It was something that needed checking out.
And it was something Jimmy would be informing Cairo about, before the day was over.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The realization that over the last few months troop numbers in outlying areas had substantially decreased, together with a rumour that the Germans were beginning to send their nurses home, had had a profound impact at Kalamata. Everyone was certain that the end of the occupation was in sight and, despite the conflict of interests taking place between Communist-led and non-Communist-led resistance groups, spirits were high. Lewis and the team had always carefully rationed their visits to the village, not because they were fearful for their own safety, but because if they were to be found there, it was the village and the villagers that would suffer.
Now such caution was relaxed, and Lewis and the team were enjoying the comforts of Andre and Agata’s cafeneion. Aminta and Rhea Mamalakis and their children were also there, as were Apollonia and old Zenobia and her granddaughter. All in all, it was quite a glendi, with children rushing around everywhere, raki glasses clinking and gales of laughter rising to the ceiling.
Only Kate was aware of how agonizingly difficult Ella was finding it, having all the team together in riotous high spirits, and Christos – who had always been the centre of any such gathering – no longer the heart and soul of it.
‘Auntie Kate! Auntie Kate! Come outside and play catch with me,’ Kostas Alfred shouted, rushing up to her and throwing his arms around her legs.
Because she was in the village and not on a mountainside, a rifle over her shoulder, Kate wasn’t wearing knee-high boots and breeches. Instead, wearing a black skirt, black blouse and a black bolero, she was indistinguishable from all the other women of the village. With her skirt swinging a couple of inches below her knees, she headed out of the cafeneion and into the square, with Kostas Alfred trotting happily by her side.
Although it was now September and Kalamata was high in the mountains, the sun was still hot and, in retrospect, it was a miracle the glendi hadn’t been taking place out of doors, for even before she and Kostas Alfred had begun playing, she heard the unmistakable sound of approaching German jeeps.
The flat-roofed, higgledy-piggledy whitewashed stone houses on the other side of the square blocked any view of the plateau, but from the sound of their engines, the jeeps had already crested it – and would be sweeping into the village square within minutes.
Yanking Kostas Alfred off his feet, Kate sprinted with him back into the cafeneion, shouting, ‘There are jeeps approaching!’
Every man grabbed the rifle that was never far from him, and Lewis rasped, ‘Everyone but Andre upstairs! We can’t shoot our way out, with women and children in the room. Andre, keep your head. Kate, if they make a move towards the stairs, get the children out, whatever the cost!’
As the team took the stairs two and three steps at a time, the jeeps could be heard entering the square. Kate said to Ella, ‘Cover your hair. Keep in the background. Zenobia, start cleaning the bar. Rhea, grab a bowl. Look as if you’re preparing food. Aminta, be brushing the floor. Apollonia, play a noisy game with the children.’ While giving instructions she was tying a head-kerchief over her hair. ‘Let them walk in on a scene of normal activity. Agata, be ready with raki.’
As the jeeps drew up outside the cafeneion, her thoughts were racing. What if Kostas Alfred started chattering in English? What if Orestes Mamalakis said his daddy was upstairs? What if . . . ?
There came the sound of men jumping from the jeeps and she shut her mind to her fears and, her heart pumping like a piston, waited for the cafeneion’s door to burst open.
It didn’t do so. Instead, seemingly in no hurry, a German major opened the door and strolled into the room, six of his men with him.
‘Soldiers!’ Kostas Alfred squealed excitedly in Greek. ‘Soldiers!’
The major came to a halt and scanned the room.
Kate felt her heartbeat steady. He wasn’t carrying a bullwhip. And he hadn’t come in with all his men, for as there had been the sound of more than one jeep pulling up, it meant there were more soldiers still outside. He didn’t look as if he was on a brutal reprisal or search mission.
‘Would you and your soldiers like wine, Major?’ she asked.
‘No, thank you. Where are your men?’
Fiercely hoping the major would be ignorant as to the months in which sheep were sheared, and with a carelessness she was far from feeling, she said, ‘Our men are all out on the high pastures, shearing sheep. We have local-made raki, Major. And cheese pasties. I made the cheese pasties myself. They are very good.’
‘I’m not interested in pasties and raki.’ He looked towards Andre. ‘Rumour has it that a Minoan palace has been found on your plateau. I would like to see it.’
Agata dropped one of the glasses she was carrying.
From the other side of the ceiling there came the sound of a movement, quickly stilled.
Andre, at a loss as to how to reply, said, ‘Speak to the girl. She has to do with such things.’
‘The palace?’ Kate was alarmed at how good the major’s Greek was. It meant that any thoughtless words would be immediately understood. ‘You would like to see it? Then of course I will show it to you. It is on the far side of the plateau. A fifteen-minute walk. Your men, I think, would like to see it as well? It is of great interest.’
Even to Zenobia it was obvious that the ‘palace’ she was going to show him was the relatively unimportant villa Lewis had excavated eight years ago.
As she followed the major out of the cafeneion, Kate said to Aminta, aware that the soldiers who hadn’t yet entered the cafeneion might still do so, ‘Don’t forget the priest is expecting the older children for their weekly lesson. You’d best take them now or they’ll be late.’
Aminta’s relief at being able to unsuspiciously shepherd the three- and four-year-olds out of harm’s way was vast, and Kate’s relief was just as great – especially as Kalamata didn’t have a priest, and Zenobia hadn’t bewilderedly and loudly pointed this out.
As she led the way across the plateau, passing the village fields and then Kalamata’s canvas-sailed windmills, the major and a lieutenant conversed in German.
Kate’s German wasn’t fluent, but she had studied it to school level, plus what she’d picked up over years of friendship with Helmut.
‘With a withdrawal to Canea, this is my last chance to see if the rumour is true’ was a sentence she heard that explained the laid-back attitude of the major and his men. They were leaving central Crete for good and no longer gave a fig for policing and brutalizing its population.
She also picked up enough to know that the major wasn’t idly interested in Minoan palaces, but had an academic knowledge of them. The German words for Proto-palatial and Neo-palatial were unmistakable. As he was a classicist, it explained his ability to speak Greek, and she thought he was probably more than just a classicist. The more she listened to him, the more certain she became that he was a classicist who was also an archaeologist.
As the windmills were left behind them and they approached the site of the villa, she reminded herself that whatever was said when they reached it, she couldn’t allow herself to sound any more knowledgeable than an ordinary village girl. The present German indifference wouldn’t stretch to remaining indifferent, if they suspected she wasn’t what she appeared to be – and the consequences of that would be a thorough search of the cafeneion. At the thought of the Germans storming up the narrow stairs and Lewis and the team storming down them, and of the bloodshed and deaths that would result, her stomach churned.
‘Ah! We are there,’ the major said suddenly. ‘I see the remains!’
Minutes later he said to his lieutenant, ‘The paving we are now standing on is over three thousand years old. It would have been a small courtyard, I think. An entrance courtyard. See these round bases in the ground? Columns would once have stood on them and here . . . yes . . . here would have
been the entrance vestibule.’
He frowned suddenly, looking around him. ‘It is very small.’
It was very small. Within a few strides he had crossed into the area where the main hall of the villa had once stood.
‘Ha! A bigger entrance porch,’ the major said in German that Kate was still able to understand. ‘See how there would have been three exits here?’
Despite all her anxieties as to what was taking place back at the cafeneion, and how the major was going to accept his disappointment when he realized the archaeological remains were not going to indicate a great central courtyard and a king’s megaron, she couldn’t help but be impressed at his speedy understanding of what he was seeing.
‘These flooring remains are limestone,’ he was saying now. ‘See how they are different from the gypsum in the footings, indicating passageways?’
The ever-dutiful lieutenant nodded his head and feigned deep interest.
Seconds later came the moment Kate had been waiting for.
Standing at the central axis of the villa, the major said, ‘Is this it? Traces of a vestibule, a hall, a central room, passageways and a series of rooms only big enough to be storerooms?’
‘Yes,’ she said guilelessly, adding in typical Cretan idiom, ‘It is wonderful, is it not? Wonderful it is.’
The major, who was probably Lewis’s age and verged on being good-looking, breathed in hard, his nostrils whitening. ‘Not to me, it isn’t!’ he said explosively. ‘This is a Minoan country house, not a palace. Are you sure there are no other remains nearby?’
‘No. Here is the palace. Here it is. Why should there be another one?’
The major swore. Then, barking an order towards the soldiers who hadn’t accompanied him on his inspection of the site, and with his lieutenant at his side, he swung on his heel, striding off at a furious pace back to the village.
What Kate had hoped she would find when they arrived was a cafeneion empty of all children old enough to chatter and let slip that fathers, godfathers and uncles were only a ceiling space away. She had also hoped to find the cafeneion as empty of soldiers as when they had left. Instead, although the older children were thankfully no longer there, all the soldiers who had previously been sitting in the jeeps were now in the cafeneion and were hard at work having a good time.
Drink was flowing. Andre was playing his fiddle and looking so unhappy about it, it was obvious he’d been forced into doing so. A couple of the soldiers, arms around each other’s shoulders, were attempting to dance a Cretan maleviziotis. Rhea was being whirled around the floor by an inebriated corporal. Ella was sitting on the lap of a bull-necked sergeant. Apollonia had a gurgling Alice Ariadne on her knee, and Zenobia, finding herself at a glendi with the enemy, was rocking backwards and forwards in bewildered anguish.
Kate gave Rhea, Ella and Apollonia full marks for having staved off a search of the upper rooms by distracting the soldiers as they had, but for how long could it go on? What if the corporal and the sergeant thought it a good idea to take Rhea and Ella upstairs and get to know them better? Counting the major, there were eighteen Germans in the cafeneion. What chance would seven men armed with rifles have against eighteen men armed with pistols – especially when the seven would be desperately trying to avoid hitting six women and a baby in the crossfire.
‘Achtung!’ The major shouted. ‘Raus!’
The dancing stopped instantly. The sergeant leapt to his feet so swiftly that Ella tumbled to the floor. Apprehensively, not knowing what was going to come next, Andre lowered his fiddle and his bow. Unhappy at the sudden cessation of noise, Alice Ariadne began howling.
The major noticed her for the first time. ‘Why does that child have red hair?’ he demanded, as all the soldiers except for the lieutenant beat a hasty retreat from the room. ‘Cretan children have black hair.’
‘Not when they have Venetian heritage, Major,’ Kate said swiftly.
‘Is that so?’ Ice-blue eyes held hers.
The lieutenant said conversationally, ‘I believe many northern Italian women are blondes, Major.’
Not acknowledging the remark, and still holding her eyes, the major said with deep feeling, ‘And according to this young woman, many Minoan palaces are only villas!’
With that, he broke eye contact with her and looked thoughtfully up at the ceiling.
Kate’s heart banged so hard against her ribs that she felt as if she was about to have heart failure. As Ella shot her an agonized glance, the major, one hand on the pistol at his hip, began walking towards the stairs.
Struggling to keep the terror she was feeling from showing in her voice, Kate said, ‘Allow me to come with you, Major.’
As he began climbing the wooden stairs, she climbed them behind him, saying, ‘My young sister is up here. She has mumps. It is why our menfolk have gone to shear sheep. They are frightened of catching it and becoming sterile.’
The major came to an abrupt halt.
On both floors of the cafeneion a pin could have been heard to drop.
After a pause that seemed to go on forever, he swung round on her, saying brusquely, ‘If the child is sick, I shall not disturb her.’ And then he pushed past her and stormed out of the cafeneion, furious at being seen to be no different from a Cretan shepherd, when it came to the fear of catching mumps, and furious at being led on a wild goose chase where a supposed Minoan palace was concerned.
Later, as Angelos Mamalakis teasingly demanded to know what kind of a wife he had, who danced with Germans, and as, for the first time in public, Pericles put his arm around Apollonia’s shoulders and hugged her hard against him, Ella said, weak-kneed with relief, ‘Thank God Nikoleta wasn’t here. The major might have recognized her from the Villa Ariadne, or from “Wanted” posters.’
‘And then we would have all been in the soup,’ Adonis said cheerfully. ‘And if you’re happy to sit on a billy-goat’s knee Ella, why won’t you sit on mine?’
Nikoleta was in a mountain village of strong resistance sympathies seventy-eight miles away. It nestled beneath a gigantic limestone crag, and beyond the crag, as the slopes steepened, were thick woods of pine and cypress. Somewhere in the higher reaches of the woods Sholto and the men of the village were having a meeting with a Communist Kapetan and, as the Kapetan in question would have taken great exception to a woman being at the meeting, she had stayed in the village, sitting on the steps of its tiny church, eating preserved cherries given to her by one of the village women.
The door behind her creaked open and an altar-boy stepped out of the church into the searing sunshine.
He regarded her with interest and she held out the pot of sticky, syrupy fruit.
He dipped a finger into it, sucked the crimson preserve from it, as Nikoleta had been doing, and then said, ‘My village grows the best preserving cherries in all of Crete.’
Whatever a village produced, it was always fiercely deemed to be better than that produced by any other village. In this case, Nikoleta thought the altar-boy was speaking the truth. The preserved cherries were the most delicious she had ever tasted.
‘You speak truly,’ she said, and was rewarded by a gratified smile.
Encouraged, he said, ‘My name is Heracles. I am a man of this village.’
He didn’t look a day over ten years old, but Cretan male dignity began early.
‘It is a fine village,’ she said of the handful of sagging-roofed houses that spread haphazardly away from the open space of bare earth they were facing. ‘My name is Nikoleta. My village is Knossos. It is far away in central Crete.’
Heracles, who had clearly never heard of Knossos, was unimpressed. He said, ‘My father has gone with the other men and the British man to meet with the Communists. I know where they are meeting. It is on the higher slopes and not too far away.’
A handful of women had now gathered around, eager for a gossip and an exchange of news. Before it could be embarked upon, Nikoleta heard the same sound Kate had heard two hours earlier in
Kalamata: the sound of approaching engines that could only be German.
She thrust the pot of preserved cherries towards Heracles, made a grab for her rifle and sprang to her feet.
‘No, Kyria!’ the woman who had given her the pot of preserved cherries said instantly. ‘If the Germans see you are armed, it will bring trouble down on us, and we have had no trouble since a month ago when the villages in the Amari were torched.’
Another woman said with great force, ‘Since the withdrawal to Canea, the billy-goats come here for vegetables and fruit. We are a resistance village that has never come under suspicion. You must not bring catastrophe down on us now, Kyria! Hide your rifle in the church.’
Heracles slid his hand into hers. ‘It’s true,’ he said, his brown eyes urgent. ‘Do nothing or we will all be punished.’
Nikoleta held his eyes for a moment and then, aware there was little option, she turned and did as they asked.
Inside, the church was as dark as a cave and she stuffed the rifle into the most obscure corner of it that she could find. If everything was as the women said, then the Germans hadn’t come because they’d been tipped off about the EOK and ELAS meeting. Sholto wasn’t in danger and, as she was at the opposite end of the island from Knossos and the Villa Ariadne, there was little chance of being recognized as the woman who had infiltrated General Müller’s headquarters and passed on information to the resistance.
Soft footsteps approached from behind her and she whirled around and found herself facing an elderly, white-bearded, black-cassocked priest. Even though it was obvious he had seen what she had just done, she instinctively greeted him in the proper manner, saying with right hand over left and palms upwards, ‘Father, bless me.’
‘May the Lord bless you,’ he responded, making the Sign of the Cross and then placing his right hand on hers.
Beneath the Cypress Tree Page 41