When the Devil's Idle (10 page)

“
Two
or three times a week in the summer, we pick the oregano, my wife
and I, and after I bring it and sell it to tourists. Also thyme and
rosemary when I can find them. They’re crazy for it, the tourists,
especially the French. We get three euros for a handful, and it
costs us nothing. They don’t mind, the family, I do this. As long
as the garden is done, I am free.”

He spoke passable
Greek and appeared to be what he said he was, a poor immigrant
seeking a foothold in a new land. He had a kind of sweetness about
him, a childish desire to please. He tended a herd of goats, too,
he said, although they weren’t his, looked after them for a man who
lived in Athens. Anything to get by. He and his wife stayed on
Patmos until November, when they left for Athens.

“
What
do you do in Athens?”

“
Cleaning. Offices, houses.”

Patronas
continued to question him. “Do you ever see anyone else when you’re
picking oregano?”

“
Tourists.”

They inked his
fingers with a kit they’d brought with them and wrote down
everything he said. After they’d finished, they took a cast of his
shoes, planning to compare it to the prints they’d found in the
garden. Patronas wanted to chase the keys down, too, but doubted
they would lead to anything. Like the gardener’s shoes, just
another dead end.

“
You
got a passport?” he asked the man.

The man retrieved
it from a drawer and quickly handed it over. Patronas copied down
the number, thinking he’d ask Evangelos Demos to run it and see
what came up. Then he handed it back to him. “Don’t leave Patmos
without telling us. We might have to talk to you again.”

“
I am
here,” the man said. “My wife also. We are not going
anywhere.”

“
You
sure you don’t want to stay with us?” Evangelos Demos asked when
they got back to the car. “It’s a big house. There’s plenty of
room.”

Patronas shook
his head. He’d spent time with Evangelos’ wife, Sophia, on Chios
and had no desire to repeat the experience. A country woman of the
old school, she was built like a fire hydrant and was just about as
malleable. Evangelos’ mother-in-law, Stamatina, who’d been living
with them at the time, had been even worse. She was a ferocious old
battle-ax who was hard of hearing and consequently shouted
everything, instructions mainly, from a chair in the kitchen,
banging her cane on the floor.

“
From
Sparta, your wife?”

“
Yes,
her mother, too. The whole family.
Sparta bore you. Sparta you
adorn.
”

An old saying
meaning one was loyal to where one came from. The part about
‘adorn’ wouldn’t apply to Sophia though. There’d be no dressing
that one up. She’d stay as she came—stout and humorless—a warrior
to the core. Everyone talked about how warlike Spartan men had
been, but they were nothing compared to the women.

“
E
tan e epi tas
,” Spartan mothers were said to have told their
sons as they headed into battle. Come back with your shield or on
it. In other words, victory or death. They were a force of nature,
those women, human tsunamis. Made his ex-wife look like
Tinkerbell.

Evangelos turned
the key and they started down the mountain, the gravel of the road
gleaming in the headlights of the car.

Patronas patted
the seat appreciatively, admiring the American workmanship. The
Jeep might be two decades old, but it still ran better than his old
Citroen with its pathetic two-horse-power engine. His car had given
up the ghost during a rainstorm—it and his marriage within a week
of each other—its canvas roof coming loose and flapping in the wind
like a wet sheet on a clothesline. As a result, the car had filled
with water and molded, speckles of mildew darkening its interior
and scenting the air. Although he’d tried, Patronas had been unable
to sell it. He’d been forced to pay an exorbitant fee to have it
towed away. Now he rode a Vespa.

Not a step up in
the world, he thought gloomily, more like a move
sideways.

He lit a
cigarette and watched the countryside, struck anew by how empty
this side of Patmos was, just one bald hill after another. It
suited him, the barren landscape, matched his mood.

“
My
wife is very unhappy on Patmos,” Evangelos Demos confided. “She
told me she was lonely and asked her mother to come for a visit.
Eighteen months, it’s been.” His voice grew unsteady. “Eighteen
months and she’s still here.”

Patronas nodded
sympathetically. “A long time, eighteen months.”

No wonder
Evangelos Demos was so useless. Living with those two warrior women
had wrecked him, taken his manhood and rendered him a
steer.

“
They
said in Athens this case was a chance for me to redeem myself. Get
my old job back.”

“
You
said you cleared it with Stathis about me coming here.”

“
Oh,
yes. He said and I quote, ‘It was a stroke of genius summoning
him.’ ”

“
You’re kidding.”

“
That’s what he said.”

“
Let
him say what he wants. I’m nothing, Evanglos. Just a broken-down
old cop, waiting for his pension.” He flicked his cigarette out the
window. “You can’t depend on me.”

“
You
caught that killer on Chios, didn’t you? You didn’t give up even
after you got hurt. You never give up.”

“
I
give up sometimes.” Patronas was thinking of his marriage as he
said this, how he’d just taken his suitcase and left without a word
of farewell.

“
Not
you. That’s why I called you. You’re a better cop than I am.” His
colleague’s voice was wistful. “A better cop than I’ll ever be. The
best cop I know.”

Poor Evangelos,
putting his faith in him. It was the equivalent of boarding the
Lusitania.

If things didn’t
work out, his colleague would be stuck on Patmos for the rest of
his professional life, Sophia and his mother-in-law riding him day
and night; his suffering would be like Job’s.

Patronas looked
out at the night. Maybe he should give Evangelos the name of his
divorce lawyer.

Or better yet,
solve the case.

The hotel was in
Hochlakas, the westernmost section of the port of Skala. The town
bridged a narrow isthmus of land, and Patronas could hear the surf
pounding in the distance, the coast here being far less protected
than the area to the east where the harbor and tourist sites were
located. There was a children’s playground across the street from
the hotel, the metal swings and slide sparkling in their
newness.

The room was
tidy, with three single beds and a rickety desk. The orange
curtains and bedspreads had faded over time to a muddy yellow, as
had the threadbare carpeting, making Patronas feel like he was
trapped inside a bottle of mustard. The shower consisted of a
handheld faucet over a hole in the floor, and the toilet was the
old-fashioned kind, with a metal box high overhead and a length of
rusty chain. It took forever to refill once flushed, which would
pose a problem once Papa Michalis and Giorgos Tembelos arrived. The
room’s one saving grace was the small balcony that overlooked the
children’s playground and beyond it, the sea.

A woman named
Antigone Balis owned the hotel and said she’d include breakfast in
the price and prepare it for Patronas whenever he liked.

A handsome woman,
she had a mane of unruly brown hair and was dressed in a red
housedress, a robe thrown over her shoulders. She apologized for
her appearance, saying she’d been just about to turn in when
Patronas rang the bell at the front desk.

“
You
can have any room you want,” she said. “The hotel is
empty.”

He told her he’d
like a triple room on the top floor. “Something with a view if you
got it.”

Smiling, she
handed him his key, said the room was up a flight of stairs on his
left, and took her leave. “I’ll see you in the morning.
Kalinyhta
.” Good night.

Patronas watched
her go. The air seemed warmer where she’d been, fresher
somehow.

He told Evangelos
Demos to pick him up at seven thirty and dragged himself up the
stairs. He stowed his belongings in the closet and took off his
shoes, then called Giorgos Tembelos on his cellphone.

“
How’d
it go in Athens?”

“
Body
got there without incident. Hearse was waiting and it bore the
three of us away. Papa Michalis and I should be back
tomorrow.”

“
Any
clue as to the history of the deceased, who he really
was?”

“
Not
yet. They’re checking. It’s hard. Staff’s been cut. Might take some
time.”

“
How’s
Papa Michalis bearing up?”

“
Stubborn as ever. He drove the technicians crazy. ‘What’s in
the liquid in your pipette? After you weigh the organs, do you put
them in formaldehyde? If so, how long does it take before the flesh
degrades?’ He’s a ghoul, that one. Could star in a zombie
movie.”

Patronas shook
his head as he closed the phone. He could see the priest in his
robes peering over the technicians’ shoulders, poking his nose in
their trays of gore and holding body parts up to the light.
‘Putrefaction’ was one of his favorite words. ‘Cadaver’ was
another, and he could go on at length about ‘adipocere,’ the soapy
foam that occasionally forms on corpses and ‘saponification,’ the
process that produces it. He’d often discussed these things with
Patronas—unfortunately, more often than not, during
meals.

Patronas was too
tired to undress and fell asleep on the bed with his clothes on.
His sleep was restless, his dreams disturbed—there was something or
someone crying out that he couldn’t get to. He woke up at three
a.m. and got up and drank a glass of water. There’d been a message
somewhere in his dream, he was sure of it. Something he’d missed
during the day or forgotten to ask. If only he could
remember.

He fumbled around
for cigarettes and stepped out on the balcony. Across the street,
the children’s playground shone in the darkness, the metal bright
under the moon, the swings creaking in the wind. Music was coming
from a taverna at the end of the street, a Greek cantata from the
time of the war. He stood outside listening for a long time,
smoking in the dark.

P
atronas and the owner of the hotel had a friendly
conversation over breakfast the next morning. She’d fried potatoes,
poured in beaten eggs, and cooked it all in oil until a crust had
formed, then slid it onto a plate and handed it to him. A loaf of
fresh bread was set out on the table, along with butter and a clay
pot full of homemade orange marmalade.

She set the
long-handled pot, the
briki,
on the propane stove and lit
the flame. “How do you want your coffee?”

“
Metrio
,” Patronas said. Medium.

He cut off a
piece of the omelet and ate it slowly, savoring the taste. “My
mother used to make eggs like this. It was one of my favorite
dishes as a child.”

She smiled.
“Mine, too.”

“
It’s
delicious. Thank you.”

When the coffee
boiled, she poured it into a tiny cup and handed it to him, then,
unbidden, sat down at the table next to him. The room was warm and
she wiped her brow with the back of her hand, touched her hair with
her fingers. She was wearing a green dress of the thinnest cotton,
so sheer Patronas could see the stitching on her brassiere
underneath, the line of her panties. The latter appeared to be a
thong, although he couldn’t be sure, his wife having favored far
more substantial underwear. Like shorts, Dimitra’s panties had
been, Bermuda shorts, reaching almost to the knee. Big and white
and hideous.

The woman’s hair
was pinned up today, a damp strand escaping and curling at the nape
of her neck. She was sitting so close he could smell the soap on
her skin.

Antigone Balis
told him the hotel had been in her family for nearly twenty years.
She’d inherited it after her father died. “I couldn’t be bothered
with it for a long time,” she said. “I mean, who wants to be stuck
on Patmos in the winter? Summer’s fine, but the rest of the year,
it’s a graveyard. But then my husband died and I said to myself,
‘Why not give it a try?’ He was much older than I was and had been
sick for a long time. I needed a change.”

“
How
long have you been here?” Patronas pushed his notebook aside, not
wanting to trouble her. She wasn’t a suspect. They were just a man
and a woman having a conversation.

“
I
opened it in June and renamed it the Sunrise Hotel. I had that big
yellow sun painted on the side, hoping it would attract people. But
so far it hasn’t.”

Patronas nodded.
He’d seen the sun and remembered thinking how pathetic it was, the
concrete beneath it riddled with cracks. He felt sorry for Antigone
Balis being saddled with this place. The Sunset Hotel might have
been a better name.