When the Devil's Idle

by Leta Serafim

  “You need anything else,” he told Patronas, “we can bring it from Skala.”

  A cloistered labyrinth, Chora reminded Patronas of the medieval towns on his native Chios. There was little visible evidence of the wealth its inhabitants supposedly possessed, only an impenetrable maze of stone walls and arched passageways. Here and there, he caught a glimpse of a courtyard or old-fashioned television antenna, but for the most part all was hidden. Unlike the other Greek villages he’d seen, there was no laundry hanging from the balconies, no plastic jugs under the eaves to collect rain water. All was quiet, the only sound, the relentless drone of the wind. Maybe it was the hour, but the village felt deserted.

  Evangelos Demos confided that since the rich Europeans had come and bought up most of the houses, the actual Greek town had withered away. Seeing their opportunity, most of the residents had sold out; the ones who lingered now were isolated and alone, elderly people with no place else to go. “You should see it in winter. It’s a ghost town.”

  The monastery was omnipresent, its gray bulk like a man-made massif towering over the houses of the village.

  Although it was still very early, a waiter was setting up tables in the square. Music could be heard seeping from a nearby bar—something in English with a driving metallic beat. Someone was already inside, a maid perhaps, readying the place for the day’s onslaught of tourists.

  Few places played Greek music anymore, Patronas thought glumly. His culture was vanishing; the young wanted no part of it.

  The owner of a taverna, in an apron, was sitting outside. He rose to his feet when he saw them and began questioning Evangelos Demos about the murder, the specifics of what had been done to the German. Two old men playing a game of tavli, backgammon, nearby stopped their game to listen.

  Patronas wondered how the taverna owner had learned the news so quickly, who might have told him. Not the family of the dead man, that was for sure. No, the language difference would have precluded that. Perhaps Evangelos Demos had said something; he’d have to check.

  Mentally, he made a list of things to do. As soon as he was done inspecting the crime scene and the victim, he’d come back to interview the two tavli players. Pensioners, they’d be only too happy to put their game aside and gossip. Perhaps they’d seen something, someone passing through Chora the previous night, or overheard an argument in one of the houses. Could be this was a domestic matter—the old man killed by a relative as sometimes happened. Fights sound the same in any language. Even if the tavli players didn’t understand German, they’d know a fight if they heard one. At the very least, they could tell him who belonged in this sequestered world and who’d spread the news about the killing.

  “The crime scene is southwest of the village,” Evangelos Demos said, “just below the church of Profitis Elias, the highest point of land on the island.”

  As with many of the estates on Chora, the garden where the victim had been found was enclosed by thick stone walls. There appeared to be only one entrance, a metal door with a tiny, barred window.

  The wind increased in intensity as they approached the door, ruffling their clothes and threatening to pull them off the hill. They were at the highest point of land in Patmos, walking along the curving spine of rock that defined the island like the skeletal underpinnings of a great fish.

  The sun had risen and the sky was already white with heat. The priest was exhausted and had to be helped along by Tembelos. His black robe dragged in the dust.

  Pulling out a handkerchief, Patronas mopped his brow. He wished he’d thought to bring water.

  He looked back the way they’d come. Reaching as far as the eye could see, the Aegean Sea dominated the view, its surface gleaming in the sunlight. A Greek fishing boat was making its way into the harbor, its red hull bright against the water. He counted off the islands in the distance—Lipsoi, Arkoi, Marathi. No wonder the Germans had chosen this site. He was so high, he felt as if he could see the very curve of the earth.

  The area around the estate appeared to be deserted, an arid wasteland used mainly to graze animals. Save for Profitas Elias and a few buildings along the road, there was nothing. A herd of goats was standing in the shadow of a withered olive tree, their bells tinkling softly in the wind.

  An old woman in black opened the metal door, bowing slightly when she saw them, her face grim. Taking a step back, she gestured for them to enter.

  The grounds of the estate were extensive—more than four stremata, or acres, Patronas estimated—and densely planted with trees. After the glare of the sun, it took him a few minutes to adjust to the gloom, the sense of being in a forest, albeit man-made. Although he could hear the wind outside, inside everything was peaceful and smelled faintly of flowers, although another odor kept breaking through, a far uglier scent. There was a fountain at the center of the garden, decorated by a life-sized statue of a child playing a flute. The corpse was on the the pavement beneath it. The statue seemed grotesque, given the circumstances, as if it were serenading the dead man.

  The victim was lying on his back in a puddle of pink, scummy water, his sightless blue eyes staring into space. Flies were crawling all over his body, their buzzing loud in the quiet, and there was water everywhere. It had mixed in with the blood, thin rivulets of it running down and soaking the stones of the terrace.

  Seeking to evaluate the scene, Patronas studied the fountain and the garden beyond. The exterior walls were at least two and a half, maybe even three meters high, certainly higher than a man could reach. He wondered how the killer got in, if he’d used a ladder. Could be this was an inside job.

  Evangelos told him everything he knew, which wasn’t much. Usually the gardener came in the evening to water the flowers and had duly arrived on the night in question. He’d seen the man lying there, hurried to investigate and slipped on the blood.

  Patronas could see his footprints now, circling around the body.

  “What time was this?” he asked.

  “Eight, eight thirty p.m. The victim was still alive then. He died immediately after.”

  Contrary to what Evangelos had originally told him, there’d been a significant time lapse between the phone call to the station and his arrival on the scene.

  “The man who reported it, the gardener, is foreign. ‘Nekros ilikiomenos anthropos,’ he kept saying.” Old dead man. “Also, there was a lot of yelling in the background, which made it hard to hear. To make a long story short, the dispatcher misunderstood him. He assumed the victim had died of natural causes and that the family wanted a hearse. It took me some time to get things straightened out.”

  “When did you realize he’d been murdered?”

  “Around nine thirty, maybe ten. I called you right after.”

  Here, there, everywhere … incompetence. Even if the man had died of natural causes, Evangelos should have come to the house the minute he heard, coroner in tow, inspected the body and signed off on it.

  “As far as I know, no one has been murdered on Patmos since the war,” Evangelos went on, his tone defensive. “My staff is inexperienced. Aside from this incident, Patmos is a pretty safe place.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Giorgos Tembelos said sarcastically, “aside from this.”

  He’d been there the night of the shoot-out on Chios and helped Patronas gather up the dead goats and bury them. “Axthos epi gis,” he’d called Evangelos Demos forever after. A burden to the earth.

  As Evangelos had said, tape was strung up around the crime scene, and there was a tarp suspended from the trees high above the body. Although the garden was shady, the victim was out in the open on the paved terrace. The square of canvas had been a good idea, offering a measure of protection against the sun.

  Evangelos assured Patronas the victim was just as the gardener had found him. “It being August, we did our best to keep him cool.”

  That explained where the water had come from. The idiot had packed the body in ice—so much for forensics.

  “It kept melting and I had
to get more and dump it on him. I must have unloaded fifty kilos.” The whine was back in his voice.

  Patronas waved him off. “Where’s the family?”

  “Inside.”

  Getting out his notebook, Patronas scribbled some notes. After suiting up in his Tyvek gear, he knelt down next to the corpse and studied it closely. He noticed a tawny residue near the victim’s feet and dug up a piece of it with his scalpel and placed it in an evidence bag.

  Curious, he sniffed the open bag and passed it over to Tembelos.

  “What do you think?”

  “Tallow,” Tembelos said.

  Patronas nodded. Someone had been burning candles.

  Every church in Greece had tallow candles in the narthex; the pious lit them when they entered as part of the ritual. Perhaps a Greek had indeed been involved.

  Also, what looked like flower petals were scattered along the length of the body, a mixture of carnations and purple blossoms, lilacs maybe, although it wasn’t the season. Not many, but enough.

  Spooked, he looked back at the house. “You interview the family?”

  “Not yet,” Evangelos Demos said. “I was waiting for you.”

  “What did the coroner say?”

  “I told you, we don’t have a coroner. A local doctor fills in, a recent graduate of medical school doing his agrotiko, two-year service in the countryside. He was here earlier, said whoever did it shattered his skull.”

  Patronas didn’t like where this was going. “Did he have any idea what was used?”

  “No. We searched the area, but we didn’t find anything.”

  “You’re sure nobody touched the body?”

  “Only the doctor. I swear, and me with the ice. It’s just the way the gardener found it.”

  Patronas and his team quickly went to work. Tembelos marked off the crime scene with chalk and took photographs, while Patronas sketched the location of the body and noted its proximity to the house, calling out measurements to the priest, who entered everything in a large spiral notebook.

  “The murder book,” the priest called it, saying the words with reverence; homicide in all its various manifestations was a serious business.

  “I know it seems unlikely,” he’d once told Patronas, “but the Bible was the first murder book. Cain and Abel. Humanity hasn’t changed much since it was written. Brother against brother, man against man. According to biologists, the species we are most closely related to—share ninety-nine percent of our DNA with—is the chimpanzee, the only other creature on earth that wars needlessly against its own kind, that kills for pleasure, for sport.”

  Evangelos was standing off to one side, watching Patronas work.

  A large man, he was packed tightly into his Tyvek suit and booties. An astronaut with elephantitis.

  “The pattern of the blood splatter is intriguing,” Patronas said, looking over at him. “It ran down the back of his neck first, and then it went everywhere. I think we can assume the killer hit him in the back of the head, the blow weakening his skull until it shattered like a piece of glass. If you look carefully, you’ll see where brain matter leaked out onto the pavement.” He pointed to a smeary area on the ground.

  Raising his hands over his head, he demonstrated how the killer had gone after the old man. “The first blow probably killed him. But the murderer just kept going, as if trying to obliterate him, erase him from the face of the earth. Man must have hated him.”

  Tembelos was still taking pictures. “Might have been a woman,” he said.

  Patronas raised his eyebrows. “Equal opportunity for murderers, Giorgos? Since when did you become such a feminist?”

  “I’m just saying we need to keep an open mind.” Tembelos mopped his face with his sleeve. “You about done? Sun’s up. We should get the body out of here.”

  “Give me fifteen more minutes.”

  Patronas tested the limbs for rigor and took the victim’s temperature, then gathered up the petals and bagged them. Given the copious amounts of watery liquid, he thought at first the victim might have been stabbed too, but on closer inspection he saw the damage to the skull was extensive; the river of blood had begun and ended there.

  Seizing the victim’s chin, he turned the man’s head toward him. In addition to the swastika, the German had other scars. There were three of them, orderly and nearly uniform in depth. The biggest, five to six centimeters long, ran the length of the jaw bone. A much smaller one marked the bridge of the nose, and the third extended from the victim’s mouth almost to his ear, making him look cartoonish, as if smiling even in the rictus of death. They looked to be very old—the scar tissue faded with age—unlike the sticky wound on his forehead.

  Patronas asked Tembelos to take a close-up photograph of the victim’s face and wrote a note to himself about the location of the three scars, thinking he’d send the information to police headquarters in Athens, see what the forensics people could tell him. Perhaps the German had been hurt during the war and medics had botched the surgery. The scars had that kind of look, as if someone had sought to repair his face and hadn’t fitted the damaged parts back together properly.

  He’d been a heavy-set man, and in spite of his advanced age, exuded strength. Although he’d been dead for over thirty hours, putrefaction had only just begun, the swelling in the abdominal region barely visible.

  Opening the victim’s robe, Patronas was startled to see he was naked, his scrotum distended in death, the thick gray hair around his genitals like the fur of a wolf.

  Patronas got to his feet, thinking there were too many mysteries here. He should send the body to forensic specialists and let them deal with it.

  “Why bother killing someone this old?” Tembelos asked, stepping around the corpse. “Why not wait a couple of years and let God take him?”

  That, of course, was the question.

  Chapter Three

  Let us all get organized, so that you can go.

  —Greek Proverb

  The driver of the hearse said the estate was too remote, that he’d never be able to bring his vehicle close enough to wheel a gurney in. “If you get the body down to the road, I can take over.”

  Patronas had been afraid the hearse would attract too much attention and was relieved they’d be removing the body themselves. Greek hearse drivers, in an uproar over increased road taxes, had held a recent protest drive in Athens, claiming the extra tolls would put them out of business. The photos in the newspapers had been chilling—hundreds of empty hearses parked in front of Parliament—death and taxes, all in one place. The driver on Patmos was sure to have an opinion and he didn’t want to hear it, not today, not with a corpse lying outside in the heat.

  Initially, he’d wanted to interview the family before transporting the victim, but it had taken him over thirty odd hours to get to Patmos and they’d had plenty of time to get their stories straight. Another hour or two wouldn’t make any difference. The day was already hot and would only get hotter. The body had to be dealt with.

  The family had emerged from the house at one point, a man and woman, a teenage girl, and a boy of about seven. The boy had a bandage over one eye. The children were visibly distraught, the girl especially, leaning against her mother and sobbing.

  “The victim, who was he related to?” Patronas asked Evangelos.

  “Him.” Evangelos pointed at the man.

  Approaching the family, Patronas introduced himself. “I’m Chief Officer Yiannis Patronas of the Chios police,” he told them. “This is my second-in-command, Giorgos Tembelos, and my associate, Papa Michalis. You’ve already met Evangelos Demos.”

  He said this in English, doubting a summer visitor would understand Greek. His was a complicated tongue, and in his experience, few foreigners ever mastered it.

  “Gunther Bechtel,” the man said, introducing himself in turn. “How do you wish to proceed?”

  “I will need to talk to each of you.”

  Bechtel frowned. “Everyone? The children, too?”<
br />
  “That is correct.”

  Since his last case, Patronas had been working to improve his English. Overseeing security on the archeological dig on Chios had helped—for the most part, the crew was American—as did watching television with Papa Michalis, who tuned in regularly to British and American detective shows. Patronas understood most of what was being said now, but he still felt self-conscious when he spoke, painfully aware of his poor pronounciation and grade school vocabulary.

  Bechtel walked over to where they’d been working and stood, looking down at the body. “What about my ….” He made a helpless gesture in the direction of the corpse. “What about my papa?” Overcome, he started to cry.

  He reached for his wife and held onto her as if his legs could no longer support him. “Papa!” he sobbed. “Papa!” He said something else in German, his voice ragged with grief.

  Bechtel wept for a long time, his wife comforting him. It was a pitiful sound, a meowing almost, and Patronas longed for him to stop.

  He didn’t try to console him, knowing if the circumstances had been reversed, he would not have welcomed the sympathy of a policeman. No, he’d have been irritated. The loss of a parent is a grievous wound. The murder of one? The pain had to be insurmountable.

  Gunther Bechtel eventually pulled himself together and took a deep breath. “With your permission,” he said quietly, returning to English. “I would like to take the body back to Germany and bury him beside my father and mother.”

  “Unfortunately we must send him to Athens first. I’m sorry, but it’s customary in a case like this. After that, you can arrange to transport him back to Germany.”

  The man gave a curt nod. “Very well, then. We will remain here and wait.”

  And with that, he excused himself by saying he had to send some emails, and went back inside the house. The rest of his family trailed after him. The woman kept looking back at them. Unlike her children and husband, she appeared to be dry-eyed.