The Devil Takes Half (40 page)

From Tembelos' tone, it was obvious he considered Kyria Athanassiou a folk hero, a brave woman who'd righted a great wrong. He would have let the old woman go if it had been up to him.

“
She's still in the hospital. There's going to be an internal investigation.” Tembelos laughed out loud, unable to contain himself. “Her lawyer insisted on it. ‘Undue force.' ”

Patronas was gratified that Evangelos Demos had made a hash of his first assignment. Being Chief Officer wasn't as easy as he'd made it seem over the years. It was hard work. Thankless. Look at him. Twenty years on the job and what did he have to show for it?

“
They ever talk about me, the men?”

“
Some. You know how it is.” Tembelos looked embarrassed. “Shame they took your pension away. What are you going to do?”

“
I don't know. The priest wants to open up a detective agency. Cash in on my experience.”

“
Maybe you should. People might hire you. You never know.”

As an endorsement, it was wanting.

“
One thing I always wondered about,” Tembelos said. “Why'd Marina go to Profitis Ilias that day? She must have known no one was there.”

“
She had some papers she wanted to give me. Travel schedules, dates I'd asked her to check on. I'd told her when people said they arrived on Chios and asked her to verify it. She discovered McLean arrived earlier than he'd said, as had Kleftis and Voula Athanassiou. She told Papa Michalis, ‘They're playing the priest with us,' which meant she thought three people were involved—McLean and two others. I don't know who she thought the other two were. Kleftis and Voula would be my guess. I doubt she suspected the boy's grandmother, but she came pretty close to solving the case before she died.”

“
Why didn't she come to the station with it? Why go to Profitis Ilias?”

Patronas swallowed his ouzo and poured himself another. He'd kept silent about his wife's role in the death of Marina Papoulis. Even when the Prefecture had accused him of negligence with respect to sealing off the monastery, he hadn't said a word. Why, he wasn't sure. Perhaps to shield her, to keep what she'd done between them, within the family, so to speak. He was her husband, after all. He set his glass down hard. No reason to protect her now.

“
My wife sent her there.”

“
Dimitra sent her to Profitis Ilias?”

“
That's right. Knowing the risks, knowing there was a murderer loose on that hillside.”

“
What'd she have against Marina?”

“
Marina was my childhood sweetheart. My wife was jealous.”

Tembelos whistled. “Holy shit.”

“
We're separated now. She's staying at her mother's.”

Let Tembelos think he'd thrown Dimitra out. Giorgos had big mouth. He'd tell everyone on the island that Dimitra and he were finished and why before the day was out. Patronas welcomed the gossip. Let people see Dimitra for what she really was: Medea made real.

“
Must be hard,” Tembelos said. Patronas could tell he was shocked, trying to work it through.

Patronas took another sip of ouzo. “What happened to the cave?”

“
Archeologists arrived and took possession, cordoned off everything. You should go up there. You won't believe it. Looks like a stage set, way they rigged it up, huge lights and all. Bunch of Greeks and Americans. Alcott is in charge, working the dirt with a sieve the way my mother did the flour. Alcott said it'll take forty years to go through the site.”

“
Good luck to them. Remember you called the cave ‘the lair of Satan'? You were right. Anyone who goes near it comes to grief.”

“
You went there. You survived.”

Patronas studied the rheumy old men at the next table. Judging by their weather-beaten faces, they'd once been fishermen. He was like them now, a fisherman who no longer went to sea, his life's work but a memory.

He swallowed what was left of his ouzo. “That's a matter of opinion,” he said.

The jug comes to us in turn.

—
Greek proverb

A
fter he was fired, Patronas spent a lot of time on the hills behind Profitis Ilias, taking the bus and getting off by the Korres' farm. He explored the area where the corral had been and eventually found other entrances to the cave. The crag proved to be riddled with openings once he knew what to look for. The American archeologist, Alcott, told him the holes would have provided ample natural ventilation for the Minoans living in the space below. Many of the openings were covered with discs, the metal so corroded as to be almost unrecognizable. He assumed the bats left each night through the openings, though he never pinpointed which ones. Alcott suggested the Minoans hadn't built the network of holes themselves. They'd simply taken advantage of the porous quality of the rock and natural shafts left from some prehistoric eruption.

What had they had been so afraid of?
Patronas wondered.
These Minoan people? Was it another tidal wave, a second onslaught of water? Or was it man? The Mycenaens perhaps, come to take what little the Minoans had salvaged from their ruined lives? Or had another, more malevolent group of men once haunted these shores?

In the course of his walks, he'd come to know Alcott well. The American always stopped what he was doing when he saw him and came over to talk to him, pointing out the progress they'd made with the excavation, what they'd discovered and what it meant. They'd occasionally had a beer together and once or twice shared a meal. Patronas had revised his opinion of the American. Aside from his bothersome American heartiness and ridiculous Indiana Jones persona, he seemed to be a pretty good man. Hard working. Passionate. He was even trying to raise funds to build a museum on Chios for the relics he'd found in the cave. ‘A tribute to Eleni Argentis,' he told Patronas. ‘Something to remember her by.'

Patronas wished he could do the same for Marina. House her in a tomb like the Taj Mahal. He'd even talked it over with Papa Michalis. ‘Her children will be her legacy,' the priest had said. ‘If you want to honor her, help her husband look after them.'

Alcott had said the Minotaur might actually have existed. ‘It wasn't a bull,' he told Patronas, ‘but a man, a priest most probably dressed as one.' The acrobatic dancing depicted in the frescoes in Thera, the people riding the bull's horns, had not been a circus or any kind of play. It had been a rite of human sacrifice, ritual blood-letting. Patronas liked the idea. It reminded him of Kleftis, his black wetsuit and camouflage. Evil always had a human face.

* * *

“
How'd you like to come and work for me?” Alcott asked Patronas one evening in the middle of October. They were sitting in a taverna in Chora, drinking
retsina
and eating
mezedakia
.

Patronas speared a meatball. “Doing what?”

“
Supervising the security of the site. There's a fortune buried on the hill and we've got twenty local people digging, in addition to the foreign archeologists on the team. You know the people here. You could make sure there's no pilfering from the site.”

“
That's a lot of responsibility. It's a pretty big place.”

“
I'll pay you well. Twice as much as you were making as a cop. There's a consortium of American and European universities participating in the excavation here, so I've got plenty of money. If that's not enough, write down your terms and I will try and meet them.”

Patronas tried to keep a poker face. He'd never negotiated a salary before. It was like playing cards without the rules, without knowing if aces were high or low—which card to play, which one to hold. “I'd probably be working for you for years, from what you said about the site. Would I get a pension when I finished?” he asked. “I'm not a young man.”

“
I'm sure it could be arranged.”

“
What would be the nature of the work? Would I have to sleep there?” Just thinking about spending another night in the cave made Patronas' skin crawl.

“
Of course not. I thought you could put a team of men together. Install some security devices. Work in shifts.”

“
When would you like me to start?”

Alcott smiled. “Tomorrow.”

* * *

The priest was wearing an apron, stirring something on the stove, when Patronas returned to the house. At least it wasn't
trahana
. They'd been living on boiled strips of dough,
trahana,
for days now. Apparently the priest saw food not as a reward or expression of God's bounty, but as a penance. And suffer they did, eating one brackish mess after another, every bowlful the color of
mufti
. Patronas had heard the English ate something called ‘mushy peas.' To his chagrin, he'd joined them, become a mushy pea eater.

“
I'm making
briam
,” the priest told him. “Eggplants were on sale at the laiki.” He did all the shopping and had proven to be exceedingly cheap, recycling leftovers and adding water to make them go further. He reached for the salt shaker and shook it vigorously over the pan. The lid was loose and more went into the pot than he intended.

“
Oops,” he said.

Shit,
Patronas thought. Tonight it wouldn't be fresh water for dinner, it'd be salt. He'd joked once about the priest's cooking, quoting the Bible, “
I will feed the wormwood and give them water of gall to drink
,” but the old man had looked so hurt he never did it again, eating whatever he put in front of him without complaining. Aside from the priest's limitations in the kitchen, he'd proven to be a good roommate and Patronas had grown fond of him. He cleaned up after himself, listened attentively when Patronas spoke. He'd even wept a little when Patronas described his wife's actions the day Marina was killed.

“
You mean it didn't have to happen?” the priest had said, wiping his eyes. “It was an act of malice?”

“
That's right. If Dimitra hadn't sent her there, Marina would still be alive.”

Patronas still remembered how stricken Papa Michalis had looked. “May God forgive her.”

“
He's welcome to. I can't.”

Patronas had expected the priest to argue with him, to blather about forgiveness and plead Dimitra's case, but he hadn't. He'd just sat there in the growing darkness, looking old and sad.

“
I was shaped in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me,” he said softly. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Who can know it?”

* * *

A week later Dimitra returned home. She came in, carrying an armful of groceries, and set about making dinner as if nothing had happened. Patronas thought his new salary was what had drawn her, but Tembelos told him she'd become a pariah among the women on the island and was seeking to restore her good name.

“
Wife said there was an incident at the hairdresser's. Women in curlers crowded around her, asking her if it was true, that she'd sent Marina Papoulis to her death. Dimitra says, ‘Oh, no, she had nothing to do with it,' but the others, they didn't believe her. ‘Why did your husband kick you out then?' one asks. There was a bit of shoving. Words were said. Must have been something. The old cows having at it.”

They were making a circuit of the monastery, checking on the workmen. The excavation was like an anthill, alive with dust and noise, the clang of shovels. People were coming and going everywhere, some carrying bubble-wrapped pottery into the makeshift vault he'd created in the refectory, others pouring out buckets of dirt next to the entrance to the cave.

“
Tell the truth,” Tembelos went on, “nobody liked your wife. She used to lord it over people, bully them. She'd park wherever she wanted and demand store discounts she wasn't entitled to. Caused all kinds of trouble. She thought your job gave
her
special privileges. We used to discuss it, me and the others. Nobody wanted to tell you.”

Patronas shook his head. “Hell's a picnic compared with Dimitra.”

“
You going to stay with her?”

“
I don't know.” He bent down and picked up a pebble, rolled it over in his hand. “I could divorce her, I guess, but then where would I go? By rights, the house is hers.
I spit high, I spit on my face. I spit low, I spit on my chin.
It will be all right. She'll hold her tongue with a priest there. She'll get the food on the table.”

Neither the priest nor Patronas had welcomed Dimitra when she'd turned up the previous night. Patronas requested she sleep in one of the other bedrooms, saying he'd gotten used to sleeping alone at night and didn't want to change. His wife had taken sheets out of the closet and made up the bed without saying a word.

Papa Michalis had been more polite, addressing some of his remarks to her during the course of the evening. But then, he was a priest.

Patronas thought if she wanted to cook and clean for him, a man who despised her, who loathed the very ground she walked on, so be it. At least he wouldn't have to eat the priest's vegetarian slop anymore. No, if Dimitra had demonstrated anything over the years, it was that she was carnivorous.