by Leta Serafim
Kyria Papoulis parked her car and she and her daughter helped him get his bags out. “I’ll bring you some stuffed tomatoes tomorrow. I won’t stay. Yiannis told me I mustn’t come up here anymore. I don’t know why, but he wants me gone from this place.”
“He has his reasons,” the priest said.
Patronas had confided in him about his troubled marriage, his wife’s jealousy of Marina Papoulis. “Truth is, Father, Dimitra and I have never been very happy together. We were calling it a carnival and eating dried bread.”
Papa Michalis hadn’t known what to say. “ ‘A rainy day and a contentious woman are alike,’ ” he’d ended up telling him, quoting the Old Testament. “Contentious wives are nothing new, Chief Officer. They’ve been with us a long time. Like the rain, you just have to endure them.”
He took the bags from Marina Papoulis. “You can come whenever you like. I’ll unlock the door at first light and leave it open for you.”
He reached in his pocket and took out lacquered rock he’d bought from the boy at the laiki. “Here, child,” he said, handing it to Margarita. “A little gift for you.”
Smiling, she ran her finger over the picture of a sailboat painted on the rock. “Thanks, Father.”
* * *
Patronas hadn’t witnessed the fight between Titina Argentis and Petros’ grandmother, but his wife had heard about it and described it to him in detail when he got home.
“I don’t know what they were squabbling about, but my cousin said the old woman yelled, ‘I only want what’s mine, what I’m entitled to.’ ”
“Did she seem upset?”
“The old woman? Not really. My cousin said there was something stagy about her performance, as if she were staking a claim and wanted witnesses. She’d do anything for a euro, that one. Cut your heart out and sell it on eBay.”
Patronas smiled. His wife had recently mastered the computer and had been bidding for household furniture on the Internet. He liked the concept. It made her feel as if she were shopping and yet didn’t cost him money.
“Titina Argentis was having none of it. Not that she’s any better. She might dress pretty, but she’s a kolopetsomeni, a leather ass, all the same. She thinks she’s something when everyone knows she’s just a tricked up villager from Epirus.”
Not everyone, Patronas thought wearily. It had taken him over a week to establish the origins of Titina Argentis, Eleni’s evil stepmother, a week and a fortune in long distance phone calls.
“What a pair those two are. The whore’s mother and that bitch from the Pindus mountains.”
They ate their dinner out on the terrace. “How was Marina?” Dimitra asked, keeping her head down, picking through her food with her fork. “My cousin said she saw you talking to her at the laiki.”
From the way she said it, Patronas knew that had been the real reason her cousin had called. Not to discuss Titina Argentis, but to report back to his wife on him. Dimitra must have hated that, being called by a relative about her husband. The subject of gossip.
“Fine, I guess. I only spoke with her a few minutes.”
“What did the two of you talk about?”
“Not much. She was there with Papa Michalis and her daughter.” See, Dimitra? he wanted to shout. No reason to be alarmed. Chaperones.
His wife got up and began to clear the table. “You should be more careful when you’re around her.”
“Why is that, Dimitra?” he asked impatiently. “Why should I be more careful?”
She surprised him. “Because I don’t have much, Yiannis. No children. No life with you. Not much of anything when you get right down to it. You weren’t in love with me the day we got married and you’re not in love with me now.”
“What are you talking about? I love you, Dimitra,” he said, biting off the words, angry at himself for feeling guilty. “I’ve always loved you.”
“No, you don’t, Yiannis. You never have and you never will. We aren’t even very good friends, you and me. That’s why you should be careful. Because I have nothing and you’re stealing from me.”
“Come on, Dimitra. You’re my wife. We love each other.”
She just stood there with the dirty dishes in her hands. “You think this is what the songs are about, Yiannis?” she said. “The poems? What you and I have? You think this is love?”
Chapter 16
“If you play in chicken feed, chickens will eat you.”
—Greek proverb
Weary, Papa Michalis set his bags down on the steps and unlocked the metal door of the monastery. The wind was up, tearing leaves off the trees, but as soon as he stepped inside, all was quiet. He used to welcome that quiet, that sense of apartness, of being removed from the world, but not now. Now it made him afraid. Bolting the doors again as he’d promised the chief officer, he hurried across the courtyard. He gathered some tomatoes from the garden then made his way to the kitchen to put his groceries away and start dinner.
He diced the tomatoes and cut two thick slices of bread, trying not to think about the meals he’d shared here. Petros or Eleni laughing at something he’d said. Gone now, both of them. The policeman who Patronas had assigned to guard Profitis Ilias was outside the walls, patrolling the dig site and fields beyond. He wasn’t going to come in and watch television with him. No, tonight, he was alone.
After he’d finished eating, he tidied up, then walked over to the church and chanted the evening service, his voice echoing in the deserted chamber. For some reason, the words, instead of providing their usual solace, depressed him. “I’m just tired,” he told himself.
One more task and then he’d sleep. He went upstairs to his room and opened the armoire, took out the first carton and carried it down the stairs. It took five trips to empty the armoire, and he was exhausted by the time he’d finished. It required all his strength, and he had to rest for a moment before climbing back up to his room. He thought he might do some reading and picked up his Bible, planning to read a chapter a day as part of his spiritual cleansing, his preparation for August Fifteenth.
He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep when he heard the footsteps.
For a moment he thought it was the policeman Patronas had assigned to the monastery, but then he remembered the man had been posted outside and the metal doors were locked. There was no way he could have gotten in. Puzzled, he opened the door of his room and peered out; the moon was up, bathing the courtyard in light. The well was directly below him, the water so still he could see the moon’s reflection on its mirror-like surface. A moment later, something set the water in motion, breaking up the image of the moon and sending waves splashing against the edge. That’s odd, thought the priest. There’s no wind. The air is still. He stood there for a moment watching the water but saw nothing more and returned to his bed. A few minutes later he heard the sound again. It sounded as if someone were walking on the balcony.
Papa Michalis opened his door again. “Who is it? Who’s there?”
A cloud had passed over the moon and it was darker now. A shrouded form was standing there. When the priest saw it, he screamed and tried to back away, but the intruder was too fast for him.
* * *
It took Yiannis Patronas more than two hours to get the lock drilled and open the door of the monastery, two more to secure a helicopter to airlift the priest to Athens. Patronas wasn’t sure what had happened to the old man. He’d been unconscious when they’d found him, lying in a pool of blood on the cobblestones below his room. The chief officer didn’t think the priest would survive the helicopter ride.
Kyria Papoulis had found the doors locked when she came to drop off the food that morning and had called Papa Michalis on his cellphone. When he hadn’t answered, she’d summoned the police.
Word of what had happened had spread quickly, and Patronas could see Evangelos Demos and Giorgos Tembelos parking their cars at the bottom of the hill. A local doctor was with them. “I can look after him until the medics arrive,” he told Patronas.
Patronas ordered the two men to string special tape around the entire monastery, desperate to preserve the integrity of the crime scene. “As soon as Papa Michalis is airborne, we’re going to tear this place apart,” he told them.
The helicopter arrived a few minutes later, stirring up dust as it circled the monastery. Patronas waved to the pilot and he put it down inside the courtyard. A team of medics rushed out with a gurney. They quickly secured Papa Michalis’ neck and spine and rolled him onto the stretcher, then stuck an IV in his arm and placed an oxygen mask over his face. Ducking their heads, they carried him into the waiting helicopter. The pilot waved once at Patronas and they were gone.
Patronas had welcomed the roar of the helicopter, the sense of action it provided. The silence after it left oppressed him. Spiros Korres had heard the sirens and followed the police cars up to Profitis Ilias, drawn no doubt by the chaos, the possibility of treasure. He tugged at the crime scene tape, trying to get past it, into the courtyard.
“Get out of here,” Patronas yelled, waving him away. “This is a crime scene. You have to leave.”
Korres took his time, taking a good look around before he left.
“What do you think happened?” Giorgos Tembelos asked Patronas. He nodded to the damp place on the cobblestones where he’d found the priest.
Patronas was glad Tembelos was there. A large, shambling man, he’d entered the police force the same time he had. Lacking ambition, he’d been content to remain a patrolman while Patronas moved ahead. Overweight and known for his laziness, Giorgos never moved unless he had to; no passions to speak of, save Olympiakos, the soccer of Athens, and the American magazine, Penthouse. He enjoyed the photos even though he couldn’t read English. “It’s not the words that matter,” he’d told Patronas, wiggling his eyebrows. “It’s the flesh.” Patronas had always relied on him. He was the closest thing he had to a friend on the force, and he could be counted on to act intelligently in a case like this, to cover your back, unlike Evangelos Demos, who, handicapped by his innate stupidity, was apt to get confused and shoot you himself.
“I don’t know, Giorgos. Someone tried to kill him.”
“But who? The doors were locked. How did they get in?”
And that, of course, was the question.
* * *
Patronas learned nothing from the young patrolman he’d assigned to guard Profitis Ilias.
“The wind came up around midnight,” the young man said. “Even if the priest had yelled, I wouldn’t have heard him, the way it was blowing. I don’t understand how he got by me, the intruder I mean. I made a complete circuit of the place just like you told me to and checked the doors on both sides every time I went by. I didn’t see anyone, Chief Officer. It was just me and the wind.”
“How often did you make your rounds?”
“Every fifteen minutes or so. Once I finished one round, I’d start another. I was walking back and forth all night.”
Patronas had summoned every available man to the monastery. “I want you to go over this place with a fine toothed comb,” he ordered them. “Get down on your hands and knees. Move furniture. Open windows. Dust everything for fingerprints. Everything, you hear me? Leave nothing to chance. Evangelos, you start with the refectory. Haris, you check the tunnel. See if the lock on the gate there has been tampered with and dust it for prints even if it doesn’t look like it has been.”
“What if I can’t get the lock open?”
“Shoot it. Giorgos, you work the outside perimeter. Check the weeds, the rocks, everything, for trace. He got in here somehow, either through the tunnel or some entrance we don’t know about. The bushes are high in the back. He might have snagged his clothes, so be on the lookout for threads, fabric. You, Panos Liaos, go through the monks’ cells on the second floor. Most of them are empty, so it shouldn’t take long. After you finish, help the others. I’ll take the priest’s room and the chapel. Now get moving.”
Patronas worked his way up the stairs and out along the balcony. He found a tiny strip of cloth caught in the splintered railing in front of the priest’s room. Papa Michalis was old. Perhaps he had lost his balance, maybe had a stroke, and crashed to the ground below. Patronas gathered up the threads with his tweezers and put them in a plastic bag, closing his eyes against the memory of Papa Michalis and his talk of forensics. “I like those American shows,” the old man had said, “where they swab things with Q-tips and use DNA to catch criminals.”
Patronas put the fragments of wood from the balcony in another bag and carefully inspected the priest’s room. There was nothing there that hadn’t been there before. The television was where the priest had left it, the remote laying on the worn lap of the chair. He rubbed his hand along the padded arm of the recliner. “Don’t die,” he whispered.
After he finished with the room, he moved slowly across the cobblestones until he reached the spot where he’d found Papa Michalis, the priest’s silhouette outlined now in white chalk. He noticed there was a new smell about the place, a smell of damp earth and decay, deep and penetrating. Marina was wrong, he decided, remembering what she’d said about the strange odor that had permeated the air the night Petros and Eleni were killed. This was not the smell of death, at least not recent death. No, a smell like this came only after the passage of time. It reminded him of the tomb where they’d placed his grandmother after she’d died, newly opened after fifty years. “Strange,” he said to himself.
He found a trail of bloody footprints near the well. So it hadn’t been a stroke or an accident. Someone had thrown Papa Michalis off the balcony and then come down to check on his handiwork, bloodying his shoes without realizing it. Patronas followed the footprints until they disappeared on the far side of the well. Judging by the size of the footprints, it had been a man. Had someone like Spiros Korres come to rob this place? Been surprised by the priest while searching for treasure? Or was it personal?
He called for one of his men and showed him the footprints, then entered the church. Sometimes these old churches had a crypt under the altar. Patronas carefully inspected the marble pavement. The entrance to the crypt was on the left side of the iconostasis, hidden beneath a copper baptismal font. It was a small space, chiseled out of limestone and sealed with a metal door. The door looked original. The shiny padlock securing it did not. Patronas cracked the lock open with the butt of his gun. He’d expected to find bones, remains of saints, reliquaries, as befitted a church as old as this one. Instead, he found artifacts of a different kind—intricately worked gold beads and hammered masks, an ivory statuette of a woman encircled with snakes, everything neatly set inside orange crates lined with newspaper.
Patronas lifted out the statuette. No more than eight inches tall, it was beautifully carved—the artistry far superior to similar ones he’d seen in Athens and Heraklion. Bare breasted, the woman was dressed in a flounced skirt, a snake in each hand. Their scales were delicately etched, their forked tongues and tiny jeweled eyes pulsing with life. On her head was a tiny gold diadem with symbols he didn’t recognize, and she had another snake, larger and thicker, draped around her waist like a belt. Patronas touched her painted hair. Four thousand years old and she was still Greek to the core.
In a second box, he found a pair of double axes, both of them gold. Beneath the axes was a random assortment of jewelry: pendants of rock crystal and carnelian, gold chains and earrings, heavy rings set with crude squares of amber or lapis, polished green stones he thought might be emeralds. Altogether there were five boxes. One held primitive votive offerings: fat, violin-shaped women and crude phalluses. Two clay jars occupied whatever space remained in the crypt. He raised the lid of one of the jars. It was full of human bones. Sighing, the chief officer carefully set the lid back down. “Sleep well, my brothers,” he said.
He wrote down everything he’d found and drew a sketch as to where each piece had been located. “Father, Father what have you done,” he said out loud when he’d finished. There were more
than eighty items on his list. Save for the two jars, most were small. Easy to hide in a pocket or the palm of a hand. At least a third of it was gold. There had been treasure after all.
He refastened the broken lock as best he could. His men weren’t paid much and they all had families. This would tempt them. He hid the door to the crypt as well as he could and left the church.
Giorgos Tembelos and Evangelos Demos were in the refectory. “Find anything?” Tembelos asked.
“No, nothing. It’s a mess in there.”
“This whole place is a mess. And that smell? It makes my skin crawl and I’m a cop.”
Chapter 17
Seize the blind and take from him his eyes.
—Greek proverb
Looking out the window of the cab as it drove through Athens, Patronas reflected that driving through this city was like swimming in a sea of cement—automobiles providing the motion, the eddying pools of current. The priest was in KAT, the national trauma center of Greece. The complex was located in Kifissia, a suburb north of Athens, and the ride from the airport had taken a long time. Built on a plain between three mountains, Athens was home to nearly four million people. Traffic was at a standstill, the air heavy with auto exhaust.
In the distance, he could see freighters moving out of the harbor of Piraeus into the steel-colored waters of the Saronic Gulf. He’d been forced to spend an Easter in Athens when he was a student, and he still remembered the sight of people grilling lamb outside on the pavement. Why live here? he’d wondered at the time. But he’d known the answer. Sparta has been your lot. Sparta you praise. It was easier to survive in Athens, especially after the war. You didn’t go hungry. You and your family were safe.