by Leta Serafim
“I’d like to know what happened the day of the massacre. You were there. Can you describe it to me?”
She didn’t speak for a long time, just sat there, crying. “It would have been better if I’d died that day, too,” she finally said. “How I longed for that, to have died with them. You can’t start over after something like that. There’s no way to go forward. My aunt took me in, but times were hard in Epirus and she didn’t have enough for her own children. I was like the ghost at the banquet, the one they talk about … I don’t recall his name. He keeps turning up and reminding the living of all they wished to forget.”
“Banquo,” the priest said quietly. “It’s from Shakespeare. Macbeth.”
“Banquo,” she echoed. “Yes, that’s who I was.”
Feeling guilty, Patronas pushed on, seeking to close the case. Bech’s unholy appetite was the key, he was sure of it. “Did he ever take you to the cellar?”
“Ah,” she whispered, “you discovered our secret.” Her initial bout of crying over, she was sitting there peacefully, hands folded in her lap.
A stone that never smiles. Patronas remembered his mother’s words.
“I repeat,” he said wearily. “Did he take you to the cellar?”
“No.”
“But you knew?”
“Yes, Daphne was my friend and I saw her after it happened. I saw her walking to the river and I followed her. It was just us and the trees and water. She was wearing a pink dress and standing in the shallows, washing what looked like spots of saliva off the front of her skirt. I asked her what was the matter and she wouldn’t tell me, but then I saw the blood on her thighs and her filthy underpants. I helped her clean herself up and held her while she cried. We never spoke of it, but yes, I knew. Everyone knew. I sometimes wonder if that’s why he burned our village … to cover his tracks.”
“Did Bech give the order?”
“I don’t know. I was a child, Chief Officer. But I always thought the timing was curious.”
“You say everyone knew. Why didn’t someone report him to his commanding officer, go to the German authorities?”
“And tell them what?” Her laugh was unpleasant, mocking. “That one of their Gestapo agents was behaving badly? We were at war, Chief Officer. We were the enemy. Vermin, they called us, same as the Jews. Cockroaches, nits. They didn’t care if we lived or died. They took our lives, for God’s sake. What difference did it make if one of them took our innocence?”
“You recognized him on Patmos,” Patronas said, making it clear he wasn’t asking, but stating a fact.
“Yes, I recognized him. I would have known him anywhere. Those scars. His face was etched in my mind.”
“But how could you be sure? You were only six years old at the time of the massacre.”
“Seven,” she said. “I was seven.”
He’d found an old tape recorder at the station, which he pulled out of his briefcase, turned on and set down on the table in front of her. They were coming to it and he wanted to have a record. Normally he liked to enter his impressions in a notebook, to jot things down, but he didn’t want to interrupt her now.
Let her talk, he told himself, get it off her chest.
“He lived next door to us,” she said. “Our village was small, and he was there off and on for months. I saw him often. I was little and he sounded funny. Now I know he was speaking German.”
She took a deep breath. “He used to stand outside and talk to the other soldiers sometimes. They were loud and I’d hear them. All day long, I’d hear them. But that was a long time ago, and you want to know what happened this summer on Patmos.”
“Yes. When did you first see him again?”
“It was late in July and I was hanging laundry outside my room in Campos. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe he had dared to come back to Greece and I walked closer to make sure. It was him, all right. Same physique, same face. He even parted his hair the same way he had in Aghios Stefanos. He was standing next to a parked car, talking to his son. That’s when I knew for sure, when I heard his voice. My heart stopped, and even after all these years, I was afraid again.”
“If you were afraid, why did you agree to work for them? Did you see it as an opportunity? A chance to kill him and avenge your family?”
If so, he’d have to charge her with premeditation. She’d be in jail the rest of her life.
“I wanted to confront him, yes.” She paused, searching for the right words. “But not then, not there in Campos. I had to gain entry to his house, which is why I took the job. I couldn’t confront him in the middle of the road, could I? But maids, they are invisible. People wipe their feet on you. I could watch him without anyone knowing and learn what I needed to know.”
“And then you killed him?”
“I killed him?” Shocked, her voice caught in her throat.
“You had cause. Gunther Bech was an evil man. He murdered your family. He raped your best friend.”
“I would never kill him,” she said, growing more and more agitated. “Never kill any of them. Oh, I might have thought about it over the years, when I was younger, but not now. What good would it do? Killing him wouldn’t bring back my family, the childhood I’d lost.”
“So why did you go there?”
“I wanted to see him up close, see what kind of man he was. I thought it would show on his face, the evil he’d done, that the devil would have branded him.”
She started to cry again, tears running down her powdered cheeks. “In Aghios Stefanos, I’d watch him from inside the house, him and the others. I saw them as monsters and maybe they were. I don’t know what I was expecting in that house in Chora. Horns? Eyes that burned? Something. But all I saw were dentures and a hearing aid, a cane hanging on the back of a chair. He was senile. I don’t know if they told you that. He couldn’t remember what day it was, let alone what he’d done to my people. I was too late. He’d outlived his evil. Maybe it had just departed. I don’t know. All I know is I never saw it. For me, it was gone.”
Maria Georgiou continued to weep. “I had it all planned what I’d say: ‘I’m from Aghios Stefanos,’ I was going to tell him. ‘Remember that place? I hid in the river the day you killed my family, covered myself with blood so you’d think I was dead and wouldn’t shoot me, too. The water was cold and my teeth were chattering and I was afraid you’d hear. You stood on the bank above us, above me and the other people from my village who’d fled to the river.’ ”
She paused a few seconds before resuming her conversation with the dead man.
“ ‘You had a name for what you did to us. You called it Sauberung, a cleansing. I heard you talking about it. My father was the village priest … and you shot him when you came that day and set fire to all the houses.’ ”
Maria Georgiou turned to Patronas. “You asked what I wanted, Chief Officer. I wanted to say those things. But after I saw him in Chora, saw how he was, I gave up the idea of confronting him. Maybe he’d been tormented by the war like I was. I don’t know. All I know is, the person he’d been—the man who’d held my people’s lives in his hand and crushed them like paper—that man had vanished. He was still a lycos, a wolf. I was sure of it. But the wolf had grown old and lost his teeth.” She smiled at this. “He would not have understood what I was saying. ‘Aghios Stefanos?’ ” She imitated a German accent. “ ‘Vere is dat? Vat?’ ”
“What about the children?”
“Oh, his hunger was still there. You could see it when the gardener came with his boy, see it on his face, the way he watched him. I always stayed outside then. Took my broom and swept.”
“Standing guard?”
“Yes. With Walter, too, sometimes.” She paraphrased the old Greek saying, “Even though he got old and his hair was white, he has not changed his disposition. In this, like the wolf, Bech remained the same.”
“Did you kill him?” Patronas asked again.
“I’m not a palikari, Chief Officer.” A brave person. �
�I might spit in your food or curse you under my breath, but that is all I do.”
She reached out a hand and touched his sleeve. “You have to understand: my father was a priest and he believed with all his heart in the vision our Savior held out for us, in the lessons of forgiveness in the Bible. He would recite them to me and my brothers when we were in bed, getting ready to go to sleep. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. People in the village called him weak, especially after the Germans came, but I knew better. I knew it was harder to be the way he was, that he was stronger than any of them. I have nothing left of him but that, that vision. That is his legacy and I would never betray it. I would never raise my hand against another human being.”
Papa Michalis was nodding. He had tears in his eyes.
“The night he died, when did you find him?” Patronas asked.
“Around six thirty, long before the gardener came.”
“Where did you get the flowers and the candles?”
Perhaps someone else had been involved. She might have brought another man or woman to the house to do the actual killing, a second individual from the village.
“What are you talking about?”
“Someone burned candles and scattered petals around the body.”
“It wasn’t me.” Maria Georgiou looked away, not meeting his eye. “No one saw me in the garden. No point in checking.”
“What about the swastika?”
“It was already there.”
“How long were you alone with him?”
“Not long. Maybe a quarter of an hour, no more. I arrived late that afternoon. I was supposed to stay on and help with dinner that night. They’d all come back from the beach, were inside the house by the time I got there, and I let myself in through the gate. When I didn’t see him in his chair in the garden, I went looking. It’s what I usually did when I came in the afternoon. I’d find him and ask what he wanted, if he needed anything. It was then that I saw him on the ground.”
“Was he still alive?”
She hesitated, understanding the implication of the question. “Yes,” she said. “He was breathing, but only a little, each breath taking longer than the last.”
Cold, to stand by and watch somebody die. Patronas studied her. “You say you’re the daughter of a priest, but you didn’t call an ambulance, didn’t get help for him. What were you doing all that time? Praying?” He struggled to keep the sarcasm out of his voice, thinking she must have been lying about the candles and the flowers. Killed him and then adorned the body in some unholy ritual.
“I didn’t pray,” she said in a low voice. “Not at first.”
She went on, “I could hear the shower running inside so I knew I’d be alone for a while. They usually left the old man alone in the afternoon. The garden was his. They didn’t use it much.”
“Wouldn’t they have noticed your absence?”
“I’m a servant, Chief Officer. As I told you before, no one notices servants, whether they are there or not.”
“Why take the risk? Why didn’t you call the police, dial 100 when you found him, then stand back and let us do our work?”
“Death is death. Whether you hate someone or not, it affects you. You have to acknowledge it. You can’t just walk away. And so I blessed him. I would have sung a mirologia, a dirge for the dead, for him, too, if I’d known one. They sang them for days in my village, the people who were left. Days and days.”
A bird flew down and began pecking at the seeds on the windowsill. “Yeia sou, poulaki mou,” Maria Georgiou called out. Hello, my little bird. She watched the bird for few moments, her face streaked with tears. “I might have hated him, but still I prayed. You see my father’s goodness? It lives on in me, while that man’s evil is gone, swept away and forgotten.” Opening her hand, she blew across her palm like a child with a dandelion. “Chaff in the wind.”
“How could you just leave him lying there?”
“For the same reason I didn’t call the police,” she said matter-of-factly. “Once you heard I was from Aghios Stefanos, I knew I’d be in trouble, that you’d arrest me.”
Raising her face, she looked him straight in the eye. “Besides, I was done with them. He was dead. Someone killed him and I would never find out what I wanted to know—what makes one man good and another bad, what determines what is in a person’s heart. No, I was done with the Bechs, the Bechtels, whatever you want to call them. It was over for me.”
Still Patronas persisted. “You didn’t pick up a rock and hit him, cut up his face with a knife?”
Her gaze never faltered. “No, I swear on the memory of my family, my murdered family, and all that is holy. I did not touch him.”
“Shit,” Patronas said under his breath. He believed her.
Chapter Eighteen
Big talkers with a plentiful lack of wit.
—Greek Proverb
After warning Maria Georgiou to stay away from the Bechtels in the future and to report her movements to the police, Patronas and Papa Michalis left the rooming house.
Patronas called Stathis on his cellphone and told him he’d decided to hold off on the arrest, saying he needed more time. “All the evidence I have is circumstantial. We have no proof that the victim raped Maria Georgiou or killed her father. All we have is proof of his presence in the same village. We need more. We need to get this right.”
“What about the assault on Gerta Bechtel?” Stathis asked.
“Again, it’s the same thing. Maria Georgiou was there, but her presence is not sufficient proof of guilt. She was working the night it happened, helping with dinner, according to the family. Anyway, Gerta Bechtel didn’t see who did it. There’s a side entrance to the estate. The assailant might have come in through there.”
“Do you have any idea who this ‘assailant’ might be?” Stathis’ voice was heavy with sarcasm.
“At the present time, no.”
“Well, find out. I’ll give you another forty-eight hours.”
Next, Patronas called the policeman who’d been monitoring Maria Georgiou and ordered him to step up his surveillance and keep track of her whereabouts day and night. “Get someone else to help you, but keep her in sight at all times. Also, keep track of who she talks to, especially anyone Greek. Under no circumstances is she to approach the Bechtels again or go near anyone else in that house. I’ll inform them that as of this moment, she is no longer working for them.”
Finally, he called the Bechtels and told them to tell the owners of the house, the Bauers, that they needed to hire another housekeeper. For a number of reasons, Maria Georgiou was now barred from the estate in Chora.
Wondering how Maria Georgiou had gotten to the house the evening of the murder, Patronas sought out the driver of the bus route between Chora and Skala and quizzed him, asking if he’d seen anything suspicious in her behavior or appearance, blood stains for instance. The only other possibility was that someone had driven her, an accomplice. She was too old to walk.
“Usually she rode to Chora in the morning and came back at night,” the bus driver told him, “but I can’t say for sure she was on the bus that day or if there were bloodstains on her dress when she returned home. It’s not a bad stroll in the evening—no hills to climb. Could be she walked. She seemed like a nice woman. What’s she done?”
“Nothing that we know of,” Patronas told him. “We’re just following up on that incident in Chora.”
Patronas had been disturbed by the interview with Maria Georgiou. The Greek woman had as much as admitted means, motive, and opportunity, yet she’d insisted she was innocent, swearing on the memory of her murdered family. A religious woman, she would never have done that had she been guilty.
“What did you think of her?” he asked the priest as they made their way back to the station.
It was a glorious summer’s night and the streets were full of people. A cluster of night-blooming flowers, nyhtoloulouda, was growing in someone’s yard, and
its scent hung heavy in the air.
“Maria Georgiou was not what I expected,” the priest said. “She’s a great lady, the kind one doesn’t often meet these days.”
“But did she do it?” Patronas insisted.
He’d already heard everything Papa Michalis could possibly have to say on the subject of the erosion of modern civilization and its influence on the Greek female, who used to be dutiful and devout, chaste—on occasion, the priest had actually used that term—and he didn’t want to hear it again.
But what the priest said was this: “She could have done it, certainly, but then if what she said was true, so could any member of the family.”
“In other words, I’m back where I started.”
“I would say so. We need to grill the Bechtels again. Maybe one of them will spill the beans. ”
“ ‘Grill’? ‘Spill the beans?’ ”
“Americanisms, Yiannis. The first, ‘grill,’ is used by law enforcement officials and means ‘to forcefully interrogate.’ The second, ‘to spill the beans,’ is a slang expression for accidentally revealing the truth. Both are used frequently on television.”
Patronas grunted. When they charted the course of the western world, where it went wrong and began to fail, they should maybe start with television. ‘Grill’ was what you did to meat. Everybody knew that. You’d never do it to a suspect. For God’s sake, policemen didn’t cook people.
He vowed never to use another English expression or foreign word, to cleanse his palette, as it were, of foreign influences. Greek it would be from this day forth.
Chapter Nineteen
The ox has one thought, the man using the ox to plow has another.
—Greek Proverb
“Cherchez la femme,” Tembelos said with a laugh.
They were eating breakfast together at the hotel, taking turns leering at Antigone Balis. She obviously enjoyed the attention and had lingered longer than necessary while refilling their coffees, bending over them and flashing her brassiere. To Patronas’ dismay, she’d also done this with the only other guest at the hotel, a businessman from France.
