room, her voice a low rasp. “Three hours that ‘government’ van has been sitting there. Since when does the Ministry of Culture send two men in shoes that shine like a hairdresser’s mirror to a neighbourhood like ours?”

Her son, Aris, a bear of a man with sawdust perpetually clinging to his clothes, looked up from his newspaper. “Maybe they’re checking for… historic cracks, Mama. This building has plenty.”

“Historic cracks, he says.” Myrto snorted. “The only history here is Mrs. Papadakis’s feud with the man who sold her the rotten olives. And those men didn’t even look at the building. They went straight into old Manolis’s basement.”

Aris shrugged, a gesture of surrender honed over thirty years. He knew the look in his mother’s eye—the same one she’d had when she’d deduced who’d been siphoning oil from the neighbourhood cars, simply by the pattern of drips on the pavement.

Her observation was interrupted by a frantic pounding at the door. It was young Katerina from the ground floor, her face pale.

“Kyria Myrto, they took him! They took Papa!”

“Who took him, child? Speak.”

“The officials! From the Ministry. They had badges, papers. They said his basement storage was an ‘unauthorized archive,’ a national security risk. They said he had to come for questioning. They were so… polite. But Papa was terrified. He looked at me like he was saying goodbye!”

Myrto’s eyes narrowed to slits. Old Manolis, a retired librarian, a man whose most dangerous possession was probably his first edition of Cavafy’s poems. “Did they show a warrant?”

“They waved a paper. It looked official.”

“A paper can be dressed in a uniform too,” Myrto muttered, an old proverb surfacing. “The wolf most often poisons the stream where the lamb drinks. Aris! Get your jacket.”

“Mama, we should call the police.”

“And say what? That two polite government men did their job? No. We will pay a visit to the ‘Ministry.’ I want to see the colour of their lies.”

Using the number on the van (which Aris, with his carpenter’s eye, noted had mismatched plates), and Katerina’s description, Myrto began her own investigation. It was a web of local gossip, of favours owed. A call to her married daughter, Mary, whose husband knew a guy at the utilities office, revealed the van was registered to a defunct furniture company. A visit to the local kafenion, where Myrto loudly lamented the “shameful way they treat our old people,” yielded a crucial detail from the waiter: one of the “officials” had a distinct tattoo on his wrist, a serpent coiled around a dagger, peeking out from his crisp white shirt.

“A civil servant with a prison tattoo,” Myrto said to Aris as they walked back. “The state’s recruitment policy has changed, it seems.”

The trail led to a shabby-genteel office building in Neos Kosmos, with a freshly painted sign that read “Hellenic Cultural Heritage Protection Directorate.” It smelled of fresh paint and fraud.

Inside, a young, nervous receptionist greeted them. Myrto, switching from sleuth to loudmouthed, traditional grandmother, was magnificent.

“Where is he? Where is my cousin Manolis? I have his heart medication! Do you want his death on your hands, you bureaucrats?” She brandished a bottle of aspirin like a grenade.

Flustered, the receptionist stammered, “The interrogation… I mean, the interview is in the basement archive. But you can’t...”

They already were. Aris led the way, his broad frame an unstoppable force. They burst into a damp concrete room. Old Manolis sat shivering at a table. Across from him were the two “officials,” no longer polite. Their polished shoes were planted on a stack of Manolis’s precious antique books.

“Who are you?” the taller one, the one with the serpent tattoo, barked.

“I am the plague of dishonest men,” Myrto stated calmly. She looked at the books. Not Cavafy. These were older, leather-bound. One was open, showing intricate diagrams and text in an old dialect. “Ah. So this isn’t about security. It’s about a treasure map.”

The man’s face confirmed it. They had stumbled upon Manolis’s real secret: a coded family heirloom, a codex, rumoured to chart the location of a small hoard of Byzantine coins hidden by an ancestor during the Ottoman era. These men, con artists specializing in impersonating officials to pressure and rob the vulnerable, had caught wind of it.

“You have no authority here,” the second thug sneered, moving to block the door.

Aris cracked his knuckles. “My mother wants to talk to the old man. You’re in the way.”

A scuffle ensued, brief, brutal, and decisive. Aris’s carpenter’s hands, used to swinging mallets, made short work of their pretensions. Myrto, meanwhile, called not the police, but her network. She called Mary, who called her sons, who arrived with three of their large football-playing friends. The imposter “Ministry” was soon surrounded by a very unofficial, very angry Greek chorus of grandsons.

When the real police arrived, summoned by a neighbour, they found the two criminals tied neatly with telephone cord, and Myrto serving everyone spoonfuls of sweet glyko tou koutaliou from a jar she’d brought “for strength.”

“They dressed in the costume of authority,” she explained to the bemused police captain, “but forgot to learn the lines. The donkey may wear a saddle, but it remains a donkey.”

The codex was authenticated and donated by a grateful, relieved Manolis to a real university archive, on the condition that any found coins would benefit the local community. A small article ran in the paper.

That evening, back in her Kaisariani apartment, Myrto watched the sunset paint the concrete a faint gold. Aris nursed a bruised knuckle.

“You were right, Mama. As always.”

“Not always,” she said, stirring her coffee. “But when the smell is wrong, too much polish, not enough honesty, an old woman’s nose knows. The devil doesn’t only come with horns, Aris. Sometimes he comes with a badge and a lie.”

She looked out at the peaceful, messy, vibrant neighbourhood, her kingdom. All was once again in its proper order. The beans were ready. The mystery was solved. And her black dress needed mending. Case closed.

End

Neighbourhoods keep ugly secrets

The summer heat in Kaisariani was a physical weight, pressing down on the narrow streets and crumbling post-war apartments. It was the kind of heat that made tempers short and secrets simmer. Myrto Zervou, a black-clad figure against the whitewashed buildings, fanned herself with a folded newspaper on her tiny balcony, her eyes like two dark olives observing the world. Below, the usual afternoon lethargy was being murdered by the relentless, throbbing bass of rebetika music.

“Again?” she muttered, the words a low growl. “This is the third day. My plants are wilting from the noise, not the sun.”

Her son, Aris, a bear of a man with sawdust perpetually clinging to his trousers, emerged from the apartment, wiping his hands on a rag. “It’s Old Man Hristos, in the building behind. He’s gone mad. Shouting earlier, now this music. The whole street is complaining.”

“Complaining is for the faint of heart,” Myrto declared, standing up with a creak of her joints. “Action is for the widow with nothing to lose but her peace. Come.”

“Mama, the police will come. Let them handle it.”

“The police? Bah! They’ll just use it as an excuse for an arrest, take him to the station to cool off, and tomorrow it starts again. A nail that sticks up gets hammered down. But first, you must see why it sticks up.”

She moved through the dim interior of her apartment, past icons and photographs of her late husband, with the quiet authority of a general. Aris followed, knowing better than to argue.

They found a small, agitated crowd gathered in the shadowy passage between the buildings. Hristos’s ground-floor apartment had its shutters slammed shut, but the music, Markos Vamvakaris singing of hashish and heartache, blasted through the gaps.

“He shouted at the postman!” cried Mrs. Sophia from the flower shop. “Called him a thief!”

“He nearly hit a child with his cane this morning!” added a young mother.

A young, sharp-faced police officer arrived, looking exasperated. “Right, that’s enough. Public nuisance. I’ll take him in, get him fined.”

Myrto stepped forward, blocking his path subtly with her body. “Officer, a moment. Hristos is eighty-two. He was a quiet man until three days ago. You hammer the nail, but the wall is still rotten. Let me speak to him.”

The officer scoffed. “Lady, he’s a disturbance. The law is clear.”

“The law is clear on noise. Is it clear on fear?” she retorted, her voice dropping into a conspiratorial tone. “What is an old man so afraid of that he must make the whole neighbourhood hate him?”

Intrigued despite himself, and wary of the formidable old woman, the officer shrugged. “Five minutes. Then I do my job.”

Myrto approached the door. She didn’t knock. Instead, she called out sharply, cutting through the music. “Hristos! It’s Myrto Zervou. You’re drowning out the television and I’m missing my serial! Turn it down and open the door. I have galaktoboureko.”

The music faltered for a second. A raspy voice shouted back, “Go away!”

“I brought dessert. Since when does a Cretan turn away a sweet and a visitor? Have you forgotten philoxenia?” She used the powerful word for hospitality like a key.

There was a long pause. The lock clicked. Myrto slipped inside, Aris a protective shadow behind her.

The apartment was dark, stale, and tidy. Hristos, a wiry man with a tremor in his hands, stood defiantly by an old gramophone. But his eyes, Myrto saw, were not defiant. They were wide with panic.

“What do you want?” he croaked.

“The truth. You’re making a spectacle. Why? A snake hiding in a field doesn’t thrash the wheat.”

Hristos sank into a chair. The bravado drained away. “They’re watching the apartment,” he whispered. “For three days. A man in a grey car. He asks questions at the kiosk. About me. About my son in Germany.”

Myrto’s gaze swept the room. It landed on a pile of unopened mail, and a recent, formal-looking envelope with a bank logo. “What did your son send you, Hristos?”

“Nothing! Just letters.”

“And you took them to the bank to have them read to you,” she stated, noticing a deposit slip peeking from under the saucer of his coffee cup. “A man who can’t read is a rich man’s favourite target.”

Under her relentless, gentle probing, the story spilled out. His son had sent a modest sum for repairs. Hristos, proud, had told everyone at the local café. The wrong ears had heard. Then came the veiled threats, a note under his door demanding a ‘share’ for ‘protection’. The grey car appeared. Hristos, terrified and alone, devised the only defence he knew: make himself a public, noisy nuisance. No one could approach unseen. The police would be frequent visitors. He was making himself deliberately, loudly, unattractive to predators.

“A donkey being sheared brays the loudest,” Myrto said, nodding. “You thought if you were a problem for everyone, you couldn’t be a target for someone. But you were making yourself a target for the law.”

She marched outside. The officer moved to enter. “I’m taking him.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” Myrto said, her voice ringing in the passage. “The man is not a nuisance; he is sending up a flare. There is a man in a grey Fiat Punto, licence plate number partially seen, AXH-…, extorting the elderly. He’s at the end of the street right now, watching you do his work for him.”

The officer stiffened, his professional pride stung. He peered down the street. The grey car, noticing the sudden attention, suddenly started and sped off.

Action erupted. The officer yelled into his radio. Another squad car arrived. Descriptions were given. Myrto, Aris, and the neighbours watched the sudden flurry.

Two hours later, the officer returned, looking chastened but pleased. “We got him. Petty criminal, new to the area. Trying his ‘protection’ racket. He talked fast. We found the notes.”

He looked at Hristos, who had emerged, pale and silent, into the evening light. “The charge of public nuisance… it can be forgotten. Given the circumstances.”

The neighbourhood dispersed, buzzing with the adventure. Back on her balcony, Myrto shared the galaktoboureko with Aris.

“How did you know, Mama?” he asked, savouring the sweet custard.

“A clean house is one thing,” she said, watching the first stars appear over the Athenian rooftops. “But a suddenly noisy house? That’s a house hiding a different kind of dirt. When a sheep is silent, it is grazing. When it bleats endlessly, a wolf is near.”

Down in the street, quiet had returned, deep and grateful. The only sound was the distant hum of the city and the cheerful clatter of plates from Hristos’s apartment, he had finally opened his windows, and was sharing the ouzo he’d been too afraid to drink alone. The nail had been left in peace, because Myrto Zervou had chosen to fix the wall instead.

End

Blood on the hill

The cicadas screamed in the pines of Kaisariani Hill, a sound like a frying pan left too long on the stove. Myrto Zervou, a stout, black-clad figure against the dusty green, muttered to herself as she descended the path. “Το κρέας τρώγεται και το κόκκαλο μένει,” she grumbled. “The meat is eaten, but the bone remains.” She was talking about the leftover lamb she’d promised to take to her son Aris’s workshop, but the proverb, like most, had a darker edge today.

Aris, her thirty-year-old carpenter with forearms like knotted olive wood, was waiting for her, but not at his workshop. He stood by the police tape cordoning off a small clearing. His face was pale beneath his summer tan.

“Mama,” he said, voice low. “They found Nikos. From the kiosk. He’s… gone.”

Myrto peered past him. Nikos, the jovial, moustachioed newsagent, lay on his back in the fine red dirt. Not a robbery, his thick wallet was visible in his breast pocket. There were two small, precise holes in his shirt, over his heart. No blood spatter. Just a dark, silent stain blooming beneath him.

Inspector Leonidas, a man whose moustache seemed to wilt in the Athenian heat, approached with a sigh. “Kyria Zervou. Here to admire the view or to tell me who did it?”

“The view is spoiled, Inspector,” Myrto snapped. “And if you opened your eyes, you’d see this wasn’t a shooting. It was a finishing.”

“A what?”

“A duel,” she stated, as if announcing the price of tomatoes. She pointed a thick finger. “Look. Heels dug in, facing the trees. His posture is formal. And the wounds. Two small calibre, close together. A professional’s shot, or a very calm one. This was an ekdikisi. A settling of accounts.”

Leonidas scoffed. “Duels? This is Athens, not 1821.”

“Honour is older than the Acropolis,” Myrto retorted, turning away. She saw what the police missed: a single, crushed white gardenia near Nikos’s right hand. A flower for a buttonhole. For a meeting that was not a meeting.

That evening, over a plate of the contentious lamb, she interrogated the neighbourhood through her balcony. Aris sawed wood restlessly below. The widow Calliope from number five lamented Nikos’s kindness. The young lawyer, Pavlos, new to the building, polished his smart car with unusual vigour. And old Captain Vassilis, a retired merchant mariner, sat in his usual chair at the kafeneio, staring into his murky coffee.

“Ο πολεμισμένος καπετάνιος γυρίζει πάντα στο λιμάνι,” Myrto mused aloud. “The battled captain always returns to port.” Aris looked up, confused. She wasn’t talking about Vassilis. She was thinking of the ritual, the pattern. An offence, a challenge, a secluded place, seconds. Who was Nikos’s second? Who was the opponent’s?

The mystery deepened when Mary, her daughter, called in tears. Her husband, a mild-mannered accountant, hadn’t come home. He’d left a vague note about “upholding a friend’s duty.” Myrto’s blood ran cold. Her son-in-law, Thanasis, was the most peaceful man she knew. But he was also fiercely loyal, and terribly rule-bound.

“He’s the second,” Myrto declared to Aris, slamming the phone down. “For Nikos. Nikos was challenged, he needed a reliable witness. Thanasis, the fool of honour, agreed.”

“But who challenged Nikos? And why?”

The gardenia. Myrto remembered Nikos arguing violently with the new lawyer, Pavlos, a week ago. Something about a defamed sister, whispers of a ruined reputation. Pavlos, with his slick hair and imported shoes, was all modern ambition. But the gardenia… that was old-world. Aristocratic.

Her investigation was a whirlwind of gossip, proverbs, and sheer imposition. She confronted Pavlos in his sterile office. “You fought with Nikos. About your sister.”

Pavlos was smooth as marble. “A misunderstanding, Kyria Myrto. Settled.”

“Settled with bullets?”

“The law will determine that.” He showed her out, but not before she saw a framed photo on his desk: Pavlos and Captain Vassilis, the old seaman, standing together. Father and son? No. The resemblance was in the posture, not the face. Mentor and protégé.

The pieces clanged together like rusty anchors. She marched to the kafeneio and sat opposite Captain Vassilis. He didn’t look up.

“The gardenia is a rare touch, Captain,” she said, sipping the coffee he hadn’t offered. “In the old code, the challenged party chooses the weapons. But the challenger can insist on a token. A flower to wear. A bit of drama for a faded old sailor?”

Vassilis’s eyes, the colour of a winter sea, met hers. “Nikos destroyed a young man’s honour with his gossip. Spread lies about Pavlos’s sister that cost her a marriage. The boy came to me, asking for the old ways. I… instructed him.”

“You orchestrated a murder over gossip?” Myrto’s voice could have cut glass.

“A duel over honour!” he corrected, fist on the table. “Pavlos was too emotional. He would have missed, or worse, been killed. I took his place. Nikos accepted me as his opponent. His second, poor Thanasis, just stood there, white as a sail. Two shots. It was clean.”

“And my son-in-law? He is missing because he is sick with the shame of it, or because you threatened him?”

Vassilis looked away. “He is a good man. He is safe. He will come home when he understands the necessity.”

Myrto leaned in. “Όποιος σπέρνει άνεμο, θερίζει θύελλα,” she hissed. “He who sows the wind, shall reap the whirlwind. You sowed old pride, Captain. You will reap a modern prison.”

She left him and called Inspector Leonidas, laying out the truth not with forensic clues, but with the logic of human folly. The gardenia, Vassilis’s anachronistic sense of theatre, the connection to Pavlos, Thanasis’s disappearance. Leonidas, grudgingly, acted.

They found Thanasis shivering in a borrowed flat in Vyronas, sworn to silence by Vassilis’s tales of bloody revenge if he talked. Pavlos, broken under questioning, confessed to the original challenge but admitted the Captain had taken over, “to see it done right.”

The arrest of Captain Vassilis at the kafeneio was a quiet affair. He rose, straightened his jacket, and walked to the police car as if boarding a ship.

That night, on her balcony overlooking the twinkling, chaotic city, Myrto Zervou adjusted her black dress. Aris brought her a small glass of tsipouro.

“How did you know, Mama?” he asked.

She knocked back the liquor, its fire a comfort. “Το χρήμα βγάζει νερό,” she said finally. “Money finds water. So does shame. It finds its own level. Nikos’s shameful gossip found the Captain’s shameful solution. And we,” she said, pinching Aris’s cheek, “are just the drains it all flows into.”

Down in the street, life went on, a scooter backfired, a couple argued, the scent of grilling meat filled the air. Another bone of contention was settled. Myrto watched it all, a silent, dark-clad judge in the Athenian night. The case was closed, but the hill, she knew, would keep its secrets. And she would be there to dig them up.

End

Stop for a widow

The Athenian sun hung heavy over the Kaisariani square, a bleached bone in the sky. Myrto Zervou, a compact figure in perpetual black, sat on her usual bench, her fingers working through a knot of wool. Her son, Aris, was at her side, smelling of sawdust and mild exasperation.

“You’ll roast, Mitera,” he muttered, mopping his brow.

“A tree needs the sun, Aris,” she replied, not looking up. “And an old tree knows where to find the shade.” It made little sense, but it felt right.

Their quiet bickering was cut by the scene unfolding near the philodendron-framed kiosk. A florid-faced tourist, camera swinging, was arguing with a sleek young man in a tight polo shirt.

“You dropped it! You grabbed it from my hands!” the tourist, German by the accent, stammered.

“I saved it, kyrie,” the young man crooned, his voice oily. “You fumbled. My reflexes are good. But the lens… listen.” He shook the camera. A sinister rattle answered. “The mechanism is broken. A new lens is five hundred drachmas. A kindness, for my trouble, three hundred.”

Myrto’s needles stopped. “A snake doesn’t save the mouse,” she said, low.

“Mother, not our business,” Aris sighed.

But it was. The young man, Nico, she’d seen him before, loitering, always with a different phone, was a stain on the neighbourhood’s tablecloth. She watched as the tourist, flustered and red, pulled out his wallet. The transaction was quick, shameful. Nico pocketed the cash with a predator’s smile and vanished into the warren of streets.

“Go,” Myrto commanded, rising. “Follow the weasel. See where his hole is.”

“Mitera—”

“Go! Or I’ll tell Mary you let a thief feast on a guest in our own yard.” The threat of his sister’s scolding was potent. Aris went, a grumbling shadow.

Myrto waddled over to the distressed tourist. “Sit,” she ordered, pointing to her bench. “Tell me.”

His name was Klaus. He was certain. He’d been focusing on the little church of Saint George when a helpful voice offered to take his picture. Then a deft hand, a fumble, the grab, the rattling diagnosis.

“He was too helpful,” Klaus concluded.

“A too-helpful stranger is a locked door,” Myrto nodded. She borrowed his camera. It was heavy, professional. She pressed the lens release, twisted. The lens came off smoothly. She peered into the body. With a snort, she upended it. A single, dry pebble fell into her palm.

“The ‘broken mechanism’,” she said. The rattle. A cheap theatre.

Aris returned, slightly breathless. “He went to the kafeneio on Dimitrakopoulou. Met another one. Skinny, with a gold tooth. They’re splitting money and laughing.”

“Good,” Myrto said. Her mind, a ledger of neighbourhood faces, flipped pages. Gold Tooth was Dimitris, a small-time hustler who worked the metro sometimes. A plan, slow and deliberate as her knitting, began to form.

“Klaus,” she said. “You want your three hundred drachmas back? And maybe a story for your friends?”

He nodded, intrigued.

“Aris, fetch Mary. Tell her to bring the boys. And her good camera, the small one. We go to the taverna of Giorgos tonight. We set a table for… justice.”

*    *    * *    *    *

That evening, Taverna Giorgos was lively. Myrto held court at a large table: Aris, Mary, her two boisterous grandsons, and a now-resolute Klaus. Myrto, still in black, was a queen of shadows.

She spotted Nico and Gold Tooth Dimitris at a corner table, celebrating with ouzo. She gave Mary a barely perceptible nod.

Action.

Mary’s youngest son, a spirited six-year-old, ‘accidentally’ sent his football rolling to the hustlers’ table. As Nico bent to retrieve it with a scowl, Mary, the ‘distracted mother’, sprang up, her expensive compact camera swinging from her wrist. She reached for the ball at the same time Nico did.

“Oh, let me!” she trilled, and with a practised clumsiness, she let her camera slip. It fell towards the stone floor.

Nico’s reflexes were, indeed, excellent. He caught it flawlessly, a smug grin already forming. He shook it. Silence. He shook it again, confused.

“Thank you!” Mary beamed, plucking it from his hands. “You’re a lifesaver! These mechanisms are so delicate, aren’t they?” She turned to Klaus. “Papou, get a picture of us with this kind man!”

As Klaus stood, Nico’s face drained of blood. He was looking at his previous mark, now part of this family tableau. Dimitris, sensing a trap, stood to leave.

“Sit,” Aris commanded, his carpenter’s hand landing heavily on Dimitris’s shoulder.

Myrto rose. The taverna quieted. She walked to their table, a ship in full sail. “A fisherman who uses rotten bait,” she announced, her voice carrying, “cathes only shame.” She held up the pebble Klaus had given her. “You sold this for three hundred drachmas. To a guest of our city. In my neighbourhood.”

Nico spluttered. “This is slander! You have no proof!”

“Proof?” Myrto smiled. She pointed to Mary, who was now reviewing photos on her camera’s screen. Clear as day, the sequence played, Nico catching the camera, his face sharp, the shake, the confused look, the moment he recognized Klaus.

“The modern eye sees more than the ancient,” Myrto said, updating the proverb. “Giorgos!” she called to the taverna owner. “Call Officer Leonidas. Tell him the Kaisariani Committee for Welcoming Tourists has a public nuisance for removal.”

The aftermath was swift and satisfying. Under the threat of the police and a very public shaming, Nico and Dimitris returned the three hundred drachmas to Klaus, plus fifty for his ‘distress’. Officer Leonidas, an old friend of Myrto’s late husband, took them in for questioning, the photo evidence solid in his pocket.

Later, back in her small apartment, Myrto poured a tiny glass of tsipouro for herself and Aris. The adventure was over, the mystery a simple one of greed and shame.

“You were loud tonight, Mitera,” Aris said, but he was smiling.

“Sometimes, the only way to clean a stain is to shout for the soap,” she replied, sipping. “A quiet mouse gets the crumbs, but a loud cat gets the thief.”

Outside, the Athenian night settled over Kaisariani, a little cleaner, a little quieter. Myrto Zervou, widow in black, keeper of proverbs and justice, watched it from her balcony, her work done. Until the next stain appeared.

End