For decades, George had been pleading with Yorgo Tsangarakis to call off the vendetta and forgive Paddy for his uncle’s death. Yorgo finally gave his answer: My daughter needs a godfather, he told George. Paddy will be my god brother and choose her name. Paddy rushed to the airport, and soon after, was holding up baby Ioanna—named in honor of long-dead Yanni and Paddy’s wife, Joan. Amid the wild dancing and embracing that night, Yorgo pulled Paddy aside to make peace, Cretan style.
I still have the binoculars and rifle, Yorgo said. Who do you want killed?
“It was the end of a miserable saga.” Paddy glowed. “All wartime Crete rejoiced.”
In 2011, at age ninety-six, Paddy returned to England to die. At a memorial, his final words were read: “Love to all and kindness to all friends, and thank you all for a life of great happiness.”
Chris White, of course, was there.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I couldn’t choose between two different book ideas—one about Natural Movement, the other about a crazy wartime adventure on Crete—when conversations with my daughters about Rick Riordan’s magnificent Percy Jackson series suddenly made me realize the two concepts were the same thing: the art of the hero is the art of natural movement. So thank you, Sophie and Maya; without you, this book would have been weaker at least by half. While I was beginning research, I made one lucky decision: after I repeatedly wrote to Patrick Leigh Fermor and never heard back, I was going to show up at his door and barge in for an interview. Instead, I first visited his lifelong friends, the husband and wife historians Artemis Cooper and Antony Beevor. Paddy was dying of cancer, so disturbing him would have been an awful mistake, but Artemis and Antony were warm and welcoming and astonishingly generous with their personal insights and unrivaled expertise (not to mention wine and pasta). I’m not the only one who feels that way; every Paddy enthusiast I’ve ever met has been overwhelmed by their graciousness. Chief among my Paddy guides, of course, are Chris and Pete White; I still don’t know why the wonderful White Brothers allowed me to bumble along in their footsteps, but man, am I glad they did. Alun Davies and Christopher Paul were kind enough not only to share their stories about Paddy but treat me to drinks in Paddy’s favorite club in London and show me, in its place of pride over the fireplace, Paddy’s hand-drawn map of his Great Walk, complete with his signature flying-birds doodle. Alun was even kinder not to complain when I stuck him with the dinner bill because I’d forgotten to change money; four years later, I’m still cringing. Anything that’s amiss in this book is probably something my editor, Edward Kastenmeier, tried mightily to get me to change. Why someone as patient as Edward is saddled with someone as stubborn as me is a mystery I’m sure he’s pondered often. Luckily, he’s assisted by fellow editor Emily Giglierano, whose deft touch brightened many passages. Normally I try to avoid any outside voices when I’m putting work together, which is why I’m so grateful for the dead-on comments from the one person I gave an advance look: Deb Newmyer, my friend and the head of Outlaw Productions. If this book becomes the next Guns of Navarone, we’ll be thanking Deb. Last time around, I was busy ruining an early draft of Born to Run when Maria Panaritis sped to my home and helped get me back on course by stuffing me with those two Greek cure-alls: food and confidence. It worked. What a hero.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
For a man who became famous for his amazing recall, Patrick Leigh Fermor could be oddly inaccurate at the most unexpected times. Sometimes he fudged on purpose—claiming to be galloping on horseback, for instance, to spice up a story about endless trudging—and sometimes he simply flubbed, losing track of details as adventures suddenly rose up and carried him along. That makes sense; you can’t live a life like Paddy’s and still be a slave to facts and plans and daily diary entries. And that’s why, of all the accounts of Paddy’s time on Crete, his own is the most poetic and perplexing. Decades later, Paddy could tell you exactly where he and George Psychoundakis were hiding at precise moments of the Kreipe kidnapping (Day 10: “The goat-fold of Zourbobasili”), yet he occasionally couldn’t keep straight if the island’s biggest mountain was ahead of him or behind, or whether the Butcher had been hot on his heels and leading the chase or already transferred off the island. But that was Paddy’s genius, and the reason he became the only man in modern history to successfully kidnap a commanding general. Paddy created excitement by always being open to it, instantly veering the second he sniffed something a bit more enticing than whatever he was supposed to be doing. It led him to bizarre plots, like his attempts to infiltrate a Haitian voodoo cult and his fortunately derailed scheme to break into a notorious German prison camp, and it set him apart even from fellow adventurers: in the midst of a grueling mountain expedition, as Artemis Cooper notes, “everyone began to dread the familiar sight of a solitary shepherd. Paddy would invariably hail the man and engage him in a long conversation, which left everyone else hanging about, kicking stones, for a good twenty minutes.” He surged along through the years without a compass, which meant facts and his journals were occasionally lost in the tumult. Luckily, there are reliable outside resources that can reorient Paddy’s memories. First and foremost are Paddy’s biographer, Artemis Cooper, and her husband, the military historian Antony Beevor. No one was closer to Paddy during the last decades of his life, and I’d be amazed if even Paddy could tell his stories any better than they can. When I first contacted Artemis and Antony, they immediately invited me out to their country home, answering every question I had and prompting many I hadn’t thought of. They were equally generous with their address book, putting me in touch with one of the last surviving members of Paddy’s circle, Xan Fielding’s ex-wife, Magouche. They told me tales that were beyond the body of this book but helped inform its spirit, like the way Paddy in his late eighties could still down twenty-six glasses of champagne without slurring a syllable, and the time Xan ran into a German officer years after the war and informed him they’d actually met before—the pretty girl the German had danced with in a Cretan tavern during the Occupation was actually Xan in disguise.
When Artemis was working through Paddy’s long-with held account of the kidnapping, she was aided by Chris White, whose boots-on-the-ground research uncovered elements that even Paddy didn’t know. Chris and his brother, Pete, tracked down the most obscure references, like the young Cretan bride who delivered food one night to the general and his abductors. Paddy and Billy Moss didn’t mention her name, only that she’d been forced into marriage to settle a blood feud between two rival clans. Chris found her and showed her a copy of Billy Moss’s book, Ill Met By Moonlight. “She insisted that we mark the paragraph that features her and that we write her name—Despina Perros—next to it,” Chris was later able to pencil into Paddy’s account. “She was clearly very attached to her husband and mourning him as he is now deceased—so an arranged but happy marriage we assume!”
Tim Todd, Chris Paul, and Alun Davies likewise shared their discoveries from retracing Paddy’s steps, and Alun in particular opened my eyes to details of the invasion and subsequent Resistance that only a military man would understand. They steered me toward so many written references that my backyard office finally looked like Chris White’s, with faded maps pinned to the walls and rows of out-of-print books squeezed together in tight rows covering every flat surface. Some of the most useful were the following: