The Bull of Mithros

by Anne Zouroudi

  ‘You shouldn’t eat such heavy food in the heat,’ said Spiros. ‘Fruit, and raw vegetables. I had a little salad, a little feta, and look at me, I’m fine. At our age, we have to be careful what we eat.’ He ran his hands over his reasonably smooth belly, and cast a glance at the tight belt on Loskas’s shorts, and the small mound of fat piled over it.

  ‘You sound like a government announcement,’ said Loskas, sourly. He turned towards the kafenion doorway, where a youth stood with a tray under one arm, his eyes on two bored-looking Danish girls drinking beer.

  Loskas called out to the youth.

  ‘Bring me a frappé, medium sweet with milk. And put your tongue back in your mouth before someone treads on it.’

  The youth went inside; the Danish girls continued to look bored. The player losing at tavli shouted his objection to the way the dice had fallen. Seeing the game as hopeless, his helper walked away.

  ‘I’m glad I found you,’ said Loskas.

  ‘Where else should I be?’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

  Loskas looked around. The youth was bringing out his frappé. He placed it on the table alongside a glass of water; ice cubes chinked in the glasses.

  ‘I’ll have an ice-cream, too,’ said Loskas to the youth. ‘Do you have any of those strawberry and chocolate, mixed?’ The youth nodded. ‘One of those. And don’t forget the spoon.’

  Spiros glanced again at Loskas’s midriff, and his eyebrows lifted.

  ‘It’s so hot,’ said Loskas, defensively. ‘I need to cool down.’ He sipped his coffee through a pink straw. ‘Now listen carefully. I’m going to say what I’ve got to say quietly.’ He leaned towards Spiros. ‘Someone came in the bank today. Someone I think we know.’

  Spiros stirred the remains of his own coffee with his straw, and relaxed back into his chair.

  ‘Don’t say any more.’ He raised a hand to a passing fisherman, and in a gesture which might or might not have been ironic, the fisherman deferentially touched the peak of his cap. Spiros pointed to the outer corner of his eye, and at the fisherman, letting the fisherman know he was being watched. ‘I saw him too. He came into my office.’

  ‘You agree with me that it’s him?’

  ‘Him, or his twin brother.’

  ‘I wasn’t so sure.’ Loskas sipped again at his coffee. ‘It’s a long time ago. People change. And we didn’t know him well.’

  ‘You know it’s him, or you wouldn’t have mentioned it to me,’ said Spiros. ‘Why should you doubt it?’

  ‘Because if it’s him, he wouldn’t be stupid enough to be here.’

  ‘But he isn’t here voluntarily. I had it from Captain Fanis that his shipmates tipped him overboard for cheating at cards.’

  ‘That would make sense,’ said Loskas. ‘He came to me for money. He wanted me to bypass the system, take his word for who he was and give him access to his account.’

  ‘What name did he give?’

  ‘He gave no name. He told me to forget it.’

  ‘He told me they call him Chiotis, Manolis Chiotis.’

  ‘Is that the name he went under before? I don’t remember. It’s so long ago. The only one of us who might remember, is here no more.’

  ‘Ah, but that’s not true, is it?’

  For a moment, Loskas looked puzzled.

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘The question is, what should we do?’

  ‘The man is very anxious to be on his way,’ said Spiros. ‘Which is hardly surprising, is it? But you, of course, hold all the cards.’

  ‘What cards?’

  ‘He can’t leave without money to buy himself a ticket. You control the money. You won’t give him money without his papers, and he doesn’t have his papers.’

  ‘What if he finds a boatman to take him? If he promises enough money, someone will take him off here. Maybe he’ll get a lift to rejoin his colleagues, wherever they’ve gone, and then we’ve lost him.’

  ‘That’s easily handled,’ said Spiros. ‘I’ll put the word round no one’s to take him, no matter what he offers. Anyone who takes him can look forward to my wrath, and needn’t come to me for renewal of any fishing permits. And you can cast aspersions on his credit-worthiness. Let it be known he’s got no money in the bank. Give out some story of him running from his creditors. Between us we can ensure if he tries to leave, he’ll be up against a wall.’

  The youth brought Loskas’s ice-cream. Loskas dipped in his spoon, and took a mouthful of strawberry.

  ‘So you think we could stop him going?’ he asked Spiros.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Spiros. ‘We could stop him all right. But the question is, should we?’

  ‘That’s what I was thinking,’ said Loskas. ‘It’s going to cause trouble, if certain people find out he’s here. And is trouble what we want?’

  ‘If certain people find out we knew, and didn’t stop him, it might cause more trouble still. You and I are in a difficult position.’

  ‘It’s hard to know what to do for the best.’

  ‘So what do you suggest?’

  Loskas’s ice-cream was melting quickly; the spoonful of chocolate he put in his mouth was almost liquid.

  ‘I don’t want trouble,’ he said. ‘But I don’t want to give offence to certain people. So perhaps we should just tell what we know, and have no more to do with it. When he comes to me with the right papers, I’ll give him his money, and he can go. All by the book.’

  ‘But by the book takes time,’ said Spiros. ‘I say we let certain people know we’ve seen him, and leave it at that. Let matters take their course. Then it’s not our funeral. Agreed?’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Loskas, and gave his full attention to his ice-cream.

  Six

  From the prow deck where he was relaxing with his copy of Herodotus, the fat man heard the rattle of a bucket, and the trickle of water running from a squeezed mop; he heard the slap of the mop on the deck, and the lazy slide of its head across the boards.

  Silently, he rose from his recliner, and made his way to the corner of the cabins, from where he could see down to the stern. Ilias was barefoot, and not yet properly dressed; the buttons were all unfastened on his crewman’s shirt, and instead of his white trousers, he wore a pair of rumpled shorts. As the fat man watched, Ilias yawned, and leaned, eyes closed, on to the handle of his mop, as if he might be going to fall asleep.

  ‘Kali mera.’

  At the fat man’s words, Ilias fell into a brief enthusiasm for his task, before plunging the mop-head into the bucket, and turning with a small bow to the fat man.

  ‘Kyrie, kali mera,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realise you were awake.’

  ‘Apparently not,’ said the fat man, walking back to the stern. ‘I awoke very early this morning. Where is Enrico?’

  ‘He’s in the galley, kyrie, brewing your coffee.’

  ‘You look tired, Ilias. Did you not sleep well last night?’

  ‘It’s been so hot, kyrie. And if I turn up the air-conditioning, I get too cold.’

  ‘As I’ve said to you before, you’re welcome to sleep on deck, if you can persuade yourself from the softness of your bed,’ said the fat man. ‘You’d find the temperature out here almost perfect. When you’ve done the decks, get some coffee, and rouse yourself. What’s the news on our repair? Did Enrico get the parts you need, yesterday?’

  Ilias shook his head.

  ‘They didn’t have them in stock,’ he said. ‘They ordered them, and promised they’d be here on a boat this evening.’

  ‘Not until then?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘It comes as no surprise. As I expected, we shall have to amuse ourselves here another day.’ He looked across at the harbour, and at the Governor’s Villa high on the headland. ‘I shall take a walk, and maybe have a closer look at that beautiful house. As for you two, please make reasonably good use of your leisure time. By which I mean, I’m charging you to make sure Enrico does nothing to embarrass us.’

  On t
he harbour-front, the fat man stopped before the window of the zaharoplasteio, where an assistant was putting out a fresh tray of bougatsa – crisp filo pastry thickly filled with vanilla cream, and dusted with icing sugar and cinnamon. It had not been long since breakfast, and the fat man was going to walk away; but the scent of warm cinnamon and vanilla was, in the end, a temptation he saw no reason to resist, and so he went inside, and bought two generous pieces to carry him through to lunch.

  He strolled in a direction he had not yet taken, towards the peninsula at the harbour’s end; but rather than taking an upwards path which would take him towards the Governor’s Villa, he stayed close to the waterside, following a route which led him away from the last harbour houses. In a few hundred metres, the path began to rise as it followed the contours of the rocky shore and skirted the base of the promontory, until he rounded a corner, and saw at the hilltop, beyond all the other buildings, the high walls surrounding the villa.

  The path forked. The right fork rose to the hillside houses in a series of steps and twists, and seemed the obvious route for him to follow; yet after a moment’s deliberation, he instead chose the left – a dirt path, leading to the sea.

  The path led downwards through scrub to a small pebble beach, where a young woman crouched at the water’s edge. She had left her slip-on shoes on the pebbles, and was in the shallows up to her ankles, with the skirt of her dress bunched in her lap to stop the hem trailing in the water. She had with her four empty water bottles, one of which she was filling from the sea. When she heard the fat man’s footfall, she turned; she was no beauty – her eyes too small, her thighs too plump, her hair uncombed and wiry – but her smile, though shy, was warm.

  The fat man took a seat on a bench, and watched her. When her first bottle was full, she screwed on the cap, and tossed the full bottle up the beach, out of the sea’s reach. She took the next empty bottle from her lap, unscrewed its cap, and filled that bottle too, and so she went on until all four bottles were filled, when she left the water, straightening her dress. She put the filled bottles into a bag made from flowered fabric which might have been intended to upholster a chair, and headed up the beach in the fat man’s direction.

  He called out to her.

  ‘Kali mera, koritsi.’

  ‘Kalos tou.’

  She was going to pass him by, but he stopped her with a question.

  ‘Will you forgive me for asking,’ he said, ‘but I am by nature curious. Might I ask why you’re taking water from the sea?’

  ‘Medicinal purposes,’ she said.

  ‘Ah, I see. My guess was, you were going to use the water for boiling lobsters.’

  She laughed – a light laugh which softened her flaws, and made her face attractive.

  ‘We can’t afford lobsters where I live,’ she said. ‘If I were boiling anything, it’d be chickpeas.’

  ‘I should introduce myself. They call me Hermes.’

  ‘Olympia.’

  ‘Chairo poli, Despina Olympia.’

  His formality amused her.

  ‘Where’re you from, kalé?’ she asked. In her island accent, she ran all her words together, in contrast to his careful enunciation.

  ‘Not here,’ he said, ‘and that’s why I’ve lost my way. I was trying to get to the big house, up there.’ He pointed to the hillside above them. ‘But I think I’ve taken a wrong turn.’

  ‘You have,’ she said. ‘Do you want me to show you the way? The house I’m staying in is just below it.’

  ‘That would be very kind,’ said the fat man. ‘But I was just going to enjoy my bougatsa, here in the peace and quiet with the view. As it happens, I have two pieces. Can I persuade you to join me, and then we’ll walk together?’

  He produced the pink-and-white striped box from the zaharoplasteio, and slipped off the string tied round it. The pastries’ buttery oils had seeped through the paper lining, and made dark blotches on the box’s cardboard.

  ‘I love bougatsa,’ said Olympia. ‘But I can’t be long.’

  As she sat down next to him on the bench, he offered to take her bag.

  ‘Let me help you with that,’ he said. ‘It must be very heavy.’

  ‘It’s nothing to me,’ she said, placing the bag of bottles under the seat. ‘Look.’ She flexed her arm to show its impressive muscles. ‘You have to be strong, in my line of work.’

  ‘And what is your line of work?’

  ‘I’m a nurse.’

  She bit into a piece of bougatsa, scattering crumbs on her dress and scooping up a squirt of vanilla cream with her finger.

  She spoke with her mouth full.

  ‘So what’s your interest in the Governor’s Villa?’

  ‘I think I’d like to buy it,’ said the fat man.

  As she chewed, she laughed.

  ‘You’d need to be a rich man to do that,’ she said. ‘You could buy a lot of lobsters, with the kind of money you’d need to pay for that house. But it’s not for sale.’

  ‘Is it not?’ asked the fat man, biting off the corner of his pastry. ‘Most things are for sale, if the price is right.’

  ‘That place isn’t,’ she insisted. ‘Uncle Vasso’ll never sell. He says he’s going to die there.’

  ‘Uncle Vasso,’ said the fat man, thoughtfully, as if racking his brain. ‘I know that name. I saw his portrait in the museum.’

  ‘Did you?’ asked Olympia. ‘I’ve never been there. Why’s he got his portrait in the museum?’

  ‘The curator says, because Uncle Vasso does the island so much good.’

  ‘Maybe he does,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t thought about it.’

  She took another large bite of her pastry.

  ‘This is very good,’ she said. ‘If you wanted to buy that house, you should have come here twenty years ago. Before he bought it, the place was a ruin. We used to play up there, when I was small. When the Italian governor lived there, they used to have lots of parties. My grandmother says the King of Greece came once, and they filled all the rooms with white roses, so many that you could smell their perfume right across the island. Do you believe that?’

  The fat man smiled. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘But the house got damaged in the war. No one wanted a house that size, anyway. It was sad to see it – the glass all broken in the windows, the plaster all off the ceilings. There were cracks in the walls you could put your fist through. And the staircase was a death-trap – someone took the banisters for firewood, and you had to know which of the treads were rotten. And the gardens! All overgrown, and full of snakes and cats. My sister took a fancy to some kittens once – they used to nest amongst the weeds – and thought she’d take them home and tame them. Panayeia, did she get bitten! Those kittens were like tiger-cubs! It was me who put peroxide on her cuts. That was the first bit of nursing I ever did, and my sister said I was better at it than our mother. That sowed a seed for me. From a little incident like that, a whole life’s direction grew.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said the fat man. ‘It’s extraordinary how the Fates will take a hand.’

  ‘I suppose we thought the place would just fall down, it being so well on its way. But then Uncle Vasso came back from wherever it was he’d been, and he bought it.’

  ‘And where was it that he’d been?’

  ‘I don’t know. Africa somewhere. All I know is, he came back rich enough to pay cash for the villa, and cash to all the contractors who worked on it. Who knows how many millions he must have spent? And everything was the best! He checked on the work constantly, and never left the builders alone. If they weren’t working fast enough, or to his standard, he fired them, and got in a new team. They say it’s like a palace, inside. They say there are gold-plated taps in the bathroom. Do you think that’s true?’

  ‘Maybe. So he was a man who went away and came back as rich as Croesus?’

  ‘He came back a different man from when he left, that’s what they say. I can’t even have been born when he went. But he came back a cut above his
old roots, and put his relatives’ noses out of joint. They offered him bed and board, as of course they would, but he turned up his nose, and took a room at a hotel. He lived there until the house was finished, and that was the best part of a year. So you can see, he’s a man with money to burn.’

  ‘It certainly sounds like it,’ said the fat man. ‘And he fell out with his relatives, did he?’

  She laughed again.

  ‘Not permanently,’ she said. ‘They’re not stupid, after all. He’s got to leave his money somewhere, and he’s no wife or children. As soon as the villa was finished, they paid a visit, a social call. Even then, they say he turned them away at the door. He doesn’t like visitors, doesn’t Uncle Vasso.’

  ‘He’s an unsociable man, then? He didn’t strike me that way. I believe it was him I saw in the taverna last night, and he seemed very sociable.’

  ‘Oh, he’s sociable, on his own terms. He’s generous too, when he’s out and about. That’s what he said to his relatives, that he’d buy them drinks and dinner, if they ever cared to join him. But his house is his castle, and he likes to keep it to himself. He locks it up like a fortress, and leaves all the lights on, all night. But he was always like that, from the beginning. After the robbery, though, it made him worse.’

  ‘He was robbed, then?’

  ‘Some years ago, now. I was still only a girl, but I remember the people talking. They tortured him to get what they were after. They burned his hands, holding them over a candle flame.’

  ‘Really?’ said the fat man. ‘How extraordinarily cruel! Is that then why he wears gloves?’

  ‘I’ve never seen him without them.’ She put the last of her pastry in her mouth, and wiped the stickiness from her hands on the skirt of her dress. ‘They say his hands are hideous, but it wouldn’t bother me. In my job, you see all kinds of nasty things.’