The Devil Takes Half (26 page)

Patronas turned away, unable to look at him. Every crime victim he'd ever interviewed had sounded the same, gasping and shrieking, their pain so visceral it was if they'd lost the power of human speech. He never knew what to say, and he didn't know now. “I'm sorry,” he said again.

Gradually Nikos Papoulis collected himself, his major concern for his children. “I'll tell them in a day or so. Let them think she's still alive a little longer.” He went on talking, oblivious to the tears running down his face.

They were sitting on overstuffed Victorian chairs in the parlor. There was a photograph of Marina and her husband on their wedding day on the table next to a drawing Margarita had made of a horse. A window was open and a faint hint of honeysuckle from the garden drifted in the air.

“
My wife, Dimitra, said Marina stopped by the house,” Patronas said. “She said Marina had something for me.”

“
Svingi.
Yes, that's right.” Papoulis gave him a wan smile. “She and Margarita wanted to surprise you. They were planning it for days, giggling with
yiayia
about it in the kitchen.”

“
My wife said Marina had something else.” Patronas fought to keep his voice level, to stay in control, professional. “Some information. Do you have any idea what it was?”

Nikos Papoulis shook his head. A few minutes later, he started to cry again, silently at first, and then with great, gulping sobs. Rocking back and forth, he pounded the arms of his chair, calling his wife's name.

* * *

“
The ruins run under the entire place,” Patronas told Papa Michalis. “Probably even beyond. They're at least as big as Knossos and in much better condition. Save for a couple of ditches the murderer dug in the back, it hasn't been touched in centuries. This will put Chios on the map. It will be like Pompeii.”

“
Why do you suppose they built inside a cave?”

“
I don't know. My guess is, Eleni Argentis got it wrong. Whatever is up there isn't a palace. It looks more like a refugee camp. These people must have come after the volcano on Thera erupted and their homes got washed away.”

“
And they wanted someplace high,” said the priest, nodding, “someplace safe. I remember you asked me about the Phaistos Disc.”

“
It was no use as a map, but it did get me started. I studied the drawings on it and then, when I was up at Profitis Ilias, I noticed the cobblestones were set in similar pattern. The Disc has a lot of symbols pertaining to water, fish mainly, and that drew me to the well. I don't think the Disc has anything to do with Chios, though. This place I found, it was an outpost, Father. A footnote. It's not the main act.”

Patronas lit a cigarette. He and the priest were sitting in a taverna. At the priest's suggestion, they'd stopped to eat after leaving Nikos Papoulis. Although neither was hungry, they'd ordered steaks and drank three carafes of wine between them.

“
I've ordered my men to stay out of the cave. I told them the walls were unstable and might come down at any time. The truth is, I was afraid if they got in there, they'd loot it, same as Petros did. You're the only person I've told.”

Patronas emptied the carafe into his glass and held it up, signaling the waiter for more. “You know that poem, ‘Ithaki?' ”

Papa Michalis nodded. “Cavafy.” He recited:

And if you find her poor, Ithaka has not defrauded you, for at last you will understand what the search for Ithaka means.

“
The point being, it's the journey and what you learn. But, tell me, Father, what is there to learn here?”

“
Yiannis …” The priest didn't like the desperate, keening note he kept hearing in Patronas' voice. The chief officer had been working for nearly forty-eight hours straight, and he had suggested they eat together as a way of making him take a break. He now thought this might have been a mistake.

As in the previous two murders, in spite of their best efforts, neither Patronas nor the forensics experts from Athens had found anything that would identify the murderer—no fingerprints, no usable footprints, nothing. Whoever this man was, his skills more than equaled those of the Greek police. The Ministry of Justice in Athens had gotten involved, and now there was talk of bringing in Interpol or the American FBI. Papa Michalis doubted Patronas would be able to keep his job much longer.

“
I stayed up all night thinking about it,” Patronas went on. “There has to be something I can take away from this. Some message. But what? Marina stopped by my house as an act of kindness and Dimitra sent her off to be killed.”

“
Yiannis, listen to me. She was killed by a madman. Dimitra didn't do it.” His wife's culpability had been the theme for much of the conversation that afternoon, that and all Patronas' misspent years with her. Such talk wouldn't catch Marina's killer and the priest was sick of listening to it.

“
Oh, she sent her there all right.” Patronas drained his glass and set it down carefully. He was quite drunk. “The bitch.” Patronas raised the carafe again. “Do you know, the priest blessed the two of us when we got married? Can you believe it? He said that we, the newly betrothed, were incomplete, that only together would we be ‘made perfect.' Yet Dimitra and I weren't made perfect. We were anything but perfect.” Impatiently, he looked around for the waiter. “We were nothing together.”

As soon as the waiter returned with a new carafe, Patronas refilled his glass and drank it down. “I suppose I could have been kinder. Such a simple thing, kindness, and yet I wasn't kind.” He was slurring his words now. “You should never take another human being for granted, Father. All of us deserve to be loved. And if we can't provide that simple service to someone, we should get out of their way and give them a chance to seek it elsewhere.”

His eyes filmed with tears. “Anyway, who cares about Dimitra? What about Marina? You're a priest. Explain it to me. Why did this have to happen?” An edge had come into Patronas' voice. “You're a man of God. You know all the answers.”

“
Not to this. I have no answer to this.” Papa Michalis wanted to hit him.

“
From what Dimitra said, I just missed her. If I'd only stayed up at Profitis Ilias a little longer, I would have seen her. Fifteen minutes more, that's all it would have taken. Fifteen minutes and everything would have turned out differently.”

This grieved him, the priest thought, the fifteen minutes. Patronas had talked of little else since the night he'd found the body.

“
During the war, people spoke like you,” the priest told him. “Soldiers. One man gets killed, another doesn't. Fifteen minutes more, fifteen minutes less. The arbitrariness of a bullet, a bomb … the randomness of death. You can't think like that. It doesn't do you any good.” He shook his head. “Faith helps, but from what you've said, you have none.”

“
Oh, but I do. I believe in evil, Father. I have total faith in it. It's relentless, relentless and everlasting. And it always wins. You can count on it. Evil always wins.”

Patronas emptied his glass and set it down. “My question is, does it exist on its own like bacteria or do we create it? I don't know about God, but I'm sure Satan exists. Yes, indeed. He walks among us, Satan does. He's everywhere.”

Like a drunk in a bar who thinks he's discovered the meaning of life.
The priest moved the carafe out of his reach. Patronas had had enough.

“
Come on, Yiannis, pull yourself together. You've got work to do.”

Patronas raised his head. “Marina's dead,” he mumbled. “In no small part because of me. She died naked and alone after someone cut her up, cut her up …. Just think of that, Father. What exactly would you have me do?”

“
To start with? I'd have you arrest the whole lot of them. As for the rest of this
saxlamara
you've been going on about, this blasphemous claptrap, it can wait for another day. If you didn't answer those questions when you were eighteen, Yiannis, you're not going to answer them now.”

* * *

Patronas thought about Dimitra as he drove to his mother-in-law's house. He wasn't looking forward to seeing her again, nor hearing her voice. He doubted that he'd ever look forward to anything connected with Dimitra again.

A row of abandoned windmills marked the beginning of Vrontados, and he could see the lights of the village up ahead. To the east was the promontory of
Dhaskalopetra
. It held a coarsely carved stone where Homer was said to have lectured. Chiots claimed Homer had been born on the island, but there was no proof, save the eroded rock and the legends that surrounded it.

His wife was outside, threading metal skewers with chunks of pork and laying them out on a grill. She was wearing an apron and her face was beaded with sweat. Intent on her work, she barely acknowledged him.

“
The day she came, did Marina say anything about the papers she had for me?” Patronas said.

“
You came here to ask me that?”

“
I tried calling, but you didn't answer.”

Setting the skewer down, she turned to face him. “We've already been over this, Yiannis. No, Marina Papoulis did not discuss what was in the envelope, nor did she leave any papers for you. All she left were
svingis
.” She spat the word.

“
Are you sure?”

“
Yes, I'm sure.”

“
Did she say anything about what she'd discovered? Why she had to find me?”

“
I already told you. She said something about ‘playing the priest.' ” And then it came, the flicker of malice. “What do you think? I'd invite her in and tell her my life story? We had nothing in common, the two of us. All we had in common was you.”

He fought to control himself. “She's dead because of you.”

“
So you keep telling me.” She turned back to the grill and began fanning the coals with a folded newspaper. Cinders and bits of ash flew in the air.

“
Dead,” he shouted. “You hear me? Dead!”

She was crying now. “Go away, Yiannis.”

He who is hungry, dreams of bread.

—
Greek proverb

T
he service for Marina Papoulis was a simple one. The church in Campos kept a coffin on hand, a plain wooden box that was used for funerals. After the bishop chanted the liturgy, the mourners followed him to the cemetery where her body was to be laid to rest. Patronas and Nikos Papoulis had conferred and decided that, in deference to Marina's wounds, they would wrap her in the linen shroud early, before people started arriving at the church, and not at the graveside as was the usual custom. Neither wanted to mar the dignity of her burial with a public display. After being disinterred from the communal coffin, she would be buried in the enclosed area that housed her father and her paternal grandparents, her mother's family having been too poor for the luxury of a stone tomb.

A large photograph of Marina on her wedding day was on display on a wooden stand provided by the undertaker. In recognition of her many years of service at Profitis Ilias, the bishop had ordered her bier covered with flowers, to which Patronas now added a small handful of his own—roses and jasmine, purchased from the florist across the street. The cemetery was crowded. Patronas had expected only family members to stay for the burial, but it looked as if most of Chios had turned up. He saw little Margarita, standing between her two brothers, her face pinched and white. She was wearing a black dress with a white collar and shiny new shoes with straps; her legs and arms impossibly thin. All worn out with crying, she didn't look like the child he'd played hide and seek with. He was surprised to see the grandmother of Petros Athanassiou standing behind Marina's family, grim-faced and isolated from the others. Why was she here? he wondered.
Come to pay her respects to a fellow victim?
Curious now, he scanned the crowd.
A sto diablo
, even Antonis Argentis and his mother were there. Apparently Marina's funeral was a historic event on the island, an affair that would be talked about for years, not to be missed.

A group of elderly women from her village spoke to him of her goodness and generosity, how she'd sponsored their Easters and Christmases for years, leaving food for the feast on their doorsteps. Anonymously, of course, though one of them had seen her and told the others, so they'd all known it was Marina who'd been responsible. Another talked of how she'd single-handedly shamed the rich into providing dowries for the poor girls of the parish and fed the poor children in the neighborhood, seating them at the table with her own family.

“
She wouldn't take no for an answer,” the woman said.

No, she wouldn't,
Patronas thought sadly, remembering what her husband had said about her. They'd been discussing why she hadn't turned around at the barricade and come home. Why she'd continued on to Profitis Ilias. “You mustn't blame yourself, Chief Officer,” Papoulis had told him. “If she wanted to do something, she'd do it. There would be no way to stop her.”

She'd been like that even when they were children. Once she'd wanted to steal figs from a neighbor's tree. He himself had been afraid and tried to talk her out of it. The man would catch him; the tree branches were too high; they'd fall. But Marina had insisted. She'd ended up standing on his shoulders, holding onto the trunk of the tree for support, while he held her ankles. She'd stripped the tree bare, raining figs down on him, laughing the whole time. Her husband was right: once Marina got an idea in her head, that was it. You couldn't tell her ‘No' or ‘It's impossible.' Just like Muhammad Ali, the American boxer, whose words had been plastered all over Greece during the Olympics. He'd said, ‘Impossible is not a fact; it's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration; it's a dare.' Nikos Papoulis had told him Marina had loved that quote and had copied it and put it up on the bulletin board in her daughter's room. ‘Impossible' and Marina, they were incompatible.