Aphrodite's Smile

by Stuart Harrison

  The bullet hit Metkas in the back. He grunted as he hit the ground and then lay still. The other prisoner had frozen in surprise but now, certain that he was about to be shot, he flung his shovel aside and made a dash through the woods. Hassel let him go, watching until he had vanished in the darkness. With his pistol still trained on Metkas he went closer. He was still breathing. He bent down on one knee and felt for the pulse in his neck but it was very weak. He looked around for Bergen’s pistol, but couldn’t see it. He thought perhaps it was underneath Metkas, but then he heard a movement behind him and he realised his mistake.

  He felt the barrel of the gun touch his head, but he never heard the shot which sent a bullet through his brain and blew off the front of his skull.

  The remainder of Schmidt’s account described what had happened after he returned to the Antounnetta. Bergen ordered the ship to leave the bay on a course for the mainland, but she had barely gone past the headland before there was an explosion from the engine room. The Antounnetta had gone down quickly, but Bergen and the handful of remaining survivors had taken to the lifeboats. Bergen had ordered the men to continue on their course. The next day they were picked up by a German ship from Patras, but by then Bergen was dead. During the night when he had fallen asleep, Schmidt had strangled him with a bootlace and then dumped his body over the side.

  When the ship which rescued them was attacked by Allied planes, Schmidt had found himself in the oily water swimming for his life. Amid the screams and cries of the dying he had struck out for the mainland shore where he had eventually washed up half drowned. Afterwards he had stolen some clothes and discarded his uniform. For him the war was over.

  It was only much later that he discovered that he had been the sole survivor from the Antounnetta. He returned to Germany after the war having assumed the identity of a dead soldier, and eventually became a builder. He married a girl he met and together they had a family of three children, but when they were quite young his wife had left him. As he grew older he became bitter and disillusioned, he began drinking and fell on hard times. Sometimes he thought about what had happened during the war. He suffered from nightmares. He remembered the crates which Bergen had forced the prisoners to bury, though he was certain that the young one who had escaped would have gone back soon afterwards and recovered whatever treasure they contained.

  It was only when he read by chance of the discovery of some artefacts in a collection in Switzerland that he recognised the pictures and thought of the statue he had seen on the Antounnetta. He guessed that the young prisoner must have sold the artefacts he had dug up after the war, which explained how they came to be in Switzerland. But the statue played on Schmidt’s mind for weeks afterwards. He wondered if it could still be on the wreck of the Antounnetta. If the statue had been found, why was there no mention of it? In the end, he resolved to get enough money somehow to travel to Greece, and when he read that the artefacts would be returned to the museum in Argostoli he decided to go there.

  It was there that he had met my father, who had realised that the verse Schmidt described must reveal the location of the temple. He already guessed from what Schmidt had told him that it was somewhere near Platrithias. There was a church on a low hill there which matched the description of the one Schmidt had seen all those years earlier, and he believed the two seas referred to the strait between Ithaca and Kephalonia and the Ionian sea that stretched to the mainland.

  My father had also realised that the young prisoner who had escaped must have been Alkimos Kounidis. He had used the money he made to buy a freighter to start his shipping business.

  Now I understood the hollow in the ground on the headland. Kounidis had buried Hassel and Metkas after he had recovered the crates, but had not bothered to refill the hole. He knew that nobody ever went there and even if somebody did stumble over it, by then nature would have disguised what had happened.

  I closed the journal. Eleni was still lying on the floor. I ordered her up. Her eyes glowed with malice. I wondered how much of this she knew, and what made her and her husband loyal to a man like Kounidis. Perhaps they owed him a debt of loyalty. Another blood tie from the war.

  There was one thing I hadn’t understood about Kounidis’s fictional account of the sinking of the Antounnetta. Why had he portrayed Hassel as being no better than the SS man Bergen, when Hassel had saved his life? But when I looked again at the pictures of Julia Zannas on the shelf, I knew the answer.

  I tossed the journal on the table and brushed past Eleni without another word.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I found a pick-up truck outside the house which I assumed belonged to Kounidis’s retainers who appeared to have been in the process of packing to leave. The keys were in it and within a few minutes I was heading north along the coast road. At Stavros I took the mountain road. As it climbed, the air became cooler. When I arrived at the monastery it was still and quiet except for the distant clank of goat bells.

  I parked outside the closed gates. On the road below, a truck headed down the mountain from the village of Anoghi, the sound of the engine rising and falling as the driver negotiated the bends. The noise grew fainter as it wound back and forth towards the coast.

  A chain was looped through the metal bars on the gate but there was no padlock. Though the courtyard inside was empty, the door to the church was open and I wondered if I was expected. As I pushed the gate open I could feel unseen eyes observing me. My footsteps echoed around the walls.

  The light was dim inside the church. There was nobody there. The silence was oppressive. I thought of the chapel at school, remembering how even a cough seemed an insult to the solemnity which was steeped into the very stones. At the end of the aisle beneath the domed roof, the Panaghia looked down at me from her alcove.

  A sound came from the door which led to the passage connecting the church to the main building, and Kounidis appeared. He had Alex with him, a pistol held against her back. Uncertainty and fear flashed in her eyes. There was no sign of the others, but I assumed they were already locked in a room somewhere underneath the monastery.

  Kounidis regarded me quizzically, as if he was surprised that I had come, but he didn’t appear concerned.

  ‘I get the feeling you were expecting me,’ I said.

  He produced a mobile phone from his pocket. ‘I had hoped you might change your mind. But, of course, Eleni told me you were coming.’

  I didn’t know what he meant by his first remark, but I could almost have laughed at the irony of his producing a cell phone, such a symbol of modernity amidst all the tangled remnants of the past. ‘Did Eleni tell you about your chauffeur? I’m afraid he’s going to have a bit of a headache.’

  ‘Actually, he is dead.’

  I was shocked. Not only because I had killed a man, but also because Kounidis relayed the information with apparent unconcern. He smiled at my reaction.

  ‘Do not distress yourself, Robert. I am sure you did not mean to kill him. Any more than I intended to kill your father. You may not believe me, but his death was an accident.’

  ‘He’s lying, Robert,’ Alex cut in. ‘He murdered Eric Schmidt and he killed your father because he didn’t want anyone to know the truth about where he got the money to start his business after the war.’

  ‘It is true I did not want your father to find the Antounnetta,’ Kounidis said. ‘But I did not kill him. I tried to persuade him to leave the past where it belongs. But he would not listen. That morning we argued. He clutched at his chest. It was his heart. Before I could help him he fell into the harbour. There was nothing I could do. Whether you believe it or not, I am telling you the truth, Robert. Your father was my friend for many years.’

  ‘What about Schmidt? Was that an accident too?’ I said sceptically.

  Kounidis made a dismissive gesture. ‘I have no qualms about killing Schmidt. After your father’s heart attack, Schmidt tried to blackmail me. He said if I gave him money he would leave and nobody would know.’


  ‘But that wasn’t true,’ I pointed out. ‘My father already knew.’

  ‘Schmidt betrayed your father.’ Kounidis gestured for me to move towards the window, keeping Alex between us. ‘You came alone,’ he said when he saw the empty road.

  ‘How do you know I didn’t call the police before I came?’

  He smiled tolerantly. ‘I think if that were true, Miros Theonas would be here by now, don’t you? Perhaps you believed that you would single-handedly save the day using the pistol that I know you have in your possession. Please give it to me.’

  ‘I left it in the car.’ I held my arms away from my body.

  ‘Please, do not insult me,’ Kounidis chided.

  ‘See for yourself.’

  He smiled at the invitation, suspecting trickery, but pushed Alex forward. ‘Empty his pockets,’ he told her, while pointing the pistol at us with a steady hand.

  She looked at me questioningly. I told her to go ahead. She searched hesitantly as if she expected that I had some kind of plan in mind, but when she found nothing she looked bewildered.

  ‘Again you surprise me,’ Kounidis said. ‘I assume that your judgement has been affected by the desire for revenge. Or is it perhaps the misplaced gallantry of youth?’ He looked at Alex coldly. ‘Is that it, Robert? You came to save Alex, even though she betrayed you.’

  ‘You mean the way Julia betrayed you?’ I said.

  He wasn’t surprised that I knew, but Alex looked at me uncomprehendingly. ‘Hasn’t he told you? There’s a room in his house full of pictures of Julia taken when she was young. He was in love with her.’

  She turned to him in disbelief. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘At first I couldn’t work out why he had made up that whole story about Hassel being a torturer and a killer,’ I said, and then I addressed Kounidis directly again. ‘But when I saw that room I understood. You did it for revenge. To punish Julia. You wanted to hurt her. And to make sure the people of Ithaca hated her.’

  ‘She was lucky to survive after what she did!’ Kounidis said bitterly. ‘Her own father would have killed her if she had not escaped to Kephalonia.’

  ‘What did she do except save a man into whose arms she was practically forced?’

  ‘She was a whore for that Nazi!’ The gun in his hand trembled. ‘She knew that I loved her. It was only because her father would not accept me that I could not marry her. My family was poor.’

  Kounidis stared at Alex with such loathing that she shrank back from him. ‘You should know how I felt, Robert. I watched you and Dimitri pant after Alex like dogs after a bitch in heat. She made fools of you both. She betrayed you just as her grandmother betrayed me when she had that Nazi’s bastard!’

  I shook my head. ‘You’re wrong. Julia loved Hassel, but she never slept with him.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Alex asked.

  I kept my gaze fixed on Kounidis. ‘Think about it. She was a simple Greek girl brought up in a traditional family. She’d had loyalty to the church and her family drummed into her since before she could walk. She’d never even been alone with a man before she met Hassel. I don’t believe she just cast all that aside.’

  ‘She went with him willingly that day!’ Kounidis cut in.

  ‘Yes, because she wanted to save him. But that doesn’t mean she slept with him. Julia told Alex’s mother that she was raped.’

  Kounidis hesitated. The beginnings of doubt, and perhaps understanding flickered in his eye, though he wasn’t ready to acknowledge what I knew to be the truth. ‘She lied!’

  ‘That’s what Alex thought. She believed her grandmother was trying to protect his family.’ I looked at Alex. I hated the fact that she had to find out the truth this way. ‘You said when she died she still loved Hassel after all these years. You didn’t see how that could be if he had raped her? You were right. But it wasn’t Hassel’s family she was protecting. It was your mother.’

  Her confusion began to clear. She looked at Kounidis with growing horror as he too began to suspect the truth which hatred had blinded him to for all these years.

  ‘What happened?’ I said to him. ‘After you escaped from the headland that night you went to her didn’t you? You told her Hassel was dead. The man she loved was dead.’

  ‘Yes, I told her that,’ Kounidis said, though suddenly he sounded uncertain as he struggled to hold on to the delusion he had maintained for all these years. ‘I told her that I saw his brains blown out with my own eyes.’

  ‘And I bet you enjoyed telling her about it. It was your revenge. But that wasn’t enough. You couldn’t stand the fact that even then it was still him that she loved. Was it you who took her to Kephalonia?’ I saw that I was right. ‘Despite everything, you didn’t want her to be killed, did you? Instead you raped her.’

  Kounidis shook his head, but his mute denial lacked conviction. He stared at Alex. The hand that held the gun dropped to his side.

  ‘Hassel was a good man,’ I went on. ‘He wouldn’t have slept with Julia even if she had been willing. He would have understood what it meant to her. On the way here I wondered why she didn’t tell you. She didn’t did she? But maybe it was because she didn’t want you to have the satisfaction. Instead she endured what you did to her, and for the rest of her life she hated you. But she lived. She got away to England and she had a daughter. Your daughter.’

  Kounidis sagged like a man who suddenly had to bear a tremendous weight. The pistol fell from his hand and clattered to the ground. As the terrible realisation of what he had done hit home, the flesh on his face appeared to cave in. He had grown rich, but he had never had children or found happiness. Though he’d been married once, I suspected that the only woman he had ever really loved was Julia. But bitterness had turned his love to hate. In the end it had poisoned his life far more than it had Julia’s.

  And all the time the child that Julia carried was his. Alex was his grandchild. He saw before him living proof of the ultimate waste of his life. His flesh and blood, who stared back at him with horror and disgust.

  The final irony was too much for him. The light faded from his eyes. It was as if he died right before us. Neither of us tried to stop him as he shambled, ashen-faced from the church. At the doorway he paused, and I thought for a moment that he would look back, but then he stepped outside and was gone.

  He was found days later on the mountainside. His body had been gnawed at by animals and the crows had taken his eyes. The empty sockets gazed unseeing towards the sky, as blind in death as he had been in life.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The smell of roasting corn drifted from a food stand on the wharf. There was a festive mood in the air. The cafés were busy serving coffee and sweets. People from all over the island had gathered at the square in Vathy. Many were dressed in their best church clothes, the older women in black and the young in bright-coloured skirts. The devout murmured solemn prayers and fingered icons of the Virgin, others smiled and talked happily to friends and neighbours. Men stood in groups smoking cigarettes, fingering newly-shaved jaws, their jackets already thrown over their shoulders in the heat, while children ran in between them playing noisily.

  It was almost two months since Kounidis had died. I hadn’t seen Alex since that day. Shortly afterwards I had returned to London to devote some time to my ailing business. The distraction had been time-consuming and welcome. I had deliberately immersed myself in work to the exclusion of all else. By the time I went home each night I was so tired I fell into bed exhausted, and if I dreamed I didn’t remember what about. As the weeks went by I rearranged my business finances and sold the Fulham warehouse on at a loss. I would survive, though for a while it was touch and go.

  Eventually I began to ease off. I gave myself time to think about my father and the way I had lived my life. One night, quite unexpectedly I was cooking something in the mircrowave and I felt my eyes brim with tears. Before I could control myself I was choking back heaving sobs. I gave in. All the repressed feelings, the
confusion of love and resentment, the knowledge of wasted years, I let it all go, and afterwards I felt better.

  I found Alicia. She was living with a friend, and when I approached her one day as she left the flat, her eyes widened and she started in surprise. I asked her to go for a coffee with me, and though at first she refused, I persuaded her. She was quiet initially, but gradually as I told her some of what had happened on Ithaca, she began to ask questions. She wanted to know why I had found her. I told her that I was sorry about what had happened between us. I should have tried to understand her. I had seen the world in black-and-white then, and I now knew it was wrong to think that way because people make mistakes. I told her I understood that we are all of us made of shades of grey. People can never be exactly what we want them to be.

  Tears filled her eyes. She looked down at the table, and when she looked up again she tried to smile. She told me she had met somebody and that things were working out so far. She asked me about Alex. She asked if I was in love with her.

  When we left the café we hugged and wished each other well. As I watched her leave, I felt a lingering ache of regret.

  Now I had returned to Ithaca for the festival of the Panaghia. As I sat with Irene at a table outside a kefenio in the square, the crowd lowered their heads while the priest performed the blessing. The statue of the Panaghia had been placed on the back of a truck. Since being salvaged from the wreck, she had been painted and restored and though her smile remained imbued with deep sadness, somehow the colours she now wore made her seem less melancholy.

  I searched the crowd, looking for Alex. Irene had told me that she too had come back to the island. She had seen her with Dimitri a few days before. When I finally spotted her, they were together. They were talking, her hand resting on his arm. I experienced a terrible emptiness when I saw them together. She looked beautiful. Her skin was tanned the colour of honey and she seemed almost to glow. She was smiling happily, but then for a moment she was distracted and her gaze swept restlessly over the crowd. When she saw me she faltered, then she turned and said something to Dimitri. His smile faded a little and he looked across at me, then she was coming towards me and I got up to meet her.