The Devil Takes Half (17 page)

“
When did all this start?”

“
Around the end of June, I think it was. He told me there was so much down there, no one would miss it. A little pilfering, that's all. A little selling off of the less significant items.”

“
Father, there's enough there for a museum. That ivory statue? That's hardly a ‘less significant item.' What else had he dug up? The Nike of Samothrace? The Rosetta Stone?”

“
I don't know. He never said. He said it would be dangerous for me, that I shouldn't get involved. So I left him alone. I didn't know what was in there and I was happy in my ignorance. I was as surprised as anyone when I saw what he'd collected.”

“
You knew what he was doing was illegal.”

“
Petros said he'd use the money to help his grandmother. But the truth was, all he cared about was motorcycles, the bigger the better. He was a boy. That was his dream. So he stole a little. He meant no harm.”

“
Who did he sell the artifacts to?”

“
I don't know. I was just a stop on the underground railroad, as it were, a way station.”

“
The loot couldn't have come from the dig site. There's nothing there. So where did he get it?”

The machines began to flicker and an alarm bell sounded. The nurse came in and checked the priest's vital signs. “You have to leave,” she told the chief officer. “He needs to rest.”

“
Yes,” he told her, “just one moment.” To the priest, he said, “Petros had to be digging somewhere else. Tell me where.”

“
I wish I knew,” the priest said. The nurse gave him an injection and his head lolled back. He muttered something before he slept. “The voice of the Lord is upon the waters; the Lord is upon many waters.”

* * *

Patronas visited the priest once more before returning to Chios. Papa Michalis had said something important the last time they'd been together, but he couldn't pin down what it was. He was surprised to find the priest chatting with a young nurse, who was spoon feeding him pistachio ice cream. Some color had returned to his cheeks, and he gave a little wave when he saw Patronas.

“
Chief Officer!”

Perhaps he'd been wrong, Patronas thought, and the priest would survive after all. His heart was beating, steadily if erratically. As for the rest, the concussion, the stitched up skull, it probably wouldn't have any long-term effects. God knows, he was
arteriosklirotikos,
hard-headed enough.

“
You've been here for almost a week,” Papa Michalis said. “Your wife will be glad to see you when you get home.”

“
Sure she will. She'll greet me with open arms the way a hawk does a field mouse.”

“
Come, come. I've met your wife. She's not as bad as all that.” He winked at the nurse. “Show her a little kindness and she'll come around. That woman of yours, she'll bloom like a rose.” He motioned for the nurse to give him more ice cream.

“
A rose? My Dimitra?” Patronas looked at the IVs with interest, wondering what they were pumping into the old man besides ice cream.
Opiates? No, impossible. It must be hallucinogenics.
“No offense, Father, but you're a priest. What do you know of women?”

“
I know women. I had a mother.”

“
Trust me, Father. Wives and mothers, they're not the same.”

As weak as he was, Papa Michalis was unwilling to concede the point. “St. Paul said, ‘I understand all mysteries and all knowledge and I can move mountains, yet without love I am nothing ….' ”

“
St. Paul was celibate, Father. He had no wife.” He patted his pockets for his cigarettes. “I've got to go. If you need anything, call me. I left the number of my cellphone at the nursing station.”

“
Wait. Before you go, there's something I must tell you.” Papa Michalis reached for Patronas and pulled him closer. “Those questions you asked me? The truth is, I don't know. I don't know where Petros was digging or who he was selling to. I thought what he was doing, what
we
were doing, was harmless. I'm a stupid old man. You were right. I should have come to you in the beginning. If I'd come to you, the two of them, they'd still be alive.”

There were tears in the old man's eyes. Patronas got a tissue and gently wiped Papa Michalis' wrinkled face. “Let it go, Father. What's done is done. For God's sake, let it go.”

From the devil's farm, neither kids, nor lambs.

—
Greek proverb

S
urrounded by a barbed wire fence, the Chios airport consisted of a single runway in a field of grass. The winds of August had started, and dust stung Patronas' eyes as he crossed the tarmac. A crowd of Greek-Americans were in the terminal, talking to their relatives from Chios while they waited for their suitcases. The two groups were uncomfortable with one another, the kissing of the cheeks perfunctory, the ritualized greetings stiff. “
Geia sou, paidi mou,”
the natives said as they looked the new arrivals over, taking in the tight jeans on a middle-aged woman, the tattoo on the arm of her son.

The Chinese called those who lived abroad ‘overseas Chinese' and mocked them. They were not considered real Chinese, but rather an unfortunate hybrid, damaged by their association with the outside world and the strange ideas and customs they picked up there. Judging by the interplay between the Chiots and the Greek-Americans, there were ‘overseas Greeks' as well, and they, too, were considered inferior by the native-born. The new arrivals were Greeks … but not quite. Greeks … well, sort of. Watching them, Patronas felt sorry for the new arrivals. Their need to belong, so obvious it was almost palpable.

A restless people since the dawn of time, Greeks had journeyed forth to seek their fortunes. Once it had been Troy, now it was the United States. These voyages had become a cornerstone of the Greek experience, the agony of leaving and joy of return, a theme in the culture since the time of Homer. There was even a song about it, “
Paloma
,” they played in Piareaus for the immigrants on the big boats bound for America. Whatever they'd been seeking, they hadn't found it, those itinerant Greeks, judging by the ones who returned summer after summer, seeking the remembered paradise of their childhoods, a way of life that had long since vanished. For them, life was a constant journey home. Like Lot's wife, they were incapable of going forward, of fully living anywhere else, because they were so busy looking back, grieving for what they'd left behind.

Giorgos Tembelos met him at the airport. “How is the priest?”

“
Holding steady.”

“
He say anything about who did it?”

“
He didn't remember much. Only that when he tried to grab him, he couldn't get a grip, that he was ‘slippery.' ”

“
Slippery, eh?” Tembelos started the car and backed out of the parking lot.

“
Did you interview Titina Argentis and Petros' grandmother, find out what they were fighting about?”

Tembelos nodded. “Seems Eleni Argentis had a box of stuff that belonged to Petros. A wristwatch he'd broken at the dig, some CDs, that kind of thing. Grandma wanted it back.”

“
Anything of value in the box?”

“
No. Kid had nothing.”

“
How about Manos Kleftis? Did you check him out with the police on Mykonos?”

“
Yes. No police record.”

“
How about the boy's mother?”

“
Voula? Has stayed at her mother's side since you left. Boyfriend, on the other hand, he's been busy, took a day trip to Turkey and came back with a trunk full of cheap jewelry. Spent time at the beach, too. Swimming and talking to the foreign women. Partial to Swedes, that one—blondes.”

“
I ran the archeologists' passports, too. They're who they say they are. I would have called England and the United States, to run background checks, but my English ....” He shrugged.

“
Ach,” Patronas muttered. That meant he'd have to do it.

* * *

According to the police logbook, there'd been a second altercation between Titina Argentis and Petros' grandmother, in addition to the one at the laiki. The police had been summoned and asked to escort the old woman off the Argentis' estate.

Thinking that Titina Argentis' son, Antonis, might be more forthcoming than his mother, Patronas drove to the shipyard to see him.

It was a busy place. A vast oil tanker was tied up at the dock—rainbows of petroleum glinting on the oily surface of the water—and a second tanker was waiting to enter.

Argentis was standing outside, deep in conversation with a female employee. She was the kind Patronas thought all too common now in Greece—common being the operative word—tottering around on shoes with three and a half inch heels. They must be to give her extra height, the shoes, Patronas decided, inspecting her. It was difficult to look as if you came off a catwalk when you were five feet tall and had an ass like hers, the ass of a mare.

“
Ah, Chief Officer,” Argentis said, hailing Patronas. “What can I do for you?”

Patronas dispensed with the usual pleasantries. “I just wanted to tell you that I've started the process to declare your stepsister legally dead. Based on our findings, she was murdered within the same 24-hour period as her assistant, Petros Athanassiou.” He described the discovery of the hand, the lacerated thigh on the beach.

Antonis Argentis closed his eyes. “What happened? Was it a robbery? Is that why they were killed?”

“
My guess is, one of them found something at Profitis Ilias.”

“
Eleni would have told me. We talked nearly every day.”

“
Your mother said you never saw her.”

“
My mother didn't know.”

Patronas got out his notebook. He hadn't expected this.

“
I communicated with Eleni every day, either by cellphone or email. I visited her at the dig site. Harvard, too, when she was there.” He shook his head, the youth gone from his face. “Eleni, she meant the world to me.”

He watched the activity in the harbor for few minutes, fighting to control himself. “My mother … suffice to say, it was difficult being a child in my mother's house. I had no one to play with, no one to talk to. Oh, we had staff, of course. But they were there to be ordered about and do my mother's bidding, not to entertain me. Everything changed when my mother married Eleni's father and she came to live with us. I finally had someone to play with, a friend.” His eyes filled with tears. “I loved her, Chief Officer,” he said. “I loved my sister.”

“
Your mother ….”

“
In a word, my mother despised her.”

“
Why?”

“
Mirror, mirror on the wall. Because Eleni was young. Because she had no use for my mother and made fun of her pretenses. Because she was well educated and led a productive life. My mother had any number of reasons. Take your pick. I know my mother resented the hold Eleni had over her father, my stepfather. Hated the spell she cast over me. My mother excels at hating people.”

“
Your mother never realized the two of you had a relationship?”

He made a gesture of hopelessness. “It was a matter of survival. You have no idea what my mother would have said, the hell she would have put me through, if she'd known. Let alone what she would have done to Eleni.”

“
Killed her?”

“
Murder's not my mother's style, Chief Officer. She may be a bitch, but she's also a snob. She's far too fastidious to kill someone herself. As for hiring a murderer, well, it's just not done in the circles she travels in. It would also be expensive, and my mother values money above all else. She wouldn't have been willing to pay the price.”

Patronas made a note. “You said you visited Eleni at Profitis Ilias?”

“
Yes, many times. I must admit I didn't share her enthusiasm for all things Minoan. But I enjoyed being up there, discussing the shards with her, watching her and that boy, Petros, work. I brought them lunch when I came ….” He looked away, his eyes wet.

“
What was your impression of Petros?”

“
That his childhood wasn't so different from mine. That he was lost the same way I had been. You should have seen how desperately he sought Eleni's approval. He thought it was a big deal, what they were doing, that the work was going to change his life. Poor kid.”

“
You didn't come to his funeral.”

“
Again, my mother. She would have found it intolerable for me to attend the funeral of an employee, especially an employee of Eleni's.”

“
I heard your mother got into a fight with the boy's grandmother, that she came to your house and your mother had her thrown off the property.”

“
The woman probably dared to speak in the familiar to her.” The smile he gave Patronas was joyless. “A mortal sin in my mother's book, using the familiar rather than the formal when addressing her.”

“
I think it was about some property the old woman wanted back.”