Blood on the hill

The cicadas screamed in the pines of Kaisariani Hill, a sound like a frying pan left too long on the stove. Myrto Zervou, a stout, black-clad figure against the dusty green, muttered to herself as she descended the path. “Το κρέας τρώγεται και το κόκκαλο μένει,” she grumbled. “The meat is eaten, but the bone remains.” She was talking about the leftover lamb she’d promised to take to her son Aris’s workshop, but the proverb, like most, had a darker edge today.

Aris, her thirty-year-old carpenter with forearms like knotted olive wood, was waiting for her, but not at his workshop. He stood by the police tape cordoning off a small clearing. His face was pale beneath his summer tan.

“Mama,” he said, voice low. “They found Nikos. From the kiosk. He’s… gone.”

Myrto peered past him. Nikos, the jovial, moustachioed newsagent, lay on his back in the fine red dirt. Not a robbery, his thick wallet was visible in his breast pocket. There were two small, precise holes in his shirt, over his heart. No blood spatter. Just a dark, silent stain blooming beneath him.

Inspector Leonidas, a man whose moustache seemed to wilt in the Athenian heat, approached with a sigh. “Kyria Zervou. Here to admire the view or to tell me who did it?”

“The view is spoiled, Inspector,” Myrto snapped. “And if you opened your eyes, you’d see this wasn’t a shooting. It was a finishing.”

“A what?”

“A duel,” she stated, as if announcing the price of tomatoes. She pointed a thick finger. “Look. Heels dug in, facing the trees. His posture is formal. And the wounds. Two small calibre, close together. A professional’s shot, or a very calm one. This was an ekdikisi. A settling of accounts.”

Leonidas scoffed. “Duels? This is Athens, not 1821.”

“Honour is older than the Acropolis,” Myrto retorted, turning away. She saw what the police missed: a single, crushed white gardenia near Nikos’s right hand. A flower for a buttonhole. For a meeting that was not a meeting.

That evening, over a plate of the contentious lamb, she interrogated the neighbourhood through her balcony. Aris sawed wood restlessly below. The widow Calliope from number five lamented Nikos’s kindness. The young lawyer, Pavlos, new to the building, polished his smart car with unusual vigour. And old Captain Vassilis, a retired merchant mariner, sat in his usual chair at the kafeneio, staring into his murky coffee.

“Ο πολεμισμένος καπετάνιος γυρίζει πάντα στο λιμάνι,” Myrto mused aloud. “The battled captain always returns to port.” Aris looked up, confused. She wasn’t talking about Vassilis. She was thinking of the ritual, the pattern. An offence, a challenge, a secluded place, seconds. Who was Nikos’s second? Who was the opponent’s?

The mystery deepened when Mary, her daughter, called in tears. Her husband, a mild-mannered accountant, hadn’t come home. He’d left a vague note about “upholding a friend’s duty.” Myrto’s blood ran cold. Her son-in-law, Thanasis, was the most peaceful man she knew. But he was also fiercely loyal, and terribly rule-bound.

“He’s the second,” Myrto declared to Aris, slamming the phone down. “For Nikos. Nikos was challenged, he needed a reliable witness. Thanasis, the fool of honour, agreed.”

“But who challenged Nikos? And why?”

The gardenia. Myrto remembered Nikos arguing violently with the new lawyer, Pavlos, a week ago. Something about a defamed sister, whispers of a ruined reputation. Pavlos, with his slick hair and imported shoes, was all modern ambition. But the gardenia… that was old-world. Aristocratic.

Her investigation was a whirlwind of gossip, proverbs, and sheer imposition. She confronted Pavlos in his sterile office. “You fought with Nikos. About your sister.”

Pavlos was smooth as marble. “A misunderstanding, Kyria Myrto. Settled.”

“Settled with bullets?”

“The law will determine that.” He showed her out, but not before she saw a framed photo on his desk: Pavlos and Captain Vassilis, the old seaman, standing together. Father and son? No. The resemblance was in the posture, not the face. Mentor and protégé.

The pieces clanged together like rusty anchors. She marched to the kafeneio and sat opposite Captain Vassilis. He didn’t look up.

“The gardenia is a rare touch, Captain,” she said, sipping the coffee he hadn’t offered. “In the old code, the challenged party chooses the weapons. But the challenger can insist on a token. A flower to wear. A bit of drama for a faded old sailor?”

Vassilis’s eyes, the colour of a winter sea, met hers. “Nikos destroyed a young man’s honour with his gossip. Spread lies about Pavlos’s sister that cost her a marriage. The boy came to me, asking for the old ways. I… instructed him.”

“You orchestrated a murder over gossip?” Myrto’s voice could have cut glass.

“A duel over honour!” he corrected, fist on the table. “Pavlos was too emotional. He would have missed, or worse, been killed. I took his place. Nikos accepted me as his opponent. His second, poor Thanasis, just stood there, white as a sail. Two shots. It was clean.”

“And my son-in-law? He is missing because he is sick with the shame of it, or because you threatened him?”

Vassilis looked away. “He is a good man. He is safe. He will come home when he understands the necessity.”

Myrto leaned in. “Όποιος σπέρνει άνεμο, θερίζει θύελλα,” she hissed. “He who sows the wind, shall reap the whirlwind. You sowed old pride, Captain. You will reap a modern prison.”

She left him and called Inspector Leonidas, laying out the truth not with forensic clues, but with the logic of human folly. The gardenia, Vassilis’s anachronistic sense of theatre, the connection to Pavlos, Thanasis’s disappearance. Leonidas, grudgingly, acted.

They found Thanasis shivering in a borrowed flat in Vyronas, sworn to silence by Vassilis’s tales of bloody revenge if he talked. Pavlos, broken under questioning, confessed to the original challenge but admitted the Captain had taken over, “to see it done right.”

The arrest of Captain Vassilis at the kafeneio was a quiet affair. He rose, straightened his jacket, and walked to the police car as if boarding a ship.

That night, on her balcony overlooking the twinkling, chaotic city, Myrto Zervou adjusted her black dress. Aris brought her a small glass of tsipouro.

“How did you know, Mama?” he asked.

She knocked back the liquor, its fire a comfort. “Το χρήμα βγάζει νερό,” she said finally. “Money finds water. So does shame. It finds its own level. Nikos’s shameful gossip found the Captain’s shameful solution. And we,” she said, pinching Aris’s cheek, “are just the drains it all flows into.”

Down in the street, life went on, a scooter backfired, a couple argued, the scent of grilling meat filled the air. Another bone of contention was settled. Myrto watched it all, a silent, dark-clad judge in the Athenian night. The case was closed, but the hill, she knew, would keep its secrets. And she would be there to dig them up.

End