The Taint of Midas

by Anne Zouroudi

  The intruder stood rigid, and listened for a moment, then set down the lamp, and, moving quickly across the room, opened the door. Peering out into the night, again he listened. Hearing nothing, he turned to go back inside the house, but the fat man picked up a stone and tossed it behind him, where it landed with a thump and a trickling of dirt beneath the trees.

  With no further hesitation, the intruder crossed the verandah and slipped away into the darkness. His footfall faded; a few moments more, and the van’s engine roared. The fat man stepped on to the verandah, and watched the van’s headlamps light its way down to the coast road, and away towards the town.

  He picked up his torch. Laying his holdall on the single chair at the table, he carried the plate and the stale bread into the house, stepping carefully over the possessions littered on the floor. The corkscrew was easy to find, but the glasses by the sink weren’t clean; so he took the bucket Maria always used for water, and made his way downhill towards the spring.

  The fat man laid his torch on the edge of the stone trough and dipped the bucket into the water. Lowering the full bucket to the ground, he crouched to cup his hands and drink, and there, by his knees, the torchlight showed the body of poor Manyiatis.

  Manyiatis lay as he used to when stretched out in the sun, but plainly he was not simply asleep. Drying blood marked a fracture line along his skull. The socket of one eye was crushed and misshapen.

  The fat man stroked the dog’s injured head and tickled the fur of his still-warm belly. His memory of Manyiatis was of a young dog, lively, fast and keen to play; could this fat, grey-whiskered animal be the same creature? The fat man’s absence had truly been too long. He’d been away a lifetime for the dog.

  ‘Poor old Manyiatis,’ the fat man said aloud. ‘If you could have kept your mouth shut, just this once, he’d never have known you were here, and you’d have lived to fight another day.’ He sighed. ‘Come on, old man. We’ll find a place for you to sleep tonight.’

  The dog was heavy, but the fat man made light work of carrying him to the house. He laid the dog beneath the verandah table and, returning to the spring for the water, washed himself a glass.

  From his holdall, he took the wine he had chosen, and an object wrapped in pale-green velvet. He drew the cork from the bottle, filling Gabrilis’s empty glass before his own. Sitting, he sniffed the bouquet. The wine smelled good; age had given it richness, and great depth.

  The fat man raised his glass to the stars.

  ‘Good journey, old friend,’ he said, and drank the mellow wine, thick with fruit and must. ‘Like us,’ he said, ‘greatly improved with age. And I have brought you one last curio, the final piece, it seems, for your collection.’ Unfolding the velvet, he laid Gabrilis’s gift beside the bottle. It was, in appearance, a flintlock, but deformed. The stock was overlaid in silver and finely engraved, and the trigger was quite usual; but, in place of a firearm’s barrel, the stock held a foreshortened, complex mechanism cast in iron. ‘It’s an odd-looking thing, you’ll agree,’ said the fat man to the night. ‘You’d never guess the use, unless you fired it.’ He held it out in the palm of his hand, as if inviting scrutiny from above. ‘A wealthy man’s pistol tinderbox. A nice example: English, eighteenth century. I meant it to be useful, a standby for when your matches were all damp. But now . . .’

  He carried the tinderbox inside and, moving the Trojan horse along the shelf, placed the tinderbox amongst the other curios.

  He drank the wine slowly, until the first pink line of dawn showed over the sea. With daylight enough to see by, he walked down to the melon terraces and found a shovel to dig a grave for old Manyiatis. As he worked, the sun’s warmth increased; by the time the hole was deep enough, the flies crawling on the old dog’s eyes were plentiful. Wrapping Manyiatis in a sheet, the fat man carried him to his grave, and, weighting the sheet with stones to deter the rats, buried him deep beneath the dry earth.

  When the work was finished, he stood awhile at the graveside, remembering Manyiatis as a puppy, his trick of stealing shoes, his love of chasing rabbits, the pride he took in guarding home and family.

  ‘Run fast after your master, old man,’ he said. ‘He’s not so far ahead. Run fast as you did as a youngster, and you’ll catch him up in no time.’

  He made his way downhill. Amongst the hives the bees were waking, making their first journeys of the day. By hive number nine, the fat man stopped. From his pocket he took the bee-embossed tin of ointment and, dipping into it with his fingers, smeared the lemon-scented balm over his forearms, dabbed a little on his face, his nose, his neck. Clearly, the bees disliked the smell; those settled on his clothing flew away, those airborne and flying near increased their distance from him.

  The painted eye on the hive roof stared up at him; he felt the watching of the other eyes around him. As he lifted the lid of number nine, no bees rose to fight off his intrusion. The smells of sweet honey and of wax were intense, the noise inside the hive like a powerful engine muted. The frames were almost filled with honeycomb. The fat man tugged at the right-most frame, loosening it enough to be removed, whilst the agitated bees dared not trouble him, as if the ointment put a shield of glass between him and them. On this frame, sealed beneath the honeycomb, was an irregularity, a swelling. Using a knife brought from the kitchen, the fat man cut away the comb, letting it fall to the ground, offering in his mind an apology to Gabrilis for the waste. Then, with thumb and forefinger, he extracted the cause of the swelling: a polythene-wrapped parcel thickly bound with tape, sticky with wax and honey. Carefully, he replaced the frame and the hive lid, and pushed the honeycomb he had removed under the hive. Except for a little stickiness on the ground, there was no trace of the bees having been disturbed.

  At the spring, he washed the wax and honey from his hands, and from the parcel. When cleaned, it showed no signs of tampering, of deterioration or damage. Satisfied all was intact, he thanked the bees for their good care of the documents and, wishing them kali mera, strode purposefully away.

  Six

  The village of Koskinou lay three miles further inland, where flat, dry fields of olive trees spread around modest houses with views to the distant hills. Chickens scratched in the dirt of well-tended vegetable gardens, goats were tethered on the roadside verges; a vintage tractor rusted by a woodpile, and a hobbled donkey waited, head bowed, by an open chapel gate.

  The few small businesses on the square – a haberdashery with fly-spotted windows, an insanitary butcher’s, a bric-à-brac shop displaying artificial flowers and cheap cut-glass, a kafenion advertising Fanta and pizza – were closed. A wooden bench circled the trunk of a spreading plane tree, and in the summer the old men liked to sit here in its shade, littering the ground with cigarette butts, enjoying the coffee and ouzo they fetched from the kafenion; but this morning the old men were all absent.

  The fat man parked the Pony outside the baker’s where, he remembered, they used to make an excellent bougatsa, the sweet custard pastry he was so fond of. But the bakery wasn’t baking any more; a chain and padlock on the door were showing signs of rust, the paint on the shutters was dull and flaking.

  Behind the square, the single bell of St Lefteris’s began to toll.

  The fat man followed the lane on the square’s south side. In the silences between the bell’s tolling, the side-streets were quiet; even in the shade of the house walls, the morning’s heat was strong. A cat with one blind eye cowered in a doorway; a naked infant sat crying on the flagstones of a courtyard.

  When he found the house, the gathering was small. Outside, a handful of old men waited; inside, Kokkona led the wailing, and her chorus – five elderly women only – made up for lack of numbers with their volume. A seventh woman, too old to raise her voice, moved her lips as if gurning and signed the triple cross over her sagging breasts; all gums and wrinkles amongst her widow’s black, she stared up at the fat man with bewildered eyes.

  A priest, obese and malodorous, wafted a censer back and forth
, chanting as it rattled and billowed smoke perfumed with frankincense and roses.

  Gabrilis lay in his coffin on the table. The fat man greeted the women – ‘May his memory be eternal’ – and looked into the casket. They had prepared him as if for a celebration – the bristles had been shaved from his chin, his old clothes replaced with a suit – so he seemed a parody of the young bridegroom he had once been, a melancholy reminder of time’s cruelty. His skin was the tired colour of old newspapers; beneath the scents of bergamot and starch, the heat promoted a subtle note of decay. Above his right eye, there was bruising; his arthritic hands, folded across his chest, were grazed across the knuckles.

  The fat man laid his hands over Gabrilis’s, and squeezed them in a final clasp before placing a kiss on the corpse’s forehead. Giving a full bow to the coffin, he made no cross over it, but simply turned away.

  The women pursed their lips in disapproval.

  The cemetery at the hilltop was sheltered from the worst of winter’s storms, and in spring white lilies bloomed. But in summer the heat must be borne. They laid him in his place beside Maria, and the women left in silence, clutching their bags of koliva, grave food of boiled wheat and almonds.

  The priest removed his hat and scratched at the bald spot on his head, then took cigarettes from his cassock and offered them to the fat man.

  For a while, they smoked in silence, listening to the cicadas in the cypress trees.

  ‘It was a pitiful attendance for such a long and honourable life,’ said the fat man as he finished his cigarette. He dropped the butt to the stony earth and ground it out with the toe of his tennis shoe, then bent to pick it up and slipped it into his pocket for later, more careful disposal.

  The priest shook his head sadly.

  ‘It’s a misfortune, these days, to die in summer,’ he said. ‘He’d have done better waiting till November. You could be the Archbishop himself and die in August, and you’d only get the old to see you off. The rest are all working, milking the tourist cow – the bars are busy, the shops never close, the nightclub workers sleep all day to be ready for the next night’s shift. Death comes only once to us all, but business is business. They’ve no time for goodbyes when there’s money to be made.’

  ‘There were no close relatives remaining?’ asked the fat man.

  The priest ground out his own cigarette, watching the dusty toe of his black shoe as he did so.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘There was no one.’ He glanced at a watch whose strap was tight around his plump wrist. ‘I must be going,’ he said. ‘If you could see your way . . . my fee . . .’

  The fat man drew three large-denomination notes from his wallet and handed them to the sweating priest, who bowed his head in acknowledgement and stuffed them in his cassock.

  ‘God bless you,’ he said. ‘You’re most generous. Most kind.’

  ‘The payment’s generous, as you say,’ said the fat man. ‘So do well by him. Say Mass for him as it’s prescribed; he was a great believer in your faith. All the prayers and rituals, make sure you attend to them. If more cash is required, inform Kokkona and she will contact me. Do you understand?’

  As the priest followed the women down the hill, the fat man stood beside the open grave, staring at the handfuls of dry dirt thrown on the coffin lid. After a while, he took out a small gold coin and tossed it into the grave.

  ‘Something for the ferryman, old friend,’ he said. ‘More than enough to pay your fare. The best of journeys to you.’

  Gathering up a handful of dusty soil, he scattered it over the coin to cover it. Beside the ossuary, the sexton waited with his shovel. The fat man called out to him to begin his work, and followed the other mourners back to the village.

  Seven

  In the police cafeteria, Gazis and Petridis were the only customers. Gazis led the way to a table with a view across the square to the town hall’s grand façade: high windows, classical pillars and a balcony where, on public holidays, the Mayor’s entourage invited visiting dignitaries to watch the military parades. On the stone steps, red-legged pigeons strutted and fluttered; the blue-and-white Greek flag hung flaccid from its rooftop pole.

  Petridis took a bite of his cheese-and-spinach pie. The filo was greasy with oil, and scorched with reheating. He leaned over his plate to catch the falling flakes of pastry; still crumbs dropped on to the tabletop, on to his uniform shirt and trousers. The table, Gazis noticed, had not been wiped after its previous occupants’ breakfast; they’d left sugar crystals and milk stains, a smear of peach jam. Petridis chewed. A crumb of white feta stuck at the corner of his mouth.

  Gazis’s coffee was just as he expected: bulked out with chicory, and bitter. He ripped open another envelope of sugar – the packet showed a scene he recognised, the antelopes guarding the harbour entrance at Rhodes – and stirred it into his cup. When he tasted it again, the coffee was not improved, just too sweet to be enjoyed.

  ‘For thirty years I’ve been drinking coffee in this cafeteria,’ he said, ‘and for thirty years, I’ve been expecting some improvement. Would you say that makes me an optimist, or a fool?’

  On the square below, the Mayor’s black Mercedes pulled into the No Parking zone by the town hall steps. The Mayor’s regular driver – a lean man with an opulent moustache – climbed out and stood by the car’s wing, turning the pages of this morning’s Ethniki.

  ‘This cheese pie’s not bad,’ said Petridis.

  ‘Cheese pies aren’t what they used to be. That’s factory-made junk. Eat too many of them and you’ll fatten up like a pig.’

  ‘My yiayia makes the best cheese pies. When I go home, I’ll bring you some.’

  ‘But does your grandmother make her own pastry? Factory pastry gives me bellyache. I remember when I was your age I could eat anything. A lifetime of this coffee has rotted my gut.’

  Behind the counter, a sullen girl laid out film-wrapped sandwiches: processed ham and cheese on sliced bread, salami and tomato on French rolls. In the kitchen, a metal pan clattered on to the tiled floor, and a woman shouted a foul curse.

  Gazis raised his eyebrows.

  ‘In my day,’ he said, ‘women didn’t know such words existed. Now they shout them in public.’

  Across the square, the Mayor’s driver turned the pages of his newspaper.

  ‘Let me tell you a story,’ went on Gazis. ‘When I was a rookie like you, I ticketed the Mayor for parking in that zone. Not this young mayor we’ve got now, obviously. He was an older man. Before your time, no doubt; before you were born, possibly. I wrote out the ticket in front of the Mayor himself, whilst he just stood there smiling. Every morning his car was parked there, and that didn’t seem right to me. So I wrote him a ticket. Next morning, I was summoned to the third floor, to the Inspector’s office. I’d never met the man before. My knees shook as I walked through his door. And the first thing I saw was my ticket on his desk, ripped right in half. We don’t write tickets for the Mayor, he said, and I said, Surely we do, if he’s parked illegally. It’s our job to apply the law to every citizen impartially. He thought I was being cocky. He told me to get out.

  ‘Next day, the Mayor parked in the same place – right there, where that Mercedes is now. So I wrote him another ticket. This time, there was no call to the third floor. This time, I got a letter slapped in my hand by some clerk from personnel as I went off shift. First disciplinary warning – failure to follow orders. I’ve got the letter still. But I had a wife to support, and our oldest was still in nappies. When my wife started to cry, I gave it up.’ He fixed his eyes on the black Mercedes. ‘What do you think, Petridis? Are you going to write that guy a ticket?’

  Petridis wetted his fingertip, and dipped it in the pastry flakes on his plate.

  ‘Not much point, is there?’ he said, licking off the crumbs. ‘Waste of time and paper. And anyway, the Mayor’s someone you want to stay on the right side of, surely? You’d never make Chief Constable if the Mayor stirred it for you, would you?’

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p; ‘I, personally, shall never even make Inspector,’ said Gazis, ‘though you might. Chief Constable’s another matter. Is that where you want to be? That’s a job you have to arse-lick your way into: no other way. Me, I never had the taste for other men’s backsides. But maybe you’re different.’

  ‘Maybe not Chief Constable, then. But Inspector . . . I’d love to see my parents’ faces, if I could make Inspector.’

  ‘I expect they’re very proud of you, in that uniform.’

  ‘Every time my mother sees me in it, she gets all weepy. She’s driving the neighbours crazy, my father says. Every conversation she has – and she talks a lot, my mother – she gets it in, somehow – my son the policeman. She should take care: they’ll be cursing us, if she’s not careful. There’s a lot of jealousy on our island. And when they’re jealous, they put bad eyes on you.’ He pointed to the centre of his forehead.

  ‘Didn’t your father want you to go into his trade?’

  ‘There’s no money in building boats.’

  ‘But it’s a craftsman’s job. I always thought I’d try my hand at boat-building, if the police career didn’t suit me. It’s a job with a long-term future: there’ll be work for boat-builders until the seas run dry.’

  ‘Work, maybe. But money, no. My father’s never been ambitious, but I’m going to make something of myself. You can’t do that in the islands. There’s nothing there but goats and church-going.’

  ‘I’ll take the vacancy you’ve left, then,’ said Gazis. ‘I’ve always thought the island life’d suit me very well. A little place by the sea, a boat to putter about in, a few hands of cards in the evenings. What more could a man need?’

  ‘You’d die of boredom,’ said Petridis. ‘Winter and summer, the same people, the same places. Nothing happens. Every day’s the same.’