Fire on the Island

by Timothy Jay Smith

  Look straight up. Those were Lydia’s only instructions.

  Nick used the binoculars to scan the ancient terraces that ascended like a giant’s staircase for any sign of the fire, or a building. That had been the only consistent thing about the fires: they were always near ruins. A village, a settlement, a house. Sometimes only a broken wall remained to attest that someone had once lived there. It could have been happenstance, but Nick thought not. At the top, he spotted the corner of an old house. Whatever path to it that likely existed was no longer evident. No doubt that’s why Lydia hadn’t given more precise bearings for that particular fire; she hadn’t climbed the giant’s steep steps.

  The terraced plots were still farmed. Rolled-up black nets had been placed under the olive trees in readiness for the approaching harvest. Stones stacked in the corners to make it possible to climb from one level to the next, though often they were at opposite ends of the terraces. Nick zigzagged his way up the hill, which grew steeper, and the terraces eventually narrowed to four or five trees in a single line.

  About halfway up, it was obvious he’d missed an easier approach to the old house but pushed on. The physical effort helped keep his mind off Takis and his possible culpability for the fires. The mayor had said that everyone seemed ready to damn him, which always made Nick as suspicious of the finger pointers as he was their target. Though he had to admit, he could more easily build a case against Takis than anyone else. Timing, opportunity, motive: on circumstantial evidence, Takis could be found guilty on all counts.

  Nick clambered over the last wall of stones and found himself facing a small house, missing its roof and windows, but the walls, cracked and stained, were largely intact. The island’s ubiquitous wild lavender roses had wrapped themselves around a stone well outside the front door. He could imagine the family life in the yard. Chickens underfoot, laundry on a line, wife forever sweeping their patch of hard dirt while the farmer, from his perch, admired his olive trees planted all the way down to the road. Or had there been a road back when the last family lived there? More likely a donkey trail.

  He peered through the broken door at the leaves littering the floor. He entered, stomping his feet to reveal any snakes hiding under them but none showed themselves. Only patches of the original stucco remained on the walls. A broken sink suggested where the kitchen had been. Through a doorway into a second room, he saw out the window where in the distance, valley, framed by headlands, fell into the azure sea. The farmer and his wife had woken up to that view every morning.

  In a couple of steps, Nick crossed the second room to stand at the window. He heard a rustle behind him and wheeled around to see a fleeting glimpse of someone running away. A male, that’s all he could tell, as he chased him to the front door and watched him disappear in the trees. “Wait! Wait!” he cried after him, but the man didn’t come back. Returning to the second room, Nick noticed the bedding of rags on the floor and a plastic bag stuffed with leaves to make a pillow. Curiously, next to it, a set of decent clothes had been neatly spread on the floor: a red shirt with pearly white buttons tucked into mustard pants, and socks sticking out of the cuffs. It was peculiar, but what interested Nick more was what he saw in the corner.

  A Styrofoam detonator.

  He bent over to look at it. Nothing distinguished it from the others in design, but it hadn’t melted. It had been a dud. There were smudge marks where a couple of cigarettes had burned down, but apparently not burning hot enough to ignite it. Or maybe some unexpected rain doused it. Touching it as little as possible, Nick slipped the detonator into a plastic bag that he tucked into his daypack. He took photos of the clothes and the ragged bedding. Next to them was a neat stack of flattened squares of aluminum foil. He examined a couple, and sniffing them smelled traces of food.

  Wondering if he’d discovered the arsonist’s hideout, he followed the path the mysterious man had taken through the trees and soon came to a clearing. Meadow-like, it was wet and green, and in the middle was a clump of burnt shrubbery. Nick could imagine why a first detonator might not have caught on fire, which would be the one in his daypack, but apparently a second one had. The fact that the arsonist targeted that spot twice supported Nick’s speculation that none of the sites was random. They’d been selected, but why?

  In a couple of minutes he reached the road and walked back to his car. Had he stopped in the next bend, Lydia’s instruction to Look straight up would have been all that he needed to see the burned trees. He hadn’t needed to climb the steep zigzag ladder of terraces. That was the other consistent thing about the fires: they had all been set only a couple of minutes’ hike off the road. The arsonist wanted to get away quickly; or perhaps he was more wanting to get back somewhere before being noticed absent, creating the illusion of an alibi.

  Nick pulled his car onto the road and gunned it, wanting to see how fast he could get back to the village.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  ATHINA CLOSED HER SHOULDER BAG with a defeated sigh. No matter how many times she searched it, her phone was not there. It had fallen out when the priest threw her stuff at the door. She couldn’t believe she had left it behind. It was the only thing she owned that was truly important. Her whole life was on it. Without it, she wouldn’t know how to telephone anyone—the only number she had memorized was her own.

  Retracing her steps up the hill, she dreaded the prospect of running into Father Alexis. In hindsight, she was embarrassed by what she had said. Maybe she had gone too far with a priest, though at the end, he really did terrify her, swooping toward her and ready to pounce. Athina shuddered, recalling how suffocating his robe had been when it fell across her face the moment he had pounced on her for his quick satisfaction.

  She eased open the gate so it wouldn’t squeak and hurried to the church door. Peeking in, she didn’t see the priest and went inside. She heard sounds in the vestry. It creeped her out, knowing that Father Alexis’s copy of the Crowned Madonna was in there with him, with the same roving eyes watching everything that he did, just like the Madonna over the altar was watching her at that moment. It dawned on her that the priest was almost never out of her sight, and she wondered if he carried her around his apartment with him. She had to stop herself from giggling when she imagined the Madonna propped on the back of the toilet while he took a piss. Where would her roving eyes be focused then?

  She didn’t see her phone anywhere. Other stuff was still scattered around, and she grabbed her makeup brush, mints, and tissues—but no phone. With no furniture except for the seats fixed to the walls, there weren’t many places it could be hiding. She checked under the seats and for the first time noticed the cubbyhole. Her phone had landed way back in it. She started to crawl in, but there was a funky smell like some animal lived there. Scaring herself thinking about it, she bumped her head scrambling back out. She held her breath, hoping Father Alexis hadn’t heard the loud thump.

  When he didn’t come charging out of the vestry, Athina returned her attention to her phone, and had to suppress a laugh imagining it ringing under some old lady’s ass during services. But how to retrieve it? There wasn’t even a long candle to extend her reach. Then she hit on an idea. Maybe she wouldn’t be so afraid if she crawled backward into the cubbyhole. Squatting on all fours, she aimed for the opening, and managed to get far enough in to reach her phone, but the space was too cramped for her to turn and grab it. Instead, she shuttled it between her feet until she successfully hooked it and punted it forward. Phone in hand, she was ready to crawl out when the vestry door opened. She stayed hidden.

  Father Alexis, carrying a stepladder, brushed past her and set it up behind the altar. Then he did the very unusual thing of locking the church door. He disappeared back into the vestry and reemerged a moment later with his copy of the Crowned Madonna. Or so Athina assumed it was the copy, though to her, the icon the priest leaned against the ladder and the one over the altar looked identical.

  Something was clearly fishy. Athina switched on her phone in t
ime to videotape the priest switching the icons. When he finished, he carried the ladder—and what she incorrectly assumed to be the original icon—back to the vestry. She prayed he wouldn’t forget to unlock the church door. He didn’t. A moment later he returned with the key and then shut himself in the vestry.

  Athina ran out of the church. She wasn’t sure exactly what she had witnessed. It might be something as innocent as the priest taking away the original icon to repair it, and putting up one of his copies to hold its place; but then, why all the secrecy? She was already devising a plan to have some fun at the priest’s expense.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  IT TOOK NICK SEVENTEEN MINUTES driving fast but not too recklessly to reach the edge of the village. Another two minutes dodging tourists before the road dipped to the port.

  Call it twenty minutes total.

  Forty round trip.

  Another twenty to futz with the detonator, lighting its dozen or so cigarettes.

  An hour for the arsonist’s whole operation.

  A lot of people could disappear for an hour without being missed.

  By the looks of it, the Coast Guard captain had been missing most of the day. He had been out searching for the five drowned men when Nick came by after leaving the mayor at midday; and he still was out, judging by the fact that the gray patrol boat wasn’t back in port.

  Nick retraced his route through the village before cutting over the hill on the road to the hammam. Could that first time with Takis have been only two nights ago? Was it possible that only last night the young waiter had licked the scars on his back? Easily two of his most erotic experiences, and yet the memories of both had tarnished as soon as Nick heard about the Takis Fire. Any fire remotely associated with an arsonist case was something to follow up, though he never expected Captain Tsounis’s undisguised accusation that Takis had started the fire and was a double murderer. Of course, Nick knew he had to rein in his infatuation for him. He should be pragmatic and use their relationship to get any information relevant to his case. He hated that notion.

  Nick pulled off the road. Way down the pebbly beach, he saw the hammam’s dome. He guessed it was along that stretch of deserted beach where the raft had capsized that morning. The sea, violent only hours earlier, was skillet flat.

  He got out of the car, stripped, and tossed his clothes back onto the seat. He reached for his swimming trunks and changed his mind; the opportunity to swim nude was too rare to pass up. He locked the door, and was headed for the water in his untied shoes when he heard his phone beep back in the car. He looked at the rapidly falling sun, and in his order of priorities, a swim was higher on his list than a message that would still be there in an hour. He decided to ignore it and kept walking.

  It beeped again.

  He had to check it. His joke with the mayor about the arsonist’s fuse getting shorter was no laughing matter. They were only hours away from the start of a new month.

  Hobbling back to the car, he took his phone from the glove compartment. An SMS alerted him that he had been sent an encrypted message. He logged on and read:

  SUBJ: ALEXIS Manolis, priest. 32. Greek national from Refinio, oil refinery town on road from Athens to Korinth. Subj has no criminal record. Father killed in refinery fire when Subj was 17 y.o. Mother still lives there. Cause of fire never determined. Subj entered seminary two months later. Standard rotation through parishes on islands Skyros and Patmos. Church on Patmos destroyed by fire one month prior to reassignment to Vourvoulos. Determined to be an accident. Fourteen months in current post.

  “In other words, a firebug,” Nick said to himself as he stuck his phone back in the glove compartment.

  He picked his way over the pebbles and lined up his shoes at the water’s edge. Burying the car key between them, he arranged some reddish stones to mark the spot in case his shoes were stolen. He waded into the water and dove in, pulling himself deeper as ticklish bubbles escaped from his beard. When he surfaced, with strong strokes he aimed for Turkey’s chalky hills, feeling winter’s tenacious approach in the cold currents trickling over him.

  Nick was glad for the message from headquarters. It gave him an opportunity to suspect someone other than Takis for the fires. Already he knew Father Alexis to be an unsavory character—indeed, a criminal—but being an art forger didn’t automatically nominate him for the arsonist, though his father dying in a refinery fire might have planted the seed for something he would do later in his life. Or perhaps he had started the refinery fire? Did he kill his father purposefully? Young Manolis had been seventeen at the time, an age when boys are becoming men, and conflicts naturally erupt between fathers and sons. Had theirs gotten out of hand? Had Manolis been a religious boy, fervent, driven by demons that pushed him too far? Was it a calling that motivated him to enter the seminary a few weeks after his father’s death, or guilt?

  Fire can be addictive. It can also be a handy tool. If the priest had been forging icons on Patmos, he might have decided burning down the church was the perfect way to cover his tracks. If it worked once, why not again? Though to have a second church burn down on his watch might bring suspicion on him. Instead, if the fuel tank was blown, and the church destroyed in the resulting fire, Father Alexis couldn’t be blamed. But why an elaborate year-long buildup? Was it some game the priest had concocted, dispensing fear and death like God, which he was playing out on unsuspecting Vourvoulos? Or was it simply to create the myth of an arsonist to keep fingers from pointing at him?

  Nick, still swimming away from shore, mulled over the same questions for Takis. Why burn down the village when he could simply return to Australia and never come back? Did he need to punish it? If so, why not take it out in one blow? Why start eleven fires before the big one and risk getting caught? Why alert people at all? Nick didn’t know the priest’s secrets, but he could imagine Takis—a lonely child, adopted and not loved—ultimately blaming the village for an unhappy childhood.

  The young waiter and the priest were Nick’s only suspects by default. No cloud of suspicion had gathered over anyone else. Except for insurance money that Lydia mentioned herself, he couldn’t imagine what her motive might be, and she hardly seemed maniacal enough to burn down the village to recoup the cost of kitchen equipment. Someone else, though, might have a lot to gain, and he made a mental note to find out who were the largest property owners in the village. But Nick didn’t sense that the case was mercenary. Something visceral drove the arsonist. Someone hated the village enough to want to create panic before destroying it. What could drive a person to want to do that?

  Then a thought occurred to him.

  Omar.

  Could he still be alive? Was his suicide a ruse in an elaborate plot to seek revenge for what the skinheads had done to him? The fact that his body had never been found left room for deceit. Had it been Omar running from the ruined house that afternoon? His clothes so neatly spread out on the floor? Nick was brought up short by that thought, and stopped swimming to tread water; mulling over who might recognize Omar’s clothes, particularly a distinguishable red shirt with pearly buttons?

  A whitecap broke in his face, a reminder that the winds were picking up. He headed back to land, swimming hard against a current that wanted to pull him away from where he had parked the car. When he finally made it to shore, he crawled out of the water, not caring that the pebbles painfully dug into his knees, and collapsed. He stayed sprawled out, absorbing the sun’s warmth retained in the stones beneath him.

  When he was ready to move, he easily spotted his shoes. They were the only things on the beach for a hundred yards in either direction. As he got closer, they looked different. Were they darker? Had a wave splashed over them? He didn’t think so, because they were lined up exactly as he left them. Then he realized, they weren’t his shoes at all, and picked one up. It was soggy; they had been in the water a long time.

  He dug in the pebbles for the car key.

  It wasn’t there.

  “Shit!” he said aloud,
and straightened up to assess his predicament: naked in a cold wind, locked out of his car, and nearly an hour’s walk to the village, not to mention the likelihood that people would see his ravaged back. He had no choice but to break a window to retrieve his clothes. Then he worried perhaps they had been stolen, too. Why would someone take the key and not the car, unless it was to take the stuff inside it?

  As he approached his car, he could see the key in the door, and his clothes were on the seat where he left them. He patted down his pants for his wallet and checked for his phone. Everything appeared to be there, though as he started to dress, he couldn’t find his boxers. He searched through everything and looked under the seat in case they had somehow migrated there, but they hadn’t. Whoever found his key had taken them along with his shoes. A little bewildered, Nick pulled on his pants, feeling that a joke was being played on him that he didn’t get. He scanned the hills for any movement to find the prankster. He saw no one, and drove barefoot back to the village.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ATHINA FELT GIDDY ONCE SAFELY away from the church with her video of the priest exchanging the icons. Her own good mood made her think of Ridi and what a nice guy he really was. He certainly had been that day. Saving a girl from drowning, risking his life to do it, learning only later that she was from his village. He hardly knew her, he said, seemingly to downplay what he had done, but in Athina’s eyes that made him all the more a hero.

  The sun, cutting the horizon, would soon disappear in a flash. Her mother was expecting her to set up for the dinner shift, but Athina, passing right by the clinic, decided she wanted to visit the girl from Ridi’s village, really more for his sake than the girl’s, as a way to demonstrate how proud she was of his bravery that morning. The girl could probably use some company, too, no doubt scared to be in a hospital—well, a small clinic but still smelling of antiseptics—in a foreign country.