by Stav Sherez
‘You know why I’m here,’ Nikos says, and his voice sounds strange to him, as if he’d pressed the wrong button on a tape recorder.
George takes a deep swallow of ouzo. His lips smack against each other. Thin tears of alcohol dribble from the glass and moisten his beard. He stares at Nikos and lights a cigarette. His hands are steady, and his movements measured as if he were the one giving Nikos benediction and not the other way around. ‘Sit with me. Have a drink,’ he points to the chair facing him, ‘you’re going to arrest me and get all the credit, it’s the least you can do.’
Nikos finds himself sitting down. This is not what he planned. But there’s something inviting about the empty glass, the beaded bottle in front of him and the chance to make this last just a little bit longer.
Nikos pours himself a beer. He checks over his shoulder to make sure the deputies are guarding the exits. He looks at George. He’s trying to see the ten-year-old boy from the photo in the relatives-of-the-deceased file. But there’s nothing there. No indicator that ten-year-old Alex Mavropolous and George Mavers were the same person. He’d taken his brother’s name, Yorgi, and anglicised it the way his mother had done with their surname.
‘I don’t understand how you, of all people,’ Nikos breathes out. The months and years of frustration come down to this one moment. ‘You lost someone yourself to murder, your own brother. How could you do that to other families? You know the effect it has. What it does to a life.’
George looks up into the air. His beard is all Nikos can see of him for a moment.
‘Don’t tell me you wouldn’t do the same? If it was your brother those priests raped and killed that night? Your blood?’
Nikos thinks about Alexia. The years of lying and subterfuge. He thinks of the ten-year-old boy in the file, how carefree and open he looked, and the man in front of him now, all shadows and darkness, and how once they were the same person until a blow had struck them apart for ever.
‘I wouldn’t kill anyone,’ he says, for himself more than for George.
George finishes his ouzo, rubbing the back of his hand against his lips. ‘Don’t be so sure. You don’t know until you know. And by then it’s too late.’
Nikos tries to imagine, but it’s impossible, like trying to picture a concept that doesn’t exist. ‘And you never thought about what you’d become? About punishment?’
George’s abrupt laughter startles Nikos so badly he’s halfway to his gun before he realises it’s benign.
‘What? You think God exists?’ George shakes his head as if at a small child professing a belief in unicorns. ‘After all you’ve seen, detective, you really still believe?’
George doesn’t wait for Nikos to answer. His tone is no longer one of amused condescension.
‘They took more from me than just my brother that night. Much more. You don’t realise that at first. One day you look at yourself in the mirror and you’re not who you thought you were. And the worst part is you don’t even remember that other person. The man before.’ There’s no remorse in his words. He’s so certain of the rightness of his actions that Nikos has to remind himself that George killed four innocent teenagers as collateral damage to his revenge.
‘You feel better now?’ Nikos finds himself surprised that he genuinely wants to know.
George’s shrug could be interpreted as anything. ‘The priests are dead. I’m happy about that.’
The air hums around them with music and insects. The stars seem too bright, lost in a massive blanket of darkness. Nikos finishes his beer and lights a cigarette. He knows George won’t be so willing to talk later, when they’re in different surroundings. ‘Why did you pick those particular teenagers? It’s been bothering me.’
George waves his arm across the dance floor and the town beyond.
‘Look what happened to us. You grew up here. You remember the place it was. Look what they made it into. Noise and drugs is all the tourists want. I had to kill someone for the plan to work, so it was better that I killed someone who was doing the island harm. It didn’t take me long to realise Petrakis was behind the drugs. I knew killing his mules would send the message directly.’
Nikos feels the night close in around him, a swaddling heat filled with guilt and recrimination.
‘Why not kill him first?’
‘I wanted him to suffer. Suffer and remember. Karelis too. It’s good to have time to reflect on your sins.’
‘I thought you didn’t believe in God?’
‘I don’t, but everyone else does.’
Nikos stands and places the handcuffs on him and with a single, unheard click shuts down the past thirty-three years of fear and silence.
Eighteen months later
The rain washes everything away. The gutters are filled with the dust of crumbling houses, getting smaller every year. The rivers of rain run through the town, sweeping empty beer cans, fast-food wrappers and cigarette butts into the hungry swell of the sea.
There was not much cleaning up to do any more. This was the off-season. The empty grey days of early winter. The ferry boats had stopped. The tavernas and clubs boarded-up for the season. The streets empty of everything but rain and skinny dogs rubbing their noses in the garbage cans behind the restaurants and bars.
Everything feels off these days. The weather. The town. The sea itself. But most of all him.
Nikos sips his coffee and stares out at the rain. The drink is too hot as always, the machine no longer working as it should. The police station is empty, the clocks ticking in the silent room. It’s almost ten in the evening, and, instead of the lights flashing from shore, the distant detonation of dance music, there’s only the sound of the rain as it hits the cobblestones and rushes back towards the sea.
He turns and sits down. There are boxes all over his office, stacked on the floor and on the table in front of him. He’s in the process of packing up his life once again. Squeezing everything into a small cardboard receptacle which he’ll take with him to wherever he goes next.
Luckily, there’s not much to pack. He’s been in the job just over two years. It had been a time of stripping, not accumulation. He looks around the dusty office, the posters of places he’ll never visit, the crime sheets and photos, the chair that always ruined his back. Everything has been tied up. The trial is over. The case closed. The drugs are, for the moment, gone. There’s nothing left for him to do.
He spent the last month in Athens, giving testimony and watching as George took the stand to receive his verdict. Now there’s only the boxing of these loose ends, the papers, files and statements that are meaningless now. He takes another sheaf of reports and squares them against the table before putting them neatly into the last box. All that’s left are his pens, notebooks and the framed photo of Alexia resting on the table.
It’s been eighteen months since he’s seen his wife.
She didn’t come back the day of George’s arrest, and she didn’t come back the following day. He’d had the whole town searched, the houses and clubs and cafés. Then the interior, the monastery grounds and labyrinth. No one had seen her. No one knew where she’d been that day.
Two months later, he received the postcard. It had been mailed from Argentina.
She said, ‘By the time you receive this, I’ll be in another country.’ She said, ‘Sorry.’ She said that the years together were all she thought of now. She told him there were things he might never understand. That she wanted a clean break. From the island. From history. From him. The last she didn’t say, but it was there between every line. She said they made mistakes. They should have come clean at the beginning. That now she had to start again, and Greece, and everything there, could only serve as a reminder of terrible days.
She wrote how she still thought about the hippies, the time they shared together and, most of all, about Frank. She broke his heart by telling him how when she was stricken with the virus, she lost Frank’s baby. She said she loved him, always had done, but some things, some people,
stayed with you for ever.
Her handwriting made him cry. Made him remember little notes she used to leave attached to food, I know you’ll come back late so I prepared this for you. In her handwriting are years of shared memories and a life he cannot return to.
He read and reread the postcard until he could tell where every mark and discolouration was. The handwriting small and cramped as if she’d contracted events, trying to fit the whole narrative onto the edges of the postcard.
He looks back down at the photo in his hand, the empty station around him. He fingers the rough gold edges of the frame, stares at his wife, smiling, ten years ago, happy on the steps of the Campanile in Venice, her eyes filled with wonder and possibility. He snaps the frame off, and the glass breaks, cutting a deep furrow in his palm. He wipes the blood on his shirt, takes the photo and carefully places it inside his wallet. Drops of blood spot Alexia’s face.
He starts taking the boxes out, one by one, into the main hallway. He’ll get one of the deputies to drive them over to his house in the morning. For now, everything’s packed. He hadn’t wanted to do this during the day. Didn’t want everyone congratulating him and wishing him the best of luck. Some things you had to do alone.
He’s just putting the last bit of tape on the last box when the phone rings. The answering machine will pick it up, he thinks, but then, out of habit, he looks at the display and sees an international prefix.
‘Palassos police, can I help you?’
‘Nikos? … Is that really you?’
Her voice floods him with memories and emotion. He almost drops the phone.
‘Kitty?’
She laughs, ‘I thought you’d forgotten me,’ she says, but her voice is deep and languid and he almost doesn’t recognise it.
‘Is she …’
He can hear her breath, slow and steady on the other end of the line.
‘No,’ he says, and that’s all there is to say about that.
He accepts Kitty’s condolences, finding himself buoyed by her voice, the memory of their last few days together on the island when they comforted each other in what they’d lost. She asks him if he’s received her letter yet. He says he hasn’t. She tells him that everything important is in there.
They talk about mundane things for a while. They talk about everything that doesn’t really matter. She tells him about the late December sunshine, and he tells her about the rain, even holding the phone out towards the window when she expresses disbelief that it could ever rain in Palassos. She tells him that she’s stopped writing, about her upcoming divorce, and then she asks what she’s called up to ask him about.
‘I was there every day,’ he says, surprised at how comfortable he feels talking to her about these things, things he’s kept locked up all these months. ‘They sentenced him to life. No parole.’
‘He give any reasons for what he did?’
‘Too many,’ Nikos murmurs. ‘He had justifications for everything.’
‘And Dimitri?’
Nikos thinks back to the other trial. Dimitri had been good to his word. His confession was worthy of Augustine. Petrakis simmered next to his attorney as Dimitri laid out the whole drug-supply network in return for a reduced sentence. Petrakis didn’t say a word as the judge gave him thirty years. As he was being carried out, he’d turned to his son and whispered, You’re as dead as me, before being dragged back into the steel and metal world he would spend the rest of his days in.
‘He’s gone. Petrakis too.’
‘And …’ Kitty’s voice stutters a bit, and Nikos momentarily thinks they’ve lost the connection, ‘What about Karelis?’
‘He died in the hospital. Heart attack in his sleep. Doctor said that as soon as he stopped having to survive, his body just gave up.’
Nikos pauses, thinks about the misery and blood caused by the actions of the two priests, the exponential nature of their crimes.
‘You don’t mind talking about this?’
‘No, not at all.’
‘What I still don’t understand is how George knew it was the priests?’
Nikos flashes back to the courtroom, George in a jumpsuit sitting next to his lawyer, his hands pressed against his beard, his voice logical and calm as if he were the judge.
‘He said he knew as soon as he heard about his brother’s death. He said the kids all knew the priests had this proclivity. But he was ten, there was nothing he could do; the next month his mother moved them to England. He came back to Palassos three years ago only to bury his mother. He saw Petrakis, the town elders, saw how rich and respectable they’d become, how his brother had been the sacrifice that allowed the island to prosper. A Faustian pact. That’s when he decided to get revenge.
‘When he kidnapped Karelis, he made him confess everything. Karelis told him all about that night at the monastery when they killed the boys. He told him about the visit from Petrakis. George put one and one together …’
‘Did he kill Vondas?’ Kitty sounds breathless, as if waiting for a doctor’s prognosis.
‘Yes. He wanted to save him till last, but he’d heard Vondas had spoken to you, to other tourists up at the monastery; he was worried that the disappearance of Karelis and the resurgence of the murders would unhinge Vondas, force him into some kind of confession.’
‘He didn’t try to deny any of this?’
‘Not at all. He was … he was proud.’ Nikos pauses. He hadn’t intended on telling her, but there’s something in her voice.
‘You know, it’s strange you calling because a couple of nights ago I had this dream, and when I woke up your face was in front of me.’
‘Was it a good dream?’
Nikos remembers waking sweat-drenched and heart fluttering, a feeling of utter dread inside him.
‘In the dream, my father gave me a box. He told me never to open it, but of course I did. Inside the box was God. He was small and shrivelled and alone. He kept trying to turn his face from me. I told him I would free him. I remember I was crying. I put my hand in and gently pulled him from the box. But when I opened my palm and looked, I saw that somehow I had crushed him. Suddenly, all the lights went out, and we were plunged into darkness, and I knew, the way you just know things, that this was the real darkness and that it would last for ever. Then I woke up and saw your face.’
They talk some more, and then Kitty says she has to go, and Nikos listens to the dead tone for a few seconds before putting it down. He stares around the office, the tables and computers and faxes. This is everything he never has to do again. Tomorrow Elias takes over. Spiros has already approved his early retirement. He stands there and smokes one last cigarette.
He takes the box of personal things with him. He carries it in his arms as the rain drenches his hair and clothes. He locks the door of the police station for the last time, looks up at the broken crucifix and crosses himself.
It’s almost midnight, and the town is asleep. It’s the opposite of what it was during the summer. Now only the sea, the weather and the islanders remain. He walks past the boarded-up tavernas and clubs, past the grocer shops and martyred saints kneeling in the square. The rain drips from his eyebrows into his eyes. His feet slosh and squeak on the cobbles. The box feels like it’s disintegrating in his hands. He follows the promenade and then starts walking on the soft wet sand. He reaches the little jetty and walks through the rain and wind until he’s at the edge staring at the deep black rippled sea. He takes the box and flings it into the water. It explodes in a shower of paper and photos. The box darkens and sinks. The papers spread out like dead jellyfish, an army of white ghosts cresting the water.
He turns and walks back home.
He stands outside his door and wipes his shoes. He remembers he forgot to put out the rubbish. He takes out his key and turns the handle. The letter from England is waiting for him. It’s funny how these things happen, he thinks, as he picks it up and shakes off the rain. The house is quiet and cold and damp. There’s no sound but the insect hum of
the refrigerator. He takes a beer out of the cooler, slumps down onto the sofa and begins to read.
A year and a half. I can’t believe it’s been that long, Nikos. Staring out at the leafy boughs caressed by wind, at these windows which haven’t been cleaned in months, I sometimes think back to that day I made my decision to go to Greece. I think about the life I led and the life I now lead. There doesn’t seem to be any connection between the two.
I stopped writing. But you know that. It’s been over a year, and I haven’t even talked to my agent or publisher in that time. A couple of weeks after I got back I disconnected the phone and answering machine. My life is simpler now. I take pleasure in what I can, the slow evening cigarette and cup of coffee that I would never have allowed myself before. I sometimes wonder what Don would say if he passed by the old house, saw me on the porch with coffee and cigarette, listening to music, watching the day fall. But I don’t wonder about it often because there’s work to do.
It’s been the hardest thing I’ve ever worked on. But that’s as it should be.
Remember that backpack you helped me with from Jason’s room? Well, I didn’t open it for six months. I put it in a special room in my house I rarely use. Then, one day, it was time.
There was a pile of clothes and toiletries. Each object so filled with the longing of going away, I couldn’t bear it. There was an iPod which I listen to every night. Sixty gigabytes of Jason’s music. I put it on shuffle, and in the sequence of songs, sometimes I think he speaks to me. Other times I’m sure of it.
There was a copy of my latest novel. It felt strange in my hand, like some alien relic. There was also an invite. From my last book launch. On it, in his cramped handwriting, was the word Palassos. I stood there and stared at it for the longest time. I remembered having mentioned to my agent where I was going, and then it struck me: Jason must have been at the launch. He must have followed me out to the island. God knows why! Nikos, I can almost hear the cop part of you going off like a fire alarm, but I swear, it didn’t feel like that to me at all. I know Jason’s actions should make me feel weird and uncomfortable. I know this is not the way most people behave, but I can’t help it. It only makes me more protective towards him, thrilled too that he’d gone out of his way to meet me. I’ve kept the invite. I placed it on my mantelpiece when I took down all the photos of Don.