When the Devil's Idle Read online

  When the Devil’s Idle

  A Greek Islands Mystery

  Leta Serafim

  * * *

  Coffeetown Press

  PO Box 70515

  Seattle, WA 98127

  For more information go to: www.coffeetownpress.com

  www.letaserafim.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover design by Sabrina Sun

  When the Devil’s Idle

  Copyright © 2015 by Leta Serafim

  ISBN: 978-1-60381-998-5 (Trade Paper)

  ISBN: 978-1-60381-999-2 (eBook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015938969

  Produced in the United States of America

  * * *

  For Philip

  * * *

  Acknowledgments

  The following people were instrumental in the writing of this book. First and foremost, my husband, Philip Evangelos Serafim. Also my friends Dawn Lefakis, Stephanie Merakos, and Thalia Papageorgiou, my daughters and their husbands: Amalia Serafim and David Hartnagel, Annie and Yiannis Baltopoulos. I would also like to thank my precious grandchildren, Zoe and Grace Hartnagel and George Baltopoulos.

  My thanks to all the people who have encouraged me to continue with the Greek Island Mystery series: my agent, Jeanie Loiacano, Jennifer McCord and Catherine Treadgold at Coffeetown Press, and my late parents, John and Ethel Naugle.

  * * *

  Chapter One

  An old enemy cannot become a friend.

  —Greek Proverb

  Night was fast approaching and the garden was half-hidden in shadows. The gardener unlocked the gate and quickly set about his evening’s work, watering the roses first before moving on to the cypress trees at the periphery of the estate. The air was very still; the only sound, a flock of birds chattering by the fountain. The estate, cloistered on a hilltop and located in the village of Chora on the Greek island of Patmos, was well off the tourist trail. People rarely ventured there uninvited.

  The gardener lingered by the fountain, enjoying the sound of the cascading water and the coolness it brought to the hot, late-summer air. He dipped his hand in the water and wiped his face.

  Distracted, he didn’t notice the wounded man at first, lying in a congealing pool of blood on the far side of the fountain. It was the birds that drew him. Crows, from the sound of them, far too many for this time of night.

  His eyes open, the man lay sprawled on the ground, barely breathing. His hair was matted with blood and his forehead was carved with a swastika.

  The gardener fell to his knees and screamed and screamed. He was far from the house, so no one heard his cries. Growing more and more desperate, he ran to the door and began pounding on it, crying for help. Eventually a woman answered. Pushing his way into the house, he demanded her cellphone and called the police. The station was located in the port of Skala, four kilometers away, the village of Chora being far too small to warrant its own station.

  There was much shouting back and forth, given the poor connection, before the gardener finally yelled, “Dolofonia!” Murder.

  At first the police dispatcher was skeptical and doubted the man’s story, but the hysteria in the Albanian’s voice finally convinced him to send someone, if only to lock him up in a padded cell.

  A policeman named Evangelos Demos duly arrived on the scene.

  * * *

  It was, as he later told his former supervisor, Yiannis Patronas, exactly as the gardener described.

  “Bloody?”

  “Yes. One of the worst crime scenes I’ve ever seen.” This was hardly significant. Evangelos Demos was no expert, having seen only one other crime scene in his life, a bloody mess on a beach. On that occasion he had fainted dead away, going down like a sequoia tree and vomiting as he went, contaminating every scrap of evidence. He was notorious among law enforcement officials in Greece, a legend almost.

  “There was an old woman who pulled me aside as I was leaving the house. ‘Prosehe,’ she said.” Be careful.

  Patronas had been at a taverna on the Greek island of Chios when the call came in, eating dinner with an elderly priest named Papa Michalis. The two were old friends and it was an idyllic evening. Far to the east, the moon was rising and he could see the dusky hills of Turkey across the narrow channel that divided the two countries, along with headlights of cars in the streets of Chesme.

  Between them, the two had drunk nearly a liter of ouzo and were discussing the nature of evil, whether it was generated by humans or an independent entity. The priest, being a religious man, favored the latter view, quoting the Bible to bolster his case. “ ‘I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven,’ it says in the New Testament. ‘For God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains.’ ”

  Patronas snorted. “So our troubles are caused by fallen angels?” As the Chief Officer of the Chios police, he’d seen plenty of the fallen and arrested more than a few of them, but he’d never encountered an angel. Not a single one in all his years on the force or in his tumultuous married life. Just the opposite in fact.

  But the priest was not to be put off. “Fallen angels, the devil, call it what you will. There’s too much evil in the world to be the work of man alone.”

  Patronas was later to recall that conversation. Papa Michalis had spoken the truth that night. Evil was indeed an entity and certain human beings embodied it, wore it like skin. He just hadn’t realized it at the time.

  When his phone rang, he hesitated, not wanting the evening to end.

  “Chief Officer Patronas?” a man asked.

  Patronas cursed, recognizing the tremulous whine of his former associate, Evangelos Demos. Fat and incompetent, he’d been forced out of the Chios Police Directorate after panicking during a stakeout and shooting up a herd of goats. It had been one of the worst nights of Patronas’ career, Evangelos firing away with his service revolver and the goats falling, writhing, and shitting themselves as they bled to death. “Get rid of him,” Patronas had told his superior at the time. “No living creature is safe while Evangelos Demos is on the job. He does harm just by breathing.”

  As usually happened, his superior in Athens, a self-serving bureaucrat named Haralambos Stathis, had ignored his warning and reassigned Evangelos Demos to Patmos. His duties there were few: overseeing the cruise ships that docked there and the hundreds of foreign tourists on holiday who inevitably drank too much and got into trouble.

  “It’s as far away as we can send him and still be on dry land,” Stathis had told Patronas at the time. “Any farther east and he’ll be policing fishes.”

  Pity the fishes.

  “Why don’t you just fire him?”

  “His uncle is a representative from Sparta.” This being Greece, it was a sufficient reason.

  Ever the parade horse, his old colleague Evangelos Demos had become insufferable since being posted to Patmos, bragging about the celebrities he knew—Aga Khan and the like—who summered there. Although he’d been totally disgraced and his uncle had been forced to call in favors to save his career, Evangelos always spoke as if he expected to be listened to, prefacing every remark with ‘na sou po’—let me tell you—and pontificating as if he were king. This time was no exception.

  Irritated, Patronas reached for his cigarettes. Just thinking about Evangelos made his blood boil. He wa
nted to hang up, but didn’t dare. He was already considered a troublemaker, an outlaw, a rogue. No reason to make matters worse.

  “There’s a dead German here,” Evangelos’ voice dropped dramatically, “murdered.”

  Patronas puffed furiously on his cigarette. He needed to get a new phone, one with a screen that showed who was calling.

  Homicide was rare in Greece, the murder of a foreigner, rarer still. After solving a case on Chios, he had become a celebrity of sorts among policemen and was often consulted by colleagues like Evangelos on difficult cases. Patronas didn’t welcome the attention and wished they’d leave him alone. It had hardly been an achievement, that case on Chios, botched as it was from start to finish. Yes, he’d caught the killer, but it had been more by accident than design and only after the perpetrator had murdered three people and sliced him to ribbons. A rank amateur, he recognized his limitations. He only wished others did.

  “I don’t know where to start,” Evangelos went on in an uncharacteristic burst of modesty.

  “You said the victim was German?”

  “That’s right. Someone carved a swastika on his forehead.”

  “One of those skinheads? A tourist?”

  Evangelos knew what Patronas was asking. Sometimes foreigners got into things, strange things better left alone. “No, the victim was an old man.”

  “How old?”

  “Eight-nine, ninety. Old, old.”

  Patronas gave a low whistle. “Was it a robbery?”

  “I don’t think so. He was staying in Chora with his family, guests of an industrialist in Munich. A very powerful man. There’s a bunch of them here now. Unlike us, they’ve got money to burn and bought up a bunch of old villas. Spend July and August there ….”

  The priest, who’d been listening, chuckled softly. “Summer, autumn, war.” It was an old saying, dating from the time of the Spartans, on the inevitability of war, the enduring presence of one’s enemies.

  “Germans haven’t made it to Chios,” said Patronas.

  “You’re lucky,” Evangelos said. “They’re all over Patmos now. Couldn’t get here with Hitler, so they bought their way in this time. Their weapon of choice, the Euro.” His voice was bitter.

  Patronas had heard similar complaints—Germans making themselves at home in places where they didn’t belong. Ieropetra in Crete, for example, a village which suffered one of the bloodiest massacres of the war. The newcomers had no compunction about it, apparently, no sense that it was hallowed ground and they shouldn’t trespass. Idly, he wondered what the Israelis would do if Germans turned up en masse in Tel Aviv, beach towels in hand, eager to buy property. Be interesting to see.

  Hospitality was a Greek virtue and had been since ancient times. Guests were to be honored, given the best food, the last drop of wine. But what if they never left, those guests? Stayed on and bought houses and lived there beside you? What was the difference between a guest and the advance guard of an invading army? Patronas didn’t know the answer. Wasn’t sure there was one.

  “You have to help me,” Evangelos said. “I can’t do this alone.” There was something in his voice as he said this. Fear maybe.

  “What about my job?” Patronas asked.

  “I cleared it with Athens.”

  “I don’t know if you know this, Evangelos, but I got a second job since you left Chios, overseeing the security on an archeological dig.”

  In addition to his police work, Patronas and a friend of his from the force, Giorgos Tembelos, worked part-time as guards on an excavation run by Harvard University. The job was easy and the pay was good. He’d be a fool to abandon it. Times were tough now in Greece. In spite of his twenty-two years on the force, he could be laid off at any time.

  “Ask the Americans for a leave of absence,” Evangelos said. “They’ll give it to you.”

  A dead German, a man of uncertain vintage with varicose veins and a cane—not a case that stirred Patronas or cried out to him for justice.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Patmos is pretty far away.”

  “I’m afraid there might be more,” Evangelos blurted out. Again, that note in his voice. “There are a lot of Germans here. I’m afraid this is only the beginning.”

  Patronas sat there, thinking. His country was hanging by a thread. Unsolved, a case like this could generate panic, keep tourists away. “All right,” he said wearily. “I’ll come.”

  Digging into his briefcase, he got out a notebook and pen. “Give me the details. Who found him?”

  “The gardener. He said the old man was lying outside in a bathrobe and slippers.”

  “So he wasn’t meeting someone?”

  “No. He kept to himself. Liked to sit outside in the sun and listen to German music. Sometimes slept there in the afternoon.”

  Evangelos hesitated. “I thought it might be political,” he said in a low voice.

  Patronas smiled to himself. A Greek perspective, that one. Sooner or later, everything led back to politics.

  “Our politics or theirs?” he asked.

  “Theirs. Judging by the house, these people have a lot of money. Maybe it was someone from Germany, one of those leftists from the Baader-Meinhof gang or the Red Brigades.”

  “First, that was a long time ago and second, the Red Brigades weren’t even German. They were Italian.”

  The priest continued to play, humming a few bars of the Horst Wessel song, the Nazi anthem, and breaking into song now and then, bellowing, “Millions are looking upon the swastika full of hope.” A moment later, he shifted and began yodeling the words of Deutschland Erwache—another anthem from the war. He was very drunk.

  To the swastika, devoted are we!

  Hail our leader, hail Hitler to thee!

  “What did the coroner say?” Patronas asked, motioning the priest to be quiet.

  “We don’t have a coroner on Patmos,” Evangelos said. “A local doctor saw him.”

  “What did the doctor say?”

  “That he was dead.”

  Patronas closed his eyes. He’d forgotten what Evangelos was like. A mosquito could outthink him.

  “How long will it take you to get here?” Evangelos asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to fly to Athens first, then to Samos and from there catch a boat to Patmos. Twelve hours at least.”

  “Stathis doesn’t want you to fly. By boat, he said, you and your men. Third class.”

  “More than twenty-four hours then. Midnight tomorrow at the earliest.”

  “I’ll keep everything in place until you come.”

  With a sigh, Patronas closed his phone. A corpse in August, a day and a half gone. It wouldn’t be pretty. Not to mention that the case was sure to have political repercussions, given the current antipathy between Greece and Germany, the sense among his fellow citizens that the Germans were bleeding them dry and finally achieving what they’d been denied during the war—the utter destruction of their country. He most fervently hoped the victim hadn’t been attacked for that reason—that some crazed public employee, upset about the cuts to his salary, hadn’t decided to avenge himself on an old man in pajamas.

  The priest had heard every word. “I fear Satan is afoot in Greece once more,” he mumbled, pouring out the last of the ouzo and drinking it down. “This killing is his handiwork, his calling card.” He rambled on a bit. Something about how the devil had gotten loose in Greece once before, and that time he had been speaking German. Now it was the Germans themselves who were being killed.

  “Some people would call that karma,” Patronas said.

  “Not me. I call it evil.” Papa Michalis slammed his glass down. “Pure evil.” He leaned across the table and clutched Patronas’ arm. “Let me come with you. I studied on Patmos. I know people there.”

  “The people you know are priests, Father. It is unlikely one of them did this.”

  “The killer could be a priest. Who knows what a man of the cloth is capable of? Just look at America.”

&
nbsp; Packing was no problem. What Patronas needed, he stowed in a plastic shopping bag: underwear, a toothbrush, a comb he liked because it folded up. After he left his wife, he’d taken to going to the Turkish baths when he needed a good cleaning, carrying his dirty clothes with him and laying them out on the stone bench and steaming them alongside his naked body. Ironing, however, remained a problem. He didn’t dare discuss it with his ex-wife, Dimitra, since their leave-taking had been acrimonious. Scissors in hand, she’d been sewing when he’d told her he was moving out. Never one to hesitate, she had reached over and jabbed him in the calf, had threatened to castrate him if he didn’t get out of her sight. In retrospect, he should have waited until she’d put the scissors down before telling her he’d had enough and was on his way. At least he’d escaped with his manhood intact and his intestines—no small thing, that. She was a praying mantis, his wife, an evil insect. If he’d let her, she would have drained him of his bodily fluids, bared her teeth, and chewed his legs off.

  As it was, she’d gouged a gash in his calf that required eighteen stitches to close. He’d been on crutches for a month.

  ‘Better to live with the devil than a mean woman,’ the Greeks said, and it was true.

  They’d separated after his last case, reconciled for a time, although Patronas’ heart wasn’t in it, and finally called it quits the previous winter. Their divorce had just come through and now he was free. The very thought of no more Dimitra made him feel lightheaded, and he danced around the room as he got ready, singing that paean to freedom, the national anthem of Greece, as he reached for his socks.