Paddy was still resting and waiting for Tom’s reply when leaflets began fluttering down over the village. Excellent! The runner must have made it to Tom’s hideout in record time. Paddy got one and read:
TO ALL CRETANS:
LAST NIGHT THE GERMAN GENERAL KREIPE WAS ABDUCTED BY BANDITS. HE IS NOW BEING CONCEALED IN THE CRETAN MOUNTAINS. HIS WHEREABOUTS CANNOT BE UNKNOWN TO THE POPULACE …
Wait. What happened to Paddy’s leaflets?
IF THE GENERAL IS NOT RETURNED WITHIN THREE DAYS, ALL VILLAGES IN THE HERAKLION DISTRICT WILL BE BURNED TO THE GROUND. THE SEVEREST MEASURES OF REPRISAL WILL BE BROUGHT TO BEAR ON THE CIVILIAN POPULATION.
Damn. Either way you looked at it, it didn’t make sense. If the Germans had found the car already, how did they know the general was in the mountains and not on a boat? And if they hadn’t found the car, why were they searching?
Paddy’s calculations turned out to be very right and very wrong. As he expected, the Butcher didn’t tear off in a rage and start burning villages. He was taking his time, asking questions, and circling the trail. But instead of falling for Paddy’s ruse, the Butcher was getting dangerously close to the truth.
The Butcher first became suspicious after one of the sentries radioed the fortress to ask about the general’s whereabouts. The Butcher always ranted that the Cretans were brutes and the Brits were harmless pests, but privately, he suspected there was a lot more going on in the mountains than he could see. Air convoys were swarmed within moments of leaving Crete, German sergeants left their rooms for an hour and returned to find them ransacked, an Italian general vanished from under the Butcher’s nose and popped up in Cairo … and now a commanding general goes on a nighttime joyride? No, something was up.
So this time the Butcher went to the maps and began thinking like a bandit. If General Kreipe were dead, they’d know it by now. His corpse was too valuable as a shock tactic, and attacking German morale was a key Resistance tactic; the Butcher couldn’t prove it, but he had to suspect it was bandits, not German soldiers, who were chalking walls with graffiti-like scheisse Hitler (“Hitler is a shit”) and Wir wollen nach haus! (“We want to go home!”).
So where do you hide a German officer on an island full of Germans? The general’s car was definitely spotted in Heraklion; it never arrived in Chania; the northern shore was too exposed for boats; the coastal villages had too many turncoats. That left …
Anogia. High in the hills, bristling with patriotic fever, gateway to Mount Ida and a single night’s hike from the road to Heraklion. That had to be it. They’d kidnapped him and fled to Anogia. The Butcher sent out the order: by first light he wanted thirty thousand troops on the march and plane crews ready to scramble. Search the hills around Heraklion, he commanded. Get aerial photos of all the footpaths leading out of Heraklion. But our priority is Anogia.
By dawn, the Butcher had seized back the advantage. The kidnappers wouldn’t expect anyone to confirm the general’s disappearance until morning. By then, they’d be surrounded.
Paddy expected a pretty hot response at Father Charetis’s house when they discovered what kind of a jam he’d gotten them into, and he was right. “The room was convulsed with incredulity, then excitement and finally by an excess of triumphant hilarity,” Paddy observed. “We could hear feet running in the street, and shouts and laughter.” The entire village was facing destruction, but instead of cowering, they were erupting with joy.
“Eh!” Paddy heard one old man say. “They’ll burn them all down one day. And what then? My house was burnt down four times by the Turks; let the Germans burn it down for a fifth! And they killed scores of my family, scores of them, my child. Yet here I am! We’re at war, and war has all these things. You can’t have a wedding feast without meat. Fill up the glasses, Pappadia.”
They loved Paddy’s plot because it was more than an act of war: it was a tribute to them, personally, as Cretans. Nothing is more Cretan—or more Greek—than pulling off an impossible hustle. Greek heroes were always stealing stuff, the bigger and weirder and more impossible the better. Sticky fingers are so important to Greek theology, it’s hard to find a myth that doesn’t involve someone pulling a fast one. Half of Hercules’ Twelve Labors were heists, including snatching an Amazon’s girdle and a team of man-eating horses. Prometheus made off with the gods’ fire; Jason grabbed the Golden Fleece; Theseus was constantly dragging off women who caught his eye, namely a warrior queen and a Cretan princess. The Iliad and the Odyssey are a pair of true-crime classics; nothing gets done in either one until someone gets sneaky.
And that someone is usually Odysseus, whose rogue’s eye made him the greatest of the Greek heroes. Breaking into Troy by hiding inside a hollow horse was Odysseus’s idea, and he warmed up for it by first sneaking behind enemy lines and making off with a rival king’s armor and prized warhorses. Odysseus was a born thief, the descendant of a long line of light-fingers: his dad was Laertes, one of the Fleece-seizing Argonauts, although his true biological father was rumored to be Sisyphus, famous for robbing houseguests. His granddad was the Thief Lord, Autolycus, and his great-granddad was Hermes, god of thieves.
But for all their shenanigans, you don’t see the heroes piling up a mountain of loot. They’re not in it for gold; given a choice, Odysseus would be happier farming at home with his wife. Stealing wasn’t his job; it was a calling, an art, a way of making the impossible possible and the imaginary real. Pulling off a clever heist is as close as humans can come to magic, allowing something in your mind’s eye to suddenly appear in your hand. Other religions condemn thieves as sinners and outcasts, but the ancient Greeks shrugged and decided, Eh, let’s give ’em their own god. Because who else will teach us that our stuff doesn’t really matter? That our possessions are fleeting, forgettable, and that anything you have someone else can take? What you’ll be remembered for isn’t your wealth and power, but your creative imagination—your mêtis.
The brazen mêtis of a thief—that was the animating spirit of ancient Greek, and it sparked an explosion of creativity unrivaled in intellectual history. The Olympics, the Acropolis, democratic government, trial by jury, the dramatic rules of comedy and tragedy, Pythagorean and Archimedean geometry, Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy, the predictive cycles of astronomy and the humanitarian principles of medicine—it all came careening out of a tiny island nation so small and thinly populated, it was as if the dominant force on Western thought for more than three thousand years was the state of Alabama.
What fueled it all was a kind of Outlaw Outlook: Instead of relying on laws passed down from some god or a king, let’s think like outlaws. Let’s think for ourselves. An outlaw outlook calls on every citizen to create, not conform; to decide what is right and wrong and act on it, not just baa along with the rest of the herd. Outlaws have to be poised, smart, and independent; they have to cultivate allies, assess risk, and keep their antennae fine-tuned to everyone and everything around them. Outlaws focus on what people can do, not what they shouldn’t. In Athens, the outlaw outlook worked so beautifully, it became a civic responsibility. The Athenians still had laws, but they were proposed by average citizens, not imperial rulers. Anyone who started acting too bossy—who thought he knew what was best for everyone else—was marched to the border and sent into exile under Athens’s steely “No Tyrants” policy.