Her Boyfriend's Bones Page 8

  Dinah’s stomach gurgled and she picked up the menu and browsed. “I see they have the spit-roasted goat tonight. And homemade pasta.”

  K.D. said, “I’ve already decided. I want the chicken in cream sauce and I’m going to share it with the kitties.”

  Thor didn’t seem to hear. He hadn’t even opened his menu.

  Dinah settled on the moussaka with a side of tzaziki and closed her menu. She poured herself another glass of wine and studied his face. He seemed to be gnawing on an impossible problem. “What’s got you stumped, Norseman?”

  “Do you really think there was a payoff of some kind in the bag Brakus gave Papas?”

  “I did think so. But it’s probably because I don’t like Brakus. I don’t appreciate him broadcasting our names and address to every Tom, Dick, and mouthpiece of Hera who walks in this place. But whatever the meeting was about, I don’t see how it could have any bearing on Fathi’s murder, do you?”

  A waiter arrived and Thor seemed glad for the interruption. K.D. and Dinah placed their orders. Without looking at the menu, Thor ordered the same dish he’d ordered the night before. When the waiter repaired to the kitchen, he refilled all of their glasses and seemed to push his worries onto the back burner. “K.D., did you know that most Greeks are named for a saint and on that saint’s day, everyone with the same name gathers for a festival? It’s the same in Norway. The Catholic church replaced the pagan celebration of birthdays with name days.”

  “Is there a name day for Thor?” she asked.

  “Every Thursday is my name day. But what do you think, Dinah? As the Christian faith evolved, did the saints substitute in people’s minds for the old gods?”

  Conversation took off and the wine began to have a yeasty effect on everyone, bringing happier thoughts to the surface. Thor told a funny story about the Norse gods and K.D. regaled them with a blow-by-blow of the movie-version Thor’s exile to New Mexico. By the time they finished their meal, Thor’s mood had improved and so had Dinah’s. Everything seemed to have an innocent explanation. On an island twenty-seven miles long and eight miles wide, everyone would be acquainted with the local police, Brakus included. They had probably known one another since kindergarten. And it was only natural that gossip would attend the first-time rental of the house that had belonged to a notorious murderess. As for Brother Constantine, he was probably just a vagrant who ferreted out the local scuttlebutt and used it to scam people by telling their fortunes.

  As they walked back to Marilita’s house in the twilight, Thor extolled the attractions of Norway, with emphasis on the nice, cool summers near the North Pole.

  Dinah laughed. “Your internal thermostat is set too high, Norseman.”

  “He wouldn’t last a week in the summertime in Georgia,” said K.D.

  Dinah got a chicken-skin feeling as they walked past the spot where Fathi had died, but Thor wrapped his arm around her waist, dispelling her fear. Honeysuckle perfumed the air and in one of the white-washed houses, someone was playing the piano—“Claire de Lune.” Somewhere out beyond the trees, the moon was ascending over the Aegean. In the afterglow of the wine, even K.D. seemed simpatico. Maybe she wouldn’t be such a bother, after all. Maybe she could hang around for a week or two so long as she minded her p’s and q’s and kept a low profile.

  They turned down the alley toward Marilita’s house and all that good feeling came to a screeching halt. The veranda was a shambles. Broken flowerpots and clumps of dirt and uprooted plants lay strewn across the tiles. The chairs and table had been smashed to kindling. The door had been egged and a stinking mound of garbage had been dumped under the mulberry tree.

  Alcina stood in the center of the chaos holding a lantern in one hand and the empty parakeet cage in the other. She said, “You brought this on, Thor Ramberg. All of our trouble is because of you.”

  Chapter Ten

  Dinah sat on the side of the bed in K.D.’s room, smoking one of K.D.’s Newports and explaining why it was too dangerous for her to stay in Kanaris. “Too much is going on. There’s too much deviousness. Too much nastiness. Thor was right about there being a lot of crime on the island. It’s not safe.”

  K.D. slouched against the wall and exhaled a long, white streamer. “Big dilly. It’s only a little vandalism and people acting pissy. Like what goes on in high school? Like daily?”

  “A man was murdered in the lane just yesterday, probably by...possibly by Alcina’s husband. This house has bad karma.”

  “Karma is so pagan. You’re overreacting.”

  Dinah narrowed her eyes. She hadn’t smoked a cigarette since last New Year’s Eve, one hundred and fifty-seven days ago, and here she’d let herself be corrupted by a willful adolescent with a subversive agenda. “You have a disturbing tendency to blow off crime as if it’s hardly worth mentioning. Your burglary caper may have been just a misunderstanding and vandalism may be an everyday occurrence back in Atlanta, but murder can’t be minimized and I don’t think I’m overreacting. Friends or relatives of the murdered man have probably decided to take vengeance against Yannis and his association with this house makes it dangerous.”

  “Don’t you trust Thor to protect us?”

  “He can’t watch over us every minute of the day and night.” Dinah stubbed out her cigarette and got up to leave. “Don’t unpack. I’ll drive you back to the airport in the morning and we can phone your mother to expect you.”

  K.D. hurled herself onto the bed face-first and began to sob. Or pretended to sob.

  So much for the doing of good deeds, thought Dinah, and stormed downstairs to see what progress Thor had made with the cleanup. She and K.D. had helped him broom up the dirt and debris and bag it, but left him alone to hose off the tiles and the door. On the first floor, she heard water splatting against the side of the house and the windows. Above the noise came the sound of gut-wrenching sobs from Alcina’s room.

  The loss of the parakeets seemed to have hit Alcina hard. If tears were any measure, she cared more about those flown birds than she did about the dead Iraqi. And where was Yannis? The police had released him. He ought to be on hand to comfort his wife.

  An alarming possibility sprang to mind. What if it weren’t the birds that Alcina was weeping for? Was Yannis here when the vandals struck? If they were friends of Fathi’s, angry about Yannis’ release and bent on revenge, they could have dragged Yannis off to do God only knows what to him.

  She rushed down the hall and rapped on the door of Alcina’s lair. “Alcina? Alcina, may I come in?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Dinah pushed the door open a crack and peeped inside. The room was cloaked in shadow, lit only by candles and permeated with the tang of incense. Painted icons of Greek Orthodox saints stared down from the walls like an unfriendly jury. Alcina rocked back and forth on her knees, wringing her hands and howling. She didn’t seem to be so much beseeching the saints as berating them for their ineptitude.

  “Alcina, please tell me what it is you’re crying about. Is it Yannis? Did the people who trashed the veranda hurt him?”

  She began to ululate.

  Jerusalem. She was Marilita’s daughter, all right. Dinah felt a mixture of pity and aggravation. “Alcina, Thor’s already phoned the police, but you need to tell us if there’s something more than broken chairs and flower pots for them to investigate.”

  “Thor Ramberg. He caused all of this. The police turned Yannis loose with no protection. He’ll have to leave Samos. They will kill him.” She clasped her cross and her fetish and held them against her mouth.

  “If Yannis has been threatened, I’m sure the police will do whatever it takes to protect him. Where is he now?”

  “Hiding.”

  “So he’s safe for now?”

  “They’ll find him and kill him and I’ll have no one.”

  “Who’s they, Alcina?”

  “Iraqi
s.”

  “Was it Iraqis who tore up the place?”

  The woman expelled a soul-searing shriek that set Dinah’s teeth on edge. At a loss for comforting words, she patted Alcina’s shoulder. “There, there.” But Alcina only wailed louder and she gave up the effort. In the face of such an outpouring of grief, Mother Mary would have there-thered in vain. “Would you recognize the vandals if you saw them again?”

  “Iraqis.”

  Dinah didn’t doubt that Fathi might have had friends or countrymen out for Yannis’ blood. But this was Zenia Stephanadis’ house and any Iraqi refugee who busted up the property of a prominent Greek citizen would know that he faced certain deportation or prison. If on the other hand, the culprits were locals who resented the fact that Zenia had rented the place to a policeman...

  “Did you actually see the vandals, Alcina?”

  “Didn’t have to. I know.”

  Dinah wasn’t so sure. “Okay, Alcina. Try to calm yourself. I’ll go and relay your concerns to Thor.”

  She marched back down the hall with a queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. What sort of scary predicament had they blundered into? The sound of the water drubbing against the door had ceased and she smacked it open with force, causing it to swing back on its hinges.

  Thor was coiling the hose. He said, “I don’t think Zenia is going to return my deposit.”

  “Probably not.”

  “I phoned her and told her what happened. She’ll stop by tomorrow to see for herself. The police will come by and confer with us in the morning.”

  “I’d like to confer with you tonight. I think we should move to a different island.”

  “You may be right.” He hung the hose on a peg on the side of the house. “Let’s go upstairs. I don’t want to be overheard.”

  She led the way upstairs. Something in his body language intensified the queasy feeling .

  Inside their bedroom, he closed the window and clicked on the radio. An explosion of static assaulted their ears before he located a station playing a bouncy folk tune. He turned the volume up, sat Dinah down on the side of the bed, and stood in front of her, his hands jammed in his pockets. “I quit my job in Norway at the beginning of this year. I’m not a Norwegian policeman.”

  “You’re not on sabbatical?”

  “No.”

  “Are you trying to get hired as a policeman here?”

  “I’m already a policeman here. I’m working undercover for N.C.I.S.”

  “You’re working on a TV show?”

  “Not that N.C.I.S.”

  “How many are there? The only one I’ve ever heard of is a serial whodunit about the American Naval Criminal Investigative Service and a hotshot marine named Leroy Jethro Gibbs who discovers dead bodies like clockwork.”

  “Don’t be flippant.”

  “Me flippant? Either the sun has addled you or you’re mocking me.”

  “I’m not mocking you. I work for Norway’s National Criminal Investigation Service and I’m violating any number of rules by telling you. But things have taken an unexpected turn and you deserve to know the score.”

  “Norway has an N.C.I.S.?”

  “Yes. It liaises with Interpol and national police organizations. I’m here to investigate a ring of illegal arms traffickers. Samos is the entry point for migrants from all over Asia and Africa and the Middle East and it’s the nexus of a number of smuggling routes for moving people and weapons north into Europe. As it happens, arms dealing is a local tradition in Kanaris dating back to the end of the Second World War.”

  “This little place?”

  “Yes, this little place. Today Greece is awash in weapons, mostly cheap, Turkish-made guns smuggled across the Aegean from Turkey by Iraqis and sold on the black market. German arms manufacturers have also been flooding the Greek military with weapons, raking in big profits while running up Greek debt. But between ’67 and ’74, it was the United States that lavished weapons on the military junta.”

  “That was forty years ago.”

  “Recently, caches of forty-year-old, mint-new American rifles, handguns, and grenades have been turning up in conflict zones from Sudan to Mexico. Three months ago, N.C.I.S. detained two operatives of the Albanian mafia in Oslo. They were carrying a duffel bag full of M1911 automatic pistols like those the U.S. used in Vietnam. One of the Albanians claimed that contraband American weapons were being sold and distributed out of Kanaris by Iraqis.”

  So many countries. She felt as if she’d been fire-hosed with information, a crash course in the geopolitics of warfare. She couldn’t digest it. “It’s insane. A tiny Greek village becomes a hotbed of arms smuggling and peace-loving Norway enters the world of international espionage.”

  “From ’95 to 2005, Norway had an elite intelligence gathering unit, E-Fourteen, that carried out covert missions abroad in Afghanistan and the Balkans. The unit was suspended and these last few years we’ve been living under the illusion that we are safe and secure, too far north and too non-controversial for the bad guys to take notice. But we have critical infrastructure and assets to protect and the government has opted to revive E-Fourteen to monitor new threats.”

  “Why in the world did this elite unit pick you for a covert operation, in Greece of all places?” She didn’t mean to dis him, but he was a long way from Longyearbyen, Norway. “I mean, why send a policeman from a small town in the Arctic. You have no experience as a spy.”

  “As a matter of fact, most Norwegian intelligence stations are located north of the Arctic Circle.” A spark of anger flashed in his eyes. “I don’t know, Dinah. N.C.I.S. keeps U.S. intelligence in the loop. Maybe one of your American senators that I offended last year recommended me, hoping I’d die in the line of duty.”

  Her jaw dropped. He could fight dirty when he chose to. She said, “Bad joke. Knock wood and cross your fingers.” She went to the window and stood with her back to him until she was sure her voice was under control. “Was Fathi one of the smugglers?”

  He answered in a neutral tone. “I think so, but he would have been a small cog in the operation. There are hundreds of illegal arms sellers across Europe. E-Fourteen doesn’t have the manpower or the resources to go after them all. It’s the buyers we’re interested in, the terrorists. If I can identify the sellers, it may be feasible to trace the weapons to the buyers. I’m not here to shut down the operation, but what I learn may provide clues to how it can be infiltrated in the future.”

  “How would somebody like Fathi be able to take guns across borders?”

  “Just by getting into Greece, he could cross freely into other E.U. countries without showing travel documents. To get into a non-E.U. country like Norway, he needed an identity card and he had one. A German card with his name and photo. It would have gotten him through in the event he was stopped or questioned in any Schengen E.U. country.”

  She turned back from the window. “Who’s running the operation on Samos? Germans? Greeks? Iraqis? Alcina is terrified that Iraqis will kill Yannis. Is he part of the operation? Is that what he and Fathi were arguing about?”

  “I don’t think Yannis is mixed up in the smuggling, but I’d be willing to bet he knows something about the history of those American guns and how they came to be cached here in Kanaris. Most of the people in the village are old-time communists. They know how to keep their secrets.”

  “So do you.” She couldn’t absorb forty years of intrigue. It was all she could do to absorb the fact that Thor had invited her to Samos under false pretenses. “What was I supposed to be, Thor? Window dressing? A stage prop to make you appear more like a tourist?”

  “No, of course not. Bringing you here was an added benefit.”

  “And all that rigmarole about the trouble you took searching out a place that I’d enjoy, sunshine and ancient ruins, and sharing a holiday in the sun with me, that was just a line?”
/>
  “It wasn’t a line, Dinah. I thought you would love this place. Plans can have more than one purpose.”

  “Like a Swiss Army knife. Each item has a use.”

  He reached out and stroked her cheek. “We were going to be so close, me here on Samos, you just across the strait in Turkey. I thought we could have this time together to find out if...” Wherever he was going with that line, he stopped short and dropped his hand. “I thought I could keep my job separate. If I’d thought that what I was doing would put you in jeopardy, I wouldn’t have asked you to come. I thought Fathi’s murder was the result of infighting among the smugglers and my mission on Samos was still a secret. I can’t be sure what this vandalism business means, but I think I’ve been betrayed.”

  “I know that I have. You lied to me from the start.”

  “Don’t be self-righteous, Dinah. You’ve been known to tell a lie when it suits you.”

  “Not one that makes a monkey out of someone I care about.” She grabbed a pillow off the bed and threw it at him. “Find yourself another bed. Tomorrow morning I’m out of here.”

  He took the pillow and started to leave. At the door, he turned. “You’re right to go. I want you safe and out of harm’s way. But we’re good together, Dinah. Don’t throw our chance away without giving it deeper thought.”