That, of course,
was the question.
T
he driver of the hearse said the estate was too
remote, that he’d never be able to bring his vehicle close enough
to wheel a gurney in. “If you get the body down to the road, I can
take over.”
Patronas had been
afraid the hearse would attract too much attention and was relieved
they’d be removing the body themselves. Greek hearse drivers, in an
uproar over increased road taxes, had held a recent protest drive
in Athens, claiming the extra tolls would put them out of business.
The photos in the newspapers had been chilling—hundreds of empty
hearses parked in front of Parliament—death and taxes, all in one
place. The driver on Patmos was sure to have an opinion and he
didn’t want to hear it, not today, not with a corpse lying outside
in the heat.
Initially, he’d
wanted to interview the family before transporting the victim, but
it had taken him over thirty odd hours to get to Patmos and they’d
had plenty of time to get their stories straight. Another hour or
two wouldn’t make any difference. The day was already hot and would
only get hotter. The body had to be dealt with.
The family had
emerged from the house at one point, a man and woman, a teenage
girl, and a boy of about seven. The boy had a bandage over one eye.
The children were visibly distraught, the girl especially, leaning
against her mother and sobbing.
“
The
victim, who was he related to?” Patronas asked
Evangelos.
“
Him.”
Evangelos pointed at the man.
Approaching the
family, Patronas introduced himself. “I’m Chief Officer Yiannis
Patronas of the Chios police,” he told them. “This is my
second-in-command, Giorgos Tembelos, and my associate, Papa
Michalis. You’ve already met Evangelos Demos.”
He said this in
English, doubting a summer visitor would understand Greek. His was
a complicated tongue, and in his experience, few foreigners ever
mastered it.
“
Gunther Bechtel,” the man said, introducing himself in turn.
“How do you wish to proceed?”
“
I
will need to talk to each of you.”
Bechtel frowned.
“Everyone? The children, too?”
“
That
is correct.”
Since his last
case, Patronas had been working to improve his English. Overseeing
security on the archeological dig on Chios had helped—for the most
part, the crew was American—as did watching television with Papa
Michalis, who tuned in regularly to British and American detective
shows. Patronas understood most of what was being said now, but he
still felt self-conscious when he spoke, painfully aware of his
poor pronounciation and grade school vocabulary.
Bechtel walked
over to where they’d been working and stood, looking down at the
body. “What about my ….” He made a helpless gesture in the
direction of the corpse. “What about my papa?” Overcome, he started
to cry.
He reached for
his wife and held onto her as if his legs could no longer support
him.
“Papa!”
he sobbed.
“Papa!”
He said something
else in German, his voice ragged with grief.
Bechtel wept for
a long time, his wife comforting him. It was a pitiful sound, a
meowing almost, and Patronas longed for him to stop.
He didn’t try to
console him, knowing if the circumstances had been reversed, he
would not have welcomed the sympathy of a policeman. No, he’d have
been irritated. The loss of a parent is a grievous wound. The
murder of one? The pain had to be insurmountable.
Gunther Bechtel
eventually pulled himself together and took a deep breath. “With
your permission,” he said quietly, returning to English. “I would
like to take the body back to Germany and bury him beside my father
and mother.”
“
Unfortunately we must send him to Athens first. I’m sorry, but
it’s customary in a case like this. After that, you can arrange to
transport him back to Germany.”
The man gave a
curt nod. “Very well, then. We will remain here and
wait.”
And with that, he
excused himself by saying he had to send some emails, and went back
inside the house. The rest of his family trailed after him. The
woman kept looking back at them. Unlike her children and husband,
she appeared to be dry-eyed.
Being a Greek,
Patronas found their behavior unsettling.
Maybe that’s how they
grieve in Germany
, he told himself.
They cry themselves out
and return to their computers
. Maybe it was all the wars that
had made them that way. It didn’t matter that they’d caused it all;
they’d still suffered. He recalled how Dresden had looked after the
bombing, the mountains of burning ash. Maybe when a person’s
country becomes a vast cemetery and death is all around, it doesn’t
affect you as much. Maybe that’s how you survive—unlike his people,
the Greeks, with their black clothes and theatrical
mourning.
After his father
died, his mother had worn mourning the rest of her life, held
memorial services every year on the date as was the custom, crying
always when she spoke of it as if her heart would break, as if it
had just happened. It had been hard growing up in her house, a
child in that world of sorrow.
Still, Patronas
questioned the Germans’ reaction. The man and his wife were too
young to have any memory of the war. Judging by the house in Chora,
they were rich, had suffered no deprivation. So what was he seeing?
Surely the man would miss his father, regret his passing, his
violent end? After all, he’d lived with them. But Patronas had seen
little evidence of that other than Bechtel’s initial tears. This
was a murder, after all. Yet there’d been no demand for justice, no
crazed talk of vengeance. Though obviously anguished, Gunther
Bechtel had also seemed resigned, almost as if he’d been expecting
this.
The woman who’d
let them into the garden stood in the doorway, watching them
furtively. Not a member of the family, Patronas judged, noting the
shabby clothes, the apron. A servant, perhaps.
“
Who’s
that?” he asked Evangelos Demos, nodding in her
direction.
“
The
housekeeper.”
“
She
from around here?”
“
No,
northern Greece. Epirus, I think.”
“
Epirus? How did she end up here?”
“
I
don’t know. Maybe she met them in Germany and they brought her
here.”
In the old days,
Greeks from rural villages had immigrated to Germany—the men to
work in the automobile factories, the women as maids, any job they
could find. Patronas wondered if this woman had been part of that
migration or if her move to northern Europe had been more recent.
His cousin’s daughter had just left for Hamburg, and others he knew
would soon follow. His people were on the move again, leaving their
homeland in search of work.
“
I
think this is her first summer working in Chora,” Evangelos said.
“You’ll have to ask her. Her name’s Maria Georgiou,
Kyria
Maria
. She keeps to herself.”
Patronas put a
star next to her name. A Greek. He’d be able to converse with her
in his native tongue, not have to struggle in German,
mispronouncing the word for ‘murder victim,’
Mordopfer
and
the word for ‘killed,’
getötet
.
Or God forbid,
spend hours speaking English stuttering like poor King George in
the movie, who’d had to be coached before he could declare war on
Germany. Patronas had about fifteen minutes of solid English in
him. Any longer and it came apart.
After he and
Tembelos finished gathering evidence, they shed their Tyvek gear,
lifted the dead man up and placed him in a black body bag, zipped
it and carried it back down the hill on their shoulders to the
waiting Jeep. An official in Chora had told them the cruise ship
was due at midday and Patronas was determined to leave the village
before it arrived. He didn’t want tourists to take pictures of the
deceased with their cellphones and post them on the Internet,
didn’t want the island to be tainted by the killing. He had the
priest lead the way, hoping his robed presence would fool any
people they encountered into thinking their sad little procession
was a makeshift funeral.
He found it
strange that the family hadn’t wanted to accompany the body, to see
the old man off as it were. Usually, grieving relatives behaved
differently, refused to let go. They’d cry until they could cry no
more, as if their tears could restore the dead to life. These
people were different, and it wasn’t just because they were from
somewhere else. No, something was going on here.
He looked back at
the house. Could be they simply couldn’t bear it. Watching the body
of a loved one being trundled off was hard. He recalled when his
mother’s body was taken, how he felt like he’d been struck by a
tree. Could be the man and his wife wanted to spare themselves
that, spare their children.
They loaded the
body without incident. Evangelos Demos started the car and they
drove off, the plan being to transport the body by boat to Leros,
where there was an airport. From there it would be flown on to
Athens.
Not wanting to
put the body in the trunk of the Jeep, they’d put it in the
backseat, laying it partially in Patronas’ lap.
A fine
metaphor for the case
, he thought sourly, looking down at the
shrouded form.
The murder of a
foreign national, it would be the case from hell, no doubt about
it. The language barrier alone would be a formidable obstacle.
Patronas didn’t speak much German, and he didn’t know anyone who
did. The German language had gone out of fashion, students in
Greece preferring now to study English.
And Evangelos
Demos would be no help. No, Comrade Stalin up there in the front
seat would only get in the way.
Also, once the
media got wind of the crime, politicians from both countries might
well get involved. Right-wing or left, it wouldn’t matter, they’d
all have plenty to say, their voices rising in a self-serving
chorus and impeding his investigation. Vigilantes had begun
attacking foreign immigrants all over Europe in recent months, even
killed a few. God help Greece if that were the case
here.
Egine
hamos,
this was. Utter chaos.
Worse would be if
there was a second murder, if someone decided to take it upon
himself to cleanse his country of outsiders … a home-grown
Hitler.
Patronas closed
his eyes. He was too old to deal with such horrors, his homeland
too broken.
Please Jesus, let that not be the case
here.
“
Let’s
hope this is not what I think it is,” he told the others. “That
this man was not singled out because of his nationality.
The priest
nodded. “ ‘To kill without pity or mercy,’ that’s what Hitler
said. ‘Who still talks nowadays about the Armenians?’ Let us pray
no one in Greece has succumbed to such madness.”
The crew on the
police cruiser rushed to help when Patronas and Tembelos carried
the body bag up the gangplank of the boat. “What happened to them?
Was it an accident?” one of the men asked.
“
No,”
Patronas said. “He was murdered.”
He had called
ahead and told them to clear a place in the hold and pack it with
ice. A morbid kind of cooler, it would have to do until they
reached Leros and the plane. The ice Evangelos had poured on the
victim had already doomed a proper forensic examination. A little
more wouldn’t do any harm.
“
Get
there as fast as you can,” he instructed the captain. “I’ve alerted
the airport on Leros and they’ll fly him out on the next plane. See
that he gets to the proper authorities in Athens.”
Before leaving
the crime scene, Patronas had called the Forensic Sciences Division
of the Hellenic Police in Athens on his cellphone and told the man
in charge to red-flag the case, stating the deceased was a foreign
national and that the lab needed to work the case and work it fast.
There could well be international repercussions once word got out.
No one in law enforcement wanted that kind of trouble.
“
Of
course,” the man said. “I’ll make sure the technicians start
immediately.”
“
Make
sure they ink his fingers and run them for prints,” Patronas added.
“I tried, but the facilities are limited here on Patmos and you
people are the experts. Also check the tallow in the evidence
bag—it’s labeled, ‘wax, body’—and compare it with the envelope,
marked ‘wax, church.’ See if there’s a match.”
His colleague
read the request back to him. “I’ll check with the general police
divisions on the islands and see if there’s been any other attacks
on foreigners,” he said. “Could be this was a simple break-in and
he surprised them.”
“
Check
the mainland, too. All of Greece. Also run those scars on the
victim’s face through the international databases. Maybe you’ll get
a hit.”
“
Will
do.”
“
And
keep it quiet. No media, no loose talk.”