Uncle stepped inside and Kouros followed.
Towers always looked so much roomier from the outside, but their necessarily thick walls drastically reduced their inner dimensions. Though considered larger than most, this tower had less than one hundred square feet of first floor space, and each ascending story was smaller than the one below. The open, west-facing doorway filled the room with light. It was empty except for a freestanding ladder in the southeast corner running up through a trapdoor in the floor above. More ladders ran between the other stories, each capable of being pulled up quickly.
“Do I sound like 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 sister after my slain sister. So that I never forget what our family has lost to vendetta.”
Kouros watched as his uncle began removing stones from inside the bottom of the trough.
“I’ve spent my life trying to spare my family the curse of vendetta. I made my decision to lease our land for that same reason. I don’t want my sons and their cousins fighting over what should happen to our land after I am gone. Some, like Giorgos, want to keep it as it is, no matter what. Others, like Theo, see the benefit of selling. Who knows what my sister’s son Pericles may be thinking? He and his brother like the high life in Athens but don’t have the money to afford it. Mangas is only interested in living life as it comes.”
“Following in his father’s footsteps?”
“I hope with the same attitude toward family. One that will never bring the two of you into conflict. But that’s not why I brought you in here.”
He piled up the stones next to the trough and on top of them placed several boards that had lain beneath the stones. He reached into the trough and lifted out a large box covered in cloth.
“What’s that?” said Kouros.
“Calliope’s chest.”
“The murdered Calliope?”
He nodded. “Grandmother hid it here the night of her murder. She feared Grandfather would destroy it. Later, she worried that showing it to my father would only bring deeper sadness to his life. She showed me where she’d hidden it just before she died and made me promise to pass it on to my daughter when I had one, or someone else I thought would treasure the memory of Calliope and ‘could forgive her for the mistake of loving a boy too much.’
“She made me promise to follow her instructions to the letter.” He stood and carried the chest to Kouros. “But I never could bring myself to open old wounds. So I left it here, buried in my grandmother’s shawl.”
“But what does this have to do with me?”
He put the chest down at Kouros’ feet. “Because the vendetta isn’t over.”
“You can’t be serious.”
Uncle sighed. “I wish I weren’t. But vendettas can go on for generations.”
“This isn’t that sort of vendetta, Uncle. There’s been no bad blood between the families for fifty years.”
“I thought the same thing until last week. When I received a threat.”
“What sort of threat?”
“One written across the back of my morning paper.” He pulled a folded newspaper page out of his back pocket and read: “Your father took his sister’s and her lover’s lives to preserve our ways. We shall take yours to save our Mani. You have one week to change your plans or die.”
“That sounds crazy.”
“I know.”
“May I see it?”
Uncle handed him the page. The message had been carefully pasted onto the newspaper with words cut out of other newspapers.
“Any idea who did this?”
Uncle gestured no.
“What plans are they talking about?”
“My guess is the hotel.”
Kouros scratched the back of his head. “In your line of work, Uncle, you must have made a lot of enemies. What makes you think the threat didn’t come from one of them?”
“I thought that, too, at first. But I’ve had death threats before and my enemies know they don’t scare me. Besides, if any of them wanted to make a macho point to impress some third party with how tough they could be by taking me on, I can assure you it would be for a flesh-and-blood real reason, not some generations-old vendetta bullshit. They’d know this sort of threat would make me think the sender a fool, one I’d never take seriously. And I didn’t. Besides, I was too busy working on completing the hotel deal to worry about it.”