Chapter 9 The Aegean Overlord
The cat had no official name.
I knew this because I had asked Theria, on my second week, whether the cat was the taverna's cat or the island's cat or simply a cat that had decided to exist in the vicinity of the taverna's fish deliveries, and Theria had said, from behind a vast quantity of herb stems, "Is the cat.
Doesn't need a name. Everyone knows it."
This was very much how the island worked and I had stopped being surprised by it.
The cat did, however, now have a name. It was The Aegean Overlord, it lived in my phone's voice note history and in Priya's consciousness and in mine, and it had been confined there, carefully, since the Thursday of the octopus incident.
I had managed three weeks of not saying it aloud.
This was, I felt, an exercise in restraint that deserved more credit than it got.
I had not said it out loud. I had been very deliberate about this.
The name was not going to enter the island's social ecosystem, because the island's social ecosystem was small and efficient and operated on a logic I was only beginning to understand — the logic of a place where everyone knew the cat and knew it didn't need a name, which meant that if someone gave it a name, everyone would know that too, and would know who had given it, and would probably have an opinion.
I did not need more opinions. I was already managing Petros's opinions about olive oil and Derek's opinions about everything and Elena's opinions, which she expressed primarily through the quality of the coffee she chose to give you on a given morning.
* * *
On a Monday at the end of June, I was restocking the outdoor station — water, serviettes, the stack of menus Elena kept in a particular order she had explained to me once with the directness of someone who had explained it many times to many people and had strong feelings about it being correct — when I heard Lex at the taverna's back gate.
He was talking to Theria. They were in Greek, which I understood in portions — I had been picking up operational vocabulary at a rate I considered reasonable, but full sentences at speed were still beyond me.
What I caught were the words for octopus, a reference to the cold room, and what I was fairly confident was the phrase to kai: "the also," or "and the," or possibly in this context something adjacent to "and then there's—"
And then Theria said, clearly and with the slight raise of someone recounting something amusing, "Ton Egeo Despoti."
The Aegean Overlord.
I turned very slowly from the menu stack.
Lex was looking toward the cat, who was sitting on the wall near the gate with the composure of something that considers itself above surveillance.
He said something to Theria. Theria said something back.
He made a sound that I interpreted as acknowledgement — not surprise, not particularly — and turned and went back into the kitchen.
I finished stacking the menus.
Then I went inside.
He was at the pass-through, managing the start of the lunch prep with the efficient economy of a man who is not wasting motion.
I stood at the order station. I had absolutely no reason to be there — the first covers weren't for forty minutes — but I was there and it was too late to retreat without making the retreat obvious.
"You know I named the cat," I said.
He didn't turn around. "Yes."
"I didn't tell you the name."
"No."
"Theria told you."
"Yes."
"You could have mentioned," I said, "that you knew."
He did turn at this — not fully, a slight turn, the three-quarter view I'd started to catalogue without meaning to. "You didn't ask."
"I — that's not the same as not wanting you to know."
He turned back to the stove. "You named it The Aegean Overlord," he said. As a fact.
"Yes."
"Because of the octopus incident."
"The cat had relevant strategic information about the situation that it failed to share."
He paused. Very briefly. The pause of a man processing something. Then he went back to the prep.
"The Aegean Overlord," he said. "It's a reasonable name."
This was — I want to be careful here — not a compliment, exactly.
It was a practical assessment. It was the kind of thing he said about things that were functional and accurate.
He had said something similar about my system for arranging the table order tickets, and about the way I'd reorganised the outdoor station, and about the carbon copy pad situation once he'd stopped working around it and started showing me which layer was which.
It was, in other words, his way of saying he agreed.
"You've started using it," I said. "With Theria."
"The cat needed a name. It has one."
I stood at the order station. The lunch tickets were beginning to come in. There was a table of four at number seven who wanted to know about the grilled fish. There were at least three things I should have been doing that were not standing at the pass-through having this conversation.
"Right," I said.
"Table seven," he said.
"I know," I said, and went to table seven. But I was smiling, slightly, at the menu in my hand, which I addressed to the menu because there was no universe in which I was going to let that be visible.
The thing about this — and I was examining the thing, briefly, in the thirty seconds between the gate and table seven — was that it was such a small thing.
He had used a name I'd given a cat. He had done this by telling Theria about it, which was barely even doing it himself, and Theria had told me, and the net result was: I knew that he knew that I'd been calling the cat something, and he found this — the phrase he'd used was appropriate — which was not, on any reasonable scale, a significant piece of information.
I was, I told myself, going to table seven.
* * *
I told Priya about it on a voice note that evening.
"So he knows," I said, sitting on the dock wall in the last of the sun.
"And he's been using it. And the first I hear of this is him saying it to Theria like it was a normal thing that everyone knew already, which I suppose it now is, because this is Kaliroi and everything that happens becomes normal immediately. "
There was a pause. I knew she was listening because I could hear, distantly, the specific silence of someone not saying the obvious thing yet. Priya was a journalist. She was very good at the pause before the observation.
"He's charming," Priya said.
"He told me the cat needed a name in the tone of a man reporting a weather system." (I am aware this description makes him sound appealing. I was not at that point ready to address this directly.)
"Yes. That's what makes it charming."
"He said it was a reasonable name." I looked at the boat coming in at the far end of the dock. "As in: reasonable. A reasonable name. Like naming a cat after its strategic failures was a perfectly sensible approach to nomenclature."
"It is."
"It is," I admitted. "But I didn't expect him to — I thought he'd find it ridiculous."
"Margot. He's been calling the cat The Aegean Overlord since you told Theria and Theria told him. That's not finding it ridiculous."
I watched the boat. A man threw a rope. Another man caught it.
"He didn't even apologise for knowing," I said. "For knowing and not saying."
"Why would he apologise? He wasn't hiding it. He just hadn't been asked."
"That's what he said."
"He's right."
"Priya."
"What? He is." There was a sound of her moving in her flat — the particular creak of her desk chair, which I'd heard on approximately three hundred voice notes over eleven years and which meant she was settling in.
Priya did not settle into her desk chair for conversations she thought were going to be short. "Can I ask you something?"
"No."
"When did you last call your mother?"
"That's not what you were going to ask."
"When did you last feel like yourself?"
I watched the boat. The rope was secured. The man was coiling the slack.
"Tuesday," I said. "During the lunch service."
There was a pause.
"Are you timing your kitchen appearances around when he's there?"
I looked at the boat.
The man had caught the rope and was tying it to the mooring post with the practiced efficiency of someone who has done this ten thousand times. The other man was unloading something. They were not talking. They didn't need to.
"No," I said.
"Margot."
"I'm being sensible."
"I know you are."
"I am being very sensible and it looks like this."
"Like what?"
I thought about the prep counter. The herbs. The laminated cards. The sound from the other side of the gate that might have been an exhale that was trying to be something else.
"Like Tuesday through Friday between eleven and noon I'm in the herb station," I said. "Because that's where the prep work is."
There was a silence.
"Of course it is," Priya said.