‘You must offer to bake him a cake,’ said Leda, ‘a fanouropita for the soul of his mother. Then you must take the cake to seven different houses, and before your neighbours eat, they must pray for St Fanourios’s mother, too. All the cake must be eaten; none must be thrown away.’
The fat man looked doubtful.
‘How can I undertake this ritual?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know the recipe for fanouropita, and if I did, I have no kitchen to bake cakes.’ He considered. ‘Do you think we might economise, and join my request with yours? When you bake your cake, will you ask for the return of my ring, as well as what you have lost?’
‘I shan’t be baking any cake,’ said Leda. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t help you.’
She turned her back on him, and set off down the road, in the direction of the poet’s house, and the village.
The evening was growing dark; the nearest trees were still visible, but in the deeper forest, night had already fallen. Leda walked as quickly as she dared, wary of irregularities in the road which would trip her. A kicked stone bounced away from her feet, and a second, much larger, hurt her toe. Then, her foot caught something else, a small, light object, which rolled tinkling over the ground.
She stopped, and peered down at the road. At first, she could see nothing; then her eye caught the glint of metal close to her shoe. She crouched, and picked up a ring. Clearly antique, the plain band was set with an unusual coin, stamped with a rising sun on one side, and a young man in profile on the other; and, even in the shades of evening, the ring shone with the glow of old gold.
Thinking of the fat man, she looked back along the road, but the chapel was round the bend, and out of sight. She considered going back, and giving him the ring, but night was closing in, and she was cold. She tried the ring on her middle finger. Made for a man, it was too big; so she slipped it in her pocket, and carried on along the darkening road.
Eight
Frona, Attis, Papa Tomas and Maria made their way in silence back to the house. Papa Tomas carried the metal box which held the remains from the poet’s grave. Attis kept a guiding hand on Frona’s back, by way of comfort.
The room where Santos had worked was never used. His papers and pens had long been cleared away, but on the old kitchen table which he had used as his desk, his typewriter still held the last sheet he had typed between its rollers, with the opening lines of an unfinished poem at its head.
The food which was to have welcomed the guests after the exhumation – sweet biscuits and Turkish delight, pine nuts and peanuts, crackers spread with fish-roe, brandy and wine – lay untouched on the starched, white cloths. Maria had prepared a dish of kolyva, food for the dead – boiled wheat flavoured with rose water and cinnamon, mixed with pomegranate seeds and raisins, and blanketed in icing sugar – which she had decorated with a cross in blanched almonds and silver dragées.
At the fireplace, Frona held her cold hands to the ash-choked fire. She had put on make-up for the ritual, but, no expert in the art, had chosen shades of rouge and lipstick which bled the bloom from her skin. Attis sensed in her the weariness of the careworn; her mouth was developing a downturn he hadn’t seen before. He poured himself a Metaxa, and passed a glass to the priest, who sat on an ornate horsehair sofa which belonged to another age, his anorak still zipped over his robes, the box holding the bones from Santos’s grave between his feet.
‘I think before we go any further, we should take another look at what we’ve got here,’ said Attis. ‘Papa, would you mind?’
‘Not at all, not at all,’ said Papa Tomas. ‘Not if you think it will help.’
‘I don’t want to see,’ said Frona, closing her eyes against the images from the graveside.
‘There’s no need for you to look,’ said Attis. ‘Not if it distresses you. Papa?’
Papa Tomas lifted the lid of the box. On a lining of white cotton, the many unwashed bones from Santos’s grave were caked in earth, but the covering was too light to hide their form. The skull was elongated, and wide at the jaws; the teeth remained, with a set of almost human molars in the rear jaw, but at the front – at the snout – a dozen more protruded oddly, and two – curling upwards – were obviously tusks. There were bones clearly from a leg, but the creature they came from was not human; the leg was too short to be a man’s, and ended not in the intricate bones of feet and toes, but in a point which could only be a hoof.
Papa Tomas crossed himself.
‘I’m afraid these are definitely from a pig,’ he said to Frona, gently. ‘I don’t think there can be any doubt of that.’
Attis peered into the box, and shuddered.
‘I’m afraid Papa Tomas is right,’ he said. ‘Unthinkable as it is, somehow poor Santos has been . . . changed.’
He drank down his Metaxa.
‘Don’t be absurd,’ said Frona. ‘There’s surely been some trick, some malicious prank.’
She looked towards Attis for reassurance.
‘Of course you’re right, Frona,’ he said. ‘Papa, you might close the box. The question is, what do we do now?’ He put on his reading glasses, and from an envelope in his pocket, withdrew several papers held together with a legal seal. ‘Because, following today’s events, the wording Santos used in his will takes on new meaning.’
‘What new meaning?’ asked Frona. ‘What do you mean? Four years, he said, and four years have gone.’
Her face was troubled. Attis looked down at the papers; in the twilight, they were impossible to read. He switched on the lamp, snatching his hand from the sting of an electric shock. At the room’s corners, the shadows deepened in the lamp’s sallow light.
Attis scanned the pages.
‘I don’t think he said four years, exactly,’ he said, as he read. ‘That’s what we assumed he meant. Here it is, here’s the paragraph: the monies are to be distributed, when my bones finally see daylight. So I suppose everything rests on whether we can reasonably assume his bones have seen daylight today.’
The priest looked dubiously at the metal box at his feet.
‘But to declare those – whatever they are – are Santos’s remains would make us look idiots,’ said Frona. ‘They’re not human; we can see that.’
Maria carried in a stack of plates, and laid them on the table.
‘Eat, all of you, please; come, eat,’ she said, gesturing at the food. ‘What can I do with all this, if you don’t eat? And where’s Leda? She should eat something. She’s had nothing since breakfast this morning.’
‘She isn’t here,’ said Frona. ‘I don’t know where she is. She’s had a great shock. How must the poor girl be feeling? Attis, will you go and look for her?’
‘I will,’ said Attis, ‘when we’ve decided what to do. Papa Tomas will be wanting to get away.’ He replaced the papers in their envelope. ‘Maria, tell me something. What are they saying in the village about this business?’
‘Business? What business? Papa, let me fill you a plate.’
‘Thank you,’ said the priest. ‘That’s very kind.’
‘This business.’ Attis pointed at the metal box. ‘What are they saying about this?’
‘I haven’t been to the village to find out,’ said Maria, choosing from the best of the food for Papa Tomas. ‘But if I had to guess, I’d guess they’d be saying the poor boy’s bones have been transformed.’ She touched the corner of her eye, where tears were gathering. ‘Someone put the evil eye on him, is what I’d be saying. What else could they say, if it’s the truth?’
In exasperation, Frona threw up her hands.
‘See! They’ll have us in horns and hoods in no time, dancing on his grave at midnight. Their stupidity and superstition is beyond bearing.’
Papa Tomas blinked; Maria turned her back, and busied herself with the Turkish delight.
‘They have faith in powers beyond the earthly,’ said the priest, ‘as should we all.’
‘So what do you say, Papa?’ asked Attis. ‘In your professional opinion, are what we have h
ere Santos’s bones? Are you happy to inter them as such?’
The priest cleared his throat, and took his time in taking a drink which emptied his glass. He wiped a small dribble from his mouth.
‘Well,’ he said, holding out his glass so Attis might refill it, ‘if they are – and I’m not saying they are – then clearly there’s been some kind of – let’s say something’s been at work. So that would prevent me from interring them. They might be – well, tainted. If something has – interfered with them.’
‘You’re saying,’ said Frona, as Attis poured more brandy for Papa Tomas, ‘if there’s been witchcraft or the devil’s work, it might infect the other remains in the ossiary. Maybe they’ll turn into pigs, too. Or sheep, or chickens.’
‘Well,’ said the priest. ‘The bones in the ossuary are sacred remains. They await their resurrection in their blessed natural form.’
‘People wouldn’t want to see their grandmother resurrected as a goat,’ said Frona. ‘Is that what you’re saying? What claptrap.’
‘Frona, please,’ said Attis. ‘Papa, please go on.’
‘To continue,’ said the priest, accepting a plate from Maria. ‘If there has been no unusual intervention, then we must assume this is the work of human hands. Of malicious hands, in fact. In which case, plainly these are not Santos’s remains. So I couldn’t inter them as such, no.’
Attis sighed, and poured more brandy for himself. Maria lifted a silver dragée from the cross marked on the kolyva, and replaced it exactly straight.
‘But if they’re not Santos’s bones,’ asked Frona, ‘where is he? Who would have done such a cruel thing?’
‘People,’ said Maria, darkly, prodding the blanched almonds with her fingertip. ‘Bad people.’
A longcase clock ticked away the moments of a silence.
‘You’ll be wanting to know,’ said Attis, at last, as he removed his glasses, ‘how much is in the account.’
Frona, Maria and the priest all looked at him.
‘How much?’ asked Frona.
‘A substantial amount.’
‘How substantial?’
‘Exactly, I couldn’t say. Substantial.’
‘And who knows this?’
‘Myself. All of you, now. The bank where the account is held, of course. And Yorgas Sarris, as the publisher, of course; they have paid the royalties over the last four years.’
‘So there might be,’ suggested Frona, ‘more money than he made in all his life.’
‘After his death, sales grew to an impressive level, as you know,’ said Attis. ‘It’s a sad fact that Death may bring rewards for a talent which brought little success for the artist in his lifetime. Santos often compared himself to Van Gogh, who lived in poverty and became wealthy as he lay in his grave. And the comparison was fair. Now he’s gone, Santos’s beautiful poems are set texts in schools and universities, even internationally; I’m told he’s under consideration by the Sorbonne. Santos would have been very gratified, there’s no doubt of it, even though he was no businessman. His life was his art.’
Frona laughed, bitterly.
‘If you believe that, you didn’t know him at all. He worried constantly about money, about bills and debts. This house has had nothing spent on it since our grandmother’s time. It’s cold, and it’s draughty, and it’s inconvenient. The wiring’s unreliable at best, and when it rains, it’s dangerous. The roof leaks and the window frames are rotten; it’s overrun by mice, and riddled with damp. Santos loved this house, but he couldn’t afford its upkeep, and he hated to watch it fall down around his ears. And his wife hated it here. She was a city girl, like me and Leda. He always said she left him because she couldn’t live in this state. And Leda and I couldn’t live here now, even if we wanted to. The place isn’t fit for dogs. Look!’
She pointed up at the ceiling, where brown stains of damp showed on flaking plaster, and at the cracked glass in the rotten window frame, the threadbare rugs and old furniture, at the oil lamps in readiness for power failures.
Attis sighed.
‘I did my best for him,’ he said. ‘There’s just no money in poetry.’
‘But there’s money in the poems of dead poets, isn’t there?’ asked Frona. ‘And now he’s dead and made his money, someone’s trying to steal it!’
‘Steal it?’ The agent seemed shocked. ‘What on earth makes you say that?’
‘That does!’ She pointed at the metal case at the priest’s feet. ‘Someone who knows what was in his will has stolen his remains to invalidate it, and keep us from our inheritance!’
Papa Tomas looked up from his plate with interest; Maria halted in her rearranging of the crackers.
‘What someone?’ asked Attis. ‘Why?’
‘Some enemy. Someone who has an interest in keeping the money locked away.’
She looked hard at the agent, and made her meaning clear.
‘Frona! Surely, Frona, you can’t be accusing me?’ In apparent hurt and indignation, Attis’s face grew red. ‘Why would I do such a thing, to you of all people? No one could have worked harder on Santos’s behalf, on behalf of his estate, and in your interests! Tirelessly, I have worked! I’ve sold rights to dozens of countries, and overseen the royalty payments in a fair and businesslike manner. The accounts may be frozen, but I can assure you that all the monies that should be there, are there! And might I remind you, I am myself a beneficiary of the will? It grants me a one-off sum, if you remember, which at the time of his death Santos simply didn’t have, a very generous gesture which four years ago his estate could not possibly have paid. Maybe he was a better businessman than he seemed. In willing me that sum, he willed me an incentive to make the money – which I may say I have done, alongside a considerable sum for you, and Leda. So I cannot for one single minute see why you think I should want to keep his money from myself, or you, especially in such a bizarre and ghoulish fashion! Why in God’s name would I do something so heathen as to dig the poor man up, and hide his bones? I may be many things, Frona, but a grave-robber I most certainly am not.’
Frona sighed.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I appreciate all you’ve done. But if not any of us, who?’
‘Bad eyes,’ murmured Maria, ‘bad eyes.’ She made crosses over her heart, and glanced at the darkening window as if an unwelcome face might be watching. The priest made crosses too, and sipped more brandy.
‘Does it matter who?’ asked Attis.
‘What do you mean?’ Frona picked up a ram’s-head poker, and shifted the charred logs to shake off their ash. Small flames flickered, and died again as she placed a fresh pine log in the grate.
‘We’ve exhumed the bones in Santos’s grave. Doesn’t that meet the terms of the will?’
‘Not if they’re not his bones.’
‘But we could say they are.’
‘Say that those pig bones belong to my brother? That will bring shame on him, and on us, his family.’
Papa Tomas nodded enthusiatic agreement.
‘But what if the bones were blessed?’ asked Attis. ‘Think about it, Frona; I’m trying to help you, and Leda. A blessing would surely make it right. You’d make it right, wouldn’t you, Papa, for a consideration?’
But Frona shook her head.
‘We can’t do that,’ she said. ‘Where are Santos’s bones? Someone has desecrated my brother’s grave, Attis! That’s more important than any amount of money! We should be going after this grave-robber, this criminal!’
‘Just so,’ said Attis, carefully, ‘Just so. And with money, you could hire an investigator to track him down. You’re quite right that a criminal act has been committed here, for reasons we don’t know. But without money to pay someone to find out, the truth may never be discovered, and poor Santos’s remains may never be found. So here’s what I suggest. Papa, we’ll need your help. We must inter the bones as if all is as it should be.’
But Papa Tomas shook his head.
‘I don’t think I could do that,�
�� he said. ‘I’m sorry – I’m sorry for you all, and I really do wish to help – but I really couldn’t.’
‘What if, then,’ suggested the agent, ‘we inter no bones at all? An empty box. That removes your objection, surely, Papa? I know in the family’s interests we can rely on your discretion and your silence. When Santos’s remains are found, maybe you’d conduct a quiet ceremony to bring him home. And when the money in the accounts is released, Frona, you can hire someone to discover the truth.’
‘And what about local tittle-tattle?’ asked Frona. ‘How will we keep a leash on that?’ She looked across at Maria, but Maria was busy, wiping dust from an unopened bottle of wine.
‘Papa Tomas has considerable influence. Papa, you could help us there, too.’
The priest looked doubtful.
‘What will I tell them?’ he asked. ‘That there was some trick of the light? I’m afraid the rumours will persist. And what about the bones, here, in the case? What if they are Santos’s bones, transformed? To dispose of them without proper ceremony would be a sin.’
‘We could re-bury them,’ said Attis, ‘somewhere they won’t be found.’
‘But what if there has been some kind of . . .’ objected the priest.
‘This is all superstition,’ interrupted Attis. ‘Do you really believe Santos has been magicked into a pig?’
‘A possibility, in the minds of some, is all I’m saying.’
By the table, Maria crossed herself again.
‘So clean the bones with holy water, and bless them,’ said Attis. ‘When Frona has money to pay an investigator, no doubt we’ll prove there’s been no magical transformation. Can we agree, then, to this plan? Our story is, the observers were mistaken and the reports are malicious gossip. The case will be placed empty in the ossuary, and I’ll contact the lawyer and tell him to call the bank to release the funds.’
‘How long will it take?’ asked Frona. ‘When do you think the money will come through? I want my brother’s remains found, and brought home to his final rest.’
The Whispers of Nemesis Page 6
