When the Devil's Idle (32 page)

“
Hannelore! What’s going on? Your father said the police were
talking to you! What’s this about?”

“
The
stupid cat. The one those Greek boys killed.”

Hannelore Bechtel
was far more clever than he’d originally thought, Patronas suddenly
realized, and possessed great presence of mind.

A wily,
manipulative creature, she’d been only too willing to admit to
killing the cat when it was just the three of them. She’d reveled
in it even. He remembered the joyful expression on her face. But
now that her mother was here, she’d quickly set about deflecting
the blame. The swiftness of the change was remarkable; her face
actually seemed to grow younger as Patronas watched—her voice to
take on a more girlish tone as she lied—and the transformation
hadn’t been to spare her mother’s feelings. Patronas was certain of
that. It was because Hannelore was an evil, calculating little
bitch. She needed her mother to keep her out of jail.

“
Oh,
Hannelore,” Gerta Bechtel said.

“
He
says because I killed it, I must have killed
Grobpapa
. He’s
mean, Mommy. Don’t listen to him.”

Ignoring the
outburst, Patronas continued to speak. “And then you tried to frame
the maid, didn’t you, Hannelore? It was you who cut the swastika on
his face. As with the cat, you wanted us to think a Greek was
responsible.”

“
Hannelore,” Gerta Bechtel said, tears running down her face.
“I will talk to them. Go back to the house.”

The daughter
dutifully got up from the chair and started toward the house,
looking back at her mother once or twice. The expression on her
face was unsettling. She looked triumphant.

“
It
wasn’t Hannelore,” Gerta Bechtel said after her daughter had
disappeared inside. “It was me. I killed him.”

Reaching for
Patronas’ cigarettes, she pulled one out of the pack.

“
Take
your time,” Patronas urged, lighting the cigarette for her. “Start
at the beginning and describe what happened.”

“
I
heard them fighting. Hannelore was yelling, ‘
Ich hasse
dich!
’ ” I hate you! “I reprimanded her. You mustn’t speak
of your grandfather that way,’ I said to her. ‘You must show
respect.’ ”

Her voice was
sardonic, self-mocking.

“
Respect,” she said bitterly. “You must show
him
respect.”

“
Where
was your husband? Surely he must have heard, especially if your
daughter was shouting.”

“
Gunther had just come from Africa, and he was exhausted. He
was asleep maybe. I don’t know. Anyway, inside the house. Walter
and Maria, also.”

Gerta Bechtel
hesitated, as if seeking a different ending to the story.
“Hannelore, she told me I must keep Walter away from
Grobpapa.
‘
Schmutzig
,’ she kept saying.
‘
Schmutzig
.’ Over and over. Dirty. Dirty. My daughter,
always she says ugly things when she’s angry—ugly, ugly things.
Gunther’s uncle, he soiled himself once at dinner. And this is what
I thought she meant. That he was dirty from shit.”

Patronas believed
her. There was nothing false in her demeanor.

“
I
told her she must not speak this way of him,‘He is very old,’ I
said. ‘He cannot not help it.’ It was then that she told me, told
me what kind of dirty he was.”

The bruises on
her face were still pronounced, especially around her eyes. She
looked drained, so exhausted she could barely speak.
Another
victim
, Patronas thought as he listened,
another ruined
life.

“
I
have lived with that man almost my entire adult life. Ever since
the day we got back from our honeymoon. At first it was all right.
I didn’t know his history and it was acceptable, but then we moved.
Gunther wasn’t there. He was in Africa, and I had to pack myself.
We had a closet under the stairs and there I found a box. Inside
were many things from that time, a uniform and some photographs, a
diary from when he was in Greece. I read what he wrote. It was all
about the Gestapo, full of bragging. I asked him about it later
that day, thinking it must be a mistake, that the things had
belonged to someone else, but he told me no, no, the things in the
box were his. He said he was proud of the way he’d served Germany
and kept the Jews from taking over. Proud to have been a
Scharführer
in the Gestapo.”

She looked over
at Patronas to see if he understood the term. “After that, whenever
it was just us, he would speak about those years. He was always
very crude and it got worse as he got older. I remember once he lit
two paper matches and put them on top of each other, laughing at
the way they writhed and twisted as they burned. ‘
Wie die
Juden
,’ he said.”

“
Like
the Jews,” Patronas said, and she nodded.

“
Gunther told me to ignore him, that he was an old man and
didn’t know what he was saying half the time. But he did—you could
sense it, see it in his expression whenever there was something
about Israel on the news. He was still a Nazi; he had never
changed. Blacks were
Untermenschen
because of the shape of
their heads, he’d say, as if it were science. ‘Racial pollution is
corrupting us.’ And the way he spoke about the Jews … I was so
ashamed, so ashamed to have a man like that in my life, to have him
in the lives of my children. My family, we were different. My
father was a school teacher, a gentle, peaceful man. He despised
the Nazis.”

She smoked in
silence for a few minutes, watching Patronas.

“
Go
on,” he urged.

“
You
cannot understand. You are not German.” She shook her head. “You
cannot understand the shame of those years. What we did as a
people. Gunther spent his whole life making up for it. Going to
Africa to work off the sin. He, too, was ashamed. All the young
people of my generation were, and then to have to live with it
morning, noon, and night. To have it sitting in my kitchen, talking
about the war as if it had been a good thing … but I loved
Gunther and I made a kind of peace with it. ‘He is my husband’s
uncle and I should respect him,’ I told myself.”

She looked back
at the house, as if searching for her daughter. “We had trouble
with Hannelore always—much trouble. She was not obedient. It is
important, respect for parents in my country, but Hannelore, she
was not respectful. Unhappy always. I didn’t know what was wrong. I
should have guessed, but I didn’t. I overheard Gunther’s uncle
talking to her once in Stuttgart. He was trying to grab her hand
and she was pushing him away. ‘You were friendlier when you were
little,’ he was saying. ‘You liked to touch me.’ It seemed a
strange thing to say to a child, but he was like that, and I told
myself I was imagining things. I should have known. The signs were
there, but I didn’t want to see. This is my fault. Mine,
mine.”

She started to
cry. “Hannelore. Oh, God, Hannelore. My little
Hannelore.”

Patronas was
watching her closely, convinced she was confessing to the murder to
save her daughter, as a kind of penance.

“
It
wasn’t so hard to kill a man, I found out. I pushed him out of his
chair and hit him with a shovel, once and then again. He deserved
to die. I only wish I’d killed him sooner. I only wish he was still
alive so I could kill him again.”

Hannelore later
admitted she’d cut the swastika on the victim’s forehead after her
mother had gone back inside the house.

“
It
was my idea,” she boasted brightly to Patronas, proud of what she’d
done. “I wanted people to think a Greek had done it. I knew how
they felt about us. In Athens, there are swastikas everywhere. It
was no big deal. I’d cut myself before. I knew how to
cut.”

Pulling up her
shirt, she showed him the scars, a grid of striated white lines
running across her abdomen.

“
I
don’t do it anymore, but I used to a lot. Not just there. Other
places, too. He bled a little when I did it, which scared me. I
mean, he was dead, so why was he bleeding? It was like he was a
vampire or something.”

Patronas
handcuffed both Hannelore Bechtel and her mother, unsure who he
should charge with the murder. He’d let the prosecutor sort it
out—a jury, when the time came. He and Tembelos had found the
shovel mixed in with the rest of the tools in the back, but it had
been washed clean. Again, Hannelore had seen to it. It wouldn’t
reveal much. They were unholy collaborators, the girl and her
mother, the girl carving a swastika on a dying man with a knife
while the other washed his blood off her hands.

‘
En
psychiko vrasmo,
’ their defense attorney would say in court, a
plea acceptable in Greece. They acted while their souls were
boiling.

One final
question. “Your husband beat you up, didn’t he?” Patronas asked
Gerta Bechtel as he settled her into the back of the
car.

“
Yes.
I told him about his uncle, what he’d done to Hannelore, and he
went crazy. We are sad people, Chief Officer. Gunther, atoning for
what his uncle did in the war. All those years in Africa. Never
seeing what he did to us, what he did in our house.”

Patronas didn’t
know what to do with the information, whether to charge Bechtel
with domestic assault or not. In the end, he decided to let it go.
Gunther Bechtel had not emerged from the house during the
interview, nor had he shown much interest when Patronas knocked on
the door and told him that he was charging his wife and daughter
with murder.

“
You
need to find someone to stay with him,” Papa Michalis counseled,
worried that the man would take his own life. Evangelos Demos had
done what he could to safeguard against such as possibility,
alerting the Bauers and finding a man on the force fluent in German
to sit with him. He called a man from his office in Germany who had
worked with him in Africa and summoned him, saying it was
imperative that he come.

Patronas visited
Maria Georgiou in her room later that night. “It was you who burned
the candles, wasn’t it? Scattered the flowers over the
body?”

“
Yes,”
she said simply. “It was important to me.”

“
Why?
You hated him.”

“
It
wasn’t for him, if that’s what you think. No, never. I was grieving
for
me
, for the girl I’d been
.
With his death, that
part of my life was over. All those feelings, I could finally let
go of them, bury them alongside him. After the massacre, I was
always alone, always a stranger. There was no one I loved or who
loved me. And I wanted to cry for that child, for the little girl
who got left behind in Aghios Stefanos in 1943. Who was unlucky
enough to live when everyone else had died.”

“
Where’d you get the candles?”

“
They
were on a shelf in the kitchen. The flowers, I found in the
garbage. Mrs. Gerta had bought a bouquet a few days before and
thrown them away. Carnations and lilacs. She said her daughter,
Hannelore, always loved the carnations.”

A tear ran down
her face. “I didn’t mind that the carnations were old and brown. It
seemed right to throw dead flowers on him.”

Patronas still
wasn’t sure who’d actually done the killing, but he was betting it
was the daughter, Hannelore Bechtel. Even at sixteen, she was an
unsavory creature, had nearly torn the head off a cat. Seventy
years before, she, like her
Grobpapa
before her, might have
served in the Gestapo. She seemed to have the calling.

A
s the boat for Piraeus wasn’t leaving until after
midnight and there was nothing left to do at the station, Patronas,
Tembelos, and Papa Michalis spent the day in Grikos, a village to
the south of Skala.

A nearly perfect
circle of sunlit blue water, the Bay of Grikos was breathtaking. A
narrow strip of land led out to a pyramid-shaped rock on the far
side.

“
Kalikatsou,” the priest called the rock, saying hermits had
once inhabited it, carving out caves, chimneys, and staircases in
the sandstone. “It’s named for the birds, the
kalikatsoudes
,
cormorants, that nest there. Supposedly, there was a temple
dedicated to Venus on Kalikatsou in ancient times. Archeologists
think the caves might be older, might even be paleolithic. People
say the place emits a strange energy.”

At first the
priest had declined to accompany them to the beach, saying it
wasn’t seemly, a man of the cloth sitting in a lounge chair under
an umbrella, but he’d finally agreed to join them.

On the ride to
Grikos, he’d spoken of the mythological origins of Patmos, reading
from a pamphlet he’d discovered in the hotel lobby. “Supposedly the
island was once submerged, existing at the bottom of the sea, until
the moon goddess, Selene, cast her light on the ocean and revealed
it.”

“
The
moon goddess, huh?” Patronas said, remembering his nightly
swims.

“
Yes,
she convinced the goddess Artemis to raise it from the sea, and
they enlisted Apollo, who convinced Zeus, and it was done.” The
priest spread out his arms to take in the island. “
Voilà
,
Patmos.”