The Devil Takes Half (23 page)

Without looking up from his screen, the Englishman nodded.

What to say? Papa Michalis had never interviewed a suspect before. What would Sherlock Holmes do? He'd lie, of course, lie in the interest of justice. “I don't know if you've heard, but the police discovered the identity of the murderer. They're planning to send the fingerprints to Interpol for confirmation.”

Devon McLean turned and looked at him. He had his attention now. “You mean they haven't done so already? I would have thought dusting and identifying fingerprints would have been de rigueur, especially in a capital crime. But then this is Chios, isn't it? Known since ancient times for the stupidity of its inhabitants. Greeks tell moron jokes about Chiots, don't they? Or has your position been usurped by the Pontios?”

He was speaking Greek, so his words created quite a stir around the pool. Unfortunately, what he was saying was true, the priest thought, especially in Athens. If you said you were from Chios, people automatically assumed you had trouble screwing in light bulbs.

He tried another lie. He felt like he was poking a stick at a snake. “You arrived on July twentieth, I believe, by way of Cyprus?”

“
I never said July twentieth,” the Englishman snapped. “I said July twenty-fifth! And for your information, I've been on this God-forsaken island twenty-one days now. That's an unacceptable length of time to be held like this. I've done nothing wrong, and yet the police forced me to surrender my passport. That's a violation of human rights anywhere in the world, in any country. There's only one place in the free world where they detain people like this and that is at Guantanamo. And, in answer to your other question, I didn't come here directly from Egypt. I came on Olympic Airlines by way of Athens. There were no direct flights from Cyprus to Chios, Father. You should know that. This island is hardly an international destination. It's not Majorca or Capri.” McLean turned back to his computer and began scrolling down the page. “Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got work to do.”

“
One more question. Do you know when Alcott arrived in Chios?”

“
No, I don't. You'll have to ask him.”

Judging by the man's hostility, Papa Michalis concluded he'd gotten all he was going to get. He finished his coffee and reached for his crutches. “I appreciate your cooperation,” he said softly.

The Englishman grabbed his arm. “What? No more questions? Are you sure? You don't want to know where I stowed the knife? What I did with my bloody clothes?”

The priest shook his head.

“
Good, I'm glad. I was beginning to feel out of sorts with you. A little fed up with your feeble efforts to entrap me. Angry, like Henry the Second.” He pulled him down closer. “You've heard of Henry the Second, haven't you, Father? He was the king who had that priest Thomas Becket killed. Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury? The king told his men: ‘Who's going to rid me of this meddlesome priest?' And they took care of it. Perhaps he was drawn and quartered. I don't remember. Anyway, suffice to say he meddled and he died.”

Papa Michalis felt a chill.
What was that?
he wondered as he hobbled away.
A threat? Was he threatening me?

* * *

“
Are you sure you want to go on?” Marina Papoulis asked. She and Papa Michalis were sitting in the car outside the hotel. “You look a little tired. We can go home now if you'd like. Start again tomorrow.”

“
No, it's only two blocks away. Let's finish.”

The part of Castro where Petros Athanassiou's grandmother lived consisted of a cluster of small houses built by the Greek government in the 1920s for the refugees from Smyrna. The refugees had moved on, and the area was now occupied by immigrant workers and their families. Contractors had dumped debris from construction sites in the vacant lots, and the unpaved roads were lined with aging metal warehouses in addition to the public housing. Most of the residents worked in the tannery at the end of one of the streets. The smell was all-pervasive and had made the area one of the poorest on Chios. Maria parked the car and they got out. The wind was blowing, stirring the gritty yellow soil, the garbage that edged the street. A headless doll had been caught in a drain by the curb. Papa Michalis felt as if he was standing at the end of the world.

He started toward the makeshift church at the end of the road. “We'll start with the local priest. A place this small, he'll know the family.”

The priest greeted them warmly. He spoke with an island accent and explained that this was his first posting after graduating from the Orthodox seminary in Athens. No older than thirty, he was a corpulent young man with a high-pitched voice. “I'm expecting to be reassigned any day. The neighborhood is full of Muslims now,” he said by way of explanation.

“
Did you know Petros Athanassiou, the boy who was killed?”

“
No, but I know his grandmother. She's one of the most devout women in the parish. His mother had gone to Athens to live before I got here, but I heard a lot of rumors about her.” The priest wiggled his heavy body like a belly dancer, making it clear what the nature of those rumors had been.

“
Were she and Petros in touch?”

The priest nodded. “He was always writing her, begging her to come home. His grandmother discussed it with me. She didn't know what to do. She didn't want her back.”

“
How about Manos Kleftis? You know him?”

“
Her lover?” His tone was contemptuous. Respectable women didn't have lovers. Lovers were for sluts and whores. “No, I'm afraid I haven't had the pleasure.”

After leaving the priest, Papa Michalis and Marina Papoulis worked their way through the neighborhood. Most of the residents were from Pakistan and did not speak Greek, but the one or two who did volunteered that everyone would be glad when Petros' mother and her ‘man' left. He apparently frightened them, though exactly why was hard to determine, given the language difference. A dog whose barking he'd objected to had disappeared. A man who'd argued with him over a parking place, his
apothiki—
storage space—had caught fire. That sort of thing. A group of ragged children were playing in a weed-strewn field, kicking a soccer ball around and yelling. Any one of them could have taken the dog, the priest decided. It probably meant nothing.

“
When did Manos Kleftis come here?” Marina asked a man who was selling foreign newspapers at the kiosk by the church.

The Pakistani hesitated, worried. “Why you ask?”

“
Petros Athanassiou,” the priest said.

“
Yes, the dead boy,” the man said. “Sad.” Not looking up, he continued to sort the magazines and put them out on the rack at the front of his stand. “Mr. Manos, he came a month ago.”

“
Has anyone visited him here?”

“
A man. Foreign, not Greek.”

“
What kind of foreign man?”

“
I don't know. I only saw from far away. Mr. Manos, he wasn't home. Man, he went away.”

“
What did he look like?”

He waved his hand above his head. “Like cartoon.”

* * *

“
Cartoon? What do you suppose he meant by that?” Patronas asked when they reported back to him.

“
Probably one of the archeologists. McLean maybe.” Marina Papoulis was silent for a moment, lost in thought. “They still would have needed someone else, someone who knew Chios.”

She turned and looked at him, her face serious. “I think they've been playing ‘papas' with us,” she said, referring to the famous Greek con game. A card shark would deal out three cards, one of which was always a king, and begin moving them around. He'd take bets as to which card was the king. No matter how many times someone played, they would never find the king. The card shark always won.

Then came a flood of evils.

—
Greek proverb

M
arina Papoulis looked at her computer screen again, then printed out the pages and put them in the envelope with the rest. Yesterday, after she and Papa Michalis had returned home, they'd gone over everything again. She'd read her notes back to him and he'd added his own thoughts. Poor Father. He'd dozed off at one point and cried out in his sleep. “Father, wake up,” she'd said, shaking him gently by the shoulder. “You're having a nightmare.” He told her he'd been dreaming of the assault at Profitis Ilias, remembering the terrifying feeling of weightlessness as he plummeted to the ground.

At the travel agency that morning it had been quiet, and she'd used the time to type up her notes. She'd included her interpretation of what the Pakistani had told them. She'd even put in how the Englishman had threatened the priest. The pages she'd printed off the Internet were last. She turned off her computer and pushed her chair back. Tomorrow was August Fifteenth, a national holiday, and there would be feasting, followed by a festival with a live band and dancing in the streets. She needed to get home and start preparing the food. She was planning a surprise for Patronas, but it could wait. She'd drop it off on her way home from liturgy tomorrow.

* * *

Patronas had wanted to get to Profitis Ilias early, to explore the hole when the sun was high in the sky, but a fatal traffic accident near the harbor had taken precedence. A young tourist from Germany on a rented motorbike had been run off the road and killed by a hit and run driver. The Coast Guard had legal jurisdiction over the harbor and surrounding area, and it had taken hours to establish who would supervise the case. He and his men had gathered testimonies from eyewitnesses. Fortunately, a cruise boat had just docked and there had been a lot of people in the street. By five p.m. they had cleared the case and made an arrest: an eighteen-year-old Romanian laborer who'd been driving a truck for the first time. Concentrating on maneuvering the truck, he hadn't seen the motorbike and panicked when he heard the crash. He was deeply sorry, he told Patronas in broken Greek. He hadn't meant for it to happen.

After making the arrest, Patronas had summoned a high school teacher he knew who spoke German and returned to the station to call the girl's parents and make arrangements.

The sun was down by the time he and Tembelos finally reached Profitis Ilias, the courtyard full of shadows. The hole beneath the well was even darker than Patronas remembered it.

“
Do we have to do this tonight?” Tembelos asked. He was on his hands and knees with his head stuck in the hole, peering down into the dank space. “I can't see a thing.”

Patronas cursed
.
Although they'd removed two more of the metal panels in an effort to see better, it had made no difference. The gloom under the well was all encompassing. He moved his police flashlight back and forth, trying to see what lay below. He could make out a battered stone staircase built into the wall closest to him, but that was it. Neither he nor Tembelos had acknowledged the presence of the staircase or made any move to see where it led.

Tembelos withdrew his head. “Easy to miss a step in the dark, hurt ourselves, if we do this now.”

Patronas let himself be persuaded. Truth was, he could use a break. He'd been up since four a.m. working on the hit-and-run, and he was worn out. He and his men had been occupying Profitis Ilias for weeks now. Aside from the assault on Evangelos Demos, he had seen no trace of the killer. Whoever the man was, he was clever. He wouldn't be waiting for them tonight at the bottom of the hole.

Clicking off his flashlight, he stood up and dusted himself off. “Okay, Giorgos. We're done here.”

Before they left Profitis Ilias, Patronas made sure the gate to the tunnel was bolted and that the lights were turned on in the courtyard and all the rooms. He ordered Tembelos to bring the police scanner up from his car and set it near the well. If the murderer was in the vicinity, he wanted him to think the police were still here, occupying the monastery.

“
Turn it on high,” he told him. “Make it loud.”

When he'd finished, Patronas locked the metal doors behind them with the key Papa Michalis had given him and started down the path to the parking lot.

“
Leave your police cruiser where it is,” he told Tembelos when they got to the lot. “I'll give you a ride home in my Citroen.”

After he backed out of the parking lot, he returned to barricade the entrance and string crime scene tape across the gravel path. It wasn't only the killer he wanted to keep away. He wanted to make sure Spiros Korres or his son weren't up here looking for buried treasure while he was away.

“
How about I take the day off tomorrow?” Tembelos said as they drove out. “It's August Fifteenth. I'm entitled.”

“
Sure,” Patronas said. “I'll stop by here at some point, keep watch on the place. We can explore the hole after the holiday.”

* * *

The next morning Patronas drove to Profitis Ilias. All appeared to be as he'd left it. Both entrances were locked and he could hear the police scanner, faint above the wind. He left and returned to the center of town.

Strings of colored flags decorated the campanile of the cathedral, and a makeshift amusement park had been set up in a vacant lot next door. Patronas could hear the whine of the merry-go-round and children laughing.