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This preliminary meeting at a busy café at Syntagma Square (a very symbolic location I
thought) went well, if quickly. Eventually I received a call from Nikos himself and we
met in this old, seemingly abandoned house, whose owner I didn’t know.
Simply sitting across from this man I felt like I was committing a crime, as though
speaking to Nikos would invite the scrutiny of the police. The rumors of his
masterminding of car bombings and shootings were well known, although I never
discovered if he was truly involved. Before our meeting a contact whispered to me that
this was the man who coordinated the attack on the US embassy in Athens earlier that
year - a claim Nikos denied. I wondered how he could walk the streets freely, why he
hadn’t been caught and jailed. It made no sense to me that I, a foreign student with no
special investigative skills, was able to find, meet, and interview this individual - but
there I was.
Consider a man: tall and slender with neatly coifed black hair and brown probing
eyes. Nikos was in his late forties but the sheer forcefulness of his presence made him
seem younger. When we met, Nikos still walked the streets of Athens anonymously
despite the fact that his alleged activities colored the front pages of newspapers regularly
adding fodder to debates about public security and policy. He described his existence in
the city as evanescent, volatile, yet absolute. Nobody officially paid Nikos though he
looked well-dressed and carefully put-together: his vintage leather jacket was
appropriately distressed; leather boots scuffed but not worn; an expensive motorcycle
helmet sat on the floor beside him; and an understated yet plainly visible Omega