Secret Passages

by Paul Preuss

  Old Maria came past, on her way from the terrace to the kitchen, and thrust a depleted bowl of stuffed aubergines at him. “Eat this, boy. You don’t have to starve while you listen.”

  He took the bowl with a whispered “Efharisto” and began to eat, slickening his fingers with oil as he devoured the cold vegetables and bent his ear to the conversation of the English.

  Sometime later, when Sir Arthur grew tired and excused himself to take a nap, Maria and the kitchen boy hurried to clear away the dishes. On an impulse, Manolis went out to help them.

  “Androulakis! Wait here a moment. We’ve something to say to you,” Pendlebury commanded.

  The Pendleburys’ and Hutchinsons’ eyes were all upon him. The Squire was the first to speak, waiting until Maria and the boy had gone inside. “I’m told you’re an orphan, lad.”

  Manolis fidgeted. What could he add to that plain truth?

  “Not our business, of course. Can’t adopt every homeless boy on Crete,” Pendlebury put in gruffly. “But you seem to have a bit of promise…”

  “My husband means to say that he admires your exceptional intelligence, Manolis, which is widely reported, and which led him to you in the mountains,” Hilda Pendlebury said gently, “and moreover that he admires your spirit.”

  “Well, of course that, yes,” Pendlebury harrumphed. “You’re a damned good shot with that old blunderbuss. And you’re rather good with numbers.”

  “He means to say that he rather likes you,” Hilda continued, “as do I. And he and I would like to do something to help you, in view of your present difficulties. If you will accept our help.”

  Manolis, having no idea what to say, said nothing.

  “We’re not here all year, you know,” said Pendlebury. “Only a few months in the spring.” He studied his glass, half full of warm champagne, and thoughtfully tossed it down.

  The Squire said, “My mother and I are here rather longer during the year. We too would be glad to help.”

  For a moment they were all silent. Then Mrs. Hutchinson spoke up, her voice creaking. “Well, young man, if I were you, I would say, ‘Thank you very much.’ You don’t want us all changing our minds, do you?”

  “No, Mrs. Hutchinson,” Manolis said. “I mean yes, I do thank you all very much indeed. But I don’t understand.”

  “We have to work out the details, you see,” said the Squire. “But in general, we thought we might employ you when we can, during the season…”

  “The time when we excavate, the spring and early summer,” Hilda explained.

  “…and put you in school when we can’t employ you,” the Squire concluded. “There’s a rather good school in Candia.”

  “In Iraklion,” Mrs. Hutchinson said firmly.

  “In the city, yes. Provided you lived with one of the families here in Knossos, that is.”

  “Here? They would have me?” Manolis glanced toward the kitchen door.

  “They work for the British School.” Pendlebury grinned his fierce, condescending grin. “What’s another Manolis to them?”

  “And so, before the Pendleburys left Crete that summer, a place was found for me with one of the Manolises. With Manolis Akoumianakis, to be precise, known to everyone as Manolakis—who was the foreman of Knossos.”

  Minakis and Anne-Marie had reached the top of their steep climb. He breathed as easily as if he’d been for a stroll on the beach; Anne-Marie, coming up beside him, gasped for air. He admired the roadside asphodels while he waited for her to catch her breath.

  “How did he feel about that?” Anne-Marie asked, between lungfuls. “Your foster father, I mean.” Sweat beaded her hairline, and her pale eyes were mirrors in the heat.

  “Manolakis and his wife had three sons and a daughter—also a niece who was living with them—who accepted me quite matter-of-factly. There is no such thing as a Greek who is not ruled by curiosity, but we knew better than to inquire too deeply into our mutual good fortune: I didn’t ask where they got the money for my keep, and they never referred to it.”

  “What did you say, when they asked why you were there?”

  Minakis grinned. “Something about a liking for potsherds.”

  Seeing that Anne-Marie had gotten her wind back, he started walking toward the villa. The driveway was a strip of fresh asphalt bordered by fieldstone walls and oleander bushes, leading through dry fields to the mansion’s iron gates.

  “Potsherds! They all had a good laugh at that. Old man Manolakis—I called him Uncle—told me about his first job at Knossos: when he was a boy he’d walked over Ida carrying bags of cherries to sell in Candia. That was in 1900, when Evans had just started to dig. Manolakis wasn’t much interested in going back to his village, and he wangled a job washing potsherds. It didn’t take long for Evans to see that he was good at recognizing what bits went with other bits. First he was promoted to chief potsherd washer. Then he became foreman of the whole dig. Here was I, boasting of my liking for potsherds to a man who was a potsherd virtuoso.”

  “Did that embarrass you?”

  “In those days I assumed everybody knew more about everything than I did.” Minakis smiled at the memory. “I had only two responsibilities. One was to vindicate the Pendleburys’ faith in me by excelling in schoolwork—me, who’d attended school less than a week in my life. The other was to earn my keep. To do that I had to learn some archaeology.”

  They had come to the iron gate, which stood ajar. The watchman had vanished, having succumbed to hunger or the drowsy heat. Minakis looked at his watch. “With luck your husband is saving the best of his talk for last.”

  “I’ve heard it before,” Anne-Marie said. “So, I suspect, have you. I’ll join you later.”

  “Be sure not to miss the buffet. Here on Olympus the menu is nectar and ambrosia—almost as good as what Sir Arthur used to serve.” He was smiling, but there was an edge to his voice.

  Anne-Marie hesitated, puzzled, before she nodded. She turned and left him watching after her as she hurried down the path among the silvery young olive trees.

  14

  “You all know Peter Slater,” said the profusely sweating man in the dark suit and tie, “whose distinguished career includes the prediction of the mass of the Z-zero from first principles, and who predicted the mass of the inside quark and the existence of the I particle, and who was one of the participants at our original Delos conference…”

  Professor Papatzis went on reciting Peter’s achievements longer than he needed to, as if to prove that Peter had not been invited to Delos II by mistake, for how could the organizers have anticipated what was being whispered on the terraces during the coffee breaks and cocktail parties, that Peter Slater had lost his edge, outlived his genius, befuddled himself with philosophy? Papatzis blotted his neck with a wadded handkerchief one last time, then handed Peter the lavalier microphone and wearily returned to his chair.

  Peter nodded thanks and looped the microphone cord around his neck, taking in the audience of two dozen mostly middle-aged males dressed as if for a golf tournament, along with a scattering of hairy youngsters in sandals and two women in sensible skirts. Peter and the unfortunate Professor Papatzis were the only ones in the room wearing jackets, but Peter’s was of silk, not wool, and he looked cool enough.

  “I’ve borrowed my theme from John Bell, a title he never used but wanted to: ‘Quantum field theory without observers, or observable, or measurements, or systems, or apparatus, or wave-function collapse, or anything like that.’”

  Someone in the back of the room laughed mirthlessly, drawing out his snorts and chuckles like a barroom drunk. Most of the people in the room were distinguished heads of university departments, happy to let their younger colleagues attend conferences in Illinois or Birmingham or Frankfurt but keeping plums like the Aegean Islands for themselves. Which meant that most of them were quantum conservatives, the kind of people Peter was here to convert.

  “An impossible goal, I agree,” Peter said to the heckler, “but
worth honoring even in the breach. You see, I’m hoping to undo a myth. The kind of myth that says it was Columbus who discovered that the Earth is not flat. That it was Copernicus who discovered that the Earth is not the center of the universe. That it was Freud who discovered, as he claimed to have done, that we are not rational beings. With apologies, Dr. Freud, we physicists knew it before you did. Long before you, we demonstrated that humans are driven by mental structures—space and time among them—which are not fully formed and are often unconscious.

  “Freud, who had little science and less mathematics, was nevertheless right to claim a lion’s share of credit for that most persistent of twentieth-century myths, that nothing is what it seems; that everything is a matter of interpretation; that nothing, ultimately, is real. In our own field, Freud’s role was played by Professor Bohr and his Copenhagen cronies.”

  As a speaker, Peter usually had a knack for bringing his listeners in, but this afternoon most of them were as silent as a field of stones. Among them were some of the world’s most self-satisfied theorists, Copenhagen-interpretationists all, who despised philosophy and were easily rankled by criticism—even implied criticism—and Peter was giving them both.

  “For most of my life I believed in that myth, shared by theoretical physicists and psychoanalysts alike,” he continued. “I believed what Heisenberg said, as most of you do, that trying to extract common sense from a quantum-mechanical calculation is like trying to understand a grammatical but meaningless sentence. I believed Bohr, as most of you do, when he suggested that comprehensibility and incomprehensibility are somehow mutually affirming. I was taught to laugh at stubborn old Albert Einstein—as most of you were taught—because he objected when quantum theorists claimed that the questions quantum theory could not answer were a priori unanswerable.”

  Peter fiddled with the switches on the tabletop overhead projector, glancing at the screen that hung on the stand behind him. “Can we have it dark, please?”

  The heckler in the back called out, “Shouldn’t we have a little light instead?”—which got a laugh.

  Peter turned on him, smiling. “If you believe in Bohr’s complementarity, sir, as I suspect you do, darkness is light”—which got as big a laugh, for no matter which side of a debate they were on, these people cherished a retort.

  Meanwhile the staff of the villa closed the thick blue drapes that separated the lounge from the terrace, cutting off the hot light along with the fitful draft from the sea. Peter took a transparency from a folder and arranged it on the projector; a list of numbered propositions in his bold and graceful hand appeared on the screen behind him.

  “Here’s where the myth has got us. We know how atoms behave, and the constituents of atoms, to an astonishing degree of accuracy. We can describe with some confidence the first three minutes of the universe. But how do we resolve the mismatch between a single quantum system, such as our theory describes, and the statistical data we get from actual experiments? How do we explain the spooky action-at-a-distance of the instant correlations in the experiments inspired by John Bell? How do we cope with the measurement problem…?”

  The door at the rear of the room opened, admitting a shaft of natural light bright enough to overwhelm the projected image on the screen. Peter squinted into the glare as Manolis Minakis slipped inside to stand against the back wall, letting the door close itself behind him.

  Peter went on. “How can we bridge the chasm between the realm of quantum characteristics and the classical world? Trying to solve this dilemma, some of our best and brightest have proposed that the world—including the most distant and ancient galaxies—actually comes into existence when we choose to observe it. I come before you penitent, an apostate Copenhagian, to tell you that observers are the most mythical part of the myth. The world is whole; it’s here; it has always been here, since before there was anything in it more observant than quark soup.”

  Peter knew well that most of his audience, if pressed, would vigorously defend the role of the observer in quantum measurements. So with as much verve and charm as he could muster—though the black chamber radiated their offended disapproval—Peter prepared to launch himself upon the central dilemma of quantum theory, which was that it violated every thinking person’s experience of the world.

  Anne-Marie let herself into their guest cottage and snatched up the phone from the pine bedside table. “Kalimera sas, kyria Thanatopolou. I need to place a call to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris. Will you help me?”

  Mrs. Thanatopolou was a switchboard miracle-worker; within minutes she had succeeded in connecting Anne-Marie with her mother. Anne-Marie was delighted that Jenny recognized her voice; she was reassured by Mama Brand’s grumbling admission that she and her granddaughter were enjoying each other’s company; she made herself sweetly patient with her mother’s lengthier grumblings when she told her she would have to be gone two more days. Just two more days.

  Finally the one-sided conversation was over. Anne-Marie hung up the phone and went to the cottage door and bolted it, just in case…

  “Kyria Thanatopolou, one more, please. To Geneva.” She recited the too-familiar number and paced in tense tight circles, waiting for the call to go through.

  Hardly an hour went by that Alain Brand didn’t spread the photographs of the Minoan hoard on his desktop and pore over them with a magnifying glass. Painted pottery, carved stone, worked gold, extraordinary objects arranged on rough cloth on an uneven surface, taken with a flash camera. Who had taken them? How had they come into the possession of the ponytailed tough who called himself Karl? Alain had asked himself these question from the beginning. He hadn’t asked them of Karl.

  The office line buzzed. “Your sister is calling, sir.”

  He pushed the button. “Anne-Marie!” His voice was full of warmth. “Thinking about you this very moment.”

  She didn’t ask what he’d been thinking. “I’ve found them—or at least I know where they came from.”

  Alain was startled. “Already?” Less than forty-eight hours had passed since they’d reached their agreement.

  “He talked about the place, described it, but I’ll have to go there to make sure. And tell you how to find it.”

  “Where?”

  “Where do you think?”

  “Anne-Marie, I…I was going to tell you…”

  “Tell me what?” she demanded.

  “I’ve been…I’ve had…Well, I don’t think this whole thing is such a good idea after all.” Alain gathered the Polaroids into a pack and slipped them into the locking drawer of his desk, as if to hide them from himself.

  “I’m friends with him, Alain. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  Oh but there was; since he’d sent her on her way, Alain had worried more with each passing hour, as he should have worried from the beginning. “I’m worried for you, Anne-Marie…”

  “Lies bore me.” Her voice was cold. “We have an agreement. I’m doing my part, and when I’ve done it you’ll do yours. I’ll call you again in two days.”

  “Anne-Marie…”

  But she’d hung up on him.

  Alain wiped his brow. If she knew how much she frightened him…His sister was capable of terrifying rages; what had he set loose when he’d sent her to Greece? She was as high on his promises as she used to get on booze.

  Because Alain Brand was a cautious man he had so far enjoyed an uneventful career. No warrants had been issued for his arrest, no countries had named him persona non grata, and nobody had threatened him with bodily harm. Dealers in ancient artifacts could rarely choose their suppliers, but they could be picky about their clients, and Alain picked his carefully. Like an alcoholic who knows that the only way to keep on drinking is to limit his intake hour by hour, day by day, until control becomes his obsession, Alain understood his own greed.

  Yet when blond Karl had muscled his way into the back room of the bookshop and thrown the Polaroids onto Alain’s desk, when he’d told him what he was willing t
o pay if Alain would only find out where these things were—not get hold of them, not even lay eyes on them, just find out where they were (Karl would take care of the rest)—Alain failed to laugh in the fellow’s pretty face or show him the door. He knew that if he found out where the objects were, he’d want to see them for himself. Even so he just couldn’t keep himself from listening.

  He’d let Karl tell him about this Minakis, this rich Greek who had the pieces hidden somewhere. Tell him how his sister could get to know the man. Suggest that she’d do whatever Alain asked her to do—that they could make a trade—because there was something Anne-Marie wanted, something Alain would rather keep between himself and her.

  How did Karl know so much about Alain and Anne-Marie? Why had Karl chosen to approach Minakis through him and his sister? How had the photographs come into Karl’s possession?

  All the multiplying questions…

  The phone buzzed again. “Herr Karl to speak to you, sir.”

  “You said I was in?” The question was a furious squeak.

  “Sir?”

  “Never mind.” He punched the lit button. “Herr Karl! Good of you to call, but it is a bit soon to—”

  “Your sister left Minakis less than half an hour ago—after she spent the whole morning with him. She called you yet?”

  Something warned Alain not to lie. “As a matter of fact, yes. She’s making good progress, but she needs time. A few days.”

  “A few days.” By his tone, Karl didn’t believe it. “Don’t make me call you again.”

  Alain hung up, trembling. Wearily he sank his head into his hands and massaged his scalp.

  He looked up with a sniff. So they’d tapped his phone. What next, if he didn’t give them what they wanted? There was one way he could get off this train, and that was to give Anne-Marie what she wanted right now, no strings attached. That would put a cork in her bottle, and as for them, he could tell them no thanks, no deal, count him out—and what could they do?