From the Devil's Farm

by Leta Serafim

  But the answer was always the same: no one knew who the dead boy was.

  For the most part, Patronas found the Syrians to be the most helpful. Sitting together, they studied the photo carefully—men and women alike—before handing it back and shaking their heads. The others—the war-hardened Afghans, primarily—shied away, as did the Pakistanis and Somalians, but to a much lesser extent. A few of the Afghans were so openly hostile, spitting on the ground at Patronas’ feet, that he feared for his safety. He would have arrested them if he could, but didn’t dare, fearing he’d set off a riot.

  One group of teenagers had an especially predatory attitude. They followed Patronas and Evangelos Demos throughout the camp, jeering loudly and making threatening gestures.

  Frightened, Evangelos Demos again begged Patronas to leave. “Tha mas sfaksoune.” They’ll cut our throats. “In Calais, the men in the camp outnumbered the police two hundred to one,” he went on, “and the authorities had to use stun grenades to subdue them.”

  “We don’t have stun grenades,” Patronas said. “Just keep walking.”

  As they were leaving, a middle-aged woman followed them out of the camp. One of the migrants, she was wearing a white hijab, headscarf, and a tunic, a long denim skirt and pristine white sneakers.

  Dark-eyed and sorrowful, she could have posed for an icon of the Virgin Mary. She had that kind of face.

  Hesitating, she reached for the photo and took it from him. “Sami,” she said in English, caressing the image with her fingers. “Is Sami, little Sami.” She began to sob, quietly at first and then louder.

  “Was he your son?” Patronas asked gently.

  “No, no. Is my sister’s boy. Sami Alnasseri. He is ten, older than you say on the paper. He is a small boy, small for ten.”

  Patronas could hear people nearby, angry voices yelling behind him in Arabic. But whether they were seeking to silence her or someone else, he couldn’t tell.

  “Is it safe for you to be talking to me?” he asked.

  “For a little, no more,” she said. “We come from Aleppo in Syria, all of us. Sami’s father, he has gone to Athens, and maybe after to Germany.”

  “Where’s his mother?”

  “She is dead in Syria. Long time dead. Many days it took for us to come and much money. Sami’s father says Sami must stay here with me. They cannot go to Germany together. I am a woman, he say, no good for me to be alone in the camp. Too many men. Sami, he must protect me.”

  “Is his father coming back?”

  “Yes. In one month’s time.” Choking back tears, she spoke very quickly, stumbling over the words. “Sami, he is with me many days. Works sometimes and gives me money. But then I don’t see him, and people in camp say he is dead.”

  Patronas didn’t know how to comfort her—a Muslim woman. Embracing her might well give offense. He didn’t want that, nor did he want to use the translation app on his phone, seeking words of condolence in Arabic while she stood there and wept.

  “He was a good boy,” she said, wiping her eyes. “He clean the cars … buy food for us.”

  A carwash maybe, or a gas station. “Is your name Alnasseri, too?” Patronas asked.

  Something closed down in her face. “Noor,” she said in a low voice. “To you, I am only … Noor.”

  Patronas was familiar with the name. A common one in Arabic, it meant ‘light.’ There were probably fifty women called ‘Noor’ in the camp.

  “What’s your last name?” he asked.

  Looking over her shoulder, she shook her head. “Noor,” she said again.

  Pretending to play with his phone, Patronas hurriedly took her picture. “Did your nephew have any friends?” he asked, leaving the issue of her name for the time being. “People who knew him we could speak to?”

  “Yes. Sami, he had two friends.”

  “Do they live in the camp or outside? Can you describe them to me?”

  Again, something passed over her face. Fear, grief, regret, Patronas couldn’t say for sure. Perhaps it was a combination of all three.

  “I must go,” she said. “Is no good for me, this.”

  The museum director at Aghios Andreas, Dimitris Papadopoulos, reported that the security camera at the entrance didn’t work and that he had been waiting for funds to fix it for close to year. He didn’t recognize Sami Alnasseri and said that as far as he knew, no migrant had ever visited the site.

  Immaculately turned out, Papadopoulos wore a shirt that was beautifully ironed, Patronas noted sourly, as were his tight-fitting jeans. His hair was jet black and formed a natural pompadour, and he had an unctuous, self-important manner. He reported that as a student, he had labored with Varvana Philippaki, the Sifnian archeologist who’d excavated Aghios Andreas. “I’ve devoted my entire professional life to the site.”

  After much hemming and hawing, he verified that a group of Americans, an older man and three boys, had visited the museum earlier in the week then disappeared for long period of time. “I know, because I wanted to close early that day and I was waiting for them to come back and take their car out of the parking lot so I could put the chain up. I always like to be the last one off the hill.”

  “How long were they gone?”

  “Two, three hours.”

  “When was this?”

  He checked the calendar on his phone, scrolling up and down with a finger. “August nineteenth.”

  “You know anything about Thanatos?” Patronas asked.

  “Not really. I do know that after we finished excavating here, we petitioned the Department of Culture for the funds to explore it, but the authorities wouldn’t hear of it. I can’t say as I blame them. The ruins there aren’t even Greek. They’re Phoenician.” Papadopoulos said this last word with disdain, as if it dirtied his mouth.

  “Phoenician?”

  “Yes. You may not know this, but the Phoenicians were savages. Sacrificed children to their gods. Burned them in pits. Archeologists have found skeletons at other sites, skeletons of babies.”

  “Bones, huh?” Patronas recalled the little ribcage and femur he’d found on Thanatos, so old they were the color of rotting teeth, thinking they might date from that time. Maybe Papa Michalis was right and a rite of human sacrifice did take place on that platform. Not recently, but three thousand years ago.

  Patronas planned to discuss both sites with Jonathan Alcott, an archeologist he had met during his first murder investigation, wanting to get his assessment of what Papadopoulos was saying. Could be the museum director was inflating the importance of Aghios Andreas for professional reasons, making it appear more significant than Thanatos for his own purposes.

  Academics did that kind of thing, fought battles about places no one else cared about—a kind of wrestling, he supposed. Only instead of grappling and headlocks, they used paper, lots and lots of paper.

  “The American was very learned,” Papadopoulos said, returning to Svenson’s visit. “He lectured the whole time, pointing to the artifacts on display and explaining their significance to the boys he was with.”

  “How did they get here?”

  “In a Jeep. They’d brought excavating tools with them and were carrying them through the museum, sieves and trowels, that kind of thing. It worried me and I spoke to them about it.”

  “Did you ask what they planned to do with them?”

  “Yes. I told them they couldn’t dig here or anywhere else without a permit from the Ministry of Culture. ‘If you do,’ I said, ‘you will be arrested and charged.’ ”

  So Svenson had known his trench was illegal, but had chosen to proceed anyway. Patronas starred this information in his notebook.

  “Do you know if they took the tools with them to Thanatos?” he asked.

  “No,” Papadopoulos said. “A tour bus arrived and I lost track of them.”

  “Did you speak to the Lydia Pappas, the woman who found the body?”

  “No, it was too early, at least two hours before the museum opened. By the time I g
ot here, the policeman had already taken her away.”

  “Had she been here before?”

  Papadopoulos paused for a moment, thinking. “I don’t know. Possibly. The path to Thanatos is not visible from the museum. Anyone might have gone there, and I wouldn’t have known. I did see lights up there once. I’d stayed late and was on the way to my car. In the distance there were lights. Seemed strange at the time.”

  “When was this?”

  “A week ago, maybe more. I’m not exactly sure.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Be on your guard.

  —The Delphic Oracle

  Patronas called Stathis and asked if he could find an aide worker, someone who spoke Arabic and could translate for him. The boy’s aunt and the other migrants might be more forthcoming if the conversation was in their own language.

  “It was a mess in that camp,” he said. “The migrants were suspicious of us and didn’t understand what we were after. They saw the flyer of the child and thought we were there to arrest them.”

  “You identify him?”

  “Yes. He was a ten-year-old Syrian named Sami Alnasseri. His aunt saw the flyer and identified him.”

  “Parents?”

  “Mother’s dead. Father’s in the wind, on his way to Germany. Aunt was deeply traumatized. Wouldn’t even give me her last name. Afraid would be my guess.”

  “Probably illegal.”

  “Maybe.”

  Patronas had followed her back into the camp after she’d left, calling, “Noor, Noor!” but she’d started to run, still crying, and the other migrants had blocked his way. They were so antagonistic, pushing and shoving him, he was forced to let her go.

  Stathis was not sympathetic when Patronas described what had happened. “Forget about the translator. There’s no money in the budget. You’ll have to do the best you can without one. Muddle through.”

  Patronas couldn’t believe his ears. “A child was murdered here!”

  “Don’t lecture me, Patronas. I was the one who brought you in, remember? That said, I simply can’t justify hiring a translator and paying, not just their salary, but their travel and lodging expenses, just to speak to a bunch of migrants. Not when our own people are starving. Speak to the Greeks in the neighborhood. Someone had to have seen something. At least with them, you’ll understand what they say.”

  Bridging three hills, Apollonia was actually a collection of villages, the priest informed Patronas and the others in the Rav, thumbing through his guidebook in the front seat of the car. It merged with a second town, Artemonas, near the summit of the highest peak, and two smaller towns, Ano and Kato Petali, farther down the slope. It also included Exambela, which meant ‘trouble in night,’ in Turkish, a notorious place during the Ottoman occupation. Papa Michalis twittered as he said this. He always found sin to be great entertainment, Patronas had noticed, telling and retelling stories of human depravity and chuckling to himself. Perhaps it was all those years in the monastery, all that piety and prayer and denial. But there was no mistaking it, the old man had a prurient streak that rivaled Hugh Hefner’s. Patronas had read somewhere that Quakers, restricted to non-violence by their religion, killed mosquitoes. Perhaps something similar was at work with his friend. Only with him, it wasn’t bugs, but sex.

  Although the road to Kamares bisected the town, effectively dividing it in half, there was very little traffic. And the area catering to tourists was limited; the majority of the bars and restaurants were confined to a single picturesque alley behind the square. A number of stores were selling locally made ceramics—Patronas had counted at least five on the way here from Kamares—so Lydia Pappas had been telling the truth, at least in that respect. Potters were indeed hard at work on Sifnos.

  If the overall impression of the migrant camp was darkness, here in Apollonia it was light. There were churches everywhere, each one dedicated to a different saint or celebrating an aspect of the Virgin. The Virgin of the Mountain was one, high on a hill above Platys Gialos, the Virgin of the Life-Giving Spring in the seaside village of Chryssopigi was another. So many, it didn’t seem possible. The priest had told him that Jews believed God only needed thirty-six righteous men and He would preserve the world. That number seemed about right to Patronas. He’d seen his share of evil over the years; and he doubted God Himself could find more than that.

  Patronas sat down in a coffeehouse on the far side of the square and motioned for his men to join him. It was an elderly establishment full of rickety tables and chairs. Solitary pensioners were seated throughout, nursing Greek coffees and reading newspapers from across the political spectrum, smoking and arguing with one another other in a desultory fashion.

  Patronas quickly brought his men up to date. “The victim’s name was Sami Alnasseri, a Syrian refugee. I spoke with the boy’s aunt. She claims her nephew had two friends on Sifnos, but balked when I asked her to describe them. She seemed very frightened.”

  “Someone threatened her, you think?” Petros Nikolaidis asked.

  “Maybe. On Lesvos, the Syrians asked to be segregated from the rest of the migrants, claiming they’d brought money with them and the others were beating them up and stealing it. Could be something like that is going on in Platys Gialos. Some perceived danger.”

  Tembelos nodded. “Migrants we spoke to were afraid, too. Hard to get them to talk to us. Nothing doing.”

  “Listen, we might have caught a break,” Patronas said. “I went back to Thanatos with Lydia Pappas early this morning and found a knife buried in some bushes at the base of the rock. It was covered with blood. I’m convinced it’s the murder weapon. I also found a leather bracelet and a charm close to the pit where she found the body. I’ve sent both off to Athens to be processed for DNA.”

  “Coroner finished with him yet?” Tembelos asked.

  “No. We’re still waiting. We need to establish what drew the boy to Thanatos and find out who lured him there. The so-called ‘friends’ his aunt mentioned might have been responsible. This might also have been an internal affair, some form of internecine warfare, although I doubt it. The boy had a sad life. Mother dead, father in Germany.”

  “Easy prey,” Tembelos said, nodding.

  “Stathis wants me to speak to the Greeks who live around the camp. The rest of you continue what you’re doing. See if you can get a fix on those two people. At the very least, we need to determine their nationality.”

  An old woman was working behind the counter, kneading dough and laying it out on a tray to be baked. She lingered after bringing them their order, eavesdropping on their conversation. “It’s about that boy, isn’t it?” she said. “The one who was killed?”

  “Yes,” Patronas said. “We’re investigating his murder.”

  Reaching for one of the photos, she studied the child’s face for a moment. “They live near Cheronissos, too, in a field out there, not just in Platys Gialos and Kamares. They’re everywhere now, those people.”

  Judging from her tone, she didn’t approve of the migrants’ presence on her island. “Lathrometanastes,” she spat. Illegals.

  She might as well have said ‘vermin.’

  Driving back down the hill to Platys Gialos, Patronas noticed that the migrant camp was located almost directly below Aghios Andreas. He hadn’t realized it before, but thought it might be significant. Marshy, the area around the camp was sparsely settled, clumps of reeds separating the small landholdings.

  In spite of the economic downturn, vacation houses were being constructed along the shore, even a small two-story hotel, the old olive trees it had displaced uprooted and lying next to the new cement foundation. Once they’d been considered valuable—‘a father plants olive trees for his sons,’ it was said in Greece—and now they were dying, cast off and discarded.

  Flyers in hand, he went from house to house, knocking on doors and asking the locals if they recognized Sami Alnasseri. While it was relief to speak Greek, he discovered nothing new. By and large, the people he spoke to were re
luctant to get involved in the affairs of the migrants and politely shut the door in his face.

  One young couple told him they were newcomers to Sifnos, having chosen to abandon their hectic lives in Athens and work the land the way their grandparents had. Brought here no doubt by the economic implosion, unemployment among Greeks their age being well over forty percent.

  With their small plot, they could survive indefinitely, they boasted, obviously pleased with themselves. No need to pay for heating fuel; the climate was mild. They could grow fruit and vegetables, raise poultry or a flock of sheep, even fish if they had to. Survive.

  “I grew up that way,” Patronas said. “There are worse ways to live.”

  With their high-topped sneakers and rock star clothing, the two seemed unlikely peasants, however. The woman had purple streaks in her hair, a diamond stud in her nose—the man, a tattoo of a rearing stallion on his forearm. Neither appeared particularly energetic.

  They should have stayed in Athens, he decided, remembering how hard his mother had worked. They’d never make it as farmers, here or in any other place, tilling the soil and spreading manure.

  “You ever witness any incidents near the camp?” he asked, flipping to a clean page in his notebook. “People harassing the migrants?”

  “Once,” the woman said. “A couple of thugs were shouting at them and telling them to go back where they came from.”

  “Could you describe them for me?”

  “They were skinheads. Greek from the sound of them.”

  A small grocery store was located across the street from the couple’s landholding. Patronas pushed open the door and went inside. A white-haired woman was shelving canned goods in the back, and she turned toward him, wiping her hands on her apron. “Ti thelete?” What do you want?

  He gave her the child’s picture. “You know him?”

  She nodded. “Some of the kids from the camp steal from me. They come in, grab a can or two, and run out again. He was one of them.”