Deadline in Athens Read Online Free

thing, and the teacher, as a way of repaying the debt, would phone him as soon as he'd seen my exam sheet to tell him the mark. The strange thing is that most of the time I was sure that I'd done well, but all I ever got were fours and fives.
    "Have you got your shoes on the bed again?" I heard Adriani's shrill voice and jumped up. That was the end of my daydreaming. What does a dream correspond to in terms of time? To a television show. The show ends and the dream with it.
    "The moment you come home, you stick your head in that stupid book instead of talking to me, when I've been on my own all day. And if that's not enough, you dirty the bed with your filthy shoes."
    "What do you want me to say to you when you're glued to the TV and you don't even say hello to me?"

    "It had just reached a crucial moment. It wouldn't have hurt you to wait five minutes, would it? But you found an excuse to run to your creepy-crawlies! " "Creepycrawlies" is what she called the letters in the dictionary. "Aren't you tired of reading the same words over and over again for twenty years! I'd have learned them all by now!"
    "And what do you expect me to do, woman? Sit and watch that brainless copper? If he were working under me, I'd have him sent to the storeroom to count bullets! Or should I wait for the second half with that old hen who plays the prosecutor and after six hundred episodes still can't decide whether she wants to do her husband?"
    "Naturally," she replied scornfully. "You're just a slob, and you can't stand anything that's even faintly glamorous." She turned and stormed out. But she'd succeeded in rankling me because I had no idea what "glamorous" meant, or where she'd got it from to dangle before me like that.
    I went over to the shelf and took down the Oxford English-Greek Learner's Dictionary, the only English dictionary I had. I'd bought it in '77 when I was in the drugs squad and we had to interrogate some foreigners who'd gone to India, supposedly in search of a guru, and had come back with saris, a load of trinkets, and half a kilo of heroin hidden up their arses like a suppository. It was then that I'd decided to learn half a dozen words in English for fear that some pasty-faced redhead might hit on me and come out with the odd "fuck you!" and I wouldn't know if she was cursing me or asking me for a cheese pie.
    I searched for glamurous but found nothing. So I looked under glamourus and again nothing. The damned English write it using o and ou just to make life difficult. So: glamorous = possessing glamour, alluring and fascinating; beautiful and smart. Glamorous film stars. So that's what she'd meant-that I don't like what's alluring and fascinating or, by inference, film stars who are alluring and fascinating, because I'm a ragamuffin. It's taken you thirty years to graduate from biscuits to croissants and she calls you a ragamuffin because you can't stomach her stupid soap stars.
    I put up the shutters and went to watch the television. It had already turned nine, and I wanted to listen to the news in case they said anything about the Albanians. Half the news was taken up with political issues, the situation in Bosnia, two junkies who'd overdosed and an eighty-year-old who'd raped and murdered his seventy-yearold sister-in-law. Just as I was feeling a sense of relief that we'd been left out, the newscaster put on a grievous expression. His face darkened, his hands rose slightly from the desk in a show of despair at the upset he was going to cause the viewers, and he gave forth a sigh that was barely perceptible. The words emerged disjointed, one by one, like the last customers out of a cafe just before it closes who scatter into the street. He always had that handkerchief in his jacket pocket. I kept expecting him to take it out and wipe away his tears, but he'd never done it. He should have kept it up his sleeve for when the ratings fell.

    "And in other crime, ladies and gentlemen," he said, "in the brutal murder of the