Kouros stared at Andreas. ‘Maybe we should just post our schedule on the front door of the town hall.’
‘Doesn’t look like we have to.’
‘How did he really know?’
‘One of the cops might have told him. Everybody gossips. It’s our national pastime. And on islands and in small villages…’ Andreas rolled his left hand out into the air. ‘Or, he might have figured it out exactly as he said.’
‘Maybe he knew the monk?’
‘I’m sure he did,’ nodded Andreas.
‘Bet it wouldn’t take much to get him talking.’
Andreas smiled. ‘Probably no more than, “Would you like to join us?”’
‘So, what do you think the monk was doing running around outside the monastery at that hour?’
‘No idea, but I’m pretty sure he was coming from, not returning to, the monastery. His body was found in the square by the entrance to the lane we took coming here. If he’d been walking through the square he’d have seen whoever was waiting for him. And even an old monk would have put up a struggle for his life. That would have left marks on his body. Besides, if he were returning to the monastery, whoever killed him would have waited up the lane where there were places to hide, and the body would have been found there.’
‘My bet is he was meeting someone.’
Andreas nodded. ‘And I’d bet the answer to all this somehow ties into that meeting.’ He drummed his fingers on the table. ‘Was he giving or receiving? Telling or listening?’ He shook his head. ‘No idea.’
‘Here’s your coffee.’ Dimitri put two cups, a coffee pot, sugar, and milk on the table. A boy behind him set down plates of cakes and cookies. ‘Compliments of the house.’
Andreas looked at Kouros. Kouros winked.
‘So, Dimitri,’ said Andreas. ‘Would you like to join us?’
Dimitri launched into a running monologue on ‘all things monastery,’ supposedly to show ‘what to expect from the abbot.’ Andreas doubted Dimitri’s views were shared by everyone; certainly not by the monks, but he was entertaining and obviously knew far more than any outsider about what went on inside the monastery. Dimitri had grown up within the literal shadow of its walls, had family who rose to prominence in the monastery’s hierarchy, operated his business for years within steps of its main — and he claimed only — entrance, and fought almost daily with monks and the abbot over what he considered their unfair interference with his business.
Dimitri was quick to say that the murdered monk was one of the few not ‘written on my balls,’ a place far worse than any shit list. He agreed with the sergeant: everyone liked Vassilis, including himself, and he had no idea who might have killed him.
He talked about the history of the monastery only when he felt it necessary to put in context his views on what was currently going on ‘inside.’ ‘If you want history, buy a guide book,’ were Dimitri’s exact words. He said he confined his history lessons to tourists who didn’t realize that the Greek Orthodox Church was only a very small part, population-wise, of the three hundred million-member Eastern Orthodox Church dominating Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Christian populations of much of the Middle East. To them, he’d say that what gave the Greek Church its exceptional influence over the Orthodox churches of other countries were the many unique and revered sites within Greece, of which Revelation made Patmos perhaps the best known to the non-Orthodox world.
He described Abbot Christodoulos as ‘one right out of the history books.’ He’d taken his name from Hosios Christodoulos, who founded the monastery in 1088. That first Christodoulos obtained absolute sovereignty over the island and permission to erect the monastery in a direct grant from the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople. Since its early days, the monastery faced a seemingly endless flow of marauding pirates, meddling local bishops, and demanding foreign occupiers. Indeed, not until the end of World War II, when the Italians were ousted, did Patmos return to Greek rule. It took great leadership skills and delicate foreign alliances, including several with the papacy in Rome, to enable the monastery to safeguard its independence and treasures for nearly a thousand years.
‘The monastery has always known how to reach far beyond this tiny island’s borders to survive. Even today, it’s not subject to the Church in Greece, its archbishop, or any other Eastern Orthodox leader. It owes allegiance only to the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople, the worldwide spiritual leader of the Eastern Orthodox Church. At least that’s what we Greeks like to consider him to be, a first among equals in the patriarchs responsible for leading their countries’ Orthodox churches within Eastern Orthodoxy.’ Dimitri paused only long enough to take a sip of coffee.
‘That makes this place no different from those monasteries on Mount Athos. They’re all essentially their own little governments, subject directly to the Ecumenical Patriarch. They do as they like, as long as they have the money. And this one does for sure; it’s one of the richest in Christendom.’
Andreas wondered if Dimitri was about to launch into the major scandal that had helped hound Greece’s ruling party out of power. Mount Athos was located on the easternmost of three peninsulas, an eight-hour drive northeast of Athens to one of two port towns where you caught a boat to go the rest of the way. It was the world’s oldest surviving monastic community, revered as ‘The Garden of the Mother of God,’ and perhaps the last remaining place on earth still using the two thousand-year-old Julian calendar. An independent monastic state jutting out into the Aegean on a peninsula of roughly 130 square miles, the area shared its name with the marble-peaked, 6,700-foot-high mountain punctuating the far southeast end of the peninsula. Mount Athos was a rugged mountain wildness of unspoiled verdant beauty, myths and miracles, history and reality; a place where for far more than a thousand years hermits utterly withdrawn from secular life living in isolated huts and monks living within massive, fortified monastery walls shared a common commitment to God, prayer, contemplation, and protecting the cherished seclusion of their life on the Holy Mountain.
In the eleventh century, as many as 180 monasteries existed on the Holy Mountain. But times had changed, and today only twenty survived: seventeen Greek, one Russian, one Serbian, and one Bulgarian. A dozen smaller communities and innumerable other structures — ranging from large farmhouses to isolated caves within desolate cliff faces — sheltered monks and hermits, too, but generally as dependencies of one of the twenty principal monasteries sovereign over their twenty respective self-governing territories.
From the amount of press coverage the scandal received, you’d think Mount Athos were a place of two hundred thousand schemers, not just two thousand monks and those few civilians doing secular work willing to live confined to the Holy Mountain’s capital of three hundred souls. What held center stage in a once never-ending media circus was the alleged involvement of high-ranking government ministers and the abbot of perhaps the most prominent of Mount Athos’ primary monasteries in a purportedly fraudulent land swap and money laundering scheme arising out of the 2004 Olympics staged in Athens.
If that was where Dimitri was headed, Andreas wasn’t interested. He’d heard it all before. Everyone in Greece had heard it all before. That scandal was the most talked about subject in Greece — until the country’s massive, unrevealed debt crisis exploded across the EU, blowing everything else off the front pages. He was tired of it. All of Greece was tired of it. In fact, that’s what some said was the idea: get everyone so tired of the subject that no one cared whether anyone was ever prosecuted.