Island Casualty

by D. R. Ransdell

  Suddenly he turned around and caught me observing him. “Come join me, Andy.”

  I didn’t move.

  “You’re making me nervous. Come over here and talk to me.”

  Two tourists were on the bench to my left. A porter crossed the deck on my right. At least I wasn’t alone. Slowly I approached, careful not to make sudden movements.

  “What’s the matter? Afraid I’m going to shoot you?”

  Then he laughed. I’d never noticed that he had a rattle in his throat, but it came up through the laugh, which started in his stomach rather than in his throat.

  “Rachel told me that you were naïve,” he continued, “but I thought she was exaggerating. Turns out you wouldn’t understand if I wrote it down for you.”

  I came a little closer. “Wrote what down?”

  “Never mind.” He reached into his other pocket and took out a slip of paper, which he thrust at me. “As soon as we have the signal, you can call Athens and tell them you’ve found a criminal. Tell them I confess.”

  I cleared my throat twice. “What are you going to confess to?”

  “Whatever it takes.”

  I tried to remember how many bullets a gun had. “You killed him?”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “How’s that?”

  “We make up the truth as we go along.”

  Several noisy teens chased each other across the deck. At least there would be witnesses.

  “We ignore the truth, but it’s always there,” I said.

  “The truth hides like a devil in a night sky. What we have are priorities. Things we will do anything to protect. I realize you can’t understand that.”

  “Why can’t I?”

  He put his hand to the forehead to ward off the direct sun. “You’re almost forty, and you never marry. Let me guess, Andy. The most you commit to is a dinner invitation, and only if you’re hungry.”

  “I committed to my mariachi group. For twenty years I worked at the same place and for the same boss.”

  “Right, Andy. You’re the king for commitment.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “What the hell? I’m going downstairs for a drink.”

  I followed him to the cafeteria bar, which was squeezed between the fore and aft decks of the lower level. Among the wooden benches and tables were twelve customers including two youths arguing over a backgammon move. The bartender, a skinny fifty-year-old, watched the players while he swooshed water over dirty glasses in lieu of cleaning them.

  Soumba chose a table near the counter, and I sat across from him. Before the bartender could ask what we wanted, Soumba called out for cans of Amirosian Sunset. He opened a fresh pack of Karelaias and offered me one.

  “No thanks. Too early.”

  “Bah! For me, it doesn’t matter.” He took a long drag. “You can call the authorities and become a big hero. Isn’t that what you want, Andy, some way to feel good for yourself?”

  His words stung. I hadn’t felt good about myself for weeks. I’d left Squid Bay to regain a sense of self only to lose it more thoroughly on the island.

  One of the backgammon players came over, signaling his hope to bum a cigarette.

  “How old are you?” asked Soumba.

  “Twenty-one.”

  “Not even my daughter’s age.” He shook two cigarettes out of the pack. “I guess you’re old enough to know better.”

  The youth thanked him and returned to his game.

  Soumba lowered his voice. “He’s probably only fifteen. Do you think anyone tells the truth?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t either. Where were we? Oh, I remember. Andy the Hero.”

  “Soumba—”

  “It’s all right. I don’t blame you for it. Lots of people want to be heroes. They want people to believe in them.”

  He checked my glass, which was half full. “Go ahead, Andy. Finish your drink so you can make your call. Tell the authorities to get ready for me. They better have several squad cars prepared, or I might slip through their fingers when they’re not looking.”

  My head spun. I imagined being a fly in a spider’s web except that the strands of silk were invisible.

  I cleared my throat. “I thought you wanted to go to the capital to pick out a health clinic for Agnesa.”

  “Bah! She’s probably beyond help. Someone else can do it.”

  “You could do it better yourself.”

  “Even if I could, how could you trust me to turn myself in afterwards? Nobody’s safe with a dangerous killer on the ship.” He downed half his can with a gulp and a burp.

  I imagined a dialog with the Athens police: “I know who killed that guy down on Amiros. I’ll bring him straight to you.”

  “Amiros is out of our district. Call the police down there.”

  “He is the police. He faked a suicide note.”

  “He sounds dangerous, all right. We’ll get right on it.”

  “What really happened to Hari?” I asked.

  Soumba blew smoke in my face without trying to. “I’m the dream for a playwright. Too bad Sophocles is already dead, or he could have used my life story to write another trilogy.”

  While I tried to remember which plays Sophocles had written, Soumba spun the metal ashtray with one finger. It made a swooshing sound against the wood.

  “I thought I was being kind, inviting Hari on my home,” Soumba continued. “My reward? The man who was once my friend steals my daughter.”

  “You knew Hari before he started dating Letta?”

  “It is my fault that they met, but at the time, who knew?”

  The information didn’t compute. Letta would have met Hari at the university. He didn’t have any reason to be spending time on a small island as far away as Amiros.

  “What do you mean by ‘steal’?” I asked.

  Slowly, as if it hurt to stretch his arm that far, Soumba extracted a wallet from his back pocket. The brown leather was worn and cracked, and he opened the wallet gently as if he were afraid the rest of it would fall apart in his hands. He leafed through several pictures before showing me a time-warp version of the scene I’d noticed on Hari’s website. Again, Hari and Letta were walking together at the edge of the ocean while holding hands. Hari had a bright smile, but Letta’s was brighter. She looked about five. He was a young man.

  I knocked over a napkin holder. Half the white slips fluttered to the floor.

  “Surprised, are you?” Soumba asked.

  “I thought Hari was one of Letta’s professors.”

  “Eventually. But she chose to study under him.”

  Soumba showed me another picture, this one from a teenager’s birthday party. Letta was surrounded by prepubescent girls. Hari stood behind them, smiling.

  “Was he a relative?”

  Soumba exhaled smoke. “I already told you. He used to be a friend.” He held up two fingers, and the bartender whisked over two more Amirosian Sunsets as if he were afraid we’d change our minds and order something even cheaper.

  “You are very kind,” Soumba told the bartender.

  The man nodded. He’d started listening, not because he was nosy, but because all his dishes were washed, his liquor bottles were organized, and he had nothing else to do.

  Soumba tucked the wallet back into his pants. “I will use these in my defense even though some will say it is a poor excuse.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Does anybody know enough about life to understand it, Andy?”

  “Hari was from Amiros?”

  Soumba blew a piece of dust off his glass. “Hari was from the capital. We met on the army. Thessaloniki. He kept me out of trouble one night when I came past curfew. Instead of reporting me, he reset his watch. A few nights later I did the same for him. Eventually we became friends. It was lonely in the army, so you learned to make alliances.”

  “One year he visited you on Amiros?”

  “Hell, he came most yea
rs. We were friends, I told you. Two young men in the army, lost, away from home. We spent half our time fantasizing on our lives when we got out. He was planning university studies. I was planning to come back to Amiros and marry Agnesa. I had an uncle who was a policeman, and he was able to get me a job.”

  “But your friendship continued.”

  “Sure. During the winters, I went up to Athens whenever I wanted to get away and have a good time. Agnesa—bah! She’s like most of the island women. She’s convinced drinking is a sin. At the sight of a beer bottle she would start a fight. So I would travel to Athens instead and drink for a couple of days. By the time I got back home, she would be happy to see me. During the summers, Hari spent his vacations on Amiros at my own house. Later he was my best man.”

  “At your wedding?”

  Soumba slammed his fist on the table, sending half the ashes out of the tray. “What other kind of ‘best man’ is there, Andy?”

  The bartender looked over but started leafing through a newspaper.

  “He was the best man at my wedding,” Soumba continued more quietly. “I trusted him, so I didn’t see what was happening under my own nose, right there in my own house.”

  “He started preying on your small daughter?”

  “God, no, Veracruz. Don’t you understand anything? The man wasn’t a pervert.”

  My throat had dried up. I finished my first can and started in on the second, which was just as bad. “He made advances on your wife.”

  “Are you crazy? You saw that woman. But of course twenty years ago she looked better than she does now. Anyway, she is the one who went for him.”

  I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to hear the rest of it. I didn’t want to get involved in another man’s pain.

  Soumba took another swig. “She didn’t approach him in the way you would think. It wasn’t his perfect torso or his bronzed shoulders that she went for. A physical attraction I could have understood and maybe—maybe—even overlooked. Hari seduced Agnesa without lifting a finger because she thought he was a man of ideas. You can think of anything so stupid? You think any man is not made of ideas, Veracruz? She was tricked by his university training. When Hari came to visit and told her about his studies, her eyes lit up like the candles for a church.”

  I tried to imagine the lure of a sexy outsider who dropped in from time to time and who wasn’t part of the workaday world that both Soumba and Agnesa were unable to escape. If all the islanders were as idiotic as I was beginning to think, Hari could have been a port in a storm.

  “Surely Hari was aware of the effect he had on your wife.”

  “Not at first. During those early years, he was busy with his books. He spent all his time reading even when he went to the beach. He was focused. We heard about it, all the courses he was taking and the exams, and then the extra classes and the harder exams. When he graduated we had to travel all the way to Athens, all three of us, for the damned ceremony. Of course his efforts paid off. He won a smart job in Athens on the best university. He didn’t have to struggle for the position. The old professors wanted Hari for his enthusiasm and his charisma. Here on Amiros I never heard the end of it. ‘We have a friend who’s a professor in Athens,’ Agnesa would tell her women friends. ‘He teaches all the best students because they know he can be the most help for our young people’s minds.’ She made me sick.”

  “She responded to his status?”

  “First to his ideas. Then to the fact that his status was worth money. I didn’t spend long years at university, Andy. I married Agnesa and we had Letta. I had a steady job, but I had to work my way up. It was a slow climb. There wasn’t anything sexy or exciting about having to hold our breath to see whether or not we were going to make it to the end of the month without borrowing money.”

  “You became the Chief of Police. You did well for yourself.”

  “That came much later. In the meantime we struggled. Whenever Agnesa wanted to buy something, we had to plan for it.”

  “So do most people.”

  “That’s true, particularly on Amiros. Before tourism set in, the island had no money at all. The situation was tough for all of us. But the life I could offer wasn’t enough for Agnesa.”

  “How do you know that? Maybe she simply couldn’t express her appreciation.”

  “Oh, no? Try this. One summer after vacation was over, Hari returned to Athens. My wife was sad all day long, pulling herself around the house like she had a bad foot. Finally I ask what was wrong. I expect she was not feeling well, or she was sad that Letta was going back to the school. You want to know what my wife told me, Andy? That she wished she’d married Hari instead of me.”

  The bartender dropped a glass into the sink. He immediately picked it up and turned on the faucet to mask the fact that he’d been so wrapped up in Soumba’s story that he’d listened to every word.

  “I slapped her across the face before I knew what I was doing. I slapped her so hard I thought I’d broken my hand. It was swollen for three days. But that’s nothing.” Soumba made a huge circle with his hands. “Agnesa’s face became a balloon. I was lucky she was too proud to see a doctor. Instead she made excuses the next week for why she couldn’t go to her mother’s house or go for coffee with her friends. So that’s the way it was. And you can guess that nothing was the same between us after that. I have three lovers because my wife won’t sleep with me. Bah! Don’t look so startled. Why do you think Letta is an only child?”

  His words fell heavy on the room.

  The other adult customers crumpled their empty bags of peanuts and dropped them in a garbage can on their way out the door. The youths started a new game of backgammon. Having given up any attempt at subtlety, the bartender perched himself on top of the adjoining table so that he could hear us without straining himself. I took one of Soumba’s cigarettes and focused on creating ashes.

  Soumba sat back, pushing out against the table and then leaning forward again. “I envy you, Veracruz. You are a grown man, but you know nothing about pain.”

  An hour earlier I would have sworn I knew all about it. I was beginning to understand what Nikos and Rachel had been talking about when they kept telling me to let things go. If you held on to the wrong things for too long, they bounced back at you over and over again until you collapsed under their weight.

  “I still don’t understand,” I said. “If your wife was so hung up on Hari, why did you let him keep coming back to your house?”

  “The wheels for destiny! They started turning without my permission.”

  I waited for him to continue.

  “To my small child, the sun rose and set with Uncle Hari. She cried if he didn’t visit. Yes, he was good to her. Played with her for hours at a time. Taught her how to swim. Took her for hiking. These were wonderful things that I didn’t have time to do myself. And he didn’t forget her when he left Amiros. He sent cards for her birthday and for Easter. Phoned her when she had trouble with school.”

  “He was trying to make her fall in love with him?”

  “Don’t be an idiot, Andy. No, he did not look at my ten-years-old daughter and think, a decade from now, I’ll make her my woman.”

  He took in all the breath his lungs would hold and slowly let it out again. “I don’t know what happened, only when. The night of Letta’s sixteenth birthday, Agnesa and I had to attend a dinner with the mayor. Since we were busy, Hari took Letta to the movies. After we got home that night, she was full with happiness, a big grin from one ear to the other. Hari looked embarrassed.”

  “What happened?”

  Soumba shrugged. “I don’t know. It was an adventure movie they saw, but there could have been a love scene. The problem wasn’t the movie. Something happened between them. Maybe he kissed her. Maybe she took his hand. I don’t know. Since that night he avoided Amiros. Instead he made excuses that he couldn’t get away, that he was busy with university work. I never thought about it. I was glad I didn’t have to suffer Agnesa paying attention to h
im. He hadn’t come back to Amiros until the other day when he arrived with you. What happened in between how I could know? You do your best to protect your children, Andy, but at some point, they make their own decisions. No matter how much you try to help them, they don’t thank you for it.”

  “I’m sure Letta appreciates all that you’ve done.”

  “Bah. They decided to spend last Easter together. Easter! She called one night last March to tell us she wasn’t coming home for the most important Greek holy day!”

  I wanted to remind Soumba that he had never seemed the slightest bit religious, but I decided now wasn’t the time for it.

  “Amiros is a long way to come. Maybe she needed to concentrate on her studies.”

  “The university takes two weeks’ vacation for Easter!” He rapped on the table. “She wasn’t avoiding us on purpose. Hari was taking her to Loutraki to meet his parents. I didn’t find out until later.” Soumba closed his eyes. “In the meantime I almost had a heart attack right there in the kitchen. I was so mad I threw down the phone. Cracked it right down the side.”

  “What did your wife say?”

  “My wife? Bah! She and Letta had discussed everything. They didn’t care if I suffered.”

  Soumba took a big swig of his soda, and I did the same. When the stuff wasn’t ice-cold, it was worse than usual.

  “I can understand why you’re so upset,” I said, “but sooner or later, she would have fallen in love with somebody.”

  “Not with somebody my age!”

  “It’s not so unusual.”