The Devil Takes Half

by Leta Serafim

  “My wife, Dimitra, said Marina stopped by the house,” Patronas said. “She said Marina had something for me.”

  “Svingi. Yes, that’s right.” Papoulis gave him a wan smile. “She and Margarita wanted to surprise you. They were planning it for days, giggling with yiayia about it in the kitchen.”

  “My wife said Marina had something else.” Patronas fought to keep his voice level, to stay in control, professional. “Some information. Do you have any idea what it was?”

  Nikos Papoulis shook his head. A few minutes later, he started to cry again, silently at first, and then with great, gulping sobs. Rocking back and forth, he pounded the arms of his chair, calling his wife’s name.

  * * *

  “The ruins run under the entire place,” Patronas told Papa Michalis. “Probably even beyond. They’re at least as big as Knossos and in much better condition. Save for a couple of ditches the murderer dug in the back, it hasn’t been touched in centuries. This will put Chios on the map. It will be like Pompeii.”

  “Why do you suppose they built inside a cave?”

  “I don’t know. My guess is, Eleni Argentis got it wrong. Whatever is up there isn’t a palace. It looks more like a refugee camp. These people must have come after the volcano on Thera erupted and their homes got washed away.”

  “And they wanted someplace high,” said the priest, nodding, “someplace safe. I remember you asked me about the Phaistos Disc.”

  “It was no use as a map, but it did get me started. I studied the drawings on it and then, when I was up at Profitis Ilias, I noticed the cobblestones were set in similar pattern. The Disc has a lot of symbols pertaining to water, fish mainly, and that drew me to the well. I don’t think the Disc has anything to do with Chios, though. This place I found, it was an outpost, Father. A footnote. It’s not the main act.”

  Patronas lit a cigarette. He and the priest were sitting in a taverna. At the priest’s suggestion, they’d stopped to eat after leaving Nikos Papoulis. Although neither was hungry, they’d ordered steaks and drank three carafes of wine between them.

  “I’ve ordered my men to stay out of the cave. I told them the walls were unstable and might come down at any time. The truth is, I was afraid if they got in there, they’d loot it, same as Petros did. You’re the only person I’ve told.”

  Patronas emptied the carafe into his glass and held it up, signaling the waiter for more. “You know that poem, ‘Ithaki?’ ”

  Papa Michalis nodded. “Cavafy.” He recited:

  And if you find her poor, Ithaka has not defrauded you, for at last you will understand what the search for Ithaka means.

  “The point being, it’s the journey and what you learn. But, tell me, Father, what is there to learn here?”

  “Yiannis …” The priest didn’t like the desperate, keening note he kept hearing in Patronas’ voice. The chief officer had been working for nearly forty-eight hours straight, and he had suggested they eat together as a way of making him take a break. He now thought this might have been a mistake.

  As in the previous two murders, in spite of their best efforts, neither Patronas nor the forensics experts from Athens had found anything that would identify the murderer—no fingerprints, no usable footprints, nothing. Whoever this man was, his skills more than equaled those of the Greek police. The Ministry of Justice in Athens had gotten involved, and now there was talk of bringing in Interpol or the American FBI. Papa Michalis doubted Patronas would be able to keep his job much longer.

  “I stayed up all night thinking about it,” Patronas went on. “There has to be something I can take away from this. Some message. But what? Marina stopped by my house as an act of kindness and Dimitra sent her off to be killed.”

  “Yiannis, listen to me. She was killed by a madman. Dimitra didn’t do it.” His wife’s culpability had been the theme for much of the conversation that afternoon, that and all Patronas’ misspent years with her. Such talk wouldn’t catch Marina’s killer and the priest was sick of listening to it.

  “Oh, she sent her there all right.” Patronas drained his glass and set it down carefully. He was quite drunk. “The bitch.” Patronas raised the carafe again. “Do you know, the priest blessed the two of us when we got married? Can you believe it? He said that we, the newly betrothed, were incomplete, that only together would we be ‘made perfect.’ Yet Dimitra and I weren’t made perfect. We were anything but perfect.” Impatiently, he looked around for the waiter. “We were nothing together.”

  As soon as the waiter returned with a new carafe, Patronas refilled his glass and drank it down. “I suppose I could have been kinder. Such a simple thing, kindness, and yet I wasn’t kind.” He was slurring his words now. “You should never take another human being for granted, Father. All of us deserve to be loved. And if we can’t provide that simple service to someone, we should get out of their way and give them a chance to seek it elsewhere.”

  His eyes filmed with tears. “Anyway, who cares about Dimitra? What about Marina? You’re a priest. Explain it to me. Why did this have to happen?” An edge had come into Patronas’ voice. “You’re a man of God. You know all the answers.”

  “Not to this. I have no answer to this.” Papa Michalis wanted to hit him.

  “From what Dimitra said, I just missed her. If I’d only stayed up at Profitis Ilias a little longer, I would have seen her. Fifteen minutes more, that’s all it would have taken. Fifteen minutes and everything would have turned out differently.”

  This grieved him, the priest thought, the fifteen minutes. Patronas had talked of little else since the night he’d found the body.

  “During the war, people spoke like you,” the priest told him. “Soldiers. One man gets killed, another doesn’t. Fifteen minutes more, fifteen minutes less. The arbitrariness of a bullet, a bomb … the randomness of death. You can’t think like that. It doesn’t do you any good.” He shook his head. “Faith helps, but from what you’ve said, you have none.”

  “Oh, but I do. I believe in evil, Father. I have total faith in it. It’s relentless, relentless and everlasting. And it always wins. You can count on it. Evil always wins.”

  Patronas emptied his glass and set it down. “My question is, does it exist on its own like bacteria or do we create it? I don’t know about God, but I’m sure Satan exists. Yes, indeed. He walks among us, Satan does. He’s everywhere.”

  Like a drunk in a bar who thinks he’s discovered the meaning of life. The priest moved the carafe out of his reach. Patronas had had enough.

  “Come on, Yiannis, pull yourself together. You’ve got work to do.”

  Patronas raised his head. “Marina’s dead,” he mumbled. “In no small part because of me. She died naked and alone after someone cut her up, cut her up …. Just think of that, Father. What exactly would you have me do?”

  “To start with? I’d have you arrest the whole lot of them. As for the rest of this saxlamara you’ve been going on about, this blasphemous claptrap, it can wait for another day. If you didn’t answer those questions when you were eighteen, Yiannis, you’re not going to answer them now.”

  * * *

  Patronas thought about Dimitra as he drove to his mother-in-law’s house. He wasn’t looking forward to seeing her again, nor hearing her voice. He doubted that he’d ever look forward to anything connected with Dimitra again.

  A row of abandoned windmills marked the beginning of Vrontados, and he could see the lights of the village up ahead. To the east was the promontory of Dhaskalopetra. It held a coarsely carved stone where Homer was said to have lectured. Chiots claimed Homer had been born on the island, but there was no proof, save the eroded rock and the legends that surrounded it.

  His wife was outside, threading metal skewers with chunks of pork and laying them out on a grill. She was wearing an apron and her face was beaded with sweat. Intent on her work, she barely acknowledged him.

  “The day she came, did Marina say anything about the papers she had for me?” Patronas said.
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  “You came here to ask me that?”

  “I tried calling, but you didn’t answer.”

  Setting the skewer down, she turned to face him. “We’ve already been over this, Yiannis. No, Marina Papoulis did not discuss what was in the envelope, nor did she leave any papers for you. All she left were svingis.” She spat the word.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “Did she say anything about what she’d discovered? Why she had to find me?”

  “I already told you. She said something about ‘playing the priest.’ ” And then it came, the flicker of malice. “What do you think? I’d invite her in and tell her my life story? We had nothing in common, the two of us. All we had in common was you.”

  He fought to control himself. “She’s dead because of you.”

  “So you keep telling me.” She turned back to the grill and began fanning the coals with a folded newspaper. Cinders and bits of ash flew in the air.

  “Dead,” he shouted. “You hear me? Dead!”

  She was crying now. “Go away, Yiannis.”

  Chapter 31

  He who is hungry, dreams of bread.

  —Greek proverb

  The service for Marina Papoulis was a simple one. The church in Campos kept a coffin on hand, a plain wooden box that was used for funerals. After the bishop chanted the liturgy, the mourners followed him to the cemetery where her body was to be laid to rest. Patronas and Nikos Papoulis had conferred and decided that, in deference to Marina’s wounds, they would wrap her in the linen shroud early, before people started arriving at the church, and not at the graveside as was the usual custom. Neither wanted to mar the dignity of her burial with a public display. After being disinterred from the communal coffin, she would be buried in the enclosed area that housed her father and her paternal grandparents, her mother’s family having been too poor for the luxury of a stone tomb.

  A large photograph of Marina on her wedding day was on display on a wooden stand provided by the undertaker. In recognition of her many years of service at Profitis Ilias, the bishop had ordered her bier covered with flowers, to which Patronas now added a small handful of his own—roses and jasmine, purchased from the florist across the street. The cemetery was crowded. Patronas had expected only family members to stay for the burial, but it looked as if most of Chios had turned up. He saw little Margarita, standing between her two brothers, her face pinched and white. She was wearing a black dress with a white collar and shiny new shoes with straps; her legs and arms impossibly thin. All worn out with crying, she didn’t look like the child he’d played hide and seek with. He was surprised to see the grandmother of Petros Athanassiou standing behind Marina’s family, grim-faced and isolated from the others. Why was she here? he wondered. Come to pay her respects to a fellow victim? Curious now, he scanned the crowd. A sto diablo, even Antonis Argentis and his mother were there. Apparently Marina’s funeral was a historic event on the island, an affair that would be talked about for years, not to be missed.

  A group of elderly women from her village spoke to him of her goodness and generosity, how she’d sponsored their Easters and Christmases for years, leaving food for the feast on their doorsteps. Anonymously, of course, though one of them had seen her and told the others, so they’d all known it was Marina who’d been responsible. Another talked of how she’d single-handedly shamed the rich into providing dowries for the poor girls of the parish and fed the poor children in the neighborhood, seating them at the table with her own family.

  “She wouldn’t take no for an answer,” the woman said.

  No, she wouldn’t, Patronas thought sadly, remembering what her husband had said about her. They’d been discussing why she hadn’t turned around at the barricade and come home. Why she’d continued on to Profitis Ilias. “You mustn’t blame yourself, Chief Officer,” Papoulis had told him. “If she wanted to do something, she’d do it. There would be no way to stop her.”

  She’d been like that even when they were children. Once she’d wanted to steal figs from a neighbor’s tree. He himself had been afraid and tried to talk her out of it. The man would catch him; the tree branches were too high; they’d fall. But Marina had insisted. She’d ended up standing on his shoulders, holding onto the trunk of the tree for support, while he held her ankles. She’d stripped the tree bare, raining figs down on him, laughing the whole time. Her husband was right: once Marina got an idea in her head, that was it. You couldn’t tell her ‘No’ or ‘It’s impossible.’ Just like Muhammad Ali, the American boxer, whose words had been plastered all over Greece during the Olympics. He’d said, ‘Impossible is not a fact; it’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration; it’s a dare.’ Nikos Papoulis had told him Marina had loved that quote and had copied it and put it up on the bulletin board in her daughter’s room. ‘Impossible’ and Marina, they were incompatible.

  Nikos Papoulis took the children away before they finished the service, leaving Marina’s mother at the graveside. She began to cry, reaching out toward her daughter’s grave with her hands and calling her name. The bishop signaled Papa Michalis, who gently led her away and found her a chair in the shade.

  After Marina had been laid to rest, her relatives offered coffee and brandy to the mourners in the small building at the back of the cemetery. Papa Michalis stayed near Marina’s mother throughout the burial and its aftermath.

  If I take anything with me from these hours, Patronas thought, it will be the image of those two old people dressed entirely in black—one crippled, the other wracked with grief—leaning against each other, struggling to stay upright.

  He kept thinking of the day he’d met Marina for the first time, of the young girl she’d been. Her mother had bought a new dress for her, a white sundress with a smocked top embroidered with tiny yellow sunflowers, and she was wearing white leather shoes, shined so recently he could still smell the polish. Remembering her like that—the way she’d smiled at him that first afternoon, her eyes full of mischief—he wanted to scream. To eat ashes and tear out his hair like the ancients had done.

  Chapter 32

  He grasps even the naked sword.

  —Greek proverb

  The travel Agency was located on a side street near the harbor, handwritten schedules for the boats to Athens taped to its front door. The owner rose from her desk to greet Patronas. “Chief Officer, what can I do for you?”

  “I need to go through Marina’s things.”

  “But your men were here already.” He could see her calculating how much his presence, sitting at the front of her office, was going to cost her in tourist walk-ins. “They came two days ago.”

  “I need to do it again.” He didn’t tell her the papers he’d found in the cave were too bloody to read and that he’d had to send them to Athens to be transcribed by the forensic people.

  Reluctantly, she led him over to an empty desk. Family photographs were pinned to the wall behind it, and there was a pair of worn slippers lying under the chair.

  Patronas turned on the computer, thinking it wouldn’t be hard to retrace her steps in cyberspace, just find the sites she’d accessed and follow them. She’d emailed Olympic Airlines and two or three shipping lines the morning before she died, and he called the airlines to see if anyone remembered the query. It took some time, but he found a woman who did. Marina had wanted to know if they’d had anyone flying to Chios from Cyprus by way of Athens on July twenty-fourth. “I told her no,” the woman said. “She said she needed me to check a bunch of other dates, too, and asked for the names of all the passengers who’d flown here from the United States. It was a lot of work, but I got her everything she asked for.”

  “Did you keep a record of this?”

  “Sure. She told me it was for a police investigation and might be used as evidence, so I made a copy and gave it to my supervisor. If you want, I can fax it to you. What’s your number?”

  A few minutes later, he had the list. Jonathan Alcott had arrived
when he said he had, on July twenty-fifth—Olympic Airlines from New York to Athens and then on to Chios. Manos and Voula were listed as passengers on an Olympic flight from Athens to Chios on July twenty-sixth. He checked his notes; that was also the day they’d told him they’d arrived. Devon McLean and Titina Argentis, contrary to what they’d told him, had arrived together three days earlier.

  He called the woman back. “Can you check and see when McLean arrived in Greece from Cyprus? Not Chios, Greece. Also Titina Argentis from London.”

  “He didn’t,” the woman told him when she called back. “There’s no record of Devon McLean on any carrier from Cyprus in the month of July.”

  “Is there any way to check and see if he came by boat?”

  “Not really. I can try. Maybe with all this commotion about terrorists, the cruise ships and ferry boats are keeping the passenger rosters, but I doubt it.”

  When she didn’t find anything, he asked her to recheck the airplane manifests for June, also May. “Check for the others as well,” he said.

  Both Manos Kleftis and Devon McLean were listed—McLean on a flight from Cyprus to Athens on May thirty-first—but there was nothing indicating he’d taken a connecting flight to Chios at any point after. Kleftis had travelled from Athens to Chios on June first, accompanied by Voula Athanassiou, who was listed as a passenger on the same flight. They’d left again a week later only to return when they said they had on the twenty-sixth.

  “Check again for McLean,” he instructed the woman.

  “Nothing. I’m sorry.”

  Patronas leaned back in his chair. “Playing the priest,” he said aloud. When they played the priest, card sharks always dealt out three cards, kings usually, which meant Marina had been talking about three men. He was pretty sure McLean and Kleftis were involved. They’d both lied to him. Titina Argentis and McLean had travelled together on the same flight. But who was the third? Marina had told Papa Michalis the two had needed a local, someone who knew Chios. That ruled out Alcott. Could it have been Antonis Argentis? Or was the third person a woman? Voula or Titina perhaps? And what was that nonsense about the ‘cartoon’?