The Devil Takes Half (11 page)

He left the marriage and went for nettles.

—
Greek proverb

T
hat night, when Patronas returned home, he checked out the computer he'd found in Eleni Argentis' house. It contained the log the priest had spoken of, the record of her work at Profitis Ilias. Her notes were comprehensive, complete with scanned photographs, drawings of the various elevations in each trench and a timetable. It was not light reading.

Today we found what appeared to be an in situ mud brick wall about 30 centimeters down in the SW quadrant of the first trench. On June 23
^rd
, we found crushed terra cotta tiles beneath the mud-brick in the NE quadrant of the second trench. This time the mortar was thick and pink and lay horizontally. On the morning of June 24
^th
, we'd been working in the third trench and found three whole mud bricks in a row, roughly parallel to what looked to be the wall of a house.

Although she meticulously described everything—the location and depth where she'd been working, the times, the nature of the finds—it all boiled down to the same thing: earthen mortar, mud bricks, and terra cotta. In other words, dirt. Sometimes the dirt was sandy, sometimes pebbles or clay was mixed in with it, once or twice greenish-gray matter. She'd found patches of charcoal and two glass beads. Also animal bones, “including what appears to be the jaw of a goat and the tooth of a horse.”

When Patronas read this entry in the log, he gave up. She hadn't found Pompeii or Atlantis. No. All she'd found—in addition to the various manifestations of dirt—were “the jaw of a goat and the tooth of a horse.” He shut the computer. He'd have to send it on to the archeologists in Athens, along with Petros' statue of the bull, but not just yet.

The book on abnormal psychology was no better. Parts of the chapter on narcissism were underlined with her stepmother's name penciled in on the side.
So that was the person she was studying up on. No mystery there.

He opened her journal, searching for the quote the priest had mentioned. One passage he discovered read, “There are few villains in this life. I, for one, have never met one.” Yet she had, Patronas thought sadly—the man who murdered her. Farther on, in a long passage about the suffering men inflict on women, he found the quote the priest had spoken of:

Ulysses left his wife to yearn, to wait, to grieve, fearing she would never see him again and longing for him.

After a few weeks in the gilded light of summer, all men go like Ulysses, abandon their women like Penelope on the shores of a lonely sea. Hope is those women's only companion, poor hope, desperate hope. Standing there, searching the horizon for a sign that he will return, that it will be as it was. Seeking to convince themselves that there had been a point to their coming together, that it had not all been in vain.

“
What the hell is this about?” the chief officer asked himself. “Gilded light. What is gilded? What is she talking about? Now ‘gelded,' I could understand. Gelded would make you sit up and take notice.”

Thinking this was women's business, he went downstairs and asked his wife Dimitra what the quote meant.

“
Simple,” his wife replied. “She thought the man she loved was one thing and found out he was another.” She gave him a long look. “It happens.”

“
What
happens? I don't understand.”

“
That part about the ‘convincing themselves that it had not all been in vain'? That means that, in order to survive, she pretended their life together was better than it was, that she lied to herself in order to keep going. Like I said, it happens.” His wife's voice always held a hint of martyrdom, as if there were an invisible cross on her shoulders and it was heavy. This time was no exception.

Thinking of Eleni Argentis, he asked, “Why would a woman feel this way?”

“
Because men lie and deceive you. They don't really want you around. They want to be eighteen again and start all over without you.”

As far as he knew, he was the only man Dimitra had ever known, so when she said ‘men,' she was talking about him.
He
was the liar, the deceiver, the one who didn't want you around. Patronas sighed. So this was going to be about them. He was sorry he'd asked.

Theirs had been an arranged marriage of sorts. He'd wanted to marry Marina Papoulis, but his widowed mother wouldn't hear of it. With the face of a Raphael Madonna, Marina had been his best friend, and he'd lived for her smile most of his boyhood. A poor girl, she'd had to work as a maid in Athens to complete her education. “She's nothing,” his mother had said. “A common girl from a common family.” But he had loved her with all his heart and still did, truth be told, his heart quickening whenever he saw her. She'd had a pair of roller skates and used to grab onto the end of his bike, screaming with laughter as he pedaled furiously through the village, her braids flying. The memory still made him smile. Oh Marina, Marina.

But he'd done as his mother wished and courted and married the girl she had picked out for him, Dimitra Pissou. Calculating, ferret-like Dimitra, Dimitra with the face, not of the Madonna, but of a basset hound.

His mother had believed she possessed great wealth. A mirage, it turned out, this
great
wealth
, though neither he nor his mother had discovered this until after the wedding, when it was too late. As for her pretenses—the way she looked down on people, her fancy manners and aristocratic way of eating, cutting her meat just so—she was simply imitating the wealthy ship owners she'd seen on Chios. Her ideas she'd gleaned from her more successful relatives, her vision of life from store displays and the gossip of neighbors.

A stolid, unwavering force of nature, his wife was rooted to the ground in every sense, with legs like tree trunks and no ankles to speak of. A perfect example of one of the older models of Greek womanhood. The kind who never laughed except at someone else and who wore black their entire adult lives. Patronas was willing to concede women like that had their uses. They were good to have around in wartime. For example, a group of them had jumped off a mountain in 1803 to avoid capture by the Turk, Ali Pasha. A victory of sorts, no matter that it killed them. It was just hard to take one on a daily basis.

He retreated to the bathroom, saying, “Enough, Dimitra. Enough.” But his wife followed him upstairs, continuing their discussion in a loud voice outside the bathroom door.

“
You want to know what that quote means? It means women have to put themselves back together, time and time again, after their men break them like pots.”

* * *

Patronas had long thought that the philosopher Socrates, when condemned to death or exile, didn't drink the hemlock to avoid political exile to Larissa, a cow town north of Athens. No, he was pretty sure Socrates had downed the poison to get away from Xanthippe, his legendary, unspeakable shrew of a wife, someone Patronas fancied was very much like his Dimitra. Socrates simply couldn't face one more day at her side: Xanthippe turning up in the agora, yelling at him when he was trying to discuss something important—say, caves for instance—with Plato. Xanthippe announcing that her mother was coming for an indefinite stay.
Xanthippe
complaining
he never took her any
where
.

Not that the chief officer thought of himself as Socrates. No, he saw himself more as a fellow traveler in the long, not so-happy, but fortunately not completely platonic dialogue that is marriage.

He thought about it as he lay in bed that night. Where had the years gone? The promise of happiness? He had to admit, he harbored little affection for his wife and none whatsoever for his mother-in-law, a gap-toothed old walrus who had iron clad opinions about everything, which she expressed in a deep, penetrating voice like a man's. Like Moses with the Ten Commandments, you could almost hear the trumpet blast in everything she said. He'd tried to overlook the gradual thickening of his wife's waist, the erosion of her face. He'd kept his hands off the Scandinavian tourists he arrested for nudity and drunkenness and came home early most nights. Well, perhaps not most nights. Some nights. A few nights.

He guessed Dimitra had had her dreams when they got married. Hell, everyone had dreams when they got married. But they hadn't come true. He was no Prince Charming. But she'd had her revenge. Yes, indeed. She was working on gelding, too, every chance she got.

The thought of growing old beside her filled him with unbearable angst. And then, to be buried side by side in the family crypt, her family crypt, which meant her momma would be there, too, for all eternity ….

Friendships and loves are forgotten, and when they meet they talk like strangers, passers-by.

—
Greek proverb

P
atronas pushed back the cloth top of the Citroen, hoping the rush of the wind would make him feel better. He was still haunted by what the fisherman, Costas, had seen on the beach, a man throwing away pieces of a human being in trash bags. He'd ordered his staff to send the remains to Athens, along with the samples from the trench and a hairbrush he'd taken from Eleni Argentis' bedroom. With any luck, the DNA would match and he could declare her legally dead. A good defense attorney might be able to argue that a severed leg and hand did not a murder make, but it was all he had. That is, if he caught whoever did this and they went to trial. He rubbed his eyes.

The road hugged the shore. The water was so clear, he could make out individual rocks on the ocean floor. Across the bay, he could see the village of Faro and the old slag heaps where the ancients had mined gold. A pair of sailboats were tacking in the wind, slowly making their way north toward Chora.

Papa Michalis was in his garden. “Something got my rooster last night. From the way it was dismembered, I would have thought a wolf, but there haven't been wolves in these hills for centuries.”

“
Maybe a dog got it.”

“
If it was a dog, how did it get in? I always lock the doors before I go to sleep. And there was no dog in here last night.”

At the priest's behest, Patronas examined what was left of the rooster. There was a narrow arc of blood splatter on the white wall above where Papa Michalis had found the bird, as if someone or something had torn open its neck. Its gizzard and guts were scattered across the pavement, the bloody feathers still stuck to the stones.

“
A dog,” Patronas said again. His mind was still on the scene at the beach. He didn't want to be bothered with dead roosters.

Shovel in hand, the priest scooped up the mess and gently laid it down in the hole he'd dug. “Death seems to be stalking this place.”

“
A coincidence, Father. Your rooster? Just one animal consuming another. Nothing more.”

“
That's the thing. Whatever killed it didn't eat it. It just tore it all to pieces and left it there.”

“
Strange.”

The priest patted the little grave with his shovel. “A detective in a novel I read said, ‘In homicides there are no coincidences.' ”

“
True enough. I'm just not sure the author was talking about roosters.”

* * *

“
How did Eleni get along with the archeological community?” Patronas asked Papa Michalis. He was standing on a stepladder in the arbor at Profitis Ilias, cutting grapes. The priest had asked for his help, saying he was too old and unsteady for such work.

After the fisherman's discovery, Patronas was sure Eleni Argentis was dead, but if the old man noticed his use of the past tense, he didn't let on. He still cried openly whenever he spoke of Eleni or Petros, and Patronas was afraid if he told him about the trash bags, it would set him off again. You could never tell with Papa Michalis. He was an odd duck,
loxos.
Weeping over his lost friends one minute and rambling on about crime detection the next, the most grisly aspects of crime detection, the reconstruction of burned faces out of clay or retrieval of gunshot residue from the skin of victims, terrible things. This morning he'd spoken of how difficult it was to catch serial killers like the one in Wisconsin, who'd eaten seventeen people.
Maybe that's what happens to you when you get old,
Patronas thought.
You mix it up.

“
Eleni didn't have much use for archeologists,” the priest told him. “She thought they underestimated the ancients, had a bias against them. ‘Because of a couple of frescoes, my colleagues think the Minoans worshipped snakes and bulls,' she said. ‘That's like visiting Chartres and concluding the French worship stained glass.' ”

Patronas cut a handful of grapes and dropped them in the basket. He was glad the priest had asked for his help. It was pleasant work, a welcome break from the investigation. The vine leaves provided dappled shade, a kind of green halo around him, and the grapes were so ripe they perfumed the air. “One of the archeologists said she was seeking Atlantis. Do you think he's right?”

“
I don't know. She did say, ‘The Minoans' relationship with the sea was the key to their civilization, and islands like Chios would have figured prominently in their cosmology.' ”

“
There are rumors that she found treasure up here.”

Was it his imagination or did the priest flinch? “You see any treasure?” Papa Michalis asked, gesturing to the courtyard, the monastery walls. “Earthly rewards of any kind?”