Aphrodite's Smile

by Stuart Harrison

  ‘Your father did not tell me about Pigania. I only knew to come here because I followed you from Kioni this morning. I plotted you on radar. May I ask where you found your father’s journal?’

  ‘I didn’t. We discovered that my father brought a man called Johann Kohl here.’ I saw the name register. ‘You knew him?’

  ‘Yes. Earlier this year he arrived at my house unannounced one evening. He claimed to have served with my grandfather during the war here on Ithaca. At first I did not believe him because all of the men under my grandfather’s command were listed as having been killed. Kohl claimed that he had in fact survived the attack on the ship which had picked up the survivors from the Antounnetta. When he reached the mainland shore he decided to desert. As proof of this he showed me a photograph which had been taken during the occupation. He claimed that he was one of the men in the picture.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I said, and I got up and fetched the picture I’d found among Kohl’s possessions. ‘Is this it?’

  Hassel nodded. ‘Yes. Where did you get it?’

  ‘From a hotel in Argostoli. But there was nobody called Kohl stationed here during the war. Though there was a soldier called Eric Schmidt. You asked me if I knew anybody by that name the night we met.’ I paused, guessing the truth. ‘Kohl and Schmidt were the same person?’

  ‘Yes. Though his documents showed that his name was Johann Kohl, he claimed to have assumed the identity from a dead soldier at the end of the war.’

  At first Kurt hadn’t been entirely convinced by Kohl’s story but the more they talked the more inclined he was to believe him. Kohl had detailed knowledge about Kurt’s grandfather and the occupation of Ithaca. In the end Kurt gave him some money.

  ‘Why did he want money?’ I asked.

  ‘To come to Greece. He told me that the official version of my grandfather’s death was not what had really happened, and that if he could come here he would be able to prove it to me.’

  ‘The official version being what?’

  ‘That he was killed during the attack on the Antounnetta.’

  ‘But even if what he said was true, why should it matter after all this time?’

  ‘It did not,’ Kurt said. ‘At least not until I came here and discovered that my grandfather is remembered as a Nazi.’

  ‘But you didn’t know that when Kohl approached you.’

  ‘No. I gave him money because I felt sorry for him. He was old. I believed that he had led a hard life and I thought that it may have been true that he served with my grandfather. He spoke of him with great respect. Also my family is quite wealthy and the money I gave him was really very little. A few thousand euros, that is all.’

  ‘This was last year, you said. When exactly?’

  ‘In September.’

  ‘He never mentioned anything about the Dracoulis artefacts?’

  ‘No.’ Kurt looked blank. ‘What are they?’

  I was surprised that he didn’t know. I showed him the German newspaper cutting I’d found among Kohl’s things. ‘I think Kohl must have seen this last year. This was the real reason he came to you for money. The artefacts were originally discovered by a man called Dracoulis, but they were stolen from Kephalonia during the war. I think Kohl read about their return and that’s when he decided to come here himself.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Did you hear from Kohl again after you gave him the money?’

  ‘No.’ Kurt told us that Kohl had promised to stay in touch, but he wasn’t surprised when he didn’t hear from him again. He might have thought no more about it if he hadn’t received a letter a few months later from a man he had never met who lived on Ithaca.

  ‘My father?’

  ‘Yes. He said that he had met Kohl, but that Kohl had been murdered. He told me that his death was connected to events which had taken place during the war and that there were things which I should be aware of regarding my grandfather. He hinted that I may have relatives I did not know of.’

  ‘He knew about Alex?’ I interrupted.

  ‘Not directly I think, but he would have known that Julia was pregnant when she left the island.’

  I realised that was true. ‘What else did he say?’

  ‘He asked me to come here, but he warned me that when I arrived I should take care not to let anyone know my identity or what the purpose of my visit was. He said that in the event that anything should happen to him he had written all I needed to know in a journal which I would find on his boat. Which of course is where you and I first encountered one another. But as I said, I did not know who you were at that time.’

  ‘But you did when we met outside a bar in Vathy.’

  ‘Yes, though I had very little idea of what was going on. That is why I wished to talk to you, but I was not sure how much to say. Your father’s death was recorded as an accident. And when we spoke …’

  ‘I wasn’t exactly communicative. It was bad timing.’

  ‘This I understand now.’

  ‘From Alex?’

  ‘Yes. By then I knew who she was. Since I could not speak to you I left a note for her asking her to meet me in Exoghi. Of course it came as a great shock to her to realise that we were related. While we were talking we saw your Jeep driving past the bay. I think everything had become too much for Alex at that point. She said that she could not see you.’

  ‘So you took her to your yacht?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They had sailed to Zakynthos, just as Alex’s note to Theonas had claimed, and it was true that they hadn’t realised that she was considered as a missing person or that I was suspected of having pushed her from the cliff. However, once Alex knew about the letter my father had sent to Kurt, she realised that they had to tell me and that’s when they had returned to Ithaca and phoned me.

  ‘We did not want anyone to know,’ Hassel explained. ‘We did not know who to trust. But somebody followed you to the marina.’

  ‘The driver of the car.’

  ‘Yes. He tried to kill us both.’

  I knew who it must have been. Earlier, when I had been studying the photograph of Hauptmann Hassel and his men, I’d realised that if the iron cross in my father’s drawer came from the grave on the headland then it was likely that one set of the remains probably belonged to Hauptmann Hassel. That could only mean that Kounidis’s account of Hassel’s death was a lie. ‘It was Kounidis in the car,’ I guessed.

  ‘Or the man who works for him,’ Kurt agreed, though he explained that at the time he was not aware of this. He suspected Kounidis’s involvement only because there was a strong suggestion that the account of his grandfather’s death was untrue.

  That night at the marina Kurt had escaped unharmed as had I, but Alex was not so lucky. I remembered the scream I had heard and now I understood.

  ‘So Kounidis has got her?’

  ‘Yes. I could not go to the police because I could prove nothing and I was afraid for her safety. And so I decided to look for you. When I saw this boat in the harbour at Kioni I followed you here.’

  Dimitri, who had all this time listened without comment, now spoke. ‘But the note Alex wrote when she went to fetch her things. You are saying Kounidis forced her? Why did she not say something to the owner of the house, or send a message to Theonas?’

  Kurt didn’t know about the note, but it wasn’t hard to guess the answer.

  ‘Kounidis probably told her that if she did she wouldn’t see either of us again,’ I said. He had been clever. Even to the point that it was he who had told me she never made the flight she was supposed to have taken back to England.

  ‘But why?’ Dimitri questioned.

  ‘Because it was Theonas he wanted to put off, not us. He wanted us to keep looking. That way he knew we’d come here. All along he’s been manipulating us. He even told us about the American my father hired to dive for him, just so there would be no doubt we were looking in the right place.’

  ‘Because he wanted us to find the An
tounnetta?’ Dimitri asked.

  I shook my head. ‘He’s always known she was here. There was something else he wanted.’

  ‘What?’ Kurt asked.

  ‘You,’ I said.

  Kounidis had used us to draw Kurt out. And he had succeeded.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The sun was beginning to rise. To the east, the horizon was changing colour as the night slowly dissolved. I had gone up on deck for some air. There was no movement, everything utterly still. I heard a sound and when I turned, Kurt was standing by the wheelhouse.

  ‘May I join you?’ he asked.

  I made a gesture of assent and together we watched as fire streaked the sky.

  ‘It was very strange for me to meet Alex,’ Kurt said. ‘To know that we are related. I have a sister and several cousins on my mother’s side, but my father was an only child. At least I always thought so. He was born while my grandfather was in North Africa. Of course he was only a baby when my grandfather came home, before he was sent here. He does not remember him.’

  ‘Did your grandmother know about Julia?’

  ‘No. My grandmother remarried after the war. But she never had any more children. Her second husband died before I was born. I think he was a good man, a good husband for her and a father to her son. But I do not think she ever loved him the way she loved my grandfather. She used to talk about him when I was young.’

  ‘Is she still alive?’

  ‘Yes. And my father also. I do not know how he will react when he discovers that he has a half-sister living in England.’

  ‘You’ll tell them?’

  Kurt looked surprised. ‘Of course. Why would I keep such a thing from them?’

  ‘Maybe it’s better not to know some things,’ I suggested. ‘You say your grandmother loved your grandfather, but she didn’t know about Julia.’

  ‘Yes,’ he mused, ‘I have thought about that. However my grandmother has always been a very practical woman. And an understanding one. I know that when my grandfather came back from Africa he was a changed man. He was very young. No doubt he had seen many terrible things. I think that she will understand how he might have fallen in love here.’ Kurt swept his arm in a gesture to encompass our surroundings. ‘It is very beautiful. The war must have seemed a long way away, and I think he had had enough of war. I think he may have needed to believe in people again.’

  ‘You know what Julia told her daughter about your grandfather?’ I asked.

  ‘That she was raped by him? Yes, Alex told me.’

  ‘She doesn’t believe it was true. Do you?’

  ‘No. As I mentioned, my grandmother talked about him often. I believe he was a good man, a gentle man. Perhaps Julia did not want her daughter to find my family. It is understandable. She could not have known how we would react. She invented a story that made certain the past remained where she thought it belonged.’

  I thought he was probably right. The account that Kounidis had given of the end of the occupation was undoubtedly untrue. He was the only living witness to the cruel acts he’d ascribed to Hassel. ‘I wonder what really happened here,’ I said. I thought about the hollow on the headland where my father and Kohl had uncovered the bones of two men, one of whom we knew was Hauptmann Hassel. But who had killed them? And why had their remains been buried at the bottom of what must have then been an empty hole?

  ‘The truth must be in your father’s journal,’ Kurt said. ‘Do you have any idea where it could be?’

  ‘I think Kounidis must have it. I think my father went to fetch it from the boat on the morning he vanished.’

  ‘You believe Kounidis murdered him?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Because of what is down there?’ Kurt gestured to the water.

  ‘In a sense. It’s ironic, but I thought this was about money. I thought you, my father, Kohl, you all wanted whatever is down there for the same reason. But now it looks as if I couldn’t have been more wrong. You want to know the truth about your grandfather. So does Alex. And Kounidis certainly doesn’t need money. In fact I don’t think he wanted the Antounnetta found at all. That’s what this is all about for him. He doesn’t want the truth to be known.’

  ‘And your father?’ Kurt asked. ‘What do you think he wanted?’

  ‘What he always wanted. To be remembered for something. Perhaps Kohl was the only one in it for the money. If my dad had planned to smuggle whatever it is down there out of the country, he never would have talked about any of it in the first place. And he wouldn’t have written to you.’

  It was getting light. Kurt saw me searching the horizon and guessed what I was looking for. ‘Do you think Kounidis will come?’

  I told him we saw a yacht yesterday. It turned out the yacht was actually Kurt’s. He’d told us earlier that it was moored in the next bay around the headland. ‘Kounidis knew you’d turn up sooner or later and he knows we won’t go to the police while he’s got Alex.’

  I didn’t think there was much we could do except wait.

  An hour later I had decided that I was wrong to think there was nothing we could do. There was one thing.

  The sun was up and the heat already building as I strapped on my tank. Another tank which I was going to take with me as a spare lay by the stern rail. When I climbed down to the water, Dimitri let out some of the line attached to my vest. I took a final look around. There was still no sign of Kounidis.

  ‘Be careful,’ Kurt said to me.

  I nodded and then I moved away from the boat. When I was twenty feet away, I released some air from my vest and sank beneath the surface. As I swam down I felt the change in pressure and the temperature became cooler. I could see the dark chasm of the trench and the rock formation below me and, when I turned on the torch, the wreck began to emerge from her surroundings. The Antounnetta was lying on her starboard side, her bow partly out over the edge of the trench. I ran the beam back along the length of her hull, lingering over the damage to the forward gun and the bridge. Twisted metal plates had peeled back like the skin of an orange. The parts of her hull which weren’t encrusted with shellfish or cloaked in seaweed were completely rusted. Fish swam in and out of empty windows and doors.

  I tied the line off on a rail near an open door amidships, and left my spare tank there while I swam inside. It was almost completely black except for the beam from my torch. I tried not to think about the tons of metal encasing me as I moved deeper into the wreck. At the bottom of a metal stairway I found a partly open door, but when I tried to push it wider it was firmly stuck. Using the torch I peered through the gap to the passage beyond where I saw the bulkhead had buckled, either from an explosion somewhere in the bowels of the boat or perhaps from the heat of a fire.

  I turned and went back to look for another route in. When I emerged onto the outer deck I retrieved the spare tank and swam over the top of the wreck until I found an open door on the other side where I left the tank. Inside, I found a ladder which led down to the deck below and another closed door. The mechanism was rusted solid and it wouldn’t open at all, but further down I found another door, and this one was open. It led into a passage which took me into the belly of the boat. The darkness was total and the silence claustrophobic. Without the torch I would have been totally blind. I tried not to think about the trench. Now and then the sound of grinding metal against rock reverberated through the wreck as if she were shifting inch by inch. I imagined her teetering at the edge of the abyss, then slowly falling into the freezing black depths with me trapped inside, the pressure steadily increasing as she fell, until it crushed my lungs.

  As I searched the Antounnetta, sometimes I found a passage was blocked and I had to go back and try another route. My tank clanked eerily against the bulkhead. An eel darted from the light, startling me so that my heart thudded like a piston. I found the galley, where pots and pans still hung in their racks above the stoves, and nearby was a room which might have been the mess. I checked my gauge and saw that I would soon need to go back and
swap tanks, but first I swam down a stairway which took me down another level to the engine rooms.

  Twisted wreckage littered the space, the internal bulkheads buckled and smashed. A gaping hole in the hull revealed what had finally sunk the Antounnetta, though for me it was a convenient exit and I swam through it and up the side of the ship to the open deck where I’d left my tank. I unbuckled the one on my back and swapped them over. When I turned on the air a stream of bubbles rose from the mouthpiece. I put it in my mouth and blew out sharply before I started breathing again.

  When I got back down to the engine room I found another passage which led past cramped cabins with rows of bunks. A locker door hung open and, though most of the contents had long since rotted away, a pair of spectacles remained on a shelf. At the end, I found myself in what appeared to be a storage hold. Broken debris littered the floor. Something was wrapped in what was left of a tarpaulin. I shone the torch over it, and when I tugged at a section of rotted material a pile of rusted metal fell out and drifted to the floor. A cross. A candle holder. Traces of gold paint glinted in the beam of my torch. The remains of a framed picture lay against the bulkhead, the canvas itself gone save for a few tattered threads. Everywhere I looked I saw the remains of what I assumed was what had been looted from the monastery at Kathara.

  I had disturbed clouds of silt and rotting matter, which swirled in the current making it harder to see. I glimpsed something pale and went closer. A face stared up at me. For an instant my heart leapt, but it was only a statue. It was life-sized, the paint largely gone, but clearly the original Panaghia. Her features were beautifully fashioned. Even in this dark and gloomy cavern, her expression was achingly serene. For several long moments I stared at her image, knowing that my father never had. This was the symbol of faith which he had wanted to return to the people of Ithaca to repay the kindness they had shown him. But there was something else he had expected to find on the Antounnetta. He had spoken of the attention of the world, of something which would make Ithaca prosper. But though I looked all around, peering through the murky debris, I couldn’t see anything.