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