The Devil Takes Half (18 page)

“
Perhaps Eleni owed Petros a paycheck, and his grandmother came to collect it. They're poor people, Petros' family. If that's the case, let me know and I'll take care of it.”

“
Could it have been anything else?” Patronas kept his tone casual, his voice light.

“
Not that I'm aware of.”

Argentis accompanied Patronas back to his car when he left. “Please keep me abreast of your investigation, Chief Officer,” he said. “I very much want to know who killed my sister.”

“
I'll do that.”

As they walked through the yard, Argentis called out to the secretaries passing by, the workmen on their lunch break. Slowly, the man Patronas had been talking to—the serious man who had loved and grieved for his dead stepsister—disappeared, and the young fool who'd been flirting with his secretary took his place, the one whose only positive attribute was his smile. A true chameleon, Patronas thought, watching him. Antonis Argentis, the master of disguise.

He sat in the Citroen, reading over his notes, thinking about what Argentis had said, disturbed by the young man's antipathy toward his mother. Unusual, that, especially in Greece. Could Argentis have been trying to mislead him? To cast aspersions on her when he himself was the guilty party? Maybe this wasn't a
gafa
after all.

The crab has not learned to keep his legs straight.

—
Greek proverb

P
rofessor Alcott was sitting at the bar in the Villa Hotel, drinking beer from a bottle. He waved Patronas over. “Chief Officer.”

Patronas looked around. The room was full of tourists. Aside from the staff, he was the only Greek. Holding up his hand, he signaled the bartender and ordered an ouzo. It arrived on a silver tray and the bartender made a big production out of serving it, first putting the ice cubes in his glass with a pair of tongs, then pouring out the ouzo from a little glass beaker. In the ouzeria across the street, when you ordered ouzo you got a plate of food, olives and feta, fresh bread. Even fried squid on occasion. Something. Patronas peered into his glass. At the Villa you got tongs and ice cubes the size of dice.

“
I need to go over a few things,” he told Alcott.

“
Sure. Fire away.”

“
You said you and Eleni Argentis had a relationship. When did it begin?”

“
When she arrived at Harvard. She initiated it.” His voice was petulant. “Hanging around after class, turning up at my office to request books.”

“
Did your wife know?”

Picking his beer up and setting it down again, he made overlapping rings on the marble counter. “Maybe. I don't know.”

“
How long did the affair last?”

“
Three years. Didn't stop until she finished her PhD.” He took a deep breath. “I wanted to continue, but she was done. God, was she done. Done with me. Done with us. Oh, I know what you think, that I took advantage of my position and seduced her. But it wasn't like that. No, she was the one who sought me out. Looking back, I think I might have been the means to an end for her. Brilliant as she was, she hadn't quite mastered English and speaking it was hard for her.”

Her and me both,
Patronas thought to himself. Sometimes when he drank, he thought he spoke English more fluently than he actually did, his syntax and vocabulary not so labored. Sitting in the bar with the American, he realized that this was an illusion, one of those happy pictures alcohol sometimes paints.

Alcott went on talking. “I think she thought I might be of some use to her, that my help would guarantee her success. After she graduated, she told me she didn't want to see me again. That ‘there was no need for us to continue.' ” He took a big swig of his beer. “
Finito
.
Terma
. Done.”

“
If that was the case, why'd you come to Chios?”

“
I thought when she invited me here, it was because she wanted to get back together again, that the dig was just an excuse. But no, the reason she wanted me here was the reason stated in her letter: to get my professional opinion of what she'd found, the provenance of the shards and so forth. Nothing else. She made that abundantly clear the night I arrived.”

“
When was that?”

“
A day or two before she was killed. July twenty-fifth, I think it was. She met my plane and we had dinner together in Chora. I pleaded with her to take me back. I even offered to marry her, but she just laughed at me. ‘You?' she said. ‘You have a wife. Or have you forgotten?' We were in a taverna by the water. I'm sure there were witnesses.” He ran his thumb along the side of the bottle, tearing into the label. “I got drunk after she left. Whoever was there, they'll remember.”

He drank more beer. “I would have done anything to have her back in my life, Chief Officer. Anything. I thought if I helped her with the excavation at Profitis Ilias … if we wrote a paper on it or put together an exhibit …. I wanted to keep her in my life somehow.” He made a desperate, bleating sound. “I loved her.”

“
One last question. Did you remove anything from the dig site?”

“
That day?” Alcott shook his head. “When I first got to the excavation, I was too excited about seeing her to be mindful of shards, and afterwards, I was too traumatized.”

“
How about Devon McLean? Could he have taken something from the site?”

“
He might have. There was a lot of confusion after I found the hand. I thought he'd already come and gone, but I might have been wrong. He might have been around. If he took anything, he'll tell you he only did so in ‘the interest of science.' Devon's big on ‘the interest of science.' He has asked me repeatedly to petition you to let us process the dig site. He even went so far as to claim it might further Eleni's professional reputation posthumously.” His voice was sarcastic. “And ours, of course. That was in the mix, too.”

“
A little callous.”

“
Oh, it was. You have to remember, Chief Officer, the ego of an academic never sleeps. Especially one as ambitious as Devon McLean.”

He hesitated for a moment. “He's right, though. Someone should go through the dig site. That bull you showed me, the one that was mixed in with the shards, it's unique. Its value is inestimable, absolutely inestimable. Perhaps if we resumed the excavation, we would find more.” There was something shining in his eyes. Greed? Grief? Patronas wasn't sure.

“
After we've laid the little matter of murder to rest, you and your colleagues are welcome to the hillside. Bring bulldozers if you like. Dig up everything.”

* * *

After he left the Villa Hotel, Patronas drove to the police station and placed a long distance call to the Dean of the Archeology Department at Harvard University. He wanted to question him about Jonathan Alcott. Self-conscious about his English, Patronas would have preferred to have conducted this conversation in private, somewhere away from the front desk, the ringing phones. But given the layout of police headquarters, this was impossible. One large room, it was subdivided into grubby little cubicles separated from one another by metal dividers less than four feet high. The metal desks, the walls and dividers, all were painted gray—the same flat gray the military used, the color of aircraft carriers and transport planes—and at work Patronas often felt like he was back in the Navy, back in the bowels of the battleship where he'd done his tour of duty.

The space allotted to him as Chief Officer was a little bigger than where his men were housed, but equally public. Everyone could hear everything. He knew that, because whenever he had fights with Dimitra on the phone, Tembelos and the others made fun of him, repeating word for word what he'd said to his wife. He'd have to remember to keep his voice down. A fax machine in the corner rattled continuously, spewing photos of criminals wanted by Interpol. He added them to the others taped to the wall by his desk. Once posted, he never removed them. “I need to clean this place up,” he muttered, looking around as he took a seat. Some of the mug shots looked like they dated from the seventies, the wanted men sporting Beatles haircuts and platform shoes. They must be dead by now. If not dead, then getting around with walkers and canes. As felons, surely retired.

The dean at Harvard answered on the third ring. Though Patronas knew rudimentary English, he was forced to scribble down half the words the man used and look them up in his
Divry's English-Greek, Greek-English Dictionary
after he hung up the phone in a desperate effort to understand what the dean had been saying. Alcott's reputation was “stellar,” which meant star, according to Divry's. Now was this a good thing, to be a star? Probably.
Ach, these academics and the way they talked.

In addition, the Dean had claimed Alcott's reputation was “unblemished,” “his teaching literate and cohesive,” “his research well-reasoned, his conclusions unimpeachable.”

In the Dean's experience, “Alcott's academic integrity was without parallel.” He was “a credit to the department and to his field.” This last bit had given Patronas the most trouble. “Credit” had to do with money in his experience. What did “credit” have to do with being a professor?

“
Do you think he kills people?” he'd wanted to scream into the phone, just to hear the man's reaction, but thought better of it. Alcott, after all, might be innocent and just what he said he was—a love-sick, middle-aged fool, seeking some kind of sexual Holy Grail in the form of Eleni Argentis. These things happened. Not to Greek men, as a general rule, who saw all women as pretty much the same. One gives you trouble, get another. That was the motto of the Greek male. Your mother, now she was different. A mother you enshrined in your heart, loved beyond reason. But as for the rest?
Vrasta
. Boil them. But in other cultures, yes, he'd been told these things happened. Men made fools of themselves over women.

The potter puts the handles wherever he wishes.

—
Greek proverb

“
A
h, Chief Officer,” Devon McLean opened the door of his room. “Come in, come in.”

Patronas couldn't face another round with the
Divry's Greek-English Dictionary
, so he'd put off calling Oxford University to discuss Devon McLean. He thought he'd return to the Villa Hotel and speak with the Englishman first and then compare what he said with what his colleagues had to say about him.

“
Sorry to bother you again.” Patronas waved his notebook in the air. “I have a few more questions.”

He inspected the hotel room, taking in the books, the furniture. The suite was immaculate, the man's notes neatly stacked beside his laptop, his books alphabetized on a make-shift shelf. There were no shards or artifacts of any kind that Patronas could see.

“
I'm sorry if you've been inconvenienced by our investigation. Hopefully you'll be able to return to Cyprus soon.”

“
Perfectly all right. I haven't been idle. I've been emailing my colleagues and editing a paper. Taking advantage of the hiatus in my summer schedule, as it were, to do some work.” As in previous conversations, the man's Greek was flawless.

“
What's the paper about?”

“
The dating of Akrotiri, those ruins on Santorini.”

“
Minoan, aren't they?”

“
Of course, but are they Middle Minoan or Late Minoan? I think archeologists underestimate the length of time Akrotiri had been inhabited. I think it was settled far earlier, perhaps even proto-Minoan. Are you familiar with the dating of Minoan artifacts, Chief Officer?”

“
Somewhat.”

“
Well, I think Akrotiri is Early Minoan. It might have even housed a Neolithic settlement, though that is harder to prove, given that the pumice is so heavy everywhere. It'll take a century to get down to the level of the eruption. In some places the ash is over fifty feet high.”

“
How can you date Akrotiri from here?”

“
Oh, I've done all my research. It was just a matter of organizing everything and getting my thoughts down on paper.” He said ‘my thoughts' in a reverential way, like a priest in church when he reads the gospel.

“
I'm working on a dateline, too. Who was at Profitis Ilias and when they were there. Could you tell me again when you visited the excavation?”

“
Certainly. July twenty-seventh.”

“
Did you visit Profitis Ilias before July twenty-seventh?”

The Englishman's face became somber. “No. I had just arrived from abroad and hadn't yet figured out how to get up to the monastery. I didn't know how far it was from the road at that point and was reluctant to try walking the distance. Bum leg, I'm afraid. Nothing serious. Just an old court tennis injury that precludes lengthy hikes. And, though my Greek is good, I didn't really know how to go about chartering a mule.”

“
Tell me again when you arrived?”

“
The day before she was killed. I flew into Athens from Egypt and caught a flight here.”

“
You and Professor Alcott are both staying in this hotel. Do you see much of him?”