—
Along Crete’s northern coast, the mysterious Gestapo sergeant Fritz Schubert was operating his own reign of terror. Born in Turkey, raised in Germany, fluent in English and Greek, a Nazi true believer, the Turk was a specter who haunted cafés and village squares. With so many refugees from burnt-down villages turning up in the cities, it was hard to tell the difference between a survivor and a spy, and the Turk’s walnut skin and Mediterranean savvy gave him natural camouflage. “The name Fritz Schubert became anathema to the people of Rethimnon, as he would be to all of Crete,” one war chronicler reported. “ ‘The Turk’ was now equated with barbarity.”
Terrible as he was, the Turk was still no rival to “the Butcher of Crete,” General Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller.
The Butcher and Paddy arrived within weeks of each other in the summer of ’42, and that is where any similarity ended. Paddy’s assignment was to match wits with the Butcher and undermine his command of Crete, but frankly, they couldn’t be more mismatched. Müller was afraid of nothing, least of all war crimes: he starved civilians by burning their winter food, he torched their homes, he turned any village suspected of sheltering rebel fighters into a death camp, murdering everyone—infants, elderly, the disabled. Any survivors who returned to bury the dead were shot on sight.
Paddy, on the other hand, had quickly established himself from the start as a cheerfully useless soldier. The dirty-tricks squad wasn’t his first choice; like Xan, he’d washed up in the unit only because he was so inept everywhere else. He’d originally volunteered for the Irish Guards, because he liked the snazzy cap and tunic—“I thought I might as well die in a nice uniform,” he explained—but army life, according to Artemis Cooper, “came as a severe shock to his system.” Paddy managed only one month of training before spending the next three in the hospital. His official assessment ranked him as “below average.”
Once again, some combination of failure, death, and disgrace loomed in Paddy’s future, so he decided to try a fresh path before it was too late. The regular army wasn’t for him, but the irregular might be a different story. Thanks to his flair for foreign languages, he managed to follow in the footsteps of other misfits and get a transfer to the Firm. Now, finally, he was in a situation perfectly suited for his natural gifts, a place where imagination and resourcefulness mattered more than blind obedience. All he had to do was focus a little and learn exciting stuff like forgery, demolition, and knife fighting.
Except not even that could hold Paddy’s attention. On the day France fell, Paddy’s fellow trainees were in turmoil, wondering how their country would survive without its staunchest ally. Paddy, meanwhile, was working on a poem about a fishpond he’d seen in the Carpathians. He only heard the news later that night.
—
Xan liked Paddy immediately. Sure, Paddy was a show-off and a chatterbox, but that’s because he was addicted to drama; if there wasn’t any at hand, Paddy would whip some together himself. Paddy lived for romance, which meant he was up for anything.
“This charm of his was still apparent beneath his shabby disguise,” Xan explained. “Though we all wore patched breeches, tattered coats, and down-at-heel boots, on him these looked as frivolous as fancy dress. His fair hair, eyebrows and moustache were dyed black, which only added to his carnivalesque appearance, and his conversation was appropriately as gay and as witty as though we had just met each other, not in a sordid little Cretan shack, but at some splendid ball in Paris or London.”
During that boozy, all-night debriefing, Xan told Paddy how they’d take on the Butcher. They’d split the island between them, with Xan in the west and Paddy in the east. Whenever the Butcher was hot on Paddy’s trail, Xan and his men would erupt from hiding and draw them off in the other direction. They’d keep the Butcher’s forces zigzagging back and forth through the mountains, which meant German fortifications along the coast would be underprotected and ripe for spying eyes and Cretan hit-and-run attacks. Any German troops in transit to Africa or any convoys refueling for the East would be detected by Xan’s operatives and become sitting ducks for Allied attack planes.
Xan and Paddy hoisted their cigarette-tin cups in a toast. “By the time the raki was finished,” Xan would recall, “and as I fell asleep on my narrow ledge of twigs I could not be sure whether it was the strong spirit, Paddy’s company or the prospect of Egyptian fleshpots that was responsible for the happiest night I had so far spent on Crete.”
—
A few nights later, Paddy was burrowed into a tiny cave for the night when he heard a faint crackling in the brush. He yanked his pistol and took aim at the entrance, but before he could shoot, something scuttled in beneath his line of fire. In the dim light, Paddy glimpsed a sweat-streaked face and black eyes glinting with, as he put it, “embers of mischief.” He drew down.
George Psychoundakis had just trotted fifty-some miles over the mountains in old boots held together with baling wire. His clothes were as ragged as his shoes and stuffed with secret messages he’d brought for Paddy from other Resistance fighters. As George began to dig out the tiny slips of paper, Paddy burst out laughing; George kept putting a finger to his lips and glancing mock-fearfully over his shoulder, living up to his code name—Bertódolous, or “the Clown,” from an Italian comedy—because he was brave enough to make fun of how scared he was. George had survived plenty of close shaves, including being stopped by a German sentry for questioning while his boots were stuffed with secret maps. That’s why, besides “the Clown,” George was also called “the Changebug”: he’d shown a magical ability to spirit himself out of impossible jams. So far.
Cramped by the low, dripping ceiling, Paddy and George and two local partisans stretched out to have a drink of raki and munch some almonds while George waited for the sun to set for his return trip. Paddy marveled at George’s stamina and ingenuity, his ability to run for hours at eagle’s height and consistently outthink, outmaneuver, and out-endure German manhunts. George didn’t shrug it off—he knew the value of what he knew.
“I felt as if I were flying,” he liked to say. “Running all the way from the top of the White Mountains to Mount Ida. So light and easy—just like drinking a cup of coffee.”
George kept Paddy amused, sharing the only complete sentence he knew in English: “I steal grapes every day.” As it got dark, George rolled Paddy’s replies into tight little twists and hid them in his clothes. By day, Crete belonged to the Butcher; by night, George and the shepherds ran free again. “When the moon rose he got up and threw a last swig of raki down his throat with the words ‘Another drop of petrol for the engine,’ ” Paddy recalled. Then he raised a finger, whispered “The Intelligence Service!” and was gone.
“A few minutes later,” Paddy continued, “we could see his small figure a mile away moving across the next moonlit fold of the foothills of the White Mountains, bound for another fifty-mile journey.”
CHAPTER 20
“YOU REALLY GROW to love George, don’t you?” Chris White said, as we inched along a thin goat track on the cliffs above Sfakiá. Sun glare and sweat were scorching my eyes, but Chris seemed unbothered. “Such warmth and humor. He’s a true Greek hero. Honest but a trickster. Brave, but goofy.”
Awful climbs on crumbling footing, I’d begun to see, put Chris in a meditative mood. Several times along this same cliff face I’d been frozen in place, convinced there was no way forward that wouldn’t end in freefall, while far ahead, I could hear Chris’s voice fading around a bend as he motored along obliviously, chatting about his old job working with the homeless in Miami Beach or his recent fascination with clinical research into root causes of good luck. (Visual receptiveness is key, apparently, along with extensive kinship bonds.)
Personally, I was fixated on how George could handle a trail like this with a girl on his back. George couldn’t have weighed more than 130 pounds, but he’d once saved a friend’s daughter by piggybacking her up these mountains with the Turk and his Gestapo band hard on h
is heels. George had been standing sentry early one morning when he heard a patter of gunshots. The Turk had tortured a Cretan prisoner into leading them to a guerrilla hideout, but made the mistake of shooting at a villager they spotted on the trail, giving George a chance to sprint back and sound the alarm.
“In a moment all our men were gathered along the height, opening fire on a party of Germans and Italians,” George recalled. One guerrilla hollered to George to alert the nearby village. George arrived to find a friend’s wife fleeing with her two little girls, so George and another man hoisted the girls on their backs and ran for it.
They made the woods just in time. “The Germans, having cut off the upper villages, were streaming south from every direction,” George recalled. George headed toward a hamlet he thought would be safe, but veered away when he heard distant screams and the roar of flames. The Germans had already arrived and were burning villagers to death in their own homes. Slipping and dodging, George snaked his little escape party through the dragnet and reached the remote home of one of his aunts. There, the young girl slid down from George’s back to safety.
Purely on a strength and skill level, I didn’t have to guess what that rescue was like; I could feel it. My boots were struggling for grip along the same cliffs—possibly the same trail—and I was carrying a pack roughly the weight of a small girl. I hadn’t stood guard duty the night before or begun my day with a high-speed mountain traverse to save my friends from German stormtroopers, but already my legs were burning, my balance was shaky, and every step, no matter how slow, seemed too quick to be safe. That was the simple genius of the Chris White immersion method: it got to the bottom of the historical questions—the whos and wheres and whens of the traitor Alexiou, the guerrilla chieftain Bandouvas, the frightened young Katsias girls, the villages of Kali Sikia and Nisi—so we could then zero in on the far trickier mystery:
How? How did they actually pull it off?
—
David Belle had a clue. David grew up in the outskirts of Paris, in a rough neighborhood that was even rougher for half-Vietnamese kids like him. When he got tired of being roughed up by bullies, David decided to do something about it: he teamed up with a band of other mixed-race kids to create what he called a “training method for warriors.” His inspiration was a mysterious stranger, someone David had heard amazing stories about and, a few times, even seen in the flesh: his father, Raymond.
Raymond Belle was born in Vietnam to a French military doctor and a Vietnamese mother. During the First Indochina War, the Belles had to flee for the border. Somehow, Raymond was separated from the family and ended up, at age seven, as a boy soldier in the French colonial army. Training was savage and effective: “It was ‘Walk or Die,’ ” David Belle would say. “Survival of the fittest.” In the mayhem of a jungle fight against Viet Minh guerrillas, the boys were told, it would be every man for himself. “He started training like a maniac,” David recalled his father saying. “At night, when other kids were asleep, he would get out of bed to go run in the woods, climb on trees, do jumps, push-ups, balance. He would never stop, repeat his moves twenty, thirty, fifty times.”
It worked; Raymond survived the war, and when the French were chased out of Vietnam, he escaped on a refugee boat and made his way to Lyon. There, his jungle-honed natural-movement skills qualified him to become a member of the sapeurs-pompiers—Paris’s elite paramilitary rescue squad. Fearless and nimble, Raymond became the squad’s go-to man whenever a mission looked impossible. Once, he cat-footed far out on a bridge and managed to pull a suicidal woman to safety. What perplexed David wasn’t his father’s heroics but his mechanics. How on earth do you balance with one arm on a spiderweb of steel when a woman is trying to hurl both of you into the river?
“When I was young, I was doing parcours,” Raymond explained.
“What is parcours?” David asked.
“Parcours, it’s like in life, you have obstacles and you train to overcome them. You search for the best technique. You keep the best, you repeat it, and then you get better.”
David had to figure out the rest on his own, because his superstar dad was rarely around. David teamed up with other outcast boys, and together they began re-creating Raymond’s survival challenges in the streets around their homes. They called themselves the Yamakasi—a Lingala word from the French Congo meaning “Strong man, strong spirit”—and their homemade training method for warriors would go on to become the open-air, underground fight club known as Parkour.
Somehow, this back-alley art with no rules, no training manual, and—God forbid!—no competitions traveled from the mean streets of France to a drugstore in Pennsylvania farm country. Like the original Yamakasi, the two guys I met in the parking lot were using their own bodies to discover the most animal-efficient way to fly over, around, and under the hard edges of the city landscape the way monkeys tumble through the trees. “I got into it because I was so fat,” Neal Schaeffer told me outside the Rite Aid. He’d begun partying after high school and by age twenty had bloated up from 175 pounds to 240. One afternoon, he was in the park watching some strangers “Kong-vault” picnic tables—they’d charge a table, plant their hands, and shoot both feet through their arms like gorillas and fly off the other side—and Neal was talked into giving it a try. Neal was shocked to discover that, even out of shape, once he got over his fear he could master skills that at first looked impossible.
Well, maybe not master. “You’re on this endless trajectory where you’re always getting better, but it’s never good enough,” Neal explained. “That’s what’s so exciting. As soon as you land one jump, you can’t wait to try it again. You’re always looking for ways to make it cleaner, stronger, flow into your next move.” Neal became a member of a local Parkour tribe that likes to train after midnight, when the city is all theirs. Whenever a police car prowls by, they drop to the ground and bang out push-ups. “No matter what time it is, no one bothers you when you’re exercising.” Within a year, Neal was so fit and trim he was able to scramble to the roof of a three-story building and hang off the flagpole like Spider-Man. “You’re back,” he told himself.
But if I really wanted to learn, Neal pointed out, I was in the wrong parking lot. I took his advice and found myself a few weeks later struggling to the top of a twenty-foot retaining wall in a London housing project while a woman half my size and twice my strength stretched out a hand to help me over the top. Ordinarily the climb wouldn’t have been that tough, but after two hours of Shirley Darlington’s wild urban obstacle course, my legs and arms were jelly. Every Thursday, Shirley blasts an e-mail to the hundred or so members of her all-female crew, revealing the secret location for that night’s challenge. She keeps the venue a surprise so her crew never knows what to expect, and she keeps guys away because the biggest threat to Parkour—as even the Yamakasi would agree—is testosterone.
“Young guys turn up, and lots of times all they want is the flash and not the fundamentals,” says Dan Edwardes, the master instructor who gave Shirley her start. “They want to backflip off a wall and leap around on rooftops. With a group of lads, you’ll get the show-off, the questioner, the giddy one. But in a women’s group, there’s none of that. It’s very quiet. They get to it.”
Back in 2005, Dan stepped in to solve a problem the Yamakasi weren’t equipped to handle. No one outside the Yamakasi inner circle really knew what Parkour was supposed to be, and the Yamakasi weren’t interested in explaining. David Belle is an artist, not a teacher; he wants to create new moves, not break down old ones. “The only way you could get into it was if you were determined and crazy enough to find some guys practicing and try to keep up,” Dan explains. “There was no teaching, no guidance.” Dan was in the same fix, but he got lucky: he met François “Forrest” Mahop, a Yamakasi acolyte living in the tough London borough of Westminster. Forrest agreed to let Dan shadow him, and at that moment a crime-fighting duo was formed.
“There’s a lot of gun crime in the area, a lot of k
nife crime,” Forrest would explain. “A lot goes on after dark that most people don’t see.” A Westminster rec director saw Dan and Forrest leaping around the city one day and realized they were doing exactly what kids are always told not to. In his mind, wheels started whirring. The more they tried to keep youngsters off the streets at night, the more they rebelled. Since they were going to run wild anyway, why not run wild under adult supervision? He asked if Forrest and Dan would teach a few sample classes on Friday nights, just to see whether it could keep some bodies off the streets.
“As a government body, that was visionary,” Dan marveled. “In France, Parkour was vilified.”
But when the rest of the Westminster City Council found out, they were appalled. “They thought we were going to train kids to escape the police,” Forrest would recall. Most UK schools believed Parkour was so dangerous and rebellious, they wouldn’t even allow it on the playgrounds. In the United States, a university graduate student made headlines when campus police tasered and handcuffed him after mistaking his Parkour training for a drug episode. (On a personal note, I was disinvited from a speaking event at a public library when I mentioned I’d be talking about Parkour.) Anything that wild and daring has to be a magnet for juvenile delinquents—and it was. More than a hundred kids turned up for the debut session, and it was bedlam.
Then Forrest and Dan got to work. They began hammering home the Parkour ethic—“Respect your environment. Respect other people”—and taking the young thugs out in the streets to train. “They reappropriate their city space,” Dan says. “They’re less likely to vandalize or litter or cause trouble if they have ownership of it.” Soon, something changed.
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