The element -inth in Greek

by Alison Fell

  ‘I see. I’m sorry.’ Sergeant Stephanoudakis has an inch of black coffee in a tiny plastic cup. His cigarettes are at his elbow, the lighter stacked neatly on top of the pack.

  ‘Ti thelete?’

  The man behind the counter is watching her impassively. She changes her mind about coffee and orders water.

  Producing a bottle from the fridge, the vendor thumps it down on the counter. The sergeant frowns and flickers a finger, and a plastic glass materialises beside the bottle.

  ‘Allow me,’ he says as Ingrid tries to pay, waving aside her protests.

  The small courtesy brings her momentarily close to tears. She pours water into the glass and takes out her cigarettes; the bottle is mercifully cold, misted with condensation. Already there’s a slime of sweat under the bridge of her sunglasses.

  ‘It’s hot,’ he agrees. ‘You’d like to sit?’

  After a moment’s hesitation, she accepts. He’s a Greek, after all, and Greeks believe in the little gallantries. Have her habits become so solitary that she can’t accept a simple kindness?

  Whisking two folding chairs from the stack beside the kiosk, he arranges them in the shade of a large plane tree. She sits down, cradling the cold bottle in her lap.The Sergeant sits opposite, cool and quiet, sizing her up.

  ‘So you’re studying our Minoans?’ His black shoes are shiny and shipshape, as if no dust dared stick to them. A gun nests snugly in the holster at the back of his belt. ‘I hope you’re also taking time to enjoy the island?’

  The protocol is pretty clear: it’s his island, and he requires her to be happy on it.

  ‘Oh of course,’ she says airily, ‘The sun, the sea, you know.’ She waves an appreciative hand at the brilliant dome of the sky, understanding that, on this occasion, the inconvenient business of the corpse won’t be mentioned.

  ‘Of course,’ he echoes, with just enough irony to make her wish she hadn’t been quite so quick to relegate herself to the status of tourist.

  Beyond a low jumble of rooftops the peak of Mount Yuchtas shows pale blue in the haze. She thinks of the sacrificial victim up on the hillside of Anemospilia, meek with awe and opium, succumbing to his fate. The torpid heat makes her feel heavy and hollow. With a sense of inevitability she waits to submit to the standard interrogation – the barrage of questions Greeks think not rude, but simply direct.

  Ise pantremeni o eleftheri? Married or single, children, and so on.

  By and large, she isn’t in favour of talking about her family. After all, what on earth would she say? An only child, father dead, mother in a Care Home. No husband, children, or pets. It sounds lonely and maudlin, as if she were some kind of Orphan Annie. Not that she minds exchanging snippets of information, in a general kind of way, but she’s not from a background where people talk freely about their feelings.

  The Sergeant wears no wedding ring. His fingernails, she notices, are clipped and clean.

  ‘Eleftheri,’ she says, only because she can’t remember the Greek for divorced. But the word sounds too assertive, literally, it means ‘free.’

  ‘Lipon, milate Ellenika?’

  Ingrid shrugs apologetically. ‘It’s rusty. Ancient Greek isn’t really the same, I’m afraid.’

  He’s in his mid- to late-forties, she guesses, but his body is lithe and exact. A disciplined man, then – one not given to excess – except, as she knows, on the dancefloor. His English seems fluent, idiomatic. Aussie English, he explains: the product of ten years in Melbourne.

  ‘Ime apo tin Skotia,’ she tells him, steeling herself for the usual whisky comments.

  ‘Bonny Scotland,’ he remarks, with a ceremonious smile.

  With kinship sorted, politics can be addressed. The Macedonian question, where the Brits stand on divided Cyprus. Ingrid feels the slow drag of boredom.

  ‘Well, obviously Turkey’s over a barrel – if they’re so keen to join the E.U., I mean.’

  She knows she is floundering. It’s always a good idea to read the newspapers before you come to Greece, work out a position. A dry leaf skims down form the plane tree and settles on her hair. Feeling his eyes on her, she says stiffly, ‘It was good of you, to get me past the guard.’

  ‘No problem,’ he says, shrugging. Behind the portaloos a JCB strikes up a terrible noise and he waits, frowning, until it stops. ‘I told her you were on official business from the British Museum.’

  The duplicity startles her. ‘But I’m not!’

  ‘But you might easily be, no? I can’t really see you as a thief, Ms Laurie. Or a forger.’

  He’s grinning straight at her now, a broad grin, unabashed. On his sleeve-badge something silver, perhaps a laurel wreath, winks in the dappling sun. To have power and to exercise it – is that what puts the gleam of pleasure in his eye?

  ‘Not even a terrorist?’ she counters.

  The Sergeant ponders this, quirking an Olympian eyebrow. ‘Mad, bad, and dangerous to know? Somehow I can’t see it, Ms Laurie!’

  Just then a small child darts between them, trips on a tree root, and falls face down on the ground. In one fluid movement the Sergeant rises from his chair, reaches the wailing boy and crouches down beside him. When the child sees the uniform his cries stop abruptly and his eyes grow wide. The mother is approaching, strolling placidly from the kiosk, dove-like sounds issuing from her mouth. She scoops the child up and sets him on his feet, shrugging ruefully at the sergeant, who returns to his chair brushing gravel-dust off his trousers.

  ‘Not too young to be scared of the cops, then.’

  His smile – understated, and undeniably appealing – invites Ingrid to agree that he could never, in a million years, be intimidating. It says that, under the uniform, he’s an ordinary, affable sort of guy – which he probably is, she decides, if a conceited one – and she nods indulgently, for if he wants to impress her a little, then where’s the harm in it?

  ‘So what brings you to the Museum, Sergeant Stephanoudakis?’

  ‘Yiannis, please.’

  ‘Ingrid,’ she says, and they lean forward on their rickety chairs and shake hands awkwardly across the gap.

  ‘Some objects came into my possession. Archaeological objects. They may be fakes but I don’t think so.’

  ‘That happens often?’

  ‘More often than you’d think.’ His shrug is casual, but something dark and doleful lingers on his face. ‘This is Crete, after all.’

  When his cellphone beeps he flicks it open and reads whatever is on the screen. Then he snaps it shut and looks around absently, as if he has lost the thread. As the silence stretches, it strikes her that the conversation may simply tail away to nothing; in a moment they’ll get up and shake hands and go about their business, and that will be that. The prospect of this fills her with an angry ache, like failure.

  She says in a rush, ‘That dance you did the other night, at the Medusa. I meant to say, well, how impressive it was.’ As soon as the words are out they sound not only gushy, but possibly intrusive. He’s a Cretan, after all; who’s to say what private relationship he has to the ecstasies of the dance?

  ‘You were there?’

  The surprise on his face is so clearly counterfeit that she’s now quite convinced he saw her. Taking refuge in theatre, she spreads exaggerated hands, throws in the Greek word for Wonderful. ‘No really. It was exaretiko!’

  With an infinitesimal shake of the head the Sergeant nips his cigarette out between finger and thumb, and drops it into the plastic cup. ‘Exaretiko?’

  ‘Exaretiko,’ she insists.

  ‘Efkaristo poli,’ he replies, bowing his head in a parody of politeness.

  ‘Parakalo,’ says Ingrid.

  20

  Yiannis took lunch at a small ouzeri behind the Police Station. Spreading the latest edition of Messoghios on the table, he ate without conviction, his thoughts lingering on Ingrid the archaeologist.

  A nun’s face, he decided: intense and abstracted, but a body that spoke volumes. At the thought of th
is a kind of torpor overtook him. He scowled at a plate of pureed aubergine, and for a shameful moment Dora, imploring him with her eyes, took on the characteristics of the mushy food he hated.

  Already he could see her facing him across the table: her clothes too considered, her face made up like a magazine cover. The way her fingers punished her napkin, while he, cringing, carried the burden of her hurt.

  He pushed his plate away impatiently. He would ring her today, definitely: make peace, or at least make the break a clean one. Settle the thing before his mother arrived from Athens with her winks and nudges and coy little questions.

  ‘Why can’t you settle down with a nice Greek girl?’ she’d demanded tearfully after he’d brought Karen home for the first time. ‘Someone who’ll look after you.’ This, after all, was what she’d spoiled him for – so that a daughter-in-law could carry on where she left off. Yet even as a youth he’d shied away from the destiny she’d planned for him. Did this make him more of a man, he wondered, or less of a Greek?

  Entering a humble plea of guilty, he stared unseeing at the Sports section. As far as he could see, his mother didn’t have an ounce of subservience in her, and his father had been the mildest man on Crete. So why on earth had she brought her son up to be a tyrant?

  He pulled out his cellphone and summoned Dora’s number. Within seconds, however, he succumbed to a fit of childish rebellion. Guilt or no guilt, how could you adore a woman who’d been reared with the sole purpose of being at your beck and call? A man needed something to get his teeth into, and he couldn’t simply transform himself to order.

  As he leafed backwards through the newspaper his eye fell on a caption.

  DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN?

  Underneath the caption the fat boy’s face stared starkly out at him. Kallenikos had opened the eyes, of course, for the photograph. The accompanying article took up the rest of the page. It was flagged MYSTERY OF THE BEE MAN, and it carried Martha Hourdaki’s byline.

  He let out a muttered curse. Hourdaki had been a media figure on the island for 20 years, and Yiannis had always measured his opinion of her by Karen’s. An opportunist, Karen had called her, a bandwagon feminist out to further her career. And further it she had, from the first brief polemics of the 80s, to a shit-stirring column in Messoghios, and now a weekly radio slot, not to mention regular appearances on TV chat-shows, whose hosts adored a controversialist – especially one with a gravelly voice, a serious cleavage, and the snaking locks of a Medusa.

  He scanned the first paragraph, nerves jumping. The police press statement had been particularly non-commital, steering well clear of disclosures that were now before him in black and white. The glaze of honey on the victim’s skin, the cocktail of opiates in the stomach: exactly the sort of prurient detail that would make newspapers fly from the the stands, regardless of how much it might muddy the waters of any inquiry. Yiannis knew plenty of reporters who, in their vanity, aspired to be one jump ahead of the police, but Hourdaki, typically, seemed determined not only to conduct her own personal investigation, but also to try the case in court.

  There was worse to come. ‘Forensic evidence has led the police to suspect the presence of a third party of the female sex,’ he read with alarm. ‘Are we to assume that the hunt is now on for the Mystery Bee Woman?’

  Led the police to suspect indeed! Where on earth was the woman getting her information?

  He rolled up the paper, threw a note on the table, and strode out to the car. There was a discomforting suspicion he couldn’t quite banish from his mind. Martha Hourdaki was a smooth operator, and he could see that her particular blend of bullying and flattery might be formidably seductive. If she’d been snooping around the lab, was it possible that a vain man like Theo might have been susceptible?

  The Incident Room was in a half-basement with square barred windows through which a tranche of pavement was visible, as well as the lower legs of assorted passers-by. The place had originally been a storehouse where Venetian merchants kept their bolts of silk and casks of spices, and although the stone walls must have been whitewashed countless times over the centuries, Yiannis fancied that the smell of the past remained: a smell of musk, salt-petre, and nutmegs.

  Vasilakis tossed the newspaper into the centre of the table. ‘What a bloody soap-opera!’ His reddish-blond eyebrows flew as high on his forehead as wild geese in the skies of autumn.

  Vasilakis had what Yiannis could only characterise as a stunned face, one that always appeared to be trying to come to terms with what life dealt out to him, the good hands and the bad. A face permanently awash with frowns of puzzlement, or blushes of surprise. But today he had heard Hourdaki on Radio Kriti on the way over from Chania, and Yiannis had rarely seen him so angry.

  ‘For your information, guys, the first Oracle at Delphi was attended by bee-priestesses called the Melissae. And old Zeus, get it, was called Melissaios, the Bee man, because sacred bees fed him on honey when he was a baby in the Diktaean Cave!’ Vasilakis snorted. ‘Welcome to Neverland. I mean, who’s she trying to impress?’

  Outside the window a papaki rested against a lamp-post. As the rhetorical question hung in the air Yiannis saw a yellow dog hoist its missing back leg and water the wheel. Understandably, Vasilakis hated it when the press seized the initiative that rightly should be his. Not to mention the fact that a case which had most probably been headed straight for the files had now taken on a momentum of its own. The four of them stared glumly back at him.

  It was Kyriaki who spoke first, brightly, as if to rally the troops. ‘At least we’ve got a name for Miss X, sir.’

  Detective Sergeant Kyriaki – Ioanna by name – looked as smart as a whip. She had a lean face with black eyebrows that crowded together in the middle, and a brazen white wave cresting at the front of her short dark hair. It was clear that she had every confidence in her boss’s indulgence; clear also, from the glances exchanged by Kounidis and Mouzakitis, that the two junior officers would be glad to see her taken down a peg. Vasilakis had crimped his face into a frown. ‘How so?’

  ‘Melissa, sir?’

  ‘Ai, Ioanna!’ Eyebrows aloft, Vasilakis shook an admonishing finger. She might have been his naughty daughter, whose name Yiannis had temporarily forgotten. Given their respective ages, she could have been. Her ploy, though, seemed to have worked: egos had been obscurely soothed, and the atmosphere lightened perceptibly. Mouzakitis and Kounides shifted in their seats, brought out cigarettes, and allowed themselves a chuckle.

  On the whiteboard Vasilakis had written. M.O.? MOTIVE? Beside M.O. he had drawn a bad hieroglyph of a bee. With a shrug that consigned the investigation to the status of a travelling circus, he picked up the marker pen and added MELISSA?

  Spectral, the name stared back at Yiannis. He imagined long dark hair, moon-dapples like silver coins on the curving shadow of a back. For a moment the comely Zoe swam into his mind, but despite that Greek temptation to see all mischief, from nude bathing to sodomy, as vices imported from elsewhere, when he thought of the ghostly girl he couldn’t pin a foreign face on her.

  ‘No belongings, that’s the real bastard!’ Vasilakis glowered at the whiteboard like a man affronted. ‘Otherwise, well, you’d think a sex-game gone wrong, something like that.’ He sat down, took a gulp of his coffee, and pulled the autopsy report towards him. ‘So. Nothing from Lyon yet?’

  ‘No sir,’ said Kyriaki. ‘They’re circulating it to the other national forces.’

  Vasilakis sighed. ‘No identifying marks, either. No scars or piercings, not a filling or a crown in his mouth.’

  Yiannis hastily consulted his copy. ‘No dental work, sir?’

  ‘Absolutely zilch. Clean as a whistle.’

  ‘Lucky sod,’ Mouzakitis muttered.

  Vasilakis withered him with a glance. ‘Not lucky for us if it means no dental records.’ He spread the photographs out on the table. ‘So come on, guys. What do the photographs tell us?’

  ‘He was strong and fit, sir?’ Kyriaki of
fered. ‘Almost like a professional athlete?’

  ‘I agree,’ said Vasilakis. He nibbled a fingernail, musing.

  The fan which had been brought in laboured feebly against the preposterous heat.

  Mediterranean origin, the report said. Nationality unknown. Yiannis loosened his tie and studied the body shot. On the chest, legs and arms the tan was still faintly visible, and more clearly demarcated against the paleness of the belly and genital area. Not a nudist, he thought, but did not say; it struck him that what was missing was the usual mark of a watchstrap.

  The drone of the fan summoned up the timeless throb of the plane that had brought him back, all these years ago, from Melbourne. After the stretched day and the refuelling stop at Singapore, they’d entered a zone of continuous night, moving in a domain of darkness. He remembered that feeling of being held in the heart of it, as if in the dark waters of a mother’s womb. Bad weather had diverted the plane to Vienna, and above him the blackness had been pricked by stars, and below him it was depthless, strung with the geometrical constellations of cities.

  ‘So how did they get there? Hiked round the coast? Papaki? Car? They’d have had to park on the road. Someone must have seen something?’

  Vasilakis cleared his throat noisily. ‘Are you with us, Yianni?’ His lips were pursed into a mode of tolerance but his eyebrows were exasperated. ‘We’re going to need house-to-house interviews in the Panomeli sector.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Yiannis, abashed. Yiannis the dreamer. Yiannis the worshipper of dawns and dusks and shifting weather.

  ‘And while you’re at it, get the passport details of every damn tourist over there. I want a proper check done, is that clear?’

  Shirt-sleeved, Vasilakis paced and smoked. Sweat shone on his bald patch; there was a brass-coloured fleece on his forearms, as if the years had contrived to transfer the deficit from his head to his extremities. He stopped mid-stride and fixed his gaze on Kyriaki. ‘Get on to Forensics, Ioanna. I’m ordering another search of the scene. I want every last centimetre dusted, I want it sieved. I know there’s trace, there’s got to be.’