Secret Passages

by Paul Preuss

  “Who’s hurt?”

  “Minakis. It crushed him.”

  She burst into violent sobs but just as suddenly stopped herself short. “I’ll go down to the village, there’s a telephone.” She shivered with the effort to maintain control. “I don’t have the strength to climb back up there now. You go up, stay with him until help comes.”

  “Anne-Marie, listen. You’re hurt too. I’ll go with you.”

  “No!” she said fiercely. “You can’t leave him alone.”

  “But I don’t know where…”

  “Climb straight up. As you start down there’s a path to the left. Half a mile, less, you’ll see a collapsed shepherd’s hut. There’s a cave behind it. We were climbing out. Then the earthquake…He’s just inside. Go before it’s too late.”

  “But you might be injured. We ought to—”

  She shook her head sharply. “Go on, I’ll come later.”

  He left her to climb the mountain, to wander in the blowing mist, shivering in shirtsleeves, sure he had lost his way.

  After almost an hour he walked past the tumbled stones of the collapsed hut without recognizing it; at the last moment he stumbled back from the cliff edge. Turning beside the dry watering trough, seeking any landmark, he saw the dark mouth of the cave.

  Inside, Minakis lay still beneath the boulder that pinned him. His eyes were closed, but Peter saw the barest movement of air in his throat. Somewhere Peter had read that wounded people—or was it people with concussions?—should not sleep.

  “Minakis, it’s Peter Slater. Can you hear me?”

  He took the man’s hand where it lay in the rubble and rubbed it between his own. Minakis’s gritty eyelids parted.

  “Can you hear me? Help is coming.” Peter hoped that was true. “Can you talk?”

  Minakis said nothing. Anne-Marie’s camera bag lay on the ground, near a leather case. In the dirt next to it was a flashlight. Peter picked it up and played the beam over the collapsed roof. When he saw how massive the block was that weighed upon Minakis, a cold current of fear went through him.

  He groped in the camera bag and found a wide-angle lens; he pulled the deep plastic cap off the back of it and used it as a cup to catch the water that dribbled haphazardly down the fallen boulders. When he had a cupful he held it to Minakis’s lips, first wiping away the dust with moistened fingertips. Minakis opened his eyes. Awkwardly Peter poured the water into his mouth, a few drops at a time.

  He said, “Peter,” barely audibly.

  “Right here.”

  “Tell you…”

  “What?” Peter bent closer, but he could not hear words in the breathy whisper.

  He kicked at loose stones and cleared a space to stretch out flat on his stomach, his ear close to Minakis’s lips. “What did you say?”

  “Fi…” Minakis swallowed. “File.”

  “File. A computer file?”

  “In the chapel.”

  Peter wasn’t sure what Minakis said next—it sounded like “jar,” and then a weak humming sound, “mmm,” repeated, “mmm,” dwindling as Minakis’s breath leaked away. He closed his eyes.

  There was nothing for Peter to do but wait.

  A dozen shapes appeared in the mist, led by Anne-Marie and the boy Dimitris, who ran ahead of the others to the cave. He knelt beside Minakis. “Kyrie, o kyrie, poli ponai?”

  Peter was astonished to see a tiny smile on Minakis’s lips. “Nai, ligo,” he whispered.

  Anne-Marie pushed into the narrow entrance beside them. “People are coming from the fire department in Neapolis,” she said as Peter backed away. He said nothing; he wondered if the rescuers had thought to bring rock drills, and maybe a big skyhook.

  Faces crowded the cave mouth, peering in, mustachioed men from the village and a couple of young German tourists, all staring at Peter as if he could tell them what to do. A villager said something in Greek; Peter raised his palms helplessly. One of the Germans said, “He asks if the man is alive.”

  “Yes, but he can’t be moved. He’s badly hurt.”

  The German translated, and the villagers began a heated discussion. The German said, “Let me have a look at him, I’m trained in—”

  Whatever he was about to say, he was cut short by a wavelike lift and subsidence of the earth and a grinding, continuing bass rumble. The crowd at the cave entrance shouted and retreated. Dimitris staggered back, frightened, and Anne-Marie knelt to grab Minakis’s hand.

  “No!” she cried, as if she could command the shaking earth. Rocks shifted in the aftershock; again the air filled with choking clouds of dust.

  Minakis groaned in anguish, his wide eyes staring at nothing. His hand squeezed Anne-Marie’s fiercely and just as suddenly let go. He fell away from her, into the cavern.

  Peter caught her by the waistband of her jeans and dragged her back as an awful crescendo of rock signaled the collapse of the ceiling of the chamber beneath them; the sound went on for endless seconds.

  27

  “The editor said they were too busy with the earthquake,” Anne-Marie said to Peter, translating the meeting they had just left, “that even if there was anything on our old plates they weren’t news.”

  They hurried down the hall of the Kritika Nea newspaper offices behind a gangly fellow with long legs, long black lashes, long black hair, a sparse mustache, and a spectacular Adam’s apple.

  “Did you tell him where they came from?”

  “I didn’t even tell him where we came from. It’s better if we keep Minakis’s name out of it.” Before they’d left Ayia Kyriaki she’d washed the mud off her face and changed into a clean blouse and skirt and sandals. Under her tan she was pale with fatigue.

  “Who’s our friend?” Peter asked.

  “His name’s Iliakis, he’s their photographer. He told the editor he’d printed everything for the next edition and he had to throw the soup out anyway, so why not see what we had…”

  Iliakis led them into a room hardly bigger than a closet, closed the door behind them, and flipped a switch; a dim red bulb came on overhead. In an instant the three of them were standing closer than old friends.

  Anne-Marie set the leather case on the bench-top, and Iliakis lifted the lid and carefully extracted the first of the plates. To Anne-Marie he said something with a question mark, pointing toward one of the cameras on the shelf. “Den xero,” she answered with a shrug. He returned his attention to the plate, carefully extracting the sheet of film from its holder and submerging it in a plastic tray, talking as he worked.

  “What’s he saying?” Peter asked.

  “He’s a camera nut, a collector. He says these plates are German made, fine grained, celluloid backed, intended for use in cameras like that one, a Voightlander-Alpin view camera”—the array of old cameras was barely visible in the dim light, packed among the bottles and packages of chemicals on the shelf above the sink—“very classy back in the twenties.”

  She bent and peered at the rectangle of film lying in its chemical bath. Peter peered over her shoulder, trying to see what was happening.

  “Den enai kala?” Anne-Marie asked Iliakis.

  The photographer sighed. “Ti krima.”

  “Tell me what’s going on,” Peter whispered urgently.

  Anne-Marie wiped her hand across her damp brow. “Nothing’s going on,” she said tiredly. “There’s nothing on that plate.”

  “It was never exposed?”

  “No, it’s fully exposed.”

  “What does…?”

  “Too much light. Like somebody held it up to the sun.”

  There were a dozen plates in the box, and an hour later Iliakis had developed the lot. His voice was full of sympathy as he poured the spent chemicals out of his trays, down the drain.

  Peter followed Anne-Marie out of the Kritika Nea offices, past staffers who gave them amused looks. When they reached the crowded street he asked her, “What do we do now?”

  “I don’t know. Give up, I guess.”

&nb
sp; Peter put his hand gently on her shoulder. “Look at me, just for a second.” She looked resolutely past him instead, onto the busy street, but finally she turned, her eyes brimming, and leaned her head on his chest. In a few moments his shirt was soaked through with her tears.

  “You never told me what you expected to find on these photos. You haven’t told me why you followed Minakis to Crete—or why you made me track you down. I don’t know whether I figure in your plans anymore at all.”

  “Oh yes, you do, Peter,” she whispered, “and I want to tell you everything. But don’t make me tell you standing on this street corner.”

  “Then we’ll go back to the village. I want to visit that chapel one more time.”

  Ayia Kyriaki was quiet and dark after sunset, with no sign of unusual activity; the rescue team had gone back to Neapolis, announcing they would not attempt to recover Minakis’s body while there was still danger of aftershocks.

  Peter parked the Fiat in the narrow street beside Minakis’s front gate. They had expected to talk their way past a police guard; no one was in evidence, but the house was undisturbed.

  “Things have changed since Minakis grew up here,” said Anne-Marie. “They would have looted the place by now.”

  “Someone on his yacht will know whom to notify about his personal things,” Peter said. “Tomorrow I’ll call FORTH about his experiment.”

  Anne-Marie made a fire in the hearth. She found oranges and hard cheese and bread on the shelf; they should have been ravenous, but neither had much of an appetite. There was a bottle of white Bordeaux in the shiny refrigerator; she poured two glasses and sipped from hers before sitting down across the table from Peter. Cradling the glass, she leaned back in her chair and stared into the fire. He waited quietly.

  “This all started when I was a little girl,” she said. “There’s a lot I never told you about my family. About Alain…”

  Peter listened with all his senses, hearing what she said but also hearing the sad melody of her voice and seeing the morose beauty of her face in the firelight, the weariness in the drape of her body on the chair. Her aroma was a strange bouquet of wine and spicy perspiration and wild herbs and sharp photochemicals—or was that acrid scent the odor of limestone?

  What she told him saddened him and made him feel angry and weak, but though it was news, it came as no real surprise. There had always been a brittle insincerity about her attitude toward her brother. As for Charlie, her unwillingness to concede that he had any rights in her children had always baffled him.

  As she came to the part of her story that dealt with her appearance on Mykonos, her voice faltered. Alain had called her to Geneva to make a deal, she said—he would sign an affidavit and provide a blood sample proving that Carlos was his son, not Charlie’s. But his cooperation had a price.

  “I agreed to find out where Minakis kept his Minoan artifacts. You probably know the magazine story was a lie.”

  “Do you know where they are?”

  “Oh yes. Buried under tons of rock, on top of a mountain, with no road to the place. And Minakis buried with them.” She put a worried hand to her temple.

  In the silence that followed, Peter tried to cut through the hundred questions that jostled in his head. He said simply, “I love you, Anne-Marie, and I love your children. I’ll do anything I can for you.”

  “Tell more lies for me?” She wasn’t teasing.

  “If I have to.”

  Tears welled in her pale blue eyes. “If only…oh, Peter, if only I had trusted you from the beginning, instead of trying to do it all alone. You do love me, don’t you?”

  “From the first night.” He smiled. “When you told me I couldn’t play the piano as well as your father.”

  “I didn’t say that, exactly.” She reached a hand across the table, taking his fingers in hers.

  He got up and went to her and held her as she stood—embraced her, kissed her, squeezed her tight. “Is there a bed in this house?”

  “Why? Are you sleepy?”

  “Too much awake.”

  “Me too.”

  He bent and lifted her off the floor, carrying her easily into the darkness under the arch.

  Later, he brushed the dark hair gently from the bruise over her temple. Her eyes were bright in the darkness, watching him. “I will get Carlos back, you know.”

  “You’ll share him with me?”

  “Oh Peter…With all my heart.” She tugged at his hand.

  He kissed her forehead. He sat up in the bed and kicked at the sheets. He should have been pleasantly sleepy by now, but he was full of nervous energy. “You never told me what all that was, about the plates.”

  She sat up beside him, as restless as he was; the night air was electric. “Because I promised him I’d find out what was on them. No, that’s not true, I made him agree to let me find out. Minakis’s father was the photographer. I think Minakis was conceived there, where I found the plates. His mother was only fourteen.” She turned to Peter, her pale eyes reflecting the new moon. “I think the men in this village murdered Minakis’s father. Maybe his mother destroyed the plates accidentally—maybe she held them up to see what was on them, after he was gone…”

  “You got to know Minakis well.”

  “Well enough. He brought you and me both to this place. At first it was all because of you. He wanted us to move here; he wanted you to work with him; more than anything, he wanted you to understand what he was doing. But he showed me the cave because he wanted to give me back my life.”

  “I wish I could have talked to him one more time.”

  “My fault for keeping him to myself.” Her gaze flickered away. “I thought there would be lots of time later for you two to go off and talk physics.”

  “Time is what I wanted to talk to him about. But all he said to me was something about a file.” He lay back, his head on his hands, looking at the shadowed ceiling. “Did he show you how his experiment worked?”

  “I was too busy taking pictures to pay close attention. He talked about transactions between the past and the future, said they got rid of paradoxes in quantum theory.” She snuggled down beside him. Her fingers crept across his belly. “Which made me wonder why theorists cling to their long-standing paradoxes. But that I didn’t ask.”

  Peter laughed. “We cherish our paradoxes. Every year thousands of graduate students learn to suppress reason and find in quantum mechanics the true faith.” His hand caught hers and gently trapped her fingers. “We’re all like German Lutherans, the ones who believe in consubstantiation. Come to think of it, a lot of the early quantum theorists were born Lutherans.”

  “What difference does that make?” Abruptly she sat up and swung her legs off the bed.

  “Communion. The Eucharist, the Mass. Most Protestants believe that the bread and wine are just symbols. Catholics like you…”

  “I was a Catholic.” She went naked to where their clothes were piled in a heap on a chair. She found something among her clothes and picked it up.

  He watched her, propping his head in his hand. “So you were taught to believe in transubstantiation—that even if the bread and wine retain breadlike qualities and vinous qualities, they turn into the actual body and blood of Christ. That may be magic, but it’s not a paradox. To Lutherans, the consecrated bread is bread, and at the same time it is the body of Christ. The wine is wine, and at the same time it is the blood of Christ. Bread, body—wine, blood. Waves, two paths—particles, one path. Superposition.”

  “Quantum mechanics as Communion?” Her voice betrayed a wan smile. “Minakis promised the metropolitan his work had no religious significance.”

  “I won’t tell the metropolitan if you won’t.”

  She turned to him, her naked body long and smooth, pale and deeply shadowed in the moonlight. “Are you religious, husband?”

  “Only in unguarded moments. You, wife?”

  “Oh yes. My religion is very old.” She came toward him, her dark hair moving on her shoulder
s. Between her full breasts a golden pendant gleamed.

  As the sun rose behind them the morning mist brightened and grew iridescent with a wavering rainbow. They climbed in muffled silence, a hard climb over slick rock. Near the top of the peak the blue sky appeared through curls of vapor; the stone chapel caught the early light.

  Inside the chapel, a shaft of sunlight streaming through the eastern window illuminated their vaporous breath. Peter took the cover off the computer. He carefully pulled the plastic sheeting off the test bed and lifted back the hood where the beams recombined.

  He indicated the fragment of pottery in its glass mount. “Did he say anything about this thing? What it was for?”

  “That wasn’t there when I was here. But I didn’t see him for two days—he was up here by himself.” She looked closer. “It reminds me of something he talked about. It’s like the potsherds he found in that cave when he was a little boy. But those would be over thirty-five hundred years old. This looks new.”

  “Could it be a piece of a jar?”

  “I suppose.”

  “He said ‘file.’ He said ‘jar’—at least I think that’s what he said. Let’s see what’s in the computer.” Peter switched on the computer and pushed the mouse across its pad, clicking on icons. A file directory appeared on the screen. “Greek, what else? Can you help me with this?”

  She watched as he scrolled. “I can read the words…but it’s Greek to me too. What’s a four-momentum propagator?”

  “Never mind, we’re looking for a file named ‘jar.’”

  “To doheio, okay. Wait, slow down. E.M., M.M., L.M.—those are archaeological periods. There’s a list of objects under each heading—cups, figures—there’s a jar, Middle Minoan I.”

  Peter clicked on the file name. The screen went blank, then slowly began to paint a picture in high resolution, line by line. A net of irregular polygons stretched over a rounded surface, most of them sketchily filled in; missing pieces were indicated in thin white lines. The whole picture was of a widemouthed pot with two handles.