The Feast of Artemis (Mysteries of/Greek Detective 7)

by Anne Zouroudi

  In his hold-all, he found a mauve polo shirt with a crocodile embroidered on the chest and pulled on a pair of pewter linen trousers too lightweight for the season, though he struggled with the buttons and found the waistband somewhat tight.

  The suit he had accidentally slept in was creased almost beyond redemption. He folded the jacket with its satin lining to the outside and draped the trousers over his arm, and took both with him on his search for breakfast.

  The hotel’s interior walls had the distorted lines of old plaster, and were painted a bold yolk-yellow. A miscellany of original artworks hung along the corridors and on the staircase: milky watercolour seascapes and splashy cubist daubs; portraits of ladies in silk, and long-vanished rural landscapes; a mildewed street map of Rome dated 1850. The door to each room was different – a rose-painted porcelain knob to open one, an elegant brass handle for its neighbour. On mismatched side tables there were vases of flowers and a number of curios: baby shoes in intricate, fragile lace; a black-haired monkey’s paw with the amputated wristbone encased in silver; five military medals arranged on blue velvet.

  The fat man examined everything on display, and his progress downstairs was slow. When eventually he reached the hotel’s reception, there was no one behind the desk, though the restorative smell of coffee was in the air. Through the open front door, sunlight brightened the steps and a garden terrace.

  He stepped up to the desk, and brought his hand down on the brass bell provided to ring for service.

  The proprietor came from the dining room. A short man dressed in an unflattering hooped T-shirt and home-knitted cardigan, he was clean-shaven except for a flamboyant moustache somewhat blacker than his silvered hair. Seeing the fat man, his smile broadened.

  ‘Kali mera sas, kali mera!’ he said. ‘How are you feeling this morning?’

  ‘Kali mera,’ said the fat man. ‘I’m better than I had a right to expect. I’m afraid when I arrived here last night, I was somewhat the worse for wine. I met up with my brother, who is notorious for leading his companions down pathways better avoided. Happily I carry with me an excellent hangover cure my aunt makes for my uncle. She never tells what’s in it, but I detect wormwood – certainly there’s something in it that’s horribly bitter. Her claim would no doubt be that wormwood settles the stomach, but it might as easily be in there to punish my uncle’s and my excesses, since my aunt is a woman who doesn’t drink. And this morning, I fully understand her teetotalism. It’s thanks to her you see me undeservedly fresh and prepared to face the day, and ready for breakfast, if there’s any available. Will you forgive me, though, if I tell you I’ve forgotten your name?’

  The proprietor laughed.

  ‘You didn’t ask it,’ he said. ‘No offence, friend, but you could hardly remember your own name last night, never mind anyone else’s. Lefteris Boukalas. Welcome to the Hotel Byron, in case you can’t remember me welcoming you last night.’

  ‘Thank you. Before I eat, I must confess – rather shamefacedly – to a sin I have never before committed. I fell asleep in my clothes, and now my suit is very much the worse for wear. I wonder if you could arrange to have it pressed?’

  ‘Gladly. My wife will see to. I’ll have her hang it in your room when it’s done.’ Lefteris took the suit, and laid it over the back of the chair behind the reception desk. ‘I think it’s warm enough to sit out on the terrace, if you’d like. Or would you prefer the dining room?’

  ‘I think the dining room,’ said the fat man. ‘Even though I feel recovered, I’d like to delay full daylight as long as possible.’

  The dining room was of the nineteenth century, with latticed windows set deep in substantial walls. The furniture was from the period, but each piece was unique; the tables were varied sizes and shapes, and the elegant dark wood chairs were of several designs, with all their seats upholstered in different fabrics. There were more paintings on the walls, and in a glass-fronted alcove, a leather-bound collection of the works of Byron, in German Gothic print, with one volume open at the second canto of Childe Harold. An ornate French clock, its porcelain face painted with a dancing couple, ticked quietly in a corner; on a window sill was a vintage typewriter, with the Greek alphabet marked on its round keys. The tables were covered in peach-coloured cloths, and laid with crockery in pastel porcelains. At one end of the bar was a Russian tea urn, and under the shelves of spirits, an ambitiously sized stainless-steel coffee maker.

  Lefteris invited the fat man to sit at a window table.

  ‘Coffee?’ he asked. ‘Greek, French, Nescafé, a frappé?’

  ‘Thank you, Greek, no sugar,’ said the fat man, taking a chair. ‘Would you make it a double?’

  ‘Malista. And shall I squeeze you some orange juice? We’ve a couple of trees out back, and the fruit’s wonderfully sweet.’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Croissants, rolls, yogurt, almond cake?’

  The fat man recalled all he had eaten at the feast, and was about to decline.

  ‘Everything’s baked fresh this morning,’ said Lefteris.

  ‘In that case,’ said the fat man, ‘a little of everything.’

  The juicer was loud, and the fat man sat in silence until Lefteris brought over a glass filled with pulp-thickened juice.

  ‘So where’re you from?’ asked Lefteris, as he went back behind the bar.

  ‘Athens,’ said the fat man. ‘Though I’m rarely there. I travel a great deal.’

  ‘I could tell by your accent you’re not from round here. You travelling with your brother?’

  ‘Half-brother. He comes from further north. We ran into each other yesterday. We haven’t seen each other in quite some time.’

  Lefteris spooned coffee into a kafebriko.

  ‘Where’s he staying? I’ve rooms here, if he wants one. Will you be staying long yourself?’

  The fat man frowned.

  ‘Now you mention it, I have no idea where he’s staying,’ he said. ‘It’s quite possible he hasn’t slept at all, and he might only now be thinking about finding himself a bed. My concern with him always is that he so easily gets himself into trouble. His love of the bottle carries him away, and sometimes it’s hard not to get carried away with him. As I did last night. Maybe he found a room at another pension. I shall go and find him in a while. He won’t leave town without me. He has no transport of his own, and he isn’t one for buses. Can I ask you, by the way – that poor young man who got burned last night, what news of him?’

  Lefteris lit a gas-burner, and put the kafebriko on the heat.

  ‘You heard about that, did you?’

  ‘Worse than that. I saw it. At least, I saw the aftermath of his fall.’

  ‘Fall?’ Lefteris’s eyebrows lifted. ‘You reckon he fell?’

  ‘How could it be otherwise? A dreadful accident, surely?’

  ‘If the boy’s name wasn’t Kapsis, you would think so,’ said Lefteris, as he assembled the fat man’s breakfast.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Lefteris didn’t immediately reply. He waited for the pot to boil, and poured the coffee into a cup, filled a glass with iced water and carried both to the fat man’s table; then he brought him his food, and fetched a basket filled with pots of preserves – peach and fig jams, and marmalade – each with a dainty spoon for serving.

  ‘All my own work,’ said Lefteris, with some pride. ‘From the growing to the boiling and the bottling. I recommend the peach especially. I add a few pods of cardamom to bring out the flavour of the fruit.’

  ‘That’s a combination I haven’t tried,’ said the fat man, ‘so peach it will be. Will you join me whilst I eat? I’m curious to hear more about last night.’

  Lefteris pulled out a chair and sat down. The fat man spooned peach jam on to his plate, cut a piece off a crisp and flaky croissant, smeared it with jam and popped it in his mouth.

  ‘Delicious,’ he said. ‘As you say, the cardamom really lifts the flavour. So tell me about the Kapsis boy. First of all,
how is he?’

  Lefteris shook his head.

  ‘Not good,’ he said.

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me.’ The fat man looked sombre. ‘I’m afraid he was badly burned before the flames were put out.’

  ‘The family are at the hospital, of course, and I hear the staff are taking the best care of the boy. They’ve got him isolated and sedated. It’ll be a great shame if he’s scarred. Dmitris is a good-looking boy.’

  ‘How old is he?’

  Lefteris shrugged.

  ‘Fifteen, sixteen. A high-school pupil.’

  ‘Why do you say this accident was no accident?’

  ‘A long-standing disagreement about olives. Dendra, as you may have noticed, is at the heart of olive country. Most families have a few trees, and some have gone a step further, and made a business out of it. The Kapsis family, for one. And the Papayiannis clan, for another. They have adjoining orchards, and over the years, they’ve both of them managed to acquire themselves a fair piece of land. And they rubbed along quite well together, for many years. Did you try the kleftiko last night, by the way?’

  ‘I did,’ said the fat man, and patted his stomach. ‘I ate rather more than I should have.’

  ‘It was the Kapsis clan who took this year’s prize. And probably well deserved, except they had no competition from last year’s winners.’

  ‘Who were . . .?’

  ‘The Papayiannis’s.’

  ‘Did the Papayiannis’s not wish to retain the honour?’

  ‘Certainly they did, and they might have done so, had their pit not been sabotaged.’

  ‘Sabotaged? How?’

  ‘The pits, as you’ll know, are left for many hours, usually overnight. The finish time of the competition is fixed, but the entrants are allowed to roast their meat for as long as they think best. Papayiannis’s favour the longest possible cooking, so they start their roast the night before. But once they left their pit, someone doused it.’

  The fat man looked at him.

  ‘The uncooked lamb I saw. That was theirs.’

  ‘No doubt. No doubt either, in truth, of who the culprits were, but how could you prove it? So the general view is that the accident that befell poor Dmitris was revenge for the sabotage of the Papayiannis kleftiko.’

  ‘One act malicious, the other vicious. How can it have come to that?’

  ‘I suspect Dmitris wasn’t expected to be so badly hurt – just a stick between his ankles as he jumped, and down he’d go. Ill considered, at best. The act of a youngster, in my view, who wouldn’t properly have thought of the possible consequences. But the feud between those families is long-standing, and the blood between them is bad.’

  The fat man had finished his yogurt, and cut himself a triangle of almond cake.

  ‘And what’s behind all that bad blood?’

  ‘A boundary dispute. In the old days, there were no fences. Walls fell down, or were taken away to make other walls, and no one cared. People relied on memory. They knew where their land ended, and their neighbours’ began. Maybe there were misrememberings and mistakes, from time to time. But between those two families, a misremembering was made worse by an offence. A young girl was jilted by a lad who decided hours before the wedding that his heart lay elsewhere. It’s a common enough story, but the groundwork was laid for bad feeling.’

  ‘How long ago was this?’

  Lefteris shrugged again.

  ‘Twenty, thirty years ago. Maybe more. They went to war then over the land issue. Fences went up, and were torn down, and moved here, there and everywhere. Childish, it sounds, and it was. But then a couple of years ago, there was a big change. Old man Papayiannis – who’s as shrewd a businessman as you’ll meet – decided to embrace the future. He’d read that he could get better oil yields by investing in new equipment, and that’s what he did. He raised the money by putting all his eggs in one basket, selling off the family fruit orchards to specialise only in olives. He built a new mill for his new equipment, and that cost him more than he could afford. But he was right. He did get better yields, significantly so, and folks said the oil he was producing was better quality, too. People who’d paid Kapsis’s to crush their olives at their mill, deserted that ship and went for the new method. Kapsis’s, meantime, did nothing but bad-mouth Papayiannis’s, and talk about how the old ways are the best, and how purity and quality and taste could only be produced using two grinding stones and a donkey. Which may or may not be true.’

  ‘And what’s your view? Who produces the better oil?’

  Lefteris laughed.

  ‘You won’t draw me on that,’ he said. ‘You must judge for yourself. Try both, and you tell me.’

  ‘I will,’ said the fat man. ‘But how did it escalate into last night’s tragedy?’

  ‘Very simply. Every little thing that happened – a dead goat, a broken-down tractor, a cracked pane of glass – each blamed on the other. There’re no accidents on either side, any more, no acts of God. Everything amiss, everything bad that happens, is blamed on the opposing clan. And some of those things might rightly be put down to malice. The kleftiko, most certainly. Dimitris’s accident, probably. And I’ll tell you what – it’s time all their heads were knocked together, and the business was sorted, once and for all, because that boy is paying the price for all their nonsense.’

  ‘The gods visit the sins of the fathers upon the children, as Euripides says. I agree in this case it seems unjust.’ The fat man finished the almond cake, and drank the last of his juice. ‘You asked me how long I will be staying. It was my intention to leave today, to return my brother to where I found him and be on my way. But I find myself both intrigued by the depth of this feud, and concerned for those involved in it. With the boy so badly injured, it seems impossible that there won’t be an attempt at revenge.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Lefteris. ‘The Kapsis’s will never let this lie.’

  ‘You may be surprised. People can be reasoned with, given the right incentives. So I shall stay at least another night, and visit these two olive growers to make my own judgement on their oils. It’s as good a place as I can think of to begin.’

  ‘And will your brother be wanting a room?’

  ‘I hope not,’ said the fat man, ‘for your sake.’

  Four

  Having no memory of the route he’d taken to the hotel, the fat man was uncertain he would be able to find his car, and as he followed Lefteris’s directions back to Democracy Square, none of the landmarks the proprietor had mentioned were familiar. The fat man’s only recollections were of ill-lit alleyways and treacherous cobbles, but Lefteris’s route was all on broad and level pathways.

  The mood in the square seemed blue, and morning-after torpor subdued the waiters’ back-chat as they carried coffee to a scattering of customers. A municipal truck rumbled slowly round in a swirl of circular brushes, whilst the driver’s colleague emptied rubbish into a reeking oil drum strapped to a pushcart. The ashes of last night’s fire had already been swept away; no marks were left on the marble but the damp whorls of the street cleaner’s bristles, fading in the warmth of the sun.

  At the Odyssey ouzeri, a man with the wearied, drooping features of a perpetual drinker was steeling himself for the day’s first brandy. The patron sat at one of his own tables, cleaning his fingernails with the tine of a fork.

  ‘Kali mera sas,’ said the fat man. ‘Do you remember me? I was here last night with a companion.’

  The patron looked him up and down, taking in his unseasonal trousers and his white shoes, so discordant with the classic styling of his raincoat.

  ‘Scruffy-looking fellow, on the skinny side?’ he asked.

  ‘That would be him.’

  ‘Friend of yours, is he?’

  ‘A relative.’

  ‘I remember him, all right,’ said the patron. ‘He found himself some companions and drank until after three. Very free with his hospitality, he was. All the drinks were on him. Then he sent me inside for one last
round, and by the time I brought out the tray, he’d disappeared. A very generous man, at my expense. If you’re a relative, maybe you could settle up on his behalf?’

  The fat man frowned.

  ‘Where did he go?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ said the patron. ‘Probably found himself some bench to sleep it off. I’ve got the constabulary on the lookout, and they’ll no doubt find him, by and by. But if you’d like to take care of it now, I’ll let them know the problem’s fixed.’

  But the fat man shook his head.

  ‘I won’t pay his debts, but I give you my word I’ll make sure he does. If he reappears – though knowing him, he won’t be rising early – maybe you could ask him to come and find me at the Hotel Byron? Please tell him Hermes was asking for him, and that’s where I’ll be.’

  The fat man walked the full length of the square, and left it by a street he judged would lead him to his car. Few people were about. Though shops closed for yesterday’s feast were open for business, their staff were largely idle, and on the main thoroughfare glimpsed between buildings, traffic was light. Finding a lane he thought he recognised, he followed it to its junction with another he was less sure of; but its end brought him back to the small square where he and Dino had parked.

  There were balled-up gyros wrappers in the fountain bowl, and an empty beer bottle balanced on a dolphin’s brass head. On the Tzen’s boot, someone had finger-written Clean Me in the dirt. The watch-seller’s, the bridal boutique and the lingerie shop were all open, though display lights made them no more inviting than they had been yesterday; and across the square, the shutters had been raised on a premises the fat man had not previously noticed. Under a navy and white striped awning there were tables and chairs arranged along its frontage, where the owner stood on a stepladder, watering hanging baskets filled with trailing geraniums. Pots of flourishing lavender were placed either side of the door, and a carefully painted sandwich-board advertised handmade Italian ice cream.