by Leta Serafim
“Of course we’re prejudiced. They killed a million of us.”
“We can’t let our personal feelings interfere with the case, Evangelos. We have to do our duty.”
“Duty? You sound like one of them.” In addition to all the food he’d consumed, Evangelos had drunk close to two liters of beer. Clowning around, he raised his arm and gave Patronas the Nazi salute, shouting, “Sieg Heil, mein Führer!” He tried to click his heels together, but was too fat and tipped the chair over.
The people at the surrounding tables turned and looked at them, aghast. Men in uniforms acting like Nazis. Patronas wanted to die.
It wasn’t Stalin he was working with, it was Groucho Marx.
Laughing, Evangelos fought to right his chair. “Had a little trouble there. Good thing I didn’t try goose stepping.”
Patronas moved the beer out of his reach. “You said there weren’t a lot of people here in Chora. If we separate, we should be able to interview most of them within the next twenty-four hours. See if anyone saw a stranger passing through, someone who didn’t belong.”
“They’re foreigners. How are we going to talk to them if we don’t speak their language?”
“You took a photo of the victim. Pass it around and gauge their reaction.”
“We can’t just go barging into people’s houses.”
“Sure we can, Evangelos. We’re cops.”
“I don’t know, Yiannis. It seems a little intrusive.”
“Intrusive? A man was murdered.” Patronas fought to keep his voice down. People were still looking at them.
He counted out fifty euros and threw the money down on the table. “Come on, we need to speak to the man who found the body, establish a time line. It’s important. After that, we’ll call it a night.”
“No fruit?” his colleague asked plaintively. “No coffee?”
“No, Evangelos. No fruit, no coffee. After we interview the gardener, I want you to go back to the police station, call the lab and get the results of the autopsy. We’ll need every detail. Bring it with you when you pick me up in the morning.”
Poor Evangelos. Instead of a slice of watermelon, he was going to get an earful of subcranial hemorrhage, followed by hypostasis, blood pooling in the lower extremities. It would go on for a while, the discussion. The coroner was nothing if not thorough.
Sieg Heil, yourself, mein Fatso.
The gardener, a young Albanian with an earnest air, lived not far from the taverna with his wife and four-year-old son. He appeared relieved to see them and started talking immediately, saying he’d been picking oregano on the hillside and had arrived at the house later than usual. He’d seen the man lying on the ground and had run to help him. That’s when he saw the blood and realized the man was dying.
“Old like my grandfather. I shook him a time or two, but I knew he wasn’t going to wake up, that he was gone. I just hoped ….” His face was stricken, his eyes damp.
“What time was this?”
“Eight, eight thirty. We were told to wait for the authorities to get there. They didn’t come for a long time, over an hour. There was much confusion.”
“Why did you come so late?”
“I always water after it cools off. Can’t water during the day. Is too hot. Usually I am earlier, but I like I said, that day, I am getting the oregano.”
“You said you pick it on the hillside. Do you go there often?” Patronas was hoping he’d seen someone, could provide them with a lead.
“Two or three times a week in the summer, we pick the oregano, my wife and I, and after I bring it and sell it to tourists. Also thyme and rosemary when I can find them. They’re crazy for it, the tourists, especially the French. We get three euros for a handful, and it costs us nothing. They don’t mind, the family, I do this. As long as the garden is done, I am free.”
He spoke passable Greek and appeared to be what he said he was, a poor immigrant seeking a foothold in a new land. He had a kind of sweetness about him, a childish desire to please. He tended a herd of goats, too, he said, although they weren’t his, looked after them for a man who lived in Athens. Anything to get by. He and his wife stayed on Patmos until November, when they left for Athens.
“What do you do in Athens?”
“Cleaning. Offices, houses.”
Patronas continued to question him. “Do you ever see anyone else when you’re picking oregano?”
“Tourists.”
They inked his fingers with a kit they’d brought with them and wrote down everything he said. After they’d finished, they took a cast of his shoes, planning to compare it to the prints they’d found in the garden. Patronas wanted to chase the keys down, too, but doubted they would lead to anything. Like the gardener’s shoes, just another dead end.
“You got a passport?” he asked the man.
The man retrieved it from a drawer and quickly handed it over. Patronas copied down the number, thinking he’d ask Evangelos Demos to run it and see what came up. Then he handed it back to him. “Don’t leave Patmos without telling us. We might have to talk to you again.”
“I am here,” the man said. “My wife also. We are not going anywhere.”
“You sure you don’t want to stay with us?” Evangelos Demos asked when they got back to the car. “It’s a big house. There’s plenty of room.”
Patronas shook his head. He’d spent time with Evangelos’ wife, Sophia, on Chios and had no desire to repeat the experience. A country woman of the old school, she was built like a fire hydrant and was just about as malleable. Evangelos’ mother-in-law, Stamatina, who’d been living with them at the time, had been even worse. She was a ferocious old battle-ax who was hard of hearing and consequently shouted everything, instructions mainly, from a chair in the kitchen, banging her cane on the floor.
“From Sparta, your wife?”
“Yes, her mother, too. The whole family. Sparta bore you. Sparta you adorn.”
An old saying meaning one was loyal to where one came from. The part about ‘adorn’ wouldn’t apply to Sophia though. There’d be no dressing that one up. She’d stay as she came—stout and humorless—a warrior to the core. Everyone talked about how warlike Spartan men had been, but they were nothing compared to the women.
“E tan e epi tas,” Spartan mothers were said to have told their sons as they headed into battle. Come back with your shield or on it. In other words, victory or death. They were a force of nature, those women, human tsunamis. Made his ex-wife look like Tinkerbell.
Evangelos turned the key and they started down the mountain, the gravel of the road gleaming in the headlights of the car.
Patronas patted the seat appreciatively, admiring the American workmanship. The Jeep might be two decades old, but it still ran better than his old Citroen with its pathetic two-horse-power engine. His car had given up the ghost during a rainstorm—it and his marriage within a week of each other—its canvas roof coming loose and flapping in the wind like a wet sheet on a clothesline. As a result, the car had filled with water and molded, speckles of mildew darkening its interior and scenting the air. Although he’d tried, Patronas had been unable to sell it. He’d been forced to pay an exorbitant fee to have it towed away. Now he rode a Vespa.
Not a step up in the world, he thought gloomily, more like a move sideways.
He lit a cigarette and watched the countryside, struck anew by how empty this side of Patmos was, just one bald hill after another. It suited him, the barren landscape, matched his mood.
“My wife is very unhappy on Patmos,” Evangelos Demos confided. “She told me she was lonely and asked her mother to come for a visit. Eighteen months, it’s been.” His voice grew unsteady. “Eighteen months and she’s still here.”
Patronas nodded sympathetically. “A long time, eighteen months.”
No wonder Evangelos Demos was so useless. Living with those two warrior women had wrecked him, taken his manhood and rendered him a steer.
“They said in Athens this case was a c
hance for me to redeem myself. Get my old job back.”
“You said you cleared it with Stathis about me coming here.”
“Oh, yes. He said and I quote, ‘It was a stroke of genius summoning him.’ ”
“You’re kidding.”
“That’s what he said.”
“Let him say what he wants. I’m nothing, Evanglos. Just a broken-down old cop, waiting for his pension.” He flicked his cigarette out the window. “You can’t depend on me.”
“You caught that killer on Chios, didn’t you? You didn’t give up even after you got hurt. You never give up.”
“I give up sometimes.” Patronas was thinking of his marriage as he said this, how he’d just taken his suitcase and left without a word of farewell.
“Not you. That’s why I called you. You’re a better cop than I am.” His colleague’s voice was wistful. “A better cop than I’ll ever be. The best cop I know.”
Poor Evangelos, putting his faith in him. It was the equivalent of boarding the Lusitania.
If things didn’t work out, his colleague would be stuck on Patmos for the rest of his professional life, Sophia and his mother-in-law riding him day and night; his suffering would be like Job’s.
Patronas looked out at the night. Maybe he should give Evangelos the name of his divorce lawyer.
Or better yet, solve the case.
The hotel was in Hochlakas, the westernmost section of the port of Skala. The town bridged a narrow isthmus of land, and Patronas could hear the surf pounding in the distance, the coast here being far less protected than the area to the east where the harbor and tourist sites were located. There was a children’s playground across the street from the hotel, the metal swings and slide sparkling in their newness.
The room was tidy, with three single beds and a rickety desk. The orange curtains and bedspreads had faded over time to a muddy yellow, as had the threadbare carpeting, making Patronas feel like he was trapped inside a bottle of mustard. The shower consisted of a handheld faucet over a hole in the floor, and the toilet was the old-fashioned kind, with a metal box high overhead and a length of rusty chain. It took forever to refill once flushed, which would pose a problem once Papa Michalis and Giorgos Tembelos arrived. The room’s one saving grace was the small balcony that overlooked the children’s playground and beyond it, the sea.
A woman named Antigone Balis owned the hotel and said she’d include breakfast in the price and prepare it for Patronas whenever he liked.
A handsome woman, she had a mane of unruly brown hair and was dressed in a red housedress, a robe thrown over her shoulders. She apologized for her appearance, saying she’d been just about to turn in when Patronas rang the bell at the front desk.
“You can have any room you want,” she said. “The hotel is empty.”
He told her he’d like a triple room on the top floor. “Something with a view if you got it.”
Smiling, she handed him his key, said the room was up a flight of stairs on his left, and took her leave. “I’ll see you in the morning. Kalinyhta.” Good night.
Patronas watched her go. The air seemed warmer where she’d been, fresher somehow.
He told Evangelos Demos to pick him up at seven thirty and dragged himself up the stairs. He stowed his belongings in the closet and took off his shoes, then called Giorgos Tembelos on his cellphone.
“How’d it go in Athens?”
“Body got there without incident. Hearse was waiting and it bore the three of us away. Papa Michalis and I should be back tomorrow.”
“Any clue as to the history of the deceased, who he really was?”
“Not yet. They’re checking. It’s hard. Staff’s been cut. Might take some time.”
“How’s Papa Michalis bearing up?”
“Stubborn as ever. He drove the technicians crazy. ‘What’s in the liquid in your pipette? After you weigh the organs, do you put them in formaldehyde? If so, how long does it take before the flesh degrades?’ He’s a ghoul, that one. Could star in a zombie movie.”
Patronas shook his head as he closed the phone. He could see the priest in his robes peering over the technicians’ shoulders, poking his nose in their trays of gore and holding body parts up to the light. ‘Putrefaction’ was one of his favorite words. ‘Cadaver’ was another, and he could go on at length about ‘adipocere,’ the soapy foam that occasionally forms on corpses and ‘saponification,’ the process that produces it. He’d often discussed these things with Patronas—unfortunately, more often than not, during meals.
Patronas was too tired to undress and fell asleep on the bed with his clothes on. His sleep was restless, his dreams disturbed—there was something or someone crying out that he couldn’t get to. He woke up at three a.m. and got up and drank a glass of water. There’d been a message somewhere in his dream, he was sure of it. Something he’d missed during the day or forgotten to ask. If only he could remember.
He fumbled around for cigarettes and stepped out on the balcony. Across the street, the children’s playground shone in the darkness, the metal bright under the moon, the swings creaking in the wind. Music was coming from a taverna at the end of the street, a Greek cantata from the time of the war. He stood outside listening for a long time, smoking in the dark.
Chapter Seven
Everyone is a physician, a musician, and a fool.
—Greek Proverb
Patronas and the owner of the hotel had a friendly conversation over breakfast the next morning. She’d fried potatoes, poured in beaten eggs, and cooked it all in oil until a crust had formed, then slid it onto a plate and handed it to him. A loaf of fresh bread was set out on the table, along with butter and a clay pot full of homemade orange marmalade.
She set the long-handled pot, the briki, on the propane stove and lit the flame. “How do you want your coffee?”
“Metrio,” Patronas said. Medium.
He cut off a piece of the omelet and ate it slowly, savoring the taste. “My mother used to make eggs like this. It was one of my favorite dishes as a child.”
She smiled. “Mine, too.”
“It’s delicious. Thank you.”
When the coffee boiled, she poured it into a tiny cup and handed it to him, then, unbidden, sat down at the table next to him. The room was warm and she wiped her brow with the back of her hand, touched her hair with her fingers. She was wearing a green dress of the thinnest cotton, so sheer Patronas could see the stitching on her brassiere underneath, the line of her panties. The latter appeared to be a thong, although he couldn’t be sure, his wife having favored far more substantial underwear. Like shorts, Dimitra’s panties had been, Bermuda shorts, reaching almost to the knee. Big and white and hideous.
The woman’s hair was pinned up today, a damp strand escaping and curling at the nape of her neck. She was sitting so close he could smell the soap on her skin.
Antigone Balis told him the hotel had been in her family for nearly twenty years. She’d inherited it after her father died. “I couldn’t be bothered with it for a long time,” she said. “I mean, who wants to be stuck on Patmos in the winter? Summer’s fine, but the rest of the year, it’s a graveyard. But then my husband died and I said to myself, ‘Why not give it a try?’ He was much older than I was and had been sick for a long time. I needed a change.”
“How long have you been here?” Patronas pushed his notebook aside, not wanting to trouble her. She wasn’t a suspect. They were just a man and a woman having a conversation.
“I opened it in June and renamed it the Sunrise Hotel. I had that big yellow sun painted on the side, hoping it would attract people. But so far it hasn’t.”
Patronas nodded. He’d seen the sun and remembered thinking how pathetic it was, the concrete beneath it riddled with cracks. He felt sorry for Antigone Balis being saddled with this place. The Sunset Hotel might have been a better name.
“It’s been hard,” she said. “I never rent more than three or four rooms a week, barely enough to get by.”
> “So you’re not from Patmos?”
“No, no. I’m from the Peloponnese, a place you’ve never heard of. The hotel belonged to my grandfather, got passed down to my mother and then to me. It’s a dump, I know. I tried to sell it, but no one wanted it. I was thinking of getting some money from the government to fix it up, but then things got bad and I gave up.”
She leaned toward him, her dress falling open. “What about you? What do you do?”
He was fighting a losing battle to keep his eyes on her face. “I’m a cop. Yiannis Patronas, Chief Officer of the Chios Police.” He gave a little bow when he finished, surprised at how much he wanted to impress her.
“Hairo poli.” Pleased to meet you. “Chief Officer, huh? I’ll have to watch my step.”
They both laughed.
A voluptuous morsel. Patronas noted the tasty way the fabric tugged at her breasts, her splendid knee caps, and trim little ankles. She was something, Antigone Balis, reminiscent of Gina Lollobrigida in her day, far too good for the likes of him. Den einai ya ta dontia sou, his mother always said when she thought he was reaching too high. Not for your teeth. Still, a man could dream.
“You have a wife, Mr. Chief Officer?” Antigone Balis asked.
“No, I’m divorced.”
“Children?” She’d noticed his interest in her dress and it amused her.
“No, nobody.”
She gave him a sympathetic look. “Hard to be alone.”
“I have friends.”
“It’s not the same. Without family, you’re nothing. Believe me, I know.” She fanned her face with her hand. “It’s going to be hot today. I hope you’re working some place air-conditioned.”
“Part of the day. The rest of the time I’ll be outdoors.” He took a sip of coffee. “Oh, I almost forgot. Two men will be checking in this afternoon. They’ll be sharing the room with me. That’s why I asked for a triple.”
“All those beds … I did wonder what you were up to.” She shifted suggestively and gave him a knowing look. “Are they policemen, too?”
