Secret Passages

by Paul Preuss

  They were children, but there were a lot of them. As if by instinct Manolis clicked his weapon to full automatic a second before he heard a slide of rock behind him, turning just as a German sergeant crashed down the slope. Manolis fired a burst, three bullets at close range. The sergeant lurched toward him and fell dead—no boy but a bold, unlucky man. Manolis snatched up his weapon and ammunition clips.

  Too many Germans were getting across the gully. The boulder and the stream bank that a moment ago had shielded Manolis and Richard were now at their backs. There was nowhere to hide; the machine gun upslope kept up a raking fire. Manolis saw Richard dive for cover in the dry watercourse. It was an awkward place from which to aim.

  Manolis wormed his way backward, keeping his belly to the rock. Up the hill there was the sharp bang of a grenade, and the machine gun fell silent. He kicked the dead German sergeant aside and peered out. Satan’s andartes had seized the ridge.

  But opposite, the Germans had almost reached the cave.

  Suddenly there was a sustained burst of fire from the cave mouth; three Germans fell among the sparse oaks, and the others groveled on dry slopes which gave them no shelter.

  Manolis had the sensation of leaving his body, of taking in everything at a glance—and when he stood upright and raised his hand in a commanding gesture, it was as if time stopped, as if his silent command was instantly communicated to everyone on the field. The lethal popping of gunfire ceased. There was not a breath of air or a whisper of shifting dirt.

  A loose pebble clattered down the slope.

  The German soldiers raised their hands above their heads and stood up cautiously; the andartes stood up against the sky and shouted and leaped and slid down the slopes of the ravine on all sides, herding the Germans toward the dry watercourse.

  Already Manolis was limping uphill toward the cave, his leg muscles cramped from crouching behind the rocks. He found Elpida lying in the cave entrance, watching him, her gun still aimed downslope. He sat down beside her. “I’m sorry I left you,” he said. He put his left hand on hers and with his right lifted away the Schmeisser; it was so hot he almost dropped it.

  “Is it over?” she asked hoarsely.

  “For now.” He glanced across the ravine. Down below, Satan and his second-in-command, Siphakas, were in a shouting match with the German officer, a young lieutenant who clutched his right hand to his bloodied side while he gestured and swung at them with his left, screaming in German. Richard was making his way uphill, shouting at them to let him translate.

  Too late. Siphakas snatched up the German lieutenant’s pistol where he had dropped it and shot him in the face; his body pitched forward, out of Satan’s grip, and landed facedown in the dirt a dozen yards uphill from Richard. Now Richard began screaming at the Greeks.

  “Elpida, I need your help,” Manolis urged.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  He bent to her, suddenly afraid. She was curled into the shade of the cave mouth as if seeking protection. Gently he sought to turn her so that he could look at her face. Her skin was pallid; her lips were blue. She turned her green eyes on him, but he could not tell what they saw.

  “My love, where are you hurt?”

  She sighed and rolled away, opening to him. Her chest was a mass of blood-soaked clothes through which the dark blood bubbled and oozed like water from a slow spring.

  “All-Holy Mother,” he whispered.

  “You do love me, Manolis?”

  He made himself look away from her wound to her chalky face. “With all my heart. I have never loved anyone but you.”

  Her blue lips were thin as she smiled. “Not even Mercy?”

  “Oh, don’t tease me now.” He tried to smile too; the tears spilling from the tip of his nose were pretty funny, after all.

  “Remember me to her.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Don’t pretend,” she said, groping for his hand. She held it over the wound beneath her collarbone. Her blood welled over his fingers.

  “I will remember you to the end of the world.”

  “Let me kiss you,” she whispered.

  He held her for a long time, holding his mouth against hers lightly, for her breath was shallow. Finally it ceased. The life and breath drained out of her, and he knew that she was gone, and that John and Sophia were forever gone with her.

  Maybe seconds, maybe minutes passed. Manolis folded his wife’s hands across her chest and stood up unsteadily, bouncing his head off the low cave roof so hard that his scalp bled. He didn’t notice the blood or the pain. He stumbled down to the ravine, to where the andartes surrounded the German prisoners.

  “What are you doing?” Manolis demanded of Satan, looking at the Germans.

  They stood barefoot in the gravel; a few feet away their boots were piled beside their weapons. Their white faces and close-cropped scalps were smeared with dust and blood, but through the dirt their stiff new uniforms gleamed.

  “Don’t concern yourself.” Satan turned away and raised his voice. “Now! Let no one escape.”

  “Wait, wait!” Manolis lurched toward the muzzles of the raised guns, waving his bloody hands. Siphakas grabbed him from behind and threw him sideways. Richard leaped at Siphakas, cursing savagely, but another man seized Richard by the throat, threw him to the ground, and sat on his chest.

  The remaining andartes took haphazard aim and began firing. There were twelve remaining Germans. Some knelt and bowed their heads as if receiving Communion; some ran a few steps down the dry streambed or tried to climb the slopes before they were shot too.

  Satan’s men left the bodies unburied and moved down the gully as far as they dared, wondering when the German patrol would be missed. As soon as it was dark they set out across the Messara, crossed fields of pungent onions, forded the shallow river and ran across the car road, and at last pushed up into the foothills of Psiloritis. One of the donkeys was more heavily laden than before with extra weapons and ammunition; the other’s added burden was a corpse.

  They came to a stony gorge where the water spilled noisily from above and made their way cautiously up the treacherous cliffside path. When at last the sky reddened with dawn, they had cleared the gorge but were still far short of their goal; they were exhausted, every one of them, and the danger of moving in daylight was extreme. They huddled under tall pines as the sun rose over the peaks. Manolis lay down on his cloak between the roots of a massive pine and sank into despairing sleep.

  He swam up through blackness, pulled on a taut line, trying to understand the voice whispering in his ear: “…next submarine would take them off as prisoners, but he couldn’t afford to take prisoners, couldn’t leave them to tell tales, and never mind how many innocents the Germans slaughtered…”

  He awoke to find Richard squatting beside him, rocking back and forth, staring into the sun that filtered through the pine branches as he drew on a thin cigarillo. “Not talking Geneva conventions here, y’know. Talking plain human decency…”

  For a long time Manolis said nothing while Richard, perhaps not really caring to be understood, talked to himself.

  Finally he sat up and interrupted him. “Do you think I would have treated those Germans any differently than Satan did?”

  Richard glanced sidelong, still rocking. “You tried to stop him.” The shadowed sunlight moved over his tired features. He hadn’t shaved in more than a day. On a Greek, his whiskers would have made him seem a regular fellow. On an Englishman who cared about appearances they looked shifty.

  “I wasn’t trying to stop him,” Manolis replied. “I wanted to know which of them shot Elpida.”

  Richard paused in his rocking and rubbed his whiskery jaw. “I see.”

  “I don’t think you do. We had to kill them, and leave no doubt that it was done by the resistance and not the nearest villagers,” Manolis said. “The whole thing’s a bloody shambles. I’m not apologizing. Why are you apologizing to me?”

  Richard studied the burnin
g stub of his cigarillo. “Do you know that SOE take the pair of us for Communists?”

  “What do I care what they think? I’m not anything.”

  Richard laughed bitterly. “Who would believe that a Greek has no politics? SOE already know about our careers at school, that we were Epistolarians…”

  “Why are you apologizing to me, Richard? Because when you tried to get yourself killed you involved me in your stupid heroics? Because you thought it would be grand for us to be killed together, fighting for liberty in the cradle of liberty? Little Lord Byron and his Greek friend?”

  Richard flinched at the ferocity of Manolis’s sarcasm, opening his mouth as if to protest but saying nothing.

  “Go away, leave me alone,” Manolis said, “long enough to bury my wife.”

  The burial was at dusk, quick and unceremonious. Under pines that caught the rusty afterglow of sunset, Elpida’s body was laid in a shallow grave. The andartes filed past, sifting bits of soil from their fingers and mumbling prayers over the mound of earth.

  Satan paused to say his condolences to Manolis, who had not moved from the graveside; the donkeys were already loaded, and the men were anxious to start.

  “What is the name of this place?” Manolis asked. A stony peak was visible through the trees. At its apex a chapel smoldered like a coal against the fading sky.

  “That peak is Ambelakia, my child.”

  When all the Cretans were gone up the mountainside into the gathering shadows and only Manolis was left beside the grave, Richard approached him. “I’m terribly sorry for your loss, kyrie Minaki. I want to say…Well, please don’t worry about me shooting my mouth to Cairo. I never saw you here. Crete is your home. This is where you belong.”

  Manolis turned red eyes upon him, studying him with fierce concentration. “Before Elpida, it was John who made it my home. I came back for them both. When John died, I still had a home in her. Without her, what do I care about Crete?”

  “Oh my dear friend”—Richard hesitated and reached out a tentative hand—“what can I do?”

  “Stop moping. You didn’t kill her.”

  “I can’t bear to have you think I put her in harm’s way.”

  “Well, I’m a realist.” Manolis leaned over the mound of fresh earth as if he intended never to leave the place.

  Richard said, “We can talk when we get to Satan’s camp. About how you want to spend the rest of the war.”

  “I’ll tell you now,” Manolis said. “I want to spend the war where I can end it faster than one child at a time. Which is not on Crete.”

  “Right, then.” Richard cleared his throat; having found time to shave, he was once again the model of upper-class diffidence. “I’ll do what I can to see you get back to England.”

  22

  The elements of my character, like the impure bronze of a statue, had been poured together and left to cool. I stopped forming, growing, the day I buried Elpida. On that day I became who I am in every essential. Time did not stop, but the rest is weathering.

  They were the last scribbled sentences of Minakis’s manuscript. Anne-Marie let it drop on the table. Her eyes stung with tears, and she wiped at them impatiently. She should be frustrated, even afraid—there was not a word about the cave or the objects in it—but against her own interests she was coming to care as much about the man she was trying to deceive as about his treasure.

  Still she needed to find it. She wondered what would happen if she simply explained her predicament—if she asked him?

  The old house was cool inside, but outside the courtyard was bright in the afternoon sun. The air was suddenly heavy with spice. Minakis’s silhouette appeared in the open door, filling the rectangle of light.

  “I picked these on the mountainside.” He came into the room and handed her a prickly bouquet.

  “Thymos. Rigani.” She inhaled. “I read that in ancient times sailors could smell the herbs before they could see the island.”

  “Yes, and not so long ago. But not any longer.” He nodded toward the manuscript. “You finished the screed?”

  “A few minutes ago.” She laid the herbs on the table and stood. Hesitantly she stepped forward, then on impulse wrapped her arms around him and leaned her head on his chest. “She is in your heart as if she died yesterday.”

  He said nothing. He put his hands on her shoulders and held her for a moment, then gently stepped away. “I have errands to do. Surely you need sleep?”

  “No. Let me come with you.”

  As they walked toward the village square they were avidly inspected by women in black, seated with heads together in the gateways of their courtyards, whispering. Anne-Marie pretended not to see them, though they pressed for her attention.

  “You ended the manuscript by saying nothing had changed since your wife died. I can’t believe that.”

  “How did I become a scientist, you mean? Where did the yacht come from? The details you need for your magazine story?”

  “They would be worth knowing,” she said coolly.

  He nodded as if this were the right answer. “There’s something on the mountain you ought to see. Do you have enough energy to climb there with me?”

  Her heart lifted. “Yes,” she said. If what he wanted to show her was a cave, she had enough energy to climb Everest.

  “We’ll have a stroll before supper. I’ll tell you the rest.”

  They crossed the square and entered Louloudakis’s place, past old men gaping in curiosity. Inside, the middle-aged proprietor was boiling coffee over a propane-fired gas ring.

  “Good day, Haralambos. How are you today?” Minakis said cheerily.

  Louloudakis looked up from the foaming briki. “Very well, kyrie Minakis, and you?”

  “Well, thank you. And your wife? And your sons?”

  “All very well.”

  “May they live long. This is my guest, i kyria Brand. A magazine photographer.”

  Anne-Marie offered her hand. When Louloudakis took it she saw the speculation in his eye—“A pleasure to meet you, kyria”—his gaze flickering over her as if to ask, Where are your cameras?

  Minakis touched the man’s arm in a friendly way to reclaim his attention. “I spoke to your boy Dimitri this morning about hiring a pack animal.”

  “He went down to Kaminaki to get her. He’ll be here soon.”

  As the men talked, Anne-Marie looked around. She was standing next to a freezer case full of Belgian ice-cream novelties and German butter. Steel propane bottles lined the floor. There was a telephone on the wall beside the door. The shelves were stacked with Dutch lightbulbs, French canned goods, Italian dried pasta, and English socks and underwear. Her eye was caught by a shelf of audiocassettes: Sting and U2 had joined Maria Pharantouri on the Ayia Kyriaki hit parade.

  She tried to imagine the place as young Manolis Androulakis had known it, with an oil lantern on a shelf instead of an electric bulb overhead, with sacks of grain where propane bottles now stood. Only the back wall seemed a remnant of that time: two stuffed pine martens and the head of a kri-kri ram with immense curving horns were mounted above a couple of shotguns on pegs. The ram’s head was very old; the endangered Cretan ibex hadn’t been seen in Lasithi nome for a hundred years.

  She wondered why Manolis did not seem as ancient as the ram. No one else in the village had escaped time—

  “…as soon as he arrives,” Minakis was saying to Louloudakis, who nodded agreement. “You may depend upon him.”

  —certainly not the man he was talking to, the son of his boyhood enemy, who was already middle-aged. Minakis, seen in a certain light, looked younger. If he was a statue, half a century of weathering had not spoiled his finish.

  Anne-Marie changed into jeans and fetched her camera bag from the house. In the courtyard, Minakis pulled a tarpaulin from a pair of small, heavy bundles packaged in blue plastic.

  “What are those?” she asked.

  “Laboratory equipment.”

  She looked at him quizzically
. “Where’s the laboratory?”

  “Let me surprise you.”

  A boy arrived at the gate, leading a sad-eyed donkey with a packsaddle. Minakis introduced them: “Dimitri, this is Anne-Marie Brand. Anne-Marie, this is Dimitris. And”—he indicated the donkey—“this is Irini.”

  “Dimitris Louloudakis?” Anne-Marie asked the boy.

  “Malista, kyria,” said the youngster. He wore a tattered sweater-vest over a dirty white shirt tucked into stained black trousers; his shoes were scuffed brogans.

  “This is indeed Dimitris Louloudakis,” Minakis said, “whose father is Haralambos Louloudakis, whose grandfather is Dimitris Louloudakis, whose great-grandfather was Haralambos Louloudakis, whose great-great-grandfather was Dimitris Louloudakis…”

  “Endaxi, I get it. I’m very happy to meet you, Dimitris.”

  While Minakis and Dimitris loaded the donkey carefully, insuring that the heavy packages could not slip, Anne-Marie circled and clicked away, occasionally reaching into her camera bag to change lenses.

  Minakis indicated the bag. “Irini can carry that.”

  “I’m used to lugging it.”

  “Feel free to change your mind.”

  They followed the bank of the arroyo toward the saddle at the head of the dry falls. Anne-Marie noted the rubberized cables on the ground paralleling their route, turning west where they turned west, taking a path that pitched up the slope of shattered rock to the northwest of Dikti’s long crest.

  The donkey’s dainty, iron-shod hooves repeatedly slipped and struck sparks from the rock with metallic rings like hammer blows. Anne-Marie scrambled to get far enough ahead to photograph the little caravan against the background of the plain; she had to scramble again to catch up after she had waited for them to pass.

  The world quickly opened below them, a bowl of golden mountains filled with green trees, a tiny village perched at its edge, the whole under a sky deepening to twilight, brushed with feathery vermilion clouds. The altitude and the steepness of the path were daunting. She stopped taking pictures and fell in beside Minakis, taking lungfuls of air. “Now tell me the rest,” she said.