When the Devil's Idle (14 page)

“
Why
would he change his name?” Patronas wondered.

“
I
don’t know.”

The four of them
were sitting outside by the water, it being too hot to venture
inside. A haze hung over the sea, and the air was very still.
Suddenly, a soft breeze rose up and stirred the tamarisk trees that
lined the shore, setting their feathery branches in motion.
Patronas liked the rustling sound the trees made, the relief the
wind brought. It was almost as if he could hear the earth
breathe.

I’ll go swimming
tonight, he told himself, looking out at the harbor. Float on my
back and look up at the stars. Frolic like a dolphin.

Maybe he’d ask
Antigone Balis to join him. He pictured her dripping wet, that long
hair of hers hanging down over one shoulder like Botticelli’s
Venus. Adrift in his vision, he subsequently lost track of the
conversation.

“
Hey,
boss, you with us?” Tembelos nudged him with his elbow.

Patronas made a
show of straightening his back, stretching. “Sorry, it’s the heat.
Always makes me sleepy.”

“
You
were grinning.”

“
So
what if I was? A man’s allowed to grin.”

“
I
don’t know, Yiannis,” the priest said. “I think when one is
discussing a homicide, it might be better if one dispensed with
grinning. At such a time, such behavior is unseemly. It makes one
appear insensitive at the very least.”

“
Thank
you for that, Father. In the future, I will dispense with
grinning.” He tapped his pencil on his notebook. “So, to sum up, we
have nothing concrete in the case, no witnesses or physical
evidence, nothing that will lead us to the killer.”

“
Gardener’s clean,” Tembelos reported. “I ran his fingerprints
and there was nothing. There was a match on the shoes, too, exactly
like he told us.”

“
What
about the housekeeper, Maria Georgiou?”

“
Same
thing. The case is heating up. If we don’t catch the killer, it
could get ugly. Ministry’s already clamoring for
action.”

“
We
need to turn the housekeeper, Maria Georgiou, inside out, also the
members of the family,” Patronas said. “Check their history.
Something’s going on here, but as of yet, I haven’t established
what it is.”

“
You
can’t rule out a random act of violence,” the priest said,
“directed at them because of their nationality.”

“
Worse
would be if it were a case of mistaken identity,” Patronas said,
“the killer targeting the owners—the Bauers—and killing one of
their guests by mistake.”

He was thinking
of Charlie Manson, who along with his disciples had wiped out six
people without blinking an eye, not realizing his intended victim
was a subletter. “Personally, I think someone targeted the family
for reasons we don’t know. The cat, the old man. It stands to
reason.”

“
I’d
start with the housekeeper,” Tembelos said. “What she said doesn’t
add up. That bit about coming to Patmos on holiday and staying on
as a maid.”

“
Unlikely, Giorgos. She’s in her seventies.”

Papa Michalis
continued to promote the locked room concept. Citing a case in
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
, he described how the
killer had released a cobra through a fake vent and activated its
poisonous energy by whistling. “ ‘Oh, my God, it was the
band,’ the victim shouted, ‘the speckled band.’ ”

“
Fiction, Father, fiction,” Patronas said impatiently.
“Remember? We discussed it.”

“
My
point is if you are determined to kill someone, a lock is no
deterrent. Sometimes murderers are ingenious. Using a cobra as a
murder weapon is brilliant when you think about it. Absolutely
brilliant. No fingerprints involved, no way to trace it back to
you. The snake does all the work.”

“
I
repeat, Father, there is no snake involved here. A stone maybe, but
no snake.”

“
A
stone? What makes you think that?”

And around they
went again, weighing the possibilities. The victim had been hit on
the head, but with what? A hammer or a rock? A shovel or pickax?
Rock, scissors, paper.

Forget swimming,
Patronas told himself. I might as well drown myself.

At one point,
Evangelos launched into a long, convoluted discourse on terrorism,
which no one paid much attention to. “Christodoulos Xeros of
November Seventeenth escaped in January and he’s threatening to
organize the Greeks to fight against the austerity measures. He
might be making a move here against the Germans. We need to go to
Lipsi and speak with the authorities there, see if there’s been any
movement in or out. Could be the Greek terrorists have liaised with
Osama Bin Laden.”

“
Liaised?” Tembelos raised his eyebrows. “Such a big word,
Evangelos, ‘liaised.’ ”

“
Evangelos, they are all in jail,” Patronas snapped. “November
Seventeenth is gone. They’re history.”

“
I
spoke to Athens again and they want us to explore the possibility.
‘Leave no stone unturned,’ they said.”

And back they
were to where they’d started. Rocks, scissors, paper.

“
I
think it all comes down to history,” Patronas finally said. “We
keep coming back to it. It’s the operative word.”

Patronas swam for
a long time that night, rolling around like a seal in the shallows
before paddling out into the harbor. He trailed after a departing
ship, one of the Blue Star ferries, floating up and down on its
massive wake, watching the single light of the boat move back and
forth across the water like the fiery eye of the Cyclops. There was
a warning buoy in the middle of the harbor, and he swam toward
it.

According to a
local legend, a sorcerer named Kynops had fought with St. John
there, lost the battle and been turned into a rock, where he
remained to this day, petrified and unmoving at the bottom of the
sea. Hence the buoy. There were many such tales in Greece,
describing how pagan forces had been defeated by the new order,
Christianity. They dated from the time the two traditions had
overlapped, the power of the saints gradually overtaking that of
the gods on Mount Olympus—but then again, not quite. You could
still find depictions of St. Dionysius with vine leaves in his
hair, nearly identical to his ancient counterpart, the wine-sodden
god Dionysus, and there was no question that Prophet Ilias, saint
of the mountaintops, was a reincarnation of the Greek god, Apollo,
both of them chasing across the sky in fiery chariots.

Antigone Balis
had told him the story of Kynops that morning, saying many people
on Patmos still believed it.

“
The
coast guard has tried to dynamite the rock many times,” she’d said.
“It’s a hazard to ships. But they’ve never succeeded, and fish
caught anywhere near it taste foul.”

“
What?
Like sulfur?”

“
Stop
teasing,” she’d said and swatted his hand.

Patronas smiled,
remembering the exchange. It had felt like flirting. Maybe it
was.

Sticking his head
underwater, he searched for the rock, wanting to tell her that he’d
seen it, but it was close to midnight; the water was dark and
impenetrable and he saw nothing.

He grabbed onto
the buoy and rested for a moment, fatigue washing over him. Made of
metal, it rocked back and forth under his weight, clanging
softly.

Releasing it,
Patronas swam farther out into the harbor. He was a good swimmer
and moved quickly through the water. A sailboat was anchored not
far from him and he could hear people talking on board, the trill
of a woman’s laughter. The lights of Skala glimmered in the
distance, but where he was, all was darkness.

The woman’s laugh
came again.

For a moment his
solitude overwhelmed him.

“
I’m
so alone.”

Everywhere people
were enjoying the summer’s night, but for him there was nothing.
Antigone Balis or someone like her was a dream, a hopeless
dream.

“
So
alone,” he said again.

Dimitra, his dead
parents, the only family he’d ever known, all of them lost or soon
would be. Where had it all gone? His hopes for children, a house
full of toys and laughter? He lifted up a handful of seawater and
let it run through his fingers.

All my life I’ve
been an onlooker, he thought. Maybe that’s why I became a
policeman, so I could peek through a keyhole because I’m unable to
open the door. My only friends are a priest who talks too much and
a cop who barely talks at all. He didn’t count Evangelos
Demos.

He lingered at
the buoy a few more minutes before starting back, swimming at a
leisurely pace. The stars were so near, he felt like he could reach
up and grab them, cast them into the water and watch them explode
like fireworks in its inky depths. He could see the entire length
of the Milky Way, gauzy and bright with stars, follow it with his
eyes as if it were a road across the heavens. He wondered what lay
beyond it—if the universe went on forever, expanding, like people
said.

Maybe, like his
mother believed, there was a heaven and he’d find his way there one
day. Somehow he doubted it. No, probably he’d be buried in the dirt
when his time came and that would be that. Otherwise, his grave
would be as it was tonight, dark and solitary, the sense of life
being lived all around him, just beyond his reach.

Patronas was
sound asleep when the priest barged in and shook him awake. He had
taken Patronas’ notebook the previous night, saying he wanted to
study it downstairs before turning in, and had it open in his
hands. He was very agitated, vibrating like a tuning
fork.

“
The
maid, Maria Georgiou, is she really from Aghios
Stefanos?”

Patronas
nodded.

“
Aghios Stefanos in northern Greece?” Papa Michalis’ voice
rose. “It’s important. There are other villages with the same
name.”

“
Judging by her accent, that would be my conclusion, Father.
‘
Tha si
’ instead of ‘
tha sou.
’ Epirus for
sure.”

The old man
seemed strangely exhilarated. Holmes closing in on
Moriarty.

“
What
is it, Father? Tell me.”

“
Aghios Stefanos has a terrible history. The Nazis ….” His
voice rose. “You must remember what happened there. You must have
learned about it in school. It was one of the worst massacres of
the war. Not as bad as Kalavryta and Distomo, but a tragedy,
nonetheless. They killed whole families, women and children, and
beat the village priest to death. That’s how I came to know the
story. They talked about it in the seminary when I was a student
and held a memorial service for him on the anniversary of the day.
August sixteenth, I still remember, it was—the day after the
Assumption of the Virgin, if you can imagine. They said people were
asleep in their beds when the soldiers came and that some of them
tried to escape by wading across the river. The Nazis shot them,
too. The water ran red for days.”

“
How
many?”

“
I
don’t know exactly. A hundred, maybe fifty or sixty more. All
non-combatants.”

“
Maria
Georgiou said her father was a priest.”

“
If
that is indeed true, this might well have been an act of revenge,
Yiannis.”

Patronas nodded.
“As a motive, it’s a good one.”

“
A
tragedy if it was.” The priest’s voice was sorrowful.
“ ‘Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two
graves.’ ”

“
That
yours or did you read it somewhere?”

“
It’s
Chinese, Confucius.” He continued, “Nearly all religions counsel
against revenge. It says in Romans,
Avenge not yourselves …
for it is written, vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the
Lord
. The Lord, not you or me, Yiannis. The Lord. Maria
Georgiou was the daughter of a priest. She should have known
that.”

“
Seventy years is a long time to wait, Father. Maybe she got
tired of waiting on the Lord.”

P
atronas immediately telephoned Athens, thinking he’d
better tread carefully. He had no proof that Maria Georgiou was
responsible. It could be coincidence that the daughter of a victim
of the Nazis was in the house with that family, but he doubted it.
The murder of Walter Bechtel might well have been a revenge
killing, a kind of geriatric score settling. Still, he needed hard
evidence. The tragic history of one’s birthplace is hardly
admissible in a court of law, and as he’d told Papa Michalis, the
war was a long time ago. It didn’t help that his suspect was a
seventy-eight-year-old woman, and as a general rule, women that age
didn’t beat people’s brains in, no matter what the provocation.
Also, there was no evidence that the victim had been anywhere near
Aghios Stefanos during the war or taken part in the massacre of its
inhabitants.

Maria Georgiou
was a long shot, he knew, but at this point, she was all he
had.