The crimson thread, p.2
The Crimson Thread, page 2
It was a baptism of fire. A fortress of barbed wire, concrete-lined trenches, and bomb shelters. Dust whirled in tiny tornadoes, encrusting nostrils and ear whorls, turning the seams of their uniforms to sandpaper. Teddy had chalked “look out, Musso, here we come” on the sides of their truck, but he knew—as they all knew—that the Anzac forces had only six thousand untried men attacking an army of forty-five-thousand seasoned Italian soldiers. The whole day was a blur, all whizz-bang-zap-boom-thwack-ack-ack-arrrrrrrrgh, like in a comic book.
Afterward, eerie silence and desolation. Sprawled bodies lying in the orange sand, flies clustered on their eyes and mouths and wounds. Thousands and thousands of Italian soldiers stumbling out to surrender, crying, “Aqua, aqua,” which Teddy eventually worked out meant “water.’ He had to learn another Italian phrase, Lascie le armi, which meant “lay down your arms’. He pronounced it “lashay lay army,’ but the message seemed to get through. So many Italians were taken prisoner, no one knew what to do with them.
That night, Teddy and Jack found an Italian officer’s tent with his uniform all laid out ready for him, a white suit bedecked with gold lace and tassels, a safari helmet waving with peacock feathers, a blue satin sash. The mess tent nearby was piled with tins of baked ham and truffles, jars of cherries, and crates of fine wine and brandy.
Jack found a gramophone and put on some opera, and Teddy forced open some tins of condensed milk with the point of his bayonet. Wearing the Italian officer’s gaudy jacket, sash, and hat, they got grandly drunk, singing, “O mio babbino caro” at the top of their voices and eating the condensed milk out of the tin with spoons, something Teddy’s mother had never allowed him to do. They had a merry old time of it until their commanding officer told them to “Take off those bloody ridiculous clothes and try to look like bloody soldiers.”
A string of swift and easy victories followed, and Teddy felt invincible. They cheered when they heard they were being transferred to Greece. “We’ll run those Eyties out in no time,” he had boasted.
As they marched through the streets of Athens, the soldiers sang:
When we meet old Mussolini,
We’ll piss right in his eye,
We’d rather shoot him
Than salute him,
That bloody old Mussolini.
Pretty girls lined the streets, throwing flowers. Teddy caught one and stuck it behind his ear, and the crowd cheered. An old woman dressed all in black pushed a bottle of wine into his hands. “Niki!” she said and mimed drinking. Teddy did as instructed, pulling out the cork with his teeth and spitting it into the gutter. The wine was sweet and rich, and he took a few more swigs before passing it to Jack. “I could get to like this place,” he said.
“Everything is so old,” Jack said in wonderment. “Look, there’s the Acropolis!”
“The whole place could do with a lick of paint,” Teddy replied.
The crowds cheered. “Kalimera! Niki! Niki!”
“Who’s this Nicky guy?” Teddy asked Jack.
“It means victory,” Jack said, grinning.
They had thought they’d be fighting the Italians, as they had in Libya, but Hitler decided that Mussolini needed a hand. Teddy and Jack and their battalion had to march north, under the Luftwaffe’s ceaseless strafing, to fight against the Germans advancing down the Thermopylae pass into Greece.
That night, their commanding officer called the men together. Lieutenant-Colonel Theodore Walker was a tall, lean man, with dark hair parted down the middle as neatly as if drawn with a ruler. He had been a banker before the war, so Teddy called him “the accountant” rather derisively. “I’m sorry, lads, but I’m afraid we’ve been given our orders,” Walker said. “The Germans are on their way, and we have to do our best to stop them. The longer we hold them off, the more of our boys will live another day. So do your bloody best, I know you’ll make me proud.”
The 2/7th battalion did their best, but the Germans could not be stopped. It was all one hideous blur after that. They had to retreat, using dead mules to fill in bomb craters in the steep narrow roads, hiding in muddy ditches as the Luftwaffe roared overhead, listening to the groans of the wounded, eyes stinging from the smoke of burning army trucks. They were ordered to abandon their supplies and their equipment, smashing up their big guns with sledgehammers so the Germans could not use them. Sand was poured into the engines of the trucks; the horses were shot.
Somehow Teddy and Jack stumbled all the way back to the port at Athens, hoping to find a berth on an Allied ship. The Greeks surrendered on April 20, Hitler’s fifty-second birthday, as if wanting to give him a bloody great big present. It didn’t matter. The Luftwaffe continued to bomb the city and the harbor, and machine gun the long lines of filthy, exhausted soldiers as they retreated.
Not a single RAF plane in sight. “Rare As Fuck,” the men had begun calling them.
A British officer stalked down the road, shouting, “Anyone here speak Greek? The bloody Greek navy has refused to transport the bloody Greek king out of here, so we need to bloody fly him out, and we can’t find anyone who speaks the bloody language!”
Teddy knew a sweet chance when he heard it. He jumped up. “I do, sir! Kalimera!”
The officer looked him up and down. “Any good?”
“I was studying Classics at Melbourne University before I signed up, sir. And we had a bastard of a teacher at school whose favorite punishment was to make us translate Homer. I was always in trouble, so I got a lot of practice.”
The officer did not smile, so Teddy added another quick “sir.”
“Very well,” the officer said wearily. “Grab your swag and let’s go.”
So Teddy had caught up his kitbag and gone off with the officer. At the last minute, he had turned and winked at Jack, laughing. It was true that their Classics teacher had often punished him by making him translate Homer. It was also true that Jack had always helped him on the sly.
Luckily, King George of the Hellenes spoke excellent English, so Teddy had not been caught out. And now here he was, guarding the Greek royal family in the comfort of the Villa Ariadne in Knossos, instead of scratching out a slit trench with his tin hat like the rest of his brigade.
He felt a bit bad about Jack, but it was every man for himself. Jack could have spoken up. And they’d not wanted two men. Teddy had to seize his chance.
He glanced at the papers in his hand and realized with a jolt that it was Anzac Day. The rest of his battalion would be down on the beach, getting plastered and playing two-up, paper poppies in their buttonholes. Twenty-six years ago, his father had fought at Gallipoli. Teddy felt that he should raise a beer for the old bastard. There was no beer at the villa, but it was well stocked with gin. Surely no one would notice if he slipped a bottle in his pocket when he went off duty. Yep, Teddy had landed on his feet, for sure. Who could have guessed those bloody boring lessons in ancient Greek would end up being of use?
“Funny old place, this villa,” Prince Peter said, looking about him with interest. “Like an English country house plopped down in the middle of an old Greek ruin.”
“I wish we were in an English country house,” King George said moodily. “Or at Brown’s Hotel. At least they know how to make a decent martini there.”
“Well, you are the king of Greece, Georgie. Your people think you should stand by them in their hour of need.”
“Unfortunately, I have a very long memory. They didn’t want me in ’24, when they deposed me, and stripped me of my Greek nationality. And they were happy for me to be a mere puppet-king dancing to the tune of that damned Metaxas these past five years. Why should I stay and fight and die by their side now?” The king took another deep drag of his cigarette, his hand shaking noticeably.
Teddy didn’t understand Greek politics. He didn’t think anyone could. Jack had told him to try and remember it in numbers.
Nineteen years since King George had inherited the throne.
Twenty-three changes of government.
Thirteen coups.
One dictatorship.
One Nazi invasion.
Teddy wondered what would happen now. If the Greek royal family was evacuated to Cairo, would he go with them? He didn’t want to miss any of the fun, but then again, it could do his army career some good. And his mum would be able to crow about it all over town.
A flash of movement caught his eye. Teddy looked across the garden. A shapely young woman in a white flowery dress was bending over, gathering up something that had fallen.
His lips formed a soundless whistle. Things just kept getting better and better.
He delivered his dispatches smartly, then went down into the garden where she was folding up her sewing. “Excuse me,” he said. “I think we’ve met before. I’m Teddy Lloyd, on secondment to the king’s guard.”
The young woman looked at him in surprise. “I don’t think we’ve met before.”
She speaks English, he thought exultantly. And she’s a real dish!
“Oh, sure we have,” he said persuasively. “It was just last week. You and I were sitting in a train carriage, along with your mother and my general. Our train went into a dark tunnel, and none of us could see a thing. Everyone heard, though, the sound of smooching, then a loud slap. When the train comes out of the tunnel, the general has a bright red cheek. “What on earth!” the general thinks. “My lieutenant kissed the girl and I get slapped?” Your mother thinks, “Bravo, my girl, you taught that handsome Aussie soldier a lesson!” You wonder why your mother slapped me, when I have come so far and put myself in such danger to fight for your country. He deserves a kiss, you think. Meanwhile, I’m congratulating myself on my cleverness. It’s not every day I get to kiss the prettiest girl in Crete and slap a general!”
She laughed. “There are no trains in Crete, you idiot.”
“Damn, you’ve got me there. Must’ve been a bus.”
“Must’ve been a different girl.”
“Can’t have been. There is no prettier girl in Crete. Want to come ride a bus with me, find ourselves a long dark tunnel?”
She shook her head, casting him a laughing glance.
Desire hissed all through his body. Teddy stepped closer, smiling down at her. “How about showing me the sights? I get a few hours off later. Go on, make a poor homesick digger happy for a few hours.”
She considered him. “I’m not sure I can trust you to keep your hands to yourself.”
“Oh, you can’t! But why would you want to?”
She could not help laughing but shook her head again.
“I’m not asking you to marry me,” he said in exasperation. “I won’t be here that long.”
“It is good you are not!” she flashed back. “Because I’m never going to get married.”
“So what’s the harm then, in having a little fun? We might both be dead tomorrow.”
That seemed to strike a chord. “True,” she answered slowly. “All right then, I’ll show you around. But only if you promise to mind your manners.”
“Sure, babe,” he said easily. “Boy scout honor.”
But he crossed his fingers behind his back.
III
26 April 1941
An old Venetian fortress guarded the entrance to the small port of Heraklion, dozens of candy-colored boats bobbing at their moorings. Beyond the fortress, a narrow pier ran far out into the sea. The island of Dia was a dark smudge in the distance. It had once been a dragon, an old fisherman had told Jack, coming to attack Crete, but Zeus had turned it to stone with a thunderbolt.
Jack loved all those old stories. He had read the tales of the Greek heroes, growing up in Cambridge. When he was eight, his nana had come to take him all the way to Australia. He had not had much time to pack, but the first things to be shoved into a suitcase were his favorite books: Andrew Lang’s Tales of Troy and Greece, The Secret Garden, Treasure Island, Peter Pan, The Princess and the Goblin.
It was Jack’s keenness for ancient myths which led him to study Classics at university. He had been thrilled when he heard his battalion was being deployed to Greece. The gods once lived here, he thought as they sailed toward Athens. Here Hermes invented the lyre, here Aristotle sat and spoke aloud to his disciples, here Socrates drank hemlock.
And now here he was, by some extraordinary workings of fate, in Crete, the epicenter of so many myths. The bull-headed minotaur locked within the labyrinth. The hero Theseus who volunteered to come to Crete as one of those to be sacrificed to feed it. The princess Ariadne who fell in love with Theseus, and so gave him a sword so that he might kill the monster, even though it was her own brother. Daedalus, the builder of the labyrinth, who made wings of feathers and wax so he and his son might escape the king’s wrath, only to see Icarus fly too close to the sun and fall to his doom. Even the name of Heraklion was mythic, inspired by the hero Hercules, who had come to the island to capture a wild bull and so fulfill the seventh of his twelve labors.
The old town was crowded within high medieval walls. Bougainvillea grew over iron lace balconies where women pegged out their washing on lines strung over the alleyways. A man dragged along a sad-eyed donkey with wooden chairs lashed on top of sacks of cement. Terracotta domes and tall belltowers rose behind an elegant Italianate loggia with rows of symmetrical arches. Jack walked up the road, carefully noting doorways and rooftops that could provide cover and the position of telephone wires and call boxes.
He still could not quite believe that he had been recruited to join Brigadier Brian Chappell’s intelligence team here in Heraklion. Or, indeed, that he had survived the nightmare that had been the retreat from the Greek mainland.
The port of Piraeus had been like a hallucination of Hades. German dive-bombers had screamed down like harpies, clawing the fleeing soldiers with machine-gun bullets. Through the smoke, Jack had seen a woman struggling along with a heavy bag, a sobbing little girl on her hip. A boy had stumbled beside her, dragging a suitcase, a teddy bear in his other hand. Jack had run to help them and gotten them to safety.
In return, her husband, the British First Secretary in Athens, had given him a berth on their steamer ship. It had sailed through the night, but at dawn was discovered by the Luftwaffe and blown to bits. Jack had helped tend the wounded, then fixed a broken radio and sent out an SOS. Help had arrived, and they had somehow managed to get to safety in Crete. The British First Secretary had recommended him warmly to the brigadier, so Jack had found himself with a new role, working in the British command headquarters set up in a cave located between the airport to the east and the town of Heraklion to the west.
So far, his duties had been light. The brigadier had introduced him around, told him to get a new uniform, write to his grandmother, and go and check out the defensive potential of the town. Jack had obeyed with alacrity.
The narrow, cobbled street led out into a broad, tree-lined square. In the center was an ornate marble fountain supported by miserable-looking lions with manes set in stylized curls. Jack knew it had been designed by the Venetian doge, Francesco Morosini, in the days when Crete had been ruled by Venice. It was cool under the plane trees, and Jack sat at one of the little tables and ordered a coffee. He was bewildered by a rush of questions and gesticulations from the waiter.
His modern Greek was getting better every day, but most of his practice had been saying things like yassous, a general term of greeting and farewell, kalimera, which meant good morning, neh, which rather confusingly meant yes, and yamas, said when raising a glass. But Jack was determined to learn. After a halting conversation, the waiter smiled widely, nodding his understanding, and took his order to the kitchen. Jack took out his battered copy of the Iliad. His place was marked with a dried anemone flower that he had plucked on the flanks of Mount Olympus. He laid it carefully on the table, and began to read:
And the renowned smith of the strong arms made elaborate on it
a dancing floor, like that which once in the wide spaces of Knossos
Daedalus built for Ariadne of the lovely tresses . . .
“How apt!” a well-bred English voice said at his elbow. “Reading Homer in Greece.” Jack looked up. A tall, handsome young man stood beside him, dressed in impeccably pressed khakis, with thick brown hair swept back from a broad brow and a patrician nose. Jack remembered meeting him earlier that day at the HQ cave. He had one of those posh-sounding double-barrelled names.
“I didn’t know I was c-c-coming to Greece when I packed it, but my university tutor gave it to me, pre-presumably so I could keep up my s-s-studies. It seemed a-a- . . .” Jack took a deep breath, carefully enunciating the word that had blocked him. “. . . appropriate to read it here.” Jack gestured around him at the old woman in black crossing herself three times before a tiny domed shrine, the bony cats sleeping in the sun.
“I’m surprised you aren’t fortifying yourself with some honey-sweet wine,” the British officer said. “Coffee isn’t very Homeric.”
“D-d-didn’t Alexander Pope translate the Iliad while sitting in a coffee house? I . . . I’m happy to mimic the master.”
The officer laughed. “A quick riposte! It seems you speak my language. May I sit, have a smoke?” He pulled out a chair, sat down, crossed his legs—giving a glimpse of plum-colored socks under his khaki trousers—and pulled out a monogrammed silver cigarette case. He offered one to Jack, then lit up, blowing an extravagant plume of smoke. He called to the waiter, asking for a coffee in perfect Greek, then turned back to Jack. “I’m Paddy Leigh-Fermor, by the way. You’re Jack Hawke, right? Is it true you saved the First Secretary’s wife? And fixed a radio with a rusty nail and a broken pencil?”
