The Angry Hills (11 page)

“Not that I gots anything against the Greek people, Jay. They’re as fine a lot of blokes as you’d come across anywhere, and the sheilas... But I tells you if it wasn’t for us diggers, the Anzacs and the rest of the bloomin’ Commonwealth troops the bloody Hun would be in London, that’s wot—and they strands us ’ere. Who’s goin’ to do their bloody fightin’ for ’em, I asks you?”

As a “New Zealander” and brother “Anzac,” Mike was compelled to agree.

“You missed the ’ell ’ole at Corinth, Jay.... You’re the lucky one. Every day we was buryin’ the dead in lime pits. Scurvy-ridden place it was; every joker there had the bloody cruds. Jerry is a mean lot, that he is. And I tells you wot happens—when I goes to make my first escape—who rats on me?—a bloody English doctor, that’s who.... Even in an ’ell ’ole like Corinth they’s got to have their snootin’ ways....”

Nothing as low as an Englishman, Mike agreed.

“I’m gettin’ to Athens, that’s wot, and find me a family to buy passage to North Africa.”

When Mike inquired as to how Bluey would get to Athens, Bluey didn’t quite know. Every train was loaded with inspectors. Travel passes were needed to budge an inch in the country and it was open season on escapees.

“Know somethin’, Jay? You talks like those Yanks I seen in the flicks.”

That, Mike explained, was because he worked for a shipping company in San Francisco for fourteen years. Nice place, America.

Ten days had gone by since Mike’s arrival in Paleachora. After his own survey of the situation, he knew he was trapped unless Christos would help him get to Athens. He waited patiently for word from Christos that he would be taking his boat out again but no mention of it came. On the eleventh night Mike decided to take the initiative.

After dinner, Christos shooed Melpo and Eleftheria from the room and the two settled back with several bottles of
krasi
and some foul-smelling tobacco.

“Christos, my dear friend, when do you plan to leave again with your boat?”

“As soon as I find the right cargo. Many things move well these days. I wait.”

“Christos. I’ll put it straight. I’ve got to get to Athens.”

“You do not like it here?”

“I like it here very much.”

“Then why you want to leave? You damned fool. You’ll get picked up for sure.”

“You know why, Christos. I endanger the whole village. They burned a village yesterday for harboring an escapee. Besides, as a soldier, it is my duty to escape.”

“The crop looks fine this year, Jay. I have a very profitable proposition being worked out. I will be able to get some property in Athens.”

Mike gritted his teeth. He drank a swig of
krasi
and puffed on his pipe. “Well, anyhow, now that I’m all well again you’d better send Eleftheria back to Dernica. I know your aged mother must need her.”

“My aged mother stays at the home of a brother. She is fine.”

“But, what I mean, Christos, I no longer have need for a nurse.”

Christos scratched his bald pate, poured more wine and stared at Mike as though he were a crazy man.

“You do not like the girl? She has done something wrong?”

“I like her very much.”

“Then why send her back to Dernica?”

“Well—the fact is, I like her—well, maybe too much. It is a rather delicate situation. Well, look at it this way. You’re a man. You know how things might happen. You see, I like you very much, Christos, and I wouldn’t want to bring anyone any unhappiness.”

“Jay, you talk like one damned fool.”

“Well, what I’m actually trying to say—it might lead to complications if she stays.”

“Complications! You say you like her?”

“Yes—but...”

“She wants to stay. You like her—settled, she stays!” Then, as an afterthought, Christos added, “Besides, my poor wife, Melpo, has been working too hard.” This was the first time he had so much as acknowledged Melpo existed.

The two men stared at each other for several moments like stubborn roosters. Mike was disturbed by Christos’ sly fox act.

“Why don’t you go out and watch the dancers, Jay? Eleftheria wants to teach you the
syrtos
so you can dance too.... You like to dance?”

Mike shoved the chair back and stomped from the room. Christos looked after him with a childlike smile.

In the middle of the night Mike awoke in a cold sweat, his heart racing. He flung off the covers and walked to the window. He calmed down after awhile as he shook off the nightmare. For many moments he stared down the street of the sleeping village. In the next room he could hear Christos and Melpo snoring in rhythm. From the window he could see the barn where Eleftheria slept. He visualized her there on a cot and his mind traced every line of her soft body.

He spun away from the window in anger. He had allowed himself to be lulled into a fool’s paradise. He was angry because he knew, deep inside him, that he did not want to leave Paleachora. Yes, Paleachora had become like an irresistible lure.

But in his nightmare the names of seventeen men had rumbled through his mind in the form of a roaring train and the click clack of the wheels said—Dr. Harry Thackery—Dr. Harry Thackery—Dr. Harry Thackery. Suddenly the train was in San Francisco Bay enshrouded in fog and he heard the voices of his children, Jay and Lynn, call in desperation from the water, “Daddy—Daddy—Daddy...”

Mike Morrison was trapped in heaven and he was angry. Christos hadn’t fully played out his hand, but Mike surmised what was coming. Without the help of Christos, Mike was powerless unless he was willing to risk a walk of two hundred kilometers to Athens. Strange land, no travel pass, no personal papers, no friends. The odds would be crushing. Too crushing a risk for the Stergiou list. On the other hand, he could not press Christos into unfriendliness.

There was still another part of Mike’s dream. A far-off chorus whispering, “They’ll find you—they’ll find you—they’ll find you...” Mike was frightened. He knew full well that each day in Paleachora brought Heilser closer. The German was not sleeping either and sooner or later a trail would bring him to the village.

Mike thought it through carefully and decided to give Christos another few days to calm down from this evening’s fencing. Then he’d have to press Christos, even at the risk of daring the journey to Athens by foot.

He looked from the window once more to the stable where Eleftheria slept. Then he climbed into the huge bed over the oven and pulled up the covers. He lay on his back and stared at the blackness and heard the sounds of Melpo and Christos snoring. He could not sleep.

Konrad Heilser sipped his Scotch and water and lit another cigarette. The fat Greek, Zervos, sat next to him, rumpled and drowsy. Heilser looked across the broad polished table at the defiant fisherman named Maxos.

Maxos glared back at Heilser. His bulging muscles rippled through a tight-knit navy-blue sweater. His massive arms were almost black from years of whipping winds and burning sun. His face was square and hard and his hair fell in black ringlets and from his right ear hung a small circular gold earring.

Maxos was angry because he had been snatched from his boat by Zervos on the Isle of Kea. He could not fish and he could not drink
krasi.
Maxos did not care whether Mr. Heilser found whom he was looking for or—or if he did not find whom he was looking for. For Maxos was half fish, and away from his boat he was a fish out of water.

“All right,” Heilser said. “Tell me the story once more.”

“I have already told it fifty times,” Maxos grumbled.

“I want to hear it again,” Heilser said.

Maxos sighed. “I can go to my boat then?”

“Perhaps.”

Maxos grumbled again. “I was in a waterfront saloon in Nauplion drinking and minding my own business. I had just returned with a catch of fine fish. A man should mind his own business.”

Heilser ignored the rebuff. He was more interested that Maxos was in the saloon the same night Morrison jumped the prison train near Nauplion.

“A man was at the next table to me, drinking. He was minding his own business, too.”

“You say you do not know who this man was?”

“I had seen him before about four months ago in the same saloon. He was a crewman from a boat that came from Larissa Province. He was dressed like a Larissa farmer and spoke with that accent too.”

“You did not meet this man personally?”

“I tell you I did not. I tell you so a hundred times I did not. How many times you want me to tell you I did not?”

“Continue with your story.”

“As I said—his boat came once before. Four months ago.”

“What do you know about this boat?”

“Only that it was trading grain and tobacco and many other things, probably stolen. I do not trade with such people.”

“How do you know about this boat?”

“From people around the docks. There is always gossip on the docks. People do not know how to mind their own business.”

“And this is the second trip this boat has made to Nauplion. Are you sure it is the same boat?”

“I’m sure. I never forget a face. Same crewman.”

“And you’re sure it comes from Larissa Province?”

“I know a central province farmer when I see one.”

“You were drinking—and minding your own business—then what happened?”

“A second man comes into the saloon and tells the man who is drinking he must return to the boat. They argue. The man who is drinking does not want to return because he is going to a whorehouse. Then the second man tells him to talk quiet. They had taken a passenger aboard and had to leave Nauplion at once. That is all. They leave and I mind my own business. Next day I go out again with my boat until he,” pointing to Zervos, “comes to me on Kea and begins asking me all sorts of questions.”

Heilser pressed a button which brought two German soldiers into the room. He nodded to them, indicating that Maxos was to be taken away.

“I can go to my boat now?”

Heilser did not answer.

“Fix me a drink,” Heilser ordered Zervos.

“What do you think?”

“It is our answer, if there is an answer. In Nauplion we caught ten British escapees while searching for Morrison. If Morrison was in Nauplion we would have caught him too. He must have gotten away by water. He is the only one we can’t account for who escaped in that area. Could the fisherman be mistaken about Larissa?”

“One Greek knows another. He is not mistaken.”

“Obviously Morrison is injured. Obviously, he will sit it out for awhile in the central part of the country. He has tried to contact no one in either Athens or Salonika.”

“He could be in any one of the thirty villages,” Zervos said. “Can we raid them all at the same time?”

“Are you insane? There are over a hundred escapees in that area now. No, we weed the villages out one by one. It will not take long. Bring me thirty Greeks tomorrow and have them here in the morning. Also get a dozen Italian tourists. I’ll see to it now that all troops are kept out of that coastal area. We do not want to startle him into the hills.”

Zervos placed the drink before his master. “Do you wish me to file a complaint with the American Embassy about the Archeological Society?”

“No. If this Dr. Thackery is aiding British escapees let him continue. We have the place under twenty-four-hour scrutiny. I have a hunch. I don’t often play them. Thackery has entered the picture late—just as Morrison entered late. I’ll wager you that he is Morrison’s contact.”

FOUR

M
IKE LOVED TO WALK
through the sloping vineyards and pick the full juicy muscats from the vines. He loved to sit in the shade of a pine and watch the old men and the boys trundle down the road under a load of firewood as they had done for centuries eternal. It was good to smell the sharp tang from the huge sacks of goats’-milk cheese and to stand on a hilltop and watch the stalks of wheat bend their golden heads. It was a delight to see the buxom, barefooted girls marching straight and handsome from the well, balancing heavy urns on their bare shoulders.

Most of all he loved the evenings when the sun dropped behind the pine forest. The shepherdesses, their crooks of office in hand, would amble down from the pasture along the narrow path surrounded by their bleating flocks. The air would be cool in the evening and a song would start on someone’s lips. The melody would carry over the hills to be picked up by another singer, then another until all of Paleachora would echo with a harmony of voices in an ancient song.

The village had become a haven for Michael Morrison. Although he kept fighting the voice that urged him to stay a little longer, he yearned for the contentment he had never known before.

The men would head for the coffee house and talk of big things and little things while the women prepared the evening meal. Soon they would sit around their crude wooden tables, say their evening prayers and eat blessed bread and chicken and a dessert of grapes....

When the women finished their chores a fire would be built in the square and there would be dancing by its light. First, the gentle
sirton
—as gentle as the people of Greece. Then, when the flames grew higher and the wine burned deep, the dancing turned to the violent gyrations of the
calamatiano.
It grew wilder and wilder and the men danced themselves into exhaustion, egged on by roaring, shouting onlookers. There would be a glint in the eyes of the old men as they thought of the days when they could leap and spin, and they would jump into the ring for a fling at their lost youth.

One night Mike felt particularly high and leaped into the ring with Eleftheria and danced her into a state of exhaustion, to the shouting approval of the villagers. He ended his dance with a leap and a firing of both pistols into the air—then collapsed into Eleftheria’s arms.

It seemed to Mike that the very soul of Greece danced by firelight.

After the dance, the women would be dismissed and the men would gather in the coffee house or someone’s cottage and talk the night away. And Christos would retell his adventures in the whorehouses and his valiant stand against the Bulgarians.

Each day Mike learned more about this strange and wonderful land. The land from which sprang the ideal that has become the eternal striving of man—the ideal of freedom. From earliest days Greece had been a tormented land—tormented by Nature—famine, flood, earthquake—and tormented by man—conquest, war, civil strife. Blood ran deep in her soil. But the Greek was a man of steel. This latest scourge—the German conquest—this, too, would pass as the others had passed.