The Devil Takes Half (13 page)

“
So you're going to go on seeing her?”

“
Yes, I suppose I am. It's a small place and she's there, so, yes, we're going to see each other. We're going have conversations, maybe even drink coffee or eat a meal together.” He said this in the same voice he used at the station when his men questioned an order and he wanted to verbally slap them down.

“
Stay away from her, Yiannis. You hear me! You stay away from her!”

An old-fashioned Greek male, Patronas normally wouldn't have allowed himself to be spoken to in such a way, but he had work to do tonight and didn't want to fight with her. All the signs were there—the accusatory tone, the prosecutorial mien. Dimitra had more stamina than he and could argue until morning.

“
For God's sake, Dimitra, what is all this? What's the matter with you? There's nothing going on between Marina and me. You know that. I'm not doing anything wrong.”

“
Yes, you are. You're remembering. You think I don't know? Every time you see her, you remember when you were a boy, when it was all ahead of you, and she was the one you loved, loved in a way that only happens once.”

Stung, he got up from the table. “I don't have time for this.”

“
Wait,” she called after him.

“
What is it now, Dimitra?”

She smoothed down the paper he'd given her. “I'm not sure, but I think it's the Phaistos Disc. Nobody knows what it means, but the tourists, they love it. They buy copies of it, Phaistos bracelets, Phaistos key chains. They claim it has spiritual powers.”

She went into the living room and returned with a book, a tourist guide from Crete, and began flipping through the pages. “Look, here's a picture.” She pointed to a photograph.

He compared the photograph to the drawings Petros had made. They looked similar, but the boy's paper had been handled so much, it was impossible to tell if the images were identical.

* * *

Patronas called Papa Michalis later that night. “When we were up at the monastery, you said that Eleni thought islands had a role in the Minoan universe. Think back. Did she ever say anything about a disc? The Phaistos Disc?”

“
Funny, that. We were having dinner up at the monastery one night—the three of us, Eleni and Petros and me—and she started talking about a book she'd been reading about the Aborigines in Australia. Bruce Chatwin, I think it was. She said the Aborigines sang their universe into being, that they navigated the world using special songs and chants. It sounded like nonsense to me. But I remember she did say one thing that stuck in my mind. She said the Aboriginal drawings, the ones they'd made of Australia, reminded her of some of the Minoan stuff she'd seen. ‘Maybe we need to look at the Phaistos Disc again,' she said. ‘Maybe it's a map.' ”

* * *

If it was a map, it was unlike any he'd ever seen. Patronas studied the image on his computer screen. The Phaistos Disc was a round clay disc stamped on both sides with hieroglyphics. Some of them were obvious—bare-breasted women were bare-breasted women the world over—but as for the rest—the boomerangs and forked sticks, the lonely humanoid-types with tails—he hadn't a clue. Searching the Web hadn't helped, as theories on the Phaistos Disc abounded. Some thought it was a board game; others claimed it was a shopping list, the fish symbol meaning simply ‘buy fish.' But if it was a shopping list, why were there so many different kinds of people on it? Had the Minoans, in addition to killing their own, been buying and selling them, too?

Other theories were even more implausible. Sir Arthur Evans, who'd discovered Knossos, alleged it was a paean to victory. Another thought it was a letter to the Hittites from Lukka Land.

This surprised Patronas, who hadn't known there were Lukkas, let alone a ‘Lukka Land.'

He'd been staring at the Disc for so long, he'd begun to see pornographic things in the hieroglyphics: male and female parts, dirty bits. He scrolled farther down. The other websites were worse. There was one connecting the Phaistos Disc with the stars, but no stars he'd ever heard of. Stars with quasi-mystical names, stars he suspected existed only in the mind of the site's webmaster. There was also a lot about the spirals on the Disc, spirals being the ‘defining motif of the universe.' Groups of Germans were sparring over whether the Disc was stamped or incised, which would have made it the first ‘typewritten' account of …. That was the problem, no one knew.

Then there were listings connecting the Disc with the lost kingdom of Atlantis, but not the historic kingdom the archeologists Alcott and McLean had spoken of. No, this was a place where the folks went for rides in UFOs and kept pet unicorns, where the cuckoo was the national bird.

One website stated the thing was a primitive computer disc, used by the Minoans as a navigational device. “Ah-ha,” he said, noting the similarities between a navigational device and a map, until he got farther into the site and realized that what was being navigated was the galaxy—the mystical, spiral galaxy. He was reluctant to contact the Archeology Department in Athens, worrying he'd tip his hand, in case Eleni had been right and there was something up there. The last thing he wanted in the middle of his murder investigation was more archeologists milling around, itching to get their hands on his hillside.

He got a magnifying glass out of the drawer and studied the images again. According to something he'd read online, what he was seeing was one form of the Minoan language, Linear A, as yet undeciphered. And unlikely to be, he decided, putting his magnifying glass away and shutting the drawer. At least not by him.

“
Neighbor, your house is burning.”

“
Impossible, I have the keys.”

—
Greek proverb

W
hen they'd first been married, Patronas had called his wife the ‘electric fork,' teasing her about how fast she ate. Later it became the ‘electric tongue,' for the sharpness of her speech. ‘Electric' in the sense that an electric eel or an electric chair was ‘electric.' That is, her tongue was a force to be reckoned with, a sort of built-in, human stun gun. Today, Dimitra ate little and said nothing.

The priest was in the church when Patronas got to Profitis Ilias, chanting the liturgy. Patronas sniffed. He could smell incense in the air, but no hint of the decay Marina had spoken of. He lit a candle and stood waiting in the semi-darkness until the priest finished.

After the priest put away his vestments, Patronas approached him. “Father, I want you and Marina Papoulis to leave Profitis Ilias.”

“
I can't. I explained to you.”

“
Then send Marina away. Replace her with one of my men.”

“
Your men can't cook.”

“
I'll bring you food from a taverna. It's important, Father. I don't want her here. It's too dangerous.” With an extra policeman, the priest would be safe. Dimitra would calm down, and he, Yiannis Patronas, Chief Officer of the Police Force of Nomos Chios, could get on with his homicide investigation. It was the perfect solution.

The priest frowned. “Does she really have to go? We have fun. Sometimes she stays up here and we watch television together. Last week we watched
The Hound of the Baskervilles,
an old Sherlock Holmes movie on the BBC. You might think such an endeavor is frivolous, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle unseemly entertainment for a priest, but it isn't, Chief Officer. Oh, no, it's work. I took notes while I watched. I studied Holmes' technique. He's a genius. He'll help us crack this case.”

“
You think we're going solve these murders by watching television?” Patronas allowed himself a little sarcasm.

“
Indeed, we are. I'm going to learn Holmes' methodology and apply it here. Inference, Chief Officer.” He held up a bony finger. “Inference is the key. Holmes sees what no other sees. In
The Silver Blaze—
probably the most famous example—the clue was ‘the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.' The dog did nothing in the night-time. Ergo: the dog did not bark. Only Sherlock Holmes could see that. He is a maestro when it comes to discerning such things.”

“
Sherlock Holmes could
see
a dog not bark.”

“
Hear
then.
Hear
a dog not bark.”

“
How can you hear a dog
not
bark?” He was beginning to think the priest had serious problems.

“
It was what wasn't there, don't you see? That was the clue: the dog should have barked, but it didn't. That's how Holmes figured it out. You should watch the show with me. You'd be amazed. Holmes is incredible. He's all-seeing.”

Sort of like Dimitra. “And you think by tuning in, you'll figure out who killed Eleni and Petros?”

The priest nodded. “Undoubtedly. This panoptic reasoning, it's bound to rub off.”

‘
Panoptic reasoning.' Put
that
on the shelf next to Atlantis and the spiral galaxies.

* * *

Dimitra had sounded pleased when Patronas called and told her that Marina Papoulis would no longer be working at Profitis Ilias. He made it clear it had been the dead rooster, the feeling that someone had deliberately killed the bird to frighten the old man, rather than the conversation they'd had the previous evening that had decided him. It was better that way. Dimitra was like Hitler: give an inch and she'd be in Warsaw by suppertime.

“
I wish I could get Papa Michalis out of there, too,” he said, “but he won't budge. He claims it's because of the Bishop, but I don't think he wants to leave his television set.”

His wife actually laughed when he described what the priest had said about Sherlock Holmes.

“ ‘
Holmes could hear a dog
not
bark.' You should have heard him, Dimitra. He's obsessed. He's seen all the movies and read all the books. He thinks he can solve the crime using Holmes' techniques.”

“
If he's Holmes,” his wife asked, “who does that make you?”

* * *

Humming a little tune, Evangelos Demos was laying shards out on the table in the refectory and trying to fit them together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Patronas watched him from across the room, certain that if one of the other policemen were doing this it would not be in pursuit of a solution to the question of who murdered Eleni Argentis and Petros Athanassiou, but for their own obscure reasons, most probably financial. A piece of Kamares ware from the Minoan period would fetch enough money to buy a car on the black market, a fact most of the force was undoubtedly aware of. This, of course, did not apply to Evangelos Demos. Stealing from the evidence boxes would never cross his assistant's mind. His brain was too little. He'd never get that far.

“
What are you doing?” Patronas asked, just to be sure.

“
Trying to piece it together, to see what it was.” He discarded one shard and picked up another.

Glancing down, Patronas noticed disgustedly that his assistant had grown out the nails on his little fingers, filed them to a point like a woman's. Inherited from the Turks, this was an old custom in Greece, used to distinguish those who worked in offices and shops from those who labored in fields.
Too bad there wasn't a way to distinguish the idiots from the rest of us,
Patronas thought.
A tattoo, maybe.
When Evangelos Demos had first arrived on Chios, he'd tried to teach him police procedure and educate him about the island. All to no avail. The man was incapable of assimilating information. It had been like talking to a tree stump.

“
Did you send her leg to Athens like I told you to?” he asked. His assistant had been forced on him by his superiors in Athens, and he despised him.

“
Yes, Chief Officer.” Evangelos pretended to study the shard in front of him, but he was really thinking about his career, how he might have to return to his village after all, that Chios for all its charm was a little too much like Belfast and the West Bank for the likes of him. That scene at the beach still haunted him. And all this talk of legs and blood spatter. He couldn't sleep. He couldn't eat. And for Evangelos Demos, that was something. He had a ferocious appetite. People said he could eat through metal.

Raised in the mountains around Sparta, he'd never really been accepted by his colleagues in Chios. They called him
xontroulis
—
fatso—and
varvarus
—uncivilized.
Vlachos
was another favorite. It meant the same as
varvaros,
only with ‘crude' and ‘stupid' thrown in. Tembelos and the others didn't realize he knew when they were making fun of him. He'd seen them snicker. He was a detective, after all. It wasn't that hard to figure out.

Still, all in all, he'd liked being Assistant Chief Officer on Chios. His wife had been happy on Chios, and if his children ran amok, well, there wasn't that far to run here. He'd even solved the problem of his mother-in-law, a stone-faced old water buffalo named Stamatina. She distrusted boats and hadn't visited once during the first two years he'd been on the job. For that alone, he was happy to keep the job.

The work had been easy, too. Chiots didn't expect much of their policemen and that was fine with Evangelos Demos, who didn't expect much, either. He could sit drinking Turkish coffee, flicking his worry beads back and forth, from the time he came in until it was time to go home. Of course, the occasional marital eruption had to be sorted out, as did sporadic bouts of thievery. True, not much in the way of police work, but not much was far better than plenty, he'd found, when it came to police work.