Here on Zakynthos, the sun was burning the ground dry. Heat sucked moisture from the plants. What greenery there was looked pale and wan, covered in dust, and forests of dead olive trees cut funereal swaths across the rocky hillsides. Some of them seemed to be blackened, as if the tips of their branches had caught fire. Liz blinked, shook her head, and still did not believe.
"Dimitris, are you seriously trying to tell me that a phoenix came down from the hills and ate those cattle?"
"Yes, Miss Sherman."
"Call me Liz." She stamped her cigarette out in the dust and leaned back against the police car. Its metal was hot to the touch. And dusty. "So did you see it yourself?"
"No, Miss Sherman."
"No," Liz said, shaking her head. "Well ... " She didn't know what else to say. She had seen a lot during her time at the BPRD — and she'd been through too much herself to let doubt cloud her mind. But something just didn't feel right about this, and she could not quite put her finger on what that was. She wished that Hellboy were here with her, because he had a knack for cracking mysteries like this. He'd add two and two and come up with an impossible five ... and then, likely as not, he'd take that five and kick the crap out of it until it reverted back to four. A basic approach, but one that invariably worked. Liz was thinking too much, too deeply, and she closed her eyes and tried to coax herself into viewing things under a simpler light.
She opened her eyes again, and Dimitris was offering her another cigarette. She smiled, let him light it for her, breathed deep. Christ knows what brand he was smoking, but she welcomed the sting of the rough smoke on her throat.
They were parked on a roadside overlooking the holiday resort of Tsilivi. To their right the sea was an inviting blue, and directly below them the long narrow beach was spotted with tourists, pale Europeans who had just arrived and the brown or red shapes of those who had been here for a week or more. The holiday makers spilled off the beach and into the sea, and Liz could hear the constant buzz of motorboats and Jet Skis bouncing from wave to wave. They drew white lines in the sea behind them, like aircraft trails in a deep blue sky.
To the left lay Zakynthos. Tsilivi itself was a long, relatively narrow band of restaurants, hotels, bars, and holiday homes twisting and turning away from the sea, mostly following the road but spreading out here and there where builders had moved outward into the countryside. Away from there, the glaring white of other buildings dotted the landscape. Hotels that lay away from the main drag often had two or three pools and plenty of land, and farther up the hillside toward where Liz now stood were occasional farms and more salubrious holiday homes.
Here and there the hillsides had been smudged, as though they were mistakes on a charcoal artist's masterpiece.
Liz looked out to sea and back again, and, yes, there was a definite pattern to the marks across the landscape. They were narrow at the top and wider farther down, as if fire had tumbled from the hilltops, spreading as it went.
"Anything could have caused those fires," she said, nodding toward a darkened stain on a neighboring hillside.
"No, Miss Sherman. Only the phoenix."
"You know that a phoenix is a mythical creature, Dimitris?" Dimitris smiled and raised his eyebrows, as if used to being patronized. "Oh shit, Dimitris, I'm sorry," Liz said. "I didn't mean anything by that, it sounded awful."
"I've heard worse, Miss Sherman. Yes, I know its mythical, and yes, I know that mythical creatures don't exist. But the coelacanth was once considered mythical, and the mountain gorilla, and ... well, I know who you work for and who else works for them. The big red one. My father worked with him a long time ago, back in America in seventy-eight. Something to do with pods, I believe."