Perhaps a week after this, I received a Facebook message from Stefano, saying that he and Maria had married, that they were very happy and were thinking about starting a family. I had not been in contact with Stefano, I was in some way amazed that he had thought to find me on Facebook, through an account I rarely used. I clicked and saw that he had posted a set of wedding photos on his profile page, they had been married at the hotel in Gerolimenas, exchanging their vows—it appeared from the photos—on the stone jetty where I had once sat and looked up at Christopher’s window.
Over the last year, at various points, I had worried that I had liked Stefano too much, that I had allowed my interest in his plight—which, in retrospect, was no plight at all, a woman does or does not love you—to blind me to his true nature. He had, after all, a clear motive, a motive that was stronger than a handful of worn bills and a watch and wedding ring, sundry charges made to a credit card. He would have had time to plan the murder, he would have had access, the thought must have occurred to him, Things would be different if he was gone.
But I at last felt certain that he could not be guilty of killing Christopher, the tone of his Facebook message was happy and relaxed, he posted his wedding photographs freely and without hesitation, photographs that were entirely ordinary. He could never have sent me such a message had he actually killed Christopher. But if not Stefano, then who? Since these coincident events, the phone call from Isabella and the message from Stefano, my thoughts have returned once again to the facts and circumstances of Christopher’s death, and to the question of culpability.
Most days, I believe Christopher was killed by a thief, that it was a meaningless and unintended crime and therefore death—although it is hard to know what is worse in these circumstances, a meaningless or a meaningful death. There are days when I think almost incessantly about the thief—who I believe exists, despite the fact that he was never seen or described, much less apprehended, and yet who is now free, entirely embodied, pursuing a life unchanged by the nature of his crime, who perhaps continues to roam the Greek countryside mugging hapless tourists. And it is astonishing to me, the fact that we do not know the first thing about the person who killed Christopher, or at the very least left him for dead.
We do not know what he looks like, we do not know if he has dark or light hair, if it is curly or straight, coarse or fine or neither, if he has a family, if there are children and a wife in a house somewhere in Mani, if he is a small man or a large one, perhaps he is a small man with soft features and delicate skin, why not? Or perhaps he stands six feet tall and his skin is marked with acne scars, this is also possible. The man—in some ways, although none of us will say it, the most important man in Christopher’s life, the man who brought him death, just as Isabella gave him life—is a blank.
But we do know, if we dare to imagine, that those final moments will have been intimate, even if the precise nature of that intimacy diverges from what we usually think of when we hear and use the word—the arm thrown around the neck, the hand resting on the shoulder, the lips against the ear and the whispered words. This will have been no tender embrace between loved ones but it will have been intimate nonetheless, the contact between the two men being of the most definite and significant kind, against which all erotic touch fades, including my own, including that of all the others.
Did he see the man, did they speak before he was attacked—perhaps the man asked a question in order to disarm him, a request for directions, or maybe he asked for change or a light for his cigarette, anything to strike up conversation and make Christopher slow his pace. Or did he spring on him from behind, so that Christopher did not see the face of his assailant, did not look him in the eyes—did not even see the features of his face or the build of his body—the man’s only greeting being the blunt force of the rock he wielded, hitting against Christopher’s skull.
Not too hard, not with the intention of killing—simply in order to daze and disorient him, enough force to knock him out, nothing about the nature of the blow indicated that murder was the intended outcome of the crime, it was theft and not murder. Most likely the man believed that Christopher was merely unconscious, he would wake up with a terrible headache and a little dehydrated but nothing more, a little less force and Christopher would be here today.