by Leta Serafim
He spoke to Lydia Pappas before he left for Kamares—a hurried, whispered conversation in the bedroom after she returned from work. He outlined his theory about the murder and warned her to be on guard. “No telling what those three are capable of. Lock your door and keep it locked.”
Shocked, she dropped down on the bed. “I can’t believe they did it.”
“All evidence points in that direction.”
“I know a child psychiatrist in Boston who has violent kids in her practice. ‘They’re pretty scary,’ she told me. ‘There’s something dead in their eyes and they give off a kind of chill.’ ”
“Is she afraid of them?”
“Not for herself, she said. For the other people in their lives.”
She looked over at him. “I never felt that way about them, not once the whole summer. They were obnoxious, sure, but that was it.”
They talked for a few more minutes. “Did you ever see the Syrian child around here?” Patronas asked. “The boy must have crossed paths with them at some point before they killed him.”
“No, never.” She hesitated for a moment. “There are migrant children out in the street here sometimes, running around. They get in the way of the cars and people yell at them. I’m not sure, but he might have been one of them.”
“Did Bowdoin and the others yell at them?”
“No, but Richard Svenson did. He had a pretty short fuse and he didn’t like it when they got in the way.”
“Did he ever threaten them?”
“Not that I remember. I think for the most part they were invisible to him. Greece wasn’t his country and he knew he’d be leaving soon. The migrants weren’t his problem.”
Pushing her hair back from her face, she sat for a few minutes, lost in thought. “I just can’t believe what you told me—that those three boys are murderers. I assumed they were just spoiled brats. Immature, maybe, but certainly not dangerous.”
“You said they spied on you.”
She laughed. “I’m a middle-aged woman. In a way, their attention was a compliment.”
They continued to argue about the character of the students. Lydia Pappas defended them, claiming Patronas was wrong, and the three were innocent. As a cop, he only saw the worst in people. “Kids make mistakes. That’s all that spying thing was. Youthful high jinks. They would never hurt anybody.”
Patronas finally stood up to go. “Be careful,” he said. “You might not believe it, but those boys are dangerous. They have already killed two people.”
He’d been expecting her to kiss him goodbye, but she stayed where she was. “It must be a heavy burden,” she said coolly. “All that cynicism. It must be a very heavy burden.”
Patronas found his men waiting for him outside Stella’s Taverna. They were all starving and ended up ordering half the things on the menu. To start with, papoutsakia, little shoes, an eggplant and meat dish crowned with béchamel; domates gemistes, tomatoes stuffed with rice, onions, and currants; keftedakia, meatballs, and for the grand finale, stavlisia, immense porterhouse steaks weighing in at close to a kilo each, one per person. This was in addition to fried potatoes, three different kinds of pitas, and various other tidbits.
Although the food was delicious, the meal got off to a rocky start. Papa Michalis was morose, full of tales about the woeful afternoon he’d spent with Svenson’s students, who had cried all over him, and Tembelos was surly, still angry about the housekeeping assignment.
But it was Evangelos who was the biggest problem. Having just learned from Stathis he’d been suspended, he’d set about consoling himself with food, emptying entire platters onto his plate. After he consumed three quarters of the potatoes, the others revolted; there’d been a lot of angry back and forth about portion control and Evangelos’ walrus-like size. Eating no more than one’s share and the like, lessons the others said he should have learned as a child.
Feeling like a grade school teacher, Patronas intervened. “Look, it’s been a bad couple of days. Go easy on each other, okay?”
“Okay?” Tembelos raised his eyebrows. “What’s that you speak? Could it be the dreaded English?”
“What can I say? I took your advice. I became bilingual.”
“It wasn’t me,” Tembelos said, his mood brightening. “It was that redheaded vixen, the Greek-American woman. What’s her name? Pappas. She’s the one. She’s the reason you abandoned your mother tongue.”
“It’s true,” Patronas said. “Thanks to Lydia, my skills in many things are improving.”
Tembelos smiled. “I’ll just bet they are. You two going to continue to cohabitate?”
The priest raised his head. He’d been squirreling away food on his plate, fearing another onslaught by Evangelos, stockpiling what was left of the french fries. He was making little piles and appeared to be counting them.
“Cohabitate?” he asked with a frown. “What is this? I am unfamiliar with the term.”
Patronas poured more wine into his glass. “It means I’m living in sin,” he said.
Papa Michalis pondered this news for a few minutes, his expression thoughtful. “Marriage, of course, would be the answer to such a situation, this moral quandary you’ve gotten yourself into, although I’m not sure I would recommend it. I’d need to meet the lady first. All those years in America …. She’s bound to be full of erroneous modern ideas.”
Familiar with the priest’s beliefs, Patronas laughed to himself. Papa Michalis’ idea of erroneous modern ideas was giving women the vote. The old man despised Hillary Clinton, not because of her political beliefs, but because she wore pants.
“Why don’t you come back with me tonight and meet her?” he told him. “Once we’re done here, I’m going to ask her to marry me. You’ve known me a long time, Father, and I would like your blessing.”
Tembelos interrupted. “So my cousin, Calliope, is out of the picture?”
“I’m afraid so, Giorgos. No hard feelings.”
“Actually, I’m surprised the two of you lasted as long as you did. I was sure one date with her would do it. Way too close to your previous model—the fearsome and all-knowing Dimitra.”
“Calliope did seem to have a lot of opinions.”
Enjoying themselves, the group began to itemize the peculiar opinions of their womenfolk, their wives’ ill-conceived ideas.
“Nothing tasty,” Evangelos said. “No salt, not fat, no sugar. And no matter what she does to lentils, at the end of the day, they remain what God made them, lentils. I’ve never eaten mouse droppings, but I’m willing to wager they taste the same. As for zucchini, another favorite of hers, it’s mostly water. Water and mouse droppings—that’s what she feeds me.”
“No casual look-see at female sunbathers at the beach,” Tembelos said when his turn came. “No girly magazines, no nudity on television or in the movies.”
“No extended visits from my mother,” Nikolaidis said.
After two liters of retsina, a potent local wine, they were all very jolly.
“Here, here!” Tembelos tapped his glass with a spoon. “In conclusion, marriage is an evil most men welcome. Our ancestor, the ancient philosopher, Menander, got it right.”
“Sosta,” Nikolaidis said. You speak correctly. “When you get right down to it, women are a pain in the ass.”
Scandalized, Papa Michalis spoke of the Holy Mother and the female saints of the church, women who were ‘chaste and pure.’ When Tembelos and the others ignored him, he began quoting St. Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, deepening his voice and doing his best to sound like God.
“ ‘BRETHREN, love is patient and kind …. It is not arrogant or rude … irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things.’ ”
Tembelos waved him off. “We’re talking about marriage, Father, not love. One sets your heart racing while the other …” he made a hopeless gesture with his hands. “Varka vouliagmeni.” It’s a shipwreck.
Evange
los smiled for the first time that night. “Amen,” he said and popped the last meatball into his mouth.
Patronas didn’t join in. Unlike these poor idiots, he and Lydia Pappas would live happily ever after. He was sure of it. She was a good woman. Like a geisha, she would make his life a pleasure.
He was paying the bill when his cellphone rang. Pulling it out of his pocket, he looked down at the number on the screen. It was a 228 exchange, Sifnos.
“You’d better come,” the harbor patrolman, Stelios Mavros, said. “The kids have disappeared. I can’t find them anywhere.”
The door to the students’ second-floor apartment was open, but it was obvious they had cleared out, packing in haste, if at all. Clothes were strewn across the floor and their razors and toothbrushes were still in the bathroom. Patronas picked up a tube lying next to the sink and read the label. Medicinal, it had been prescribed by a doctor to treat Michael Nielsen’s acne.
Patronas and his men searched the apartment thoroughly, but found nothing to indicate where the students had gone. They had taken their laptops and phones with them, so there was no way to check the sites they’d visited on the Internet, the recent calls they’d made.
“Athens?” Patronas said out loud.
It was the logical choice. And from there, back to the United States. That’s what he would have done in their place. Their parents would hire lawyers to defend them and fight their extradition to Greece. Chances are they would never spend a day in jail.
Remembering the Syrian boy, he slammed his fist down on a table.
“They had everything, those kids,” he told Tembelos. “And Sami Alnasseri, what did he have? Nothing. Who spoke out for him when he was alive? Who sought to make his lot better? He was nothing in life and he’ll be forgotten in death. Just a statistic, one more lost child from the Middle East.”
“Ach, Yiannis, it’s the way of the world.”
“As long as I live, I will never understand it. Those three were blessed in every sense of the word, and yet they ended up without conscience or heart.”
“I repeat. It’s the way of the world. An easy life does not guarantee goodness.”
Pawing through the fugitives’ possessions, they noticed that despite the disorder, the kids had been careful—no scraps of paper in the wastebasket, no ticket stubs or scribbled notes. Aside from the acne prescription in the bathroom, there was no trace of their respective identities in the room. Whether from watching crime shows on television or thanks to their own innate intelligence, their leave-taking had been sophisticated. It was a wonder they hadn’t snipped the labels out of their clothes.
“What tipped them off?” Patronas asked Tembelos.
“Young Stelios, your harbor patrolman. They were used to seeing you hanging around, given your relationship with the fair Lydia, but when he showed up tonight in a uniform, they must have realized you were on to them.”
Patronas turned to Stelios Mavros. “When did you first notice they were missing?” he asked.
“Around ten thirty. I was sitting outside the apartment when I smelled smoke. I was afraid it was another firebomb and I ran to check. Some idiot had poured gasoline into a trashcan on the street and set it on fire.”
“It was the kids,” Patronas said. “They set the fire to distract you.”
Stelios Mavros considered this and nodded. “Figures. They had their music turned up real loud, and when I got back, I could still hear it. Only the CD had changed—the same song over and over, ‘Before You Accuse Me.’ That’s when I got suspicious and went upstairs to check.”
“Trying to get in your face. The song was a message.”
Lydia Pappas had come out of her apartment and was standing there listening to the conversation. She was barefoot and dressed in thin, lavender pajamas, her hair tied back with a ribbon.
Preoccupied, Patronas continued to speak with Mavros and Tembelos. Eventually she went back inside and closed the door.
He followed her with his eyes, wondering if he should talk to her, ask her if she’d spoken to the kids while he was at dinner, alerted them somehow. Not deliberately, just let something slip. But in the end, he decided not to.
If she was innocent, a conversation like that would destroy their relationship, and if she was involved …. He closed his eyes, remembering what Tembelos had said about the woman with the ice pick. All he knew about Lydia was what she’d told him. What if, like the cop in the movie, he was wrong about her?
He continued to question Stelios Mavros. “How much time were you actually away from the building?”
“Forty-five minutes, maybe a little longer. I phoned you right after.”
So the kids had an hour’s lead.
Grabbing his phone, Patronas called the Coast Guard in Kamares and told the dispatcher the suspects were headed their way, most probably in a white Jeep. Then he rounded up his men and they sped to the harbor to head them off.
When they got there, Patronas spied a group of uniformed officers working their way through a surging crowd of people, photos in hand. They were pulling individuals out and questioning them, and the family members of the people they’d seized were shaking their fists and shouting at them. A boat was due to arrive and it was a chaotic scene. Long lines of tourists were shoving their way forward, and cars and trucks were gunning their engines, blowing their horns.
“When’s the next ferry?” Patronas asked.
“In fifteen minutes,” one of the Coast Guard officers said. “We checked everybody after you called, but those boys of yours never turned up.”
“There’s no airport on Sifnos,” Patronas said “Only a heliport, and that would pose too great a risk. If you were a fugitive, how would you get away?”
The man thought for a moment. “Their best bet would still be by boat. As we’ve seen from the migrants, there’s really no way to monitor the people passing through Greece. There’s a multitude of islands and boats of every description, some registered, some not. Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t seal it off. You want to come, you come. You want to leave, you go. And there’s nothing any of us can do about it.”
A Hellenic Seaways ferry arrived not long after. An immense red catamaran, it dwarfed the other vessels in the harbor, its prow like a vast pair of scissors cutting into the sea. The traffic out of Sifnos was going in the opposite direction tonight, the people boarding the ferry far outnumbering those coming ashore.
Spreading out, Patronas and his men joined the throng of tourists, pushing them aside and running up into the hold of the boat. Far below, the propellers were spinning in preparation for the ferry’s departure, creating massive whirlpools, white and frothy in the darkness, the churning water slamming against the pier. It was late and Patronas saw people bedded down on the floor, others with their heads on the tables in the lounges, fast asleep. The journey to Piraeus took less than three hours, so few people bothered to rent cabins.
Patronas checked all the public areas, the snack bar and the dining room, the first and economy class. When he was sure the students weren’t there, he ordered crew members to unlock the doors of the cabins.
When he explained what he was after, the crew willingly joined the search. Together they scoured the boat, going from cabin to cabin, even inspecting the engine room and the storage cabinets where they kept the fire hoses—any place a person might hide out.
But Gilbert, Nielsen, and Bowdoin were nowhere to be found.
Patronas eventually released the ferry, telling the captain he could leave. He watched it go with a sinking heart.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Why are you going barefoot on thorns?
—Greek Proverb
It took Patronas and his men until early the next morning to discover the escape route the students had followed. After untying Svenson’s Zodiac, still anchored at the marina in Platys Gialos, they had taken off on it, bypassing Sifnos altogether and heading for the island of Antiparos, a distance of roughly thirty kilometers. It must have been a
harrowing journey at night.
The captain of a rented sailboat had seen them. Afraid the Zodiac might capsize in the heavy seas, he had notified the office of the Coast Guard, which in turn had informed Patronas. “Three people were on board,” the man said. “Young foreigners, from the look of them, not Greeks.”
Boarding a Coast Guard cruiser, Patronas and his men raced to Antiparos in pursuit. Patronas feared the trip would be too much for Papa Michalis and ordered the old man to stay behind, suggesting he continue his ministry at the summer study.
“Keep your ear to the ground, Father. See what you can learn about our fugitives.”
“What is it you’re hoping to learn?” the priest asked.
“Their history, if they bragged about doing something like this before, any previous acts of violence, and where they might be going. That’s the main thing.”
The rest were already on board the cruiser, even Evangelos Demos. Patronas had asked Stathis to lift his associate’s suspension, saying he needed the extra manpower. His boss had reluctantly agreed.
Patronas had visited Lydia Pappas at Leandros before he left. Still a little suspicious of her, he’d been vague about where he was going. She’d been very unhappy.
“When are you coming back?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll be going back to the States soon, Yiannis. We’re running out of time.”
“In case you’ve forgotten, I’m investigating a murder and my time isn’t my own. I don’t get to choose the days I work. I’m a cop, for Christ’s sake.”
Her face softened and she reached out to touch his sleeve. “I know, I know. I’m sorry. Just come back alive.”
Standing on the terrace, she watched him until he was out of sight, something no one had done since his mother died.
“Stop being a cop,” Tembelos told Patronas when he voiced his doubts about Lydia Pappas.
“Come on, Giorgos. Don’t you think the timing was suspect? I tell her and,” he snapped his fingers, “ten minutes later, they’re gone.”