When the Devil's Idle (29 page)

Not Sherlock
Holmes or Agatha Christie, Patronas decided. No, today Papa
Michalis was channeling someone new, Clint Eastwood in Dirty
Harry.

He had quite a
repertoire, the priest. Lots of company for the bats in his
belfry.

Patronas been
working hard to exclude foreign words from his speech and had
referred to the batteries as
syskevi apothikefsis
energeias
—energy storage devices—when he tried to purchase them
at the kiosk. This had caused an unnecessary delay and Tembelos had
been forced to step in.

“
Batteries,” he told the man, “that’s what he
wants.”

“
Afta einai kinezika
,” the man said, looking
suspiciously at Patronas. This is Chinese.

“
I
know,” Tembelos answered. “
Einai trelos.”
He’s
nuts.

The two of them
were preparing to exhume the cat. They’d left Papa Michalis behind
at the police station, and Evangelos Demos had demurred when they’d
invited him along, saying he had a lot of paperwork to complete.
Stathis, they hadn’t told.

Opening the trunk
of the Jeep, Tembelos stowed their gear inside and shut it again.
“So let me get this straight. You think the victim kept going after
the war, worked his way through the kids in the neighborhood …
and the cat was a witness.”

“
Meow,” his friend added, in case Patronas had missed the
point.

“
Catcalls, Giorgos? Trust me, That animal is crucial to our
case.”

Tembelos sat for
a minute before starting the car. “You said he sexually abused her.
How could he do that? I just don’t get it.”

“
Pedophiles have a different hunger than the rest of us,
Giorgos. It happens sometimes.”

“
Whoever killed him did the world a favor. No trial, no
nothing—just
bam.
Done.” Tembelos thumped the steering wheel
for emphasis. “End of story. If we did that with every child
molester, that would put an end to it.”

It very well
might,
Patronas thought, recalling what the priest had said
about children who were abused growing up to be abusers themselves,
the way such crimes perpetuated themselves.

The most tragic
kind of karma.

A handful of
xelidoni
were darting through the yellow grass by the road,
their forked tails like arrows. The swallows took off a moment
later, coasting out over the mountain, borne by the
wind.

Once, when
Patronas was a little boy, swallows had nested in the rafters of
his house. His mother had rejoiced, telling him the birds’ presence
was a great blessing. It was one of the few times he’d seen her
happy.

A favorite in
Greece, the birds were featured in numerous songs and poems.
Usually they were depicted as messengers. In ancient times, a dead
boy or girl might return to their parents in the guise of the
bird.

Patronas watched
the swallows. It pleased him to think of the dead as birds, that
they hadn’t truly left, only changed form and taken to the
sky.

Maria Georgiou
had been feeding birds on her windowsill. It was a sign. He was
almost there; he could feel it. The Greek woman would be
exonerated, and he and Tembelos could go home to Chios. Bechtel’s
family would be destroyed, but there was nothing he could do about
it. It was almost biblical, the way the case was playing
out.

“
If
Bechtel asks, how are you going to explain what we’re doing?”
Tembelos asked.

“
Loose
ends, Giorgos. We’re tying up loose ends.”

The gardener was
standing outside the entrance of the estate, waiting for them as
Patronas had instructed. Ill at ease, he was wearing his work
clothes. His shoes were caked with dirt. As soon as he saw them, he
ran toward them and began greeting them effusively.

“
Mr.
Police, Mr. Police.”

“
We’ve
got some things to ask you, and you must tell us the truth,”
Patronas told him. “You’re not in trouble now, but if you lie, you
will be. We’ll charge you with perjury and you could get deported.
Also, you must never speak about what we say to another person, not
even your wife.”

“
I
will keep the silence,” the Albanian said. “I am good for
trust.”

They stood by the
gate, talking.

“
First
question,” Patronas said. “Did your son ever accompany you to the
house where the man was killed? Spend time alone in the garden with
him?”

“
Mr.
Bechtel?”

“
Yes,
the deceased.”

The gardener
reported that while the child had often come with him to the house,
he had kept him by his side always. The little boy had helped him
with his work, handing him his rake or his shovel, moving the hose
when his father asked, but that was all. His son had never wandered
off and had had absolutely no contact with the old man.

“
Were
there ever any other children around?” Tembelos asked.

The man studied
the two of them, comprehension slowly dawning on his face. “Only
little Walter,” he said gravely. “He was there.”

“
Did
Walter have any friends he played with? Kids from the village who
visited the house?”

“
Walter?” The way he said it was answer enough.

“
What
about Hannelore?”

“
The
girl, she was off at the beach most days.”

He stopped,
remembering something, his face troubled. “Something
did
happen there once. I don’t know what it was about, but the girl and
her grandfather, they had a fight out in the garden. I was in the
back, pruning the roses, but I heard them.”

“
What
were they fighting about?”

“
I
don’t know. My German ….” He lifted his shoulders and let them
drop. “After that, Hannelore, she was gone.”

“
Was
anyone else at the house then?”

“
Her
mother, I think. Yes, Mrs. Gerta, she was there.”

Patronas nodded.
“Did the cat get killed before or after the fight?”

“
After,” the man said. “It was after the fight that the cat
died.”

“
Do
you remember where you buried it?”

“
Yes,
yes. It is by the wall.”

The Bechtels were
packing when the three of them got to the house. Gunther Bechtel
informed them that the coroner’s office in Athens had called and
said that the body of his uncle would be released within the next
seventy-two hours. He and the rest of his family were planning to
fly back to Germany beforehand to prepare for the
funeral.

“
I
thought nothing could be worse than what I saw in Africa,” he said
bitterly, “but, thanks largely to you and your colleagues, this has
been. My papa is murdered and instead of solving the crime, you do
your best to destroy him, destroy what he meant to me, what he
meant to my family. I know what you think of him, but he was my
relative and I want to have a funeral and bury him. It is necessary
that I do this and unconscionable that I have been denied the
opportunity. Personally, I hope Merkel destroys the lot of you and
bankrupts this country.”

“
Poor
fool thinks this is the end of it, doesn’t he?” Tembelos whispered
to Patronas.

The gardener
walked ahead of them to a clump of oleander bushes. He was standing
about twenty meters from the fountain.

“
Is
there.” The Albanian pointed to a disturbed place in the ground.
“Is there where I put cat.”

Tembelos quickly
unpacked their gear, laid a tarp down on the ground, and began
pulling on a pair of latex gloves.

The gardener
watched him uneasily. “Is many weeks dead, the cat,” he said. “Hot
now in summer.”

Lighting a
cigarette, Patronas handed the pack to Tembelos, who did the same.
It wouldn’t help much against the smell, but it was all they
had.

“
Bad,”
the gardener warned, taking a cigarette himself. “Long time dead.
Long time.”

Patronas and
Tembelos began digging up small amounts of soil with their trowels
and laying it aside. Neither of them spoke, the only sound the
steady chink of their tools against the earth. They worked very
carefully, removing only a fistful at a time. When they got closer,
they switched to brushes, sweeping the dirt away a half centimeter
at a time.

It was the head
that emerged first, whiskers and bared teeth.

Funny what
happens in death 
… Patronas studied the animal’s matted
fur and milky eyes, runny now and half gone. The cat’s mouth hung
open, its pointed teeth exposed in a silent roar. Maggots were
swarming all over it, thousands upon thousands of them, and the
animal’s body seemed to writhe and twitch as he watched, alive with
the teeming insects.

Lifting the cat
up with his gloved hands, Tembelos laid it down on the tarp. It was
very small. More of a kitten than a cat, not yet full grown. Here,
too, the old man had favored the young.

Patronas nudged
it with his foot. Even now, in an advanced state of decay, it was
easy to see that the animal’s neck was broken and only partially
attached to its skull, secured with little more than a few tendrils
of rotting flesh.

“
What
do we do now?” Tembelos asked Patronas. He was sweating profusely,
alternately gasping for air and holding his breath against the
smell. Between the three of them, they’d already smoked the entire
pack of cigarettes. It hadn’t helped.

“
We
package it up and ship it to the lab in Athens.”

“
But
it’s a cat.”

Patronas, too,
was holding his breath. He felt like he was swimming underwater,
and if he resurfaced even for a second, he’d die. The gardener had
already vomited into the bushes, and he feared he would be
next.

Don’t inhale, he
warned himself. Stay the course. Concentrate on the
work.

“
We
need to find out what happened to it,” he said.

“
Tell
me why,” Tembelos said.

“
Because whoever killed it, killed Gunther Bech.”

Patronas had been
intent on the exhumation in part because of what the priest had
said about the Gestapo, how some of its agents had degenerated over
time and one sadistic act often begot another. They’d unleashed the
dogs of hell, according to him, and Patronas was pretty sure that
was what had happened here. The cat had never been the target. It
was just practice, a way of working up to the real target, the old
man.

“
You
exhumed a dead cat?!” Stathis’ tone was scathing. “What did Bechtel
say when you dug up his cat?”

“
He
doesn’t know, sir,” Patronas responded in a level voice. “We
proceeded without him.”

This mollified
his boss somewhat. “What did you do with the remains?”

“
We
put them in the refrigerator at our hotel.” Patronas braced
himself.

Stathis did not
disappoint. “Jesus Christ, Patronas, what were you thinking? Some
tourist will go to get a soda and have a heart attack.”

“
We
took care to disguise it, sir. We wrapped it up in tin foil and put
it in a big plastic tub with a lid—you know, the kind that people
use for food. Patmos doesn’t have a lab, so we had to
improvise.”

“
I
don’t believe it. A dead cat!”

Patronas wasn’t
sure, but he could have sworn Stathis was laughing.

“
And
what do you plan to do with this dead cat of yours?”

“
Send
it to Athens.”

“
How?
You going to mail it?”

“
No,
sir, we plan to send it to Leros, same as we did the dead man, and
from there fly it on to the lab in Athens. It’ll be all right. We
bought a cooler.”

No doubt now.
Stathis was definitely laughing.

Patronas pushed
on, “We can’t let the Bechtels leave Greece. They’re planning to
fly out tomorrow and we need to flag their passports and stop them
at the airport. Otherwise, we’ll have to extradite them, and
they’re sure to fight it. I’ve posted a man at the entrance to the
house, but they could slip by him, take a boat to another
island—Leros or Kalymnos, someplace with an airport—and return to
Germany from there.”

“
You’re sure about this, Patronas?”

“
I am,
sir.”

“
Very
well then. I’ll flag their passports. But if this doesn’t work out,
I’m going to reassign you, send you to that rock where they used to
keep lepers.”

P
atronas had taped the address of the lab on the side
of the cooler and explained to the crew on the ferry that a
policeman would pick it up in Athens. He’d spoken eloquently of the
cooler’s importance, leading them to believe it held a human organ,
harvested and ready for transplant, and that its safe arrival was a
matter of great urgency. Although he’d gotten confused and said at
first it was a liver, switching midstream to ‘an adult kidney,’ no
one on the crew seemed to notice.