When the Devil's Idle (26 page)

Patronas watched
him eat for a moment. Wasn’t gluttony a sin? He should ask
him.

“
Of
course,” the priest went on, “the Orthodox Church has also made its
share of mistakes. Undoubtedly. But it lacked the power of the
church in Rome, and by the Middle Ages it was in eclipse and its
battles were largely external. It never went after heretics or
Jews, because it was too busy fighting the Turks.”

The priest fished
out the eyeball and popped it in his mouth “Let’s order some more.
I must say, the shrimp looks tasty.”

And shrimp it
was, followed by a plate of feta and
kataifi
with ice cream
for dessert. The total bill came to well over a hundred euros. At
this rate, the priest would bankrupt him.

“
Shit,” Patronas muttered, counting out the money. He’d have to
visit the ATM again tomorrow. He’d never get reimbursed, either.
Under duress, Stathis might pay for lentils, but never, not even if
you held a gun to his head, would he pay for barbounia.

“
Fish
was a little overcooked,” Papa Michalis said on the way out. “Next
time, we should eat in Skala. We might do better there.”

T
he order to arrest Maria Georgiou came early the next
morning. Patronas was in the hotel room getting dressed when his
cellphone rang. It was Stathis.

“
I
relayed Bechtel’s concerns to the central office in Athens, and
they want you to arrest Maria Georgiou immediately. They were
outraged that Bechtel had contacted the German embassy, seeking to
impede our investigation and withhold valuable information about
the victim. They said it was a gross breach of Greek
sovereignty.’”

“
But
what if she’s innocent?” Patronas asked.

Stathis cut him
off. “See to it, Patronas. Call me when you have her in
custody.”

Giorgos Tembelos
and Papa Michalis were in the room with him and heard every word.
Tembelos, who had been shaving, laid his razor down.

“
Goddamn Bechtel. He’s the cause of this. Government’s going to
posture now. Use her as an example to show how strong-minded they
are, how they don’t bow to foreign influence.”

“
They’re not that venal.”

“
Stathis is, and you know it.”

“
We’ve
got to bring her in, Giorgos. It was a direct order. We have no
choice.”

Tembelos went
back to shaving. “Let Evangelos do it. He’s the one who got us into
this. Let the sin be on him.”

To make matters
worse, there wasn’t a proper jail on Patmos and they had to prepare
a cell to put her in, the only space available being the holding
cell the police used for drunks. Patronas sent Tembelos out to buy
sheets and towels, a bar of decent soap, paying for them with his
own money. A toilet seat, too, if Tembelos could find one the
proper size. He would have wallpapered the space and hung curtains
if he could.

Tembelos didn’t
question him, just took the money and headed out to do as he was
told. None of them felt good about the direction the case had
taken—the prospect of arresting a Greek woman in her seventies—and
they were all dragging their heels. They’d summoned a cleaning crew
to mop the floor of the cell with bleach and wash its rancid walls
and had nailed up a handful of air fresheners shaped like Christmas
trees.

It was nearly
five o’clock by the time they finished. By then Stathis had called
twice, furious about the delay.

Maria Georgiou
was dressed in widow’s weeds this time: a black dress and
stockings, a pair of black patent leather shoes.

Mourning
,
Patronas thought when she opened the door.
She knows why we’re
here
.

“
Maria
Georgiou,” Evangelos Demos said. “You’re under arrest for the
murder of Gunther Bechtel and for the assault on his
daughter-in-law, Gerta Bechtel.”

Taking his time,
he continued on in this manner, ordering her to get her things
together and to come with them.

Glorying in
it.

She quickly
packed a little polka-dotted bag and zipped it closed, then opened
a canister of birdseed and poured some out on the windowsill.
Picking up the bag, she walked over and stood by the door. “I’m
ready,” she said.

Tembelos took the
bag from her and helped her down the stairs. “
Siga, siga,
”
he said. Take your time.

Hoping to
forestall gossip, they placed her in the back seat of the Jeep
between Evangelos Demos and the priest. If anyone saw them, they’d
think there’d been a family tragedy, which in a sense this was, and
that they were taking her to the boat, a common enough occurrence
on the islands. The priest’s presence would further the
illusion.

No one would
think they were transporting a murderess … an alleged
murderess, Patronas reminded himself.

She’d been very
solicitous of the priest as they drove to the station, asking after
his health, chatting amiably about the infirmities of old age and
how best to address them.

“
At
our age, we must be more careful,” she’d said, laying a hand on his
arm. “Perhaps you should get a cane, Father—not that you need
it—for stability.”

Patronas listened
to them talk with an aching heart. His mother had sounded much the
same as she’d aged, going on at length whenever he called about the
precariousness of her health—her growing list of ailments, her
failing sight, her failing bowels. It had been a kind of background
noise that only increased in volume as the years went by,
eventually drowning out all else until she died.

Old age does
not come alone
, she’d often said, reciting the proverb as if it
somehow explained her plight. Perhaps all old people sounded the
same. What Maria Georgiou did not sound like was a killer. Patronas
had known a few, one especially who’d bided his time like a
scorpion, waiting to strike. She comported herself with great
dignity, as she had on the two previous occasions.
I am
innocent
, she seemed to be saying.
As God is my witness, I
am innocent
.

After they
settled her into the makeshift prison cell, she’d requested a lamp,
saying she wanted to read. Then she opened a chapped leather
Bible.

Patronas and the
others took turns watching her through the grate in the metal door.
With her head bent low over her book, she appeared utterly unaware
of her surroundings, to the fact that they’d seized her passport
and charged her with murder. She was totally lost in what she was
doing, the verses she was murmuring.

“
Praying,” the priest said quietly. “Those are psalms she is
reciting.”

Maria Georgiou’s
father had taught her well. Patronas could see her at the cave
after the crucifixion anointing the body of Christ. One of the
myrrh-bearing women they sang about at Easter, whose faith never
wavered.

Catching the
light, her white hair glowed in the semi-darkness of the cell and
bathed her face. A Renaissance artist might have painted her
sitting there, a saint on her way to martyrdom. All that was
missing were the little angels whispering in her ear.

Tembelos was
distraught about the arrest. “Look at her,” he told Patronas.
“She’s an old woman. How could she hit anyone hard enough to kill
them?”

Giorgos had
raised a fair point. At her age, Maria Georgiou lacked the physical
strength to shatter a man’s skull.

“
You’re the expert on murderers,” Tembelos went on angrily.
“How many of them invest in bird seed?”

“
None,” Patronas admitted. “It’s an anomaly.”

“
An
anomaly! She’s innocent. Can’t you see it?”

In spite of the
fact that he’d been the one who’d arrested her, Evangelos
concurred. Worried about possible political repercussions, for the
most part, he’d let Patronas take the lead during the
investigation, rarely volunteering an opinion or contradicting him.
But tonight was different. Tonight, he had a lot to say.

“
We
should have followed up the lead on November Seventeenth,” he said.
“Anything would be better than this. Arresting a woman old enough
to be my grandmother …. It’s a disgrace. They will destroy you
in the press, Yiannis, and rightly so. The newspapers will have a
field day.”

You
,
not
us,
Patronas thought angrily. Evangelos was
jumping ship. Idly, he wondered if that’s why he’d been summoned to
Patmos in the first place, so Evangelos could use him as a
scapegoat. Blame him when it all came apart.

He stared at him.
Oh, to be Medusa and turn your fat ass to stone.

As always, the
priest had the final word. “I’d be careful if I were you, Yiannis.
It’s like the day they set about burning Joan of Arc. You don’t
want to be the one lighting a match to her pyre.”

Three against
one … four, if he counted Bechtel. He was on his own. And
Stathis would never support him, not if the case unraveled. As if
any of this had been his choice. What was he supposed to do,
disobey a direct order? The police force was like the army, and
Stathis was his commanding officer. He would have his head if
Patronas refused, fire him on the spot.

Patronas looked
through the grate again. “It’s not so bad in there,” he said,
trying to convince himself. “She’ll be all right. Anyway, the law,
aftoforo,
dictates we can only hold her twenty-four hours
without a judge’s decision. After that we have to let her
go.”

“
Yiannis, she’s in
jail
!” Tembelos bellowed. “We need to
start over again. We got it wrong.”

“
All
right, all right. I’ll talk to the Bechtels tonight and go over my
notes when I get back to the hotel. Could be I missed
something.”

“
Could
be you missed a
lot
of something.”

Grabbing Patronas
by the arm, Tembelos spun him around. “You need to find the killer
and find them fast. Come back with a name … any name but
hers.”

“
I
apologize for the lateness of the
hour,” Patronas told Gunther Bechtel when the German opened the
door. “May we come in?”

Bechtel scowled.
“What do you want now?”

“
We
need to ask you a few things.”

“
If
you must. They phoned from Athens and said they will be releasing
my father’s body at the end of the week. We will be leaving
then.”

“
What
about the Bauers?”

“
They’ll be staying on a few more weeks.”

“
Are
they here now?”

“
Yes.
They’re in their bedroom. I’d prefer that you not disturb
them.”

He led Patronas
and Papa Michalis into the kitchen and the three of them sat down
at the table. “Do you need to talk to Gerta, too?” he asked. “It’s
late. She’s getting ready for bed. Couldn’t this wait until
morning?”

“
Let
your wife be. We prefer to speak to you alone.”

That caught
Bechtel’s attention, and he gave him a wary look. “Very well
then.”

Now is as good
a time as any
, Patronas told himself, taking a deep breath.
“It’s about your uncle. His wartime service.”

It cost him to
say ‘service.’ The only thing the Gestapo had been in the service
of was suffering.

“
Ah,”
the man said. He did not seem surprised.

Patronas paged
through his notes. “My men and I went to Epirus earlier this week
and interviewed the elderly inhabitants of Aghios Stefanos, a
village near Ioannina. We spoke with a number of people there. Your
uncle’s division conducted an anti-guerrilla mission in that
village in the fall of 1943, and as a result, many of its
inhabitants were killed.”

Listen to me
babble, the words I’m using, Patronas told himself. An
‘anti-guerrilla mission.’ You’d think it was an accident that those
hundred and thirty-seven people got killed, that those butchers
hadn’t meant to do it.

“
It
was war. Such things happen in wars.” A guarded look had come into
Bechtel’s eyes and the anger was back. “Anyway, that is old
history. What does it have to do with my uncle, Chief
Officer?”

“
Because of his distinctive scars, he was easy to identify,
despite the passage of time. We think one of the survivors
recognized him, hunted him down, and killed him.”

“
This
person who recognized him … have you arrested him?” Bechtel
asked.

“
Her.
It’s your housekeeper, Maria Georgiou. She lost
her entire family that day. If convicted, she’ll probably spend the
rest of her life in prison.”

“
And
this business about the village?” Bechtel asked heatedly. “I tried
to get the embassy involved. I told you before I didn’t want you
pursuing this aspect of the case, those false allegations about my
papa. I don’t want my children to learn of them.”