by Leta Serafim
“Nine years old.” Patronas touched the engraved name with his hand. “Jesus Christ.”
Tembelos was crouching down with the camera, videotaping the names. Patronas had written them in his notebook, but had requested that they be recorded, too. The victims’ names would serve no useful purpose, but he wanted them anyway, a way of paying tribute.
“They murdered more than three hundred in Kommeno,” Tembelos said, shutting off the camera and standing up, “seventy-four of them under ten years old and close to one hundred in Lingiades. One was a baby, less than a year old.”
“I know what they did, Giorgos. What I don’t understand is why.”
“Evil comes, evil goes. You’re a cop. You should know that.”
Chapter Fourteen
A flood of evils.
—Greek Proverb
Patronas and the others regrouped in the field where they’d parked the car. Early afternoon, a man was driving a herd of goats down the hill, the bells around their necks clanging as they made their way home. The grass in the field was golden, bleached by the sun, and the air smelled of summer, xera votana, chortaria—dried herbs and leaves.
“The victim was here,” Patronas said. “That’s for sure. We’ve got six witnesses who’ll swear to it, but that’s it—nothing that links him specifically to Maria Georgiou. As far as we know, he didn’t shoot her father or burn her family out. He came and went, they said.”
“Something’s off,” Tembelos said.
They reviewed their notes out loud, Patronas and Tembelos bringing Evangelos Demos and Papa Michalis up to date.
“Why take the children down to the cellar?” Evangelos Demos asked after they’d finished. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe he wanted privacy,” Papa Michalis said. “He would have been alone there. Nobody would have seen him.”
They looked at one another.
“No witnesses,” Evangelos said.
Patronas nodded. “Maybe it wasn’t information he was after,” he said, puzzling it out. “I had the sense that Daphne Kallis was hiding something. I thought at the time she was ashamed of what she’d done, that she’d given up the men in her village, but maybe it was something else.”
“She never married,” Tembelos said.
“No, she didn’t.”
“I remember there was something sad about her, crippled almost. Like a bird whose wings had been broken. I thought at the time it was the war, but maybe it was this, the evil he visited upon her.”
None of them dared say the word aloud, as if giving voice to it would poison the air.
“There might well have been others,” Patronas said. “We’ll have to speak to everyone again. And if it’s true, any number of people might have killed him—family members, if they learned of it.”
“A vendetta, you’re thinking?” Tembelos said.
“People in Greece stalked collaborators for years after the war, followed them all the way to Australia and murdered them there. This could well be the same.”
“Been a long time since the war, Yiannis. People who did that are mostly dead now.”
“I know.”
“Weird, this geriatric murder. Victim in his nineties; killer, too, most likely. Guess whoever did it wanted it finished before they died.”
Papa Michalis again recited the words of Confucius. “When you seek after revenge, dig two graves. Literally, in this case. One for Bech, another for the old man or woman who killed him.”
“What are you going to do?” Evangelos Demos asked.
You, not we, Patronas noticed. Evangelos didn’t like where this was going and was distancing himself from the case.
“Talk to Daphne Kallis again.”
“It won’t be easy,” the priest said. “Such things are held close to the hearts of children—a great secret, usually. It might be a secret still. She might never have said a word to anyone.”
She’d set out pots of basil to ward off mosquitoes, Patronas saw—a row of them on the front steps of her house—and strung a clothesline across her yard. A cheap cotton dress was hanging from it, black like his mother used to wear, and two pairs of black cotton stockings. All of it was deeply familiar to him, transporting him back to his childhood on Chios.
The feeling was so intense that for a second, he felt like he was knocking on his dead mother’s door. Shaking it off, he knocked again. He could hear Daphne Kallis shuffling around inside, hesitating on the other side of the door.
Papa Michalis was standing next to him. Patronas had left the others at the coffee shop, not wanting to overwhelm the old woman with their presence.
“We need to talk to you,” he said. “Gunther Bech is dead, murdered, and if you don’t help us, Maria Georgiou will be charged with the crime. You remember her, little Maria, the daughter of the priest?”
The old woman unlocked the door and opened it slowly. Walking ahead, she led them into a dank room that smelled of mildew. A worn cushion on a chair marked where she sat and watched television; an unfinished crossword puzzle was laid out on the table next to it, a pair of reading glasses on top. Patronas could hear a canary singing somewhere in the back of the house.
“We need to talk to you about Gunther Bech,” he said. “We need to know what happened in that cellar.”
Grasping the arms of the chair, she let herself down. “I told you. He asked me questions and I answered them.”
“What else?”
“It was a long time ago. I don’t remember. “
Patronas blundered on brutally, thinking it was better to get it all out in the open, to have it said.
“Someone said that he ‘favored’ children. That can mean many things. Among them that he preferred children sexually, that he was a pedophile. Was this the case with Bech? Did he rape you in that cellar?”
Raising her arms, Daphne Kallis shielded her face as if to ward off a blow. “Stop,” she cried feebly. “Please! I beg you.”
The priest sat down next to her and took her hand. “We wouldn’t be asking if it weren’t important.”
Her eyes filled with tears and she fumbled for a Kleenex, her thin body trembling. “Yes,” she said, “he did what you say.”
And then there was no stopping her.
She’d been six the first time and hadn’t understood what the German officer wanted when he led her down the rickety wooden staircase into the room with the dirt floor and began unbuttoning his fly. The cellar was cold and damp and smelled like rotten vegetables. He’d forced her to lie down and pushed her dress up, then lain down on top of her. A moment later the pain had come, surprising in its intensity. It had terrified her and she’d begun to scream.
“He covered my mouth with his hand. I couldn’t breathe. I was afraid I’d die, that he was killing me.”
She remembered all of it, the animal sounds of the soldier and the rough way he’d handled her. The spiders, how the rafters of the cellar had been snowy with their webs. Most of all how he’d hurt her.
“He tore me open, tore my childhood away, and trampled it in the dirt of that place. All that I was changed that day and I became something else. Something broken. I’ll never forget it, never. He smelled of hair tonic and talcum powder. And after he was finished, he wiped his hands on my dress as though I’d dirtied him. He said he’d kill my mother if I told anyone. He said I was to blame and called me Fotze and Schlampe. I didn’t know what the words meant then. I only found out later. Cunt and slut.” She was crying in earnest now. “I was six years old.”
After he was finished with her, he’d thrown her out and told her to go home. She’d been bleeding and didn’t know what to do and had gone to the stream to wash. “I was trying to hide it, so my mother wouldn’t see and ask questions. I was afraid for her. Bech had said he’d kill her and I wanted to save her. It didn’t matter. They shot her anyway two days later.”
“Did Bech take other girls to the cellar?”
“Yes. Boys, sometimes, too. I’d watch them go with him
and came back out again, trying not to cry.” She wrapped her arms around herself, seemed to shrink up into the chair.
“He’s dead now,” Patronas said, hoping the news would bring some comfort. “He can’t hurt you anymore. Someone murdered him. Whoever did it carved a swastika on his forehead.”
“A ston diabolo,” she hissed. The devil take him.
Patronas asked Daphne Kallis for the names of Gunther Bech’s other victims. There were two she knew of still living in the village—Dimitra Spanos, whom they’d spoken to earlier, and a woman, Maria Papayiannis, who lived some distance beyond the town. For the most part, their words echoed those of Daphne Kallis.
“He ruined me,” Maria Papayiannis said, tears streaming down her wrinkled face, a balled up handkerchief clutched in her hand. “I was dead inside, dead to my husband, dead to life.”
It was harder for Spanos, who balked at first and refused to answer. “Psemata,” he kept saying. Lies. “Psemata.”
Patronas eventually wore him down. Not only had Bech victimized him, Spanos said, but two of his cousins as well.
“Children, they were. I remember the way they stumbled home after, bleeding where they shouldn’t have.”
Both female victims, Maria Papayiannis and Daphne Kallis, refused to let this portion of the interview be videotaped, not wanting to be identified, even now in the twilight of their lives, with the rape, the abiding shame of what had been done to them.
“People wanted to kill him,” Spanos said at one point.
“Who spoke of it?” Patronas asked, pressuring him. “I need their names.”
“It was just talk. Anyway, most of them are dead now. It was a long time ago. After the Germans left, we took up arms against each other. Too much fighting, too much blood to worry for one man.”
“Names,” Patronas repeated impatiently.
“They were relatives of the kids. They are in their nineties now or over a hundred. They are not the people you seek.”
Before leaving Aghios Stefanos, Patronas approached Christos Vouros again. “You knew, didn’t you?”
The old man nodded. “All of us did, all of the children.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
He squinted at him. “It was something we didn’t speak of … not then, not now.”
“So you weren’t a victim?”
“No, never. We knew, like I said, but we didn’t, you understand? We watched when a kid went down to the cellar, saw how they acted after. We kept track.”
His face was clouded, difficult to read.
“There’s a saying: Otan o diavolos vrisketai se adraneia dernei ta paidia tou. Bech was the devil. Only difference was they were Greek children. They were us.”
When the devil’s idle, he fucks his children.
Chapter Fifteen
What the wind gathers, the devil scatters.
—Greek Proverb
The villagers gathered to watch Patronas and the others leave, waving goodbye as they got in the Skoda and started back down the mountain. “Na pate sto kalo,” one of the women sang out. A blessing on you.
Patronas was driving and Papa Michalis was sitting in the front seat next to him. He welcomed the old man’s presence, hoping the priest would help him put what he’d learned from Daphne Kallis out of his mind.
“The rest of the German soldiers didn’t know, did they?” he said, looking over at Papa Michalis. “Bech’s commanding officers?”
“Probably not.”
The sun was setting, its lengthening rays bathing the landscape in soft light, the peaks in the distance like hammered bronze. The air was cooling and fog was rising from the stream by the road. The window was open and Patronas had his hand out, holding it up as if blocking the oncoming rush of air.
“Let’s stop for a minute,” the priest said.
Patronas pulled over and parked alongside the road. Pushing their way through the underbrush, they walked down to the stream, leaving Evangelos Demos and Tembelos back in the car. Cedar trees lined the banks of the stream, so tall they blocked out the light, and the air was heavy with damp. Patronas had expected the priest to urinate and had come along to steady him as he sometimes did, but then the old man surprised him.
Kneeling down by the water, he ran his hand through it. “She probably bathed in a stream like this, as if it would make her clean, would give her back what he took from her.”
He picked up a stick and began to draw in the sand, his eyes still on the water. “In answer to your earlier question, Yiannis. No, I don’t think the German authorities knew what Bech was doing. I know the first head of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels, worried that his organization was attracting ‘all the sadists in Germany and Austria’ … also unconscious sadists, men who according to Diels did not know they were sadists until they’d begun torturing others. In other words, the Gestapo was creating them. He didn’t know why and speculated that it was the nature of the work that rendered them thus, unleashing inclinations long buried, letting loose the dogs of hell, as it were. Himmler, of course, was a different story. He wanted to set those dogs loose. He wanted his people to be savages.”
The priest continued to draw. “As for these acts directed against children, the systematic crimes we’ve uncovered here … there might have been a few instances. But as a general rule, no, not even in the Gestapo.”
“That explains the cellar.”
“Yes, Bech had to hide his proclivities.”
“What would they have done if they’d caught him?”
“Shot him, probably. Order above all else.”
“But he was one of them.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered. They would have considered him a disgrace or—what was that word the Nazis were so fond of?—a degenerate.”
“You read a lot of books, Father. How do you explain a man like Bech?”
“You know as well as I do that pedophiles are like serial killers. There is no rational explanation for what they do. I believe some of them are born that way. Others are created by the abuse they themselves suffered as children.”
“I do unto others because it was done unto me.”
“Exactly. Who knows what drove Bech? Maybe he was like the men Diels spoke of: the tendency was always there and the war provided him with the opportunity to act on it. All I know is evil visited that place. Evil visited Aghios Stefanos.”
“This is where we came in, Father, you and me. The nature of evil. If God exists, which I seriously doubt, he has a lot to answer for.”
The priest paused, stick in hand, and looked up at Patronas. “It seems we worship at different altars,” he said.
“Father, you know me. I don’t worship at all.”
“You’re not alone.” Returning to his drawing, the priest made a face with his stick. “There are those who argue God died in Auschwitz, that He went up the chimney with the millions put to death there, that there was no point in religious faith or prayer. Some even go so far as to say hope has no meaning either, that it’s a plague on humanity and serves no useful purpose, stops us from acting on our own behalf. ‘It will be water coming out of that showerhead. I know it will, I know it will. It has to be. I haven’t done anything to these men. Why would they kill me?’ ”
He drew another stick figure, this one with a smile on its face. It seemed grotesque, given the nature of their conversation. Then he drew another and another and put a showerhead above them. Patronas understood what he was doing. Hope. He was showing him hope—malignant, pestilent hope.
“And where was God then?” Patronas said. “I ask you. Why was it gas, not water?”
The priest sighed, his face a mask of sadness. “I don’t know. I think about these things, too, Yiannis. And the only answer I’ve come up with, given my unwavering belief that God is benevolent and just, is that evil, too, exists and that it works independently of Him. Point, counterpoint, as it were.”
As if for emphasis, he threw the stick in the water.
Night was fast ap
proaching, and it had become very dark by the river. Helping the priest to his feet, Patronas led him back to the car. “Come on, Father. The others are waiting for us. We need to go.”
“I think sometimes God made a mistake,” the priest whispered. “The older I get, the more convinced I am.”
“What? Mankind?”
“Yes. Some of it.”
“Ach, Father. We’re not alone in nature. Other animals eat their young.”
“Yes, but they don’t defile them first.”
The four of them discussed the case as they drove to Ioannina. They planned to interview the two people Christos Vouros had named in person while they were there. Patronas had already spoken to them on the phone and knew it would be a waste of time. One was bedridden with Parkinson’s disease and the other had suffered a stroke the previous month. As he’d expected, the two people in Ioannina were able to account for themselves at the time of the killing and had witnesses who would testify to that effect—caretakers and nurses, a daughter who never left the stroke victim’s side.
A dead end.
“Maria Georgiou is our only suspect,” Patronas said as they got back in the car.
“You going to arrest her?” Tembelos asked.
“I don’t know. I’ll interview her again and go from there. I never had a case like this. What did you call it, Giorgos? ‘The geriatic killing?’ Those two old people. Jesus, their combined ages must be over one hundred and seventy. You would think they’d be done with the war by now.”
“You heard what happened,” Tembelos said. “How could they be done?”
“If Bech had been in a wheelchair, would she still have killed him? If he’d been bedridden? Palsied or comatose? At some point you have to let it go. She was younger than him. With any luck, she would have outlived him. Why didn’t she just wait?”