by Leta Serafim
“Did you meet her?” Patronas asked. “Meet Maria Georgiou?”
“She seemed old for the job,” the man admitted, “but she assured me she could do the work. Anyway, it was only for a month; summer was nearly over.”
He gave them his address and phone number in Germany and his local contact information in Greece. He said his passport was back in his room, that he never risked taking it to the beach, but that he’d get it for them if they needed it.
Patronas waved him off. He’d check him out when he got back to the station house, but he was certain Müller was who he said he was. He’d played only a walk-on part in the drama of the Bechtels and Maria Georgiou and had no reason to lie.
“How do you know the Bauers?” Patronas asked him.
“I got to know them here in Campos. He and I took windsurfing lessons one summer.” He shrugged. “I see them when they’re here—not in Germany, never in Germany.” There was anger in his voice, a sense of grievance. “I’m a plumber,” he said by way of explanation.
They are rich, Müller was saying, and own a summer house while I rent a room. They might ask me to find them a maid or to fix a leaky faucet, but that is the extent of our relationship. They’d never invite me to their home back in Stuttgart or introduce me to any of their friends.
Patronas thanked Müller for his help; then he and the priest walked back to the rooming house with the owner. “She ever make any phone calls?” he asked Pavlos.
“Who? Maria? No, she never called anybody. I don’t even think she had a phone. That’s one of the reasons I tried to help her. She seemed so alone.”
Patronas and the priest had lunch at another taverna on the beach, not wanting Müller to think they were stalking him. This place, too, was full of tourists, and they watched them without comment. Few Greeks were in evidence. The majority hailed from northern Europe.
“We’re losing our country,” Patronas said morosely.
“We’re resilient.” Papa Michalis had put on his reading glasses and was studying the menu as if it were one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. “We’ll survive.”
“Will we? Look around.” Patronas made a broad gesture. “Do you hear anybody speaking Greek? We could be anywhere, Father—London, Heidelberg, Atlantic City. Nothing here is ours.”
Even their waiter was foreign, a slight adolescent from India or Bangladesh.
They ate at a table in the corner, fish again, which Patronas, of course, paid for. His walk on the sand had given Papa Michalis an appetite, and he ate and ate, the pile of bones on his plate growing apace while the one on Patronas’ dish remained relatively small.
A whale inhaling plankton didn’t come close. The Greek expression, ‘ilektriko piorouni’ was better, electric fork, although in Papa Michalis’ case, the fork might well be jet propelled.
“This murder doesn’t add up,” Patronas said.
Papa Michalis had pulled the head off the fish and appeared to be licking it. “You need to look elsewhere for your murderer.”
“You just say that because her father was a priest. Priests get into trouble. Look at that mess they made in America.”
“Those men were Catholics.” Papa Michalis paused. “Priests might be sinners, Yiannis, I’ll grant you that, but as a general rule, they don’t kill people. Well, at least not since the Inquisition. Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor, might have condemned thousands of so-called heretics to death, but he only signed the orders; he didn’t do the actual killing. Do you know they wore special garments, the condemned, called sanbenito, which depicted the fires of hell, and that religious authorities hung them up on the rafters of the churches after they were executed?”
“Why?”
“As lesson to the others, I suppose. Who knows? The church has done many puzzling things over the years. Endorsing the Fourth Crusade, for example, was a mistake, and that business with Galileo and the sun …. Well, you know how that turned out. Far worse was affixing the blame for the death of Christ on the Jews. The suffering caused by that is unimaginable, and no amount of apologizing by the Vatican will ever make it right.”
Patronas watched him eat for a moment. Wasn’t gluttony a sin? He should ask him.
“Of course,” the priest went on, “the Orthodox Church has also made its share of mistakes. Undoubtedly. But it lacked the power of the church in Rome, and by the Middle Ages it was in eclipse and its battles were largely external. It never went after heretics or Jews, because it was too busy fighting the Turks.”
The priest fished out the eyeball and popped it in his mouth “Let’s order some more. I must say, the shrimp looks tasty.”
And shrimp it was, followed by a plate of feta and kataifi with ice cream for dessert. The total bill came to well over a hundred euros. At this rate, the priest would bankrupt him.
“Shit,” Patronas muttered, counting out the money. He’d have to visit the ATM again tomorrow. He’d never get reimbursed, either. Under duress, Stathis might pay for lentils, but never, not even if you held a gun to his head, would he pay for barbounia.
“Fish was a little overcooked,” Papa Michalis said on the way out. “Next time, we should eat in Skala. We might do better there.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Second thoughts are ever wiser.
—Greek Proverb
The order to arrest Maria Georgiou came early the next morning. Patronas was in the hotel room getting dressed when his cellphone rang. It was Stathis.
“I relayed Bechtel’s concerns to the central office in Athens, and they want you to arrest Maria Georgiou immediately. They were outraged that Bechtel had contacted the German embassy, seeking to impede our investigation and withhold valuable information about the victim. They said it was a gross breach of Greek sovereignty.’”
“But what if she’s innocent?” Patronas asked.
Stathis cut him off. “See to it, Patronas. Call me when you have her in custody.”
Giorgos Tembelos and Papa Michalis were in the room with him and heard every word. Tembelos, who had been shaving, laid his razor down.
“Goddamn Bechtel. He’s the cause of this. Government’s going to posture now. Use her as an example to show how strong-minded they are, how they don’t bow to foreign influence.”
“They’re not that venal.”
“Stathis is, and you know it.”
“We’ve got to bring her in, Giorgos. It was a direct order. We have no choice.”
Tembelos went back to shaving. “Let Evangelos do it. He’s the one who got us into this. Let the sin be on him.”
To make matters worse, there wasn’t a proper jail on Patmos and they had to prepare a cell to put her in, the only space available being the holding cell the police used for drunks. Patronas sent Tembelos out to buy sheets and towels, a bar of decent soap, paying for them with his own money. A toilet seat, too, if Tembelos could find one the proper size. He would have wallpapered the space and hung curtains if he could.
Tembelos didn’t question him, just took the money and headed out to do as he was told. None of them felt good about the direction the case had taken—the prospect of arresting a Greek woman in her seventies—and they were all dragging their heels. They’d summoned a cleaning crew to mop the floor of the cell with bleach and wash its rancid walls and had nailed up a handful of air fresheners shaped like Christmas trees.
It was nearly five o’clock by the time they finished. By then Stathis had called twice, furious about the delay.
Maria Georgiou was dressed in widow’s weeds this time: a black dress and stockings, a pair of black patent leather shoes.
Mourning, Patronas thought when she opened the door. She knows why we’re here.
“Maria Georgiou,” Evangelos Demos said. “You’re under arrest for the murder of Gunther Bechtel and for the assault on his daughter-in-law, Gerta Bechtel.”
Taking his time, he continued on in this manner, ordering her to get her things together and to come with them.
Glorying in it.
<
br /> She quickly packed a little polka-dotted bag and zipped it closed, then opened a canister of birdseed and poured some out on the windowsill. Picking up the bag, she walked over and stood by the door. “I’m ready,” she said.
Tembelos took the bag from her and helped her down the stairs. “Siga, siga,” he said. Take your time.
Hoping to forestall gossip, they placed her in the back seat of the Jeep between Evangelos Demos and the priest. If anyone saw them, they’d think there’d been a family tragedy, which in a sense this was, and that they were taking her to the boat, a common enough occurrence on the islands. The priest’s presence would further the illusion.
No one would think they were transporting a murderess … an alleged murderess, Patronas reminded himself.
She’d been very solicitous of the priest as they drove to the station, asking after his health, chatting amiably about the infirmities of old age and how best to address them.
“At our age, we must be more careful,” she’d said, laying a hand on his arm. “Perhaps you should get a cane, Father—not that you need it—for stability.”
Patronas listened to them talk with an aching heart. His mother had sounded much the same as she’d aged, going on at length whenever he called about the precariousness of her health—her growing list of ailments, her failing sight, her failing bowels. It had been a kind of background noise that only increased in volume as the years went by, eventually drowning out all else until she died.
Old age does not come alone, she’d often said, reciting the proverb as if it somehow explained her plight. Perhaps all old people sounded the same. What Maria Georgiou did not sound like was a killer. Patronas had known a few, one especially who’d bided his time like a scorpion, waiting to strike. She comported herself with great dignity, as she had on the two previous occasions. I am innocent, she seemed to be saying. As God is my witness, I am innocent.
After they settled her into the makeshift prison cell, she’d requested a lamp, saying she wanted to read. Then she opened a chapped leather Bible.
Patronas and the others took turns watching her through the grate in the metal door. With her head bent low over her book, she appeared utterly unaware of her surroundings, to the fact that they’d seized her passport and charged her with murder. She was totally lost in what she was doing, the verses she was murmuring.
“Praying,” the priest said quietly. “Those are psalms she is reciting.”
Maria Georgiou’s father had taught her well. Patronas could see her at the cave after the crucifixion anointing the body of Christ. One of the myrrh-bearing women they sang about at Easter, whose faith never wavered.
Catching the light, her white hair glowed in the semi-darkness of the cell and bathed her face. A Renaissance artist might have painted her sitting there, a saint on her way to martyrdom. All that was missing were the little angels whispering in her ear.
Tembelos was distraught about the arrest. “Look at her,” he told Patronas. “She’s an old woman. How could she hit anyone hard enough to kill them?”
Giorgos had raised a fair point. At her age, Maria Georgiou lacked the physical strength to shatter a man’s skull.
“You’re the expert on murderers,” Tembelos went on angrily. “How many of them invest in bird seed?”
“None,” Patronas admitted. “It’s an anomaly.”
“An anomaly! She’s innocent. Can’t you see it?”
In spite of the fact that he’d been the one who’d arrested her, Evangelos concurred. Worried about possible political repercussions, for the most part, he’d let Patronas take the lead during the investigation, rarely volunteering an opinion or contradicting him. But tonight was different. Tonight, he had a lot to say.
“We should have followed up the lead on November Seventeenth,” he said. “Anything would be better than this. Arresting a woman old enough to be my grandmother …. It’s a disgrace. They will destroy you in the press, Yiannis, and rightly so. The newspapers will have a field day.”
You, not us, Patronas thought angrily. Evangelos was jumping ship. Idly, he wondered if that’s why he’d been summoned to Patmos in the first place, so Evangelos could use him as a scapegoat. Blame him when it all came apart.
He stared at him. Oh, to be Medusa and turn your fat ass to stone.
As always, the priest had the final word. “I’d be careful if I were you, Yiannis. It’s like the day they set about burning Joan of Arc. You don’t want to be the one lighting a match to her pyre.”
Three against one … four, if he counted Bechtel. He was on his own. And Stathis would never support him, not if the case unraveled. As if any of this had been his choice. What was he supposed to do, disobey a direct order? The police force was like the army, and Stathis was his commanding officer. He would have his head if Patronas refused, fire him on the spot.
Patronas looked through the grate again. “It’s not so bad in there,” he said, trying to convince himself. “She’ll be all right. Anyway, the law, aftoforo, dictates we can only hold her twenty-four hours without a judge’s decision. After that we have to let her go.”
“Yiannis, she’s in jail!” Tembelos bellowed. “We need to start over again. We got it wrong.”
“All right, all right. I’ll talk to the Bechtels tonight and go over my notes when I get back to the hotel. Could be I missed something.”
“Could be you missed a lot of something.”
Grabbing Patronas by the arm, Tembelos spun him around. “You need to find the killer and find them fast. Come back with a name … any name but hers.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Making the same mistake twice does not indicate an intelligent person.
—Greek Proverb
“I apologize for the lateness of the hour,” Patronas told Gunther Bechtel when the German opened the door. “May we come in?”
Bechtel scowled. “What do you want now?”
“We need to ask you a few things.”
“If you must. They phoned from Athens and said they will be releasing my father’s body at the end of the week. We will be leaving then.”
“What about the Bauers?”
“They’ll be staying on a few more weeks.”
“Are they here now?”
“Yes. They’re in their bedroom. I’d prefer that you not disturb them.”
He led Patronas and Papa Michalis into the kitchen and the three of them sat down at the table. “Do you need to talk to Gerta, too?” he asked. “It’s late. She’s getting ready for bed. Couldn’t this wait until morning?”
“Let your wife be. We prefer to speak to you alone.”
That caught Bechtel’s attention, and he gave him a wary look. “Very well then.”
Now is as good a time as any, Patronas told himself, taking a deep breath. “It’s about your uncle. His wartime service.”
It cost him to say ‘service.’ The only thing the Gestapo had been in the service of was suffering.
“Ah,” the man said. He did not seem surprised.
Patronas paged through his notes. “My men and I went to Epirus earlier this week and interviewed the elderly inhabitants of Aghios Stefanos, a village near Ioannina. We spoke with a number of people there. Your uncle’s division conducted an anti-guerrilla mission in that village in the fall of 1943, and as a result, many of its inhabitants were killed.”
Listen to me babble, the words I’m using, Patronas told himself. An ‘anti-guerrilla mission.’ You’d think it was an accident that those hundred and thirty-seven people got killed, that those butchers hadn’t meant to do it.
“It was war. Such things happen in wars.” A guarded look had come into Bechtel’s eyes and the anger was back. “Anyway, that is old history. What does it have to do with my uncle, Chief Officer?”
“Because of his distinctive scars, he was easy to identify, despite the passage of time. We think one of the survivors recognized him, hunted him down, and killed him.”
“This person who recognized h
im … have you arrested him?” Bechtel asked.
“Her. It’s your housekeeper, Maria Georgiou. She lost her entire family that day. If convicted, she’ll probably spend the rest of her life in prison.”
“And this business about the village?” Bechtel asked heatedly. “I tried to get the embassy involved. I told you before I didn’t want you pursuing this aspect of the case, those false allegations about my papa. I don’t want my children to learn of them.”
“I’m a policeman. I go where the evidence leads me …” Patronas said, thinking he might as well tell him the rest, “and it led me there.” He consulted his notes. “Are you aware that your uncle was a Gestapo agent?”
Bechtel’s tone was dismissive. “What proof do you have of this?”
“Eye witness accounts. Photos.”
“That can’t be true. I knew him. I knew what kind of man he was.”
“Mr. Bechtel, people picked him out; they recognized him.”
“Greeks?” He turned it into a slur.
“Yes, Greeks. Elderly Greeks who survived the massacre. Like your uncle, they, too, have scars, only theirs are from bayonets and shrapnel. They showed them to me.”
“Why are you telling me these things? It’s not enough that he was killed … now you have to slander him, too?”
“I was hoping you’d verify what we’ve learned.”
“You bastard! Why would I do a thing like that? So you can convict him? So you can perpetuate the lie that he deserved to die, that he brought it upon himself? You masquerade as a police detective, but like everyone else in this godforsaken country, you don’t know how to work, to do a proper job. Is this really the best you can offer, Chief Officer? Aren’t you ashamed?”
Upon reflection, Patronas concluded it was Bechtel’s use of the word ‘ashamed’ that set him off. He’d been willing to tiptoe around, exactly as Stathis had ordered, to pretend the victim had been a simple soldier—a good German, one of the ones everybody talked about who’d only been obeying orders. But then Bechtel had given his little speech and all hell had broken loose.