Secret Passages

by Paul Preuss

  A jolt of fiery pain shot up Peter’s right leg. He hopped back as if he’d stepped on a live coal, holding fast to his ankle; a bee’s stinger, a thread of entrails attached, was lodged under his little toe. He brushed the stinger away and stood on his heel, arching his head backward, gasping.

  In a crack in the wall under the roof of the chapel bees came and went, buzzing in multipart harmony. A few feet away from their nest, on the east end of the vault, sat a glass corner reflector as sturdy as the corner reflector the astronauts had left on the moon, cemented to the wall and aimed toward Dikti.

  For a moment Peter ignored his throbbing foot. Far to the east, the Dikti Mountains were hazy gray under the high sun. He ran his fingers through his hair, as if trying to massage some sense into his head. Ambelakia. Dikti. The two places Detorakis had named were in line of sight of each other, something he could have seen from the map if he’d thought to look. And Minakis’s interferometer had a long leg…

  One more day, then. Tomorrow—if he could get his bee-stung foot back into his boot—he would climb a different mountain.

  In Athens the morning smelled of Aleppo pines and diesel exhaust. From her hotel in the Plaka, Anne-Marie walked to the cemetery, up the hill beyond the vast ruined temple of Olympian Zeus, a short walk made tortuous and long by rush-hour traffic. Once she was inside the cemetery gate the traffic sounds fell away and the air seemed cleaner. Doves wobbled along the yellow sand paths, calling sadly; a priest chanted a memorial service somewhere up the hillside. Among black cypresses and pines that shivered in the fitful breeze, pale marble glowed, greenly phosphorescent. There were funeral stelae in the manner of classical Greece and florid modern allegorical statues of grief and eternal life. There were miniature Orthodox churches, miniature ancient temples, and miniature neoclassical mansions. The graves were family homes, housing the dead and tended by the living. Women in black swept leaves from in front of the mausoleums, washed down the marble pavement with hoses, set fresh flowers in bronze urns, lit the oil lamps, and set smoking sticks of incense in front of the ceramic plaques that were likenesses of the dead.

  Everywhere the faces of the dead looked back at Anne-Marie, photographs turned to stone: gray-haired old men and old women and young men in uniform, as one would expect, but so many children too, and so many young women, full of hope, innocently beautiful, fashionable in the fringed satins of the 1920s or the angled suits of the 1940s. In these decades the death dates clustered, rising to a crescendo by the end of the 1920s—here lay the victims of the Catastrophe—rising again in the 1940s, when the Germans and Italians ruled, but peaking only after they had left, after civil war and famine had killed tens of thousands.

  It was a sprawling plot of ground, crowded with trees and graves, and she searched a long time before she came upon a stained and untended slab of marble with a cracked glass case at its head, empty except for a picture in a tin frame that was bleached to whiteness. The gravestone was inscribed KON/NOS M. DIDASKALOS, 1896–1922. The vanished picture in the frame had no doubt been of Saint Constantine, but there was no ceramic portrait of the dead man. Unlike most of the others in the cemetery, Konstandinos Didaskalos lay alone in his plot, sharing it with no relatives.

  “He was an orphan, never married, raised by his maiden aunt, my grandfather’s cousin. My grandfather bought the plot for her—well you must know that, that’s how you found me—but she was buried with her own family in Thessaloniki, so there has been nobody else to put there.”

  Anne-Marie said nothing but only leaned forward with an encouraging look toward the speaker, an attractive middle-aged woman with stiff yellow-blond hair arranged in a coiffed helmet, who twisted her round face now comically, now tragically as she told her tale.

  “I do feel badly about neglecting his grave. After all, he is my…my…Let me see, he was my grandfather’s cousin’s nephew, so…oh, dear.” Seeing Anne-Marie smile, the woman understood that she had permission to laugh at herself. “Well, I promise to do better.”

  They sat sipping tea from a china service on a silver tray laid upon a carved Chinese table, in a penthouse in the fashionable Kolonaki district of Athens. Anne-Marie, seated on the brocaded sofa, had a view through open French doors to an iron balcony facing Mount Likavitos; i kyria Kargioti sat close by in an armchair sumptuously upholstered in satin. Everything in the room—the furniture, the heavy drapes, the gold-framed prints of Mont Saint Michel and Versailles and the Eiffel Tower on the wall—spoke of a yearning for France. Guessing this, Anne-Marie asked, “Parlez-vous français, madame?” and when the answer was a happy “Mais oui, madame,” Anne-Marie continued the conversation in French, to the delight of her hostess.

  Soon they were drinking Napoleon brandy with their tea, and Anne-Marie was telling stories of the exciting magazine-publishing scene in Paris, and shortly Madame Kargioti—she insisted that Anne-Marie call her Nitsa—was rooting in her closets for a photo album. Her grandfather having died in the famine of 1945, his cousin having died twenty years earlier of malaria, no one had looked at the album in years. She had almost forgotten she had it.

  With a triumphant cry Nitsa found the dusty book. She placed it on Anne-Marie’s lap, then collapsed in her chair and poured herself another brandy. Anne-Marie lifted the cover. The album was filled with Kodak snaps, Brownies having been to the 1920s as video camcorders were to the 1990s. Anne-Marie leafed through pages of prints mounted in black paper corners: families at the beach, families on ferryboats, families posed in front of ruins.

  “Who are these people?” she asked.

  Nitsa shrugged happily. “I don’t know. Oh, that one—that’s Aunt Niki. And there’s my grandfather, I think.”

  Anne-Marie kept looking. Midway through the book she came upon a photograph of a young man wearing a shirt and tie and a dark suit, standing against a backdrop of sky. He could have been standing on the edge of the Acropolis, or on Areopagos or Pnyx or Likavitos, or not in Athens at all; there was no clue to his whereabouts except bare rock beneath his feet and storm clouds behind him. “Is this Didaskalos?”

  Nitsa leaned over Anne-Marie’s shoulder to peer at the photograph. “Yes, that’s him, I think.”

  “Who took the picture?”

  “I don’t know. Aunt Niki?”

  “She took a good picture. Where did he get the gun?”

  “I don’t know that either. Maybe my grandfather’s graduation present to him? When he completed law school?”

  Anne-Marie hesitated. “I don’t know how to ask you this…”

  Nitsa giggled. “Just ask me.”

  “Can I take this picture? I promise I will send it back to you within the week.”

  Nitsa leaned back, rolling her glass of brandy between her fingers. “I would like to have it back. But I confess it really doesn’t mean that much to me.” She didn’t need to repeat her earlier confession, that she had not even tended the man’s grave. “Maybe if you take it, it will acquire some meaning.”

  Anne-Marie carefully lifted the photograph from its mounting and held it close and studied it—the handsome young man in his suit and tie, standing against the stormy sky, holding the silver-chased gun that now hung on the back wall of Haralambos Louloudakis’s store.

  26

  “He was your father. I’m sure of it. There are ways you can prove it.” As always when they were climbing, Anne-Marie hurried to keep up, for Minakis’s stride seemed to lengthen as the pitch steepened.

  “One could ask to exhume the body, I suppose; one could test the DNA.”

  She could not see his expression, but she could hear his distaste. “He must have written letters to his aunt, sent pictures. I’m sure kyria Kargioti would be happy to find them.”

  Minakis stopped when they reached the saddle above the village, where the crest of Dikti lifted away to the east, and the chapel’s isolated peak rose to the west. “Forgive me, I should be grateful for the work you’ve done. Before Pendlebury found me, I wanted desperately to know who my f
ather was. Afterward it no longer mattered; when I lost Pendlebury, I lost the only father I ever knew.”

  “So I wasted my time. Merde.” The heat and his lack of interest provoked her; perspiring fiercely, she loosened a button of her cotton shirt and hitched up her jeans as if preparing for battle. “Why did you come back here, then? You could have set your stuff up lots of places, a lot more convenient places.”

  His response was cheerful. “Revenge perhaps?”

  “Revenge?” she said sourly. “Have you ever told Louloudakis who you are?—I mean that old monster who was the kid who tried to shoot you with your own father’s gun? Have you ever told the priest’s son, who was supposed to look out for you, who inherited everything that was yours? Who probably sold your grandmother’s house back to you?”

  “Why warn them? I’m planning to slit their throats in their sleep,” he whispered, full of menace.

  “How can you make a joke of it?”

  He shrugged. “I do thank you for what you have done. For one thing, you have given me the name of the man who persuaded my disreputable grandfather to leave Limnakaros.”

  “You could have found out for yourself. Perhaps you already have. Perhaps this is all a charade.”

  “You’re wrong.” He leaned toward her, resting a hand on her shoulder. “As far as I knew, that gun was always the property of the Louloudakis clan. If Katerina knew it was the photographer’s—not likely—she didn’t think it mattered enough to mention.”

  Anne-Marie turned away, shrugging off his touch. “Doesn’t it make a difference that they murdered him for it?”

  “Oh Anne-Marie,” he said quietly, “if my grandmother didn’t know that, how can you know it? Nothing but ragged coincidence suggests that that man was my father. Nothing at all connects me to his relatives—relatives so distant they do not even tend his grave.”

  “You don’t want it to be him, do you?” she said, red-faced and sweating. “Maybe you wish your father was a god, like some old hero’s. That would make you half a god yourself.”

  His expression was cool and opaque. “I promised to take you to the cave. We have a long way to go.”

  It was the worst climb she had ever undertaken. Nothing technical about it—just seven hundred vertical feet of loose gravel and greasy clay lying at the angle of repose. Every step was a landslide, like climbing an endless escalator running backward, except that an escalator doesn’t suck at your shoes.

  She stopped for breath often. Minakis paused, watching without sympathy until she was ready to go on, not offering to help with her cameras: this was her trip. When she resumed climbing he went along beside her easily, almost dawdling, no doubt thinking of other things as she struggled toward the high ridge where the clouds boiled, flashing into existence out of the clear, rising air.

  When they reached the crest she bent over, gasping for breath. They were immersed in blowing mist; she heard the liquid sound of the wind sifting through the shattered rocks and the ground-hugging thorns, which crawled with orange ladybird beetles lifted here on the wind from the fields below. She tried to imagine Sophia and Katerina and little Manolis climbing this murderous slope again and again, sometimes daily, as if they were climbing apartment stairs.

  When she straightened and stepped off along the path she was still heady with fatigue, but at least they were no longer going uphill. The path divided, and she knew without asking that their route was the faint trace to the left. Before long a tumbled heap of stones emerged from the mist, the ruins of a shepherd’s hut: in front of it the edge of a cliff with wet fog blowing over it into nothing, and beyond it, coming clearer with every step, a low scarp of limestone where a trickle of water seeped from a dark crevice edged with ferns and lichen.

  Minakis paused at the entrance. “This will be dangerous and messy. Now you’ve seen the place—do you really need to go in?”

  “I told you why.”

  “Stay close and do exactly as I say.”

  Inside the narrow mouth of the cave she saw a coil of knotted rope, stiff and new, secured around a sturdy outcrop of stone.

  “How many times have you been in here?” Anne-Marie asked.

  “Once during the war, to see if Pendlebury missed anything in ’38. All I found was sherds. Since I came back to the village, I’ve been here twice. I went deeper than before.”

  “And found more than sherds.”

  His answer was a grunt. He tested the rope against its mooring, then tossed the coil into the depths. She looked at the narrow passage through which they must go, past a block of limestone covered with dripping moss; it was a black hole that soaked up her flashlight beam. The flesh rose on her forearms.

  “They’re still in there, aren’t they?” she said.

  “They won’t bother us.” He was stone-faced, as if her question were a breach of etiquette. He went first into the darkness, showing her how to lean back on the rope and plant her feet against the slope. She followed him cautiously down the muddy slide. With her flashlight hooked over her waistband, she could see nothing but a diminishing patch of pale skylight above her; the only thing she could hear, besides her own breathing, was the trickle of water. But the breath of the cave was dry; the lower she went the warmer it seemed. She was inside the earth now, out of the sky’s cold turbulence.

  “Stop a moment. Aim your torch down here,” Minakis called.

  Her pale beam found him resting his back against a massive block of stone that loomed out of the darkness. The rope had fallen away over a ledge, disappearing from view. “It’s steeper and muddier from here on. Keep a tight grip.” He swung over the side and soon was out of sight.

  She let herself down until her feet touched the block. She shifted her grip and lowered herself cautiously down what was now an almost vertical drop; her flashlight, at waist level, lit only a circle of slippery green moss in front of her. The sound of running water was louder.

  Then Minakis had her by the waist and the arm, steadying her as she let go of the rope. Her feet were on flat ground. “This way,” he said. “Stay behind me. Don’t get off the path.”

  She flicked her flashlight beam over the ground around her: she saw no jewels or weapons sparkling among the crumbling human remains, only moldy ribs and pale round skulls. She was in a boneyard, ranker than anything she had imagined from Minakis’s tale. Sixty years had passed since he had found these people; it was now almost 130 years since they’d died. All that time the spring had poured from above.

  She took her camera from its bag and filled the cave three times with blinding light. Minakis waited patiently until she was done and then led her on a winding path across the floor, among the scattered bones, to the far wall. Lit from this angle the wall seemed blank and smooth, but when they had felt their way along it for several yards a vertical black shadow suddenly opened under Minakis’s light. He aimed the beam into a narrow crevice.

  “We go up in here. We’ll have to crawl part of the way.”

  Minakis moved as confidently as if he could see in the dark, bending over, squeezing sideways through tight spots, dropping to his hands and knees when the floor rose—while behind him her flashlight beam made puzzling shadows and highlights of the roof and walls of the low passage—until the passage opened out into the darkness of a larger chamber.

  “Just shine your torch on the ceiling; that will be light enough for the moment.”

  She pointed the flashlight beam upward. The roof was hung with slender stalactites and veils of stone.

  A match flared beside her with almost painful brightness. Minakis crouched to light the wick of an oil lamp, then another and another, three lamps clustered on the floor of the cave.

  “Save your batteries now,” he said. “Wait here. I’ll be back in a moment.”

  He left one of the lanterns where it sat and carried the other two with him as he walked deeper into the cavern. Among the groves of stalagmites the floor was sandy, not muddy like the chamber they had left behind. When Minakis passed b
ehind a column, masked from her view, amber light flickered over the formations and walls of the cave; when he re-emerged he was momentarily blinding to her eyes, a creature of fire. For a moment it was as if he were walking across a bridge of air. Then she realized she was seeing the cave’s intricate ceiling reflected in a still pool of water, as if in a perfect mirror. Minakis bent to place one lantern on a low pedestal of travertine. He walked a few steps and put the other on a ledge.

  Her breath caught in her chest. Gold glistened between the lanterns and reflected from the still pool: two labryses, double axes of incised gold leaf, were set upright in sockets on a low sill of clay. They framed a pair of shattered goddesses, large shards that once had been deft sketches in orange clay, bell-skirted, bare-breasted, and dove-crowned. At their feet and beside them on the sill was a heap of pottery, scattered jars and cups and inscribed plaques and little clay figures of worshipers, male and female, the females skirted like the goddesses, with arms raised, the men loin-strapped, their backs arched at attention, their right fists clenched against their brows in the salute of adoration. This was the treasure she had been sent to find, far richer than anything Alain could have imagined.

  Anne-Marie reminded herself to breathe. She lifted her camera and flooded the cavern with light half a dozen times; the utter stillness was punctuated by the camera’s click and the levered advance of film. She blinked and peered into the lamplit darkness. There was no sign of Minakis in the inky shadows.

  “Manolis, where are you?”

  A shadow moved in the labyrinth of shadows cast by the three lanterns, and he stepped into the light. There was something odd about his pace as he came toward her, something measured and solemn. In front of him, in his right hand, he held an object she could not quite make out, except that it gave off flashes of reflected light.