The Devil Takes Half (4 page)

“
What the devil is a
galopetra
?”

“
They're how Evans found the ruins in Knossos. He'd been working in Peloponnese near Mycenae and noticed the strange amulets the local women wore, carved out of translucent rock. When he asked the women about them, they replied that the stones were talismans to protect them in childbirth—‘milk stones'. Evans followed the stones back to their source in Crete and eventually to Knossos. The amulets, you see, were actually Minoan seals.”

For an Orthodox priest, he seemed to know a surprising amount about Minoan archeology. “You're sure this is hers and not something she found here?”

“
Oh, yes. She always wore it. I chided her … an Orthodox Christian wearing a pagan symbol. But she said her father had bought it for her and that she'd never take it off.”

Patronas fingered the necklace. The charm was a pale blue stone, carved with the image of a woman surrounded by snakes. A superstitious man, he felt a chill as he held it. He pocketed it and returned to his inspection of the site.

* * *

Patronas' second-in-command, Evangelos Demos, arrived a little after ten a.m. with Giorgos Tembelos, a longtime veteran of the force. Alerted by a cloud of flies, Tembelos moved toward a rocky crevice some distance from the dig site and slowly worked his way down to the bottom of it. After a moment or two, he called to Patronas.

“
Boss, you'd better come.”

“
What is it?”

“
I think I found something.”

Patronas climbed down the crevice after him. The rocks on either side were splattered with blood and the air was thick with flies. Tembelos was kicking gravel away from something with the toe of his shoe, unwilling to touch whatever lay buried there with his hands. The mound was covered with dead weeds and loose stones, and insects crawled over it. Brushing them away, Patronas began to dig through the debris.

“
It's the kid,” he yelled in a strangled voice. “It's Petros Athanassiou. Someone slit his throat.”

Though the body had been covered with trash, birds had somehow found it. Patronas turned away, fighting not to be sick, when he saw what they had done to the boy's face.

“
Jesus Christ,” Tembelos whispered.

They quickly shifted the debris aside, taking care not to touch the body. After they finished, Patronas stood looking down at the corpse. The boy was dressed in an orange t-shirt and cotton shorts. His sandals were scuffed and caked with dust and he'd been badly in need of a haircut. The key chain in his pocket had a motorcycle insignia on it, and he had a silver baptismal cross hanging around his neck, the chain buried deep in the gaping wound in his throat.
Young and poor,
Patronas concluded after taking inventory. Both of the boy's shoes had been mended repeatedly and his watch was the kind sold in kiosks.
From his dress, he needs not fear the thief.

“
So young,” Tembelos said.

After Patronas took photographs and logged the details in his notebook, he and the other two policemen hoisted the boy's body on their shoulders and carried it up the hill to the monastery. Petros Athanassiou had been small for his age and didn't weigh much. No one spoke. The cicadas had fallen still, the only sound now the relentless drone of the wind.

The priest had been watching from a distance. “Holy Mother of God,” he cried when he saw their burden. He unlocked the door of the refectory and hurriedly motioned them in. He was crying openly, tears wetting his cheeks. He reached out and touched the boy's shirt as they passed. “Petros,” he kept saying. “Petros.”

Signaling the men to lay the body down on the table, he sank down beside it and covered his face with his hands.

Patronas could hear him weeping. After a few moments, the priest raised himself up again and left the room, returning with a handful of candles and a hymnal. He lit the candles and handed them around to the policemen, then opened the hymnal and began to chant the Orthodox prayer for the dead. His voice kept breaking, and it took him a long time to finish. Patronas and the others joined in near the end, singing in hushed voices. Rigor mortis had given way during the night and the congealed blood that covered the child had thickened and turned black. When the priest was done, he got a sheet and covered the boy with it. The candles cast long shadows against the walls and over the small, shrouded form on the table.

“
Who could have done this?” the priest asked.

“
I don't know,” Patronas answered.

Papa Michalis wiped his eyes. “He was a wonderful boy. He helped his grandmother and worked hard in school. Tried to do his best, always.”

“
How well did you know him?”

“
Pretty well. I tutored him a time or two last spring. He was having trouble with his ancient Greek and asked me to help him. He was a pleasure to teach. So quick, so amazingly quick. Eleni said he had the makings of a great scientist. You wouldn't believe what he'd ….”

Papa Michalis had been about to say something more, but stopped in mid-sentence. “Never mind.” He bent over the body, straightening the sheet that covered it. “It doesn't matter anymore.”

Patronas looked around, troubled by the empty rooms, the eerie silence that hung over the place. “Are you alone up here, Father?”

The priest nodded. “Marina Papoulis comes when she can, three or four times a week. She cooks for me, sees to the sweeping up, the laundry. If there's heavy work, Vassilis Korres does it, but he never comes unless I call him on the telephone.”

The chief officer asked his assistant to contact police headquarters and arrange for the removal of the body. “Have them take this, too.” He pulled the necklace with the
galopetra
out of his pocket and laid it down on the table. “The chain isn't broken. They must have removed it from her neck and dropped it by mistake. That means they took their time. Whoever did this was methodical.”

“
And Petros got caught in the crossfire?” the priest asked.

Patronas didn't have the heart to correct him. Slitting throats did not generate crossfire. Crossfire came from guns.

It is better that a priest, a doctor, and a policeman not enter one's house.

—
Greek proverb

P
etros Athanassiou's grandmother lived in a small weathered house in Castro, the poorest section of Chora, the capital of Chios. The area had housed Turks and Sephardic Jews during the time of the Ottomans. Now it was a congested, filthy slum, home to immigrant workers from Africa and Bangladesh.

Patronas drove his Citroen over the garbage-choked moat that led into the quarter. Most of the old houses had been broken up into apartments, their facades heavily defaced with graffiti. A gas station had been grafted onto the first floor of one. The plasterwork on the upper stories had rotted away, exposing the timber framing beneath, in marked contrast with the shiny gasoline pumps and neon sign out front.
A perfect symbol of Greece,
Patronas thought to himself. The uneasy relationship between the past and present there on display. The modern not well mastered, too often a graceless intrusion, the past just below the surface, beneath the walls, the soil, omnipresent. Oil cans and discarded auto parts blanketed the vacant lot behind the gas station. A flock of chickens were living there and watched the car warily from their perch on a soiled mattress. He'd often been called into Castro to break up fights, usually arguments between husbands and wives that had turned violent. He knew the area well and found the house easily.

He parked and helped Papa Michalis out of the car. He'd brought the priest along, thinking, as a religious man, he might know how best to console the old woman. He himself had no words to offer her. He'd been a policeman long enough to know that. He didn't buy the bunk people told themselves when something like this happened, the crap about earthly suffering and heavenly reward. Perhaps there was some rationale for the death of a child, some divine purpose. Perhaps on the day of reckoning, it would all make sense. He didn't think so. ‘Spare me the explanations,' he'd tell God when that day came.

She'd made an effort to grow a garden, he saw. The front yard was fenced in with chicken wire and planted with spindly-looking rose bushes. The whitewashed walls were dirty, splashed with mud where someone had watered the flowers. An elderly woman opened the door.

“
Good morning.” She looked back and forth between Patronas and the priest, confused as to why they'd come.

“
Good morning, Kyria Athanassiou,” Patronas said. “May we come in?”

She was wearing a blue-gray cotton housedress and had a black sweater thrown over her shoulders. Her hair was what Greek children called ‘
malia pisgrias,
' cotton candy hair. It had been hennaed some time ago and at least two inches of white now showed at the roots. They'd taken her by surprise and she was barefooted, not dressed for company. He recognized this as a sign of poverty. Shoes were to be hoarded and worn only when necessary.

The woman stood back to let them enter. The room was small and crowded, with furniture from another era, heavy and dark. The sofa and chairs were covered with handmade lace antimacassars, the top of the table with cheap souvenirs and painted china animals. The space smelled closed in, musky. She motioned for Patronas and the priest to sit down on the sofa. “A moment please.”

She returned a few minutes later with two demitasses of coffee, glasses of water and a plate of candied nectarines. It was one of those unspoken rules that governed life. A matter of
filotimo
, pride, to be able to offer something. Even during the war, when there had been nothing and people were starving, the Greeks had saved a little food, a sweet on a plate in the kitchen, to offer visitors. The guest was expected to refuse this food the first and second time it was offered. If the host offered it a third time, that meant there was other food in the house and the guest could eat. If not, the ritual had been observed, the shame avoided. And all this was done in silence. Nothing was ever said. The tray the woman offered reminded him of those times.

“
Kyria, I have bad news,” Patronas said.

She clutched at her sweater. He noticed she'd slipped into her shoes in the kitchen and put on a clean apron. She closed her eyes for moment. “Tell me,” she said quietly.

He guessed she was a refugee from Asia Minor, forced into exile by the genocidal rampage that had accompanied the first stirrings of Turkish nationalism at the turn of the century. From Smyrna, perhaps. Chios was full of such people. The few who'd survived the massacre, the burning of the Greek quarter of the city, had never recovered and wore their grief as if it were part of their national dress. His mother had been such a refugee and had the same sense of sorrow and darkness about her.

“
I'm sorry, Kyria. We found your grandson's body up at the monastery. Someone killed him.”

She didn't say anything for a long time. Just looked at him. Then, slowly, she began to keen, rocking back and forth in her chair, chanting the name of her grandson.

“
I'm sorry,” Patronas said again.

She cried for a long time, then wiped her eyes and stood up. “What about her? The woman?”

“
You mean Eleni Argentis? We don't know. We think they might have been killed at the same time.”

The woman nodded as if this pleased her. “I warned him about her. About that place. To stay away.” She began to cry again. “But he liked her. He couldn't keep away.”

“
What do you mean, ‘liked' her?”

“
He was a silly boy, young. I found a poem he wrote her.”

“
May I see it?”

She went to a bureau and opened a drawer. On top was a piece of ruled paper. Patronas scanned it quickly. She was right. It was a silly poem, written in pencil and smudged in places, the kind an immature boy would write to a woman he was sexually attracted to. “Did he ever talk about any visitors to the site? Anything suspicious he'd noticed when he was working there?”

“
No. When he first started he used to talk about what they did, but then she came by once to pick him up and I saw what kind of woman she was. Wearing the top of a bathing suit, clothes like that to go to work.” The old woman made as if to spit. “She thought because she was rich she could do as she pleased, that it didn't matter. I told Petros she was a dirty woman, a
vromiara.
”

Seeing Papa Michalis, she covered her mouth with her hand. For a moment, she'd forgotten the priest was there and now was embarrassed she'd let the vulgarity, the word for whore, slip in front of him. “I told him to find another job. But he wanted to buy a motorcycle and she offered him more money than any other work would bring in.”

“
And so he stayed on.”

She nodded. “He never talked to me about her again.”

“
Perhaps he spoke to someone else. His mother, perhaps?”

“
How do you think I know about women like that? His mother was one. That's why she lives in Athens. She had a baby, a baby and no husband. There was no place on Chios for her. She left Petros with me when he was six months old and took off. I'm the one who raised him.”