Nights with old eyes

The theft at Papadopoulos’s grocery was the third in as many months. To the police, it was a nuisance, a petty crime in a neighbourhood fraying at the edges. To Myrto Zervou, sitting in her armchair by the window, it was a personal affront. The shop was two streets over. She’d bought her lentils there for forty years.

“They took the cash box, the good olive oil, and all the bottles of tsipouro,” her son, Aris, reported, wiping sawdust from his hands onto his trousers. At thirty-two, he was a gentle giant, forever smelling of pine and varnish. “Old Papadopoulos is devastated. Says he’ll have to close.”

Myrto clicked her tongue, a sharp sound like a stone on glass. “When the wine is gone, the barrel complains of its emptiness,” she quoted, her eyes fixed on the dance of the afternoon sun on the apartment blocks across the street. “But a barrel doesn’t empty itself. Someone tilts it.”

“Mama, don’t start. The police came, they wrote their report. That’s that.”

“The police see the hole in the wall. They don’t see the rat that’s been fattening itself for weeks.” She pushed herself up, her black dress rustling. “I need air. And figs.”

Aris sighed, knowing the walk would take her past Papadopoulos’s.

The shop’s shutters were half-down. Inside, old Papadopoulos, a man as dried and wrinkled as a harvest-time fig, was stacking cans with trembling hands.

“Geia sou, Kiria Myrto,” he mumbled.

“Geia sou, Thanasi,” she said, using his first name. She didn’t ask about figs. “Show me.”

He led her to the back room. The safe was a small, rusty thing, its door hanging open like a slack jaw. The window beside it was broken, glass scattered on the floor.

“They came through here?” she asked.

“Yes. Sliced the lock clean off.”

Myrto peered at the window frame, then at the floor. She picked up a shard of glass, holding it to the light. Outside, in the narrow alley, she saw shards glittering amongst the weeds. And something else. A single, fresh cigarette butt, a foreign brand, not the kind the local men smoked.

“Did you hear anything?” she asked.

“Just the crash. By the time I came down from my flat upstairs, they were gone.”

“Like ghosts,” Myrto muttered. “But ghosts don’t smoke.” She pocketed the cigarette butt.

That evening, over a dinner of beans, Myrto was unusually quiet. Her daughter, Mary, called, worried about the break-ins.

“Don’t let Papa go out at night!” Mary pleaded about Aris, as if he were still a boy.

“A tree doesn’t move unless the wind blows,” Myrto said cryptically before hanging up.

The next day, Myrto’s “air” took her to the local kafeneio. She sat with a coffee, a black monument amidst the clouds of smoke and booming voices. She listened. The men talked of the theft, of hard times, of a new face seen lately, a young man from Thessaloniki, a cousin of the mechanic, Spiros. He was flashy, had a new motorcycle.

“Spends money like he found it,” grumbled one old timer.

Myrto’s ears pricked. Found it, indeed.

Her investigation, as she called it to Aris who rolled his eyes, was a series of small, deliberate movements. She visited the mechanic’s garage under the pretence of asking about a neighbour’s faulty scooter. The cousin, Yannis, was there. He was lean, with quick, nervous eyes. He smoked. Myrto caught a glimpse of the pack in his shirt pocket. The same foreign brand.

“Business is good?” she asked innocently.

“Can’t complain,” Yannis said, wiping his hands on an already greasy rag. His eyes darted away from her steady gaze.

“A busy hand makes a clean shop,” she said, smiling thinly. He didn’t get the proverb.

The puzzle pieces were there, but they didn’t fit. The broken glass was outside. If the window was broken from the inside to stage a break-in, the glass would be mostly inside. And Yannis, for all his nerves, didn’t seem like a mastermind. He was a tilting stick, not the hand that held it.

The answer came from an unexpected source: the widow’s network. Myrto’s friend, Kiria Sophia, mentioned that Papadopoulos’s son, the one who lived in Piraeus, had visited last week. “They argued,” Sophia whispered over the fence. “About money. About selling the shop. The old man refused.”

Aris dismissed it. “So? Families argue.”

“A snake in the house doesn’t need a door,” Myrto replied, her mind racing. The son. Access to the keys. A reason to make the shop fail. A staged robbery for insurance? But the stolen goods…

She marched back to the alley behind the shop. In the daylight, she saw it clearly. The weeds were trampled in a path leading not from the broken window, but to the back door of the adjacent building—a shuttered tailor’s shop, owned by Papadopoulos’s late brother.

Myrto didn’t call the police. She enlisted Aris.

“I need you to be my witness,” she told him that night. “And my… bulk.”

“Mama, this is madness.”

“Is it madness to want peace? To want to sit in my square and not hear the whispers of thieves?” Her voice was steel. He relented.

They waited in the shadows of the alley after midnight. Aris fidgeted; Myrto was a statue. Just past two, a figure slipped into the alley. Not Yannis. An older, heavier man. Papadopoulos’s son, Stelios. He had a key. He opened the back door of the tailor’s shop and disappeared inside.

Minutes later, a light flickered in the upper floor of Papadopoulos’s grocery. The old man’s flat.

“He’s not robbing the shop,” Myrto whispered. “He’s robbing his father.”

They moved. Aris’s large frame blocked the alley exit. Myrto, with a courage that belied her years, rapped sharply on the tailor’s shop door.

It flew open. Stelios stood there, a bag of cash and his father’s few good pieces of jewellery in his hand. Behind him, in the dim light of the connected buildings, old Papadopoulos stood in his nightshirt, his face a mask of betrayal.

“A wolf may change his coat, but not his heart,” Myrto declared, her voice cutting the cold air.

Stelios lunged, but Aris was there, catching him with the easy strength of a man who lifts timber for a living. The bag clattered to the floor.

The mystery was no mystery at all. Stelios, desperate for money, had been pilfering from his father for weeks. He’d hired the flashy cousin to stage the break-in, giving him the tsipouro and oil as payment, keeping the cash for himself. The broken window was his cover, a false trail. He’d been entering through the connected building, a childhood secret passage.

The police, summoned by a furious Aris, were this time genuinely interested. Stelios, in a fit of cowardice, implicated Yannis, who was picked up trying to flee on his motorcycle.

A week later, the morning sun warmed the square. Old Papadopoulos, his shop still open, pressed a bag of the best figs into Myrto’s hands.

“I owe you more than this,” he said, his eyes wet.

“A good deed is its own reward,” she said, patting his hand. “But these figs will do.”

At home, Aris was sanding a chair leg. “Alright, Sherlock,” he said, a grudging smile on his face. “You were right.”

Myrto settled into her armchair, arranging her black skirts. She looked out at her neighbourhood, its rhythms restored, its small wrongs righted.

“The mouse is happiest when the cat is blind,” she said, contentedly. “Today, the cat saw.”

She ate a fig, sweet and perfect, and watched the world go by.

The End