Fire on the Island

by Timothy Jay Smith

  That morning, longing for Omar, anguish overwhelmed her. Only thirty years old and doomed to be in mourning for the rest of her life. She couldn’t imagine anyone after Omar. When the skinheads cut away his cheeks, they cut out her heart, and when Omar committed suicide, he killed her, too. She sobbed, wanting the life that had been stolen from them, preferring to join him in death than endure a life without him.

  The cats, risking her swift kicks, rubbed against Vassoula’s legs to remind her that they wanted to be fed. She stomped her foot to scatter them and went back inside. Opening the kibble bag sent them into a zigzagging frenzy between her feet, and that time she did kick at them. “Go away!” she cried, and hurled kibble at them, which they dodged before darting around to scarf it down. “I hate you! God, I hate you!” she screamed while throwing more handfuls at them. Her laughter was seeded with madness as the animals cowered under the furniture to eat the pellets that rolled there.

  Takis walked in and saw the kibble on the floor. “I see you fed the cats.”

  “They were hungry.”

  “They’re always hungry in the morning.”

  “What did you eat for breakfast? Cock?”

  “Don’t start.”

  “You should never have gone to Australia. Look what it turned you into.”

  “I was always like this.”

  “You’re going to end up just like father, hiding behind rocks to have sex.”

  “No I’m not. I’m going back to Australia where I don’t have to hide behind rocks to have sex. Why did you hate him so much? Didn’t you feel sorry for him at all?”

  “He was pathetic. He settled for Zeeta because he’d been caught doing something with another man one time. He didn’t try to explain it away as a youthful experiment or some drunken mistake. Or that he’d been seduced against his will. Over one incident, he settled for her, for a nothing life. What kind of man is that?”

  “A gay man in Greece,” Takis answered. “Most of them end up unhappily married. Sometimes you forget that he rescued us from the orphanage. They both did.”

  “I don’t forget. I only wish they had been different parents.”

  He poured kibble into a bowl, which brought the cats running. “They were who they were.”

  “Neither one of them had a life, especially him, because of your kind of love.”

  “You’re as bad as the rest,” Takis said. “What kind of life could he have had? He was never going to have a relationship with a man.”

  “Is Superman the right man for you?”

  “Yeah, Nick’s my type, only he doesn’t live in Melbourne.”

  “I didn’t know there were types, only faggots.”

  “Okay, he is a faggot, if that’s the word you want to use. He’s also an FBI agent,” Takis boasted.

  “FBI?”

  “The American police.”

  “I know what FBI is.”

  “So he’s not a faggot in the way you think.”

  “He must be investigating the fires,” Vassoula suggested. “Why else would he be here?”

  “He says he’s writing a book.”

  “Be careful what you say to him.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He might try to make a connection to you. In fact, he might have come looking for you.”

  “Why?”

  “Why do you think?”

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  BY THE TIME NICK ORDERED his breakfast at Lydia’s, it was already brunch. While waiting for his food, he sipped coffee and eavesdropped on the conversation a couple of tables away between Apostolis, the village’s part-time Everyman, and the Coast Guard captain. Occasionally a few words drifted his way: drowned, saved her, and Albanian boy chief among them. When Athina, not Ridi, brought his plate of runny beans and sausage, he realized that Ridi was probably the Albanian boy they were talking about.

  “More coffee?” she asked.

  “Never ask, just pour.” He tipped his head in the direction of the two men. “It sounds like something happened.”

  “It’s so horrible!”

  “What is?”

  “Five men drowned.”

  Athina told him how Ridi, on the beach to collect jewels for her crown, had witnessed a small raft scuttled too far from shore, and without a single thought for his own safety dove into the rough sea, managing to rescue the only woman, but apparently all the men drowned. “He’s kind of a hero, isn’t he?” she asked.

  “He risked his life to save someone, and that definitely makes him a hero,” Nick assured her. “Is he okay?”

  “I think so.”

  The girl didn’t sound confident. The young waiter had been shaken when he telephoned to say he couldn’t come to work that morning. He was still shivering from the cold sea and shocked by the experience. “Isn’t it horrible that people are so desperate?” Athina lamented. “Sometimes they even try to swim from Turkey and drown when they’re almost here!”

  She broke into tears and fled. Nick ate quickly, hoping for an opportunity to speak to the Coast Guard captain. It came when Apostolis’s phone beeped. After checking his message, he said a hasty goodbye.

  Nick leaned over to say, “Yeia sas, Kyrios.”

  The man glanced up. “Yeia sas.”

  “You are the captain of the Coast Guard here, is that right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I saw you at the church a couple of nights ago.”

  “I recall you, too. Are you visiting for a few days?”

  “I’m writing a novel.”

  “Set here in Vourvoulos?”

  “It could be. I’m still working on my story. In fact, you might be able to help. Do you mind if I join you for a minute?”

  Before the man could say anything, Nick was on his feet sticking out his hand. “Nick Damigos,” he introduced himself.

  “Captain Tsounis. Are you Greek?”

  Nick slipped into a seat. “Greek American.”

  “You speak good Greek.”

  “My mother insisted that we speak it at home. Athina told me about the raft capsizing this morning.”

  The captain’s expression turned grim. “It was a rough sea but we had it on the radar and thought it was going to be okay. Whoever was steering it knew what he was doing. We were more worried about a second raft and were headed for it when the first guy slashed his raft too soon. They do that so we can’t send them back.”

  “Are they from the second raft?” Nick asked, pointing to the dock where young men smoked, kids ran up and down, and women spread clothing on the wall to dry.

  Captain Tsounis shook his head. “No, the second raft made it to shore. We picked those people out of the water yesterday. If they get tossed overboard and don’t drown, they don’t have to walk to town. They get a bus.”

  “Lucky them.”

  “There’s nothing lucky about them, and when they get to the camps, some are going to wish they had died. All you smell is shit. Shit everywhere.”

  “Can I ask you something about the fires?”

  “Sure.”

  “I know that Lydia’s map shows the fires coming closer, but why’s it assumed the whole village is the target? Why not something more specific?”

  “Like what?”

  “The Coast Guard station,” Nick suggested.

  “We haven’t had any direct threats.”

  “You rescue refugees. Some people would prefer that you let them drown.”

  “Why would they make a game of it?”

  “What’s your theory why someone would want to burn down the village?”

  “No one has listened to my theories in the past,” Captain Tsounis answered, clearly bitter.

  “About the eleven fires?” Nick probed.

  “No. The Takis Fire.”

  “The Takis Fire?”

  “Named for the kid who works next door. Takis Vatis. Both his parents were killed in it.”

  “That sounds like it might be a good story for a book,” Nick
said.

  “If you write murder mysteries, it’d be one hell of a story,” the captain agreed. “The day it happened, Takis took home a spare bottle of cooking gas. It leaked, and when his father walked in smoking a cigarette, it caused an explosion.”

  “Was it suspicious?”

  “Takis closed up the kitchen when he left the gas.”

  “Closed it up?”

  “It was usually his job to close the kitchen shutters at sunset. Zeeta, his mother, had some peculiar habits and that was one of them. He claimed he did it early because he wasn’t sure he’d be back by sunset. It trapped the gas.”

  “It could still be an accident.”

  “There was an investigation. Nobody could prove it wasn’t accidental, but nobody believed it was, either. Everybody knew how much Takis hated his mother. She was bedridden from a fall and couldn’t have stopped the gas in the kitchen even if she smelled it.”

  “So you’re saying it was murder? Of his father, too?”

  “Nobody can say if he intended to kill Markos or not, but there was no love lost in that family.”

  “It’s a good mystery all right,” Nick said.

  “The real mystery is why the boy’s not in jail. He left that gas bottle leaking. Intentionally or not, he should be in jail for manslaughter. I lost a man in the fire when the first bottle, still hooked to the stove, exploded. We thought that was the bottle that had already exploded. We didn’t know about the second one or we wouldn’t have gone so close.” Captain Tsounis finished his coffee. “If you’ll excuse me, I have an unhappy report to make.”

  The men stood and shook hands.

  “Thanks for your time,” Nick said, “and your story ideas.”

  “You never said, what’s your book about?”

  “After you told me about the Takis Fire, I’m thinking it might be a book about heroes.”

  “Heroes?”

  “Stories of men and women who risk their lives—or lose them— saving other people. You know, people who die fighting fires to save a village, or risk drowning to save a young woman tossed overboard in a storm.”

  For the first time, the taciturn captain smiled. “It sounds like a book I’d like to read,” he said, before disappearing into the Coast Guard station.

  Nick, his mind reeling from what he had learned, realized he needed to know a lot more about the Takis Fire, and Takis himself. He pulled out his phone, went into encryption mode, and typed:

  SUBJ: VATIS Takis, male, 22. Req background check. Adopted by VATIS Markos. Implicated in “Takis Fire” 3 yrs ago. Both parents and one Coast Guardsman killed. Can you locate official report?

  He reread it, and whoosh! it was gone.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  RIDI TRUDGED UP THE PATH to the medical clinic with trepidation. Growing up in Albania, he learned that the last place you wanted to go was a hospital because the likelihood was that it would be the last place you ever went. Hospitals were only for the extremely ill, which was ironic, because the doctors had little to dispense except advice, and usually for nothing more exotic than the flu. When he arrived at the small clinic’s door, a handwritten note taped to it read Closed today except for emergency. He knew the reason was Jura and felt like fleeing. She had been unconscious and so sallow when they loaded her stretcher into Apostolis’s pickup, he worried what bad news might await him inside.

  He tried the door handle.

  It turned.

  He stepped into the waiting room. A half dozen straight-backed chairs were pushed against a wall decorated with cheerful paintings by schoolchildren. Two doors led off the room, both closed. “Hello?” he said. “Yeia sas?”

  A moment later, a door opened and the doctor stepped out. A mass of red curly hair fell to the shoulders of her spotless white coat. “The clinic is closed today,” she said. “Do you have an emergency?”

  “Is Jura here?”

  “Are you Ridi?”

  “Yes.”

  “She asked for you.”

  “She comes from my village.”

  “She’s very weak.”

  “Will she be okay?”

  “I think so. But she lost her child.”

  “Her child?”

  “She was pregnant. Around six months.”

  Ridi paled. “Six months?”

  “Under other circumstances, I might have been able to save him.”

  “Him?”

  “Yes, a little boy. He had suffered too much trauma. Jura was hemorrhaging. It was all I could do to keep her from bleeding to death.”

  Thunderstruck by the implications of what the doctor had said, Ridi asked, “Can I see her?”

  She took him into the second room. Light sneaked through the shuttered windows to spill across the bed’s rumpled sheets. Ridi stepped up to the bed, still in shock that Jura was the person in it, and he had saved her from drowning only that morning.

  “She’s asleep. Do you want to stay?” the doctor asked.

  “I think I should.”

  She put a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. “Are you the father?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She’ll be glad to see you when she wakes up.”

  The doctor left, closing the door behind her.

  As soon as she did, Ridi leaned closer to the girl’s face, drifts of her fair hair on her forehead and pillow. He couldn’t believe it was she: he couldn’t reckon the chain of events that put her in that clinic’s bed. How many coincidences did that involve? Though not so coincidental if she had come looking for him, which he feared she probably had. He’d last seen her in a bed, with her hair similarly splayed on a pillow, though it hadn’t been limp and dulled by residue from the sea, but the beautiful lush hair of the prettiest girl in the village. If he had stayed, they would likely have married. He could have had his choice of the village girls, being the brightest, most ambitious boy his age; yet because of those same qualities, he wanted none of them—he didn’t want to be trapped in a life as predictable as the sunrise, barely scraping by, his chances of getting ahead forever confounded by a system fueled by corruption, not hard work. Ridi didn’t dream of seeing the big world, but settling someplace where he would have a chance to make an honest living. So he set his goals, saving toward the day he could emigrate legally to Greece, and finally announced a date for his departure—much to the dismay of the village girls, not only because he was the most desirable among the lot of current bachelors, but he was also their best hope, too, of escaping their mean lives.

  Jura had been the most distraught, convinced if he stayed he would marry her. She’d have the best life a village woman could expect, because her husband would be kinder and gentler than the others; but if he got away, he would be gone forever. As the day of his departure approached, she finally relented on the notion of marriage, confessing that she had resigned herself to a future of enduring other men she might sleep with, though Ridi would be the only man she ever truly desired. She had to have him before he left. Ultimately, he succumbed to her seduction, meeting secretly his last week, freely pleasing each other; but if her intent had been to change Ridi’s mind, she had underestimated his determination. However compatible their lovemaking proved to be, it wasn’t enough to snare a life of bigger dreams.

  How different she looked that last afternoon in their village, flush from sex, not so pale that death could have already snatched her were it not for her shallow breathing. From bed, she had watched him pull on his pants, tears spilling from her eyes. He had bent down to brush her lips with a farewell kiss, brushing back strands of hair stuck to her forehead; and now the sadness he felt at that moment six months earlier returned to him in that clinic room. Tears welled in his eyes, sorry for her miserable condition, and feeling unaccountably responsible for it. As he had before, he brushed back the hair on her forehead.

  Jura’s eyes fluttered open. “Ridi?”

  “It’s me.”

  “I found you.” She smiled weakly.

  “You came looking fo
r me?”

  “Your father told me where you were.”

  “I wasn’t hiding.”

  “I never heard from you.”

  “I am never sure what to write.”

  “That you still love me?”

  “We said goodbye, Jura. I couldn’t write more than that.”

  “But you did. I saw you, bent over a table, writing each word to me.”

  “I never did.”

  “I memorized all the ways you had said you loved me.”

  “I never said it.”

  “I brought you our baby. I want us to be together when our baby is born.”

  “Our baby?”

  “It’s our baby. I’m sure. He’s always kicking. He’s restless like you. Here.” She tugged at his hand and pressed it to her belly. “Do you feel him kicking?”

  Ridi pretended to feel for it. “He must be asleep. You should sleep, too. You’ve been through a lot.”

  “You won’t leave me again, will you?”

  “I won’t leave you.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise. Now go to sleep.”

  When he was sure she had drifted off, he left the room.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  AN ARSONIST INTENT ON BURNING down the village is likely motivated by a slight to him or his family profound enough to have the weight of history behind it. Only eternal guilt demanded such fierce justice, or so Nick conjectured as he descended the spiral steps into the City Hall’s archives. Otherwise, why not just slash someone’s tires for revenge, or poison his dog? No, in the arsonist’s mind, the whole village was guilty of something.

  The mayor had said that the Greeks adopted worry beads from the Turks. For two days, Nick mulled that over, wondering if there was a connection between the ornate beads in a file drawer and the cheap ones coming in the mail. He sensed, if the old beads could talk, he’d know the who and why of his case. Opening the drawer, he picked up a string of them, one by one slipping the smooth red beads down the short chain, musing on how many worries had been counted on them. Unlike the cheap plastic ones arriving in the mail, the old beads had heft, and he flipped them around his hand, remembering his father instructing him how to use the komboloi in the same conversation that he taught him about the birds and the bees. Only years later did he understand how stressful that conversation must have been for his father.