When the Devil's Idle (28 page)

“
I
like her.”

But Papa Michalis
did not appear to be listening. Lifting up slices of bread, he was
examining the contents of each of the sandwiches in turn. “Ham and
cheese, ham and cheese, ham and cheese.”

“
She’s
shown an interest,” Patronas insisted.

The priest
tsk-tsked. “You don’t want a woman like that, Yiannis, a loose
woman.
Vromiari
.” Dirty. “You want one like they speak about
in scripture: ‘Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far
above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so
that he shall have no need of spoil. She will do him good and not
evil all the days of her life.’ ”

“
No, I
don’t, Father. I want a harlot. The looser the better.”

“
Whatever for?” the priest asked, confused.

It had been a
long night and the last thing Patronas wanted at this point was to
discuss the facts of life with a priest. “If you don’t know by now,
Father, I’m sure as hell not going to explain it to
you.”

Selecting a
sandwich, the priest took an exploratory bite. “Not bad,” he said
between mouthfuls. “Now, if we could only get her to button up, you
might have something. Not that I’d bless such a union, you
understand. My mother would have called a woman like her a
tsoula.
” Slut. “And I must say, I concur. You might not have
noticed, but that dress of hers was transparent.”

Jezebel, in other
words.

They debated the
pros and cons of Antigone Balis a few minutes longer.

“
You’re a priest, Father,” Patronas pointed out, “and as a
priest, you appreciate chastity. Whereas, I have no use for it.
I’ve experienced it, involuntarily I might add, for much of my
married life, and found that it does not agree with me. I much
prefer the sins of the flesh.”

The priest pursed
his lips. “You realize, of course, the key word in that phrase is
‘sin.’ ”

“
A
matter of opinion, Father.”

Papa Michalis ate
another sandwich, looking askance at Patronas from time to time.
“To welcome sin is worrisome, Yiannis. Satan, if you recall,
started out as an angel, one of God’s favorites. He didn’t start
out as a sinner. Things got away from him.”

“
I’ll
say,” Patronas said with a chuckle.

Tembelos, too,
had expressed doubts about Antigone Balis’ character.

“
Afti i gynaika koimatai me oti kinietai
,” he’d said.
That woman sleeps with whatever moves.

Difference
between Tembelos and the priest was that Tembelos spoke in an
admiring way, leering and rubbing his hands together. “Oh, if I
wasn’t married …. I envy you, Yiannis. I love my wife, but
night after night, it’s always the same. No surprises. You don’t
want to eat lentils every day; sometimes you want eggplants. I only
wish I could, but you know, Eleni ….”

Indeed, if
Tembelos’ wife caught him sampling eggplants, there’d be no
plea-bargaining, no trial. No, she’d cut off his offending
appendages and feed them to the dog.

Perhaps dallying
with Antigone Balis wasn’t such a good idea. She appeared to be a
woman of passion, but passion could go either way. What was the
expression,
dikopo mahairi
—a knife that cuts two ways. That
might well be her. Remembering Tembelos’ wife, Eleni, he touched
his manly parts protectively. No telling what a passionate woman
might do. Dimitra had jabbed him in the calf with a pair of
scissors. If provoked, Antigone Balis might well jab him someplace
worse.

He chewed
contemplatively. Still, that ass of hers is a thing of
wonder.

Who knew what lay
ahead?
Lay
being the operative word.

He handed the
priest a transcript of the first interview with Maria Georgiou.
“Let’s go over it again, Father. See if anything jumps out at
us.”

Tembelos was at
the police station, looking after the prisoner, Maria Georgiou.
He’d just bought her breakfast, he reported when Patronas called,
and was in the process of ordering lunch for her from a taverna. In
addition, he had offered to bring her books, a radio or television,
even a laptop computer if she wanted—anything to break up the
monotony of her confinement.

“
She
waved me off. Said she had her Bible and that was
enough.”

“
How’s
her appetite?”

“
Terrible. She didn’t touch her food last night. We’ve got to
get her out of here.”

“
I
know, Giorgos. I’m working on it.”

Patronas poured
himself a cup of coffee. “What about a lawyer?”

“
Evangelos is arranging it. He called around this morning, but
didn’t get anywhere. There are only a couple of lawyers on Patmos
and they’re all busy.”

“
Well,
have him talk to Stathis,” he said. “See if we can get somebody to
come from Athens. She has the right to counsel.”

Bechtel turned up
at the hotel an hour later. He flinched when he saw Papa Michalis
and started to apologize, but checked himself. He looked exhausted
and hadn’t changed his clothes since they’d last seen him. He
seemed subdued, far less confrontational than he’d been the
previous night.

“
The
person who killed him? You said you arrested her,” he said to
Patronas.

“
Maria
Georgiou? Yes, we have her in custody.”

“
What
will happen to her?” he asked.

“
I
don’t know. A long sentence, probably. ”

“
The
motive for the killing, the massacre in Aghios Stefanos, you said
it will be brought up at the trial.”

“
Yes.
I know you objected, but it’s extremely relevant. By the way, it
wasn’t me. It was my superiors in Athens who insisted that we
charge her with murder. Your letter was what decided them.”
Patronas added this out of spite. “They saw it as an ‘unwarranted
interference in the Greek judicial system and a breach of national
sovereignty.’ ”

“
What
if I don’t press charges?” Bechtel bleated.

In all his years
in law enforcement, Patronas had never met the relative of a murder
victim who didn’t want revenge. An eye for an eye cut deep. It went
to their very core. And yet here was Bechtel, pleading with him to
drop the case.

“
What’s this really about?” he asked.

Bechtel fell back
in the chair and covered his face with his hands. He stayed like
that for a long time.

“
It’s
a puzzle,” he said, choking a little on the words, “how you can
love someone … love them and worship them and want to be like
them … all the time knowing they are not what they seem, that
they have blood on their hands. That was my dilemma as an
adolescent, reconciling the man who lived only to please me and my
mother, who was a gentle and playful uncle and grandfather, with
such a foul history. You asked if I knew. Yes, yes, of course I
did. That’s why I changed our name. It was me, not him. You got
that part wrong—unfortunately not the rest. I wanted to go forward
from that time, to leave it behind and start anew. My uncle was not
pleased when I did it, but I told him I had no choice, that I must
protect the children, and he eventually acquiesced. I did not know
the specifics of what he’d done or where he had served. He never
told me and I never asked. But yes, I was aware that he was in the
Gestapo—my mother threw it up at him once when they were
fighting—and the Gestapo was not known for its
humanity.”

Although Patronas
struggled with the English, he understood most of what Bechtel was
telling him. “Does your wife know?”

Bechtel closed
his eyes, gave a slight nod. “She was cleaning out the attic of my
family home in Stuttgart after my mother died and found an old
uniform of his. A bunch of souvenirs from the war. I don’t know why
he kept them. He was very young when he enlisted. It was 1942 and
they were taking everyone, young and old alike.”

It had been
youthful foolishness, he was saying. My uncle hadn’t meant to do
what he did. Some kids drive too fast; my relatives, they joined
the Gestapo.

Patronas felt a
touch of pity for him. To carry such a burden ….

“
I
don’t see what good it will do to arrest her,” Bechtel cried. “It
won’t bring my uncle back. It will only perpetuate the horror of
those years.”

“
I’m
sorry,” Patronas said, and he was.

All of Bechtel’s
good deeds, his years of service in Africa, would soon be eclipsed
by what his relative had done in the war. The trial would probably
destroy his life.

And like those
victims in Aghios Stefanos, Daphne Kallis and the others, he too
was innocent.

“
Even
if it was a revenge killing, why’d she wait so long?” the priest
asked, thumbing through the pages of the notebook. “We found out
who Walter Bechtel was in less than a week. Surely she could have
discovered his new name and where he lived years ago.”

“
She
didn’t even know he was alive until she saw him in Campos. Could be
she didn’t mean to kill him. He might have said something to her in
the garden that provoked her.”

It had gotten
stuffy in the room so they’d moved their chairs out onto the
balcony. Across the street, the playground was empty, the swings
creaking eerily in the wind.

The priest
frowned. “Yiannis, Maria Georgiou and Bech didn’t speak the same
language. How could he have insulted her?”

“
I
don’t know. She implied he was an irritable, unpleasant man. Who
knows what he might have said?”

“
Yes,
she also said he was Gerta Bechtel’s problem, not hers.”

“
So
where do we go from here?”

The priest paused
for a moment. “In my opinion, the death of the cat bears further
investigation. Perhaps the killing of the animal was not as random
as we initially thought. We assumed it was a hostile act directed
at the Bechtels or the Bauers because they were German, but maybe
it wasn’t. It could have been directed at the victim
,
at him
and him alone. The cat belonged to him, after all. Someone could
have been sending him a message.”

Working his way
through his notes, Patronas thought Tembelos might be right and
that they should let Maria Georgiou go. What Daphne Kallis and the
others in Aghios Stefanos had told him still haunted him. They had
been hostages during the war, too afraid to fight Bech off. Afraid
if they did, it would cost them their lives. He’d just re-read what
Maria Georgiou had said about finding Daphne Kallis in the river
after the rape and it sickened him. The image of the little girl in
the pink dress, trying to clean herself in the water.

He lit a
cigarette and sat there smoking. Somebody should have killed Bech a
long time ago, shot him to death like a rabid dog.

“
You
know, pedophilia is a lifelong affliction,” the priest said.
“Perhaps Bech’s hunger didn’t abate after the war. Perhaps there
have been other children.”

Patronas swore
under his breath. How could he have missed it?

He threw the
notebook down. “That’s it, Father. That’s the missing
piece.”

He would have
yelled ‘Eureka!’ like Archimedes, except it was late and he was
outside. Unlike the ancient Greek scholar, he wasn’t lolling in a
bathtub.

“
J
ust sit there in the cell with Maria
Georgiou?” Papa Michalis said. “I don’t know, Yiannis. It seems a
little passive.”

“
You
can read Bible verses together.”

Patronas was
planning to go to Chora with Giorgos Tembelos to dig up the cat—and
possibly re-interview the Bechtels and make an arrest. In any of
these scenarios, he didn’t want the priest involved. Their last
visit to the house had been a disaster. Also, the priest had a
regrettable tendency to side with the accused once the handcuffs
came out, to advocate for mercy and forgiveness. His being a man of
the cloth inevitably trumped his role in law enforcement. In other
words, too much talking.

“
It’s
a jail and she’s an inmate,” Papa Michalis said. “What if she tries
to escape? What would I do if that happened?”

“
Yell
for help. It’s a police station.”

The priest mulled
this over. “Perhaps if you were to give me your gun.”

They were
standing in the corridor outside her cell, arguing.

“
Although Canon Law does not expressly forbid it,” the priest
went on, “most of it having been written before firearms came into
being, one would assume that as a member of the clergy, I am not
allowed to gun people down. The Bible is very strong on this point.
Thou shalt not kill
is not exactly open to interpretation.
However, I could
hold
a gun on her, I think, as long as I
didn’t fire it. There’s no religious stricture against holding a
gun on someone. If she tries to escape, I could point it at her and
yell, ‘Stop or I’ll shoot.’ I wouldn’t shoot, of course, but she
wouldn’t know that and she’d stop dead in her tracks. Not
dead-dead. ‘Dead in her tracks,’ in case you are unfamiliar, is
just a figure of speech, Yiannis. A euphemism in
English ….”