When the Devil's Idle

by Leta Serafim

  Evangelos Demos said he would keep an eye on her or assign one of his men in his place, if he were unavailable. The Bechtels were also confined to their house and would not be leaving Patmos tomorrow as planned. The victim’s body was not going to be released from the morgue in Athens, Stathis had informed them, or flown back to Stuttgart anytime soon. Everything was on hold, pending the outcome of the investigation, including their departure. If they tried to leave Greece, he’d have them arrested. His boss had made good on his word. Gunther Bechtel had been irate, but Stathis stood his ground.

  With nothing to do, Patronas, Tembelos, and Papa Michalis drove to Lampi, a beach on the northernmost part of the island. Nearly deserted, it extended a long way and was framed by an ancient lava flow, the movement of the molten rock still visible on the hillside above. The beach itself was covered with pebbles. Of volcanic origin, they were vividly colored—filigreed in places with quartz and agate—and glistened like gemstones along the water’s edge.

  The owner of the taverna reported that Lampi had once been famous for the pebbles. Unfortunately the tourists had taken away so many that the local government, Demos Patmou, had been forced to post a sign forbidding their collection.

  “You should have seen it before,” he said.

  The epitaph of modern Greece, Patronas thought sadly. There it was in that one sentence: ‘You should have seen it before.’

  They ate at the restaurant, sitting at a table next to the sea. Called Lampi Taverna, the interior was decorated with sea shells and fishing nets, ancient amphorae the owner said he’d found when he was snorkeling. There was a strong swell along the shore, the waves tumbling the rocks over and over, grinding them against each other. It was a soothing sound, the water rushing forward, only to pull back again a few minutes later.

  After inspecting the fish on display, Patronas selected three lavraki—sea bass—and asked the owner to grill them and serve them with ladolemono, a sauce of olive oil and lemon. In addition, he ordered fried gavros—anchovies—and a half kilo of the tiny pink shrimp from the island of Symi. He also invested in a kilo of wine. If the priest was still hungry after the meal, he could, as the farmers said, ‘go shear himself.’

  “When do you think we’ll hear from the coroner?” Tembelos asked when Patronas returned to the table.

  “Tomorrow, maybe. Cat was small. It shouldn’t take too long to cut it up.”

  “Which one do you think killed the old man? The boy or the girl?”

  “The girl. Boy was too young for that level of violence. Whoever did it damned near broke the old man’s skull in two.”

  “Spontaneous, you think? Grobpapa said something and the kid went crazy?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. The cat indicates premeditation. My guess is that she was practicing, getting ready to take on the old man.”

  After lunch, they drove back to Chora. Papa Michalis had requested the trip, saying he wanted to visit a local shrine, Panagia Diasozoy. The church was said to possess a miraculous icon of the Virgin that answered penitents’ requests, and he wanted to pray there.

  The sun was low in the sky by the time the three of them had climbed up to the chapel, a terraced hillside at the center of the village. The courtyard in front was paved with red and white tiles and enclosed by a decorative wrought-iron fence. A row of palm trees towered over the church, which was very old—a dark frescoed space that smelled of incense and candles, the icons on the walls so blackened with smoke as to be barely visible. The face of the Virgin had cracked over time, and the whole of it was overlaid with silver and draped with offerings—bracelets and necklaces, even an old-fashioned wristwatch hanging from a gold chain. Patronas wandered around outside while Tembelos and the priest wrote their requests on the slips of paper provided. He couldn’t think what to ask for, what his prayer should be. An end to his loneliness, maybe, or a woman. Neither seemed worth the Virgin’s time.

  Restless, he walked back to the parking lot to wait. Dusk was settling over the island, and he sat down on a bench and watched the lights come on. The wind continued to howl and there were birds everywhere, plummeting downward on shafts of air like aerialists in a circus only to rise up again a few minutes later.

  Far out to sea he caught sight of a small triangular island. He wondered if it was inhabited or empty—if he and the island were the same, both of them passing their nights in solitude, alone in the water. The bus from Skala was making its way up the mountain toward Chora, sounding its horn as it disappeared around a curve, only to reappear again a few minutes later, its headlights playing across the darkening hillside.

  Patronas heard Tembelos and Papa Michalis coming toward him, their voices loud in the stillness. Getting to his feet, he dusted himself off and unlocked the doors of the Jeep. He wasn’t looking forward to spending another night at the hotel with them. Papa Michalis inevitably left his dentures in a glass of water by the sink, food particles swirling around beside them, and prayed for hours on end before getting into bed, reciting what sounded like most of the Bible. Worse was Giorgos Tembelos, who snorted and squealed in his sleep like a pig being castrated. Truth was, he was tired of their company. Tired of being driven around by Giorgos or Evangelos, tired of always feeling crowded.

  He went swimming later that night after the other two turned in. The moon was full and he followed the path of light it cast as if on a road, splashing toward it through the spangled water, pretending to catch the light and pour it over himself. They said if a girl was born under a full moon, she would always be beautiful. Although it had been a long time since his birth, perhaps the moon could still work its wonders. Turn him into Adonis.

  Laughing, he continued to pour water over himself. He’d read about phosphorescence and how it set the sea on fire. The Aegean was like that tonight, alive with light.

  He hummed a song from his youth as he swam back to shore. A beautiful song about a woman setting her hair free and letting the wind take it. It always made him think of mermaids, that song, the way their hair floated on the waves in the storybooks, swirled around in the eddying water—a vision of loveliness just out of reach. Something he’d always assumed was imaginary, but might not be … like love.

  Antigone Balis was sitting outside in the dark when he returned to the hotel after his swim, and they drank a glass of ouzo together. Wrapped in a towel, he’d initially wanted to go upstairs and change, but she’d waved him off.

  “Iremise,” she said, laying a hand on his wet leg. Relax.

  She lit a candle and they sat there talking while he dried himself off. She said she knew an isolated beach where they could go swimming together, just the two of them, au naturel. Gymnos—naked—in case he missed the point.

  “Any time you’d like, Chief Officer,” she said in a husky voice, raising a fleshy arm and smoothing her hair back. It was a practiced move and made her breasts more prominent.

  Patronas watched her in the candlelight. A reflex, that hair thing was. Like one of those female baboons with the scarlet asses, who bend over every time they see a male.

  She was sort of a sexual wind-up toy, Antigone Balis, far too old for the role she’d assigned herself—that of a siren, a temptress. Sitting there in the moonlight in her low-cut dress, she was in desperate need of—what was the word?—a makeover.

  She was his for the asking, he’d come to understand, loneliness driving her, same as him. But he was old enough to know gifts from a woman like that were never freely given. Inevitably, there was a price tag. If he was lucky it would only be a tearful phone call. Worse would be her turning up in Chios with a suitcase. Neither of which he wanted.

  Better to be like the birds he’d seen in Chora, soaring out across the sky at twilight, unencumbered, save for their need for food and rest.

  “I’ll let you know about the swimming,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  When the wolf grows old, he becomes the clown of dogs.

  —Greek Proverb

  The coroner calle
d early the next morning. Patronas was eating his breakfast when his cellphone rang.

  “You find anything?” he asked

  “I must say, you surprise me, Patronas,” the coroner said. “Shipping me a cat and asking me to dissect it. Haven’t done that since I was in medical school. Those specimens were in far better condition—latex in their veins, smelling pleasantly of formaldehyde instead of decomposing flesh. Still, your boss, Stathis, was very persuasive when I called police headquarters to inquire. He insisted I do an autopsy on it as soon as possible.”

  The coroner continued to talk, as always unwilling to be rushed. “As you well know, I have limited resources these days—I didn’t see how a dead cat could possibly be relevant to a homicide—but I did as Stathis instructed.”

  He shifted some papers. “The cat was in a state of advanced and pronounced decay, and I had to work around a lifetime’s worth of maggots—at least a a hundred per square centimeter by my estimate—but the results were revealing.”

  Patronas pushed his plate away. The coroner always spoke at length and in great detail about things other people found disgusting. Maggots, for example, at seven o’clock in the morning.

  “I found a human fingernail lodged in its throat and I extracted it. No need to ask, I already submitted it for DNA analysis. As the nail was painted, I doubt it was left there by a vandal, who as a general rule are adolescent males, local adolescent males—Greeks, in other words. I know that was the theory at one point, that a local youth had killed the cat because the family was German, but you will have to revise that now. No, I suspect the person who left the nail was a female—probably well under forty, given the color—and she was the one who strangled it.”

  “What color was it?” Patronas asked, the phone pressed to his ear. “Orange? Was it orange?”

  “You must be clairvoyant. Yes, as a matter fact it was.” The coroner made a derisive noise. “A bright metallic orange.”

  Patronas ended the call and sat there thinking.

  “Well, now,” he said.

  “You sure about this, Yiannis?” Tembelos asked as he parked the car.

  Patronas nodded. He and Tembelos were riding in the front seat of the Jeep, Papa Michalis and Evangelos Demos sitting in the back. The four of them had driven to Chora almost immediately after receiving the call from the coroner.

  It being early morning, the streets of the village were deserted, a handful of dead leaves scuttling across the pavement. Hopefully no one would see them lead her away in handcuffs. A small mercy, that.

  Patronas had called Stathis as soon as the coroner’s call had come in to tell him what he was planning to do and line up the necessary paperwork to make an arrest.

  “She’s only sixteen years old,” Stathis had said. “What possible motive could she have?”

  “He sexually abused her.”

  “So he came to Patmos and brought his perversion with him?”

  “Something like that.”

  An old fashioned Greek, the priest had been fighting a losing battle since the trip to Epirus to understand the facts of the case—how a human being could do such things to children.

  “She was innocent, poor child,” he kept saying.

  “I don’t know, Father,” Patronas said. “She beat his brains in and carved a swastika on his forehead.”

  “Nonetheless, she was the victim. You need to remember that when you question her.”

  Patronas was sorry now he’d come to Patmos, sorry he’d ever gotten involved. The whole case had been an exercise in futility. No matter what the girl confessed to, no matter what evidence was presented, no judge in Greece would convict her, not after they learned her tragic history. In all likelihood, she would get off. It had all been for nothing. Evil had indeed existed and an adolescent girl had dealt with it. Case closed.

  “What about her father?” the priest asked.

  “I’m assuming he doesn’t know. He spends a great deal of time in Africa, seems to have removed himself from the day to day life of the family.”

  “And the mother?”

  “The same. I fear it will be a great shock to them.”

  “It’s a tragedy any way you look at it. The old man is dead, and her life is ruined.”

  “It was ruined before. It was ruined the first time he laid a hand on her.”

  Today she was dressed in a lacy skirt that barely covered her ass and had painted her nails a new color, dark purple, the color of plums. She was wearing more makeup, too, her eyes rimmed with kohl and silver shadow, the same dark red lipstick on her mouth. The first time he’d seen her, Patronas had thought she’d been experimenting, using the makeup to try out different personas, but now he believed it was a much sadder thing, a mask.

  He and Papa Michalis were sitting with her in the garden, not far from where the body had been found. He’d chosen the site carefully, wanting to control what happened. Gunther Bechtel had objected to the interview, saying he wanted to sit in on it, but Patronas had insisted on doing it alone, in part to spare him. Bechtel would find out eventually what had transpired between the girl and his uncle—no reason to bring such grief into his life today.

  “It’s only a preliminary interrogation,” he’d said, “nothing formal. We can either talk to her here or take her down to the station and talk to her there. You can get a lawyer for her if you want. It’s up to you.”

  Choking with rage, Bechtel had reluctantly agreed to let them interview his daughter, Hannelore, at the house and had left them alone with her.

  Patronas positioned Tembelos at the gate and Evangelos next to the side entrance, the half door where Maria Georgiou had put out the trash, thus effectively sealing everyone inside the compound. He told both men to wrestle Hannelore Bechtel to the ground if she tried to escape and to keep the rest of the family away—the Bauers, too, should they wander out.

  He’d already explained the procedure to the girl, set the tape recorder out on the table and turned it on. He’d discovered an old one at the station and brought it with him, planning to give the MP3 player back to Bechtel after they had copied what was on it.

  The girl laughed when she saw the tape recorder, amused by the dated technology.

  “What’s that?” she asked, acting like the whole thing was a joke.

  “A tape recorder.”

  “It looks old.”

  “It is.” He’d installed the new batteries before coming and checked to make sure the spools were turning.

  She watched them spin for a moment. “What do you need a tape recorder for?”

  “To record what you say.”

  She studied her nails. “What if I say stupid things?”

  “Then it will record you saying stupid things.”

  “Why do you have to do it today?” she complained. “I was going to go to the beach with Hilda. It’s our last chance before I leave for Stuttgart. Now there won’t be time.”

  Her English was better than Patronas’, and she was speaking rapidly. He had to struggle to keep up with her.

  “First of all, you are not going to Germany any time soon,” he told her, “nor is anyone else in your family.”

  “But my father said—”

  “Hannelore, we need to talk to you about your Grobpapa. Are you aware that he was in the Gestapo and served in northern Greece?”

  “You want to talk to me about the war?” She sounded incredulous.

  “Yes,” Patronas said. “Did your grandfather ever speak about that time with you?”

  “No, but I knew what he was. I knew all about him. He told me he knew how to hurt people, that he’d learned in the war and I better be good when he looked after me or he’d hurt me. Hurt Walter.” Hannelore Bechtel reported all this in a bored monotone.

  “He was also a pedophile. Do you know what that is?”

  She shifted in her chair and her features hardened. Patronas could almost hear the door slamming shut. “What does that have to do with me?”

  “He raped some c
hildren in Epirus during the war, worked his way through a village called Aghios Stefanos, targeting six- and seven-year-olds.”

  Getting up hastily, she bolted, but Patronas went after her and grabbed her by the arm. “Sit,” he ordered first in English, then in German, dragging her back to the table. “Setzen Sie.”

  After she’d complied, he resumed the interrogation, speaking in a calm, steady voice. He could feel her tension. She was like a young horse, shying away from what he was about to tell her, desperate not to hear it, to be gone.

  “It was a great secret in the village. People often have secrets, don’t they, Hannelore? A Greek boyfriend like your friend, Hilda. Families can have secrets, too, and yours does, doesn’t it?”

  “No, we don’t, not my family.” She’d returned to her nails, chewing on them pensively.

  Patronas didn’t feel good about cornering her. “You were like those children in Epirus, weren’t you, Hannelore? He raped you, too.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, her voice rising. “He was my grandfather and I loved him. It is disgusting what you say.”

  But her voice was unsteady and she wouldn’t meet his eye.

  “How old were you when it started? I’ll bet it was innocent at first. He’d stroke your arm. Maybe run a hand under your clothes. Then one day he did other things to you, unexpected things that hurt.”

  “Shut up!” She put her hands over her ears. “Leave me alone!”

  “Did he try again on Patmos? Is that why you killed him?”

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  She wasn’t denying the abuse now, only the murder.

  “Maybe it was Walter he was after and you tried to stop him.” Papa Michalis was sitting at the table between them, playing the role of protector, as he and Patronas had discussed on their way to the house. “That would have been an honorable thing to do, Hannelore, to protect your little brother. No one would blame you if that’s what you did.”