A few days later, Mayor Nicolas Skoulas was in his office when three German officers paid a call. By midmorning the Germans had wrapped up their business and were heading out the door when they ran into a little traffic jam: two shepherds were trying to get in without an appointment. Charitably, the mayor agreed to see them, although one of the shepherds was clearly a little slow. The Germans noticed nothing, but the mayor quickly saw through Xan’s disguise and “looked aghast,” Xan would say. “He hardly expected to see a British agent in his own office in the Town Hall in the middle of the morning.”
As soon as they were alone, the mayor heard Xan out and agreed to become his eyes and ears in Chania. Xan slipped out of the city that afternoon, eventually arriving safely at his stifling little hideout. Unbelievable, Xan thought. He’d just walked into the heart of German operations—he’d brushed chests with three German officers!—and enlisted a top asset right under their noses. Churchill was right: Xan really did have a fighting chance of turning Hitler’s greatest weapon—fear—against him.
All Xan needed was some help. Not help exactly. What he needed was …
CHAPTER 18
Don’t worry, Paddy’s not a typical army officer or guerrilla leader. He’s not a typical anything, he’s himself … a sort of Gypsy Scholar.
—DAPHNE FIELDING, friend of Patrick Leigh Fermor
Leigh-Fermor does not submit willingly to discipline, and I think, requires firm handling.
—BRITISH WAR OFFICE MEMO
“YASOU, KOUMBARO!” And then … whap!
Paddy Leigh Fermor made an entrance that could out-Greek any Greek. “His Yasou—‘Hail’ or ‘To your health!’—was much louder than any Cretan’s, his slap so much harder, and his embrace a danger to one’s ribs,” one war memoirist recalled. Paddy also liked to call total strangers “godfather”—koumbaro—because to his thinking, that made them instant co-conspirators in a private joke. “It strikes a note of friendly collusion,” Paddy explained, and friendly collusion was the story and guiding light of his life.
Paddy snuck ashore from a camouflaged fishing boat in June, after Xan had been working with the Cretan Resistance for six months. Paddy was immediately led to “Lotus Land”—Gerakari, a lost village in a remote mountain valley. Gerakari was a favorite place for the Resistance to stash Brits on the run, because finding it, even with a map, meant getting very wet and very lost, very often. Rivers tumbling from mountains on all sides twist together, often washing over the single dirt road and forcing foot travelers to curlicue their way through a dizzying maze of torrents and gullies. You can be close enough to see Gerakari and still not know how to get there. But arrive and you’ll look back on the hellish hike as the gateway to paradise. The pastures are thick with wildflowers and edible greens, the orchards heavy with grapes, cherries, and vyssina, a luscious stone fruit that makes an even more delectable liqueur. Fugitive soldiers would stumble into Gerakari and stare, stunned, as they were handed frothy pitchers of wine and gigantic bowls of creamy yogurt smothered with syrupy cherry glyko.
Xan set off on the thirty-five-kilometer trek to Gerakari as soon as he heard the new SOE agent had arrived. When he got there, he was greeted by a beaming grin, a full bottle of raki, and a nagging sense he’d seen this guy before. They yanked the cork as they got acquainted….
… And Paddy was still talking when the sun came up the next morning.
“When Paddy opens his mouth, shut yours,” Lady Diana Cooper, the socialite and celebrated beauty, later advised her granddaughter, the writer Artemis Cooper. Paddy’s stories crackled like fireworks; he could pop off tales about his teenage romance with a sultry married Serb in a red dress or a summer swim in Transylvania that turned into a hay-bale sexcapade with two saucy farm girls, or his ill-considered attempt to sell silk stockings door-to-door by likening them to condoms, and he seemed as alarmingly intimate with German dueling scars as he was with “unconventional young shepherds” who “may have cast a thoughtful eye among their ewes for the quenching of early flames.”
Between snorts of laughter, Xan suddenly realized why Paddy looked so familiar. They’d run into each other before, back in a London café when Xan was hustling work as a wandering sketch artist and Paddy was in the midst of the best punishment any student ever served for getting thrown out of school. Schools, actually—by seventeen Paddy had seen two psychiatrists and been expelled three times. The only place that hadn’t tossed him was Walsham Hall, an experimental program for disciplinary cases that specialized in nude dancing and free association storytelling. Walsham was run by bohemians in homespun dresses and tattered tweeds, and their approach to education suited ten-year-old Paddy perfectly: he got to run around in the woods, perform naked barn dances with his teachers and fellow students, and lie back on the floor and spin yarns instead of conjugating verbs. But after his mother heard rumors that the headmaster was personally bathing the older girls and hand-toweling them dry, Paddy was pulled out for another try at a conventional boarding school.
He was bright, no doubt about it, with a hunger for literature and a flair for languages. By his early teens, he was devouring Rabelais and François Villon in French and crafting his own translation from Latin of Horace’s ode “To Thaliarchus,” which, not surprisingly, spoke directly to his heart: “Spurn not, young friend, sweet love-making, nor yet the dances round….” Romance and dances round weren’t on the curriculum at most of the schools his mother forced him into, however, so Paddy had to skulk them up on his own.
“Patrick had an energy and individuality which the oldest public school in England could not tolerate, the real trouble being that he liked women and did something about it,” recalled Alan Watts, a classmate who’d go on to write The Way of Zen and become an international authority on Buddhist thought. “Patrick, as an adventurer of extreme courage, was constantly being flogged for his pranks and exploits—in other words, for having a creative imagination.” The floggings even became a kind of methadone when Paddy couldn’t score any other kind of adventure. “I didn’t mind the beatings,” he’d shrug. “There was a bravado about that kind of thing.”
His final offense was sneaking into town and getting caught in a back room with the greengrocer’s daughter. When he was thrown out this time, Paddy didn’t complain. “Far better to get the sack for something slightly romantic than for just being a total nuisance,” he’d say. Paddy’s fed-up parents wanted him in Sandhurst military academy, but he failed the entrance exam. So Paddy came up with a plan of his own.
On December 9, 1933, after waking up with a terrific hangover from a farewell party with his London friends, Paddy pulled on an outfit he’d assembled from army surplus: hobnailed boots, leather vest, a soldier’s greatcoat, and riding breeches with vintage puttees. He shoved Horace’s Odes and The Oxford Book of English Verse into a rucksack, along with a sleeping bag, which he almost immediately lost. Then he set off in a freezing rainstorm to catch the ferry to Holland.