by Gavin Scott
“The whole world will pay if you destroy these inscriptions,” said Forrester, looking down at the stone.
“I have no intention of destroying them,” said Kretzmer. “I intend to take the stone with me. But you, Captain, will remain here, in this cave, as mute witness to my success.”
“I thought you gave me your word not to shoot me.”
“I did, and I will not shoot you, but you will die here anyway, that I promise you. But you may take one last look at your prize if you wish.”
Forrester hesitated.
“Go on, feel free: I do not break my word.”
“For God’s sake, Duncan. He’s going to kill you.” Forrester’s heart sank as Sophie slid down the shaft that led into the chamber. But Kretzmer’s ravaged face seemed to smile.
“Ah, Grevinne Arnfeldt-Laurvig. How convenient of you to join us.”
For a moment Sophie said nothing, silenced by her first sight of the man, and then she said, “What use is revenge, Herr Kretzmer? What good does it do? Anybody?”
“It will soothe my soul,” said Kretzmer, and Forrester knew the end was about to come.
“You have no soul, Kretzmer,” said Forrester, “it’s all gone,” and as Sophie fired the flashbulb on the Hasselblad Miss Bulstrode had lent him, momentarily blinding Kretzmer, the gun slid from Forrester’s sleeve into his hand. The torch still lay on the ground where he had rolled it down the shaft to convince the German he was unarmed.
Both weapons fired simultaneously – but Kretzmer’s was aimed not at either of his human opponents, but at the roof of the cave. As the bullet struck the keystone and dislodged it, half a ton of rocks crashed to the floor and Forrester knew that if he had accepted Kretzmer’s invitation to look at the inscriptions, he would been crushed like an insect beneath them. Of course the German could not afford to have a body, even a skeleton, with a bullet wound in the cave where he had made his find. But a dead Englishman crushed in a rockfall – that need have nothing to do with him at all.
Or a dead Norwegian woman, for that matter. Jesus!
The cave was full of dust now, blinding, choking dust.
“Sophie! Sophie! Are you alright?” and he saw that though the main rockfall had not hit her, one of the rocks had knocked her to the ground, and she lay still with blood on her face. Mouthing incoherent prayers he lifted her out of the rubble, fear coursing through his body like freezing water.
When she opened her eyes and stared at him groggily he felt as if it were he who had come to life again. He looked up: Kretzmer had vanished. The cave was unrecognisable – it seemed almost the entire roof had come down.
“Jesus, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”
Sophie smiled.
“I came of my own free will, Duncan. And I think it was a good thing I did. Now, start looking for your stone.” A beat, and then he laid her down and began pulling aside the rocks that lay between them and the cave wall where he had last seen it, but long before he reached the wall he knew what he would find.
The stone had gone along with Kretzmer.
Sophie looked at the shaft that had brought them in here. “He couldn’t have gone that way,” she said. “He could not have got past us without us seeing him.”
“I know,” said Forrester, and began burrowing through the debris until he was on the side of the cave where Kretzmer had been when he fired.
And there was the third shaft, vanishing up into the mountainside.
“Don’t go up there,” said Sophie. “He’ll kill you if you do.”
Forrester shook his head. “Don’t worry. I’ve been a bloody fool today, and nearly lost you. I’m not going to take that risk again.”
“I’m glad.”
“But I’m not giving up,” said Forrester. “I’m just not going to make it easy for him. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
9
THE HUNTER AND THE HUNTED
Because the tunnel through which Kretzmer had escaped had led upwards, Forrester guessed it came out on the mountainside above the gorge; the walls of the gorge, as Kretzmer no doubt knew, were too steep to scale without mountaineering equipment, and that meant that when they emerged from the cave they had to trek back to the entrance before they could head up the mountain to the point where he might have emerged.
By the time they finally scrambled out of the gorge and onto the upper slopes the sun was beginning to descend towards the west, but its glare still reflected off the rocks and they had to squeeze their eyes half closed to see. It took twenty more frustrating minutes before they found where Kretzmer had come out of the tunnel leading up from the cave, but the marks, where he’d dragged the stone out into the light, were unmistakable.
More significantly, as Forrester knelt down and examined them, he smelt engine oil, and a few yards further on found the indentations left by Kretzmer’s motorcycle. Despite himself, Forrester had to acknowledge Kretzmer’s ingenuity: not only had the motorcycle allowed him to get to the gorge well ahead of them – it had also allowed him to get away with the stone, doubtless stuffed into a pannier bag, so fast they had no hope of overtaking him.
“No hope at all?” said Sophie.
“Not while he’s on the bike,” said Forrester. “But at some point he has to get off.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, we’re on an island. If he’s going to smuggle that thing out of Crete he’s got to do it by boat.”
“From Chania?”
Forrester examined the motorcycle tracks in the fading light; they weren’t tracks really, just marks in the fragrant, low-growing scrub covering the mountainside, but there were just enough of them to make out the direction.
“He’s headed north and west, which is the way to the Chania road. You’re right, it is the obvious jumping-off point, because it’s where most of the caïques are.”
“Too obvious?”
“Possibly. But he may have made an arrangement at some little fishing village nearby. That would have been the smart thing to do.”
“And he’s smart.”
“Yes,” said Forrester ruefully. “He’s smart.”
“What should we do?”
“We need to get to a telephone as soon as possible.”
But reaching a telephone proved, as Forrester had suspected, no easy matter. As dusk fell, the journey back down the course of the stream to Meskla became more and more treacherous, and their pace slowed dramatically. The gurgling of the stream beside them and the cold depths of its pools were no longer an attraction, but a constant source of danger. Even turning an ankle on one of the slippery rocks could have wrecked their plans. By the time they reached Meskla it was dark, they were exhausted, and the last bus was long gone. Also, it turned out there was no telephone in the village.
Responding to Forrester’s urgency, the local doctor agreed to take them down in his horse and cart to the police post on the main Chania road, and Forrester telephoned from there. Finally, after going through many operators, he roused Osbert Lancaster in Athens and explained what had happened.
“Well, from what you say your chap shouldn’t be too difficult to spot,” said Lancaster, “if he comes through Athens.”
“I don’t think he will,” said Forrester. “If I were him I’d hire a caïque and get them to drop him somewhere well outside Greek territory: Sicily perhaps, or Albania, and not at one of the big ports either – some cove or other.”
“So effectively he’ll probably make a clean getaway,” said Lancaster.
“Partly depends on how well he does in hiring his boat. If you could get onto the British Consul in Chania he might be able to help. I’ll be speaking to the Chania police myself.”
“Consider it done,” said Lancaster.
Forrester spent another half hour getting a call through to Miss Bulstrode at the Empire Council for Archaeology in Athens. When he finally got through, that redoubtable lady, without wasting a moment in unnecessary comment or questions, promised to enlist the assistance of the director of t
he Chania Archaeological Museum, whom she knew well.
* * *
It was not until the next day that Sophie and Forrester themselves reached the port on the Chania bus, having spent an uncomfortable night dozing in the police post, and Sophie went straight back to their hotel to clean up while Forrester went first to the consul and then to the archaeology museum to enlist the aid of its director, a silver-haired man called Evangelous Apostopolous.
A bitter look came into Professor Apostopolous’s eyes when he heard what had happened: his brother had been one of the hostages machine-gunned by General Müller’s men at Kedros.
“The harbourmaster will tell you about caïques from Chania,” he said. “I will call him to make sure he does everything he can. I myself have many relatives in the fishing villages to the west of here. I will send messages to them in case the German left from there.” He looked hard into Forrester’s eyes. “Don’t worry, my friend, we will track this monster down.”
Forrester nodded, and shook Apostopolous’s hand, but there was little confidence in his answering smile. Kretzmer was a too formidable opponent for that.
The urgent requests from Miss Bulstrode and Osbert Lancaster had ensured that the local police were also doing their best to help, and it turned out the harbourmaster was Evangelous’s brother-in-law. But he shrugged his shoulders expressively when Forrester asked if any of the Chania caïques was missing, pointing out that as usual a third of them were out on fishing expeditions, a third were delivering cargo along the coast, and most of the others were taking cargo to and from nearby islands. Yanni Patrakis himself was out at sea somewhere. The one useful thing Forrester was able to establish, when the harbourmaster brought the leader of the dockers’ union into his office, was that no one remembered seeing a man fitting Kretzmer’s description in the last twenty-four hours. Forrester guessed that if the German had ridden his noisy motorcycle down the dock, and anybody had seen that grotesque mask, or indeed the face beneath it, they would have remembered.
Which meant that if he had taken a caïque, he must have taken it from somewhere else.
At this point Forrester himself returned to the hotel, cleaned himself up, changed his clothes, and ate a late breakfast with Sophie: a meal in cheerless contrast to their dinner two days previously, when Forrester had felt so near his goal.
“Have you asked Yanni?” she said.
“Out fishing,” said Forrester. “Nobody’s sure when he’ll be back.”
“Well,” said Sophie, “I’ve got something that may be useful,” and to Forrester’s surprise she brought out a map. Examining it, Forrester realised that it was a German wartime map of coastal defences.
“Where on earth did you get this?”
“From a second-hand stall in the marketplace,” said Sophie. “I think they were quite surprised anyone wanted to buy it.”
The map was creased and beer-stained, and depicted only an odd mushroom-shaped peninsula to the east and north of Chania; it was an entirely random acquisition, but Forrester decided to take it as a sign.
“The director of the museum is enquiring in the villages west of here,” he said. “But this map covers the east. I think we should take advantage of it and check out the peninsula ourselves.”
“There seem to be a lot of places there where he could have got a boat,” said Sophie, tracing her finger across the map. “Agios Onoufrios, for example. Or the coves around Kalathas. I suppose we’d better go round each one.”
Forrester considered. “We may run up against a certain reluctance to say anything that might get a local man into trouble for smuggling antiquities.”
“Then perhaps we’d better not mention that,” said Sophie. “We could say Herr Brandt – I imagine he’ll still be calling himself Brandt and pretending to be Dutch – is a great friend of ours who’s accidentally left his wallet behind in Chania.”
Forrester looked at her and grinned. “I hope you’re never on my trail,” he said.
“As long as you never go anywhere without telling me,” replied Sophie levelly, “you have nothing to worry about.”
* * *
They hired a local taxi and began a long, hot, weary afternoon spinning their story to suspicious fishermen and their families at the little villages around the Katafigio peninsula – and getting nowhere. Dozing dogs eyed them narrowly as they trekked through whitewashed alleys heavy with the trapped heat of the day’s sun. As they stood waiting for people to answer their knocks the endless chirp of the cicadas seemed to mock the futility of their quest. And no one seemed to know anything about a man with a strange-looking face on a motorcycle asking to hire a boat. Halfway round the peninsula, after visiting four fishing settlements, the cab broke down and the driver announced there would be a half-hour wait while he made running repairs.
It was stiflingly hot by now, and the chorus of cicadas was louder and more mocking than ever. Seeking shade, Sophie suggested they walk down to the beach to bathe their feet in the water. A little way along the beach was a ruined chapel, and without giving the matter much thought, they strolled along to visit it. It was a relief, however brief, to get out of the sun into the cool dimness of the church and put their quest behind them for a moment. To Forrester’s surprise, despite its ruinous appearance, much of the interior was intact, and there was even, beneath a surviving section of roof, a faded Byzantine fresco.
“It’s beautiful,” said Sophie. “It looks like a ship in a storm.”
“I think that’s exactly what it is,” said Forrester. “And look – one of the people on board has a halo, so he’s a saint. St. Paul, I’d guess. He was always getting caught in storms while he was crossing the Mediterranean.”
“Spreading Christianity.”
“Absolutely. Nothing was going to stop him: not the weather, not shipwrecks, not the Romans, nothing until he’d got his new religion off the ground.”
At which point Sophie put her finger to her lips and pointed. A young girl was kneeling at the far end of the chapel, praying.
“Kai as érthei píso̱sto chróno gia ta genéthlia ti̱s miṯras tou.”
Sophie looked at Forrester for a translation.
“She’s praying that somebody comes back in time for her mother’s birthday,” whispered Forrester, and Sophie’s eyes softened.
“Makári o Agios Christóforos na tou chamogelásei kai to téras den tha ton vlápsei,” prayed the girl.
“May Saint Christopher smile on him and the monster not hurt him,” said Forrester. His eyes met Sophie’s, and as the little girl ended her prayer, they backed out of the church so she would not find them standing over her when she opened her eyes.
Instead, when she emerged, they were sitting on the sand, looking out to sea.
“Kali̱ sas méra,” said the girl, gravely. Good day.
“Kali̱spéra sas,” Forrester replied politely. The girl looked at them, curious and uncertain, but reassured by the fact that they were sitting down and she was standing up and able to run away if she chose to do so.
“Eínai o patéras sou psarás?” asked Forrester – Is your father a fisherman? – and when the girl replied, hesitantly at first and then more volubly, Forrester followed up for a moment or two with a series of apparently casual questions. Then the girl said her goodbyes and headed for home.
“Well?” said Sophie when she was out of earshot.
“Her name is Calliope Laskaris and she says a man with a bad face gave her father money to take him somewhere in his boat,” said Forrester.
“På målet!” said Sophie.
“På målet?”
“It means on target in Norwegian. Bang on target. Any more?”
“Her father left with this man last night. She’s worried that he hasn’t come back.”
“It has to be Kretzmer.”
“Yes,” said Forrester. “She also mentioned he came on a motorcycle.”
“What should we do? Get the police?”
“No,” said Forrester, getting
up. “It’s too late for that and I don’t want to get the family into trouble. But I think we should have a chat with Calliope’s mother.”
They followed the girl at a discreet distance until she reached a cluster of whitewashed houses clustered around a small cove and disappeared inside one of them. They waited, giving her chance to talk to her mother, and then went up to the house themselves. Slightly modifying their story about being friends of Brandt to account for the family’s obvious unease about him, but reassuring the woman – whose name was Anna – there would be no trouble with the authorities if she told them where her husband had gone, they gradually got the story out of her.
The husband – Spiros Laskaris – had met the Dutchman at a bar in Chania two nights ago, and had agreed to take him out to one of the islands. No, her husband had not told her which island – the Dutchman had sworn him to secrecy – but the little girl interjected to say she had seen the man studying a map on which the island of Antikythera featured. The Dutchman had put it away quickly when she saw him looking, and she could not be certain Antikythera was the island to which her father was going, but that was what she had seen.
She also added that she did not like the Dutchman. She did not like his strange face and she did not like the way he ordered her father around. Her father, who owned the best caïque on the peninsula!
Forrester thanked the woman and her daughter with great politeness, and asked them whenever their man returned to send a message telling his friend Evangelous Apostopolous at the Chania Archaeological Museum. At this point the taxi, now repaired, came cruising along the coast road looking for them, and when they were back aboard Forrester told the driver to take them straight back to Chania.
“Do you think the little girl was right about Antikythera?” said Sophie.
“I don’t know,” said Forrester. “There would be no point in taking the stone there, because it’s still in Greece, but if you were heading for Sicily or somewhere on the Adriatic, Antikythera is in the right direction.”
“And he probably wouldn’t have told Laskaris that he wanted to leave the country.”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t. He’d wait till the man was committed.”
