by Leta Serafim
Patronas found a lantern, untethered Chryssoula, and rode in the direction of the crag. It was farther than he thought, the passage difficult in the dying light. Swinging the light in an arc around him, he urged the horse forward, moving beyond the dig site and on up the hill. There was little vegetation on the slope, and the rocks were riddled with fissures where the lava had folded in on itself. The soil was thin and the color of unfired clay. Patronas dismounted frequently, checking the ground beneath him. He was sure there was a cave here. The bats had to be coming from somewhere, and there were few trees, no place for them to roost in this wasteland, nothing but tortured shafts of blackened stone. Caves were worshipped in ancient times, he remembered. Zeus had been born in one, the Diktaian Cave, located on Crete, and the Minoans had sought refuge there after the volcano erupted on Thera and the resulting tidal wave engulfed their island.
“Probably had something to do with female anatomy, the cave thing,” he told himself. In Athens, there was the Cave of Pan. God knows what went on there in the old days, given the lascivious nature of the god, whose image with its enormous phallus was a favorite of young tourists. Later, the Christians had taken over some of these sites. His mother had brought him to one when he was a boy, the monastery of Panayia Spiliani, the Madonna of the Cave, on Samos. He still remembered the total darkness, the endlessly dripping water. He wasn’t looking forward to exploring a cave tonight.
He spurred Chryssoula forward. Goats were living somewhere on the hillside, and he could hear their bells jingling faintly in the darkness. So someone had been here, a shepherd perhaps. There was a rough trail leading farther up the crag, and he followed it with his horse, wondering where it led. A few minutes later, he came to the corral where the goats were housed. It was fashioned out of twigs and brush, as was the crude lean-to in the back, shelter for the animals when it rained. A raised table of rock—broad and flat—formed the rear wall of the corral. A furrow ran along the base of this rock, but Patronas saw nothing there when he inspected it, only a thin cleft in the earth filled with spiders. For a moment he watched the goats milling around inside the corral. When he raised the lantern, their eyes reflected back at him and they shied away. Evidence of the animals was everywhere; he could see hoof marks in the trampled soil, the ground marked by droppings.
He smelled something wafting on the night air, something besides goat, but he couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Patronas hoisted himself back up on the horse and rode farther. Near the top of the hill, it looked like someone had been excavating with a shovel, the dirt overturned in an orderly way. The heat of the day had broken and the stars were bright overhead. He inspected the area as carefully as he could but found no opening, nothing that led underground. He wasn’t even sure it was a dig site he was looking at. It might have been some peasant’s vegetable garden. Those without land often worked a borrowed plot to supplement their meager income without the owner’s knowledge or consent. Whenever possible, they would lay claim to the land outright over time. Perhaps it was the Communist in him, but he was always sympathetic to these outlaw farmers. Better for those who cared for the land to possess it than some absentee landlord in Bayswater or Astoria.
He circled the area on horseback, but saw nothing and started back down, guided by the distant lights of the monastery. He was about halfway down the hill when he noticed the smell again. It was stronger here, more pungent. With a snort, Chryssoula reared up, pawing the ground and breathing heavily. Patronas patted her neck, trying to soothe her. “What is it, girl? What’s the matter?”
The horse neighed loudly and jerked her head. Afraid of being thrown, he dismounted, took the reins and led the mare away on foot. He had gone about a hundred yards when he heard the noise. It was a metallic creak, the sound the monastery doors occasionally made, piercing, grating. At first he thought it was the mare’s hooves clattering against the stones, but when he looked down he saw they were on soft ground. He walked in the direction of the sound but found nothing, only a stunted olive tree, creaking in the wind. A few minutes later he heard the sound again, closer this time. Raising his lantern, Patronas examined the area. All he saw were outcroppings of volcanic rock, overgrown with thistles and prickly pear. Behind him loomed the shadowy mass of the crag. It was as if the hill itself had made the sound. Patronas shivered, afraid now, in spite of himself.
Chapter 10
Cabbage twice over is death.
—Greek proverb
“You remember when I asked you who Eleni was involved with?” Patronas asked. “It was Professor Alcott.”
“Her adviser?” The priest put down his spoon. “You think he killed Petros?”
“Could be. I don’t know.”
“Eleni never said anything about him except as an archeologist. She told me many personal things. I’m surprised she didn’t say something. At least give me a hint that they were ….” The priest fumbled around, seeking the right word before settling on, “paramours.”
“She might have been too ashamed to tell you. He’s married. And if they’d gotten caught, it would have been professional suicide. It’s very risky for a professor to be involved with a student. A man could lose his job over a thing like that.”
The priest broke off a piece of bread. “Still, I don’t think he did it. Killed them, I mean. I saw him after he found the hand. No one is that good an actor.”
He ladled up some more lentils and added them to Patronas’ bowl. It was two weeks before August Fifteenth, the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, and all Orthodox Christians were expected to abstain from meat, fish, cheese, eggs, and oil during this time. As a priest he must, of course, comply.
Looking down at his plate, Patronas wished he’d remembered Papa Michalis would be fasting and declined his invitation to dinner. “A lentil boils against its will,” Patronas’ mother always said. So did the eater of the lentil, in his opinion.
The priest was slurping down his meal has if it was ice cream. “The timing is also off,” he said. “Petros was killed long before Alcott got here.” He cut off more bread and began to mop his plate.
Patronas stirred the lentils in his bowl, disheartened by their brackish color. “Cooked these in water, did you, Father?”
Papa Michalis nodded. “I have some Lenten cake, too, if you’d like. One of my sisters sent it to me.”
“The kind with raisins, sort of heavy?” His grandmother had made that same sort of cake in the weeks before Easter. It did not, if his memory served him right, deserve the title ‘cake.’ No matter, it had to be better than lentils.
It wasn’t. “Where does your sister live, Father? Chios?”
“Oh, no. She’s never left the village. She’s in Mani.”
That explained the terrible dryness. The cake had probably been on the road for a month.
Patronas pushed his plate away. “Tell me what you know about Eleni’s family.”
“The Argentis family is one of the oldest on Chios. They were originally from Genoa, or so they claim, direct descendents of the Doge. They own vast tracts of land in Campos and along the sea on the way to Vrontados. The church up there, Aghia Barbara, was donated by her grandfather as was the soccer field behind the school. They have deep ties to Chios and like to be known as benefactors here.”
“Ship owners, right?”
“Yes. They are part of that group that winters in London and summers here, but who would say ‘Chios’ if someone asked them their place of origin. You know the ones I mean. They like to eat like the local people when they come here: a big table for twenty at a taverna, drinks for the whole village at the ouzeria, that sort of thing. I think of it as a kind of dress-up game they play. Pretending to be the same kind of people their ancestors were when, of course, they’re not.”
“And Eleni was one of them?”
Papa Michalis hesitated for a moment. “Yes, I suppose she was. No matter how casually she dressed or how friendly she acted, she always held herself back a little. Oh, she’d help clean
up when we ate together, but you always knew she was playing at it, that what was required of others was not required of her. It was an unspoken thing, but it was always there.”
“Not so different from her stepmother.” Patronas picked one of the raisins out of the cake and ate it.
“No, perhaps not.”
“It doesn’t add up. Why would a young woman with money to burn spend her life in a God-forsaken place like Profitis Ilias, searching for Minoans?”
“I don’t know. They weren’t good people, the Minoans. Everyone thinks they were joyful, lighthearted seafarers, childlike and innocent. But they weren’t; they were pagans and killers. They had rites of dismemberment. They practiced human sacrifice.”
“A lot of the ancients did.”
“Not like them. Archeologists found a little temple on Crete that had collapsed during an earthquake. Inside was the skeleton of a young man, trussed up like a bull. Eleni told me the clay bowls in the temple contained human blood, and that the priests had been bleeding him out as he died, the same as they did with the animals they sacrificed.”
Patronas ate listlessly for a moment. He wished the priest would change the subject.
“That dig got a lot of publicity. It was even in National Geographic. It set off a firestorm, she said. Many of her colleagues in archeology refused to accept the evidence that the Minoans practiced human sacrifice, especially the Greek ones, but she was sure they had. ‘That’s what the snakes and the bulls were about,’ she said. ‘That’s what makes them so interesting.’ ”
“So our forefathers were bloodthirsty people.”
“Indeed. Greek history is full of death, ritualized death. Look at Agamemnon. He sacrificed his daughter, didn’t he?”
“Iphigenia. Yes, on the eve of the Trojan War.”
Patronas got up from the table. It had been a long day, and he was sick of this. “With all due respect, Father, what does this have to do with Petros’ death or my murder investigation? Are you saying he was the victim of human sacrifice? That his grandmother slit his throat so she could win the war against the Spartans?”
* * *
“Interesting.” Patronas climbed out of the trench. “Either Titina Argentis was lying or the killer took the package with him.”
He and the priest had gone through everything but had found no trace of the package from England. Patronas looked around the dig site, struck anew by its isolation. “He had to have come up that path from the parking lot. There’s no other way to get here. The rocks are too steep.”
“I don’t think you can assume it was a ‘he,’ ” the priest said primly. “The killer might have been a woman.”
Hercules Poirot, Patronas thought. Or perhaps Miss Marple.
“Greek history is full of women who kill,” the priest went on. “Medea. Clytemnestra.”
Patronas nodded. His mother-in-law was certainly capable of murder; his wife, too, if provoked.
“Do you have a specific woman in mind?” he asked.
“Maybe.”
“Who?”
“Eleni’s stepmother.” He said this so softly Patronas could barely hear him.
“She came to Profitis Ilias a couple of months ago. Eleni wasn’t here. She asked me to show her around. Every room she wanted to see. Eleni was furious when she found out. She said we’d all pay for it now. ‘My stepmother’s greed is as boundless as the sea,’ Eleni said. She called her ‘a cobra.’ May God forgive me, but it suited Titina Argentis right down to the ground. There is something snake-like about her, reptilian. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. What if I opened Pandora’s box that day? What if I said something I shouldn’t have?”
“Like what, Father? That her stepdaughter found Atlantis?”
“You don’t understand. She was after something. I’m sure of it. The way she fastened onto me with her fingers, those eyes of hers. I felt like I was gripped by a demon, that Lilith had me in tow. In the Bible it says Lilith could kill unprotected babies with her smile. I felt like Titina Argentis was the same, that everything about her was poison, evil.”
“Lilith, huh?” Although he wouldn’t have put it quite that way, he didn’t disagree with the assessment. Titina Argentis had gotten to him, too.
Papa Michalis threw up his hands. “Oh, what’s the matter with me? I shouldn’t talk like this. The church teaches that all of us have souls, the capacity for goodness. We’re all creatures of God.”
“You ever visit a war zone, Father? A prison camp? Places where civilization wears a little thin? We’re not creatures of God. We don’t have the capacity for goodness. At least not all of us.”
“Of course we do. It’s a cornerstone of our faith.”
“Your faith, Father, not mine. I’m a policeman, remember? Judging by what I’ve seen, human beings are the devil’s own, his one true family. There’s nothing divine about us. We’re just a bunch of animals, greedy animals who harm their own kind, harm them to possess what they have, harm them to own. The only thing special about us is, we don’t die off when we should. We adapt. We endure. That’s our single greatest attribute as a species … our staying power. In our tolerance of misery, we are quite versatile.” Patronas was thinking of his marriage as he said this. “We act blindly, then ponder what we’ve done and find a rational or, since the advent of psychiatry, a not-so-rational reason for it.”
The priest’s mouth fell open. He looked like a schoolgirl who’d heard her first dirty word.
Patronas felt guilty. It was one thing to think this way, another to give voice to it in front of an elderly priest, to commit blasphemy. He hastened to change the subject.
“You said you showed Titina Argentis this place. How about giving me a tour?”
* * *
The monks’ cells were on the second floor of the monastery. Pilgrims used these rooms when they came for the saint’s name day, the priest explained. The rest of the time, the space was empty. “They didn’t have much, these pilgrims,” he concluded, noting the bedroom slippers someone had left behind, the water-logged prayer books in a drawer.
The priest’s room was larger and better furnished than the rest. Like the other cells, it opened off the balcony and overlooked the courtyard. A carved walnut armoire covered most of one wall. The priest pushed the door of the armoire shut and leaned against it. “Nothing to see in there. Just priestly attire and religious accouterments.”
A huge leather chair and television set took up most of the remaining space. The priest sat down on the chair and demonstrated how it worked. “Eleni had it shipped here from America. They call it a ‘recliner.’ ”
He picked up the remote and began flipping through the channels. “She said I needed to have something to do, that it was too quiet up here. ‘A person can’t be expected to pray twenty-four hours a day,’ she said. ‘Even a priest needs some entertainment.’ She had a crew of men install a satellite receptor up on the roof. That’s how I watch my detective shows. I get television shows from all over the world. The Bishop was furious when he found out. Said the money she spent should have gone to charity. She told him it was her money and she could do what she wanted with it. She was like that, Eleni.” Tears filled his eyes. “Strong.”
Thinking to distract him, Patronas asked if he could sit in the reclining chair. It was indeed palatial, padded everywhere, with room to spread out. If he upholstered the Citroen, it might look like this. “How on earth did she ever get it up here?” he asked.
The priest shrugged. “With enough money, all things are possible.”
* * *
The chapel inside Profitis Ilias dated from the fifth century, the priest told him, built to house an icon given to Chios by the Patriarch in Constantinople. A small gold-encrusted work, the icon depicted the Virgin alone on a throne and was housed in a locked glass case to the right of the altar inside the church. The earliest icons did not feature the Christ Child, the priest said. No one knew why. Perhaps it was the gradual synthesis of pagan images with the
Christian that had taken place in the early years of the church. Perhaps the early painters copied Roman goddesses. Who could say?
The inside walls of the chapel were blackened from centuries of incense and candle smoke, the frescoes crude and primitive. The images looked to be from the Apocalypse—flames consuming villages, men and women running in burning clothing, the whites of their eyes bright against the sooty background. Patronas had never seen anything comparable and studied them for a long time.
“Who painted these?”
“Some Chiot, probably. The roof leaks and they’ve been painted over many times. I think the originals were done at the same time as the church.”
“They’re old, then.”
“Yes. At least one thousand five hundred years old, maybe more.”
At one time, the monastery had been self-sufficient, Papa Michalis explained. There’d been terraced fields, fruit and olive trees, herds of goats and sheep pastured on the surrounding hills. “I continue the tradition, but on a smaller scale,” he said, pointing to chickens housed in a wire coop next to the chapel, the trellised grape arbor and the tidy rows of vegetables growing in a small plot beside it. “I make my own wine. Bread, too, sometimes.” The bakery was a cold damp space next to the kitchen, the old wooden troughs as big as canoes.
Taking one of the keys from his belt, Papa Michalis unlocked an iron gate and pushed it open. “As you know, Profitis Ilias has a back entrance. They say it was built in 1822. But I think it’s much older.”
The blocks of stone reminded Patronas of the tunnel on Samos he’d visited on a school excursion when he was a boy. It had been carved out of a mountain in 524 B.C. to ensure a water supply in times of siege. But there was no water here. He walked back and forth, running his hands over the stones, inspecting the tunnel. Who or what had so threatened the settlers on this hillside that they had spent decades building a way to escape it?