The Devil Takes Half

by Leta Serafim

  Pulling over to the side of the road, Patronas got out his cellphone and called the Bishop.

  After being connected, Patronas spoke for a few minutes, explaining that as Chief Officer he’d long noted the lack of spirituality on the part of his men and asked that Papa Michalis be released from his current duties and reassigned to the police department. The priest’s responsibilities there would be threefold. First, he would provide moral guidance to the wayward members of the force. Second, he would counsel the public whenever necessary as a sort of ride-along social worker, and third, he would act as a religious adviser to ensure that canon and civil law co-existed in peace and harmony. It was all bullshit, of course, especially the last part, but Patronas thought the Bishop, who recognized no authority save his own, would like the sound of it, which was why he’d thrown it in.

  Reluctantly the Bishop consented, after making it clear that these new duties on the part of Papa Michalis would be voluntary and that the Holy Mother Church would not be expected to pay him a salary while he did such a thing.

  Patronas shut the cellphone. “It is official,” he said. “You’re working for me. You can help Evangelos Demos catch shoplifters.”

  “A policeman, eh?” The priest clapped his hands together.

  “Well, sort of.” What harm would it do? Miss Marple was eighty-two if she was a day. Why not let the old fellow have a little fun before he headed off into the sunset? Perhaps his presence would even improve things at headquarters. Get Tembelos to put away his girly magazines and the others to be more respectful in their speech and deportment.

  Papa Michalis immediately launched into a lengthy discussion of how he would conduct his criminal investigation of the shoplifting at the harbor, starting with the installation of video cameras and the assigning of numerous plain-clothes men. Patronas let him natter on. The shoplifters were usually impoverished refugees passing through Greece and gone before daybreak. Catching them was like catching fish with one’s hands. The priest’s work would never come to much, but at least he’d have a sense of purpose, a badge. Like offering him a place to stay, it was an act of kindness.

  * * *

  Idly, he wondered what Dimitra was doing, what would happen to them. Technically the house was hers. Her parents had purchased it and she’d kept it in her name when they got married, and he assumed she could reclaim it if she wanted to and put him out on the street. He’d be homeless. Wandering the earth like a Jew. He’d always joked marriage wasn’t for the faint of heart. But then neither was divorce.

  He’d had a case once where a woman had thrown acid into the face of her rival. There was even a Greek expression for it: vitroli. He didn’t think Dimitra would do something like that, but then he never thought she’d do what she did to Marina, and she had. And now this. Fighting with him at his moment of triumph, at the very apex of his career. He emptied his glass. Ah, the perfidy of women.

  Chapter 45

  An enemy’s gift is no favor.

  —Greek proverb

  The two policemen Patronas had left in charge had been playing poker, they said, when the old woman appeared. It was so slow they needed to do something, anything to stave off sleep.

  “We didn’t see her at first,” one of the men told Patronas. “She was standing by the front desk, holding a plastic bag. She looked like she’d been crying and told us Kleftis was her son. She begged us to let her see him, said she’d come all the way from Athens. When we told her he wasn’t allowed visitors, she didn’t insist. She just handed us the bag and asked us to give it to him.”

  He said he’d pawed through the bag but hadn’t seen anything, just a foil-wrapped package of rusks, paximadia. “She had bad arthritis. Her fingers were all twisted up.”

  The woman had specifically asked him to take the package in to Kleftis while she waited. “We didn’t see the harm in it. Kleftis seemed happy to get the parcel and told us to thank ‘his little mother.’ Nothing out of the ordinary, Chief Officer. I swear. His mother thanked us when we came back out again and patted my cheek. Then she left.”

  Patronas looked down at Kleftis. The front of the man’s shirt was coated with vomit and blood. Judging by the level of rigor mortis, he’d been dead for hours.

  “The pain must have been excruciating as the glass moved through his bowels,” the coroner said, kneeling by the body. “See here. His duodenum is torn to ribbons.” A prissy man with thick glasses, the coroner had spent the better part of an hour performing the autopsy, weighing and re-weighing Kleftis’ internal organs and dictating his findings.

  Patronas looked away. Stretched out on the coroner’s rubber sheet, Kleftis was clotted with blood that had leaked from every orifice. He had a large y-shaped incision on his chest, which the coroner was probing with a scalpel. The floor of the cell was stained with fluids he’d just as soon not think about. He made a mental note to get the room repainted.

  “Wouldn’t Kleftis have felt the glass?” he asked the coroner impatiently. Who cared about how many centimeters Kleftis’ liver was or the length of his colon? Dead was dead.

  The coroner had slipped his hand into Kleftis’ body and was moving it around. “Oh, yes. He would have been in considerable pain.”

  Patronas reached for the bag of rusks, discarded on the floor. “How much glass does it take to kill you?” The rusks had been laced with glass, microscopic slivers of it, shiny like quartz. The policeman who’d been on duty said Kleftis had eaten at least two of them.

  “A half teaspoon will do the trick. It’s an old Ottoman trick. Women in the harem used it on their rivals. Stirred the glass into their victim’s coffee; the grounds thick enough to disguise them. Your murderer used walnuts in much the same way. If Kleftis noticed anything, he would have thought it was a nut, when in fact it was a needle of glass. Usually it takes a long time to die like this as the wounds are very small and the glass has to be administered repeatedly.”

  Patronas got to his feet. “Did Kleftis complain of a stomachache?” he asked the two men who’d been on duty when he died.

  They nodded. “Said his shit was all bloody.”

  “Why didn’t you get a doctor for him?”

  “We thought he was faking. The way he kept clutching his belly and moaning. It seemed sort of, I don’t know, hysterical.”

  Patronas closed his eyes. Between Evangelos and these two, he now had a complete set: Larry, Curly and Moe. He turned back to the coroner. “So Kleftis bled to death?”

  “I’m not sure. Usually it takes a lot longer, a couple of months, even a year after ingesting glass to die. No, I think your man was poisoned. Those rusks were soaked in something. You can find any number of poisonous agents in your garden if you know what you’re looking for. Castor beans, pokeweed, rosary pea. She could have used any one of those or a combination. I’ll bet money the poison was home-brewed, something she concocted herself. An agent or agents that worked in conjunction with the glass in his gut. Whatever it was, it gave him violent diarrhea, which in turn furthered the internal hemorrhaging, the shredding of his digestive organs. Whoever did this knew what they were doing.”

  “So he shat himself to death.” Patronas had suspected as much. Kleftis had voided himself repeatedly during the night, the smell adding to the unholy stench in the cell.

  Patronas turned back to the man who’d given the bag of rusks to Kleftis. “Would you recognize this woman if you saw her again?”

  “I don’t know, maybe. I could try.”

  “You could try?” Patronas bellowed. “You could try? You don’t try to make an identification. Either you make it or you don’t. Now I ask you again, would you recognize her or not?”

  The man looked down. “Probably not.”

  The coroner had finished and was standing there, stripping off his bloody gloves, listening to the discussion. “Kleftis was an animal. I doubt he even had a mother.”

  “Of course he had a mother. What do you think? He was spawned by spiders?” Patronas sighed. None of this
was his fault. No reason to yell at him.

  “No,” the coroner replied.“Scorpions. Scorpions would be my guess.”

  * * *

  “There’ll be hell to pay for this,” Patronas told Tembelos. “I never should have left those two in charge. They’re new to the force. They don’t know what they’re doing.”

  “You and me, we would have done the same had it been us on duty. Old lady shows up with cookies for her boy, you’re going to tell her, ‘Wait, I have to send them to the lab, I have to go over them with my metal detector’?”

  “Giorgos, he was shitting blood. They should have gotten him a doctor.”

  “The coroner said it wouldn’t have made any difference. Kleftis was a dead man from the moment he took a bite. There was no way anyone could have found an antidote in time, no way to save him. Only question was the pace of his leaving. Anyway, I’m glad he’s dead. The world is better off without him.”

  “That’s not our decision to make,” Patronas said. “That’s never our decision to make.”

  He lit a cigarette, trying to steady himself. “I’m finished, Giorgos. Once the Prefecture hears I wasn’t in the station, that I left two rookies in charge, I’m done.”

  “Me and the others, we’ll talk to him.”

  “It won’t matter. He’ll haul me up for dereliction of duty.”

  Yesterday he’d come into work feeling triumphant like Jesus entering Jerusalem, expecting ‘hosannas’ from his superiors at the Ministry of Justice, the Prefecture waving palms. He’d get a call from Athens, of that he had no doubt, but now it would be a different one. And there’d be no palms in his future. Me stravose. They’ll crucify me. No, when this was all over, his men would be gambling for his clothes.

  Chapter 46

  Though the wolf grows old and changes his hair, he has not changed his disposition.

  —Greek proverb

  Patronas wanted to make the arrest quietly. She was an old woman, a grandmother. She was out in her garden when he pulled up in the Citroen, doctoring a sickly rose bush next to the chicken wire fence. She stood up when she heard the car and turned to face them, her hands caked with soil.

  “Chief Officer,” she said with a faint smile. She didn’t look surprised. It was as if she’d been expecting him.

  “Kyria Athanassiou.”

  “I need to wash my hands.” She led him into the kitchen. After washing her hands, she dried them carefully on a worn hand towel, then turned and walked slowly through the house, running her crippled hands over the china knick-knacks and stroking the furniture, straightening the doilies on the arms of the chairs. The room was as Patronas remembered it: the cheap veneered tables, the machine-made Persian rug. The windows were closed against dust, the curtains against the sun. The foil-wrapped chocolates on display on the étagère hadn’t been touched since his last visit. It was the salon of a poor person, but a poor person with certain aspirations. He thought she’d probably studied the rooms of the people she’d cleaned for and then copied them. The arrangement was stilted, artificial. Like the landscape in one of those paint-by-numbers sets.

  “Where’s Voula?”

  “I sent her away yesterday. She’s in Athens.” The old woman slowly let herself down on the settee. “Leave her be. She had nothing to do with it. I’m the one who killed him.” Again, the same thin smile. “Your men, they wouldn’t let me into his cell. I wanted to watch him die.” There was no trace of emotion in her voice. “I wanted to watch him die,” she said again.

  The hair that strayed from under her kerchief was greasy and there were lines of filth in the folds of her neck. He remembered her as a fastidious woman and asked her if she was all right, did she need something, a medic perhaps. When she shook her head no, he pulled out the tape recorder, set it down on the table and turned it on. They could do the whole thing here. She was willing to talk. There was no need to take her to the station house and interrogate her. “How did you kill him?”

  “I boiled some oleander leaves and other things from the yard and ground the glass in the mortar the way you do when you make skordalia. Mixed it all up together. My grandmother was from Asia Minor,” she added as if the poison was a legacy, a recipe handed down through the generations. “My father he was from Tripoli.”

  Her head had been bowed, but now she raised it and looked at him, and Patronas noticed her eyes for the first time. Black and shiny, they were devoid of feeling, reptile eyes. He remembered what Kleftis had said about her: ‘she was clever and not to be trusted.’ There had been three, after all. “You were the one, weren’t you?” he asked. “You were the one who started it all.”

  She gave a curt nod. “Petros told me about the cave the day he found it.”

  “How did he find it?”

  “Chasing goats. He said he heard something clang underfoot. ‘It was a disc,’ he told me, ‘a door.’ ‘Where does the door go?’ I asked him. ‘To a ghost town’, he told me.” She smiled to herself, remembering.

  “What happened after he found the cave?”

  “I had Petros write to McLean in England. I knew he liked boys, McLean did. You could tell. I figured he’d pay more attention if he got a letter from Petros than one from me and it worked just like I planned. I wanted him to sell what we found, to take care of that part of it. I’d met him one summer, working at his hotel, and I knew he wouldn’t ask too many questions. I thought we could make a lot of money; the cave would be a gold mine for us, if we were careful and played our cards right. String the man along a little. Petros gave me trouble about McLean. He was afraid that the woman would find out, think less of him. ‘She doesn’t care about you’, I told him. ‘You’re just a servant to her.’ But oh, how he fretted. That’s why he asked the priest to hold the stuff for him. He waited until the woman left every day before bringing the things down to me.”

  “You are talking about Eleni Argentis, the archeologist?”

  “Yes. The one he worked for. The priest didn’t know anything. He thought it was just Petros. He wanted him to give the money to me, his poor old Yiayia, instead of buying himself a motorcycle with it. He never realized we were in it together.”

  It was all becoming clear. “When did you lose your pin up there, the little quail?”

  “After Petros died. I asked a neighbor to drive me to Profitis Ilias. I told her I wanted to see where it had happened, where he’d been killed. The place was empty. There was no one around and the doors were locked. I knew there was an entrance to the cave on the hill and I went there. I wanted to take more things from the cave. But when I got there, I heard people talking … men.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I ran away. Something bad had happened. I could see blood on the rocks. The pin must have come loose then. I went back another time to look for it. Voula gave it to me and I was afraid that if you came around again, asking questions, she’d say it was mine. But I’m old. I don’t see so good. I never found it.”

  “How many times did you go there?”

  “Two, three. After I saw the blood, I stopped going.”

  “How did Kleftis get involved?”

  “Petros wanted his mother back, and he wrote a letter to her after we sold the first batch of things. He told her she’d be rich if she came back to Chios, that he’d buy her diamond bracelets and a big Mercedes Benz. I didn’t know about the letter. If I had, I would have torn it up, burnt it. But it was too late. Two weeks later they descended like hawks, Voula and Kleftis. I knew there’d be trouble the minute I saw him. Voula’s father was a man like that. A man you had reason to fear.”

  She rubbed her gnarled hands over her arms as if trying to get warm. “That foolish boy, thinking Voula would ever be a mother to him. If only he’d done what I said and left her alone.”

  Patronas saw that her dress, too, was unclean, a line of grayish-white material across the knees as if she’d been kneeling in ash. “After Voula arrived, did she get involved?”

  “No. Too lazy. Only know
s how to do one thing, Voula, and she doesn’t have to get up to do it. She didn’t even get up when Kleftis hurt me.” With a sigh, she held up her crippled fingers. “Wasn’t her problem, she said. He threatened to kill Petros and me and it wasn’t ‘her problem.’ ”

  “What was her relationship with Kleftis?”

  “He was her pimp. That’s why he came with her to Chios. To make sure no one got off with his property.” She was watching him now. “What did you think? They were lovers?” She shook her head. “Only thing those two ever loved was money.”

  “What happened after they arrived?”

  “Petros had found two bulls and wanted to keep them. I thought it’d be all right. I could sell them later, but he left one out by mistake and Kleftis saw it. He beat him half to death, trying to find out where he’d gotten it. After that, we worked for Kleftis. He was in charge. I warned Petros. I told him to watch out. ‘Never let him see where you’re digging,’ I said. ‘He’ll kill us if he finds out.’ I was afraid for him. But we were already in the middle of it. We were trapped.”

  “Even though you were afraid, you continued, didn’t you? You and Petros, stealing things on your own, away from Kleftis?”

  She seemed surprised that he knew this. “Yes,” she said. “We needed the money.”

  “How did it work?”

  “Petros would hide things and bring them to me when Kleftis wasn’t looking, little things he could slip in his pockets. Nothing like before, just some stones. I didn’t trust McLean, so I sold them to a jeweler I knew in Chora. Never got close to what they were worth.” A petulant note had entered her voice. She went on for a few more minutes, talking about how the man had cheated her, her lost wealth.

  “What happened next?”

  “Petros discovered more stones, handfuls of them like jewels, and I told him to bring some to me but be careful about it. But he was a boy, a silly boy, and he got caught. He was no match for Kleftis.”