by Paul Preuss
Manolis looked a hard question at the soldiers.
The sergeant shook his head vehemently, and the haggard private said, “’Aven’t seen any of ours for a month or more.”
“All right, through the hole,” Manolis said. “No noise.”
There was a hole in the back wall of the house at floor level, through which the fugitives could squeeze under a pile of brush stacked against the outside. Manolis blocked it with loose stones and hauled a cedar chest in front of it.
He stepped outside and shaded his eyes against the low sun on the slopes of Lazaros. With his natural teleskopia he saw a group of men and a donkey approaching through the golden fields, raising an orange column of dust behind them.
“They came up the west side, from Lasithi,” Elpida said. She sat beside the door, working at a loom upon which half a rug had taken shape, woven tight as canvas and red as blood, bordered by bright blue and yellow flowers. She, however, was dressed in black from her shawl to her long skirt, like all the village women; hardly a woman in Greece did not wear mourning. “Siphis went out to meet them. He’s stirring up dust on purpose.”
“He’s a clever fellow.”
Manolis strolled through the village, looking around with a critical eye. Old men and women sat in front of their houses, and a few children played in the dust or went about their chores. Yannitsi looked innocent, entirely unremarkable.
Minakis found Papalexakis and his men lurking in the rocks and prickly ilex trees above the village. “Germans,” he said.
“Not Italians?” Papalexakis asked, disappointed.
“They wouldn’t have the wit to disguise themselves as stragglers. You and the others must leave now, while I get the English away from here.”
“Only three? We’ll slaughter them.”
“And the Germans will come back and slaughter every male they can find and blow up every house in the village.”
“We’ll stay here until you get the English out,” Papalexakis grumbled. “Take your wife. She’s as good as Siphis or any man.”
Minakis took the big man by his shoulders. “Don’t wait for us, Pavlo. Your job is to rob Italians. Go do it.”
Old Siphis, a practiced deceiver, hid the amateurish Gestapo pretenders in Papalexakis’s own house and offered to introduce them to the local resistance, and when they expressed delight he immediately went off to report these “English” stragglers to the nearest Italian outpost in Lasithi.
As soon as it was dark Manolis and Elpida pulled the real English out of their hole. Elpida wore a shepherd’s cape over wool trousers; like her husband she had a Schmeisser slung across her back along with her sakouli. They set out over the pass for the south coast, under a sky clotted with stars.
Their progress was slow. The shadows under the pines were so thick that the air itself felt dense, and despite rest and food the English soldiers were still weak. They did not reach Christos until the Libyan Sea was already a plain of purple emerging from the gloom.
The schoolmaster and his wife greeted them as warmly as they had greeted Manolis and Pendlebury five years earlier, putting the English in the storeroom under the house and giving Manolis and Elpida their own bed. They slept like innocents in the shuttered room.
In midafternoon they awoke together. He buried his face in her fragrant hair and she ran her fingers along the stubble of his jaw. “Do you think we can go back to Yannitsi?” she asked.
“Siphis knows how to handle those Germans. Who knows, the village may get a reputation for being friendly to the occupation.”
“That’s too easy.” She snuggled closer.
“We may have to stay away until the fascists lose interest. Before I met Pendlebury I lived most of my life alone in these mountains, afraid to go home to my own village. There are people all around who will do what they can to help us.”
“We’ll need their help.”
He raised himself on an elbow to look at her. “Why?”
“You and me and John. Or Sophia.”
“John? Sophia?” He stared at her a long time without getting the message.
Finally she smirked. “John for Pendabri. Sophia for your mother. If you like those names. I don’t know who’s coming first, but one of them is on the way.”
Comprehension dawned. “Elpida! Wife! I love you!”
“Sshh, don’t shout.”
He engulfed her, holding her close, then holding her suddenly away again as if afraid to smother her.
She laughed out loud. “That old prude Papalexakis made us get married just in time.”
“How can you joke about it?”
“How can you not?”
He jumped off the bed and began pacing, pausing long enough to pull on his boots. “You must stay here,” he said. “Christos is a good, safe place. The schoolmaster will take care—”
“First let’s get the English aboard their submarine.”
They argued urgently, but after a long time Manolis conceded that her condition wasn’t delicate and that the English, not to mention Manolis himself, would be safer with her help.
“I want this war to be over,” he said passionately. “I want us to have a place to live, and work for our hands and our minds, and a safe place for our children to grow up. And…”
Her graceful hands tugged at his sides, begging comfort. “All I want is you, Little Minos.”
When it was dark, they took their leave of the schoolmaster. The English were bone weary and their feet were swollen and bleeding, but they kept up without complaint, spurred by the hope of rescue. Before daybreak the little band was asleep on hard ground, sheltered only by a rocky overhang, hardly moving all day except to take turns standing watch.
As the sun went down beyond the volcanic landscape they set off down a steep westerly ravine, toward the rendezvous. Waves seethed against the shingle, a rhythmic, perpetual slide of wet gravel that masked other sounds. By two o’clock in the morning they had reached the beach below Tsoutsouros.
Through the thick sea mist they could see only the diffuse silvery glow of the young moon that had risen behind them. Manolis signaled a halt, and they crouched in the reeds. “There are other andartes here, bringing English to be picked up,” he whispered to Elpida.
“How do we find them without getting shot?”
“The runner gave me a code phrase.”
“That’s reassuring,” she muttered.
They went ahead cautiously. A dozen steps farther down the beach they heard gravelly footsteps, and the slick slide of bullets entering chambers. Manolis stretched out his left arm, his hand palm down, and Elpida and the English flattened themselves on the wet shingle.
“Good evening to you,” Manolis called softly. “Any fresh mizithra?”
“Fresh as in May,” a voice replied. “Come forward, where we can see you.”
“I’d rather see you first, Captain Satan.”
There was laughter in the mist, and the voice replied, “Together then, Little Minos.”
Manolis stood up, and immediately Satan loomed out of the fog in front of him; their guns were leveled at each other. They grinned, two sets of teeth bright in the mist, acknowledging that neither had fooled the other. Then they aimed their weapons skyward and embraced.
They were a long time catching up, trading a thousand and two questions and lies, and Satan made an appropriate fuss over Elpida. He had good news: her cousin Micky Akoumianakis had survived and was living in Knossos, working for the underground.
Satan’s men had two dozen stragglers hidden in the darkness, but there was little chance of signaling the submarine until the fog lifted. “So we sit here on the beach until daybreak flashing our torches, and pray to Saint Nicholas they can get their man ashore.”
As he spoke, there was a splash offshore, audible between the gravelly beat of the waves. A few seconds later a rubber boat grounded on the shingle not ten feet away. A man crouched in its bows whispered loudly, speaking Greek with a strong British accent, “Any fresh m
izithra?”
His answer was a chorus out of the fog. “FRESH AS IN MAY!”
A half-dozen andartes ran barefoot into the surf to help the Britisher, a small, neat lieutenant wearing battle dress that had been cleaned and pressed, who looked as if he would have been more at home in a yachting party. The Greeks lifted him out of the boat and put him down high and dry on the shingle, along with his kit, before helping the first group of stragglers aboard.
“Yank that line sharply now,” the lieutenant called when the boat was full, “and you’ll get a free ride to Egypt.” The soldier in the boat did so, and the line stretched taut. Out in the fog, persons unseen began hauling the boat in.
Three more times the andartes pulled the boat back by the rope they had payed out behind it, running into the surf to bring it safely through the low breakers. In half an hour all the refugees were safely aboard the submarine, which sank into the depths of the Libyan Sea, never having been visible from shore.
“Grigorakis, good to see you again,” the lieutenant said heartily, extending his hand, which Satan gave a firm yank. “Now those chaps are safely off, I look forward to meeting your men.”
At the moment Satan’s men were imps in the mist, collecting the boots and weapons that the departing British, with fervent thanks to their rescuers, had dropped behind them on the shingle, and busily packing the booty alongside the lieutenant’s gear on a pair of donkeys.
“First meet these,” said Satan. “Papalexakis on Dikti sent this one. Minosakis. Or do you know him already?”
“Yeia sou, Richard,” Manolis said calmly.
“You were dead!” exclaimed the astonished lieutenant. “I mean, we thought…Oh, Manoli, what a…How glad I am to see you!”
“Satan didn’t tell me it was you.”
“He didn’t know. I was lucky to get this mission.”
Manolis turned to Elpida. “Darling, this is Richard Wingate, Lieutenant, SOE. Richard, my wife, Elpida.”
She towered over him on the foggy beach and thrust out her hand to shake his like a man; Richard smiled as graciously as if they were meeting in a London drawing room. “Charmed, kyria Androulaki. My friend is surely lucky to have found you.”
She eyes him curiously. “I am lucky too.”
Satan, who had been paying close attention to the exchange, laughed heartily. “These two are the brains behind Papalexakis’s troop of amateur clowns.”
“Good, glad to hear it,” Richard said heartily. “SOE want to put some men and resources into his region.”
“You will be lucky indeed,” Satan sneered, “if he uses what you give him to fight the enemy.”
“Come with us now,” Richard told Manolis. “I’ll make arrangements by radio with Cairo.” He turned to Satan. “Captain, hadn’t we ought to put some distance between us and this beach?” There was already a hint of light in the east, much diffused by the thinning mist.
“Waiting on you, my little palikari.” They fell in behind Satan and his second-in-command, a gap-toothed ruffian named Siphakas. The others followed, tugging the overburdened donkeys.
“What did Satan call you?” Richard whispered. “Minakis? Something like that?”
“Minosakis, Little Minos. A nickname John gave me.”
“Have you heard anything of Pendlebury, then?”
“There’s said to be an English captain on Psiloritis,” Manolis replied, “leading a band of andartes. A tall man with a glass eye.”
“That must be the story they tell on Dikti,” Satan put in; he was a shameless eavesdropper. “On Psiloritis we tell the same story, except the one-eyed captain is in the White Mountains.”
“He’s everywhere,” Elpida said. “The Germans are terrified.”
Richard understood them: Pendlebury was dead. “Sometimes people do come back, as if from the dead,” he said cheerfully. “Androulakis here. Case in point.”
Manolis said nothing, but Elpida crossed herself.
The sun was well up in the clear sky by the time they reached their bivouac, a shallow cave in the dry mountains of the south coast. Satan’s headquarters were more than twenty miles away across the long, low Messara Plain, and German troops were stationed in strength along the highway. The andartes pulled the packs off the donkeys and led the animals inside the cave, then lay down on the cold earth at the cave mouth and curled up in their cloaks. A few dragged on cigarettes and talked in whispers. Before long even these were fast asleep.
Outside the cave, Manolis and Elpida spread their cloaks on drifts of little prickly leaves beneath a stand of holly oaks, in shade fretted like a net—bright, but better for sleeping than the clotted darkness of the cave. They were drifting into unconsciousness when Richard appeared and squatted beside them.
He took a thin cigar from his jacket pocket and lit it with a cylindrical brass lighter. “Too excited to sleep,” he confessed. “First time behind enemy lines.”
“You’ll get used to it,” Manolis mumbled. Beside him Elpida yawned mightily.
“Well, I won’t keep you. I just wondered…”
“What?”
“Why Cairo thinks you’re dead.”
Manolis squinted at the high sun and sat up. Elpida sat up too, sensing his unease. “Glad you’re here. You can set them straight.”
“Planning to tell them, then, were you?” When Manolis said nothing, Richard shrugged. “I mean, could be awkward. Now you’re married.”
“SOE left me, Richard. I didn’t leave them.”
Richard sighed. “The British army’s a lot of things, but not often reasonable. Can’t speak for the Greeks, of course.”
“What are you saying?” Elpida demanded, catching more from Richard’s manner than from his abbreviated English phrases.
“Your husband’s gained valuable experience fighting behind German lines, kyria Androulaki,” Richard explained. “There are a lot of places SOE might find a use for him besides Crete—the Balkans, Palestine, North Africa…”
“Forget him,” she said. “You never saw him.”
“I understand your sentiment, but I can’t pretend he doesn’t exist. For one thing, he’s my liaison with Papalexakis.”
“Call him what you called him before: Minakis”—a name that meant nothing in Greek. “You never saw this Androulakis.”
Richard drew on his cigarillo and studied Manolis. “You?”
“We’ll talk later.” Manolis glanced sidelong at Elpida.
“Right, then.” Richard stood up and brushed the dust from his trousers. “Dreadfully sorry to have disturbed you,” he said to Elpida, avoiding her gaze.
As he climbed away uphill, Elpida seized Manolis and pulled him close. “He is not your friend.”
“He is. He’ll do what he can for us.”
“When he calls on his radio, I’ll be standing over him,” Elpida whispered fervently. “The British won’t take you away. I’ll kill him first.”
Manolis held her close and hugged her, searching helplessly for words that were not only comforting but true. He found none.
There was an eruption of dry leaves beside them, a sudden crackle of rifle fire from the ridge across the ravine. They flattened themselves in the prickly oak leaves; then, grabbing their weapons, they half ran, half crawled uphill toward the mouth of the cave.
Richard ducked out of the cave, his Marlin gun in his hand. “These Greeks are half asleep. You and me.”
Manolis nodded. “Inside,” he told Elpida, and to Richard, “We’ll go upslope, pick them off if they try to—”
“No. Down there,” Richard yelled. “We can’t hit anything at this range.”
“Neither can they,” Manolis yelled back, too late. Richard was already sliding toward the bottom of the ravine, bullets popping in the air and digging up the dirt around him, a one-man frontal attack. Manolis muttered curses only his grandmother would have understood and plunged after him. Now it was a two-man frontal attack.
By the time they reached the dry streambed, Satan’s gu
errillas were returning fire from the shelter of the cave. Among them were marksmen who had a chance of hitting someone, while Manolis and Richard were mere targets, taking what shelter they could behind the basalt blocks that cluttered the watercourse. Richard leaned against a boulder and checked the chamber of his Marlin gun. “Let me get a little farther up this gully. If they try to come across, we’ll have them pinned.”
“They’re green boys, Richard. Stay here.”
But Richard was in no mood to take advice. “Make them keep their heads down,” he ordered, and hurled himself into the open.
Manolis threw himself against the underside of the boulder and fired at the hurrying shapes on the slope above him, squeezing off shots as fast as he could aim. One German soldier sat down abruptly, and others dived for shelter. He saw Richard stumble and fall—
—then crawl a few feet forward on all fours and get up again, sprinting to shelter under the eroded stream bank. Crouching, he waved back at Manolis, a smile lighting his face, his dark hair gleaming in the sunlight, looking as natty as ever. Manolis cursed and gave him the five fingers of his open hand, then returned his attention to the Germans.
High above him a German officer was screaming at his men, threatening to shoot them himself if they did not press the attack. A machine gun opened fire, shooting over the heads of the frightened soldiers as they stumbled reluctantly downslope toward the streambed, the shortest route to the cave.
Meanwhile Satan’s guerrillas had left the cave and were climbing the ridge behind it, gaining the high ground even as the Germans were leaving it. Within moments the first Germans would reach the gully between Manolis and Elpida.
Manolis was astonished to see that they really were children, inexperienced and frightened. What fantasies of Aryan triumph and revenge had brought them here to be slaughtered? He waited until the first of them tried to jump the gully to the slope opposite; he shot the boy in the spine as he struggled for balance. Two more Germans jumped the gully. Richard got one, who flopped down and lay screaming, and Manolis shot the other in the back of the head; he dropped without a sound.
