“Even if I mail it today, I’ll be home before she gets it.”
He pointed to the nearest shop. “Go.”
The postcard rack displayed a dozen scenes. The sunsets were too generic, so instead I bought two shots of the port, one for Mrs. Sfirakis and one for my refrigerator.
I had almost reached Nikos’ Café when I spotted the woman who’d assaulted me outside the hospital. She was heading towards me. Given a choice, I would have dodged her or turned away.
Unfortunately, we recognized each other at the same time.
“You!” She ran towards me, her green skirt billowing, her straw purse bouncing behind her. “You!”
Instinct told me to avoid her, but since she was standing between me and the café, I couldn’t think where else to go. Besides that, I felt sorry for her. Something had gone wrong with her wiring, but lots of things went wrong with people. It wasn’t usually their fault.
When the woman started rummaging in her bag, I assumed she’d heard the ring of her cell phone. Instead she pulled out a handgun. The metal glistened in the sun.
“You won’t escape me this time if I have to shoot you myself!”
As I backed up, she approached at an even pace. “Put down the gun,” I said. “You don’t want to use it.”
“Andy, what’s the matter?” Joey had meandered from the café to the street. He stood a few paces behind the woman.
“Get back!” I shouted.
The woman reeled around. “Christé mou!” My god! “You really are the devil!”
Before I could make any move to stop her, the woman shot my brother.
Chapter Twenty Seven
I couldn’t rush to Joey’s side because the woman proceeded to point her gun at me.
“You ruined my life! I’ll shoot all of you!”
I answered by raising my arms above my head.
“He would have been a fine son-in-law! So what he’s older?”
When she aimed, I dived for the cement as if it were a favorite swimming pool, landing on my back with a painful splat. Although I heard the gun go off, I didn’t feel anything.
By the time I sat up, the woman was lying face down on the street. Nikos had subdued her by wrestling her to the ground and throwing himself on top of her. I couldn’t see the gun, but by then we’d attracted so much attention that people had huddled around us, obscuring the view, and passersby rushed towards us from every direction. I pushed through them to get to Joey.
Rachel was cradling his head. The rest of his body was crumpled as if he could neither lie flat nor sit up. Blood oozed from an area below his right shoulder, turning uneven sections of his white T-shirt to maroon. I felt woozy as I knelt beside him. “Can you hear me?”
“Take care of me.” With his left hand, he reached for mine and squeezed it. “Take care of my wife.”
“An ambulance!” I shouted.
Rachel didn’t look away from my brother. Veins bulged in her neck. “Eleni went to call.”
My brother’s face was pale. His blood had spilled all over Rachel’s bare legs and onto the pavement beneath. Bystanders stepped back to avoid the red stream.
“You have to take care of the kids. They love you.”
“Cut it out, Joey! You have to relax!” I yelled, realizing I shouldn’t be yelling. “You’ll be fine,” I said more quietly.
“Eleni!” Rachel shouted. “Bring cool cloths!”
The crowd surrounded us, but the magnitude of the catastrophe kept them subdued. Yiorgos squeezed through and squatted next to us. He took off his apron, wadded it up, and pressed it against Joey’s shoulder.
“You must stop the bleeding,” he said. “Move away! Give this man some air!”
The crowd took a small step backward. A tourist stepped forward offering his bottle of water, which Rachel put to Joey’s lips. Eyes closed, he took a series of swallows.
Eleni stumbled through the group of café patrons with a stack of towels. She placed one on Joey’s forehead before dumping the others on the ground.
By the time I heard the siren, the ambulance was nearly upon us.
“Terrible pain,” Joey muttered. “Body is cold. Bro,’ I’ve had a good life. Be sure to tell Christina that. Tell them to go on with their lives.”
The ambulance stopped next to us, and its two attendants hopped out.
“Stretcher,” the driver ordered his partner. “Oxygen.”
“Is he ... is he ... ” I fumbled.
The driver knelt beside us, examining Joey’s face more than his body. “Doesn’t look too bad.” The men lay the stretcher beside Joey and then maneuvered his body onto it. I tried to follow them into the back of the vehicle.
“No room.” The second man put his hand on my chest and closed the ambulance behind Joey. “You’re from out of town? The hospital is close by. Walk three blocks—”
“I know where it is.”
I turned back to the crowd. Nikos wasn’t having trouble restraining the woman, but she was kicking, yelling obscenities, and beating the pavement with her fists. Her hands were bloody, but she didn’t notice. She was too busy punishing the ground. A few feet away, Cleto safely held her gun.
By twisting her torso, the woman caught sight of me. “He is the devil! He survives fire! He survives bullets! But he must pay for what he has done!”
“What happened? What did she say?” People started mumbling questions, but I didn’t have a coherent response. I wanted to go to the hospital.
A second siren announced Soumba and Lascar. The latter drove slowly, carefully monitoring the crowd so that he didn’t run into anyone. He pulled up beside the café.
“Step back,” Lascar commanded as he opened the car door into the crowd. “Let us through!” They approached slowly because they had to ask every other person to step aside.
Finally they made it through to our cluster.
“Soumba!” I cried. “You’ll never believe what happened!”
“Thee mou!” My god! Soumba tore through the onlookers and sank next to Nikos and the woman. “Nikos, get up!”
Nikos extracted himself from his position, but the woman made no move to get away.
“I’m sorry if I was rough,” Nikos said, “but this woman already shot a man. She must be crazy. She’s shouting wild accusations.”
Soumba waved Nikos out of the way and lay on the ground next to the woman. “Agnesa! What you have done?”
A boy in the crowd pointed at me. “She shot a man who looks like this one!”
The woman sat up. Soumba bent to embrace her, but she started thrashing. Soumba threw his arms around her and lifted the woman to her feet. “Lascar! Help me get her into the car.”
The police officers pushed the struggling woman through the crowd to the vehicle and stuffed her into the back seat. While Lascar kept her subdued, Soumba came over to me. “You are all right?”
I was too stunned to respond.
Rachel shoved her way to my side. “That woman shot Andy’s brother! Andy was walking down the street, and she started yelling, and then Joey went into the street, and she turned and shot him. Just like that.”
Soumba stared sadly.
“She went berserk,” Rachel continued, “like a jack-in-the-box when the lid comes off.”
The police chief nodded.
“Who the hell is she?” Rachel continued.
Soumba hid his eyes with his hands for three long seconds before slowly opening them up. “My wife.”
***
After the nurses assured us for the third time that my brother would survive the night, I sent Rachel to work at the taverna and Nikos back to his café. Eleni elected to keep me company, and we spent the first hours of the tedious evening in the second-floor lounge waiting for something to happen. The surgeon on call had turned off his beeper; another had to be tracked down. After the surgeon arrived, he discovered the operating room hadn’t been sanitized. As he prepared to operate, his staff couldn’t find any rubber gloves. The head nurse
had to call her cousin to open the pharmacy, which was already closed for the night.
The consolation was that Eleni and I had the lounge to ourselves, and if the linoleum tiles were dirty, at least the gaudy vinyl couches were comfortable. For the most part we sat glumly, trying to remember jokes or pretending that we were interested in whatever program played on the ancient black and white TV, no doubt a donation, that perched in the corner.
“I guess the summer’s almost over,” I said, desperate to make noise.
“I start back to school in three weeks. I suppose we need the fall. It is a quiet time, good for reading, but I am not looking forward to it. The third graders from last year, the ones I will have next year, terrorized their teacher, and they have had all summer to become more clever. And then Rachel leaves. We miss her terribly when she is gone.”
“Why doesn’t she move to Amiros permanently?”
“Spiros closes for the winter, so there is no steady work. And Rachel likes getting back to her mariachi group. But I feel she has not discovered her true calling. I am not sure what it is.”
I knew less about my own. “As long as everything is going well, you can drift for years without thinking things through.”
“That is what I did before my first husband was killed in the scooter crash. I went happily from day to day without thinking about it.”
Rachel had told me about the tragedy, how Christos had skidded off the road when a tire blew. In a freak accident, he’d broken his neck in the fall, leaving Eleni a young widow with two small boys who kept asking when their father was coming back. It wasn’t until several years later that she’d met Nikos and gotten the courage to love again.
The janitor flung open the door, noticed that our assortment of drinks and snacks occupied most of the coffee table, and decided the lounge didn’t need to be cleaned after all. He wished us a good night and disappeared.
“He is afraid we will want to tell him our stories,” Eleni said. “Can you imagine working here? Every night you would hear nearly the same tragedies with the circumstances changed only a little bit. You would go home feeling bad, thinking about all the fatal accidents that happen.”
“After this last couple of months, I’m sure it’s better not to think at all,” I said. “How could that crazy woman think I was responsible for what happened to Hari?”
“That picture in the paper, remember? The article that accuses you of being a spy.”
“I can hardly forget. But it’s only a random picture. That nutcase must be the only one who paid any attention to it.”
Eleni ripped open a bag of chips and dumped the contents on a paper towel so that we could share them. “Maybe she was desperate for any connection. She does not want to believe the man who wanted to marry her daughter committed suicide, so she has created a story that fits her imagination. It is clear she is deranged, so there is no way we can understand the way she is thinking.”
I crunched a chip in two, and half the crumbs fell on the floor. “I can’t figure out why Hari and Letta weren’t traveling to Amiros together.”
“She was still in Athens. She may have had some exams. But I think Hari wanted to ask Soumba’s permission to marry his daughter without her around. The engagement ring was proof that he was earnest.”
I took another chip. “Letta was of age. Hari wouldn’t need to ask Soumba’s permission.”
“Not legally, no. But this is Amiros. We are provincial. People still have expectations from how things were in the past.”
“Soumba is so old-fashioned?”
Eleni shrugged. “Maybe they had never met. Hari did not know how Soumba would react, so Hari wanted to be on the safe side.”
“Surely when you were getting serious with your first husband, he didn’t come ask your father for your hand!”
She lowered her voice. “My father had already passed away by then.”
I bit my lip, wishing I could kick myself. Eleni’s father had died of cancer while she was in high school. Rachel had explained the whole story the first afternoon on the beach, but at the time, I hadn’t paid attention.
“Christos came to talk to my mother even though I told him it was unnecessary.”
“How did she react?”
“She laughed that he was too proper and gave him such a big hug that he started coughing. By that time my sister had already married Zenen and moved to Arizona. At least Christos was an islander!”
“Was your mother disappointed that your sister married a foreigner?”
“Only because she lives so far away. But my mother is a strong woman. She likes traveling, and she is open to new ways of doing things. You have to remember that most of the islanders are like Himena. They know little outside their own worlds, and they are not too curious to learn more.”
“Some islanders move on.”
“A few. Many go to Athens because they need work, but that does not mean they like giving up their old ways of thinking.”
“Soumba himself might be traditional, yet he let his daughter go away to study.”
“She won a scholarship to help with the expense of her first year. Soumba had no choice but to let her go.”
The TV switched from white noise to static. I got up to turn it off. “How many Amirosian women get a higher education?”
“Perhaps ten percent or twenty.”
“So marriages to older men are common.”
“Yes. But uneducated women marry locals, not Athenians. How old was Hari?”
“The same as me. Thirty-nine.”
“Letta is barely twenty. Hari was twice her age.”
“You think Soumba refused to give his permission?”
She took the last of the chips. “I do not think Hari had the opportunity to ask.”
The longer we talked, the more ridiculous the situation seemed. A young girl with an older lover had worried her father and driven her mother off the deep end. All this had happened on Amiros, an island paradise where every beach was an enviable one, and all the foreigners who came for a first vacation returned to enjoy a second and third. If things could go so wrong here, there wasn’t much hope for them to go right anywhere else.
“Why do you think Soumba put us up in his own house and claimed his wife was away?”
“He thought he was protecting you. And technically, his wife was away. The nurses downstairs said that she has barely left the hospital since Letta was admitted.”
“The whole thing is weird.”
Eleni crumpled the empty sack. “Perhaps it is wrong for us to ask too many questions. We have been lucky. Think of it! You could have been killed the night of the motor scooter incident. We could have all been blown up by the car. Your brother is suffering from a gunshot wound, but his presence may have saved your life. Agnesa became too confused to aim well.”
“I’m glad my parents are dead.”
Eleni regarded the dingy white ceiling as if heaven were somehow concealed beyond it. “Your parents would be proud that their sons have such a strong bond. Your brother was compelled to come to Amiros even though he did not know exactly why. You should not question a miracle as big as that one.”
***
I woke to a silent waiting room. As I rolled over to my back, I found that Rachel was sitting nearby, leafing through a magazine. She had turned off the overhead light and was now reading by a mini-lamp. When she saw that I was awake, she scooted towards me and kissed my forehead.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“A couple of hours.”
“You could have wakened me.”
“You were zonked out.” She revived me by stroking my hair.
I sat up, stretching my limbs in all directions. “I wonder if I can get any coffee around here.”
“There’s a machine downstairs, but I don’t recommend it.”
“That bad?”
She pointed to a half-empty cup. “Yes.”
“Has the surgeon come in?”
“He removed
the bullet, and Joey has been resting. The nurse says he’s stable, but they’re monitoring him regularly. There’s a moderate danger of infection.”
I rubbed my eyes until they hurt. I still felt drowsy. “How was the taverna?”
“You should have heard the gossip.”
“About me?”
“About Agnesa. Everyone says she’s nuts.”
“We sure as hell know that. Soumba should have locked her up!”
“That’s what they were telling him downstairs. That there’s a good program near Metéora and a couple of others near Athens.”
“Let her find a program in jail!”
“That depends on whether or not your brother decides to press charges.”
“Why wouldn’t he? If she were a better shot, we’d be preparing for a funeral.”
Rachel patted my leg. “I don’t know the legal details. For now, let’s nap. We can speak with Soumba in the morning.” She turned off the light and curled up in my arms.
In my dreams, I kept falling off Vespas.
Chapter Twenty Eight
Joey’s hospital room was a copy of Letta’s. It was a cheerful area with big windows that admitted the morning light. The white walls made the space seem larger than it was.
Joey was sitting up. A bandage stretched from his neck halfway down his chest and over his shoulder, but at least he seemed alert. Rachel and I gently patted his good arm as we told him how well he looked.
“Did you have a good night’s rest?” Joey asked. “I hear the couches in the lounge are comfortable!” His voice was weak, but the attempt at levity encouraged me.
“We slept a little,” I said. “How are you?”
“Much better than yesterday. And I’m still in one piece. Listen, Andy, I need a favor. I want you to call my wife.”
“I already did. She’ll call you as soon as she gets up.”
“Some brother,” Joey said as he winked at Rachel. “Always working behind my back.”
“He’s trying to keep up with you.”
Island Casualty Page 19
