Who Pays the Ferryman Read online

  The arrivals lounge was heavy with the smell of floor polish and the redolent aroma of Greek tobacco and Turkish coffee. No, thought Haldane, not Turkish coffee; Greek coffee. Here on Crete of all places. The coffee was Turkish of course and served in the same style; in a small cup, thick and usually very sweet unless, he recalled, you made a point of asking for it metrios, medium sweet, or sketos, without any sugar at all. But either way, as a point of national pride and honour, no Greek would ever call the muddy brew, Turkish. They hated the Turks too much to grant them even that. And with good reason, mused Haldane. 'Never trust a Turk,' he remembered one of the Cretan partisans advising him during the war. 'Even if he turns himself into a bridge don't walk over it.' And then the man had spat on his knife and dreamed a beautiful day-dream of cutting a Turkish throat.

  There were few other foreigners among the passengers who jostled into the small lounge. Only the German businessman who, throughout the flight, his table and the empty seat beside him strewn with papers, had endlessly checked and then rechecked column upon column of figures on an adding machine; a young couple who looked and sounded as though they were Scandinavian and the French woman who had protested so shrilly at being body searched before they boarded the aircraft in Athens.

  The rest all appeared to be Cretans returning home from business trips or from visits to friends and relatives on the mainland. Peasants many of them; shiny suited, dark skinned and heavily moustached men and wizened, black shawled and head scarved women. For most, their luggage was nothing more than a wicker basket or a newspaper-wrapped bundle tied with string.

  Others among them, though, were more smartly dressed, the men in well cut, expensive suits and carrying briefcases while a few of the younger women, with delicately shaped faces and beautiful eyes, were elegant enough to have stepped straight out of an ancient Minoan fresco. Only, instead of the many tiered, long skirts and bare breasts which were the fashion in 2000 BC when Crete ruled the Mediterranean, these modish, brassiered, bloused and sweatered descendants of the subjects of the Priest King Minos favoured, in the main, stylish trouser suits with high waisted slacks, close fitting around the cheeks of their small, tight and provocative backsides.

  As each of the Cretans came up - the steps from the dispersal area and into the building so those that had been waiting there for them surged forward to greet them with enthusiasm and exuberant emotion and Haldane soon found himself hemmed in on all sides by a kissing, crying, laughing, gesticulating mob of people all talking at once.

  Until his luggage was unloaded there was nothing he could do to escape the hubbub and he had no wish to for strangely he felt a part of it and he was faintly saddened that there was no one there in the milling crowd to welcome him. But then, he consoled himself, no one knew I was coming. Nevertheless he was grateful when the toothless old woman who had sat across the aisle from him and who had spent most of the time they were in the air praying, thrust a shopping bag and two dead chickens into his arms so that she was unencumbered while she embraced and cried over her numerous children, grandchildren and great grand-children. As Haldane handed her luggage back to her, one of the men in the group thanked him in Greek and shook his hand so that, if only for a moment, the Englishman was at least part of a reunion. And that pleased him.

  It was only later. as the throng in the lounge thinned a little and he was edging his way towards the baggage counter, that the thought struck Haldane; what if he had let anyone know he was coming? What if he had managed to get in touch with anyone he had known thirty-six years ago and said that he was arriving today on flight 504? Would they have been there to greet him? Would anyone have cared?

  'Kalispera,' said the barman, grateful for some customer so early in the evening and moving up behind the counter to take his order.

  'Kalispera, ' replied Haldane. He sat down on one of the bar stools.

  'American?'

  Haldane smiled ruefully. Did he really look like an American? And what had happened to his Cretan accent of which he'd once been so proud? 'English.'

  The barman nodded and said proudly, 'I speak English.

  French and German as well.' He pulled a face and added hastily, 'Ligo, ligo, you understand A little. You speak Greek?'

  'I used to. Some. I seem to have forgotten most of what I knew though.'

  'You stay a long time? '

  'I'm not sure. A few weeks perhaps.'

  'Then you will see. Your Greek. She will come back,' the barman reassured him. 'What would you like?'

  'Raki?' enquired Haldane hopefully.

  The barman looked crushed. He made an apologetic helpless gesture. 'Sorry,' he said. 'No raki. Not here.'

  'An ouzo then.'

  'Water and ice?'

  Haldane nodded . ‘Please. '

  As his drink was being poured he looked around the empty bar, proudly international in style and decor; all glass and chrome. I should have known that they wouldn't serve raki in this hotel, he thought. Only the more expensive drinks. There would be little profit to be made out of the fiery, local eau-de-vie so freely available in every household and taverna. Besides the management probably thought it would lower the tone of the luxury hotel. The Cretan peasants, he remembered, not only drank it but used it as an embrocation.

  Haldane hadn't chosen the hotel. The taxi driver who had driven him from the airport had recommended it almost certainly because he got a commission for every uncommitted client he persuaded to stay in the place. And Haldane hadn't argued. Besides, despite its characterless modernity .and its pretentiousness it suited him well enough; for a day or two anyway.

  For one thing his room overlooked Liberty Square, the heart of the city; a noisy plaza shaded by eucalyptus trees set in a sea of traffic and almost surrounded by restaurants and tavernas. The square was the focal point, the pivot of Heraklion and if you were looking for anyone who lived or worked in the town sooner or later you were bound to meet them there.

  Liberty Square itself appeared to Haldane to be the one part of Heraklion which had not changed a great deal. It was much as he remembered it. A new statue or two perhaps and many unfamiliar, hideous concrete facades among the buildings facing on to it. But otherwise the same. The tables and chairs were still there round the edge of the island where, winter and summer, people used to sit and drink and gossip. And, as he had already witnessed from the window of his room, that hadn't changed either. For the rest he would hardly have recognised the city. Not surprising really, he'd said to himself, since the last time he'd been there the place had been in ruins, the result of two savage invasions. Even so, while it was still largely intact and under German occupation he didn't recall it being the ugly place it was now. But perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps it had always been ugly and his memory, prompted by nostalgia, was playing tricks on him. One thing he was certain of though, because he'd already seen enough evidence of it on the drive in from the airport, was that Crete was now in the throes of another invasion; an invasion which it clearly welcomed, encouraged and was beginning to grow fat on; tourism.

  The barman put the Englishman's drink down on the counter and placed a small bowl of olives beside it. Haldane smiled and nodded his thanks. 'Perhaps you can help me,' he said.

  The barman grinned. 'Ask me. If I can I will,’

  'There's a man I knew. He lived in Heraklion. Before the war.'

  The barman looked doubtful. He shrugged. 'That is a long time ago. I was only a boy when the Germans came.

  'I was hoping he might still be here.'

  'What is his name?'

  Haldane sipped his drink. 'Spiridakis. Babis Spiridakis. '

  'The lawyer?' suggested the barman, puzzled and hesitant.

  Haldane was greatly encouraged by this. He leaned forward. 'Yes. Probably,' he said eagerly. 'He was studying law in Athens when the war started. He fought with the Andarte here in Crete. They called him 'The Eagle.'

  The barman nodded gravely. 'Spiridakis the lawyer.

  And after the war he w
as in politics. A democrat.' And then he added just in case Haldane should be in any doubt. 'Like me.' He paused and sighed. 'And when the Junta was in power he spoke out against them. And he was put in prison. He was tortured. He had a bad time.'

  'You know him?' urged Haldane.

  The man's grave expression gave way to a broad, beaming smile. 'Of course! Everyone knows Babis Spiridakis! He is a fine man.' Suddenly grave again, he crossed himself. 'More than that. A saint.'

  'And where is he now?' asked the Englishman, half afraid to know.

  'Where else?' The barman's face relaxed again into another broad smile and he spread his arms wide. 'Where he belongs. Here in Heraklion. He has an office on the Twenty-fifth of August Street.'

  Haldane contentedly drank his ouzo, ordered another and then another, totally ignoring the old Greek saying that one ouzo is an aperitif, two ouzos are an aperitif but three ouzos are a disaster.

  When he got up from his stool to leave, the bar was a lot busier. By then, though, he and Panos, the barman, were firm friends and he had learned not only that Babis Spiridakis was alive and well and practising in the city but also the name of the best taverna in Heraklion, a place where he should certainly go for dinner that night. And he had great difficulty in persuading Panos to accept such a generous tip.

  The following morning Haldane went to Spiridakis' office. It was on the first floor of one of the old buildings on the Twenty-fifth of August Street, the road which ran down the gentle hill from the bustle of Venizelos Square and its famous Lion Fountain to the Venetian harbour.

  An attractive woman in her late twenties looked up at him from her typewriter as he pushed open the door of the outer office.

  'Kalimera, ' she said without smiling.

  'Kalimera,' replied Haldane glancing nervously at the closed door of the inner office beyond and to one side of her desk.

  The secretary had him summed up in an instant. 'You wish to see Mr Spiridakis?' she enquired in more than passable English.

  Damn, thought Haldane. She might at least have let me try my Greek. He smiled. 'If he's not too busy. I'm an old friend of his.'

  The woman shook her head regretfully. 'I am sorry, sir.

  But Mr Spiridakis is in Athens. He will be away for four, five, maybe six days. I am not sure.'

  Haldane was disappointed and it showed. 'I see,' he said lamely.

  The secretary took pity on him and smiled. She picked up a pencil and her notebook. 'If you will give me your name and tell me where you are staying I am sure that he will telephone you there when he returns,' she assured him.

  Haldane hesitated. 'That's difficult. I'm not sure what my movements will be over the next few days. Look, just tell him that Alan Haldane called, will you.'

  The woman frowned. 'Aldine? she asked.

  'Haldane.' He reached into his pocket, took out one of his old business cards and handed it to her. 'Here, I'll give you my card. And just tell him I'll be back.'

  The woman nodded and Haldane left her staring at the card.

  Back on the street again he paused in the doorway of the building. Somehow he had fully expected to find Babis in his office so he had not made any other plans. But now their reunion was to be delayed even longer. He had time on his hands. Maybe six days the secretary said. Six days in which to do what, he asked himself. He could, of course, try to track down some of the other men he had known during the war but he dismissed that idea as a course of action which very probably would lead only to other and perhaps wounding disappointments. No, he decided, he must make contact with Babis first. And it was, after all, Spiridakis who he most wanted to see again. Well almost. But trying to trace Melina was out of the question. If he found her he could only be an embarrassment to her. An intrusion. And almost certainly an unwelcome one. No, Babis would have to tell him about Melina.

  He was still deliberating what to do when he saw the Hertz offices on the opposite side of the road just down from where he was standing. He knew then how he should spend the next few days.

  Two hours later Alan Haldane, at the wheel of an Opel Kadett, was driving out of Heraklion and beading west.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Haldane spent three days in the White Mountains and touring through the wild southern province of Sfakia. It was in this part of Crete that he had spent most of the three years during which he had fought with the partisans and alongside Babis Spiridakis. And it was from their mountain strongholds that the Andarte had carried out their daring and often costly raids on German and Italian military establishments in other parts of the island. It was from here that Haldane had played no small part in the kidnapping of Major General Kreipe, the German Commandant who was later taken to Egypt by a British submarine. An audacious operation for which the Cretan people paid heavily in terms of the German reprisals which followed.

  Haldane found that the countryside, so ideally suited to guerrilla warfare, was hardly more accessible all these years later. To reach many of the more isolated villages he had to abandon his car and clamber up narrow, rock strewn paths. Not tourist country this, he had thought more than once. Not yet anyway. And he had found great comfort in that thought.

  He had not stayed long anywhere and although the object of considerable curiosity in every village he had visited he had not once been recognised. Just occasionally, when he was enjoying the overwhelming hospitality for which the Cretans are renowned - in the more isolated areas particularly - and from which there is no escape without giving deep offence, had some of the men and women clustered around him who were of his own generation or older given him an odd searching look as if trying to rake up something from the past; as if trying to place a faintly familiar face.

  And there had been faces equally familiar to him but none that he had immediately recognised and could name. But then most of the men he had been close to during the war were not of the mountains but had taken refuge in them after the German invasion and would now be once again scattered across the island if not around the world. Those among the people he had met on his travels and who troubled their minds to place him would all have played lesser, more peripheral, roles in his wartime experiences. So he had touched their lives again briefly but had remained unknown. And he was content to leave it that way. Leandros, the right hand of 'The Eagle' was of a distant time and part of another world and it was with no thought of a triumphant return to scenes of former glory that Haldane had decided to revisit Crete. Therefore he had said nothing, encouraged no recognition and passed quickly on from place to place, happy to be taken for a stranger and alone in his remembrances.

  Early on the fourth day Haldane had turned eastward again and, whenever possible avoiding the new motorway and skirting Heraklion, he had made the tortuous cross country drive, often along roads which at first glance appeared to be impassable, to the fertile Plain of Lasithi and the slopes of Dhikti Mountains which encircled it.

  Haldane did not remember the house being there when he was last in the olive grove. It had been hidden from his view when he swung the Opel off the road, down the track and into the trees and coming on it had been a surprise to him.

  It was an attractive, welcoming house built in the traditional Cretan style and standing on raised ground with a broad terrace and a garden around all four sides of it. Stone steps led up to the terrace.

  He had parked the Kadett just off the track and for a while he had sat there looking at the house and admiring it, then he had got out of the car and walked closer until he was only a few yards from the base of the steps to the terrace. But now it was the olive grove which interested him more than the house and he turned and gazed into it and remembered.

  He remembered the sounds of gunfire, the reek of death and the fear he had known that day. He remembered that, after four hours of bloodshed, often hand-to-hand, of the twenty-seven men trapped among the vast expanse of trees by the Germans only he and two others were still alive to break through into the open countryside beyond the grove and escape back into the r
elative safety of the mountains. And again he remembered Melina.

  'Do you want something? Can I help you?' The woman spoke in Greek and from behind Haldane and at first he did not hear her. Then she repeated the questions and this time her voice penetrated and scattered his memories. He turned to her.

  She was standing on the terrace at the top of the steps.

  She was not young. If, at that moment, Haldane had been challenged to guess her age he would have said that she was in her mid-thirties. A year or so older perhaps. It was difficult to tell. and anyway her age was unimportant. She was beautiful. Breathtakingly so. Her delicately moulded face was framed in light brown hair, immaculately cut in an elegantly casual style. Her mouth, finely sensual and half smiling, was set off by a strong, determined chin. Her eyes, sharp and intelligent under full, sweeping lashes, were now regarding the Englishman quizzically. The dress she was wearing was simple but expensive and the body beneath it was slim and well proportioned with firm, proud breasts, a well-defined waist and long, slender legs. She wore no make-up. And she did not need to.

  Staring up at her Haldane found himself in the grip of a strange and oddly uneasy feeling that he had seen her before somewhere. But where? He racked his brains for the answer and knew then that it had to be an illusion. Nevertheless, he could not shake off the impression and it discomforted and troubled him.

  'Who are you?' she asked him in Greek, frowning slightly and studying him thoughtfully.

  Still trapped in the web of deja vu and struggling to free himself from it, Haldane, unthinkingly, replied in English. 'I'm sorry,' he said awkwardly. 'Am I trespassing?'

  She shook her head. 'Not really.' And her reply had only a slight accent to it. .

  Haldane knew that he was staring but there was nothing he could do about it. There was such an air of unreality about this encounter, about her, about his reaction to her. It was almost as if this were some kind of magic moment; predestined and to be lingered over. And she did nothing to break the spell. Her eyes were on his. But then suddenly her frown deepened as though she were discomforted by his gaze and her own thoughts. 'What is it?' she asked.