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

by Anne Zouroudi

  The fat man wandered over to the gelateria. A card listing ice-cream flavours was taped inside the window, alongside several yellowing newspaper cuttings – reviews, and photographs of the man on the stepladder shaking hands with camera-savvy dignitaries. The fat man read one of the captions: ‘Lorenzo Rapetti receives his award from Yiannis Kanellopoulos, Minister for Culture and Tourism’. Propped against the glass was a signed, glossy photograph in a frame, a head and shoulders shot of a famous film star, though the picture wasn’t recent; the film star had long ago lost his looks to smokers’ wrinkles and a paunch.

  The owner climbed down the stepladder. His apron was spotlessly white and well starched; he carried scents of laundry, and the smell of bleach. He wore a St Christopher medallion round his neck, and red socks and tassled loafers on his feet.

  ‘I was admiring your display,’ said the fat man. ‘The praise for your ice cream is impressive. May I introduce myself? Hermes Diaktoros, of Athens.’

  ‘Thank you. They call me Renzo. And you should try my ice cream for yourself. I think you won’t be disappointed.’

  ‘Where are you from?’ asked the fat man, hearing the accent in Renzo’s speech. ‘I suspect you’re not a native of Dendra.’

  ‘I come from a little town near Genoa, a beautiful place where my family has lived for four generations. That’s where I have roots. All my family are ice-cream makers, so in that area, it’s hard for me to make a living. I came here because there’s no competition to speak of. Only me.’

  The fat man glanced at the long list of Renzo’s flavours.

  ‘Unfortunately, it isn’t long since I finished breakfast,’ he said. ‘But even so, I do think I’d like a little taste.’

  Renzo put down his watering can.

  ‘Please, come inside.’

  A glass-covered counter stretched across the back of the shop. By the cash register were towers of cones and boxes of sprinkles – rainbow and chocolate sugar strands, white and milk chocolate chips, chopped toasted hazelnuts and green pistachios – and bottles of syrups – raspberry, chocolate and butterscotch. There were tubs in three sizes and two sizes of spoons, and for those taking their order home, cake boxes waited for assembly, with curling ribbon to tie them with coloured bows.

  Renzo was washing his hands. The fat man looked down through the glass, on to the myriad flavours in the freezer below: the palest of creamy vanillas and dark, cocoa-rich chocolate; the natural green of pistachio and the brighter green of mint; the subtle yellow of banana, the strawberry’s soft pink and the fresh tints of sorbets in lemon, orange and watermelon.

  Renzo dried his hands on a clean towel, and spread his arms over the freezer.

  ‘Welcome to my empire,’ he said. ‘All my flavourings are natural, and everything you see is made in my kitchen here.’

  ‘It all looks fabulous,’ said the fat man. ‘And to do it justice, I should come back when my appetite is better. But I could manage a little now, I’m sure.’ He lingered over the coffees and caramels, and the three-striped Neapolitan. ‘Perhaps a half-scoop of two flavours. What’s this one here?’

  ‘Turkish delight. A rosewater-flavoured ice cream with a dark chocolate swirl.’

  ‘I shall try a little of that. And a little strawberry too, because it’s my favourite.’

  Renzo took a steel scoop from a basin and a small tub from the stack, and expertly dispensed the ice cream, planted a spoon in the Turkish delight, wrapped the tub in a navy and white striped napkin and handed it to the fat man. The fat man laid his money on the counter.

  ‘Please,’ said Renzo, ‘take a seat, and enjoy it.’

  The tables and chairs outside were ornate wrought iron painted white. Under one of the tables, a tan and black terrier was curled asleep, a red leather diamanté collar around its neck. As the fat man took a seat, the dog first raised an eyelid, then lifted its head and sniffed mistrustfully in his direction before struggling to its feet, and slinking away to lie under another table.

  ‘You’ve done the impossible, and chased my dog away,’ said Renzo. ‘Usually he won’t give up that table except for rain, or dinner. That’s his place, and there he stays. He’s an old man, and he sees no reason to defer to anyone, not even me.’

  A small boy entered the square, preoccupied with the bottle cap he was playing with, but noticing the terrier shifting to get comfortable in its new spot, he narrowed his eyes to take aim, and launched the bottle cap at the dog. The cap fell short, but still the dog cowered and flattened its ears. Indifferent, the boy skipped away.

  ‘What an unpleasant child,’ said the fat man.

  Renzo crouched next to the terrier, and to soothe it, stroked its head with the side of his finger.

  ‘Those kids are no better than animals,’ he said, ‘and some of them are worse. They think I have peculiar foreign habits. Keeping a woman’s dog is bad enough, but to keep it as nothing but a companion is beyond their understanding. In his youth, he would have given as good as he got, and nipped that lad’s ankles. But that’s far beyond him now, as you can see.’ He rose, and sighed, and bent to retrieve the bottle cap from where it had landed. ‘They care for nothing. Look, see what they do?’ He pointed to the rubbish left in the fountain. ‘What will they grow up to be, when they learn no respect for anything? It will be me who cleans it up, in the end. No one else will do it, only me.’

  ‘Sadly, you cannot control those around you,’ said the fat man. ‘But if you are doing your best, isn’t that enough?’

  ‘I suppose you’re right. And I do do my best. But, sometimes . . . So, tell me. What do you think?’

  The fat man let a spoonful of strawberry ice cream melt in his mouth, and found it sublime – creamy, but enlivened by the tang of ripe fruit.

  ‘Wonderful!’ he said. ‘Really, this is something special!’

  Renzo smiled.

  ‘I boost the taste with wild strawberries. I manage to find a few, in the season. And I add just a very few mint leaves, to bring out their true flavour.’ Intrigued, the fat man tried the strawberry again, and there, very subtly, was a touch of mint. ‘And I use no vanilla in the base. I use an unflavoured cream base, as I do when I make the lemon. Vanilla does nothing for either fruit.’

  The fat man tried the Turkish delight, discovering a rosy sweetness and dark tendrils of demi-sweet chocolate.

  ‘You present me with a dilemma, Renzo. I don’t know which to enjoy first, and which to save till last. Your prizes are well deserved.’

  Renzo shook his head.

  ‘When I won those prizes, my ice cream was really something, in a class above what you’re tasting now, and as it was meant to be. But things change. Nothing in life should be taken for granted.’

  As the fat man finished his ice cream, a woman entered the square with a wicker basket on her arm. Her pace was steady, but when Renzo called out Kali mera, she walked faster, giving him no more than a silent nod. As she reached the square’s far side, coming towards her was a man, carrying over his shoulder a long, wrapped parcel which seemed heavy enough to weigh him down. The woman greeted him affably, and offered some comment on the weather, and the man answered her politely.

  As the man grew close to the gelateria, Renzo again called out.

  ‘Hey, Miltiadis, how’s it going? Vre, come and have a coffee. It’s on me!’

  The man lowered his head, and looked away.

  ‘Another time,’ he said, and went on by.

  The fat man was watching Renzo. Catching his eye, Renzo gave a shrug.

  ‘You see I’m a popular man,’ he said. ‘I try, and I’m rebuffed.’

  ‘What was he carrying?’ asked the fat man.

  ‘Cloth,’ said Renzo. ‘He has a tailor’s shop, in the next street down.’

  The fat man pulled at his waistband, which was digging into the folds of his stomach.

  ‘I’m afraid I need the services of a tailor,’ he said, ruefully. ‘I shall pay him a visit, later on. Renzo, I thank you for the pleasure yo
u have given me with your wonderful ice cream. No doubt I shall see you again, before I leave.’

  Five

  The fat man drove carefully down the narrow alley away from the square, and following Lefteris’s directions, turned right on to Dendra’s main thoroughfare to make his way towards the olive groves at the town’s perimeter. By a chapel which predated the buildings of the outskirts by several centuries, he took the left fork towards open country. To east and west, the land lay in drifts of low hills and shallow valleys. The new growths of grasses and clovers invoked by autumn rains gave the illusion of fertility; but rocks and stones were everywhere in the fields, and limestone outcrops made barren islands in meadows stippled with white crocuses and rosy-purple colchicum.

  In the groves, the silvery-leaved olive trees grew in orderly rows, the vast black nets for gathering their fruit in rolls around their roots or spread across the ground ready for the harvest. Many of the trees were uniform in age, but all were diverse in their anatomies; the passing centuries had contorted each one uniquely, twisting only the branches in some, distorting others with huge swellings from the roots, or opening fissures and holes where daylight shone through and a man might without difficulty pass his fist.

  There were few firm divisions on the land – only long-collapsed walls which had once marked boundaries or confined sheep – until the fat man rounded a bend, and saw ahead of him a high fence of deer netting, which ran perpendicular from the road across country, splitting one of the orchards into two.

  The fence was incongruous with the landscape, an eyesore intruding on an idyll. The fat man stopped the car, and reversing to where fence and road met, climbed out. The deer netting seemed illogically placed. It enclosed no land, and so was useless for containing livestock; it was simply a divider, running in a straight line, except at one point where it dog-legged, continuing shortly afterwards in its original track. There were no gates or openings, so anyone wanting to move from one part of the grove to the other would be forced to walk back to the road, or carry on to the fence’s far end, hidden beyond a dip in the land.

  The fat man rattled the netting, sending a metallic shiver down its length. The fence was sturdy, the posts and staples almost new. Whoever had erected it, had made certain it was solidly fixed.

  He studied the divided land, finding no differences between the two tracts. The trees were all of the Koroneiki cultivar, their branches still laden with their distinctive dusty-green drupes; all were expertly pruned, and the ground between them was equally well tended.

  He followed the fence along its left-hand side, orchard grasses brushing the hems of his trousers. The trees on both sides at first seemed healthy; but at the dog-leg, a number of trees were showing signs of disease.

  The fat man approached an ailing tree. Running his fingers over the bark, he followed knots, whorls and fissures, tracing a distorted face in the aged trunk. He walked around the tree, and crouched down by its roots, then looked slowly up and down its length. Above his head was a daub of dried mud. He stood, and peering closely, found a ring of mud daubs around the tree. He scratched at one, and it flaked easily away. Licking the pad of a finger, he rubbed where the mud had been, and revealed a circle of bright copper set in the grey bark.

  He took a Swiss army knife from his raincoat pocket, and prised out from its many attachments a petite pair of pliers. Applying the tips to the circle of metal, he eased out from the wood a long copper nail.

  The mud daubs all hid nails. Painstakingly, he pulled all that he could find from the first tree, then moved on to the others that were sickly. When there were no more nails to be found, he gathered up his collection in both hands; there were perhaps fifty, the contents of a hardware merchant’s bag. He searched amongst the tree roots for a hollow, and dropped the nails in, hiding them under handfuls of grass. Then, as if taking leave of a valued friend, he patted a tree on its trunk, and walked back to his car.

  A kilometre along the road, the olive groves ended in rough pasture, where goats foraged amongst thorny shrubs for wild greens and herbs. A sign advertising olive oil for sale was hammered into the verge, and pointed down a dirt track, which the fat man followed.

  The low-slung Tzen coped badly with the ridges and potholes, and the fat man drove cautiously to avoid damage to the exhaust. A line of stately cypress trees stretched skywards, the globes of their cones amber baubles in the sun, and around their feet was a builder’s rubbish: a broken ladder, a cracked bucket, burst paper sacks of rain-hardened cement. Beyond the trees, the track forked. The fat man braked to a halt, and with the engine running, considered; then he put the car back into gear, and went left.

  He passed through a gateway into a yard fronting a farmhouse and outbuildings. The place had age enough to be a curiosity, its origins lying in the house itself, where the door had once been central and the windows matched; but there had been extensions and renovations with no attempt to blend with the original, so the architecture of the elongated house flirted with styles and eras, and its façade was now set with an eccentric mix of windows – large and small, rectangular, square and round. The walls had been patched and restored, though the mortar was still crumbling in places, and more work was needed where the stone’s natural weathering had deteriorated into decay. Here and there the red roof tiles had slipped, and crude repairs had been made to the chimneys where years of acid smoke had perished them; and on a chimney pot sprawled the great, precarious tangle of a stork’s nest, a flamboyant woven disorder of sticks and twigs.

  The yard’s size suggested the farm had once thrived, though the stalls for livestock were all disused, piled up with rotting hay long past usefulness as feed, and fit only for nesting rats. A dilapidated lean-to was stacked to the roof with olive-wood logs. But where the bulk of the old farm-workings might once have been – the granary, dairy and presses – was now one single-storey building, with frosted glass in its windows and skylights in its roof, with the stones left over from its building stacked along its side, and lumps of hardened cement covering its forecourt.

  Behind the new building, a young man at the wheel of an idle fork-lift truck was leafing through the pages of a newspaper; two others sat on full sacks of olives, smoking, flicking ash on to the empty sacks which lay around their feet and oblivious to the noise of a conveyor belt running unused at their backs. The fat man parked next to a silver Opel with rusted wheel arches and a dent in its driver’s door, and taking his hold-all with him, waved a greeting to the men, and headed for an open door below a sign reading Sales.

  Inside, the building was as broad and long as a warehouse, with no divisions from one end to the other, so the racket and clatter of machinery rebounded off every wall. The hospital-clean floors were painted functional grey, and all the steel and aluminium plant – vats, hoppers, pipes, valves – gleamed with polishing. Nowhere were there any olives to be seen, except on shelves above a counter and a cash register; there, various sizes of oil cans were displayed, all bearing a stylised view of olive groves, fronted by a cartoon-like picture of lustrous olives framed by branches of healthy green leaves, and in cursive black script, D. Papayiannis & Son, Extra-virgin Olive Oil.

  Donatos Papayiannis sat in his wheelchair, his walking canes resting against its arm. On his knee lay a spiral-bound notebook where he had been making calculations with a blue crayon, now tucked behind his ear. Hard fluorescent lights emphasised the purplish flush on his face.

  ‘Kalos tou,’ he said. He slipped the notebook down the side of his seat-cushion, grasped his canes and heaved himself from the chair, struggling a little to do so and tangling his legs with the sticks.

  The fat man stepped forward to help him, but Donatos balanced himself, and motioned the fat man back.

  ‘Leave me,’ he said, loudly enough to be heard over the machinery. ‘I can manage. What can I do for you?’

  The fat man looked around.

  ‘This is an impressive operation,’ he said, similarly raising his voice. ‘Very impressive
indeed. Everything is so . . . clean.’

  ‘We pride ourselves on our cleanliness.’ Donatos paused for breath before he went on, the machinery’s din covering the wheezing in his lungs. ‘My son polishes that floor himself, and does it better than any woman. I always say, if we ever spilled any oil, you could sit down with a piece of bread, and mop it up and eat it.’

  ‘As it happens, I’m here to try your oil,’ said the fat man, ‘though I would prefer not to eat it off the floor.’

  Donatos turned away unsmiling, and said something the fat man didn’t catch. He made his way wheezing to the shelves, leaned his sticks against the counter, and from underneath took out a part-filled bottle of oil and a glass tasting cup. He unscrewed the cap from the bottle and prepared to pour oil into the little cup, but his hand trembled, and he hesitated.

  ‘May I help?’ asked the fat man.

  Donatos shrugged, and conceded, holding out both bottle and cup. The fat man took them, and Donatos picked up his canes.

  ‘Heart trouble,’ he said, making his way painstakingly back to his wheelchair. ‘I have good days, and bad days. Damn thing doesn’t work the way it used to. If it were an electric pump in there, I’d have it out and put in a new one.’

  ‘You could have a new one, or at least replace some parts,’ said the fat man. ‘Modern medicine can do almost anything, these days. What does your doctor advise?’

  ‘Doctors? Pah!’ Donatos grimaced, and might have spat, if the floors hadn’t been so clean. ‘I don’t believe in doctors! A fast way to a quick death, putting your faith in doctors!’

  He sat down heavily in his wheelchair.

  ‘Of course there’s a fair amount of quackery in the world,’ said the fat man. ‘And the medical profession is prone, these days, to treating symptoms and not causes.’ He glanced covertly at Donatos’s dark-red colour. ‘Take high blood pressure, for example. Doctors will give you tablets, whereas by far the best prescription is sea water.’