When the Devil's Idle (16 page)

Patronas laughed.
“A vacuum cleaner.”

“
A
human Hoover.”

“
A
whale. One of the big ones that eat plankton.” He proceeded to suck
the air, his head going from side to side, then attached his mouth
to the fabric of his friend’s shirt and pretended to inhale
it.

It worked, the
joking. Patronas was grateful. It eased his disappointment over
Antigone Balis, about him not being Romeo. Maybe he should choose
another role model. After all, Romeo had committed suicide. Things
hadn’t worked out so well for him.

A
fter breakfast, Patronas, Tembelos, and Papa Michalis
walked to the police station together. Up two flights of stairs
with no elevator, it was hidden away at the top of a tower and not
easily accessible to the public.

There was an icon
of Jesus in an arched alcove outside the station, a big one, nearly
two meters high. In Patronas’ mind the placement was
inappropriate—police and Jesus, they didn’t exactly go together—but
Evangelos said such was the nature of Patmos. “The so-called ‘holy
island,’ ” he said. “Every third person is a priest. Criminals
are rare here.”

A row of potted
plants and a filthy grill from some long ago Easter celebration
took up the rest of the space.

In no hurry to go
to work, Patronas lingered outside for a few minutes, smoking a
cigarette and looking out over Skala.

The office of the
Hellenic Coast Guard occupied the ground floor of the same
building, and he could see men and women in blue uniforms walking
briskly in and out, monitoring the traffic at the harbor with
walkie-talkies. On a small hillside to his right was the
seventeenth-century chapel of
Aghia Paraskevi,
said to
possess a miraculous icon that restored sight. Another church, far
older, stood almost directly below, virtually at his feet, its two
domes glimmering dully in the sun.

He had tried to
buy a Greek newspaper at a kiosk earlier but hadn’t been able to
find one. There’d been plenty of German ones, stacks of
Die
Zeit
and the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
, but no
Ekathimerini
or
To Bhma
. Apparently, Patmos wasn’t
Greek anymore; it had become an outpost of Berlin.

With a sigh,
Patronas ground out his cigarette, pushed open the door and entered
the station. Tembelos was already on the computer, typing
feverishly on the keyboard. Papa Michalis was sitting next to him,
doing a much slower version of the same.

Wearing
headphones, Evangelos was listening to Bechtel’s MP3 player,
stopping and restarting it as he jotted down notes from the
interviews with the family.

“
You
find anything?” he asked them.

“
Maybe,” Tembelos said.

He pointed to the
computer screen. “I’ve been researching the Twelfth Company, the
unit that butchered the people in the village of Aghios Stefanos,
and I put in a request for pictures. One thing about Nazis: they
kept good records, photographed what they did and who they did it
to. There’s a shot of a bunch of them riding donkeys in front of
the Acropolis. About sums them up, if you ask me. Asses on top of
asses; asses—if I may be so bold—squared. They even took photos of
Kalavryta after they killed everybody.”

He gestured at
the screen. “A man named Böchner—two of those dots Germans use over
the ‘o’—was in charge. That’s him there, see? Seems he was some
kind of maniac. His own men called him ‘Attila.’ ”

Patronas examined
the picture. “No scars.”

“
No
nothing. Partisans killed him in 1944.”

“
You
find anyone who looks like the dead man?”

“
Not
yet, but if it’s out there, I will find it. I’ve got people looking
all over the world.”

Patronas nodded.
If Tembelos could place Walter Bechtel anywhere near Maria
Georgiou’s village, they might have a case.

He didn’t hold
out much hope. Unless she confessed to the crime, most probably all
they would be able to establish was that she and her family were
victims of a group of rogue foreign soldiers a long time ago. The
police and the prosecutor would have nothing to go on but
that … and even that was uncertain. She could deny she’d even
been in Aghios Stefanos on the day in question, testify that she’d
been living with relatives somewhere else. If what the priest said
was true, the casualties had been many—nearly the whole village
shot to death. There might be no one left alive to contradict
her.

It was around
four o’clock when the fax with the photograph came in. Tembelos
retrieved it from the machine. Reaching for his magnifying glass,
he studied the paper closely before handing it on to Patronas. “I’m
pretty sure that’s him. Take a look and see what you
think.”

Smudged and out
of focus, the photograph showed a group of soldiers, rifles in
hand, standing in front of a burning building. Judging by the
uniforms, the distinct shape of the helmets, the soldiers were
German.

“
See
those columns there, the frieze?” Tembelos pointed out details of
the building. “That’s the town hall of Aghios Stefanos. I recognize
it.”

Taking their
time, the four of them took turns examining the fax, passing the
magnifying glass back and forth over the image.

“
It’s
him,” Tembelos said with growing certainty. “See those scars on his
face? That’s Walter Bechtel. I’d stake my life on it.”

Patronas
hesitated. “You sure this is her village? Not Kalavryta or
Distomo—one of those other places they annihilated?”

“
Yup.
It’s Aghios Stefanos. The commission in Athens faxed it to me just
now, the one seeking reparations for the massacres in Epirus during
the war.”

Taking the fax
from Tembelos, Patronas looked at it again. There was no date or
location on it, no identifying mark or list of names. Just a group
of nameless jackals posing for a photograph.

“
It’s
not enough,” he said, handing the picture back. “So what if he was
there? It doesn’t prove he killed her father or that the two of
them knew each another. She was a child. All the men that day would
have looked the same to her—uniforms, guns.”

Evangelos
concurred. “There were soldiers in my village during the war, and I
never heard anyone describe them physically or call them by name.
Rank maybe, but not by name. They knew who the Gestapo agents were
and did their best to avoid them, my grandmother said, but that was
it.”

“
You
researched the massacre,” Patronas said, turning back to Tembelos.
“How long did it last? How long did the soldiers stay in that
village?”

“
I
don’t know. All I know is it started early and they shot up
everything. They might have been living there for all we know.
There were German units stationed all over Epirus for the duration
of the war, fighting the resistance. Two or three years in some
places. If they were in Aghios Stefanos that long, she definitely
would have known him.”

He tapped the
fax. “This photo gives us what we need, Yiannis. You’ll see. It’s
going to unlock the case.”

“
What
about the family? Do we show it to them? Get them to verify his
identity?”

Tembelos
considered the idea for a moment. “Not until we’re sure, Yiannis.
From what you said, Gunther Bechtel’s pretty touchy on the subject.
He might charge you with harassment if you imply his father was a
war criminal.”

“
A
Nazi on Patmos,” Evangelos said in amazement. “Who would have
thought? Sunning himself on our beaches, a man like
that.”

Patronas scanned
the photo and emailed it to his boss in Athens.

After he saw it,
Stathis reluctantly authorized a trip to Epirus. The four of them
were to take a boat to Piraeus that night—economy class, he was
careful to specify—then take an unmarked car and drive to Maria
Georgiou’s village and question the inhabitants there. While they
were in Epirus, they were not to discuss the murder of Walter
Bechtel, but instead to gather as much information as they could on
the Nazi atrocities in the region and work to determine the
identities of the men who had committed them.

“
Anyone asks, you’re there on a pending reparations
case.”

“
Didn’t the German president say they were done with
reparations—that they had a ‘moral debt’ and that was
it?”

“
People who lived through that time will be glad to talk to
you, Patronas, no matter who you represent. They don’t want these
events forgotten. But be careful, this is strictly a fact-finding
mission. We don’t have solid evidence that the victim was involved
in the massacre and we don’t want to damage his reputation
needlessly. For all we know, he might have spent the war working in
the army canteen serving up stewed fruit or whatever slop those
people ate.”

A short man with
a melodic voice and the build of a rooster, Stathis had risen
swiftly through the ranks and was now in charge of both the
northern and southern Aegean regions. Fiercely ambitious, he was
quick to push his subordinates aside and take credit for their work
and to punish those who displeased him. Patronas had suffered under
Stathis’ rule, even been fired and brought back once in the past.
He despised him. A person would have to be a snake charmer to get
along with his boss. Man was a cobra.

Taking no
chances, Patronas carefully repeated Stathis’ instructions back to
him on the phone. “Tread lightly, you’re saying.”

“
Yes,
and leave no evidence of your stay. Sleep in another village if you
have to and pay cash for everything. No paper trail. No photographs
of you and Tembelos grinning at each other in front of some
statue.”

“
Understood, sir.”

“
If
the Bechtel family or anyone connected with the German embassy gets
wind of this, I will personally strip you of your rank and
court-martial you.”

“
We’re
the police, sir, not a military unit. I’m not sure you have the
authority to court-martial people.”

As usual, his
boss had little use for his insubordination.

“
Tha se evnouchiso.”
In that case, I’ll castrate you.
Stathis paused before continuing, “I am authorizing an expenditure
of ten euros a day per person plus an allotment for gas. Times are
tough, Patronas. You’re not going to be in Epirus long. You and
your men can sleep in the car.”

Before they left
Patmos, Patronas phoned Maria Georgiou and told her she was to
notify the department if she left the island for any reason. “We
need to know your whereabouts at all times,” he said.

She willingly
acquiesced. “I will be here,” she said, “With the Bechtels at their
house or in my room in Skala.”

“
Do
you have a cellphone?”

“
No,
but the man at the desk where I live can always find me. He has my
contact information.”

“
Good.”

The local police
were going to monitor her movements while Patronas and the other
three were away in Epirus, keep track of where she went and who she
spoke to, in case someone else had been involved.

“
I
don’t want her to know she’s the object of your surveillance,”
Patronas had told them. “Tell her you’re guarding the house to
prevent further incidents. You’re there to protect the
Bechtels.”

After Stathis
approved the trip, Patronas and the others hurriedly returned to
the hotel and packed their bags, intending to take the Blue Star
Ferry at midnight. There being no money for cabins, they planned to
sleep out on the deck.

“
I’m
no good on boats,” Evangelos told Patronas while they were standing
in line to buy tickets.

“
What’s the problem? Can’t you swim?”

“
Not
very well.”

Patronas tried to
imagine resuscitating Evangelos as they boarded the boat,
performing CPR if by some quirk of fate the man was swept
overboard.

Wouldn’t
happen
, he quickly decided. No matter what, he’d never put his
mouth on his. He’d let him drown first.

His colleague
continued to enumerate his fears. What if the boat capsized like
that cruise ship in Italy, the
Costa Concordia
? Or the crew
left the door open and water came flooding in like the ferry in the
Baltic Sea? To hear him talk, anything connected with the sea undid
him, caused panic attacks and palpitations.

Tuning him out,
Patronas stretched out on a bench and tucked his bag under his
head. It was a warm night. With any luck, he’d be able to sleep all
the way to Athens. Tembelos and the priest quickly followed suit,
each on a separate bench. Evangelos alone remained upright,
watching the water of the harbor as if it was going to eat
him.

Within minutes,
the ferry got underway, gliding swiftly out of the harbor. It was a
stormy night and the wind was fierce, the sea covered with
whitecaps. With a groan, the boat began to mount the oncoming
waves, teetering on the crest for a moment then crashing back down.
To Patronas, it felt like a watery kind of earthquake—seven, maybe
eight on the Richter Scale. The tourists quickly fled to the lounge
below, and within minutes, the four of them had the deck to
themselves.