When the Devil's Idle

by Leta Serafim

  Evangelos Demos was sitting with them, working on his laptop. “I must have read six hundred pages of testimony yesterday,” he complained. “How do the Jews do it? The ones like Simon Wiesenthal? It must be different with them. Maybe they have more reasons than we do.”

  “Yeah, they do, Evangelos,” Tembelos said in disgust, “six million of them.”

  Without a confession or compelling forensic evidence, they’d gone back to looking for information on the massacre. Patronas was pretty sure what he’d learned about the rapes would never make it into court. Given that the old women hadn’t wanted their pictures taken, it was unlikely they’d be willing to testify. In addition, the trip from Aghios Stefanos to Patmos was an arduous one, and at their age, risky. To charge Maria Georgiou and go forward, the prosecutor would need something more—irrefutable proof that Bech and Bech alone had been responsible for the destruction of her family.

  The area next to the harbor was teeming with tourists. Patronas, who was in the car with Papa Michalis, hit the brakes to avoid hitting a couple of teenagers crossing the street.

  He continued to drive along the quay, passing the Skala Hotel on the left, its entrance obscured by magenta bougainvillea, and the seaside terrace that fronted Hotel Chris.

  Seeking to prove premeditation, they were on their way to interview the owner of the rooming house in Campos where Maria Georgiou had stayed.

  The priest indicated a fenced square on the left. “That’s where St. John baptized the first Christians. There’s a spring there. Another one in the Monastery of Panagia Koumana.” He pointed to a building across the harbor. “It was considered a miracle at the time, that second spring, proof that the Virgin had interceded for them and answered their prayers. You should visit it sometime. The garden is magnificent. They have all kinds of birds, even peacocks. Such a beautiful bird, the peacock, a thing of wonder.”

  “I’ve been to Panagia Koumana, Father,” Patronas said. “I went there on my honeymoon.”

  The priest’s face fell. One of the seven sacraments, marriage was a bond he took seriously. And in spite of all that Dimitra had done to Patronas and others, he mourned the end of their union. For him, divorce was a kind of death, like someone who had succumbed after a long illness.

  “Ach, Yiannis,” he said. “She’s leaving, Giorgos said, going to Italy and resettling there.”

  “So?”

  “So I was thinking you should call her.”

  At breakfast earlier that day, the priest had watched him chatting with Antigone Balis, and Patronas wondered if sin, or even anticipated sin—as in his case—gave off a scent the priest could smell the way those French pigs did truffles. Perhaps that was why he’d brought up Dimitra’s departure.

  “Why would I want to call Dimitra? We’re divorced. We have nothing to say to each other.”

  The priest laid a hand on his arm. “She needs your support,” he said. “She’s embarking on a journey to parts unknown.”

  “She’s going to Italy, Father, not leaving the solar system.”

  “I’m sure she’d welcome a word of encouragement from you. It would be an act of kindness, and acts of kindness are like pebbles in the water, Yiannis, they increase the goodness in the world. Call her and say goodbye. That’s all I’m saying.”

  Fearing he’d overstepped his bounds, the old man went back to the peacocks, quacking and shrieking in turn to give Patronas an idea of their unholy call. “Movie stars in silent pictures became laughing stocks when the talkies came in and people heard their voices. Alas, the poor peacock is much the same. One of nature’s greatest glories until it speaks.”

  Patronas found himself missing Evangelos Demos. Evangelos took himself seriously and wouldn’t be caught dead imitating a peacock.

  He turned onto the road to Campos, passing a humming generating station and walled cemetery. The latter was exactly as he remembered it, the rectangular tombs encased by white marble.We might have lost our culture, our music, but at least the rituals of death haven’t changed, he thought. The dead were buried facing east today, exactly as they were in the time of Homer. A Greek, one day he too would be laid to rest facing the rising sun. Who will mourn my passing? he wondered sadly. Who will care if I’m gone?

  He could see Panagia Koumana, the monastery the priest had spoken of, in the distance. Far smaller than St. John’s in Chora, it was nearly invisible, well hidden in a cleft in the mountain.

  He remembered the trip he and Dimitra had made there, how they’d lingered in the chapel, kissing the icon of the Virgin and praying for a baby that never came.

  A large cross had illuminated the monastery at night then, and there’d been young people, seminarians probably, sitting outside on the hillside, chanting prayers in the darkness, a herd of goats bleating softly on the rocks below. The cross was still there, far smaller now than it had been on his honeymoon, but the goats were gone, as were the prayerful young Greeks.

  Perhaps he’d revisit the monastery before returning to Chios, see if there really were peacocks. Maybe take the priest with him and make a day of it.

  “Father, I need to discuss something with you.”

  “What is it?”

  “Bechtel came by the police station before you got there, and we had a lengthy and troubling conversation. To sum it up, he wants us to drop our inquiries concerning the massacre. He must have heard what we’re doing, because he said if we continue to pursue it, all the rumors and lies surrounding his father will resurface and his children will learn of them.”

  “The mark of Cain,” the priest said. “It can cast a long shadow, the past, thrust any family into darkness. His children are innocent. Why should they be punished? And yet punished they will be. Bechtel, too, for that matter. He wasn’t even born when his father was spreading terror in Epirus and yet ….”

  Spreading his arms, he flapped them for emphasis. Another bird this time, a crow.

  “Would you want to be related to Josef Mengele? This is the same.”

  “Bechtel was very angry,” Patronas said. “He was waiting for me when I got in and informed me that he’d contacted the German embassy and filed a request seeking to put an end to our investigation. Apparently, someone told him about the leads we were pursuing, the research Tembelos and Evangelos were doing. He’s claiming we planted the evidence of his father’s complicity in the massacre, hoping to embarrass Germany.”

  The priest shook his head. “A corrosive thing, rage.”

  “I’m not sure it was rage. It felt more like grief to me.”

  “Of course, his sorrow must be profound. Flawed as his uncle was, he obviously loved him.”

  Patronas had called his boss in Athens after Bechtel left and relayed the German’s concerns. “He doesn’t want us to arrest her. He says it’s all propaganda, an effort to humiliate Germany. He contacted the German ambassador in Athens.”

  “Ignore him. We’re Greeks and this is our country, our justice system. We’ll fight him on this.”

  “We really don’t have enough evidence to charge her,” he repeated for what felt like the hundredth time.

  “Bring her in anyway,” Stathis had ordered. “Make her sweat, keep after her until she breaks.”

  “She won’t break, sir.”

  “Of course she will. She’s an elderly woman. A few nights under lock and key and she’ll tell you what you want to know. You just have to scare her.”

  “I need more time.”

  Stathis had reluctantly agreed to the delay, but Patronas knew he was running out of time.

  He had been repelled by Stathis’ words, finding them eerily familiar to what the survivors in Epirus had said of the dead man, that he liked to scare people, especially children. “Break her,” his boss had said. “Do whatever’s necessary.” The same had been said of Bech.

  Profoundly discouraged, he’d hung up the phone. If he wanted to keep his job, he would have to do as Stathis ordered. The thought made him sick.

  Chapter Twenty
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  Now that we’ve found a priest, let’s bury the whole village.

  —Greek Proverb

  There was nothing on either side of the road, only great swaths of rock intermixed with patches of brackish soil. Olive trees were planted on a few of the terraced hillsides, but unlike the ones on Chios, these trees were buried in brush, their branches untrimmed and brown. Patmos was like a desert, the absence of water evident everywhere he looked. A small military outpost occupied a stony plateau above the beach of Meloi, a huge anti-aircraft gun set out on the sparse grass in front.

  Ah, the military …. Patronas recalled his days as a soldier. Only they would use a cannon as a garden ornament.

  Farther up the road, signs began to appear marking the turn-offs for the various beaches, Agriolivado and Meloi, rooms-to-let in Lampi and elsewhere. A bus was lumbering up the hill and Patronas followed it into Ano Campos.

  Like many places in rural Greece, Campos was divided into two parts: an upper village, Ano Campos, which occupied the summit of a hill and a lower, less populated area by the sea. There had been historical reasons for this division. In the days of the Saracen pirates, people retreated to the mountaintops and stayed there. The beaches and coves were only now being repopulated with the coming of tourists.

  A group of people sitting under a grape arbor at the center of the village turned their heads and stared at the Jeep as it went by. Why, Patronas wasn’t exactly sure. Maybe their attention had been caught by the priest, who had stuck his head out the window and was watching the road like a hunting dog closing in on a rabbit.

  Patronas smiled to himself, recognizing the look on his friend’s face. It was what Papa Michalis called his ‘panoptic, all-seeing eye,’ a term he’d gotten from a book by the Chios author, Michael Plakotaris, who was an expert on Sherlock Holmes. The so-called ‘eye’ came upon the priest whenever he and Patronas worked together, a sign not so much of schizophrenia as of enthusiasm. But the people in the grape arbor didn’t know this. They just thought he was crazy.

  The windows were open and the old man’s hair was sticking straight up, his long gray beard ruffling around his neck like a scarf.

  The Bay of Campos was the largest on the island. A gentle breeze was blowing and kymatakia—little waves—made a soft, lapping sound along the shore, pleasant to the ear. Far out in the bay, windsurfers were flying through the air like human dragonflies.

  Patronas wondered what had happened to the boys he’d seen windsurfing in Campos on his honeymoon, the ones he and Dimitra had spoken of. “Do you think our sons will look like them?” he’d asked her. “Better,” she’d replied with that stolid, unflinching certainty of hers.

  “You ever go swimming?” he asked the priest, his eyes still on the boys.

  “Not anymore. I had to give it up when I took my vows. Anyway, I am old now, all knobbly and wretched. Fish would flee if they saw me, take to dry land.”

  After parking the car, they walked along a dusty road, checking the numbers of the buildings, trying to find the rooming house where Maria Georgiou had stayed. Rented mopeds and cars were parked in the sand, and people were lying in the shade of the feathery trees that lined the beach.

  A more formal operation was set up farther down, directed by two young men sitting under a faded yellow parachute. It offered rented chaises and umbrellas, kayaks and canoes and waterskiing lessons.

  Shielding his eyes, Patronas looked out at the bay with longing. The sea was absolutely clear in the shallows, darkening where the land dropped away and the water deepened. In the distance, he could see rocks on the floor of the ocean, clumps of seaweed undulating in the current.

  The rooming house they sought was about fifty meters beyond the parachute, situated on an arid strip of land. A wooden sidewalk was laid across the sand leading up to it.

  The owner, Antonis Pavlos, remembered Maria Georgiou well and spoke highly of her. “Sure, she stayed here,” he told Patronas. “I was glad to have her. I get tired of speaking English day in and day out: ‘Please, breakfast over at ten, after, no. Towels not for beach.’ It grates on me. And she was a nice lady. Kept to herself and never asked a thing. She stayed on the first floor here.”

  “Can you show me the room she rented?”

  “A couple of kids are in there now, but seeing as how you’re the police ….” He shrugged. “Come on, it’s this way.”

  Initially, he hadn’t known what to make of the two of them—a priest and a detective showing up at his rooming house—but he’d made a fast recovery.

  Patronas had noticed the man’s discomfort. Doing something illegal on the side, Mr. Pavlos was. A fiddle with his taxes, maybe.

  He didn’t care. He was here to investigate a homicide. Unpaid taxes were no concern of his.

  Pavlos unlocked the door and pushed it open. Sparsely furnished, the room was very clean and faced an impromptu parking lot on the sand. Two twin beds and a chest of drawers filled the space.The walls were decorated with tired botanical prints, the floor by a strip of old carpeting. The bathroom was down the hall, Pavlos informed them.

  A suitcase was open on the floor, and Patronas stepped around it and opened the door of the terrace. Made of poured concrete, it held a folding rack for laundry, exactly as Maria Georgiou had described. A line of cars were parked very close to the terrace, again in keeping with what she’d said. There was a taverna on the other side of the lot and he could hear voices from where he was standing, the clatter of dishes. Perhaps the victim had been on his way to eat there with his family when she’d spotted him.

  “Would you mind walking outside and standing next to that car there?” he asked the owner. “I need to check something. Once you’re there, start talking in a normal tone of voice.” He wanted someone besides the priest to do this, an independent observer.

  “People will think I’m crazy,” Pavlos complained.

  “It will only take a minute. Trust me, it’s important.”

  Disgruntled, Pavlos headed out the door and soon reappeared outside. He walked over to the car Patronas had picked out and started muttering to himself. Standing in the door of the terrace, Patronas could see and hear him clearly, every word as clear as a bell.

  “Malaka,” the owner was saying. Jerk. “Paliogaidouri.” Old donkey. In case Patronas hadn’t realized the invective was directed at him, he opened his hand and raised it, giving the mountzose, in other words, ‘eat shit,’ the universal Greek symbol of contempt, the equivalent of ‘fuck you.’ He and Pavlos laughed.

  When Pavlos came back inside, Patronas quizzed him about the job offer that had led Maria Georgiou to the house in Chora. “Did she hear you talking about it and volunteer? Or did you come up with the idea yourself?”

  They were standing in the lobby, talking, and Patronas had his notebook out.

  “It was my idea,” the owner of the rooming house said. “She liked it here and said she wished she could to stay on longer, but that she couldn’t afford it. We often talked about it. What’s this about anyway?”

  “We’re investigating a murder.”

  “That German in Chora?”

  Patronas nodded.

  “Maria had nothing to do with it. Leave her alone. She’s over seventy years old.”

  “So was the victim.”

  “Bah. This isn’t his country. He should have stayed in Berlin.”

  “Stuttgart,” the priest interjected. “The victim, Walter Bechtel or Bech, depending on what time frame you are referring to, was from Stuttgart. The family called themselves one thing during the war and changed their name afterward.”

  “Who cares?” The owner snorted. “Fucking Germans.”

  Patronas fought to regain control of the interview. “Who told you about the job?”

  “A man who rents a room from me mentioned it. He asked me to find someone as a favor to him. Hans Müller, his name is. He’s a German, too.” Pavlos snorted again.

  Patronas wrote the name down in his notebook. “Where can I find him?”


  “He usually eats lunch across the street. He’s a sociable fellow, Herr Müller. Likes to talk. If you find him, he’ll tell you what you want to know.”

  The three of them walked across the street to the taverna. A group of Germans were sitting on the patio, their table covered with the remnants of a meal.

  “Him.” Pavlos pointed to a fair-haired man with a sunburned face. “That’s Müller.”

  Dressed for the beach, he was wearing a swimsuit with seagulls on it, an unbuttoned shirt and heavy leather sandals. As Müller spoke neither Greek nor English, they had to rely on a waiter to translate, a tattooed native of Patmos named Babis.

  Patronas was uncomfortable using him, but had no time to file a formal request and wait for an official translator to arrive from Athens. “Just tell us what he says,” he instructed the waiter. “Nothing fancy. Keep it simple.”

  Müller had been coming to Patmos for years and knew the owners of the house, the Bauers, the waiter reported. They asked him to find a woman to clean and do laundry at their house in Chora, cook an occasional meal. They had specifically requested that this woman be Greek. They’d been very emphatic on this point, not wanting to trouble themselves with immigrants and their attendance problems. They’d hired one in the past, nationality unknown, and she hadn’t been reliable. She’d left without giving notice, taking a trash bag full of things that didn’t belong to her.

  “Not the family silver, but just about everything else.” The waiter snickered as he shared this. “Hazocharoumeni,” he said under his breath. Happy idiots.

  The Bauers spoke some Greek and thought it would be better if they were seen to support the natives—given the current political climate in Greece.

  Hans Müller smiled nervously, watching them as the waiter translated what he’d just said. “Also, a Greek would have papers, so there’d be no problem with the authorities.”