‘Open the door!’ yelled the Nazi leader. The young girl shrieked in terror as the other SS troopers slammed her parents against the wall. ‘Open it, or I’ll kill you all!’
‘Wait, wait!’ cried the horrified Patras. ‘I’ll open it!’
His older son shouted in protest even as gun muzzles were jammed against him, but Patras scurried to the wall and pulled aside a stack of boxes. Behind them, at floor level, was a small nook. He slipped his hand inside, fingers curling around a concealed catch.
A clack came from behind the fake wall. ‘It will open now,’ he told Kroll. ‘Please, let my family go!’
‘How many people are hiding?’ the German demanded.
‘None, there is nobody there. It is just a room. Take what you find and go, I beg you!’
Again his son protested. ‘Father, no! You can’t let them into the shrine!’
The last word caught Kroll’s attention. ‘What shrine?’ he said, rounding on the elderly man. ‘What’s back there?’
The conflict on Patras’s face told him that the Greek did not want to give up his secret. ‘It… it is our family’s heritage,’ he finally said. ‘We have protected it for many generations, many centuries.’
Kroll regarded him for a moment, then addressed Walther. ‘Open it.’
The big man slotted his fingers back into the gap. This time, there was little resistance when he pulled. The hidden door swung outwards.
The Nazi leader shone his torch into the newly revealed darkness to find another set of steps heading downwards. He directed his light to the bottom. There was a chamber below.
‘Sir,’ warned one of the stormtroopers, a thin-faced man named Gausmann, as Kroll began to descend. ‘If someone’s down there, they could be armed.’
Kroll stopped, shining his torch back at his prisoners. ‘If anyone is down there, kill the family,’ he said. Their lack of reaction told him that they did not speak German. ‘But I don’t think he’s lying. Rasche, follow me.’
The second set of stairs seemed even older than the first, the irregular stones in the whitewashed walls held in place by the weight of those above them rather than mortar. But the room beneath had been built with more care, he saw as it came into view. Elegant columns supported the ceiling of the roughly circular space. Ancient Grecian architecture, Kroll thought, directing his torch beam over the nearest. But later than the classical period…
He turned his light into the centre of the room — and froze.
‘My God!’ he gasped, astonishment reducing his voice to a whisper.
The shrine was filled with treasure.
Gold and silver glinted everywhere his torch beam darted. Coins, jewellery, statuettes, even armour and weapons; the spoils of several lifetimes. Amongst them was something that immediately seemed out of place — a clockwork mechanism, bronze or brass. He quickly dismissed the anachronism as a later addition to the collection, his gaze instead going to the figure at the chamber’s far side. The marble statue of a man, flakes of coloured paint still visible on the pale stone, watched over the room of wonders.
Kroll heard Rasche let out an exclamation, but he ignored the SS section leader, advancing on the statue. The light picked out a word on its plinth: ανδρƐας — Andreas. A common enough Greek name, but what had this man done to arouse such adulation?
Rasche’s own torch flitted excitedly over the gleaming riches. ‘It’s a fortune!’ he said. ‘It must be worth millions of marks. And those farmers were hiding it from us!’
‘Not just from us,’ Kroll said as he examined some of the items in more detail. The inscriptions upon them were in Greek — ancient Greek. ‘These are thousands of years old.’ He illuminated a line of carved text beneath the name on the plinth. ‘It says, “Servant and friend of the king Alexander”… Does it mean Alexander the Great? It must do!’
‘I’ll take your word for it, sir,’ said Rasche. ‘I never studied Greek.’
‘You should always study the past, Obersturmführer,’ Kroll replied, reading on with growing intrigue. ‘It can teach you a lot. Especially when it concerns Alexander the Great. He was born near here, near Pella — it was the capital of Macedonia.’ He stepped back, almost reflective. ‘Alexander was my childhood hero, actually; he was the greatest military leader in history, never defeated in battle. He’d conquered most of the known world before he was thirty years old. If he’d lived longer, who knows what else he could have accomplished?’
‘Sir,’ Rasche replied, with clear disinterest. He moved to prod at a pile of coins.
‘Philistine,’ Kroll muttered as he read more text. It was referring to Alexander the Great, he was sure. ‘These dates, they’re long after Alexander died. But this Andreas, the inscriptions say he knew Alexander personally…’
He regarded the statue. The man it portrayed was old, bald-headed with a long beard, yet still had the upright posture of youth. The remaining scuffs of paint on its face were enough to give the impression that it was looking back at him, expression almost challenging. ‘Andreas, Andreas…’ he whispered, searching his memory. The name was connected to Alexander’s somehow, but the link was elusive—
Suddenly it came to him.
The rational part of his mind instantly dismissed the thought as ridiculous. It couldn’t possibly be true! But…
His gaze fell upon something behind the statue. It was a pithos, an earthenware jar as tall as a man and a metre across at its broadest. More Greek text was inscribed upon it. He went to the vessel to read some of it, then stood on tiptoes to examine the wide spout. It had been sealed, black pitch around a silver stopper. The rim was silvered too, as if the jar’s interior was lined with the precious metal.
‘Silver,’ he said out loud. However ludicrous it sounded, the connection between Andreas and the Macedonian conqueror had now solidified in his thoughts.
‘And gold,’ said Rasche, coins clinking from his fingers.
‘Forget the gold — we may have found something even more valuable.’ Kroll turned, ignoring his subordinate’s look of confusion. ‘The old man and his family. Bring them down here!’
Rasche shouted an order up the stairs. The surviving members of the Patras clan were quickly hustled into the hidden chamber, their dismay at their secret having been revealed mirrored by the amazement and raw greed on the faces of the Nazis. ‘Andreas,’ Kroll said to the patriarch in Greek, indicating the statue. ‘He is who I think, isn’t he? Andreas the cook, from the Alexander Romance?’
The defeat and resignation in the old man’s voice told Kroll that he was right. ‘Yes, it is he.’
The commander’s pointing finger shifted to the pithos. ‘Then the jar — it really contains what Andreas found in the Kingdom of Darkness?’
Patras’s son gave his father a look of alarm. ‘How could he know?’ he hissed. Rasche raised his dagger to the man’s throat to warn him to be silent.
Kroll’s sneer turned upon the prisoner. ‘You think we Germans are all uneducated thugs? You need to remember that Greece is no longer the centre of civilisation. Yes, I know about Andreas, and what he discovered. But I thought it was only a legend, another of the Romance’s chapters of fantasy.’
‘Andreas wrote the Alexander Romance,’ Patras replied, a certain pride entering his tone despite his fear. ‘He hid the truth inside the fantasy.’ A flick of one hand towards an unimpressive wood and metal chest. ‘A copy of his original is in there.’
The urge to open the chest and read the ancient text rose in the Nazi leader, but he restrained it. There were more important answers he needed first. ‘Why did he hide the truth?’