by Gavin Scott
“Delighted to hear it, old man. Best of luck. Have you heard the news, by the way?”
“What news?”
“Your pal Ari Alexandros has disappeared.”
“What?”
“Didn’t turn up at army HQ this morning, isn’t at his house, vanished without leaving a return address.”
“What do the police make of that?”
“Well, there’s an obvious conclusion, isn’t there? And knowing Inspector Kostopoulos, I’m sure he’s jumped to it. Whether he’ll do anything about it is another matter. Sleeping dogs, you know. But it’s not your problem any more, dear chap. Go and dig up your relic. Tell us what King Minos had for breakfast. That’s what we’re all waiting for – with bated breath.”
And the line went dead.
* * *
Later that day, after a smooth, uneventful voyage through the turquoise waters of the Aegean, the ferry was nosing its way gently through a fleet of picturesque caïque into the old Cretan port of Chania, against its absurdly flamboyant theatrical backdrop of the massive snow-capped peaks of the White Mountains. Chania was Forrester’s favourite city on the island: he loved it because of the deep sense of continuity it gave him. There had been people living here, beside this sea-strand and on the gentle hill above it, since the Stone Age. Chania had been one of the jewels in the crown of King Minos, revered in the golden age of Greece, a governor’s headquarters during the Roman Empire, a prized possession of the Byzantine Empire, a refuge for Christian monks when Islam came storming out of Arabia, and the headquarters of the Pasha of Crete under the Ottomans. Massive Venetian seawalls enclosed the harbour.
“Venetians?” said Sophie. “I hadn’t realised the Venetians were here as well.”
“Absolutely. They bought Crete from a French knight for a hundred pieces of silver in the year 1204.”
“You are teasing me.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” said Forrester. “He was called Bonifacio and he came from Montferrat. He’d been given it as part of the loot when the Crusaders destroyed Byzantium.”
“But wasn’t Byzantium Christian?”
“Yes, but it was also immensely rich, which made it fair game as far as the Crusaders were concerned, so they robbed it blind. After the Fourth Crusade Bonifacio got Crete, among other things, and promptly sold it to Venice. Hence these delightful harbour walls, put there to make sure anybody else who wanted Chania had to pay a much higher price than a hundred pieces of silver.”
Sophie shook her head. “The study of history does not do much for one’s faith in human nature.”
“But it does wonders for one’s sense of irony,” said Forrester. “Besides, though human beings do terrible things, they also do wonderful things. For example – creating a city like this.”
“I love the way your face lights up when you talk about the past,” said Sophie.
“I love the way you keep me in the present,” said Forrester, “which is much the best place to be.” He took her hand, and she leant her head against his shoulder.
The boat landed and they gathered up the ex-army backpacks that now held their luggage and Forrester’s equipment, divided at Sophie’s insistence, equally between them. They walked together along the cobbled quayside to the pensione Forrester had booked, in one of the tall, narrow-windowed Venetian buildings on the waterfront, with a tiny balcony looking down on the immense dome of the Mosque of the Janissaries.
“That’s not Venetian,” said Sophie, looking at it out of the window of their spare, whitewashed room.
“Well spotted,” said Forrester, standing beside her and pushing the shutters fully open. He put his arm around her, breathed in her scent, felt the curve of her hip against him.
“Well?” said Sophie. “I’m expecting an explanation.”
“I’m sorry, I was distracted,” said Forrester. “The Ottomans besieged the city in the mid seventeenth century.”
“And I assume they took it,” said Sophie.
“They did. They had a vast slave army known as the Janissaries, and the Janissaries prevailed. Hence the size of their mosque.”
“It’s huge,” she said.
“I imagine they were very excited to be here.”
“They’re not the only ones, are they?” said Sophie. She pulled the shutters closed again, plunging the room into an inviting shade. “Have you checked out the bed?”
“Not yet.”
“I think we should check out the bed,” said Sophie.
The bed was comfortable, but with every movement of its occupants it creaked and emitted an absurdly loud metallic squealing noise. “We are just above the restaurant,” whispered Forrester.
“Then the diners will have some distraction,” said Sophie, “while they eat their kebabs.”
Afterwards, as they lay beside one another, Forrester felt the tension inside himself beginning to ease. It sometimes seemed to him as if a giant key had been turned in his soul in September 1939, winding his nerves as tight as a watch spring, and every time the spring had uncoiled, as in those weeks with Barbara Lytton before he went back behind enemy lines, something had happened to wind it up again.
Such as returning home to find that she had volunteered to join the SOE and gone to France because she thought he was dead.
Such as learning that within six weeks she had been caught and shot by the Gestapo.
Such as returning to Oxford to resume his academic career and realising his first task was to save his best friend from being hung for a murder he did not commit.
But as it was that quest which had led him to Sophie Arnfeldt-Laurvig, he knew he should be grateful. Knew he was grateful. Because if there was one thing that five years of danger and fear had brought him, it was the ability to snatch joy from the moment, however fleeting, and savour it.
* * *
As Forrester slept, Sophie lay watching the glory die away over the Aegean, enjoying the weight of his head on her body, running her hand idly over the scars on his arms and chest, wondering, and not wanting to know, how he had come by them. As the dusk deepened she listened to the clatter of pans and dishes from the restaurant kitchen, the cocks crowing in the gardens on Kastelli Hill and the shouts of the children running along the waterside. She thought of the silent pine forests above the water at Bjornsfjord, before her mind drifted to her lost husband and his foolishness and how she had once loved him and how he had vanished into the maelstrom of the war like so much else. And then she too began to doze.
* * *
Later that evening they sat at an outdoor table by the waterside eating the fish soup called kakavia and watching the people pass to and fro. The last time Forrester had been here he had been watching a group of German officers wolfing down horta while he and Leigh Fermor had studied the movements of the sentries along the harbour, wondering if it would be practicable to sabotage some of the shipping that lay there. It would have involved swimming for half a mile carrying a limpet mine, and Paddy had been eager to make the attempt, but the Cretans were wary of sabotage, knowing how ferocious the German reprisals would be, and in the end they had decided against it.
Instead they had come up with the plot to kidnap a German general.
“What was it like here, during the war?” Sophie asked.
“Exciting,” said Forrester. Sophie raised an eyebrow.
“Nervous-making,” Forrester amended. “But the truth is there was something of a boys’ own adventure about it. Blame Paddy Leigh Fermor for that. You’ve met him, you can imagine what he was like given the chance to dress up like a Cretan bandit or disguise himself as a German officer.”
“How did the Cretans feel about that? After all, they must have suffered most when the Germans made reprisals.”
“True,” said Forrester, “though we did our best to make sure the Germans knew the stunts were by us rather than locals. We even left letters explaining.”
“That didn’t stop them wiping out whole villages, though, did it?”
/> “It didn’t, though that mainly happened after their own guerrillas got overenthusiastic. The fact is that Cretans are a warlike people. There was one old priest, whose youngest son was shot by the Germans, who shook my hand afterwards and said he had two more he was also ready to sacrifice.”
“I wonder what his wife thought about it?”
“She was probably as fierce as he was.”
“Was it worth it?”
Forrester considered. “Well, the information we gathered about aircraft movements and shipping movements helped Cairo work out what Jerry was up to all over the Mediterranean. By Cairo I mean Allied intelligence.”
“And the resistance? What about that?”
“It was war,” Forrester said at last. “In war, you fight. You don’t know what the outcome will be, but if you stop to consider, you’re beaten. The important thing was to keep on fighting.”
“That was all that mattered, boss,” said a voice beside them that sounded like pebbles clattering down a dry mountain streambed, and suddenly Forrester found himself in an embrace that lifted him right off his feet. Yanni Patrakis had found him.
Yanni Patrakis had been Forrester’s closest companion among the band of shepherds, millers, shopkeepers, olive-oil makers and bandits who had come together to form the core of the Cretan resistance movement. A giant of a man with huge black handlebar moustaches and hands the size of hams, Yanni was a fisherman with his own caïque, who had once killed two German sentries by banging their heads together before throwing them off a cliff. He was also a philosopher. Forrester introduced him to Sophie, and the Cretan looked her up and down with unfeigned admiration.
“Thou wilt be good for this one,” he said, jerking his thumb at Forrester. “He lives too much inside his head.”
Sophie smiled. “Where do you live, Mr. Patrakis?”
“Patrakis lives in the earth,” said Yanni without missing a beat. “He is also in the olive trees they planted here when Jesus was a boy. He is in the stones they used to build the walls of the harbour.” He gestured up towards where the White Mountains lay in the darkness. “He is in the bones of the mountains. Duncan knows this is true, for he has been in the mountains with me, hast thou not, boss? Thou knowest Patrakis is Crete.”
No one else, thought Forrester, could have brought off such braggadocio, but you only had to look at Yanni to know with him it was entirely authentic. His high-collared white shirt, his heavily embroidered blue jacket, his breeches ballooning like exuberant jodhpurs and tucked into white knee-boots, all proclaimed him Cretan to the core. But whereas most of the guerrillas alongside whom he had fought had offered little conversation during those long weeks in the caves beyond what was the best brand of pistol or whether leather-soled boots were better than rubber-soled ones, Yanni had been full of ideas from the moment Forrester had parachuted down onto the Agostina Plateau. “Like Icarus,” Yanni had said then as they hid the parachute, “thou fallest from the sky. But where is Daedalus?”
“Flying back to Cairo,” said Forrester. “And keeping well away from the sun.” Yanni had laughed and clapped him on the back and Forrester knew he had a friend for life.
Now Yanni joined them at their table and without for a moment excluding Sophie from the conversation brought Forrester up to date with the adventures of all the andartes in their band – Manolis, the shepherd boy, now back with his flocks, Agios the windmill-builder, dead in the massacre at Krousonas, Antonios Grigorakis, the oldest of them all, who had fought the Turks in the uprising of 1897 and used the same musket to shoot at the Germans in 1942.
“A man full of dignity,” said Yanni to Sophie. “With a white beard, cut so neatly you would think he had a barber with him in the caves.”
“His beard came to a beautiful point,” said Forrester. “So he looked like an unusually respectable Elizabethan pirate.”
“But very fierce and hard,” said Yanni. “He once shot off his own finger for rolling a bad number in a game of dice.”
“He sounds quite mad,” said Sophie. “But I’m sure he’s very charming.”
“Oh, he would give Duncan a run for his money with thee, my lady.”
“What is he doing now?” asked Forrester.
“Trading in olive oil, boss,” said Yanni. “But, as always, with great dignity.”
“And you,” asked Forrester at last, as the second bottle of wine arrived. “Do you thrive?”
“Patrakis thrives, boss,” said Yanni. “There is his wife, bobbing in the water.” They looked across the waterfront at Yanni’s caïque, with the black and white eyes painted on either side of the prow. “The fish leap into my net, the fishmongers throw themselves at my feet to buy my catch, the sun rises on me in the morning and sets on me in the evening. And now my best friend in the world has come back.”
There was silence for a moment, a companionable silence, for Yanni – in addition to his other gifts – knew when there was no need for further speech. But finally Sophie said, “Yanni, Duncan probably won’t mention this, but I will, in case you have seen anything. An old enemy has been following him.”
Yanni looked at Forrester, puzzled.
“We’ve probably left him behind in Athens,” said Forrester.
“Who is this enemy? Tell me his name, boss, that I might smite him for thee.”
So Forrester, half annoyed with Sophie for bringing it up, and half relieved to be able to share the story of Cornelius Brandt with his friend, told him about the man with the tin mask covering his face, and what had happened in Athens.
“He wishes to make thee uneasy,” said Yanni.
“He has made me uneasy,” admitted Forrester. “The problem is I can’t think why he’s been after me. I mean, the Dutch were on our side.”
“What if he is a German, pretending to be Dutch?” asked Yanni, shrewdly.
Forrester paused. “That would make sense,” he said. “If I were a German I don’t think I’d announce the fact in Greece just now.”
“Well, thou and I caused much trouble for the Germans in the war.”
“True.”
“Perhaps some of them are angry with thee.”
“That is quite possible.”
“Perhaps it is because of something thou and I did to the Germans here in Greece.”
“That could be so,” said Forrester.
“I will spread the word,” said Yanni. “If he sets foot on my island, boss, thou wilt know.”
“Thank you,” said Forrester.
Yanni smiled and turned to Sophie. “Did Duncan ever tell thee, my lady,” he asked, “about the time we walked into a Christmas party for German officers, and I passed him off as my idiot brother from Agios Nikolaos?”
And he proceeded to relate the story, so vividly that by the time he had finished half the diners at the tables around them were listening too, and the orange moon hung huge in the velvet sky.
7
INTO THE WHITE MOUNTAINS
The bus that would take them to the village closest to the Gorge of Acharius left from Eleftherios Venizelos Square in the middle of the old town. Eleftherios Venizelos had been born near Chania and had led the 1896 uprising against the Turks in which Antonios Grigorakis had fought. As the bus pulled out of the square the driver pointed to a large, shady tree. “That is where the Turks hanged the Bishop of Kissamos for supporting the uprising,” he said.
“They never forget, do they?” Sophie whispered to Forrester.
“A little bit,” said Forrester quietly. “The bishop was actually hung in 1836.”
“You are such a pedant!”
“No, just a historian.” An old woman across the aisle was holding two live chickens, their legs tied together with twine; she caught Sophie’s eye and smiled, revealing a mouth with just three teeth in it. Sophie smiled back, pointed to the chickens and mimed eating. The old woman grinned more broadly, and indicated the strings of tomatoes and onions she had in her basket. Sophie peered in and breathed in appreciatively as the scent w
afted from bundles of herbs.
“That’s rosemary,” she said.
“Dendrolivano,” said the old woman.
“And this we call oregano,” said Sophie.
“Rigani,” said the woman, and with a twinkle in her eye held up a velvety plant neither Forrester nor Sophie recognised. Its round green leaves were covered in soft, woolly white-grey hair and its tiny flowers were rose-pink and purple.
“Thelete na to peíte Díktamo,” said their interlocutor, “alla oi Krhtikoí to léne éronta.”
Forrester grinned. “She says you’d call it ‘dittany’, but the Cretans call it érontas, which of course is related to the word ‘eros’.”
“As in erotic?”
“Very much so. They believe it’s an aphrodisiac, and young lovers climb the mountains to find it for each other every spring.”
Sophie smiled. “How romantic.”
“Also, if I recall rightly, Aristotle claimed that if goats that had been wounded by arrows ate dittany, the arrows would fly out of their bodies.”
“Then Aristotle was more gullible than I had imagined,” said Sophie, but to the old woman she gestured to the plant and repeated, to her interlocutor’s great delight, “Erontas.”
As she spoke the roar of yet another unmuffled engine caused Forrester to glance idly down as a noisy motorcycle came alongside the bus and its rider looked up at them.
It was Cornelius Brandt.
For what seemed like eternity the disfigured man steered neatly between the carts and animals meandering along the street, glancing up every now and then through the dirt-smeared window at Forrester, as if taunting him.
Then suddenly his gloved hands twisted the throttle and the bike accelerated, pulled ahead of them, and disappeared down the road.
Forrester glanced across at Sophie. Now in conversation with a little girl who was showing her a peg doll, she had seen nothing. Forrester wondered whether to tell her, and then decided he must. If she continued on the expedition with him she must do it with her eyes open.
