T
he 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.
The aching grief welling up within him felt all out of proportion to the affection he had shown Mikalis in life. They had different mothers, had chosen different paths, believed different things. They were not close, except in the instinctive way that blood sometimes demanded. Elias would have died to protect Mikalis, yet could not swear that he loved him. Died to protect him; yet had he not let him escape his grasp, race to his death? The captain closed his eyes, tried to steady himself once more. Knife was better than fire, surely. The job had been mishandled, though; he’d not died at once but managed to crawl down here. Bled to death, a martyr to a painting.
His hands shook with rage, but the rage only masked a withering self-judgment. He could blame the Snake and Müller for dreaming up the trade, but he could not blame them for his part in it. The actual plan was his alone. The icon meant nothing to him, weapons were what mattered; but it had all gone wrong now. One life had been lost already, and more would follow if he could not discover who exactly had betrayed the dirty scheme, if he could not find a way to sew this ugly business back together. If he could blame Müller, there might be a righteousness to his anger. Yet he knew that the Prince had been as surprised as himself to find the church ablaze, and he certainly would not have stayed around to engage the
andartes
if he had the icon—he’d be back in Ioannina by now, with his loot. The captain looked at his brother’s face once more. It wasn’t a German who had stabbed Mikalis. No, the betrayal lay much closer.
Elias slipped the small gold cross and chain from around the priest’s neck and placed them in his pocket. There was nothing else of value on the body. Grabbing hold under the armpits, pillowing the limp head against his leg, the captain dragged Mikalis to a corner of the crypt, nearer the tunnel exit. There, he arranged the body as respectfully as possible, placing his kerchief over the face, only noticing now the dark blisters on the hands, the burned and frayed bottom of the cassock. The priest had fought both flame and wounds to crawl down here and die among his ancestors. The captain placed two fingers on the cold forehead in a sort of benediction, but no words came. Next, he retrieved the lantern, doused the flame, and returned it to its place. Then, dizzy from the invisible fumes, twice as blind as when he had entered, Elias made his way back out into the night.
The glow from the church lit the valley, the fire reaching its apex. Elias stuffed his hands in his pockets, chin down, eyes alert, and slipped into the village. A small crowd had gathered at the base of the lane to the churchyard, women and children, buckets in hand. Four German soldiers prevented their progress. Light from the flames above caught the sentries’ helmets and young faces, and Elias could see that they were edgy and ready to shoot the first fool bold enough to step forward. Müller would not want the
andartes
to escape by slipping into the crowd, pretending to be part of the fire brigade, and he would let the house of God burn to its foundation. Was that a clue? If there was a chance the icon was still in the church, would the German not have every adult and child, even his own men, throwing water on the flames? What had he seen before the smoke drove him out of the sanctuary? Had the Holy Mother been removed before the fire, and did the Prince know it? If Müller thought the icon was still intact, somewhere, then anything was possible.
Elias slid around the group unnoticed. His only clue was Kosta, and he had to make a choice now: the house or the shop? If the boy had escaped the fire, and if the captain’s fears were true, then Kosta would not lead pursuers to his own home. The shop, then. Elias pushed on toward the heart of the village, using the crooked back streets. At the top of a lane the square came into sight, where another crowd was gathered. This one seemed dominated by helmeted figures and shouted commands. A number of people stood together by Tzamakis’ tavern, under guard. Village elders. Glykeria’s father was there, but Elias did not see Kosta’s father, Stamatis Mavroudas, among them.
The Mavroudas shop faced the square, but the captain had no intention of trying the front door. Instead, he slid into an alley just wide enough for a man, invisible in the night shadows. Within a few yards the space widened into a small court, four meters square, and he was before the back door. The curtains were drawn on a tiny window, but Elias could make out candlelight behind them. He slipped his pistol from his belt and gently pressed his ear to the door. Only silence at first, but a minute’s patience was rewarded by a raised voice, questioning, angry. Elias knew the voice.
Stepping to the side of the door, he rapped hard upon it. Silence once more.
“Who’s there?” a weak voice asked, finally. The old man, Stamatis.
Elias merely rapped again.
The bolt slid aside within, and the door opened a hand’s breadth. Mavroudas looked flushed and frightened. “What do you want?”
Elias looked the man in the eye but directed his words past him, into the room.
“Fotis, it’s me.”
There was a telling pause. Then the candle was covered, the door pulled wider, and Elias stepped inside. The door thumped shut behind him, the candle leaped back to life as a large bowl was lifted up, and the familiar figure of his commander stood by the table. Huge black mustache, hawklike nose, somber eyes in a long, sloping forehead. Fotis always conveyed a sense of calm, but the captain could see tension etched in the forehead and the jawline. The Snake was angry.
“You shouldn’t use my name.”
Elias ignored the comment. Stamatis knew them both.
“What are you doing here?” Elias demanded. It was not the tone to take with a superior, but he didn’t care. Fotis should have been with the team sent to retrieve the guns, simultaneously with Müller’s removing the icon. Elias, the only one among the guerrillas who knew where the Mother was hidden, had insisted on assigning roles. He’d never forgotten the covetous way Fotis had admired the work years before, stroking the cypress panels as he would a lover. He wanted the Snake nowhere near the church when the confiscation occurred, and leading the team that seized the guns was an honor Fotis could not refuse without revealing some ulterior motive for the whole scheme. The captain had thought it all through. A false message would get Mikalis out of the church; the Germans guarding the wrecked villa where the weapons were stored—three or four men in Müller’s pay—would fire some rounds at the
andartes
and withdraw. Each side would get what it wanted, and only the Prince, the Snake, and the captain would know what happened.
“Interrogating this son of a whore,” Fotis answered him.
Mavroudas had used Elias’ entry to shuffle across the small storeroom—now empty of the barrels of olives, figs, and cheese that used to crowd it—toward the front of the shop. Fotis covered the distance in two strides and flung the cowering merchant back into the old chair, which groaned beneath his sudden weight. Coiled rope and a six-inch blade sat on the table, on either side of the fat candle. Fotis had placed them carefully, to give Stamatis something to think about.
“Why aren’t you with the men I sent?”
“They are safe,” the Snake answered casually.
“What happened up there?”
Dragoumis looked at him hard.
“What do you think happened? The Prince didn’t get his gift, so he didn’t call off the men guarding the house.”
“You couldn’t overrun them?”
“We could have. There were only a few, but they had a machine gun, and it would have cost many men. God knows they were eager, but they were not my men to spend that way.”
We’re all your men, thought Elias, and you spend us in whatever manner suits you.
“So why are you here?” he pressed.
“The same reason as you. To find out what the hell happened.”
“You seem to know already.”
“I could say the same.” Fotis circled the table like a shark.
“Here we both are.”
“Kosta went into the church during the shooting. I don’t know why he went in or if he got out.” Elias could not mention Mikalis. It was too new, too raw.
“The son, yes, he is part of it.”
“And this one?” Elias kicked the chair leg and Stamatis flinched.
“This one,” Fotis answered evenly, a hand upon the merchant’s shoulder, “was seen leaving the church, with another man. And something wrapped in a bundle.”
“Before the fire?”
“During
the fire.”
“Seen by whom?”
“It’s a lie,” hissed the old thief. “It’s a lie. They all hate me. Peasants. They would lie for a crust of bread. Captain Elias—”