by Ben Pastor
“I’ll be sending a man to collect you.”
“Fine.”
Bora finished his coffee. Her lack of curiosity about details was not a sign of acquiescence, much less passivity. Her detachment, welcome as it was, bordered on abstraction; it had the effect of making him feel wrong-footed. So far, only Dikta had succeeded in doing so. Four years earlier, when he’d finally been able to reach her by phone weeks after their first, glorious intercourse, “I’m sorry, who are you?” she’d said, pretending surprise even though he had clearly introduced himself. “Ah, yes, the lieutenant from the dance party in April. How are you?” She’d easily agreed to a date the following day, during which they’d outdone themselves in his parents’ country house. Then she vanished again with that Willy from Hamburg, whom she couldn’t seem to bring herself to leave. If I should ever find myself without Dikta, God forbid… We depend on each other sexually, I’m too spoilt to make do, and so is she. If she left me (it could happen: in Krakow I was afraid for a moment – for more than a moment), I don’t know what I’d do with myself.
“We’ll be walking a good part of the way, Mrs Sidheraki. Is there any equipment you’ll need?”
“I have all I need.”
Bora nodded to the soldier waiting a few steps away to escort her back upstairs. He stood from his chair when she did, and watched her leave. Major Busch was right: she’s likely to drop the ball of yarn midway through the labyrinth to make sure I don’t make it back. If she pulls a fast one, he said, shoot to kill. Would I do it? I would. The thought floated through him along with a separate, bittersweet ache for Dikta, whom their third time in bed had conquered. “Martin, you’re ruining my fun with Willy,” she told him. “I could be foolish enough to fall in love.” And she had written him a postcard after two weeks of total absence: Without you, it isn’t fun any more. From then on they’d “stock up”, as they laughingly said the nights they spent together, for the times when they’d be apart. Married for nearly two years now, Bora expected to meet her for a few hours in East Prussia before moving out, and “stock up” for the duration of the Russian campaign: one, two months at most. Then, after beating the Reds, one more supply, for wherever war would take him next.
Bora climbed to the lobby two steps at a time. Hell, I should be thankful I have a whole war ahead of me. Prisoners like Lieutenant Sinclair are stuck for the duration. I wonder what he’s thinking this morning. Does he regret giving me a clue to find Powell, which means: does he regret trusting me to such an extent, on my word? We’re both officers, readers of the Classics. The tie goes beyond our respective roles at this time of the war. And he doesn’t know it, but on Mother’s side great-grandfathers Ashworth-Douglas and Carrick served Her Majesty in India during the First and Second Opium Wars. That connects us, unless there were native ancestors of Sinclair’s among the Sepoys who mutinied some eighty years ago.
The twang of a Berlin accent reached Bora as he left the hotel with his eyes on the list of supplies needed. Looking up from the sheet, he recognized the red-headed officer dismissing a non-com just outside.
“Bruno! What are you doing here?”
Bruno Lattmann, a colleague supposedly assigned to the Abwehr post in Tunis, wheeled around at the question. “No. What are you doing here?” He had an African tan, a duffel bag at his feet and seemed to be either arriving or ready to leave. As soon as the non-com was out of earshot, he added critically, “I thought you were in Moscow and Busch’s replacement not due in until tomorrow.”
“I’m on an errand. Thank God, I thought I’d have to go crazy trying to contact Athens for it. I need urgent support. Can you help?”
Lattmann, although visibly glad to see him, frowned a little. “Depends. We’re setting up a sub-post on this island, but won’t be immediately operational. I’m just passing through on my way to Athens, working on a shoestring as it is.” They’d last seen each other a month earlier at Peter’s wedding, where they’d respectively been witnesses for the bride and groom. He knew Bora well enough to wonder at his agitation. “Tell me quickly what you’re doing and what I have to check on.” Having heard a concise summary of the case, he took a couple of quick notes. “Fuck it all, don’t you know there’s an International Red Cross team flying in today? You had better leave Iraklion before it gets here; they’ll tan your hide if they find you. For the rest, I’ll see what I can do. No promises, though. If there’s no file —”
“Oh, there’s a file somewhere. I’d like to know when and why it disappeared from our central office.”
“Well, you and the Lord Jesus. I’ll see what I can do, Martin.” Lattmann craned his neck to look across the square, beyond the Venetian fountain and its weather-worn lions. “A car is coming to pick me up any time now and take me to the airfield.”
Bora handed him the passports he’d found in the safety deposit box. “What about these?”
“Open them, Bruno.”
Lattmann changed expression, and even ceased cursing. Before putting them away, he anxiously reread the aliases jotted down in a diminutive notebook “M.A. Duvoin, eh?”
“Yes. Marcel Amédée, M.A. Duvoin.”
“Hm. Hm. One thing I can tell you already. Maybe. It’s just a guess at this point, and I don’t know what you can do with it even if it’s right. The initials M.A., pronounced Em-ah… Sounds like Emma.”
“Who’s Emma?”
“Let me flip the question around: weren’t you part of the retinue during the Führer’s state visit to Rome?”
“I don’t much like the word retinue, but I was.”
“Go back to your notes, then. Emma is a Comintern codename that popped up a year and a half ago in connection with Rome.”
So Villiger wasn’t ours, or not ours alone. Rome, the Colosseum paperweight… but Villiger the antiquarian might have bought it all the same. Bora had to take a deep breath to keep calm. Comintern, Communist International – the coordinating centre of all Stalinists: huge as the agency was, in the sense used by Lattmann it could only mean the umbrella for Soviet espionage.
“Or I could be completely wrong, Martin, and it was Heini Himmler who gave your dead Switzer two extra noms de guerre to play with. Well, there’s my princely coach.” A rickety car skirted the fountain and drew close to the officers. Lattmann shouldered his duffel bag and shook hands with Bora. “In either case, it won’t do you much good. Here and now there are as many good reasons to kill somebody because he works for us or against us, as there are because he’s simply in the way of a pissed-off paratrooper.”
Bora’s mind uneasily went back to the morning he’d left Russia, when – in a somewhat complacent way – he’d written a diary entry about intrigue in Moscow. He took Lattmann aside, away from the car. “Off the record, what do you know about Major Busch?”
“Only that he was here and was sacked. He’s in Lublin now. Why?”
“Run me a little private check on him. See if he had contacts in Casablanca, and what, if anything, he’s got to do with Moscow.”
Lattmann shook his head. “I’m not touching Moscow these days, sorry. Ask for something else.”
“All right, forget about ‘Moscow these days’. Just for the hell of it, then, see if we have Federico Steiger in our archive among our old Moscow informants, or as a Hotel Lux resident there. He figures as having travelled to the Soviet Union, and to China, too.”
“China where?”
“Don’t know. Port of entry, Shanghai.”
“I thought you wrote a paper on Shanghai.”
“That was about the Japanese siege much later; it has nothing to do with it. See if Nanking Road and Wongshaw Gardens mean anything to us. Steiger underlined the addresses on the 1927 city map. You’ll find it in the passport. Both are in the so-called Shanghai International Settlement, home to most of the 40,000 foreigners in town back then. It was also one of the largest collection points for White Russians after the October Revolution.”
“What a pain in the arse you are. I’ll do what
I can. Anything else?”
Bora showed him, without letting go of them, the forms and typewritten sheet found with the passports.
“What’s this?” Lattmann spoke under his breath. “Blank visas?”
“Blank ‘Aryanized’ visas. Plus names and addresses of wealthy Greek Jews, who must have been paying to get out or save their lives ever since we took Greece and its islands. He had loads of their calling cards in his library.”
“Martin, you know you have to turn these in.”
“No, I don’t.”
“I haven’t seen any of it, then.”
Lattmann stepped to the car and threw his duffel bag onto the back seat. “Well,” he turned around to add, flippantly as he always did when he was nervous, “I guess it’s pointless to tell you, but don’t go off at a tangent.”
“I think that’s my speciality. Have a safe trip, Bruno.”
“No. You have a safe stay.”
Anxious as he was to pick up his supplies (and to avoid Red Cross officials), Bora stepped back into the hotel for the time needed to slip his diary out of the rucksack and reread his sparse peacetime entries, often as brief as a one-liner. He’d been among the 500 who’d travelled with Hitler in ’38, sitting in the second of three trains that sped to and across Italy between 3 May and 9 May. Officially he was there as an additional interpreter. In fact, he’d done some busy legwork in and around the Vatican, especially the Collegium Russicum, seeking discreet information on the presence of foreign agents at the Jesuit school created to convert the Soviet Union. Lattmann’s suggestion that he check his notes, as if he carried around such details, would have made him smile at another moment. With investigative time being so short, he was ready to rummage through the entries. After all, it had been his habit – and still was – to drop cryptic hints into his daily accounts, purely for personal use and future reference. 4 May 1938, afternoon. The Führer and Duce at Centocelle for Fascist ceremony. I lunched with Father Leiber, S.J., of Gregorian University and Father MacGregor, of the Scots College in Rome, at Hotel Miramare in Ostia. Afterwards, back to Rome; at the Congregation, a fascinating look at the contribution of Baltic students, especially those from Estonia. Weather warm but pleasant. Early dinner with Italian colleagues: excellent choice of wines, although I wasn’t as impressed by the Swiss chocolate pudding as they were.
Aside from Father MacGregor, friendly to the German cause, and the Jesuit Leiber, who had the pontiff’s ear, the real hints in the entry were others. The underlined reference to the Congregation meant Bora’s call at the Russicum, the Congregation for Eastern Churches, where an Estonian seminarian was suspected to have contacts with Moscow. Bora remembered only the man’s surname, Kurtna, and that he was about to go on leave in his homeland. His own recommendation on returning to Germany had been that he be at once enrolled or else put out of commission. The last he’d heard about Kurtna was that he worked for Cardinal Tisserant, head of the Congregation, and newly for Dr Bock of the Institute for German History in Rome, a cover for the Abwehr; which did not mean he wasn’t still passing information on to Moscow. As for the chocolate dessert, it stood for a conversation with his Italian counterparts regarding Swiss espionage in Rome, and its British and Russian ties. A Swiss citizen, codename Paolo, real name unknown, resided at Ostia in the hotel he’d lunched in with MacGregor. By all accounts, he was the most important of them all, likely to replace Leonid Bondarenko, embassy cultural attaché (and likely Comintern head operative), once the war with Russia began. Bora passed the information on to Berlin, but had been unable to see the agent in person. At the time, the codename Emma was unknown, but operatives could function under several different ones.
What did Villiger of the Ahnenerbe have to do with any of this?
It was a gun-toting member of the German Feldpolizei, not a Cretan policeman, who stopped him at the corner of Ithaca Street. “Sorry, sir. You’ll have to go around.”
“Why, what’s going on? My lodgings are on this street, I need to pass.”
“There’s been an incident. Two locals dead.”
“When?”
“Around seven. We were notified by local police. Seems they were plain-clothes men assigned to picket an officer’s – well, I suppose it must have been your billet, Captain.”
“Yes, yes, it was. What then?”
“Fearing you’d been targeted, the local police went up to search your quarters. Now we’re combing the neighbourhood, but it looks like a drive-by shooting, not much of a chance we’ll catch them. When did you leave the premises, by the way?”
Bora had to shove the worrisome conversation with Bruno Lattmann to the back of his mind. “They were alive when I walked out at quarter to seven.” He cut matters short. Kostaridis’ bluntness made sense now: in one blow he’d lost two of his men. Whom I never asked for. Bora tried to draw a line between himself and any sense of guilt. He forced them on me, and they weren’t even clever enough to keep me from sneaking away last night. It might be because he was preoccupied, but the nagging germ of a doubt, which he smothered before it took shape, suggested another remote possibility. What if Kostaridis… No. Too egregious, too gratuitous. It was true that the shooting gave Cretan and military police an excuse to search the houses on the alley, including his apartment. Luckily, according to his Moscow habit, he never left behind what he meant to keep from others. Notes, Villiger’s passports, anything sensitive, he’d taken along this morning. “Look,” he told the military policeman, “I need to pick up some things in a hurry. Either you take me there or let me go on my own.”
The man let him pass. Pools of blood on the pavement at this end of the alley, and midway alongside it, suggested that one of Bora’s guards might have been taken by surprise where he stood, but the other must have reacted by running over and presumably firing back, before being felled in turn. The thought of two human beings, killed while standing watch on the empty quarters of an enemy officer, made him angry. If they have families, Kostaridis will have to explain to them that they died for no reason at all.
One flight of stairs up, the door to his billet had been kicked in. An overly zealous intervention, given that assassins would hardly lock up after a hit. Kostaridis must have a copy of the key, since he got this place for me. So he wasn’t with those who came on the scene, and that’s why they had to break in. Or was it our military police who applied their usual thoroughness?
All appeared as he’d left it, but experienced searchers leave no trace. Bora refilled his lighter and used it to burn the typewritten sheet of names, flushing the ashes down the sink in spite of Greek regulations. He picked up his container of Atebrin, a Russian wrist compass (embassy party Christmas gift), and left. Below, he gave orders to gather his belongings and transfer them to the headquarters of Cretan police, under the personal responsibility of Epitropos Vairon Kostaridis.
The soldier at the depot read out loud from Bora’s list. “1,500 gr canned meat (750 gr meat with vegetables); 4,000 gr preserved bread; 1,500 gr zwieback; 900 gr Dextro Energen; 1000 gr dried fruit; 400 gr sugar; 12 packages lemonade powder; 18 packages soluble coffee; salt tablets; water purification tablets; 50 cigarettes. Esbit cooker No. 9 and fuel tablets. Anything else, Herr Hauptmann?”
Bora double-checked the supplies as they were placed in his rucksack. “No. These,” he said, setting aside the dried fruit, lemonade powder, sugar and zwieback, “pack separately in this canvas bag. They should come to just over three kilos.” She’ll have to do her bit, he told himself. I’m carrying the rest, in addition to everything else we’ll need for the trip.
The coast was clear when he stepped outside. On his way from Ithaca Street to the former British depot, upgraded to distribution centre for German supplies, he’d been intercepted by Waldo Preger in a captured Humber staff car, newly marked with the paratroopers’ divisional crest, a yellow comet on a sky-blue background. Preger followed him to his destination at walking pace, only to continue down the street and park in front of the closest k
afeneio. Now he’d apparently moved on.
The day promised to be hot. Already the shade had lost its azure tinge, and girls walking out into the sun seemed to catch fire in their bright summer dresses. They were the first women Bora saw strolling in town, and paradoxically the everyday nature of the sight made him feel more, not less out of place. Occupied countries, he remembered from Poland, mark the solitude of the invader the moment they regain apparent ordinariness. First the hospitals, then the brothels, then the cafes and shops: we fill them in progression, as armies always have. For all I know, lonely Mycenaean and Roman soldiers stopped to drink and bargain over souvenirs in Crete thousands of years ago, and perhaps were sent here by their superiors to buy wine, too.
A few minutes before nine, other than collecting his travel companion at the hotel, Bora was ready to leave town.
Well, almost. The matter of obtaining a ride was formally ensured by the handful of typewritten passes (in Greek and German) that Busch had provided him with. The major’s foresight extended to papers securing free access to depots, prisoners of war, a return flight on any aircraft leaving Crete at any time, and permission to take along as needed one Frances Allen, US national. Money, Bora had procured independently. The only fly in the ointment was the lack of an available vehicle and driver.
Unless the worst came to the worst, at this point of his mission Bora would rather avoid asking the Air Force or Jäger for help. The same went for Kostaridis. On the other hand, with the scarcity of private trucks and cars in circulation, short of commandeering a vehicle, driving it himself and leaving it behind where the mountain trails began, there wasn’t much of a choice but to walk out of Iraklion. After all, in his estimate (based on maps and Pendlebury’s notes), on foot and without stopping, even dangerous Krousonas lay less than five hours away. Bora still leaned toward this option as he came into view of the hotel, unaware that two incidents in succession were about to solve his dilemma. Granted that Preger had as much right as any other German to find himself in the Venetian-built square, his being parked in front of the Hotel Knossos spelt trouble now that Bora could least afford it. By nature he was inclined to face obstacles even when they implied physical confrontation. But, he told himself, it’s not a good time. Waldo thinks I’m rooming there and is waiting for me to go past so he can provoke me. He can’t do more than that, under orders as he is not to work against me, which doesn’t mean he won’t try to delay me. This was the first incident.