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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.”
    Patronas checked
his notes to see if he’d missed anything. The list in his head kept
growing. “One of my men is escorting the body to Athens. His name
is Giorgos Tembelos. He should be there in nine or ten hours. He’ll
hand over the evidence: the bags I told you about, everything else
we found.”
    As a precaution,
Tembelos was going along to make sure the victim got where he
needed to go. Patronas doubted there’d be a problem with the
pick-up and delivery, but he was taking no chances.
    “ By
the book, Giorgos,” he cautioned. “No fooling around. No ‘I’m in
Athens, I might as well go and visit my mother,’ bullshit. If the
hearse isn’t there to meet you when the boat docks—drivers might
still be on strike—call headquarters and ask them to send a van.
Don’t try to flag a taxi, Giorgos. You hear me? Don’t leave the
body lying on the curb and run off looking for a cab. You’ve got
the address of the lab. Go directly there and deposit the body,
make sure the coroner signs the release form, then turn around and
come right back. We can’t afford to screw this up.”
    “ Okay,” Tembelos said gruffly, miffed at the lengthy
instructions.
    “ What
did you say?”
    “ I
said, ‘okay.’ ”
    ‘ Okay’
had become increasingly popular in Greek along with chillaroume— the Americanism, ‘chill out,’ reworked in Greek.
Patronas, for one, didn’t approve of the trend. His homeland was
disappearing right before his eyes—his music, his language,
everything was going. Socrates would have wept.
    “ Greek, Giorgos, Greek. That’s who we are, that’s what we
speak. The word you should use to signal your assent is entaxei. ”
    Tembelos was now
thoroughly aggravated. “Whatever, you asshole,” he said. “Need me
to translate? It’s where you shit.”
     
    Papa Michalis had
insisted on accompanying the body to Athens. “I’ll go, not as a
policeman, but as a priest and pray for the victim,” he told
Patronas.
    He’d been deeply
moved at the sight of the dead man, even wept a little as they
loaded him into the cooler. “To meet such a fate so far from