Fire on the Island

by Timothy Jay Smith

  “You’re late,” Mayor Elefteros scolded her.

  “I’m sorry. I had something to do.”

  She rushed over to Stavros’s boat, where Ridi waited with her crown. The fisherman held out a hand to help her aboard. “Okay. I’m ready,” she said. “Let me put it on.”

  “Sit down first,” Stavros told her. “The crown is heavy enough to make you wobbly.”

  Athina arranged herself on a taverna chair on the bow. “Okay.”

  As Ridi fit the crown on her head, she asked, “What’s Irini’s costume?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You didn’t see it?”

  “It is a big secret.”

  “A big secret?”

  The girl’s anxiety level shot up when she heard that, but it temporarily abated when she saw how, in the long rays of the setting sun, her crown’s faux gems flashed every color in the spectrum. She didn’t have to look in a mirror to see it was dazzling. That was clear in everyone’s awed expressions.

  Ridi asked, “How does it feel?”

  “Awesome. How do I look?”

  “More beautiful than the Madonna.”

  “You shouldn’t say that. It might be bad luck.”

  “You want me to lie?”

  “Not to me.”

  “It’s not a lie that I love you.” Ridi wanted to kiss her, but didn’t feel comfortable doing it in public; their romance was still unannounced.

  “Are we missing anyone else?” the mayor called out.

  “Father Alexis,” Stavros reminded him.

  “Well, the sun sets on God’s time, not at our beckoning nor the priest’s. We will start when Athina is ready.”

  “I’m ready!”

  “Pame!” the mayor shouted. Let’s go!

  There was a last-minute frenzy on Irini’s boat. Her brothers brought down the hoisted sheets. Athina could only see the back of a huge cross, until Irini’s boat made its U-turn to head for the dock and passed her.

  Athina’s mouth fell open in astonishment. Her friend appeared to hang on the cross by ropes around her wrists, though her feet were planted on the deck. She had cut her straw blonde hair, dyed it brown, and curled it to appear like the flouncy hair in every flattering portrait of Jesus. She’d pasted short brown hairs on her face to pass for a stubbly beard, and glued more to the chest of her flesh-colored body sock that flattened her breasts. Though there was no rule against portraying a male saint, traditionally the Miss Icon Contest had been an event for young women to announce their readiness for marriage, and what young woman would want to show herself with chest hair? Obviously Irini flat-out wanted to win, and planned to do it on shock value alone.

  Athina heard the crowd’s first roar when the floats came into view. It was the second roar, when they had their first real view of Irini on the cross, that made her heart sink. She knew she had lost the contest. “I will never win!” she wailed.

  “Who thinks it is beautiful for a woman to have chesty hair?” Ridi asked, trying to reassure her.

  Athina could not be consoled. “I keep telling you, it’s not a beauty contest!”

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  “WHY IS EVERY FUCKING CHURCH built on top of a fucking mountain?” Pinballer grumbled.

  “To give you something else to complain about,” Vladimir answered, and opened the church gate. He had decided simply to take the Crowned Madonna. Father Alexis be damned for trying to double-cross him. He brought the kid along in case he needed extra muscle if the priest tried to stop him. That created another predicament: what to do with the kid later? He was a pain-in-the-ass travel companion. Vladimir had planned to complain to the escort service, but now the problem was: the kid was about to witness his theft. Who knew what he might say to retaliate?

  Vladimir knocked on the vestry door. No answer. Another knock, another no answer, and he tried the handle.

  It was unlocked.

  They let themselves in, and Vladimir immediately saw the teddy bear perched in the gold frame where the icon should have been. Something was tucked under its furry little arms. He approached it, and saw the photograph of the priest switching icons. Vladimir, enraged, couldn’t make sense of why it was there. Was it a way to mock him, or confuse him about which icon was which? With a blow he sent the teddy bear flying and stormed into the church.

  Father Alexis, on his knees in a blubbering trance, didn’t notice the intrusion.

  The Russian snorted derisively at the priest’s bare ass and went behind the altar to reach for the Crowned Madonna. He tried several times without being able to unhook it. “Come here,” he said to the pinballer, and cupped his hands to hoist him up by his foot. The kid managed to grab the icon, but Vladimir shifted and he fell onto the rack of votive lamps. Oil splashed across the ancient iconostasis which instantly burst into flames.

  The Russian stuck the Crowned Madonna into a garbage bag he’d brought to conceal it. “Let’s go!”

  From the church door, he glanced back.

  The priest had not stopped praying.

  “Hey, Papoose! Papoose!”

  He still didn’t move.

  “Fucking crazy priest,” the Russian mumbled, and hurried back to the harbor.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  ATHINA WAS NOT GOING TO let herself be upset. On the first pass, the response to her costume had been lukewarm compared to Irini’s, but now her friend’s shock value was over and hers was yet to come. Her crown alone had elicited swoons of appreciation and waves of applause, but she had saved her radical Madonna outfit for the second passing of the floats. The first was to show the people the costumes; the second was for their vote. She was still confident that her pregnant Mary would shock them every bit as much as Irini’s chest hair.

  As the boats approached the dock for a second time, another roar greeted Irini, but decidedly less enthusiastically than before. Athina, her hope of winning revived, stood up as she came into view. No more an idle Madonna, she was a fierce Amazon—an Everywoman for all women. When her moment came, she flung off her teal sheets, and turned sideways so no one could miss the outline of her very pregnant belly.

  She hadn’t expected the complete silence.

  She had misread everything! No one got it. No one wanted to get it. Not one but all her worst fears came true.

  Until the crowd roared.

  It was spontaneous and grand. Filled with laughter and shock. A noise so uninhibited that everyone—whether they loved, hated, or didn’t get her costume—still recognized her as the winner. In unison they began chanting, “A-thin-a! A-thin-a! A-thin-a!”

  She had won! She couldn’t believe it!

  It was the moment she was supposed to throw a copy of her icon into the sea. Not knowing the priest had switched the icons a second time, Athina assumed she had grabbed the original one from the vestry. She hesitated, worried about the repercussions of destroying the venerated image, but the chanting crowd was too insistent for her not to do it. Lifting it over her head, she plunged it into the water while young men were already diving off the dock hoping to retrieve it and win her hand.

  As she watched it sink out of sight, the church bell started ringing wildly. Everyone looked up the hill and saw the flames shooting from the church. Athina, assuming she had caused the fire with her blasphemous act, couldn’t stop screaming.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  SOMEWHERE IN FATHER ALEXIS’S GUILT-RIDDEN mind he had wormed his way to Hell. He could smell its fire if not its brimstone; the flames around him a holy vision until they came too close, too burning hot, and he wakened from his trance to the spreading fire. He ran outside and rang the bell, not minding that the bits of the tower sprinkling him soon became a heavy dusting. He heard a crunching noise, but masked by the bell, he didn’t take it for the serious warning that it was; and when he heard it a second time, it was too late. The wound he had inflicted on the tower gave way and brought the whole structure crashing down with a final, muffled toll of the bell.

  It fell right on top of
him.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  NICK’S FIRST THOUGHT WAS THAT the arsonist’s target must have been the church, never the fuel tank. His second was to wonder if Takis had set the fire, but at that moment the young man came running out of his sister’s bar. He appeared to be confused, unsure why there was such an uproar as people pushed and shoved to get off the dock. From where he was, the buildings along the wharf block his view of the church up the hill, and he shouted at people running past asking what was happening.

  Why wasn’t Vassoula there to tell him? Nick wondered.

  She had disappeared. He searched the crowd swamping the wharf, some aiming for the church, most just wanting to get away. It was twilight and hard to discern their faces. Then he saw Vassoula come back outside, pausing to smell a lavender rose dangling from the overhead arbor before starting to walk against the crowd. She swung a jerry-can in her hand. It was an odd time to collect her petrol, but maybe an afternoon romp with Vassoula was another reason that Captain Tsounis had stayed back to guard the fuel tank.

  Then it dawned on Nick.

  She was the arsonist!

  Vassoula had more reason than her brother to hate the village after what happened to Omar. Destroying it would be her revenge. How had he not seen it?

  The fires hadn’t been random but specifically sited. All had been set on land once owned by Turks. Land Omar had marked by planting the lavender roses of his family’s lore. He was Turkish, and Nick bet his family was the Ozturk family named on the land map. That would explain why he came to that particular island, and why Vassoula held the whole village responsible for the brutal attack on him. Had his family never been expelled, there would have been no homecoming decades later. Omar would have already been there, and that alone would have changed his fate. In a circle of upright dominos, one knocked over the next, until the full circle had fallen, returning Omar to his ancestral home—only to be brutally cast out again. Vassoula wanted revenge going back as far as that first domino. That’s why the whole village was her target; they were all to blame for their history— a history that ultimately destroyed Omar, destroying her. Nick was certain that was her convoluted thinking.

  Around him, everyone pushed and jostled for their chance down the dock’s narrow steps. Nick, penned in, watched Vassoula vanish behind the Coast Guard station. He prayed that the jerrycan was empty. If she had to fill it, he’d have an extra minute to stop her. If she ignited it full, the explosion would be enough to set the leaky fuel tank ablaze.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  FOR A LAST TIME, SHE sniffed the arbor’s lavender roses that Omar planted the day they opened the restaurant. People were rushing past her talking excitedly about the church on fire. Had the bell tower really come crashing down, too? That news had the older women wailing in distress, and if Vassoula were successful, they would soon be grieving over a cataclysmic fire as well. She had worried that when the day came, she wouldn’t have the courage to go through with it, but the destruction of the church urged her on. She wanted it all to burn down, and reminded herself that her own searing pain would be over quickly. Those moments she would have to endure her flesh melting, she would dedicate to Omar.

  Omar.

  Slain not by his own hand. The skinheads had ended his life when they mutilated him. He would survive his indecent wounds but not his indecent appearance. Their trial had lasted longer than his living torture, but under the law, it couldn’t be called murder. They had murdered him, but not in the chronological order of the law.

  Omar.

  He came on a quest for lavender roses. He wanted to find his family’s Paradise Lost, to see the places that had been mythologized when recalled from the distance of scrappy Istanbul. As awful as his attack was, people didn’t feel compelled to come to his defense when rumors started about why he had been out at Poustis Point, insinuating that maybe he deserved what happened. Vassoula knew why he was out there. They all did. They all knew everybody’s business, only pretending not to when it suited them to tell an altered truth. They all knew Omar walked that long beach almost every day, well past Poustis Point, talking to himself until he talked himself out and turned around; the whole time oblivious to the ragtag queers of the village, her father among them, who stumbled out there for hand jobs. Omar was so much more a man than any man in the village. Than in Vourvoulos: its name luscious, suggestive, yet its women, ruined by God, and then by husbands who ignored them like discarded chrysalises after bearing their children. Except Vassoula, and that’s why every man had wanted her. Still wanted her. They resented Omar when he showed up and he was the first man she took.

  Omar.

  Their adoptive mother had never had a man she fervently desired. If she had, she wouldn’t have thrown Vassoula out of the house for having an affair with Omar; she would have borne the shame if she had experienced such illicit passion. She wouldn’t have set out to have him deported, nor would she have continued her campaign after they married, declaring he had been illegally in Greece when they wed, and denouncing their marriage as a ploy to allow him to stay—in itself, a criminal offense. Twice officials came to the village to interview them and determined Omar was there legally, but that didn’t stop her bigoted mother from trying to change their minds. Given the rising anti-immigrant sentiments in the country, Vassoula feared she might succeed. Zeeta made the mistake of telling her that she was going to cancel the life insurance policy they’d been required to buy when they adopted her. That was the first time she’d heard about the insurance. She didn’t know what it was worth, but it was definitely more than the nothing she had earned all those years working as Zeeta’s scullery maid. Vassoula had shut the shutters (why Takis claimed he did, she couldn’t ask without revealing herself) and opened the gas bottle. She had anticipated a refrigerator spark igniting it, killing only her mother, but Markos returned home earlier than usual that Sunday, smoking a cigarette and causing an explosion. Her double murders hadn’t paid off exactly as planned. She didn’t get the insurance money because she was older than eighteen; something Zeeta must have known about, and so her threats were only to taunt Vassoula, which made her hate the old hag even more. She was still glad she had done it. It gave her and Omar a future. A future until Omar’s had been cut away. Fed to the seagulls. Bleeding him even after the blood had been staunched.

  Omar.

  He’d always had a plan. A plan to come to Vourvoulos, a plan to open a restaurant, a plan to have a baby with her. A plan for a long life amidst his grandmother’s lavender roses, only to be foiled by some skinheads’ vile hatred. Vassoula made a plan, too, for revenge; a plan as carefully constructed as all of his had been. She made it worthy of Omar’s intricate thinking. She hoped to witness the villagers’ mounting fear, though the mayor disappointed her by never revealing the worry beads. The fire, so devastating, would be repeatedly scrutinized, her motives endlessly analyzed, until one clever investigator would realize that all the fires had been on Turkish properties. She had used them to point a finger at the village guilty for Omar’s destruction. The penultimate fire had been on his great grandparents’ land where Shirley and Lukas now lived. It was Omar’s great uncle who tossed himself headfirst into the well to contaminate the water for its new Greek owners.

  Her plan would conclude that day. It had an end, and with jerrycan in hand, Vassoula walked to the back of the Coast Guard station. In the middle of the yard, Captain Tsounis watched the flames from the church lick the darkening sky. “Where’s your brother?” he asked.

  “Napping in the restaurant.”

  “You sure he wasn’t playing with matches in the church?”

  “Why aren’t you up there helping?”

  “Someone has to guard the tank.”

  “You guard it now?”

  “For the time being.”

  “Why?”

  “Hunches, mostly.”

  Slipping a finger under the top button of his shirt, Vassoula pulled him closer. “Do your hunches let you take a ten-minute br
eak?”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  Her lips brushed his. “You know what I want.”

  “You brought your can. It looks like you want petrol.”

  “I want to pay for it first.”

  “I have to wait for one of the crew to relieve me.”

  “I’ll relieve you,” she purred suggestively, and slipped a hand down to touch him.

  He pulled it away. “Come back after the procession.”

  “I will. But I’ll fill this now, since I have the can.”

  He carried the can to the hose. Opening the padlock, he unwound the reel a few spins, and stuck the nozzle into it. With another key, he turned on the pump.

  Vassoula gripped the nozzle’s handle.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Sometimes it jerks and I don’t want it to fall out.” The hose spurted just then, and she added, “You see?”

  “It’s only air caught in the hose.”

  The jerrycan quickly filled up. When it had, she pulled out the nozzle and turned it on the Coast Guardsman, dousing him with fuel. “Get back!” she barked, chasing him away from the pump’s switch.

  “Are you crazy?”

  With her free hand, Vassoula flicked a cigarette lighter. “Get back!”

  “Okay. Okay. I’m getting back.”

  With the captain at a safe distance, she pointed the nozzle to the ground to pool petrol at her feet.

  Nick ran into the yard and took in what was happening. “Don’t do it.”

  Vassoula laughed. “Superman to the rescue!”

  He took a step toward her.

  She flicked her lighter and splashed petrol in his direction. “Don’t come any closer!”

  Takis appeared. He had seen Nick racing behind the station and knew something was up. “Vassoula? What the fuck are you doing?”

  “Omar wouldn’t want you to do this,” Nick told her.

  “What do you know about Omar?”

  “That he wanted you to have a life. He knew you’d never leave him, and he’d be a freak forever. That’s why he took his own life. To free you.”