Night of the Furies

by David Angsten

  As I rode the bike through town, I noticed that I seemed to be attracting many stares. Several people stopped to gape as I passed. When I entered the lobby of the Argonauta, the old Greek landlady gasped. It wasn’t until I was up in my room that I saw what had drawn their attention. A bloody phantom stared back from the mirror. My face and throat had been blackened and burned, my knees and palms were raw, and my shirt and shorts were soiled with blood from my crawl through the monastery drain.

  I was so shocked by this appalling apparition that I didn’t even notice Phoebe’s message at first—a small pink Post-it on the middle of the mirror. Gone to look for you at the church, it said in a neat, feminine script. Obviously she had grown tired of waiting and figured something must have gone wrong.

  I suddenly noticed an odd, animal odor. After searching a bit, and finding that the smell seemed to follow me around the room, I realized it was coming from my pocket.

  The dead bird.

  I’d forgotten all about it. The wicker wheel was scrunched, and the bird’s wings and feet and head had all been compacted together. I carefully unfolded the disgusting little thing, then slipped it into a Ziploc bag I found inside my backpack.

  Evidence for the defense.

  I washed up in the sink, cleaned my wounds, decided that my ribs were probably not broken, and quickly threw on fresh clothes.

  Then I took the kid’s bike and raced up to the church.

  For some reason—maybe the late hour of the afternoon—the square was full of children playing. Watching them from the bench near the fountain were the three old men, twirling and clattering their worry beads.

  Inside the church, Damiana appeared to be at the tail end of her tour, heading into the infirmary with half a dozen people. I didn’t see Phoebe among them, and after searching through the interior, went to look for her outside. Walking around to the side door, I found her at the curved wall of the main apse, examining the church’s foundation.

  “Jack! You were gone so long—”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “How about Dan? Is he okay?”

  “They’re moving him to the mainland tomorrow. He’s going to be arraigned at the courthouse in Athens.”

  Time was running out. I had a lot of questions for her, but knew they had to wait. “We’ve got to get Damiana to help us,” I said. I looked over her shoulder at the wall of the church. “What were you doing out here?”

  “I was going crazy waiting, and I started looking at these foundation blocks.” She pointed to markings on the stone she’d been examining. “This one appears to be a grave slab from the Roman era. Christian churches were frequently built over ancient sacred sites—often using the very same stones.”

  I started to tell her about the painting I’d seen, but she suddenly noticed the burn on the side of my face. “Jack!”

  “It’s nothing,” I said.

  “What happened?”

  “Some nun whacked me with a burning stick.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what I say. It was worse than Catholic grammar school.” I took her hand. “C’mon, we’ve got to talk to Damiana.”

  THE TOUR was ending as we came into the church. Damiana was in a conversation with two well-dressed Greek women, a mother and daughter, but when she saw us coming down the aisle, she excused herself and started toward her office.

  “Damiana!”

  She kept walking.

  We followed her into the narthex through the forest of marble columns. “I’ve been to the monastery,” I shouted, my voice echoing. “I talked to Thalia…”

  Damiana stopped. She didn’t turn around. We walked up and stood behind her.

  “…or do you call her Mother Melissa?”

  She lowered her head in silence.

  Phoebe looked at me. “What are you saying?”

  “The Greek Chorus Girls. Turns out they live in a monastery up on the mountain.”

  Phoebe was astonished. “They’re nuns?”

  “Yeah. And that’s not the half of it. Tell her, Damiana.”

  Finally, she turned to face us. She hadn’t seen Phoebe before. After looking her over, she turned her gaze on me. “If you talked to the Mother,” she said, “then there is nothing for me to tell you.”

  “Oh yes there is,” I said. “And I think you know what it is.”

  She stared back at me without blinking.

  Phoebe was growing anxious. “Jack—”

  “Tell us, Damiana. Tell us where the bones come from. All those skulls you’re collecting in the attic.”

  Phoebe thought I was losing it. “What are you talking about?”

  “Up in the tower, under the belfry. There’s a room full of skulls and bones. Thousands of them.” I watched Damiana’s face as I spoke. Her expression revealed nothing.

  I turned to Phoebe. “It’s a collection of their murder victims. Basri was only their latest.”

  “How do you know?” Phoebe asked.

  “‘Cause I saw his corpse at the monastery.” I looked at Damiana. “The nuns were boiling the body parts to separate the bones.”

  “My God!”

  “You’re the one who told me about the Maenads, Phoebe. Well, take a good look. Here’s one in the flesh.”

  The two of us stared at Damiana. Her eyes looked sad and fatigued, as if she were suffering under the burden of her silence. Slowly, she shook her head. A gesture of futility. It seemed she couldn’t begin to try to make us understand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have tried to warn you.”

  “You can do more than that,” I said. “You can tell us what you know.”

  “This I cannot do,” she said.

  “Then we’ll tell the police,” I said.

  “Yes. Of course. But then you must leave at once.”

  “Why?” Phoebe asked.

  Damiana’s voice was flat and fatalistic. “If you stay on the island, you will not survive the night.”

  Phoebe and I exchanged a glance.

  I looked at Damiana. “I can’t leave here without my brother.”

  She heard the emotion in my voice; it seemed to tug at her heart. I remembered she had a brother, too.

  “Please,” Phoebe pleaded. “I beg you.”

  Damiana glanced between us. For a moment she seemed to hesitate.

  A telephone rang, startling us. She waited until it rang again, then went into her office to answer it.

  Phoebe and I waited and listened. We heard her speak some words in Greek.

  “I think it’s her father,” Phoebe said. “Something’s wrong…”

  The call was brief. She emerged pulling on a black shawl. Her face was grim. “I am told the police are ordering all visitors to leave the island immediately,” she said. “A ferry has been ordered to the harbor.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “The nuns at Panaghia. They reported that a man broke into the monastery and attempted to kill them.”

  “What?”

  “They gave the police your description.”

  Phoebe looked distraught. “Jack…”

  My mind was racing. Of course—I’ve been an idiot! Who wouldn’t believe the nuns? The mad head-chopper is still on the loose! The police will be looking for me at the harbor. Checkingevery passenger. If we stay, we’ll be the only foreigners left, with nowhere on the island to hide.

  Phoebe was having the same thoughts. “What should we do?”

  I looked at her. I thought of Dan. What he had said about the Fates. “I don’t think we have any choice,” I said.

  I turned to Damiana. “We’re going to the police. Will you help us?”

  She backed away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I cannot. There is no one here who can help you.” She clutched her shawl tightly around her and hurried out of the church.

  OUTSIDE, THE children had all abandoned the square and taken their voices with them. An unnatural silence ensued. All you could hear was the weep of the founta
in and the piercing cry of a bird. The air seemed as still as the air in the church, and even the light was peculiar: the sun had slipped behind the mountain and left the town in a luminous shade.

  Walking through this strange dusk, we made our way to the jail. I asked Phoebe what she’d found out from the police.

  “Believe it or not, they apparently don’t have much crime here,” she said. “There’s only one cop on the island. His name is Vassilos. Andreas Vassilos.”

  “I’ve seen him,” I said. “He looks like a drunk.”

  “I don’t think he’ll be sympathetic. He just wants to pass the problem along to the authorities in Athens. Make the whole thing go away.”

  “I suppose Ogygia is no different than most Greek islands,” I said. “It survives on tourism. Murder is bad for business.”

  Up ahead an older couple was leaving a small hotel. Other tourists, bags in hand, were heading toward the harbor.

  A Greek family—father, young mother, little boy—dragged their suitcases hurriedly past us down the street. The wheels rumbled loudly. When the boy slowed to stare at us, his mother grabbed his hand and pulled him along, eyeing me warily.

  For a second I remembered the thumb clenched in my fist, and my bloody handprint on the wall. I asked Phoebe if Dan had remembered anything about the killing.

  “No,” she said. “He can’t begin to comprehend what happened. He’s terribly distraught about Basri. But he seems remarkably unconcerned with the situation he’s in. I tried to make him face the facts. He’s going to be charged with murder. Instead, he’s obsessed with the mysterious drink. Says he’s never had anything like it—and as you know, he’s tried everything.”

  “Does he think it’s the kykeon?”

  “He says it fits with the prophecy. Your ‘Aphrodites’ led you to Dionysus, and Dionysus led you to…well, something like the ecstasy of Eleusis.”

  We finally reached the police station. The light had faded and the street was empty. Even the squad car was gone.

  I tried the door and found it locked. No one answered my knock.

  “He’s left” Phoebe said. “Must be down at the wharf.”

  That meant Dan was alone inside. Sitting in his cell. I banged on the door with my fist.

  “Jack. It’s no use.”

  The single narrow horizontal window was high up on the wall and encased in iron bars. Too high to reach or to see inside. I called out for Dan.

  No answer.

  A ferry horn sounded from the harbor.

  “We’ve got to find Vassilos,” I said.

  We continued down the street, then turned and descended the twisting route that led to the waterfront. The closer we came to it, the more people we encountered: bellhops pushing luggage carts; street vendors hawking last-chance souvenirs; tourists, families, children, couples—all of them dragging suitcases or carrying bags, and looking harried and scared and upset. The anxiety in the air was palpable. The news had quickly spread. A man had been decapitated. Nuns had been attacked. The killer was on the loose. The island had finally become so dangerous it had to be evacuated.

  A decrepit old taxi rolled past, the first I had seen on the island. It was jammed to the brim with passengers, and baggage was tied to the roof. The driver honked to part the growing crowd making its way to the wharf.

  At last we came out onto the esplanade. Phoebe kept her grip on me as the jostling crowd grew thick. A couple hundred people were converging from the streets. Everyone was heading toward the dock.

  The air seemed darker near the water. Gulls circled and squawked overhead, adding to the cacophony of voices. Out at the pier was a large ferryboat with a great black funnel, and a second boat, a hydrofoil, with a crosslike radar tower. The huge ships made Basri’s yacht, secured nearby, look like a rowboat.

  I nearly tripped on a little girl. She was searching the ground for something she’d dropped. Her mother was fighting the flow of the crowd, trying to retrieve her. Phoebe took the girl’s hand and helped her to her mom. I spotted what the girl was looking for and picked it up off the ground—a small, tightly twisted circle of twigs. Tied inside it was a tiny, carved-wood bird.

  I stared at it in my hand. My mind racing back. It was the same trinket I’d seen Damiana give to her brother—a toy version of the dead bird wheels hanging in the chapel.

  I waded through the crowd to the girl. “What do you call this?” I asked.

  She grabbed it out of my hands and clutched it to her chest. Her mother glared at me suspiciously and pulled the girl away. She spat out words I didn’t understand, then dragged her daughter off into the crowd.

  I watched them go.

  Phoebe was waiting for me just up ahead, where the crowd jammed together at the entry gate. Two ferryboat officers were checking people through. Tourists were fumbling for their passports or IDs, which had to be inspected and approved.

  “There’s Vassilos,” Phoebe said, as I caught up with her.

  Standing off to the side with the ferryboat captain was the bearded and bedraggled policeman. He looked slightly less slovenly than the last time I had seen him, as if the urgency of the evacuation had somehow sobered him up. His wrinkly blue uniform shirt was tucked into his pants, which only seemed to emphasize the enormity of his gut. His policeman’s cap was tilted back on his head, and his hair flowed out from beneath it, reaching over his collar to the epaulets of his shirt. Despite this disheveled demeanor, he had a prideful air about him, staring aloofly over the crowd with a calm and noble authority. I had to wonder how he might react to what I was about to tell him.

  “Here goes nothing,” I said.

  As I started away, Phoebe stopped me. “Wait.”

  I turned to her. She looked at me a moment and held my arm. “I’m afraid. What if…?” Her blue eyes searched into mine.

  I hugged her in my arms. “It’s all right,” I said. That afternoon, she had pleaded with me to go to the police; now she was having second thoughts. Following the nuns’ accusation, I could be charged with breaking and entering, assault, perhaps even murder. But I had already made up my mind. Or the Fates had made it up for me.

  “We have to tell them the truth,” I said. “It’s really all we can do.”

  She knew that I was right, and when she lifted her glistening eyes, they seemed to give me courage.

  I turned and headed for the cop.

  The ferryboat captain was talking to Vassilos, who stood with a cigarette in his hand, watching the people walk by. I figured he was looking for someone based on the nuns’ description, and when his eyes finally landed on me, they did not move away. He watched me walk up through the crowd until I was standing before him.

  The ship captain stopped talking, and the two of them stared at me, waiting for me to speak.

  “You’re looking for the wrong person,” I said.

  The policeman glanced at the ship captain, then looked back at me. “And how do you know this?”

  “Because I’m the one you’re looking for, and I’m not the one you want.”

  Vassilos’s bloodshot eyes peered from beneath his drooping brows. His voice was soft and gravelly. “It was not you who break into the monastery?”

  “I did. But I swear I never tried to hurt anyone.”

  “Of course.” He turned his head slightly and studied me for a moment. “I have seen you before,” he said.

  I nodded. “Yesterday. On the beach. The American you found in the boat is my brother.”

  “Yes. His friend, the girl, she tell me this.” He peered suspiciously down his hawklike nose. “Why did you not come to me before?”

  “I had to find out what happened on the yacht.”

  “And did you find?”

  “Yes.”

  He continued looking at me for a moment, then turned to the captain and spoke to him in Greek. The captain gave me a scrutinizing look, then tipped his cap to Vassilos and headed back to his ship.

  Vassilos stepped up, took my wrist, and clapped a handcuf
f around it. He pulled my arm behind my back to attach the other wrist.

  “I just turned myself in,” I said. “Do you really think I’m going to run away?”

  “No,” he said, grinding his cigarette under his foot. “But then—I would not think you would rape a nun, either.”

  “What?”

  16

  DAN AND I shared the little concrete cell. Apparently, it was the only jail in Ogygia. A square, windowless room with two cots, a single toilet, and no sink—Dan still hadn’t cleaned the dried blood off his body. Vassilos had given him a pair of orange drawstring pants and a matching shirt with the number “11” stenciled on the back; they looked like E.R. scrubs. While I kept sitting down and standing up and pacing the little room, Dan stood with his hands propped against the metal door, peering out the wire-mesh window. With his shaved head, bare feet, and bloodstained arms, he looked like a convict in a Tarantino movie.

  “You break the law, the worst they do is take away your freedom.” After two days alone in the stir, Dan couldn’t seem to stop talking. “Like Mommy forcing you to go to your room. In Europe, even if you’ve murdered someone, all they can inflict is a time-out. It might be a long time-out, but even that’s unlikely.”

  “How do you suppose they’ll feel about me having had my way with a nun?”

  “If you’re actually convicted of rape, you won’t get more than a year or two.”

  This didn’t sound all that reassuring. Dan had spent months behind bars in Colombia and Mexico; once for smuggling cannabis, and once for selling fake antiquities. He’d had plenty of practice with “time-outs.” I’d never even seen the inside of a jail. “What do you expect them to do, Dan? Cut off your head? Cut off my balls?”

  “There are countries that’ll do that, you know. That’s why when I travel in the Middle East—like when I tried to go to Saudi for the hajj—I always make sure—”

  He stopped. Put his ear to the door. “He’s off the phone.”

  “Finally.”

  “Phoebe’s talking.”

  “Good.”

  “Not so good. They’re arguing again.”

  I had already showed Vassilos the dead bird and told him about the barbecue at the monastery. He hadn’t listened to me any more than he’d listened to Dan.