When the Devil's Idle (20 page)

“
Maybe
he wanted privacy,” Papa Michalis said. “He would have been alone
there. Nobody would have seen him.”

They looked at
one another.

“
No
witnesses,” Evangelos said.

Patronas nodded.
“Maybe it wasn’t information he was after,” he said, puzzling it
out. “I had the sense that Daphne Kallis was hiding something. I
thought at the time she was ashamed of what she’d done, that she’d
given up the men in her village, but maybe it was something
else.”

“
She
never married,” Tembelos said.

“
No,
she didn’t.”

“
I
remember there was something sad about her, crippled almost. Like a
bird whose wings had been broken. I thought at the time it was the
war, but maybe it was this, the evil he visited upon
her.”

None of them
dared say the word aloud, as if giving voice to it would poison the
air.

“
There
might well have been others,” Patronas said. “We’ll have to speak
to everyone again. And if it’s true, any number of people might
have killed him—family members, if they learned of it.”

“
A
vendetta, you’re thinking?” Tembelos said.

“
People in Greece stalked collaborators for years after the
war, followed them all the way to Australia and murdered them
there. This could well be the same.”

“
Been
a long time since the war, Yiannis. People who did that are mostly
dead now.”

“
I
know.”

“
Weird, this geriatric murder. Victim in his nineties; killer,
too, most likely. Guess whoever did it wanted it finished before
they died.”

Papa Michalis
again recited the words of Confucius. “
When you seek after
revenge, dig two graves
. Literally, in this case. One for Bech,
another for the old man or woman who killed him.”

“
What
are you going to do?” Evangelos Demos asked.

You
, not
we,
Patronas noticed. Evangelos didn’t like where this was
going and was distancing himself from the case.

“
Talk
to Daphne Kallis again.”

“
It
won’t be easy,” the priest said. “Such things are held close to the
hearts of children—a great secret, usually. It might be a secret
still. She might never have said a word to anyone.”

She’d set out
pots of basil to ward off mosquitoes, Patronas saw—a row of them on
the front steps of her house—and strung a clothesline across her
yard. A cheap cotton dress was hanging from it, black like his
mother used to wear, and two pairs of black cotton stockings. All
of it was deeply familiar to him, transporting him back to his
childhood on Chios.

The feeling was
so intense that for a second, he felt like he was knocking on his
dead mother’s door. Shaking it off, he knocked again. He could hear
Daphne Kallis shuffling around inside, hesitating on the other side
of the door.

Papa Michalis was
standing next to him. Patronas had left the others at the coffee
shop, not wanting to overwhelm the old woman with their
presence.

“
We
need to talk to you,” he said. “Gunther Bech is dead, murdered, and
if you don’t help us, Maria Georgiou will be charged with the
crime. You remember her, little Maria, the daughter of the
priest?”

The old woman
unlocked the door and opened it slowly. Walking ahead, she led them
into a dank room that smelled of mildew. A worn cushion on a chair
marked where she sat and watched television; an unfinished
crossword puzzle was laid out on the table next to it, a pair of
reading glasses on top. Patronas could hear a canary singing
somewhere in the back of the house.

“
We
need to talk to you about Gunther Bech,” he said. “We need to know
what happened in that cellar.”

Grasping the arms
of the chair, she let herself down. “I told you. He asked me
questions and I answered them.”

“
What
else?”

“
It
was a long time ago. I don’t remember. “

Patronas
blundered on brutally, thinking it was better to get it all out in
the open, to have it said.

“
Someone said that he ‘favored’ children. That can mean many
things. Among them that he preferred children sexually, that he was
a pedophile. Was this the case with Bech? Did he rape you in that
cellar?”

Raising her arms,
Daphne Kallis shielded her face as if to ward off a blow. “Stop,”
she cried feebly. “Please! I beg you.”

The priest sat
down next to her and took her hand. “We wouldn’t be asking if it
weren’t important.”

Her eyes filled
with tears and she fumbled for a Kleenex, her thin body trembling.
“Yes,” she said, “he did what you say.”

And then there
was no stopping her.

She’d been six
the first time and hadn’t understood what the German officer wanted
when he led her down the rickety wooden staircase into the room
with the dirt floor and began unbuttoning his fly. The cellar was
cold and damp and smelled like rotten vegetables. He’d forced her
to lie down and pushed her dress up, then lain down on top of her.
A moment later the pain had come, surprising in its intensity. It
had terrified her and she’d begun to scream.

“
He
covered my mouth with his hand. I couldn’t breathe. I was afraid
I’d die, that he was killing me.”

She remembered
all of it, the animal sounds of the soldier and the rough way he’d
handled her. The spiders, how the rafters of the cellar had been
snowy with their webs. Most of all how he’d hurt her.

“
He
tore me open, tore my childhood away, and trampled it in the dirt
of that place. All that I was changed that day and I became
something else. Something broken. I’ll never forget it, never. He
smelled of hair tonic and talcum powder. And after he was finished,
he wiped his hands on my dress as though I’d dirtied him. He said
he’d kill my mother if I told anyone. He said I was to blame and
called me
Fotze
and
Schlampe
. I didn’t know what the
words meant then. I only found out later. Cunt and slut.” She was
crying in earnest now. “I was six years old.”

After he was
finished with her, he’d thrown her out and told her to go home.
She’d been bleeding and didn’t know what to do and had gone to the
stream to wash. “I was trying to hide it, so my mother wouldn’t see
and ask questions. I was afraid for her. Bech had said he’d kill
her and I wanted to save her. It didn’t matter. They shot her
anyway two days later.”

“
Did
Bech take other girls to the cellar?”

“
Yes.
Boys, sometimes, too. I’d watch them go with him and came back out
again, trying not to cry.” She wrapped her arms around herself,
seemed to shrink up into the chair.

“
He’s
dead now,” Patronas said, hoping the news would bring some comfort.
“He can’t hurt you anymore. Someone murdered him. Whoever did it
carved a swastika on his forehead.”

“
A
ston diabolo,
” she hissed. The devil take him.

Patronas asked
Daphne Kallis for the names of Gunther Bech’s other victims. There
were two she knew of still living in the village—Dimitra Spanos,
whom they’d spoken to earlier, and a woman, Maria Papayiannis, who
lived some distance beyond the town. For the most part, their words
echoed those of Daphne Kallis.

“
He
ruined me,” Maria Papayiannis said, tears streaming down her
wrinkled face, a balled up handkerchief clutched in her hand. “I
was dead inside, dead to my husband, dead to life.”

It was harder for
Spanos, who balked at first and refused to answer.
“
Psemata
,” he kept saying. Lies.
“
Psemata.
”

Patronas
eventually wore him down. Not only had Bech victimized him, Spanos
said, but two of his cousins as well.

“
Children, they were. I remember the way they stumbled home
after, bleeding where they shouldn’t have.”

Both female
victims, Maria Papayiannis and Daphne Kallis, refused to let this
portion of the interview be videotaped, not wanting to be
identified, even now in the twilight of their lives, with the rape,
the abiding shame of what had been done to them.

“
People wanted to kill him,” Spanos said at one
point.

“
Who
spoke of it?” Patronas asked, pressuring him. “I need their
names.”

“
It
was just talk. Anyway, most of them are dead now. It was a long
time ago. After the Germans left, we took up arms against each
other. Too much fighting, too much blood to worry for one
man.”

“
Names,” Patronas repeated impatiently.

“
They
were relatives of the kids. They are in their nineties now or over
a hundred. They are not the people you seek.”

Before leaving
Aghios Stefanos, Patronas approached Christos Vouros again. “You
knew, didn’t you?”

The old man
nodded. “All of us did, all of the children.”

“
Why
didn’t you tell us?”

He squinted at
him. “It was something we didn’t speak of … not then, not
now.”

“
So
you weren’t a victim?”

“
No,
never. We knew, like I said, but we didn’t, you understand? We
watched when a kid went down to the cellar, saw how they acted
after. We kept track.”

His face was
clouded, difficult to read.

“
There’s a saying:
Otan o diavolos vrisketai se adraneia
dernei ta paidia tou.
Bech was the devil. Only difference was
they were Greek children. They were us.”

When the devil’s
idle, he fucks his children.

T
he villagers gathered to watch Patronas and the others
leave, waving goodbye as they got in the Skoda and started back
down the mountain. “
Na pate sto kalo
,” one of the women sang
out. A blessing on you.

Patronas was
driving and Papa Michalis was sitting in the front seat next to
him. He welcomed the old man’s presence, hoping the priest would
help him put what he’d learned from Daphne Kallis out of his
mind.

“
The
rest of the German soldiers didn’t know, did they?” he said,
looking over at Papa Michalis. “Bech’s commanding
officers?”

“
Probably not.”

The sun was
setting, its lengthening rays bathing the landscape in soft light,
the peaks in the distance like hammered bronze. The air was cooling
and fog was rising from the stream by the road. The window was open
and Patronas had his hand out, holding it up as if blocking the
oncoming rush of air.

“
Let’s
stop for a minute,” the priest said.

Patronas pulled
over and parked alongside the road. Pushing their way through the
underbrush, they walked down to the stream, leaving Evangelos Demos
and Tembelos back in the car. Cedar trees lined the banks of the
stream, so tall they blocked out the light, and the air was heavy
with damp. Patronas had expected the priest to urinate and had come
along to steady him as he sometimes did, but then the old man
surprised him.

Kneeling down by
the water, he ran his hand through it. “She probably bathed in a
stream like this, as if it would make her clean, would give her
back what he took from her.”

He picked up a
stick and began to draw in the sand, his eyes still on the water.
“In answer to your earlier question, Yiannis. No, I don’t think the
German authorities knew what Bech was doing. I know the first head
of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels, worried that his organization was
attracting ‘all the sadists in Germany and Austria’ … also
unconscious sadists, men who according to Diels did not know they
were sadists until they’d begun torturing others. In other words,
the Gestapo was creating them. He didn’t know why and speculated
that it was the nature of the work that rendered them thus,
unleashing inclinations long buried, letting loose the dogs of
hell, as it were. Himmler, of course, was a different story. He
wanted to set those dogs loose. He wanted his people to be
savages.”

The priest
continued to draw. “As for these acts directed against children,
the systematic crimes we’ve uncovered here … there might have
been a few instances. But as a general rule, no, not even in the
Gestapo.”

“
That
explains the cellar.”

“
Yes,
Bech had to hide his proclivities.”

“
What
would they have done if they’d caught him?”

“
Shot
him, probably. Order above all else.”

“
But
he was one of them.”

“
It
wouldn’t have mattered. They would have considered him a disgrace
or—what was that word the Nazis were so fond of?—a
degenerate.”

“
You
read a lot of books, Father. How do you explain a man like
Bech?”

“
You
know as well as I do that pedophiles are like serial killers. There
is no rational explanation for what they do. I believe some of them
are born that way. Others are created by the abuse they themselves
suffered as children.”