From the Devil's Farm

by Leta Serafim

  Patronas decided to leave the car until tomorrow and rejoined his men standing out in the street. In spite of the lateness of the hour, a group of kids were swimming in the harbor, splashing water and yelling at one another in Greek.

  He remembered the dead boy, and with a heavy heart he watched the Greek children play, wondering if the victim had ever swum with his friends in the dark, laughed with them on a summer’s evening.

  “I wonder what his name was?” he said out loud.

  The priest understood instantly who Patronas meant. “We may never learn it,” he said softly. “All he’ll ever be is ‘child.’ Child of our horror, child of our grief. Hopefully, one day, child, too, of our justice.”

  “I don’t know if we’ll get justice for him, Father. I don’t know if we’ll ever find out who did this.”

  “We have to. We have to seal off this evil, Yiannis. It cannot be allowed to spread. We must do everything in our power to contain it.”

  After inspecting all seventeen of the restaurants in Kamares, with much discussion—eating being a serious business—they selected a midsized taverna named Stella’s and sat down at a table next to the water.

  Since Stathis was paying, they ordered extravagantly, lobsters and shrimp, an immense fagri, the fish alone weighing in at well over three and a half kilos. In addition, they told the waiter to bring them revithokeftedes, a local specialty made of chickpeas, and tiganates karavides, fried crawfish, an expensive delicacy. And to drink, ouzo to start, to be followed by two bottles of his finest wine.

  The policemen sat there morosely, discussing the case in fits and starts, while they waited for their food. Each of them had been deeply affected, the priest moved to tears more than once when he spoke of it.

  “Means, motive, and opportunity,” Patronas said. “Until we learn more, opportunity is paramount. Access to the site is all we have at this point.”

  “Maybe it was political,” Tembelos said. “Revenge for what that Pakistani did on Paros.”

  “Let’s say you’re right and the killer or killers wanted revenge,” Patronas said. “Why there? Why Thanatos? If they wanted to send a message to the migrants, wouldn’t they have chosen a more public place?”

  Tembelos rubbed his eyes. “Personal then? A stepfather, maybe, or the mother’s boyfriend?”

  “Those kinds of killings are impulsive and usually directed at younger children—babies and toddlers mostly,” Patronas shot back. “A man gets irritated, loses his temper, and beats the child to death. This was different.”

  “He’s right,” Papa Michalis agreed. “My feeling is this murder was carefully planned, steeped in ritual. The way they cut him … that wound on his neck. I’ve been thinking about it all day. Whoever did it knew what they were doing. For one thing, the incision was less than an inch long, straight across the jugular, and yet there was no pooling of blood under the body, very little blood anywhere.”

  “Maybe he was killed somewhere else and brought to Thanatos,” Evangelos offered.

  “Unlikely,” Patronas said. “It was nearly impossible for the five of us to get him down from there. Carrying him up would have been exceedingly difficult.”

  “Maybe the murderer had help,” Papa Michalis said. “Maybe it wasn’t one killer, but two.”

  “Any other thoughts?” Patronas asked, reluctant to get caught up again in the priest’s dark fantasy life.

  The five men looked at one another.

  “Could be the killer collected the blood,” the priest said after a moment. “They used to do that in the old days.”

  He hesitated for a moment before continuing, “It was common practice at pagan temples. The priest or priestess—I’m not sure which—would nick the jugular of the animal, be it a lamb or a goat or a bull, and collect its blood. It was a way of securing the favor of the gods, a rite of sacrifice. Occasionally they killed human beings, too. There’s evidence the Minoans took the life of a young man on Crete, shortly before the eruption of Thera. He was bound hand and foot and his blood was collected in amphorae.”

  He turned toward Patronas. “I know you have little use for the church, Yiannis. but it has brought us forward. As a general rule, we don’t do such things anymore. But, oh how we used to …. Oh my, yes, from Abraham onward.”

  Arranging his robe primly, he continued to espouse his theory, “All I am saying is we should not exclude the possibility that the boy was killed as part of a religious ritual. The temple was Phoenician, and they were among the worst in this respect in human history, not Satanists, per se, but equally evil. Their god, Moloch, demanded children be sacrificed to him, and the Phoenicians in Carthage gladly obliged, burning their own babies alive. They placed them in the arms of a statue over a fire pit and incinerated them.” His voice grew louder. “This child on Thanatos was burned, was he not? The absence of blood is extraordinary. There was no blood at the scene, correct? Ergo, someone had to have collected it. That is the only reasonable explanation.”

  “The Phoenicians have been gone for a long time, Father. It is unlikely one of them did this.”

  Evangelos Demos bit into a breadstick. “Maybe the killer drank it.”

  Patronas poured himself a shot of ouzo and gulped it down. It was going to be a long night.

  They continued to argue. No one ate much when the waiter brought their food, the lobster and the shrimp growing cold in front of them, untouched. The ghost of the dead boy seemed to hover above the table.

  “Ritual murder, human sacrifice, call it what you will,” the priest said, pushing his plate away.

  “Human sacrifice?” Patronas said. Just saying the words aloud frightened him—all that ancient darkness closing in, a vision of a god who required human blood. Although his teachers in school had glossed over the fact, he knew his forefathers had been murderous, bloodthirsty people and that Greek history was full of death, ritualized death. Look at Agamemnon, who sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, on the eve of the Trojan War. He killed his own child to fill the sails of his ships with wind.

  As if there was ever any point to murder.

  “Also the platform itself,” the priest said. “I don’t know if any of you noticed, but it had a greasy feel. Someone had burned things on top of it before, flesh of some kind; the rock was blackened and stained in places. The only time I’ve ever seen anything like it was on Samos at the Temple of Hera.” He looked over at Patronas, his face tormented. “You’re going to have to tear that place apart.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it isn’t just a pit, Yiannis. It’s an altar.”

  Chapter Nine

  Practice what is just.

  —The Delphic Oracle

  Not yet ready to sleep, Patronas and Tembelos went for a walk after dinner, hiking deep into the countryside. They climbed to the top of a rise and started down, ending up in a wide flood plain about a half kilometer from Kamares. The area was full of gravel washed down from the highlands, the remnants of some ancient cataclysm. Mountains surrounded them, steep walls of rock reminiscent of Thanatos, pockmarked and full of shadows.

  A donkey was tethered to a tree at the edge of the plain, a wooden saddle still in place on its back.

  “Aren’t you a fine beast,” Patronas said, pulling up a fistful of grass and offering it to the animal.

  In truth, the donkey was no more than a shape in the night, its breathing deep and regular, a series of poignant sighs. Still Patronas felt a kinship with it. It seemed melancholy standing there, suited up and ready for work, in need of comfort.

  “Hee haw,” he said softly, hoping the animal would respond and they might have a conversation. The donkey ignored him and stayed where it was, silent and implacable.

  Despite all the tourists and migrants, Sifnos had kept its Greek character, he told Tembelos on the way back to Kamares. The donkey was proof of it. Foreigners hadn’t yet made their presence felt.

  “You see a jackass and you rejoice,” Tembelos said. “You know each other, the two
of you? Is this creature a long lost family member? A brother perhaps?”

  They went on like this for a few minutes, sparring and trading insults. Patronas had been seeking to purge his speech of non-Greek words, and Tembelos, for one, had been highly critical. “What convoluted horseshit are you talking?” he asked him. “What the hell do you mean, ‘filonikia’?”

  “It means ‘victory over a friend.’ It’s a better way to say ‘we had a fight.’ ”

  Tembelos just rolled his eyes. “Why can’t you just talk like the rest of us? Why do you have to pretend you’re Demosthenes?”

  Reaching down, he gathered up a handful of pebbles. It was said that the ancient Greek orator, Demosthenes, had used them to conquer a speech defect, and his friend suggested Patronas might want to do the same. “Here,” he said. “Gargle with these.”

  They had rented two rooms at Morpheus Pension, a family-owned hotel on the outskirts of town. Evangelos Demos and Papa Michalis were already upstairs in their room. Patronas had banished them after dinner, unwilling to listen to them any longer, especially the priest, who’d been thoroughly keyed up and apt to talk all night.

  The pension was well cared for, with a pretty, arched entranceway. Pots of geraniums lined the walkway that led inside, and the grounds were planted with jasmine and nyxtoloulouda, a fragrant plant that only blossomed at night.

  The balcony off their room was small, but the view was pleasant, overlooking a densely wooded area, and beyond that, the sea. Rising from the garden below, the scent of flowers filled the air.

  Stathis called as Patronas was getting ready for bed. “I did some research on those Americans. Richard Svenson is a real scholar, apparently. Pretty high profile. I doubt if he’s your man.”

  ‘Your,’ not ‘our,’ Patronas noted angrily. Stathis was signing off on a case. As always, his boss never failed to disappoint.

  “What about Lydia Pappas?” Patronas asked.

  “I didn’t see much under her name.”

  After he hung up, Patronas sat there on his bed, pondering what Stathis had said. So what if Svenson was a ‘high-profile’ professor? Being a celebrity didn’t equal innocence; often it was exactly the opposite. Those movie stars in Hollywood were a case in point. And on occasion advanced university degrees did not preclude evil. Josef Mengele, the so-called ‘doctor of death’ at Auschwitz, had plenty of education, and look what he’d done with it? Performed bogus medical experiments and tortured people.

  Let Stathis say what he wanted. He would keep Svenson on the list of suspects.

  He was pretty sure Lydia Pappas was what she said she was—a clear sky. But one never really knew with women. Just look at Dimitra, whose metamorphosis after they got married had been worthy of Kafka. One minute, the docile little bride, the next—abracadabra—the evil sorceress. She might not have eaten children like the hag in “Hansel and Gretel,” but she sure had done her best to devour him.

  He needed to remember that tomorrow, when he took Pappas to Thanatos. Keep his guard up.

  Tembelos was taking a shower in the bathroom, singing a song about Crete at the top of his lungs. The lyrics were beautiful, describing how a mermaid, the sister of Alexander the Great, would ask after her brother and stir the sea if the answer displeased her. Unfortunately, there were a lot of high notes, and Tembelos couldn’t reach them.

  Tone deaf. Maybe entirely deaf—it sure sounds like it. “Quiet,” Patronas shouted, banging his fist on the wall.

  Oblivious, Tembelos sang on, coming to an end in a terrible crescendo and starting back up again.

  There were two twin beds in the room, and Patronas shoved them apart, giving a wide berth to Tembelos, who in addition to his lack of musical ability, tended to be active in his sleep, punching the pillow and boxing with people in his dreams. He also called out to women in a lascivious manner and smacked his lips, made fondling gestures with his hands. Patronas had shared a bed with him on a previous case, and it had almost ended their friendship.

  After carefully laying his uniform over the back of a chair, he got into bed and pulled the sheet up over him. It smelled of soap and was pleasantly rough against his skin. He’d left the door to the balcony open, and he lay there for a few minutes listening to the sea. The waves sounded louder in Kamares than they had in Platys Gialos, booming and crashing along the shore. A cruise ship must be passing, its wake generating the onslaught.

  Still humming, Tembelos emerged from the bathroom a few minutes later. Not wanting to talk, Patronas closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep. The hotel was named after the god of sleep in ancient Greece—Morpheus—and that’s what he intended to do, by god, sleep.

  Tembelos wasn’t fooled. “How’s it going with Calliope?” he asked, sitting down on Patronas’ bed. “I’ve been meaning to ask.”

  Patronas had floundered after his divorce. Tembelos, sensing his friend’s loneliness, had fixed him up with a cousin, a thirty-five-year-old school teacher named Calliope.

  “When you fall off a horse, you get back up and ride it,” Tembelos had said. “Same thing with women.”

  Seeing the broad flanks of Tembelos’ cousin, Patronas had thought the advice fitting. Horse-like in the extreme, she was, this Calliope. A veritable Clydesdale. She also lived to instruct, never let up for a minute. Every date had been a lesson. What to eat and how to eat it, where the napkin went and the proper way to hold a knife. A fountain of wisdom. No, she was more than a fountain. She was a river, Calliope. Goddamned Niagara Falls.

  His ex-wife had a similar personality. What was the expression? The wounded old horse sees the saddle and trembles. That was him, trembling all over.

  “I think I’m too old for her,” Patronas said, feeling charitable. “I’m fifty-five and she’s thirty-five. Twenty years is a big difference.”

  “You can’t keep sleeping in the office, Yiannis. It’s no good. You’re a wreck. You need a wife. “

  “Maybe just an iron, Giorgos. Let’s start with an iron.”

  A branch kept banging against the outside wall, scratching like an animal seeking to get in. The sound awoke Patronas and he was unable to get back to sleep. Thanatos kept crowding into his mind—the suffering the boy had endured in his final hours.

  He got out of bed and stepped out onto the balcony, fighting his way past the billowing curtains. He closed the door behind him, intending to smoke a cigarette and go back to bed. He needed to get a grip on himself and get some rest, to focus on the job and stop acting like the dead child was his son. The waves continued to pound the quay, foamy water spilling up onto the cement. In the distance, he could see the red and green buoys that marked the entrance to the harbor, a small lighthouse blinking just beyond. Outside, the wind was an even greater presence, sweeping through the garden and bending the trees almost double, gusts making rippling patterns across the surface of the harbor.

  It was very dark and stars filled the sky. Leaning against the railing, Patronas picked out the constellations he knew. He had a telescope on Chios and he often took it up on the roof of the station at night when he couldn’t sleep, solitary hours he cherished. Seeking to educate himself, he had even bought a book on astronomy. He didn’t understand most of it. Novas? Black holes? The only black holes he knew were in people, in their diseased and troubled hearts. Stars were different, each one a miracle.

  Sometimes they even made him think of God, that there might actually be one, the mystery of their light coming from so far away—proof of His existence.

  Patronas had been six years old when he lost his father. To comfort him, his mother had told him that stars were the souls of the dead and that his father was up there now, that he had taken his place among them. ‘He will always be there,’ she’d said. ‘You will always be able to find him in the night sky. His light will never leave us. It will last longer than all our imaginings—longer than the earth itself.’

  He saw a star fall, and he wondered what she would make of it. A disgraced angel, maybe, one who’d violat
ed one of the Almighty’s many rules. She’d been like that, his mother, always with an explanation for everything, one the priests would approve of. A biblical verse for every occasion.

  He shook off the memory. Another time, another life.

  The door creaked and Tembelos slipped out to join him. “You all right?”

  “No. Every time I close my eyes, I see him hanging there.”

  “I know. It was awful.”

  They stayed out on the balcony for a long time, watching the sea and smoking in silence.

  “You ever go to that monastery in Athens, Kaisariani?” Tembelos asked, his voice so low Patronas could barely hear him. “That place where the Germans killed those people?”

  Patronas flicked his cigarette off the balcony, a shower of sparks briefly lighting the night. “Sure,” he answered, “a long time ago. Why?”

  “You could tell something bad happened there, couldn’t you? Sense it as you walked around. I thought at first it was the wind I was hearing, but it wasn’t. It was them—the people who died in that place. Battlefields, too; they are like that.”

  Patronas had known Tembelos a long time. Taciturn and calm, his friend was not given to hyperbole or excessive emotion. He’d never once seen him cry. Yet tonight, he sounded awash with anguish. “What are you saying, Giorgos?”

  “I’m saying Thanatos was the same. You could feel it in the air there, feel something bad had happened. You could almost hear that kid screaming.”

  Chapter Ten

  Take care to recognize opportunity.

  —The Delphic Oracle

  Lydia Pappas was standing at the entrance of Leandros, waiting for Patronas. She was wearing jeans and a blue tunic with white embroidery down the front, and her shoes were the same amphibious ones she’d had on before. Her hair was loose, reaching almost to her waist, held back from her face by a faded cotton bandanna. In spite of the hour, she was wide awake and hurried out to meet him.