When the Devil's Idle (19 page)

“
Will
you go?” Patronas asked.

“
Never!” He made a dismissive gesture. “What would I do in
Athens? I’ve lived here my whole life. Everything I know is here.
Who would see to my land if I left? Care for my flocks of sheep,
the lambs in springtime?”

He named five
people who were still alive and had been in Aghios Stefanos during
the war, saying they would verify what he’d said, that the man in
question was named Bech and that he had served in the Gestapo
during the war.

“
How
did you know he was in the Gestapo?” Patronas asked.

“
I
don’t know how I knew. Maybe I overheard my parents talking. It
wasn’t his uniform, if that’s what you’re thinking. He usually wore
a suit with a little swastika pin in the lapel. All I know is he
scared you. It was like the air went cold when he was
around.”

He pointed to a
stone house on the corner. “He worked out of there. He’d come for a
few days and then go. I don’t know where he went. All I know is
death followed him.” His voice was raspy and his hands shook a
little. “Everyone was afraid of him.”

Patronas was
writing down everything, which pleased Vouros, who asked him to
read it back to him, adding more details and correcting certain
items as he went along.

“
My
neighbors will tell you the same thing,” he said. “Knock on their
doors and they’ll tell you. They’re here, the five I said. They
don’t travel anymore. The only trip any of us will make now is to
the cemetery when we die.”

Thanking him for
his assistance, Patronas and the others left, eager to get started
on the interviews. Five people weren’t many. If they worked hard,
they’d be able to finish by the end of the day, get in the car and
leave.

“
A
cheerful man,” Tembelos said. “Only place he’s going is to the
cemetery.”

“
I
hadn’t thought of being buried as a journey,” the priest said,
utterly missing the point, “but I suppose in a sense it is—a move
from this world to the next, from the earthly to the divine, from
the cares of this life to everlasting peace in heaven.”

“
Ach,
faith, Father, faith,” Tembelos said, shaking his head. “Don’t you
ever get tired of it?”

Patronas had
prepared a packet for each of them with a blow-up of the deceased’s
face and a photocopy he’d made of Maria Georgious’ ID. The priest
headed toward the church, telling Patronas he’d see if the marriage
and baptismal records had survived the war, and if they had, he’d
find out what he could about the Georgiou family. Evangelos was to
search out the school, if there was one, and do the same thing.
They arranged to meet at the car at noon.

Three of the
residents Vouros mentioned were being attended to by immigrant
caretakers or family members; the other two were living alone in
their houses. Like Vouros, they all remembered the war. The Germans
had stayed in Aghios Stefanos for weeks, a woman named Eleni
Noutsopoulos said, billeted themselves in villagers’
houses.

“
They
ate better than we did,” she added, laughing a toothless laugh.
“They took everything, you see, and left us with nothing. We were
hungry.
Panagia mou,
how hungry we were.”

The Germans had
chosen the village for its vantage point, she added. “The view from
Aghios Stefanos was its misfortune.”

Leaning on a
cane, she walked outside to show them. “See there, to the south,
you can see all the way to Ioannina and to the north, deep into
Albania and the heartland of Greece. Also, there weren’t many trees
then—people had been burning them for fuel—so there was no place
for resistance fighters to hide.”

The story of the
massacre gradually unfolded as the day went on. “They saw two
antartes
near here and that was the end of us,” a man named
Stavros Georgakis said. “They rounded up everyone in the village
and killed them, then moved down the hill and murdered the people
in Lingiades, too, women and children. They didn’t care who they
killed. It didn’t matter to them.”

Patronas showed
him Bechtel’s photo. “Was he here that day?”

Georgakis studied
the photo carefully. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I believe he
was.”

“
Do
you remember anything about him? His name or what unit he served
in?”

“
The
others called him
Scharführer
. I remember because it sounded
like what they called Hitler on the newsreels.
Führer.
Most
of the time he was dressed like a civilian. I only saw him in a
uniform once. Gray, it was, with SD on the sleeve.”

An SS man. Vouros
had been right.

“
He
stayed in the house next door to us. They’re still there, the
family. They might remember more.”

A middle-aged
woman answered the door. “It was before my time,” she told
Patronas, “but my mother might be able to help you. She’s in the
back. I’ll get her.”

The woman she
wheeled into the room was a twisted, wizened creature with a
pronounced tremor. Dressed entirely in black, she kept seeking to
right herself and control her shaking limbs. Her daughter was very
solicitous. Helping her over to an upholstered chair, she settled
her into it and covered her knees with an afghan. The room was
nicely furnished and there was a television, a new one, in the
corner. The chair the old woman was sitting in was part of a set,
its arms covered by embroidered cloths similar to the one Patronas
had seen in Maria Georgiou’s room.

Nodding to the
two policemen, the old woman introduced herself, saying her name
was Fotini Chalkias. She had been born in 1923, eleven years after
Ioannina had been liberated from the Turks. She was very frail and
it cost her precious energy to speak, but her voice grew stronger
as she reminisced.

“
Of
course I remember him,” she said when she saw the picture. “Bech,
his name was.” She also verified that he’d been in the
SS.

“
Bech,
not Bechtel? Are you sure?”

“
Yes,
yes. It was said he ran the Gestapo.”

She grew more and
more agitated as she talked and her eyes kept straying to the
window. Patronas wondered what she was looking for there, if she
was searching for Nazis, afraid they might still come and claim
her. “He interrogated everyone, even children. He was always
seizing them for questioning, pulling them off the street and
taking them down to that cellar of his.”

Locked up in a
room with a man with a scarred face, a man whose language they
didn’t understand, the children of the village must have been
terrified. Worse still, if Bech had been aided by a Greek in a
mask, a collaborator, a
maskoforos
. Patronas remembered the
fear in his mother’s voice when she spoke of them, how they
couldn’t be trusted and would betray their own kind. Thousands of
them had been shot in Athens after the war.

“
Why
would Bech interrogate children?”

She continued to
watch the window, didn’t answer for a long time.

“
Who
knows the devil’s purpose?” she whispered, her voice barely
audible. “Who knows why the devil does what he does?”

“
Did
he interrogate you?”

“
No,
but he dragged my brother, Nikos, down there. He was never the same
afterward. He went all quiet and stayed that way. Wouldn’t play,
wouldn’t talk.”

“
Does
your brother still live in Aghios Stefanos? Can we speak to
him?”

“
No.
He died in the massacre. They killed all the boys.”

“
What
about her?” He showed her Maria Georgiou’s photo.

“
Ah,
Maria. Of course, of course, little Maria.” She thumped the picture
with a gnarled finger. “I’d know her anywhere. She looks just like
her mother.”

The old woman
paused for a moment before continuing, “Her father was the village
priest and he lived behind the church. The house is gone now, but
you can still see where it was. He had four children, and she was
the youngest. They killed all of them that day, every one but her.
She’d been down by the stream and escaped somehow. There are caves
in the rocks and maybe she hid in one. She was young when it
happened, not more than six or seven years old.”

She sank back in
her chair. “I can still see them, Maria’s mother and father, her
brothers. They were my friends, and I wanted to stop the Germans
when they took them away, but my mother held me back. ‘Run, child,’
she said, ‘run to the mountains,’ and I did. I ran and ran. I was
wearing a dress and I remember I tore it. I was worried she would
be mad, but she was dead when I got back and everything was
burning.” Tears filled her eyes. “My mother was gone.”

Next Patronas and
Tembelos questioned a man named Dimitra Spanos. Although he was
much younger than Fotini Chalkias, he verified her
story.

He said he’d be
willing to testify in court that a man named Gunther Bech had
stayed in their village during the war and that he had been a
Gestapo agent.

“
Gunther? Are you sure?”

“
Yes.
My uncle knew all of them. I don’t know how, but he did. I heard
him call him that.”

Patronas made a
note, underlining the name, convinced now that the nephew and uncle
had switched first names and lengthened their surname from Bech to
Bechtel. They’d kept it as close to the original as
possible.

Tembelos had
brought a video camera with him from Athens, and after getting
permission, taped the interviews. Given the age of the witnesses,
it was a prudent thing to do. Who knew how long it would take to
bring charges against Maria Georgiou and haul her into court?
Spanos was in his late seventies. He could be dead before the case
came to trial, his memories of Bech and the massacre irretrievably
lost. They needed to close the case and close it fast.

A Gestapo
operative, Bech had conducted sweeps in the area around Ioannina,
Spanos said, picking people up and bringing them back to Aghios
Stefanos for questioning.

“
Someone said he interrogated children,” Patronas
said.

“
That’s right. He favored kids.”

The last villager
they interviewed was an elderly spinster named Daphne Kallis.
“After the Germans saw the
antartes
outside the village, he
took me down to the cellar and told me he’d kill me if I didn’t
cooperate,” she said. “I was afraid. There was blood on the floor,
blood everywhere.”

“
Did
you cooperate?”

She looked down
at her hands, unwilling to meet his eye. “Yes,” she said
faintly.

“
What
did he want to know?”

“
Names. The names of the men in the village.”

The priest
reported back that although the church had been set on fire, not
everything inside had been burned. A few of its relics had been
saved, among them nearly a century’s worth of baptismal
records.

“
Maria
Georgiou’s name is there. Along with the name of her father, Petros
Georgiou, and her mother, Anna.”

They also found
her parents’ names on the war memorial, along with the names of her
three brothers—Philippos, Nikos, and Constantinos—nine, ten, and
thirteen years old. All five were listed as killed on October 1,
1943. Altogether, 123 people perished that day.

“
Nine
years old.” Patronas touched the engraved name with his hand.
“Jesus Christ.”

Tembelos was
crouching down with the camera, videotaping the names. Patronas had
written them in his notebook, but had requested that they be
recorded, too. The victims’ names would serve no useful purpose,
but he wanted them anyway, a way of paying tribute.

“
They
murdered more than three hundred in Kommeno,” Tembelos said,
shutting off the camera and standing up, “seventy-four of them
under ten years old and close to one hundred in Lingiades. One was
a baby, less than a year old.”

“
I
know
what
they did, Giorgos. What I don’t understand is
why
.”

“
Evil
comes, evil goes. You’re a cop. You should know that.”

P
atronas and the others regrouped in the field where
they’d parked the car. Early afternoon, a man was driving a herd of
goats down the hill, the bells around their necks clanging as they
made their way home. The grass in the field was golden, bleached by
the sun, and the air smelled of summer,
xera votana,
chortaria—
dried herbs and leaves.

“
The
victim was here,” Patronas said. “That’s for sure. We’ve got six
witnesses who’ll swear to it, but that’s it—nothing that links him
specifically to Maria Georgiou. As far as we know, he didn’t shoot
her father or burn her family out. He came and went, they
said.”

“
Something’s off,” Tembelos said.

They reviewed
their notes out loud, Patronas and Tembelos bringing Evangelos
Demos and Papa Michalis up to date.

“
Why
take the children down to the cellar?” Evangelos Demos asked after
they’d finished. “It doesn’t make sense.”