Chapter 12 Thessaloniki
Priya arrived on the Tuesday ferry for the second time.
This time she had a better rolling suitcase and considerably stronger opinions. The first visit had been officially research. The second was, she told me at the dock with the air of someone who has decided not to pretend, "journalism with an ulterior motive, specifically you."
She stayed for three days. She ate at the taverna every evening.
She watched me work with the concentrated attention of someone professionally trained to notice things, which I had found charming in week one and somewhat oppressive by day two of this visit, because I had started to suspect she was filing observations.
She was. I confirmed this on Tuesday evening.
We were on Derek's terrace — Derek having performed his usual tactful withdrawal, this time with a bottle of local white left pointedly on the table — and Priya had been quiet for approximately four minutes, which for Priya was the silence of someone building toward something.
"Elena's been giving you better coffee since day one," she said.
"I know," I said. "You told me."
"I know I told you. I'm saying it again because I want to watch your face." She watched my face. "You thought it was just the coffee."
"It is the coffee. Elena makes—"
"Lex has the same coffee as the standard order. Theria has the standard order. Derek told me." She picked up her wine. "Elena has been making it differently for you since before you'd worked a single shift."
I considered this. I'd known, since Priya had mentioned it, that the coffee was different. I had assumed — I had been so confident that I assumed — it was simply the way Elena made coffee for the staff. A perk. A small welcome. Not something directed specifically at me.
"On what basis," I said, "did she decide that before I'd done anything?"
"On what basis did you give the Aegean Overlord a name before you knew him well enough to know his strategic failures?" Priya said.
I opened my mouth.
"Some things," she said, not unkindly, "don't require a full data set."
I looked at the harbour. The evening light was doing the thing it always did — the boats going from gold to grey, the string lights coming on at the taverna, the water flattening out — and I thought about Elena, who had been making me better coffee since the morning before I'd known anyone's name, and about what she had apparently seen on the dock that first day that had made her decide to do that.
"I've been cataloguing Lex," I said. "For six weeks. I have a whole — I've been tracking the patterns."
"I know," Priya said.
"And I missed the coffee."
"You were looking the wrong direction," she said. "You were watching him. You missed the thing that was watching you."
I sat with this for a moment. The string lights at the taverna came on, one strand after another, the particular warm yellow I'd been walking past every evening since June.
"That's a good line," I said.
"I know," she said. "I'm putting it in the piece."
She left on the Wednesday ferry.
Priya left on the Wednesday ferry.
She hugged me at the dock with the specific ferocity of someone who doesn't normally hug and has decided, on this occasion, to compensate. Then she stood back and gave me a long, measuring look.
"You're not coming home," she said.
It wasn't a question. I answered it anyway. "I haven't decided anything."
"You're not coming home," she said again, exactly the same way, and picked up her bag and walked up the gangway.
I watched the ferry go. Michalis was doing something involving a rope and absolute indifference to the emotional weight of the moment.
The island receded — no, wait, I was the one staying still.
The ferry moved. I stayed on the dock with my sandals on the salt-bleached wood and the afternoon sun and the particular feeling of having been seen through with some precision and not actually minding.
I bought a coffee from Barba-Nikos's kafeneion out of mild spite.
He put it on the counter without looking at me.
I drank it standing up. It was, I had to admit, excellent.
He made it the way I liked it now, not the way I'd ordered it on the first day.
I did not know when he'd made this adjustment.
I suspected he'd known within the first week and had been quietly making it regardless.
I thought about saying something. I did not say anything. We had a system.
* * *
It was Priya who'd told me, the night before she left, that Elena had been giving me better coffee from the first day.
We'd been sitting on the terrace at The Blue Door — Priya drinking something local and complicated that Derek had produced with the pleasure of a man who has been waiting for someone to appreciate his inventory; me with wine; Derek himself inside listening to something from the eighties with the volume at a level he thought was subtle — and she'd mentioned it the way she mentioned everything, which was precisely and without preamble.
"Elena's been giving you better coffee since day one. Did you know that?"
I thought about it. The coffee at the taverna. The way it tasted when Elena made it versus the decent but standard coffee at Barba-Nikos's. "I thought that was just — how the coffee was at the taverna."
"Lex has the same coffee. Theria has the same coffee. Derek told me." She looked at me. "She makes it differently for you. Has been since day one."
I sat with that for a moment. "Why?"
"I don't know. Maybe she just likes you."
"She barely speaks to me."
"She speaks to you in coffee," Priya said, in the tone of someone stating something entirely obvious, and picked up her glass.
I thought about this now, walking away from the dock with Barba-Nikos's excellent coffee — which he, too, apparently, had adjusted without announcement — and felt the particular sensation of being gently, collectively known by people who were not making a performance of it.
London had been loud about knowing me. Dominic had made quite a production of understanding me, as it turned out — very convincingly, very persistently, until the production closed and the set was struck and there was just the echo of my own voice in the last conversation I'd had in our flat before I changed the locks.
Kaliroi knew me differently. In coffee and laminated cards and the careful adjustment of invoice filing.
I didn't look at this too long. I was looking at more data. This was the responsible approach.
* * *
I went back to The Blue Door and did something with my laptop for a while that I was calling work, because I was doing a supply chain analysis of the taverna's August ordering cycles and this absolutely counted as work even if no one was paying me for it.
I was learning. I was being useful. I was absolutely not doing this because I had been in the same building as Alexios Stavros for six weeks and had developed what I could only describe as a very specific and inconvenient data interest in the efficiency patterns of Taverna Stavros's operations.
Priya had not said I told you so before she left, but she'd packed her bag with the energy of someone saving it for later.
* * *
I went back to the taverna after closing.
I'm not entirely sure what my intention was.
I had the August supply order analysis on my laptop, which was a reasonable pretext.
I walked down the harbour steps with the evening settling into its particular blue — not dark yet, not golden, just the specific blue of an Aegean evening that I had been, privately, cataloguing every night for six weeks — and pushed open the side gate of the taverna courtyard.
The service lights were still on. The cats were doing their post-service thing among the chairs.
The Aegean Overlord was in his spot on the wall. He looked at me with the expression he always had, which was the expression of someone who has been asked the same question many times and found it philosophically wanting.
"Evening," I said.
He didn't respond. He had the same dignity as Barba-Nikos. Perhaps dignity was something the island conferred on its longer-term residents.
Lex was at the corner table. The one near the kitchen door, where he sometimes sat between lunch service and dinner — except service was long over and it was gone nine and he was still there, in his kitchen whites with the apron cloth on the chair beside him, working through a stack of papers that appeared to have a disagreement with each other.
He looked up.
He didn't tell me the taverna was closed. He didn't look surprised to see me. He just looked at me with those flat, direct dark eyes and said: "The supply order."
"I have some thoughts," I said.
He pulled out the chair opposite. "Sit down."
* * *
We did the supply order first. It wasn't even a pretense — I genuinely had found a thing with the August wine projections that hadn't been accounted for, because August had the feast cycle and the tourist peak and the local demand ran at cross-purposes with the tourist demand in a way that the current ordering didn't capture.
I'd built a very small model on my laptop (using a spreadsheet, in the way Margot Bellamy, former sustainability consultant, had built every model of her adult life, because some things are just what you do).
He looked at the spreadsheet for a long time. Then he moved it closer and looked at it again. He had a pen in his hand and he turned it over once, twice, the way I'd noticed he did when he was thinking, the pen moving slowly between his fingers.
"The feast cycle," he said.
"It's the same period every year but it shifts the local demand curve — everyone's eating communally for three days, so the private-table orders drop but the taverna's contribution to the communal supply should go up. The current projections don't seem to account for—"
"The communal cost comes out of reserve," he said. "It's not in the order cycle. It's a separate budget."
"Oh." I looked at my spreadsheet. "So I've modelled the wrong thing."