by Leta Serafim
Patronas nodded. “Only tomatoes thrive in August.”
“Come, I’ve got some in the back. I’ll give them to you.” Stooped and arthritic, she walked slowly around the house. Her garden was small but well–kept, with even rows of vegetables interspersed with marigolds and sunflowers. The majority of space was given over to tomatoes, neatly tied to long, slender pieces of graying wood. She had chickens in a wire enclosure behind the garden and a wooden cage filled with rabbits. Everything was tidy, but worn; the garden hose had been taped up, the chicken wire patched in places. She emptied the horta out onto the ground and began to fill the plastic bag with tomatoes. Something was wrong with her hands, the knuckles of her fingers swollen and twisted. Arthritis, Patronas thought with pity.
“Have you found out who killed him?” she asked.
“Not yet, Kyria Athanassiou. But we’re making progress. We’re moving out of Profitis Ilias and down into Chora, where we’ll continue the investigation.” He looked toward the house. “Is your daughter here?”
She raised her head and studied him, her eyes narrow against the sun. “What do you want with her?”
“I think I know why your grandson was killed.”
She began to cry silently, tears running down her wrinkled face. “Tell me why,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her gnarled hand. “She doesn’t care. He was nothing to her. Tell me why my engonaki, my little grandson, was killed.”
“I have no proof, but I think your grandson found a Minoan settlement near where he and Eleni Argentis had been digging.”
Hearing their voices, her daughter, Voula, came out of the house. She was dressed in white capris and a black top that hugged her breasts. The cork heels on her sandals were so high she tottered like a geisha. Her make-up, too, was geisha-like, the pale foundation clearly painted on, her red lipstick too dark for the hour of the day.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“He came about Petros,” the old woman said. “He knows why they killed him.”
The daughter touched Patronas’ arm. “Why?”
“He found a Minoan city.”
Her eyes widened. “Manos,” she called. “Manos, you’d better get out here.”
Her boyfriend appeared a moment later. He was dressed as before, in a loose cotton shirt, khaki shorts and plastic flip-flops. “Chief Officer,” he said in the same lazy manner. “I don’t know … these women. Treating a guest this way. May I offer you a seat? Something to drink? A beer? Ouzo perhaps?”
“No, nothing.”
“Yiayia, go get us something.”
Wiping her eyes, the grandmother dutifully went back into the house, leaving the door open, and the chief officer could hear her putting together food and drinks in the kitchen. He wondered what the man’s hold on her was. What was that in her black eyes? Fear? Hate? Or was she simply the relic of another time, one of those women raised to do a man’s bidding, taught since birth to serve? They didn’t bind women’s feet in the old days, but they might as well have. Or was her servitude something more?
Studying Voula and her lover in turn, he recounted the discovery of the settlement up at the monastery and his decision to turn it all over to the university in five days time. Like the archeologists, they’d keep quiet about it. They’d be banking on getting a piece of whatever there was, and they wouldn’t want to share. “The university people are better equipped to sort it out than we are,” he said. “They’ll post guards at the entrances and go through it slowly. We don’t have the manpower to protect and evaluate it properly.”
Manos and Voula exchanged glances. “Does the government pay for a discovery like that?” the man asked. “Was there any reward Petros could claim?”
“No. The law is very clear. All archeological finds belong to Greece and to Greece alone, not to the individual whose land they are found on, nor to the individual who finds them. Everything must be turned over to the government immediately. It’s to prevent smuggling.”
The man’s interest seemed to flag. “Okay, then,” he said. “No money.” He leaned against the back of the house and lit a cigarette.
Patronas pulled out the brooch and handed it to Voula. “This yours?” he asked.
She took it, looked at it for a moment and returned it to him. “No.”
“Are you sure?”
Something passed between her and her boyfriend. “It isn’t mine,” she said, not meeting his eyes.
Patronas put the brooch back in his pocket. “We are pretty sure someone was moving the artifacts out of the site and selling them. Whether they were working with Eleni and Petros, we don’t know. But we are pretty sure whoever was doing the smuggling was the same person who killed them.”
The old woman came out with a tray and set it on the table. She handed each of them a china plate with a spoon sweet on it, a tiny nectarine in syrup. Then she stood there as if bewildered, as if she didn’t know where to go or what to do. Patronas could hear her chanting the name of her grandson over and over like someone reciting the rosary.
The daughter finally put her arm around her mother and took her back inside the house. Manos Kleftis ate his sweet, drank his water and wiped his mouth. When he was finished, he picked up the plastic bag the old woman had dropped on the ground and handed it to Patronas.
“Enjoy your tomatoes, Inspector,” he said.
Chapter 36
Where you hear of many cherries, bring a small basket.
—Greek proverb
Patronas lifted the brass doorknocker and let it fall. Ironically, it was shaped like a hand.
In spite of what Alcott had said, he doubted anyone would kill three people to get his name in archeology journals. He still thought Titina Argentis was involved. It stood to reason: she’d argued repeatedly with the grandmother of Petros Athanassiou and expressed hostility toward her stepdaughter both times he’d interviewed her. She’d flown to Chios with McLean. Her son was weak. He’d do her bidding. Yes, it would work. He’d have to check on their finances when he got back to the office. They acted rich, but then so did a lot of people. Dimitra and her mother for instance, and look where that had gotten him.
He could see tables set out in the garden of the Campos estate and gaily colored Japanese lanterns strung up in the trees. Either Titina Argentis had entertained recently or she was planning to. Not exactly the behavior of a murderess, but then one never knew. He’d read about killers, Americans mostly, who attended the funerals of their victims, even going so far as to console their grieving widows and children. Human behavior was an uncharted wilderness as far as he was concerned. Perhaps Papa Michalis was right, and it was a woman. One shouldn’t let sexual stereotyping cloud one’s judgment. No, with respect to murderers, it was best to keep an open mind.
The same maid answered the door and ushered him into the house. The stepmother was on the second floor and slowly made her way down the stairs to meet him. Again, he was struck by her regal posture, her impeccable grooming.
“Sorry to trouble you again. I was looking to speak with Antonis.”
“Whatever for?”
“It’s about his sister.”
“Stepsister.” She smiled to take the chill off the word. “He isn’t here. I believe he’s down at the harbor awaiting one of our freighters. He’s signed a contract with a firm in China, and this will be the first of what we are assuming will be a steady flow of containers. He’s hoping to dominate the traffic between Greece and China, to corner the Asian trade in this part of the Mediterranean.”
“Profitable, I would imagine.” The chief officer offered her a cigarette, which she declined, and took one himself. “Oh, by the way, Eleni apparently found a Minoan site up at Profitis Ilias. My guess is it will turn out to rival Knossos and Troy one day. It was an entire city, virtually untouched, an unbelievable find. She’ll go down in history as one of the great archeologists, like Harold Carter or Schliemann.”
“Really? Do you think that was why she was killed?” Fr
om the level of interest in her voice, he might as well have been a garage mechanic talking about an oil change for the car.
“Undoubtedly.” He told her, too, about leaving the dig site on Monday. “My investigation up there is over. I might as well let the archeologists get started on the place.” Like McLean, she wouldn’t conspire with a local man or woman, and for the same reason. As Greeks said, She’s so high, she wears a toupee. In other words, a snob.
She turned and walked down the long hallway into the study. “Have you discovered who killed her?” she called over her shoulder. Returning a moment later with an ashtray, she pointedly set it down on the table next to him.
“Yes, we are closing in on our murderer.” He ignored the ashtray, letting the ash from his cigarette fall where it may. Hopefully it would set fire to the exquisite Persian rug underfoot and damage the parquet floor. He was sorry it was only a cigarette. He wished it was an acetylene torch.
“Oh, by the way, is this yours?” He showed her the plastic envelope with the brooch.
She examined it carefully before returning it to him. “No.”
“Could it have been Eleni’s?”
“I doubt it. She never wore costume jewelry.” A little sneer in the way she said ‘costume jewelry.’ As if he should have known better, that only a fool would wear costume jewelry and he should not have troubled her with such an absurd inquiry.
She pushed the ashtray closer to him. “Antonis will be pleased to hear that. He’s been most disturbed by this dreadful business.” Antonis, he noted, not her. “When do you think you will be making an arrest?”
“Any day now. We are closing in on him.”
“So Eleni has been vindicated,” she said thoughtfully. “All her theories, her thrashing around on that hill. It turns out she was right, after all.”
“Indeed she was.”
“Too bad she didn’t live to enjoy it.” Was it his imagination or was there just a hint of malice in her words, a touch of a smile?
* * *
“What’s the state of Titina Argentis’ fortune?” Patronas asked the accountant who handled her accounts.
The man smiled indulgently. “Fortune?”
“That’s right. How much money does she have?”
Getting up, the accountant made a show of closing the door to his office. He then spoke in a hushed voice about the need for privacy and confidentiality, about not betraying his client’s trust. It was all bullshit and they both knew it. After five minutes and a few idle threats, Patronas got what he’d come for: Antonis and his mother were living far beyond their means, and they had, in spite of his—the accountant’s—frequent warnings, been doing so for years. They had yet to pay off the contractors for the house and had grave difficulties meeting their payroll at the shipyard.
“So she’s broke.”
“Not ‘broke’ in the usual sense, but they do have a very serious problem. It is my understanding that she and her son still possess a number of valuable assets in England: real estate, an art collection. I don’t remember exactly. I’ve never seen any of this, but my superior in London told me he checked it out and it exists, at least some of it. Her son is trying to salvage Argentis Shipping and make it profitable again, which is probably a good move from a financial point of view. His mother, Titina, doesn’t understand the need to guard one’s principal, to live off one’s profits and leave the rest alone. They’ve fought about it more than once.”
“What about Eleni?”
“I don’t know the state of her fortune. She inherited the bulk of her father’s estate, so it’s probably quite substantial. They might have put it in escrow after she died. You’ll have to speak to her lawyer.”
* * *
Patronas sat in his car, reviewing what the accountant had told him. Titina Argentis had married a rich man twice her age and fought with Petros Athanassiou’s grandmother over a big box of nothing. If you could test a person’s DNA for such things, you’d find greed all over hers. It was one of her defining characteristics.
Patronas had once assumed rich people led idyllic lives and never coveted what others had, that only poor people were greedy. But later, as a policeman, he’d changed his mind. Greed had nothing to do with what people had or didn’t have. It was another thing entirely. Those who suffered from it, be they rich or poor, were perpetually uneasy, victims of a kind of cancerous, insatiable yearning that no purchase could long satisfy. Greedy people, they hungered. As simple as that. No matter what they had, it wasn’t enough, they wanted more, and Titina Argentis was such a person.
But was she a murderer?
He wished he knew. He longed to arrest her, knock her off her high horse and drag her down the street in handcuffs, squealing like a pig, dirty her up a little with a fingerprinting kit.
Chapter 37
Making the same mistake twice does not indicate a wise person.
—Greek proverb
Patronas took the tomatoes Petros’ grandmother had given him home. He thought he’d eat lunch before heading up to Profitis Ilias to organize the stake-out. “Dimitra,” he yelled as he unlocked the door. As always, the house was orderly and impeccably clean. His clothes washed and put away, the garbage emptied. In the refrigerator, he found a fresh pasticcio—a kind of Greek lasagna—a bowl of eggplant spread and half a watermelon. Dimitra must have come and gone. He ate the pasticcio cold, standing in front of the open refrigerator, and drank two beers, dribbling some on his uniform. He wiped it off with his hand.
After he finished eating, he took a shower, remembering how he’d looked at the Villa Hotel—as if he were the desperado in an American western, the criminal the posse was after, not the proud sheriff leading them. Then he gathered up some bedding and food and headed out to the car. He tried his wife’s cellphone as he drove.
She picked up on the first ring. “Speak,” she said.
“Dimitra, it’s me. I’m heading back to Profitis Ilias. I told all ‘persons of interest’ that I’m turning the site over to the authorities on Monday, which gives me five days to catch him. Hopefully that’ll be enough.”
“Did you find Marina’s papers?” Her voice was guarded.
“Yes, but they were too bloodstained to be of any use.” When he dialed her number, he hadn’t meant to punish her, but as soon as he heard her voice, there it was. God help them if they stayed together. “Apparently Marina tried to hide them as she was dying. Remember how she told you ‘they were playing the priest with us’?”
“Yes. She thought three people were involved. McLean and two others.”
“Did Marina tell you McLean was involved?"
“No, I just guessed it was him.”
He had to give it to her. It had taken him nearly a week to figure out that ‘playing the priest’ meant three people acting in tandem and that Mclean might be one of them. Dimitra had already put it together and hadn’t thought to share it with him.
“I’m not convinced McLean is involved,” he said, more sharply than he intended. “It might have been Titina Argentis. She and her son could have met McLean in England, planned the whole thing there.”
“Titina Argentis would never kill someone with a knife, Yiannis.” She spoke like a teacher addressing the dumb kid in the class.
“Why not?”
“Knives generate blood. She’d ruin her clothes.”
“So now you’re a detective, Dimitra?” Her skepticism made him furious. “When did that happen? When you were doing the dishes?”
“I’m sure Marina didn’t count Titina as one of the three.”
“We’ll never know now, will we, Dimitra? She’s dead. Fodder for worms. We can’t ask her what she meant. We can’t talk it over with her.” He went on for a few more minutes, berating her for her role in Marina’s death. After he’d finished, he told her of his preparations for the days ahead—how he had taken the blankets in the closet and the food in the refrigerator.
He waited for her to tell him to be careful, that the nigh
t air would be cold up on the mountain. The usual. It took him a minute or two to realize she’d hung up on him.
* * *
Eleni Argentis’ lawyer was based in London and, when Patronas finally reached him, the man spoke in the same long-winded English the Oxford don had used, the kind that required a lot of patience and a dictionary. However, he was clear on one point: if Eleni Argentis died, according to the terms of her will, neither her half-brother nor her stepmother stood to inherit ‘a tuppence.’ She’d updated the will a year ago and left specific instructions as to how the money was to be used. She had instructed the law firm to establish a scholarship at Harvard University in her father’s name for ten Greek students who wished to study abroad there and to endow a chair in the archeology department—also in her father’s name.
Patronas sighed as he hung up the phone. He’d thought, before he’d talked to the accountant, that he’d solved the case. It stood to reason: Titina Argentis and her son were broke. They’d killed Eleni for the money and Petros had been in the way. Antonis Argentis, the hooded man in the corral with Evangelos Demos, the one who’d pushed Papa Michalis over the balcony. Patronas had even gone so far as to recheck their alibis and had discovered a discrepancy. Antonis had said he’d been with a woman, but if so, she was not the one he’d told them, whom Patronas had interviewed. Perhaps his lady friend had been married and he’d wanted to spare her grief. Perhaps his company was male and he wanted to spare himself gossip and scandal, shame. It didn’t matter now anyway. He had opportunity, maybe, but his motive had just gone up in smoke.
“I’ve got nothing.” As his mother used to say, his treasure was coal.
* * *
Worried about the old man, Patronas called Papa Michalis that night and invited him for dinner. It was no good, him staying on at Marina’s house, sleeping in that house of grief. Once he solved the case, he’d find a better place for him to stay. Him and the harelip both.