The Black Monastery

by Stav Sherez

  Nikos needs Petrakis to repeat this last statement. To make sure he’s heard him right. Because if he has, then this whole thing … he’s been thinking about it wrong, and people have died because of it. He flashes back to the funeral, Vondas’s room, the book on the cult. To what Kitty said a few hours ago.

  ‘Oh, it was well covered up. But we knew.’ Petrakis draws out the words as if they were strings on a kite. He watches Nikos’s face, enjoying the look of surprise and horror that suffuses it.

  ‘There had been incidents. Reaching four years before the murders. Stories we were told. Marks and bruisings. But things were different then. No one talked about sexual abuse. No one even mentioned it. And priests? They were, forgive the expression, sacrosanct.

  ‘Of course, nowadays, every priest is guilty of molestation until proved innocent. Back then, the idea that a priest, a man of God, would do such things … it was unthinkable. It was like saying God was guilty.

  ‘These days, it’s different. People no longer have the same quality of faith. They go to church, say their prayers, make their tithes, but their hearts are empty. You tell them this or that priest was a paedophile or rapist and they’ll shake their heads at the tragedy of it, but not one of them will really be surprised. Back then, God was infallible. And so were his emissaries. You might as well accuse God of molesting boys.

  ‘But after four years, we’d heard enough rumours, covered up enough complaints – we knew who the two priests were and what they did – but as long as nothing big happened, there was no way we were going to shake the boat. What if we were wrong? Imagine that. Accusing priests falsely. We would have been locked away ourselves. And besides, how could you prove these things? Even now, same problem. But then? Who would take a child’s word against a man of God’s?

  ‘And that’s not even looking at the big picture. If one priest was sentenced, then all priests were. To being human. To being slaves of their own desires. God was an essential commodity in the days of the generals. People needed to believe in something more than their shitty lives. They needed to be able to rise above the repression, depression and fear. You think the generals would have allowed us to prosecute a priest?

  ‘So. We knew the two priests – Vondas and Karelis – had this proclivity. We knew they’d been friends in the seminary and that Karelis made a special request for Vondas to join him at the monastery in 1970. We knew all this, but we also knew there was no way we could arrest them for it.’

  Nikos sits listening. He can’t believe it and yet has absolutely no reason to doubt Petrakis. The delight the old man takes in telling him how wrong he’s been all these years is proof enough. His mind is skipping possibilities and speculations like a search engine. The empty funeral. The death of the priest. The vandalised book. This all begins to fit into the frame. The things which he always thought were outside this case he’s now realising are at the very heart of it.

  ‘So, you didn’t do anything to the priests? You just let them get away with raping and killing those boys?’ His anger startles him, and he knows it’s not just the boys he’s thinking about but the hippies who had to pay for this crime. And his own wife, who’s had to live for years with the possibility that her friends were killers.

  ‘We didn’t let them off that easy. But, as I explained, there was not much we could do. The island was falling apart as it was – the fishing dried up, the youngsters leaving – imagine what would have happened if they’d found out their own priests were murderers. That would have been it. I wasn’t going to let that happen just to satisfy some righteous sense of justice. Justice is what’s right for the most people at the time. I made my decision. It was the right one.’

  ‘Even now you’re sure of that?’

  Petrakis actually takes a few seconds to think this through, the first sign of self-doubt that Nikos has noticed.

  ‘Even now,’ he says finally, and his voice is as heavy as a judge’s pronouncement.

  ‘Tell me what happened.’

  ‘We went to the monastery. Straight after we saw the boys. Vondas and Karelis were praying in the chapel. Trying to ask God’s forgiveness? Or just praying they wouldn’t be caught?

  ‘When they saw us, they gave themselves up. They could read our expressions, the blood-splattered clothes, the guns in our hands. Vondas said something to the older priest, but they didn’t try and run, I’ll give them that.

  ‘Of course, we needed proof. And, I guess, maybe we did want to get back at them. To hurt them some.’

  The glint in Petrakis’s eyes says it all.

  ‘You tortured them?’

  ‘We only gave them back some of what they’d given out to the boys.’

  ‘What did you do to them?’ Nikos’s voice comes out through clenched teeth.

  Petrakis leans in closer. ‘You really want to know, don’t you? Well, OK. There’s no shame in it. I don’t spend nights worrying about what we did.

  ‘Of course they were beaten a bit. Guns and sticks. Enough to let them know we weren’t going through the motions. Then we asked them about the boys. They began blabbering, denying everything, praying to God. Can you believe that? They actually began to pray to God to save them.

  ‘We tied the priests to chairs. We sat them next to each other in front of the altar. In front of God. They were stripped naked. You remember Theo, the sergeant?’

  Nikos nods, the bitterness rising in his throat like backwash.

  ‘You know he was on the mainland before coming to the island? No, you didn’t know that, did you? Worked for the colonels. He’d done this kind of thing before. Knew how to extract information. How to administer pain.

  ‘My God, even I had to turn away, remind myself of what these two priests had done, tell myself some humans give up their right to human rights when they step over a certain line. Still, their screams echoing in that empty church didn’t make me feel better. You ever seen a man castrated? Perhaps you can imagine. This was after they confessed everything. Confessed to things we didn’t even know about. Molestations and rapes stretching back years. They confessed to every sin they’d ever committed as if they were at the gates of Heaven and Peter their interlocutor.

  ‘They said the two boys had stayed behind that day. The priests caught them smoking in the gardens. They took them back in to scold them. They hit them, and, I guess, that’s where it started, where they felt their blood rise. Desire took hold of them. They kept whacking the boys, telling them they were wicked and that God would punish them. They stripped them and beat them with bibles and sticks. The blood must have set something off. Vondas told us this; he was beyond embarrassment or concealment then. He said they took the boys. And took them again. Writhing in the blood and screams and pain. He said they totally lost control, but, even as he said it, I could see a glimmer in his eyes, reliving that moment, that one moment in his life when he’d done what he truly wanted, and you could tell he didn’t regret it at all.

  ‘When they were finished, they realised one of the boys was dead. The other boy started screaming. Vondas said both him and Karelis knew what had to be done.

  ‘They strangled the other boy. They then had a problem. By nightfall, the boys would be reported missing. Everyone would know they’d gone to the monastery for the weekend. The priests remembered the hippies living in the mountains. They knew the stories. Realised they could use them.

  ‘And so they began to think. And the story they made up, it was so good, so logical, that I think even they began to believe it. As you of all people know, denial is an extremely useful thing.’ Petrakis’s glare is like a hawk’s.

  ‘Just get on with it.’ Nikos feels the blood drain from his face. He can see the satisfaction in Petrakis’s eyes. He only wants to get this over with now.

  ‘They took the boys out to the ruins. They did what they had to do with their bodies. The centipedes were a final touch of the bizarre. They were all over the mountain and monastery, and it seemed just the kind of thing a cult would do and the las
t thing on earth a priest would. They improvised a story out of necessity and fear. They planted the bodies and hoped the story would hold. That people would only need to move that one small step from what they already suspected about the cult.

  ‘Vondas told us all this, and then Theo finished his work. The doctor cauterised their wounds. Told them they were getting off lucky. That it would bring them closer to God. Old man had a sense of humour, I’ll give him that. Kept a cigarette in his mouth all the time he was treating the wounds. Went along with everything we agreed. Kept his mouth shut till the cancer ate it away. By then it was too late for deathbed confessions. The man couldn’t even speak after they removed his tongue.

  ‘We knew the priests wouldn’t talk just as we knew we couldn’t do anything more to them. But we believed they wouldn’t be a problem any more. Didn’t have the tools even if they still had the desire. We left them there, passed out, lying in their own puke and blood.

  ‘But we still had the problem. What to do about the boys? Who would take the blame? We went out to the woods. Sat and smoked and passed a bottle of brandy we’d liberated from the monastery. Got blind drunk. Only reaction to events we could think of. And maybe it was partly the drink, maybe partly the dark of the woods, the unnatural quiet after the screaming crescendos of the priests – that’s when we decided what to do. No, realised what we had to do. What needed to be done to keep the community whole. And, with that, to also clear the island of the little problem we had. The hippies. The fucking hippies.

  ‘You wouldn’t understand how it was. They represented everything we were fighting against. They lived up in the mountains and thought they were better guardians of the island than we were. They didn’t realise we needed to make money to eat, we didn’t have their trust funds, we needed to fish and exploit the island for what it could give us. This, you have to understand, was survival not revenge.

  ‘We all sat there in the deep forest, drinking steadily. We decided we could play on everyone’s feelings about the cult. The priests gave us their idea. And we saw how two birds could be killed. We knew we were the stone.

  ‘I don’t think we ever said it out loud to each other, but it was there in the way we looked at one another, in the things we didn’t say, the objections we never raised. Someone had to pay the price, after all. Otherwise, without resolution, this thing would haunt the island for ever.

  ‘Theo radioed for some more men. A couple of deputies and some of the locals we knew we could trust. When they arrived, we explained to them what we’d found. How every sign pointed to the cult. The ritualisation, the proximity, the cold-bloodedness. They believed us – after all, who else would do such a thing? Not normal islanders, no, but a bunch of weird Americans living out in the open? Everyone could buy that.

  ‘They didn’t have a chance. They were sleeping, and never even heard us enter the clearing. The deputies had brought more guns and ammunition. We explained that this needed to look like a mass suicide. We told the angry village men that if we arrested these people – and, with their numbers, there was no guarantee we’d get them all – that if arrested they would go to trial. There would be a big international outcry. A conviction was possible but not guaranteed. We let the men make the choice we’d already made for them. We detailed what had been done to the boys, the mutilations and sexual abuse. We wanted each man to have that picture in his mind when he entered the tent. We didn’t want any wavering or second thoughts.

  ‘Then we went into each tent, and we killed them. The ones who woke up had no chance. The ones still asleep never knew what hit them. It took less than five minutes.

  ‘The next day, you came back with the mainland detectives, and they too wanted to believe the story we’d made up for them. They saw what had been done to the boys, and they knew no Greek could have done such a thing. They wrapped it up with a ribbon and took the package back to Athens.

  ‘There never was a cult, you see, but there was the belief in one, and that was enough. We gave people the ending they wanted and secretly intuited. And … and we thought we’d got away with it. Thought that until last year when they found the first body. The ones of us left, we knew what it signified. We knew it couldn’t be a resurgence of the cult, because there never was a cult in the first place. Still, it scared us. If someone had found out … we still had lives we didn’t want to lose. We thought it was Vondas, you see. Vondas and Karelis finally taking their revenge for what we did to them that night. But then Karelis disappeared, and Vondas got killed.’

  Nikos doesn’t say anything to that. He runs his fingers through his moustache, thinking it through. ‘And the library?’

  ‘The library had too many archives. Too many things about the hippies, the cult, that whole period. When your wife set up the cult exhibit, we all got nervous. But it was nothing, just another display. Now though, with the murders continuing, with that fucking English writer poking her nose into things, talking to Vondas – who knows what he might have told her? Well, you see it was better that it burned down. We didn’t know what was in the archives, what someone with enough perseverance would find.’

  ‘Is that why you broke into Kitty’s room?’

  ‘Dimitri saw her talking to your wife and to Yanni. We didn’t know what she was after. What she’d discovered. We had to make sure. Protect the island.’

  ‘You’re saying you had nothing to do with the centipede murders? With the four teenagers killed?’

  Petrakis looks towards his mother. His head is shaking. He seems slighter, his unburdening a thing of the body as much as of the conscience.

  ‘You think it’s in my interest to kill tourists? To kill our boys and girls? What could I gain from this? Tell me? You can’t, can you? I don’t know who killed those tourists and our children. It wasn’t us. It’s someone who wants to get back at us. If anything, we’re next.’

  Nikos smiles.

  He takes out the cuffs, watches Petrakis’s bemusement like a stain spreading across his face. ‘You’ll be safe in the cells,’ he says.

  Petrakis’s mouth makes shapes, but there’s nothing coming out. His face flushes red. Nikos hopes he’s not going to have a heart attack. He’s waited for this moment too many years.

  ‘You’re under arrest for attempted murder and arson. That’s the library. You’re also under arrest for intent to distribute and smuggle methamphetamine.’

  Nikos watches Petrakis’s face run through his options. He looks ten years older than he did a few moments ago.

  ‘Bullshit,’ is the best the old man can come up with. ‘You think any of that will stick? This is the end of your career,’ he shouts.

  ‘Your son was very cooperative.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘When we arrested Dimitri, told him how many years he’d be serving for the arson and attempted murder, you should have seen him. You would have been proud. Spilling anything he knew, fucking begging us not to ship him to the mainland. He told us everything. How the drugs are manufactured in your villa on the other side of the island. How you co-opt mules and dealers. He gave you up, and you know what?’ Nikos waits a beat, ‘He was happy to. Don’t think he likes you that much. Just another failure to chalk up, Petrakis.’

  The old man closes his eyes. He leans back into the sofa and takes a deep breath as the handcuffs go on and Nikos leads him out of the house, through the streets of town and into the station.

  FORTY-ONE

  The dog collar is faded and torn, but there’s no mistaking it. The beard is rust red and the skin black with dust and dirt, yet Karelis keeps laughing. The smell is stronger than at the altar, and, as they carefully make their way towards him, they see the bucket he uses for his needs, overfilled and surrounded by a halo of flies. The contents of the bucket are in motion. The torch reveals large centipedes crawling in and out of the human waste, gorged and fit to burst. Centipedes cover the floor and crunch under their feet like dry leaves.

  Kitty looks at the priest’s wrists, cut, scabbe
d and infected. There are sores all over his skin, dirt covering every inch of exposed flesh.

  Jason tries wrenching the pole out of the wall, but it doesn’t budge. The rough metal tears at his fingers, and when he looks down he’s bleeding. The blood drips onto the priest’s face. Karelis’ tongue emerges from the tangle of his beard and catches the drops.

  ‘We have to get him out of here,’ Kitty says.

  The priest is looking at them, but it’s the look of an animal. Uncomprehending, sensing only danger, not needing to know more. He struggles against his chains, the sound of metal grinding against bone.

  ‘It’s OK, we’re here to get you out,’ Kitty says in faltering Greek.

  Jason reaches for the old man’s wrist, feels along the metal for an opening.

  ‘It’s locked.’ He bends down, examines the floor, picks up a rock and puts it back down. Finally, he finds one just the right size. It fits in his palm. He motions the priest to turn away.

  ‘Shine the torch on his wrist.’

  He stands there in the spotlight, measuring, sizing, getting his nerve up. In one clean arcing movement, he brings the flat edge of the rock down on the rusted lock. There’s a spark, and slivers of metal fly across the room. He does it again, and this time the sound of the lock breaking ricochets against the roof and walls like a gunshot.

  Jason loses balance, dropping the rock, falling towards the priest. Karelis looks up at him, teeth red and rotten in the fading light. The priest laughs then, with the broken lock still attached, swings his arm in a circle. It’s too fast a movement for Kitty or Jason to react. One minute the priest is still, the next it’s a whirlwind of motion as his arm completes the circle and comes crashing down onto Jason’s thigh, the rusted and sheared metal of his manacle cutting cleanly through Jason’s jeans and embedding deeply into his flesh.

  Jason screams. His head spins. The priest slashes again with the broken metal, hitting the same point, unleashing a geyser of blood as Jason steps back, stumbles and falls.