by Leta Serafim
“He make you pay?”
“Of course. No fish this time. Filet mignon and a bottle of French Bordeaux.”
“Bordeaux?”
“Yes. You should have heard him. Chateau this and Chateau that. Waiter couldn’t believe it. Austerity is not a word Father is familiar with.”
“Or self-denial.”
“That’s two words.”
Patronas recalled his dinner, that sad little bag of tyropitas. Unlike Papa Michalis, he was familiar with self-denial in all its guises, beginning with his wedding night and moving onward. Maybe in heaven he’d be rewarded, be able to drink Bordeaux at least. He doubted God would provide him with a woman, doubted sexual congress was part of heaven’s plan.
Again, he thought of the Muslims, how the Jihadists were promised seventy-two virgins when they died. Far better than the Christians, who only got feathers and a halo.
Getting into the front seat of the car, he fastened his seatbelt. “Sami Alnasseri’s aunt called from a payphone in Platys Gialos. She has a box of the boy’s things she wants to give us.”
“She say anything more about his two friends?” Tembelos asked.
“Only that they were ‘men’ and didn’t live in the camp.”
Tembelos hit the steering wheel with his hand. “It’s them, I tell you, Costas and Achilles Kourelas.”
Patronas shifted around in his seat, trying to get comfortable. His ribs hurt and he wished he’d let the doctor tape him up. “If it was indeed Kourelas, father and son, or some other member of Chrisi Avgi, it will be a catastrophe for Greece, Giorgos. You’d better pray it was a foreigner who killed that boy and not one of our own.”
“Yiannis, all the evidence points to them.”
“A Greek would never do something like that.” Patronas was clutching at straws and he knew it. “Children are cherished in Greece.”
“Not migrant children. You know what men like that are capable of. Look at Pavlos Fyssas, that rapper in Athens. Writes a couple of anti-fascist songs and they kill him. Prime Minister got it right that time: ‘The descendants of the Nazis are poisoning the foundations of a country that gave rise to democracy.’ ”
“Things are worse in Athens.”
“Yiannis, you’re dreaming. Achilles Kourelas would have beaten you to death if Evangelos hadn’t intervened. He hit you with a wrench, for God’s sake. I don’t know what’s wrong with him. Steroids maybe, but he’s a murderous bastard.”
“But why kill a child?”
“For the same reason Hitler killed the Jews. There’s something twisted in him. You know the saying: ‘From the devil’s farm, neither lambs nor kids.’ In other words, from the devil’s farm, nothing good ever comes. It’s like that with Costas and Achilles Kourelas. The only thing they’ll ever succeed at is inflicting pain.”
It was a long speech for Tembelos, obviously one he’d thought about.
Patronas looked out at the darkened hills, suddenly afraid for Sami’s aunt.
“Ela grigora,” he urged. Hurry.
Chapter Sixteen
Pity those who have been beaten until the arrival of judges.
—The Delphic Oracle
Platys Gialos was so quiet Patronas could hear the sea, the soft booming of the waves along the shore. The wind was up, and it made a mournful sound as it swept through the deserted village.
He saw no sign of Sami Alnasseri’s aunt, but as promised, she’d left the box for him on the pavement by the payphone, painstakingly labeled ‘for polic.’ The box was small, about the size of an old-fashioned cigar box, and well worn. Something in Arabic was scrawled across the top. Sami Alnasseri’s name, Patronas guessed, seeing the clumsy childishness of the writing.
The child’s treasures had been modest: a leather dog collar, well-worn and chewed almost through, a blue spiral notebook, and a couple of modest toys. Patronas opened the notebook and flipped through the pages, then tipped it over and shook it out to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. A few of the pages were written on in Arabic, and there was a drawing of an airplane on the inside cover. The tail had given the boy trouble and he’d erased and redrawn it a number of times. Patronas could see the marks clearly, the paper wrinkled and soiled from the child’s efforts. The only other things in the box were a little figurine of a man made of straw, bound together with strips of cellophane, and a donkey carved out of wood. It was tethered to a little slatted cart piled high with crude facsimiles of fruit, misshapen watermelons and oranges, and a cluster of grapes. Patronas spun the wheels of the cart with a finger and put it back in the box.
Tears filled his eyes and he clutched the box to his chest. He knew who Sami Alnasseri was now, and he grieved for him.
Stepping under a streetlight, he opened the notebook again. What he’d mistaken for Arabic was actually Greek. A series of phrases the boy had copied over and over:
To onoma mou einai Sami. My name is Sami.
Ti kaneis? How are you?
Pos se lene? What is your name?
Eimai apo tin Suria? I am from Syria.
Either he’d been trying to teach himself Greek or someone had been instructing him. He stowed the box in an evidence bag, thinking he’d send it to Athens and have them dust it for prints. He wondered where Sami’s passport was, the rest of the documentation he’d been issued upon his arrival in Greece. Perhaps the boy’s aunt had held onto them.
He was opening the door of the Toyota when he heard a sudden tinkling of glass, followed by a huge explosion. Smoke started pouring out of the migrant camp and everywhere people were screaming.
“Holy Jesus, what was that?” Tembelos cried, jumping out of the car.
“A Molotov cocktail!” Patronas yelled. “Come on. Someone just firebombed the camp.”
Spotting a man running away, they gave chase, but he was too fast and escaped, sprinting across the fields and vanishing into the night.
The Molotov cocktail had set the brush along the riverbed ablaze. It was almost the end of August and the vegetation was very dry. The fire spread quickly, growing in intensity as it advanced through the undergrowth. Little by little, the sheeting on the hovels began to burn, melting like wax and sending up clouds of acrid black smoke as it disintegrated, the ends of the plastic writhing and curling like living things.
Migrants were fleeing in all directions, their eyes wild with fear. A woman jumped into the sea with a young child in her arms, her long black robe floating up around her on surface of the water. Others soon followed. Late at night, the sea was very cold, and the children shrieked and cried.
Within minutes, the trees surrounding the camp began to burn, the pines seething and crackling as the resin ignited, going up on all sides like Roman candles. The air was so hot, Patronas could barely breathe, but he and Tembelos rescued as many people as they could, charging toward them through the smoky haze and leading them to safety.
Fearing the priest wouldn’t survive, Patronas ordered him to stand back. “Console the victims. If they’re injured, have a local person drive them to the clinic in Apollonia.”
Tembelos was helping an arthritic old woman escape when there was a huge splintering crash behind him. Without thinking, he pushed the woman to the ground and threw himself down on top of her. The massive tree missed them by centimeters, but the shower of sparks set his clothes on fire, tendrils of flame burning his legs.
Terrified, he thrashed around, twitching and writhing as if having a seizure.
Patronas and the old woman grabbed him by the ankles and pulled him to safety. They rolled him back and forth on the ground and threw dirt on his clothes.
“How are you, Giorgos?” Patronas asked, kneeling beside him. “Are you all right?”
Tembelos gritted his teeth. “What can I say, Yiannis? Eimai kalopsimenos.” I got roasted.
Patronas helped him to his feet, and together they fled the camp, the old woman in tow. Holding her scarf across her face with one hand, she clutched Patronas’ arm with the other. She was surpr
isingly strong and had a fierce grip, her nails digging into his flesh like talons.
Tembelos tried to embrace her when they got to the street, to thank her for saving his life, but she just bowed her head and muttered something in Arabic, a blessing it sounded like. Watching her hobble away, Patronas wondered what her history was, where she had learned to save men from burning to death. Like applying tourniquets, it was a terrible knowledge to possess.
Half the people in the neighborhood were now fighting the blaze. A local man in bedroom slippers and bathrobe was lugging a hose over his shoulder, seeking a spigot to screw it into. Others were filling buckets with a slurry of sand and seawater and dumping them out on the flames. A line quickly formed, people dunking their buckets into the sea and passing them on to the person standing next to them, the last one in the procession running up to the fires and emptying the water out. Even the hipster farmers had gotten involved, husband and wife beating back the flames with wet blankets.
Patronas was surprised to see that Lydia Pappas was one of the runners. Her auburn hair had come loose, her face surrounded by a flattened mass of sweaty curls, and her clothes were covered with ash. Catching sight of him, she gave him a weak smile. Then, picking up her bucket, she headed back into the inferno.
Svenson and his students were also in the vicinity, not laboring as intensely as the rest. They dabbled at it, leisurely, with their buckets. Patronas noticed Bowdoin was taking pictures with his cellphone, and he signaled for him to stop.
Shrugging, the boy slipped the phone back into his pocket. Gave Patronas a two-fingered salute.
The migrants were huddled together, watching the camp burn on the far side of the street, their faces stony. A few of the children were shrieking, clutching at their mothers’ skirts for reassurance. Patronas ordered his men to speak to them, to ask them in English if they had seen the person who did this, if they recognized him.
“It was arson, no question about it. Someone deliberately firebombed the camp.”
It took nearly two hours to put out the fire, and by the time it was over, at least half of the camp had been destroyed. A huge number of people had gathered by then, the entire population of Sifnos, it looked like. A group of priests were talking to Papa Michalis, looking across the street at the smoldering wreckage and shaking their heads.
Though in a great deal of pain, Tembelos insisted on waiting it out. “I told you we should leave. We’re under siege here. First you, now me. Who’s next? Evangelos?”
Evangelos was standing next to them, placidly eating a gyro, a big messy one in a pita, tzatziki, garlic sauce, dripping down his chin. Patronas had no idea where Evangelos had acquired it. Perhaps his associate had hidden talents.
As for Evangelos being the next victim, in Patronas’ opinion, it couldn’t happen soon enough.
“Not too many people got hurt,” Papa Michalis reported. “I counted fewer than twenty. For the most part, they only had minor injuries.”
Deeply shaken, the mayor announced he was opening up a local school for the people displaced by the fire. “You can live there until September,” he told the migrants. “After that, I’ll make other arrangements for you.”
“You see, Yiannis,” the priest said. “The fire changes everything. It’s human nature, I guess. Mankind is always better at survival than success. It takes a crisis to bring out what’s best in people.”
Patronas could think of lots of occasions when a crisis gave rise to not what was ‘best in people,’ but to bloodletting and mayhem—the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand came to mind—but he kept those thoughts to himself. Let the old man think what he wanted. Such delusions were probably nutritional—fueled the priest’s belief system and supported his faith. Unacquainted with faith himself, Patronas assumed it was a fragile thing, made of gossamer and starlight, and needed shoring up on a daily basis.
The local bus was idling in the street, waiting to ferry the migrants to the school. Greeks from the neighborhood began loading it with blankets they’d brought from their homes, bags of food and clothing. They helped the migrants climb onboard and handed their children up to them.
“Ola kala,” they kept saying. Everything is fine.
A handful of Greeks had offered to take the victims of the fire into their homes, and Patronas watched them lead them away. The migrant children were holding their parents’ hands and skipping along beside them, laughing together.
Seeing them, the priest smiled. “ ‘For I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me.’ ”
He continued on in this vein, quoting the Bible and commending the people of Sifnos for their generosity and goodness, their adherence to the word of Jesus. “ ‘Then Jesus looked up at his disciples and said, ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the Kingdom of Heaven.’ ”
Patronas rolled his eyes. It was hard to believe someone could turn a firebombing into a testament of faith, but that was what Papa Michalis appeared to be doing, seeing signs of God’s bounty even where it didn’t exist. Satan’s maybe—Beelzebar or whatever the hell Alcott had called him—but not God’s, definitely not God’s.
Chapter Seventeen
Tell me who your friend is and I will tell you who you are.
—Greek Proverb
Chaotic and overcrowded, the clinic in Apollonia was full of people, the burn victims and their relatives and friends. A few were sitting on chairs in the waiting area. Others were spread out on the floor. However, the great majority were standing in the hallway outside the examining room, clustered around the gurneys that held their loved ones, effectively blocking anyone else from getting by. A couple of older women in caftans were keening loudly, their voices rising and falling in a dirge-like chorus that set Patronas’ teeth on edge.
He’d been waiting with Tembelos for more than an hour to see the doctor, and those women had been caterwauling the whole time. He didn’t know where the noise they were making came from, the Sahara maybe, what he imagined a bunch of grieving Bedouins might sound like. All he knew was he hated it. Human agony, fresh from the desert.
A total of nineteen migrants had been hurt, Sami Alnasseri’s aunt among them, but fortunately, no one had died that night. Patronas had caught sight of her when she was brought in, but after seeing her injuries, he quickly abandoned the idea of speaking to her. She’d been hooked up to a morphine drip, groggy and in pain. Questioning her now would be a violation of all he believed in, the equivalent of torture.
When Tembelos’ turn came, Patronas helped him up onto the gurney. His friend cried out as he settled himself down on the thin mattress, adding his voice to the unholy chorus in the hallway, his eyes shiny with tears.
“Ach, Giorgos,” Patronas whispered.
The doctor was the same one who’d treated Patronas earlier and he shook his head when he saw him. “You again?”
“What can I say? It’s not easy being a cop these days.”
“I know. I saw the demonstrations on television.”
Recently there’d been huge protests in Athens, farmers driving their tractors into the city to protest the new wave of austerity measures and the searing cuts to their social security payments. They’d blocked the roads and occupied the center of the city. A number of policemen had been injured in the subsequent melee. Head injuries mostly—concussions and the like.
Until tonight, Patronas believed he’d been one of the lucky ones, assigned to Sifnos this summer when the rest of Greece was up in arms. But now after Tembelos got hurt, he felt cursed.
After clipping away Tembelos’ clothing, the doctor examined him carefully. “The wounds aren’t extensive,” he said, “but they’re deep. I’m afraid you might have some trouble with your left leg in the future. Scar tissue may limit your mobility.”
The hair on one side of Tembelos’ skull had also been burned. It didn’t look terrible, only as if he had been badly barbered, little singled tufts interspersed with sw
aths of exposed and blistered skin. Moaning, Tembelos kept feeling it with his hand. “My hair, what happened to my hair?”
“It’ll grow back,” the doctor assured him. “It’s your leg I’m worried about.”
Before he left, the doctor handed Tembelos a bottle of painkillers and a cane. “Keep the weight off that leg. It will help promote healing.”
Scowling, Tembelos held the cane at arm’s length, as if it were a cobra. “You see this, Yiannis?” he told Patronas, shaking it at him. “It’s a cane. A fucking cane. This case just keeps getting better and better.”
After leaving the clinic, they drove back to Platys Gialos and camped out in front of Leandros. Patronas had promised the harbor patrolman he’d relieve him, and he wanted to keep his word.
He’d wanted to go alone, but Tembelos insisted on accompanying him. “Hurts no matter what I do, so I might as well work. Anyway, I want to get this done and go home. I’m sick of this place.”
They parked the Rav across the street and took turns sleeping in the backseat. Tembelos was in a great deal of pain, and he kept moaning every few minutes. Neither of them got much rest.
“No offense, Yiannis,” Tembelos said over breakfast the next morning, “but Florence Nightingale, you’re not. When a person is suffering and cries out in pain, you’re supposed to comfort them, not cover your ears.”
“I’m sorry, Giorgos. I’m exhausted.”
They were sitting in Narli’s Café, drinking coffee and eating tyropitas. Breakfast or dinner, it doesn’t matter, Patronas thought. The menu is exactly the same.
“Maybe I should warn Calliope off,” Tembelos went on. “I’m not sure I want my cousin mixed up with a man like you.” The words were harsh, but his friend grinned as he said them.
“Might not be a bad idea,” Patronas said, rejoicing that he might be off the hook. “I’m not myself these days.”
