When the Devil's Idle (6 page)

Patronas checked
his notes to see if he’d missed anything. The list in his head kept
growing. “One of my men is escorting the body to Athens. His name
is Giorgos Tembelos. He should be there in nine or ten hours. He’ll
hand over the evidence: the bags I told you about, everything else
we found.”

As a precaution,
Tembelos was going along to make sure the victim got where he
needed to go. Patronas doubted there’d be a problem with the
pick-up and delivery, but he was taking no chances.

“
By
the book, Giorgos,” he cautioned. “No fooling around. No ‘I’m in
Athens, I might as well go and visit my mother,’ bullshit. If the
hearse isn’t there to meet you when the boat docks—drivers might
still be on strike—call headquarters and ask them to send a van.
Don’t try to flag a taxi, Giorgos. You hear me? Don’t leave the
body lying on the curb and run off looking for a cab. You’ve got
the address of the lab. Go directly there and deposit the body,
make sure the coroner signs the release form, then turn around and
come right back. We can’t afford to screw this up.”

“
Okay,” Tembelos said gruffly, miffed at the lengthy
instructions.

“
What
did you say?”

“
I
said, ‘okay.’ ”

‘
Okay’
had become increasingly popular in Greek along with
chillaroume—
the Americanism, ‘chill out,’ reworked in Greek.
Patronas, for one, didn’t approve of the trend. His homeland was
disappearing right before his eyes—his music, his language,
everything was going. Socrates would have wept.

“
Greek, Giorgos, Greek. That’s who we are, that’s what we
speak. The word you should use to signal your assent is
entaxei.
”

Tembelos was now
thoroughly aggravated. “Whatever, you asshole,” he said. “Need me
to translate? It’s where you shit.”

Papa Michalis had
insisted on accompanying the body to Athens. “I’ll go, not as a
policeman, but as a priest and pray for the victim,” he told
Patronas.

He’d been deeply
moved at the sight of the dead man, even wept a little as they
loaded him into the cooler. “To meet such a fate so far from home.
It’s like something out of Exodus,” he said. “ 
‘
He
called his name Gershom: for he said I have been a stranger in a
strange land
.’ ”

He touched the
cooler with his hand. “I’ll accompany him on his sad journey and
guide him to his rest.”

“
Father, he’s not going to his rest,” Patronas said. “He’s
going to a forensic laboratory.”

“
There, then.”

With great
reverence, the priest touched the large cross he wore around his
neck, a mannerism Patronas found extremely irritating. Roughly
translated, it meant, ‘Don’t trouble me with your earthly concerns,
my friend. I am a man of God. I answer to a higher
authority.’

In other words,
Patronas could go to hell. The priest was simply too polite to say
so.

“
I
think you should stay here,” Patronas insisted.

A mulish
expression on his face, Papa Michalis sat down on the floor next to
the cooler and set about arranging his robe, “I will go wherever he
goes. To a forensic laboratory, if that’s where he’s
bound.”

He looked up at
Patronas. “I am not unfamiliar with forensic laboratories, Yiannis.
I have seen such places on television.” This was said as if
watching television conferred an advanced degree in forensics, a
PhD.

Patronas wanted
to throttle him. “You won’t like it, Father. Place reeks of
death.”

“
Bah,
I’m an old man. I’ve seen my share of death.” He patted the cooler
again. “He shouldn’t be alone, especially now. He might not be one
of us, Yiannis, but he’s still a child of God.”

And that was
that.

Which left
Patronas in the front seat of the car with Evangelos Demos. So much
for his master plan.

A
fter the midday heat, the air inside the house felt
glacial to Patronas. The victim’s family was there, the woman and
two children sitting at a pine table in the kitchen, the man
standing behind them.

A fireplace took
up most of one wall. A pair of armchairs were positioned in front
of it. Patronas took one when he came in, thinking to dominate the
proceedings, and motioned for Evangelos Demos to sit in the
other.

A woodcut of a
dead hare hung above the fireplace. A compelling work, it seemed
out of place in the kitchen.

“
Albrecht Dürer,” Bechtel said, nodding to the print. “My papa
loved it and insisted we bring it with us and hang it where he
could see it. ‘Even in Greece,’ he said, ‘we must pay homage to our
heritage.’ ”

It was as true a
depiction of death as Patronas had ever seen. “Shouldn’t it be in a
museum?”

“
Dürer
was a printmaker, Chief Officer,” Bechtel said, drily. “This is a
print.”

The German had
shaved his head; and his glistening scalp only served to emphasize
the sharp angularity of his features, the hollowed out cheeks and
beaked nose, the thin, angry line of his mouth.

Thin and wiry, he
was built like a long-distance runner. He was dressed in jeans and
a polo shirt, worn cloth espadrilles on his feet. Aside from his
coloring, he bore no resemblance to the victim.

He and Patronas
had gotten off to a bad start. After returning to the house,
Patronas announced he needed to search the grounds one last time
before interviewing the family. The murder weapon had yet to be
found and he was determined to look for it.

Gunther Bechtel
was very unhappy about the delay. “Nearly thirty-six hours and no
one from the Greek police has seen fit to interview us. By all
means, see to the garden, Chief Officer. Take your
time.”

It didn’t help
that although they searched the garden high and low, neither
Patronas nor Evangelos Demos discovered anything of
consequence.

They then
gathered in the icy room and at Bechtel’s suggestion began
discussing the killing in English, which was the only language they
all understood. Bechtel sent the children away, insisting they not
be present during the initial interview. Patronas agreed, thinking
he could find out what he needed from them later.

He would have
preferred to get a translator in order not to miss anything, but
given the man’s hostility, he didn’t want to risk a further delay.
“Well, then,” he stammered. “Let us commerce.”

“
I
believe the word you are seeking is ‘commence,’ Chief Officer,”
Bechtel said, moving swiftly to correct him. “ ‘Commerce,’ the
word you used, does not mean ‘start.’ It means
‘business.’ ”

The interview
crept along at a snail’s pace, Patronas painstakingly licking his
pencil and entering every word said in his notebook. When he asked
the wife to repeat the word, ‘blood,’ not understanding her accent,
Gunter Bechtel lost all patience. “One would think that police in a
country with over twenty-five million tourists would know
rudimentary English—would know the words for ‘victim’ and ‘killed’
and ‘dead.’ ” His voice was venomous.

Patronas let it
go. He knew his English sounded bad. As it had for King George, it
deteriorated when he got nervous, and he was nervous now. “All my
other victims were Greeks,” he said. “This is my first foreign
murder.”

Bechtel examined
him. “How many other cases have you solved?”

“
I am
Chief Officer of the Chios Police Force.”

“
I
repeat: How many cases have you solved?”

Patronas
concentrated on his writing. “One,” he said in a low
voice.

The German and
his wife exchanged glances. “But how can that be?” Bechtel said.
“When I called and asked about the delay, they told me they were
bringing in an expert.”

He shrugged. “By
Greek standards, I am an expert. Such crimes are rare here. We are
not a violent people.”

Unlike you and
your kind, he longed to say, hell-bent on genocide a generation
ago. The Greeks might be lazy and disorganized, corrupt, too—he’d
give him that—but at least they’d never gassed children.

Gunter Bechtel
left the room and returned with an MP3 player. “Use this,” he said,
slapping the machine in the palm of his hand. “It will speed things
up.”

Patronas fiddled
with the MP3 player, not knowing how to operate it and too proud to
ask. Noticing his hesitation, the German stepped forward and
started it.

“
It
has a button, Chief Officer. See? You push it.”

Reddening,
Patronas stated the date, time, and location of the interview, then
set the machine down on the table and angled it toward the German
couple. He had his own tape recorder—standard police issue—but had
forgotten to bring it with him from Chios.

“
Spell
your name please,” he said to the woman.

“
Gerta
Bechtel,” she said in heavily accented English. “G-E-R-T-A
B-E-C-H-T-E-L.”

“
And
the children?”

Gunther Bechtel
quickly answered. “They are Hannelore and Walter.”

“
And
the dead man?”

“
Walter Bechtel. My son is named for him.”

“
Describe your father to me,”

“
He
was not my father, not in the biological sense. My actual father
was killed in a car accident when I was sixteen and in the
Gymnasium.
Walter took over for him after he died, caring
for my mother and me and helping us financially. He supervised my
education and has been my closest adviser, my dearest relative, for
as long as I can remember.”

Bechtel paused.
“
Was,
” he said, his face stricken. “He
was
my dearest
relative, my one true friend.”

Gerta Bechtel
stirred restlessly beside him.

“
You
called him ‘Papa,’ ” Patronas said.

“
Yes.
That’s how I saw him. He might have entered my life late, but his
influence on me was profound. He had no children of his own and he
legally adopted me after my father died so you see, he was in truth
my papa. I owe everything I am to him.”

“
You
said something else in German? What was it?”

“
I
asked, ‘Who did this to you’? It was a rhetorical
question.”

“
He
came with you to Patmos?”

“
Yes,
I didn’t want to leave him alone in Germany. We only had each
other, he and I. He served as a grandfather for my children. As I
told you, he was part of the family.”

“
You
say he was not your father.”

“
That’s right. He was my uncle, my father’s
brother.”

“
Tell
me about him. What kind of person he was.”

“
What
do you want me to say, Chief Officer? He was a dutiful family man.
He worked hard to support us after the car accident. He was an
engineer and a Lutheran. He studied in Heidelberg.”

Patronas
continued entering information. He was very tired and didn’t want
to stay up all night transcribing the tape. His notes would give
him what he needed.

“
And
you, what do you do?” he asked.

“
I am
an aid worker in Africa,” Bechtel responded.

“
Where?”

The man made no
effort to hide his annoyance. “Darfur, Sudan, Congo, Burundi,
wherever I’m sent. I don’t see what relevance this has to my
uncle’s death.”

Patronas
interrupted. “In Africa, what do you do?”

“
Nutrition. I work for the UN.”

Back and forth it
went, Patronas asking questions, the German making disparaging
remarks and humiliating him, volunteering as little information as
possible.

Patronas paused
to regroup. Talking to Gunther Bechtel was like playing tennis with
a broken racquet.

“
Is
this your house?”

“
No,
no, how could it be? I just told you. I am an aid worker. I cannot
afford a place like this.”

“
Whose
house is it?”

“
A
friend of mine, Joseph Bauer. I will spell it for you, B-A-U-E-R.
Did you get that, Chief Officer? Or do you want me to spell it
again? B-A-U-E-R. He bought the land and drew up the design. Greece
being the way it is, it took him more than a year and a half just
to get the permits; then there was a strike in Piraeus and a delay
in customs. That’s why it seems unfinished.”

There was implied
criticism in everything he said.

“
Where
is your friend now?” Patronas asked.

“
He
and his wife are in Turkey.”

“
When
did they leave? Were they here when your father was
killed?”

“
No,
they’d left some time before. Ten days, I think.”

“
I
will need to talk to them. How long have you been in
Patmos?”

“
My
wife came the beginning of July—the third, I think it was.” Bechtel
looked at his wife for confirmation.