Secret Passages

by Paul Preuss

  “He wrote the twenty-first? That’s tomorrow.”

  “He wrote in haste.”

  “How was he, Little Minos?”

  “In high spirits. The Germans were attacking the Hania Gate. He and Captain Satan went to join the defense.”

  “I was wrong to leave Knossos,” said Manolakis. “We must go back there at once.”

  “He will be glad to know that his message reached you.”

  “You’re going into the city?”

  Manolis nodded. To the west, the flashes and flares of sporadic fighting lit the walls of the town.

  “When you find John, tell him that after all he is truly a man of Crete.”

  “Uncle, he will be proud to hear that from you.”

  Manolis made his way toward the town. Fifty yards past a British machine-gun emplacement he stumbled into a ditch full of bodies, swollen with corruption in the unseasonal heat. He lurched backward, and his heel squelched into softness; he heard a loud “Aaaahhh.” He reeled in terror and tried to bring his gun to bear, but the groan bubbled away to nothing; it was a corpse’s sigh.

  He entered the darkened town through the harbor gate. Inside the Venetian walls and among the Turkish houses, his first challenge was from a Greek, who shouted at him from the shadows, “Freedom or death!”

  “Freedom or death!” Manolis shouted back.

  “Say who you are!”

  “Androulakis from Lasithi. They say that there are beautiful weapons to be had here,” Manolis responded, in an enthusiastic spate of rural Cretan, “that they fall from the sky, or else that all one has to do is pluck them from the Germans, who hang in the trees like ripe oranges.”

  The man laughed, a dry and cynical laugh. “Too late for easy pickings, my little palikari. Maybe you can get something off a German sniper, if you can kill him before he kills you.”

  It was almost midnight; sporadic gunfire came from the western part of town, toward the Hania Gate. Manolis loped through the narrow streets, keeping close to the walls. Twice bullets dug holes in the plaster close to his head; twice he threw himself into doorways and shouted, “Freedom or death!” and twice the answer came back, “Freedom or death!” in an accent no German could mimic, and he ran on.

  The third time he shouted “Freedom or death!” a tight pattern of bullets struck the stone wall beside him at the level of his chest—one, two, three—spraying him with rock chips and smashing wood splinters out of the door behind him.

  For a moment everything was quiet. Without streetlamps or lights in the windows, the rooftops were silhouetted against the stars. Manolis bent down as slowly as he could and groped about on the doorsill for a handful of the rock chips the sniper’s bullets had cut out of the wall. He stood up and threw them hard, sideways, back the way he had come.

  The sniper’s bullets ripped the wall at chest height where the chips had clattered—one, two, three shots, no more. But his muzzle flash was bright, and by the time it blinked out Manolis had crossed to the other side of the street.

  He climbed the stairs to the pitched tile roof of a deserted house and crossed to the next with a leap. The sniper was on the flat roof of the next building. Manolis lay sprawled on the sloping tiles, unmoving, waiting to learn if the noise he had made had exposed his position or panicked the sniper into flight.

  The sniper waited a long time before he moved, not out of fear but from prudent caution, separating himself only by movement from the pale shadows cast by the stars.

  Manolis shot him, once.

  The man squealed in surprise, and when he realized what had happened to him squealed again, a sound more like despair than pain, but his panic had a perverse effect on Manolis, whose coolness—an actor’s coolness; he’d been bluffing ever since he’d set foot on Crete in his new uniform; he’d never killed anyone, not even that pitiful half-dead paratrooper he’d found in the ditch whom he claimed to have killed—suddenly boiled away in a flash of bloodthirsty rage.

  Manolis stood up and leaped across to the next roof, moving without caution, inflated with his image of himself as untouchable. Who was this man to think he could hide in the dark? To think he could kill in safety? He found the sniper pulling himself away from his abandoned Mauser, still squealing like a baby as if expecting a mother’s pity, his bare, close-cropped head of blond hair white in the starlight, trailing a wide streak of blood that was black in the same starlight, and Manolis shot him again in the back of his head from two feet away, and he stopped squealing.

  He staggered away from the body and sat down hard, desperate for breath, overwhelmed with physical hurt although he wasn’t wounded, wasn’t even bruised. He wasn’t sorry for what he had done, no, though the sniper was an adolescent no older than he was, no, not sorry for killing a xenos who had tried to kill him, maybe had already killed his countrymen. So why did he ache as if his ribs would burst? Because this was war? Because killing seemed natural? Because it gave him a thrill?

  At dawn Manolis retreated to the British consulate, carrying his Marlin gun and his newly acquired Mauser with its packet of ammunition clips. He was hoping to find Pendlebury, but a younger man was behind Pendlebury’s desk, his head down, pawing through a file drawer.

  When he raised it, the young man’s irritated expression flickered into pleasure. “Manoli! Here at last!”

  Manolis recoiled. “Richard!”

  Richard stood up from behind the desk. “Pendlebury didn’t tell you?”

  “No he didn’t.”

  “I thought…He went on at quite extraordinary length about you, when he found I knew you.” Richard thrust out his hand. “It’s very good to see you again.”

  Manolis hesitated, then put out his hand to shake Richard’s. “Good to see you too,” he said, businesslike, withdrawing his hand abruptly. “I have urgent news for John.”

  Richard clasped his hands behind his back. His uniform was spotless, his trousers creases knife-edged. “Quite sure you’re all right?”

  “Oh, quite.” Manolis affected a laugh. “Busy night.”

  “Yes, it has been. As for Pendlebury, Corporal tells me he was here an hour ago—tells me he was fighting in the streets all night. Left again almost immediately. Wearing his glass eye, no doubt. It’s gone from his desk.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Out the Hania Gate, says Corporal, in a car with one of those bandit friends of his.”

  “West?” Manolis rubbed his stubbled jaw. “The Germans are everywhere to the west.”

  “You’re said to know him better than any of us, old chap.”

  “Where’s Captain Satan?” Manolis demanded.

  “To Krousonas. Left in the night.”

  “I’m off to Krousonas, then. Orders.”

  “Surely there’s time for you to get some rest,” Richard said.

  “Couldn’t sleep.”

  “Some breakfast then.”

  “Couldn’t think of eating. Sorry.”

  “A drink if you prefer. Damn it, we ought to talk.”

  “Perhaps later.”

  The look between them, before Manolis turned and left, was freighted with resentment, but at the last moment Richard whispered, “Andio, Manoli.”

  Pendlebury was not in Krousonas. Satan was, but he claimed to have heard nothing from Pendlebury since Tuesday afternoon, when the two of them had been heavily engaged with German paratroopers in the streets of Kastro, near the harbor. Manolis waited in Krousonas a day and a half, until he could wait no longer. Then he went to join Manolakis at Knossos.

  In the far west of Crete, things went badly. After a week of hard fighting, British and Anzac soldiers retreated over the White Mountains toward Sphakia-town on the south coast, pressed by German mountain troops and harassed by the Luftwaffe. Thousands of men in a narrow file many miles long lined up to board the Royal Navy’s destroyers standing off the rocky shore. They could only be taken aboard a boatload at a time. Most waited as patiently as if queuing for a bus, although the last in line knew
they would be left for the Germans.

  To the east, Iraklion and its harbor and airfield held out, although German paratroops had occupied Knossos and the heights south of the city, and a German field hospital was installed in the Villa Ariadne. In the town, Allied commanders were advised that British ships would arrive on the night of May 28 to evacuate as many men as possible from the harbor. The British officers were instructed, for security reasons, not to inform the Greeks.

  On the afternoon of the twenty-eighth, the Old Wolf, Manolakis Akoumianakis, led a party of Cretan irregulars up the steep Ailias Ridge opposite Knossos, toward an entrenched unit of German paratroops. At the same time a British platoon approached the Germans from the north, up the gentler seaward slope of the ridge.

  For the past two days Manolis had worked to coordinate the attack; when the Old Wolf’s men were within sight of the enemy position Manolis left them, running, to advise the British platoon leader that the Greeks were in position.

  He climbed hard, dodging through a grove of young olives, when suddenly he heard the crackle of small arms and the staccato chatter of a light machine gun. A British corporal staggered backward, down through the trees. Manolis caught him and dragged him to shelter behind a slender tree trunk. Around them, other soldiers were taking cover. Bullet-clipped branches of gray-green olive leaves fell to the ground around them.

  “Where are you hurt?” Manolis demanded.

  “I ain’t.”

  “Why aren’t we advancing?”

  “I don’t see you advancing, mate,” said the corporal. Facedown in the dry earth, he turned his face toward Manolis; his eyes were sunken with fatigue, he had a week’s growth of beard, and he stank.

  “Where’s your officer?” Manolis demanded.

  “Dead. Jerries got him soon as he stood up.”

  “Then you’re in command, Corporal. Rally your men and follow me. The Greeks are attacking from the west.”

  “They got fucking machine guns up there!”

  “One light machine gun. We’ve faced worse this week.”

  “Yeah, when we were in for it,” the corporal snarled. “But who wants to be the last dead Britisher in this hole?”

  “We’ve got to clear the highway. Do your duty, man.”

  The corporal rolled onto his back and brought his rifle to bear. “Get clear of me, wog, or I’ll do for you myself.”

  Manolis knocked the rifle aside and grabbed the man by his collar, pulling his face close. “Open this road, or you and your mates have nowhere to retreat.”

  The corporal stared up at Manolis for a moment, then started giggling. “Always somebody ’asn’t got the word, eh?” His gaunt, whiskered face looked like a much abused forty-year-old’s, though he couldn’t have been much more than twenty. “We’re already retreating, you stupid shit. Stay alive and get back to town before midnight, that’s my mission. Then the bleedin’ Royal Navy takes me off.”

  After a moment the corporal’s meaning penetrated. Manolis let him go to lie in his funk and ran back the way he had come.

  The German fire was concentrated on the Greeks now, who were climbing a steep, wide slope that broke the crest of the ridge. Most of the Greeks were belly down among bright green stalks of wheat that had grown thigh high in the hot spring weather. It was their only cover; they had to rise to their knees to shoot back at the Germans.

  “Where is Manolakis?” Manolis asked the first man he came to, a villager armed with a captured Mauser.

  “Pinned, up there.”

  “Go back. Tell everyone you can find to retreat—slowly, carefully. We’ll have to try another time.”

  “What about the English?”

  Manolis hesitated an instant before he told the necessary lie. “The Germans are even stronger on the other side. Go, tell the others. I’ll find Manolakis.”

  Manolis cradled his gun in his crossed arms and wormed his way through the young wheat, belly down, his nostrils filled with the rank smell of crushed vegetation. Lots of insects he had never seen before were squirming and hopping about under his nose. His progress was visible to the Germans; every few seconds bullets popped the air over his head and sprinkled him with clippings. He clung to the belief that no bullet would kill him—he had worked out a mathematical rationale for his blatant superstition, having to do with Riemannian manifolds and space-time coordinates—but he was not above caution.

  He lifted his head out of the wheat just long enough to get his bearings. A few feet ahead of him, someone was moving. “Uncle Manolakis!” he cried. “Stay down! We must go back.”

  Either Manolakis didn’t hear him or chose not to, for suddenly the old man stood up, a grenade in his hand.

  With half his consciousness, Manolis noted his foster father’s irrational courage and registered the image of his defiance—they had killed Micky, his firstborn son, and to the devil with them—Manolakis standing up in the young wheat, hurling a thunderbolt back against the sky, his wide-brimmed straw hat on his head.

  What a target that made.

  From their dug-in position the Germans concentrated their fire, catching Akoumianakis as he began his throw. He jerked backward; jets of gore expelled from his back propelled him forward again, onto his face. From reflex or habit he clutched at his straw hat, as if caught in a strong wind.

  The live grenade fell behind him and bounced downhill toward Manolis, who, having overlooked the space-time mathematics of grenades, tried to bury his face in the earth. It went off three yards away. The shrapnel plowed his scalp and covered him with his own blood, bright red blood flecked with shreds of green wheat.

  The Germans, terrified for their safety and moving fast through the wheat, counted Manolis among the dead. For a day and a half he lay unconscious.

  As the sun was setting on the warm evening of May 29, Phylia Akoumianaki and Elpida Pateraki climbed the Ailias Ridge. Phylia came upon her father facedown in the dirt, his body scattered with earth, his hat clutched in his hand. She touched him; he was cold. With her bare hands, she scooped earth out of the wheat field and covered him over, defying the German decree that Greeks were not permitted to bury anyone who had taken up arms against them, on pain of death.

  A little downslope Elpida came upon Manolis, crusted with blood and flies. She touched him; he whispered for water. His eyes were glued shut with coagulated blood.

  In his dreams he was among the skeletons in the cave, sitting with them around a cold green fire, trading stories of betrayal as he tried to reassemble a shattered Minoan jar. Pendlebury touched his shoulder with a cold hand and gestured at the jar and then at his own face, a skull with one glass eye; he reached out to touch Manolis’s eyes…

  In a panic, Manolis opened his eyes.

  They were cleansed, unstuck. A woman’s face was bent close to his, framed in black curls, her wide green eyes glistening with tears. Her hand rested on his brow.

  “Elpida?” He blinked cautiously. “You’re in Katalagari.”

  “I’m here with you, Manoli.” Her long hair came down around him and her hot lips pressed against his.

  She sat up again, pulling back. “No talk until you eat something,” she said. “We have to make you strong. You are in danger here.”

  He moved his head and looked around. A wick burning in a dish of olive oil lit the walls of the Queen’s Megaron with a dim and fitful light, like an offering to the dead. Painted dolphins leaped in the shadows.

  “We’re in the palace?”

  “The only place we could hide you. The Germans are everywhere, but they don’t come here at night. Can you eat?”

  He sat up cautiously. “I could eat a donkey.”

  She’d brought artichokes and lamb stew, still warm from the hearth. After he’d eaten as much as he could—hardly a donkey’s worth, for his stomach was shrunken with hunger—he leaned back and rested his head on the stone.

  She gave him the news, most of it bad. Uncle Manolakis was dead. The Allied troops had vanished overnight, leaving by sh
ip—all but those who were prisoners of the Germans or stragglers who’d escaped capture. The Germans had moved into Iraklion, and already they were shooting Greek hostages. They’d promised that for every one of their men killed since the collapse of the Allied defense, they would kill ten civilians.

  “And for sheltering a fugitive?” he asked. She said nothing, but he knew. “I’ll bring catastrophe upon Knossos if they find me here. I must leave now.”

  “I told you, the Germans don’t come here at night.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because most of the soldiers are farm boys with good sense. They’re afraid to trip over people like us in the dark.” In the guttering lamplight, she held up two German machine pistols, one in each hand. “And the educated ones, the officers, are superstitious. They think the palace of Knossos is—how do they call it?—‘the cradle of Europa.’”

  “You mean they’re afraid of ghosts.” Manolis tried to smile.

  She laughed at that. “Sit up and eat more stew.”

  Perhaps it was the stew. By an hour before dawn Manolis felt strong enough to walk, a few steps at a time. Elpida threw a shepherd’s cloak over his shoulders and led him out of the ruins, down to the reeds by the stream. Before the sun had risen they had crossed the road south of the guarded bridge and reached Knossos village unseen.

  Elpida knocked once, then twice, and Phylia opened the door of the Akoumianakis house and pulled them inside.

  Manolis spent the day dozing off in the heat of the upstairs room, while Elpida made a show of going about a village girl’s work: washing, sweeping, shelling beans, and feeding the chickens. She and Phylia chatted with the neighbors and like them fell haughtily silent whenever a pair of German soldiers passed by in the narrow street.

  As soon as it was dark, Elpida and Manolis said good-bye to Phylia and slipped out of the village. It took them most of the night to cross the fields and low ridges to the southeast of Knossos—Manolis was weak, and twice they had to dodge German patrols—but by dawn they were climbing the steep canyon of the Erganos stream, the back door into Lasithi. It was slow going; it would be days before Manolis could once more jump around the rocks like a kri-kri. When the stars dimmed in the ruddy sky, they found themselves many miles short of their destination, among peaks of bent and layered gray rock.