‘Since you’re such an expert in arson, you probably know already that the more that burns, the more time we’ll serve. Small fire, short sentence. Big fire, years and years and years.’
Kylis ignored him, and unscrewed the cap from a container. Fumes rose shimmering above it; the stink of petrol intensified. Pandelis watched him splash petrol on the wooden verandah. Kylis worked until he noticed Pandelis was doing nothing.
‘Are you helping me, or just standing there?’
‘Just standing here.’
Kylis said no more, but splattered fuel all over the front of the house. With a second container, he moved along the house side, dousing the wooden shutters, soaking the shrubs that grew under the windows. Soon, he moved out of sight.
Quickly, Pandelis unsealed a container. Pacing out what he judged an adequate firebreak, beyond the clean ground he splashed a trail of petrol in the direction of the trees and hives, so Kylis, returning for more fuel, saw Pandelis working hard beneath the pine trees. When Kylis was gone again to the rear of the house, Pandelis emptied the fifth container on the verandah that Kylis had already covered, then hurried with it empty to the trees. When Kylis reappeared, he saw Pandelis emptying the last drops amongst the hives.
‘I’ve done the trees,’ Pandelis said, joining his brother. He placed his container in the barrow. ‘We’ve done enough. Let’s go.’
Kylis looked at the last container.
‘No point in not using this,’ he said, unscrewing its cap. ‘You take the empties down to the van. I’ll be there in a minute. And don’t forget this.’ He laid the shotgun across the empty containers, and dropped in the box of cartridges.
Pandelis, glad to be leaving, picked up the barrow as Kylis carried the last petrol towards the house.
Passing the verandah, Kylis patted his pockets, and stopped.
‘Crap,’ he said. ‘I left my lighter in the van. Go and get it, there’s a good brother.’
Pandelis gave a short laugh.
‘What an expert arsonist you are!’ he said. ‘Come out without your lighter!’
But Kylis had walked on, out of sight.
The morning was already growing warm; the track down the hillside was steep, and Pandelis was reluctant to make the trip there and back. A few paces down the path, he turned the barrow around and wheeled it back to the house. By the stove, surely there would be matches.
Inside the house, the smell of petrol was intense. He looked about him; then, drawn by curiosity, he crossed to the mantelpiece. Gabrilis’s curios were as intriguing as they were tempting; as Kylis had said, what difference, stolen or burned? He pocketed the little terracotta horse, and a small tortoise carved in jade. Clearly, the objects were antiques; it was his duty, he told himself, to preserve them.
There were matches, as he expected, by the stove; they lay alongside the pistol tinderbox Gabrilis had never received. Intrigued by this curio, too, Pandelis took the flintlock in his hand, admiring the fine engraving on its silver-encased stock and examining the strange workings in place of the barrel. He wondered at the object’s use. He tried its weight, cocked it without difficulty and pointed it at the wall; and, thinking of robbers and pirates, expecting nothing but a click as the hammer fell, he pulled the trigger.
There was a whoomph of air, and a force of pressure against him which struck his face as warm, and so powerful, it blew him back into the centre of the room. Dazed, he looked out on an inferno, on high-burning flames that filled the doorway. The burning created noise, a kind of muted roaring; but above the roar, he heard his brother shout.
‘Kylis!’
His own shout was loud, pitched by panic and with no restraint on volume. Beyond the flames, he saw the world he’d left – the pine trees and the sky, the cool blue sea, the path down to his father – but not Kylis. His lungs were filling with smoke, and he coughed; when the coughing passed, he looked again through the burning doorway, and Kylis was there.
It was hot beyond belief; already, sweat was running down his back. His face was stinging; again, he coughed.
‘Kylis!’
But his brother responded strangely to his shout. He didn’t rush forward to fetch him out; instead, he very slowly raised his hand, as if in farewell to one already distant.
Kylis could see terror in his brother’s face, a face already changed: the skin was raw and pink, his eyebrows and the hair across his forehead were burnt away. Despairing, Kylis began to shake his head, and Pandelis, reading the implication, began to yell at him: Papa, fetch Papa, fetch Papa. But seconds passed with Kylis still unmoving, and Pandelis’s yelling turned to screams.
Pandelis didn’t see what Kylis saw: fierce burning barring every exit, the dreadful, fatal hopelessness of his situation.
In Kylis’s eyes, tears welled. Snatching up the shotgun, he broke it and, with unsteady hands, loaded two cartridges. Snapping the barrel back in place, he clicked off the safety. In these last moments, the truth of his feelings was quite clear to him – he loved his brother deeply – and from that would come the strength to do this kindness, to perform the act of love that must be done.
He took his aim – through the door, an easy shot at a standing target – but could not meet his brother’s eyes, knowing the fear and horror he would see there.
He squeezed the trigger, blasting a bloody hole in Pandelis’s chest.
The second shot was not required. Pandelis was dead before he hit the smoking floorboards.
By the van, Paliakis saw smoke, and waited for his boys. He expected them running; instead, there was shouting.
And a gunshot.
Panting, cursing their incompetence, he made his way up the winding path.
The house was well alight; before it, on his knees, Kylis hugged himself, crying like a man out of his mind. The shotgun lay beside him on the ground.
Grabbing Kylis’s hair, Paliakis pulled him round to face him, looking into eyes demented with remorse.
‘Where’s Pandelis?’ yelled Paliakis. ‘Your brother, for Christ’s sake, where is he?’
But Kylis could not speak; he only shook his head, and pointed a trembling finger towards his brother’s funeral pyre.
Twenty-One
At the village kafenion, the quiet of siesta was breaking. A small boy, barefoot and wearing only shorts, pedalled a battered bicycle to the grocer’s, a shopping list wrapped in a banknote poked in his handlebars. A cat high on a wall licked at its tail, pausing to watch a youth in waiter’s black-and-white buzz by on a rattling moped, heading for town. An old man clattered dice on a backgammon board; when the numbers came up against him, his opponent hid a smile behind his hand.
As the fat man took a seat inside, the patron wished him kali spera. With the tables outside for the season, only two remained in front of the counter, and the fat man was crowded by cases of water, by crates of beer and boxes of Sprite. Above his head, a linnet in a bamboo cage sat lonely on its perch.
‘Kali spera,’ said the fat man. ‘Iced coffee, if you please, no sugar, plenty of milk. And would you be kind enough to turn on the television? I have an interest in this evening’s news.’
The ancient TV stood precariously on a shelf behind the counter; the pictures it showed were unstable, moving slowly upwards towards the top of the screen, then reappearing at the bottom to travel up again. The patron thumped the set on its side, and the picture settled, but the images were grainy and blurred. As compensation for the shortcomings in its visuals, the patron turned the volume up too loud.
The fat man sipped his coffee through a straw, watching with mild interest the lead story on state politics. A journalist in a flak jacket reported on a foreign war, his right eye twitching nervously as smoke billowed from the ruins behind him.
And then, the scene shown was familiar: the police station, and two men hustled inside by uniformed police. As the cameras flashed, the fat man saw a red-faced Petridis in the background, and heard Gazis’s voice command the press to move back, and let them th
rough.
On the police station steps, a suave, suited young man held up a microphone carrying the TV station’s logo, and made his report.
‘The men are likely to be charged with both murder and arson,’ he said. ‘Early information suggests Aris Paliakis and his son Kylis shot Paliakis’s eldest son dead, then set fire to the building he died in to destroy the evidence. The motive for this shocking killing is unclear, though sources close to the family suggest a dispute over money. Paliakis is a well-known entrepreneur in this area; his son, Pandelis, was a well-respected lawyer. The question being asked this evening is, What would drive a father to kill his own son?’
The fat man frowned, and finished his coffee. Behind the counter, the patron whistled a love song; in its cage, as if responding to a distant memory, the linnet stretched its throat and began to trill. Outside, a small audience had been drawn to the game of backgammon, and a cheer went up as the dice fell in one man’s favour.
The fat man called out to the patron.
‘A beer, if you please,’ he said, ‘a small glass of the draught. I’ll take it outside, if I may.’
Leaving the linnet to its song, he found a chair close to the backgammon players. Inside the kafenion, the patron turned off the TV, and in the quiet whistled as he poured the fat man’s beer.
Two days had passed since Dinos was reported missing, and two hours since Sostis put to sea. His catch, in the first hour, was respectable; but now the late-afternoon meltemi had picked up, whipping the waves into whitecaps, rocking the boat and tangling the line as he hauled it in.
Sitting at the tiller, he steered towards the Dragon’s Teeth, where the steeply rising land gave shelter, and anchored the boat in water deep enough to make the rocks no threat to Agatha’s hull.
But the wind worked against him, and his luck stayed poor. Winding in the last cast of the day, he glanced up at the sun to judge the time: 3:30, 4. Tying up the bag of bait, he dropped it in the basket with the line; then, making his way up to the prow, he roped the basket to the handrails, knowing the wind on the homeward leg would take it if it weren’t secured.
Back in the stern, he turned the magneto key and pressed the starter to fire the engine. Under the engine cover, there was a light click, but nothing more.
‘Yiamo to.’ In frustration, he cursed aloud, surprised at his voice sounding loud as a shout. Raising his head from the engine, he listened. The wind had dropped; the canvas canopy which gave him shade was no longer flapping, the boat was almost still on a gently moving sea. Baffled, he climbed up on the bench that ran around the inner stern, and looked out across the water. All the way to the horizon, the sea was settled and calm.
In puzzlement, he frowned; then the frown deepened. Close by, a ship was passing, cutting in close to the coastline – as he had done – to avoid the wind. The strong waves of the ship’s wake were moving in his direction, the rolling water innocuous at this distance, but the upset to Agatha would be significant if she were not faced head-on into the swell.
A memory stirred, a sense of déjà vu; he recalled the day he mistook the bloated goat’s corpse for an apparition, the coldness of the water that day, the stillness, that irrational dread. Some of that dread was with him now.
The rolling swell came on, and slowly, from her anchor point, Agatha turned, until, by happy chance, her prow faced into the waves. From prow to stern, she bucked, and bucked again; and then the swell was gone, breaking white on the shoreline, spray leaping over the pinnacles of the Dragon’s Teeth, breaking again in backwash where the rocks were hidden beneath the surface.
In a minute or two, Agatha settled, and soon, at the shoreline, the sea had settled too. Above Sostis’s head, the canopy edges flapped, and the wind – rising again – put ripples on the surface of the water.
By the control panel, he touched the icon of St Nicholas that was his talisman, and said a prayer for luck. Switching on the magneto, he pushed the starter. The engine fired, rattling and roaring, expelling clouds of diesel smoke from the exhaust. Relieved, he went back to the prow to raise the anchor. Rope in hand, he took the strain; but as he was ready to haul, his eye was caught by an object at the shoreline, rising and falling with the swell amongst the rocks.
A breath of wind sent a coldness down his back.
He steered the boat in slow and close, until he could reach the body with the boat-hook. Its skin, pale as milk, was waterlogged and peeling, with small fish nibbling at its frond-like edges. The corpse’s face was in the water, and Sostis was grateful, even though avoiding the face meant looking at the back, where little was left but bone, as if the flesh had been scoured away by pumice. Around the body’s waist, the net bag for holding the snorkeller’s catch was empty. Sostis caught the bag with the boat-hook, but never considered bringing the body aboard. Let those who were paid for it take the bad luck. With hook and pole, he dragged the body from prow to stern and, holding it steady with his right hand, put in the VHF call to the coastguard.
Twenty-Two
At the public enquiries desk, the officer was filling out a claim for overtime. For a short while, the fat man waited patiently for him to finish but, when the policeman’s concentration on his paperwork didn’t waver, he put his hand to his mouth and lightly coughed. The officer counted eight on his fingers, and pencilled in a figure in Tuesday’s box, then, laying down the pencil with a sigh, he stood and crossed to the desk.
The fat man smiled.
‘Kali mera sas,’ he said.
‘You should ring the bell if you want service,’ said the policeman. A few fibres of cotton wool stuck to a razor-cut on his jaw.
‘I have all the service I need, without the bell,’ said the fat man reasonably. ‘I’d like to speak with Sergeant Gazis, if he’s in the building.’
The officer regarded him. Without speaking, he pointed to a bench against the wall. As the fat man sat down, the policeman was speaking into a phone.
The fat man looked at his feet, where the toecap of his right shoe had acquired a scuff mark. Unzipping his holdall, he took out a bottle of shoe-whitener, and dabbed it on the blemish. Finding no more, he replaced the bottle in the bag, and zipped it closed.
Gazis approached smiling along the corridor, Petridis a pace behind. The creases in Gazis’s uniform shirt were crisp, his handsome face seemed shaved especially close.
The fat man rose from the bench.
‘Sergeant Gazis,’ he said. ‘I’ve come to wish you goodbye.’
With warmth, the men shook hands.
‘It’s been a pleasure,’ said Gazis, ‘though the circumstances of our meeting were unfortunate. You’ve forgiven, I trust, my initial suspicions of you? It’s a hazard of the job; it becomes second nature to suspect everyone.’
The fat man smiled.
‘There is nothing to forgive. I was the only suspect at the time, though I think we agree, now, who our man was. The paint samples from Dinos Karayannis’s car – I presume there was a match for Gabrilis’s tricycle in there somewhere?’
‘There was indeed. It would have been a small step from there to an arrest, though how the case would have gone in court we’ll never know. Sentences these days can be unduly lenient. It seems, in this instance, the gods took matters into their own hands.’
The fat man nodded thoughtfully.
‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘I believe, by the way, I saw you and Constable Petridis on the television news. What a shocking case that is! For a father and brother to commit such a crime seems unthinkable. I met Mr Paliakis, once. He struck me as a man obsessed by money. No doubt it will transpire money’s at the root of it.’
‘It’s a fascinating case,’ said Gazis, ‘and not so cut and dried as you might think. The father’s claiming all the guilt, but it’s the son’s prints we’ve found all over the gun. Both tell the same story – a mercy killing – that the brother was trapped inside the burning house. As to why the house was burning, or why the place was awash with petrol, they’ve no good answer. Someone
shot that poor man like a dog, and there’s not enough left of him to tell his own story, forensically. Whether he inhaled smoke before he died, no one can say. My guess is, the father’s willing to do the time for murder, manslaughter, whatever the verdict is, on the son’s behalf, if the court will let him. They’ll both do time for arson, regardless. I’d throw the book at them for that.’
‘One wonders at the motive for arson.’
‘The family has interests in property development, and arson’s almost a tool of that trade, these days – by firing the land, they render it virtually worthless. Then they either buy it at a knock-down price, or simply move the bulldozers in, and start building. The landowner on this occasion, at least, had a lucky break. Paliakis called the emergency services whilst the fire could still be controlled; in fact, the fire investigator believes he and his son made some efforts to extinguish the fire with well-water. The house is nothing but ash, but, apart from a little singeing, the land round about escaped.’
‘Which makes one wonder, doesn’t it?’ said the fat man. ‘Why set the fire, and then throw water on it? I’m sure you’re pondering that question already; perhaps it is some mitigation for one, or both, of them. I am going away for a while, but I shall certainly watch the press to see how the case develops. Keep up the good work, Sergeant. Your zeal and commitment are not unnoticed, you know.’
Gazis laughed.
‘That’s truer than you know,’ he said, ‘though not everyone views my commitment in a positive light. But I have George here now to follow in my footsteps.’ He placed a hand on Petridis’s shoulder. ‘A like mind to train as my successor, and soon to join me, too, in the ranks of respectable married men. Somehow, he’s persuaded that lovely girl of his to take him on. She’ll keep him on the straight and narrow.’
Petridis, colouring, smiled as the fat man offered his hand.
‘Does the lady have a name, Constable?’ asked the fat man.
The Taint of Midas Page 23