Icon of Gold

by Teresa Crane

  From the path below came the sound of footsteps, the murmur of voices. The swift village telegraph had done its work. In a moment a group of men appeared, carrying between them a wooden door. Dark, watchful eyes met hers, then bent upon the sprawled body. To a man they doffed their caps. Their leader looked at Cathy. ‘Constantine — astinomia,’ he said, miming a running movement.

  The police station. Constantine must be the man who had found Leon. She struggled to concentrate. ‘We must not —’ she searched for a moment for the Greek word ‘— move him. He must stay until they come.’

  The man grunted and nodded.

  ‘Will you wait with him?’ She reinforced her appeal with her hands, not trusting them to understand her ill-accented Greek. ‘I — go to the house. To prepare. You will stay?’

  There was a general murmur of assent.

  Cathy dashed a hand across her tear-stained face. ‘Thank you.’ She climbed away from the little group as fast as she could. Would Adam still be there? Surely not. But she had to check. Whatever he had done she could not bear to lose him too.

  The house was quiet, and empty. She could hear the sound of voices floating up from the path. ‘Adam?’ she called, her voice a whisper in the shadows. ‘Are you there?’

  No reply.

  In the kitchen the stove was roaring. She lifted the lid. All that was left of a bundle of clothing flared and collapsed into a glowing heap of ashes that, as she watched, disappeared into the burning logs. She slammed the lid down. Ran to the door. She was crying again, the hot, exhausting tears running down her face, dripping on to her shirt. Her throat ached with them and her nose was running. She stood for a moment, listening. Nothing. Adam had gone. She went back into the kitchen, reached for her handbag that lay upon the table and opened it, looking for a handkerchief.

  The note rustled as she reached into the bag. She opened it. It was hastily scrawled, in some places all but unreadable. ‘Ma — I didn’t mean it. I swear I didn’t. He attacked me. I —’ she could not entirely make out the next word, but she thought it might be ‘pushed’ — ‘him, and he fell. I tried to help him. I pulled the knife out. Believe me. I didn’t mean to kill him.’ It was unsigned.

  With careful, shaking hands she tore the note to shreds and consigned it, too, to the fire. Then she dropped into a chair, sat unmoving, hands lying still and lightly clenched on the table before her, waiting.

  *

  ‘He won’t get off the island.’ Yannis, leaning in the doorway, his eyes on the distant hills, lit a cigarette. ‘And if he does, I’ll find him.’

  ‘Yannis, please —’ Cathy was sitting at the table, a glass of wine untouched before her. Her voice was hoarse with exhaustion. ‘— he’s my son.’

  ‘And Leon,’ Yannis said evenly, his voice like granite, ‘was my friend. More than my friend. He was my brother.’ He drew on the cigarette. The sounds of the evening drifted to them. ‘Tell me the truth. Did you see him?’ His eyes were unfriendly.

  She hesitated for only a second. ‘No.’ It was the story she had told the police. It was the story that wolves and wild horses would not make her change. She had neither seen nor heard from Adam since he and his stepfather had set out for the village on the morning of the murder. She had listened in silence to the story, repeated word for word by more witnesses than anyone could possibly need — of the drinking and of the fierce quarrel that had followed in the taverna — no one knew the reason for the sudden flare-up, the argument being conducted in English, though most seemed to agree it was something to do with money - of Adam lunging at Leon and of Leon using those huge fists, as he had upon his own son, to defeat and humiliate him. Of Adam shouting, threatening, pleading; and finally storming off up the mountain path. Where, as was undeniable from all the evidence - and as she knew from Adam’s own words — he had lain in wait for his stepfather. And killed him. His fingerprints were on the knife. And he had disappeared. She rested her forehead on her clenched fist. ‘No,’ she said again, softly, ‘I didn’t see him. He didn’t come here. Why would he?’

  The police had believed her. Two days had passed and no sign had been found of him. Two days in which she had hardly eaten and slept not at all. Two days when momentarily she had expected news of his capture. She was exhausted, emotionally and physically. Yannis’ unexpected arrival had all but broken her. At least from everyone else she had received some degree of sympathy. Yannis’ hard-eyed, uncompromising — and she had to admit justified — judgemental antagonism had been hard to bear.

  He pushed himself now away from the doorjamb and without a word left her. She closed her eyes, and as always opened them again immediately, fighting off the image that imprinted itself in that glinting darkness; of the arrival at the house of the sombre little group who had carried Leon home, lying on the door, eyes open and sightless in the brilliant light, the great bloodstain spread across his chest, all the vivid, intemperate life of him gone. They had laid him upon this very table, and she had covered him with a sheet. Then had come the questions. The terrible explanations. The awful thing was that the knife wound was not, in the end, what had actually killed him, though almost certainly he would not have survived it. Left mortally wounded in the searing heat he had crawled to the water, and then collapsed, rolling down the steep-sided gully and sliding into the stream unconscious. Bereft of the protection of his golden icon, Leon had drowned within a few hundred yards of the place that the woman who had given it to him had died, equally horribly. Leave it, she had said, leave it. Don’t look for it. The luck it bestows is worse than bad.

  She stared into the wine. It glimmered in the gathering dusk, red as rubies. Red as blood. She turned her face away.

  ‘You’re a liar,’ Yannis said, softly, from the doorway.

  She started, turned to him, eyes wide.

  ‘You’re a liar,’ he repeated.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Adam was here.’

  She wrapped her hands about the glass to still their trembling, kept her eyes wide and steady on his face. ‘What makes you say that?’

  For a moment he watched her with those narrowed, sceptical eyes, then he said softly, ‘You still don’t know, do you?’

  ‘What?’

  He was silent for a moment, still studying her.

  ‘Yannis — what? What don’t I know?’

  ‘Why your son murdered your husband.’

  She closed her eyes in pain. ‘No. I don’t.’

  ‘Come with me.’

  Puzzled, she stood up, followed him out on to the terrace and down the steps into the garden. As she realised where he was leading her, her heart began to thud uncomfortably.

  It was dark in the Shepherd’s Hut, and it took a moment for her eyes to adjust. She looked around. So far as she could see it was as it had always been. Dust lay thick. The place was airless and hot as an oven. Sweat started the moment she entered, dampening her shirt.

  Yannis moved to the fireplace and picked up a rusty crowbar that leaned against the wall. Cathy watched in uncertain silence as he slipped the thing between two flagstones and, one handed, levered one of the stones up until he could reach a hand beneath it and swing it up on smooth, well-oiled hinges. Snugly beneath it nestled a metal box, massively padlocked. Yannis slipped a hand in his pocket and brought out a key. The heavy lid yawned. ‘There,’ he said, quietly. ‘See what he died for. As others have before him.’

  Cathy knelt beside the hole, reached into the box. It was almost empty, but her groping hand found something; a small bag that was much heavier than she expected as she lifted it out. It chinked weightily in her hand. She glanced back into the box; there were perhaps three or four more of its like lying there. Yannis reached for it, undid it and tapped some of its contents into her palm. The gold gleamed in the sunlight that fell through the door. She picked up one of the coins and held it to the light. It was not one she immediately recognised, though she could see that it was English. On one side was depicted the portrait of George V, on the rev
erse, St George and the dragon. ‘What is it?’

  ‘A sovereign. A golden sovereign. Now, as always, negotiable anywhere in the world.’

  Cathy sat back on her heels, shaking her head. ‘But — what are they doing here? How did they get here?’

  Yannis reached to take the coins back from her, dropped the bag back into the box and lowered the lid. ‘Come back to the house. I tell you.’

  *

  ‘In the war, as you know, the Germans and the Italians invaded and occupied Greece.’ Yannis poured himself a glass of wine, turned a chair around and straddled it, across the table from her. ‘But Greece never submitted. We fought in the cities and in the countryside. We were an army, a real army and we resisted to the end.’ He fell silent for a moment. Cathy sipped her wine and watched him, intrigued despite herself. This part of the story at least she already knew something of. Yannis lifted his head. ‘The problem was that we were not one army, but two.’

  ‘Loyalist and Communist,’ Cathy said. ‘Leon often spoke of it. I believe he hated the Communists more than he hated the Germans.’

  ‘Exactly. And with good reason — for while we, who were fighting for our king and our country expended our lives, our arms and our gold to free Greece, the Communist pigs waited, hoarding their coin and their arms, like vultures who watch the death throes of lions in order to feast in safety later.’ His normally good-natured face had hardened suddenly to hatred, the long scar stood livid on his cheek. The civil war that had followed the departure of the vanquished Axis powers had been more bitter by far than the occupation itself, for brother had fought against brother, and father against son. Many families in Greece were still torn apart by the wounds of the conflict.

  ‘And the gold?’ Cathy asked.

  ‘The British Government supported the Partisans — with arms, with specialist agents — and with gold. Gold meant to be used to fight the Germans. To buy arms and explosives, to bribe, to feed the ragged army in the mountains.’ Yannis tilted his head and drained his glass at a swallow. ‘The problem was that whilst the loyalists put the gold they received to the purpose for which it was intended the Reds hoarded any they could lay their hands on. For future use. Against us, their brothers.’ The words were bitter.

  None of this was new to Cathy. She waited, watching him.

  Yannis hunched his shoulders and reached for the bottle

  before he started to speak again. The story in the end was a simple one: 1949, the civil war drawing to a close, ELAS, the pro-communist guerrilla army on the run, and every man for himself. Leon, Yannis and some of their loyalist comrades had been following the trail of a party of ELAS men known to be carrying partisan gold. The two groups had met in the mountains to the north of the island and a particularly bloody clash had ensued; the clash that had put Leon out of the war for good, with a wound that had nearly killed him.

  ‘And the ELAS men?’ Cathy asked.

  Yannis lit a cigarette, scraped the chair back from the table and wandered to the door, stood with his back to her. ‘They died.’

  There was a long moment of quiet. ‘All of them?’ Cathy asked.

  ‘All of them.’

  Once again the silence hung heavily between them. Yannis turned, his face in shadow. Smoke drifted lazily into the air. ‘It was war,’ he said. ‘These men had done terrible things. There was too much bad blood.’

  ‘And — there was the gold’ Cathy said, trying, unsuccessfully, to keep the dawning horror from her voice.

  He came back to the table. His face was expressionless. ‘No. There wasn’t. The gold had disappeared. Into thin air, it seemed. At the time there was nothing we could do — we had to get Leon and our other wounded comrades to safety. But he never forgot, and neither did I. When the fighting was finished we agreed that I should try to follow the trail. It had to be somewhere. Obviously they had hidden it before we caught up with them. It was a long task —’

  ‘But you did it.’

  He shrugged. ‘I did it. I traced them at last to a small village in a valley deep in the mountains. Nothing much. A few huts. A church. They had hidden there for some days. As with every other location I had found there were three possibilities; the gold was never left there in the first place, it had been hidden, discovered and stolen, or —’

  ‘— or it was still there,’ Cathy offered into the silence as he let the words trail off.

  ‘Yes. At first it was not promising. I talked to the peasants, and to the priest. The peasants knew nothing. The priest was young, and had been in the village but a few months. The trail was cold. Until a few months later — at the end of last year — I traced the priest who had been at the church when the terrorists were there. He remembered them. He remembered them well. It was the only time the war had touched the village. And he was surprised — the Communists showed more respect for mother church than he had looked for. A terrorist, sadly, had died.’ Yannis’ lips twitched into the faintest, bleakest of smiles. ‘He conducted a funeral service.’

  ‘A funeral service,’ Cathy repeated. And then -— ‘You mean — the gold?’

  ‘The gold. They buried it with full rites, a fallen comrade, dead for the cause.’ The words were sardonic. ‘It was worth a try. And I had heard rumours. Someone else was on the trail, not far behind me. I flew to London —’

  ‘Christmas,’ Cathy said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Christmas. That explains Christmas. Why Leon didn’t come.’ Why I was left alone. Alone with Nikos.

  Yannis lifted a shoulder, drew on his cigarette.

  ‘So — Leon joined you and you discovered that it was the gold that was buried there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did you do it? Didn’t anyone object? What of the village? Wasn’t there gossip?’

  He smiled that small, hard smile again. ‘Everything has its price, and the place was well chosen. Isolated, self-concerned. Silence comes a little expensive, but it comes. There are sons being educated, and daughters with dowries. And a small matter of reprisal should lax tongues wag.’

  Out of her depth, she pondered that. ‘And of course there is the respectable firm of Kotsikas and Son,’ she said at last, quietly bitter. ‘Founded on the strength of stolen gold.’

  ‘Stolen? How is it stolen? To whom does it belong? Who had a greater right to it?’

  She was silent.

  ‘And it was for this,’ Yannis added, quietly, ‘that Adam killed Leon.’

  Her head came up fiercely. ‘How can you know that? The evidence is purely circumstantial — what makes you think that Adam even knew about all this? How could he?’

  He leaned across the table, palms flat, face very close to hers. ‘Because I told him. I showed him the gold. On Leon’s orders.’

  ‘Why? Why?’

  ‘Because we needed a way to exchange a — shall we say a commodity that might raise some questions? for one that would raise none. There are organisations in America, organisations with power and influence. An arrangement was made. It worked. No one questioned Adam’s gambling —’

  ‘Jesus!’ Cathy said, and dropped her face into her hands.

  There was a long silence. She lifted her head. Yannis was watching her. ‘Did you know,’ she asked, very calmly, ‘that Adam’s father was a compulsive gambler?’

  He made a small, dismissive gesture with both hands.

  ‘Did you know that Adam’s father — because of the gambling — committed suicide?’ Her voice was very calm, very quiet.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Leon knew,’ she said. And then, again, forcefully, ‘Leon knew!’ A promise made. A promise terribly broken. ‘I will watch over your son for you as if he had been my own.’ Oh, the irony of that!

  ‘What we know, and what we don’t know,’ Yannis said, after a moment. ‘How does it signify? One thing I know. Adam killed Leon.’

  The lift of her head was challenging. ‘How can you be so certain?’

  ‘The key,’ he said, quie
tly and reasonably.

  ‘What key?’

  ‘The key to the chest. Gold has been taken. A fair amount; as much as a man could carry. Do you think I wouldn’t know? It was my charge. But the padlock was not broken. It was open. Unlocked. Only three people knew of the existence of that box. Myself, Leon - and Adam. And there were only two keys. Mine. And Leon’s. There was no key on Leon’s body. It had been taken. By the one who killed him.’ He studied her shielded face. Unexpectedly he said, softly, ‘I am sorry.’

  She shook her bowed head, said nothing.

  ‘Where is he?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He questioned no further. Lifted his head. ‘Someone is coming.’

  A moment later Cathy heard it too; the sound of a motor car approaching the house up the narrow road. ‘The police again, I expect,’ she said, tiredly.

  Yannis had a keener ear for an engine than hers. ‘I think not,’ he said.