The Devil Takes Half

by Leta Serafim

  “What happened then? McLean noticed the stones were missing and asked Kleftis about them?”

  “I don’t know what happened up there.” She wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron. “We had to go on, don’t you see? Otherwise, we would have had nothing. Kleftis would have taken it all and left us with nothing.”

  “Papa Michalis told me Eleni Argentis gave your grandson a laptop computer, a Toshiba. What became of it? Did you sell it?”

  “No, Kleftis smashed it. Smashed the computer on my hand the day he took over. Broke it. Broke my hand. I went to the Englishman after Kleftis hurt me and begged him to help us, but he was too scared. ‘Just give him what he wants,’ he said.” She mimicked the man’s high pitched voice. “ ‘Just give him what he wants.’ ”

  “You knew Kleftis killed your grandson. Why did you wait till now to kill him?”

  “I wanted you to prove it first. I was waiting for you. So everyone would know what he was … why.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us, Kyria Athanassiou? We could have helped you.”

  “I’ve worked all my life cleaning up after people,” she said softly. “Kleftis, he was part of my cleaning up. Where I come from, my people, we take care of these things ourselves.”

  Then as much to herself as to him, she said, “I was hoping that once he got enough money, he’d go away and, Petros and me, we’d be like before. I was praying for that. But instead he killed him. Killed my little Petros.” She clutched herself and began rocking back and forth. “I should have known better. Men like that? They’re locusts. They feed and feed until there’s nothing left.”

  * * *

  As the afternoon wore on, the old woman’s conversation took an ominous turn. She began slipping in and out of the past, speaking to the dead as if they were there. The war featured prominently in her memories. At one point she sang songs she’d heard on the radio from that time and spoke of Walter Blume, a Nazi active in Greece during the war. A few minutes later, during the same conversation, she pointed to the window and said, “Look, there’s my husband’s freighter, the one he works on.” She was quite adamant, insisting Patronas get up and go see it. He dutifully went to the window and looked out. All he saw was the chicken coop and her little garden, gone to weeds.

  “I’m from Peloponnese—Kalavrita,” she went on. “The Germans, they killed my brothers, my father. Shot them in the square along with the other men. My mother spent a week digging graves for them with her hands. For five years we had nothing but horta, grass, to eat. Nothing but rags to wear. My mother died of tuberculosis in 1944.”

  She was safe, Patronas thought. No matter what she’d done, no jury would convict her once they learned she was from Kalavrita. It had been one of the worst episodes of the war. After killing every male over ten, more than five hundred people, the Nazis had locked the women and children inside a schoolhouse and set it on fire. A German soldier had unlocked the door, allowing the women and children to escape. Yet there had been no escape. Starvation, tuberculosis, and death had awaited the survivors of Kalavrita. The suffering in Greece during the war had been terrible.

  ‘Eine gewisse Brutalität, a certain brutality was necessary,’ the German commander had said. And now the sons and daughters of the men who’d done those things came to Greece to get a tan. And the Greeks welcomed them, even in Kalavrita. God help us all.

  Patronas wanted to stop the interview then. But she insisted on speaking. “After the war, I moved to Pireaus. Met a sailor from Chios and got married. Lived in Kastella. Oh, not in one of the grand houses, the ones by the sea. In a room over a garage. We moved to Chios when Voula was four. My husband was like Kleftis. He liked to hurt people. It gave him pleasure.”

  Patronas interrupted. “How did he die?”

  She looked up at him sadly, disappointed he’d had to ask. “Car, Chief Officer. He was killed in a car accident. After he died, Voula started going with men. I worked in the hotel and people’s houses. Every day of the week, I cleaned. She never did anything to help me. No one did.”

  She asked if they could eat together before he took her to jail. “Don’t worry, Chief Officer,” she said. “I won’t poison you. I just want to cook dinner and eat at my table one more time before I go.”

  Although it violated police protocol, Patronas thought it would do no harm and agreed. He checked the kitchen before sitting down and waited until she took the first bite before serving himself. She noticed his behavior and gave him a wounded look.

  The table she set was like her house: a machine-embroidered tablecloth, woven to look like damask, stainless steel flatware embossed like silver. The food was simple. She seemed proud as she put the roast on the table, meat still a cause for celebration.

  Patronas didn’t think he’d ever eaten a sadder meal, choking down the gristly meat, the stony potatoes, while she watched him from her end of the table.

  She treated him to dessert liquors after, saying she’d steeped the fruit, the peaches and cherries, in the alcohol herself. “The sun is what does it,” she explained. “You have to leave it out in the sun.” She opened the doors of her cupboard and showed him the glass jars full of produce she’d put up herself, the white dishtowels she’d embroidered with flowers.

  A person who’d been silent for too many years, she talked for over two hours. Patronas was reluctant to cut her off, struck by her need to speak. It pleased her that he was taping her, that she finally had a witness. She complained bitterly about her life, where she found herself in her old age. “Castro isn’t like it used to be. It’s full of Pakistanis now.”

  One last piece of the puzzle. “Why did you argue with Titina Argentis at the laiki?”

  “Voula worked for them as a maid before she took off for Athens. She was only sixteen and pretty. Soft. Not like now. Husband cornered her, Voula told me. We were having coffee together, just the two of us, a couple of days after she got here. Had her in the garden, she said. I wanted Titina to pay damages for what he had done. I thought Argentis had been Voula’s first, that Petros was his son and that’s why she was the way she was.” She pulled her sweater tighter around her. “After Titina refused, I went to the shipyard and spoke to her son. He didn’t even ask me to sit down. He acted like I was dirty, like I would ‘dirty his chairs.’ ”

  “Was Petros indeed the son of Eleni’s father?”

  “No. Voula was a slut even then. When I told her, she thought it was funny, me going to Titina Argentis demanding money, claiming Argentis had ‘besmirched her honor.’ Voula laughed and laughed. Said, ‘There’ve been so many, if they all paid I’d be a millionaire.’ ”

  He could see her hands trembling in her lap.

  “It is hard enough to be poor, Chief Officer. But to be the mother of a whore, to be poor without honor ….”

  Her voice rose. “You don’t know what it is to struggle. To be walled in, forced to live in a tomb of a marriage with a man who beats you like it’s his right, who shames you day after day after day. Knowing you were meant for better, that you deserve better. Diamantis wrote a story about it. I can see from your face you’re surprised. What, you thought I didn’t know how to read? I was unfamiliar with literature?” She smiled to herself. “I know more than you think. It’s a good story. It was about an old woman who drowned baby girls in order to spare them from a life like hers, a life of hardship and pain, a life like mine. Diamantis got it wrong, though. She shouldn’t have drowned the girls. She should have drowned the boys. You get nothing but pain from men. They ruin themselves and you in the bargain.” She spat out the words. “Whether you love them or not, it’s all the same. They ruin you.”

  Patronas had excused himself after dinner and gone outside to call her daughter in Athens from his cellphone. He’d suggested that she return to Chios to be with her mother, to help her now. Voula Athanassiou refused. “I can’t, Chief Officer. Surely you understand. Seeing my mother in jail? It would be too hard on me.”

  He had hung up without saying good
-bye. Who would put flowers on the old woman’s grave when the time came? he wondered. Her situation filled him with pity. What a life she’d had.

  “You said you kept some stones,” he asked gently. “Where are they?”

  She hobbled to the back door and opened it. “Out there,” she said, pointing to the chicken coop. “Everything’s in there. No one goes there but me. Too delicate, all of them. Too clean and fresh and sweet-smelling.” There was spittle on her face. Her eyes were alive. Some spark alight now. When he’d started the interview, she’d been listless, whining and resentful. Proud, yes, but her pride had been misplaced. She anticipated humiliation. Saw it when it wasn’t there. Apologized for her china, the poor quality of the coffee. “I am poor.” Her statement thrown down like a gauntlet. Now she was different.

  There were few things in the coop. A handful of galapetras, nothing more. Slipping on his gloves, Patronas turned on his flashlight and poked through them with a finger. Petros had been holding out on his grandmother. Even little Petros had betrayed her. Leaving the most valuable artifacts with the priest at Profitis Ilias instead of bringing them home. Probably McLean had been helping him, selling the jewelry and figurines for the boy and splitting the money with him. Or maybe he’d been holding them for a future time when he could salt an undiscovered site and claim it as his.

  It smelled terrible inside the coop, the ammonia from the droppings so powerful it stung his eyes. The droppings clung to his shoes, covering them up to the laces. The dirt on the old woman’s skirt had to have come from here. The chickens were wearing some sort of harness to keep them in place, their feathers worn away where the metal rubbed against their necks. Prisoners, Patronas thought. Everywhere prisoners. He stepped back outside.

  The old woman was standing in her garden, waiting for him. “I couldn’t wait,” she said. “I’m too old. I wanted it settled.” He realized she was talking about Kleftis. “I couldn’t wait for justice.”

  * * *

  Papa Michalis was still up when Patronas got home, padding around the house in his bathrobe. “I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “Too much, all of this. Too much for an old man.”

  After pouring himself a drink, Patronas told him about the death of Kleftis, the role the grandmother had played in the whole affair. “I didn’t take her in. I probably should have, but I didn’t have the heart, at least not tonight.”

  “What did you do with her?”

  “Left Tembelos with her at the house, told him to keep an eye on her. We’ll jail her in the morning.”

  “What did she say about Kleftis?”

  “She admitted killing him. ‘He was a rabid dog,’ she told me. ‘You kill rabid dogs.’ Very matter of fact, she was. No remorse, no tears, nothing.”

  He took a sip of his drink. “A real Spartan lady. She’s not from Chios. She was born in the mountains of Peloponnese, Kalavrita.”

  “Was she there during the war?”

  Patronas nodded. “A victim from the day she was born.”

  “What are you going to do with her?”

  “Charge her with murder in the first degree. I don’t care how old she is or what she went through. Nothing gives you a license to kill.”

  “Where she’s from, it does. Kleftis killed her grandson and she avenged him. That’s how they do things in those mountains. The people there, they don’t need law enforcement. They settle things themselves. To her this is like the war, when we killed all the collaborators. No one cared what happened to them. No one bothered with due process. You just shot your enemies. The ones who’d sold you out to the Germans. That’s what she did.”

  “She confessed,” Patronas said. “I can’t ignore it. It’s not enough that my prisoner dies in custody. Now you want me to let a killer go? I can’t. You know that. I’m sworn to uphold the constitution.”

  “Can’t you find a legal way to absolve her?”

  “Absolve her? That’s your domain, Father, not mine.”

  Chapter 47

  I am not yet dead, but they have lit my candles.

  —Greek folk saying

  The call from the Prefecture of Chios came the next morning. Patronas was relieved of his duties until further notice. His second-in-command, Evangelos Demos, was to take his place as Interim Chief Officer until a successor could be appointed by the Ministry of Justice in Athens.

  The Prefecture had been quite specific about Patronas’ inadequacies when he’d fired him: the poisoning of the suspect, Manos Kleftis, while under lock and key at the local jail, the failure to follow proper procedure with respect to Kleftis’ murderer, the elderly widow, Calliope Athanassiou, who remained at home in spite of confessing to the crime, the lack of police oversight at Profitis Ilias on August fifteenth, which had resulted in the death of Marina Papoulis, the refusal to permit the suspect, Devon McLean, to use the bathroom in a timely fashion, resulting in a formal complaint filed against the Chios Police Department by the British Consul.

  “Needless and wanton destruction of life and property under your administration,” the Prefecture intoned. Patronas thought he probably could have survived had it not been for the British Consul’s scathing letter, which had been sent to the Ministry of Justice in Athens. The Prefecture had read it out loud to him at the start of the phone call, his voice pained. To be shamed by a foreigner and to have your colleagues in Athens witness your shame. No wonder he’d been sacked.

  “Your conduct throughout this investigation has been highly unprofessional,” the Prefecture went on. “While Manos Kleftis was dying on the floor of his jail cell, you were seen drinking by countless witnesses at a taverna in Langhada. Evangelos Demos testified that you ordered him to chase bats at Profitis Ilias, bats, mind you, and this in spite of his most fervent objections, his legitimate fear that he might injure himself in their pursuit. He also stated that when he was assaulted there one night and the opportunity arose to seize Manos Kleftis, you gunned down, not Kleftis, but two goats, which subsequently died of their injuries.”

  “Testified? You had a trial.”

  “A hearing.”

  “Why wasn’t I invited? Given a chance to defend myself?” To be tried and convicted, not by a jury of one’s peers, but by Evangelos Demos.

  “It wouldn’t have mattered. Your dismissal was a foregone conclusion.” The Prefecture instructed Patronas to clean out his desk by the end of the day and hung up without saying good-bye.

  Patronas set the phone back on its cradle. He wanted to die, to run the Citroen in a closed garage until he was no more, drink hemlock like Socrates. Fired for incompetence. Fired for stupidity. Ach, fired on the word of Evangelos Demos.

  He sat at his desk for a long time with his head in his hands. He ached all over. His wounds from the cave hadn’t healed and now he had new ones. What was he going to do? Go home to Dimitra? He wished he’d let Kleftis kill him.

  At the end of the day, he did as he was told. He gathered up his files and personal belongings and shoved them in cardboard boxes and carried them out to the car. His men stood around awkwardly.

  “Prefecture’s a fool,” Tembelos said.

  * * *

  Ironic how things work out. At one point during the murder investigation, Patronas had wanted nothing more than to join the people in the ouzerias and coffee shops that lined the quay, to sit and watch the boats. Now that he had joined them, drinking endless Nescafé frappés among the hordes of German and Danish tourists, he hated it.

  In the days immediately following his dismissal, Dimitra alone had called and pledged her support. Not her love, Patronas noted sourly. Her support.

  Against his better judgment, he called her back.

  “Hello, Yiannis,” she said, speaking carefully, enunciating her words with just a hint of regret like a doctor about to give a patient the bad news. And bad news it was. “I’ve been thinking over what you said. You know, about my being jealous of Marina, the fact that she had children and I didn’t.”

  “What about it?” Patron
as asked impatiently.

  “I never told you this, but after we were married and the children didn’t come, I went to the doctor and got myself checked out. Took the plane to Athens. I told you I was going to see my cousin, but I wasn’t. I was going to see a specialist there. A man who’d trained in England. It made me embarrassed the questions he asked. The doctor, he said I was all right, that it was you. Probably the mumps you had when you were a boy, the ones that messed up your ear. I didn’t tell you. I thought, Yiannis, he’s a man and men, they worry about making children, their man parts, so I kept silent. I let you go on thinking it was me, that I was one to blame, when all the time it was you.”

  My cup runneth over, Patronas thought to himself. It isn’t enough she made my life hell and sent Marina to her death. It isn’t enough that I botched the case and lost my job. Now even my manhood is suspect.

  “Thank you for clarifying that, Dimitra.” He slammed the phone down. What did she know? Her word isn’t worth the fart of a donkey.

  * * *

  The Citroen quit in the rain that afternoon. Just stopped where it was and ceased to function. No amount of coaxing would get it to start. He kicked one of the tires. All others with pebbles and thou with stones. Fortunately, the car was light and he could roll it to the side of the road, out of harm’s way. When he finished, he was thoroughly soaked. He fiddled with the heater, hoping to get warm, while he waited for the rain to stop. No luck there, either. The rain continued to pour down, rivers forming on either side of the road. A huge bolt of lightning split a cypress tree less than a mile away. The Citroen was elderly, arthritic in its elements, and Patronas knew he’d pushed it unmercifully over the last four months, driving back and forth to Profitis Ilias. Still, why did it have to choose today of all days to die? Why not give up the ghost when the sun was out, instead of in this cataclysm of water? The Citroen’s canvas roof was worn in places and the rain quickly found its way in, trickling down his forehead and along the back of his neck. The heat failed completely a few minutes later. The windshield wipers proved to be worthless too, going back and forth every fifteen minutes and then only if the car was running. Patronas knew; he timed them.