When the Devil's Idle (4 page)

Few places played
Greek music anymore, Patronas thought glumly. His culture was
vanishing; the young wanted no part of it.

The owner of a
taverna, in an apron, was sitting outside. He rose to his feet when
he saw them and began questioning Evangelos Demos about the murder,
the specifics of what had been done to the German. Two old men
playing a game of
tavli
, backgammon, nearby stopped their
game to listen.

Patronas wondered
how the taverna owner had learned the news so quickly, who might
have told him. Not the family of the dead man, that was for sure.
No, the language difference would have precluded that. Perhaps
Evangelos Demos had said something; he’d have to check.

Mentally, he made
a list of things to do. As soon as he was done inspecting the crime
scene and the victim, he’d come back to interview the two
tavli
players. Pensioners, they’d be only too happy to put
their game aside and gossip. Perhaps they’d seen something, someone
passing through Chora the previous night, or overheard an argument
in one of the houses. Could be this was a domestic matter—the old
man killed by a relative as sometimes happened. Fights sound the
same in any language. Even if the
tavli
players didn’t
understand German, they’d know a fight if they heard one. At the
very least, they could tell him who belonged in this sequestered
world and who’d spread the news about the killing.

“
The
crime scene is southwest of the village,” Evangelos Demos said,
“just below the church of Profitis Elias, the highest point of land
on the island.”

As with many of
the estates on Chora, the garden where the victim had been found
was enclosed by thick stone walls. There appeared to be only one
entrance, a metal door with a tiny, barred window.

The wind
increased in intensity as they approached the door, ruffling their
clothes and threatening to pull them off the hill. They were at the
highest point of land in Patmos, walking along the curving spine of
rock that defined the island like the skeletal underpinnings of a
great fish.

The sun had risen
and the sky was already white with heat. The priest was exhausted
and had to be helped along by Tembelos. His black robe dragged in
the dust.

Pulling out a
handkerchief, Patronas mopped his brow. He wished he’d thought to
bring water.

He looked back
the way they’d come. Reaching as far as the eye could see, the
Aegean Sea dominated the view, its surface gleaming in the
sunlight. A Greek fishing boat was making its way into the harbor,
its red hull bright against the water. He counted off the islands
in the distance—Lipsoi, Arkoi, Marathi. No wonder the Germans had
chosen this site. He was so high, he felt as if he could see the
very curve of the earth.

The area around
the estate appeared to be deserted, an arid wasteland used mainly
to graze animals. Save for Profitas Elias and a few buildings along
the road, there was nothing. A herd of goats was standing in the
shadow of a withered olive tree, their bells tinkling softly in the
wind.

An old woman in
black opened the metal door, bowing slightly when she saw them, her
face grim. Taking a step back, she gestured for them to
enter.

The grounds of
the estate were extensive—more than four
stremata
, or acres,
Patronas estimated—and densely planted with trees. After the glare
of the sun, it took him a few minutes to adjust to the gloom, the
sense of being in a forest, albeit man-made. Although he could hear
the wind outside, inside everything was peaceful and smelled
faintly of flowers, although another odor kept breaking through, a
far uglier scent. There was a fountain at the center of the garden,
decorated by a life-sized statue of a child playing a flute. The
corpse was on the the pavement beneath it. The statue seemed
grotesque, given the circumstances, as if it were serenading the
dead man.

The victim was
lying on his back in a puddle of pink, scummy water, his sightless
blue eyes staring into space. Flies were crawling all over his
body, their buzzing loud in the quiet, and there was water
everywhere. It had mixed in with the blood, thin rivulets of it
running down and soaking the stones of the terrace.

Seeking to
evaluate the scene, Patronas studied the fountain and the garden
beyond. The exterior walls were at least two and a half, maybe even
three meters high, certainly higher than a man could reach. He
wondered how the killer got in, if he’d used a ladder. Could be
this was an inside job.

Evangelos told
him everything he knew, which wasn’t much. Usually the gardener
came in the evening to water the flowers and had duly arrived on
the night in question. He’d seen the man lying there, hurried to
investigate and slipped on the blood.

Patronas could
see his footprints now, circling around the body.

“
What
time was this?” he asked.

“
Eight, eight thirty p.m. The victim was still alive then. He
died immediately after.”

Contrary to what
Evangelos had originally told him, there’d been a significant time
lapse between the phone call to the station and his arrival on the
scene.

“
The
man who reported it, the gardener, is foreign. ‘
Nekros
ilikiomenos anthropos,
’ he kept saying.” Old dead man. “Also,
there was a lot of yelling in the background, which made it hard to
hear. To make a long story short, the dispatcher misunderstood him.
He assumed the victim had died of natural causes and that the
family wanted a hearse. It took me some time to get things
straightened out.”

“
When
did you realize he’d been murdered?”

“
Around nine thirty, maybe ten. I called you right
after.”

Here, there,
everywhere … incompetence. Even if the man had died of natural
causes, Evangelos should have come to the house the minute he
heard, coroner in tow, inspected the body and signed off on
it.

“
As
far as I know, no one has been murdered on Patmos since the war,”
Evangelos went on, his tone defensive. “My staff is inexperienced.
Aside from this incident, Patmos is a pretty safe
place.”

“
Oh,
yeah,” Giorgos Tembelos said sarcastically, “aside from
this
.”

He’d been there
the night of the shoot-out on Chios and helped Patronas gather up
the dead goats and bury them. “
Axthos epi gis
,” he’d called
Evangelos Demos forever after. A burden to the earth.

As Evangelos had
said, tape was strung up around the crime scene, and there was a
tarp suspended from the trees high above the body. Although the
garden was shady, the victim was out in the open on the paved
terrace. The square of canvas had been a good idea, offering a
measure of protection against the sun.

Evangelos assured
Patronas the victim was just as the gardener had found him. “It
being August, we did our best to keep him cool.”

That explained
where the water had come from. The idiot had packed the body in
ice—so much for forensics.

“
It
kept melting and I had to get more and dump it on him. I must have
unloaded fifty kilos.” The whine was back in his voice.

Patronas waved
him off. “Where’s the family?”

“
Inside.”

Getting out his
notebook, Patronas scribbled some notes. After suiting up in his
Tyvek gear, he knelt down next to the corpse and studied it
closely. He noticed a tawny residue near the victim’s feet and dug
up a piece of it with his scalpel and placed it in an evidence
bag.

Curious, he
sniffed the open bag and passed it over to Tembelos.

“
What
do you think?”

“
Tallow,” Tembelos said.

Patronas nodded.
Someone had been burning candles.

Every church in
Greece had tallow candles in the narthex; the pious lit them when
they entered as part of the ritual. Perhaps a Greek had indeed been
involved.

Also, what looked
like flower petals were scattered along the length of the body, a
mixture of carnations and purple blossoms, lilacs maybe, although
it wasn’t the season. Not many, but enough.

Spooked, he
looked back at the house. “You interview the family?”

“
Not
yet,” Evangelos Demos said. “I was waiting for you.”

“
What
did the coroner say?”

“
I
told you, we don’t have a coroner. A local doctor fills in, a
recent graduate of medical school doing his
agrotiko
,
two-year service in the countryside. He was here earlier, said
whoever did it shattered his skull.”

Patronas didn’t
like where this was going. “Did he have any idea what was
used?”

“
No.
We searched the area, but we didn’t find anything.”

“
You’re sure nobody touched the body?”

“
Only
the doctor. I swear, and me with the ice. It’s just the way the
gardener found it.”

Patronas and his
team quickly went to work. Tembelos marked off the crime scene with
chalk and took photographs, while Patronas sketched the location of
the body and noted its proximity to the house, calling out
measurements to the priest, who entered everything in a large
spiral notebook.

“
The
murder book,” the priest called it, saying the words with
reverence; homicide in all its various manifestations was a serious
business.

“
I
know it seems unlikely,” he’d once told Patronas, “but the Bible
was the first murder book. Cain and Abel. Humanity hasn’t changed
much since it was written. Brother against brother, man against
man. According to biologists, the species we are most closely
related to—share ninety-nine percent of our DNA with—is the
chimpanzee, the only other creature on earth that wars needlessly
against its own kind, that kills for pleasure, for
sport.”

Evangelos was
standing off to one side, watching Patronas work.

A large man, he
was packed tightly into his Tyvek suit and booties. An astronaut
with elephantitis.

“
The
pattern of the blood splatter is intriguing,” Patronas said,
looking over at him. “It ran down the back of his neck first, and
then it went everywhere. I think we can assume the killer hit him
in the back of the head, the blow weakening his skull until it
shattered like a piece of glass. If you look carefully, you’ll see
where brain matter leaked out onto the pavement.” He pointed to a
smeary area on the ground.

Raising his hands
over his head, he demonstrated how the killer had gone after the
old man. “The first blow probably killed him. But the murderer just
kept going, as if trying to obliterate him, erase him from the face
of the earth. Man must have hated him.”

Tembelos was
still taking pictures. “Might have been a woman,” he
said.

Patronas raised
his eyebrows. “Equal opportunity for murderers, Giorgos? Since when
did you become such a feminist?”

“
I’m
just saying we need to keep an open mind.” Tembelos mopped his face
with his sleeve. “You about done? Sun’s up. We should get the body
out of here.”

“
Give
me fifteen more minutes.”

Patronas tested
the limbs for rigor and took the victim’s temperature, then
gathered up the petals and bagged them. Given the copious amounts
of watery liquid, he thought at first the victim might have been
stabbed too, but on closer inspection he saw the damage to the
skull was extensive; the river of blood had begun and ended
there.

Seizing the
victim’s chin, he turned the man’s head toward him. In addition to
the swastika, the German had other scars. There were three of them,
orderly and nearly uniform in depth. The biggest, five to six
centimeters long, ran the length of the jaw bone. A much smaller
one marked the bridge of the nose, and the third extended from the
victim’s mouth almost to his ear, making him look cartoonish, as if
smiling even in the rictus of death. They looked to be very old—the
scar tissue faded with age—unlike the sticky wound on his
forehead.

Patronas asked
Tembelos to take a close-up photograph of the victim’s face and
wrote a note to himself about the location of the three scars,
thinking he’d send the information to police headquarters in
Athens, see what the forensics people could tell him. Perhaps the
German had been hurt during the war and medics had botched the
surgery. The scars had that kind of look, as if someone had sought
to repair his face and hadn’t fitted the damaged parts back
together properly.

He’d been a
heavy-set man, and in spite of his advanced age, exuded strength.
Although he’d been dead for over thirty hours, putrefaction had
only just begun, the swelling in the abdominal region barely
visible.

Opening the
victim’s robe, Patronas was startled to see he was naked, his
scrotum distended in death, the thick gray hair around his genitals
like the fur of a wolf.

Patronas got to
his feet, thinking there were too many mysteries here. He should
send the body to forensic specialists and let them deal with
it.

“
Why
bother killing someone this old?” Tembelos asked, stepping around
the corpse. “Why not wait a couple of years and let God take
him?”