by Leta Serafim
“Why didn’t you or your husband call the police?”
“We were too upset. Also the gardener, his Greek, it is better.”
She touched the pane of glass with her fingers. “We have air conditioning. The windows, they are sealed shut.”
Gerta Bechtel looked back at him. “If an intruder came and Grobpapa called for help, we would not have heard him.”
The daughter, Hannelore, a sullen sixteen-year-old, was less forthcoming than her mother, reluctantly volunteering that while Patmos was fine, she would have preferred to spend the summer in Stuttgart with her friends.
“I only have one friend here, Hilda. We go to the same school in Germany, but we’re not friends there, only here. She’s a lot older than I am, almost eighteen.” Hannelore grew slightly more animated as she described her friend, saying Greek boys were always hanging around her. They just wouldn’t leave her alone.
In the old days, Greek men who pursued foreign women were called kamaki, the instrument men use to spear fish—the fish dangling off their hook, the female tourists they’d snagged. A song had even been written about them. “S’aresei i Ellada, Señorita?”—“Do you like Greece?” The key word in the lyrics changing from ‘Fräulein’ to ‘Mademoiselle,’ to ‘Miss.’ Such men were enterprising and versatile, could speak a few words in nearly every European language.
Envious, Patronas had watched them work the beaches over the years, yearning for a little taste of Sweden himself, a bikini-clad piece of England. In those days, native girls had been reluctant, to say the least, more trouble than they were worth. Perhaps now that he was divorced, he’d give spear fishing a try. Find a lonely housewife like Shirley Valentine and show her a good time.
“Does Hilda like the boys’ attention?” he asked the girl.
“She talks to them. She has a boyfriend in Germany, but she likes to flirt.” How unfair, she was saying, Hilda with many boyfriends and me with none.
Unlike her mother, Hannelore Bechtel had a sturdy, somewhat masculine physique and an androgynous way about her—feminine and coy one minute, boyish and abrupt the next. Her arms were unusually well muscled, her biceps well defined.
“Do you play sports?” Patronas asked, wondering if she spent a lot of time roughhousing with boys—if that would explain her manner, what he was seeing.
“Oh, yes, yeah. All the time. I cycle and I ski. All winter I am out. But mostly I scull.” Holding her arms out in front of her, she mimed rowing. “I like to be on the water and go fast. I am most happy then.”
She’d made a clumsy effort to pretty herself up, he noticed, painting her nails a lurid orange and applying a chalky foundation and red lipstick so dark it made her mouth look bruised. The makeup looked off to Patronas, seemed to be at odds with her tomboy persona, but then what did he know of adolescent girls?
He wondered why her mother didn’t take her in hand, pass on a little of that elegant fastidiousness.
Her shirt had a shiny Hello Kitty cartoon printed on it, its childish innocence clashing with the girl’s Kabuki-like face. A child masquerading as a woman.
“When you’re at the beach, do you and Hilda go off alone?”
“There’s no place to go. That’s the problem with Patmos.” She gave him a long, assessing look. “Don’t you want to ask about my grandfather? Isn’t that why you’re here?”
“Yes. How did you get along with him?”
“He was my grandfather and I loved him.” End of story.
“Did he ever act afraid?”
“Grobpapa? No, not him. Nothing frightened Grobpapa.” She kept fussing with her hair. Like her mother’s, it was bleached by the sun, but hers was greasy and dirty looking.
“Your mother said you’d learned a piece on the violin for your grandfather.”
She nodded. “The violin solo from Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. It took me a long time to learn it. My mother made a CD of me playing. It was my Christmas present to him.” Her voice was stiff.
“You must be very good violinist,” he said.
“I have a good teacher, and I practice.” Again, the same stilted politeness.
“How about your brother? Does he play an instrument?”
“Yes, the violin, the same as I do. We sometimes play together. What’s the word?”
“Duets?”
“Yes, that’s right. We play duets.” Two of her nails were broken off and she kept chewing on the remnants, trying to even them out.
“Did your grandfather ever talk about the war?”
“The war?” She looked puzzled.
“Yes, about the time he was a soldier?”
She seemed surprised by the question. “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask my parents.”
“How about you? Is there anything you’re afraid of?”
Something passed over her face. “No, nothing. I am never afraid.”
Seven or eight years old, the boy Walter couldn’t sit still. He kept jerking his head this way and that and bobbing his knees up and down. He was wearing glasses and had a Band-Aid over his left eye.
Very polite, he’d shaken Patronas’ hand as soon as he’d entered the room. “I am Walter Bechtel,” he’d said. “How do you do?”
Patronas, in turn, had introduced himself. “I am Yiannis Patronas, Chief Officer of the Chios Police Force.”
“I am very pleased to make your acquaintance, Chief Officer. I will endeavor to answer all your questions truthfully.” He furrowed his brow. “Excuse me, but you said you were from Chios. This isn’t Chios. This is Patmos.”
“I know, son. I’m here about your grandfather.”
“Grandfather,” he said in a robotic voice. “My grandfather’s dead.”
His eyes kept darting around, looking at everything but Patronas.
Kid has some kind of handicap, Patronas thought, autism maybe.
“I know your grandfather’s dead,” he said gently. “Somebody hurt him and I’m trying to find out who it was.”
The boy frowned. “Hurt him? Why?”
“I’m trying to find that out, too.”
“How did they hurt him?” His voice went up a notch. “Was it like the cat?”
“What cat?”
“Bonzo. Someone killed it. It was a stray and Grandfather took it in and fed it, made it his pet. He is the one who called it Bonzo.” The boy continued to fidget, tired of sitting in the chair, tired of the questions.
Patronas wrote the name of the cat in his notebook and underlined it. “What happened to it?”
“Someone strangled it. Whoever did it pushed me down. That’s how I hurt my eye. My glasses broke and I got a piece of glass stuck here.” He pointed to his eyebrow.
“Did you see who pushed you?”
“No. I was looking at Bonzo, wondering what was wrong with him, and then BOOM!” He clapped his hands together. “I was very upset about Bonzo, but my mother told me not to be sad, that we would get another cat when we got back to Germany.”
“You said Bonzo was your grandfather’s pet. Was he upset?”
“Yes. He was very angry and told my mother to fire Maria. I don’t know why. My mother didn’t pay attention. She just told the gardener to bury the cat outside and he did. She made us promise not to tell my father. She said he wouldn’t like it.”
The boy got up and skipped around for a moment before returning to his seat. “Grandfather never wanted us to be here. He said it would only bring us trouble, and it did. My mother cried when she found the cat … cried and cried.”
Bechtel told Patronas to keep the MP3 player, saying the family had two others. Reluctantly, Patronas accepted, thinking he’d only use it until he could find a replacement. Bechtel was only trying to help; he knew that. Still, he resented the gift, well aware of the financial disparity between the German and himself. Even an aid worker in Africa was better off than a Greek policeman now.
The present German chancellor, Angela Merkel, had been forcing the Greek government to tighten its belt, and he
r actions had caused widespread suffering throughout his homeland, especially among the young, fifty-seven percent of whom were now unemployed. Patronas’ salary had been cut repeatedly. He was poorer now than he’d ever been, and his father had been a manavis, a green grocer.
Looking down at the MP3 player in his hand, he sighed. “Fucking Merkel.”
Before he left the estate, he searched the grounds a final time, accompanied by Bechtel. There were a lot of garden tools lined up against the wall, and he inspected each of them carefully, looking for evidence of blood, but saw nothing. He’d have to get the luminol and try again. He searched the outside walls, too, seeking a place where a rock might have been dislodged, but it was a hopeless task. The wall was high and went on forever. It would take an eternity to check it all. He’d have to wait for the autopsy in Athens. Maybe the coroner would be able to establish what had been used.
The victim had occupied a large guest suite on the far side of the house, well away from where the rest of the family slept. As with everything else related to the deceased, it was impersonal. There were no pictures on the walls or photographs in evidence, no books or papers anywhere, not even a discarded German newspaper. True, it wasn’t the Bechtel’s house, but usually when people occupied a space, they left some trace of themselves. Here there was nothing, almost as if it had been swept clean. The only item of note was an old-fashioned hearing aid lying on the nightstand.
Patronas picked up the hearing aid. It looked like it had never been used, the plastic unmarked and glossy. “Was your uncle deaf?” If so, that would explain why the old man hadn’t cried out. He’d been taken by surprise.
The German nodded. “To a degree, depending on who was speaking and what they were saying. If you asked him what he wanted for dinner, he’d hear you perfectly. Other times, not so much. I insisted he get a hearing aid, but he didn’t like to wear it. He said, ‘If I get one now, what will I do when I’m old?’ He was like that, my papa, always making jokes.” Gunther Bechtel looked away.
Patronas opened the door of the closet and rummaged around. Everything was clean and relatively new. Pants with elastic waistbands, light-weight cotton shirts in a variety of colors. There was a row of shoes at the back of the closet, cloth slippers and a pair of white American sneakers still in their box. Wrapped in tissue paper, they had never been worn.
“You see,” said Bechtel. “All is in order.”
A chest of drawers held cotton boxer shorts and rolled-up compression socks for circulation. In addition, there was a wallet and a black and white photo of a man and a woman. It was very old, the photo, the style of the woman’s hair dating from the 1940s.
“My parents.” Gunther Bechtel reached over and shut the drawer.
Initially, Patronas had wanted to quiz him about the cat, but changed his mind after hearing the tremor in the man’s voice. He’d discuss it with Gerta Bechtel when he got the chance, keep her husband in the dark in case he didn’t know. The cat was a stray, and according to the little boy, save for the grandfather, no one had been overly attached to it. As Bechtel had pointed out, Germans weren’t popular in Greece these days. The cat’s death could have been an act of vandalism, the equivalent of someone spray painting ‘Fuck Merkel’ on a wall.
He felt like he’d trespassed enough. “Could this have been a robbery? Did you check the house after you found him? Was anything missing?”
“Not that I’m aware of. As my wife told you, they had just returned from the beach and were all inside, taking showers. I had recently come from Africa and was asleep in the bedroom. It is a long journey and very exhausting, hours and hours in airports and on planes, then the boat from Leros. Whoever did this might have been planning to rob the house and my uncle caught them. However, aside from the usual chair he sat in, nothing appeared disturbed in the garden and the outside lock had not been tampered with. Sometimes Walter is careless with the door, so it might even have been left open that night. I don’t know. You must remember: we are guests here, so we do not know precisely what belongs. I’ve called my friends and asked them to return as soon as possible. They’ll know better if something valuable in the house is missing. Also, they’ll be able to tell you the names of the people who built the house. Perhaps one of them kept a key.”
A long, complicated speech. Apparently, Bechtel had gone over things in his mind.
“I will let you know the results of the examination in Athens.” Patronas took care not to say the word ‘autopsy’ out loud.
“Why does he need to be examined?” Bechtel asked angrily. “Any fool can see he was beaten to death.”
“If we’re lucky, forensics can establish the weapon.”
“What difference does it make? Whatever it was, it killed him. He was a deaf old man who liked to sleep in the garden. Anyone could have surprised him. It would have been easy. No trouble at all.”
“But how did they get in?” Patronas asked.
Bechtel continued to stare at him. “Finding that out is not my job, Chief Officer. It is yours.”
Patronas thought about the interview as he walked down the path, going over Gunther Bechtel’s words again and again in his mind. The German’s remark about Mossad seemed strange, too emotional a response to what Patronas had been asking. It could have been a long-standing resentment—Bechtel saying he was a good man, that those had been different times, different people—but somehow Patronas didn’t think so.
Also, the interaction between the couple felt off. Bechtel did all the talking, his wife remaining silent except when summoned to endorse his point of view. And why hadn’t she told her husband about the cat? A stray, perhaps it hadn’t seemed important to her, or maybe she’d wanted to preserve the illusion that all was going well for them on Patmos. The victim had been opposed to the trip, the little boy had said. Perhaps her husband had been opposed, too.
There was a puzzling formality about the whole family. Save for a few moments with Gunther Bechtel, they had all been deeply courteous, and in spite of their pain, endeavored to answer his questions. Their words had been thoughtful and precise. They hadn’t wanted to discuss the war, but who could blame them?
How strange it all was.
Chapter Six
He who has no brains at twenty should not expect them at thirty.
—Greek Proverb
Evangelos Demos was waiting for Patronas in the square, and they spoke briefly to the owner of the taverna. The man volunteered that the two tavli players had gone home earlier that day but would return the following morning. “They’re my wife’s cousins. They spend every day here.”
A stout man with a mouthful of crooked teeth, he was cheerful and good natured. He and his wife were working behind the counter, ladling up food and handing it to the waiters while they talked to the two policemen. “Come back tomorrow, Chief Officer,” the owner said. “I’ll round up the men you want. We can all have breakfast together.”
Patronas reluctantly agreed, and they arranged to meet the next day.
“Food’s good here,” Evangelos Demos said, eyeing the steaming dishes on the counter. “Let’s take a break and eat.”
They took a table in the corner. The taverna was bustling, full of foreigners. They were the only Greeks. The sun had gone down and the whitewashed buildings of Chora were luminous in the gathering darkness. A man was going from table to table with an accordion. Patronas recognized the tune he was playing. “Pame mia volta sto feggari,”—Come Walk with Me in the Moonlight—by Hatzidakis. He had courted Dimitra to that song.
“Problem with songs like that is they lead you astray,” he told Evangelos. “They never tell you what comes after those walks in the moonlight, when the sun rises and you and your beloved see each other in the light of day.”
“You’re right,” Evangelos said. “In my experience, a woman acts one way before you get married and another way after. Worse, far worse.”
A string of light bulbs were strung up overhead, lending the square a festive air. A
group of boys were chasing each other in a nearby alley, full of bravado as they played a game of their own devising. From the looks of it, it was a war game, Patronas decided, watching them, full of shooting and falling down, dramatic dyings, the real Patmos showing itself in their laughing faces. Alive with people and noise, Chora felt like an island of light in the encroaching night.
The death of the old man, Walter Bechtel, seemed very far away.
Evangelos, a prodigious eater, rejoiced when he saw kokoretsi on the menu—intestines stuffed with offal—and ordered a plateful. His wife, Sophia, had forbidden him to eat kokoretsi, he told Patronas. “Says it’s full of cholesterol and bad for me. Cheese, too. Everything I like.”
In addition to the kokoretsi, he requested loukaniko—pork sausage—cheese pies, fried cheese, and cheese croquettes. Away from Sophia, he was having a free-for-all—a kilo of lamb and a mountain of fried potatoes.
“My wife wants me to lose weight,” he said. “It’s always salads with her. Six months now, only salads. Maybe a slice of watermelon or a fistful of grapes. She counts them, the grapes—only seventeen I get. I can’t sleep at night, I’m so hungry.”
Picking up a lamb chop, he chewed contentedly. “She made a graph and put it up on the refrigerator to chart my progress. She bought me a scale, too, so I could weigh everything that goes in my mouth.”
Patronas watched him eat for a few minutes. Not a bad idea, the diet, as Evangelos was the size of a sofa and had been puffing like a locomotive most of the day.
“What did you think of the family?” Evangelos asked. “They hiding something?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it. Maybe Gunther Bechtel was right, what he said about the war—that we’re prejudiced against Germans.”
