‘Screw you,’ the Fat Man said harshly. ‘Then again, if shedoes that, Niki will hang your intestines from your mother’s balcony.’
‘Over and out,’ Mavros said, heading for the door.
The man on the other side was wearing black clothes and a matching balaclava. Only the long knife in his right hand provided any contrast. Its point pierced Mavros’s T-shirt before he walked rapidly backwards into his room.
From The Descent of Icarus:
I came round in another field hospital, this one in the grounds of a Cretan prison. The inmates were all gone, most of them, I learned, killed when they joined the locals in the battles against the mountain troops who had flooded the west of the island from Maleme. My head was pounding and every movement provoked worse pain. I slid my hand up slowly and felt a bandage swathing my skull.
‘Ah, the brave paratrooper has woken up,’ said a sardonic voice.
I looked up at the doctor who was standing by my bed. His white hair was cut short at the sides and he wore a moustache like Himmler’s — clearly the kind of martinet who wished he was in the SS but had been deemed too old. The army was less choosy.
‘How long have I been out?’ My voice sounded tinny, as if it came from outside my body.
‘Your three-day coma has apparently rendered you unable to use the customary terms of address.’
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ I mumbled, my interest in military discipline long gone.
‘Your captain — what’s his name?’
I didn’t know if it was a test, but I found that my memory was working adequately.
‘Blatter.’
‘Indeed. Captain Blatter, who, you’ll be pleased to learn, has been awarded the Iron Cross Class One by General Student, thinks you’re a coward and a malingerer.’ The doctor gave me a tight smile. ‘I have no opinion about the former, but I seriously doubt you’ve been faking the comas you’ve been in. Here’s my difficulty. We are unable to treat head injuries such as yours on Crete. We therefore will have to send you to Athens, from where I would hazard that you’ll be returned to the Fatherland and discharged from the parachute division — meaning you’ll spend the rest of the war stamping papers or fire-watching. Meanwhile, your unit has been ordered to leave the island tomorrow to take part in a major operation elsewhere.’ He glanced at my chart. ‘So how do you feel today, Private?’
I didn’t know what he was trying to do — maybe he felt a trained paratrooper shouldn’t be wasted even if he had a potentially catastrophic head injury, or maybe he wanted to see if Blatter was right about me being a coward. In any case, after what I’d seen at Makrymari, I had a single imperative — I was going to prove myself to the captain and then I was going to kill him. For myself? For the executed woman? I’ve never been able to decide. Maybe it was for both of us, victims of the war in our different ways.
Blatter welcomed me back to the unit with an ironic smile and a sarcastic remark, but he had more important things to think about. A month later we were storming into the Soviet Union, but as ground forces. After the Pyrrhic victory on Crete, Hitler had decreed there would be no more airborne assaults, so we fought alongside the ordinary army troops and the cold-eyed bastards of the Waffen-SS. Blatter’s zeal began to waver after two months of the winter, but I bided my time. I wanted him to be in full disarray before I ended his life.
That happened in early spring, when the birds on the great Ukrainian plain had started to sing again and the first shoots of grass had begun to appear under our ragged boots. We were ordered to attack a Red Army stronghold by a small river, and Blatter’s nerve finally went. I stepped up and said to his second-in-command, a Bavarian lieutenant named Wanner, that I’d look after the captain, taking my Luger from its holster and putting the muzzle against Blatter’s back.
We moved forward in an extended line, taking heavy machine-gun fire at several points. We had artillery support and that eventually pounded the enemy into disarray, not that they surrendered. After the last of them had been mopped up, I pushed the captain into a command post filled with shattered bodies and took out my service bayonet.
‘This is for the woman in Crete,’ I said. ‘And for me.’
He started to beg, dropping to his knees, which made it easier for me to slide the blade slowly into his mouth and upwards into his brain.
That was the end of the real war for me. I fought on, robot-like, but I remember few details. I was always the first to charge forward, the first to volunteer for suicidal missions, the last to turn tail when the great Soviet advance commenced. I expected every day to be my last, but I survived. It was as if I was under the protection of some jealous god. Eventually I could refuse promotions no longer and did what I could to protect the ever-younger, doe-eyed recruits from the inevitable. I was even given medals, which I accepted on behalf of my men. My unit was finally cut to pieces in western Poland and I dropped my decorations into the River Oder as the last of the great expedition staggered back into our homeland.
After the war I was still in some parallel world, passing through camps and offices until I was declared clean of the stain of Nazism and free to remake my life. Which I did, after I met Hildegard.
But my heart had never left Crete and I returned as soon as I could to live out my days near the places where the dark-haired woman and I had saved each other’s lives; and where I had failed to give her death from a compassionate hand.
When Mavros got further into the room, he saw there were two more balaclava-clad men behind the one with the knife. The latter pushed him backwards so he landed on the sofa. Then he went behind it and held the edge of the knife against Mavros’s throat. The shorter of the others sat down in the armchair on the other side of the coffee table, while the third stood alongside him. None of them were wearing Cretan boots or other garb.
‘You move, you lose your Adam’s apple,’ said the seated man, in Greek.
Mavros didn’t recognize the voice, but the accent was definitely Cretan.
He decided that moving his tongue and lips was an unnecessary risk.
‘You’re in luck, you know,’ the man opposite continued. The bared teeth in the balaclava’s slit suggested he was smiling. ‘I mean, you could already be dead. A vendetta isn’t something you Athenian ponces should take lightly. So we’re here to teach you a lesson.’ He paused for effect. ‘Cut his throat.’
Mavros was instantly drenched in cold sweat, his heart thundering. The knife blade was moved round his throat, nicking the skin. Then he felt warm drops on his forearms. He was about to duck out of the position, even though he knew such a movement would only bring death more quickly, when he thought of his father. Spyros was looking at him steadily, dark-blue eyes willing him to hold his nerve. Mavros stayed still and got his breathing under control, as the knife continued its light pressure round his neck.
‘Enough,’ the man in the armchair ordered, a hint of disappointment in his voice. ‘You’re a cool one, Mavro. But this is your last warning. Go back to Athens by tonight or next time you’ll be drinking your own blood.’ He came over, then took a wide roll of duct tape from his pocket, pulled off a length and held it up for the man with the knife to cut. A moment later, the tape was over Mavros’s mouth. Then the rest of the roll was wrapped round his body, binding his arms to his sides and pressing his legs together.
‘You’d better hope you never see us again,’ the leader said, as one of the others checked the corridor through the spyhole in the door.
They left, closing the door softly behind them.
Spyros had faded from view and now Mavros did begin to panic, unaware how deep the cut in his throat was but feeling pain. How long would it take for him to bleed out?
Mikis was standing by the Jeep in the hotel car park. Mavros had asked him to hang around while he made some calls. The sun was sinking over the high ground to the west and bats were flitting about the oleanders and palm trees. Despite the Kornaria vendetta, Mikis was at peace with the world. His father would sort those idiot mountain men out one way or another and, if it came to another fight, he was ready. He hadn’t told Mavros that this wasn’t the first vendetta his family had been involved in, even though they were much rarer than they used to be. An uncle on his mother’s side had been accused of stealing the woman who became his wife from a village on Mount Psiloritis. Shots had been fired, including some by the seventeen-year-old Mikis; nobody had been badly hurt and money had exchanged hands. He didn’t think the Kornariates would be so open to compromise.