When the Devil's Idle

by Leta Serafim

  Patronas and Papa Michalis were both from Chios and Tembelos was from Crete—all islands with strong seafaring traditions—so they were untroubled by the fourtuna, the rough sea.

  Not so Evangelos Demos, who hailed from the mountains of the Peloponnese.

  “I don’t feel so good,” he said.

  A few minutes later, he staggered over to the railing of the ship, gripped it hard with his hands and vomited. Although he’d turned his head away, he’d miscalculated the direction of the wind and everything had blown back onto Patronas.

  “Panagia mou,” Patronas squealed. Holy Mother!

  And him in his dress uniform, hoping to impress Stathis.

  The situation brought to mind the old Greek saying, I spit high, I spit on my face. I spit low, I spit on my chin.

  Patronas looked down at his uniform, picking off things he’d rather not think about.

  God, how he wished it was spit.

  “Ach, Evangelos Demos,” Tembelos said, shaking his head, “a burden to the earth and now the sea.”

  They were all gathered in Stathis’ office. Putting his arm around Patronas and calling him his ‘trusted colleague,’ Evangelos Demos spoke eloquently to Stathis, describing the flash of insight that had led him to summon his former colleague to Patmos. He hadn’t brushed his teeth since the incident on the ferry and was breathing heavily in Patronas’ direction.

  “When I realized the complexity of the case, the possible international repercussions, I requested his assistance,” Evangelos was saying. “I have many theories as to who might have committed this heinous act and anticipate an arrest forthwith.”

  “Forthwith?” Tembelos whispered to Patronas. “Heinous? Who does that vlachos, that imbecile, think he is? Demosthenes?”

  Stathis doled out the money, all 160 euros of it, and handed the car keys over to Patronas. “Remember what I told you. Keep it quiet or else.” He made a scissoring motion.

  “Yes, sir. I will, sir.”

  “And keep me informed. I don’t want this to be one of your rogue operations, Patronas. You’re not Digenis Akritas, so don’t try and act like him.”

  A Greek version of Superman, Digenis Akritas was the hero of the twelfth-century epic poems, the Acritic Songs. In a way, Stathis’ words were a compliment.

  Patronas grinned at his boss. “Understood, sir.”

  Evangelos, Stathis pointedly ignored.

  He led them out to the parking lot and pointed to a sad-looking white car in the far corner. “Off you go,” he said and turned on his heel and left.

  The car was a ten-year-old Skoda that looked like it had been driven across a couple of continents—large continents, Asia or Africa maybe. It had a sense of angst about it—dents, a rusting underbelly, bald tires—which made Patronas wonder about its history, if it had run over someone in a former life and was being punished for it. Although the insignia of the department had been painted over and the light bar removed from the top, it still looked like a police car. When people saw it coming, they slowed down. What was it they said, Once a soldier, always a soldier? He prayed it would do its duty, the little car, and soldier on.

  The car wasn’t big enough for the four of them and their four suitcases and they had to repack, stowing what they needed in one and leaving the rest behind. It hadn’t been pretty, the co-mingling of their pajamas, shaving gear and briefs, and had caused the priest acute distress. He’d balked at first, insisting he would hold his bag on his lap.

  Apparently he’d been anticipating famine, for his suitcase proved to be full of food, food he hadn’t wanted them to know about, food he hadn’t planned to share—loaves and fishes and an entire round of cheese, three jars of Nutella, a bag of sugar, and an entire canned ham from America.

  “Father, Father,” Patronas said, “we’re going to Epirus, not Somalia.”

  “Some of my relatives are from Epirus. The Pindus Mountains. They ate grass during the war. You never know what will befall you, what the day will bring.”

  Patronas weighed the bag of sugar in his hand. Two kilos, easy.

  “Insurance,” the priest said, reaching for the bag. “If need be, we can bargain with it, trade it for other things. I keep a stockpile in my room. If our history has taught us anything, it’s to prepare for the worst.”

  Patronas handed the sugar back to him. “Keep it, Father, and the rest of the food. We’ll find the space.”

  Before they left, he doled out the keftedakia Antigone Balis had given him, and they ate them in the parking lot. Then he assigned seats: Evangelos Demos and Papa Michalis in the front, in keeping with his death by talking formula, and he and Tembelos in the back. Evangelos would drive as far as the town of Arta, about halfway there; then they’d switch and Patronas would take over.

  Although Patronas had changed his clothes after the meeting with Stathis and done his best to clean himself up in the bathroom of the station, he remained deeply disgruntled.

  In a decent vehicle, the trip to Epirus would take six hours, but in a car like the Skoda, it could well take twice as long. Hopefully he’d get back to Chios someday and not end up wandering the earth like Ulysses. He might have been gone a long time, Ulysses, and had his share of shipwrecks, but at least his crew hadn’t thrown up on him. Goddamn Evangelos Demos! He should have thrown him overboard when he had the chance, fed his carcass to the fishes. Maybe on the trip back.

  Tembelos leaned over and whispered in his ear, “What was that business with the scissors?”

  “Stathis said if I mess up, he’ll castrate me,” Patronas whispered back.

  “Bah,” Tembelos said. “Better than him have tried—your wife for one. And look where it got her? Yours are made of iron, Yiannis.”

  Patronas pondered what his friend had said. Not necessarily a bad thing, iron, he decided upon reflection. Except that with lack of use, it’s susceptible to rust. Idly, he wondered if the same principle applied to a man’s parts, if they locked up and ceased to function after a period of inactivity, creaking and groaning when a person started them up again.

  Chapter Twelve

  He who becomes a sheep is eaten by wolves.

  —Greek Proverb

  They drove out of Athens and headed west, passing the petroleum refineries of Elefsina. It had been the site of a shrine to Demeter, the goddess of the earth in ancient times—one of the most sacred in the Greco-Roman world. Now burning gas cast a yellowish pall over Elefsina, and the sea along its coast was iridescent, a rainbow of colors like a vast pool of gasoline.

  Supertankers were anchored in the gulf, and ahead lay Kakia Skala, the Evil Passage, the mountainous cliffs that marked the entrance to Attica. In mid-August there was a lot of traffic on the road, and it took them more than five hours to reach the city of Patras, twice as long as it should have.

  A few minutes later, they crossed the Rio-Antirrio Bridge. It was unlike any bridge Patronas had seen, the white cables strung in a series of triangles like sailboats linked together in space. It had been built for the 2004 Olympics, Tembelos told him. It remained an impressive accomplishment, supposedly the longest of its kind in the world.

  They passed through a marshy lagoon and entered Messolonghi. Called Iera Polis, the sacred city, Messolonghi had been the site of a terrible massacre during the War of Independence, Patronas had learned in school. The Turks had killed over nine thousand people—the English poet, Lord Byron among them—and hung their severed heads on the city walls.

  Although he searched, he saw no trace of its bloody past today. Just modern cement apartment buildings and traffic. Evangelos eventually tired of driving and Patronas took over for him, Tembelos riding shotgun next to him. They continued to move steadily north.

  Near the town of Preveza, Papa Michalis pointed to a sluggish river. “That’s the Acheron,” he said. “The Necromanteion was there, the oracle where the ancients spoke to the dead.”

  Patronas could see a scrim of mist rising from the distant water, wisps of it drifting acros
s its surface like ragged strips of cloth. A vast flood plain surrounded the river, thick with myrtle trees, half-swathed now in fog.

  “The dead ever talk back?” he asked.

  “Supposedly, when summoned, the dead appeared and advised the living,” the priest said. “I don’t know if you know this, but the Acheron was one of the three portals of hell. It emptied into a lake where the souls of the dead began their journey to the underworld. It was guarded by the dog, Cerberus, who prevented those same souls from escaping. If you recall, he had three heads and his fur was made up of snakes. The ferryman would meet the dead on the shore and row them across the lake. The kingdom of Hades was at the bottom. The dead had to pay the ferryman a coin—a single coin; otherwise they would roam in torment for all eternity.”

  “Ulysses stopped here, didn’t he?” Patronas asked.

  “Yes, Orpheus, too. Hoping to catch a glimpse of the woman he loved, Eurydice. Poor Orpheus! For all his songs and gaiety, he was a prisoner of grief.”

  Patronas watched the river for a moment. Maybe it was what the priest had said, but it felt haunted to him, the mist rising endlessly from its depths and the pale leaves of the trees rippling in the wind. Perhaps the ghosts had retired after the coming of Christianity, but somehow he doubted it. He sensed their presence there in the gloom, believed he could hear them crying still.

  Not far from the river, they came upon the ruins of an entire city.

  “Nikopolis,” Papa Michalis told them, reading outloud from a guidebook he’d brought with him. “It was built by the Roman emperor, Octavian, to celebrate his victory over Anthony and Cleopatra.”

  There was nothing left of it now. Just a handful of crumbling walls on top of a hill.

  Ghosts and more ghosts.

  “Dust to dust,” Patronas said out loud. “So it was and will always be.”

  He remembered when he’d disinterred his mother’s bones five years after she died, as was the custom in Greece. He’d been seeking a sign that day in the cemetery, some evidence that she was still with him, but there’d been nothing as he’d boxed up her remains, only a strand of her hair still attached to her skull. He’d broken down when he saw it and sobbed like a child.

  He continued to drive, following the signs to Ioannina, the city closest to Aghios Stefanos. The landscape grew more rugged and majestic as they approached the Pindus Mountains, the great range that defined northern Greece. The lower slopes were heavily forested, and even in August, there was water everywhere, trickling down and pooling in shadowy ravines.

  “Our ancestors developed a breed of oxen, famous in ancient times,” the priest announced, reading an entry from the guidebook. “King Pyrrhus, who lived here, was responsible for them. But something happened and they degenerated over time and became short and misshapen.”

  “Hear that, Giorgos?” Patronas called out. “Short and misshapen. Same as us.”

  “Same as you,” Tembelos said. “I, myself, am a comely man.”

  “He was an unlucky man, Pyrrhus,” the priest continued. “Suffered great losses in battle. He may have won over the Romans, but it cost him so much, his victory was tantamount to defeat.”

  They were now deep in the Pindus Mountains. It was late afternoon and the peaks were half-hidden by clouds, the rocky slopes below, the color of rain-soaked slate.

  A woman was standing next to a stream by the road, watching a flock of sheep and knitting, swallows soaring and dipping around her. The shadows of the clouds were dark against the looming expanse behind her, the mountains framing the scene like a painting. Urging the sheep forward, she vanished into the forest a moment later. Patronas wondered where she was going, if there was a village nearby.

  A river in the region had once been called the Vedis, the priest said, the word for water in the hymn of Orpheus, the father of music. “The area has been settled since Paleolithic times.”

  “You think that’s the Vedis?” Patronas asked, nodding to the stream where the woman had been.

  “Could be. Legend, history? Epirus has long combined the two.”

  Patronas nodded. It was easy to see where Orpheus had gotten his song. You could pull it out of the air here. Weave the birdsong and the rushing water together, the hushed murmurings of the trees.

  “You see that up there?” Papa Michalis pointed to a distant peak. “That’s where the Souli women fled to escape the army of Ali Pasha. Holding hands, they danced the traditional dance of their people and jumped off. There’s a statue commemorating it carved out of the mountain. Looks a bit like Stonehenge.”

  “Got anything more recent, Father?” Tembelos asked. “World War II, say? The reason we’ve come?”

  “Yes, yes, of course. Some of the worst fighting of the war took place in Epirus. In 1943, the Nazis and a rogue group of Albanian Cham Muslims massacred hundreds to the north of here. The crime was so terrible it was cited during the Nuremburg Trials, but the general in charge—Lanz, I think his name was—defended it, saying it was part of ‘war regulations.’ The judges didn’t accept his explanation. The executions were ‘plain murder,’ they said.”

  Yet another tragedy. Patronas could feel the burden of the past weighing him down. All those slaughtered innocents rising up and demanding justice.

  “What happened to Lanz?” he asked.

  “Nothing. He got away with it. They all did. No one was ever found guilty.”

  “It’s always like that,” Evangelos Demos said, leaning over the front seat. “The Greeks die and their killers go unpunished. You wouldn’t believe what the Germans did to my village, the carnage. That’s why I became a policeman.”

  “You became a policeman to fight the Germans?” Patronas eyed him in the rearview mirror. “They’ve been gone a long time, Evangelos. You might have miscalculated.”

  “You know what I mean. To serve justice.”

  “We all did,” Tembelos said. “That’s why we became cops. To serve justice.” After a lengthy pause, his friend went on. “I’m not sure that’s what we’re doing here.”

  “What do you mean?” Patronas asked.

  “If this woman, Maria Georgiou, did in fact murder the man who killed her father, there’s a kind of symmetry to it, a catharsis. I probably would have done the same thing, had it been me. Ancient or modern, that’s who the Greeks are, people who fight for their families, who avenge the wrongs that are done to them.”

  Patronas frowned. “So you think this trip was a mistake?”

  “Maybe. All I know is if she killed him, killed the man who murdered her father, what she did was just. Maybe not legal, but just. And maybe we shouldn’t be up here, chasing our tails in Epirus, seeking evidence to convict her.”

  “There has to be an accounting,” Patronas said. “Justice for the victims, no matter who they are.”

  “With respect to the war, the Nazis got off easy. Their victims—some six million of them, historians say—didn’t get justice. There isn’t enough justice in the world, in the whole fucking universe for them.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Old age and poverty, incurable wounds.

  —Greek Proverb

  Aghios Stefanos was located to the north of the city of Ioannina. Tembelos had printed out the directions and was reading them aloud to Patronas, using his cellphone for light. Night had fallen and it was very dark. They’d passed the village of Lingiades earlier and driven on, the road narrowing ominously and shifting from asphalt to gravel. The village was located on the western slope of Mount Mitsikeli, Tembelos said, well over 1800 meters high.

  “Better for goats than people.”

  Patronas was inclined to agree. About a kilometer straight down, he could see the lights of Ioannina, so far below the road he was on, it was like the view from a satellite.

  Lingiades had been the site of another massacre, Tembelos had said as they drove through the town. “The German president apologized for it, said it had been a ‘brutal injustice’ and that he was apologizing to the families of victi
ms—as if saying ‘we’re sorry’ would cover it.”

  “Anything about where we’re headed?” Patronas asked.

  “No, nothing. But from what I read, they burned their way across the whole region. More than a thousand villages were destroyed during the war and most of them were here.”

  They’d seen no signs of life since turning off the highway, no houses or livestock, and Patronas was getting worried. In addition to its other problems, the car apparently had cataracts; its headlights were so weak he could barely see. Worse, they kept going out, only to come on again a few seconds later as if the car was blinking its eyes. He was wiping the windshield with his hand, praying he wouldn’t drive off a cliff in the dark and die like the Souli women.

  “How much farther?”

  “Two or three kilometers. I Googled the place before we left and I think you’ll find what you’re looking for. There were some pictures of the residents of Aghios Stefanos posted on the Internet by the tourist authority. Older than time, most of them. Could have been with Moses when he crossed the Red Sea.”

  “You see any advertisements for hotels?”

  “There were a couple in Lingiades, but not up here.”

  “Shit.”

  It was going to be a long night. The priest had fallen asleep in Evangelos’ arms and the two were snoring up a storm in the back seat. Patronas couldn’t face the thought of sleeping in the Skoda, of staying in the car with the other men one minute longer than he had to. He’d camp out, he decided. Pull up one of the car mats and use it as a blanket.