Prey on Patmos

by Jeffery Siger

  “All we found were his robe, hat, sandals, undergarments, and two crosses.”

  “Do you know what was taken?”

  “No, but his pockets were turned inside out.”

  “Any idea of how many attackers?”

  The sergeant did a quick upward jerk of his head, Greek for “no.” “No idea, but my guess is more than one. These mugger bastards are cowards when alone.”

  “A lot of monks get mugged here?”

  He gestured no again. “This is the first I know of.”

  Andreas looked at the crosses. One was heavy, silver, and connected to a long, thick, woven black cord. The other was much smaller and lighter, like tin, and tied to a thin black lanyard. It was the only item without bloodstains. He pointed at the smaller cross. “Why is there no blood on this?”

  “We found it clenched in his fist.”

  Andreas nodded. “Any thoughts on why the crosses were left behind?”

  The sergeant shrugged. “No. The captain thinks it’s because he was a man of God and the muggers thought it a sacrilege to take them.”

  Andreas stared deadpan at the sergeant. Kouros started to laugh. “Can’t wait to meet your captain,” said Andreas. “A monk is butchered in your town square and he thinks the muggers were worried about committing a sacrilege by stealing his crosses?”

  The sergeant stammered. “No…no…I…I’m sure what the captain meant was that…uh…they didn’t know Vassilis was a monk when they attacked him.”

  Andreas kept staring. “Show me the photographs of the body.”

  The sergeant took an envelope off the desk and handed it to Andreas. “These were taken after we removed the body from the square. I’ll have to get you copies of the ones we took at the scene, the captain has them.”

  It contained two dozen eight-by-tens of a very old, very thin, naked man. For an instant, Andreas wondered what passed through that poor soul’s mind in his last seconds on earth. His youth? His parents? His loves? Children perhaps? Regrets? Andreas moved on. He had to be clinical and focus: focus on finding the miserable, damned-to-hell bastards who murdered this old man.

  Andreas studied the first few photos very carefully, handing each to Kouros as he finished. Then he quickly shuffled through the rest as if disinterested. “What do you think, Yianni?”

  “Only one.”

  Andreas nodded. “Sergeant. Where’s your captain?”

  He looked at his shoes, “I don’t know.”

  Andreas took that to mean that he did, and that his captain probably was nearby. “Tell him to get his ass in here now or I’ll find him and personally drag him in here by his balls.”

  “Chief, I don’t think—”

  “I said now.”

  The sergeant hurried out the door.

  Andreas looked at Kouros. “Do you think they’re just stupid, or lazy, or is it something else?”

  Kouros shrugged.

  “Let’s hope it’s the first two. But watch out for the third. Which reminds me.” Andreas spun his hand in the air and pointed to his ear. Listening devices were not unusual in police stations trying to catch suspects talking among themselves.

  Kouros nodded. “But do you really think the captain is being blackmailed by his gay lover?”

  Andreas rolled his eyes. He’d grown used to that sense of humor. They’d been together since Andreas was chief of police on Mykonos and Kouros was a brash young rookie.

  Kouros laughed.

  About a minute later the door burst open and a middle-aged man about Andreas’ height, but with a noticeable potbelly, stormed into the room. “Who the fuck do you think you are?” he screamed, moving his eyes between Andreas and Kouros.

  Andreas smiled. “I’m the one you’re looking for, Captain. How nice of you to take time out of your busy schedule to drop in for a chat.”

  The captain pushed himself straight into Andreas’ face. “You’re an asshole and I don’t give a fuck who you think you are, this is my island and no one talks to me that way. No one.”

  Andreas smiled. “Simple choice. Start cooperating or grab your worry beads and start praying. My job description includes investigating police corruption anywhere in Greece. So if you and your island want to make it to the top of my shit list, just keep it up,” Andreas lifted his hands and patted the captain’s cheeks, “kukla.” The use of the endearing word for “doll” in Greek did not hide Andreas’ message: go ahead, test me, asshole.

  The captain drew in and let out a quick breath, then stepped back, so fast that Andreas made a mental note to seriously consider starting an investigation.

  Andreas stared at the captain. “I understand you believe the monk was the victim of a random mugging?”

  “What else could it be?” His tone was edgy.

  “That’s what I’m asking you.”

  “He was a monk. Been here forty years. Everyone loved him. He had no vices, no girlfriends, boyfriends, or enemies. His life was an open book. No one had a motive.”

  “You think he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

  “Yes, he probably was attacked by some of that same scum that drifts in during tourist season to prey on whatever looks easy. We get that sort passing through every once in a while.” The captain paused. “Why, do you think some psycho with a grudge against the church decided to take it out on poor Vassilis?” He smiled as if he’d already anticipated and dismissed Andreas’ thinking.

  “As a matter of fact, no, I don’t. But, for the same reason, I don’t think it was a mugging.” Andreas handed him the photographs. “What jumps out at you from these?”

  The captain looked through each one and shrugged. “His throat was cut.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Exactly. And what does that mean to you?”

  The captain bristled. “I don’t have time for your bullshit.”

  Andreas remained calm. “Yianni?”

  Kouros answered matter-of-factly. “There are no other marks or stab wounds on the body.”

  “So?” said the captain.

  Kouros continued. “A single cut, administered at precisely the point most likely to cause as quick and painless a death as can be done by a knife.”

  The captain shrugged.

  “Muggers aren’t that careful, precise, or trained,” said Andreas. “I can’t remember ever seeing a mugging-turned-murder victim cut just once. Have you, Captain?”

  The captain didn’t answer, just glared.

  “I’ll take that as a no. And if this were a psycho lashing out against a symbol of the church, I can’t imagine rage great enough to drive a deadly, random attack on a monk being satisfied by a single, surgical slice.”

  The captain clenched and unclenched his fists. “So what are you saying?”

  “Premeditated murder.”

  Andreas expected an argument.

  “I can’t imagine why. But I see your point.”

  Andreas was surprised. Perhaps this asshole actually had an open mind. Maybe he ought to try mending fences. “I’d like to speak with the abbot. Do you think you possibly could arrange for him to see me now?” Andreas didn’t need his help to make the appointment, but he wanted the captain to feel that he did. It was always better to have the head of police on a small island inside your tent pissing out, rather than outside pissing in.

  The captain walked over to his desk, picked up the phone, pressed a speed dial button, and after a hushed, thirty-second conversation, hung up. “He’ll see you in an hour at the monastery.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” The captain extended his right hand.

  Andreas wasn’t sure if that meant they’d made up, or that a farewell sucker punch was on the way. Andreas smiled, reached out and shook the captain’s hand, but all t
he while kept an eye on the man’s left, just in case.

  ***

  Andreas and Kouros parked in the square across from where the monk was murdered. Flowers now covered the bloodstains. A sign pointing to the monastery was posted on the wall of the path that began a few feet from where the body was found. They followed it out of the square. The route soon merged with another path funneling tourists up from the parking area below. They followed the crowd uphill, past a taverna on the left and a few souvenir shops on the right.

  Just before the path started downhill, almost everyone made a sharp right up onto a set of terraced steps leading into a small piazza. It was packed with tourists. On the far left side, a dozen more steps led up toward the monastery’s entrance. Andreas looked at his watch. They were thirty minutes early for their meeting. He suggested they have coffee at the taverna they’d just passed.

  It took only a minute to get there, and no sooner did they step inside than a man built like Kouros, but twice his age, yelled out, “Welcome to Dimitri’s! Come, let me show you to our best table.”

  “We just want coffee,” said Andreas.

  “Does that mean I should not give you our best table? Please do not offend me by suggesting I treat my guests as euros. My duty is to show Patmian hospitality to all pilgrims to our holy island.”

  Andreas wasn’t buying the pitch. “We’re not pilgrims.”

  The man smiled. “I know, you’re cops.”

  He’d caught Andreas off guard. “Are we that obvious?”

  The man laughed. “No, I saw you in the square with Mavros.”

  “Mavros?”

  “The sergeant.” He patted Andreas on the shoulder. “Hi, I’m Dimitri, and welcome to my place. Follow me, please.” He led them out a rear door onto a broad balcony running the length of the building. It literally hung off the edge of the mountain, looking out above Skala and off to the horizon as far as the eye could see.

  “This is quite a view,” said Kouros.

  “Sure is,” said Andreas. He wished Lila could be here.

  “Thank you. Please, sit down.” Dimitri pointed to a large table by the open railing at the edge of the balcony. “I’ll bring your coffees. I know you are in a hurry to see the abbot.”

  Before Andreas could speak, Dimitri added with another smile, “Only a hunch, but I saw you leave for Skala. Now you’re back in Chora, and five minutes ago you walked past my place headed in the direction of the entrance.” He pointed toward the monastery. “Now you’re back again and only want coffee. I assume you’re waiting to go inside, but since the monastery is about to close to tourists for today, my guess is you’ve come back to meet someone inside. And the only one in the monastery who would dare talk to the police about what happened to Vassilis is Abbot Christodoulos.” He walked away from the table.

  Kouros stared at Andreas. “Maybe we should just post our schedule on the front door of the town hall.”

  “Doesn’t look like we have to.”

  “How did he really know?”

  “One of the cops might have told him. Everybody gossips. It’s our national pastime. And on islands and in small villages…” Andreas rolled his left hand out into the air. “Or, he might have figured it out exactly as he said.”

  “Maybe he knew the monk?”

  “I’m sure he did,” nodded Andreas.

  “Bet it wouldn’t take much to get him talking.”

  Andreas smiled. “Probably no more than, ‘Would you like to join us?’”

  “So, what do you think the monk was doing running around outside the monastery at that hour?”

  “No idea, but I’m pretty sure he was coming from, not returning to, the monastery. His body was found in the square by the entrance to the lane we took coming here. If he’d been walking through the square he’d have seen whoever was waiting for him. And even an old monk would have put up a struggle for his life. That would have left marks on his body. Besides, if he were returning to the monastery, whoever killed him would have waited up the lane where there were places to hide, and the body would have been found there.”

  “My bet is he was meeting someone.”

  Andreas nodded. “And I’d bet the answer to all this somehow ties into that meeting.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “Was he giving or receiving? Telling or listening?” He shook his head. “No idea.”

  “Here’s your coffee.” Dimitri put two cups, a coffee pot, sugar, and milk on the table. A boy behind him set down plates of cakes and cookies. “Compliments of the house.”

  Andreas looked at Kouros. Kouros winked.

  “So, Dimitri,” said Andreas. “Would you like to join us?”

  ***

  Dimitri launched into a running monologue on “all things monastery,” supposedly to show “what to expect from the abbot.” Andreas doubted Dimitri’s views were shared by everyone; certainly not by the monks, but he was entertaining and obviously knew far more than any outsider about what went on inside the monastery. Dimitri had grown up within the literal shadow of its walls, had family who rose to prominence in the monastery’s hierarchy, operated his business for years within steps of its main—and he claimed only—entrance, and fought almost daily with monks and the abbot over what he considered their unfair interference with his business.

  Dimitri was quick to say that the murdered monk was one of the few not “written on my balls,” a place far worse than any shit list. He agreed with the sergeant: everyone liked Vassilis, including himself, and he had no idea who might have killed him.

  He talked about the history of the monastery only when he felt it necessary to put in context his views on what was currently going on “inside.” “If you want history, buy a guide book,” were Dimitri’s exact words. He said he confined his history lessons to tourists who didn’t realize that the Greek Orthodox Church was only a very small part, population-wise, of the three hundred million-member Eastern Orthodox Church dominating Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Christian populations of much of the Middle East. To them, he’d say that what gave the Greek Church its exceptional influence over the Orthodox churches of other countries were the many unique and revered sites within Greece, of which Revelation made Patmos perhaps the best known to the non-Orthodox world.

  He described Abbot Christodoulos as “one right out of the history books.” He’d taken his name from Hosios Christodoulos, who founded the monastery in 1088. That first Christodoulos obtained absolute sovereignty over the island and permission to erect the monastery in a direct grant from the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople. Since its early days, the monastery faced a seemingly endless flow of marauding pirates, meddling local bishops, and demanding foreign occupiers. Indeed, not until the end of World War II, when the Italians were ousted, did Patmos return to Greek rule. It took great leadership skills and delicate foreign alliances, including several with the papacy in Rome, to enable the monastery to safeguard its independence and treasures for nearly a thousand years.

  “The monastery has always known how to reach far beyond this tiny island’s borders to survive. Even today, it’s not subject to the Church in Greece, its archbishop, or any other Eastern Orthodox leader. It owes allegiance only to the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople, the worldwide spiritual leader of the Eastern Orthodox Church. At least that’s what we Greeks like to consider him to be, a first among equals in the patriarchs responsible for leading their countries’ Orthodox churches within Eastern Orthodoxy.” Dimitri paused only long enough to take a sip of coffee.

  “That makes this place no different from those monasteries on Mount Athos. They’re all essentially their own little governments, subject directly to the Ecumenical Patriarch. They do as they like, as long as they have the money. And this one does for sure; it’s one of the richest in Christendom.”

  Andreas wondered if Dimitri was about to launch into the major scandal that had helped hou
nd Greece’s ruling party out of power. Mount Athos was located on the easternmost of three peninsulas, an eight-hour drive northeast of Athens to one of two port towns where you caught a boat to go the rest of the way. It was the world’s oldest surviving monastic community, revered as “The Garden of the Mother of God,” and perhaps the last remaining place on earth still using the two thousand-year-old Julian calendar. An independent monastic state jutting out into the Aegean on a peninsula of roughly 130 square miles, the area shared its name with the marble-peaked, 6,700-foot-high mountain punctuating the far southeast end of the peninsula. Mount Athos was a rugged mountain wildness of unspoiled verdant beauty, myths and miracles, history and reality; a place where for far more than a thousand years hermits utterly withdrawn from secular life living in isolated huts and monks living within massive, fortified monastery walls shared a common commitment to God, prayer, contemplation, and protecting the cherished seclusion of their life on the Holy Mountain.

  In the eleventh century, as many as 180 monasteries existed on the Holy Mountain. But times had changed, and today only twenty survived: seventeen Greek, one Russian, one Serbian, and one Bulgarian. A dozen smaller communities and innumerable other structures—ranging from large farmhouses to isolated caves within desolate cliff faces—sheltered monks and hermits, too, but generally as dependencies of one of the twenty principal monasteries sovereign over their twenty respective self-governing territories.

  From the amount of press coverage the scandal received, you’d think Mount Athos were a place of two hundred thousand schemers, not just two thousand monks and those few civilians doing secular work willing to live confined to the Holy Mountain’s capital of three hundred souls. What held center stage in a once never-ending media circus was the alleged involvement of high-ranking government ministers and the abbot of perhaps the most prominent of Mount Athos’ primary monasteries in a purportedly fraudulent land swap and money laundering scheme arising out of the 2004 Olympics staged in Athens.

  If that was where Dimitri was headed, Andreas wasn’t interested. He’d heard it all before. Everyone in Greece had heard it all before. That scandal was the most talked about subject in Greece—until the country’s massive, unrevealed debt crisis exploded across the EU, blowing everything else off the front pages. He was tired of it. All of Greece was tired of it. In fact, that’s what some said was the idea: get everyone so tired of the subject that no one cared whether anyone was ever prosecuted.