Mikis didn’t look happy, but left the notes where they were. ‘Where are we going, then?’
Mavros was looking at the map he had bought. ‘Get us to Karies and then I’ll direct you.’
‘Karies? There’s not much up there.’ He turned to Mavros. ‘Except the track to Kornaria. You wouldn’t by any chance be wanting to go to that crazy end-of-the-road place, would you?’
‘Erm, maybe.’
Mikis stopped the Jeep. ‘You need to be straight with me, Alex. I know this island. There are places you can’t go asking questions.’
‘You’re right.’ He recounted the story of his call to Dhrakakis and his idea that Maria Kondos might be in the village.
‘Sounds pretty thin to me,’ the Cretan said.
‘I’m sure he knew her,’ Mavros countered. ‘In my business you learn to tell when people are lying.’
‘That may be,’ Mikis said, ‘but Kornaria is bandit country – always has been. Not that I’ve ever been near the dump. It’s up in the middle of nowhere for a reason, you know. The Venetians never got it, the Turks steered clear, even the Germans left the locals to themselves. The headbangers from Sphakia like to think they’re Crete’s bad boys, but they’ve got nothing on the Kornariates.’
‘Wonderful,’ Mavros muttered. ‘Couldn’t I just pretend to be a dumb foreigner on a personal tour?’
‘Need to take these off,’ Mikis said, slapping the outside of his door.
Mavros remembered the stickers for Freedom or Death. ‘Yeah, maybe you should.’ He didn’t mention that David Waggoner, one of the film’s consultants, had a place near the village. He presumed he’d be on location today, watching the planes and remembering the days of death and defeat.
Mikis jumped out and peeled the decals off. ‘Plenty of these back in the depot,’ he said, getting back behind the wheel. ‘OK, let’s play it your way. You speak only English and I’ll see if we can pick up any hint of the missing woman.’
They drove out of the resort and headed east, before turning south on a road that bisected lush groves of fruit and olive trees. The sun was already high in the sky, but they were shaded from its heat and the first half-hour of the trip was a pleasure. Then the road started to climb and the foliage thinned, until soon all that confronted them were the sheer bare flanks of the White Mountains, their summits capped in glinting silvery white. Although they weren’t far from Chania as the crow flies, it was a different world.
‘Don’t be fooled,’ Mikis said, as he slipped into third gear. ‘There are plenty of watercourses that you can’t see from here and villages were built around them, even in ancient times. There’s one of those Mycenaean beehive tombs not far from here. A lot of the villages are deserted now, the people down on the coast fleecing the tourists.’ He laughed. ‘Like my family. Our village is further to the west. There are twelve people in it now, all of them over seventy-five.’
Mavros nodded. It was a common tale in the mountainous parts of Greece. Signs pointed to villages that weren’t on his map. The road was asphalt, the result of European Union grants, but it was badly potholed.
At Karies, Mikis turned to him. ‘Are you sure you want to go through with this?’
‘Yes. Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll claim that my British grandfather was here during the war with the SOE.’ That way, he might also find out more about Waggoner. ‘Let’s say he was known as Panos, that’s common enough. If we get anywhere with that, we’ll ask if there are any Kondos’s in the village.’
Mikis shrugged. ‘It’s not a very Cretan name.’ He was concentrating on the much rougher track they were now grinding up. The bushes on either side were thick and thorny, but the trees were leafless and bent.
‘True. Maybe her family shortened it when they got to the States – lots of them did.’
‘Kondakis?’ the driver suggested. ‘Kondhylakis?’
‘No, let’s stick to Kondos. If she had relatives in the village, they’d know the family’s new name, wouldn’t they?’
Mikis didn’t look convinced. ‘Wasn’t it some Hollywood guy who said nobody knows anything?’ He swerved as a goat walked across the track with its head held high.
‘Impressive,’ Mavros said, meaning both the driving and the quotation. ‘William Goldman. Have you read him?’
‘No, one of the guys on the crew told me.’ Mikis laughed. ‘I’m a driver. I don’t read.’
Mavros had noticed the corner of a book under tissues and torches in the open glove compartment. ‘So you use this for wiping your arse, do you?’ He held up a new-looking copy of Nikos Kazantzakis’s Kapetan Michalis, remembering that it had been translated into English as Freedom and Death.
The Cretan crossed himself. ‘How can you say such a thing about a book by the greatest modern Greek writer?’
‘I could argue the toss about that for hours.’ Mavros was not a fan of the great man’s work, finding it overblown and under-edited, though this book – the story of a freedom fighter and family patriarch who dies in a final skirmish against the Turks – was better than most; certainly more powerful than Zorba the Greek, which largely owed its popularity to the film. Give him a poet of few words like Cavafy or Seferis any day.
‘Actually, I was only messing with you. I have a literature degree from the University of Crete,’ Mikis admitted. He stared ahead. ‘And now the fun starts.’
Mavros followed his gaze. A pickup truck with massive chrome bull bars was parked across the road, completely blocking it. Two men in high boots, vraka, and mandili, stood in the back, each carrying a shotgun, while another one in the cab spoke into a walkie-talkie.
‘Shit,’ Mikis said, under his breath. ‘You sure you want to go through with this?’
Mavros looked over his shoulder. Another pickup was drawing up behind them. ‘I don’t think we have much choice, my friend.’
‘Play dumb and British,’ said the driver. ‘If that isn’t a tautology.’
From The Descent of Icarus:
It was dusk when I came round, unaware of where I was until I managed with great difficulty to pull myself up from the floor of the ruined house. I stumbled over to the shattered window and looked out on to the small square. What I saw was a scene of unbelievable horror.
The bodies of my fellow paratroopers were now almost completely covered by those of the New Zealanders, gendarmes and local people who had defeated them. I was unable to focus and struggled to walk, so hard had the blow to my head been. But at least I was still alive – not that I took any comfort from that. I could only imagine that either 109s had strafed the enemy to destruction or that our troops on the higher ground to the rear had fired down on them. The place smelled like the slaughterhouse in my grandparents’ Bavarian town in August – iron blood, rotting guts and lacerated flesh.
Leaning on a rifle, I staggered out into the square and started looking for the woman. I was drawn to her and, if she had been killed, I wanted to lay her out and place her arms across her chest as a mark of respect. But there was no sign of her, even though there were several other women in black among the dead. Then I heard a groan from what turned out to be the sole survivor.
It was the squat British tank officer I had seen giving our men the coup de grâce – an action I was fairly sure was not within the bounds of the Geneva Convention. Not that we had been observing that either. He was at the side of the street, his legs covered in blood and his face peppered with shrapnel. I dropped to my knees and lifted his head, then poured some water from my canteen into his mouth. He stared at me in amazement.
It wasn’t long before paratroopers began to trickle into Galatsi, initially observing the drills for taking possession of disputed territory and then showing themselves as it became clear there was no danger from the enemy.
‘Identify yourself!’ came a raised voice I recognized instantly.
I slowly hauled myself upright and gave my name and unit.
Captain Blatter came closer, limping from a wound above his right kne
e. ‘Where are the others?’ he demanded.
I nodded to the square. ‘Underneath.’ I said, provoking a glare. ‘Sir.’
Troops were pulling enemy bodies off their comrades and swearing.
‘Herman! Throat cut!’
‘My God, the lieutenant’s head’s nearly off!’
‘Two men stuck by the same Maori!’ I watched as the sergeant drew his own bayonet and stabbed it repeatedly into the dead New Zealander’s back.
Blatter ignored that. ‘What have we here? A British survivor?’
The wounded man stared up at him. ‘Waggoner, Captain David.’ He stated his regiment and serial number.
‘How many of my men did you kill, Captain?’ Blatter placed one of his jump boots on the Britisher’s legs and pressed down hard. ‘How many?’
‘My Captain,’ I said. ‘You—’
‘Silence!’ he roared. ‘You hid yourself away while your comrades were massacred. Do not think I will forget that!’
Captain Waggoner looked at me, his eyes dull, then turned back to Blatter. ‘Fuck you!’ he shouted. Blatter kicked him hard and he lost consciousness.
The regimental doctor came up to me and examined the side of my head. ‘He couldn’t have done this himself, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ he said to the captain. He was taking a risk, but the medics were a law to themselves after they proved themselves in battle, as this one had in Belgium.
‘They will pay for this,’ Blatter said, limping over to an old woman who had been nearly cut in two by machine-gun fire. ‘Your children and grandchildren will burn in hell!’ he yelled, his spittle flecking the dead woman’s swollen features.
Without being ordered, the paratroopers set about removing our dead from the heaps in the square, treating the bodies of the enemy without the slightest respect. I was glad the woman who saved me had escaped, fearing that her corpse would have been mutilated because of her great beauty.
‘With a head wound like that, you should be in hospital,’ the doctor said to me in a low voice.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘I should be beneath the ground.’
He didn’t understand my meaning. Why should he? We were the spearhead of the German armed forces, we did not crumble after a few days’ fighting. But it wasn’t the fighting that had undone me, hard and ghastly though that had been. It was the dauntless courage and nobility of the Cretan woman. I realized that if I’d found her body in the square, I would have plunged one of the long Maori bayonets into my own heart.
NINE
‘Leave this to me,’ Mikis said, opening his door.
‘No,’ Mavros said, doing the same with his. ‘Time for me to play the blundering Brit.’ He walked forward slowly, waving his hand. ‘Hello!’ he said, in English. ‘Is the road closed?’
Mikis swiftly overtook him. The men in the pickup had levelled their shotguns at them.
‘The gentleman is British,’ he said, in Greek. ‘He asks if we can visit the village.’
‘Why?’ demanded one of the men, beetle-browed and bearded. ‘Don’t you know better than to bring tourists here?’
Mikis let his shoulders slump. ‘I’m sorry, but he insisted. He says his grandfather was here when the Germans held the island.’
The men’s expressions remained stony, but they exchanged a glance.
‘Was he sent by someone?’ the bearded villager asked.
Mavros was playing dumb, but the question put him in a dilemma. Should he lie about Waggoner providing an invitation? And if so, how could he get that across to Mikis?
The Cretan wasn’t thrown. ‘I think so,’ he replied. ‘I can’t understand the name he says.’
‘Ask him again.’
Mikis went through the process of asking Mavros in halting English for the name of the man whose writings had led him to visit Kornaria.
‘Waggoner,’ Mavros said.
‘O Lambis,’ hissed the bearded man to his sidekick.
Mavros presumed that was the cover-name Waggoner had used when he was on Crete during the war. He cursed himself for not asking the Fat Man to do those searches overnight. Outwitting Oskar Mesner had distracted him from the main case.
He nodded. ‘Lambis, that’s right,’ he said, in English.
There was a hurried conversation between the men in the first pickup and another who had come up from the one behind the Jeep.
‘All right,’ the bearded man said to Mikis. ‘You can go up to the village.’ He frowned. ‘Keep your tourist under control and don’t go beyond the houses.’
Mikis raised his shoulders. ‘It’s a dead end anyway, isn’t it?’
‘It’s certainly been that for all the invaders who tried to take us,’ the other man said, his eyes unwavering.
The pickup was manoeuvred out of the way and Mikis drove on.
‘I hope you enjoyed that demonstration of mountain hospitality,’ he said.
Mavros grunted. ‘Friendly types, aren’t they?’
‘Still sure you want to go through with this? I won’t be able to step in like I did last night. There are dozens of guys like those ones in Kornaria.’
‘I’ll keep my questions to a minimum.’
The track led down into a wide valley and ahead of them lay a surprisingly large patch of flat land covered in sheds, with a cluster of white houses in the centre. The air was clear and tinged by the chill of the snow on the peaks. It struck Mavros that this would be a very harsh place in winter.
‘See those sheds?’ Mikis asked.
‘Not for mushrooms?’
‘Correct. Don’t even think of taking photographs.’
‘Never crossed my mind.’ The only camera he had with him was in his mobile and it wouldn’t pick up much from such a distance. ‘Anyway, I don’t give a shit about them growing dope.’
Mikis glanced at him, then steered round a large pothole. ‘You say that, but it isn’t the way things work. Everything that goes on in Kornaria has some connection to the core business. And that business extends far beyond the village.’
Mavros thought about that. David Waggoner had a house up here – could the old soldier have anything to do with the narcotics trade? The mayor, Vasilios Dhrakakis, would obviously be in the business up to his neck. And what about Maria Kondos? Was the missing woman linked to it in some way too? Had she been driving Cara Parks’ car after all when the drugs gang member was killed?
They drove past a few abandoned buildings and into the village proper. It was spotless, the white houses on each side of the concrete road gleaming in the sunlight, their wooden shutters and fences freshly painted. There was obviously no shortage of water, as the bougainvilleas and oleanders were tall and healthy. Old women in black peered at the Jeep and its occupants curiously, while young women in jeans played with chubby children.
The road ended in a wide square with a large tree in the centre. It was very quiet – the men presumably in the cultivation sheds or playing cowboy in their pickups. Metal tables and chairs with wicker seats were arrayed outside a solitary kafeneion.
‘Give them a few moments,’ Mikis said. ‘They’ll have been told we were on the way.’
Sure enough, a trio of barrel-chested men in traditional garb and boots came towards the Jeep. They weren’t armed, but they hardly needed to be. Mavros had the feeling that they were being closely watched from the open windows of surrounding houses, each of which no doubt had a well-stocked gun cabinet.
‘Welcome,’ the man in the middle said, in Greek. He wore a moustache that extended horizontally across his cheeks. ‘I am the mayor, Dhrakakis is my name.’
Mikis introduced himself – he had no choice about using his real name since ‘Tsifakis’ was all over the Jeep. ‘I have brought an Englishman whose grandfather was here in the war.’
Mavros bowed extravagantly. ‘Arthur Smith,’ he said, with a tentative smile. ‘Very pleased to meet you.’
Dhrakakis eyed him diffidently and then extended a horny hand. ‘Kornaria welcomes the offspring of the b
rave man who fought for Crete’s freedom.’
Mikis translated for form’s sake.
The mayor turned on his heel and walked over to the kafeneion. He stopped at the most shaded table and extended his arms. ‘Please, accept our hospitality.’
Mavros nodded and smiled frequently, trying to look as foreign as possible. As he sat down, he realized what a dangerous game he was playing. These men had their code of honour and it wasn’t long since the vendetta had become less common – for all he knew, it might still be flourishing in Kornaria. Deceiving them might be very costly. Then again, he’d be off the island as soon as he found Maria Kondos and he didn’t think their reach would extend to Athens.
After glasses of raki had been consumed – Mavros pretending to choke – and coffee provided, along with slices of a dark, nutty cake, the mayor turned to him.
‘Your grandfather, what did he tell you about Kornaria?’
Mavros explained via Mikis that Ralph Smith had been a wireless operator in the mountains, spending weeks with only a pair of guards, but that he had always spoken with great pleasure of the days when they came down to Kornaria to replenish their food supplies. The villagers had been most generous, slaughtering sheep and chickens and opening casks of aged wine.
Dhrakakis nodded throughout Mikis’s presentation, a slack smile on his lips.
‘And he was part of Lambis’s group?’ he asked.
Mavros smiled broadly.
‘Ou-anggoner,’ Dhrakakis said, struggling with the English ‘w’ and ‘gg’ sounds.
‘David Waggoner,’ Mavros said, nodding vigorously. ‘I have read about him, but my grandfather didn’t say if he was attached to his unit.’
The mayor raised a shaggy eyebrow. ‘Lambis was in command of all the British in this area,’ he said firmly.
‘Well, then, my grandfather was with him,’ Mavros relayed back.
‘How was he called, your grandfather? He still lives?’
Mavros shook his head. ‘He died last year.’
Mikis’s translation brought exclamations of grief and sympathy. Again, Mavros felt bad about deceiving them. Then he remembered Dhrakakis’s voice on the telephone – he definitely knew Maria Kondos and had been concerned by mention of her name.
The Silver Stain Page 10
