When the Devil's Idle (2 page)

“
Ask
the Americans for a leave of absence,” Evangelos said. “They’ll
give it to you.”

A dead German, a
man of uncertain vintage with varicose veins and a cane—not a case
that stirred Patronas or cried out to him for justice.

“
I
don’t know,” he said. “Patmos is pretty far away.”

“
I’m
afraid there might be more,” Evangelos blurted out. Again, that
note in his voice. “There are a lot of Germans here. I’m afraid
this is only the beginning.”

Patronas sat
there, thinking. His country was hanging by a thread. Unsolved, a
case like this could generate panic, keep tourists away. “All
right,” he said wearily. “I’ll come.”

Digging into his
briefcase, he got out a notebook and pen. “Give me the details. Who
found him?”

“
The
gardener. He said the old man was lying outside in a bathrobe and
slippers.”

“
So he
wasn’t meeting someone?”

“
No.
He kept to himself. Liked to sit outside in the sun and listen to
German music. Sometimes slept there in the afternoon.”

Evangelos
hesitated. “I thought it might be political,” he said in a low
voice.

Patronas smiled
to himself. A Greek perspective, that one. Sooner or later,
everything led back to politics.

“
Our
politics or theirs?” he asked.

“
Theirs. Judging by the house, these people have a lot of
money. Maybe it was someone from Germany, one of those leftists
from the Baader-Meinhof gang or the Red Brigades.”

“
First, that was a long time ago and second, the Red Brigades
weren’t even German. They were Italian.”

The priest
continued to play, humming a few bars of the
Horst Wessel
song
,
the Nazi anthem, and breaking into song now and then,
bellowing, “Millions are looking upon the swastika full of hope.” A
moment later, he shifted and began yodeling the words of
Deutschland Erwache—
another anthem from the war. He was very
drunk
.

To the swastika,
devoted are we!

Hail our leader,
hail Hitler to thee!

“
What
did the coroner say?” Patronas asked, motioning the priest to be
quiet.

“
We
don’t have a coroner on Patmos,” Evangelos said. “A local doctor
saw him.”

“
What
did the doctor say?”

“
That
he was dead.”

Patronas closed
his eyes. He’d forgotten what Evangelos was like. A mosquito could
outthink him.

“
How
long will it take you to get here?” Evangelos asked.

“
I
don’t know. I’ll have to fly to Athens first, then to Samos and
from there catch a boat to Patmos. Twelve hours at
least.”

“
Stathis doesn’t want you to fly. By boat, he said, you and
your men. Third class.”

“
More
than twenty-four hours then. Midnight tomorrow at the
earliest.”

“
I’ll
keep everything in place until you come.”

With a sigh,
Patronas closed his phone. A corpse in August, a day and a half
gone. It wouldn’t be pretty. Not to mention that the case was sure
to have political repercussions, given the current antipathy
between Greece and Germany, the sense among his fellow citizens
that the Germans were bleeding them dry and finally achieving what
they’d been denied during the war—the utter destruction of their
country. He most fervently hoped the victim hadn’t been attacked
for that reason—that some crazed public employee, upset about the
cuts to his salary, hadn’t decided to avenge himself on an old man
in pajamas.

The priest had
heard every word. “I fear Satan is afoot in Greece once more,” he
mumbled, pouring out the last of the ouzo and drinking it down.
“This killing is his handiwork, his calling card.” He rambled on a
bit. Something about how the devil had gotten loose in Greece once
before, and that time he had been speaking German. Now it was the
Germans themselves who were being killed.

“
Some
people would call that karma,” Patronas said.

“
Not
me. I call it evil.” Papa Michalis slammed his glass down. “Pure
evil.” He leaned across the table and clutched Patronas’ arm. “Let
me come with you. I studied on Patmos. I know people
there.”

“
The
people you know are priests, Father. It is unlikely one of them did
this.”

“
The
killer could be a priest. Who knows what a man of the cloth is
capable of? Just look at America.”

Packing was no
problem. What Patronas needed, he stowed in a plastic shopping bag:
underwear, a toothbrush, a comb he liked because it folded up.
After he left his wife, he’d taken to going to the Turkish baths
when he needed a good cleaning, carrying his dirty clothes with him
and laying them out on the stone bench and steaming them alongside
his naked body. Ironing, however, remained a problem. He didn’t
dare discuss it with his ex-wife, Dimitra, since their leave-taking
had been acrimonious. Scissors in hand, she’d been sewing when he’d
told her he was moving out. Never one to hesitate, she had reached
over and jabbed him in the calf, had threatened to castrate him if
he didn’t get out of her sight. In retrospect, he should have
waited until she’d put the scissors down before telling her he’d
had enough and was on his way. At least he’d escaped with his
manhood intact and his intestines—no small thing, that. She was a
praying mantis, his wife, an evil insect. If he’d let her, she
would have drained him of his bodily fluids, bared her teeth, and
chewed his legs off.

As it was, she’d
gouged a gash in his calf that required eighteen stitches to close.
He’d been on crutches for a month.

‘
Better to live with the devil than a mean woman,’ the Greeks
said, and it was true.

They’d separated
after his last case, reconciled for a time, although Patronas’
heart wasn’t in it, and finally called it quits the previous
winter. Their divorce had just come through and now he was free.
The very thought of no more Dimitra made him feel lightheaded, and
he danced around the room as he got ready, singing that paean to
freedom, the national anthem of Greece, as he reached for his
socks.

Hail, oh hail,
freedom.

We know thee of
old

Oh, divinely
restored

By the lights of
thine eyes

And the
swiftness of thy sword

He waved a sock
around his head and slapped the dresser with it. He’d never fought
the Turks. No, his war had been only with her, but by God he’d won
it.

Before leaving
for the house, Patronas called his second-in-command, Giorgos
Tembelos, told him to pack up Papa Michalis, pour some coffee in
him, and meet him at the harbor with a suitcase. “The three of us
are going to Patmos. We’ll be there for a while, so come
prepared.”

It was probably a
mistake bringing Papa Michalis along, but he couldn’t leave him in
Chios, not drunk as he was and singing about Horst Wessel, a dead
SS man. The bishop had been seeking to defrock the old man for
ages. This would give him the ammunition he needed. He’d allege the
priest was a Nazi and that would be that, when in fact Papa
Michalis was just the opposite—a genuine war hero. He’d hidden
people from the Gestapo and spirited them to safety—courageous
deeds he rarely spoke of. He was a good man, a little flawed
maybe—he couldn’t hold his liquor, for one—but insightful and
occasionally brillant. Patronas trusted him with his life. It was
an odd pairing, he knew, a priest and a cop, an atheist and a man
of God, but somehow their partnership worked.

The year before,
Patronas had hired him to work part-time in the department,
counseling victims of domestic abuse, the drug-addled and an old
fool who kept exposing himself, whipping it out and yelling ‘hee
haw’ like a cowboy on a cattle drive. Papa Michalis wasn’t very
effective with the latter, who persisted in spite of the uproar it
caused and the horror on the tourists’ faces, but he worked hard
and brought a level of decorum to the station. Tembelos and the
other cops were less likely to pass around pornography and comment
on it while he was present.

Addicted to
television crime shows, the priest fancied himself a great
detective and was always citing Miss Marple or worse, Hercule
Poirot, whenever he and Patronas worked a case, even going so far
as to refer to Inspector Clouseau on occasion, apparently unaware
that the character from
The Pink Panther
was an incompetent
buffoon. In addition, he had memorized
The Adventures of
Sherlock Holmes
in its entirety, which he quoted almost as
often as the Bible, the omniscience of God and the British
detective having somehow gotten tangled up in his elderly
mind.

“
Holmes is a fictional character,” Patronas kept telling him.
“A figment of the author’s imagination.”

All to no avail.
The priest’s brain was a locked vault. Nothing got in.

Arterioskilrotikos.
Thick-headed in the
extreme.

Truth was,
Patronas was fond of the old windbag. Papa Michalis might have
mastered the basic vocabulary and techniques of police work, but he
had absolutely no understanding of the forces that drove the darker
side of human nature. Greed, lust, and anger were abstract concepts
for him. Holy fool that he was, he believed everyone was good
simply because he was.

Patronas had
survived the last case in part because of Papa Michalis and his
abiding faith in the goodness of people. If there was indeed an old
man dead on Patmos, he’d be in need of his services again, crimes
against the helpless being the hardest part of the job. Thankfully,
he’d not seen much of it on Chios. But what he had seen had stayed
with him, eaten into his soul like acid.

As there were no
boats that connected Chios directly to Patmos, the journey
necessitated going first by ferry to the port of Piraeus near
Athens, then catching a second boat to Patmos for a lengthy ride
across vast stretches of dark water. The boat was old and smelled
of fresh paint. Judging by the sounds of the engine, it hadn’t been
overhauled in years. Another victim of the decaying Greek
economy.

The inside of the
cabin was hot and stuffy, dense with diesel fumes, and the boat
creaked ominously as the crew lifted the anchor. Indifferent to the
sound, Tembelos, a large shambling man with white hair, quickly
settled down, closed his eyes and went to sleep while the priest,
who was still a little drunk, continued to sing off-key.
Eventually, he fell asleep, too, his wooly head on Tembelos’
shoulder.

Patronas looked
out the window. Soon he’d be back in the thick of it, examining a
dead body and collecting evidence. The thought made him
tired.

Restless, he got
up and walked out onto the deck. The Aegean was a wondrous thing in
the moonlight, the roiling water dark except where the light played
across it. Not wine-dark, as Homer claimed, more the color of a
summer sky at twilight.

A faint mist hung
over the sea, magnifying the moonlight, and Patronas saw a school
of fish close to the surface, tiny flecks of silver against the
blue-black water. After the cabin, it felt good to be outside. He
leaned over the railing and inhaled the briny air, droplets of
spray stinging his face.

The strange thing
about Patmos was the lights, he remembered. That shimmering crown
of lights, so high they seemed to be part of the night sky, which
appeared long before the actual island came into view. Patronas had
never approached Patmos by day—the boat from Piraeus always docked
after midnight—but the memory of those lights had stayed with him
for years.

It was almost one
a.m. when he caught the first glimpse of the lights.

As he’d expected,
they disappeared for a time, only to reappear a few minutes later.
Although he knew they were from a village high on a mountain and
the mysterious lights that came and went were only streetlamps,
they made him think of stars, a constellation of stars almost
within reach.

He’d been to
Patmos once before—on his honeymoon nearly twenty years ago. His
new bride had been a pious woman and wanted to see the Monastery of
St. John and its holy relics.

That boded ill
for his marriage, although he’d not understood it at the time, had
not understood that piety had little to do with kindness or
compassion or love, that his wife, who’d kiss the bones of dead
saints by the hundreds, would be more than a little reluctant when
it came to kissing him. He didn’t fault himself. He’d been
twenty-two at the time, a policeman for less than six weeks, and
under pressure from his widowed mother, who’d thought Dimitra would
be their ticket out of poverty. There’d been other clues, but he
hadn’t read those either. Her voice, for one, which went off like a
siren whenever he displeased her, or the way her jaw jutted out
like a boar’s when she was angry. Yes, there’d been plenty of
signs. He should have seen it coming, but he hadn’t.

He shook his head
sadly. Who reads the cautionary notes the Almighty leaves for you
at twenty-two, the modest hints that you might want to rethink your
choices? Had Napoleon felt a chill as he was plotting the assault
on Moscow? The German army as it approached Stalingrad?
We’d all
be better off if God quit His hinting and used a bullhorn
, he
thought.
Better yet, if He took up skywriting, spelled it out
with flashing arrows: “Retreat! Retreat!”
Maybe Moses could
decipher the message in the burning bush, but Patronas was sure if
it had been up to him, he would have grabbed a bucket and thrown
water on it.