Murder in Mykonos

8

The early-morning bus to Paradise was filled with two types: the totally wasted who had not slept and were returning to the campgrounds by the beach, and the totally alert who had not partied. Annika felt closer to the former but tried acting like the latter. When the bus arrived, Annika followed the sober ones to the beach. She decided it was better to stay with that crowd because the others — and stragglers out of Paradise's notorious all-night dance clubs — were busy making up for one last shot at whatever they hadn't quite been able to achieve by midmorning.

Her crowd headed to the end farthest away from the clubs, past the rented umbrellas and loungers to an open section of beach. She followed them. They put down their towels. She did the same. They took off all their clothes. She didn't know what to do.

Nudity was common on Mykonos, but these people were her parents' age. She looked back up the beach to see where else she could go, but something told her she was least likely to be bothered here. They all seemed to know one another, and the group kept growing. Before long she was surrounded by naked Karlas, Georges, Sharons, and Edwards from all over the world. As hesitant as she was to take off her suit, she felt she'd attract more attention in it rather than out of it; so with a 'when in paradise' attitude she stripped naked as the rest. No one seemed to notice. They all seemed so nice. She fell asleep on her belly with a towel over her head to the sounds of old friends having a good time. Andreas told the officer watching the rooms not to leave the hotel until the woman staying in the Vandrew room returned. He wanted to know how she ended up in there. Then he left to see Pappas. There still was the matter of those other churches to follow up on.

Contractors, as a rule, aren't in their offices much, and Pappas was no exception. It took about an hour before Andreas found him, he was over by Elia Beach, where he was supervising the 'renovation' addition of two dozen mountainside villas to an already huge hotel. There were mixed feelings over the effect those hotels had on the beauty of the island but not on how they affected the families who owned them. They made them very rich — and powerful enough to go on 'renovating' away to their hearts' content.

Andreas met him in the hotel restaurant.

'So, Chief, how can I help you this time?' asked Pappas, from behind his sunglasses.

Andreas knew this was going to cost him. 'I'm trying to locate some old churches.'

'Which ones?'

Andreas handed him the list. Pappas looked at it. 'These are Father Paul's,' he said, his voice hard.

'I know. He gave me the names.'

Pappas' voice grew loud. 'You can't possibly think he had anything to do with the murder.'

Andreas kept his cool. 'I think it's best for your friend that you keep your voice down.'

'Don't tell me what to do,' he said in a quieter voice.

'I didn't say he's a suspect,' Andreas said. 'We found a dead body in an abandoned church. Now we're checking out other abandoned churches for clues.'

'Why?'

Obviously Pappas didn't know about the other three bodies. If he had, he wouldn't be asking why. That meant word hadn't leaked out yet, because if it had, Pappas would be among the first to know.

'It's routine.' Andreas was getting weary of playing up to Pappas' ego. 'Look, if you want to help, fine; if not, I'll find someone else. I figured I could trust you not to start gossiping that your friend Father Paul might be a suspect just because I'm asking about his churches.' Yeah, sure.

Pappas stared at him for several seconds. 'You know, I'm getting a lot of grief about my trucks hauling concrete at seven in the morning through that neighborhood up there.' He pointed north. 'On the road to Aghios Sostis Beach, but it gives me the edge I need to finish my projects on time.' The price had been set.

Andreas shrugged. 'I don't see a problem with that, as long as your drivers aren't any drunker than the rest at that hour.'

Pappas smiled. 'Do you have a map?'

Andreas handed him one and watched Pappas make eight marks and write eight names before handing it back.

'Thank you.'

'No problem, Chief. By the way…' Andreas couldn't believe he had the balls to ask for more. 'Ilias is a pervert, everyone knows that, but he's no murderer.'

How the hell does word get out so fast? Of course, Ilias' cousin's the mayor and Pappas is the former mayor. 'What do you mean, everyone knows he's a pervert?'

Pappas gave his best 'you should know this already' look. 'Ilias is kinky, he films the women in his hotel, then watches the videos with his girlfriends. He gets off on having them imitate what he's filmed.'

'How do you know all this?' Andreas' voice was official.

He snickered. 'We have the same girlfriends. We all do. It's a small island.'

Andreas took the we to mean the Mykonos powers that be.

'I'm not telling you how to do your job, Chief, but Ilias isn't your killer. Besides, he's probably out by now. The mayor's already spoken to Syros.'

Andreas was certain his anger was showing now. 'Anything else?'

Pappas obviously was enjoying this chance to lecture the new boy in town on how to get along. 'No, but good luck in finding your killer. I'm sure it's some Albanian. Find one, and the whole town will support you.'

In other words, if Andreas knew what was good for him, he'd stay away from the Mykonians. Andreas wanted to wipe the smirk off the asshole's face with a lecture of his own, on the perils of allowing a serial killer to run around his island paradise murdering tourist women, but instead he thanked him and left. He had churches to visit. Andreas' first call once he was back on the road was to Tassos. He wanted to keep Ilias in custody.

'Don't worry about it,' Tassos said, his voice calm, reassuring.

'What do you mean don't worry, he's our number one suspect.' Andreas was yelling in the Greek style.

'Andreas, relax. Where's he going to go? His whole life is on Mykonos, and we'll have him watched day and night. It'll be like house arrest — in a very big house.'

Andreas knew Tassos was trying to put the best face on a politically impossible situation. It didn't make him any happier, but there was no way Ilias was staying in jail without solid evidence tying him to a murder. Showing he was a pervert wasn't enough of a reason for Syros politicians keeping the Mykonos mayor's cousin in jail. 'Damn it.'

Tassos must have sensed Andreas' tension through the phone. 'I know.' He paused until Andreas was breathing normally. 'So, what about our former number one suspect?'

'I'm on my way to check out his churches,' he grumbled.

'Do you really think he'd be crazy enough to name places where he buried bodies?'

'Who knows, he's damn smart, and if he didn't tell me, he knew we'd find out anyway. It was the savvy move.' The anger had drained from Andreas' voice.

'Guess you're right. If you find anything, let me know and I'll send the forensic guys from the hotel over to meet you.'

'Thanks. Any luck yet?'

'A lot of tapes of what must be five hundred women, indexed and cross-indexed by name, address, age, country of origin — the stuff off passports.' He paused.

'And?' Andreas was not in the mood to enjoy Tassos' penchant for the dramatic.

'By body parts. Hair color — top and bottom — breast size, nipple color… need I go on? I think you get the idea.'

'Fuck.' Andreas shook his head. 'Trouble is, unless we get a match to another dead woman, it's all consistent with what we already know — he's a pervert.' He slowed down to turn onto the road leading to the old mines.

Tassos said, 'I have someone trying to come up with a match, but I'm not sure we'll find one even if he's our guy.'

'Why?'

'He could have destroyed tapes of girls he killed.'

'But we saw Helen Vandrew on tape.'

'Yeah.' Tassos' voice was tentative, as if searching for an answer. 'But maybe he hadn't gotten around to destroying that one yet.'

Andreas was impatient — he knew there was something else. 'What's bothering you?'

'My Scandinavian wasn't in the index, and it goes back years before we found her.'

After a short silence, Andreas, clearly exasperated, muttered, 'Nothing's easy. Well, maybe she's not in it, but they'll find her on the tapes.'

'Maybe.' Tassos didn't sound encouraged. 'Good luck with your churches.'

'I'll take that to mean "May all the bones be old bones." Call you later. I'm almost at the first one.' Andreas hung up.

He pulled off the road at a place Pappas had marked on the map. He shut off the engine but didn't move, just looked up the hill at a ramble of dry brush and neglected stone walls and stared at the whitewashed church near the top. He still remembered standing in a museum as a child with his father, staring at the side of a famous sculpture and wondering what all the fuss was about. It looked so very simple and unremarkable — until he moved to face it and saw head-on all the terrifying power and complexity of snake-haired Medusa. Please, not again, he prayed. When Annika awoke there was a light, azure pareo draped over her body. It was not hers, and she had no idea who had put it there, but whoever did had spared her a horrific sunburn. She must have been sleeping for hours. She sat up, carefully folded it, and looked around. No one seemed to be paying attention to her except for a few young Greek men waving for her to join them.

An attractive, middle-aged woman on the towel next to her was reading a magazine entitled California Living. Annika asked if she knew who her Good Samaritan was. The woman pointed to a very fit, silver-haired man lying naked on his stomach two towels away. He was facing them but seemed asleep. Annika was sure she'd seen him before but couldn't place him.

'Just give it to me, darling, and I'll see that Paul gets it when he wakes up.'

'Thanks,' Annika said, and handed her the pareo. She was hungry and decided to get something to eat at the taverna on the beach. The Greek guys started calling to her, first in Greek and then in English. She ignored them as she dressed, gathered up her things, and walked to the taverna.

She chose the table closest to the sea and ordered water, a Greek salad, and grilled octopus. She felt at peace. She also felt someone watching her — but that wasn't unusual; the reason she picked that table was so she could look at the sea without someone in her line of vision trying to catch her attention. Not that anyone could have, for she was mesmerized by the endless stream of swimmers climbing onto a nearby reef running parallel to the beach.

Once on the reef, most preened a bit, as if they were walking on water. But their godlike experiences were not without risk, for the reef was covered in sea urchins — with porcupine-like spines. She watched one strutting, barefoot waterwalker after another suddenly jump in the air and grab a pierced foot. As for the occasional naked swimmer unwary enough to sit on the reef, all Annika could think of was 'ouch!' She was feeling slightly guilty at her schadenfreude fascination but not enough to look away. After all, she thought, it's sort of their fault for not having the common sense to know better, and besides, it was very funny.

At around five, people started drifting in from the beach to begin their early-afternoon partying. That was when the guys began bothering her again. It was time to head back to the hotel. She walked behind the taverna to the bus stop next to the campgrounds. It was just a wider bit of dirt than the rest of the road down to the beach.

She watched a faint-brown-and-green bus wind down the road toward where she stood. Brown and green were the colors of the hills. She wondered about the significance of Mykonos buses being land-colored instead of blue and white like the sea and sky. Probably just a practical one — light brown and green don't show the ever-present dust so much; when the winds are blowing it is like brown powdered sugar flying everywhere.

The bus at that hour was virtually empty except for a few older couples and locals lucky enough to squeeze in some time at the beach before getting back to their jobs. She decided to go into town rather than back to the hotel.

She had a coffee under a canopied taverna on the harbor and watched Petros and Irini do their tourist thing — posing for pictures and giving the occasional nip at gestures deemed unfriendly — Mykonos' clipped-wing, pelican mascots were direct descendants, some claimed, of the pair donated to the island by Mykonos lover Jacqueline Kennedy not-yet-Onassis.

Annika had seen this harbor from every approach and never tired of it. Her favorite vantage was the one she got when sailing between Mykonos and Delos, a sea view of the most famous church in the Cyclades, the fifteenth-century Paraportiani. It stood between the bays of Tourlos and Korfos on the outer edge of a jut of land at the southernmost side of the old harbor. Really a combination of five churches — four below and one above — its roots traced back the thirteenth-century when a portion of its structure served as part of a defensive wall for the protecting castle that once stood there. Paraportiani always made Annika think of a huge mound of sunlit marshmallows topped by a jumbo white cherry. The church was practically all that remained of the castle — that and the Kastro name for the area bordering Little Venice, where today's invaders sought their adventures in all-night bars and clubs.

Annika thought of the night before and how stupid she'd been. She must rid her mind of that memory. Tomorrow morning she'd catch an early boat to Delos. That should do the trick.

The holy island was only a mile from where she sat. She'd spent her college freshman summer there working at archeological digs begun by the French in 1873 and pitching in as a guide through its ancient ruins for VIP tours in one of her languages. She'd loved it. The uninhabited island was different from Mykonos in every way — though in antiquity Delos clearly had been the better place to party. Mykonos wasn't even on the maps of those times, and its name meant nothing more than 'mound of rocks.'

Annika tried to recall the words of the introduction to her tour: 'Basically flat except for two hills, and only one twentieth the size of Mykonos, Delos in the ancient world was considered the center of Cycladic life. But its influence ended abruptly in the early part of the last century before Christ, when Delos backed the wrong protector and twenty thousand inhabitants were slaughtered, its physical and cultural landscape destroyed. The island was leveled, but its intense spiritual power endures to this day.'

She repeated the last words aloud to herself: 'its intense spiritual power endures to this day.' Yes, that's definitely what she needed, and she vowed to be on the first boat the next morning. She'd be back by four at the latest. Demetra was arriving tomorrow. Besides, she had to be — the guards allowed no one on Delos after sunset, and the last boat left at three.

But for now she was off to explore the shops just opening for the evening. Most didn't close until after midnight, some not until sunup. As if following Alice down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, Annika plunged through a break in a row of seafront tavernas, and — like magic — the harbor vanished. She was back in the maze of twisting, narrow stone paths that, for her, held the essence of Mykonos' charm; it was the labyrinth itself — not what it offered — that she loved.

Sure, Mykonos was famous for tantalizing tourists with brightly lit shops, colorful restaurants, roaring bars, and freewheeling dance clubs, but this still was a town where people raised families and shared strong traditions. Down the less traveled lanes, children played their games oblivious to the occasional tourists squeezing through their four-, five-, or maybe six-foot-wide playgrounds. Pairs of grandmothers, all in black, did duty watching the children. They'd sit on stoops in front of their houses or, if a shop occupied the street level, on brightly painted wooden balconies outside their second-floor homes; balconies with gates guarding pets, pots of geraniums, draping bougainvillea, and — if rented to tourists — clothes left to dry.

As she walked, Annika's eyes drifted up from the rows of glossy green, blue, and red banisters to where the white textures of the buildings met the sky. So many whites: light white, dark white, sunlit white, shaded white, dirtcaked white, white over color, white over stone, white over wood, white over steel, white over rust, peeled white, fresh white, old white, slick white, coarse white — against so many blues: dark blue, pale blue, and all those blues in between. Annika smiled, took in a deep breath, and said softly, 'I just love it here.'

She wandered over to Little Venice and in a shop looking across to the windmills bought a blue-and-silver beaded necklace that reminded her of the sea. She was admiring her purchase in the reflection of another shop's window when a voice behind her said in English, 'Great necklace, fits you perfectly.' She could see in the reflection that it was an older man in the doorway of the shop behind her.

She turned and said, 'Thank you.' Her voice was courteous, nothing more.

'Is that one of Susy's?'

'Susy?'

'From La Thalassa.'

She smiled and felt a tinge of pride at having something so recognizable. 'Yes, it is.'

'I thought so. She has great things. Glad her price point is different from mine. Couldn't stand the competition, especially from a fellow South African.' He smiled.

Annika realized the shop was one of the premier high-end jewelers on the island — way out of her league. 'That's very sweet of you to say.'

'I like her, she has style. Would you like a coffee?'

Annika hesitated but caught herself. This is Mykonos, she thought, and jewelers are nice to everyone. She should stop being so paranoid over last night. 'Thank you. That would be lovely.'

She spent over two hours in the shop. The owner was a Greek born in South Africa and also a George — but very different from her George of the night before. He was raised on a farm 'in the bush' and educated in Johannesburg. Although he missed the beauty of Africa — if not its politics — in Greece he'd been able to pursue an interest in ancient civilizations he'd picked up in college. He took great pride in showing her a small Corinthian vase he claimed predated the birth of Christ by more than five hundred years.

Even after more than twenty years on Mykonos, George still felt treated as a foreigner, but he accepted that as a fact of island life. Besides, there wasn't much choice because this was where his business was and where he'd made his life — though off-season he lived in Athens. He mentioned a few other old-timers, as he called them who felt the same way, including the artist she'd met the night before, and pointed to one of his paintings hanging in a corner.

'I admire how his style appeals to so many on so many different levels. It's not just for tourists.' He pointed again and when he spoke, intensity came into his voice. 'See how he weaves mythic Greek figures into his work.'

Annika was tempted to add that somewhere in each painting lay the image of 'a lost soul rebirthing out of darkness into light,' but that inevitably would lead to explaining those were the artist's words to her — and a discussion of their meeting last night. She didn't want to get into that. Instead, she talked about her life as if she were a Dutch girl on her first trip to Greece; but mostly she listened. George liked to talk, and although he didn't say whether he was married, she assumed he was. She pointed to a photograph of a young girl and younger boy on his desk and asked if those were his children.

The question seemed to surprise him. He hesitated, as if searching for the right words. 'No, it's my sister and me. In fact, you remind me of her.' He smiled.

When she said she had to leave, he seemed disappointed but didn't push to see her again. They simply shook hands and said good-bye.

She walked back to the harbor and sat in a cafe to watch the sunset. For the first time in a long while she felt in control of her life. As far as she was concerned, Peter was now ancient history. She owed nothing to anyone but herself — and her family of course, which reminded her to call home the moment she got back to the hotel. For now, though, she wanted to enjoy her anonymity a bit longer. Andreas was getting used to climbing dry, rocky hillsides. It was his fourth of the day and so far so good — if not finding anything but very old bones was good. His fourth church of the afternoon was on the southeast part of the island, not far from some of Mykonos' most popular beaches. Sooner or later developers would bring a lot of company to this isolated tribute to Saint Fanourios. For the time being, though, it sat on deserted ground — the same as the three others he'd visited today honoring Saint Nicholas, Saint Barbara, and Saint Phillipos.

All four churches were several hundred years old. Andreas had been told that some went back to the 1500s, maybe even earlier, depending on who you talked to. Whatever their age, all were recently whitewashed, and their doors and shutters functioned properly. The roof of one could have used a paint job, but for the most part, they'd been kept up — just as Father Paul had said.

This church looked about the same as the other three: a bell tower above a west-facing blue door, one blue shuttered window on each side wall, a sacristy on the inside along the east wall, and a stone slab in the middle of a hard-packed floor. Newer churches built of concrete had hollow spaces in their walls for accommodating individual remains or steps beneath a floor slab leading to a cellar with places for the same purpose, but these old ones had only mass crypts in the floor — like the one where they found the Vandrew body. Aside from honoring different saints, the only real difference Andreas saw in any of them was that the church where they had found her was built of natural stone and never whitewashed. He wondered if that was somehow a clue.

He carefully examined the floor for anything that seemed out of place. Nothing looked unusual. He stood by the end of the slab nearest the door and gripped its edge. He took a deep breath to calm himself and forced a smile at the thought of how he was getting used to all this grave tampering. As he braced himself to pull at the slab, anxiety gripped the pit of his stomach — as it had each time before. If, God forbid, there weren't just old bones under here, he didn't know how they'd possibly keep things quiet. Another forensic team gathering bones from under another quaint Mykonos church was too much for the media to miss.

He wondered if he was up to handling the pressure of the press if it turned on him for doing what he thought was right. His father hadn't been. But he'd been set up and forced to choose between watching his family's reputation destroyed and… 'Damn it,' Andreas said aloud. 'Stop thinking about that.'

He pulled at the slab until it moved enough for light from the doorway to shine into the crypt. He stared in for a moment, then walked outside and lit a cigarette. He took a puff, exhaled, and began to gag. He caught himself, took another deep breath, and wondered if he felt this way because of all the pressure he'd been under and those recurring thoughts of his father. That had to be part of the reason — that and the almost fully decomposed body he'd just found on a pile of not-so-old bones.