by Leta Serafim
His story was an old one: the son of an illiterate workman from Epirus and a prostitute from Asia Minor, he’d been born in the slums of Athens and sent to live with his grandmother in a village so small ‘it wasn’t on the map.’ She couldn’t control him and when he was fifteen, he’d run away. He’d served as a mercenary in Sudan for five years, his specialty being night raids and hand-to-hand combat. Patronas wondered if that was where it had all begun—Kleftis’ taste for blood, the sophisticated equipment, the knives.
“Who’d you work for in Africa?” he asked.
“Anyone who’d pay me. If I was fighting for one group of rebels and another offered me more, I switched sides. Didn’t matter to me.” He said he’d bummed around Greece after his return, ‘living off women mostly.’
Patronas would have been convinced he was what he said he was, one of those Greek males who see every woman as an opportunity, save for the chilling way he turned himself off and on, the gleeful way he described his role in Burundi and Mozambique. He has a strange sort of charisma, Patronas thought, a way of seducing you. Kleftis could charm the birds from the trees if he wanted to, birds both feathered and human. But then, so could Charlie Manson.
* * *
“That’s what they do, psychopaths,” he told Tembelos. “They charm you. Then bite your head off.”
“You think he’s a psychopath?” Tembelos asked.
Patronas nodded.
“How did it go this morning when you questioned him?”
“He threw ashes in my eyes. He isn’t going to confess, that’s for sure, and without a confession, we’ve got nothing tying him to Marina and the other two—no witnesses, no fingerprints, nothing.”
“What about the knives?”
“I’m sure the only blood on them will be mine. He’s a cool one, our Mr. Kleftis. Served time and knows the drill. Being locked up doesn’t bother him.”
“Shit. He cut you up pretty bad. Can’t you charge him with that?”
“I’d lose my job if it went to trial and the press heard what went on in the cave. No, Giorgos. That part’s done. Kleftis and me? We’re even.”
He took a sip of his soup, chicken avgolemono. His mother’s remedy, it always made him feel better. “The only thing we’ve got is the smuggling. Kleftis claims he just ‘stumbled across the artifacts’ when I ‘encountered him in the cave.’ He could claim he was planning to donate them to the National Archeological Museum and get away with it. Tell the judge I manhandled him, tried to burn him alive.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Come at him from a different direction. He implicated the Englishman. Said he fenced the stuff he gave him. I’ll lean on McLean, see what he has to say and confront Kleftis with it.”
“How long can we hold him?”
“I don’t know. As you know, this is my first homicide.”
“Shit,” Tembelos said again.
Chapter 41
“I’ll eat the others first,” the Cyclops told Ulysses, “and save you for last.”
—The Odyssey
Patronas and his men were leaning against the fender of the squad car, watching Devon McLean and eating gyros.
The Englishman was across the street, drinking wine at one of the better tavernas. He was outfitted like a college student in jeans and a Rolling Stones t-shirt, Mick Jagger’s leering face stretched tight across his paunch.
Like Kleftis, McLean did not go quietly.
“Get your hands off of me!” he yelled, scuffling when Patronas and Tembelos seized him. “I’m English. You have no authority over me!”
They drove him to an army base at the northern part of the island, thinking he’d be safer there. “We arrested Manos Kleftis last night and charged him with murder,” Patronas said. “You’re the only witness to his crimes and he knows it. If we put you in jail with him, he’ll kill you. He likes to kill people, Kleftis does, but then you know that.”
The parking lot in front of the stockade was edged with whitewashed rocks. Ah, the military, thought Patronas, remembering how he’d painted rocks as an enlisted man. His commander had been crazy for them. It had been peace time and shellacking them had kept everyone busy. As soon as they finished one coat, he’d order them to do another. It had been almost existential, that rock painting.
Patronas put McLean in a cell and locked himself in with him. He’d noticed how the Englishman had quieted down at the mention of Kleftis’ name, and he thought he could probably use it as leverage if he refused to talk. “How did it start?”
At first the Englishman was hostile and demanded to speak to a lawyer. “I’m a foreign national. You can’t treat me this way.”
When he continued, Patronas exploded. “What do you want, man with ringworm? A pearl cap? If you don’t talk, I’m going to have to turn Kleftis loose tomorrow. He’s a dangerous man, Kleftis. Might even be a serial killer. It won’t matter where you go, he’ll find you. He won’t rest until you’re dead.”
McLean walked over to the window and stood there for a long time, looking through the bars at the sleeping army base. The street lights cast a yellow glow over the room.
“Petros Athanassiou brought me in,” he said quietly, all his bravado gone. “He was helping his grandmother at my hotel during my last trip to Chios. She was working in room service and brought the boy along and we got to know each other. He was a bright lad, interested in the dig I was involved with. He turned up three or four times that summer with shards he’d found. I paid him handsomely for them. Far more than they were worth and I suppose he never forgot it. When I left, I gave him my address and told him if he ever was in England to look me up, that sort of thing, the nonsense people always say when they leave a place, not meaning a word of it. I’d completely forgotten about him, to tell the truth, when I received a letter in which he described this site he’d found. Minoan, he said, a secret town. He called it the ‘city of ghosts.’ ”
“When was this?”
“May, I believe.” With a sigh, he turned away from the window.
“What happened then?”
“I was planning to return to Cyprus anyway, so I thought to myself, Why not a trip to Chios? But when I arrived here, Petros refused to show me the site. He was very cautious. We met in an empty lot near his grandmother’s house. He bicycled there with the relics wrapped up in a towel, if you can believe it, and laid them out on the ground. As soon as I saw them, I knew. They were simply amazing, Minoan, no doubt about it, and judging by the workmanship, from the apex of their civilization. Fourteen hundred BC or thereabouts, give or take fifty years. An altogether extraordinary find. I pressed Petros to bring me more, thinking I’d start to catalogue them, to claim the site as mine as an archeologist, but he wanted money, a lot of money. With the advent of the Internet, he’d been able to look things up, and he knew what he had.” McLean’s tone was regretful.
“Go on,” Patronas said.
“I knew a collector who might be willing to purchase the artifacts if they were fine enough and who would prefer to do so ‘under the table,’ so to speak. We agreed on the asking price for the lot. I persuaded Petros to let me set up a bank account and he, the collector, transferred the money there. As soon as I received it, I gave Petros his share in cash. Our customer was happy with the arrangement. He avoided difficulties inherent in removing antiquities from Greece, the paperwork and customs duties, not to mention the time consuming task of proving actual provenance.”
“You didn’t take a cut?”
“Yes. A small one.”
“How much?”
“I don’t remember. Shouldn’t you wait until I secure a lawyer before you interrogate me? Don’t I have the right to counsel?”
“Not in a capital crime.”
“A capital crime?”
Patronas held up three fingers. “Actually three. Three capital crimes.”
“I didn’t kill anyone.”
“If you cooperate, I’ll recommend you be charged separately. O
therwise, you and Kleftis will go down together.”
“How did you know I was involved?” McLean asked.
“Your boat. You anchored it at Volissos, didn’t you?”
Something seemed to go out of him. “Yes. About a week after the smuggling started. I thought it would be easier to offload the artifacts at sea and then move them out of the country. Some of the amphorae were quite large. I didn’t want to risk storing them in the hotel or a rental car. I stayed well away from the crowds. Figured I’d be safer if I anchored on the other side of the island.”
“People saw a woman on your boat. Who was it? Voula?”
“The boy’s misbegotten mother? No. It was Petros’ grandmother. I don’t even know her name. Sad little woman, hunched over, always dressed in black. Came to collect the money for him. I thought I’d be safer if it was a woman. Greeks were apt to talk if a sixteen-year-old boy came calling on an older man. Couldn’t have that now, could we?” His voice was arch and self-mocking.
“Later we moved our operation to the parking lot below Profitis Ilias. It made it easier to transport the heavier items. We’d meet at night. Petros would show me what he had and I’d go over it with him and log everything in so that we could divide the money properly after I’d completed the sale; then I’d pack the lot up and, when it was safe, move it out to the boat. Everything was going swimmingly until Kleftis arrived.”
“When was this?”
“Early July, I think. I don’t remember, exactly. Petros had gone home with two little gold bulls. He didn’t want to sell them. He wanted to keep them, play with them, I suppose. In many ways, he was still a child. He left one out on the table and Kleftis saw it. He slapped Petros around until the boy told him what was going on. Kleftis took half the money Petros had collected, then came after me. We had no choice but to let him in as a partner.”
“What about Voula, Petros’ mother? Where was she when Kleftis was beating the boy up?”
“Probably putting on make-up. She never interfered with Kleftis.”
“Surely the boy’s grandmother—”
“She tried to stop him. Kleftis broke two of her fingers.”
Patronas remembered the woman’s gnarled hands, the swollen knuckles on her fingers. He’d assumed it was arthritis that had crippled her and hadn’t thought to ask. “How did the smuggling work?”
“Exactly as before, only with Kleftis overseeing the logging in of the artifacts and the dividing up of the subsequent payments.”
“Did Voula get involved?”
“No. It was just Petros, Kleftis, and I. An unholy alliance if ever there was one. Grandma no longer came to the boat, no longer acted as courier. Kleftis didn’t like her, said she was clever, someone you had to keep an eye on.” A petulant note had entered his voice. “Whenever we were together, he’d torment me. Make sexual overtures to me in front of the boy, crude ones, grotesque. Or flick that knife of his into the ground at my feet and laugh like a hyena when I jumped.”
“You came to Chios on the same plane as Titina Argentis. Why?”
McLean raised his eyebrows. “I underestimated you, Chief Officer.”
“Yes, you did.” He waited a beat. He hadn’t felt this good in days. “You sneered and patronized me. You assumed because I was from Chora, not London, I was second rate, a backward peasant from a backwater town.”
“It’s a failing of the English, that. We hear an accent and assume the person we are speaking with is at best ignorant, at worst, a fool.”
“Back to Titina Argentis. Why were you on the plane with her?”
“She wanted to sell her husband’s collection of artifacts and someone gave her my name. We arranged to meet in Athens and go over what she had. I wondered why she wanted to do it there. It didn’t make sense. After all, I was going to be in Chios a week later. I remember asking her about the provenance of some of the items, testing to see if the collection was really hers. Most of it was Minoan, and given Eleni’s interest, I was sure her father would have left it to her in his will. Mrs. Argentis was evasive and I backed off. My guess is, she was trying to sell the things out from under Eleni.”
“Did you have any further contact with her?”
“Titina? No. When she didn’t get what she wanted, she became hostile and refused to talk to me. Made the trip here a little awkward, as we were sitting side by side on the plane.”
“What happened on July twenty-sixth? Did Eleni Argentis catch you and Kleftis up on the hill?”
“No. She had no idea what was going on. Not that day, not ever.” He looked down at his hands again. “I fear, Commissioner, that it was I who started it all.”
“How?”
“Petros had accumulated an impressive collection of galapetras, seal stones. Astounding ones, larger and more exquisite than any I’d seen in any museum in the world. I counted them out when entering each one in the ledger—the kind of stone, the type of carving, estimates of age and worth, that sort of thing—and there were fifty. I was sure of this. I counted them twice just to make sure, so there was no doubt in my mind. Aquamarine, carnelian, agate, even a few emeralds mixed in. They’d be easy to sell, I thought, worth a small fortune. When I got to my boat that night, I wanted to see them again and opened the box I’d put them in. There were only twelve. I called Kleftis and asked if he had them and he said no. Petros swore he hadn’t touched them either, but Kleftis didn’t believe him and beat him half to death. What I didn’t realize was that Kleftis had been haunting the site. Not the cave. Neither of us knew about the cave at that point. Petros insisted that we stay in the car when he was up there. I think he was afraid Kleftis would kill him if he found out where he was digging. Petros didn’t trust us and would check up on us periodically, always coming from a different direction. Long nights, those were, Chief Officer, sitting alone in the car with Manos Kleftis.”
“So what site was it that Kleftis was haunting?”
“The legitimate one, the trenches where Eleni Argentis was excavating. I assume he wanted to find the place where Petros was digging and take it over—squatter’s rights, so to speak. Erase the boy from the equation, at least financially. After the seal stones disappeared, Kleftis got it in his head that Petros was stealing from us and that Eleni was somehow involved, and he confronted them at the excavation the next morning.”
He hesitated for a moment. “Petros and Eleni had been examining one of the seal stones when Kleftis and I showed up. Terrible timing, that. Given Kleftis’ suspicions, it couldn’t have been worse. She was down in the trench and tried to hide it, to protect him, but Kleftis saw them and accused her of stealing from him. She was baffled. She kept looking at Petros. ‘What is this?’ she asked. ‘What is he talking about?’ Petros just hung his head and wouldn’t answer. Shamed, I suppose.”
“Then what happened?”
“Kleftis got out his knife.” McLean raised his manacled hands, covered his face with them. He stayed like that for a few minutes. When he spoke again, his voice was hoarse. “I thought at first he was just going to threaten her with it,” he said. “But he cut a deep gash on her forearm. Petros thought he was going to kill her and came after him, screaming, ‘No, no!’ Kleftis is a fast man with a knife and he grabbed him around the neck and slit his throat. And then, of course, he had to kill her, too. He took a great deal of pleasure in it, or so it seemed to me. He kept asking her where she’d hidden the rest of the stones. She didn’t know what he was talking about and when she said this, he’d cut her some more. I never realized how much blood there was in a human body until that day. I don’t know why he had to cut her hand off. A souvenir, maybe. A way to keep me in line. Who knows? After that, it went quickly. She bled out in a matter of minutes. I left it up to him to dispose of her. Rented a Zodiac for him in Izmir. Towed it over here with my boat. We sank it after he was done with it. I paid for it out of funds provided for me by the Americans. Figured you’d never find the trail that way. A bit frightened by that point. Not just of Kleftis, but o
f being caught and charged as an accessory to murder.”
“Did you ever find the stones?”
“No. A couple of other things also went missing, but I never told Kleftis. Not after Eleni. I was too afraid. You should have seen him, Chief Officer. Wiping his knife on her clothes, whistling a little song while he worked.”
“Was Kleftis the one who attacked Papa Michalis?”
“Yes. He wanted him gone from the monastery. Killed his rooster, too, tried to write obscenities with its blood in the dirt. Didn’t work that way, though. Drew you people to Profitis Ilias like flies.”
“Was that your wetsuit he was wearing?”
“No. He had his own, a special one. He claimed it would prevent him from leaving physical evidence.”
And so it had.
“What about the other woman?”
“The lady in the cave?”
Patronas nodded.
“In the weeks after Petros and Eleni died, Kleftis and I explored the hills around Profitis Ilias, mostly at night, and eventually we found the cave. You didn’t have enough police to protect the place and it was easy to get by them. He still needed me to sell the artifacts for him and we were hard at work there, carrying things out and boxing them up, the plan being that we’d move them down to the boat after it got dark. It was a holiday, so we thought we’d be safe, that everyone would be away, but then in she comes like Little Miss Muffet, calling for you. Saw us. Tried to get away, but of course, we couldn’t let her. Again, Kleftis took his time about it. Enjoying it, luxuriating in it.”
He shook his head. “She was praying and calling to God to save her. I finally got tired of her screaming and told him to end it or I would. He wouldn’t, so I grabbed the knife and had a go. A mercy killing it was at that point. An act of kindness. Otherwise, he’d still be up there, torturing her like a boy with a magnifying glass, setting fire to ants.”