Eleni (89 page)

She looked at me curiously, then decided I was harmless; just an eccentric foreigner.

“He’s moved back to Konitsa, where he came from,” she replied. “He’s built a retirement home there.”

Luckily, I had an acquaintance living in Konitsa. I telephoned him to ask if he knew Achilleas Lykas. Like most towns in northern Greece, Konitsa is small enough for everyone to know everyone else’s business. My friend informed me that Lykas and his wife were indeed living there in a new house, along with their daughter and her husband, a career army officer stationed in Konitsa. “But if you want to find Lykas,” he added, “he’s not here now. He’s just gone to Athens on business.”

Having Katis in Athens, away from his family, suited my purposes well. I needed to find where he was staying, so I called a relative who, like Katis’
son-in-law, was an officer in northern Greece. I prevailed on my relative to call the young man and tell him that an American friend, writing a book about the civil war, was in Athens and wanted to interview his father-in-law. I told him to mention the names of other prominent guerrillas I had interviewed to calm any suspicions Katis might have and to say that I would be at the Caravel Hotel. Soon my relative phoned back. The son-in-law didn’t know where Katis was staying, but he promised that when his father-in-law called home, he would pass on my message.

Back in Athens I took a room at the Caravel and recovered the pistol I had left behind. Then there was nothing to do but sit in the room and wait for Katis’ call.

From time to time I checked and cleaned the pistol, testing the spring in the cartridge to make sure it was working smoothly. I tried not to leave the room except during the hours of two-thirty and five-thirty in the afternoon—the siesta—when Greeks don’t make telephone calls or pay social visits. There was no way I could sleep, so I got in my rented car at two-thirty every day and began to drive. I headed north toward the gently rising slopes of Mount Hymettos, a green, wooded retreat not far from the door of my hotel.

On the first afternoon of my vigil, I drove up the road that winds around the mountain, past the twelfth-century monastery of Kaisariani, surrounded by cypresses, built on the site of an ancient temple to Aphrodite. I pulled up at a curve in the road which suddenly revealed a sweeping view of the city below.

As I studied the prospect, the slopes around me wore the Easter colors of lilacs, red poppies and yellow daisies. The air was heavy with the odor of thyme, lavender and clover. Above on the mountain’s peak was a radar station, where a statue of Zeus once stood. I knew that the secluded ravines of Hymettos had been used during the occupation by the Germans for the execution and burial of hostages. As I sat there, I admitted to myself for the first time what had brought me to Hymettos: I was looking for a place to dispose of Katis’ body.

As Friday and Saturday passed and Palm Sunday began Holy Week, I found myself on the mountain every afternoon. Gradually my plan took shape, almost without my volition. When Katis called me I would invite him to come by the hotel at the usual visiting hour of six-thirty, right after the siesta. I would ask him questions about the civil war and the trial of the four officers captured at Povla, his most important trial. I would phrase the questions in such a way as to inflate his ego and quash any suspicions he might have. Then I would offer to drive him back to where he was staying in Athens.

Once Katis was in my car, I would be on the slopes of Hymettos within minutes. When he asked where we were going, I would reply that I was not quite finished asking him everything I wanted to know. We should reach Hymettos just about sunset. I knew that the drive up the mountain was
closed to the public after dark, but I had often driven around the sign standing in the middle of the roadway and up the mountain to admire the view of the city at night. I never encountered a police car to stop my ascent.

In the solitude of Hymettos after dark, I would question Katis about his role in my mother’s execution. Then I would kill him, leaving his body in a ravine, covered with branches and rocks, just as my mother’s had been. I would drive straight to the airport, taking the first plane leaving for anywhere. By the time the body was found, I would be far from Greece.

With my plan fixed in my mind, it became harder every day to wait. My relative in the military called Katis’ son-in-law again and was told that the young man had passed on the message for his father-in-law to contact me at the Caravel. My impatience grew while I wondered if Katis suspected something. As Holy Week crept by, my hopes dwindled. I knew that by Good Friday every Greek would have returned to his home and family to celebrate the most solemn days of the Easter holiday. On Holy Wednesday I called my friend who lived in Konitsa. He casually said in answer to my questions that Katis had already come back from Athens. I hung up the receiver in despair. My preparations had been useless. Katis had ignored my message and now I would have to confront him on his home ground.

The next day, Holy Thursday, when in every Greek household eggs are dyed the color of Christ’s blood, I took the first plane to Yannina, arriving at about ten in the morning. I immediately began to drive toward Konitsa. For months I had been growing a beard, shot with gray at the jaw line, and I was wearing my most formal blue suit and tie. I looked older than my forty-two years and knew that as soon as I shaved and put on blue jeans, my appearance would be completely transformed.

Outside Konitsa I stopped the car and put the pistol inside my belt in the small of my back, covered by my suit coat. I also slipped a Pearlcorder tape recorder, no larger than a pack of cigarettes, in the top of my right stocking. As an investigative reporter I had used this mini-recorder many times when interviewing criminals and informants. It was a sensitive machine, which would tape up to an hour of conversation. By crossing one leg on the knee of the other I could manipulate the off-on control through the fabric of my clothing without anyone noticing. I wanted a record of what Katis and I said to each other, no matter how the conversation ended.

A single highway leads from Yannina to Konitsa and then on eastward toward Kastoria. Konitsa is built on the curved slope of hills rising in stages above the road, the houses looking down on the Aoos River Valley. To reach the home of Achilleas Lykas—Katis—one had to follow a winding, narrow road that left the main highway and snaked up the hill.

Lykas’ house was almost at the top of the village, a gleaming new two-story residence designed with stone walls and an arched wooden door for the main entrance. I rang the doorbell and heard a voice from overhead saying, “Who is it?” Looking up, I saw a handsome, dark-haired young woman in her thirties leaning from a second-story window. When I said my
name she replied, “Oh yes, you want my father. My mother will come down and let you in.”

The door was opened by a plumper and older version of the daughter; a woman in her late fifties with dyed auburn hair and olive complexion, in a somber but smart brown dress. She received me hospitably and led me up marble stairs to the main living room on the second floor. To the right I saw a long hall leading to what were clearly bedrooms. The spacious living room was decorated with carved wooden furniture, Greek rugs in bright colors, and touches of local handicrafts. The wood floor shone as if it had just been waxed. Everything was new but harmonious with the traditional architecture of the town. I wondered how Katis, an unemployed former Communist justice of the peace, managed to live in such luxurious style.

The woman apologized for her husband’s tardiness—he had been napping and was now getting dressed. While we waited she served me ouzo and a cup of Greek coffee and questioned me politely but persistently about my origins. I told her that I had been born in the United States and that my parents came from the Greek town of Finiki.

From somewhere I could hear the sounds of food frying and a small child talking. I cursed my bad luck in finding Lykas surrounded by his wife, daughter and grandchildren. The craving to hurt Katis was eating at me like a tumor, but I had no appetite for harming women and children as well.

Lykas made a rather theatrical entrance. He was taller than I had expected, and despite the heat, wore a heavy gray suit. The vest was unbuttoned over a small paunch and the coat was thrown over his shoulders cape style, giving him a jaunty, military bearing. He walked with his shoulders back and his stomach projecting, his long legs slightly bent at the knees. Although he was seventy-eight years old, his arms were well-muscled and his eyes were sharp, but his gait was that of an old man. His white hair was cropped close all over his head into a military brush. Because the villagers had described Katis as gray-haired during the war, although he could have been only in his early forties at the time, I had expected him to look older than he did now. His beak of a nose had become his dominant feature, and I could see muscles and tendons working beneath the skin and the skull. Several teeth were missing on the left side, which caused his face to have a lopsided, comical air, an air that disappeared as soon as he began to speak. The voice was mellifluous, with a slight nasal quality, but the missing teeth blurred his enunciation as if he had a mouthful of something.

He introduced himself with studied dignity and shook my hand. He sat down on a chair opposite and began to quiz me about Gastis, the former guerrilla judge from Dilofo, and Kalianesis, the hotel clerk who had been the chief of staff of the Epiros Command, as if testing to see whether I really knew them. When I told him about my interviews with Gastis in his village and Kalianesis at the hotel where he worked, he seemed satisfied. I noticed that Katis’ wife ignored him, as if he wasn’t in the room, and I sensed tension between them.

“What can I do for you?” Katis asked. I began by telling him that I needed his insights for a book I was writing, especially on the subject of military justice in the DAG. I asked about the trial of the four officers, including a doctor, captured at Povla after the battle of Pergamos and tried at Tsamanta. He conceded that he had been president of the court that tried them. “Listen, Niko,” he said, assuming an earnest expression. “You did say that your name was Nicholas? Whomever we tried, we sent their cases to headquarters with the hope that their sentences would be commuted. From that point on we had no responsibility. In the case you mention, there were five judges and a prosecutor—Yiorgos Anagnostakis, who died of cancer. There was Grigori Pappas, who was the examining magistrate,” he added, naming the man who had been the third judge at my mother’s trial. “He died in Tashkent.”

His wife raised her head. “Where was he from?” she asked belligerently. “He must have been a smart one, like you!”

“Let us talk, will you?” Lykas snapped. Turning to me he said, “She’s a nervous woman. We were separated for so long. Twelve years.”

“Twelve!” his wife exploded. “It was seventeen! Seventeen years! My daughter was one month old. He was going to free the world, my hero there,” she added contemptuously.

“Will you stop?” Katis said in a louder voice. “Will you let me speak to this man? Or shall we get up and leave? We know all about your ordeals! You don’t have to keep telling us.”

Katis began to explain how he had gone to the mountains to join the guerrillas in 1945. He had been a justice of the peace in Konitsa, and after the war, informers identified him as a sympathizer of ELAS. Afraid that he would be imprisoned or worse, he joined the DAG. I brought him back to the subject of the four executed officers and he repeated that as president of the court, he had sentenced them with the hope that they would be pardoned. “We rendered the verdict that we were called on to give,” he added. “The responsibility for the fate of the four men rested with Koliyiannis.”

I asked if the accused had anyone to represent them at the trial, a defense attorney or counsel. “Counsel?” Katis uttered a short laugh. “Where do you think we were? These were military trials in the mountains!”

There was another incident I wanted to ask him about, I said, and I noticed that my words became slower as I got nearer the point. “There was a trial of civilians in Lia in which you took part.”

“No, no!” he interjected before I finished the sentence. “I tried no civilians.”

“But there were three hundred villagers present,” I said. “They all remember you.”

He was becoming uneasy and kept uttering denials before I could complete my questions. “They are wrong!” he said. “They made a mistake. I tried no civilians.”

“The villagers all remember Katis,” I said. “Didn’t they call you Katis?”

“No, I had no pseudonym.”

“All the guerrillas I interviewed told me you were called Katis. Your friends Kalianesis and Gastis both told me that ‘Katis’ was the name of Achilleas Lykas from Konitsa. Now you tell me you never used the name.”

He sat up straighter. “I have no connection with any Katis,” he said, waving the question away with his hand. “The important thing is that all those matters were settled at headquarters by Koliyiannis. No one else was responsible. Not Kalianesis, the chief of staff. Not Chimaros, the military commander. Not the military courts. We did our duty, and we sentenced everyone with the wish that they would be pardoned.”

He stood up abruptly. “That’s it,” he said, his manner a model of magisterial hauteur. “Do we have anything else to discuss?”

His arrogance infuriated me. “Aren’t you ever going to admit the truth?” I snapped.

“That
is
the truth,” he said, and shrugged. “What am I telling you—lies?”

I began to speak very slowly and clearly, trying to organize my thoughts. My hatred for the man began to blur my planned series of questions. “Listen, Lykas,” I said. “I have come a long way to see you, and as you can surmise, I have talked to a lot of people already. I know everything that happened, so I don’t want to hear lies from you—”

Unexpectedly, his wife broke in. “Listen to him,” she admonished.

Katis glanced at her and sat down with a harassed expression. “I’m listening.”

“In the village of Lia,” I began, finding my breath with difficulty, “there was a trial of five people. The president of the village. His nephew, eighteen years old. Another man, fifty-seven years old—”