by Alison Fell
Incense burned primly beside the till, as if to exorcise any lurking demons of commerce. A notice on the wall exhorted customers who required plastic bags for their purchases to kindly bring their own. ‘Of course,’ said Yiannis, who as far as he knew had implied no criticism. On the shelf behind the counter he saw detox products, cholesterol kits. For reasons best known to herself, Dora had once presented him with a self-test kit. The packet had nagged at him from the bathroom shelf until, suspecting that it was just the first item on a long agenda of reforms, he’d thrown it in the bin.‘And last Sunday in particular?’
The youth shrugged listlessly. ‘You’ll have to ask Maria? She’s the owner? She could have been doing the books and stuff?’
‘She’s here now?’
The brim of the Fedora jerked towards a hessian-covered door deep in the interior. To reach it Yiannis would have had to negotiate sacks of lentils, as well as stacked crates of leeks and avocados and lamentably shrunken apples.
He looked at the boy, who, making no move to help, looked back at him. His patience sorely tried, he said levelly, ‘Can you fetch her for me, please?’ An epitrepetai, he thought, if I may ask, fuckwit.
As soon as the kid had disappeared into the nether regions of the shop Yiannis was attacked by a fit of sneezing. He had a sense of healthful husks of grain hanging in the air; then again, perhaps he was simply allergic to all this righteousness.
He gazed bad-temperedly at the shelves, hoping to find cause for criticism. A brief survey revealed produce that had never grown in Cretan soil: lemon-grass, vanilla pods, Kenyan coffee. He saw pollen grains from Denmark, Thai fish sauce, buckwheat pasta all the way from South Australia. On the floor stood enough foreign bottled mineral water to fill a small reservoir. Gratified, he blew his nose loudly. Hypocrisy was the word that came to mind: if he wasn’t mistaken, the place had a carbon footprint the size of King Kong.
Maria held the door open for Fedora boy, who was carrying a full tray of pastries. She came toward Yiannis wiping red workmanlike hands on a sackcloth apron.
‘Can I help you?’ Under a parched thicket of tawny hair her face was young and angelic.
Yiannis didn’t elaborate more than he had to. ‘In connection with an enquiry’ was as far as he would go.
The girl cocked her head, listening. She was Dutch, he reckoned – a compatriot of Jaap the raspberry man. Up close, her skin looked desiccated, like an unhosed garden; there were flakes of psoriasis around her eyebrows. This seemed odd to Yiannis. Hydration, he thought – wasn’t that the buzzword? Most kids her age could guzzle any old junk and still glow like gods, so how come wholefoodistas always managed to look so sickly?
‘I shut the shop myself on Saturday night, and no one was here until Monday, I assure you.’
‘And the German commune, at Neo Chori – they’re regular suppliers?’
‘Halcyon? For sure. They do cheeses, honey. Some vegetables like fennel and tomatoes.’
‘But they definitely didn’t deliver on Sunday morning?’
‘As I said, no.’ The girl knitted her dry brows at him. ‘Please. They are in some trouble?’
He smiled non-committal. ‘That remains to be seen, I’m afraid. Thank you for your help. We may need you to make a statement, however, at some point.’
The boy was decanting the pastries on to labelled plates, setting them out on the display counter. As Yiannis turned to go a label on one of the plates caught his eye. Non-gender-specific gingerbread persons. Were they serious? Pointing to the plate, he smiled sourly at the etiolated youth. ‘That’ll really change the world, won’t it, mate?’
Outside he lit a cigarette and, good temper restored, strolled across the street to the zacharoplasteion. He could still produce a fair Melbourne accent when required. Karen, he reckoned, would have been proud of him. He left a message on Kyriaki’s mobile, bought a baklava, and carried it to the counter by the window, where he pondered on Wiltraud, and her early-morning ‘delivery’. A harmless lie, possibly, but his instincts told him otherwise. He had a sense of things coming together, massing.
The baklava looked like a bird’s nest that had been woven from twigs and shreds, the pistachio nuts snuggling at its centre like eggs. It also looked like the perfect antidote to all things healthful. He waited while the girl eased it into a cardboard container, and carried it out to the car.
Even with the windows open the dustbin smell of Pericles still clung to the passenger seat. He’d seemed pleased to see Yiannis at first, and had scurried eagerly into the car, but had sat, all the way back to Katomeli, in a silent leakage of tears. Yiannis could get no sense out of him; he seemed to have gone beyond the reach of scolding and chivvying. When they stopped outside the empty house he made no move to get out, and Yiannis had to go round to the passenger door and persuade him.
Clearly things couldn’t go on as they were. Pericles had no sisters or cousins, not even a kindly niece to look in on him. Someone was going to have to step in, the Church, Social Services, fuck knows who.
Leaning against the bonnet of the car, Yiannis bit into the honeyed heart of the cake and stared blankly at the traffic, monitoring his sensations. The taste didn’t exactly flood his mouth, as it had done yesterday in the Flagstaff office, but when your starting point was zero, everything was a matter of degree. The fact remained, though, that something in his damaged circuitry had been reactivated, and was transmitting a faint but detectable signal to his salivary glands.
*
Yiannis was chatting to one of the women constables in Missing Persons when Kyriaki rang back.
‘Sorry, Yianni, we’re up to our eyes. Only just got your message.’ Her voice was resonant with recent drama, as if she’d just come off stage at Epidavros.
‘What’s up?’ he asked, instantly alert.
‘All hell’s broken loose, that’s what! You remember that ATM fraud over at Rethymnon? Well, we had a tip-off, right, a good one? So there was a raid last night up at Anogeia.’
‘The Devil’s Triangle?’
Yiannis was incredulous. Anogeia and its two neighbouring villages up in the Lefka Ori had become a no-go area for the police. Albanian bandits had moved in, planting their drug farms, turning a sleepy patch of rural Crete into a Wild West defended day and night by hand grenades and Kalashnikovs.
‘Anyway, the gang took off – all but the grass, who got shot in the leg by mistake. So half the squad’s in pursuit, and we’ve stretchered the casualty into the ambulance, when a couple of the bastards pop up again, out of fucking nowhere, Yianni! So then they force open the back doors of the thing, and just blast the guy. Right under our noses!’
‘Christ,’ breathed Yiannis, truly awed. For a moment he stood speechless, registering the hum of the ceiling fan, the anodyne click of keyboards. When the constable he’d been speaking to – a shy-looking girl in headphones, who could barely have been out of high school – flushed and lowered her eyes, he realised that he’d been staring at her. What a fucking cock-up, he thought but did not say.
‘You got them, though?’
‘The papareli? Sure we did, the little shits!’
Yiannis caught the note of hysteria in her voice, shock tightening the strings of her triumph. He decided not to ask about the big fish, the ones that got away. No doubt they were snug in their burrows by now: honour satisfied, they’d be twirling their moustaches and plotting more mayhem.
In the light of such a bloodbath his Eleftheria news faded into insignificance. As he filled Kyriaki in, Wiltraud’s lie began to look grey or even white. Alternative explanations – ones that, embarrassingly, hadn’t occurred to him till now – crowded his mind. What if she’d simply been sneaking back to the commune after a secret tryst? Or on some other early-morning scam she preferred to keep under her hat?
‘So.’ said Kyriaki, heaving an exhausted sigh.
‘Look, don’t worry about it,’ he said, feeling decidedly sidelined. He glanced at his watch and made a decision. ‘I’ll go up
there myself and have a word. I know the woman already. She’s a vet, she treated my cat.’ It sounded so pathetic that he immediately wished he’d kept his mouth shut.
‘Do you need Mouzakitis?’
Did anyone ever need Mouzakitis? Yiannis wondered. Mouzakitis was a six foot hulk with armour-plated biceps. He had a low forehead from which his black hair was gelled straight back, a squared-off nose, and small, rather wistful, blue eyes. As Theo said, if he had a brain he’d be dangerous.
‘It’s okay, I can handle it.’ Footslogging. It’s what he’d signed up for, after all.
‘Better take him anyway. You never know, Yianni.’
Kyriaki’s voice was so awash with sympathy that for a moment he thought she would dissolve in tears. Catastrophe suited her, he decided: maybe it reminded her that she was human.
He was about to go in search of Mouzakitis when the fresh-faced constable came hurrying up to him.
‘There you are, sir!’ she said breathlessly, handing him a memo. ‘One of the callers gave us a name.’
Ivo Kruja, he read.
‘Did you get the caller’s name?’
‘Sorry sir, she rang off.’ The girl looked crestfallen. ‘She was Greek, though. She sounded, well, really scared.’
Yiannis looked at her badge. Constable N. Constantinou. ‘N is for?’
‘Nina, sir.’
‘Thank you, Nina,’ said Yiannis, wondering about the biochemistry of the blush, the seemingly autonomous dilation of blood vessels. Why boys grew out of it, but women didn’t. It must, he supposed, have something to do with mating.
‘She mentioned a commune, sir. I can’t be sure, but it sounded like Neo Chori.’
*
‘Last Sunday, in the early morning,’ Yiannis said, ‘I believe you told Mr Jansen you were delivering?’
Wiltraud gave an embarrassed shrug. When she bent to stroke the brown dog which panted in the shade of the awning, her breasts swung free under the thin white kaftan, and Yiannis saw the dark shadow of nipples.
‘Between ourselves, Sergeant, I am a naturist. It’s not the sort of thing one broadcasts, nowadays. So I must take my swim early, if you understand me.’
Yiannis inclined his head. It was well done, smoothly done. So why didn’t he believe a word of it? Mouzakitis, he saw, was positively salivating: he might not have much English, but there wasn’t a man in Crete who didn’t understand the word ‘naturist’.
When they’d got out of the car Mouzakitis had let out a whistle of admiration at the view: the grove of lemon and pomegranate trees sloping down to terraced fields and, far below, the beach of Katomeli, where the coastline blurred into a haze through which glinted the distant control towers of the airport.
‘Some piece of real estate!’ he’d said, shaking his head regretfully.
Wiltraud had been husking corn on the porch when they arrived, the dog comatose at her feet. A lilac-coloured jeep was parked in the yard, next to a battered pick-up, below which someone’s splayed legs were visible. 50 metres away, in the parched grass of the perimeter, two children of about five years old were building a house out of straw bales.
‘Castor and Pollux,’ she’d told Yiannis, with a hostessy smile. ‘Cassie and Polly to us.’
‘The Heavenly Twins,’ he’d observed, because even at a distance they were beautiful: gold-skinned, limber, with hair the exact colour of the bales they played among.
Margrit’s children, she’d said. Margrit, apparently, was indoors making lemonade. The other communards, Prys and Jean-Yves, were still down in the fields but were expected back shortly.
When the the man emerged from beneath the pick-up Yiannis recognised the Teutonic wall-builder. Wolfgang, that was the name. He’d greeted Yiannis with a nod of recognition, but since then hadn’t uttered a word. When they’d met on the track Yiannis had put him in his 40s, but he saw now that the guy was younger. His pitted complexion – had he had chicken pox as a child? – had given the impression of age.
Wolfgang wiped his oily hands with a rag and, straddling the low wall that edged the porch, began to roll a cigarette. Encouraged, Mouzakitis produced his own pack and made a general address to the air. ‘I may?’
Wiltraud nodded. ‘On the veranda, yes of course.’
Wolfang smoked in silence. Two spiralling white butterflies landed on his bare thigh where, reassured, perhaps, by some stillness in him, they settled down to copulate. Motionless, he observed them.
‘Lipon,’ said Yiannis, perplexed. ‘You haven’t heard anything about it in the media? On television?’
Wiltraud shook her head. ‘We don’t have one.’
Yiannis raised his eyebrows. ‘No television?’
‘People come here to find their centre, Sergeant, to learn about nature. Not to watch television.’ Wolfgang had moved nothing but his eyes, which glinted severely at Yiannis over the Trotskyesque glasses.
Failing to come up with a suitably stinging rejoinder, Yiannis turned his attention to the love-struck antics of the butterflies. Kore would have stalked them, in increments of motion so tiny that only geological time could measure them; then, in an instant no camera shutter could capture, she would reappear a metre away in her other, killer, guise, the pretty wings clamped between her jaws.
‘And you’ve had no one staying here by the name of Ivo Kruja?’
‘No we have not!’
Wolfgang leaned his head against the whitewashed wall of the house and shut his eyes, as if the business of entertaining two policemen was simply beneath his dignity.
‘This happened last Saturday, you say?’ Wiltraud put in quickly. She gave the ghost of a shiver. ‘How awful.’
A woman appeared in the doorway, carrying a tray laden with a pitcher and glasses.
‘Margrit!’ Wiltraud cried, jumping up with evident relief and taking the tray from her. Wolfgang and the butterflies, Yiannis noticed, stayed put. A hollow-cheeked blonde in her thirties, with greyhound-thin shoulders, she wore a pale yellow vest and a skirt tiered in long flounces. She limped to the edge of the veranda and semaphored her arms at the children. When she sat down in the basketwork chair Wiltraud had pulled out for her, Yiannis saw the prosthesis which replaced her lower left leg, and the trainer, incongruously big and boatlike on the end of the slender steel pole.
The twins came running towards their mother, chattering in a language Yiannis didn’t recognise.
‘English now,’ Margrit commanded, pouring two glasses of lemonade. ‘Say hello to the officer.’
The one Yiannis took to be a girl, if only because of the longer hair, looked him straight in the eye.
‘Hello officer. My name is Cassie.’ Polly, who was apparently a boy, hung back until nudged forward by his sister.
‘I am Polly,’ he mumbled, blushing fiercely.
‘I’m impressed,’ said Yiannis.
‘English is the lingua franca here,’ Wiltraud said pleasantly, handing him a glass the rim of which was crusted with sugar, like an old-fashioned American cocktail. ‘Danes, Germans, a Frenchman and a Welsh – as you see, we are like the United Nations!’
Mouzakitis accepted the glass Wiltraud offered, and even thanked her in English. He sipped at the drink dubiously, as if it might be spiked with ecstasy. The children had settled down on the deck, leaning their backs against the unprotesting dog. Making a trollish face at them, Wolfgang licked a finger, dabbed at the sugar, and popped it into his mouth. The twins copied him immediately, giggling themselves silly, as though white sugar were a rare and guilty treat.
An Edenic scene, thought Yiannis to himself.
Mouzakitis was standing with one foot on the bottom step of the porch, blowing prissy smoke-plumes at the yard, and making what appeared to be an expert assessment of the wind-chimes. The impression he gave was that of a man trying to blend into the background, with about as much chance of success, Yiannis thought, as a dinosaur in a duckpond. Feeling a distinct desire to distance himself from the photos, he decided to let Mouzakiti
s be the carrier of contagion. At least it would give him something to do.
‘My colleague is going to show you some photographs of the victim.’ He looked at Margrit, hesitating. ‘But not, perhaps, the children?’
It was Wolfgang, however, who answered. ‘Cassie and Polly are commune members. I don’t think we should exclude them.’
Margrit gave him a sharp glance, but nodded in agreement.
‘As you wish,’ said Yiannis.
When Mouzakitis lumbered up the steps with the file, Yiannis told him to hand round the prints. There were two sets; Kallenikos had taken full-face, profile, and several oblique shots. From every angle, the boy looked equally dead.
Wiltraud glanced at them and let out a gasp, covering her mouth with her hand. Margrit leafed through them slowly, her face impassive. As she passed the prints across to Wolfgang the dog sniffed at them and let out a mournful growl; the butterflies, panicked, uncoupled and fluttered away.
Cassie was up on her knees, craning eagerly to see. After a second she said in a small voice, ‘What’s wrong with Pema, Mummy?’
For a moment Yiannis thought she meant the dog. Then Margrit said emphatically, ‘No, darling, it isn’t Pema.’
‘Pema?’ said Yiannis.
Cassie had edged closer to her mother. Suddenly babyish, she drooped her head against Margrit’s knee, or whatever stood in for it under the flowing skirt.
‘Just someone who stayed here for a while,’ Margrit said, holding Yiannis’ gaze. ‘The photograph resembles him, perhaps, a little.’ Her eyes were dark and depthful, the pupils dilated. She could have been a doper, but he doubted it: contact lenses over a certain magnification could produce a similar effect.
‘And this Pema – when did he leave?’
‘About two, three months ago?’ Margrit said, glancing at Wolfgang for confirmation.