Sons of Sparta: A Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis Mystery Read Free Page B

an old man on the edge of making his confession?”
    “The thought did cross my mind,” said Kouros.
    “But you’d think I’d know better than to pick an honest cop as my confessor.” He put his hands on Kouros’ shoulders. “What I’m about to tell you I’ve never told another living soul.”
    “Uncle, I’m not the right person to hear this.”
    “I’ll be the judge of that.” He drew in and let out a deep breath. “There is nothing more important to me than my children. Nothing.”
    Uncle walked to the front door and closed it, shutting out all but a narrow spray of light cutting across the room through a tiny, barred window on the north wall and a pale glow fanning down through the trapdoor from tiny windows and narrow gun slits above. He stayed in the shadows by the door.
    “Until the day I die I will never understand what drove my grandfather to have my father kill his sister. She was his daughter .”
    Kouros looked down at the floor.
    “I could never bring myself to cause someone to kill my child. Or my sister or my brother. I am not a fool, I know it happens, it is part of our culture, but for me…no…never. Not after all that I saw in this house.
    “My father never got over killing his sister. He never spoke of it, but he lived his life as if he’d died the day he murdered her. And when his own children began falling victim to vendetta, he took no steps to save them. As if he saw their deaths as the price God had placed upon his soul to pay for his sin. It was my mother who sent your father and aunt to Athens, and pleaded with the council of elders on my behalf.
    “And all the many things he did for all those women he cared for in the village, he did seeking a forgiveness that never came.”
    He took a step toward Kouros. “The strangest thing of all is, I don’t think my father’s father ever forgave his son for the killing. My father’s return to the village as a doctor was not just my father’s penance, but became his father’s as well. Every day, the father saw the son and remembered what he’d made him do. It was a festering wound impossible to heal. And when his first grandchild fell to vendetta, Grandfather did not leave his grandson’s burial site for two days and two nights. He returned home with fever but did not send word to his son for help. He stayed in his bed and died of pneumonia as his wife—my grandmother—sat patiently in the corner of the room watching him pass on.”
    He took another step closer to Kouros. “They were all sad people. Sad every day of their lives.”
    Silence.
    “That’s quite a burden you carry, Uncle. But I’m really not the one to help you with this. Perhaps a priest, a—”
    He raised his hand for Kouros to stop. “No, that is not the sort of help I need. I’ve lived with this all my life, and will live with it for the rest of it. I have something I want to show you.” He walked past Kouros into the darkest corner of the room and shone his flashlight into a stone, trough-like structure once used to store powder kegs and shot for musket battles.
    “My grandmother never uttered a word to her husband about his decision to have their daughter killed, but he knew she never forgave him. He’d murdered her pride and joy.”
    “How do you know?” said Kouros.
    “She told me after Grandfather died. Long before that, when I was the baby of the family, she took care of me so that my mother could do other things. Like all grandmothers, she liked talking to babies. She had much she wanted to tell, but dared not tell an adult, so she opened up to me. She got used to talking to me about her secrets, and the older I grew the more she revealed. From her I learned things different from what others told me. Proud talk about the honor of vendetta she tempered by showing me the inevitable emptiness of it all, mourning her beloved Calliope every day of her life.
    “My Calliope is named after her, Theo and Giorgos after my slain brothers, and their