Secret Passages

by Paul Preuss

  Older still were the peeling murals—but only a couple of centuries old at most, crudely drawn and painted, no great Byzantine treasures. Yet an air of faded vitality clung to them. On the rear wall was an implacable Christ in majesty, surrounded by angels and demons, caught in the act of dividing the saved from the damned, the sheep from the goats. On one side of the vault Michael with his flaming sword barred the gates of Eden, and on the other side flocks of saints and holy men eavesdropped on Gabriel’s message to the Virgin Mary. Mold and dampness had attacked the teeming scenes; patches of paint had fallen away, leaving blooms of lime on the stone.

  Anne-Marie stepped closer to the mural of the Virgin. Here Maria and her mother, Anna, the saints after whom she herself had been named, were seated on thrones to receive the archangel, whose wings were those of an eagle. The damage this mural had suffered was not just from mildew or moisture. Mary’s eyes had been scraped out, down to the bare rock.

  To Anne-Marie, more comfortable photographing living faces and bodies in motion, recording the damaged paintings was a technical challenge; to make them vivid was a greater challenge. She took her time, setting her flash unit on the floor, on a chair, anywhere that would give texture to the light without obscuring details. She worked for an hour, forgetting the time.

  Outside the church, the sunlight momentarily blinded her. She went through the deserted schoolyard to the back of the church, to the walled burial ground. The graves were raised boxes of stone or concrete filled with gravel, most with inscribed plaques at their heads, some with cases built of marble and panes of glass containing a photograph of the deceased, a polychrome of the name saint, an oil lamp. A few had offerings: flowers, a bottle of oil or raki, a slab of honeycomb, a cigar that hadn’t been smoked much. Inside some of the cracked glass cases, wasps and spiders were at work.

  She expended half a roll of film on the graves before she came to one with a cracked limestone plaque upon which was inscribed KATERINA K. ANDROULAKI, 1886–1935. Another name had been inscribed below it but had been crudely chiseled away until only the dates remained: 1908–1922. The missing name was Sophia’s. This grave had no case of marble and glass, no photographs, no pictures of saints, no burning lamp, no offerings, only a few wildflowers lying on the gravel, already wilted and drying to weeds. Who but Minakis would have left them?

  Anne-Marie shot the rest of the roll, then reloaded, but the sun was too high for romantic photos in a graveyard.

  Louloudakis’s place was busier now, and young Dimitris was serving and taking orders from French and German tourists who had arrived by car. The local old men were planted at their accustomed iron tables, staring at Anne-Marie as she crossed the square. She gave them and Dimitris a cheerful kalimera sas as she passed among them and entered the store.

  Haralambos Louloudakis was busy over the propane stove, brewing coffee in a copper briki. “Kalimera, kyria,” he called happily. “How can I help you?”

  “You can let me take your photograph,” she replied, holding up her camera.

  “You want to photograph me?”

  “Why not?”

  “You are here to photograph the philosopher.”

  “True, but I have to place him in his surroundings. Where does he buy his lightbulbs? Who sells him coffee?” She smiled and raised her camera to her eye.

  “I understand.” He stood there beaming as she clicked and flashed away, until the boiling briki overflowed behind him.

  At that moment Dimitris stuck his head in the door. “Quickly, Father! What’s taking so long?”

  “Enough of that insolence,” Louloudakis shouted at him, and to Anne-Marie, said, “Excuse me, excuse me, please.” He poured the coffee into tiny cups and set them on a tin tray with glasses and a carafe of water, which he handed to Dimitris to carry outside, then followed the boy onto the terrace to soothe any ruffled feelings.

  Like any seasoned lens-slinger, Anne-Marie shot first and asked questions later, spending six frames on the moth-eaten kri-kri and the martens and the shotguns mounted on the wall. Then she lowered her camera and tried to see the objects not as they appeared through her viewfinder but for what they were: the remains of rare animals; a massive rusty shotgun that could have dated from 1866; a beautiful slender birding gun, its barrel chased with silver.

  “Tell me the story of that beautiful gun,” she demanded, when Louloudakis came back inside.

  “You think it is beautiful?” His smile faded.

  “Who wouldn’t?” she asked, surprised by his change of tone.

  “You are a woman.”

  “I’m a photographer.”

  He grunted. A photographer, was she? Every tourist had a camera. “My father is outside, finishing his midday meal,” he said, moving impatiently to his stove. “Get him to tell you the story of that gun.”

  The elder Dimitris Louloudakis sported baggy black trousers below and a bristling white beard above. He was only a few years older than Minakis, but to Anne-Marie he looked like a holdover from a different century. It was his eyes, she decided, milky from staring into mountain light, and his skin, wrinkled into worn parchment. Hard to picture this old man as the teenage bully who had tried to kill young Manolis.

  He fastened upon her eagerly, pressing her with questions that she had learned to answer automatically—husband, children, home, job, where she had learned Greek—while he prevailed upon her to accept a glass of his son’s raki. But when it arrived accompanied only by a plate of chopped cucumber, he shouted abuse at his son through the open door, and young Dimitris came running out with plates of olives and cheese and a dish of marinated bulbs and a basket of bread.

  Satisfied that he had cowed her with his hospitality, old Dimitris deigned to answer her question. “The gun belonged to a Turkish spy,” he said. “In those days there were many Turks.”

  The two other old men at the table, a priest and a shepherd, wagged their heads in agreement.

  “Turks? Or Greek Muslims?” Anne-Marie raised her camera to frame Dimitris’s picturesque face.

  He irritably lifted a hand. “You cannot make photographs.”

  She lowered the camera to her lap. “I’m sorry. I should have asked.” Still he looked at her silently, suspiciously. Ostentatiously she twisted the lens off her camera, capped its ends, and put it in her bag. “You were telling me about Turks.”

  Mollified, he settled into the iron chair. “I was a boy then. There were many Turks as well as Mussulmans about. I knew this one was a spy, because my father told me he was.” He looked to the others, and they nodded. “He came up to photograph the passes. Lasithi is a natural fortress, everyone knows that. That’s why the conquerors always tried to keep us out of the mountains.”

  “This Turk was a photographer like me?” Anne-Marie asked.

  They all had a good laugh at that. “He was a real photographer,” Dimitris told her. “His camera was this big.” He held his hands a couple of feet apart.

  “What happened to him?”

  Dimitris eyed his companions, who seemed to be thinking heavily, their lips pursed and their brows bunched. The priest reached for a chunk of bread and stuffed it into his mouth. Anne-Marie had noticed him when she first arrived in the village, an ancient graybeard, hunched and sly; she realized he must be Kriaris, son of Papa Kriaris, and Manolis’s long-ago guardian. And the shepherd? One of the Michalis boys, perhaps?

  “You must have heard what happened to him,” she prompted. “A spy, a photographer. People must have talked about him a lot.”

  Dimitris shrugged. “We were children.”

  “He fell,” mumbled the priest, his mouth full of bread. “He fell off a cliff. It was icy.”

  “No one found him for days. They said ravens had been at him,” said the shepherd, crossing himself vigorously. “And dogs.”

  “They even carried off his shoes, those animals,” said the sullen priest. Unexpectedly he laughed, spilling bread crumbs into his beard.

  “And his gun?” Anne-Marie a
sked. “How did that come into your father’s possession, kyrie Louloudakis?”

  Dimitris did not answer. The priest grinned slyly at the shepherd and said, “Perhaps a dog brought it to him.”

  Anne-Marie kept her attention on Dimitris. “Is that how your father got the gun, kyrie? A dog brought it to him?”

  A fleeting expression crossed his face, bitter and bright and sly, a look she could not have described but fervently wished she could have photographed. “I don’t know how it came to him,” he said, a smirk twisting his mustache, “but in any case, it is impossible not to steal beautiful weapons.”

  At that everyone laughed, for it was an old saying and certainly true, and its truth covered many lies.

  Anne-Marie laughed with them, enjoying their wit. “And cameras,” she cried happily. “Who would not steal a beautiful camera? Who got the Turkish spy’s camera?”

  The old men’s laughter died in confusion. They traded glances, sharing the quick, bitter thing she had seen in Dimitris’s expression, before they turned sullen, weary faces back upon her.

  She thanked them for their hospitality and went back inside Louloudakis’s place. “I need to call a taxi,” she said, giving him a large banknote; he had the only telephone in town. “And buy those men a round of drinks. Tell them it’s on you.”

  Louloudakis made the call for her; after negotiations that would have sounded fierce to someone less fluent than she, he assured her that a taxi would call for her at Minakis’s gate in forty minutes.

  She packed a change of clothes into her camera bag and left a note on Minakis’s table: “I look forward to another dinner with you—not tonight, but tomorrow night. Until then, with much affection…”

  When it came to the written word, Anne-Marie was experienced at getting what she wanted, which had as much to do with getting access to documents as what was in them. By midafternoon she’d talked her way past a phalanx of clerks and policemen in the headquarters of the Hellenic Police in downtown Iraklion with a tall tale about doing a magazine story on the Dikti Mountains.

  Rows of steel shelves held faded logbooks and bundles of papers covered with dust. She untied ribbons and lifted fragile official forms printed in uneven type on cheap paper, the blank spaces filled in by many different hands, elegant-looking by the handwriting standards of the 1990s but hard to read, and the ink itself vanishingly pale with age. Her hopes rose and sank again. Many records had been destroyed in the war; there must have been more losses after the war, when files from all over the island were moved to Iraklion, the new administrative center of Crete. Much of 1922 was missing; what remained were scorched folders almost too fragile to handle.

  At first Anne-Marie could find nothing from Lasithi nome, but this proved to be an accident of organization; when she untied the last bundle, the piece of paper she was looking for was near the bottom, still where it had been placed on the last day of January 1922.

  Summary of investigation regarding the accidental death of Konstandinos Didaskalos, male, 26 years old, of Athens.

  Report of gendarme Sergeant N. Bounialis, Tzermiado, 15 January 1922, as follows: “On the evening of 12 January 1922, M. Michalis and S. Ariakis, herdsmen residing in the village of Ayia Kyriaki in the Limnakaros Plain, discovered a body at the foot of the scarp of Mount Dikti approximately one mile east of the village. On the morning of 13 January these men, accompanied by H. Louloudakis, reported the discovery to this office…

  “I was able to observe that the body was that of a young man with brown hair, wearing a blue serge suit and white shirt. His shoes and other outer clothing he may have been wearing, such as an overcoat, were missing. Although the flesh was well preserved by the cold, the soft parts of the face, hands, and feet had been eaten by animals. A thorough investigation of the site at the base of the cliff and of the top of the cliff two hundred meters above uncovered no additional evidence. The clifftop was slippery with ice and extremely dangerous. The man was known to be an admirer of wild scenery. It is possible that he approached the cliff too closely and lost his balance…

  “…through these and other interviews it became evident that this was the same young man who had arrived in Ayia Kyriaki on approximately 18 December, bringing with him a pack mule. He stayed in the household of M. Michalis, to whom he identified himself as K. Didaskalos of Athens. He was known as a photographer, having previously visited the region to make scenic pictures. On this visit, however, he seemed interested in making portraits of the inhabitants, including various unwed young girls. He also made photographs of the frescoes in the chapel…”

  As she struggled to read the puristic Greek, Anne-Marie felt the skin of her brow tighten. The report was written in the passive, conditional voice of bureaucracies everywhere—It became evident. It is possible—with a marked lack of enthusiasm for further investigation. To this end, Sergeant Bounialis had done more than merely distance himself. The dead man had “seemed interested in making portraits of…various unwed young girls,” he had written, and his meaning was plain enough: accident or not, the dead man deserved what he got.

  What happened to the man’s mule, Sergeant? To his camera? Having mentioned these valuable properties, Bounialis’s report made no further reference to them. She read on.

  Supplemental report of gendarme Lieutenant S. Sarakatsanis, Lasithi nome, as follows: “Subsequent inquiries to Athens revealed that one K. Didaskalos, a law student residing with his aunt N. Didaskalou in Athens, had been reported missing after failing to return from Crete on 15 January as expected. An amateur photographer, Didaskalos had been touring the island to make scenic pictures. On 21 January, i kyria N. Didaskalou arrived in Neapolis, accompanied by her cousin, ton kyrio S. K. Didaskalo, also of Athens, and identified the body of her nephew. I kyria Didaskalou was permitted to take the body with her for burial…”

  Anne-Marie closed the file. Though she had not been permitted to take notes in the archive, she would have no trouble remembering the contents. Outside police headquarters she ran to catch a taxi to the airport.

  She reached Athens after sunset. An hour after the airplane touched ground she checked into a tourist hotel in the Plaka; she ate mezethes in a tourist place on Tripodon Street and went straight back to her room, yanking the curtains closed against the cliffs of the Acropolis, ablaze with artificial light.

  Morning on Crete came softly, the salt sea breeze mingling with the scent of oranges in the courtyard of Peter’s hotel. After breakfast he drove his banged-up little rental Fiat out of Iraklion; at the first hill he wondered if he would have done better to hire a taxi. But an hour later when he arrived at the lonely monastery of Saint Nicholas, thirty miles southwest of the city and a mile from the nearest village, at the foot of a spectacular gorge down which spring torrents poured from the pine-forested heights, he was glad he had his own transportation.

  His tourist map indicated that Ambelakia was over 4,500 feet high and that the climb was mostly vertical. Peter stood at the trail head listening to the cascading water, trying to persuade himself that Minakis would not have chosen such an isolated spot for scientific work—yet if the coin had fallen the other way, he would have had as steep a climb on the slopes of Mount Dikti. He was glad Detorakis had made him buy boots and khaki trousers.

  He locked the car and set out upon the uneven path that clung to the wall of the gorge, forcing himself to stretch his long legs. An hour passed before the pine forest gave way to a meadow covered with meager new grass; flocks of sheep and goats were busily stripping it bare. Ambelakia loomed seventeen hundred feet higher still—all stones, no more falling water—and for the first time he could see the stub of a chapel on its peak.

  He stumbled over ankle-breaking eroded limestone, climbing toward the peak. At last he pushed through the unlocked door into the empty chapel. Three oil lamps burned with pale yellow flames under the stone vault; the only furniture was the decrepit wooden stand supporting the lamps. There was no sign Minakis had ever been near the place.
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br />   He went outside and settled himself against the sunny wall of the chapel, stretching his aching legs. His feet were tender in the stiff new boots; he tugged them off and pulled off his wool socks and wriggled his toes in the cool air. No blisters yet, only bright pink patches, but he’d be raw by the time he got back down. Was this the way to search for reality, climbing mountains crowned with empty chapels?

  Reality was that the woman he loved had walked away without a word. Last night Markos Detorakis had taken Peter to dinner at a fish taverna; he was full of questions about Anne-Marie, and at first Peter had been delighted to tell him about her, her beauty, her talent, her quick intelligence rooted in the world of things—so different from his own weakness for abstractions—and the way his heart had jumped when he’d laid eyes on her the first time, after his divorce from Kathleen had convinced him that he’d never fall in love again. But Detorakis kept pressing him for details, and somewhere between the cuttlefish and the red mullet things got awkward. Peter could hardly admit that she was off doing some kind of in-depth interview with the same guy he was looking for and didn’t know how to find.

  Maybe she wasn’t with Minakis at all; maybe that was just smoke. When he thought about it, this freelance magazine assignment had sounded fishy from the start. Not Anne-Marie’s style, leaving Jenny with her mother, even if it was less than four days now. And what did her brother have to do with it? She’d barely mentioned his name until the phone calls to Geneva started last fall—then got prickly and evasive when he’d asked about the charges. Not that he’d cared; he was just curious.

  Frustrated, he stood up, the stones cold under his bare feet. He would go straight back to the hotel and call Madame Brand in Paris and ask her the humiliating questions he’d avoided before. Face it, he’d wanted to believe Anne-Marie was with Minakis because it gave him an excuse to track down Minakis’s intriguing experiment. But it wasn’t worth the price of not knowing…