by Stav Sherez
Kitty watches all this. It’s like she’s there and she’s not there. She sees Jason lean down to unshackle the priest. She sees the old man lunge. The broken metal sparkles in the torchlight. Then Jason is on the floor, holding his leg, stemming the blood, a red fountain arcing into the air.
She bends down and takes his hand. It is both cold and hot and covered in a thin layer of sweat. She hears him moan. ‘It’s going to be OK,’ she says, but there’s no conviction in her voice. The priest chuckles behind them. His beard red and wet, his eyes bright and burning.
‘Christ, it hurts,’ Jason moans, and she nods though she knows he can’t see her. He’s lying on his back, his left hand wrapped around his leg, above the knee. It’s like trying to hold onto a handful of water. The dark black blood pours between his fingers and around his hand. She doesn’t want to think the word ‘artery’, but there it is, and she knows there’s barely any time left.
The priest continues cackling, his back against the wall. ‘You fucking asshole,’ she screams, ‘he was trying to help you.’
She takes off her shirt. The cold air scrapes against her skin. She folds the shirt, wrapping it around Jason’s leg. He’s as cold as the rock under her feet. Cold as the air.
She takes the end of the shirt and tightens it. Jason screams. His back arches, and she nearly loses him. ‘It’s OK,’ she whispers, her hand stroking his forehead. She tries to find words that will make him feel OK. She looks into his eyes. His mouth opens, but no sound comes out, just an echo of his breath. Her shirt has gone from canary yellow to deep dark red.
His eyes roll back, and he falls limp into her arms.
‘Jason! Wake up!’ She screams, grabbing his other hand. She pinches it hard. His eyes flutter and open. The blood is coming through the shirt now. Deep black puddles lie at her feet.
‘Kitty?’ His voice is less than a whisper. She feels his palm tighten against hers, but there’s hardly any strength left in it.
‘This is going to hurt,’ she says, and before he can reply, she yanks on the shirt, tightening the tourniquet. He screams, and his body twists. The blood squeezes out either side of the shirt. She feels his body vibrating, a slow tremor that turns into an explosion, and she almost loses hold of his hand.
‘Jason!’ She’s screaming into his face. His eyes are misty and unfocused. The blood is warm and sticky on her knees. The priest cackles to himself in the corner.
‘Jason? Can you hear me?’
He takes her hand, pulls her towards him. He can feel the softness of her body make contact with his, feel her warmth flow through him. His head is full of light. ‘It doesn’t feel like anything,’ he says.
She forces a smile, nods her head. ‘I need to go and find Nikos. I need to find a doctor.’ She looks down at his jeans, stained red from thigh to ankle now, and she knows there isn’t enough time.
He looks up at her. Takes everything he has to focus. Her lips. The shape of her mouth. The words mean nothing. Her eyes say it all. He knows.
‘Go.’
She leans down, straining to hear his words. His hand feels cold and dry. His breath dark and bitter. ‘No,’ she whispers. ‘I’m not leaving you.’
She thinks he’s laughing, she’s not sure, it’s not a sound she can make sense of, but his lips are curled in a smile.
‘Get a doctor. I’ll be fine.’ He tries to smile again, to show her it’s no big deal, but a wave of pain buckles his mouth and tears through his face. He feels himself falling, falling out of his body and into the soft wet earth. It’s like the first big dip on a rollercoaster, the ecstasy of weightlessness before the plunge.
She hesitates. Stares down into the whirlpool of his eyes. It’s as if he’s moving further away. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’
He watches the back of her head. The black waterfall of hair. The sway of her leaving. She looks back once and then disappears round a corner into the darkness.
He lies there, the warmth of his life leaking over his legs and sinking into the moist earth. He stares at the corrugated roof of the cavern, traces the lines and cracks until they spell out names long forgotten, lovers lost in memory, days gone to the mist of time. He can hear the priest cackling, the echo transforming his voice into a choir of voices, his own Greek chorus to usher out his days.
It’s too late. He wishes he’d told her when she held his hand, when she cupped his shoulder and whispered her breath into his lungs. But she’s gone, and so are all the paths and possibilities of his life. He’d never told her what he felt towards her, the deep burning awakening of something within himself, the fire that sparked from his fingertips every time they touched. He wants to kiss her lips once more, just once. So many things he’d intended to do, say. So much left unfinished. It rises in him like a fire, ripping through his stomach, collapsing his lungs, burning his head. He should have told her that he could see a future where they would fit each other like missing pieces of a puzzle. But he’d been so terrified of her rejection, the look on her face, the cold words she would utter. So scared of so many things all through his life, and now, lying here in the pool of his own blood, all the fear was gone, but it was too late.
He thinks of the manuscript back in his room. He’s never even mentioned it to her. It would be cleared away, he supposes, along with his other belongings, trashed, compacted and forgotten. Maybe that was better, but yet it felt like another thing lost to the world. He remembers a bright diamond-studded night in London, the books he’ll never see again, music he’ll never hear, the dog he never had, the house with curtains and children. His life seems to be summed up by everything he hasn’t done. He grinds his hand into the floor, the sharp stony ground underneath him, and it feels good, to feel pain, to feel anything again.
He says her name. Kitty. And again, but there’s no sound coming through his lips. He can hear water rushing somewhere in the distance, the heartbeat of the world. The scampering of cave-dwelling creatures. The laughter of the priest. The last words she said. The way her lips didn’t quite meet when she closed her mouth.
And then he sees her. A shadow emerging from the gloom. Hair electric and black. She’s walking towards him. She’s at the end of a long tunnel. There is light in her hands, a soft white light she cradles like a baby to her chest.
He begins to fall. The ground tilts and swerves under him. His breath catches in his chest. He can hear it wheeze and sputter, try and fail. His head rests on the ground. His eyes stare at the cavern’s ceiling. The priest is quiet now. There is no one in the room but him. No one in the world but him. And then not even that.
FORTY-TWO
It’s here somewhere. He’s sure of it. It’s been here all along. Thirty-three years in a box, the box sitting like an unexploded bomb in the station’s basement. The way secrets can reveal themselves to you.
You were never that good a cop.
Petrakis’s words come back to haunt him, and, finally, he has to admit there’s more than a little truth to them. Was he always a bad cop or was the importance of hiding Alexia’s identity more important? Were the two even so mutually exclusive as he’d like to think they were? If he’d presented Alexia to the authorities that first day, if he’d allowed her to tell her story, explain how the cult could never do such a thing, how they didn’t even possess guns – if he’d done all that, would things still have played out as they did?
He’s glad she’s out. They haven’t been talking much recently. She’s become the shadow he sees in the corner of his vision, floating from room to room like a silent cleaner. He knows she’s retreating into some part of herself she thought she’d lost, but he doesn’t know how to stop her or whether he should. There’s something in these silences that prevents him from worrying. It’s the silence of a secret brought out into the open after many years, not the silence of betrayal or disappointment.
Petrakis’s words rumble through his head. The worst thing is, he believes him. The story of the priests turns everything upside down. The clues
have led him down the wrong path. They only showed a tiny piece of a much larger puzzle.
He thinks back to that day at the morgue: Vondas’s body, the fury in which he’d been attacked. This was revenge, not business. This was personal, fuelled by cold anger and bad memories. He rubs his temples, the headache a constant pulsing presence behind them. Who would have a good enough reason to extract such revenge? There’s only one person he can think of.
The files and papers he holds are lies. He can barely stand to touch them. His own report on the discovery of the bodies – was that the last truthful piece of information to come out of the past?
Coroner’s reports. Pages of interviews with locals. Deputies’ reports. The summations of the mainland detectives. All lies.
He places them to one side. He knows what he’s looking for, and he knows it’s somewhere in here.
It’s a file he’s read countless times. A report on the relatives of the murdered boys. He’d skimmed it and put it away. He’d thought it was irrelevant, background work. He’d been wrong.
He finds it at the bottom of the fifth box. He takes out the four pages of badly typed transcript, faded, almost invisible now. There are photos of Yorgi and Constantine, the two murdered boys, serene in their frames. A list of living relatives: aunts, uncles, siblings and cousins. He divides the papers into two. He puts the Constantine material to one side. He notes Yorgi’s father died two years before his son. The only relatives he’d had were his mother and older brother. He stares at the faces, wondering if he’s looking at the killer.
He re-reads the names, and it still doesn’t make sense. And then it does.
He takes out his phone. He has to warn Kitty and Jason they’re looking for the wrong man. But before he can dial, a tone notifies him there’s a message. He puts the phone to his ear and hears Kitty’s voice. ‘We’re going to the labyrinth. Don’t worry, we’re not going to do anything stupid.’ The call was left over an hour ago.
He immediately calls Elias, tells him to prepare some men and meet him by the gates of the labyrinth. He takes the file containing the information about the deceased’s next of kin. Once they secure the labyrinth, he’ll make the arrest. He wants to get as much evidence as he can first. This time, there can be no mistakes.
The scooter rasps and stutters as it carries him away from town and into the interior. He thinks about all the fuck-ups he’s made, past and present, as he climbs up towards the monastery.
He can see Elias and the deputies sharing cigarettes, laughing and joking outside the entrance to the labyrinth. If he’s right, they won’t be laughing or joking long.
They stand at the gate, shuffling their feet and hunching against the wind, as he explains what happened in 1974. He takes out the report and shows them the name. Says it’s different now, but it’s the same man. They take deep breaths and shake their heads as they listen. They can’t believe it, and he catches them glancing back towards the monastery with fear and revulsion.
They take photos of the footprints leading to the gate. They scour the ground. Nikos takes out his torch and is about to enter when he hears a strange sound. He tells the others to shut up. There it is. Definitely. He can see Elias has heard it too. Footsteps, hurried and irregular, coming from inside the cave. They draw their guns. The footsteps get louder. They can hear breathing, grunting, feeble attempts to catch the air.
Kitty comes running out, hair ablaze, her body dark and half naked, pitted by scratches and welts like an army of red ants decorating her skin.
A shot goes off. Kitty stops dead as the bullet ricochets against the wall of the cave. She’s staring at the policemen, but Nikos can tell she doesn’t recognise them.
‘It’s OK. It’s me. Nikos,’ he shouts, turning to the deputy who fired the shot, making sure he’s got the message too.
Kitty’s skin is scratched and bleeding. She’s not wearing a shirt. Her bra is dark with blood. She looks from face to face trying to make sense of this strange group. They’re all taut and rigid, feet apart, more like diagrams of men than flesh and blood.
Nikos steps forward, holstering his gun. He treads carefully, feeling Kitty flinch as he puts his arm around her shoulder. ‘It’s OK now,’ he says, his breath falling softly on her ear, ‘it’s over.’
Kitty looks up at him. Her eyes look like they’re dissolving. ‘It’s not OK,’ she whispers, and he catches her as she collapses to the ground, her body slick and sticky with someone else’s blood.
FORTY-THREE
He leaves Kitty with one of the deputies. Her face is blank, and her eyes stare into the distance as if she’s watching a movie of her life. There’s nothing he can do for her now. He radios the paramedics, warns them what they’re likely to find. He tells Elias what he wants him to do. He instructs the other policemen to start searching the labyrinth.
He takes the bike into town. He speeds around curves and almost loses the road several times. As he revs the engine, he notices curtains shimmying, doors being silently opened, men stopping in the street to watch him. The news of Petrakis’s arrest must have already spread through town. News travelled faster than CNN in small communities.
The smack of wind on his face makes his eyes water. The houses and people blur by. He feels the motor hum below him. A slow cyclic purr. He knows it’s the end of this thing. He’s surprised, but not really, at how despondent this makes him feel. He knows by now that the case is all in the hunting. When it’s over, it leaves you wasted and spent, empty-eyed and hollowed, like a political candidate the night after an election. Normally, there are other cases to sink into, a new mystery to make special the days, but this time it’s the last one. There’s nothing after this but the rest of his life. And this thought terrifies him more than what he’s about to do.
He leaves the scooter a few blocks away. He walks the rest of the distance, watching the light slip and fade behind the distant Peloponnese. Shopkeepers and customers emerge from shops as he walks past. They stand like wooden Indians by the doors and watch him, their faces betraying neither hate nor respect. He fixes his eyes straight ahead.
He passes by the tavernas and clubs hugging the shore. Here the looks are darker, filled with mistrust and antipathy. Waiters and owners, clubbers and cleaning staff, watch as he walks past, some shaking their heads, a few spitting on the floor in front of him. The island will change now. This he’s sure of. Whether it will survive these changes, he can’t say, and, to his surprise, he doesn’t care. He and Alexia will be gone by the time the case is wrapped up. He knows their life cannot be what it was. Maybe this time they can leave the island for good.
He walks past the museum, nothing now but a heap of black ash pollinating in the wind. Scraps of books and maps and faded photos rise in the late evening breeze and twist like dust devils across the cobblestones.
He passes the church, its white steeple an obscenity against the square, regimented houses. He used to walk past it, envy the sense of peace and escape from the world. Now it only reminds him of events up at the monastery. Petrakis’s story rushes through his head like a compressed vision of hell. He bites down on his tongue, thinking about the two boys, the priests, but most of all thinking about the deception. Petrakis’s pathetic attempts to justify shifting the blame onto the commune so that they could murder them.
What would have happened if they hadn’t sent him to the mainland that day? Would he have joined them? He curses Petrakis for having seen into his heart so easily, for giving him the easy way out.
He stops outside one of the bars and lights a cigarette. He watches as Elias drags out a handcuffed and bruised Wynn. The drug dealer is shaking his head, blood dripping from his eyebrows and nose, still fighting the restraints which will keep him company these next few years. Elias stops and nods at Nikos. Nikos acknowledges him and turns away.
Petrakis and Dimitri are already in facing cells, their mutual loathing boiled down into that tiny space. Spiros, back in Athens, will be pleased. The drug trade will be curtailed
for a while, though it won’t be long before someone takes Petrakis’s place. Nikos knows there’s a hundred Wynns just waiting for their chance. But he did what he was sent here to do. The drugs are gone. Now there’s only one thing remaining.
Nikos walks in to the bar. The lights are flashing, the music is blaring, and the revellers are twisting and twirling on the diamond dance floor. The place is busier than usual tonight. Nikos stands there and surveys the room. He can see a girl passed out on a table, two men running their hands up her legs like they were the keys of a piano. There’s someone throwing up in a corner. Dancers with eyes like teddy bears, all pupil, unblinking and empty. There’s a lot of people wandering around, looking distressed, asking others if they have anything to spare.
Nikos sees him as he’s crossing towards the bar. He doesn’t stop. He calls the waiter and orders a double, no ice. His whole body is quivering with energy, fear and madness. He takes the drink and slowly lets it slake his desiccated mouth. He wants to make this moment last.
The glass in his hand is empty. The cigarette gone. He tips the waiter and recrosses the dance floor. A scarlet-haired girl grabs him as he passes and pulls him into her. She’s smiling and laughing, but when she looks up into his eyes her face drops, and she lets go of his hand. He watches her spin on the dance floor, a burning flame like some fabled Djinn crossing the land.
He turns away and walks over towards the far booth. He sees him sitting where he always sits, a glass of ouzo half empty in front of him. When Nikos enters, he looks up, and it’s a look not of surprise or fear but a quiet contentment that almost throws Nikos off balance. He’d expected fake outpourings of innocence, an attempt at running perhaps, but not this quiet and silent resignation.
They stand there for a moment in the hot stuck air like two figures in an improbable still-life. The fan buzzes overhead, casting blade-shaped shadows on the walls. The singer on the stereo is singing something about going home.