The Devil Takes Half (25 page)

Patronas thought he heard something and clambered deeper, not knowing how far the shaft penetrated the earth or what he'd find when he reached the bottom. His flashlight was losing power and he knew he was destroying evidence, but he stumbled on, praying she was still alive.

It was damp in the hole, the smell of decay overwhelming. The darkness was total, the fading light from his flashlight barely penetrating the gloom.

Patronas dug out his phone and called headquarters. “Bring floodlights and a stretcher,” he ordered. “Hurry.”

Slipping on his gloves, Patronas inched forward. He turned the flashlight off a few minutes later, wanting to preserve the battery. The darkness was beyond anything he'd ever experienced. It was like being blindfolded. Desperate, he fumbled to turn the flashlight back on, his hands shaking. He was four to five meters underground, standing at the entrance to an immense cave. But unlike other caves he'd been in, this one had no stalactites or standing pools of water. Its walls were smooth, the floor even. He moved his foot back and forth. It wasn't lava he was standing on, but a chunk of roughly hewn stone, a pavement of sorts.

Clay pots, each about two meters square, lined the wall closest to him, hundreds of them. He raised the lid of one. Inside was a skeleton, its knees tucked up against its chest. It was decorated with lapis and gold, its bony fingers adorned with rings. Its teeth, bared in a grimace, were a thing of terror in the darkness. He let the lid down and checked another. It, too, held a skeleton. So it had been death they'd been smelling. Ancient death. A cemetery.

Finding no trace of Marina Papoulis, Patronas pushed farther into the cave, edging deeper and deeper into the darkness. No light penetrated this space, the endless blackness at the far reaches of the cave. Patronas wondered how far it extended beneath the monastery and surrounding hills. He swung the flashlight back and forth, as if the gloom were a cobweb he could sweep away at will. He couldn't see beyond the circle of light and dropped to his hands and knees. He was afraid of falling, losing his way in this world of night.

He didn't know how long he'd been crawling when he came to the chiseled opening in the rock. The blocks fit seamlessly together and ventilation shafts were cut into the rock overhead; he could feel cool air pouring in all around him. Holding his flashlight tightly, Patronas inched forward. After a few minutes, he stood up. He was looking out on a small city.

The devil takes half.

—
Greek proverb

H
e could see streets lined with houses, the polished ceiling of the cave forming a protective arch above them. The houses were small, built one on top of the other like seats in a stadium, and wound down to the floor of the cave, lost somewhere in the darkness. They looked to have been made of mud brick and were nearly identical in their construction to houses he'd seen on Thera and Mykonos.

“
Marina!” he bellowed. He stumbled through the ancient village, carefully inspecting the ground underfoot, seeking some trace of her. A thin layer of grayish dust covered every surface and muted his steps as he went. The pine beams that had once held the roofs in place had all rotted away, creating an intricate labyrinth, a maze of walls and alleyways, terrifying in the gloom.

Playing his flashlight over the interior of one of the houses, he was surprised to see the walls were painted with a delicate tableau of plants and gazelles. Four thousand years old and he could still see the colors, the ochres and greens, gleaming faintly in the weak light. He continued on to the second house, and the third, hurriedly making his way through the abandoned city, this Minoan ghost town. He saw clay figurines spread out on the floor—tiny chariots and cooking pots, farm animals, toys, he guessed, and an ivory game board with pieces still in place. He could smell cigarette smoke in the air and saw signs of digging everywhere, holes where something had been removed, places where the walls had been breached. He tried to measure the intruder's footprints against his own, seeking to determine if they belonged to a man or a woman, but it was too difficult, balancing on one foot, juggling the flashlight in the dark. “Later,” he told himself. “I'll get forensics up here and we'll turn this place inside out.”

He found a small statue lying next to one of the ancient coffins and pocketed it carefully, hoping for fingerprints. Unlike Eleni Argentis' orderly excavation, whoever had been working here had done so in haste. Some of the ditches were barely a foot deep, as if someone had probed the earth, found nothing and quickly moved on. He saw little piles of signet seals by a doorway,
galapetras.
He scooped up as many as he could and began going through them in the palm of his gloved hand. They were like jewels and incised with Minoan motifs, a bull or waving palms, the omnipresent snake goddess. The seals would be easy to transport and bring a fortune on the black market. Whoever was looting the site knew what they were doing.

Something stirred in the deep recesses of the cave.

Patronas paused, his heart pounding.

A cloud of bats came streaming by him, careening wildly as they returned to the shelter of the cave. An immense twitching mass, there must have been over five thousand of them. Their whispery fluttering terrified him, and he put his hands over his head and ducked down, willing them away.

Deeply traumatized, he resumed his search a few minutes later, spying a faint trail of blood on the ground, tricklings of it, still sticky, in the grit. The graveyard smell was back. Stronger, it seemed to fill the air around him. He gagged when he came upon a scattering of loose bones on the floor of the cave, brittle and yellow with age. The thin rill of blood led to a row of massive amphorae. The lid of one was slightly askew. A woman's shoe lay nearby. Black patent leather, it looked as if it had never been worn.

Whimpering softly, he pushed the lid aside. Inside was Marina's naked body, her arms crossed over her chest, her head lowered as if asleep. She'd been beaten and slashed with a knife. The cuts weren't deep, but there were a lot of them. Whoever had done this had taken their time. She was wearing a heavy amber necklace and a pair of gold bracelets. The jewelry looked to be ancient, and Patronas guessed it had once adorned the bones that now littered the ground at his feet. Someone had dumped the skeleton out of the sarcophagus, stripped it, and placed Marina's body inside, dressed it with the jewelry, and closed it up again. Blood caked the beads of the amber necklace, which meant that whoever had done this had done it while she was still alive, while she was dying. Her neck had been cut nearly in half and a small plate left in her lap to collect the blood. Human sacrifice, or a close approximation.

He staggered back. He was sure he must be somewhere under Profitis Ilias. He waved his flashlight around and caught sight of a square of burnished metal gleaming faintly above him. He searched for the staircase he knew must be there, found it and started up as fast as he dared. When he reached the top, he crawled through the hole and lay there, rocking back and forth, sobbing quietly. As he'd anticipated, he was in the courtyard of the monastery. All the lights were on, just as he had left them. The smell of death was strong in the night air.

Patronas looked up at the sky. He could see Orion and Mars, the Milky Way a great swath of white gauze. They could have his job, he thought. He didn't want to go back down into the cave. He no longer feared being entombed under the well or encountering the ghost of the Minotaur or its dead masters. No, he admitted to himself. It was meeting up with the man who had done this he was afraid of, the monster who had destroyed Marina, cut her up like chum on a beach.

* * *

After radioing for help, Patronas finally returned to the cave. He removed his shirt and covered Marina Papoulis' body with it. He'd found a bloody envelope near her body. Inside were pages of notes, so soaked with blood as to be nearly illegible. Airplane schedules for June and July.

“
Ach, Marina, to die for this.”

He sat as close to her body as he dared without disturbing the crime scene. In the silence of the cave, he thought for a terrifying moment that he could hear her blood dripping onto the plate but then realized it must be the water in the well above, splashing against the stones in the courtyard. Beetles were at work in the dust, spiders, too, and he killed as many as could, grinding them into the dirt with the heel of his shoe. He kept clicking the flashlight on and off, fearful he would lose his mind if it went out and he was shut up here in the darkness. Finally, he began to weep again, crying for Marina, for her husband and her children. He even found himself praying—long, rambling, incoherent prayers—begging God to keep the shadows at bay, the evil he'd stumbled across from overwhelming him.

He couldn't bear to think of Marina's last moments on earth. He touched the clay pot that held her body, wishing he'd never gotten her involved, wishing many things.

* * *

Patronas guessed it was close to dawn when he heard the first car. He had a sense of increased light, of growing warmth in the dank interior of the cave. “Bring a crime kit,” he'd told Tembelos on the phone. He planned to process the scene himself. Judging by the people shouting, the thundering of equipment being unloaded, he and the others must be here. Not wanting them to find him lying there, groggy with fatigue, he brushed himself off and climbed out of the cave to meet them. “Go over the corral for fingerprints,” he told Tembelos. “You'll need to take an impression of the footprints, too. Be mindful of the spatter. It's on the flat rock there.”

Tembelos nodded, thinking Patronas wasn't himself, all business and strangely unemotional, as if the murder of Marina Papoulis was a routine occurrence. His own mother, a woman from Sparta, had been like that. When his father had died, killed in a car accident, she'd shed no tears, not one. Stone-faced, she'd identified the body, fingering the bloody stains in the front of his shirt, all without a sound. Crying would have lessened her pain and she hadn't wanted that, she'd told him. She wanted to keep the suffering alive, the agony of her loss fresh. It was as if doing so, in some small measure, would preserve her loved one as well. His boss, Patronas, he was the same. He would feel right at home in Sparta.

The policemen waited silently above ground while Patronas removed Marina Papoulis' body from its clay tomb, gently loaded it on a gurney and signaled for them to raise it, working the ropes he'd rigged around it like a pulley. He ordered his men to stay away from the cave, claiming it was too dangerous, that the roof was weak and might collapse, making a show of shaking the beetles out his hair and wiping the blood off his gloves. He didn't tell them about the city, the wealth of Minoan artifacts beneath their feet. They were poor men with families. They might be tempted, as Petros Athanassiou had been, to pilfer the ruins. If word got out, half of Chios would show up, people eager to lay claim in a sort of Minoan gold rush, and he wanted to trap the murderer before that happened.

After the darkness of the cave, the sunshine was blinding, and he was surprised to see Spiros Korres standing there, talking to the shepherd on the other side of the corral. The farmer'd caught the scent of riches and was not to be put off. Patronas ordered Tembelos to escort both men away from the monastery and make sure they stayed away. There was a path now, leading from the monastery to the corral, the brush beaten down by his men travelling back and forth. The goats had been driven off, housed in a makeshift pen on the far side of the hill. He could hear them bleating plaintively in the distance.

Thirsty, he went to the kitchen to get a drink of water. Papa Michalis, sitting at the table, greeted him sadly. Where had the priest come from? Patronas wondered. Had he hobbled up here on his crutches? Patronas got himself water, then opened a cupboard and rummaged around, looking for something to eat. He found a heel of stale bread, picked up a knife to cut it, then put the knife down again, overcome, remembering Marina's wounds. Without a word, Papa Michalis got up, limped over and took the knife from his hand. He motioned for Patronas to sit down while he cut the bread. Patronas ate half a slice then pushed it away and lit a cigarette, his hand trembling as he worked the lighter.

The priest watched him smoke.

“
What's that you say in church?” Patronas could feel his face start to crumple, to come apart like a flooded riverbank. “It's on that list of things we pray for … ‘a peaceful end to our days without pain, suffering or shame.' Marina had pain. The forensic man said she was still alive when he cut her. She had suffering and she had shame.” He put his hands over his face and started to sob.

Papa Michalis got out a bottle of brandy, poured Patronas a glass and pushed it toward him across the table. “One day it will be easier,” he said. “One day you will be able to bear it.”

A drowning man grips his own hair.

—
Greek proverb

A
fter overseeing the removal of the body to headquarters, Patronas and Papa Michalis drove to Campos to tell Nikos Papoulis the news. He was alone in the house and said he'd sent the children to stay with their grandmother the night Marina went missing.

Patronas took a deep breath. “She's dead, Nikos, I'm sorry. We found her body.”

“
But how?”

“
Someone killed her.”

“
Killed Marina?!”

He started to scream and kept screaming, “No! No!”