The Devil Takes Half (16 page)

Patronas put the fragments of wood from the balcony in another bag and carefully inspected the priest's room. There was nothing there that hadn't been there before. The television was where the priest had left it, the remote laying on the worn lap of the chair. He rubbed his hand along the padded arm of the recliner. “Don't die,” he whispered.

After he finished with the room, he moved slowly across the cobblestones until he reached the spot where he'd found Papa Michalis, the priest's silhouette outlined now in white chalk. He noticed there was a new smell about the place, a smell of damp earth and decay, deep and penetrating. Marina was wrong, he decided, remembering what she'd said about the strange odor that had permeated the air the night Petros and Eleni were killed. This was not the smell of death, at least not recent death. No, a smell like this came only after the passage of time. It reminded him of the tomb where they'd placed his grandmother after she'd died, newly opened after fifty years. “Strange,” he said to himself.

He found a trail of bloody footprints near the well. So it hadn't been a stroke or an accident. Someone had thrown Papa Michalis off the balcony and then come down to check on his handiwork, bloodying his shoes without realizing it. Patronas followed the footprints until they disappeared on the far side of the well. Judging by the size of the footprints, it had been a man. Had someone like Spiros Korres come to rob this place? Been surprised by the priest while searching for treasure? Or was it personal?

He called for one of his men and showed him the footprints, then entered the church. Sometimes these old churches had a crypt under the altar. Patronas carefully inspected the marble pavement. The entrance to the crypt was on the left side of the iconostasis, hidden beneath a copper baptismal font. It was a small space, chiseled out of limestone and sealed with a metal door. The door looked original. The shiny padlock securing it did not. Patronas cracked the lock open with the butt of his gun. He'd expected to find bones, remains of saints, reliquaries, as befitted a church as old as this one. Instead, he found artifacts of a different kind—intricately worked gold beads and hammered masks, an ivory statuette of a woman encircled with snakes, everything neatly set inside orange crates lined with newspaper.

Patronas lifted out the statuette. No more than eight inches tall, it was beautifully carved—the artistry far superior to similar ones he'd seen in Athens and Heraklion. Bare breasted, the woman was dressed in a flounced skirt, a snake in each hand. Their scales were delicately etched, their forked tongues and tiny jeweled eyes pulsing with life. On her head was a tiny gold diadem with symbols he didn't recognize, and she had another snake, larger and thicker, draped around her waist like a belt. Patronas touched her painted hair. Four thousand years old and she was still Greek to the core.

In a second box, he found a pair of double axes, both of them gold. Beneath the axes was a random assortment of jewelry: pendants of rock crystal and carnelian, gold chains and earrings, heavy rings set with crude squares of amber or lapis, polished green stones he thought might be emeralds. Altogether there were five boxes. One held primitive votive offerings: fat, violin-shaped women and crude phalluses. Two clay jars occupied whatever space remained in the crypt. He raised the lid of one of the jars. It was full of human bones. Sighing, the chief officer carefully set the lid back down. “Sleep well, my brothers,” he said.

He wrote down everything he'd found and drew a sketch as to where each piece had been located. “Father, Father what have you done,” he said out loud when he'd finished. There were more than eighty items on his list. Save for the two jars, most were small. Easy to hide in a pocket or the palm of a hand. At least a third of it was gold. There had been treasure after all.

He refastened the broken lock as best he could. His men weren't paid much and they all had families. This would tempt them. He hid the door to the crypt as well as he could and left the church.

Giorgos Tembelos and Evangelos Demos were in the refectory. “Find anything?” Tembelos asked.

“
No, nothing. It's a mess in there.”

“
This whole place is a mess. And that smell? It makes my skin crawl and I'm a cop.”

Seize the blind and take from him his eyes.

—
Greek proverb

L
ooking out the window of the cab as it drove through Athens, Patronas reflected that driving through this city was like swimming in a sea of cement—automobiles providing the motion, the eddying pools of current. The priest was in KAT, the national trauma center of Greece. The complex was located in Kifissia, a suburb north of Athens, and the ride from the airport had taken a long time. Built on a plain between three mountains, Athens was home to nearly four million people. Traffic was at a standstill, the air heavy with auto exhaust.

In the distance, he could see freighters moving out of the harbor of Piraeus into the steel-colored waters of the Saronic Gulf. He'd been forced to spend an Easter in Athens when he was a student, and he still remembered the sight of people grilling lamb outside on the pavement.
Why live here?
he'd wondered at the time. But he'd known the answer
. Sparta has been your lot. Sparta you praise.
It was easier to survive in Athens, especially after the war. You didn't go hungry. You and your family were safe.

Patronas remembered Kifissia fondly as a place with towering plane trees and tourists riding in horse drawn carriages. There'd been water everywhere in those days, running along the road in little canals. It was an oasis in the sun washed plains of Attica. Now Kifissia was an overbuilt, expensive suburb with cars parked everywhere and stores selling designer goods, Gucci and the like. Patronas paid the cab driver and pushed open the glass door of the hospital. The doctor had said Papa Michalis was housed in the new wing. A modern, seven story building, this portion of KAT had been built as part of the preparations for the Olympic Games. Thousands worked here now, and it was a confusing labyrinth, the biggest medical facility Patronas had ever seen.

“
The man from Chios is in the Intensive Care Unit,” a Filipino nurse told Patronas. “He's very weak. You can't stay long.”

Papa Michalis was lying in a hospital bed, apparently asleep. He had wires hooked up to the side of his neck, IVs attached to both of his hands, and a bag of yellowish solution dripping into one arm. His head was swathed with bandages and his skin was mottled, covered with purple bruises. Patronas couldn't tell if the bruises were the result of the attack or of the doctors' efforts to save him.

“
Papa Michalis?”

The priest stirred when he heard his name and opened his eyes. He tried to sit up, but the effort cost him and he fell back on the bed. He looked a hundred years old.

Patronas kept his eyes focused on the old man's face, trying to block out the machines, the bag of blood hanging up next to the bed, the bag of blood draining beneath it. “Did you see the man who did this to you?”

The curtains were drawn, and it was too dark to read the priest's expression, the only light in the room the green readings of the monitors. Patronas felt as if he were underwater. As if there was no air. He longed for a cigarette. He hated hospitals.

“
We found footprints leading away from where you fell. Whoever did it walked through your blood without realizing it.”

“
Did you take an impression?” Forensics again. Even though he was broken in two, the priest wanted to play detective. Patronas found this unbearably sad.

“
No. The cobblestones were too uneven. There was one interesting thing, though. They didn't lead anywhere. They just stopped.”

“
A ghost, you think?” The smile was feeble, but it was there.

“
No, Papa Michalis, I don't think it was a ghost. I think it was a grave robber. That's what you've been doing, isn't it? You and whoever did this to you. You've been looting the site. That's why Eleni and Petros were killed. They were involved in it, too, which makes you an accessory to murder.”

The priest turned away. “It's not my fault what happened to them.”

“
What I don't understand is how you, a priest, could hide something like that and go on hiding it after what happened.” Patronas fought to keep his voice down, surprised at how angry he was. “How you, a man of God, could shield a murderer.”

“
It wasn't like that,” the priest whimpered. “You don't understand.”

“
I found everything, Father, everything. In a
church
of all places—the gold, the jewelry. Museum quality, all of it.” The monitors were flickering. Patronas thought he probably had another minute before the nurse appeared. “Question is: how did it get there? How did it find its way into the crypt, behind a padlocked door?”

“
I don't know what you're talking about.”

“
As soon as I get back to Chios, I'm going to bring in the experts and we're going to dust everything in that room for prints, and I'll bet money we won't just find yours, Father. No, my guess is we'll find Eleni's or Petros'. One of them was smuggling and you were helping them. Now I want to know which one it was.”

“
What difference does it make now?” The priest fidgeted with his blanket. “They're both dead. You can donate everything to a university.”

“
Father, tell me.”

He shook his head. “It is better to lose an eye than one's good name.”

“
Father, whoever killed them isn't done. He'll keep killing until he gets what he wants. Until he finds that crypt and empties it.”

“ ‘
Him' again. It's always ‘him' with you. I told you before: You have no evidence it's a he.” His voice grew faint and he began slurring his words as he drifted in and out of consciousness.

* * *

Patronas spent the night in a plastic chair outside the priest's room, sharing the space with the family of a car accident victim. The women in the group cried for hours.

Periodically, he'd get up and check on the priest. Papa Michalis slept fitfully, crying out in his sleep. Though Patronas tried, he couldn't make out what the priest was saying. He was too drugged, whatever he was shouting impossible to understand.

He seemed better the next morning, sitting up in bed while a young aide washed his face. The bandage on his head was smaller and he was breathing without oxygen.

He still refused to cooperate.

“
Don't you want us to catch him, the person who did this to you?” Patronas asked. “Don't you want him punished?”

“
I wouldn't dream of it. I am a Christian priest, and one of the tenets of Christianity is that when a wrong is done to you, even a great wrong, you turn the other cheek. That's what I intend to do. To turn the other cheek.”

“
Father, if you don't start cooperating, I'm going to lock you up. I swear it. I'll throw you in jail, IVs, heart monitors and all.”

“
Go ahead. The newspapers will have a field day. You'll lose your job. They'll talk about you on television.”

The story came out in fits and starts. “They were Petros' things,” the priest finally admitted. “I was holding them for him in my room in that armoire you saw, the one against the wall. I didn't know what to do with them after he died. I was afraid to leave them. Suppose you or one of your men stumbled across them? I would have been—how do the Americans say?—‘busted.' So I bought a padlock and moved it all into the crypt. I thought it was a good place. I hadn't shown the crypt to you and nobody else knew about it. These days no one goes to church. Soon, my brethren and I, we will be obsolete.”

“
You moved everything yourself?”

The priest nodded. “It wasn't easy. I had to take the bones out and move them separately. It took me most of the night.”

“
When was this?”

“
The night I was attacked. I'd just finished.”

“
You were in town during the day. Do you think someone followed you into the monastery?” That would solve the puzzle of the locked door.

“
No. I was nervous. I bolted the door as soon as I got there. I kept looking over my shoulder. It was still light then. I would have seen. There was no one in the courtyard. No one anywhere near me.”

“
Are you sure?”

“
I had a feeling someone was watching me at the laiki, but only for a moment. At the time, I thought it was God, angry at me for desecrating his house.” He closed his eyes, leaned back on the pillow. “Now, of course, I know better.”

“
How about the tunnel? Are you sure it was locked?”

“
Yes. I was afraid. It was getting dark and I'm an old man.”

“
When you were moving the artifacts, did you hear anything?”

“
Mice. Perhaps an owl. Creatures of the night.”

Patronas was taking everything down in his notebook. “You yourself didn't take the artifacts from the dig site. Petros was the thief.”

“
Petros was a boy who wanted a motorcycle. A poor boy, who wanted to ride through town with a pretty girl, to rev his engine and make a big noise. When he found those things ….” The priest hesitated. “Of course he was tempted. The truth is, I never knew exactly what he was storing in the armoire. He came and went as he pleased. Once or twice I saw him bring in gold. Other times, pottery, a scrap of metal. He kept it to himself. We agreed it was better that way.”