by Stav Sherez
‘Even if they damn us?’
She takes her hand out of his and places it on the table. ‘Yes,’ she replies, and there’s nothing he can say to that, so he only nods. It’s the unspoken agreement that’s held them together but also apart these past thirty-odd years.
He looks down at the fragments of plate surrounding his feet. He’s about to bend down and pick them up, but he doesn’t.
She gets up and disappears into the bedroom. She’ll sit there, propped on the bed, and read, this he knows, and while normally he would try and coax her out, use sweet words and sweeter promises, today, now, he lets her be, glad for the space it affords him. Space to think about things he doesn’t want to think about.
Christ, he can hardly remember the man he’d been back then, just out of the academy, a rookie cop on an island where nothing ever happened.
Until it did.
And while he never quite understood what happened that night, he knows it was bad, knew it back then, and now that these things have materialised again, here in the middle of their lives, he knows he was right – something terrible had happened, and they only thought they’d got away with it.
He leaves without telling her. He slips out the back door like a thief or an unfaithful husband. He waits outside the police station until he sees Elias lock up. He waits a few minutes more, then he goes in.
At times like this, it’s easy to be reminded it was once a church. With the men gone, the phones mute, the computers sleeping, it could almost be the church Nikos took his mother to on Sundays and holidays. He remembers her hand in his, so much smaller, as if she were the child and he the parent. The sense of peace and surrender upon entering. The smell of incense. The sonorous tones of the priest. But now it has a different function, and these are just memories in an old man’s head. He stares at the walls, the ceiling, the dark smudges where crucifixes used to hang, but it’s no use. He can’t bring that time back.
He takes the key out of the secretary’s desk. The island being small, the ground floor is all they need. They store files and old furniture in the basement. Since coming back to the island, Nikos hasn’t seen anyone go down there. He’s never had a reason to until now.
The key turns in the old lock. It sticks and scrapes against the edges but finally gives.
Nikos takes a deep breath of the musty air. He’s always liked the smell of damp, can’t explain it, something reassuring in its very earthiness, but today he thinks it smells of death. Which is no surprise as the basement is the old church crypt. The only part that wasn’t renovated. He slips the key out of the lock and hesitantly closes the door behind him. He’s plunged into darkness. Into the smell of wet earth and cold stones. He feels along the rough wall until he locates the switch. The light, when it comes on, is barely enough to illuminate the underground room.
He walks slowly down the creaking steps, testing each before putting his weight on it. The light flicks and flutters, fades and returns. He can see carvings on the walls, primitive graffiti, markings from another time.
He reaches the bottom of the staircase and takes in the crypt. To his left, there are empty niches; once holding the relics of island martyrs, they now lie empty, the stones crumbled and collapsed upon the ground. To his right is an area of broken furniture. Chairs missing legs, tables that don’t stand up, rotary phones and cracked file cabinets. It’s like a graveyard, he thinks, the ruins of a desk-bound civilisation.
He sees the file cabinets and boxes at the other end of the room. This is what he’s here for. The island’s police records, stretching back to before his time and Petrakis’s time, boxed and forgotten down here. He takes the torch out of his pocket and begins to scan the writing on the boxes. It’s immediately apparent they’re in no kind of order. Some have only dates scrawled on their rodent-bitten fronts, others names now lost to history, others yet with only a string of numbers to mark them out. He lights a cigarette, gets on his knees and begins going through the boxes.
The dust spumes around him. The files, some of them, fall apart in his hands, the paper thin now like the skin of old people, transparent and brittle.
Above him is a fresco, the colours undistinguishable from each other. There are angels in the corners, their faces like cherubic babies, their hands small and plump. In the centre, Jesus lies crucified on a black cross. His hands are mangled and twisted in pain. His face contorted beyond recognition. The spear in his side seems to twist in the flickering light, the drops of blood trickling into a grey-earthed Golgotha.
Nikos puts the checked boxes to one side. He quickly realises the names and dates scrawled on the fronts have little or nothing to do with the contents as if all history becomes one once consigned here.
He flicks through reams of reports, badly aged photos whose subjects are no longer apparent or thin as ghosts. He hears rats scampering in the corners, the dead sound of the underground world. He can feel his heartbeat like the ticking of a clock. His hands turn black with dust as he opens more boxes but there’s nothing relating to the cult or the murders of the two boys.
He gets to his feet, his legs gone dead and buckling under him, and scans the room again. He hears creaking above him. The floorboards? Or Elias returned to pick up something he’d forgotten? He stands still but there’s only silence. A rat scampers across the floor in front of him, its tail obscenely white in the cloistered gloom.
He crosses the graveyard of furniture and finds an annex previously occluded filled with broken stone saints and ruined Magdalenes.
He stares at this strange gathering, the saints missing arms or legs like crash victims, their beatific expressions covered by a thick layer of dust. The Marys stare open-eyed into the blackness. Three of them, different sizes, all missing hands or feet. There’s a broken cross with nails still protruding from its points, a St Nikodemos hobbled like a leper, his white face staring up from the floor. And beyond all that, more boxes.
He winds his way through the statues and past faded icons and opens the first box. In it are back issues of Playboy, some forty or fifty of them. They date from the eighties, and the women on the covers look strange and unappealing. He wonders whether he would have found them attractive twenty-odd years ago in their garish hair and ridiculous make-up. The next box contains receipts for coffee and stationery. He reaches for the third box and stumbles. He curses as he cuts his hand on the sheared-off face of an icon of St Cyril. Thin droplets of blood spot the saint’s face.
Inside the box is what he’s been looking for. Transcripts and records from 1974. The case of the murdered boys. The suicide of the cult. He’s shocked to see himself in one of the photos, almost doesn’t recognise his younger face, plumed by sideburns and fear. This is not who he thought he was.
There are many photos of the police entering the hippy camp. There’s a younger Petrakis, muscles and moustache, a grim look to his face, his lips thin and bloodless. Photos of the ruins. Photos of the boys. The camp. The tent. The sleeping bags. The bodies. He puts them back into the box and drags it across the dusty floor. He’s about to do the same with the other two boxes when he hears the door above him snap shut.
Sweat pops out across his face and neck. His heart feels lodged in his mouth. He reaches for his gun then remembers he left it back at home. He waits for footsteps, the sound of someone coming down the stairs, but there’s nothing. He remembers closing the door on his way in, wonders whether it’s possible it swung open. He squats there for ten minutes, breathing slowly, trying to pick up any change in sound or light. Maybe it was Elias coming back for something he’d forgotten, noticing the door to the basement was open, closing it. He tells himself this and stands up.
He takes the two boxes into the light. He sits on the floor and sorts the files into one box. He almost twists his ankle on St Erasmus’ neck but manages to right himself. He takes the box back up the stairs with him, placing it at the top of the staircase as he slowly puts the key back into the lock and opens the door. He waits for the shot, the scr
eam, but there’s only the rushing silence of the crypt below him and the cold, damp air. He locks the door, checks the other rooms but there’s no one there.
He takes the back way out, the box nestled in his hands. He checks the street but it’s empty. As he walks back to his house he’s certain he’s being followed. It’s not something he sees but rather senses, an instinct bred from being a policeman all these years. He’s been wrong before; still, it’s with a feeling of relief that he unlocks his back door and takes the box into the storeroom.
He makes himself coffee, brushes the dust off his jeans and goes back to the storeroom. He unearths the old crumbling folders that contain all the case files and notes. He finds the one marked June 1974, lights a cigarette, and begins.
FIFTEEN
Her voice snaked through the black telephone, all whisper and stuttered breath. ‘I need to see you.’
‘I know. We need to talk,’ Jason replied.
‘That sounds very mysterious.’
He could almost hear her smiling on the other end of the line.
‘It’s about what we heard last night.’
The restaurants and tavernas were all closed. The main street was packed with drunken revellers bellowing football chants. For a split second, Jason thought he was back in England on a Saturday night and everything that happened on the island only a dream. But the sight of Kitty, in black dress and yellow flip-flops, brought him back into this night with its caterwauling soundtrack and Bacchanalian roar.
‘Shall we risk one of the clubs?’
Her suggestion surprised him, but there was nowhere else to go at this time of night.
The Wooden Horse was built around a mirrored dance floor. Men sat at tables staring at the ground, watching the bronzed legs of miniskirted girls reflected in the dazzle of the dance floor. The music was deafening, pounding beats and piano riffs, repeating over and over. They ordered hot dogs and wine and found an alcove to sit in, sheltered from the worst of the noise.
‘I’m dying to tell you what I discovered.’ Kitty took a sip of wine, made a slight gesture of distaste and then decided what the hell and drank the rest of the glass. ‘I went to the museum—’ she began but was interrupted by a girl crashing against their table. The girl’s eyes were milky and unfocused, and when she tried to apologise, the words came out slurred and broken.
Jason looked away and poured some wine, thinking this is better, hold it back, keep what he’d discovered for later. He raised his glass, ‘Go ahead.’
She told him about her visit to the museum. As she described the dusty shelves and strange displays, he could tell she was pleased to have someone to narrate this to; that it was something she needed and yet never got enough of. She described the librarian even though just telling the story would have been enough, but she wanted to place him there, so he closed his eyes and listened to her voice glide effortlessly over the detonating bass and screaming dancers.
Jason thought his news would be unexpected, but it was not as unexpected as what Kitty had to say. The cult wasn’t something new. There had been precedent and history, and now, thirty-three years later, it had come back, like a bad dream can sometimes come back to haunt you long after you’ve woken up from it.
When she told him about the dead children, he thought about the dead child in the opening chapter of her first book, and her voice stumbled a bit as she got through this part, and then she told him about the mass suicide, using details as shorelines on a map that delineated this peninsula of death. Jason wondered how much she was embellishing, certain that some particulars were far too complicated and perhaps, literary, to have been passed on to her by a woman whose first language wasn’t English. But he never questioned or doubted her, for he knew the truth of the story lay not in the details but only in its resonance.
‘Jesus,’ he said when she’d finished.
She poured some more wine, nodded, acknowledging the strangeness of the story, the way it opened up these last few murders into a whole realm of history, imbuing them with meanings and timelines previously occluded.
‘Do you think the cult’s still active?’ She paused as if to think, but he knew she’d already thought about this and had worked out a theory since leaving the museum.
‘It’s been bugging me,’ she replied. ‘The librarian told me all the members had killed themselves, but I’m not sure how anyone could know.’
‘Know what?’
‘Hippies had been coming to the island for two years, looking for the cult. Some stayed, and some left, either to another island or back home. I don’t know how anyone could have kept track of how many members the cult had, so how could they know they’d all killed themselves?’
‘And if they hadn’t, then maybe they’re still out there committing these current murders?’
Her teeth sparkled in the strobe light. ‘Yes.’
There was a crash on the other side of the dance floor. A couple lay on the ground giggling. Dancers navigated around them, none offering a helping hand. Kitty and Jason watched as the skinny girl tried getting up, but her legs crumpled like a cheap camping chair. The boy just laughed, his eyes popping like pinballs. Two bouncers, squat unshaven men with yellow vests and black boots strode towards the fallen bodies. The bouncers said something unintelligible and began kicking the couple until finally they got up. The girl started to say something then crunched down and puked. The dancers were drugged in the sway of the beat and didn’t notice. The bouncers grabbed the girl and took her off into the darkness beyond the dance floor. The boy stood there limply, his face a cartoon of incomprehension, shouting silently in the drum-and-bass drenched air.
‘The whole island’s so tense,’ Kitty said, turning towards him, but Jason thought it was she who seemed so.
‘Four murders in two years. It’s not surprising. Their livelihood depends on the tourist trade. The island’s getting a bad reputation. George told me only half the number of tourists booked this year compared to previous years.’ He poured some more wine. The story she’d told, and what they’d seen, had sobered him up, and the wine was far better than she allowed. ‘Must be worse this year,’ he continued. ‘They see their revenues falling, and then the murders start up again, two summers in a row. They realise they’ve put away the wrong man and that the killer’s still on the loose. That it could be anyone.’
‘You’d think after what happened to those children they wouldn’t want tourists on the island again.’
‘Money can be very persuasive.’ This was a bad time to be a tourist on Palassos, and yet it was partly because there weren’t enough tourists that the situation was like this.
‘You know, you’d make a good crime novelist.’ She smiled and tilted her head.
He tried to keep his face steady and his eyes neutral. He tried to forget the reason he’d originally followed her all the way to Palassos.
‘So, what was it you found out?’ Her voice was soft and heavy with wine.
Jason stared at the roiling tablecloth, the sashaying dancers, the silver-starred night. He moved his chair closer to Kitty’s. He took a sip of wine to steady his voice.
‘They killed another tourist?’ Kitty leaned forward, almost toppling her glass in the rush to get to the story’s punch line.
Jason shook his head. Waited a beat. ‘The priest.’
‘The priest? From last night?’ She put the glass down. It sloshed and spilled. She didn’t notice. ‘But we were just talking to him,’ she said, as if there was a rule somewhere that people didn’t get killed after you’d just talked to them.
‘George said some kids found him this morning by the sandy bay on the north side.’
Kitty looked puzzled for a second, her fingers tapping out a silent beat on the table. ‘I wonder if it’s the same priest.’ She sat back and let the information sink through her as the light flickered blue and steady on the tablecloth, looking not so much like a rippling ocean any more but like police lights flashing behind you in the night. ‘The prie
st just doesn’t make sense.’
He didn’t know what she was referring to. He looked at her blankly, hypnotised by the bare-chested dancers, the gleam of their medallions and shine of their white shoes.
‘All the others were young. The priest, if that’s who he was, was old. It doesn’t fit the pattern at all.’ There was a slightly miffed quality to her tone he hadn’t noticed before.
‘You’re assuming there is a pattern.’
‘There’s always a pattern.’ Her voice was filled with the authority of someone who’d published five books ascertaining this fact. ‘Even if those patterns do at first seem random and meaningless to us, they’re still patterns, and all patterns eventually reveal themselves.’
He knew not to argue with her. He believed in coincidence and random acts of the world. In the mystery of not knowing and our need to see patterns and read the world in paradigms whether they existed or not. But he didn’t tell her this. Last night had made him realise how quickly she could flare into argument, how under that polite exterior there bubbled another Kitty. This sharing of information had drawn them together; he didn’t want to ruin that.
‘So, what’s the pattern?’
She smiled, her eyes met his then looked away. ‘Over the past two years, four people have been murdered on the island. All were under thirty. A tourist, then a local, then another local and finally, a tourist. It’s too symmetrical. One of each, last year and this year.’
‘Doesn’t mean it couldn’t be random.’
She shook her head, ‘Let’s leave that for the moment. Concentrate on what we know. All the crime scenes point to ritual murder: displaying centipede bodies, centipede poison and markings relating to centipede mythology. Not to mention their faces had been peeled off, which, to me, suggests a personal, intimate crime. Someone patient enough to do it properly. All four were found in the same area, by the ruins. That’s a pattern, no doubt about it.’