Tentatively he approaches the board and slumps down in the chair across from me. He points his finger at my white rook.
“No,” I say. “No handicap. I’m not as good as Charlie. We start even.”
I open with a pawn to e4. He counters with a pawn to c5. Classic Sicilian Defense, and my only strategy is a quick attack. We play in silence, annihilating little men.
“I saw Helios tonight.”
Christos’s outstretched hand trembles, and he shoots it onto his lap. He stares down at the board, refusing eye contact.
“He’s still in bad shape. I worked at a place in New York for guys like him. Withdrawal is vicious. How long has he been hooked?”
Christos escorts his bishop to a square in the direct path of my queen. It’s either a novice mistake or an offering. A bead of sweat drops from his nose. I don’t take the easy meal.
“Christos?”
He won’t look up.
“Christos, I understand. He’s your only son.”
His throat chokes, and there must be more waves now because he’s clenching the table.
“You did what you had to do to protect him. He wasn’t going to stop on his own. And Charlie wasn’t going to stop either.”
Christos lifts his face. Tears stream from brown eyes as haunted as churches, the deep, quiet alcoves of desperate prayers. He presses his fist to his chest.
“What did you do to Charlie?” I ask.
“Helios my son,” he wails with iron syllables. “My son. And all light go out of him. Dead boy that Charlie hurt.” His shoulders quake, and his knee bangs against the table, irrevocably shifting the pieces. “Charlie plan go to Bodrum that night. Plan to bring more drug to Patmos. My island, Helios home. He destroy my family. I have no choice. Only stop to save my boy.”
I nod. My eyes are watering too because I’m not sure I’m brave enough to hear how Christos stopped him. Charlie must have been sitting in this very seat, facing the same opponent over the same game, closing in on his captain’s king. That’s when Christos inflicted his surprise attack. Christos is trustworthy, Charlie assured me on the morning I arrived. He must never have seen it coming.
“What did you do to him?”
“Charlie like son to me,” he pleads. “Boy I help raise since small. But he change, he forget, and he become.” He jolts back in his chair as if shot. “For Helios, my future, you see! Helios change this summer too. I only stop Charlie. Not kill him, not tell police for arrest. Stop him only from Bodrum. My wife, she not even know.” His gnarled fingers sprout at odd angles over the board; tourists might take pictures of those ancient instruments. “I know you make alibi for Charlie. He tell me so. He tell me he will be gone few days and you lie for him. That give me time. I try call Charlie’s father. I try every hour to speak to him in New York. To tell what his son does and to come get him. Only he can fix. But Mr. Konstantinou in hospital. I wait for him wake up. I wait and pray every day. He does not wake. He only get worse and now—” His hands aren’t useless. One slaps against the varnished wall.
And now. And now there is no Mr. K, no last resort on the other end of the line to clean up his son’s mess. A red blaze funnels through the windows, and an air horn raids the galley. Christos’s eyes rifle into me as if I’ve betrayed him. But it’s only a party yacht sailing through the harbor. Singing men and laughing women pass by as they prepare to disembark.
“Where is he?” I ask, extending my arms. “Is he still alive? I want to see him.”
Christos clambers from his seat and walks with a bent back to a wooden bin. He opens its lid and rummages through the contents.
“Konstantinous,” he curses. “My life, yes, but not my son. They will not steal it. I will bring you where you want to go. I will take you, and you will be with him. It will be over then, and you will see.” Christos’s English, so garbled in past and present, becomes magically fluent in the future tense. And it’s the future that scares me. I picture the specks of Charlie’s blood on the floor and consider making a break for the ladder rungs. How far up would I get before he drags me under, while all around us restless boats party into the night?
“I am sorry.” Christos is almost weeping as he reaches into the bin. “He all I have.”
“Christos!”
He pulls out an orange life vest. “To get there, you will need to swim.”
GOAT ISLAND IS pitch-black, its contours only distinguishable as land from where it blocks out the glimmering sea and sky. The captain steers Domitian thirty feet from the island’s lowest slant and shines a flashlight on a cluster of boulders that billow like fossilized clouds from black-velvet ripples of water. Any place seen through a flashlight’s beam looks nefarious. I try to recall the island as I first glimpsed it, its ram’s horn peaks and mossy slopes and thin, steely trees poking out like wires, peaceful and unpopulated. Behind us, the distant monastery glows over its dominion of tiny orbs. A ferry is revolving in the harbor, a sugar cube crawling with ants. Christos can’t sail the boat any closer for fear of running aground. I secure the clips of my lifejacket over my chest.
As kids, long after midnight, Charlie and I would press our foreheads to the floor-to-ceiling windows of his parents’ Fifth Avenue apartment. We’d watch the traffic below stream south, and we’d pick out cars to ambush with stories. Destroyers didn’t work in vehicles: too many doors, no room to run, the black-balaclava gunmen sitting docilely next to us in the backseat like ride-sharing companions. The woman in that taxi just left her sleeping husband; she’s hurrying down to SoHo to meet her girlfriend at the Mercer who is also her gallerist; her art career is failing. There’s a hip-hop producer in that white stretch limo with a male escort, but the producer’s mother from Indianapolis is also with them; she surprised him with a visit and now the escort is pretending to be a tour guide showing her the sights. That yellow Oldsmobile is packed with Buddhist monks and religious icons that they’re going to pawn for casino money.
Charlie’s favorite destination was the airport; every other taxi was headed there. Even at that age, he was dreaming of someplace else. As I got older, I understood why. For us, where you happened to be born or raised—that meaningless factoid beloved of biographical synopses—didn’t matter as much as where you went. We were already from Dream City. Later, when fresh arrivals from sleepier parts of the country moved in, we’d shrug or roll our eyes. All they brought with them were their ecstatic delusions of New York, but the natives were defeated by the fantasies of the immigrants. They squatted in our normal lives, and maybe we hated them because they seemed to own the city out of sheer determination to possess it. Someplace else, far away, unknown air, two children’s foreheads slicked against tinted glass high above Manhattan, refusing to dissolve into the wavering mercury of the skyline. Did Charlie and I hold hands as we made up those stories? Why do I picture us holding hands?
I strip my pockets of my keys and wallet. Christos signals for me to remove my shoes, but I leave them on. I slip off the stern and paddle through the freezing current. The vest prevents swift strokes, but as my legs scrape against hidden reefs, I realize its necessity at night. If I go under, Christos won’t be able to find me. He follows, treading without a vest, the flashlight lodged in his mouth, the blue light illuminating his skull. I reach the boulders, out of breath, and locate a slender divot in the bedrock. It takes all of my strength to drag myself out of the water. The smell of dill weed and fresh earth pours from above. I climb the boulders and reach the beginning of a dirt path. Christos has already caught up to me. He aims the flashlight up the trail.
Faint rustling stirs the darkness, soft bleating, hooves on stone. For two minutes we hike the incline, and Christos’s beam attracts a whirl of flying insects. A small fluorescent-white shrine glimmers up ahead. The glass in its oval windows is blown out, the cross at its crown tilted and the nails loose in its rotted wood. Greek text is written in red milk paint above the doorframe. I catch sight of my very first goat, a matted gray male with boomerang h
orns lapping at a spigot. It glances up at us, its silver eyes contracting in the shine, and kicks off for higher ground.
Christos switches off the flashlight. “Wait,” he orders and enters the shrine. I hear the wrench of metal and the moan of a generator starting up. Electric orange fills the church from a strand of bulbs in the rafters. I step into the damp ruin, its walls peeling and tapestried with mold. Scabs of stonework cling to the edges of a deep crater in the center where the floor has fallen through. Mosaicked saints dissolve into mud at the drop. I notice Charlie’s phone and wallet on top of a stack of bottles and sardine tins. A coiled rope hangs from a hook by the door. Christos nods toward the hole, refusing to look at me, and walks outside.
I test my weight with each foot forward and stare over the edge of the pit. Water bottles, a bucket with a board over its top, empty tins, and sheaves of Konstantinou Charters stationery cover the bottom like a raven’s nest. For a second I mistake him for a pile of blankets. But there he is, my oldest friend, lying on his side, his face and legs covered in dirt, a filthy bandage wrapped around his forehead. No door, no window, no clever improvised ladder for him to use as an escape. It cuts my heart to see him trapped.
Charlie squints, disbelieving, his eyes trying to blink me away. “Ian?” he murmurs. And now his voice rising like hands that have discovered crevices in the dirt, “Ian, oh my god, Ian. I never thought I’d see you again!” He struggles unsteadily to his feet.
“Christos brought me. Are you all right?”
“Do I look all right!” he shouts in a pitch nearing laughter. “I’ve been down here for so many days. I’ve almost lost count. The sun comes through the roof. All I’ve done is watch it. Oh, my god, Ian. You’re too late. I already gave up hope.” He’s sobbing as he stamps the blood back in his legs. Even now, he is a beautiful man.
I kneel down and worm my chest against the floor. I dangle my arms, and Charlie reaches on tiptoe. Our fingers touch, cupping, and whatever it is I thought we had lost passes between us, a feeling so mortal and raw it seems to tell my years to me.
“You know, don’t you?” he says. “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t.”
I nod.
“All of it?”
“Pretty much.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I got you involved in my mess. I never meant for that to happen.” He drops his hands to wipe the wet grit on his cheeks. “I didn’t plant that bomb. All I got was a text from Vic telling me not to go near the taverna that morning. I had no idea what she was going to do.”
“That counts for something.”
“Does it?” He stares up, his expression caught halfway between sentenced and pardoned, as if he’s trying to determine whose side I’m on.
“How—” I begin. How did we get here, Charlie?
“Don’t ask a man in a hole for a confession. He’ll tell you whatever you want to hear.”
“It’s not me you owe answers to.” I extend my arm again and wiggle my fingers. He doesn’t reach for them. He merely gazes around at his prison walls of rock and mud. It occurs to me that he hasn’t yet asked for the one thing I can give him: a way out.
“How’s Sonny?”
“Desperate to see you again. As worried as you can imagine. We’ve all been worried. No one has any clue where you are.”
“Does she know what I’ve done?”
“No.”
“Miles didn’t crack and tell her about Stefan?”
“Miles is dead.”
He absorbs that information with a stagger of his feet.
“What about the dock? Have they found—”
“It’s closed. Ugur shut it down and left.”
His eyes flicker, some last brown spark of a fire that’s gone cold.
“So it’s only you who knows? You and Christos. Is he up there with you?”
I turn to search the doorway, but Christos is nowhere in sight.
“He’s outside.”
Charlie’s open mouth issues a series of sharp, dry breaths.
“Do you understand what this means?” He pants. “We can take care of him. We can bribe him to keep his mouth shut. Or if he won’t accept that, when we get to the water, we can—” He’s pleading deliriously, trapped in a corner and expecting me to supply one final method of escape. He must have waylaid Miles with a similar speech. The panicked plotting is so familiar, like a song I loved in youth, that for a moment I fall victim to it, confusing its rhythm for sense. “We can do this, and it can be just like it was supposed to go. You and I. Oh my god, listen, Ian, it’s not too late.”
“It is too late,” I say. “I won’t do that to Christos. There have already been too many.”
“Why?” he begs, dropping onto the dirt. His eyes welt in the overhead lights. “Why is it too late?” But the whine of that last question holds a comprehension of its futility.
“There’s an agent on the island waiting for you to return. It’s going to come out eventually. Maybe not all of it, but enough. Let’s get you out of here and talk about it once you’re home. We can make a plan then. A real one.”
Charlie doesn’t move, except to kick weakly at a water bottle. When he does look up at me, he’s no longer a boy playing Destroyers but the defeated player of a different game.
“I’m not going back,” he says quietly.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you know the prison term for drug trafficking in Greece? It’s life. Can you imagine how much the world will celebrate a Konstantinou convicted of a felony like that? And one crime exposes others. If the truth ever comes out about Stefan, I wouldn’t be able to take it. I told you, I’m not going to confess. What I’ve done can’t be forgiven. I know that now, and I won’t ask for it.”
“You don’t have to confess. Rasym brought over a family lawyer. You can—”
“I was going to do it this morning. But the light was so beautiful through the roof.”
He crawls toward the loose papers, snatching at one and brushing off the dirt. He checks his notes for the date, writes it across the top, and folds the paper twice. He hands it up to me.
“I’ve asked you for too many favors. But do one more for me, will you? Take that. Say you found it on Domitian.”
I unfold the letter.
“Don’t read it!” he yells. “Just say you found it and leave it alone!”
To whom it may concern, I married Sonny Towsend on December 13, 2014, in Cairo at the Oberoi by a judge named Abdel Barakat. The certificate is in my desk in Nicosia. I leave her all of my money and assets. While this might be a suicide note, I am of sound mind and body. Also, please allocate $2.¹ million to the Patmos Children’s Day School to be bequeathed under the name of Stefan Konstantinou.
Sincerely, Charalambos Konstantinou
It is an insane piece of paper written by a sane man.
“Charlie, come on!” I stretch my arms to him, my hands snapping like jaws. I’m certain if he sees my face he’ll change his mind. If that doesn’t work, I’ll crawl into the hole with him. “You aren’t thinking straight. When you’re back on the island we can figure it out.”
“Don’t!” he shouts. “There’s no other way free, okay? You can’t make someone live if they don’t want to. Even you can’t do that for me. Time down here”—he swallows hard—“it’s made me live with myself. I’m not sure I ever have before.”
His eyes are unfocused as he stares at the moths orbiting the bulbs.
“Listen,” I beg. “I was wrong. We can try to bribe Christos. Let’s do that.”
“And the agent?”
“Maybe he can be paid off too. There’s still a chance it can be like you planned. Please, Charlie. I won’t say a word, I promise. You have your inheritance. Are you listening? You are free.” For a second, I wonder if I’m being tricked by a brain more cunning than my own: I’ll void his guilt to save his life. I’ll invent a last, make-believe window for him to jump through. I’ll tailor the universe to suit him. But in this moment I mean e
very word I’m speaking. “Please,” I cry. “We’ll pay the whole world off if we have to.”
“No,” he says simply. He juts his tongue to the side and brings his fingers to his teeth, tweezing out a tiny metal arrowhead from the back of his gums. He must have spent his days honing that weapon on the tins.
“Come on, Charlie,” I stammer. “Don’t do this. There are other ways to make amends. And Sonny is up at the house waiting for you, and I’m here, and your father needs you in New York. He’s in the hospital. He sent a message that his only wish is to see you one last time. At least do that for him, dammit.”
“This isn’t a rash decision. I’ve already decided. Don’t make it harder for me.”
“I love you too much to make it easy.”
“I love you too,” he says. “I’m glad I got the chance to tell you that. But now I need you to go. For once, I’m okay with this. Did you hear me? I’m okay.” As he looks up at me, I know that nothing I can say will change his mind. I couldn’t stop Charlie any more than I could ever hold him in place.
He reaches out his hand and I take it, all of us in the tips of our fingers. It’s as close as we will ever get.
“Tell Christos to come back tomorrow. Break the generator, will you? Make it so he can’t get me until the morning.”
When I don’t answer, he screams, “Say you’ll do that. Please.”
“Fine,” I reply, wiping my eyes. “But you have to do one final thing for me.”
“What? Money? I have some in the safe. The code is—”
I hurry to the rope. Knotting it tightly on the hook, I thread the coil across the floor and toss the remainder down the hole. The last curls land at his feet.
“You can climb out if you want to. It’s another option. It’s not too far to swim. And there will be ferries tomorrow to anywhere you want to go. I think you’ll change your mind if you see the sunrise. And there are plenty more after that one, I swear. Just consider it. You don’t have to be Charlie Konstantinou anymore. You could be anyone in the world.”
He fights the furious smile that’s threatening to destroy his resolve.
The Destroyers Page 52
