by Leta Serafim
Bechtel closed his eyes, gave a slight nod. “She was cleaning out the attic of my family home in Stuttgart after my mother died and found an old uniform of his. A bunch of souvenirs from the war. I don’t know why he kept them. He was very young when he enlisted. It was 1942 and they were taking everyone, young and old alike.”
It had been youthful foolishness, he was saying. My uncle hadn’t meant to do what he did. Some kids drive too fast; my relatives, they joined the Gestapo.
Patronas felt a touch of pity for him. To carry such a burden ….
“I don’t see what good it will do to arrest her,” Bechtel cried. “It won’t bring my uncle back. It will only perpetuate the horror of those years.”
“I’m sorry,” Patronas said, and he was.
All of Bechtel’s good deeds, his years of service in Africa, would soon be eclipsed by what his relative had done in the war. The trial would probably destroy his life.
And like those victims in Aghios Stefanos, Daphne Kallis and the others, he too was innocent.
“Even if it was a revenge killing, why’d she wait so long?” the priest asked, thumbing through the pages of the notebook. “We found out who Walter Bechtel was in less than a week. Surely she could have discovered his new name and where he lived years ago.”
“She didn’t even know he was alive until she saw him in Campos. Could be she didn’t mean to kill him. He might have said something to her in the garden that provoked her.”
It had gotten stuffy in the room so they’d moved their chairs out onto the balcony. Across the street, the playground was empty, the swings creaking eerily in the wind.
The priest frowned. “Yiannis, Maria Georgiou and Bech didn’t speak the same language. How could he have insulted her?”
“I don’t know. She implied he was an irritable, unpleasant man. Who knows what he might have said?”
“Yes, she also said he was Gerta Bechtel’s problem, not hers.”
“So where do we go from here?”
The priest paused for a moment. “In my opinion, the death of the cat bears further investigation. Perhaps the killing of the animal was not as random as we initially thought. We assumed it was a hostile act directed at the Bechtels or the Bauers because they were German, but maybe it wasn’t. It could have been directed at the victim, at him and him alone. The cat belonged to him, after all. Someone could have been sending him a message.”
Working his way through his notes, Patronas thought Tembelos might be right and that they should let Maria Georgiou go. What Daphne Kallis and the others in Aghios Stefanos had told him still haunted him. They had been hostages during the war, too afraid to fight Bech off. Afraid if they did, it would cost them their lives. He’d just re-read what Maria Georgiou had said about finding Daphne Kallis in the river after the rape and it sickened him. The image of the little girl in the pink dress, trying to clean herself in the water.
He lit a cigarette and sat there smoking. Somebody should have killed Bech a long time ago, shot him to death like a rabid dog.
“You know, pedophilia is a lifelong affliction,” the priest said. “Perhaps Bech’s hunger didn’t abate after the war. Perhaps there have been other children.”
Patronas swore under his breath. How could he have missed it?
He threw the notebook down. “That’s it, Father. That’s the missing piece.”
He would have yelled ‘Eureka!’ like Archimedes, except it was late and he was outside. Unlike the ancient Greek scholar, he wasn’t lolling in a bathtub.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The brave warrior seeks another path.
—Greek Proverb
“Just sit there in the cell with Maria Georgiou?” Papa Michalis said. “I don’t know, Yiannis. It seems a little passive.”
“You can read Bible verses together.”
Patronas was planning to go to Chora with Giorgos Tembelos to dig up the cat—and possibly re-interview the Bechtels and make an arrest. In any of these scenarios, he didn’t want the priest involved. Their last visit to the house had been a disaster. Also, the priest had a regrettable tendency to side with the accused once the handcuffs came out, to advocate for mercy and forgiveness. His being a man of the cloth inevitably trumped his role in law enforcement. In other words, too much talking.
“It’s a jail and she’s an inmate,” Papa Michalis said. “What if she tries to escape? What would I do if that happened?”
“Yell for help. It’s a police station.”
The priest mulled this over. “Perhaps if you were to give me your gun.”
They were standing in the corridor outside her cell, arguing.
“Although Canon Law does not expressly forbid it,” the priest went on, “most of it having been written before firearms came into being, one would assume that as a member of the clergy, I am not allowed to gun people down. The Bible is very strong on this point. Thou shalt not kill is not exactly open to interpretation. However, I could hold a gun on her, I think, as long as I didn’t fire it. There’s no religious stricture against holding a gun on someone. If she tries to escape, I could point it at her and yell, ‘Stop or I’ll shoot.’ I wouldn’t shoot, of course, but she wouldn’t know that and she’d stop dead in her tracks. Not dead-dead. ‘Dead in her tracks,’ in case you are unfamiliar, is just a figure of speech, Yiannis. A euphemism in English ….”
Not Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie, Patronas decided. No, today Papa Michalis was channeling someone new, Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry.
He had quite a repertoire, the priest. Lots of company for the bats in his belfry.
Patronas been working hard to exclude foreign words from his speech and had referred to the batteries as syskevi apothikefsis energeias—energy storage devices—when he tried to purchase them at the kiosk. This had caused an unnecessary delay and Tembelos had been forced to step in.
“Batteries,” he told the man, “that’s what he wants.”
“Afta einai kinezika,” the man said, looking suspiciously at Patronas. This is Chinese.
“I know,” Tembelos answered. “Einai trelos.” He’s nuts.
The two of them were preparing to exhume the cat. They’d left Papa Michalis behind at the police station, and Evangelos Demos had demurred when they’d invited him along, saying he had a lot of paperwork to complete. Stathis, they hadn’t told.
Opening the trunk of the Jeep, Tembelos stowed their gear inside and shut it again. “So let me get this straight. You think the victim kept going after the war, worked his way through the kids in the neighborhood … and the cat was a witness.”
“Meow,” his friend added, in case Patronas had missed the point.
“Catcalls, Giorgos? Trust me, That animal is crucial to our case.”
Tembelos sat for a minute before starting the car. “You said he sexually abused her. How could he do that? I just don’t get it.”
“Pedophiles have a different hunger than the rest of us, Giorgos. It happens sometimes.”
“Whoever killed him did the world a favor. No trial, no nothing—just bam. Done.” Tembelos thumped the steering wheel for emphasis. “End of story. If we did that with every child molester, that would put an end to it.”
It very well might, Patronas thought, recalling what the priest had said about children who were abused growing up to be abusers themselves, the way such crimes perpetuated themselves.
The most tragic kind of karma.
A handful of xelidoni were darting through the yellow grass by the road, their forked tails like arrows. The swallows took off a moment later, coasting out over the mountain, borne by the wind.
Once, when Patronas was a little boy, swallows had nested in the rafters of his house. His mother had rejoiced, telling him the birds’ presence was a great blessing. It was one of the few times he’d seen her happy.
A favorite in Greece, the birds were featured in numerous songs and poems. Usually they were depicted as messengers. In ancient times, a dead boy or girl might return
to their parents in the guise of the bird.
Patronas watched the swallows. It pleased him to think of the dead as birds, that they hadn’t truly left, only changed form and taken to the sky.
Maria Georgiou had been feeding birds on her windowsill. It was a sign. He was almost there; he could feel it. The Greek woman would be exonerated, and he and Tembelos could go home to Chios. Bechtel’s family would be destroyed, but there was nothing he could do about it. It was almost biblical, the way the case was playing out.
“If Bechtel asks, how are you going to explain what we’re doing?” Tembelos asked.
“Loose ends, Giorgos. We’re tying up loose ends.”
The gardener was standing outside the entrance of the estate, waiting for them as Patronas had instructed. Ill at ease, he was wearing his work clothes. His shoes were caked with dirt. As soon as he saw them, he ran toward them and began greeting them effusively.
“Mr. Police, Mr. Police.”
“We’ve got some things to ask you, and you must tell us the truth,” Patronas told him. “You’re not in trouble now, but if you lie, you will be. We’ll charge you with perjury and you could get deported. Also, you must never speak about what we say to another person, not even your wife.”
“I will keep the silence,” the Albanian said. “I am good for trust.”
They stood by the gate, talking.
“First question,” Patronas said. “Did your son ever accompany you to the house where the man was killed? Spend time alone in the garden with him?”
“Mr. Bechtel?”
“Yes, the deceased.”
The gardener reported that while the child had often come with him to the house, he had kept him by his side always. The little boy had helped him with his work, handing him his rake or his shovel, moving the hose when his father asked, but that was all. His son had never wandered off and had had absolutely no contact with the old man.
“Were there ever any other children around?” Tembelos asked.
The man studied the two of them, comprehension slowly dawning on his face. “Only little Walter,” he said gravely. “He was there.”
“Did Walter have any friends he played with? Kids from the village who visited the house?”
“Walter?” The way he said it was answer enough.
“What about Hannelore?”
“The girl, she was off at the beach most days.”
He stopped, remembering something, his face troubled. “Something did happen there once. I don’t know what it was about, but the girl and her grandfather, they had a fight out in the garden. I was in the back, pruning the roses, but I heard them.”
“What were they fighting about?”
“I don’t know. My German ….” He lifted his shoulders and let them drop. “After that, Hannelore, she was gone.”
“Was anyone else at the house then?”
“Her mother, I think. Yes, Mrs. Gerta, she was there.”
Patronas nodded. “Did the cat get killed before or after the fight?”
“After,” the man said. “It was after the fight that the cat died.”
“Do you remember where you buried it?”
“Yes, yes. It is by the wall.”
The Bechtels were packing when the three of them got to the house. Gunther Bechtel informed them that the coroner’s office in Athens had called and said that the body of his uncle would be released within the next seventy-two hours. He and the rest of his family were planning to fly back to Germany beforehand to prepare for the funeral.
“I thought nothing could be worse than what I saw in Africa,” he said bitterly, “but, thanks largely to you and your colleagues, this has been. My papa is murdered and instead of solving the crime, you do your best to destroy him, destroy what he meant to me, what he meant to my family. I know what you think of him, but he was my relative and I want to have a funeral and bury him. It is necessary that I do this and unconscionable that I have been denied the opportunity. Personally, I hope Merkel destroys the lot of you and bankrupts this country.”
“Poor fool thinks this is the end of it, doesn’t he?” Tembelos whispered to Patronas.
The gardener walked ahead of them to a clump of oleander bushes. He was standing about twenty meters from the fountain.
“Is there.” The Albanian pointed to a disturbed place in the ground. “Is there where I put cat.”
Tembelos quickly unpacked their gear, laid a tarp down on the ground, and began pulling on a pair of latex gloves.
The gardener watched him uneasily. “Is many weeks dead, the cat,” he said. “Hot now in summer.”
Lighting a cigarette, Patronas handed the pack to Tembelos, who did the same. It wouldn’t help much against the smell, but it was all they had.
“Bad,” the gardener warned, taking a cigarette himself. “Long time dead. Long time.”
Patronas and Tembelos began digging up small amounts of soil with their trowels and laying it aside. Neither of them spoke, the only sound the steady chink of their tools against the earth. They worked very carefully, removing only a fistful at a time. When they got closer, they switched to brushes, sweeping the dirt away a half centimeter at a time.
It was the head that emerged first, whiskers and bared teeth.
Funny what happens in death … Patronas studied the animal’s matted fur and milky eyes, runny now and half gone. The cat’s mouth hung open, its pointed teeth exposed in a silent roar. Maggots were swarming all over it, thousands upon thousands of them, and the animal’s body seemed to writhe and twitch as he watched, alive with the teeming insects.
Lifting the cat up with his gloved hands, Tembelos laid it down on the tarp. It was very small. More of a kitten than a cat, not yet full grown. Here, too, the old man had favored the young.
Patronas nudged it with his foot. Even now, in an advanced state of decay, it was easy to see that the animal’s neck was broken and only partially attached to its skull, secured with little more than a few tendrils of rotting flesh.
“What do we do now?” Tembelos asked Patronas. He was sweating profusely, alternately gasping for air and holding his breath against the smell. Between the three of them, they’d already smoked the entire pack of cigarettes. It hadn’t helped.
“We package it up and ship it to the lab in Athens.”
“But it’s a cat.”
Patronas, too, was holding his breath. He felt like he was swimming underwater, and if he resurfaced even for a second, he’d die. The gardener had already vomited into the bushes, and he feared he would be next.
Don’t inhale, he warned himself. Stay the course. Concentrate on the work.
“We need to find out what happened to it,” he said.
“Tell me why,” Tembelos said.
“Because whoever killed it, killed Gunther Bech.”
Patronas had been intent on the exhumation in part because of what the priest had said about the Gestapo, how some of its agents had degenerated over time and one sadistic act often begot another. They’d unleashed the dogs of hell, according to him, and Patronas was pretty sure that was what had happened here. The cat had never been the target. It was just practice, a way of working up to the real target, the old man.
“You exhumed a dead cat?!” Stathis’ tone was scathing. “What did Bechtel say when you dug up his cat?”
“He doesn’t know, sir,” Patronas responded in a level voice. “We proceeded without him.”
This mollified his boss somewhat. “What did you do with the remains?”
“We put them in the refrigerator at our hotel.” Patronas braced himself.
Stathis did not disappoint. “Jesus Christ, Patronas, what were you thinking? Some tourist will go to get a soda and have a heart attack.”
“We took care to disguise it, sir. We wrapped it up in tin foil and put it in a big plastic tub with a lid—you know, the kind that people use for food. Patmos doesn’t have a lab, so we had to improvise.”
“I don’t believe it. A dead cat!�
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Patronas wasn’t sure, but he could have sworn Stathis was laughing.
“And what do you plan to do with this dead cat of yours?”
“Send it to Athens.”
“How? You going to mail it?”
“No, sir, we plan to send it to Leros, same as we did the dead man, and from there fly it on to the lab in Athens. It’ll be all right. We bought a cooler.”
No doubt now. Stathis was definitely laughing.
Patronas pushed on, “We can’t let the Bechtels leave Greece. They’re planning to fly out tomorrow and we need to flag their passports and stop them at the airport. Otherwise, we’ll have to extradite them, and they’re sure to fight it. I’ve posted a man at the entrance to the house, but they could slip by him, take a boat to another island—Leros or Kalymnos, someplace with an airport—and return to Germany from there.”
“You’re sure about this, Patronas?”
“I am, sir.”
“Very well then. I’ll flag their passports. But if this doesn’t work out, I’m going to reassign you, send you to that rock where they used to keep lepers.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
The wounded old horse sees the saddle and trembles.
—Greek Proverb
Patronas had taped the address of the lab on the side of the cooler and explained to the crew on the ferry that a policeman would pick it up in Athens. He’d spoken eloquently of the cooler’s importance, leading them to believe it held a human organ, harvested and ready for transplant, and that its safe arrival was a matter of great urgency. Although he’d gotten confused and said at first it was a liver, switching midstream to ‘an adult kidney,’ no one on the crew seemed to notice.
“Keep it in sight at all times,” Patronas stressed. “It’s a matter of life and death.”
After seeing the boat off, he headed back to the station, where he released Maria Georgiou on her own recognizance. He ordered her to return to her room in Skala and stay there, a kind of informal house arrest that he prayed would mollify Stathis, should he learn of it. She’d cried and kissed his hands, thanked him again and again.