by Neil Olson
“Then we try the back,” Mikalis insisted. “There are trees, they won’t see us.”
Again, the men were eager, and the captain could not justify inaction. Nor could he trust the errant priest to anyone else.
“Stay by me. On my left, and just behind me, understand?”
“Yes.”
They skirted the tree line to the north and came up on the rear of the old stone structure, where the cleric’s private entry lay in shadow. The fire had indeed started in front, but they could chart its progress through the tall, murky windows, and it seemed that the better part of the interior was now in flames.
“It’s too late,” Leftheris said mournfully.
“No.” The priest began to force his way past the captain, who seized him.
“Leftheris is right.”
“Let me at least try. The icon…”
“Is wood and paint, Mikalis. Let it go.”
The long face thrust itself at Elias, forehead to forehead, whispering.
“You’re wrong. There is more to it than you see.”
“What?”
“But even if you were right, faith may invest objects with power. The Mother has cured the ill here for centuries; it means everything to these people.”
The captain could not respond at once. The cult of the icon had always seemed an old woman’s obsession to him, something his father had scorned, as he scorned all religion, something the young people of the local villages would surely grow up to reject, or ignore. Elias was no communist, but he was a man with his eye on the wider world, where science trumped superstition, where worship of the Mother of God did not guide men’s actions. Athens had given him a taste of that world, but perhaps he had been there too long. Or perhaps he’d done wrong to return here. His young fighters trusted priests even less then he did, yet in moments of fear they turned not to each other, like their brothers with the communists, but to God, and to Panayía, the forgiving Mother. How had it happened? If the priests and old women had no hold over them, from where had this belief emerged? Where had Mikalis, whose own father was utterly godless, found his faith? And how could Elias look such faith in the eye after setting such mischief in motion?
“Listen to me.”
There was nothing to say. His words would have hung unfinished in any case, but at that moment the captain noticed shadows on the far side of the church, moving among the graves. Müller and six or eight soldiers, looking for the rear entrance. They had gone the long way around but would be upon the andartes in moments. Distracted, Elias loosened his grip fractionally. It was enough; the priest was gone from beneath his hands, leaping the broken wall and racing up the remaining slope for the dark portal. The captain froze, unable to call out. The Germans apparently recognized the black cassock and did not shoot, but one soldier darted forward to intercept the cleric.
“Halt, halt.”
A rifle boomed to the captain’s left—Spiro’s old Männlicher—and the soldier sat heavily, listed sideways to the ground. A moment later shots came from the other side, springing hot chips from the stone wall, and the guerrillas ducked their heads as the Germans sought cover. Mikalis stumbled over the fallen soldier but righted himself and disappeared into the entry.
Elias, calmed by the eruption of fighting, found his voice and commanded his men to spread out along the wall and shoot as fast as they could reload. Accuracy was not important. The crosses and narrow tablets gave the Germans no refuge; their only real cover was the corner of the church—and since only one or two men at a time could fire from that position, the guerrillas might keep them pinned briefly, while disguising their own paltry numbers. It would be four against fifty once the rest of the Germans arrived, presumably in minutes, but perhaps the priest would emerge before that.
Then a second figure was leaping the wall and making for the door. Black shirt and kerchief, running low and swift. Kosta. What the hell was the boy up to? He had no love for priests or icons, but so be it: the action was undertaken. Reloading the Enfield was too slow; the captain tossed the rifle aside, drew his pistol, and fired blindly at the shadows, wasting precious ammunition. Spiro and Leftheris picked up their fire as well, and Kosta raced through the doorway.
Captain Elias bent to reload his hot pistol and consider his position. A bad business, no helping that now. Spiro should not have shot but must have thought Mikalis was in danger. The dead German would cost the village dearly unless Elias could put it right with Müller. Müller, with whom he was now exchanging hostile fire, never a good place from which to negotiate. To hell with it all. If he had the men the Snake had taken to retrieve the weapons, he would scrap the whole dirty plan and kill as many Germans as he could. If. No, this was a foolish action, thoughtlessly undertaken, his own fault.
Never mind. From the woods to the north, almost behind them, he could just discern the sound of creaking rifle straps. From the lane behind the church, clattering boot heels. They would be encircled in minutes.
“Withdraw.”
He scrambled along the wall to Leftheris and Spiro, and when they would not listen he knocked their rifle barrels up and forcibly pushed them toward the wood line.
“Withdraw, damn you. Not the cave, the old monastery.” An eight-kilometer trek, hard on old Spiro, but the Germans would not pursue them so far in the dark, and they must by no means expose the cave.
Slowly, the men obeyed, disappearing into the trees, leaving the captain alone. He rushed back along the broken wall and slipped over it at a point closer to the front of the church, out of sight, he hoped. A heavy machine gun suddenly opened up from the graveyard, spraying the position were Elias and his men had been half a minute before. On his belly, he arrived at the church wall and slid upright against it. The tall stained-glass window above him had already shattered from the heat. Kerchief against his face, Elias peered in. The fire was nearly out in the front—having consumed everything there—but still in full fury near the back. The altar and ancient iconostasis were lost in smoke. Venerable wooden pews were skeletal beneath fiery cowls, roof timbers exploded above. The church was old, much of it contents centuries older, and even the godless captain felt the loss. He could not see the place where the icon was hidden, and there was no sign of any man.
He ducked down again. There were voices and rushing feet in the woods below. A lantern swung wildly. They would be up the slope any moment, finding only their fellow Germans in the graveyard beyond. With any luck the bastards would shoot each other. Elias dropped to his stomach and crawled back toward the front of the church.
The few soldiers who had been left in the courtyard had abandoned it, presumably to join the encircling troops. That left the front entrance clear, if the men inside had been able to fight through the flames to get to it. The crypt passage still seemed the most likely route, though. At a safe distance from the enemy, the captain reentered the woods, where he quickly stashed his rifle and bandoleer inside a split tree trunk. Then he tucked the pistol under his loose vest. Anyone with a good eye and a little bit of light to work with could spot him as an andarte, but it would have to do. He must make his way into the village. Already the wheels of his mind were turning with the night’s terrible possibilities. He had three places to search, four men to find, and some hard questions to answer. Then he had to make things right with the Prince.
By morning everything would be clearer, though certain questions would persist for a lifetime. Six weeks later, upon their retreat from the region, the Germans would burn the village of Katarini to the ground.
PART ONE
SPRING 2000
NEW YORK CITY
1
T he blue sky that had oppressed him for days was gone, replaced by a solid wedge of leaden gray and the sound of rain in the courtyard. He could still make out the towering brown mass that formed the rear of an old hotel, but the wet leaves and branches of the giant plane tree were now beyond his failing sight. The nurse constantly assured him that the tree was still there, and he woul
d accept her word. It had, after all, been there forty years and more, long before he’d moved into these haunted chambers. It would be there after he was gone. This was reassuring.
He had become grateful for the ordinary things that could be maintained in this thoughtless city. It was no longer necessary for these things to last indefinitely. A few more years would do, perhaps less. Better not to think too much about that, his granddaughter kept telling him. Absurd. It was all that he could think about; it was the only thing that made sense to think about. His wife and son were already gone before him. He spoke to no one but the nurse and the girl, when she made time for him, when she wasn’t in London, or California, spending his money. He could picture her now, perusing the walls of some slick Santa Monica gallery, striding about in the track-lit backroom, making hasty decisions she could repent at leisure. A Hockney or Thiebaud being wrapped for packing, or else some new, even less talented artist she had just discovered. Abominable. Why had she inherited his interest but not his taste? Where did she put all the pieces she bought? She must have filled the walls of all her flats by now. It couldn’t be that she was hanging them on the walls around him, taunting his advancing blindness? No, he didn’t think she hated him that much, but he would ask the nurse just the same. Of course, he wouldn’t know if she was telling him the truth. After all, she was stealing his books. That was all right; she could have them.
Books had been his solace since childhood. They were an older and, he could now see, a far better love than the paintings, which had become a sad obsession, a bright flame burning up the middle decades of his life. The books never disappointed him. He didn’t worry about getting first editions, though he probably had many. He didn’t try to keep them pristine, never treated them as objects of art. They were for reading, preferably over and over again. Most of his books had seen hard duty, were well and proudly worn. He wanted what was in them. Not knowledge so much, or wisdom—every fool chasing wisdom in books, dear God, what idiocy. Stories, which was to say, the chaos of life made coherent, this is what compelled him. Lies, his father had called the novels he read as a boy. Yes, but what beautiful lies, what useful lies in a world of hard, unrevealing truth. Even the biographies, memoirs, essays: Boswell, Augustine, Montaigne, all liars. Who cared? They got at something that was real.
Could it be that he had gone to the paintings, sixty, seventy years ago, with similar expectations, similar needs? He could no longer remember, but it seemed likely. Somehow the values assigned by the world, by men like his father, the wealthy pack that plucked and hoarded, had clouded his mind. He became very good at the acquisition game, ceasing to wonder why he played. He had so many stories, which he remembered telling and retelling with pride, at the clubs in Zurich, or here in New York, tales of triumph, getting this painting from that one, or snatching it out from under the nose of that other one, his vanquished opponents sometimes sitting at the same table with him, laughing with him. The dilettante, the banker who could outduel the craftiest dealers. And the stories were always about the deals, never about the paintings.
Yet surely that wasn’t right. That was an oversimplification. Club talk had no bearing on his private impulses; the two were unrelated. He had loved the works he had collected, of course he had. There was no other explanation for the choices he had made. Love, not greed, had compelled the decisions that hounded his conscience. It was the only logical explanation. It was his only hope for forgiveness, that he had acted out of love.
He pressed the familiar button on the arm of the chair and sensed the bell ringing in the nurse’s quarters below. She might at least tell him which volumes she was taking, but that would be a confession, of course. How to let her know that he didn’t mind? He could even direct her to which titles might best suit her limited intelligence. As long as she was reading them, or giving them to friends. God, what if she were selling them? That would be hateful. No, if she were selling them she would have to be stopped.
The books. He could no longer see the words well enough to read, not even in the large-print editions. His granddaughter used to read to him, poetry mostly. She had a mannered delivery, but he suffered it to hear her beautiful voice, to hear her say anything at all. Recently, all he heard was the distraction in her tone, the moment’s hesitation when he asked her to read him this or that passage, and so he told her to stop. She protested, but he understood that she was relieved. Anyway, he seldom saw her anymore. Something had changed, she could no longer be the same old girl with him. The nurse was a miserable reader; only the Bible inspired her. He tried the books on tape, but it was impossible, some heinous actor’s interpretation of a text he couldn’t even grasp. So, no more books. It was the heaviest blow he’d suffered since his son’s death, a killing blow he suspected. And the girl wondered why he obsessed about the end! What else was there?
He pressed the button again but the woman was suddenly there before him, blocking the light from the window, her face in shadow. She was clever that way.
“I’m right here, Mr. Kessler.”
“I can see that.” How long had she been there, reading the thoughts on his face? Or worse, reading his lips? He had acquired the habit of speaking his inner musings aloud, or so a few people had told him.
“Do you want something to eat? You haven’t eaten today.”
Always with the food. He understood that these basic activities went neglected without her reminders, but he still resented the nagging. He must seize control of the conversation, command her, or else suffer an endless series of questions about his diet, digestion, hygiene. But her name wavered before him uncertainly.
“Do you want me to have André make you something? Some oatmeal, or a sandwich?”
“Diana.” There it was. Like the huntress, or the dead princess. Must use her name when he thought of her, stop leaning on lazy terms like “the nurse.” “Diana, I want to go to the chapel.”
He heard her sigh, ignored it. Her manipulations did not move him; he knew what he wanted. Contemplation, not food. She worked for him, damn it. He sat quietly, not repeating the request, determined not to sound desperate. Then she was behind him, and they were moving. In theory, he could do this for himself. The chair was motorized, and he’d had the lift installed years ago, after he had taken that fall down the narrow stairs. With his vision going, however, simple negotiations around the furniture had become perilous, and he was terrified of having a seizure on the lift, unable to call for help, dying alone in the tall, mechanized coffin. They might not find him for hours.
The lift door rolled shut, and Kessler clutched his armrests as they descended. He had never learned to like this contraption, but it had allowed him to move freely about his home, rather than become a one-floor recluse, with all of the limitations of mind and spirit that entailed. Truthfully, most days he did not feel like stirring from his bed, but something always drove him to move, cover ground, breathe fresh air. Sometimes he would even go to the park, if he was able to persuade the girl—no, use her name. Christiana. Chris to her school chums, such a bland, American name. Ana to him. He had felt so painfully close to the child before Richard died, and she to him, it seemed. Visiting often, accompanying him on his daily walk, an honor he had accorded none before her. Going to all the museums and galleries, speaking about art, German expressionism, surrealism. She was so curious about everything.
Then the newspaper stories surfaced, dirty deals during the war. His name wasn’t mentioned, of course, but his bank was, and he had been rather highly placed. Awkward questions arose within the family, seldom voiced but always present. And then his first serious illness, the errand undertaken by his son, which ended in his death. Her mother forbade Ana’s visits after that. Nobody told him this, but he knew it must be so. Richard’s wife hated him, blamed him for Richard’s death, as he blamed himself. After her schooling ended, Ana sought him out again, and they had a few wonderful years. He’d made his last trip to London with her, set her up with dealers and gallery owners, made purchase
s for her growing collection. Somewhere between his first stroke and her short, unfortunate marriage, Ana stopped seeing him so often. There were plenty of good reasons why, but he suspected the girl had simply grown weary of his dark moods, his feebleness of mind and body. She hadn’t grown tired of his money, that was certain. It was the last hold he had upon her.
They maneuvered through the dim ground floor of the brown-stone until they reached a pointed archway in back. Diana would not enter. That was fine with him. He had ceased wondering whether she was offended by his eclectic religious tastes, was simply spooked by the place, or had somehow intuited that it had been paid for in blood. It didn’t matter. Long his private preserve, the chapel had come to feel like more than that, a place apart from the rest of the world, a place no one else could enter, even had anyone wanted to. In fact, he could not remember when the chapel had seen another soul besides himself. Diana’s footsteps retreated. He gripped the motor controls and rolled through the archway.
The place had once been a sort of solarium, decades ago, but he had seen right away how to utilize it. The walls were reinforced, a domed oval ceiling stuck on, more Byzantine than Western. The six stained-glass windows came from a bombed-out church in Alsace. There were a dozen wooden panels from Hungary, depicting the stations of the cross. Also, some blackened, ornate candelabra from Italy, though he seldom lit candles in here. None of these objects was terribly valuable, not by the standards of his other possessions, but they all pleased and eased him in a way that other work could not.
On the far wall, lit softly from above and serving as altarpiece, was the Byzantine panel. Older by a thousand years than anything else in the room, his greatest treasure, though it had failed him in nearly every way. The Virgin’s face and hands had faded long before he had taken possession of the work. Now, except for those dark eyes, she had become indiscernible to his failing vision, creating the impression of a deep maroon robe wrapped about some spectral being. Not what the maker intended, but quite effective. Kessler wheeled himself the length of the chamber to sit before it.
