When the Devil's Idle (12 page)

“
And
what did Stathis say?” He drew on his cigarette furiously. He would
have eaten it if he could.

“
He
said, and I quote, ‘November Seventeenth is no longer a
threat.’ ”

“
There
you go.”

“
I
still think we should check it out.”

“
Listen to me, Evangelos, we’re going to interview the
residents of Chora. That’s what’s on the schedule for today—not
Lipsi, not terrorists. Understand?”

“
But
what if the killer doesn’t live in the village? We’ll be bothering
a lot of innocent people.”

It’s a wonder he
doesn’t blow a fuse in his brain, overload that one, hard-working
cell. “We’re cops, Evangelos. Like I told you before, we don’t care
about bothering people.”

“
That’s not true. I care. I care a lot. I live
here.”

“
I
have an idea. Why don’t you go back to your office and wait there?
Maybe the killer will come and find you.”

“
What
if you’re wrong? What if the crime was political?”

“
You
think someone’s declared war on Germany?”

Evangelos nodded.
“It wouldn’t be the first time.”

They drove in
silence through the backstreets of Skala, slowly making their way
to Chora. It was a beautiful morning, the sunlight piercing.
Patronas yearned for Chios, for the security of what he knew, to
forget about the case and the mastodon sitting next to
him.

He rolled down
the window and inhaled deeply. Tembelos and the priest were due to
arrive in a few hours; he could last until then. Hopefully, what
was wrong with Evangelos wasn’t contagious.

“
What
do we say to people?” Evangelos asked fretfully, a moment later.
“You can’t just ask, ‘Did you do it?’ I’d be insulted if someone
asked me that.”

“
Oh,
for God’s sake, Evangelos!”

They continued in
this manner for another ten minutes, Evangelos proposing and
Patronas resisting.

Groucho Marx, no
doubt about it.

Patronas
remembered the way the comedian had talked in circles in the
movies, answered questions no one had asked and derailed entire
conversations.

Maybe I could get
a harp and strum it like Groucho’s brother, Harpo. Forget about
police work; we could swing from the rafters, Evangelos and me,
reenact A Night at the Opera.

They started with
the two
tavli
players in the square, Themis Poulis and
Philippos Zanaras.

“
You
see anything?” Patronas asked the men.

He had bought
them breakfast earlier and the table was littered with crumbs. The
man called Themis had offered to read his fortune in the coffee
grinds—an old custom that involved dumping the grinds out on a
plate and studying them, prophesying the way the ancients had once
done with entrails—but Patronas had declined. He was here to work.
Besides, he knew his fortune. A divorced policeman, he was destined
to spend the rest of his life lonely and poor. First, his hair
would go, after which he’d probably lose control of his
bladder.

He opened his
notebook. “Was someone hanging around the house?”

“
I
never saw anyone,” Poulis said, “just the family and the people who
worked for them, the gardener and the maid.”

He’d been a
farmer in the old days, he went on to say, had wrestled with the
stony earth for over sixty years. “I grew tomatoes and raised a few
sheep. It was a hard life, but a good one. I helped out at the
monastery, too, on feast days.”

In his eighties,
he had skin like wrinkled brown paper.

“
Did
you ever speak to the Bechtels?” Patronas asked.

“
Only
the little boy, Walter.”

The child had
wanted to learn
tavli
and had watched them avidly for a
morning or two when the family first came. “He couldn’t get it,”
the farmer said. “Maybe it was the language ….” His voice
trailed off. “I know a little German,” he added, embarrassed.
“Nothing formal, only what I picked up during the war. The
soldiers, they occupied my house. But I didn’t want to use the
German I knew on the boy. It was ugly, the German I knew, curses
mostly. Hateful talk.”

The taverna owner
had nothing to add. Although the Bauers and their guests, the
Bechtels, had eaten often in his tavern, aside from taking their
orders, he’d never spoken to them directly. He, too, had seen
nothing the night of the murder. Over and over he repeated that he
couldn’t believe something like this had happened on Patmos. “We’re
not the way we were,” he said.

The two old men
nodded.

“
Greece has changed,” Themis Poulis said.

The housekeeper
lived in a rooming house in Skala, about four blocks away from the
Sunrise Hotel. An abandoned water desalination plant had once
occupied the site, Patronas remembered. Immense in its ugliness, it
had been a vast graveyard of shattered glass and rusting metal
frames. He saw no trace of it today.

Made of
reinforced concrete, the housekeeper’s building appeared to be
relatively new, two stories high with a row of windows overlooking
a small parking lot in front. Dumpsters were lined up along the
left side of the building and pots of fake flowers adorned the
entrance, their plastic leaves gray with dust.

“
Tourists stay here?” Patronas asked.

“
Some,” Evangelos said. “Church groups, mostly. There are only
sixteen rooms and the owner prefers to rent them by the month, so
the majority of residents work in the tourist industry or for
private families like the Bauers. It’s not a bad place to stay.
It’s cheap and the rooms are clean.”

“
How
does she get from here to Chora?”

“
Bus
probably. It drops you off at the top of the hill near the city
hall, and then you walk the rest of the way.”

Illuminated by
fluorescent bulbs, the lobby was full of elderly Greek women, at
least fifteen of them, chattering like magpies.

Some kind of
religious tour
, Patronas guessed, seeing the women had a priest
with them. That had been the only kind of tourism permitted widows
in the old days. They all had the same brochure in hand and were
discussing the Cave of the Apocalypse, where trumpets had sounded
and a saint had foreseen the end of the world.

Dimitra’s
kinfolk.

Listening to
their excited voices, Patronas again remembered his honeymoon—not
quite the end of the world, but close.

The owner of the
hotel directed Patronas and Evangelos down a dimly lit hallway to
Maria Georgiou’s room.

Not wanting to
alert the other residents of the rooming house of their presence,
Patronas tapped softly on the door.

How did the
saying go? It is better if a priest, a doctor, and a policeman not
enter one’s house.

He’d called the
hotel the previous day and spoken to her to arrange the interview,
so she was expecting them.

The housekeeper
looked as if she were on her way to church, dressed in a blue rayon
shirtwaist with a lace collar, stockings, and high-heeled shoes. A
poor woman, she probably kept the outfit for special
occasions—feast days, perhaps—an interview with the police
evidently counting as one.

Patronas
introduced himself. “I am Yiannis Patronas, Kyria Georgiou,” he
said, “Chief Officer of the Chios Police Force, and this is my
colleague, Evangelos Demos, who’s in charge of the police
here.”

“
Maria
Georgiou,” the woman said shyly. “
Hairo poli
.”

Glad to meet
you.

The room was
clean and spare, light streaming in from a row of open windows.
Patronas saw a pair of birds pecking at some seeds scattered along
the sill. Swallows, they came and went, fluttering their wings as
they landed. Their nest must be elsewhere.

The housekeeper
nodded to the little birds. “I feed them.” she explained. “I’m
alone and they keep me company. It’s a small reward for their
songs.”

Maria Georgiou
was a handsome woman with perfectly symmetrical features,
reminiscent of classic statuary. Her nose was long and straight and
her lips were full. Her eyes were dark and her unplucked brows were
as thick as a man’s.

What Nefertiti
might have looked like in old age, Patronas thought.

Her white hair
was coiled in a bun at the nape of her neck.

There were two
upholstered chairs in front of a bank of windows, a broken down
coffee table positioned between them. A neatly made bed and a tiny
kitchenette occupied the rest of the space. A pine chest, stained
to look like mahogany, was pushed up against the back
wall.

A small fan on
top of the chest whirred softly as it rotated back and forth. In
spite of it, the room was hot and stuffy.

Maria Georgiou
had made an effort to make the space her own, he saw, setting out
an icon of the Virgin Mary and a photograph of a man and woman in a
silvery frame. Her mother and father, Patronas judged, noting the
family resemblance. A piece of cloth was artfully draped across the
top of the coffee table. Hand-embroidered in the style of the
Epirus region in northern Greece, the fabric was dense with blue
and ochre stitching, gold threadwork. It looked out of place amid
the cheap furnishings.

Patronas fingered
the cloth. It seemed an odd thing to travel with.

As was the custom
in Greece, she had set out a tray of sweets for them.

“
The
koulourakia
are fresh,” she said, pushing the plate of
cookies toward him. “I bought them this morning.”

Patronas took one
and ate it in awkward silence while she sat and watched him, having
taken nothing herself. Evangelos was leaning against the wall by
the door. He and Patronas had mapped out their strategy on the way
there, and his colleague was doing as instructed, stepping aside
and letting Patronas take the lead.

“
You
know why we’re here?” Patronas asked her.

“
Yes,
the murder of Mr. Bechtel’s father.” Her Greek was heavily
accented. Like the cloth on the table, she was from Epirus,
Patronas judged, hearing the way she spoke, the distinct regional
intonation. She might even be a Greek from Albania.

“
May I
see your identity card?”

Getting up, she
walked over to the chest and opened a drawer. She removed a tired
leather handbag, took out a square of plastic, and handed it to
him.

Patronas compared
the photo on the ID to the woman standing before him. They looked
to be the same, although the photo did not do her justice. She was
older than he’d originally thought, born in 1937.

As he’d done with
the gardener, he wrote down the information and handed the card
back to her.

“
How
long have you worked for the Bauers?” he asked.

“
Since
June. I came to Patmos on a holiday. The owner of the place where I
was staying said a family was looking for a woman to do housework.
They wanted a Greek, he said. It was important to them.”

“
And
you volunteered?”

“
Yes.
It’s hard to find Greek maids now and he said it wasn’t hard work.
Only a little cleaning, two or three hours a day, and the pay was
good.”

“
Where
did you have this conversation?”

“
Campos. That’s where I was staying. In a place that rents
rooms, smaller than here. Pavlos, it’s called.”

“
Is
that the owner’s name?”

“
Yes,
Antonis Pavlos.”

Patronas entered
the name in his notebook. “How did the owner know the Bauers were
looking for someone?”

“
He’s
married to a German woman, and she’s friendly with them. There’s a
group of people from Stuttgart who come to Campos every summer and
they know each other.”

“
Where
are you from originally?” he asked, curious about her
accent.

“
A
village near Ioannina. Aghios Stefanos.”

“
Do
you still live there?”

“
No, I
left years ago. I’m in Athens now. Exarhia.”

No wonder she’d
wanted to linger on Patmos. Exarhia was a crime-ridden slum, one of
the worst in Greece. A woman alone? She’d be afraid to step outside
her door.

“
You
said you came to Patmos on a holiday? That’s a long trip, over
eight hours by boat. Wouldn’t one of the islands near Athens, Poros
or Aegina, have been more convenient?”
Cheaper, too
. Patmos
was expensive by Greek standards.

She touched the
gold cross around her neck. “My father was a priest and he studied
at the seminary on Patmos. I am a religious woman and I wanted to
see it and the other churches on the island—the Monastery of St.
John and the Cave of the Apocalypse—have a
mnimosina
sung
for my parents.” A memorial service. “It was important to
me.”

“
Do
you work in Athens?”