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

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

The forged will

The summer heat clung to Kaisariani like a sweaty shirt. Myrto Zervou sat on her balcony, fanning herself with an old newspaper, her sharp eyes scanning the street below. Her son, Aris, was hammering away in his workshop downstairs, the rhythmic thud-thud-thud blending with the cicadas’ buzz.

Then, the shouting started.

"Thief! Liar! You think you can steal from your own blood?"

Myrto’s ears perked up. She knew that voice, Stavros, the butcher from down the road, a man whose temper was as thick as his pork chops. She shuffled to the railing just in time to see him shove his younger brother, Nikos, a meek accountant who looked like he’d faint if a napkin blew his way.

"Aris!" Myrto bellowed. "Come! We have drama!"

Aris wiped sawdust from his hands and jogged up the stairs. "What now, Ma?"

"The Papadakis brothers are at it again," she said, nodding toward the street. "And this time, it smells like money."

*    *    * *    *    *

Myrto marched downstairs, Aris trailing behind. The brothers were now nose-to-nose, Nikos clutching a folded paper like a shield.

"Stavros! Nikos!" Myrto clapped her hands. "What’s this? A street brawl at your age? Shame!"

Stavros whirled, his face red. "Aunt Myrto, this worm forged our father’s will! Suddenly, he gets the shop, and I get nothing!"

Nikos sputtered. "It’s real! Papa signed it before he..."

"Lies!" Stavros roared.

Myrto snatched the paper from Nikos’ trembling hands. She unfolded it, squinting at the shaky signature. "Hmm."

Aris leaned in. "What do you think?"

"I think," Myrto said slowly, "this ink is too fresh for a dead man."

*    *    * *    *    *

That evening, Myrto and Aris visited the notary who’d witnessed the will, an elderly man named Mr. Kostas, who smelled of mothballs and ouzo.

"Of course it’s authentic," Kostas insisted, adjusting his glasses. "I saw Mr. Papadakis sign it myself."

"At midnight?" Myrto asked sweetly. "Because that’s the time written here."

Kostas paled. "Well… he was… insistent."

Aris crossed his arms. "Or maybe someone paid you to say that."

The notary’s silence was answer enough.

*    *    * *    *    *

The next morning, Myrto cornered Nikos at his office. "Tell me, child, how much did you pay Kostas?"

Nikos’ glasses fogged with sweat. "I... I don’t know what you..."

"Stop." Myrto slapped a hand on his desk. "A dead man’s hand doesn’t shake like a drunk’s. That signature is a fake. And if I can see it, so will a judge."

Nikos crumpled. "Stavros would’ve ruined the shop! He’d sell it for gambling money!"

"Maybe," Myrto said. "But stealing is stealing."

*    *    * *    *    *

By sundown, Nikos confessed. The will was nullified, the notary disgraced, and Stavros, though no saint, got his share.

Back on her balcony, Myrto sipped her coffee, satisfied.

"You always get them, Ma," Aris chuckled.

"Of course," she said. "A snake may shed its skin, but it’s still a snake."

And with that, Kaisariani’s black-clad guardian settled back into her chair, ready for the next mystery.

THE END

Burning shadow

The acrid stench of smoke clung to the morning air as Myrto Zervou shuffled past the charred remains of the New Dawn Party’s local office. The fire had gutted the building overnight, leaving behind blackened walls and the sour tang of gasoline. A small crowd murmured nearby, while two weary policemen strung up yellow tape.

Myrto adjusted her black headscarf and clucked her tongue. "Fire is a bad servant and a worse master," she muttered to no one in particular.

Her son, Aris, lumbered up beside her, his carpenter’s hands stuffed in his pockets. "Mama, don’t start. The police will handle it."

"Bah!" Myrto waved a dismissive hand. "Those boys couldn’t find a goat in a church. Someone did this on purpose."

Aris sighed. "And what are you going to do? Interrogate the ashes?"

"Ashes don’t whisper lies," she shot back, eyes narrowing at a glint near the rubble. She bent down slowly, joints protesting and plucked a half-melted cigarette lighter from the debris. Engraved initials: A.K.

*    *    * *    *    *

That afternoon, Myrto marched into Ouzeri Stelios, the dingy local taverna where the New Dawn boys drank. The room fell silent as she planted herself in front of Andreas Karamanlis, the party’s hotheaded youth leader.

"Andreas," she said sweetly, slapping the lighter on the table. "You left this at your little bonfire."

Andreas paled. "That’s not mine!"

"Liar!" barked Stelios, the taverna owner. "I’ve seen you use it a hundred times!"

Andreas bolted. Myrto didn’t chase him, she didn’t have to. Ten minutes later, Aris dragged him back by the collar.

"Alright, alright!" Andreas spat. "I was there, but I didn’t set the fire! I saw someone—covered in black, like a shadow. They threw the petrol and ran."

Myrto’s eyes gleamed. "A shadow with a name?"

Andreas hesitated. "...Maybe. But if I talk, I’m dead."

"You’ll be deader if you don’t," Aris growled.

*    *    * *    *    *

That night, Myrto and Aris staked out the abandoned textile factory where Andreas claimed the arsonist lurked. The wind howled through broken windows as a figure slipped inside.

"Now," Myrto whispered.

They burst in, Aris wielding a plank like a club. The figure spun, hood falling back to reveal Eleni, Mary’s best friend, her face streaked with soot.

"Eleni?!" Myrto gasped.

"They were going to take our homes!" Eleni cried. "The New Dawn bought the land, they were going to evict everyone!"

Myrto’s heart ached. "Foolish girl! Fire only burns the hand that lights it."

*    *    * *    *    *

The next morning, Myrto marched into the police station, dragging Eleni by the ear.

"Here’s your arsonist," she announced. "But if you ask me, the real criminals are the ones forcing people to choose between their homes and desperation."

The chief sighed. "Myrto, you can’t just..."

"I can, and I did. Now, who’s paying for the damages?"

By noon, the New Dawn’s shady land deals were front-page news. Eleni got community service. Andreas got a broken nose (courtesy of Stelios). And Myrto?

She sat on her balcony, sipping bitter coffee, watching the neighborhood breathe easy again.

"Mama," Aris said, shaking his head. "You’re a menace."

She grinned. "And you’re welcome."

THE END

Foreign lover

The summer heat clung to Kaisariani like a sweaty shirt. Myrto Zervou, dressed head-to-toe in black despite the weather, fanned herself with a folded newspaper as she watched the neighborhood from her balcony. Below, her son Aris sanded a wooden chair in his workshop, the rhythmic scrape-scrape-scrape mixing with the distant hum of motorbikes.

Then the shouting started.

"Ela re, malaka! You think you can steal our women?" A thick voice, angry.

Myrto’s sharp eyes flicked to the street. Two men, Stavros, the butcher’s son, and a tall, blond foreigner, were squared off outside the kafeneio. The foreigner, lean and sunburnt, held up his hands. "I didn’t steal anyone," he said in accented Greek. "Elena is free to choose."

"Choose? Pou sta kala! She’s my cousin!" Stavros lunged, but the foreigner sidestepped, quick like a cat.

Myrto sighed. "Panagia mou, not again." She grabbed her cane and shuffled downstairs.

By the time she reached the street, a small crowd had gathered. Elena, a pretty girl in her twenties with defiant eyes, stood between the men. "Stop it, Stavros! Jens is my boyfriend!"

"Boyfriend?" Stavros spat. "Oloi tha mas lene poutanes!" Everyone will call us whores.

Aris appeared beside Myrto, wiping sawdust from his hands. "Want me to break it up?"

"Not yet," Myrto murmured. She stepped forward, cane tapping. "Re paidia, enough. The whole neighborhood hears you acting like goats."

Stavros scowled. "Kyria Myrto, this xenos thinks he can..."

"Think?" Myrto cut him off. "From what I see, you’re the one not thinking." She turned to Jens. "You. Swedish?"

"Danish," he corrected.

"Same difference," Myrto said. "You love her?"

Jens blinked. "Yes."

"And you, Elena?"

Elena lifted her chin. "Yes."

Myrto nodded. "Good. Then Stavros, pou na pas na gamithis." Go get lost. She smacked his shoulder with her cane. "Elena’s heart isn’t your business."

Stavros flushed. "But the family..."

"Bah! Family means happiness, not prison." She pointed at Jens. "This one works?"

"He’s an architect," Elena said.

"Bravo. Better than a butcher who smells like lamb guts." The crowd chuckled. Stavros fumed but backed off.

That evening, over bitter coffee, Aris smirked. "You’re getting soft. Last year you’d have chased the foreigner off yourself."

Myrto sipped her coffee. "O xronos allazei ton anthropo." Time changes a man. "But if he hurts her…" She cracked her knuckles. "Tha ton kano kima." I’ll make him a wave.

Aris laughed. Some things never changed.

The End

Black widow, red secrets

Myrto Zervou adjusted her black shawl and peered through the lace curtains of her Kaisariani apartment. Across the street, two men in ill-fitting suits lingered near the kiosk. They weren’t locals.

“Ari,” she called to her son, who was sanding a wooden chair leg in the kitchen. “Those men, they’ve been there since morning. Who waits that long for a newspaper?”

Aris wiped sawdust from his hands and joined her. “Maybe tourists?”

“Tourists don’t wear shoes that cheap,” Myrto muttered. “And they keep looking at old Manolis’ building.”

Manolis, the retired bookseller, had been acting jumpy lately. Just yesterday, he had pressed a foreign magazine into Myrto’s hands at the market, whispering, “Hide this.” She had tucked it between her groceries, but now she wondered, was this why those men were here?

*    *    * *    *    *

That evening, Myrto knocked on Manolis’ door. No answer. She tried the handle, unlocked. Inside, the apartment was ransacked. Books torn from shelves, drawers upended. And in the corner, Manolis sat slumped in his armchair, a bruise darkening his temple.

“Manoli!” Myrto rushed to him.

He groaned. “They took them… the magazines…”

“Who?”

“Security police. They think I’m spreading… lies.” He coughed. “But I just wanted people to know the truth.”

Myrto clenched her fists. “Don’t worry, old fool. I’ll fix this.”

*    *    * *    *    *

The next morning, Myrto marched into the local police station, where her nephew, Lieutenant Dimitris, sipped bitter coffee.

“Thea Myrto,” he sighed. “What trouble now?”

“Manolis was beaten. His things stolen.”

Dimitris shifted. “It’s… complicated.”

“Complicated?” She slapped a wrinkled hand on his desk. “Since when do police let thugs attack old men?”

He leaned in. “Orders from above. Those magazines, anti-regime material. Dangerous.”

Myrto scoffed. “Dangerous? A few articles?”

“People get ideas.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Who took them?”

Dimitris hesitated, then scribbled a name: Kapetan Stavros.

*    *    * *    *    *

That night, Myrto and Aris crept through the back alleys of Exarchia, following whispers of a secret police stash house. Aris, nervous, whispered, “Mama, this is crazy.”

“Quiet,” she hissed. “A fox doesn’t announce its hunt.”

They found the building, a crumbling neoclassical with a broken lamp. Inside, voices argued. Myrto peeked through a window. There, on a table, lay stacks of foreign magazines.

Aris swallowed. “Now what?”

Myrto smirked. “Now we remind them that grandmothers know best.”

She threw a rock through the back window. As the men inside shouted and scrambled, she and Aris slipped in, grabbed an armful of magazines, and vanished into the night.

*    *    * *    *    *

The next day, Myrto distributed the magazines to trusted neighbors, whispering, “Read fast, then burn.” By afternoon, the whole neighborhood knew but no one talked.

When the suits returned, they found nothing. No evidence, no witnesses. Just an old widow sweeping her doorstep, humming.

Kapetan Stavros glared at her. “You’re hiding something.”

Myrto smiled sweetly. “Me? I’m just a grandmother. What do I know of politics?”

As the men left in frustration, Aris exhaled. “We did it.”

Myrto patted his cheek. “Of course. As the ancients said: ‘The mouse laughs when the cat’s away.’”

And with that, she went inside to make coffee, the last of the magazines already turning to ash in her stove.

THE END