From the Devil's Farm

by Leta Serafim

  That seemed to reassure them, and one by one, they began to talk. Unlike Patronas’ earlier conversation with them, it was Michael Nielsen, not Charlie Bowdoin, who took the lead this time.

  “Svenson wasn’t involved,” he admitted. “It was just us.”

  Patronas opened up his notebook and wrote the date and the time. “Why Sami Alnasseri?”

  “He stole Charlie’s iPad.”

  “An iPad!”

  Michael Nielsen nodded. “That’s right.”

  Patronas kept his head down and concentrated on entering this information in his notebook, afraid if he looked up, his horror and repulsion would show in his face.

  “It was brand new,” Nielsen insisted as if that explained everything. “When we caught him with it, he just laughed.”

  Sensing Bowdoin was the weakest link, Patronas turned to him. “You can speak freely, Charlie. Go on, I won’t hurt you. Confession is good for the soul.”

  “The three of us discussed it and decided he needed to be punished,” Bowdoin said.

  Although they continued to talk for the next ninety minutes, the motive for the crime remained murky and confused in Patronas’ mind. An unholy combination of adolescent bravura—evidently Nielsen had dared the other two—and television-spawned violence. Once they’d gotten started, drugging and kidnapping the boy, it had been too late to turn back and they’d gone ahead and killed him, goading each other on. There had been no true leader, no Charlie Manson or demonic puppet master. They’d taken turns, according to Bowdoin; the group had acted in tandem.

  As Patronas had anticipated, Michael Nielsen was the worst. “I wanted to feel what it was like to kill,” he said. “To cut a person’s throat and feel their life ebbing away. To hold the power of life and death in my hand … to play God.”

  Although he was doing his best, the boy was far from convincing in the role he’s assigned himself, that of a bloodthirsty maniac. He sounded arrogant and more than a little silly, an actor reading the script of a bad movie.

  Bowdoin was different, an avowed racist. When Tembelos pressed him about the Syrian, he brushed him off, complaining that ‘those fucking people are ruining the world.’ Growing up in Texas, he fancied himself an expert on the problem and said Europe needed to send the migrants a message. “Machine guns,” he said, “that’s the answer. Blast every last one of those sons of bitches to hell and back.”

  Again, Patronas questioned what he was hearing. As with Nielsen, there was a false element in Bowdoin’s little speech, a staged quality. Patronas was sure Bowdoin had heard the words elsewhere and was just repeating them. Maybe his father had said them one night over dinner, or a local politician in Bowdoin’s hometown. Such people existed in America. George Wallace wasn’t that long ago.

  “What about the fire?” Patronas asked.

  “That was us, too,” Bowdoin said. “We figured you’d think a Greek did it and that he killed the kid, too, and we’d be off the hook. A group of Greeks beat a Pakistani to death in Athens, and we assumed you’d think the death of the kid was the same kind of thing.”

  “We almost did,” Patronas said under his breath, remembering Achilles Kourelas.

  Gilbert was far less forthcoming, shrugging when Patronas asked him why he’d participated in the killing. “Temporary insanity?” he offered.

  He tried to sound as callous as the others, but he couldn’t quite pull it off. Alone among the three, he seemed to realize the gravity of what they’d done.

  Sensing they’d reached an impasse, Papa Michalis stepped in and took over the interview a few minutes later. “How did you convince the boy to come with you?” he asked Nielsen.

  “We promised him a bicycle,” Nielsen said. “We even asked him what color he wanted. ‘Red,’ the little fucker said. ‘I want a red bicycle.’ ”

  “None of you speak Arabic. How did you communicate with him?”

  “We looked the words up on the computer. There are sites that tell you how to sound things out and that’s what we did. He was always around, playing in the street with the other kids, so it was easy to find him. Before we spoke to him, Charlie, here, bought a soda and we laced it with drugs and gave it to him. After that, we told him about the bike and the rest was easy.”

  He smirked. “He actually thanked us.”

  “Those people love handouts,” Bowdoin said. “They just take and take.” He drawled these last few words, and again, Patronas had the sense he was repeating something he’d heard.

  Translated, the kid didn’t matter. He was nothing.

  Patronas shook his head. The part about the bike made him want to cry.

  He remembered what Lydia Pappas had said about someone watching her at Thanatos. “Were you there when Lydia Pappas found the body? Were you spying on her?”

  “Yeah,” Bowdoin said. “We were deep into the ritual when we heard her coming, pretending to be Phoenicians and all that shit. Michael was the high priest, and we were all calling to Moloch. We didn’t want her to see us, so we stopped what we were doing and hid in the bushes. It was about an hour after we killed him. The blood was already pretty dry.”

  “I was all for killing her, too,” Nielsen said, a swagger in his voice, “but these guys wouldn’t let me.”

  “After she left, we wiped everything down and ran for it,” Bowdoin said. “I threw the knife off the rock, thinking no one would find it. She had her phone out and we knew she was calling the cops.”

  “How’d you get away?” Lydia had specifically said she’d seen no cars in the parking lot.

  “We stayed well behind her and skirted around the museum, then hiked back down the hill. We knew the way. We’d mapped it out before we killed him. There’s a little path not far from the migrant camp. Using the Jeep would have been too risky. Svenson would have known.”

  “Is that how you got Sami up there?”

  “Yup. We’d already drugged him, so we had to carry him part of the way. We’d rehearsed going back and forth one night, so we knew what we were doing.”

  Very gently, the priest continued to probe. “There was very little blood at the scene. What did you do with it?”

  “We drank it.” Nielsen widened his eyes, obviously seeking to shock the old man.

  Thinks he’s the star in a feature film. Patronas could hear it in the young man’s voice, how entertained he was to have been involved in a murder. Soulless and foolish and a killer of children.

  “Svenson had us reenacting religious rites all summer,” Bowdoin explained. “He told us people had practiced human sacrifice in the old days and that it had brought them power and prosperity, so we wanted to try it out.”

  “The red ocher and the beads?” Papa Michalis asked.

  “They were Svenson’s,” Nielsen said. “I bought the metal pole at a hardware store in Kamares and the chain there, too, but everything else came from him. He had all this crap, tons of it, and I figured he wouldn’t miss it.”

  “The anklets we found in his apartment?”

  “I put them there. I wanted to confuse things, make you think he was culpable.”

  A big word, culpable. Unfamiliar, Patronas could only guess at its meaning. The kid might be a psychopath, but he had a fine vocabulary.

  Looking off into space, Nielsen seemed to lose his train of thought for a moment. “Using the lock was a mistake. Svenson had it in his room and I took it. He’d showed it to us once and I remembered where he kept it. I wanted to make everything authentic, you know? As close to the original as we could get. He got suspicious and confronted me. We were in deep by that point and we couldn’t have that.”

  “So you killed him, too?” Papa Michalis stated this quietly.

  Nielsen nodded. “I called him and told him I’d left something on the boat the last time we went out and I needed to get it—a watch my father had given me for my birthday. He said he had an appointment with you, but if I hurried, he could meet me before.”

  “And the three of you were waiting for him?�
��

  “Yes.”

  “How’d you get away from school? Didn’t you have classes that day?”

  “Svenson had already left, so we didn’t have to stay. He was our adviser, and that’s how it worked. After he died, they gave us another adviser, but he was it for us then.”

  “Who hit him?”

  Looking down at his hands, Nielsen inspected his fingernails. “I don’t remember.”

  “It was you, Michael,” Bowdoin said, his voice rising. “You hit him and hit him and then you threw him into the water. You did all of it, every last fucking bit.”

  Gilbert was in tears. “And we just stood there and watched.”

  In spite of himself, Patronas was troubled by the fate of the students, and he spoke to the Turkish authorities at the prison before he left, flashing his badge and asking if there wasn’t some way to release the three boys into his custody.

  The official he spoke with was extremely polite. “We know what they did,” he said in English. “Your commanding officer explained it to us when he called and asked us to hold them at the airport. They are very bad people, your supervisor said. They killed a ten-year-old Muslim boy, a refugee from Syria.”

  “It happened in Greece. We have jurisdiction.”

  The man gazed at him thoughtfully for a few minutes. “Don’t you wonder what made them do such a terrible thing?” he asked. “What manner of people they are? Was it because the boy was a Muslim and America is at war with Muslims? Or maybe it was sadism that motivated them, the desire to hurt. Either way they should not walk the earth with the rest of us. They should be in prison. Here or Greece, it doesn’t really matter. While I believe you are sincere, Mr. Patronas, your concern is misplaced. You should be mourning the victim, not seeking freedom for his killers.”

  “The drugs were planted,” Patronas said. “I’m sure of it.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Patronas, but I am afraid I must refuse your request. They are our prisoners now and they will stay here with us. They will not leave Turkey.”

  Standing up, the Turk escorted Patronas and the priest to the door. “Good day, sir. Give my regards to your commanding officer, Mr. Stathis.”

  Patronas had the cellphone number of Benjamin Gilbert’s father and he called him. When the man answered, he introduced himself and told them he’d just visited his son in his cell in Istanbul.

  “Benji, oh my God … is he all right?” the man asked in an agitated voice.

  “As well as can be expected,” Patronas answered. “The prison where he’s staying is a pretty rough place.”

  “My wife and I are in Munich, waiting to catch the plane to Istanbul with our lawyer. If everything goes according to plan, we should be there later today. I spoke to the parents of the other two and we’re planning to get some funds together, hopefully, pay a fine and get them out. How’s the system work over there? How soon can we post bail?”

  Poor, trusting Americans. Thinking money would solve everything,

  “I don’t know what the custom is,” Patronas said. “I’m not sure they even have bail in Istanbul, and I doubt you can buy the Turks off.”

  “There must be something we can we do,” the man howled.

  “You need to get Benji and others out of the cell they’re in and into solitary. They’re in a compound with the general prison population; and it will go badly for them if they stay there. There are Jihadists in that place. Muslim fanatics who hate Americans.

  “I’ll see to it. Thank you.”

  Hopefully, the man would never learn the full extent of his son’s crimes, would go on believing until the day he died that smuggling heroin was the worst thing his boy ever did. Patronas wished that for him. The alternative was too painful to contemplate.

  He tried unsuccessfully to reach the other two sets of parents, but eventually gave up. They must be in transit, and Gilbert’s father would tell them what he’d said. They had money and influence, contacts within the State Department and the American Embassy in Ankara. Perhaps they’d succeed in building a wall around their children, protecting them from the local inmates.

  Maltepe, where the prison was located, had once been a summer resort for rich Ottomans, Papa Michalis informed Patronas as they made their way to the waiting taxi. “My mother was from Istanbul and she often spoke of it.”

  Still in shock over what they’d learned, neither wanted to discuss the students.

  Getting carried away, Nielsen had even gone so far as to reenact the child’s terror, demonstrating how the little boy had writhed and screamed when they chained him to the pole then brought out the knife.

  “You should have seen him.”

  Raising his hands in the air, Nielsen cried, “Allah, Allah!’” mimicking the child’s Syrian accent. Bowing and playing the fool.

  It was quite a show. Unable to control himself, he’d laughed hysterically. Bowdoin had also been amused.

  “Show them what he did, Michael!” he shouted, egging his friend on. “Come on, show them!”

  Knowing the drugs had worn off before the boy was killed made Patronas want to vomit.

  Maybe the Turkish official was right, after all, he thought. The world would be a better place without them.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Do not wrong the dead.

  —The Delphic Oracle

  Malptepe was overrun with sprawling apartment buildings. All that was left of its former grandeur was the view. Patronas could see the Sea of Marmara and the archipelago of the five Princes Islands in the distance, small outcroppings of land in the seemingly endless water. A large mosque dominated a nearby hillside. Built in the traditional style, it was a magnificent structure, blue-gray with a large dome and four delicate minarets.

  The prison was far from the center of Istanbul, and the drive to the hotel where they’d arranged to meet Stathis took over two hours. The road they were on traversed almost the entire Asian side of the city. The suburbs were densely settled, and there was a tremendous amount of traffic. Patronas saw a family picnicking by the water, smoke rising from their grill, and beyond them, a group of boys playing soccer on the grass. Not so different from us, he concluded, studying them from the window of the cab.

  They sped down a street full of stores selling women’s evening dresses. Heavily beaded and obviously expensive, the gowns were elaborate affairs in every color of the rainbow, at least a third of them strapless.

  “Where do they wear them?” Patronas asked the priest. “From what I’ve seen, women keep themselves pretty covered here.”

  “What do I know of women’s fashion,” the priest said, “here or elsewhere? I am a man of God, a priest.”

  Aside from the historic district, many areas of Istanbul appeared to be under construction: work crews pouring cement, giant cranes erected over vast holes in the ground. They crossed the Bosphorus and headed toward the Golden Horn. The park fronting the water was beautifully cared for, its lush gardens planted with rose bushes. Every two or three kilometers, there was a shiny new playground for the children, exercise equipment for their parents, and metal grills for cooking. Immense apartment buildings covered the low-lying hills on both sides of the water, their balconies overlooking the luminous channel that separated the two continents.

  “A boomtown, Istanbul,” Patronas told Tembelos and Papa Michalis. The feeling of prosperity was almost palpable. It didn’t seem fair to him, Turkey ascending while his homeland, a far nobler and more ancient country, was in economic freefall.

  “The seventh largest city in the world. The population of Istanbul is over fourteen million,” the priest told them, “almost five times that of Athens.”

  As they neared the historic center of Sultanahmet, the priest pointed to the high stone wall, saying, “It was built by the Roman Emperor Theodosius in the fifth century AD. It’s only been breached twice since then, once in the thirteenth century by the men of the Fourth Crusade, the other in 1453 when the Ottoman Turks overran the city.”

  While wa
iting at a red light, Patronas noticed a group of men washing their feet in a low marble fountain outside a mosque. They all seemed to know one another and were chatting amiably.

  “Wudu,” the priest said. “It’s a Moslem ritual. Worshippers must be clean and wear good clothing before presenting themselves to God. The devout face Mecca and pray five times a day, reciting prayers that are over fourteen hundred years old. There are many rules, and they abide by each one. For example, no one is allowed to wear shoes in a mosque. It’s well organized; they have attendants at the entrance who take the shoes and store them while people worship. The religion is a living force here and throughout the Middle East. It influences absolutely every aspect of life.”

  And therein, yet again, Patronas thought, lies the difference between us.

  Stathis was waiting in the lobby of the small hotel in Sultanahmet. It was very hot outside, and in contrast, the high-ceilinged room felt like an oasis. Overhead, huge fans whirled slowly, and the Turks eating in the adjoining dining room were chatting with one another and chuckling —what the priest called, kefi, Turkish for ‘good spirits.’ On the walls were many paintings—scenes from the age of Ottomans—and on the shelves, knickknacks of every variety—china dogs and cats, porcelain shepherdesses, even a clock, its dial held in place by a pair of half-naked blackamoors. Patronas felt strangely at home, the décor eerily reminiscent of the furnishings in his mother’s house.

  His boss was sitting in an upholstered chair, drinking a demitasse of Turkish coffee. “How’d it go?” he asked when he saw Patronas. He remained where he was, hadn’t bothered to get up.

  “They admitted they murdered Sami Alnasseri. Reason didn’t amount to much. The boy stole an iPad from one of them. Ritual killing also came into play, or so they wanted me to believe. According to them, Richard Svenson had reenacted a ritual murder one day in class, a rite of human sacrifice from Phoenicia. They’d been intrigued and wanted to try it out themselves. Nielsen gave me a lot of crap about it. Pretty creepy, the things he said. But I don’t think that was the real reason they killed him. Thrill-seeking would be my guess. Racism played a part, too. It was pretty clear they despised Sami Alnasseri because of what he was.” Not wishing to forget anything, Patronas scanned his notes. “They also admitted they threw the firebomb.”