When the Devil's Idle (17 page)

Patronas and Papa
Michalis were both from Chios and Tembelos was from Crete—all
islands with strong seafaring traditions—so they were untroubled by
the
fourtuna,
the rough sea.

Not so Evangelos
Demos, who hailed from the mountains of the Peloponnese.

“
I
don’t feel so good,” he said.

A few minutes
later, he staggered over to the railing of the ship, gripped it
hard with his hands and vomited. Although he’d turned his head
away, he’d miscalculated the direction of the wind and everything
had blown back onto Patronas.

“
Panagia mou
,” Patronas squealed. Holy
Mother!

And him in his
dress uniform, hoping to impress Stathis.

The situation
brought to mind the old Greek saying, I spit high, I spit on my
face. I spit low, I spit on my chin.

Patronas looked
down at his uniform, picking off things he’d rather not think
about.

God, how he
wished it was spit.

“
Ach,
Evangelos Demos,” Tembelos said, shaking his head, “a burden to the
earth and now the sea.”

They were all
gathered in Stathis’ office. Putting his arm around Patronas and
calling him his ‘trusted colleague,’ Evangelos Demos spoke
eloquently to Stathis, describing the flash of insight that had led
him to summon his former colleague to Patmos. He hadn’t brushed his
teeth since the incident on the ferry and was breathing heavily in
Patronas’ direction.

“
When
I realized the complexity of the case, the possible international
repercussions, I requested his assistance,” Evangelos was saying.
“I have many theories as to who might have committed this heinous
act and anticipate an arrest forthwith.”

“
Forthwith?” Tembelos whispered to Patronas. “Heinous? Who does
that
vlachos
, that imbecile, think he is?
Demosthenes?”

Stathis doled out
the money, all 160 euros of it, and handed the car keys over to
Patronas. “Remember what I told you. Keep it quiet or else.” He
made a scissoring motion.

“
Yes,
sir. I will, sir.”

“
And
keep me informed. I don’t want this to be one of your rogue
operations, Patronas. You’re not Digenis Akritas, so don’t try and
act like him.”

A Greek version
of Superman, Digenis Akritas was the hero of the twelfth-century
epic poems, the
Acritic Songs
. In a way, Stathis’ words were
a compliment.

Patronas grinned
at his boss. “Understood, sir.”

Evangelos,
Stathis pointedly ignored.

He led them out
to the parking lot and pointed to a sad-looking white car in the
far corner. “Off you go,” he said and turned on his heel and
left.

The car was a
ten-year-old Skoda that looked like it had been driven across a
couple of continents—large continents, Asia or Africa maybe. It had
a sense of angst about it—dents, a rusting underbelly, bald
tires—which made Patronas wonder about its history, if it had run
over someone in a former life and was being punished for it.
Although the insignia of the department had been painted over and
the light bar removed from the top, it still looked like a police
car. When people saw it coming, they slowed down. What was it they
said,
Once a soldier, always a soldier?
He prayed it would
do its duty, the little car, and soldier on.

The car wasn’t
big enough for the four of them and their four suitcases and they
had to repack, stowing what they needed in one and leaving the rest
behind. It hadn’t been pretty, the co-mingling of their pajamas,
shaving gear and briefs, and had caused the priest acute distress.
He’d balked at first, insisting he would hold his bag on his
lap.

Apparently he’d
been anticipating famine, for his suitcase proved to be full of
food, food he hadn’t wanted them to know about, food he hadn’t
planned to share—loaves and fishes and an entire round of cheese,
three jars of Nutella, a bag of sugar, and an entire canned ham
from America.

“
Father, Father,” Patronas said, “we’re going to Epirus, not
Somalia.”

“
Some
of my relatives are from Epirus. The Pindus Mountains. They ate
grass during the war. You never know what will befall you, what the
day will bring.”

Patronas weighed
the bag of sugar in his hand. Two kilos, easy.

“
Insurance,” the priest said, reaching for the bag. “If need
be, we can bargain with it, trade it for other things. I keep a
stockpile in my room. If our history has taught us anything, it’s
to prepare for the worst.”

Patronas handed
the sugar back to him. “Keep it, Father, and the rest of the food.
We’ll find the space.”

Before they left,
he doled out the
keftedakia
Antigone Balis had given him,
and they ate them in the parking lot. Then he assigned seats:
Evangelos Demos and Papa Michalis in the front, in keeping with his
death by talking formula, and he and Tembelos in the back.
Evangelos would drive as far as the town of Arta, about halfway
there; then they’d switch and Patronas would take over.

Although Patronas
had changed his clothes after the meeting with Stathis and done his
best to clean himself up in the bathroom of the station, he
remained deeply disgruntled.

In a decent
vehicle, the trip to Epirus would take six hours, but in a car like
the Skoda, it could well take twice as long. Hopefully he’d get
back to Chios someday and not end up wandering the earth like
Ulysses. He might have been gone a long time, Ulysses, and had his
share of shipwrecks, but at least his crew hadn’t thrown up on him.
Goddamn Evangelos Demos! He should have thrown him overboard when
he had the chance, fed his carcass to the fishes. Maybe on the trip
back.

Tembelos leaned
over and whispered in his ear, “What was that business with the
scissors?”

“
Stathis said if I mess up, he’ll castrate me,” Patronas
whispered back.

“
Bah,”
Tembelos said. “Better than him have tried—your wife for one. And
look where it got her? Yours are made of iron, Yiannis.”

Patronas pondered
what his friend had said.
Not necessarily a bad thing, iron,
he decided upon reflection.
Except that with lack of use, it’s
susceptible to rust.
Idly, he wondered if the same principle
applied to a man’s parts, if they locked up and ceased to function
after a period of inactivity, creaking and groaning when a person
started them up again.

T
hey drove out of Athens and headed west, passing the
petroleum refineries of Elefsina. It had been the site of a shrine
to Demeter, the goddess of the earth in ancient times—one of the
most sacred in the Greco-Roman world. Now burning gas cast a
yellowish pall over Elefsina, and the sea along its coast was
iridescent, a rainbow of colors like a vast pool of gasoline.

Supertankers were
anchored in the gulf, and ahead lay Kakia Skala, the Evil Passage,
the mountainous cliffs that marked the entrance to Attica. In
mid-August there was a lot of traffic on the road, and it took them
more than five hours to reach the city of Patras, twice as long as
it should have.

A few minutes
later, they crossed the Rio-Antirrio Bridge. It was unlike any
bridge Patronas had seen, the white cables strung in a series of
triangles like sailboats linked together in space. It had been
built for the 2004 Olympics, Tembelos told him. It remained an
impressive accomplishment, supposedly the longest of its kind in
the world.

They passed
through a marshy lagoon and entered Messolonghi. Called
Iera
Polis,
the sacred city, Messolonghi had been the site of a
terrible massacre during the War of Independence, Patronas had
learned in school. The Turks had killed over nine thousand
people—the English poet, Lord Byron among them—and hung their
severed heads on the city walls.

Although he
searched, he saw no trace of its bloody past today. Just modern
cement apartment buildings and traffic. Evangelos eventually tired
of driving and Patronas took over for him, Tembelos riding shotgun
next to him. They continued to move steadily north.

Near the town of
Preveza, Papa Michalis pointed to a sluggish river. “That’s the
Acheron,” he said. “The Necromanteion was there, the oracle where
the ancients spoke to the dead.”

Patronas could
see a scrim of mist rising from the distant water, wisps of it
drifting across its surface like ragged strips of cloth. A vast
flood plain surrounded the river, thick with myrtle trees,
half-swathed now in fog.

“
The
dead ever talk back?” he asked.

“
Supposedly, when summoned, the dead appeared and advised the
living,” the priest said. “I don’t know if you know this, but the
Acheron was one of the three portals of hell. It emptied into a
lake where the souls of the dead began their journey to the
underworld. It was guarded by the dog, Cerberus, who prevented
those same souls from escaping. If you recall, he had three heads
and his fur was made up of snakes. The ferryman would meet the dead
on the shore and row them across the lake. The kingdom of Hades was
at the bottom. The dead had to pay the ferryman a coin—a single
coin; otherwise they would roam in torment for all
eternity.”

“
Ulysses stopped here, didn’t he?” Patronas asked.

“
Yes,
Orpheus, too. Hoping to catch a glimpse of the woman he loved,
Eurydice. Poor Orpheus! For all his songs and gaiety, he was a
prisoner of grief.”

Patronas watched
the river for a moment. Maybe it was what the priest had said, but
it felt haunted to him, the mist rising endlessly from its depths
and the pale leaves of the trees rippling in the wind. Perhaps the
ghosts had retired after the coming of Christianity, but somehow he
doubted it. He sensed their presence there in the gloom, believed
he could hear them crying still.

Not far from the
river, they came upon the ruins of an entire city.

“
Nikopolis,” Papa Michalis told them, reading outloud from a
guidebook he’d brought with him. “It was built by the Roman
emperor, Octavian, to celebrate his victory over Anthony and
Cleopatra.”

There was nothing
left of it now. Just a handful of crumbling walls on top of a
hill.

Ghosts and more
ghosts.

“
Dust to dust
,” Patronas said out loud. “So it was and
will always be.”

He remembered
when he’d disinterred his mother’s bones five years after she died,
as was the custom in Greece. He’d been seeking a sign that day in
the cemetery, some evidence that she was still with him, but
there’d been nothing as he’d boxed up her remains, only a strand of
her hair still attached to her skull. He’d broken down when he saw
it and sobbed like a child.

He continued to
drive, following the signs to Ioannina, the city closest to Aghios
Stefanos. The landscape grew more rugged and majestic as they
approached the Pindus Mountains, the great range that defined
northern Greece. The lower slopes were heavily forested, and even
in August, there was water everywhere, trickling down and pooling
in shadowy ravines.

“
Our
ancestors developed a breed of oxen, famous in ancient times,” the
priest announced, reading an entry from the guidebook. “King
Pyrrhus, who lived here, was responsible for them. But something
happened and they degenerated over time and became short and
misshapen.”

“
Hear
that, Giorgos?” Patronas called out. “Short and misshapen. Same as
us.”

“
Same
as
you,
” Tembelos said. “I, myself, am a comely
man.”

“
He
was an unlucky man, Pyrrhus,” the priest continued. “Suffered great
losses in battle. He may have won over the Romans, but it cost him
so much, his victory was tantamount to defeat.”

They were now
deep in the Pindus Mountains. It was late afternoon and the peaks
were half-hidden by clouds, the rocky slopes below, the color of
rain-soaked slate.

A woman was
standing next to a stream by the road, watching a flock of sheep
and knitting, swallows soaring and dipping around her. The shadows
of the clouds were dark against the looming expanse behind her, the
mountains framing the scene like a painting. Urging the sheep
forward, she vanished into the forest a moment later. Patronas
wondered where she was going, if there was a village
nearby.

A river in the
region had once been called the Vedis
,
the priest said, the
word for water in the hymn of Orpheus, the father of music. “The
area has been settled since Paleolithic times.”

“
You
think that’s the Vedis?” Patronas asked, nodding to the stream
where the woman had been.

“
Could
be. Legend, history? Epirus has long combined the two.”

Patronas nodded.
It was easy to see where Orpheus had gotten his song. You could
pull it out of the air here. Weave the birdsong and the rushing
water together, the hushed murmurings of the trees.

“
You
see that up there?” Papa Michalis pointed to a distant peak.
“That’s where the Souli women fled to escape the army of Ali Pasha.
Holding hands, they danced the traditional dance of their people
and jumped off. There’s a statue commemorating it carved out of the
mountain. Looks a bit like Stonehenge.”