The Devil Takes Half (20 page)

“
It was worse what happened to the Jews,” Tembelos said, remembering a trip he'd taken to Munich to see his brother, who worked in a Volkswagen factory. They'd visited Dachau and he'd never forgotten it. The science experiments with the Russians in the icy water, the open skull and exposed brains of other men. Had the men been dead when they'd done it, he'd wondered? An air of hopelessness still hung over the place. It had been like catching a glimpse of hell.

The mastica bushes were still well cared for, the ground beneath them spread with white cloths or aluminum foil to catch the resin. The majority of the villages along this route had been built in the Middle Ages, the first floors opening out onto the street and used as stables.

Patronas decided this practice must still be in use, judging by the piles of manure and clouds of flies, the smell. The priest in the local church was hard of hearing and had no news of value, nor did Patronas or Tembelos discover much talking to the old women in the villages they visited. They wanted to complain about the deficiencies of their daughters-in-law, not catch murderers.

Their final stop was a boutique hotel near the Argentis mansion in Campos. Too expensive for locals, it was patronized largely by foreign tourists and Greek ship owners who lived abroad.

The clerk at the reception desk led Patronas into the kitchen, and he spent an hour talking to the staff—all local people. They discussed the families of Chiots who lived in England and came to the hotel—the bankruptcy of one, brought low by the prolific spending of the heir. No one had seen any artifacts pass hands or heard rumors of smuggling. They were all appalled by the death of Petros, less so the death of the Argentis woman.

“
Trelli
,
” one man said. “Crazy.” A woman that rich, working with men, sifting dirt for a living. They despised her stepmother, even going so far as to call her a gorgon, a legendary female monster of ancient Greece whose glance could turn a man to stone. They called her Medusa, too. There was no end of insults. Eleni's half-brother they liked better. He left generous tips and remembered the waiters' names. Not too familiar, the proper blend of warmth and distance. He would never be one of them, but for a rich person, he was okay. They loathed Petros' family, but for different reasons. Voula had brought shame on the island. Her boyfriend, they'd seen frequently in town, drinking and making friendly with the locals, but too often he let others buy and pinched cigarettes when they weren't looking. They called the American archeologist ‘Indiana Jones,' the British one ‘Brideshead,' after the BBC production of the same name that had recently aired on local television. The latter they suspected was a
poustis
, a homosexual. However, when Patronas questioned them about it, they admitted there'd been no sightings of McLean with a man, no Greek lover boys they knew of.

Patronas had been hoping to discover signs of new wealth as he drove around the island—an expensive car where there shouldn't have been one, a home built by someone who'd previously had nothing. Everything the waiters told him, he already knew. As police work, it had been a waste of time. Nothing. “
We spoke of winds and water
,” he muttered, recalling the old saying.

Either the shore is crooked or our boat's going the wrong way.

—
Greek proverb

T
he next morning Patronas reluctantly returned to Profitis Ilias and ordered his men to search the site again. The answer had to lie here; it could be no place else. Although he and the others walked four abreast over the entire area, they found nothing. Someone had been there, Tembelos reported back to him. A shepherd, probably, as the goats were no longer in the corral, but spread out on the slopes below, hobbling around on three legs, the fourth leg fettered to keep them from wandering too far off.

The disturbed earth near the summit was exactly what Patronas had thought—some peasant's secret garden. In daylight, the tomatoes were clearly evident in the dirt, fenced with chicken wire to keep the goats out. No, this was just another empty Greek hill. Torn shafts of lichen covered the rocks, the soil poor, gravel mostly interspersed with patches of clay. Brambles and thorns grew between the rocks, the only vegetation the goats had spared.

When the sun went down, Patronas handed Evangelos Demos a can of paint and ordered him to watch for the bats. “It's almost dark. They should be out any minute now. The paint glows in the dark. Mark the place where they come from.”

His assistant nodded, not liking any of this. “But, sir, they might be rabid.”

“
If they attack you, shoot them.”

“
How long do I have to stay up here?”

“
Until you locate where they come from. Till dawn, if necessary.”

He posted the others around the monastery and gave them the same assignment. “I'll take the corral. You two take the north and south sides of the hill. There's got to be another way in here. My hunch is, it's an underground passageway. It's imperative that we find it.”

“
Bats, Jesus,” Giorgos Tembelos said.

* * *

Drawing his gun, Patronas crept toward the dark figure on the far side of the corral. The goats were restive, and he could hear them milling around inside, their hooves clattering softly against the gravelly soil. He had been chasing bats in and out of the corral all night, hoping the animals would lead him to the secret entrance to the monastery—the one he was convinced existed. He had ordered Evangelos Demos and Giorgos Tembelos to do the same.

“
I've got my cellphone on,” he'd told them. “Call me if anyone approaches the monastery.”

He wondered what had happened, why they hadn't called, how the intruder had gotten past them. The figure was encased entirely in black, gleaming faintly in darkness, exactly as Costas Stamnas and Papa Michalis had described. Its skull looked distorted and Patronas saw no eyes, no face. Whoever it was, hunched over at the back of the corral.

Raising his gun, Patronas moved closer. He didn't know what it was that alerted the intruder, but suddenly he lifted his face and looked directly at Patronas. Then he bolted out of the corral and was gone.

“
Stop or I'll shoot!” It was then Patronas realized that it was his phone the man had seen, the phone he'd taken care to turn to vibrate and to stow in the front pocket of his shirt. His phone, which was all lit up and shining like a beacon.

Patronas fired twice and charged after the intruder, moving through the herd of goats as quickly as possible, shoving the animals roughly aside with his hands. They began to panic, bleating and climbing on top of one another, desperate to get away. Without the lantern, he couldn't see well and slipped over something. At first he thought it was another goat, but it wasn't. It was his assistant, Evangelos Demos, lying face down in the dirt.

Patronas knelt down and rolled him over. “Evangelos, Evangelos, can you hear me?” He raised the man up and cradled him in his arms. The back of his head was wet. Patronas looked around. There was no sign of Giorgos Tembelos or the dark shape that had been in the corral.

* * *

Evangelos Demos told Patronas he heard a noise and had gone to explore. It was a clanging noise, he said, the sound of metal hitting rock. He'd been knee-deep in goats when he'd seen the figure. Hooded it had been, black. He'd pulled his gun and fired a shot, but the intruder had been too fast for him and hit him hard with something, knocking him down.

“
Did you get a look at his face?” Patronas asked. They were in the emergency room of the hospital, his assistant on a stretcher beside him. He wished he could smoke. Doctors were walking around. The sight of them always increased his longing for cigarettes.

“
No. It happened too fast.”

His assistant had survived the assault, though he had required emergency surgery to close the gap in his skull. Aside from the Frankenstein-like stitches, Evangelos Demos appeared to be all right.
Probably it was the thickness of his skull that saved him,
Patronas thought uncharitably. He'd spent hours at his assistant's side and his initial concern had worn off. Though they'd discussed the incident repeatedly, Evangelos Demos had been unable to come up with a single scrap of useful information. His assistant was and remained what he'd always been—
stupid with a helmet on.

The shot Demos had fired had not hit his attacker, but a goat, a goat that had bleated pathetically as it bled to death, shitting and writhing in agony, irreparably compromising the crime scene. The two shots Patronas had fired had also hit goats, bringing the total for the night to three dead goats and no suspect. They'd buried the goats on the hillside. Patronas had felt like a fool, watching his men carry away the dead animals. There'd been bits of bloody fur stuck to the brush of the corral and the place smelled like a charnel house.

Evangelos Demos' entire family turned up at the hospital after breakfast and crowded around, offering their opinions in shrill voices. Patronas had never met such people. Between Evangelos' wife and his mother-in-law—a fearsome old battle axe from Sparta—they made a hash of everything, interrupting continually and correcting Evangelos Demos when he tried to tell Patronas his story.

Patronas finally ordered them out of the emergency room. “Now start over and tell me what happened,” he told his assistant.

First, he and Giorgos had gotten tired of wearing the night binoculars, Evangelos Demos said. They were heavy and made their heads hurt and so they'd discarded them. Then they'd gotten hungry and Giorgos Tembelos had gone back to the monastery to get a little snack for them. Apparently, the intruder had waited until his assistant was alone before making his move. He'd been on that hill somewhere, watching.

“
I called you on your cellphone,” Evangelos Demos said. “Last thing I did before I passed out.”

When Patronas had searched the area, he'd found a bloody shovel in the brush behind the lean-to, but no footprints or disturbed ground of any kind, no discarded cigarette butts. How could the man have gotten up there without leaving a trace? He had ordered his staff to bag the shovel and send it to the laboratory in Athens on the next plane, but he doubted the forensic specialists there would find anything. He was ingenious, this killer. He'd found a way to make himself invisible. Patronas rubbed his eyes. He felt like Theseus trying to get out of the labyrinth, only he was on his own. He lacked the thread.

“
I still don't understand how he got by us,” Evangelos Demos was saying. “Neither of us heard a thing.”

“
The goats could have masked the sounds.” Patronas got up from the chair and walked over to the window and looked out. “Evangelos, was there anything else, anything at all that you noticed about the man who hit you?”

Evangelos Demos frowned. “He smelled funny.”

“
What do you mean, ‘funny'?”

“
Like rubber.”

“
Shit. That's a great help, Evangelos. What, he smelled like tires?”

“
No. Different.”

* * *

At the press conference that afternoon, Patronas told the reporters that Evangelos Demos was a brave protector of the people, struck down in the line of duty by an evil criminal. He called him ‘courageous.' He might even have said ‘noble'; he couldn't remember.

The Prefecture of Chios had insisted on the press conference. He'd told Patronas it was necessary to quell the rumors that were circulating and to reassure the people of Chios. They needed to believe the police were not
psychopathis
,
the Prefecture had said, stalking bats and shooting up goats in the middle of the night. The people of Chios needed to believe they could rely on them.

And so Patronas had termed Evangelos Demos a ‘hero.'
A man can risk his life and still be an idiot,
he told himself, like the soldiers in the “Charge of the Light Brigade,” a poem he'd been forced to memorize in English class, riding into the valley of death. He could see Evangelos doing something like that. Riding into the valley of death with his saber drawn, his big thick head held high. When he spoke to the reporters, Patronas didn't mention the search for the bats or the dead goats. The Prefecture had been very specific on that point. Unkind even.

“
How much longer do you think you'll be up at Profitis Ilias?” one of the reporters asked.

Patronas thought for a moment. “Until we apprehend the murderer or murderers of Eleni Argentis and Petros Athanassiou. Until we take them into custody.”

We know nothing. The truth is hidden at the bottom of a well.

—
Greek proverb

S
tarting up the Citroen, Patronas left the hospital in Vrontados and drove back to Profitis Ilias. He'd called Giorgos Tembelos after the press conference and told him he'd take over for him and that he could leave. He passed the police cruiser on the road to the monastery and Giorgos Tembelos circled around and gave chase, honking and waving, having fun, glad to be leaving. Calling Patronas on the police walkie talkie, he shouted, “Did you see that last turn? I was on your Citroen the whole way. I clung to you like a saddle burr.”

“
Yes, you did, Giorgos. Like the thorn in the side of Jesus.”