The Road to Ithaca

by Ben Pastor

  Crete provoked recollection. Like a memory machine, its antiquity and starkness dredged up images and feelings from the past, pieces that belonged to him and had been dismissed, or so he thought. Every step Bora took was fraught with an anxious sense that it had an analogy with something experienced years earlier. Heat, dust, the meagre vegetation of summer reminded him of the Sierra near Teruel. Of Spain, where he’d fought a year without a scratch – exactly the expression Preger used to rile him. There, up in those mountains, Remedios initiated him into undreamt of sexual practices, telling him that he was worthy of it. “Why?” he’d asked.

  “Because you’ll suffer much.”

  “Because you’ll suffer much,” she told me. I haven’t seen it thus far, however you want to define suffering. I don’t know how worthy I really was, either. To be sure, learning to outlast an orgasm and keep going was a big thing for a lad of twenty-three brought up not to curse, answer back or masturbate – although through the years, two out of three I did learn to practise. For some months afterwards, he’d thought himself special because he was destined to suffer – as if it weren’t his human lot after all. Yet there are those who don’t get hurt, and you wonder whether they’re at ease or uncomfortable with their state.

  Soon they took a southbound road. All around, the parched air, brittle like old paper, dried his throat and lungs when inhaled. Bora told himself he’d taken Remedios’ words for a prophecy, but was it really? Villiger and those with him at Ampelokastro had once and for all resolved the issue of suffering: and now a man who hadn’t – who longed to be hurt – had come from the other end of Europe to solve their murder.

  Close to an hour was what it took to travel ten miles. The sun, already high on the horizon, baked the crusty sides of the road; clods larger than a man’s fist, hard like rocks, forced the light armoured carriers into a painfully slow, jarring ride. Automatic weapons at the ready, the motorized Jäger sat looking right and left at the barren stretches of land, marked by lonely, dilapidated huts and stone fences built without mortar. Whenever the ruts made the surface impassable, one after the other the vehicles braved the slopes on either side of the road, at risk of overturning. Narrow spots came up where the passage was reduced to a convulsed bed of shingle, over which the carriers listed like clumsy boats. Dust alive with sand-coloured crickets hovered all around, the harsh pitch of cicadas dressed meagre shrubs and rare trees: elements that for thousands of years had belonged to the place and the season. The variables were a smell of fuel and overheated engines, the clank, roll and thud of pebbles as they cannoned under heavily treaded tyres. Its own aggressiveness gave the platoon away.

  Where the path widened ahead, unexpectedly a swarm of tropical blouses pointed to a German roadblock, or another such impediment. The head vehicle braked, halted in idle. Bora checked the place against the map: they weren’t at a crossing exactly, more like a fork in the road, manned by paratroopers. Waldo Preger led them, khaki blouse and narrow-rimmed helmet on his head.

  Bora left his seat, but not the side of the vehicle he’d been riding in. Whatever was going on, if it was the sort of operation that culminates in a reprisal, being there as a witness, in the company of a Greek official, would only complicate his role in Crete. He knew himself well enough to see – as if from the outside – the frowning stillness disguising his own unrest. Any sign of imminent violence, however, was lacking among the paratroopers. They hung around in their field outfits, the loose smocks – bone-sacks, they called them – buttoned around their thighs so as to resemble shorts worn over trousers. Preger himself – feet apart, hands on his hips – was stationed on a boulder higher than the road, like a sea captain surveying his crew from the bridge.

  Goddamn him, I bet there’s nothing going on. Preger’s done this on purpose. If he can’t keep me from looking into things, he’ll slow me down all he can. Waiting for the platoon leader to clear matters with the paratroopers, Bora kicked the closest tyre in frustration. By the map, they were still two or three miles from Ampelokastro, in the middle of nowhere. Now we’ll have to waste an hour or more while Preger pretends – what? To be making the road ahead safe?

  He exceeded in optimism. Soon the dusty Jäger non-com joined him. “Sorry, Rittmeister.” He apologetically shook his head. “We’ll have to leave you here, there’s danger of antipersonnel mines ahead. Road’s off-limits for the next few hours. You’ll have to continue on foot.” Which may have been what Preger had told him and he actually believed, or a story he had agreed with him he’d report, given that in Crete paratroopers and mountain troops seemed to work hand in glove.

  Bora wouldn’t give his old playmate, was looking over his shoulder in Bora’s direction, the satisfaction of seeing he was furious. “Very well.” He grabbed his rucksack from inside the vehicle, followed without haste by Kostaridis. The exchange had been in German, but evidently Kostaridis understood the situation, and probably the motives behind the hold-up as well. He indicated a rather forbidding incline to the left of the road, barely mitigated by a goat trail that zigzagged upwards like a scar.

  “This way, capitano. It’s a bit long, though.”

  Bora stepped in front of him to start the climb. “Are you armed, at least?” he said through his teeth.

  “What for?” Kostaridis shrugged. “If my fellow Cretans or the English want to pick us off, they’ll do it from a distance, with rifles that a handgun isn’t about to stop.”

  They were already clambering through a herd of spiny, yellow-flowering bushes when the Jägers’ vehicles below them ground into reverse to reach a wider place, where they could change direction and return north.

  Bypassing the road meant taking to the wild hills, trusting Kostaridis’ sense of direction (trusting him at all!), wasting precious time. If they came to grief, it would be Bora’s fault for going along. He was nervous in the measure that he wanted to make it quickly to the crime scene. More energetic than his companion, he overworked himself in the first ten minutes, after which he had to stop in the brutal heat for Kostaridis to catch up with him.

  Spain had been wild in ’37, but this terrain was harsher, even lonelier than the Aragon hills, like a carcass picked clean by scavengers. Bora paused because he did not know the way, and because elementary prudence required that he observe Kostaridis, in case he showed any alarm.

  “Just because I keep going, don’t think there’s no one around.” Kostaridis disabused him of the idea. “But we must continue as if we didn’t care.” He’d taken off his jacket and slung it over his shoulder, like a farmer going to the fields. “If you see a mirror flashing on the ridges or hear voices far off, don’t worry. They’re only signals. When they’re about to shoot you, they give no warning.” On cue, a cry muffled by distance, as of someone plunging into an abyss, wavered across the thirsty air. “Hear that? It isn’t for us, it’s meant for somebody down Bisala’s way.”

  Bora wasn’t so sure, but there was nothing he could do about it. In the next few minutes, other isolated calls rose far away – boys’ or women’s shrill cries, as from disembodied creatures. Easy in a place like this to believe in spirits that inhabit nature, Bora thought.

  They kept to the sloping sides of the hills to avoid becoming easy targets on the ridges. It was a precarious balancing act, especially for Kostaridis’ sandals. There were turns where, far below, they could see the road they’d be following had they not been prevented from doing so. Distances trembled with heat where the mountains began, mountains faded into the bright sky behind them; only the protection provided by his sunglasses made it possible for Bora to stare at the rugged rocky horizon, or at the sky.

  “Did Professor Villiger own a car?” he asked Kostaridis, turning to him. “How did he travel to Iraklion?”

  “He seldom did. Unlike most villa owners who spend part of the week in town, renting an occasional room or as guests of friends, he stayed put. Came by bus to Iraklion once a month to do chores, his banking and dine at the Megaron or Knossos Hotel.” (B
ora noticed Kostaridis pronounced the name Knossos with the accent on the last syllable, not on the first as in classical Greek.) “For longer trips around the island one usually travels by public car or rides a mule, depending on the itinerary. To catch the bus near Keramoutsi, I expect he walked. Did I tell you that two weeks prior to his death he enquired about passenger ships leaving Crete?”

  Bora turned, and risked stumbling. “You did not. Leaving for where?”

  “Nowhere specific. Leaving Crete. Africa being out of the question because of the war, I’d say that either he was looking into a trip to Turkey, or to another non-European country.”

  “He dealt with the National Bank, right? Has anyone looked into his account or deposit box?”

  “Oh, yes.” Kostaridis took advantage of the questions to catch his breath. Hoofing along the scrub of the incline, where slippery rocks made it necessary to grip with both hands, he’d had to put his jacket back on. He dripped with sweat. “It was done on the first of June.”

  “The first of June was a Sunday!”

  “It wasn’t done, shall we say, during regular banking hours. I believe it’s called a victor’s privilege. When I checked on it, the paperwork relative to his deposits wasn’t there. To the best of his memory, the clerk told me the last amount was in excess of 10,000 German marks, none of which the professor reportedly turned into ready money. But every first Monday of the month, considerable sums of cash in German marks arrived for him from an undisclosed account in Rhodes, by special courier. That’s possibly why his safe-deposit box was emptied, and at present there’s no deposit left at the National Bank under Signor Filligi’s name.”

  Possibly? Ten thousand marks are a German general’s yearly pay. Bora balanced in a crouch to remove burs from his socks. “When we first met you only spoke of ‘regular money transfers’ from Switzerland!”

  “You seemed somewhat impatient to wrap up the conversation, capitano. Besides, I didn’t want to give you all the bad news at once.”

  Fuck. Bora cursed to himself without saying the word, staring at the policeman. Another hell of a detail to look into. If Villiger’s official employer was Reichskommissar Himmler, deposits – routed through Switzerland by way of Rhodes in order to avoid incidents – could be hefty. But to this extent…? And if for whatever reason large amounts of cash were stashed in his deposit box at Iraklion, no surprise that it had been opened. He stood up quickly, losing and regaining his balance in succession. “Cash and valuables could attract many, not excluding bank employees. When you say ‘emptied’, do you mean ‘opened with a key’ or ‘broken into’?”

  “I mean to say that Signor Filligi’s deposit box was simply opened by German paratroopers, who were in possession of the key, on the morning of 1 June. The bank director had to unlock the doors for them.” Kostaridis mopped his neck with a crumpled handkerchief. “Fifteen more minutes.” He sucked in his breath. “Then you’ll be able to see the villa way down there.”

  So it was. Still distant, eventually Ampelokastro came into view, on a shelf less elevated than the travellers’ lookout but higher than the road leading to its gate. From where Bora and Kostaridis stood, a spiderweb of other trails and mountain roads showed, criss-crossing the dramatic landscape in all directions. No vineyards grew around Ampelokastro despite the meaning of its name, only solemn olive trees twisted by time into fantastic shapes. Through Bora’s green lenses, even in the bone-dry light of day, their pale heads of small leaves resembled schools of silvery fish. Tall, long-maned palm trees gave the enclosed garden the look of an oasis, but an oasis you see in films, built to suit. The two-storey stucco house, of a fading oxblood red, sat half-seen behind the luxuriant greenery. To someone drawing close from the same level, nothing but the roof would be visible above the garden wall. It remained to be seen where Sergeant Major Powell had supposedly been sitting with his camera when he watched Preger’s men march down and walk through the gate.

  At the bottom of the gully separating Villiger’s house from the opposite hill, a small river or seasonal brook – the contended Potamos – had carved a deep bed, lined with dwarf willows and water-seeking grasses. Rifat Bey’s Sphingokephalo must be the pale ochre, sprawling house built on that ridge, steeper and nearly bald, behind a long terrace parapet overlooking the valley. Rows of vines covered the rolling ground beyond the dour profile of the hill, as far as the eye could see. South, west and eventually up the mountains, more ledges, yellow bushes, sparse huts or chapels perched on spurs of rock, white and opaque like wave-tossed shells.

  Out of the depths of that solitary vista, a savage male voice called out. Impossible to locate as echoes rebounded and multiplied it, it tore the heat-trembling air, answered by another further off, and by more echoes. The voices of hunters, of fishermen crying out to others that the prey was approaching the net. “That might be for us,” Kostaridis commented with a fatalistic twitch of his lips. “We’d better go down. It’s safer.”

  It took another quarter of an hour, during which Ampelokastro disappeared from view as Kostaridis hiked the back road through a defile so steep and confined both men had to balance by propping themselves on the rock walls with their hands, and squeeze sideways as it tapered off to a crevice at the lower end. Bora removed and hand-carried his rucksack in order to fit; at his request, and not only because he knew the way, Kostaridis preceded him.

  Watching the policeman press on like a cork caught in a bottleneck, Bora felt no sympathy: his own knees and chest rubbed against the scraggy stone wall. Because he couldn’t reach for the holster on his left hip if he needed to, he’d driven the pistol into the right pocket of his shorts, where it bulged and chafed his thigh. By God, if this is some form of trap the Greek’s drawing me into, I can’t even shoot straight.

  A trap, at least for now, it was not. From the high ground they reached a knoll where Kostaridis said, “See? If you go down that way, by and by you find yourself on the road, but south of Ampelokastro. You have to backtrack and enter the garden through the rear gate.”

  “No. I want to enter as Sergeant Major Powell did, from the front.”

  “This way, then.”

  They rejoined the road from Iraklion – by Bora’s map still nearly a mile away from Ampelokastro. The dusty verge of the road was alive with insects; a solitary cicada opened the chirring season far afield. A few steps beyond, as they passed an unremarkable spot, Kostaridis said, “See that shrub? Your War Crimes colleagues notified us that when they first drove to Ampelokastro, they passed by two dead Englishmen about there. Shot point-blank. No papers, no other identification on them, except their uniforms.”

  “Two dead Englishmen: is that all?” Bora looked indifferently toward the place indicated. “I’ve seen photos of German paratroopers robbed even of their boots.”

  Kostaridis ignored the provocation. “Yes, well. Dead soldiers were popping up everywhere during those first days.”

  “God will know them even without a name on their graves, Epitropos. Any of us might end up that way.”

  Bora’s watch read 8.35 when they reached the garden gate, both the worse for wear. Kostaridis had a hole in his sad-looking left sock. He pulled the tip of it and tucked it under his big toe as Bora pretended to look elsewhere. What small, cottony clouds had topped the mountains had long since evaporated; the bright sky crowded everything. The moment Bora took off his sunglasses, even the faded colours of summer exploded into radiance all around, whites turned incandescent: as upon his first arrival, he struggled not to feel blinded by the excess light.

  The road from Iraklion lapped the gate in a shallow curve; there, it widened into a sandy space before skirting the property along the brook and heading south. The segment along the garden wall was dilapidated; it made sense now why the paratroopers had entered the garden, to bypass the crumbling spot. Bora followed with his eyes a second trail that came down from the foot of Sphingokephalo Hill, passing over a reedy culvert and across the brook. If the report Preger had showed him was cor
rect, that trail came from the west, and the paratroopers had arrived from that direction. A man concealed in the muddy brook bed could crawl into the culvert to avoid detection and then emerge far enough away to fix the soldiers’ movements on film: the angle from which the photos were taken confirmed that possibility.

  An overheated Kostaridis fanned himself by the wide-open garden gate. Once they had walked past it, he pointed out the gravel, combed and mounded by the tyres of ambulances or other vehicles that had manoeuvred in and out. A bucket by the front steps must have served to wash the dog’s blood away. “It wasn’t there when we first came,” he told Bora. “But who knows how many have since passed through here. See, they also piled up the gore-soaked carpets out there and tried to burn them. Good thing they stopped halfway. Look at the trees’ lower leaves, they came close to torching them.”

  Bora had replaced the pistol in its holster, but kept it unlatched. “The loose dirt in the flowerbed? Were the two dead Brits buried there?”

  “No, we took them to town. I bet it’s where they buried the dog.”

  “Was the dog killed by one or more shots? I couldn’t tell from the photos.”

  Kostaridis’ thumb pointed to his own forehead. “Single pistol shot.”

  The front door was ajar. From the outside, there was no evidence of a broken lock, but looking closer there were signs it had been kicked in. Bora used the toe of his boot to push it, and stepped in first. No vestibule, no hallway; he found himself directly in the large room where Villiger and the others were killed. An indefinite odour, best left unexplored, hung in the air. Blood had dried on the flooring and walls. That soldiers had camped here overnight was proven by the scatter of empty food cans and bottles, but there had been looting as well, before, during or after the Germans’ bivouac. The place Bora knew from the photographs was hardly recognizable: it looked as though it had been abandoned for years. The furniture was gone, except for the pieces built in or too large to drag out through the door; books – taken off the shelves to search for valuables behind them? – lay in heaps. Wading through the broken odds and ends dropped by pilferers, Bora paced all around the killing area, where blood had seeped through the carpets to the floor. The image of a carcass picked clean came back to his mind.