The Bull of Mithros

by Anne Zouroudi

  He reached into the bag from the periptero and took out the matchbox. Sliding off the cover, he tipped out all the matches, which fell tinkling to the bottom of the waste-bin. He replaced the lid on the empty box, dropped it back in with the cigarettes and tucked them away in the front pocket of his hold-all.

  Thirteen

  In no hurry, the fat man walked in the direction of his rendezvous with Enrico. When he reached the bank, he saw that the door stood open, and behind the counter, counting out notes to a middle-aged woman, was Loskas Vergas.

  Recalling he had been low on cash when he paid for his cigarettes, the fat man went inside.

  Loskas’s customer was gathering up her passbook, tucking the money she had withdrawn inside its pages.

  ‘It doesn’t seem like much interest to me,’ she was saying, tartly. ‘I think I’d be better off with some stocks and shares.’

  ‘That’s up to you,’ Loskas replied. ‘But then you’re gambling, aren’t you? You might make a little more, or you might lose it all. Personally, I’d never take such a risk. And you’d have to pay someone to invest it for you, and those fees mount up. It’s not what I would do. But it’s up to you, Maria. That’s all I can say to you – it’s up to you.’

  ‘It’d be less of a worry kept under the mattress,’ she said. ‘That’s all my mother ever did. She never had all this worry about making returns.’

  She turned from the counter and came face to face with the fat man, whom she hadn’t noticed enter the bank.

  ‘Oh!’ She looked him up and down, admiring his tailored clothes and his shoes, and her belligerence evaporated. ‘Please, excuse me,’ she said, and called out a polite Yassas as she went out the door.

  The fat man stepped up to the counter, and gave Loskas a smile. Through the glass between them, the cashier looked tired. A disorder of slips and dockets was spread before him, and his half-moon spectacles were pushed back on his head, dishevelling his hair.

  ‘Kali mera,’ said the fat man, laying his hold-all at his feet and the leg of mutton on the counter. ‘You and I have already met, if you remember. At Kolona.’

  ‘I remember. What can I do for you?’

  ‘Let me see if I can recall – I think your name is Loskas. Loskas Vergis.’

  ‘Vergas.’

  ‘Vergas, that’s right. I never forget a name,’ said the fat man. ‘It was so interesting to hear of your families’ histories yesterday. Between you, you have an impressive heritage. And I found it touching you have all remained so close. You, Makis, Spiros – you are good friends still, it seemed to me, and you seem so proud of your bond. I want to withdraw some cash, if I may.’ From a trouser pocket, he produced a passbook for a savings account, and pushed it under the glass to the bank clerk.

  Loskas moved aside the slips and dockets to clear space on the counter, and found a withdrawal form in the rack behind his pencil pot. His hands were slight and almost feminine, with one of his little fingernails kept long as a sign of his clerical status.

  ‘You’ll forgive me for saying so,’ said the fat man, ‘but your filing system seems a little haphazard.’

  Loskas shook his head, and sighed.

  ‘There’s a discrepancy, from yesterday,’ he said. ‘I never have discrepancies. I’ve been through these papers a dozen times, and I still can’t get the books to balance. Every time I have someone stand in for me, it ends the same. No one takes the same care I do. But I’ll find it. No discrepancy’s been reported from this branch, in all the time I’ve run it. I’ll need to see your ID.’

  ‘If someone else has made an error, you should fetch them in to put it right,’ said the fat man.

  ‘It was my wife,’ said Loskas. ‘I don’t want to upset her.’

  The fat man handed over his ID card from his wallet.

  ‘I seem to remember one of you saying there were four families at Kolona when the well ran dry,’ he said. ‘But I recall being introduced to representatives of only three. Was there no one there from the fourth? I know how people are on these small islands, and I would hate to hear there has since been a falling out between the clans.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Loskas. He pulled his glasses forward on to his nose, and studied the fat man’s ID, reading even the smallest print. He looked up at the fat man’s face, checking for a match with the photograph, then checked the name with the name on the passbook. ‘Our contemporary was poor Socrates, who we so tragically lost. He and I were friends from childhood. He’s the reason I go to St Nikodemos every year – to honour his memory. The saint has plenty of folk to remember him. Socrates has only us. His son was there yesterday. How much do you want?’

  ‘Fifty thousand,’ said the fat man. ‘In fives, if you would.’

  Loskas opened the passbook. The bottom-line balance was high, and had been so since the account was opened, with generous deposits outpacing the modest withdrawals.

  ‘Whatever the gentleman wants,’ he said. He slotted the withdrawal form into the printer beside him and dextrously keyed numbers on a keyboard. The form fed through the printer; when it emerged, Loskas removed it, and pushed it under the glass to the fat man. ‘Sign, please.’

  The fat man did so, and pushed the withdrawal form back to Loskas, who checked the signature with the specimen in the passbook.

  ‘You’re a good customer of ours, I see,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve been a customer for many years,’ said the fat man. ‘Happily, I’m in the fortunate position of being a depositor rather than a borrower. I appreciate that it is not the same for everyone.’

  ‘No, it certainly isn’t,’ said Loskas. He folded back the pages of the passbook, slotted it into the printer and hit a single button on his keyboard. When the printer had made its updates, he removed the book, and made a mental check of the recorded entries. ‘The majority are otherwise. They come to borrow money, not to make deposits. I have a policy of saying yes, if I can. With some of them it’s impossible, of course. I know before they open their mouths what they’re worth, by and large, and with those plain dirt-poor or already mired in debt, I’d be mad to give them money. But I try to be sympathetic. I’m a man with three daughters, and I paid for three dowry houses. Believe me, I know what it means to worry about money.’

  He laid the passbook on the counter and, opening the cash drawer, took out a wad of notes bound by a paper band.

  ‘And surrounded by it, as you are,’ said the fat man, ‘no one could help but sympathise with a man in your position. Three daughters, and a drawer full of cash . . .’

  Loskas slipped the paper band from the banknotes.

  ‘It takes courage to be a thief,’ he said, ‘and I’ve never been a very courageous man. I’ve always played by the rules, except where the rules didn’t matter.’

  ‘That’s an interesting concept. Who is it who decides when the rules don’t matter? Surely only those who made the rules in the first place can decide to suspend them? Or are you saying that no rules matter? And something else I’ve often pondered – when is a rule bent, and when is it broken? Do you think bending is any different from breaking?’

  Frowning, Loskas counted out ten of the banknotes, and knocked what remained in his hand back into shape before replacing the paper band.

  ‘You sound like a philosopher,’ he said, putting the notes back in the drawer. ‘I’m not much of a philosopher myself.’

  ‘But my point’s a simple one,’ said the fat man. ‘Let me give you an example. The rules – the company rules – state that this branch closes at a certain time. Two o’clock, would it be?’ Loskas nodded agreement. ‘But on a winter’s day, when the wind’s howling and the rain’s pouring and you’ve had no customers for over an hour, have you never closed up a few minutes early?’ Loskas shrugged. ‘Of course you have. Why should you stick it out, when common sense tells you it’s a waste of your time? And yet the rule is, 2 pm. Now, is that rule bent, or broken?’

  ‘What difference does it make?’ asked Loskas. He pushed the fat
man’s passbook and cash under the glass. ‘No one’s harmed.’

  ‘Ah, but you can never know that, can you? You’ll never know if, on that winter’s day when you close up early, some poor desperate soul comes banging on the door at the last moment, and finds you already gone.’

  ‘It isn’t likely, is it?’

  ‘Many things that happen in life are not likely. Some even appear to be impossible. Tell me about your daughters. Are they all married now?’

  ‘The last one married this year, only a few months after the second. I married them off in order, as I should have done, oldest to youngest. We were lucky enough to find suitors for the two youngest close together.’

  ‘But the expense! You now, I knew a man once who had seven children, and all seven were girls. And without wanting to be unkind, they were not great beauties. There was no queue of men at the door to claim their hands. So this unfortunate fellow had seven houses to find, and seven portions of land to go with them. Of course he couldn’t afford it. It would be a rare man that could. So he solved his dilemma in a unique way.’

  He stopped speaking, and seemed to become absorbed in putting away his passbook and his cash.

  ‘How, then?’ prompted Loskas. ‘How did he do it?’

  The fat man smiled.

  ‘Ah, now. No doubt you’re wishing you had met me before you spent your money. How did you solve this problem yourself?’

  Loskas shrugged.

  ‘For the first, I borrowed from the bank, a loan I’m still paying back now and won’t be saying goodbye to anytime soon. As an employee, there’s no way for me to increase my income and pay it off. A fisherman may catch more fish and a carpenter may sell more doors, but my salary stays the same, more or less, from year to year. Happily I have a good friend who helped me out with the other two. It’s not everyone who has such friends.’

  ‘No, indeed,’ said the fat man. ‘Your friend was generous, I’m sure. Though no doubt you’ll be paying him back for years to come, too.’

  ‘But he isn’t one to worry too much if I miss a payment,’ said Loskas. ‘Especially since I’m able to do him a favour in return.’

  ‘That’s fortunate,’ said the fat man. He craned his head to see to the back of the office, where the stuffed owl perched under its glass dome. It was a pretty bird, with cream and taupe feathers and large eyes of green glass. ‘Is that an Athena’s owl I see back there?’

  ‘It is. And not just any owl. She was my pet for several years. I found her as a fledgling, and raised her by hand. She used to sit on my shoulder whilst I worked. When she died, I preserved her, and here she is.’

  ‘I think I saw some of your other work, at the museum.’

  ‘I’ve given them a number of my pieces,’ said Loskas. ‘Mostly birds. I keep an aviary at home. Most of the birds I give to the museum have come from there.’

  ‘The Athena’s owl reminds me of home,’ said the fat man. ‘In ancient times, they lived in great numbers on top of the Acropolis. They’ve long been a symbol of wisdom, of course. Was your owl wise, in life?’

  Loskas smiled.

  ‘Maybe not wise, but clever,’ he said. ‘She knew which customers would pet her, and which to stay away from. My friend, the one I mentioned, she never went near. He’s one of those who thinks all animals should be useful.’

  ‘Does he use you, then? Or have you only used him, to bail you out of your financial predicament?’

  ‘Of course he doesn’t use me,’ said Loskas, offended. ‘He scratched my back, I’m happy to scratch his. That isn’t using each other. It’s what friends do.’

  ‘A favour in return for a favour.’

  ‘Exactly so.’

  ‘And because you’re friends, the size and scope of the favours wouldn’t matter. Which is just as well, since it would be hard for any man – especially one such as yourself, on a limited salary – to match the favour of a generous loan. I myself would feel the weight of the inequality of our positions. With nothing comparable to offer, I would feel I was the poor relation. But you, no doubt, were better than I would be at swallowing your pride.’

  ‘I’ve no need to swallow my pride,’ said Loskas, indignantly. ‘My friend’s grateful for what I can do for him. A bank has facilities you don’t find in other places, and my friend has assets he wants to keep safe.’

  ‘Is that so?’ asked the fat man. ‘I assume when you say facilities, you mean the vault?’

  ‘It doesn’t hurt, does it? You talked about bending rules, and of course by the rules we’re not allowed to use the vault for anything but the bank’s business. But my friend was robbed a number of years ago, and that’s made him very nervous. He’s a self-made man who’s done very well for himself – he made a lot of money in the coffee trade – and of course those with money tend to have all kinds of valuables. It’s easy enough for me to keep them here. And in return, when the time came for my daughters to marry, he was happy to help out.’

  ‘Your friend being Vassilis Eliadis, of course.’

  ‘Yes. And I’m proud to call him my friend. He’s a man of importance, here in Mithros.’

  ‘But what are you keeping safe for him that couldn’t be kept safe by other means? Why doesn’t he open an account with you, and deposit his funds like other people?’

  ‘It isn’t funds, it’s a box,’ said Loskas. ‘And don’t ask me what’s in it, because I haven’t asked, and I haven’t looked. I couldn’t look if I wanted to without him knowing. The box is bound. It’d take a week to unwrap it.’

  ‘How intriguing,’ said the fat man. ‘If it were me, I’d be eaten with curiosity to know what is in it. Plainly he doesn’t want you to know, good friends though you might be. But I didn’t finish telling you about the man with seven daughters. His first step was the same as yours: he took a loan from the bank, as much as they would give him. Then he sat down, made his calculations, and worked out how much that would be for each daughter, and divided up the money into seven portions, plus one remaining. I don’t need to tell you, it wasn’t much: nowhere near enough to give each girl a house, and land. So instead, he wrote a letter, to a cousin of his mother’s in Australia. He took her advice, and gained her agreement to his plan. As each girl came of age, he paid for a whole wardrobe of new clothes, a visit to the hairdresser’s, perfume and jewellery: he spent a good amount to make her look the very best she could. Then he bought a boat ticket, a one-way ticket from here to Australia, and sent the girls off, one by one. He didn’t send them steerage, but put them in first class, and had them spoiled and cared for to make them appear much wealthier than they were. And do you know, in the length of time it took to make the journey, all but two of those girls had won themselves suitors – men from a Greek background, setting out to make a new life for themselves – and free of the constraints and conventions of our dowry system, they made themselves a match. The remaining two were taken in by the cousin, who enjoyed herself playing matchmaker to find them husbands amongst the Australian-Greek community. And when word reached the man his daughters were all settled, he sold the property he had used to secure the debt, paid it back and used the last portion of the loan to buy tickets for himself and his wife to go and visit his girls. For some years, he and his wife lived happily, moving from one daughter to the next, a month or two here, a month or two there. I had letters from him, once in a while; and when he felt the old country call him home, he got over his homesickness by seeing how happy and settled his daughters were. He died a happy man, without a penny of debt, surrounded by family. They brought his ashes back here, and scattered them on the sea.’

  ‘A happy man indeed,’ nodded the clerk. ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’

  ‘People are not creative thinkers, generally. They look for no solutions beyond the obvious. Also, this man didn’t insist on being stuck like a limpet in one place, with his family stuck on the rock beside him. He understood life is short, and if we have to endure some discomfort – in his case, intermittent homesickness –
it cannot be for long, as life itself is so brief. What are forty years, or fifty, after all? Take it from me, they are gone in the blink of an eye.’

  The fat man picked up the leg of mutton from the counter.

  ‘I must go,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid your friend Makis’s trade is very slow this morning. People are understandably reluctant to buy meat from a makeshift morgue. I persuaded him to let me see the corpse, and it is rather shocking. I suspect the wretched man went through a great deal of pain before he died. Have you seen him?’

  Loskas was going through his pencil jar, trying to find a pen which worked. He scribbled the tip of a biro on a blank paying-in slip.

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ he said. ‘What’s it to me, a stranger dead?’

  ‘You didn’t know him, then? I believe he’s the man I saw at the army barracks at Kolona, yesterday. It’s a sobering thought that perhaps even whilst we were together, talking and laughing, he was suffering down that well. Do you think he shouted? I’m sure he would have done, if he were able.’

  ‘I suppose over the music and dancing, no one heard him.’

  ‘Do you think not? Even those who passed the well when they were leaving? How did you get there and back yourself?’

  ‘I had a ride in the coastguard launch.’

  ‘Are they allowed to carry civilians, then, in the launch? Or was that another rule being justifiably bent?’

  ‘It’s another of those rules that makes no sense,’ said Loskas, defensively. ‘It’s paid for with public money. And if we’re all going to the same place, why shouldn’t we travel together? The launch is fast. It takes much longer in a fishing boat.’

  ‘Were you in a hurry, then, to leave?’

  ‘No. Why should I have been?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I’m still wondering about that poor soul down the well, and why no one heard him shout.’

  Loskas chose a different pen. When it didn’t work, he put it back in the pot and tried a third.

  ‘Obviously, because he wasn’t there. Clearly, he fell in after we were all gone.’