When the Devil's Idle (33 page)

Patronas thought
that if he ever had cause to leave Chios, he might take up
residence on Patmos, buy a little apartment and swim every night,
keep the moon goddess company. He had come to love the
island.

The sand of
Grikos was very fine, the beach lined with gray-green tamarisk
trees. The old government hotel, the Xenia, was now in private
hands and stood in pristine splendor at the center of the cove. A
few boats were tied up at the dock in front and there was a taverna
called Stamatis a little farther down.

Happy with the
outcome of the case, Evangelos Demos had invited them to a
celebratory dinner at his house that evening. He hadn’t come to the
beach with them, saying he needed to stay home and help his wife
with the preparations.

Patronas had
already spoken to Antigone Balis and checked out of the hotel.
After the meal at Evangelos’ house, he and the others planned to
board the ferry and leave.

He was still
working on purifying his tongue. They weren’t taking a
vapori
to Piraeus, he’d told Tembelos, as the word was of
foreign origin—Italian, he believed. They would instead
tha
epivivastoume eis to ploion tis grammis—
experience the art of
travel by boat.

These exercises
gave his speech a stilted quality, Tembelos informed him, and were
becoming very tedious.

“
Milas san daskalos,”
he said. You sound like a
teacher.

It was a grave
insult. Maybe his language purification program wasn’t such a good
idea.

He had decided to
forgo the pleasure of swimming naked with Antigone Balis. Playing
Adam and Eve at his age was a perilous idea. Already rusty, his man
parts might well lock up and stay that way permanently.

“
I
wanted to thank you for the lunch you made us,” he’d told her when
he paid the bill. “It was delicious, especially the
keftedakia
.” He kissed his fingers like a Frenchmen.
“
Magnifique!
”

He’d spent some
time preparing this little speech, even going so far as to practice
the hand gesture, the
magnifique
in front of the mirror.
Although it was a violation of his Greek protocol, he liked the
sound of it. He’d wanted to strike exactly the right note, a little
show of worldly sophistication.
Cary Grant,
he was thinking.
Manly, but beguiling.

“
You’re welcome, Chief Officer,” she said.
“Anytime.”

If not her, then
another, he told himself.

He was on his
way. Women were fifty-two percent of the population of Greece.
Sooner or later, he’d find one.

Tembelos and he
had discussed it as they lounged in Grikos that day, and his friend
had offered to introduce him to his cousin, a thirty-five-year-old
named Calliope.

“
What
does she look like?” Patronas inquired. Tembelos, much as he loved
him, was an exceedingly homely man. It was said on Chios that given
Patronas and his friend’s appearance, homeliness must be a
requirement to join the force. One had to be a runt to be a cop on
Chios—a runt with a big nose.

“
She
plays the piano well,” Tembelos said of his cousin.

Greek shorthand
for ‘ugly as sin.’

She was newly
arrived from Crete, Tembelos went on to say—another strike against
her in Patronas’ mind—and was looking forward to meeting people.
“She’s a good girl. Sturdy.”

Yes, the world
was full of possibilities, Patronas told himself. Him and a Cretan
whale. Sure, why not?

Tembelos waded
into the sea. “Come on, Yiannis!” he shouted, splashing him with
water.

Patronas stumbled
in after him. There were women everywhere, marvelous women swimming
in the water all around him.

A woman in a red
bikini was doing the breast stroke. She caught him eyeing her and
smiled.

He smiled back,
feeling better than he had in ages. Perhaps a woman like her would
find her way into his bed someday, his heart even. Anything was
possible. In the movie about his life, Stephen Hawking had said,
‘Where there is life, there is hope.’ Hawking knew better than Papa
Michalis. He was smarter.

Evangelos Demos
lived not far from the police station, in a large second story
apartment overlooking the harbor. He opened the door when Patronas
rang the bell, a brown haired boy clinging to him. The child was
about eight years old and wearing a gladiator’s helmet. It appeared
to be historically accurate, the helmet—bronze-colored with
sculpted ear flaps and a plume of feathers five centimeters
high.

Patronas crouched
down next to him. “What’s this?” he asked the child. “Are you going
to reenact the Persian War?”

“
I
made it.” The boy rapped the side of the helmet with a knuckle.
“See? it’s made of papier mâché. I copied it out of a book. It took
me a long time.”

His name was
Nikos, he said, and he had just turned nine. Patronas and Giorgos
Tembelos spent most of the evening playing with him, while Papa
Michalis sat in the kitchen and talked to Evangelos and his wife,
Sophia.

The child had a
plastic sword and they grabbed wooden spoons from the kitchen and
pretended to fight with him, battling their way from room to room,
shouting like musketeers, while the boy’s grandmother, Stamatina,
chased after them with her walker, yelling at them to
stop.

Nikos’ vocabulary
was very childish, far too young for his age, and he kept repeating
the same words over and over again in a wooden monotone. He didn’t
seem to understand what was being said to him and would look at
Patronas blankly whenever he spoke to him.

Patronas thought
he might be deaf and asked Evangelos about it when they were alone
in the kitchen.

Evangelos’
shoulders sagged. “No, it’s something else. We took him to the
doctor and he said Nikos will never grow up in his brain. No matter
how old he gets, he’ll always be the same, a little boy. There is
nothing we can do.”

Having no
children, Patronas had no idea how it felt to raise a mentally
challenged one. It must be hard, especially here in rural Greece,
where people weren’t always kind to the less fortunate, weren’t
always patient with those who couldn’t keep up.

No wonder
Evangelos was eating himself to death. He wished he’d been kinder
to him.

Grabbing his
spoon, Patronas stomped back into the living room.“Come on, Nikos!”
he shouted, thwacking the boy’s sword with his spoon.

It was the best
he could do. At least tonight, he’s see to it the child had
fun.

After hearing
Evangelos Demos complain about his diet, Patronas had been afraid
his wife would serve them
vrasmena,
boiled crap, for dinner,
but the meal she’d prepared was wonderful: a roast leg of lamb and
little roasted potatoes, a savory zucchini pie with a homemade
crust, and a multitude of appetizers—everything from stuffed vine
leaves to artichokes in the style of Constantinople, lemony and
redolent of olive oil. For dessert, there were spoon sweets, tiny
nectarines and cherries, and
revani
, a cake heavy with
honeyed syrup.

The four of them
toasted one another, laughing and congratulating themselves on
solving the case.

Patronas joined
in, although his heart wasn’t in it. Theirs had been a pyrrhic
victory at best, like that of the king in Epirus whose victory had
been tantamount to defeat. What had been gained by solving the
case? Nothing. He, for one, wished they’d never gone to Aghios
Stefanos, never learned what had been done to those children in the
cellar.

When it came time
to leave, Evangelos’ son grabbed him around the waist and wouldn’t
let him go.

“
Kneel,” he kept insisting, tugging at his pants.

After Patronas
got down on his knees, the child tapped him on his shoulder with
the little plastic sword. “Arise, Sir Yiannis. Go forth from this
day and do good.”

Evangelos walked
down the stairs with Patronas. “King Arthur is one of his
favorites,” he explained. “I read it to him every night. He knows
all the words by heart.”

He touched
Patronas’ arm. “Come back and see us sometime, Sir Yiannis. It was
good having you here.”

Touched in spite
of himself, Patronas called Stathis after he left and asked that
Evangelos Demos be reassigned to his precinct in Chios. “I need
more men. There’s a lot of crime now in the bars along the
waterfront.”

Stathis, pleased
with the outcome of the case—the person of interest being a German
national—readily agreed. “Sure, take him,” he said. “I’ll put
through the paperwork. He can start immediately. I’ll even kick in
a little for moving expenses.”

Overhearing the
conversation, Tembelos raised his eyebrows. “Evangelos Demos, a
burden to the earth and now, yet again, to the Chios Police
Department. You’re getting sentimental in your old age, my
friend.”

“
Boy
will do better on Chios,” Patronas said gruffly. “There’s a school
for kids like him there and I know the principal. She’s a good
woman. She’ll see that he gets the help he needs.”

A group of Greek
college students were sitting on the quay waiting for the ferry.
Accompanied by an older man with a bouzouki, they were passing
around a bottle of wine and singing ‘
Strose to stroma sou gia
dyo
’—Make your bed for two—a song from Patronas’
youth.

The ferry was
delayed and the kids continued to sing, one Greek song after
another. Then a pair of them got up and began to dance. The others
quickly fell in, forming a line and moving in a circle across the
cobblestones, singing as they danced, their feet flying.

The sight of them
filled Patronas with joy. The song was by Theodorakis, and the
dance they were doing was one of the most popular in Greece. Those
were the steps Zorba had taught his friend on the beach at the end
of Kazantzakis’ novel. They were immortal in Patronas’ mind. More
than five thousand years ago, his people had come to inhabit this
sunlit land. It was theirs then. It would always be
theirs.

We tried being
European, the kids seemed to be saying as they danced, and it
didn’t work out for us, so let us be what our parents were and
their parents before them. Let us be Greek.

Patronas joined
the dancers a moment later, breaking into the circle and grabbing
the hands of people on either side of him. He couldn’t remember the
last time he’d danced, his wedding maybe, and whistled loudly as he
spun around and around. Tembelos entered the circle a few minutes
after him, leaping high in the air and touching the soles of his
feet with a hand when his turn came to lead. On and on they danced,
the crowd growing more and more frenzied as more people joined the
circle. Soon there were so many, it was impossible to contain them,
and they danced on into the square, pushed the chairs and tables
back, and formed a ring around the blue fountain, shouting and
laughing.

As inevitable as
rain, trouble came. But just as inevitably, one day it
departed.

Nodding, Patronas
continued to dance.

His homeland
would endure. These kids would see to it.

* * *

Leta
Serafim
is the author of the Greek Islands Mystery series,
published by Coffeetown Press, as well as the historical novel,
To Look on Death No More
.

She has visited
over twenty-five islands in Greece and continues to divide her time
between Boston and Greece.

You can find her
online at www.letaserafim.com