When the Devil's Idle (9 page)

The victim had
occupied a large guest suite on the far side of the house, well
away from where the rest of the family slept. As with everything
else related to the deceased, it was impersonal. There were no
pictures on the walls or photographs in evidence, no books or
papers anywhere, not even a discarded German newspaper. True, it
wasn’t the Bechtel’s house, but usually when people occupied a
space, they left some trace of themselves. Here there was nothing,
almost as if it had been swept clean. The only item of note was an
old-fashioned hearing aid lying on the nightstand.

Patronas picked
up the hearing aid. It looked like it had never been used, the
plastic unmarked and glossy. “Was your uncle deaf?” If so, that
would explain why the old man hadn’t cried out. He’d been taken by
surprise.

The German
nodded. “To a degree, depending on who was speaking and what they
were saying. If you asked him what he wanted for dinner, he’d hear
you perfectly. Other times, not so much. I insisted he get a
hearing aid, but he didn’t like to wear it. He said, ‘If I get one
now, what will I do when I’m old?’ He was like that, my papa,
always making jokes.” Gunther Bechtel looked away.

Patronas opened
the door of the closet and rummaged around. Everything was clean
and relatively new. Pants with elastic waistbands, light-weight
cotton shirts in a variety of colors. There was a row of shoes at
the back of the closet, cloth slippers and a pair of white American
sneakers still in their box. Wrapped in tissue paper, they had
never been worn.

“
You
see,” said Bechtel. “All is in order.”

A chest of
drawers held cotton boxer shorts and rolled-up compression socks
for circulation. In addition, there was a wallet and a black and
white photo of a man and a woman. It was very old, the photo, the
style of the woman’s hair dating from the 1940s.

“
My
parents.” Gunther Bechtel reached over and shut the
drawer.

Initially,
Patronas had wanted to quiz him about the cat, but changed his mind
after hearing the tremor in the man’s voice. He’d discuss it with
Gerta Bechtel when he got the chance, keep her husband in the dark
in case he didn’t know. The cat was a stray, and according to the
little boy, save for the grandfather, no one had been overly
attached to it. As Bechtel had pointed out, Germans weren’t popular
in Greece these days. The cat’s death could have been an act of
vandalism, the equivalent of someone spray painting ‘Fuck Merkel’
on a wall.

He felt like he’d
trespassed enough. “Could this have been a robbery? Did you check
the house after you found him? Was anything missing?”

“
Not
that I’m aware of. As my wife told you, they had just returned from
the beach and were all inside, taking showers. I had recently come
from Africa and was asleep in the bedroom. It is a long journey and
very exhausting, hours and hours in airports and on planes, then
the boat from Leros. Whoever did this might have been planning to
rob the house and my uncle caught them. However, aside from the
usual chair he sat in, nothing appeared disturbed in the garden and
the outside lock had not been tampered with. Sometimes Walter is
careless with the door, so it might even have been left open that
night. I don’t know. You must remember: we are guests here, so we
do not know precisely what belongs. I’ve called my friends and
asked them to return as soon as possible. They’ll know better if
something valuable in the house is missing. Also, they’ll be able
to tell you the names of the people who built the house. Perhaps
one of them kept a key.”

A long,
complicated speech. Apparently, Bechtel had gone over things in his
mind.

“
I
will let you know the results of the examination in Athens.”
Patronas took care not to say the word ‘autopsy’ out
loud.

“
Why
does he need to be examined?” Bechtel asked angrily. “Any fool can
see he was beaten to death.”

“
If
we’re lucky, forensics can establish the weapon.”

“
What
difference does it make? Whatever it was, it killed him. He was a
deaf old man who liked to sleep in the garden. Anyone could have
surprised him. It would have been easy. No trouble at
all.”

“
But
how did they get in?” Patronas asked.

Bechtel continued
to stare at him. “Finding that out is not my job, Chief Officer. It
is yours.”

Patronas thought
about the interview as he walked down the path, going over Gunther
Bechtel’s words again and again in his mind. The German’s remark
about Mossad seemed strange, too emotional a response to what
Patronas had been asking. It could have been a long-standing
resentment—Bechtel saying he was a good man, that those had been
different times, different people—but somehow Patronas didn’t think
so.

Also, the
interaction between the couple felt off. Bechtel did all the
talking, his wife remaining silent except when summoned to endorse
his point of view. And why hadn’t she told her husband about the
cat? A stray, perhaps it hadn’t seemed important to her, or maybe
she’d wanted to preserve the illusion that all was going well for
them on Patmos. The victim had been opposed to the trip, the little
boy had said. Perhaps her husband had been opposed, too.

There was a
puzzling formality about the whole family. Save for a few moments
with Gunther Bechtel, they had all been deeply courteous, and in
spite of their pain, endeavored to answer his questions. Their
words had been thoughtful and precise. They hadn’t wanted to
discuss the war, but who could blame them?

How strange it
all was.

E
vangelos Demos was waiting for Patronas in the square,
and they spoke briefly to the owner of the taverna. The man
volunteered that the two
tavli
players had gone home earlier
that day but would return the following morning. “They’re my wife’s
cousins. They spend every day here.”

A stout man with
a mouthful of crooked teeth, he was cheerful and good natured. He
and his wife were working behind the counter, ladling up food and
handing it to the waiters while they talked to the two policemen.
“Come back tomorrow, Chief Officer,” the owner said. “I’ll round up
the men you want. We can all have breakfast together.”

Patronas
reluctantly agreed, and they arranged to meet the next
day.

“
Food’s good here,” Evangelos Demos said, eyeing the steaming
dishes on the counter. “Let’s take a break and eat.”

They took a table
in the corner. The taverna was bustling, full of foreigners. They
were the only Greeks. The sun had gone down and the whitewashed
buildings of Chora were luminous in the gathering darkness. A man
was going from table to table with an accordion. Patronas
recognized the tune he was playing. “
Pame mia volta sto
feggari,
”—Come Walk with Me in the Moonlight—by Hatzidakis. He
had courted Dimitra to that song.

“
Problem with songs like that is they lead you astray,” he told
Evangelos. “They never tell you what comes after those walks in the
moonlight, when the sun rises and you and your beloved see each
other in the light of day.”

“
You’re right,” Evangelos said. “In my experience, a woman acts
one way before you get married and another way after. Worse, far
worse.”

A string of light
bulbs were strung up overhead, lending the square a festive air. A
group of boys were chasing each other in a nearby alley, full of
bravado as they played a game of their own devising. From the looks
of it, it was a war game, Patronas decided, watching them, full of
shooting and falling down, dramatic dyings, the real Patmos showing
itself in their laughing faces. Alive with people and noise, Chora
felt like an island of light in the encroaching night.

The death of the
old man, Walter Bechtel, seemed very far away.

Evangelos, a
prodigious eater, rejoiced when he saw
kokoretsi
on the
menu—intestines stuffed with offal—and ordered a plateful. His
wife, Sophia, had forbidden him to eat
kokoretsi
, he told
Patronas. “Says it’s full of cholesterol and bad for me. Cheese,
too. Everything I like.”

In addition to
the
kokoretsi,
he requested
loukaniko
—pork
sausage—cheese pies, fried cheese, and cheese croquettes. Away from
Sophia, he was having a free-for-all—a kilo of lamb and a mountain
of fried potatoes.

“
My
wife wants me to lose weight,” he said. “It’s always salads with
her. Six months now, only salads. Maybe a slice of watermelon or a
fistful of grapes. She counts them, the grapes—only seventeen I
get. I can’t sleep at night, I’m so hungry.”

Picking up a lamb
chop, he chewed contentedly. “She made a graph and put it up on the
refrigerator to chart my progress. She bought me a scale, too, so I
could weigh everything that goes in my mouth.”

Patronas watched
him eat for a few minutes. Not a bad idea, the diet, as Evangelos
was the size of a sofa and had been puffing like a locomotive most
of the day.

“
What
did you think of the family?” Evangelos asked. “They hiding
something?”

“
I
don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it. Maybe Gunther Bechtel was
right, what he said about the war—that we’re prejudiced against
Germans.”

“
Of
course we’re prejudiced. They killed a million of us.”

“
We
can’t let our personal feelings interfere with the case, Evangelos.
We have to do our duty.”

“
Duty?
You sound like one of them.” In addition to all the food he’d
consumed, Evangelos had drunk close to two liters of beer. Clowning
around, he raised his arm and gave Patronas the Nazi salute,
shouting, “
Sieg Heil, mein Führer!”
He tried to click his
heels together, but was too fat and tipped the chair
over.

The people at the
surrounding tables turned and looked at them, aghast. Men in
uniforms acting like Nazis. Patronas wanted to die.

It wasn’t Stalin
he was working with, it was Groucho Marx.

Laughing,
Evangelos fought to right his chair. “Had a little trouble there.
Good thing I didn’t try goose stepping.”

Patronas moved
the beer out of his reach. “You said there weren’t a lot of people
here in Chora. If we separate, we should be able to interview most
of them within the next twenty-four hours. See if anyone saw a
stranger passing through, someone who didn’t belong.”

“
They’re foreigners. How are we going to talk to them if we
don’t speak their language?”

“
You
took a photo of the victim. Pass it around and gauge their
reaction.”

“
We
can’t just go barging into people’s houses.”

“
Sure
we can, Evangelos. We’re cops.”

“
I
don’t know, Yiannis. It seems a little intrusive.”

“
Intrusive? A man was murdered.” Patronas fought to keep his
voice down. People were still looking at them.

He counted out
fifty euros and threw the money down on the table. “Come on, we
need to speak to the man who found the body, establish a time line.
It’s important. After that, we’ll call it a night.”

“
No
fruit?” his colleague asked plaintively. “No coffee?”

“
No,
Evangelos. No fruit, no coffee. After we interview the gardener, I
want you to go back to the police station, call the lab and get the
results of the autopsy. We’ll need every detail. Bring it with you
when you pick me up in the morning.”

Poor Evangelos.
Instead of a slice of watermelon, he was going to get an earful of
subcranial hemorrhage, followed by hypostasis, blood pooling in the
lower extremities. It would go on for a while, the discussion. The
coroner was nothing if not thorough.

Sieg Heil
,
yourself,
mein
Fatso.

The gardener, a
young Albanian with an earnest air, lived not far from the taverna
with his wife and four-year-old son. He appeared relieved to see
them and started talking immediately, saying he’d been picking
oregano on the hillside and had arrived at the house later than
usual. He’d seen the man lying on the ground and had run to help
him. That’s when he saw the blood and realized the man was
dying.

“
Old
like my grandfather. I shook him a time or two, but I knew he
wasn’t going to wake up, that he was gone. I just hoped ….”
His face was stricken, his eyes damp.

“
What
time was this?”

“
Eight, eight thirty. We were told to wait for the authorities
to get there. They didn’t come for a long time, over an hour. There
was much confusion.”

“
Why
did you come so late?”

“
I
always water after it cools off. Can’t water during the day. Is too
hot. Usually I am earlier, but I like I said, that day, I am
getting the oregano.”

“
You
said you pick it on the hillside. Do you go there often?” Patronas
was hoping he’d seen someone, could provide them with a
lead.