The Devil Takes Half (5 page)

“
Didn't she visit him?”

“
When it suited her. She's here now with her boyfriend. On
vacation
.” Her tone was bitter.

“
Is he the boy's Father?”

“
What do you want from me?” the old woman yelled. “The boy had no father. Or he had many fathers. You pick. My daughter was a whore.”

She felt her way to the back of the house as if blind-folded. “I did the best I could for him. He had a nice room, clothes.” She pointed to a small, whitewashed space off the kitchen. “Go see for yourself.”

Unlike the rest of the house, the furniture in this room was new, Scandinavian, as were the brightly colored curtains at the windows. The boy's clothes were copies of popular brands, clumsily reworked in cheap cotton. There was a box of new Timberlands sitting on his bed, the shoes still wrapped in paper.

“
A gift from his mother,” the old woman told him. “She bought them in Athens.”

There was something desperate about the posters of American movie stars taped to the wall, the pictures cut out of magazines. The boy's blanket had been crocheted by his grandmother, Patronas guessed, and she'd probably made most of his clothes as well. He had a cheap stereo set up next to his bed and Greek CDs were spread out on the floor. In the armoire, Patronas found school books and winter clothing neatly stored in taped plastic bags. It held nothing else of interest, only a small box of toy cars and trucks, some photographs of his grandparents and a woman he assumed was the mother. There was also a book bag, embossed with cartoon figures, forgotten in one corner. Patronas turned the bag upside down and shook it on the bed. Inside was a small gold bull.

The priest did not seem surprised. “Minoan,” he said when Patronas showed it to him. “The bull was sacred to them.”

Patronas turned the bull over in his hand. “I've gone over every inch of the dig site and there's nothing like this there.” Less than two centimeters long, it was a beautiful thing with tiny ivory horns and turquoise eyes. “Where did it come from?”

“
Perhaps it was a gift from Eleni.” The priest stood at the window, looking out. Without turning around, he added, “Eleni liked to give people expensive presents.”

“
She is an archeologist. She wouldn't give something like this to a kid.”

“
Maybe it's a copy.”

“
Maybe.” He was sure now the priest was lying. If it were a gift from Eleni, why would Petros hide it? To keep peace with his grandmother? No, it didn't make sense. Especially if it were gold and he wanted money. Patronas carefully bagged the bull. Between the mattress and the bed frame, he found a piece of paper with a childish drawing on it, a round circle with pictures in squares. It looked familiar, but Patronas couldn't place it. The drawing was erased in places, and he thought the boy might have copied it out of a book. There was no sign of the laptop the priest said Eleni Argentis had bought him. “Where's his computer?”

“
He often took it with him to the dig site. Perhaps it was there when ….” The old man's voice trailed off.

Petros' grandmother came to the door. “Where is he now?” she asked.

As Chios had no morgue, they'd sent the boy's body directly to the funeral home. “Stelios.”

“
I must go sit with him,” she said. “He shouldn't be alone.”

“
Do you want us to take you there?”

“
No. I'm an old woman and that's one of the things you learn.” She began to cry again. “You learn the way to Stelios.”

“
Why did she say that about her daughter, about her being a whore?” the priest asked Patronas on their way back to Profitis Ilias.

“
An old wound. That's what happens with something like this. All the old wounds, they start to bleed again.”

No one envies the dead.

—
Greek proverb

A
fisherman named Costas Stamnas was about to push his rowboat into the sea when he heard the car. It was after midnight and the small cove was dark, the cliffs behind him hidden in the shadows. Few people used the cove. It was hard to navigate a boat around the rocks, the jagged knuckles of basalt that protruded from the water like the bones of a vast decaying animal. Veins of iron ore crisscrossed the rocks, staining them where the water touched and leaving dark, bloody puddles on the sand below. The only sign of life was a stunted olive tree, growing out of the cliff. It creaked in the wind, its twisted roots clawing at the pebbly earth like arthritic fingers.

Costas had planned on spending the night fishing. He'd shine his lantern on the water and the fish, thinking it was daybreak, would rise to the surface. He loved to work then, to cast his net and watch the fish dart back and forth in the silvery light.

A car turned onto the road that led down to the cove. Its lights off, it slowly moved across the packed sand to the water's edge. Costas wondered who it was. The cove was small and isolated, and as far as he knew, only he and a few other fishermen anchored their boats there. It was convenient for him. His farm was the only one in the area and his acreage extended to the cliff's edge. Wary, he left his boat and crouched down behind an outcropping of rock. He'd found syringes here and was sure the cove was being used as a drop off point for hashish and heroin smuggled in from Turkey. The car stopped. Costas could hear the radio playing, but the music was too faint to tell if the station was Greek or Turkish.

After a few moments a man got out of the car and walked along the beach, checking out the cove. He paused when he reached Costas' boat and ran his hand along the length of it to see if it was wet. Satisfied, he returned to the car and turned it around. He had a small boat hitched to a trailer in the back. It was a Zodiac from the looks of it, a small inflatable one. It had no registration numbers on the side, no name painted on the back or across the bow.

The man unhitched the boat and pushed it out into the water, then returned to the car. He removed a large plastic bag from the back and carefully set it down on the sand.
It must be heavy,
Costas thought,
judging by the way he carries it. Not hashish. Something else.
The man unloaded two more bags, then moved to stow them onboard. He dropped one of them and it opened, its contents slipping out onto the beach. Cursing, the man scooped up the soggy material and stuffed it back in the bag. He threw it into the Zodiac, stepped aboard, and fired up the engine.

He steered the Zodiac in the direction of the breakwater. It rode low in the water and left a sizeable wake, white in the moonlight. The boat moved quickly beyond the breakwater and out into the open sea.

As soon as the boat was gone, Costas crept forward, curious to see what the man had dropped out of the bag, hoping for something he could sell. He thought the man had been transporting guns, given his furtive manner and the heaviness, the bulky shape of the bags. He could see the outline of the boat on the sand and something dark at the edge of the water. It was a smaller plastic bag. Drawing closer, he tugged the bag loose from the sand. It was half buried. The boat must have run over it when the man pushed it into the water. He gasped when the plastic unrolled and he saw what was inside. He heard the Zodiac start up again in the distance and hurried back to his hiding place in the rocks.

When the boat reached the beach, the man jumped out and pulled it ashore, then maneuvered it onto the trailer attached to his car and made ready to leave. He paused for a moment, spying the trail of footprints Costas had left. He opened the trunk of his car and pulled out a pair of binoculars and a gun. His binoculars were bigger than any Costas had ever seen, with a headband and green lenses, and his gun looked like something out of the movies, the kind that spat fire and split people in two. The man fitted the binoculars over his head and began scanning the cliffs and surrounding rocks. Costas stayed very still.

The man stood there a long time, watching the cliffs through his headpiece. Suddenly Costas heard another boat churning in the waters off the cove. It looked to be a fishing boat, a local one. Putting down his binoculars, the man watched the boat for moment. It was turning in toward the beach. This decided the man, who threw the binoculars and gun in the backseat of his car and drove away quickly, the Zodiac swaying from side to side as he sped up the hill.

Costas stayed where he was, thinking the road home was too dangerous, that the man might be waiting up there to ambush him. Maybe he'd be lucky and the man hadn't seen his name stenciled on the side of his boat. He'd wake his wife. “Calliope,” he'd say. “Gather up the children. Chios is too dangerous. We are taking the first plane to Athens.” His wife, a quarrelsome woman, would protest, but even she would grow silent when he told her of the events of the night, how he'd seen a smuggler and stepped on a human leg.

“
Worse than an animal he was,” he'd tell her. “He would have shot me with no more feeling than a shark tearing up a fish.”

* * *

Patronas studied the ground under the bright crime lights. He'd once seen a hawk swoop down on a flock of chickens at his father's farm. The ground beneath his feet reminded him of that. Blood, ground up earth, and a shoe, a leather moccasin, on its side at the waterline, the waves rolling it over and over.

It had been 3 a.m. when the duty officer, Evangelos Demos, had summoned him here. A fisherman, Thanos Solomos, had been returning from a night of fishing and beached his boat next to a rowboat, only to stumble across something soft there on the beach. A very shaken Costas Stamnas had emerged from his hiding place a few minutes later and embraced him and together they'd called the police.

A half hour later Patronas had arrived at the crime scene with three other men. He'd cordoned off the area and set up the portable electric lights. The coroner was there now, rolling the leg in plastic. They'd found a hand, too, a little farther down, closer to the water. There'd been traces of polish on the nails of both. Until now there'd been no need for body bags on Chios, and they'd been forced to improvise. What was left of Eleni Argentis was now being wrapped and sealed in saran wrap, and it was proving to be a slow, tedious process.

The two fishermen, Thanos Solomos and Costas Stamnas, were still there, huddled together with blankets thrown over their shoulders.

“
I was worried even before I found it,” Costas Stamnas was saying. “No one ever uses this cove and last night there was a man here. He drove in late with his lights off and unloaded an inflatable boat, a Zodiac it looked like. After he left, I could see there was something dark on the sand, a real thin trail of it. Sometimes happens when you fish, a little drizzle of blood on the ground like that. I saw something buried in the sand and I went to pull it out ….” He started to gag and covered his mouth with his hand.

“
Go on,” Patronas prodded, his voice gentle. He saw how frightened the man was.

“
I thought at first maybe someone's boat had overturned and a propeller had … that the leg had washed in from the sea. But it was too neat, the bone …. Propellers, they're messy, they rip you up, the wounds are all jagged-like, and sharks are rare in these waters. It couldn't have been a shark.” He was trembling all over. “Whose leg do you think it is?”

“
I don't know.” Patronas motioned for his men to wall off the entire cove with crime scene tape. “Did you get a good look at the man in the Zodiac? Could you describe him for us?”

The fisherman shook his head. “It was too dark.”

“
If you saw him again, would you recognize him? Was he one of us?” he asked, meaning Greek.

“
I don't know, Chief Officer. I swear. He was dressed all in black and had something over his head. A
drakos
,
he was. A monster. That's all I can tell you.”

Outside a doll. Inside the plague.

—
Greek proverb

C
hildren were selling pottery along the road on the way to Campos. A farmer threshing wheat in his stone
aloni
waved to Patronas
,
the chaff making a golden cloud in the air around him. Patronas wondered how much longer the man would continue to do it that way, using a donkey and a millstone
,
how much longer the Greece of his youth could withstand the pressures of the modern age.

The Citroen, an elderly 2CV, protested as Patronas turned onto the cobbled road. He'd heard from Tembelos that there was a cartoon in which a Citroen such as his transforms itself into a giant robot and performs a dance routine. Personally, he'd settle for a little more horsepower. The Germans called the Citroen 2CV
Ente
or duck, and he'd always wondered if it might do better in water. It was virtually powerless on dry land.

He wanted to speak to Titina Argentis, Eleni Argentis' stepmother, before she learned of the discovery at the beach, to gauge her reaction. She lived in Campos, a verdant, well-watered valley behind the airport. The Genovese had used the area as a summer resort during the Middle Ages and their decaying villas still dotted the landscape. A few had been restored by wealthy ship owners but most remained abandoned, their grounds overtaken by vines, their windowless structures in ruins. Open to the sky, the old houses had a stark grandeur, their crumbling limestone walls blending into the landscape.