The Destroyers

by Christopher Bollen

  “Good afternoon, Sonny.” In the second’s ensuing silence, I can feel the willful stemming of her temper. “Didn’t the inspector tell you?” I ask.

  “No, he didn’t. He said it was a minor matter. But in all of my time here, there’s never been a cop at my door. You can’t get a cop to come to your door when there’s a major matter let alone a minor one.”

  I’m impressed that Martis had the foresight not to mention the deaths of the backpackers to her. Perhaps he realized how quickly panic spreads in the closed confines of a house.

  “But it is minor,” I assure her. “At least for us. I spoke with the inspector. There was a motorbike accident near Charlie’s dock yesterday. No one you know. Some hippies died in a crash. He was just asking if anyone saw anything.”

  “If Charlie saw anything?” she drawls. “Why would he have?” And as if the news has finally caught up with her, she whispers, “That’s awful. You say they’re dead? But Charlie . . . I’ve been trying to call him and he isn’t picking up. He hasn’t come home yet. Where the hell is he, Ian? What’s going on?”

  A figure shifts in the shadows of the hangar, a tall, wire-thin body ducking around the corner. I’m suddenly aware of how quiet the dock is, without a single sound of activity or repair. There is only the mournful swaying of the crane’s hooks overhead and the surf slapping along the rocks. Seagulls nestle on the vacant pier.

  “Ian, are you there?”

  “I’ve got to go, Sonny. Try not to worry. I’ll call you later.” Her protests dissolve with the press of a button.

  I drop my helmet in the seat and head toward the hangar. One of the garage doors is pulled down, the other open to reveal the swampy darkness of the interior. Now that I’m alone, in the silence of the island, the inspector’s suggestion of murder is hard to shake. Could the hippies really have been killed deliberately on this barren coastal stretch, the boats too far out at sea to protect them, the empty fields of thistle and scrub offering no shelter or hiding spot, only the goat bells clanging in the night? Even in the brittle sunlight, the landscape holds a mad desert stillness. Charlie called the camp a death cult. I wonder if it’s the custom to return the clothes of the dead to the families and what Mikael’s parents might make of the ripped ANTI-BETHLEHEM slogan covered in their son’s dried blood.

  Before I reach the hangar, a peal of metal echoes from around the corner. “Hello?” I call. The metal object continues to swivel, rotating like a spun coin. There’s no answer. “Hello?” I try again. I step into the shadow and steady my hand against the concrete as I turn.

  Helios sits halfway down the building’s side, just beyond the lid of an oil drum settling on the pavement. His knees are bunched at his chest, his sneakers projecting out like turtle heads, the cuffs of his long-sleeve T-shirt bunched in his palms. He rises when he sees me, sliding his back up the concrete wall like an execution in reverse.

  “What are you doing?” I ask sharply. My anxiety has instantly converted into unjustifiable anger.

  Helios wipes his mouth with his T-shirt sleeve.

  “What does it look like?” he grumbles in his stiff English. “Taking a break. Hiding out from my father. He wants me working all the time.” Helios prefers to stare out at the gated field beyond the hangar that encloses nothing but dry dirt. But an idea must have flared through his dim mind because he quickly rotates his head to me, his blistered lips easing into a smile. One of the blisters is dotted with pus. “How do you like the cabin? The hot water okay?”

  “The hot water’s fine.”

  He nods, good, good. “My job,” he says, jabbing his chest. “I did plumbing. The locks too. I do it nice for Charlie.”

  “I met your sister, Vesna, this morning.”

  He scowls, rolls his head back, and takes in more of the view. Either the original idea is reinstated or an entirely new one drops its bags in his head. “Soon, next year, the year after, if you stay, you will be able to drink at my bar.” He runs his hand across invisible signage. “Helios’s Lounge. You bring your friends, okay? Leather stools. First-rate sound system. Stage and dance floor. I will put it here by the sea or maybe in Skala. Charlie is helping me. He promises. Maybe I put it where Nikos’s was. Something will have to open there. Bad to see it empty and black, and the family will not reopen.”

  “That’s a good dream,” I tell him. I can’t imagine Helios’s Lounge will ever see the electric light of day. Charlie must have factored lazy ambition in the lounge’s launch schedule.

  “One year, maybe two or three. Soon.” Helios twists a few goatee hairs with his bruised fingertips. His back is still pressed against the hangar, as if it’s his job to keep it from toppling over. I wonder if he’s considered on the winning side of the country’s youth employment statistics. “Charlie is a good friend. Have you seen him today?”

  “No. Have you?”

  He chews on his pus-dotted lip. “I have to find him, have to ask him for a small favor. Very little.” He glances at me, gauging my cash potential, his eyes fleeing to my pockets for the imprint of a wallet. I finally get to perform my universal poverty gesture with empty waving hands. “That’s okay,” he replies contritely, shivering a bit in the building’s shadow. Helios is far less aggressive than Vesna about borrowing funds, maybe because he has nowhere urgent to be. “Charlie helps me out. He is my pal. It can wait until I see him.”

  “Has your father seen him?”

  He glides a hand through his gelled hair. The back of his neck is sunburned, but his pocked forehead is as pale as moth wings.

  “No, I do not think so. Charlie gave him day off. He might still be out on his rowboat fishing. Fffff. I hate fishing. My father won’t let me play music. He says it scares the fish. He is an old man, out of touch. Doesn’t want me to open my bar, either. Doesn’t understand what money it brings. Money, girls, real nice first-class place.” Christos must view Helios’s Lounge the way my father did charity work: solar-powered fantasies on which no practical machines can run. “Charlie never gives my father days off in August,” he says. “That means Charlie is off the island. I was hoping he would be back by now. He always comes right back.”

  I’m relieved by even this vague, hash-muddled confirmation of Charlie’s plans. Without realizing it, Helios has restored my faith in the timetable. To express my thanks, I pull the twenty-euro bill from my pocket and hold it out to him.

  Helios gazes at it waywardly, one eye closing, as if steadying on a mark.

  “What is that?” he says, as if he has already forgotten asking for money.

  “For you. Take it. It’s not a problem just this once.”

  “Are you sure?” He snatches it and wads it in his palm. “Thank you.” For the first time there’s a healthy color to his cheeks. “I appreciate. A free drink for you at my lounge.” He slaps my shoulder, holding his hand there to momentarily balance himself. “Tell Charlie I find him tomorrow, okay? Thank you for the tip, dude.”

  Dude. With that last triumphant Americanism, Helios wanders with a sideways stagger into the field, dropping out of sight into a gulley. Unlike with the hippies, Patmos actually is his backyard. He grew up here and must know every beach and cove in which to hide from his father, who also grew up here and probably knows exactly where to look for him.

  I return to the front of the hangar, inspecting the horizon for a white yacht with a red K on the bow drifting in from Bodrum. Out in the deeper channels is a mini-UN of luxury vessels, flags from Turkey, Malta, Nicaragua, Spain, Australia, Italy. The faint glittery beige of human bodies collects at the tips of the decks like expensive hood ornaments. A few black orbs dot the water, swimmers treading around their crafts. The shimmer of the sea reminds me of the fiber-optic whirl of technology, as if those swimmers are floating in the electrodes of boundless information, bobbing through screen-like waves of transference. They are tiny glitches that spark and fade.

  I step into the hangar, its silence reeking of butane and paint thinner. The brass frame of the refurb
ished boat gleams in the blackness, the K already painted across its peak. Two small squares sparkle a few feet behind it. Ugur shuffles forward, pushing his glasses higher on his nose. He has the reluctant, mole-like expression of a man caught hiding.

  “E-on,” he wheezes, nervously scanning the area behind me. “The police were here today. I do not like the police.”

  I concur that most people don’t.

  “I did not answer his questions,” he says. “We have understanding with the local police, but not this one. Do you think he will come back?”

  “Not if Charlie talks to him.”

  That response prompts no perceptible consolation. “I do not want him asking for my papers, to have my name down.” He inches forward, still distrusting the light.

  “Ugur, where are the workers?” I gesture around the empty hangar.

  “I tell them not to come. I did not think it was good idea with that inspector from Kos turning up. They too have names, families, papers. I wait for Charlie to tell me it is safe.”

  “He’s not from the Better Business Bureau.” I laugh. Ugur heaves a flummoxed sigh that underscores what little humor there is in undocumented labor. I try to inject the command of a number two in my voice, to exert a firm authority over my future workplace. I channel Edward Bledsoe. “We can’t shut down just because an officer has a few questions about a traffic accident. What about the customers? Aren’t there bookings? Someone besides Charlie has to be handling the reservations and dock schedules.”

  “Customers?” Ugur repeats.

  “The tourists. The vacationers. The charterers.”

  “I, I do not handle,” he stutters. If only Ugur would step into the sun we could have a reasonable conversation, but I’m staring at the twin reflections of his glasses and the charcoal color of his lips. “I think booking this week with family from Moldova. To Agathonisi?”

  “One booking this week? What about the yachts out now? It’s high season!”

  “I do not handle,” he cries again. “That is your job. Like man who came before you. I handle boats. I do not liaise with customers.” It’s as if Ugur and I are only proficient in the universal language of corporate catchwords. “Customers! The customers are not my problem! Why you not ask Charlie? Where is he?”

  I’m startled, tossed back, someone who had mistaken this planet the last few hours for Earth. Of anyone on this island, it is Ugur who should know where Charlie is.

  “What do you mean? You don’t know? He’s in Bodrum. He should be back any second. He went to deal with some problem about”—what did he call the problem?—“ports. Didn’t he take one of the charter boats out yesterday morning?”

  One step back, and Ugur fades into the shadows. Maybe he doesn’t want me to see him shaking, but I can feel it, the air running cold between us.

  “He was supposed to, yes. On a boat scheduled to leave at seven A.M. But he did not show up. He never show up yesterday. The boat leave without him.”

  “So he’s not in Bodrum?” Silence, only silence. “Could he have taken another boat?”

  “No. Not one of ours. I radio captains at sea. They never hear from him. And I call his phone all yesterday and today. He does not answer.”

  “Where the hell is he then?”

  Ugur scoots closer to the boat, and his mouth issues a panicked sound midway between a growl and a bleat. “I thought you would tell me. You are his best friend. Now your job. E-on, where is he? Charlie needs to be in Bodrum yesterday. That meeting was very important. He would not miss it. Tell me what to do now!”

  There are prayers for the faithful. And there are prayers even for the faithless, quieter maybe, but no more certain of their futility. I try one. Answer, appear, just show up right now in your skimpy yellow shorts with your bob-and-weave smile, end this by being here, for fuck’s sake, appear. A dirty brown mutt lopes into the hangar and sniffs the door grate, his curled tongue lolling. He notices the two pathetic inhabitants and scampers off. I suppose the faithful might take it as a sign.

  “So he’s still on the island?” I yell toward Ugur’s glowing lenses.

  “Yes. I think. Where else would he be? But he would be here now. Very bad. Very, very bad. Eon, you do not know how bad this is.”

  It’s odd that the moment I realize my friend is missing I feel in some way that he’s found. Against all logic, Charlie is still on Patmos, out of sight, not answering his phone. But if he is on the island why isn’t he at home with Sonny or down at the dock running his boats? All I can picture are the strange tears in his eyes the last time I saw him that night in Skala, as if a star he loved had finally stopped transmitting light. Or were the tears over a less poetic blow that resulted in the last-minute change of plan?

  “Charlie!” I scream into the darkness of the hangar. Ugur’s lenses are no longer visible. He must have backed into a corner where even indirect light can’t reach him, behind the steel shells and paint buckets and boxes of folded towels.

  I spin into the sun and march toward my bike, the need to find Charlie pressing on me, tightening each nerve like a string. The problem is, I can’t think of anywhere in particular to look. I would go to the police if they weren’t already searching for him. I would notify Sonny if she weren’t already agonizing over his whereabouts. Even Helios is stalking the island trying to hunt him down. Without my lifting a finger, the search parties have all been dispatched. And yet it is little solace that every lie I told about Charlie being here has stumbled backward into the truth.

  I rev the motor—where are you? where are you?—and take the thin trail away from the beach. On the main road, where the dirt meets the blacktop, a white Mercedes station wagon idles. I see Petros through the windshield with his thin, Rolex-ed arm dangling from the window. As I turn, he flashes his headlights in recognition. Petros must be looking for Charlie too. It occurs to me that if anyone ran two foreigners off the road in the night, Petros is the likely suspect. I would offer his name up to Martis for questioning, but even I know the futility of that accusation. The clergy owns the island, more immune even than the Konstantinous to suspicion.

  I speed along the pavement, worried the station wagon might appear at any moment in my rearview mirrors, its grille hungry for more casualties. When it hits me that Domitian is the only place I haven’t checked, I swerve the bike into the dusty village of Grikos. Whitewashed homes are built into the hillside like rice terraces on an Asian steppe. Their walls stream with meaty bougainvillea and the circuitry of rust-brown grapevines. At the port, just beyond tables of yellow wine and heat-exhausted families, Charlie’s black yacht is moored with a beige canvas strapped over its hatch. But I’m too late. Martis, using an officer as a support beam, is jumping onto its polished deck.

  After dialing and redialing Charlie’s number, I have nowhere left to go but home. I pull a bottle of vodka from the minifridge. I turn out the lights. I slide the lock on the connecting door. A passing rainsquall beats across the roof like the feet of running children. When Louise knocks gently from her room, I swallow a shot and whisper that I’m sick. I sit in the minutes and hours trying to conceive of what might have happened to Charlie that night after Miles punched him and we all drifted back to our beds. Where did he go? Where is he now? He must know that everyone is worried, that I couldn’t hold them off indefinitely with a phony alibi. I don’t need to check whether Charlie’s resurfaced. As evening sets, my phone vibrates with Sonny’s incoming number—one missed call, twelve, twenty-two.

  Not every lie I told has proved true. I claimed to be the last to see him, and blame rests on the last known visitor, the one who sat in the rocking chair, the one who still had the power to breathe when he exited the room. There’s too little left in the bottle not to finish it.

  Ian, what did you do?

  CHAPTER 10

  Sonny’s calls stopped at 3:14 A.M. When I wake late, my head throbbing and my stomach in the midst of a fulminous congressional debate about whether I should run immediately to the toilet t
o vomit or wait agonizingly for a unanimous decision, the bleary sunlight a mean double operative, I’m relieved that her calls haven’t resumed this morning. That gives me hope that Charlie is back. Instead I’ve slept through three Skype requests from my mother. Unable to reach me, she resorted to text message.

  Mom: IAN? YOU THERE? CAN WE TALK?

  Mom: WHERE EXACTLY ARE YOU?

  Mom: I’M ASKING BECAUSE I GOT A DISTURBING CALL FROM ALEXIS. HONEY, SHE SAYS SHE’S BEEN TRYING TO TRACK YOU DOWN ABOUT MISSING MONEY FROM YOUR FATHER’S ACCOUNT??? THAT GIRL IS A PIECE OF WORK, SHE REALLY DOES TAKE AFTER YOUR FATHER. BUT SHE SEEMS TO BELIEVE YOU RAN OFF WITH 9K—WHICH I TOLD HER MUST BE A MISTAKE. YOU ARE MY HONEST IAN, EVEN IF YOU DID SEND ME THAT ODD AND, I MUST ADMIT, UNNERVING SYMBOL OF A POLICE SIREN. AND WHILE I’M SURE YOUR FATHER

  Mom: WAS NO DOUBT MISERLY IN HIS WILL—BELIEVE ME I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT IT’S LIKE TO TRY TO EXTRACT DESERVED MONEY FROM THAT MAN—HE MUST HAVE LOOKED AFTER YOU SOMEHOW? YES/NO? AT ANY RATE, SHE WOULDN’T GET OFF THE PHONE UNTIL I PROMISED TO REACH OUT TO YOU. I GOT THE FEELING SHE HAD MORE PRESSING REASONS THAN 9K. QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS ABOUT YOUR

  Mom: FATHER, LAST WORDS? WAS HE EVEN ABLE TO SPEAK AT THE END? JUST OUT OF CURIOSITY, DID HE MENTION ME AT ALL? I HIGHLY DOUBT LILY WOULD HAVE ALLOWED THAT, BUT I DO WONDER. I’VE BEEN THINKING A LOT ABOUT OUR MARRIAGE THESE LAST FEW DAYS. BEFORE YOU, IT WAS AS IF ALL THAT YOUR FATHER NEEDED WAS THE SOUND OF SOMEONE IN THE NEXT ROOM. THAT WAS HIS IDEA OF MARRIAGE: A NOISE IN THE BACKGROUND. BUT THEN YOU WERE