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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