by Neil Olson
“The truth, yes, I will tell you the truth. Listen to me. Everything was my idea. The Snake knew nothing. My father cooperated only because I threatened him. I threatened to tell you all of his dark schemes. No, wait, this is better. He stole the icon to keep you from giving it to the Germans. He is a patriot, a hero even, my father. What do you think of that? Tell your master that story.”
The boy was only taunting him. He had pushed him in the wrong direction. Now Elias would have to use other methods, and his spirit sickened at the thought.
“Kosta, I will make you speak to me.”
“I have told you everything. I did it all, stole the icon, killed your hypocrite brother.”
“What did you say?”
“All priests are hypocrites, liars. Religion is a lie. You have told me so yourself.” The false smile was now pinned solidly on the burned mask. “I did not think you even liked your brother.”
“Bastard.”
“Truly. I thought you might be happy that I killed him.”
“Be silent, you bastard.” The captain squeezed the words out, barely able to speak, his entire body a clenched muscle.
“Why should I be? I am beyond the commands of men. I have nothing to fear, or to hide.” He took a deep breath. “I am damned, and I will see your bastard brother in hell, where he burns right now.”
The action was involuntary, instantaneous. The roar and flash filled the small chamber. Kosta’s head flew back and a bright mist sprayed the ancient wall behind him, like an abstract gloss to the three-quarters vanished image of the saint painted there. The ringing persisted long afterward in Elias’ ears. Days and weeks. The arm holding the hot pistol dropped to his side. He understood immediately that he had been played, had probably understood it before he fired. The two of them had conspired in this ritual of provocation and reaction, so that they each might avoid what must otherwise follow. Yet Elias could not help feeling made a fool of. He had learned little. Kosta died protecting a father who was already dead, and Fotis kept his secrets.
The captain lifted up the icon, too small and light to support its reputation, it seemed to him. A stream of daylight through the door struck the surface, setting the gold leaf ablaze. Out of the shadows, the eyes no longer accused but seemed more frightened or sad. Like a mother who knew her son was doomed. The two panels were indeed out of alignment, looking as if someone had dug at the seams on one side.
Was he really going to give it to Müller? His brother had died trying to save it; should he not try to honor that brave, futile action? What then, keep it? Fotis or Müller would pursue it wherever it went. And forty villagers would be shot. Then Mikalis truly would have died for nothing. No, the last good thing Elias could do was trade the work for those lives. And the guns, he must not forget the guns, the original purpose behind this madness.
A small scrabbling sound caught his attention: the little one, Ioannes, with his bruised head and eyes wide as plates, staring not at his murdered brother but at Elias. There was no determining how much he had seen and heard, and he was now a problem. A witness against the captain, to any number of parties. The last male of his family, and thus the certain carrier of a blood feud. Logic dictated an obvious course. Fotis would not hesitate, but he was not Fotis.
He ushered the child out into the sunlight, where he began shivering uncontrollably. Then Elias went back inside and wrapped the painting in the old sheepskin jacket in which it had been carried to this place. Kosta stared blindly at heaven. The captain settled for closing the dead man’s eyes.
“I will come back for your brother,” Elias told the boy when he stepped back outside, the parcel under his arm. “I will not leave him here.”
The boy said nothing, stared off into space, though the shivering had receded somewhat.
“Walk,” said the captain, and they started down the hillside together. When they reached the trail, Elias looked south. He would have to go that way soon, but one more detour detained him. The boy must be put somewhere, and he thought he knew the place. Still, he lingered a moment, staring south, his mind traveling to Katarini. His village. Some way or another word would get out of what he and Fotis had done, and it would be his village no longer. He would have to leave then, and probably never return. It made no difference. His life would be in Athens after they drove the Germans out, provided the communists did not get it. He could not expect others to see the necessity of what he did. The world was full of small men, and yet it made him sad. Generations of his ancestors had lived here. His father’s bones lay in that village, and now his brother’s would as well. But not his own, never his own.
Captain Elias shook these thoughts from his mind, took the boy by the shoulders, and turned him north.
SPRING 2000
18
T he tables around them in the cramped airport bar were empty. No one would know what to make of such an odd tale in any case, Matthew figured. He had not wasted the opportunity of Andreas’ coming to Kennedy to meet his flight, but had dragged the old man to the nearest quiet spot available and demanded whatever part of the story he was still missing.
“The exchange went off?”
Andreas sipped his ginger ale before answering.
“Yes. Stefano delivered the message. Müller was willing to make the deal, even then. The soldier we killed at the church meant nothing to him, he was gathering his riches. Many of the German officers were doing the same. Merten, the one in charge of Salonika, sank fifty cases of stolen Jewish gold off Kalamata, thinking he would retrieve it after the war.”
“I read about that.”
“Müller wasn’t after gold. Art, especially religious art, was his calling. He had heard about the icon somewhere, from his father most likely. Art theft was a family tradition. I learned this later, when I was hunting him. He had himself stationed in Greece just to find it. Between Göring, the art lover, and the Nazi obsession with the occult, I imagine the story of a painting with supernatural powers got him some attention. Maybe one of them even sent him to retrieve it, a birthday present for the Führer, what do you think?”
The old man’s tone was cynical, but Matthew felt the depth of his suspicion and disgust, felt a chill enter his own body. Was such a guess really so outlandish?
“Epiros was in the Italian occupation zone,” Andreas continued, “so Müller had to bide his time. Even once the Germans came in, there were all those villages in all those hills. Needle in a haystack, you say, yes? Greeks love to gossip, but no one could tell him the truth about the Holy Mother. Many villages had old icons, all of them liked to claim theirs was the famous one. Nobody knew where our icon had gone. After we beat back the Italians, before the Germans attacked, my brother had it walled up in a secret space near the altar, behind the iconostásis. A good spot. Only Mikalis, the carpenter, and I knew where it was.”
“Not Fotis?”
“No. That is why he had to come to me. Müller understood the political split among the guerrillas. The communists were strongest, so contacts developed between the Germans and the other groups. We were fighting them, too, especially in Epiros where that fat-assed Zervas commanded the republicans. But mostly Zervas was watching the communists, watching the royalists, whom he hated even more, until he made peace with them. As the war went on, and we knew the Germans would leave soon, everyone started to think about postwar politics.”
“Including you.”
“Yes. I was a republican at heart, didn’t give a damn about the king. I wanted a president, like in America. But your godfather and I served the government-in-exile, and that made us royalists. Better royalists, better anyone than the communists. Fotis and I agreed on that, and at a certain point it became the focus of our thinking. We fought the Germans, though, killed many, lost good men. Watched villages burn. My people fought.”
The old man sipped at his small glass again and seemed to go far away.
“So Müller came to you.”
“To Fotis. Fotis was our regional commander. He
is from Epiros, too, from Ioannina, and went to Athens for training years before me. He was already an instructor when I got there. A very clever fellow, and strong, hardened in some way, as I wanted to be. We were Patriótis, so of course we became friends. I’m sorry, you know all of this already?”
“Most, but go ahead.”
“After the Germans cut off our army, we volunteered to go back to Epiros. The government was leaving Athens, and men were going out to every region to organize. Most never made it. The resistance sprang up locally, on its own, and the communists did the best job. Fotis and I worked with the British, brought letters and gold to Zervas. Can you believe it, they had to pay him to fight? Even then he delayed. Fotis was patient, but I needed something to do. The men from my area had formed a guerrilla group, and I joined. They lost their captain, and chose me to lead them.”
“You were very young for that.”
“Older than most. I had been in the army, and my father led guerrillas against the Turks, years before. That meant a lot to them, fathers, grandfathers. As if a hero could not father a drunken sot, or the other way around. Anyway, Müller contacted Fotis. Two men of the world. The icon for guns. Fotis persuaded me to go along with it. We needed weapons, ours were old and poor. Zervas was stockpiling what the English gave him, and we didn’t even know whose side he would be on in the end. The icon had vanished as far as anyone knew. To me, it already seemed a sort of…mythological creature. I was a modern man.”
Andreas’ words were sour, and Fotis’ defense echoed in Matthew’s mind. How could it have been my plan? To burn a church? To trade a work of such holy love and beauty? His godfather always told a lie with a piece of the truth. It was how he managed to be so convincing.
“Burning the church was Stamatis’ idea,” said Matthew.
“Yes.”
“And Fotis never meant to give the icon to the German.” He spoke the thoughts as soon as they came to him, as if translating for his unconscious. “The whole thing was an excuse for him to find out where it was. To get you to tell him. For all you know, it was he who approached Müller, and not the other way around.”
Andreas was silent a long time, staring past Matthew to the streaked glass wall and busy runways beyond.
“I have thought about those things all these years,” he said at last. “I had suspicions from the start. It was why I made the plan myself, which went all to hell. It was why I kept Stamatis’ note to myself, made the final exchange myself. I wanted to know what Fotis’ game was, but we killed the two men who could have told me. He, the father; me, the son. And as time passed I became less certain that I wanted to know. Because to know the truth might put my brother’s death on his head, as well as my villagers. And then I would have to decide what to do about that.”
“What about the villagers?”
Andreas clenched his teeth once or twice, the false ones clicking.
“Müller shot them.”
“What, after you gave him the icon?”
“The next morning. He took the icon and let me walk away, and we retrieved the guns that night. A good take, fifty rifles, a few machine guns, crates of ammunition. Fotis knew nothing until it was over. I made up a story about someone seeing Kosta, tracking him down, how I had to act swiftly to save my villagers. He was angry, deeply angry, but made a show of congratulating me. We still had to work together. The next morning Müller shot twenty people. He had been able to delay a day, but his men could not accept that there would be no retribution. It was part of their system; I should have anticipated that. He probably thought he was being generous, twenty instead of forty or fifty. Two of them were cousins of mine, one a woman, I would call her girl today. Glykeria. Her parents wanted me to marry her. She was shot with her father. Another was my messenger, Stefano.”
Matthew thought of photographs he’d seen, fallen, twisted figures in an olive grove, the entire male population of a village, lined up and shot; a German officer walked among them with a pistol, finishing off the wounded. It was Crete, he remembered, but it could have been anywhere in Greece. The death of Mikalis the priest became absorbed in those other deaths, like a drop of water in the sea.
“That’s why you hunted Müller all those years. It had nothing to do with the icon.”
“It had everything to do with it, but I was not looking for it, if that’s what you mean. The painting is bad luck. When I heard the shots fired that morning, I would have destroyed the thing if it had been in front of me. I wish it had burned in the fire.”
Matthew took a deep drink of his beer and imagined the icon, the chipped paint, the haunting eyes, enshrouded in flame. Blackening and peeling away to ash. If it had burned fifty years ago there would be no cause for this present strife. His godfather and grandfather might not be at odds. He himself would have been saved this troubling obsession. And yet who could say how many lives it had touched for the good? Between Andreas’ contempt—a kind of reverse superstition—and Fotis’ perverted reverence, Matthew had come to see only the negative effects, which had more to do with the men involved than the work. Was his own desire so impure? He wanted it, yes, but only to study, to sit in contemplation within its calming radius. Others must feel the same. The church had used the icon as a force of good for centuries without any legend of death or discord growing up around it. It was a matter of putting it back in the right hands.
“That’s a terrible story. I’m sorry.”
“Just one of many from those times.”
“There were lots of executions, weren’t there? They made the people pay every time you resisted them.”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t stop fighting because of that. The icon was incidental.” Matthew hated the tone of his own voice. “Anyway, you needed the guns, right?”
“Oh, yes, the guns proved very useful later, for killing our countrymen.”
“Müller would have killed more people if you hadn’t bargained.”
“All my life,” Andreas said quietly, “I have been able to see through men. Not all the time, but often enough that I have come to depend upon it. Some fool will be telling me a lie and the truth will appear before me clearly, as if I am watching it. Like a film. I uncovered many secrets this way, saved myself from bad mistakes. Yet in every piece of business involving this icon I have behaved like a blind man. I see only part of the truth, and my decisions are always bad ones. Every step of the way I have made the wrong move.”
“Papou, you’re being too hard on yourself.”
“Not too hard, I think. The signs were there, a wiser man would have read them properly. I knew enough to keep Fotis out of the exchange, but I made a terrible mistake trusting Kosta. And it cost my brother his life. I made a bargain with Müller that anyone should have seen he could not keep. Twenty more died.”
“You couldn’t have saved them.”
“I chased a phantom all over New York while Fotis was making mischief right under my nose, using you.”
“You could not have known any of those things. And you’re not responsible for me. I’ve been a bigger idiot than anyone.”
“You were lacking information. And you have a weakness for this thing. There, again, he saw what I did not. He has been one step ahead of me all along. He still is.”
“If he’s not dead.”
“I would not wager on it.”
“You don’t think that was him in the car with Taki?”
“I have only secondhand reports, but the description, presumed age, everything I’ve been told sounds wrong.”
“I should have gone out there to identify him. Sotir hustled me onto the plane, didn’t want me mixed up with any investigation.”
“He was right. They might have held you for days, weeks.”
“At least we’d know.”
“Perhaps not, the body was badly damaged. I am glad you were spared viewing it. They will know for certain in a day or so—teeth, fingerprints. But it is not him.”
Andreas closed his eyes
, pursuing his own thoughts. Matthew took another long swallow. He saw what I did not. What did Fotis see? What did Andreas imagine he saw? That Matthew could be coerced, or inspired, by faith? Was it true? Could one call these half-formed gropings, these awkward manifestations of awe, faith? Should he be ashamed of that? He was embarrassed now to think of his father before the icon. What had he expected, that the Holy Mother would reach out of the wood and smite him on the forehead, You are healed! Maybe only that the man would feel some of the mystery and joy that his son felt before the image. That the two would join in some silent communion there on the spot. Ridiculous.
“I wish I knew what the hell to do next,” Matthew said.
The old man looked him in the eye for the first time in many minutes.
“I have not dissuaded you from this hunt at any point. I have assisted you to the degree that I was able. True?”
“Sure. I was a little upset about Sotir, but he saved my ass, so I’m grateful.”
“Then what I must tell you now is to let this go. Two men are dead. Another in the hospital, another missing. This has become far too dangerous a pursuit, with far too small a reward. What would you do with the icon anyway?”
“Give it to the Greek church, as Ana Kessler intended.”
“Not good enough. Not a reason to die, or to put others at risk. She received money, and she is safer without the work. If she does not reverse herself, her story should protect you from prosecution. There is no reason to continue. Not to mention that the trail is cold.”
“What about the Russians?”
Andreas sighed.
“They are dangerous people. Information would not come easily. Chances are, they disposed of the icon days ago, if they ever had it.”
“What do you mean? Where did it go if they didn’t take it?”
“All I mean is that we have been underestimating Fotis.” Andreas looked hard at him. “I see I have made no impression on you. Does this mean you do not intend to give up the search?”
Matthew felt trapped, then suddenly angry, even furious, absurdly so. He wanted nothing more than to let this all go. It had frightened and sickened him. Why did it provoke him so to be asked to say it? I will let it go. Just say it.