‘Yorgia. Her name’s Yorgia.’
‘Well, my congratulations. Take good care of her, won’t you?’ The fat man turned back to Gazis. ‘I mustn’t keep you. You’re busy, I know.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ said Gazis, ‘we’re on our way to a little job that’ll really get us noticed, aren’t we, George? It doesn’t matter to me: two more years and I’ll be hanging up my hat. And George has enough talent to get away with it, or youth enough to start a new career, if they boot him out. For the moment, we’re on our own little crusade. Equality in justice. Come outside, and enjoy the show.’
In the street, the fat man watched from the shade cast by the police station’s wall. Across the road, outside the town hall, a group of people waited: a camera crew with a dark-haired woman presenter, two photographers with long-lensed cameras, a young man with a stenographer’s notebook. The national flag hung limp from its rooftop pole; red-legged pigeons pecked in the unswept gutter. A little apart, in the shade of a plane tree, Gazis and Petridis stood silently together.
The stately doors of the town hall swung open, and the mayoral party – three men in French-tailored trousers and pastel shirts – ran down to the black Mercedes parked in the No Parking zone. The driver folded his paper and tucked it beneath his seat, then jumped out to open the car door for the Mayor.
But Gazis and Petridis were there first. Gazis blocked the doors on the near side, leaving the three men facing the members of the press; Petridis moved round to speak to the driver. As Gazis took out his ticket book and pen, the cameras flashed; as he began to write the ticket, the Mayor threw up his hands. One of the aides began to shout objections, until the TV camera pulled focus on his face; as the Mayor concocted a good-humoured speech for the reporter, the aides remained silent, their eyes hidden behind dark glasses.
‘I applaud the actions of these officers,’ said the Mayor into the microphone. ‘The law is made for all, not just for some. I shall pay my fine promptly, of course.’
Completing the ticket, Gazis held it up for the press to photograph. Then, with a practised action, he lifted the Mercedes’s windscreen wiper and deftly slipped the ticket beneath it, snapping the wiper back into place.
The dark-haired presenter patted her hair, preparing for her piece to camera. The Mayor glanced up at the upper-floor windows of the police station, where the Chief Constable stepped back, out of sight. Across the street, the fat man smiled, and slipped away to find a baker who would supply his morning pastry.
At Paliakis’s house, little – to the fat man’s eyes – seemed changed, though at the windows of the salone where he and Ourania Paliakis had talked the shutters were now closed, and fastened with iron bars. Beneath the gracious portico, the fat man applied the lion’s-head knocker, its banging echoing through the house as in the high halls of museums.
Father Babis opened the door only a few centimetres, and put his eye to the crack to see who was calling.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘She’s not receiving visitors.’
‘That’s understandable,’ said the fat man, ‘but I didn’t want to leave without offering my most sincere condolences. Please tell her that; please tell her I am deeply, deeply sorry.’
‘I’ll tell her,’ said the priest. He moved to close the door, but the fat man raised a hand to stop him.
‘Father Babis,’ he said. ‘Before you go, I have a gift for you.’
The priest opened the door a little wider.
‘For me?’
From his pocket, the fat man took a bottle of brown glass filled with a pale and viscous liquid.
‘Forgive my impertinence,’ he said, ‘but I brought you something to ease the condition of your skin, a natural remedy based on clay minerals from the north. My cousin suffers a similar complaint, and swears by this to bring relief. If you apply it at night, you’ll find your skin improved by morning. Will you try it?’
The priest took the bottle, and held it up to the light.
‘It has a lot of sediment,’ he said.
‘You must shake it well before use. Otherwise the cure stays in the bottle.’
‘Thank you,’ said the priest. ‘I shall be glad to try it.’
Again, he moved to close the door, but before he did so the fat man spoke.
‘How is she?’ he asked. ‘She has taken his death very badly, I assume.’
The priest sighed.
‘How else should a mother take the death of a favourite son?’ he said. ‘And yet, some good may still come from it. She blames her husband, of course, and has already filed the papers for a divorce. There is a lesson to be learned, she says, from poor Pandelis’s death. He was a good man, you know.’
‘I suspected so,’ said the fat man, ‘though I didn’t know him.’
‘She feels she must compensate for the waste of his life, and that wasting her own life in this mausoleum – I think you used that word, and it stayed with her – is not acceptable now. She’s thinking of establishing some charity, whether here or abroad she doesn’t yet know.’
‘And where will that leave you?’ asked the fat man.
Father Babis gave the smallest of smiles.
‘Once she’s divorced, perhaps she’ll consider me,’ he said. ‘Our interests are the same. As husband and wife, we could work together very well, I feel. Africa, perhaps. There’s so much of God’s work to be done there.’
The fat man smiled.
‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been there myself, though I’m sure it would be quite an adventure. A little different from the tea and chess you enjoy here.’
‘Very different,’ agreed the priest. ‘But I think the time has come for me – and Ourania – to forget our chessboard, and embark – together – on a more useful kind of life.’
‘Good luck to you, then,’ said the fat man. ‘It’s early days, of course, but perhaps I may hope that, before too long, I might be offering congratulations in place of today’s condolences.’
‘I brought you a gift.’
In the shade of Agatha’s canopy, the fat man drew a small confectioner’s box from his holdall: white, with writing in curling pink script, tied round with pink ribbon, and at the corners, cherubs teasing flying bluebirds. The boat rocked languidly on the light wake of a yacht.
Sostis looked at the romantic images on the box, and askance at the fat man.
The fat man laughed.
‘Not for you,’ he said. ‘For your wife. Turkish delight, but of a rather special kind. The rose water used in its manufacture is unique. It has the gift, they say, of sweetening bad temper, and I’ve known it be effective in many cases. Encourage her to eat a piece each day. Within a week, you’ll see a difference. You’ll go home to a content and kinder woman.’
Sostis took the box and laid it on the bench beside him, where flies crawled on a bait knife and buzzed frustrated around a closed pot of chopped shrimp. The grey imprint of his dirty thumb was on a cherub’s face.
‘If it works,’ he said, ‘if a few sweets are all it takes to change the sourness of fifteen years, then I’m indebted to you. Better live with the devil than a mean woman. I know the truth of that.’
Feeling the light touch of a bite, he jerked the line suspended in the clear water, and swiftly started to haul it in; but there was no weight there, and so he brought the rest of the line in slower, hand over hand.
‘Bastard,’ he said. ‘I had him, and he’s taken my bait, and gone. Your luck’s much better than mine today.’ In the bucket between their feet, two good-sized bream stared bright-eyed, as if in surprise at their unexpected surroundings. ‘You know, I’m pleased to have the water as a friend again. I’m not afraid of it today. Perhaps it’s your company.’
The fat man finished winding his line around its holder, and put it aside. Taking a cigarette from his box, he lit it with his gold lighter, inhaled deeply and exhaled, blowing the smoke out over the calm sea.
‘The mind,’ he said, ‘is willing, but the flesh is wea
k. I have had a long debate with myself over my smoking, and I find I enjoy cigarettes too much to give them up. I suppose you’d have to call it lack of willpower.’
Sostis pulled up the end of his line. The bait was gone from all three hooks.
‘Bastards,’ he said.
He took the lid from the shrimp pot and dextrously rebaited the hooks. He cast the line far from the boat; as bait, hooks and lead weight hit the surface, ripples spread across the water. The line ran through his fingers until he felt it touch the rocks on the sea bed.
‘Forgive me for saying this,’ he said, ‘but you don’t strike me as one who lacks willpower.’
The fat man smiled.
‘Perhaps not,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I’m nothing more than a hedonist.’
He drew again on his cigarette. Around the resealed bait pot, agitated flies still buzzed. The fat man watched them, until a honey bee, dull-brown and marked with black, landed on the hem of his yellow bathing shorts, and settled there, quite still, seeming to rest.
The fat man touched the bee with a fingertip.
‘You’re a long way from home, friend,’ he said, ‘and too far from land for your own good. Better take a long rest, before you attempt the homeward journey.’
‘We’ll give him a ride,’ said Sostis, ‘if he can pay the fare.’
‘There’s a legend of bees in Arcadia,’ said the fat man. ‘Do you know of Aristaeus?’
‘I was a dunce at school. I never paid attention.’
‘The legend stems, I think, from what the ancients observed – that bees will sometimes use decaying carcasses as hives, though I have never seen a case of it myself. The story goes that Aristaeus – a shepherd and a bee-keeper – took a fancy to a woman who ran away from him, and in doing so, she stepped on a snake, was bitten and died. In anger, the nymphs killed Aristaeus’s bees, and he – showing behaviour still typical of men today – went running to his mother for advice. She told him to make a sacrifice of bullocks to the gods, to bury them and, after three days, to see what had transpired. And Aristaeus was amazed to find, in the bellies of the rotting cattle, swarms of bees, and a harvest of honey. Sweetness from corruption. Blood sacrifice yielding gifts. Are such things possible, barber?’
‘All things under heaven are possible. This Turkish delight you’ve given me may sweeten my wife’s temper. But the possible isn’t the likely.’
The fat man laughed.
‘Have faith, barber, have faith. An attitude of mind can change an outlook, and a future.’
He drew on the end of the cigarette and leaned over the side to douse it in the water, laying the wet stub on the bench for careful disposal on dry land.
Sostis felt again the nibbling on the hooks, and once again jerked hard and fast and began hauling up the line. This time, the line stayed heavy.
‘Hah!’ he said. ‘Got you this time, you bastard! It’s a good one, I can feel it! Here he is – let’s have a look.’
He pulled the twisting fish from the sea, its wet skin metallic and beautiful, like platinum in the sunlight. Droplets flew, from the fish and from the line, and one landed on the bee, so it flew off, heading unswervingly back to the shore. Sostis grabbed the fish’s slippery body in his hand, holding it firm whilst he unhooked the barb from its gasping mouth, its tail flapping at the other end of his fist. The hook came cleanly from the bony roof of the mouth; the bait was still intact. He dropped the fish into the bucket, and peered in after it.
‘Another bream,’ he said. ‘Not quite so good as yours, but not bad nonetheless. Not bad at all.’
He wiped his slimy hands on his shorts, looked up at the sun to judge the time, and began to wind up his line.
‘Time’s up,’ he said. ‘My wretched duty calls.’
‘Your wretched duty,’ echoed the fat man. ‘How would you feel, barber, about a change of career?’
‘I’d welcome it with open arms,’ he said. ‘Never to cut another head of hair would be like heaven.’
‘I’m looking for a steward for my land,’ said the fat man. ‘To take care of my bees and olives, and to look after my vines.’
Sostis’s face fell.
‘Regretfully,’ he said, ‘I have no knowledge of agriculture.’
‘That is a problem I am finding everywhere,’ said the fat man. ‘The new crop of foreigners is obliterating our old knowledge. On the coast, a generation’s growing up knowing nothing of the land. I want to do my part to redress the balance. You may know nothing now, but there are men I know who can mentor you – and, as importantly, your son. He’d grow up to be a farmer. Would that suit you?’
‘Would it suit him?’ asked Sostis doubtfully.
‘I believe he’d come to love it.’
‘Where is your land?’
‘I have a holding at Palea Chora. And land you know – the land at the Temple of Apollo.’
‘That’s yours?’
‘In the absence of natural heirs, Gabrilis named me. The land was my gift to him, some years ago, and he saw it as the natural thing, I think, to give it back. The house there is gone, as you’ll have heard, but the land survived the fire with little damage, and I plan – with the right permissions – to build a family home. There’d be no rent to pay: the house would be part of your salary. I’d take a cut of what’s produced, of course. The honey and the wine from my land cannot be bettered.’
Still Sostis hesitated.
‘There’s my fishing,’ he said. ‘It’s a poor farmer who spends half his time fishing.’
‘Perhaps you’ll find,’ said the fat man, ‘that, as your interest in the land grows, your need to escape to sea diminishes. But whether it does or not, it’s not my intention to chain you to the hives. It’s a poor Greek, after all, who spends no time at sea. So what do you say, barber? Does the title of farmer sound better than your present job? Do we have a deal?’
He held out his hand.
Sostis smiled. He slapped his salt-dried hand into the fat man’s and shook it vigorously.
‘Deal,’ he said. He pumped the fat man’s hand. ‘We certainly have a deal. I shall think of you as my liberator – the one who freed me from service to other men’s hair.’
The fat man chose a wine of the millennium year, of which only a few bottles remained. Blowing the dust and sandy dirt from its neck as he lifted it from the rack, he noticed a little fall on his freshly whitened shoes, and a small frown of irritation crossed his face. At the cellar steps, he paused for a moment, looking at the empty spaces where the vintage of the past two years should be, but as he climbed the steps his mood was light. Before too long – not this year, but perhaps the next – with his vines in the care of Sostis, he’d be drinking from his own vineyards once again.
The cellar was cool, but on the verandah the contrast in temperature was not so marked as it had been just a few days ago. The evenings were growing cooler, and the season was, unmistakably, shifting. Summer’s ending had arrived.
The table was laid for one. By his wine glass lay a corkscrew, and the fat man peeled the lead foil from the bottle, then smoothly pulled the cork and half-filled his glass. Carrying his wine to the verandah railing, he looked out into the night, towards the village lights and, beyond them, to the dark mountains and the starlit sky. Far off, a goat’s bell rattled; on the new road, a distant motorbike roared.
The fat man raised his glass to the stars, and drank. The wine was excellent, lush with fruit, pleasingly dry. At his back, Kokkona laid warm dishes on the table: his favourite courgette fritters, flavoured with mint and fried till crisply golden, thick tzatziki pungent with dill and garlic, and the sea bream he had caught grilled over wood and sprinkled with lemon.
The fat man turned to her, and smiled.
‘Food fit for the gods,’ he said.
He took his place to eat; she sat down in her wicker chair, and took up her lace-making.
Breaking into a fritter with his fork, he dipped the mouthful into tzatziki before tasting it.
‘You’ve taken the best care of me, as always,’ he said.
‘What time will you be leaving in the morning?’ She didn’t look at him; her attention seemed all focused on her work.
‘When the time is right,’ he said. ‘Not too early, not too late.’
‘You should stay longer. We need you here. We miss you.’
‘I’ll be back before you know it.’
‘Every time you say the same.’
He laid down his fork and, leaning across, placed a hand on top of hers. The hand was changed from what he remembered; the veins were prominent across the bones, and the brown marks of ageing had covered the thinning skin. Gently, he squeezed her hand.
‘I’d love to stay,’ he said. ‘You know that. But matters elsewhere demand my attention.’
In the morning, she intended to be there early and give him breakfast; but the baker had overslept, and the wait for the pastries was half an hour. Still, when she slipped into the kitchen, the sun had barely risen, and only the keenest bees buzzed in the roses. Moving quietly so as not to disturb him, she made his coffee just the way he liked it and carried it down the hallway to his room.
The door was ajar, and his room was empty. The bed was made; the clothes he’d left behind were folded, ready to put away. On the dresser, a vellum envelope held her wages. Beneath the bed, forgotten or lost, was a half-used bottle of shoe-whitener. She crossed to the window, and looked out on the shady place beneath the garden trees, but of the red Namco Pony there was no sign.
Anne Zouroudi was born in England and lived for some years in the Greek islands. Her attachment to Greece remains strong, and the country is the inspiration for much of her writing. She now lives in the Derbyshire Peak District with her son. She is the author of four other Mysteries of the Greek Detective: The Messenger of Athens (shortlisted for the ITV3 Crime Thriller Award for Breakthrough Authors and longlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize), The Doctor of Thessaly, The Lady of Sorrows and The Whispers of Nemesis.
By the Same Author
The Taint of Midas Page 24