“Of course not,” he said weakly.
The old man stared at him a moment longer, released him, and walked a few steps away.
“And I call him the fool. Your helping him made no sense to me. Now I see. It was not for Fotis’, not for yourself, even.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“No. It was a missing piece, the piece that fits the others together. It was in front of me and I did not see it. There is no shame, my boy, or the shame is mine.”
“Why do you think he left so suddenly?”
Andreas scanned the street as he considered the question.
“Possibly so that he would not be here when the action unfolded.”
“What do you mean? That he knew someone was going to rob him?”
“Not just knew. Planned it himself.”
“He stole the icon from himself? Why?”
“I am not saying he did, but there are many reasons, if you would consider the chain of events. How could he keep it when he was only supposed to be the middleman?”
“And you think he had Nicholas shot?”
“It cannot be ruled out. Or perhaps his scheming collided with someone else’s.”
“What else do you know that you’re not telling me?”
“In time, Matthew. I do not even know these things, I only surmise them. I realize that you mistrust me, and that I am to blame for that. It will take time to rebuild that trust. Just as understanding will take time.”
The shaking in Matthew’s limbs was diminishing, and with it the shock and confusion, replaced by something else. A cool resolve. Trust. It would be a long time indeed before he trusted again, and that was not a bad thing. He needed to stop answering so many questions and start asking a few himself. He needed to clean up this mess he’d made.
“Fotis told me some things.”
“I am sure that he told you many things. Some may even be true.”
“He told me you killed a priest.”
Andreas appeared perplexed by this.
“During the war,” Matthew coaxed, heart pounding. “He told me you were called the Snake, and that you killed a priest to get the icon.”
The old man’s face became an angry mask as understanding slowly sunk in. The transformation was so extreme that Matthew became alarmed, but he held his ground.
“Oh, he wants this thing badly,” Andreas whispered. “He must want it very badly indeed to tell you such a story.”
“Then it’s not true.”
“The priest’s death is on my conscience, and always will be. But I did not kill him.”
“And why should I believe that?”
The old man eyed him carefully. “He was my brother.”
“Your brother.”
“The Snake,” Andreas continued, the hard look slowly passing from his face, the hard edge from his words, “was what we all called Fotis, behind his back.”
Everything was turned around again. “And what did they call you?”
“My name, in those days, was Elias.”
PART TWO
EPIROS, 1944
The crypt beneath the church was many years older than the structure above, and housed the bones of countless village ancestors. Some old men claimed to know which shelf of skulls, shards, and powder belonged to which family, but most agreed that such arrangements had become confused generations ago, and the bones went wherever they fit. During times of persecution the crypt had been a sanctuary for prayer, and a refuge for wanted men, it was said; but the same claim was made for every crypt, cave, and cellar in the region. More recently, the dank, tangled passages of the ossuary had become a place to avoid for anyone who had sampled even a taste of his own mortality, but they continued to hold a fascination for the young.
As a boy, Andreas had shown no interest in the church, but the crypt was another matter. He would take whichever brave souls who would accompany him, even his gloomy half brother, on after-dark tours of the chamber, scaring the other boys senseless with made-up tales. Mikalis, bred on his mother’s grisly Bible stories, scared least easily. Decades later, Andreas could still call forth the image of his runtish sibling, at the edge of the lantern’s light, staring transfixed at a broken skull in a dark crevice. A disturbing memory. It would take until Mikalis went to the seminary for Andreas to understand what he had seen in his nine-year-old brother’s face: not ghoulishness, but reverence.
A shot sounded nearby, a German Mauser, and the captain crouched among the spindly trees behind his cousin Glykeria’s house. Were more andartes about; the communists perhaps? More likely a soldier’s nervousness. A dangerous thing. All it would take was one frightened eighteen-year-old Austrian conscript to shoot a villager, and the whole company would empty their rifles at anything that moved. By morning the place would be a smoking ruin, women and children dead in the streets, another Koméno or Klisoúra. Andreas, who now went by the name Elias, would have to prevent that, but first he must get to the crypt. It was the most likely route of escape from the burning church.
Germans were scattered about the roads, and the captain moved cautiously. Fotis had called him Elias, herald of the Messiah, some bad joke, but the name had stuck. Most of the guerrillas took aliases so that the enemy could not trace them to a family or village which would pay the price for their actions. Who knew that the Germans would not care, that they would simply kill any random fifty or hundred civilians in the area? Tonight, the captain could call himself Elias or Fritz from Berlin, but if they caught him with a pistol in his belt, he would be shot, along with half the village.
The crypt entry was more or less an open secret. Every child knew of the low path that split off of the road to the churchyard. Beyond the last houses-shacks, really, for squatters or monks-at the edge of the wood line, a passage appeared in the earth at the steep bottom of the slope. Tall weeds and wildflowers abounded there, but the entrance was not hard to find. Most men had to duck to enter, and Captain Elias more than most, being tall. He would have to make his way by feel until he reached the place where a lantern was stowed. The walls were earth for the first twenty meters, uneven, liable to collapse. When his toes kicked the little step up, and he felt cool stone beneath his hand, he knew he’d found the ossuary.
The roar of the fire was audible, but no heat penetrated the crypt-just a thin smell of smoke. He made his way clockwise to the niche where the lantern was stored, found it: one panel of glass was broken, the candle a mere stub, but it would serve if he could find his matchbox. Yes, there. The spark of the match head was like lightning in that space. Slowly, an illuminating glow grew, and the shelves of yellow bones were before him. Beyond them was the stairway that led behind the flaming altar above. The bones were watchful, unmoved by recent events. They seemed saintly in their lifelessness, purified by death. Yet their owners were just dogs like me, thought Elias: selfish, angry, ignorant fools; breeding, feeding, boasting, stealing, killing, dying, generation after generation. They were not good souls simply because they had perished. Just wreckage. Just bones.
At the far end of the aisle, the sound of the fire grew louder, and he could see black smoke rolling down the stairway. The door above was open. Thrown aside by someone making an escape? Covering his mouth, the captain approached more closely, bent nearly to the ground: blood, dark pools in the shadowy lantern light, on several of the worn steps. The acrid smell was thickening. He would not be able to stay long. Elias searched the other aisles as swiftly as he could, and quickly found what he’d most feared.
In the space nearest the south wall, where the oldest bones lay, he saw a bunched black cassock on the floor. He put the lantern down carefully, his movements slowed, breathing the poisonous air freely now, and knelt beside his brother. He rolled the body over, and his right hand came away wet with blood from a wound in the back. The face, as the light found it, was far too pale, the eyes glazed, the mouth a pained rictus, and Elias reflexively covered it with his free hand. It required a long, deep breath before he could look again. There, an awful, jagged wound in the throat, around the larynx. Designed not necessarily to kill, but to silence the victim instantly. The captain knew that particular wound well. He had inflicted it a few times himself, had taught its use to his young disciple. He thought again of the strange look Kosta had given him earlier, and read new possibilities into it.