A square of whispers

The cicadas screamed in the Kaisariani pines, a sound Myrto Zervou normally found comforting, like nature’s own radio. Today, it grated. It was the same sound that had been drilling into her skull the afternoon the police came to Plateia Eleftherias, two streets over.

Now, in her small, immaculate apartment smelling of lemon polish and reheated fasolada, her son Aris was carving a worry into a piece of walnut. At thirty-two, his carpenter’s hands were broad and steady, but his face was that of a scolded boy.

“They just handed them out, Mitera,” he said, not looking up from his whittling. “Pamphlets. Words on paper. And they swooped in like hawks on sparrows.”

“Hawks don’t care if the sparrows are singing folk songs or protest songs,” Myrto replied, her black dress a pool of shadow in the bright kitchen. She adjusted the simple gold cross at her throat. “They just see movement. Who were they? Students?”

“Three of them. From the University. Two boys, a girl. They had that look.” He finally met her eyes. “The look Mary’s boys get when they’re about to do something foolish but think it’s brilliant.”

“Your sister’s children are ten and eight. They throw water balloons, not political manifestos.” Myrto rose, her joints offering their usual chorus of small protests. She peered through the lace curtain onto the sun-baked street. The neighbourhood was quiet, but it was the wrong kind of quiet. A listening quiet. “This isn’t about pamphlets, koukla mou. It’s about the square. First they take the benches, then they take the voices.”

A week earlier, the municipality, citing vague “public order” concerns, had removed half the benches from Plateia Eleftherias. The old men had grumbled, displaced from their gossip thrones. Myrto had thought it petty. Now she saw the chess move.

“I need air,” she announced.

“Mitera, don’t get involved.”

“Involved? I’m going to buy yoghurt. A widow can’t buy yoghurt?”

*    *    * *    *    *

The square, usually a tapestry of old men playing backgammon, women with shopping trolleys, and teenagers flirting by the kiosk, was taut as a drumskin. Two uniformed officers loitered by the unusable fountain. Myrto nodded politely, the harmless old woman in perpetual mourning.

At ‘Polykratis Kiosk, Newspapers, Tobacco, & Everything’, old Polykratis was polishing the same espresso cup for the third time.

“Yia sou, Polykrati,” Myrto said, picking up a tub of FAGE yoghurt.

“Yia sou, Kyra Myrto,” he mumbled, his eyes darting to the square.

“A shame about the benches. My knees, you know.”

“A shame about a lot of things,” he said, leaning forward. In a whisper meant for spy novels, he added, “They took Dimitri’s grandson. The tall one, studies philosophy.”

“Dimitri the baker?”

“The same. The boy’s name is Leonidas. A good boy. A bit loud with ideas, but good.” Polykratis’s face crumpled. “Dimitri is baking kourambiedes in August. He’s lost in the dough.”

Myrto paid, her mind working. “A man lost in flour needs a clear path out. Άσπρο πούλι, κόκκινο πούλι, την αλήθεια θα πω,” she quoted. “White bead, red bead, I’ll tell the truth.” She wasn’t sure what the truth was yet, but the proverb was a start.

Her next stop was the bakery. The smell of burning almond hit her first. Dimitri, flour-dusted and hollow-eyed, was indeed pulling trays of sugar-dusted shortbread from the oven.

“Dimitri,” Myrto said, her voice soft. “I heard about Leonidas. We are all sorry.”

The baker’s big shoulders slumped. “Sorry doesn’t un-bar the cell, Kyra Myrto. He was handing out paper. Paper! In ’73, we handed out more than paper, and we were heroes. Now they are criminals.” He slammed a tray down. “They say he ‘disturbed public order’ and ‘insulted the authorities’. His mother is sick with fear.”

“Who was with him?”

“A girl, Katerina, from Ano Kalamaki. And another boy, Stathis, I don’t know his family. They all vanished into the Piraeus Street station.”

“And the pamphlets? What did they say?”

Dimitri looked around, then reached under the counter. He slid a crumpled, photocopied sheet toward her. It was a simple text, quoting the constitution on freedom of speech, asking rhetorical questions about democracy. The language was youthful, impassioned, naive. At the bottom, a small symbol: an owl inside an open book.

“An owl,” Myrto mused. “Athena’s bird. For wisdom. Not a fist, not a flame. An owl.”

“It’s the symbol of their little reading group. ‘The Owl’s Library’, they call it. They meet at the old anarchist bookshop off Mavromihali. The one that’s always getting fines for its signage.”

The mystery, Myrto felt, was already shrinking from a grand political drama to a local one. This was about a specific place, a specific bookshop. The junta’s heavy hand was the backdrop, but the play was neighbourhood-sized.

That evening, over a dinner Aris barely touched, Myrto’s daughter Mary called, her voice tight with suburban anxiety.

“Mana, Aris told me. You’re not playing detective again? Remember the ‘Case of the Missing Cat and the Adulterous Butcher’?”

“That cat led me to a stolen pension book, which put food on a widow’s table,” Myrto said primly. “This is different.”

“It’s dangerous!”

“Life is dangerous. Driving your boys to football is dangerous.” She changed the subject. “Do you know a bookshop off Mavromihali? An ‘alternative’ one?”

Mary, a teacher, sighed. “You mean ‘Parousia’? It’s a haunt for intellectuals and troublemakers. Why? Mana, no.”

*    *    * *    *    *

The next morning, Myrto dressed with extra care, her best black dress, her late husband’s onyx ring. She looked like a woman going to a memorial, which, in a way, she was. Aris, torn between worry and a carpenter’s need to fix things, insisted on driving her to the general area, then hovering at a café opposite the bookshop.

‘Parousia’ was squeezed between a hardware store and a shuttered tailor. The window display was a careful, defiant clutter: philosophy, poetry, history books with cracked spines. The owl-and-book symbol was stenciled in white on the glass door.

Inside, the air was thick with the smell of paper, dust, and cheap coffee. A man in his fifties with a formidable grey beard and tired eyes looked up from a ledger. He had the air of a ship’s captain on a sinking vessel.

“Good morning,” Myrto said, her tone suggesting she was possibly lost. “I am looking for a gift for my grandson. He is… politically aware.”

“This is not a gift shop,” the man said, not unkindly. “It is a repository of inconvenient thoughts. I am Nikos.”

“Myrto. My grandson mentioned a reading group. The Owls. He might have come here.”

Nikos’s guard snapped up. “Many young people come and go. I don’t keep a register.”

“Of course not. A foolish old woman’s question.” She let her gaze wander, noting the overflowing shelves, the small back room with a table and chairs. On the wall behind Nikos was a framed, faded newspaper clipping from the 1970s, showing a younger, beardless Nikos being arrested at a protest. “You’ve been fighting for a long time, kyrie.”

“Fighting? No. Just standing in the same spot while the world tries to move me.” He softened. “Why are you really here?”

“A good baker’s grandson is in a cell because he distributed words from this shop. His grandfather is baking funeral sweets for a living boy. It offends my sense of proportion.”

Nikos studied her. The silence stretched, filled only by the tick of a wall clock. Finally, he spoke. “Leonidas, Katerina, Stathis. Good kids. Passionate. They printed the pamphlets themselves. The message was theirs. I just… loaned them the books that planted the seeds.”

“Who knew they would be in the square that day?”

“Everyone. They were not secretive. They posted on university boards, told friends. It was an open act of dissent.”

“Too open,” Myrto muttered. “Like setting a trap and walking into it yourself. Ο εχθρός φυλάει σιωπηλά.” The enemy guards in silence.

Just then, the door jingled. A thin, sharp-faced man in a cheap suit entered. He didn’t browse. He walked straight to the counter, ignoring Myrto.

“Nikos. Another citation. Signage violation. The letters on ‘Parousia’ are three centimetres too large. You have forty-eight hours to comply.” He slapped a paper on the counter.

Nikos didn’t flinch. “Thank you, Inspector Vorias. My grand project for the week.”

Vorias’s eyes swept the shop, lingering on Myrto with impersonal suspicion before he left as abruptly as he came.

“That,” Nikos said, bitterness edging his voice, “is our local spectre. He appears weekly. Fines for dust on the sill, for the door opening outwards, for the wrong shade of paint. A slow strangulation.”

“And was he here, watching, before the students arrived at the square?”

Nikos’s eyes widened. He thought. “Yes. He was at the kiosk, buying gum. He watched them set up their little stack. He made a phone call. Then he left. Five minutes later, the vans came.”

The pieces clicked into place with an almost audible snap in Myrto’s mind. It wasn’t a grand conspiracy. It was a petty, local, brutal opportunism.

*    *    * *    *    *

 “It’s not about the junta,” Myrto announced to Aris that night, over a map of the neighbourhood she’d drawn on the back of a calendar. “Not directly. It’s about Vorias.”

Aris speared a piece of feta. “The building inspector? What’s he got to do with it?”

“He’s the junta’s little fingernail in Kaisariani. His job is to harass people like Nikos. He saw the students, a perfect opportunity. He calls his higher-ups, reports ‘a major disturbance, subversive elements linked to the troublesome bookshop’. He provides the location, the evidence. They get a nice, easy arrest to put in the news, showing they’re ‘tough on disorder’. Vorias gets a gold star. And the bonus?” She tapped the map. “With the students gone and Nikos terrified, who defends the bookshop? Vorias can finally close it. A neat little victory in his small, mean kingdom.”

“So it’s a… a bureaucratic frame-up?”

“It’s a man using a big stick to settle a small grudge,” Myrto corrected. “The junta is the stick. Now, we need to find the man’s weak spot. Every rat has a hole it scurries back to.”

The weak spot, discovered through a network of widowly gossip and Aris’s contacts in the carpenter’s union, was surprisingly banal. Inspector Vorias was having an affair with the wife of a fishmonger in the Varvakeios Agora. He was also, quietly, taking bribes from a building contractor to overlook code violations in new apartments in nearby Goudi. He was a climber on a greasy pole, using whatever leverage he had.

Myrto’s plan was not one of dramatic confrontation. It was one of subtle, unbearable pressure.

She started with the fishmonger’s wife, a woman named Calliope, whom she ‘accidentally’ met at the neighbourhood laiki (farmer’s market). Myrto spoke loudly to a friend about the scandalous cost of octopus, and how some men, like that building inspector from Kaisariani, must have gold-lined pockets to afford taking their girlfriends to such nice restaurants. Calliope, her face pale, dropped her bag of oranges.

The next day, Aris, while doing a job at the contractor’s office in Goudi, let slip to the foreman that his cousin at the Ministry was auditing ‘localized corruption in building permits, starting with Kaisariani’. The foreman’s smile froze.

Finally, Myrto penned three identical, anonymous letters. They were written in a shaky, old-fashioned script on plain paper. They read:

“Inspector Vorias. The Owls see in the dark. Your gold star is tarnished. Your hole is known. The bribes from Goudi, the wife at the fish market, your orchestration of the arrest in the square. Withdraw the charges against the students as ‘a misunderstanding’. Let the bookshop be. Or this information finds its way to your superiors, who will be most interested, and to the fishmonger, who will be most angry. A friend of the neighbourhood.”

She had Aris mail one from the centre of Athens, one from Piraeus, and slipped the third under Vorias’s apartment door herself at dawn, her black form blending with the shadows.

*    *    * *    *    *

The unravelling was swift and quiet. Within two days, the charges against Leonidas, Katerina, and Stathis were ‘re-evaluated’. They were released with a stern warning, their records mysteriously unstained. The arrested students, chastened but free, emerged into the sunlight, squinting and confused.

A week later, Myrto sat with Dimitri in his bakery. He was making normal bread again, the sweet, comforting smell replacing the cloying scent of kourambiedes. Leonidas, thinner and older-looking, brought them coffee.

“It’s a miracle,” Dimitri said, his voice thick.

“No miracle,” Myrto said, sipping her coffee. “Just logistics. Η κακή συνήθεια γίνεται δεύτερη φύση.” A bad habit becomes second nature. Inspector Vorias had a bad habit of greed. When that habit threatened to expose him, he chose the path of least resistance.

That afternoon, she walked through Plateia Eleftherias. The benches were still gone. The policemen still loitered. But Nikos was outside his bookshop, repainting the sign—in the legally correct size with careful, deliberate strokes. He saw her and gave a small, solemn nod.

At home, Aris was fixing a loose shelf. “So, case closed, Mitera? Justice served?”

Myrto looked out the window at the Athenian haze settling over the red-tiled roofs of Kaisariani. The big, distant machinery of the junta ground on, untouched. But here, in this small corner, a tiny gear had slipped. A petty tyrant had been checked. A few young souls were free. A bookshop still stood.

“Justice is a big word, koukla mou,” she said, turning to him, a faint, tired smile on her face. “Today, we settled for a little peace. And that, for now, is enough. Now, eat. You’re too thin from all this worrying.”

The mystery of the Square of Whispers was solved. Not with gunshots or dramatic speeches, but with the quiet, relentless pressure of an observant widow, a few well-placed words, and the universal fear of a scandalised fishmonger. The Thin Man of Athens she was not, but in her own black-clad, proverb-quoting way, Myrto Zervou had restored a fragile, local balance.

End

To politiko krevati

The cicadas in the pines of Kaisariani Hill sawed away at the August heat. In her small, immaculate apartment, Myrto Zervou listened to them as she diced onions for yemista. The air was thick with the smell of dill and tomato.

Her son, Aris, lumbered in, the scent of sawdust and sweat clinging to his work clothes. “Another one, Mama,” he grumbled, dropping his toolbox with a thud. “Old Man Drakos on the third floor. Says his balcony door is sticking. Wants it fixed by Friday. For free, because I’m ‘like a son’.”

Myrto didn’t look up. “A guest and a fish stink after three days, but Drakos has been stinking up the building for thirty. Charge him half. He’ll pay.”

Aris grinned, kissing her cheek. “Where’s the logic?”

“The logic is in the koutalia,” she said, tapping her temple with the knife handle. “If you give the spoon away, you’ll eat with your fingers.”

The peace was shattered by a scream from the courtyard below, sharp as broken glass. Then shouts—panicked, overlapping.

Myrto was at the balcony before Aris could blink, her black dress a stark flag against the whitewash. Below, in the patch of dusty earth they called a garden, a crowd was forming around a prone figure.

“Panagia mou,” Myrto whispered, crossing herself.

It was Yannis Kaloudis, the building’s resident malcontent, a man whose politics were as loud as his voice. He was sprawled on the ground, a dark red bloom spreading across his cheap white shirt. Not far from his outstretched hand lay a kitchen knife, common and bloody.

A neighbour, Toula, was shrieking. “He attacked him! I saw it! Spiro attacked him!”

Spiro, a young, wiry man with haunted eyes, was backed against the wall, being held by two others. “He came at me!” Spiro yelled, his voice cracking. “With a gun! He had a gun!”

But there was no gun to be seen.

*    *    * *    *    *

The police came, led by Inspector Gavras, a weary man with a permanent five o’clock shadow and a distaste for neighbourhood dramas. He took statements in the shade of the mulberry tree.

“Kaloudis is a loudmouth,” growled old Drakos. “Always arguing about the elections, about the ‘traitors’ in government. Spiro’s from a lefty family. They were always at it.”

“Spiro’s a good boy,” insisted Toula, now less sure. “But Yannis… he was waving something. Metal. It could have been…”

The Inspector found no gun. The only weapon was the knife, which belonged to Spiro. A simple case, it seemed. A heated political argument turned lethal.

Myrto observed from her balcony, a silent sentinel in black. She watched the ambulance take Yannis away (alive, but barely). She watched Spiro being led to the squad car, his face ashen. She watched the neighbours disperse, their gossip already mutating in the heat.

“A bad business,” Aris said, joining her. “Stupid boys and their politics.”

“A wolf in sheep’s clothing is still a wolf,” Myrto murmured. “But which one is the wolf?”

“Mama, the knife was Spiro’s. They all heard Yannis shouting about ‘cleansing the neighbourhood’. Spiro snapped. It’s simple.”

“Simple is for recipes, not for people,” she said, turning inside. “Yannis shouted, yes. But did he attack? Spiro says there was a gun. So where did it fly? To Egypt?”

Later, she went down to the courtyard. Inspector Gavras was finishing up.

“Kyria Zervou,” he nodded, tired. “Don’t worry. We have it in hand.”

“The hand that rocks the cradle sometimes gets bitten,” she replied, peering at the chalk outline. “Spiro’s apartment. It faces the courtyard?”

“Yes. Second floor. Why?”

“And he says Yannis was waving the gun here, by this bench?”

“Yes, yes. A story to cover the stabbing.”

Myrto’s eyes scanned the building, the balconies strung with laundry, the potted geraniums, the satellite dishes. Her gaze landed on the third-floor balcony of Old Man Drakos. The one with the sticking door.

“Inspector,” she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial rasp. “A man is shouting he will kill you with a gun. You run to your kitchen, grab a knife, run back down three flights of stairs… and then you stab him?”

Gavras paused. “He could have had the knife on him.”

“A carpenter’s son, I know tools. A knife for filletting fish is not a knife for a walk in the courtyard.” She pointed to Spiro’s balcony. “You see? His door is open. If he was in such a panic, would he close it? No. He heard the shout, grabbed the nearest weapon from his kitchen, ran out here.” She walked a few steps from the bench towards the building entrance. “This is where he would have met Yannis. Not over there by the bench.”

“So?”

“So the gun,” she said, as if explaining to a child. “If it existed, where is it?”

She turned and marched into the building, Gavras, surprised, following. She didn’t go to Spiro’s. She climbed to the third floor and knocked on Drakos’s door.

The old man opened, eyes wide with false concern. “Kyria Myrto! A tragedy!”

“A great tragedy needs a great liar,” she said, brushing past him. His apartment was a museum of clutter. She went straight to the balcony, to the sticking door. She examined the frame, then got on her hands and knees, ignoring Gavras’s protest.

“Aris said you wanted your door fixed by Friday. Why so urgent? The election rally is on Friday. In the plateia.” She ran her fingers along the bottom track of the sliding door. With a grunt, she pried something loose. It was a small, oily rag, wedged deep. She unfolded it. Inside was a key.

Not a house key. A small, safe-deposit box key.

Drakos paled. “That’s not mine!”

“When the fox preaches, look to the hens,” Myrto said, standing up. She looked out from Drakos’s balcony. The view was perfect. Directly down to the bench in the courtyard.

“You saw everything,” she stated. “Yannis came to meet someone here, by the bench. A private meeting. Not a shouting match. He was agitated, yes. He showed them something. Something small. Not a gun. A key. Perhaps to a box holding proof of some dirt, a political bribe, a secret. The other person wanted it. They argued. They grabbed Yannis’s own knife, he was a cook, wasn’t he? Always had a little tool for olives in his pocket—and they stabbed him.”

“Ridiculous!” Drakos spat.

“Then,” Myrto continued, her eyes hard, “they saw Spiro come out of the building, knife in hand. They saw their chance. They threw the key up here, to their partner watching from above. And they took Spiro’s knife, pressed it into Yannis’s wound, and dropped it. They made it look like Spiro did it. A perfect political crime: a leftist killing a right-wing loudmouth. Who would question it?”

“Partner? What partner?” Gavras asked, now fully alert.

Myrto turned to Drakos. “The one who needed the door fixed. To retrieve the key before the rally on Friday. Before Yannis’s associates went looking for what he had on them. You weren’t fixing the door to open it easier, kyrie Drakos. You were fixing it to close it quieter, so your nephew—Yannis’s young ‘comrade’ from the same party, the one who visits you every Tuesday—could sneak in and get the key without you ‘hearing’.”

Drakos’s defiance crumpled. Gavras radioed for backup.

*    *    * *    *    *

That evening, the yemista was perfect. Aris ate in awed silence. The news had spread: Yannis would live. Spiro was released. Two men from a minor political party, one old, one young, were arrested for attempted murder and blackmail.

Inspector Gavras stood in Myrto’s doorway, holding a box of baklava. “A small thanks,” he said, embarrassed. “How did you know about the nephew?”

“A lonely old man has a nephew who suddenly visits every week? Either he is dying, or they are up to something. And Drakos looked too healthy to be dying.” She took the sweets. “The snake may shed its skin, but it is still a snake.”

After he left, Aris shook his head. “Mama, you should have been a detective.”

Myrto sat by the balcony, watching the first stars appear over Athens. The cicadas had quieted. “Pah,” she waved a hand. “In a small building, everyone’s business is written on their laundry. I just read the lines.”

She sipped her coffee, a contented, sharp-eyed widow in a black dress, the mysteries of Kaisariani safely tucked away for another night. The real crime, she thought, was never the knife or the gun. It was the lie wrapped in a flag. And for that, there was an old proverb for every occasion.

End

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