That was the good news. Then Paddy delivered the bad:
The Butcher was gone.
CHAPTER 24
With patience first and patience last, and doggedness all through, A man can think the wildest thoughts, and make them all come true.
—GEORGE PSYCHOUNDAKIS, improvising a mantinada poem in Paddy’s honor
DURING BILLY’S DELAY, a grocer’s kid from West Virginia wandered into the middle of their plot.
Nearly four years prior, Nicholas Alexander had taken his wife and three kids to visit their relatives in Greece. Nicholas immigrated to the United States in 1919, and because he’d been working and scrimping to buy his own grocery store in Wheeling, West Virginia, he hadn’t been back since. June 1940 wasn’t the best time for a family trip to Europe, but Nicholas realized it could be the last. America was still neutral, and Greece was doing everything possible to stay out of the war, even swallowing hard when an Italian sub fired three torpedoes toward the holy site of Tinos and sank a Greek cruiser sitting peacefully at anchor, so before the world erupted and his children moved on with their own lives, Nicholas wanted to take the chance for a family reunion. The Alexanders set sail for Crete.
Taking that trip was Nicholas’s first mistake. Forgetting to register with the U.S. embassy in Athens was his second. Tangling with the Turk was his last.
When the German invasion stranded the Alexanders on Crete, Nicholas and his family holed up in his parents’ home in the port city of Rethymno. Nicholas hung an American flag in front of the house and draped another on the roof, hoping that would protect them from bombers and Gestapo. Surprisingly, it seemed to work. So well, in fact, that Nicholas agreed to hide two Australian soldiers left behind by the evacuation. One night, a Gestapo team burst into the house and went directly to the trapdoor hiding a secret room. Nicholas tried to block them, arguing they had no right to search the home of an American citizen. The Turk shot him to death, then dragged the two Australians and Nicholas’s seventeen-year-old son, John, off to prison.
A few months earlier, John had been a high school senior looking forward to another slow summer in Wheeling. Now he was scared and starving behind razor wire in a German POW camp on an island in the Mediterranean. Unlike the captured Allied soldiers, John was a skinny kid and no threat to run off, so he was tapped for death detaiclass="underline" hauling decomposing bodies outside camp on a hand-cart and burying them in a mass pit. He and two young Cretans were so harmless-looking, in fact, that only one guard was assigned to accompany them. They smashed him in the back of the head with a shovel, and together the three ran for their lives into the White Mountains.
A rifle in the ribs woke John up on only their second morning of freedom. At gunpoint, the three fugitives crawled from their hiding place—and met George Psychoundakis. The Clown was passing through to deliver a message for the Resistance when friends in a nearby village warned him that three strangers had been spotted in the vicinity. Wanderers in the woods meant trouble; for his own sake, George had to track them down and find out what they were up to in case they attracted German search teams. George shared his food with the fugitives, then veered from his own mission to lead them over the mountains and into the hands of the heroic monks at the Preveli monastery. John wanted to return to Rethymno for his mother and two sisters, but the abbot persuaded him that showing his face would only guarantee their deaths. Instead, on August 20, the American teenager was led down to the beach and onto a sub bound for Egypt.
John’s tenacity, fluency in Greek, and firsthand knowledge of the Cretan mountains made him a natural for Special Forces. He enlisted in the British Army, and after six months of combat training, John was on his way to joining the Firm. The SOE had the perfect assignment: they needed someone to accompany a sabotage squad to Crete on a quick, in-and-out mission to blow up German planes at the Heraklion airfield. The mission was a success, but rather than return to England for a fresh assignment, John remained with the Resistance. Through the guerrilla grapevine, John got news that his mother and sisters were safe in a relative’s home deep in the mountains. Then he received another tip: the guerrillas knew a way into the Turk’s private residence. Schubert didn’t know it, but like many homes built on the waterfront during the Turkish occupation, the one he chose had a secret escape tunnel. John was given a hand-drawn floor plan and shown where the tunnel could be accessed by way of a bamboo screen in the rear garden. Then he was sent off to fulfill the Cretan code and avenge his father’s death.
After midnight on a moonless night, John slipped into Rethymno. He found the tunnel’s hidden entrance and squirmed inside. Unlike many others that had caved in or were converted to root cellars, this one was still clear. John crawled through the dark until he reached a trapdoor. He pried it open and emerged in an empty bedroom. Down a short hallway, someone was working by lamplight at a desk. John readied his pistol, tiptoed down the hall … and discovered he’d stalked the wrong man. With John’s pistol in his face, the startled Gestapo officer told him the Turk had just moved. As John would later tell the story, he couldn’t bring himself to murder a stranger in cold blood, so he cracked the Gestapo officer across the temple with his pistol and fled back out through the tunnel.
John would later discover that, unlike Rommel, the Turk hadn’t needed a tingle of Fingerspitzengefühl sixth sense to let him know he was in danger. One of the Turk’s own commanders had recently warned him that his brutality was on the verge of igniting a powder keg. Cruelty had to be calibrated; if the Turk and the Butcher pushed the Cretans too far, the entire island could erupt in waves of suicide attacks. Already the Resistance was a handful—imagine it without a shred of survival instinct. Any urge the Turk felt to argue was soon extinguished when eight members of his elite strike force—the Jagdkommando Schubert—were ambushed and killed by Communist guerrillas near the village of Meskla. So hated were Schubert’s men that the entire village dug up its hidden weapons and prepared to fight to the death if the Turk came gunning for retribution.
Instead, he gave up. Schubert must have gotten an inkling that peril was closing in when his commanders decided to leave Meskla be. “The Germans evidently concluded that the gangsters were not worth supporting, and left their deaths unrevenged,” British intelligence reported. The Jagdkommando Schubert was disbanded, and its leader bolted for the capital, where he hid himself like “a medieval despot,” according to British intelligence, “living in a house blocked up like a watch tower and never moving without a bodyguard.” In January, soon after John Alexander’s assassination attempt, Schubert left Crete for Athens.
Maybe Paddy should have seen the next move coming. After all, there was only one man the Cretans wanted to kill more than the Turk, and nearly every day that man was driven in plain sight down a lonely road to his private residence. A residence, incidentally, that in the eyes of the Cretans belonged to their adored and adopted son, John Pendlebury. If Müller’s goal was to choose a house that would equally infuriate all his enemies at once, he couldn’t have done better than the Villa Ariadne and its neighboring palace of Knossos. The Cretans revere Knossos as the birthplace of world culture; the British consider it a jewel of national achievement. But on a more heartfelt level, stealing Ariadne was like robbing the grave of Pendlebury—“a golden man,” as the Cretans called him, whose final words were pure Greek battle cry.