When the Devil's Idle

A
Greek Islands Mystery

* * *

Coffeetown Press

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Seattle, WA 98127

For more information go to:
www.coffeetownpress.com

www.letaserafim.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may
be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any
information storage and retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the
author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Cover design by Sabrina Sun

When the Devil’s Idle

Copyright © 2015 by Leta Serafim

ISBN: 978-1-60381-998-5 (Trade
Paper)

ISBN: 978-1-60381-999-2 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number:
2015938969

Produced in the United States of
America

* * *

For
Philip

* * *

T
he following people were instrumental in the writing
of this book. First and foremost, my husband, Philip Evangelos
Serafim. Also my friends Dawn Lefakis, Stephanie Merakos, and
Thalia Papageorgiou, my daughters and their husbands: Amalia
Serafim and David Hartnagel, Annie and Yiannis Baltopoulos. I would
also like to thank my precious grandchildren, Zoe and Grace
Hartnagel and George Baltopoulos.

My thanks to all
the people who have encouraged me to continue with the Greek Island
Mystery series: my agent, Jeanie Loiacano, Jennifer McCord and
Catherine Treadgold at Coffeetown Press, and my late parents, John
and Ethel Naugle.

* * *

N
ight was fast approaching and the garden was
half-hidden in shadows. The gardener unlocked the gate and quickly
set about his evening’s work, watering the roses first before
moving on to the cypress trees at the periphery of the estate. The
air was very still; the only sound, a flock of birds chattering by
the fountain. The estate, cloistered on a hilltop and located in
the village of Chora on the Greek island of Patmos, was well off
the tourist trail. People rarely ventured there uninvited.

The gardener
lingered by the fountain, enjoying the sound of the cascading water
and the coolness it brought to the hot, late-summer air. He dipped
his hand in the water and wiped his face.

Distracted, he
didn’t notice the wounded man at first, lying in a congealing pool
of blood on the far side of the fountain. It was the birds that
drew him. Crows, from the sound of them, far too many for this time
of night.

His eyes open,
the man lay sprawled on the ground, barely breathing. His hair was
matted with blood and his forehead was carved with a
swastika.

The gardener fell
to his knees and screamed and screamed. He was far from the house,
so no one heard his cries. Growing more and more desperate, he ran
to the door and began pounding on it, crying for help. Eventually a
woman answered. Pushing his way into the house, he demanded her
cellphone and called the police. The station was located in the
port of Skala, four kilometers away, the village of Chora being far
too small to warrant its own station.

There was much
shouting back and forth, given the poor connection, before the
gardener finally yelled, “
Dolofonia
!” Murder.

At first the
police dispatcher was skeptical and doubted the man’s story, but
the hysteria in the Albanian’s voice finally convinced him to send
someone, if only to lock him up in a padded cell.

A policeman named
Evangelos Demos duly arrived on the scene.

* * *

It was, as he
later told his former supervisor, Yiannis Patronas, exactly as the
gardener described.

“
Bloody?”

“
Yes.
One of the worst crime scenes I’ve ever seen.” This was hardly
significant. Evangelos Demos was no expert, having seen only one
other crime scene in his life, a bloody mess on a beach. On that
occasion he had fainted dead away, going down like a sequoia tree
and vomiting as he went, contaminating every scrap of evidence. He
was notorious among law enforcement officials in Greece, a legend
almost.

“
There
was an old woman who pulled me aside as I was leaving the house.
‘
Prosehe
,’ she said.” Be careful.

Patronas had been
at a taverna on the Greek island of Chios when the call came in,
eating dinner with an elderly priest named Papa Michalis. The two
were old friends and it was an idyllic evening. Far to the east,
the moon was rising and he could see the dusky hills of Turkey
across the narrow channel that divided the two countries, along
with headlights of cars in the streets of Chesme.

Between them, the
two had drunk nearly a liter of ouzo and were discussing the nature
of evil, whether it was generated by humans or an independent
entity. The priest, being a religious man, favored the latter view,
quoting the Bible to bolster his case. “ ‘I saw Satan fall
like lightning from heaven,’ it says in the New Testament. ‘For God
spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell and
delivered them into chains.’ ”

Patronas snorted.
“So our troubles are caused by fallen angels?” As the Chief Officer
of the Chios police, he’d seen plenty of the fallen and arrested
more than a few of them, but he’d never encountered an angel. Not a
single one in all his years on the force or in his tumultuous
married life. Just the opposite in fact.

But the priest
was not to be put off. “Fallen angels, the devil, call it what you
will. There’s too much evil in the world to be the work of man
alone.”

Patronas was
later to recall that conversation. Papa Michalis had spoken the
truth that night. Evil was indeed an entity and certain human
beings embodied it, wore it like skin. He just hadn’t realized it
at the time.

When his phone
rang, he hesitated, not wanting the evening to end.

“
Chief
Officer Patronas?” a man asked.

Patronas cursed,
recognizing the tremulous whine of his former associate, Evangelos
Demos. Fat and incompetent, he’d been forced out of the Chios
Police Directorate after panicking during a stakeout and shooting
up a herd of goats. It had been one of the worst nights of
Patronas’ career, Evangelos firing away with his service revolver
and the goats falling, writhing, and shitting themselves as they
bled to death. “Get rid of him,” Patronas had told his superior at
the time. “No living creature is safe while Evangelos Demos is on
the job. He does harm just by breathing.”

As usually
happened, his superior in Athens, a self-serving bureaucrat named
Haralambos Stathis, had ignored his warning and reassigned
Evangelos Demos to Patmos. His duties there were few: overseeing
the cruise ships that docked there and the hundreds of foreign
tourists on holiday who inevitably drank too much and got into
trouble.

“
It’s
as far away as we can send him and still be on dry land,” Stathis
had told Patronas at the time. “Any farther east and he’ll be
policing fishes.”

Pity the
fishes.

“
Why
don’t you just fire him?”

“
His
uncle is a representative from Sparta.” This being Greece, it was a
sufficient reason.

Ever the parade
horse, his old colleague Evangelos Demos had become insufferable
since being posted to Patmos, bragging about the celebrities he
knew—Aga Khan and the like—who summered there. Although he’d been
totally disgraced and his uncle had been forced to call in favors
to save his career, Evangelos always spoke as if he expected to be
listened to, prefacing every remark with ‘
na sou po
’—let me
tell you—and pontificating as if he were king. This time was no
exception.

Irritated,
Patronas reached for his cigarettes. Just thinking about Evangelos
made his blood boil. He wanted to hang up, but didn’t dare. He was
already considered a troublemaker, an outlaw, a rogue. No reason to
make matters worse.

“
There’s a dead German here,” Evangelos’ voice dropped
dramatically, “murdered.”

Patronas puffed
furiously on his cigarette. He needed to get a new phone, one with
a screen that showed who was calling.

Homicide was rare
in Greece, the murder of a foreigner, rarer still. After solving a
case on Chios, he had become a celebrity of sorts among policemen
and was often consulted by colleagues like Evangelos on difficult
cases. Patronas didn’t welcome the attention and wished they’d
leave him alone. It had hardly been an achievement, that case on
Chios, botched as it was from start to finish. Yes, he’d caught the
killer, but it had been more by accident than design and only after
the perpetrator had murdered three people and sliced him to
ribbons. A rank amateur, he recognized his limitations. He only
wished others did.

“
I
don’t know where to start,” Evangelos went on in an
uncharacteristic burst of modesty.

“
You
said the victim was German?”

“
That’s right. Someone carved a swastika on his
forehead.”

“
One
of those skinheads? A tourist?”

Evangelos knew
what Patronas was asking. Sometimes foreigners got into things,
strange things better left alone. “No, the victim was an old
man.”

“
How
old?”

“
Eight-nine, ninety. Old, old.”

Patronas gave a
low whistle. “Was it a robbery?”

“
I
don’t think so. He was staying in Chora with his family, guests of
an industrialist in Munich. A very powerful man. There’s a bunch of
them here now. Unlike us, they’ve got money to burn and bought up a
bunch of old villas. Spend July and August
there ….”

The priest, who’d
been listening, chuckled softly. “Summer, autumn, war.” It was an
old saying, dating from the time of the Spartans, on the
inevitability of war, the enduring presence of one’s
enemies.

“
Germans haven’t made it to Chios,” said Patronas.

“
You’re lucky,” Evangelos said. “They’re all over Patmos now.
Couldn’t get here with Hitler, so they bought their way in this
time. Their weapon of choice, the Euro.” His voice was
bitter.

Patronas had
heard similar complaints—Germans making themselves at home in
places where they didn’t belong. Ieropetra in Crete, for example, a
village which suffered one of the bloodiest massacres of the war.
The newcomers had no compunction about it, apparently, no sense
that it was hallowed ground and they shouldn’t trespass. Idly, he
wondered what the Israelis would do if Germans turned up en masse
in Tel Aviv, beach towels in hand, eager to buy property. Be
interesting to see.

Hospitality was a
Greek virtue and had been since ancient times. Guests were to be
honored, given the best food, the last drop of wine. But what if
they never left, those guests? Stayed on and bought houses and
lived there beside you? What was the difference between a guest and
the advance guard of an invading army? Patronas didn’t know the
answer. Wasn’t sure there was one.

“
You
have to help me,” Evangelos said. “I can’t do this alone.” There
was something in his voice as he said this. Fear maybe.

“
What
about my job?” Patronas asked.

“
I
cleared it with Athens.”

“
I
don’t know if you know this, Evangelos, but I got a second job
since you left Chios, overseeing the security on an archeological
dig.”

In addition to
his police work, Patronas and a friend of his from the force,
Giorgos Tembelos, worked part-time as guards on an excavation run
by Harvard University. The job was easy and the pay was good. He’d
be a fool to abandon it. Times were tough now in Greece. In spite
of his twenty-two years on the force, he could be laid off at any
time.