by Leta Serafim
Titina Argentis was standing on the lawn, talking to her son about a car he was apparently intent upon buying. “Finished, Chief Officer?” she called.
“This was just a preliminary search. A crime team will go through the house more thoroughly tomorrow.”
Though this displeased her, she said nothing.
“By the way, Kyria Argentis, who inherits?”
“I suppose I do,” she answered as if it were of no matter. Money, like working, was a thing she couldn’t be bothered with. “And Antonis, of course. He was like a son to my husband. Themis adopted him formally when he was ten years old. He wanted Antonis to have his name, to inherit the business when he was gone. Antonis and my husband, they were very close.”
“What business is that?”
“Argentis Shipping. My husband, Themis, was one of the biggest ship owners in Greece. Now Antonis manages the company.” She said this with obvious pride.
How he could do that while drinking the day away in the house of his mother was a great puzzle. Perhaps he’d underestimated Antonis. “Your half-sister went to Harvard,” he said to Antonis. “How about you? Where’d you go to school?”
Again, his mother rushed to answer for him. “He was unable to complete his studies. He was too busy here. Themis and I wouldn’t have survived if it hadn’t been for him.”
But Themis hadn’t survived, had he? Neither had Eleni. Patronas looked at Titina Argentis with renewed interest.
But she was done with him. Turning back to Antonis, she began speaking again about the car. “But you wrecked the last one,” she said, smiling indulgently at her son, pleased by what she saw.
The son smiled back. That smile—that beguiling, disarming smile—but this time there was a hint of mischief in it, something a little disingenuous. The smile of a boy being naughty, but only a little, and sure he was going to get away with it.
“I’ll be more careful this time,” he said, sipping his drink.
Chapter 7
The village is burning and the village whore is combing her hair.
—Greek proverb
They buried Petros Athanassiou the next morning in the cemetery behind the town. The chief officer attended the funeral out of respect for the boy’s grandmother, thinking she would be forced to do this alone or at best with a neighbor in attendance and that he might lend some dignity to the proceedings, perhaps furnish her with a police escort if she wanted. But she wasn’t alone. Entering the chapel, he was surprised to see a woman in her forties standing beside her, holding her hand. Marina Papoulis was also there, and Papa Michalis. Women from the Castro neighborhood were crowded around her too, talking among themselves over the priest’s chanting. They might have come out of kindness, Patronas thought, but more likely out of curiosity. Like those who slow down when they pass an accident. Giving voice to pity, secretly thankful they’d been spared. The great show that is death breaking up the monotony of their daily lives.
The old woman nodded to him as he pushed his way to the front. The service was brief, the priest’s chanting perfunctory. At the cemetery, the old woman led the mourners forward, throwing a handful of dirt down on the coffin. It was made of cheap pine, tricked up to look like walnut and draped with plastic flowers. As she threw the dirt, she began wailing, tearing at the front of her dress. The same woman who’d been with her in the church led her away.
Patronas waited a half hour before following them back to the house. Petros’ grandmother opened the door. She was still in her funeral clothes, a black dress, kerchief and stockings, as was the custom, her face ravaged with grief.
“Come in,” she said. “Meet my daughter.”
The woman he’d seen at the funeral rose and came forward. Her black dress was too short and tight for both her age and the occasion. Her bleached hair was piled high, and Patronas could see the line along her jaw where her make-up ended. She had an air of spent voluptuousness about her. An overripe peony, he thought, pretty once, but now about to make a mess on the table. Her nose and lips were too thick, too coarse, for real beauty, and her eyes were deepset and swollen, as if from dissipation.
“I’m Voula Athanassiou,” the woman said. “Petros’ mother.” She sat down on the sofa and patted the cushion beside her, indicating for him to join her. “My mother called me and told me what had happened,” she said. “Manos and I were staying at a hotel on the other side of the island. We came as soon as we heard.”
She was so close, Patronas could smell the cigarettes on her breath.
“Manos Kleftis is her boyfriend,” the old woman said by way of explanation. She laid a certain stress on the last word as if mocking her daughter.
They talked for a few more minutes. “I need to speak to Mr. Kleftis,” Patronas said.
Voula got up and stretched, pulling her dress tight across her breasts. “Manos,” she called in a lazy voice. “There’s a policeman here. He wants to talk to you.”
A man emerged from the back of the house. Although stocky, he moved with a kind of animal grace, his gait fluid and loose. His shirt was loud, Hawaiian. Decorated with sea turtles and palm trees, it hung open over his naked chest. Odd garb for a house in mourning, even in the modern age. His head was shaved and he had no eyebrows or eyelashes to speak of. His eyes were a pale green, nearly colorless, his lips thick and protruding. Though not handsome, he had an air of sensuality about him that complemented Voula Athanassiou’s. He placed one hand on her thigh as he sat down and the two of them exchanged a smile. A pimp or close to it.
“How do you do?” Patronas said. “I’m Chief Officer Patronas.”
“Manos Kleftis.” The man crossed his legs and began fiddling with his plastic flip flop. He seemed sleepy, out of focus.
“Sorry to bother you on such a sad occasion.”
“Ah, yes, little Petros.”
“I heard you and Voula were up at the monastery the day it happened.”
“That’s right. Voula wanted to see the boy. We got there at eleven or so. Voula had arranged it. The kid was supposed to meet us in the parking lot, but he didn’t show up.” No sorrow in his voice, no grief.
“Did you wait for him?” Patronas was trying to establish a timeline. The coroner had said the boy was killed at least twenty-four hours before they found his body and Eleni, a bit earlier.
The man shrugged. “A few minutes maybe.”
“You didn’t try and find him?”
Kleftis shook his head.
“Do you remember what time you got back here?”
“Noon or thereabouts.” He signaled the old woman. “Hey, Yiayia, how about getting us something to eat? I’m starving.”
Without a word, the old woman got up and left the room. Patronas could hear her moving around in the kitchen, opening the refrigerator door and getting dishes out. Little more than a maid in her own house. He wondered why she put up with it.
“Tell me, Mr. Kleftis, how did you get along with Petros?”
“He was okay, I guess. Seemed nice enough.” He didn’t seem to hold the fact that his girlfriend had a son against her. A rare tolerance, unusual in a Greek male.
“How often did you see him?”
“Every six months or so.”
“How about you?” Patronas turned back to Voula. “How often did you see your son?”
“The same. Once or twice a year. We usually came together, Manos and me. I wished it was more, but what can you do?” She flicked something off her dress. Her nails had been recently done and gleamed with coral polish. “The truth is, I was more of a sister than a mother to him. Yiayia, she’s the one who raised him. I was only seventeen when he was born. Petros and I, we were children together.”
Seventeen, my ass, thought Patronas. You were twenty-five if you were a day and should have known better. “Did you keep in touch with him? Phone him every week? Email?”
“No, nothing.” She stared at him a little defiantly. “Sorry.”
“When did you get here?”
; “I’m not sure. July twenty-second, I think it was.”
She and her boyfriend seemed well suited. The pot, while rolling, fell in with the cover. “How long have you and Mr. Kleftis been together?”
“Three years.”
“She was in my store, buying earrings.” Manos Kleftis put his hand over his heart. “I saw her and my heart stood still,” these last few words in English.
“You own a store?”
He nodded. “Kleftis’ Souvenirs on Mykonos.”
That’s probably where he learned to speak English, romancing foreign women, picking them up on one of those touristy, anything-goes beaches and spending a couple of days with them before they flew home on Lufthansa or British Airways. The chief officer had no doubt. Manos Kleftis was one of those men who make summer vacations in Greece so memorable for female tourists. He probably spoke a little Swedish, too.
A few minutes later, the grandmother came in with a plate of tyropitas, chopped tomatoes and feta and a sprinkling of olives. Without a word, she set it down in front of Manos Kleftis, and with an apologetic glance at the chief officer, returned to the kitchen.
Kleftis took a tyropita and ate it. “You’re a local. Voula’s been telling me how good the sweets are on Chios.”
As if the boy’s mother and he were still on vacation, tourists. As if sixteen-year-old Petros hadn’t been buried that day. Patronas didn’t know what to make of Manos Kleftis. Perhaps he was playing what they called the ‘white dove,’ a man who pretends to be artless, stupid even, in order to con you.
“They have loucoumades on Chios, Chief Officer?” Kleftis went on. “I’m crazy about loucoumades.”
Loucoumades?! Again, Patronas couldn’t believe his ears. A child had died and this man wanted honey balls. He put his notebook away. “You’ll be staying on, won’t you?”
He assumed Kleftis would remain on the island as long as necessary to investigate the boy’s estate, to see if there was anything he and Voula could glean from the child’s death. The purse of the dead is turned inside out. Even good people sniffed around after a family member died to make sure they got their share or—even better—more than their share. Not that people didn’t grieve. He’d seen women tear clumps of their hair out at funerals, scratch their faces with their nails. But too often the children of those same women visited the family lawyer on their way home from the cemetery and fought with each other over the inheritance. Patronas was careful never to say this out loud. They’d dumped manure on Katzanzakis’ grave in Crete for depicting the scavenging that had followed the death of one of his characters in Zorba the Greek, the picking of her poor bones. But as a policeman, he stood with Katzanzakis on this, albeit silently. Too often in Greece, death was about money.
“I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to remain here until our investigation is concluded.”
“No problem. We were going to stay here anyway.” Kleftis took another tyropita. “Help Yiayia as long as she needs us.”
Chapter 8
The tongue serves some, the teeth others.
—Greek proverb
Yiannis Patronas emptied the wooden boxes out on the table in the refectory and began pawing through the shards. He didn’t understand why anybody would bother collecting this stuff, let alone labeling it. To spend your life rooting around in trenches like a pig after truffles, searching for broken bits of clay, clay that when you got right down to it was nothing more than dirt, baked dirt. You’d never catch him doing it, that’s for sure. He’d shared this thought with his wife, Dimitra, over breakfast.
“But you work with dirt, too.” She’d waited a moment or two before delivering the skylovrise, the dog bite. “Adulterers and thieves, the human kind of dirt.”
Marriage to Dimitra was like living in a bed of cactus. There was simply no way to get comfortable.
He looked at his watch. They were supposed to be here an hour ago. He never should have told Evangelos Demos to bring the two archeologists, Alcott and McLean, to Profitis Ilias. He should have asked Tembelos to do it.
He wasn’t looking forward to interviewing the two men. He had little use for archeologists. He’d had to post a guard in Emborio, on the west side of the island, after he’d caught a pair of Dutch ones digging flints out of the dry gulley without permission from the Ministry of Culture. He hadn’t thought much of what they’d collected until a colleague on Samos informed him of the worth of such items. More valuable than heroin, the man had said. Patronas had ordered the archeologists to surrender everything over and leave Greece immediately. He’d put the flints—or whatever the hell they were—in a shoe box and locked it up in the evidence room next to the contraband cigarettes and cellophane-wrapped blocks of Turkish hashish. The following summer, a French archeologist seeking a Roman tomb had dug up the town water main by mistake. Six months it had taken to straighten that mess out. The list went on and on.
Greece would be better off, he’d long thought, if it had a less illustrious past, one that didn’t draw these people from abroad, eager to relive Homer and fight the Trojan War, or worse, the ones who’d thought they’d found some kind of personal answer to life’s questions in Katzanzakis and came here to drink ouzo with Zorba and dance in the moonlight. “Go home,” he wanted to say to all of them. “Go back to Frankfurt and Scarsdale and live your lives.” Being Greek is as much a curse as a blessing. And it is a struggle best left to the Greeks.
* * *
There was a knock on the door. Standing outside was a pale, redheaded man. He seemed not to know what to do, whether to come in or stay out, like a child uncomfortable around grown-ups.
“Good morning. I’m Dr. McLean.” His Greek was flawless. “You said on the phone you needed to see me.”
“That is correct.” Patronas gestured to the pile of shards on the table. “I would like your professional opinion on these.”
Devon McLean nodded. “Certainly.”
There was something weak and defenseless about the man’s pale skin and watery blue eyes. His torso was flabby and loose, his large stomach obvious beneath his clothes. He reminded Patronas of a newly hatched baby bird, had the same kind of exposed nakedness.
“I’d appreciate it if you would set aside anything of particular interest,” Patronas told him.
The Englishman began going through the shards, holding them up, quickly examining them and setting them down again. “Like I told you on the phone. There’s nothing here. Routine Aegean pottery of mixed provenance.” His voice was high and tremulous.
Patronas opened his notebook and got out his pen. “Where are you from?”
“Oxford.” McLean continued examining the shards. His fingers were unusually long, jointed like the legs of a spider. “I am one of the Senior Assistant Keepers at the Ashmoleon Museum.”
“How long have you been there?”
“A little over a year. I know I’m young for such an appointment, but I have published widely in the field. As you are undoubtedly aware, I’m an archeologist. An expert on the Minoan diaspora. In addition to my position at the Museum, I am involved in two digs: the multi-period field survey at Sfakia, Crete, and the maritime archeological project off the coast of Cyprus.” He chuckled. “You can’t call the latter a ‘dig,’ exactly, as it is under water.”
“When did you arrive on Chios?”
“The twenty-fifth, I believe it was.”
Patronas wrote everything down, noting that when he talked about himself and his career, McLean seemed more decisive, older. “How did you come to find out about the dig if you were busy scuba-diving off Cyprus?”
“Someone at Oxford or perhaps here in Greece mentioned it to me. I spoke to Eleni for a few minutes. Introduced myself and took a look around. Nothing much to it that I could see. I was planning to leave today, actually, to resume my underwater work in Cyprus. I was checking out of my hotel when your policeman summoned me.” He hesitated for a moment. “Miserable business.”
“What day was this?”
�
��At the site? July twenty-sixth. Eleni and I went over what she thought she’d found,” he said, laying stress on the word ‘thought.’ “I left her there and returned to my hotel. I was as shocked as anyone when I learned she’d disappeared.”
“How well did you know her?”
“I knew her a bit from conferences. She had the makings of a first-class archeologist.” Makings, Patronas noted, not made. There was something here.
Thinking of the letters, he asked, “Were you involved with her?”
“You mean sexually?”
Lighting a cigarette, Patronas nodded. He tossed the match in the ashtray. “Were you sleeping with her?”
“Absolutely not. Eleni was lovely, don’t get me wrong, but she was already involved with someone when I met her. And, quite honestly, I myself was very busy at the time, preparing my lectures and a show we were mounting. I really didn’t have time for a serious relationship.”
Mounting a show, not a woman. Ach, these English.
Patronas had been slowly reading the letters he’d found in Eleni Argentis’ house, painstakingly translating each word into Greek with a dictionary. They weren’t exactly love letters. There’d been long discourses on archeology mixed in with the dirty stuff. At least that’s what Patronas thought the stuff was. It was hard to tell. Most of the words in those parts were missing from his dictionary. The letters were not dated and he was sure they’d been written two or three years into the relationship. Not new anymore. Both of them moving onto other things.
He slid a piece of paper over to the Englishman and asked him to write his name.
McLean quickly complied. His handwriting was spiky and narrow. It didn’t match.
“So if Eleni Argentis wasn’t involved with you, who was she involved with?”
McLean wouldn’t meet his eyes. “What difference does it make?”
“It makes a great deal of difference, Mr. McLean. I’m sure a man of your erudition can understand why.” Mister. He would not refer to this womanish man as doctor or professor.