10. Konstantine
CHAPTER TEN
KONSTANTINE
The courier comes on the second morning after.
He is on the property by eight, in through the south service road on a delivery truck, with papers naming him as a man from the village wine collective.
The papers are good. The driver is not. He unloads everything half a beat late, everything watched from the corner of his eye.
Stathis flags him at the inner gate. Stathis has been on that gate since six, because two days ago the brothers in Patras went quiet, and in my work a Kallis silence is heavy with the consequences to come.
I am in the south office when his voice comes over the radio.
“Bratáki. Brother. The courier is from the Kallis brothers. There is a sedative in a small case under the crates. He has been told to bring her back alive.”
“Where is she?”
“In the south garden. With Sophia.”
“Hold him at the inner gate. I am coming.”
I go to the south garden first.
Isadora is on the low bench under the lemon trees with the sun on her shoulders. Sophia is at her feet on the gravel, sorting pebbles by color into the hem of her dress.
Isadora looks up and sees my face.
She does not ask. She lifts Sophia in one motion, settles her on her hip, and walks past me toward the house without a word.
She has been in this house two weeks and she reads a Drakos man’s face like a manifest. Her father taught her the reading.
It is mine now, like everything else he did not intend me to have.
I take the south path to the inner gate.
The courier stands on the gravel between two of Stathis’s men, in the collective’s gray overalls, holding the small leather case. He sees me cross, and he makes his first mistake, which is to speak first.
“Konstantine Drakos,” he says, in the formal mode my own father used at councils. “I am sent by Vassilios Kallis. I am to retrieve his sister.”
I do not answer in the formal mode. The formal mode is for men who came to the front door.
“Open the case,” I say, in the village mode of a Drakos man.
He does not open the case.
I take it from him and open it myself. The sedative is the kind that puts a sixty-kilo woman down for eight hours.
There are three doses. One for the taking.
One for the boat. One in case the first two taught her nothing.
Somewhere in Patras, my wife’s murderer’s son sat at a desk and counted to three about my woman.
I close the case and hand it to Stathis.
“Tell me your name.”
“Petros.”
Of course. That family serves the Kallis line the way gulls serve a trawler.
Antonios Petros broke a girl’s finger in a coffee shop and died on Nikos’s gravel.
Kostas Petros came through a skylight for two sleeping boys, died under Nikos’s dog.
Now a third one stands on my gravel with a case built for my wife-to-be.
This is not a family we are fighting. It is a habit the Kallis house cannot break.
He goes for the small knife at his belt, but he is not fast enough.
He was told he was the courier, not the killer, and no one trained him for the morning he is having.
I take his wrist with my left hand and turn it, past resistance, past the angle a wrist is built for, until something inside it gives and the knife drops.
He makes a sound through his teeth while I pick the knife up off the gravel.
For the space of one breath I think about the boys’ room at Nikos’s estate three weeks ago, about Nikos’s voice on the phone the morning after. Two children asleep in that house. One child in this one.
I cut once.
The courier goes down on his knees, bleeding from the throat, both hands going up to hold in what will not be held.
I crouch in front of him, and now I use the formal mode, my father’s mode, the mode for messages that must arrive intact.
“Tell your master, when you reach him, that the next message he sends here will be the last. Tell him his sister has chosen. Tell him she wears the signet of the head of the dark cargo arm, and that she is not for sale.”
I do not know how much of it he hears. Enough or not enough; the message will travel either way, because a courier who does not come back is itself the oldest sentence in our language.
I stand. Stathis’s men take the body away.
I wash my hands at the stone basin by the south door, and I watch the water run pink, then clear. Our grandfather built these basins into every doorway of this compound for exactly this. No one has ever once said so aloud.
Then I walk up the south path.
Isadora steps out of the house as I reach the lemon trees, Sophia asleep against her shoulder.
She carried my daughter up to her room, settled her with a book, came back down, walked out to meet me, all in the time it took me to answer her brothers.
She looks at my hands, which are clean, then at my cuff, which is not. She does not flinch.
“He was a Petros,” I say. “He is not coming back.”
“I see.”
“Mikrí mou. They will send another.”
“I know.”
“I want to speak with your brothers. Today. Not on Kalydon, and not in person. By video, from a yacht offshore. I will allow them within ten kilometers of this island, no closer. Stavros will chair. I want you in the chamber, and I want you to renounce them, Isadora. Of your own mouth, in front of the cousins, on a recorded line. Will you?”
“Yes, Konstantine.”
I lift her free hand from her side and press it to my mouth.
Then I walk her back into the house, the lemon trees closing behind us over the path to the gate, where the morning already looks like any other morning, which is the whole art of this family, and the price of it.