by Leta Serafim
“Your mother ….”
“In a word, my mother despised her.”
“Why?”
“Mirror, mirror on the wall. Because Eleni was young. Because she had no use for my mother and made fun of her pretenses. Because she was well educated and led a productive life. My mother had any number of reasons. Take your pick. I know my mother resented the hold Eleni had over her father, my stepfather. Hated the spell she cast over me. My mother excels at hating people.”
“Your mother never realized the two of you had a relationship?”
He made a gesture of hopelessness. “It was a matter of survival. You have no idea what my mother would have said, the hell she would have put me through, if she’d known. Let alone what she would have done to Eleni.”
“Killed her?”
“Murder’s not my mother’s style, Chief Officer. She may be a bitch, but she’s also a snob. She’s far too fastidious to kill someone herself. As for hiring a murderer, well, it’s just not done in the circles she travels in. It would also be expensive, and my mother values money above all else. She wouldn’t have been willing to pay the price.”
Patronas made a note. “You said you visited Eleni at Profitis Ilias?”
“Yes, many times. I must admit I didn’t share her enthusiasm for all things Minoan. But I enjoyed being up there, discussing the shards with her, watching her and that boy, Petros, work. I brought them lunch when I came ….” He looked away, his eyes wet.
“What was your impression of Petros?”
“That his childhood wasn’t so different from mine. That he was lost the same way I had been. You should have seen how desperately he sought Eleni’s approval. He thought it was a big deal, what they were doing, that the work was going to change his life. Poor kid.”
“You didn’t come to his funeral.”
“Again, my mother. She would have found it intolerable for me to attend the funeral of an employee, especially an employee of Eleni’s.”
“I heard your mother got into a fight with the boy’s grandmother, that she came to your house and your mother had her thrown off the property.”
“The woman probably dared to speak in the familiar to her.” The smile he gave Patronas was joyless. “A mortal sin in my mother’s book, using the familiar rather than the formal when addressing her.”
“I think it was about some property the old woman wanted back.”
“Perhaps Eleni owed Petros a paycheck, and his grandmother came to collect it. They’re poor people, Petros’ family. If that’s the case, let me know and I’ll take care of it.”
“Could it have been anything else?” Patronas kept his tone casual, his voice light.
“Not that I’m aware of.”
Argentis accompanied Patronas back to his car when he left. “Please keep me abreast of your investigation, Chief Officer,” he said. “I very much want to know who killed my sister.”
“I’ll do that.”
As they walked through the yard, Argentis called out to the secretaries passing by, the workmen on their lunch break. Slowly, the man Patronas had been talking to—the serious man who had loved and grieved for his dead stepsister—disappeared, and the young fool who’d been flirting with his secretary took his place, the one whose only positive attribute was his smile. A true chameleon, Patronas thought, watching him. Antonis Argentis, the master of disguise.
He sat in the Citroen, reading over his notes, thinking about what Argentis had said, disturbed by the young man’s antipathy toward his mother. Unusual, that, especially in Greece. Could Argentis have been trying to mislead him? To cast aspersions on her when he himself was the guilty party? Maybe this wasn’t a gafa after all.
Chapter 19
The crab has not learned to keep his legs straight.
—Greek proverb
Professor Alcott was sitting at the bar in the Villa Hotel, drinking beer from a bottle. He waved Patronas over. “Chief Officer.”
Patronas looked around. The room was full of tourists. Aside from the staff, he was the only Greek. Holding up his hand, he signaled the bartender and ordered an ouzo. It arrived on a silver tray and the bartender made a big production out of serving it, first putting the ice cubes in his glass with a pair of tongs, then pouring out the ouzo from a little glass beaker. In the ouzeria across the street, when you ordered ouzo you got a plate of food, olives and feta, fresh bread. Even fried squid on occasion. Something. Patronas peered into his glass. At the Villa you got tongs and ice cubes the size of dice.
“I need to go over a few things,” he told Alcott.
“Sure. Fire away.”
“You said you and Eleni Argentis had a relationship. When did it begin?”
“When she arrived at Harvard. She initiated it.” His voice was petulant. “Hanging around after class, turning up at my office to request books.”
“Did your wife know?”
Picking his beer up and setting it down again, he made overlapping rings on the marble counter. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“How long did the affair last?”
“Three years. Didn’t stop until she finished her PhD.” He took a deep breath. “I wanted to continue, but she was done. God, was she done. Done with me. Done with us. Oh, I know what you think, that I took advantage of my position and seduced her. But it wasn’t like that. No, she was the one who sought me out. Looking back, I think I might have been the means to an end for her. Brilliant as she was, she hadn’t quite mastered English and speaking it was hard for her.”
Her and me both, Patronas thought to himself. Sometimes when he drank, he thought he spoke English more fluently than he actually did, his syntax and vocabulary not so labored. Sitting in the bar with the American, he realized that this was an illusion, one of those happy pictures alcohol sometimes paints.
Alcott went on talking. “I think she thought I might be of some use to her, that my help would guarantee her success. After she graduated, she told me she didn’t want to see me again. That ‘there was no need for us to continue.’ ” He took a big swig of his beer. “Finito. Terma. Done.”
“If that was the case, why’d you come to Chios?”
“I thought when she invited me here, it was because she wanted to get back together again, that the dig was just an excuse. But no, the reason she wanted me here was the reason stated in her letter: to get my professional opinion of what she’d found, the provenance of the shards and so forth. Nothing else. She made that abundantly clear the night I arrived.”
“When was that?”
“A day or two before she was killed. July twenty-fifth, I think it was. She met my plane and we had dinner together in Chora. I pleaded with her to take me back. I even offered to marry her, but she just laughed at me. ‘You?’ she said. ‘You have a wife. Or have you forgotten?’ We were in a taverna by the water. I’m sure there were witnesses.” He ran his thumb along the side of the bottle, tearing into the label. “I got drunk after she left. Whoever was there, they’ll remember.”
He drank more beer. “I would have done anything to have her back in my life, Chief Officer. Anything. I thought if I helped her with the excavation at Profitis Ilias … if we wrote a paper on it or put together an exhibit …. I wanted to keep her in my life somehow.” He made a desperate, bleating sound. “I loved her.”
“One last question. Did you remove anything from the dig site?”
“That day?” Alcott shook his head. “When I first got to the excavation, I was too excited about seeing her to be mindful of shards, and afterwards, I was too traumatized.”
“How about Devon McLean? Could he have taken something from the site?”
“He might have. There was a lot of confusion after I found the hand. I thought he’d already come and gone, but I might have been wrong. He might have been around. If he took anything, he’ll tell you he only did so in ‘the interest of science.’ Devon’s big on ‘the interest of science.’ He has asked me repeatedly to petition you to let us process the di
g site. He even went so far as to claim it might further Eleni’s professional reputation posthumously.” His voice was sarcastic. “And ours, of course. That was in the mix, too.”
“A little callous.”
“Oh, it was. You have to remember, Chief Officer, the ego of an academic never sleeps. Especially one as ambitious as Devon McLean.”
He hesitated for a moment. “He’s right, though. Someone should go through the dig site. That bull you showed me, the one that was mixed in with the shards, it’s unique. Its value is inestimable, absolutely inestimable. Perhaps if we resumed the excavation, we would find more.” There was something shining in his eyes. Greed? Grief? Patronas wasn’t sure.
“After we’ve laid the little matter of murder to rest, you and your colleagues are welcome to the hillside. Bring bulldozers if you like. Dig up everything.”
* * *
After he left the Villa Hotel, Patronas drove to the police station and placed a long distance call to the Dean of the Archeology Department at Harvard University. He wanted to question him about Jonathan Alcott. Self-conscious about his English, Patronas would have preferred to have conducted this conversation in private, somewhere away from the front desk, the ringing phones. But given the layout of police headquarters, this was impossible. One large room, it was subdivided into grubby little cubicles separated from one another by metal dividers less than four feet high. The metal desks, the walls and dividers, all were painted gray—the same flat gray the military used, the color of aircraft carriers and transport planes—and at work Patronas often felt like he was back in the Navy, back in the bowels of the battleship where he’d done his tour of duty.
The space allotted to him as Chief Officer was a little bigger than where his men were housed, but equally public. Everyone could hear everything. He knew that, because whenever he had fights with Dimitra on the phone, Tembelos and the others made fun of him, repeating word for word what he’d said to his wife. He’d have to remember to keep his voice down. A fax machine in the corner rattled continuously, spewing photos of criminals wanted by Interpol. He added them to the others taped to the wall by his desk. Once posted, he never removed them. “I need to clean this place up,” he muttered, looking around as he took a seat. Some of the mug shots looked like they dated from the seventies, the wanted men sporting Beatles haircuts and platform shoes. They must be dead by now. If not dead, then getting around with walkers and canes. As felons, surely retired.
The dean at Harvard answered on the third ring. Though Patronas knew rudimentary English, he was forced to scribble down half the words the man used and look them up in his Divry’s English-Greek, Greek-English Dictionary after he hung up the phone in a desperate effort to understand what the dean had been saying. Alcott’s reputation was “stellar,” which meant star, according to Divry’s. Now was this a good thing, to be a star? Probably. Ach, these academics and the way they talked.
In addition, the Dean had claimed Alcott’s reputation was “unblemished,” “his teaching literate and cohesive,” “his research well-reasoned, his conclusions unimpeachable.”
In the Dean’s experience, “Alcott’s academic integrity was without parallel.” He was “a credit to the department and to his field.” This last bit had given Patronas the most trouble. “Credit” had to do with money in his experience. What did “credit” have to do with being a professor?
“Do you think he kills people?” he’d wanted to scream into the phone, just to hear the man’s reaction, but thought better of it. Alcott, after all, might be innocent and just what he said he was—a love-sick, middle-aged fool, seeking some kind of sexual Holy Grail in the form of Eleni Argentis. These things happened. Not to Greek men, as a general rule, who saw all women as pretty much the same. One gives you trouble, get another. That was the motto of the Greek male. Your mother, now she was different. A mother you enshrined in your heart, loved beyond reason. But as for the rest? Vrasta. Boil them. But in other cultures, yes, he’d been told these things happened. Men made fools of themselves over women.
Chapter 20
The potter puts the handles wherever he wishes.
—Greek proverb
“Ah, Chief Officer,” Devon McLean opened the door of his room. “Come in, come in.”
Patronas couldn’t face another round with the Divry’s Greek-English Dictionary, so he’d put off calling Oxford University to discuss Devon McLean. He thought he’d return to the Villa Hotel and speak with the Englishman first and then compare what he said with what his colleagues had to say about him.
“Sorry to bother you again.” Patronas waved his notebook in the air. “I have a few more questions.”
He inspected the hotel room, taking in the books, the furniture. The suite was immaculate, the man’s notes neatly stacked beside his laptop, his books alphabetized on a make-shift shelf. There were no shards or artifacts of any kind that Patronas could see.
“I’m sorry if you’ve been inconvenienced by our investigation. Hopefully you’ll be able to return to Cyprus soon.”
“Perfectly all right. I haven’t been idle. I’ve been emailing my colleagues and editing a paper. Taking advantage of the hiatus in my summer schedule, as it were, to do some work.” As in previous conversations, the man’s Greek was flawless.
“What’s the paper about?”
“The dating of Akrotiri, those ruins on Santorini.”
“Minoan, aren’t they?”
“Of course, but are they Middle Minoan or Late Minoan? I think archeologists underestimate the length of time Akrotiri had been inhabited. I think it was settled far earlier, perhaps even proto-Minoan. Are you familiar with the dating of Minoan artifacts, Chief Officer?”
“Somewhat.”
“Well, I think Akrotiri is Early Minoan. It might have even housed a Neolithic settlement, though that is harder to prove, given that the pumice is so heavy everywhere. It’ll take a century to get down to the level of the eruption. In some places the ash is over fifty feet high.”
“How can you date Akrotiri from here?”
“Oh, I’ve done all my research. It was just a matter of organizing everything and getting my thoughts down on paper.” He said ‘my thoughts’ in a reverential way, like a priest in church when he reads the gospel.
“I’m working on a dateline, too. Who was at Profitis Ilias and when they were there. Could you tell me again when you visited the excavation?”
“Certainly. July twenty-seventh.”
“Did you visit Profitis Ilias before July twenty-seventh?”
The Englishman’s face became somber. “No. I had just arrived from abroad and hadn’t yet figured out how to get up to the monastery. I didn’t know how far it was from the road at that point and was reluctant to try walking the distance. Bum leg, I’m afraid. Nothing serious. Just an old court tennis injury that precludes lengthy hikes. And, though my Greek is good, I didn’t really know how to go about chartering a mule.”
“Tell me again when you arrived?”
“The day before she was killed. I flew into Athens from Egypt and caught a flight here.”
“You and Professor Alcott are both staying in this hotel. Do you see much of him?”
“At first I did. For example, I was with him the night he found the hand in the trench. He was in wretched shape. Kept talking about what ‘they’d done to her.’ The blood. You’ve heard him. Blaming himself.”
“Blaming himself?”
McLean nodded. “I must say, Jon had had a great deal to drink, a very great deal, and he was more than a little incoherent. I had to get a porter to help me get him back to his room. He kept saying if only he’d gotten here sooner, he could have saved her, that kind of thing. It didn’t make much sense.” He hesitated for a moment. “You know, Chief Officer, Alcott’s a decent man. He was an even better one before he met Eleni. You should have seen him when he was in his prime. I went on a dig with him in Cyprus.” The archeologist smiled at the memory. “It was amazing. Jon was unstoppabl
e. A force of nature.”
The chief officer frowned. There was something in his voice, he thought, watching McLean closely. Something off. The way he said ‘Jon’ caressed Alcott’s name.
McLean continued talking. “When he got entangled with her, he lost something—his edge, his focus. He was like an animal with its leg caught in a vise: he just couldn’t get free. You know, he risked everything, not just his marriage but his tenure, his reputation, with that affair. It was a terrible thing to see. We, members of the archeological community, all talked about it. At every conference people discussed the situation. I’m hoping once this unhappy episode has passed, he’ll be able to resume his life. Get on with it, as it were.”
“I know you said you visited the site. You didn’t think much of it.”
“Second rate, if you want the truth. I thought it was pathetic, actually, the way she’d made such a fuss about those miserable shards. Interrupting our summer schedules and bringing us here for nothing. Half of Greece is covered with better relics than the ones she and that boy, Petros, found. I’m not sure even half of it is Minoan. I think much of it dates from a much later time. Roman, perhaps, or even the early Christian era.”
“I thought you came on your own. I didn’t realize Eleni had summoned you here.”
“It was strictly voluntary on my part, don’t get me wrong. Curiosity killing the cat and all that. She spoke to a colleague of mine in Athens, who in turn spoke to me. I was intrigued by what I’d heard. I won’t deny it. I thought she’d found a second Knossos. What a disappointment it all was, however. What a waste of time.”
“So you don’t think she was killed because of the excavation?”
“Not by anyone knowledgeable. A local might think those bits had value, but anyone in the field could tell instantly they were virtually worthless.”