The Bull of Mithros

by Anne Zouroudi

  As the butcher had warned, the corpse bore little resemblance to how Manolis had been in life. His face was black and bloated, his upper torso was dark with pooled blood, whilst the rest of his body from feet to chest was ghastly parchment yellow. On his upper arms were deep grazes, the skin scraped away as he had slipped down the shaft; his army trousers were ripped at the knees from his struggling to move himself either up, or down. His cheeks bulged; his lips and eyelids were peculiarly swollen, his lips engorged enough almost to hide the cut where both Gounaris and Manolis’s crewmate had landed punches. A dark trickle from lobe to left temple showed where his ear had bled.

  The fat man reached out and lifted an eyelid. The eyeball was dark red, and swollen with blood.

  ‘He’s certainly not pretty, is he, poor fellow,’ he said. ‘But why were his arms by his sides? Why didn’t he put out his hands to save himself?’

  Drawn to do so, Makis looked down at the corpse, and shuddered.

  ‘He’ll haunt my dreams for years to come,’ he said. ‘Ugly bastard. Still, now you’ve got the fridge open, I suppose I might as well cut your meat. If you don’t mind what it’s been keeping company with.’

  ‘I don’t mind, no,’ said the fat man, glancing up at the animal flesh. ‘Mutton, then, if you will.’

  The butcher stepped around him, hauled out the headless sheep and dropped it on to the block.

  The fat man leaned closer over Manolis’s body, and sniffed. The odour of decay was distinct, and now the corpse was uncovered, the flies gathered on and around it.

  The fat man did his best to waft them away.

  ‘He waited a while to be found, I think. And there’s no doubt, I’m afraid, that he suffered badly. Most people who fall down wells go feet first, finding disused wells by accident. Head first is far more unpleasant, and much harder to survive. I knew of a man in Zakynthos who came to a similar end. He was repairing a bakery chimney, and leaned too far down the stack. Hidden from view as he was, and his shouts muffled by the thickness of the stone, by the time they found him, it was too late. When they pulled him out his face was black, and they took it to be soot. But when they washed him, the black remained; it was the blood pooled in his head. Did you know hanging upside down has often been used as a form of torture? The suffering it causes was exploited by the Romans, who tended to invert their prisoners for crucifixion.’

  ‘I don’t see why,’ said Makis, examining the sheep carcass for the best cut. ‘How can a man die from being upside down?’

  ‘It’s all to do with gravity,’ said the fat man. ‘When you’re standing upright, the lungs expand naturally within the rib cage. But when you’re upside down, your organs – your liver and your intestines – press on to the lungs. It’s a long, slow death from suffocation. Death is far from instantaneous. The inversion induces blindness, too. The vessels in the eyes become engorged quite early on, and burst as has happened here. And this trickle of blood from his ear suggests more internal bleeding. I imagine he would have been in considerable pain.’

  Makis picked up a steel, and began to sharpen a boning knife.

  ‘Let me tell you something, friend,’ he said. ‘No disrespect to the dead, but it seems to me anyone who falls down a well has only themselves to blame. I grew up around that well, fetched water from it from being four years old, and never once managed to fall into it. So it seems to me if he did, it was through his own stupidity. He was drinking. We all saw him take the bottle. Drink’ll do that to you. Makes you stupid.’

  ‘You’re correct on that point,’ said the fat man. ‘But even so, why should he have fallen in?’

  ‘Leaning too far over the rim, surely.’

  ‘Yes, but why would he be leaning over the rim? Do you think he might have been looking for something?’

  ‘Like what? What’s down there but water? You don’t need to look for the water to draw it. And anyway, you can’t see to the bottom. The army bored it deep. It goes halfway to the centre of the earth.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of water. Might he have been looking for something else? Something like your famous bull?’

  The butcher was silent for a moment, then he let out a laugh.

  ‘Looking for the bull down that well? Then that would make him stupid!’

  He lay down the steel, and shifted the sheep’s corpse to expose the best of its legs.

  ‘Did you ever see the famous bull?’ asked the fat man.

  ‘No, I never did.’

  ‘Did you see the replica?’

  ‘What replica? We’ve ten thousand replicas in Mithros.’

  ‘I mean the one at the museum. The one with hooves and horns of gold.’

  ‘Is there such a thing? That’s news to me.’

  ‘It will be news to you also, then, that the replica has been stolen.’

  ‘Why would anyone steal a replica?’

  ‘Why, indeed?’

  The fat man touched Manolis’s swollen cheek, and pressing gently with his fingers, found it hard. Prising open the mouth, he looked inside, then reached in and pulled an object from the cavity.

  ‘Now this is very interesting,’ he said. ‘Look what we have here.’

  He held up a round, smooth pebble. The butcher poked the tip of the knife into the sheep’s hip joint.

  ‘A gag,’ said the fat man. ‘That’s why no one heard him shout. This pebble was put in his mouth to stop him shouting. It’s too big for him to have spat it out. Whoever put him down that well, intended that he shouldn’t be found, or not found quickly, at least. Someone wanted him to suffer. And suffer he did.’

  The butcher was slicing expertly into the sheep, separating the leg at the joint.

  ‘You think someone put him down there? Sounds a bit far-fetched to me,’ he said. ‘But if he’d been keeping bad company, who knows?’

  ‘Am I the first to notice he’d been gagged?’ asked the fat man. With great care, he replaced the pebble in the mouth. ‘Surely the police and the coastguard have had a good look at him?’

  ‘I suppose they didn’t look as closely as you’re doing. They’ve called the coroner, but the coroner’s at his summer place and isn’t rushing back. And dead is dead. Cause of death isn’t their responsibility.’

  ‘It is if he met his end at someone’s hands. He’s been punched, too. Look, here on the lip.’

  ‘I don’t want to see,’ said the butcher. ‘But if someone killed him, it’s obvious who it was.’

  ‘Enlighten me.’

  ‘There was a stranger in the hills, yesterday. He had a rifle. The captain took his men to look for him. Maybe it was one of his shipmates, come back to settle a score. A quick shove in the back, and down he’d go. If that’s how it was, it was a score settled, well and truly.’

  ‘If his shipmates were involved in his death, then that boat shouldn’t be too far away.’

  ‘I said the same to Spiros. He’s been on to his coastguard colleagues. They’re all out looking.’

  ‘So there are people who know what this boat looks like?’

  ‘The soldiers at Kolona. They saw it come and go when he first arrived. They saw the argument, and him being thrown overboard. They’re witnesses to the bad feeling between him and the crew.’

  ‘No doubt that might be useful, when it comes to proving the case. Though when it comes to witnesses, I’m always mindful of the proverb: one witness, one liar; more witnesses, all liars. But a man with a rifle would surely shoot a man, rather than going to the trouble of forcing him down a well.’

  ‘Not if he wanted to make no noise,’ said Makis. ‘Which plainly he didn’t, since the man is gagged, as you say. There were a lot of people at Kolona yesterday. If someone had shot him, it would have been heard.’

  The fat man looked at him.

  ‘You’re right, of course,’ he said. ‘It had to be done without too much noise.’

  The butcher brought the chopper down on the mutton. The first blow split the bone; the second cut it clean through.

>   ‘I wish you’d cover him up,’ he said. ‘He gives me the horrors. And that fridge needs to be closed. It’s hot, and the meat’ll spoil. Not that anyone would buy it now, anyway.’

  ‘You mean no one but me,’ said the fat man. ‘But even I hope the necessary steps have been taken to make sure he doesn’t leak?’

  ‘We’ve stopped him up, if that’s what you mean,’ said the butcher, placing a sheet of waxed paper on the scale before he weighed the mutton leg. ‘A piece of string for his manhood, and a cork at the other end. The doctor did it yesterday, before we put him in there. With luck, that should hold him until he’s claimed.’

  ‘But what if no one does claim him?’

  ‘An unmarked grave, I suppose. And if that’s how it’s going to be, the sooner, the better.’

  ‘You’ll forgive me for saying, but you seem to have little sympathy with a man who’s died such a gruesome death.’

  The fat man drew the sheet back over the corpse’s face, and stood up. The butcher wrapped the mutton in the waxed paper, and put it in a carrier bag.

  ‘Five thousand five hundred,’ he said. ‘Sympathy or not, it’s not the first bad death at Kolona. Drowning’s a nasty death too, by all accounts.’

  The fat man drew out his wallet, and handed over money.

  ‘There’s something extra there for your trouble, as we discussed,’ he said. ‘So you have unhappy associations with Kolona, yet you talked yesterday as if you’d like to go back there.’

  ‘I’ve always wanted to go back,’ said the butcher, as he opened the till. ‘Beholden to no one, living off the land. In the meantime, like a fool I borrowed money, and set up this shop.’

  He tucked the banknotes into the drawer, and pushed it shut.

  ‘You borrowed money for this enterprise, did you?’ asked the fat man. ‘But I expect a butcher’s shop must be very profitable, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’d be doing all right if it weren’t for the wife. I save money, and she spends it. It was a mistake, looking back, to borrow from an acquaintance. She’d take our debts more seriously if we’d borrowed from the bank. It costs me a fortune in meat to keep the man sweet when she’s spent what I’ve put aside. Prime cuts, and a whole lamb at Easter – she doesn’t understand it comes out of my profits. When you add it all up, it’s double what I’d pay him in cash.’

  ‘So your loan was on an unofficial footing, was it? In my experience, such favours often turn sour. I knew a man once who borrowed money at the age of twenty, and at sixty still hadn’t managed to pay it back. Fortunately for him, his creditor then died; but the poor man had spent his working life enslaved to his creditor. There was no favour this man could refuse him, or the debt would have been called in, and unable as he was to pay, he’d have been disgraced. What looked like a favour became a yoke the poor man bore most of his life. Why did you not go to the bank?’

  ‘Because the bank wouldn’t look at me. What could I offer as security? The family plot? That’s just a few trees on a piece of near-barren land. Banks are for rich men.’

  Makis carried the remains of the sheep carcass to the fridge, and was spiking it back on its hook when a voice called out from the door.

  ‘Butcher! Eh, Makis, where are you, malaka?’

  Tavros, the taverna owner, squeezed through the door’s narrow opening. Makis slammed the refrigerator door closed.

  ‘So you are here, malaka! Where’s my order?’ demanded Tavros.

  ‘Tavros,’ said the butcher, deferentially. ‘Kali mera, kali mera.’

  Tavros only glanced at the fat man; he offered him no greeting.

  ‘Where’s my order, malaka?’ he said. ‘Why hasn’t it been delivered? I’ve a cook over there picking his nose and reading the newspaper, and when I ask him why, he points the finger at you. For Christ’s sake, I’ve got lunches to serve in two hours! Give the order to me, and I’ll take it with me.’

  But Makis spread his hands in apology.

  ‘It isn’t ready yet. Be reasonable, Tavros. You know the drama I’ve had here. You can hardly expect business as usual. I didn’t get an hour’s sleep last night.’

  But reminded of the corpse, Tavros wasn’t listening.

  ‘Where is he?’ he asked. ‘Is he in there?’

  He threw open the refrigerator door, and seeing the sheeted form on its floor, crouched down, and uncovered it. Shocked by the blackened, bloated face, he blanched, and dropped back the sheet.

  ‘Christ,’ he said, and stood up. ‘He makes an ugly corpse, doesn’t he?’ He crossed himself. ‘Christ.’

  ‘You should close the fridge,’ said Makis. ‘I think it’s more respectful to leave him be. Spiros promised me they’ll be coming for him soon.’

  ‘Spiros?’ Tavros gave a snort of disdain. ‘I can’t be waiting for those malakas to sort themselves out.’ Keeping his eyes off the body, he turned back to the fridge and, hauling out the beef carcass, pressed it on to Makis. ‘Let’s start with this.’

  ‘I don’t know, Tavros,’ said the butcher. ‘I’m not sure people will want to eat this, now it’s shared room with him.’

  ‘If no one tells them, people won’t know, will they?’ said Tavros. ‘Now, let’s get to it. You might have time to stand around wringing your hands, but in my business, time’s money.’

  The fat man searched out a periptero – a kiosk. The vendor there sat low in a plastic chair, his legs stretched out before him, his arms folded over his chest, a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes, sharing a canopy’s shade with displays of chewing gum and biscuits, of guidebooks and postcards, of salted almonds and pistachios in their shells. There was chilled beer and Coca-Cola, fruit juices and chocolate; the ice-cream was hidden by ripped-up cardboard providing extra insulation against the heat. Fastened to the kiosk with four rusty drawing pins was a handwritten sign which said ‘Fresh Fish’.

  The harbour-side was lively with summer’s bustle – with wandering tourists, with women shopping and men lingering. In the midst of it all, the kiosk vendor appeared to be sleeping; but when the fat man stood before him, he immediately reached up and pushed the cap’s peak from his eyes.

  ‘Kalos tou,’ he said, but without yet sitting up from his slouch. He had the leathery skin of an outdoor man, with sun-ingrained wrinkles in his face; as he looked up from his chair, his expression was cheerful. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Yassas,’ said the fat man. ‘I’m looking for a particular brand of cigarettes. I’m hoping you might have them in stock.’ From his pocket, he brought out a near-empty pack, and held it up for the vendor to see.

  The owner squinted up at the starlet’s picture, and smiled.

  ‘Now do you know,’ he said, ‘I believe I might.’ He got up from his chair, removed his hat and dropped it back on the seat. His head was shorn bald, a fresh cut only a day or two old. ‘I think you might be in luck, friend. You just might be in luck.’

  He disappeared through the kiosk’s back door, and reappeared at its small hatch.

  ‘You’ll have to give me a minute,’ he said. He turned his back to the fat man, and began to search amongst the stock piled against the rear wall. ‘I used to have a regular customer who smoked those,’ he said, opening boxes and closing them again. ‘I used to get them in specially for him. Since he died, no one’s ever asked for them. It was only yesterday I was thinking I should throw them out. I won’t lie to you, I’ve had them a while. They might be stale, or got at by damp – it’s damp like you wouldn’t believe down here by the water, come winter. But I said to myself, just wait a while, you never know when someone might happen along. So I kept them, and now here you are.’ There were sounds of cartons being lifted and dropped, of paper rustling. ‘Here we are!’

  Triumphant, he slammed a box of the fat man’s cigarettes on the counter.

  ‘Do you just have the one pack?’ asked the fat man.

  ‘Oh dear Lord no,’ said the vendor, cheerfully. ‘I’ve half a dozen.’

  ‘Then I’ll take them
all. They are increasingly hard to find. And I’ll take a box of matches to go with them.’

  The owner put both cigarettes and matches in a bag.

  ‘Like I told you, they’re old stock,’ he said. ‘The quality may not be as good as it should be. If you’re not happy with them, bring them back, and I’ll give you your money back.’

  ‘Really? That’s a rare offer indeed. How much do I owe you?’

  ‘Let’s call it seventeen hundred, for cash,’ said the vendor. ‘You’ve done me something of a favour, taking them off my hands.’

  ‘I see from your sign there you sell fish,’ said the fat man. He handed over his money, leaving little cash remaining in his wallet.

  ‘I do when I have any to sell.’

  ‘Is there any chance you could get me any for tomorrow? Something of premium quality. I’m having dinner guests.’

  ‘Well, that’s in the lap of the gods,’ said the vendor. ‘I was thinking of going out in the morning, if the wife will let me. She gets sick of fish, you know. Thirty years we’ve been married, and many of those days we’ve eaten fish. I suppose you might get sick of it, though I never have.’

  ‘I have a suggestion for you, then,’ said the fat man. ‘My preference would be to serve fish, but I have a leg of mutton here as my contingency. If you catch anything suitable, what do you say to you and I doing a trade? You can have my leg of mutton for your wife; I get fresh fish for my guests.’

  The vendor offered his hand through the hatch.

  ‘Done,’ he said. ‘I’ll do my best for you. But I offer no guarantees. Maybe the gods will be kind.’

  ‘Maybe they will. And if they are, come and find me or my crew. I’m on the Aphrodite, over there. They call me Hermes. You should ask for me.’

  ‘Nondas is my name. So she’s yours, is she? She’s a beautiful craft. I’ve been admiring her. Wish me luck with the nets, then, and if I get anything worthwhile, I’ll bring it over.’

  The fat man found a waste-bin stencilled with the initials of the Municipality of Mithros, where wasps crawled on the stickiness of melted ice-cream.