When the Devil's Idle

by Leta Serafim

  What Nefertiti might have looked like in old age, Patronas thought.

  Her white hair was coiled in a bun at the nape of her neck.

  There were two upholstered chairs in front of a bank of windows, a broken down coffee table positioned between them. A neatly made bed and a tiny kitchenette occupied the rest of the space. A pine chest, stained to look like mahogany, was pushed up against the back wall.

  A small fan on top of the chest whirred softly as it rotated back and forth. In spite of it, the room was hot and stuffy.

  Maria Georgiou had made an effort to make the space her own, he saw, setting out an icon of the Virgin Mary and a photograph of a man and woman in a silvery frame. Her mother and father, Patronas judged, noting the family resemblance. A piece of cloth was artfully draped across the top of the coffee table. Hand-embroidered in the style of the Epirus region in northern Greece, the fabric was dense with blue and ochre stitching, gold threadwork. It looked out of place amid the cheap furnishings.

  Patronas fingered the cloth. It seemed an odd thing to travel with.

  As was the custom in Greece, she had set out a tray of sweets for them.

  “The koulourakia are fresh,” she said, pushing the plate of cookies toward him. “I bought them this morning.”

  Patronas took one and ate it in awkward silence while she sat and watched him, having taken nothing herself. Evangelos was leaning against the wall by the door. He and Patronas had mapped out their strategy on the way there, and his colleague was doing as instructed, stepping aside and letting Patronas take the lead.

  “You know why we’re here?” Patronas asked her.

  “Yes, the murder of Mr. Bechtel’s father.” Her Greek was heavily accented. Like the cloth on the table, she was from Epirus, Patronas judged, hearing the way she spoke, the distinct regional intonation. She might even be a Greek from Albania.

  “May I see your identity card?”

  Getting up, she walked over to the chest and opened a drawer. She removed a tired leather handbag, took out a square of plastic, and handed it to him.

  Patronas compared the photo on the ID to the woman standing before him. They looked to be the same, although the photo did not do her justice. She was older than he’d originally thought, born in 1937.

  As he’d done with the gardener, he wrote down the information and handed the card back to her.

  “How long have you worked for the Bauers?” he asked.

  “Since June. I came to Patmos on a holiday. The owner of the place where I was staying said a family was looking for a woman to do housework. They wanted a Greek, he said. It was important to them.”

  “And you volunteered?”

  “Yes. It’s hard to find Greek maids now and he said it wasn’t hard work. Only a little cleaning, two or three hours a day, and the pay was good.”

  “Where did you have this conversation?”

  “Campos. That’s where I was staying. In a place that rents rooms, smaller than here. Pavlos, it’s called.”

  “Is that the owner’s name?”

  “Yes, Antonis Pavlos.”

  Patronas entered the name in his notebook. “How did the owner know the Bauers were looking for someone?”

  “He’s married to a German woman, and she’s friendly with them. There’s a group of people from Stuttgart who come to Campos every summer and they know each other.”

  “Where are you from originally?” he asked, curious about her accent.

  “A village near Ioannina. Aghios Stefanos.”

  “Do you still live there?”

  “No, I left years ago. I’m in Athens now. Exarhia.”

  No wonder she’d wanted to linger on Patmos. Exarhia was a crime-ridden slum, one of the worst in Greece. A woman alone? She’d be afraid to step outside her door.

  “You said you came to Patmos on a holiday? That’s a long trip, over eight hours by boat. Wouldn’t one of the islands near Athens, Poros or Aegina, have been more convenient?” Cheaper, too. Patmos was expensive by Greek standards.

  She touched the gold cross around her neck. “My father was a priest and he studied at the seminary on Patmos. I am a religious woman and I wanted to see it and the other churches on the island—the Monastery of St. John and the Cave of the Apocalypse—have a mnimosina sung for my parents.” A memorial service. “It was important to me.”

  “Do you work in Athens?”

  “No, I’m retired.”

  “What did you do before you retired?”

  “I was a beautician.”

  Strange, a beautician who didn’t dye her hair or bother with makeup, whose whole persona seemed frozen in time. He decided to probe further.

  “What was the name of the salon?”

  “Electra. It was on Solomos Street.”

  “Do you remember the exact address?”

  “It’s gone now. It went out of business last winter. The building’s been empty for months.”

  He underlined the name, thinking he’d have the police in Athens follow up. “Let’s talk about your job here. How did you get along with the family? Not the ones who hired you, but their guests, the Bechtels.”

  “I got along good. Mrs. Gerta, she wanted to learn how to cook Greek sweets and I showed her how to make baklava and kataifi, other things she didn’t know. The children were very well behaved and polite. And they always paid me on time. Overtime, too, if I worked late.”

  A serious woman, her gaze was steady, her voice unwavering.

  “No offense, Kyria, but aren’t you a little old to be working as a maid?”

  Her smile was sad. “I am a poor woman, Chief Officer. What choice do I have?”

  “What about Mr. Bechtel’s father? How did you get along with him?”

  He was watching her closely. It was the key question and they both knew it.

  “We were not friendly.” Raising her head, she gazed at him for a moment before continuing. “He was an old-fashioned man, used to getting his own way, and not very patient. But he didn’t ask for much, only a cold beer in the afternoon and to keep his newspaper where he could find it. His daughter-in-law, she was the one who took care of him.”

  The old man was her problem, she was saying, not mine.

  What she said was consistent with what Gerta Bechtel had told him. Due to the language barrier, Maria Georgiou’s contact with the victim had been limited.

  “And his son?”

  “Mr. Gunther? The same. Mrs. Gerta was the one in charge. My job was to help her. They might be different from us, those people, but not in that. For them, too, the house belongs to the woman.”

  Patronas scribbled down what she said. “And the children?”

  “Little Walter, we were together sometimes in the garden. The girl, Hannelore, no.”

  “Did you ever see anyone suspicious hanging around?”

  “No. The house is isolated. No one goes there.”

  She spoke no more than necessary and always in the same steady voice.

  “What about the entrance? The door in the stone wall, is it kept locked?” He’d meant to go back to the subject of the door and who had the keys to it with the Bechtels, but had forgotten. He made a note to discuss it with them again.

  “The gardener is supposed to lock up after he’s done watering, but sometimes he forgets and it stays open all night. Or the little boy leaves it open after he puts his bicycle in. The old man liked to stay in the garden, and I guess they believed no one would bother them as long as he was there. But he was deaf. You could walk right past him, and he wouldn’t hear.”

  “So it wasn’t your job to secure the outside door?”

  “When I was there at night, I’d see to it, but usually I just cooked dinner for them and left it on the stove. I didn’t like to stay on in their house after I finished my job.”

  “Who has keys to the door?”

  “The one in the wall? I do, and the gardener. Also the family kept extra keys around the house, one on a nail by the outside entrance for
Walter to use—a big skeleton key like in the old days. Little Walter would take it down, use it when he left with his bicycle, and slide it back under the door.” She demonstrated, sliding her hand along the floor.

  “How many extra keys?”

  “Five, maybe more. You’ll have to check with Mrs. Gerta. Anyway, you didn’t need a key to get into the garden. Most of the time, the gate was open.”

  On his list, Patronas drew a line through the word, ‘key.’ He’d keep after them, but it wouldn’t be the focus of his investigation.

  Arthritic, the housekeeper’s fingers were thick and reddened with work, her palms heavily callused. She rubbed the swollen joints as she talked, one hand going back and forth over the other.

  Patronas’ mother had made a similar gesture, and he wondered if her hands pained her the way his mother’s had.

  “What about the cat, the stray the grandfather befriended?”

  “I told Mrs. Bechtel I didn’t like cats, that they were dirty, and she told me not to worry, that she’d take care of it, feed it, and make sure it had water. She was very upset when it died. Walter, too. I stayed in the house. I didn’t want to see.” She shuddered, remembering. “The gardener got a shovel and buried it in the garden. A crow tried to peck at it after, but he chased it away.”

  “You don’t know who killed it?”

  She shrugged. “Kids in the village, maybe. Who knows?”

  Unable to think of anything else to ask her, Patronas got up from his chair. “Thank you for your cooperation. We will verify everything you said and get back to you if we have any further questions.”

  “Of course,” she said, bridling a little. “I am an honest woman. You will find everything is as I said it was. I have nothing to hide.”

  Chapter Nine

  Either the coast is crooked or our boat is going the wrong way.

  —Greek Proverb

  After leaving the rooming house, Patronas and Evangelos Demos worked their way through the rest of Chora, fanning out separately and going from door to door. There weren’t more than eight or nine streets. Patronas drew a grid and checked off each one as he completed his interviews. He and Evangelos Demos had agreed to meet at the car when they finished, then drive back to Skala to meet Tembelos and the priest.

  Morning, most of the residents were still at home, drinking coffee on their terraces or eating breakfast inside. In spite of their wealth, most were dressed casually, men and women alike. Similar to the Bechtels, they wore jeans and t-shirts, espadrilles or leather flip-flops. A few had children running around, overseen by bored-looking women from the Philippines. For the most part, they welcomed Patronas and were eager to share what they knew. They had all heard about the murder and wanted whoever had done it apprehended.

  He’d been expecting grandeur, but found instead artful imitations of Greek village life: clay water jugs and primitive furniture, hand-loomed tapestries and rugs. One house even had an old spinning wheel on display, a spotlight shining on it as if it were a work of art in a museum. Patronas had studied it with amusement, wondering how much the owners had paid, thinking the further away people got from their peasant origins, the more they celebrated them. How little they actually knew of that life, the hardship and the struggle. Again, he thought of his mother’s hands.

  He laboriously interviewed more than thirty people in a variety of tongues.

  Before they’d started, Evangelos Demos had suggested Patronas use the translation application on his phone and shown him how to use it. Painful advice, given who it was coming from, but Patronas had tried it out and found it useful. Most of the residents spoke passable English. He’d only needed it with the Russians.

  The majority of the people admitted that while they might recognize the Bechtels on sight, they did not know them well. They were unwilling to speculate about what went on in their house. There’d been no incidents with the children, and they could think of no reasons anyone would bear them a grudge.

  “How about strangers hanging around?” Patronas asked one elderly British man.

  “Strangers disembark from the cruise ships all summer, Chief Officer, and come swarming through the streets of Chora. It’s quite unsettling. I’ll be sitting outside and look up and see some Chinese woman in a hat, peering over the wall at me.” He gave a snigger of laughter. “I’m not a native. Truth is, I wouldn’t know a stranger if I met one. As Casca said to Cassius in Julius Caesar, ‘It’s all Greek to me.’ ”

  Patronas did not find the man nearly as entertaining as he thought he was. “So you never saw anyone suspicious?”

  The Englishman paused for a moment. “I might have. It’s hard to say. Personally, I loathe tattoos and think those who possess them must be criminals. Only jailbirds sported them in my time. However, my grandchildren inform me that such things are all the rage now, the height of fashion. I fear I am out of date, Chief Officer, a throwback to an earlier, and if I may say so, more genteel era. I don’t trust my judgment with respect to people anymore. Nor should you.”

  “So no one suspicious?”

  “None that I am aware of.”

  A French woman with a high-pitched voice claimed she’d seen Maria Georgiou coming away from the house on the night in question. However, her description was highly inaccurate, as eye witness accounts often were. For one thing, she considered the housekeeper to be a gypsy, ‘une gitane,’ or possibly a Moroccan, ‘une habitante du Maroc’ and said she had ‘les cheveux gris,’ gray hair, when her hair was white. Although the French woman was a pretty thing, stylish and petite, her voice began to grate on Patronas, the going back and forth between French and English.

  Couldn’t she have learned the word for maid, at least? Domestique, be damned.

  Still, pencil in hand, he dutifully transcribed what she said and entered it in his notebook. Useless, every word of it.

  Many people had seen the children, Walter and Hannelore, in the square or waiting for the bus on the road. Their parents, too, on occasion. Yet, no one could recall ever seeing the victim in Chora.

  They recoiled when he told them about the cat. One woman—a matronly Greek-American with bleached hair—commented that torturing animals was what serial killers did. It was their defining characteristic, the only thing they all had in common. According to her, “As children such people wet the bed, set fires, and hurt animals.” He must be vigilant, she warned, in case such an individual was now on Patmos.

  All in all, quite tedious.

  Evangelos hadn’t fared much better. “It’s worse than I imagined,” he told Patronas when they met up later by the car. “Only fifteen Greeks in the whole village and most of them only work here during the day. Even if they were born in Chora, they can’t afford to live there anymore. I ended up speaking English nearly the whole time.”

  “You learn anything?”

  “Everyone I spoke to said that while they’d probably recognize Gunther and Gerta Bechtel, they had never had what amounted to a conversation with either one of them. As far as they knew, the victim, Walter Bechtel, didn’t exist.”

  Patronas nodded. He’d heard much the same. “What about the kids?”

  “Same thing. They said they knew the girl on sight, Walter, too, but that’s it. They never talked to them.”

  “How about Hannelore’s friend, Hilda? Did you speak to her or her family?”

  “Yes. Nothing there.”

  Patronas made a note. They were ciphers, the Bechtels. It was almost as if they avoided people. Again, he wondered why.

  He opened the door of the car and got in. A day lost and they’d come up empty handed. As the proverb went, They spoke only of winds and water.

  The police cruiser arrived later that day and Giorgos Tembelos and Papa Michalis disembarked, the priest inching down the ramp like a tortoise.

  “I think the identity of the old man is the key,” Papa Michalis announced when they’d all gathered in a taverna to review the case. “I analyzed it and that is my conclusion. It simply c
annot be anything else. It has elements of an Agatha Christie story, one of her locked-room mysteries like And Then There Was None. Nobody else had access; ergo, one of the people inside the estate, a family member or a servant, must be the guilty party.”

  “Anyone could have gained access,” Patronas pointed out. “The Bechtels were careless. They didn’t keep the door locked and there were keys lying around everywhere.”

  “No matter. It’s got to be one of them. We can interview other people forever, but it will eventually come back to them. Them and them alone.”

  “I think Father is right,” Tembelos said. “The identity of the victim is the important thing here. There was nothing about him in any of the European databases I checked. I called our counterparts in Germany and asked them to run him through their system, but I doubt they’ll find anything. It’s like he never existed. We need to establish who he was. Could be he changed his name.”

  “Why would he change his name?” Patronas wondered.

  “I don’t know.”

  The four of them were sitting outside by the water, it being too hot to venture inside. A haze hung over the sea, and the air was very still. Suddenly, a soft breeze rose up and stirred the tamarisk trees that lined the shore, setting their feathery branches in motion. Patronas liked the rustling sound the trees made, the relief the wind brought. It was almost as if he could hear the earth breathe.

  I’ll go swimming tonight, he told himself, looking out at the harbor. Float on my back and look up at the stars. Frolic like a dolphin.

  Maybe he’d ask Antigone Balis to join him. He pictured her dripping wet, that long hair of hers hanging down over one shoulder like Botticelli’s Venus. Adrift in his vision, he subsequently lost track of the conversation.

  “Hey, boss, you with us?” Tembelos nudged him with his elbow.

  Patronas made a show of straightening his back, stretching. “Sorry, it’s the heat. Always makes me sleepy.”