From the Devil's Farm

by Leta Serafim

  Patronas didn’t envy the Hellenic Coast Guard its mandate. Given the country’s porous nature, it would be impossible to seal it off or stop any boatman from discharging his cargo, be it human or otherwise, on its shores. Over the last few weeks, the Coast Guard had intercepted thousands of migrants, crossing over from Turkey to the Greek islands of Lesvos and Kos, in multiple incidents. The government then announced the number of undocumented people expected to enter Greece would more than triple in the coming year. Close to a million people were on the move across the Middle East, officials had reported, all seeking to pass through Greece and enter Northern Europe.

  Patronas wondered if the victim had been one of those immigrants, brought here by his family. If so, where were they now and why hadn’t they reported him missing?

  Three identical sailboats were anchored close to the cruiser, their rigging clanging in the wind. Foreign tourists, Patronas judged, part of a flotilla making its way through the Cyclades Islands—Mykonos to Santorini, Paros to Sifnos and back again.

  The islands were justifiably famous and drew over twenty million visitors every summer. A journey through them was what foreigners dreamt about. The Greeks, their economy in ruins, didn’t dream of such things anymore. They only dreamed of having enough money to feed their children. His people were being washed away in a storm of debt and misfortune, the future of their children forfeited perhaps forever. If things didn’t change, one day all that would be left of his homeland would be its beauty.

  The driver of the van, a small taciturn man with greasy hair, started the engine. “When did you want to be picked up?” he asked, turning to Patronas.

  “Sunset,” Patronas told him. “We should be finished by then.”

  “Athens said you’d be bringing out the body.”

  “That’s right.”

  They drove through Apollonia, the capital of Sifnos, then turned onto another road and headed toward Vathi, a modern settlement on the southern coast. Stathis had said the entrance to Aghios Andreas was about halfway between the two towns.

  Patronas rolled down his window and looked out. The island was lovely in the midday light, full of terraced hills thick with olive trees. The air was fragrant with the smell of oregano and thyme. Closing his eyes for a moment, he breathed deeply, savoring the scent. Beneath the trees, the earth glimmered faintly in the sun. In ancient times, Sifnos had been famous for its gold mines, he’d learned in school, and it was as if a residual gleam still lingered in the soil.

  In the old days the inhabitants of Sifnos were well known for their deceitfulness and greed, his teacher had said, and tried to cheat Apollo, presenting him with a gilt egg at the Oracle of Delphi instead of their customary gold one. Angry, Apollo retaliated and flooded their mines. An object lesson, if ever there was one. The teacher had gone on to imply such would be the fate of any student he caught cheating. Maybe not divine retribution as in the case of Apollo and the flooded mines, but something equally dire.

  Patronas smiled at the memory, remembering how he and his classmates had tossed an exam folded up like a paper airplane out a bathroom window to another group of students waiting below. Textbooks in hand, the latter had solved the problems and sent the exam flying back. Unfortunately, all the answers had been wrong; the teacher had gotten suspicious, and everyone in the class failed. A flood of sorts it had been, that deluge of zeroes.

  The priest had bought a guidebook and was calling out the names of the churches as they passed. “According to what it says here, they are scattered all over,” he said. “Three hundred sixty-five total, one for every day of the year.”

  Patronas smiled. Not greedy anymore, the natives were pious now.

  The van climbed steadily, passing through the settlement of Katavati and slowly traversing the mountain that formed the core of the island.

  The ancient citadel of Aghios Andreas proved to be far bigger than anyone had anticipated. “More than ten thousand square meters,” the priest informed them. In addition to the extensive ruins, a modern museum had opened in 2010 to house the finds from the excavation.

  Perhaps it was its location—they were very high—but the place felt like a world apart to Patronas. Almost as if he was suspended in the sky. The day was clear and he could see three islands in the distance—Antiparos and Paros to the east, and Kimolos to the south—little more than dark shadows against the horizon. The Aegean seemed to fill the visible world, the landfalls in the distance mere markers in its vast blue expanse.

  Idly, he wondered what had driven the ancients to build so high—what manner of monsters they’d been fleeing. And what had drawn the murdered child to this place. It was unlikely the child had come here on foot. He’d either taken a bus or someone had driven him.

  Getting out his notebook, he wrote ‘access’ and put a question mark next to it.

  As arranged, Petros Nikolaidis was waiting for him in the parking lot.

  “I took a preliminary statement from Lydia Pappas and drove her back to her hotel,” he told Patronas. “She was a wreck, shaking and crying. Covered with vomit.”

  “And the boy?” Patronas asked impatiently. “The dead boy? What of him?”

  “I left him where he was. He’s been there awhile, so prepare yourself.”

  Patronas and the others followed Nikolaidis through the ruins and down a poorly marked trail. Equipment in hand, they walked for a long time, passing through an empty valley and moving on, deep into the interior of Sifnos. The area was desolate, arid and rock-bound. No trees, no shade whatsoever, only a thin scrim of thorny brush and patches of mustard-colored lichen on the stony ground.

  Nikolaidis pointed to an outcropping in the distance. “That’s Thanatos. There are stairs leading up to the top, but they’re pretty treacherous, so watch your step. The gravel can shift underfoot, and it’s a long way down.”

  Judging by its appearance, Thanatos’ origins were volcanic, the result of some prehistoric lava flow. The area at the base had been smoothed down over time, sanded by the ebb and flow of some long vanished ocean, but higher up, the lava remained rough, so black it seemed to pull the light out of the sky. Although the flow was threaded in places with bright bands of ingenuous rock—quartz, mostly—the overwhelming impression it gave was of darkness. It was as bleak a place as he’d ever seen.

  Patronas had seen photographs of Devil’s Tower, the basalt shaft in Wyoming that featured prominently in the American movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Thanatos reminded him of that place. Looking up at it now, he felt again a sense of unease.

  Well on in years, the priest, Papa Michalis, was too proud to ask for help, but the long hike in the sun had cost him and his face was beaded with sweat. “How much farther?” he asked Patronas, wiping his brow on his sleeve.

  “Just a few more steps, Father,” Patronas said. “We’re almost there.”

  On a leave of absence from the church, the priest now worked in the police department on Chios. He had originally been hired as a counselor, to help the wayward—the drunks and wife beaters—mend their ways, but his role had evolved over time and now included assisting Patronas and his team on criminal investigations. He was especially good at ferreting out the truth, even from the worst offenders. Patronas had no idea how he did it—maybe it was the priestly regalia, the black robe and the cross, a reminder that there could indeed be a hereafter, and in the case of habitual criminals, it might well be bleak—but he was unequalled when it came to gaining their trust and eliciting confessions.

  The two had become friends over the years, often eating dinner together on their native Chios, drinking ouzo and sparring about human nature and the role God played or didn’t play—Patronas being an atheist—in the affairs of man. The priest had told him long ago that family was one of the keys to human life. Apparently, homicide also played a part, for this was the third time they’d been summoned to investigate a murder in the last eighteen months.

  But never for the killing of a child, Patronas thought sa
dly. No, this is a first for us.

  Greece had one of the lowest homicide rates in the world, and consequently, most local law enforcement officials had little experience dealing with it. They had no firsthand knowledge of forensics, no idea how to chart the trajectory of the blood spatter, for example, or assess the time of death. The places under their jurisdiction were peaceful, so they’d no cause to acquire these skills. For the most part, Greeks died of old age or in car accidents; they did not die at each other’s hands.

  Patronas, on the other hand, had learned far more about forensics than he wanted to know, having solved two previous killings, and was now considered an expert in the field. His colleagues called him ‘Hercule’ now after Agatha Christie’s legendary detective, Hercule Poirot. A man, not unlike Patronas, of diminutive stature with a well-groomed moustache. The thought amused him. He’d been lucky; that was all. He hadn’t known what he was doing then and he didn’t know what he was doing now. Thankfully, his fellow officers had chosen Poirot and had not dubbed him Miss Marple.

  The priest’s lengthy robe was giving him trouble and he paused for a moment to tuck a portion of it up into his voluminous drawers, exposing his heavy orthopedic shoes and long black socks held in place around his spindly calves by hideous old-fashioned garters.

  Patronas looked away, embarrassed for his friend. Normally, he would have made fun of him—the garters alone demanded it, and those drawers, Mother of God, were the size of bed sheets—but today his mind was elsewhere. “I’m worried about this one,” he said.

  “As am I,” Papa Michalis said. “The killing of a child? It is an abomination. Who could have done such a thing?”

  “A psychopath, maybe.”

  “Yes, yes. Someone like Ted Bundy.” Papa Michalis continued in this vein for a few minutes, enumerating the sins of Ted Bundy, who if he was to be believed, had murdered at least fourteen young women and as many as a hundred.

  Patronas was sorry he’d brought it up. His friend was fascinated by serial killers and could go on at length, recounting their misdeeds in grisly detail. The names of the men Jeffrey Dahmer had eaten, for example, and which limb he’d usually started with. Or the fact that Jack the Ripper had extracted a kidney from one of his victims and mailed it to a newspaper. While Patronas understood that such people were a challenge for a priest—it was a thorny theological question: how does one forgive the unforgiveable?—he wished his friend would find another hobby. Collecting stamps, maybe.

  “However, Bundy didn’t kill children,” the priest was saying. “I fear what we’re after is someone far worse, with the means to lure a child here and slaughter him.”

  Papa Michalis fancied himself a great crime stopper, the true heir to Sherlock Holmes, but he tended to get carried away. Today was no exception.

  Patronas waved him off. “We will go where the evidence leads us, Father. And I seriously doubt it will lead us to someone worse than Ted Bundy.”

  “Bah, that’s what you think. There is evil alive in the universe, Yiannis, and you and I, I fear, are about to enter one of its lairs. To pass through a dark portal into hell itself. ”

  As inevitably happened once he got going, the priest continued to speculate—brevity was a concept Papa Michalis had no use for—about the nature of the evil. As was his wont, he thundered off in the wrong direction—that of fiction and fantasy and bad American television shows.

  Later Patronas would recall the conversation. Papa Michalis had been onto something that morning in Sifnos; he just hadn’t realized it at the time. Evil was indeed alive in the universe, and like fear, it was contagious and sometimes infected whole groups, spreading like a malignant virus, a contagion of violence and misery.

  Ahead, the lava that formed Thanatos shone dully in the sun. A staircase had been cut into the rock, so steep it had been like climbing a ladder. Patronas paused to catch his breath. Nikolaidis and the other men had already reached the top and called down to him to hurry. The steps were deeply worn, cratered from centuries of use. Bending down, he touched one with his hand.

  Swab it for DNA, you’d probably find Cain and Abel’s.

  Chapter Three

  Be a seeker of wisdom.

  —The Delphic Oracle

  High on the rocky crag, the ruins at first glance appeared to be part of the natural landscape. The shrine, what was left of it, had tumbled off the cliff at some point, chunks of squared-off stone littering the valley below. All was quiet, the air absolutely still.

  “A lesser temple, it isn’t featured in any guide books or maps,” Nikolaidis said. “It’s a secret place, well hidden. Tourists rarely make their way here.”

  “And now all these people in less than a week,” Patronas said.

  “I know.”

  Starting with the perimeter, Patronas circled the ruins at a deliberate pace, seeking to get a sense of the area before processing the body. The shrine didn’t amount to much, consisting only of a long, rectangular platform with a circular pit at the center. The child’s body was in the middle, hanging above the pit from a metal pole.

  A shallow trench had been dug alongside the outer edge of the platform. Seeing the rawness of the disturbed soil, Patronas assumed it must be new. Whoever had done it hadn’t made much progress; the rocky substrata must have given them trouble.

  What undergrowth there was nearby had also been cleared away, a pile of yellowing weeds stacked neatly off to one side. Patronas made a note to ask the museum director at Aghios Andreas who was responsible for the upkeep of the site. That person might have seen something or possibly been involved himself.

  Three columns had survived the earthquakes that plagued the region. They stood like sentinels on the far end of the platform. Crude things, the columns, unrecognizable as Greek, with scratchy symbols and drawings etched into the stone. Not modern graffiti, Patronas judged, running his hand up and down one of them. No, these were far older, probably dating from the dawn of recorded time.

  The child’s wrists and ankles had been bound with a chain and fastened to the pole with a lock. He hung there about half a meter above the fire, suspended over the pit. Greeks had once transported dead livestock that way, two men shouldering opposite ends of a pole.

  Nearly as big as a man’s hand, the lock was unlike any Patronas had seen, forged out of bronze and encrusted with some kind of white residue. It looked ancient, possibly centuries old. He could see where the clasp had come loose, the metal on either side worn thin. Had the child been bigger, he might have been able to break free.

  Why hadn’t the killer used a modern lock, a padlock made of steel? Could be he was afraid of being recognized, didn’t want to risk buying one on Sifnos. Strange.

  Patronas worked part-time on Chios, overseeing security for an excavation run by Harvard University. As soon as he got the chance, he intended to speak to the archeologist in charge there, Jonathan Alcott, and ask him about Thanatos—see if Alcott knew who’d built it and why. Could be he’d also know the provenance of the lock. If it was as rare as Patronas suspected, such information might well lead them to the killer.

  ‘Source of lock?’ he wrote in his notebook.

  The platform was constructed out of chiseled blocks of gray basalt, a huge undertaking given its location and the intractable nature of the stone.

  Korakia, crows, were circling the site, cawing raucously, their dark shadows passing back and forth, high above him. Their presence made him nervous. He picked up a fistful of gravel and threw it at them, hoping it wasn’t the boy’s body that had drawn them. The child still had his eyes and had been spared that at least.

  Papa Michalis and Petros Nikolaidis were wrestling with the yellow crime scene tape, seeking to secure it in place. There’d been talk of erecting a tent above the victim, but Patronas vetoed it. Although it was standard operating procedure, he considered it pointless now. After they finished, they would move the body out. It couldn’t stay here a minute longer, not in this heat.

  “Suit up in you
r protective gear and start at the periphery of the crime scene,” Patronas told the two. “Move in on your hands and knees. Make a grid. Go over every square centimeter. Bag all the evidence you find. Tembelos will record everything while I deal with the body.”

  Camera in hand, Tembelos was already hard at work photographing the murder scene, starting as Patronas had on the outside of the platform and working his way in. Stepping close to the body, he took a head shot, then moved down the length of the child’s body, the flash going off at regular intervals.

  Patronas took a photo of the lock with his phone and sent it on to Alcott, asking if he could identify it. He planned to call him later, once the child’s body had been dealt with.

  Evangelos Demos, true to form, had taken sick almost immediately upon arrival and been banished from the crime scene by Patronas, who feared he would vomit on the corpse and contaminate the evidence. They had been there for over an hour, and Patronas could hear his assistant still at it, retching loudly off the side of the mountain.

  “Eisai touvlo,” he muttered under his breath. You blockhead.

  As a cop, Evangelos was hopeless. He should have been a grocer. He’d be good at sorting vegetables. They’d have a natural affinity—potatoes and cabbages and him. With a sigh, Patronas returned to his work.

  Stepping into his tyvek coveralls and booties, he hastily zipped them up and pulled on a pair of latex gloves. It was already close to 40°C, 100°F. He’d have to work fast. They were running out of time.

  Nikolaidis was right. The body had been there for some time. Rigor mortis was giving way and the limbs were somewhat pliable now, the flesh waxen. The child’s eyes were open but cloudy. The heat might have rushed the process, he wasn’t sure. The coroner had more resources. He’d leave the estimate of the time of death to him.