“Paddy” was staying behind; the young man in the wandering-poet costume would be known as “Michael.” And when Michael came ashore, he planned to walk all the way across Europe and keep going until he reached the “Gateway to the East,” Constantinople. He was facing a journey of some two thousand miles, hoboing his way deeper and deeper into the growing Nazi storm as he followed the Rhine and Danube Rivers through Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.
“We don’t get many in December,” the ferry’s steward told him as the boat slid from shore and rain turned to snow. Paddy was the only passenger. Winter was a terrible time to set off, and because Paddy’s small monthly allowance was being mailed to post offices along the way, he’d eat only if he kept moving. Where he’d sleep, how he’d get by without speaking the languages, how he’d even get home, Paddy had no clue. Like Lawrence, he was just desperate to peel off the outer shell that had caused so many problems and start over with a new name, a new look, in a new place. Among strangers, maybe he wouldn’t seem so strange.
He got off the boat near Rotterdam, then trudged through the snow all day before falling asleep watching a card game in a water-front bar. Instead of being robbed or tossed in the street, he woke up “under an eiderdown like a giant meringue.” When he pulled on his boots and found his way downstairs, the bar owner wouldn’t let Paddy pay for the room. “This was the first marvelous instance of a kindness and hospitality that was to occur again and again on these travels,” Paddy would tell Xan—but that didn’t even begin to describe the bizarre talent he’d demonstrate for hopscotching between castles and baronial estates for the next four years.
“I had meant to live like a tramp or a pilgrim or a wandering scholar,” Paddy would tell Xan. Instead he found himself “strolling from castle to castle, sipping Tokay out of cut-glass goblets and smoking pipes a yard long with archdukes.”
In Bratislava, a banker he met by chance hosted him for three weeks of hot meals, fireside brandies, and endless browsing in the rich family library. In Stuttgart, Paddy was watching sleet batter the café windows and wondering where he’d sleep when two lovely young women in fur boots stomped in to buy snacks for a house party. Their parents were away for the holidays, so Paddy spent the long weekend drinking “the last of a fabulously rare and wonderful vintage that Annie’s father had been particularly looking forward to” and sleeping in Papa’s scarlet silk pajamas. In Greece, he galloped along on a borrowed horse in the middle of a cavalry charge when his host was suddenly called to help quell a military revolt against the king.
Listening to Paddy’s tales, Xan was stupefied. “Like him, I had tramped across Europe to reach Greece; like him, I had been almost penniless during that long arduous holiday—but there the similarity between our travels ended, for whereas I was often forced to sleep out of doors, in ditches, haystacks or on public benches, Paddy’s charm and resourcefulness had made him a welcome guest wherever he went and his itinerary was dotted with the châteaux, palazzi and Schlösser in which he had been put up before moving on to his next chance host.”
Paddy was a fine-looking young man—any Pre-Raphaelite would have loved painting those wavy brown curls and earnest eyes, always hunched in thought over a journal or the tattered Horace he’d dug from his rucksack—but smooth talk and a pretty face weren’t the secret of his appeal.
“One has also to imagine the impact of Paddy on an old count from eastern Europe, barely able to live off his much-diminished lands and keep the roof on a house stocked with paintings and furniture that harked back to better days,” the writer Artemis Cooper, Paddy’s long-time friend, would later explain. “A scruffy young Englishman with a rucksack turns up on the doorstep, recommended by a friend. He is polite, cheerful, and he cannot hear enough about the family history. He pores over the books and albums in the library, and asks a thousand questions about the princely rulers, dynastic marriages, wars and revolts and waves of migration that shaped that part of the world. He wants to hear about the family portraits, too, and begs the Count to remember the songs the peasants used to sing when he was a child. Instead of feeling like a useless fragment of a broken empire, the Count is transformed. This young Englishman has made him realize that he is part of a living history, a link in an unbroken chain going back to Charlemagne and beyond.”
The Paddy problem wasn’t so hard to solve after alclass="underline" once fidgety, show-offy, daydreamy Paddy was allowed to get up and walk around a little, he began soaking in languages and literature at a tremendous rate, far faster and with more command than he would have in any classroom. The same impulsive curiosity and raw animal energy that got him serially ejected from the British educational system was turning him into Europe’s Favorite Guest. From then on and for the rest of his life, Paddy’s motto was Solvitur ambulando: “When in doubt, walk.”
Paddy was having such a good time that even after he reached Constantinople, he kept on rambling, only coming to a dead halt on a rooftop terrace in Athens, when he first caught sight of Princess Balasha Cantacuzene of Romania.
Balasha was breathtaking, a dark-eyed beauty who’d descended from one of the great dynastic families of Eastern Europe and looked it. When she met Paddy in May of 1935, she was thirty-six years old and had been abandoned in Greece by her cheating Spanish-diplomat of a husband. Charming as Paddy was, it was hard to imagine a worse choice for a romantic rebound. He was restless, jobless, homeless, nearly penniless, and barely out of his teens, having just turned twenty. But Balasha found him “so fresh and enthusiastic, so full of colour and so clean” that she took him back with her to Baleni, the Cantacuzene ancestral manor deep in the Romanian countryside.
There, cut off from the world as snow piled up to the windowsills, they settled into a life of artsy aristocracy. Balasha spent the mornings painting, often portraits of Paddy, while Paddy worked at translating a friend’s French novel into English. By the same instinct that prompted Paddy to adopt his alias of “Michael” at the beginning of his journey, he now dropped it: his life on the road was over. Content with the woman and life of his dreams, he showed no sign of straying.
Until, four years later, a new adventure called.
CHAPTER 19
SITUATION HERE UGLY
—PADDY’S FIRST MESSAGE TO HQ AFTER ARRIVING ON CRETE
“UGLY” barely cut it.
Paddy had been surprised to find guerrillas wading past him to escape the island while he was wading in. Satan and his family were eager to get aboard the British boat, while grumpy old Colonel Papadakis was stewing on the beach because he’d just been told there was no more room for him and his followers. A lot had changed since Xan’s moment of derring-do in the mayor’s office, Paddy would soon learn, none of it good and much of it due to the Russians and a murderous thug known as “the Turk.”
Xan filled Paddy in during their long night of drinking and storytelling in the cave outside Gerakari. The Germans had gotten off to a late start on Operation Barbarossa, exactly as Hitler feared, so instead of blitzing into Moscow they’d been socked by snow and were now stuck in a muddy, bloody, frozen-toed death slog. Hitler was facing a campaign that could last years, rather than months, so to rest some of his troops he’d begun rotating them with tours of duty on Crete. Frostbitten and battle-scarred, these frontline survivors showed up with a score to settle and zero patience for any shepherd shenanigans. Crete was now the biggest transit depot in the Mediterranean, and the Germans intended to lock it down once and for all.
“Better to shoot once too often than once too seldom” was their standing order, and their approach to bandits was even more vicious: If you can’t grab a ghost, grab his family. That’s why Satan and Colonel Papadakis had to get off the island until the heat died down; their children, parents, and neighbors were in danger of being seized. “Since it was the German practice to seize the relatives of a ‘wanted’ man as hostages,” Xan explained, “the Colonel’s family had taken the precaution of leaving their home in Kallikitri to join him in the mountains, and were now living as he was, like hunted refugees out in the open.”