Free Devil of Delphi: A Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis Mystery by Jeffrey Siger Page A

have killed you anytime I wished.”
    Kharon pursed his lips and raised an eyebrow. “Make that two thousand ships.”

Chapter Seven
    “Maggie, come in please,” Andreas yelled from his office.
    Maggie poked her head in the doorway. “Do you mean all the way in, or is the head enough?”
    “Nope, this will require the full-body experience.”
    “Are you lonely for your playmates?” She walked over to his desk.
    Andreas smiled. “Funny you should say that. Yianni and Petro are preparing to chase down our sole lead on Greece’s bomba kingpin, and your boyfriend is off doing only the devil knows what trying to generate another lead. So, I figured it’s time we pitch in too.”
    “What’s with the ‘we’? Apparently, unlike some people, I’ve got a lot of work to do.”
    “ We are going to do some Internet research on the counterfeit wine business.”
    Maggie smiled. “Have you punched ‘counterfeit wine’ into your browser yet?”
    Andreas gestured no.
    “Then do so, please.”
    Andreas inhaled, typed in the words, and exhaled.
    “Stop with the passive-aggressive breathing. There’s a point to this.”
    A rush of headline world media coverage—ninety-nine percent of it in English—popped onto Andreas’ screen.
    “As you can see, Boss, there’s more than enough material there to keep you busy all afternoon practicing your English language skills. You’ve got back issues of the world’s leading financial newspapers, a mass of wine industry publications, and recorded British and U.S. television news reports to listen to.”
    She smiled. “Sadly, my English isn’t good enough to be of much help.”
    Andreas quickly scrolled through the list of articles. “How did you know about all this?”
    “I went online after Tassos asked me what I knew about counterfeit wine. I’d told him not much, because it hadn’t been a big problem in Greece and I didn’t collect expensive French wines, a pursuit fraught with counterfeit-related risks.”
    “‘Fraught?’”
    “Yes. I came across ‘fraught’ in the first sentence of the first English language article I found on the subject. That’s about when I decided to give up on my Internet research project. All I can tell you is the amount of money at play boggled my mind, Worldwide annual wine sales approach thirty-four billion bottles, distilled spirit sales run at about the same rate, and demand for both continues to grow.”
    “That explains the big push into counterfeit.”
    Maggie nodded. “And I couldn’t find anything about counterfeit in the Greek press that we didn’t already know.”
    “Meaning?”
    “That it took bomba -induced sex in public, crowds on drunken rampages, and a flood of counterfeit euros into one of the country’s most notorious, busy tourist locations to get that community united enough to demand police action. The bottom line reality is, only when a bomba death of a foreign visitor threatens Greece’s tourism image will authorities drop a highly publicized, but selectively administered, hammer on bomba sales.”
    “For a while.”
    Maggie pointed at the screen. “There’s a lot there that might interest you. Let me know when you find something exciting.” She smiled as she turned and headed back to her desk.
    Andreas thought to ask her just who did she think was the boss, but he already knew the answer.
    He began to read, hoping that somewhere in all that information he’d find what drove the counterfeit alcohol market, and from that perhaps deduce a clue to the sort who might be involved in Greece. But what he learned was there were different markets, driven by different motives.
    What drove counterfeiting in places like China had nothing to do with lower prices, but with a lack of access to the product. Chateau Lafite Rothschild ranked as the hottest expensive wine in China, yet estimates put only one of every ten bottles sold there as genuine. Counterfeiters rebottled good, fifty-euro bottles of Bordeaux and sold