26

IN HOMER’S ODYSSEY, BAD DREAMS WERE always an ominous presentiment, a sign of a god’s displeasure, a warning to keep a watchful eye—and keep the sacrifices coming. I couldn’t shake the feeling as we drove to Pylos that I was getting myself into something I’d regret. And I realized how completely I’d broken with my father, forgoing his field of Greek Bronze Age archaeology to specialize in the golden age of Periclean Athens—so complete a break that I’d barely set foot in the Peloponnese, much less Pylos. But it was a distance that had served me well. It didn’t help my sense of dread and anxiety that Laura kept her nose buried in her heavily underlined copy of the Odyssey, a way of avoiding conversation while rubbing the bruise on her arm just in case I’d forgotten. I felt I should warn her not to get her hopes up. Neokosmos Grigoriadis—our Nestor—could just as easily turn out to be a blowhard disappointment with a hidden agenda that had best be left alone. Names can be dangerous. And the Greek Civil War was hardly a dead issue: Scratch any Greek of a certain age and you will hear horror stories as terrible as anything Stalin or Pol Pot had perpetrated, if on a lesser scale. I had long learned not to talk politics—it never ended and never well. The recent socialist prime minister, Andreas Papendreou, whose father had been a right-of-center prime minister after the war, had deep roots in the fratricidal passions of the Greek Civil War, and even though educated in America, he played the anti-American card with the best of them, especially concerning issues of Cypress and Turkey. What I felt like telling her but saved my breath: No mortal can enter the same stream twice, but names—Philby, for one—can attach themselves like millstones around your neck, bearing with them the treacherous burdens of a past not your own.

I was skeptical our little jaunt would produce anything good but felt I owed it to her to give it a try. Even if my father hadn’t trusted her mother an inch.

Nor did it help that Laura—a voracious reader and long in thrall to Max’s theory that we are the stories we tell and so come to believe in them more than reality—saw the world through names, just as she had experienced life onstage, inhabiting various characters through choreography and music until they were second nature.

So, on the winding coastal road all the way to Pylos, troubled by the recurrence of old nightmares and leery of the meeting with this self-proclaimed Nestor and the dredging up of glorious OSS exploits, I sought to distract myself with more practical ambitions. As we reached the west coast, I began relishing the glorious views of Navarino Bay and contemplating the island of Sphaktiria shimmering in the cobalt blue distance. Sphaktiria presented a more productive possibility for our journey, for Sphaktiria was where the Spartans were famously defeated by an Athenian force in the Peloponnesian War. It had been one of the very rare occasions in which the Athenians had actually cut off, isolated, and beaten the Spartans in a land engagement. I realized that my book on Thucydides could certainly benefit from a visit to Pylos and a firsthand survey of the typography of Sphaktiria, the kind of specifics and detail in my writing that I prided myself on, often encouraging my students to get their noses out of their notes: “Get some dirt under your fingernails, people, a feel for the lay of the land.” I found myself relishing the opportunity: After enduring the wartime reminiscences of some grizzled veteran, I’d have a chance to take photographs and make notes on the ancient battlefield of Sphaktiria—even visit the excavations of Bronze Age Pylos, which I had sorely neglected, and turn the trip into a windfall. Laura, with her well-thumbed copy of the Odyssey, would certainly enjoy a visit to the real Nestor’s Palace . . . the wise king of Homer and storyteller of epic battles.

“Left at the white house with green shutters up ahead.” She pointed, looking up from her printed instructions. “Well, it certainly feels like the place, sandy Pylos, and the wine-dark sea, and . . . on the trail of your father’s widespread fame. No horses, though—wasn’t Nestor a breaker of horses?”

“Give the Homer a break, okay?”

“Max always said you were obsessed with the Odyssey.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, just like he wrote in his novels—and you, of all people, know how full of lies they are. So, enough of the bullshit, okay? Let’s meet with this guy and hear what he has to say.Then we can look at the Mycenaean excavations of Pylos down the road, and a few other odds and ends I have in mind.”

We turned onto a private dirt road that led to a sprawling walled compound overlooking Navarino Bay. It seemed to stretch the length of a broad promontory, surrounded by an imposing sandstone wall painstakingly constructed with interlocking patterns of thin pinkish stone. Concertina wire ran along its entire length, and the razor barbs, glinting menacingly in the waning light of afternoon, didn’t offer much comfort. The dirt and gravel road ended at a huge wrought-iron gate with leaping dolphins forming the apex of a series of branching floral patterns. Two security guards stood on either side, one with an M16 slung over his shoulder, the other with a clipboard in hand.

“Oh great.” I smacked the steering wheel. “What the fuck have you managed to get me into?”

After a night of bad dreams, that M16 was just about the last thing I needed.

“Hey, relax, will you? Why so jumpy? I’m just following the directions I was sent.”

The guard with the clipboard was wearing a blue Yankees baseball cap—that was a relief; it could’ve been the Mets. He casually came over to my window and checked off our names on his list. Speaking into a walkie-talkie, he alerted someone to our arrival as the guard with the M16 opened the heavy gates onto a gravel drive. My fellow Yankees fan waved us through.

“Hey, they’ve been worried when you’d get here. Just follow da drive through da gardens and orchards. You’ll see Nikos waiting for ya at da big house.” He tipped his hat. “Welcome. You guys are da honored guests.”

“Say, how’s Tommy John holding up?”

“The old guy can still throw a hell of a sinker, but not enough to save the Yanks.”

“I hear the Toronto Blue Jays are going to take it.” “Toronto—Toronto, I tought they just played hockey up dere.”

The white gravel drive wound past elaborate gardens and nurseries, corralled by immaculate lawns and hedges, while stately poplars lined our way toward the main house. In the distance were fan-shaped palms, wonderfully radiant in the sunset, their fronded undersides bathed in mustard-orange half tones. As we got closer, the green lawn became patterned with spiraling arabesques of neat flower beds, the perfectly trimmed herbaceous borders setting off rows of pansies: blue, bronze, and lavender. Scattered in spiky clumps and clusters were a few ancient olive trees, like lingering personages from an earlier era, relics of what might once have been extensive groves. I was reminded of the haggard apple trees in the Circle at Winsted. We passed a swimming pool and tennis courts and fruit orchards and the air swelled with the fragrance of apricots, oranges, and lemons, the sweet citrus scents giving way to the smoky aroma of a barbecue as we neared the main house.

Try as I might, I could not help conjuring images of the splendid Bronze Age palace of Nestor, which excavations in the decades since the war had revealed on a hilltop just a few miles down the road. The huge building that came into view was hardly a Bronze Age citadel, but impressive enough, a smorgasbord of traditional Greek white geometries with a sprinkling of Spanish Colonial ranch style circa Beverly Hills of the 1920s. Venetian Gothic windows did add a nice touch, along with dutiful postmodern detailing—the functionless columns in a blind portico being the most egregious example. Long balconies dripped with flowering hibiscus and honeysuckle and offered spectacular views of the gardens and Navarino Bay. Off the entrance driveway was a parking lot filled with a small fleet of Volvo trucks and silver Mercedes with prominent CB antennas. Two male peacocks strutted by the front entrance and greeted us with piercing cries. Nestor’s elder son, Nikos, waved to us from the massive front door of rusticated oak.

“You won’t believe how much I’ve heard about your dad from the old man,” Nikos told me. He shook our hands warmly, lingering with Laura, as so many did because they half-remembered her from the days when the paparazzi filled the pages of the celebrity press with her photos. She had her hair up in a chignon, a blue skirt just covering the knee brace, and she seamlessly segued from Homer to full flirting mode as she stepped out of the Land Rover. Nikos couldn’t have been more American: not a trace of an accent, dark hair barbered in compact layers, trim in build, and nicely dressed in a blue blazer and khaki slacks. Bare feet in tattered loafers, he could have been hosting a party in the Hamptons. Two porters quickly got our bags from the back of the Land Rover and took them to our rooms. “Since I was a kid, I’ve been hearing these stories.” Nikos motioned us into the house with a smile and an exaggerated roll of his eyes, as if these endlessly repeated stories of resistance days past and the civil war had become well-worn chestnuts of family lore, which only confirmed my skepticism about our venture. “We’re in for it tonight, my friends; he’s got the old crowd here, and you guys are the main attraction.”

“This is so great,” said Laura, taking in the beautifully furnished home.

Nikos was a lawyer in Boston by way of Harvard and had a stunning Italian-American wife, who knew all about Laura’s ballet career. Their three children were in high school and all had come to visit granddad for the occasion. “We only come back here for holidays. But since my brother took over the restaurants, my dad spends more time in Pylos— the country-squire, old-country thing. With the socialist government in Athens, he’s got to be crazy, but he hangs in there.”

“I’m looking forward to meeting your dad,” I said.

After we got settled in our rooms and washed up, Nikos gave us a quick tour of the house as he conducted us to the office wing. Room after room was filled with very up-to-date Milanese modern furnishings, and many rooms were packed with books: stuffed into shelves, in piles on a coffee table, tumbled stacks by easy chairs. One might have thought it was an academic’s summer house.

Nikos smiled. “I should tell you: He’s not the same man your father knew during the war and after. My old man, since he retired from the day-to-day running of the restaurant business, has become a philosopher—a big reader; he will talk your ear off—so, that’s my due diligence: You’ve been warned.”

Nestor’s offices were in a complex toward the rear of the house, overlooking the gardens. We found him hunched over his messy desk, intently scribbling notes on a legal pad. I later realized these were notes for his dinner speech. He was a big man, once compact and powerful but now overweight due to age or infirmity. His full head of white hair was immaculately pomaded back from a pinkish brow lined with ragged creases. When Nikos waved us into the office, Nestor glanced up with a start, as if his mind had been elsewhere, as he registered our sudden appearance. It was almost comical how his expression shifted from surprise to incredulity and then finally to a smile of recognition. And then he was up with a grunt, a great bear of a man, papers flying as he lumbered around his desk to engulf me in a hug that elicited an embarrassed laugh from his son.

“My God . . . it can be no one else.” He pushed me to arm’s length, squinting behind his thick lenses, embraced me again, and again shoved me back for another inspection. I felt like a trapped insect under those magnified lenses, his eyes tearing up. “The last time I saw John was in Athens in 1949—he must have been what, about thirty-five, and you must be . . . .”

“A couple of years older.”

“Jesus Christ—I’d have known you anywhere. So the son has finally found his way to old Nestor.” Realizing he’d been forgetting himself, he turned to Laura. “And so it is you, beautiful lady, I have to thank for bringing this son of a gun my way.”

Nestor took Laura’s outstretched hand and brought it to his lips, lingering in his kiss, and his son laughed again.

“Take it easy, Pop, you’re going to embarrass these good people.”

Nestor swiped at his tears and gave Laura a regal nod, his watery eyes sparking with highlights, as if he were seeing something in her that quite captivated him.

He growled, clearing his throat. “After all the years and lives, something of your father remains to me—good old Johnny A., friend and comrade.” He put a hand on my shoulder and cast a nodding glance again at Laura. “Yes, I would have recognized you, Peter. Perhaps not the young OSS officer I first met on the beach in ’43, but for sure the not so young CIA man that saved us in the civil war of ’48–’49.”

It was a refrain I hadn’t heard since school days. I had steered clear of my father’s circles and had turned down, on more than one occasion, invitations to join the Winsted board of trustees led by Elliot Goddard. And yet I was moved; there was nothing rehearsed about Nestor’s enthusiasm. His were the genuine effusions of an old man who, as I would soon find out, was struggling with the truth as much as I. Nikos escorted us down a corridor toward the gardens, with Nestor still wiping copious tears, waving his arms from a barrel chest as we passed offices seemingly papered with photographs of restaurants he owned in the United States, in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and points west. On the back veranda, overlooking the gardens and a spectacular array of arbors beyond, he stopped short of the steps, struck by a thought.

“Did you know . . .” He raised a hand as if making a pledge to his gods, his open-necked shirt displaying a hairy chest and a glittering gold medallion. “Did you know that it was your father who gave me the name Nestor? On the first night, the first hour when the submarine dropped him on the beach, he gave me the name.”

“Come on, Pa,” said Nikos, “save it for later, or we’ll never get through the dinner on time. I’m worried about the older guys; some of them don’t look so good.”

Nestor ignored his son and winked at Laura as he attempted a kind of awkward apology, as if concerned we might take amiss the business about his name. “No, no, you must understand. It was a joke; at first it was, I think, a joke. I had no idea back then what it meant to be a Nestor in Pylos.”

“King of Pylos,” I said, laughing, more and more intrigued as my forebodings seemed to be taking on more of a farcical cast.

“Yes, king,” agreed Nestor, echoing my laugh and spreading his arms expansively. “Your dad knew all about kings and heroes. What an educated man.”

“He was that, Nestor—shall I call you Nestor, or do you go by Neokosmos?”

I noted a flicker of disdain. “Nestor. My old friends call me Nestor.” He made a motion about his face as if to portray a mask. “Now I’m stuck.”

“You see, Nestor, my father might have been one of the greatest scholars of his generation if the war hadn’t intervened,” I said.

The old man grimaced at the protective tone in my voice, which, in turn, prompted a note of regret or self-justification, and a significant look from his son.

“Isn’t that the truth.” Nestor pawed his hairline in a gesture of despair. “My God, eight years of my life when I returned from America, first the Italians, then the Germans, and then the fucking Communists—eight endless years and how many lives, half a million of our people dead. What a terrible waste to take such things into old age. I hope you are not like Nikos and his brother, who don’t give a shit about what happened here.”

“We care, Pop,” said Nikos.

“Not enough to prevent you from spending your years at Harvard protesting the war in Vietnam.”

“Pop, that hardly follows.”

“Follows, follows what? You don’t think killing Communists is an honorable thing for a young man?”

Nikos smiled. “In Greece, maybe. In Southeast fucking Asia—sorry for my French.” He nodded apologetically to Laura. “Come on, everybody’s waiting for us.”

Nestor took my arm. “Did you protest, too? Did you burn flags?” “No flag burning. I was a bookworm, like my father.” Laura smiled half playfully, half daring to keep the pot stirred. “Better than that, he fought in Vietnam,” she told him.

“Yes, I heard something about all that from Elliot Goddard.”

“Not a big deal. I was a language expert, part of an advisory team in 1972 helping the Vietnamese local militias get their shit together.”

A look of deep pleasure came into Nestor’s face as he eyed me.

“Praise the gods”—he nodded, brushing the underside of his chin with his fingers in the Greek gesture for the workings of fate—“that you are safe and something of John remains. Children are a blessing,” Nestor smiled sweetly at us and winked at Nikos. “Some more than others. His brother, too damned busy to come, heh.” He put his arms around Laura and me. “You said you two were cousins?”

“Fourth or fifth—isn’t that right, Peter?

“Fourth. Our families go back a long way.”

“Yes, yes, there is a resemblance.” Nestor scrutinized our faces.

“A beautiful and mysterious thing.” Nestor reached to his son and pinched the side of his neck. “But my Nikos, the gods be praised, has his mother’s beauty—God rest her soul—and his old man’s brains—although maybe not his lion’s heart.”

“Dad, your guests are going to lynch us if you keep them waiting any longer.”

A waiter in a white linen coat ran up and handed Nestor his jacket and the notes he’d forgotten in his office. Nestor struggled to get his thick arms into the sleeves and then extracted a set of amber worry beads from the pocket. Our route to the promised “genuine American barbecue” turned out to a circuitous one, as Nestor was intent on our viewing his domain before the daylight was gone. He wanted us to see him for who he was, that he hadn’t misappropriated the name Nestor or come by it under false pretenses. He was clearly proud of his gardens, especially of the painstaking labor that had been required to transform the dry, rocky soil of Homer’s “sandy Pylos” into something approaching a lush English garden. This had been in the works since the late fifties, he explained, and still required a legion of gardeners to keep up. He told us he had single-handedly revived the citrus-growing business in this part of the Peloponnese. Nestor was very intent that we see the extensive orchards that provided fruit for his table, picking apricots and limes and handing them to us to smell. As we walked, he became more expansive, asking us about the States, complaining of recent emigration laws that made it more difficult for him to get in staff for his restaurants. He had nothing good to say about the present socialist government in Athens.

“They lead the people to ruin again, as before, and spit in the face of Greece’s greatest friend, America.”

As we neared an enormous arbor thick with hanging vines, the plaintive lament of a bouzouki band could be heard over the murmur of the guests. The cavernous arbor, thick with cooking smoke, gave way to a central space of tables arranged about a barbecue pit, where an entire side of beef was turned on a spit over a roaring coal fire, tended by two sweating youths stripped to the waist. There must have been close to a hundred diners at various tables, already well into the wine and enjoying the bouzouki band. Nestor’s tardy appearance brought yells and greetings. White-coated waiters were efficiently shuttling food and drinks among the guests. Then some of the older men at the head table spied Nestor and stood with their raised glasses and sang out more greetings in his direction, which he returned with waves and hugs. A quiet fell over the scene as Nestor made introductions. Children scampered to the sides of parents. The undersides of the leafy arbor were alive with flickering notes of translucent colors—emeralds and copper-orange and burnished gold.

Seated at the head table were the men Nestor and my father had fought with in the Resistance and later against the Communists during the civil war. Their names poured in exclamations from our host’s lips: Achilleas, Christos, Dimitrios, Harisis, Alexo, Sotiris—men with the names of heroes, gods, and saints, most old and infirm and many showing the effects of wounds from their days as fighters in the hills around Pylos and the north of Greece. Some used canes, two were in wheelchairs. Laura basked in their stares. I felt devoured, as more than once she nudged me forward to acknowledge a greeting. Every one of them had known my father, and in their glittering fire-softened eyes and wine-smoothed voices I detected a wellspring of memory swirling like sudden rapids. When they found I spoke Greek, many broke into tears, as if they’d seen the Second Coming. They patted my back, gave me rough kisses, praised my father effusively, so much so that I wanted to slink away and withdraw from what suddenly felt like a fraudulent life and mistaken identity. Laura, on the other hand, seemed mesmerized by the reactions of these wizened fighters, savoring the near-ritual fare of tearful accolades that came to so many lips. She took a place to Nestor’s left and sat there like his warrior queen, proud and tall, as if drawing strength from the flow of wine and words, more confident than ever in the instincts that had led her to this place.

“New York prime,” Nestor crowed to me, pointing out the beef. “Had it specially flown in from the States.”

Waiters filled our glasses before they were half-empty, and Nestor was on his feet bellowing out toasts to the faithful. He spoke movingly of dead comrades, saying their names with a dirgelike rhythm, and urged parents to teach their children what had befallen them and all they had sacrificed for the sake of Hellenic freedom. “Remember the cause of freedom and solidarity between Greece and America.”The old fighters at our table barked their assent, raised their glasses, and downed their wine. Moments later, our candelabra-lit table with its centerpiece of tiny crossed Greek and American flags was gridlocked with plates of appetizers—tiropitakia, piperies psites, gharithes vrastes—along with salads swimming in fresh tomatoes and hunks of feta cheese, warm bread, and bowls of olives. And when the initial commotion had died down, Nestor turned to me, took Laura’s hand in his great bear’s paw, and proclaimed in a fervent whisper, “Fate, a lousy business—heh, that a man should not live to know his son, and a son his father. He was one helluva a guy. Let me tell you, I have never met one like him—never.”

“Thank you,” I said. And as I nodded to the candlelit faces fading into and out of shadow, I noticed a striking woman at the very end of our table: tall, pale-skinned, with long, flowing dark hair and intense deep-set eyes. She was staring at me in a way that recalled the penetrating stare of Suzanne Williams that night at the dinner table at Hermitage. Then she glanced down and away, as if aware she was being impolite. She began speaking to a one-armed veteran at her side. I couldn’t recall being introduced to her. Then Nestor touched my arm as if he’d noticed how I had been distracted, and by whom, and wished to reclaim my attention.

“He stirred our soul,” said Nestor, “in a very dark time. In him, the best of what we hoped for ourselves and our people had a human face, a heroic face.”

The hyperbole was beginning to get to me, and I began downing my wine—and really good wine at that—to soften the cynical spirit I felt coming over me. I couldn’t refrain from making a face at Laura, and she instantly shot me a fierce look of intense sobriety, as if to indicate that

I must act the part. What part? I had defended my father’s rectitude right to the banks of the Vam Co Dong River, and then some. I was amazed at how much she drank and wondered how much Xanax she had downed. She was leaning on Nestor’s shoulder, becoming more animated by the moment, first childlike and then doing more of her flirty courtesan thing, encouraging Nestor to tell us about the war and my father. The bouzouki band had her all loosened up and giddy, and she was playing her character out of Homer for all it was worth—and worse, not even realizing she was doing it.

As if Nestor needed encouragement.

The fire glinted on the great lenses of his thick glasses and he held out a wine-wet hand to the fire and the smoke, as if in oblations to his gods. For a moment, he seemed stuck, but only for a moment, and he was soon off and running, reentering the world of his waning youth, those terrible and disastrous years of invasion, occupation, and civil war that had devastated every person at our table. Fathers had buried sons and daughters; sons and daughters, fathers. Whole families had been exterminated by starvation and execution and butchery.

Nestor relished the description of my father’s tiny rubber raft bobbing in the darkness off the beach, taking forever to close the distance between the British submarine out of Bari and the shore. The moon was nearly full, the submarine a sitting duck, but the Germans had only recently taken over from the surrendering Italians, who had occupied the Peloponnese in 1942, only to go over to the Allies in the early fall of 1943. It took the Germans a few months to collect the Italian units and get their claws into the occupation. Nestor remembered a tall, powerful figure, along with his British radio operator, staggering in from the surf, eyes all the more brilliant for the black camouflage grease on his face.

Nestor touched a shaking finger to his temple.

“An American, not British, OSS, not SOE, though the British were providing all the logistics and equipment. Perfect Greek, too, a little educated maybe—like you, but like a native, like the rich guys from Athens, the great shipping magnates. And his handshake, a grip like a vise. Only an idiot would try and put one over on the owner of such a handshake. But it was his name that confused me. I knew that name. The face, too, but where?”

Like the skilled storyteller that he was, Nestor paused, looked around to make sure he had our attention, smiled, and raised his glass for a refill. The glass glinted rubies in the blaze of firelight. With his left hand, he began fingering his worry beads, beginning a soft clicking that continued all evening, like the song of an overnight train in your sleeping ear.

“There was something in his voice, something about his face.”

Nestor had left Greece as a boy in 1917, during World War I, to work in his uncle’s Newark, New Jersey, restaurant. By the time of the Depression, he owned five restaurants in New York, one a fairly upscale Italian restaurant on Lexington and Seventy-third Street. He had returned to Greece in late 1940 to bury his father and to find a bride, a rich man by Greek standards. Preparations for the wedding took longer than expected and there were complications with the embassy about American immigration papers for his new wife. Most of Europe was under German occupation; the American embassy was short-staffed, communications shaky. Then the Italians invaded from Albania, followed by the Germans in the spring of 1941. “It offended my American sense of what was right and wrong—you might say, idiot that I was. I mean those sneaky Italian bastards pouring across the Albanian border—I knew their kind from Brooklyn.” The Germans were another matter. So when my father showed up on that beach, Nestor was a battle-hardened veteran and a resourceful resistance leader who had gone to ground in his hometown of Pylos. And a widower, for his young wife had starved to death in Athens during the first winter of the German occupation.

My father may not have been in combat, but he’d driven an ambulance in northern Greece during the Italian invasion and knew frontline warfare; he had been well trained by the OSS in guerilla tactics—top among his class of recruits, an outstanding marksman, and eager to return to the Peloponnese, where he had worked in the decade before the war. Allied intelligence in Cairo wanted to prevent an incipient civil war between the Greek Resistance groups, the royalists and republicans under the banner of EDES and the Greek Communist Party, KKE, controlling the combined front groups, EAM-ELAS. By the fall of 1943, the opening salvo of the fratricidal Greek Civil War took place as the Communists attempted the destruction of all non-Communist Resistance groups, saving their worst savagery for Marxist splinter groups in their own ranks.

As they made their way inland from the beach, mules loaded down with supplies and radio equipment, climbing the tiny goat trails Nestor had known in his childhood, my father barraged him with questions.

“A thousand questions, and always one more.” The quality and quantity of arms, ammunition supplies, numbers of active fighters, local men or ex-Greek army, republican officers or EAM sympathizers; training, security of communications, German troop movements and strength. But the thing that surprised Nestor was that this American, still wet from the surf, seemed to know an awful lot about local geography.

“Hell, he knew the villages, the roads, the trails as if he’d spent years in the country.”

As I would soon learn, there was nothing arbitrary about my father’s landing on that beach near Pylos in the fall of 1943. He had volunteered himself, cornered OSS chief Bill Donovan and lobbied for an American presence in Greece—insisting that OSS and America couldn’t afford to be dependent on the British for intelligence and influence in this crucial southeastern flank of Europe. He was by any measure the best man for the job, given his intimate knowledge of the area and his language skills, but Greece and Yugoslavia were a British area of operations. The British reluctantly agreed to joint operations between OSS and their British counterpart, SOE, focusing most of their resources on northern Greece, especially toward the end of 1944, to harry the retreating Germans. My father was indeed the first American OSS officer in mainland Greece and the only one in the Peloponnese, something of a backwater for Allied subversion, with only a few German naval bases offering substantial targets. Only later would I find out that both my father and the SOE had ulterior motives for the Pylos operation. Of this, Nestor knew only as much as my father let on. By the time they stopped to rest in the relative safety of the high hills overlooking Navarino Bay, John offered one version of his operational orders.

“He had a mind like that.” Nestor raised an open hand draped with the amber worry beads and shut it into a clenched fist. “If the Allies were to support the republican Resistance fully, we needed to be an effective fighting force against the Germans, like the Communist ELAS—the British favorites, in the north. We were instructed to put our differences with the Communists aside and find a target of opportunity: A German naval base was high on the list.

“‘If you can’t unite and put politics away for the duration of the war, postwar Greece will be a mess.’That’s what he told me, and he was right about the mess. But he had no idea what monsters we were up against.”

They were standing together on a ledge above the sea. The tall American offered Nestor a cigarette, a Lucky Strike—pure heaven for Nestor, who’d hadn’t had an American cigarette in over two years. The flame of the Zippo lighter lit my father’s face in the dark, his Hollywood face like that of a saint in an icon, said Nestor—such a handsome American face.

“Like a fucking million dollars, a movie star, I thought. I must’ve seen this guy in a movie. First, we figured we must’ve run into each other in the north when he drove his American ambulance—the Italian fighting in Albania. But it was your dad who remembered. He smiled at me and laughed and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Alfredo’s,’ he told me, ‘Lexington, between Seventieth and Seventy-first streets—or is it Seventy-second?”

“Seventy-third, boss.”

It was Nestor’s flagship restaurant, from which his empire would expand in the fifties and sixties once he returned from the Greek Civil War. My father had gone there for dinner many times with his mother when he was home from Winsted, from Princeton, a six-minute walk from the apartment on Fifth Avenue.

“You had to see it. Me, a kid arrived in America with a dirty shirt and my father’s blessing to go to work for my uncle—what?—twentyfive years later, standing in this place where as a child I’d come to watch the goats for my father. And there I was in the middle of a war with this rich American guy, a class act, a family that owned half of New York, to hear what people said—with me, there, in that place, talking about how we were going to kill Germans and make nice with the Communists. Who could have made up such a story?”

Who indeed? In spite of my skepticism, I found myself relishing Nestor’s every word—not so much because of the romantic scene of firelight and fine wine, but because it was the countertext to Max’s novel—the troubling truth he hadn’t bothered about, and a story he could never have dreamed up.

“John put his hand on my shoulder. ‘We shall call you Nestor.’”

“‘Yes, Nestor, king of Pylos, a wise ruler and intrepid warrior . . . let me tell you something about him.’”

I couldn’t help laughing when Nestor said this. It was, of course, the exhilaration of the moment, of surviving the first contact with the enemy with your nerve intact, when joy in life reaches a fever pitch and the mind races to fortify itself with familiar analogues. Yes, my father had reached for the model of Odysseus, his boyhood hero: a giver of names. But it was also his way of boosting morale and building respect and an esprit de corps among the ranks of these devastated men who had known victory over the Italians, only to have it snatched away by the Germans. Now, a year later, the Greek Resistance had been largely taken over by the Communists under the fronts of EAM and ELAS. The Communists had a long history of subversion and clandestine warfare; their propaganda and strong-arm tactics allowed them to destroy the moderate republican Resistance groups either by subterfuge or pitiless elimination. My father’s attempt to expound on democratic principles was almost laughable in Nestor’s eyes.

“Democracy, free elections, rule of law, individual rights: It’s how we Americans think, don’t you see—forget the romance business. But the Communists don’t care about our American niceties, not when they have a gun to your head. And let me tell you, the Greek Communists—all these smart-ass intellectuals who brought chaos and ruin to my old country—we should’ve shot them all. I know, I know what you’re thinking: I’m just a right-wing businessman without even a high school education.”

But Nestor quickly realized something else about my father: something from his youth, a vague romantic yearning for a golden age and an inbred distaste for industrialized killing.

As he and my father rested and smoked after their climb, the vast night distance began to fill with a faint drone. The sound grew louder, and then over the sea tiny wedges of black appeared against the gray night, followed on across the whiter sea by winged shadows racing for the place where they stood. It was an enormous formation of American bombers, moonlight glinting in the pilots’ windows, sparking on the front nose-gunner turrets—mechanical insects looming larger as they flew so low to the water that they might have been giant water bugs skating across the white surface. As the bombers drew closer, Nestor, my father, and the others found themselves actually looking down on patterns of silver wings sluicing silver waves until they reached the island of Sphacteria; then, within seconds of disaster, these apparitions of an industrial age leapt skyward, motors screaming for altitude, as if to fly right into the cliff face and annihilate them all with their screaming buzz saws. Some of the men dropped to the ground or dashed for a nearby cave. Nestor said he had never seen anything like it; the sky was packed with a hundred, more. Nestor and my father held their ground, eyes inching up as the bombers shot past barely a hundred feet over their heads, shooting the escarpment above, so close that the night darkened for seconds and their hair blew in the back draft. Then an instant of almost complete silence followed as if it had all been a trick of their minds. What Nestor remembered so well—and why he felt compelled to tell us about it—was how different his reaction was from my father’s. He found this display of American might exhilarating— as if a sign from the gods that my father’s presence among them was going to change everything. But the tall, keen-eyed American had only shaken his head with weary despondency, explaining to Nestor that they were Mitchell B-49’s, probably headed for the Ploiesti oil fields in Romania, perhaps a daring night raid, something exceptional.

“‘What a shame, Nestor, what a goddamn shame—don’t you think?’” Nestor, perplexed, had turned to my father’s distant stare, the smell of exhaust fumes sifting down around them. “‘Sad how men have learned to fight with such machines, high explosives delivered from a great distance. Don’t you think so? What the German bombers have done to London, sad, so terribly sad, so little nobility of purpose left in the world. The gods have gone mad, Nestor; the gods have turned against their creation—what do you think?’”

Around our dinner table, Nestor looked at us with head high, as if to display something of my father’s demeanor, repeating himself to get my father’s cadences near perfect. “‘So little nobility of purpose . . . the gods have turned against their creation.’” He looked at us with an expression of bafflement. “Those were his exact words to me. I never forgot them. What could an uneducated man say to that? Was I stuck with some American professor who knew nothing about modern warfare, who had never experienced German artillery fire?” Nestor spun the worry beads and snapped his fist shut. “‘Sure, boss,’ I told him, looking into his intelligent eyes, ‘but if those bombers kill lots of Germans, it’s okay with me. And, while they’re at it, they can kill the Communists, too, those depraved sons of bitches.’”

In that moment, I suddenly understood something—deeply, viscerally: the lonely childhood of my father absent his father, a brilliant surgeon blown to smithereens by a German artillery strike. In that split second of compression, past and present squeezed to nothing, I, too, bridled at the horror of mechanized slaughter . . . I who had blithely called in B-52 strikes on Communist staging areas in Cambodia.

“The truth,” said Nestor, “without Captain Alden, nothing would have been possible.” As I looked down the table, I saw confirming nods in the flame-fevered faces; all except one, the tall woman at the very end of the table, who took everything in quietly, her eyes barely blinking, watching from some distant place inside herself. “You see, your father taught us to believe in ourselves—not just fighters but warriors. He taught them the American way—out of many, one. Not like the Communists, who always found ways to pit brother against brother, family against family, rich against poor. Even the poorest farmers among our fighters knew about America and rich Americans.” And Nestor laughed at those down the table who screamed out in Greek words that meant “Yes, rich American Greeks like you.” Nestor stood and bowed, sharing their laughter as he gestured like a royal personage to his court. Then he raised his hand to make a serious point. “John did not come like the Moscow-trained cadres and play on the jealousies and resentments and battered pride of our people—no, he filled them with the pride of their democratic ancestors. He reminded them that they had a grand history of freedom to die for and preserve.”

Nestor patted Laura’s hand and made eye contact with his former fighters as if to confirm the truth of his words.

“The picture never leaves my mind, when we were huddled around the fire at night. The flames in his eyes as he told these men the history of their race and recited to them from the great poets of their people. We sat for hours sometimes, like children at the knee of a grandfather. John explained how Greece had once been the center of the civilized world, as if he had been there—when Athens was a city of great statesmen and lawgivers, poets and philosophers, a civilization where the arts of sculpture and architecture reached a perfection never to be surpassed. Our men were proud again to be Greeks, a people of such history and tradition. You see, no longer peasants haggling in the marketplace, but fighters for the cause of civilization, for freedom and justice.”

By the end of the initial toasts, I was feeling no pain—I was happy to embrace the man portrayed by Nestor. The kernel of my father’s biography, contra Max, was taking shape in Nestor’s telling. But as the evening settled down and Nestor got drunker, confining his words mostly to me and Laura, he became more introspective and perturbed, his portrait darker. Part of the problem turned out to be that the Resistance fighters “sat around on our asses most of the time. John and the British radio operator, Malcolm, had brought lots of small arms and ammunition, even Bren guns, bazookas, and three Thompson machine guns—boy, like right at home in the Bronx. But not the high explosives we needed if we were going to do something big. Six weeks until the explosives and grenades finally arrived by airdrop.”

With the Allied successes in Italy, Greece looked less and less a potential beachhead for an allied thrust north through the Balkans. Not that the British didn’t keep the pot stirred in Greece, hoping to hold down German forces that might be transferred to the Italian theater and later to France. And then there was the ongoing battle of the Dodecanese islands of Kos, Samos, and Leros, which had been held by Italian troops and would soon be contested by the British and Germans as the Italian units surrendered. Disruption of German naval assets in Greece and the islands became a high priority for the British.

“I wanted to wait it out, until the Germans withdrew, and then take care of the Communists before they took care of us. And you kill a German, they kill ten of your people—a hundred—worse.”

Nestor sighed into his wine.

“As your father always put it to me, between Scylla and Charybdis—how’s my pronunciation, professor?”

“Near perfect,” I told him.

Nestor smiled. “You see, because of that damned name, I’ve become the old dog forced to learn new tricks. Do I not live up to the name your father gave me?”

He said this not entirely in jest, and I could detect a bitter irony creeping into his voice as he drank, shaking his mane of white hair, his worry beads atwitter in his massive hand. Nestor was struggling to fit the discordant pieces into a more convincing picture, especially the quixotic, perhaps devious, aspects of my father’s nature that would end up changing all our lives.

“He kept telling the guards that he couldn’t sleep, that he needed a short walk. Even Malcolm, his British radioman, never seemed to catch on—actually, Malcolm must have known something, but he never made a peep. John would sometimes be gone half the night. But who in their right mind walks in the hills at two in the morning and doesn’t return, sometimes until dawn? So I told the guard to alert me the next time your father wanted a midnight stroll. It was a full moon when the guard woke me, maybe a week later, and pointed in the direction John had taken. Where the hell was he going—what was he thinking? You go right off the fucking edge in daylight unless you’re a goat. And so I followed him, half-asleep, picking my way along the cliff trail, accompanied by my shadow plastered against the rock face. Every once in a while, I caught sight of him far ahead when the path curved, just a moon glint off his rifle. Where was this crazy guy leading me? We had gone maybe seven or eight kilometers north along Navarino Bay, until the path broadened out when it reached a broad plateau, a place called Epano Englianos. The moonlight was so bright, it almost hurt my eyes. A turkey shoot, I thought, if the Germans have patrols out, but even they wouldn’t be so stupid. John was nowhere to be seen. I moved quietly, trying to see but not be seen. There were some old walls. I did not remember those walls and excavations from when I was a boy—it seems people had been digging trenches in the sandy earth. I thought maybe they were defensive positions for soldiers, but they were empty, just rubble and old walls.

“Then I heard voices and I dropped to one knee. Peering into the distance, I saw two men sitting in an area that had been excavated. There were stone walls, what remained of stone walls. And just their shoulders and heads showed above the piles of earth. Each was bending toward the other in deep discussion, and they gestured to something one of them was holding. The other had a stick and seemed to be drawing in the dirt. As I crept closer, I found that I was hearing German spoken. I switched the safety on my Thompson and covered them. They were so intent on their discussion, their drawings in the dirt, that they didn’t hear me until I was practically on top of them. I told them—John and the other man—to raise their hands. Your father recognized me immediately and this big smile spread across his face.

“‘Nestor, you are just the man. ‘Welcome home, my king, to your palace.’

“That was exactly what he said, ‘to your palace.’ And he laughed like a drunkard—drunk on the moonlight, so delighted with himself—even as I kept my barrel pointed at his heart. Then he stood and introduced his friend; he called him a very old friend, a captain in the Wehrmacht no less.

“‘Karel, I’d like you to meet Nestor.’

“The man stood, a brick or a stone in one hand, a cigarette in the other. He put the cigarette to his lips and reached out to shake my hand. I leveled my gun at his smiling face and told him not to move a muscle.

“‘Take it easy, Nestor, I’ve know this man since school days. We were at Leipzig together, Cambridge, too. Point that thing away, just in case you shoot the greatest archaeologist of our generation.’

“The German bowed to John and laughed.

“‘Perhaps an exaggeration, but coming from you, friend, an honor.’

“They were like that, you see, sucking up to each other, like old pals. This Karel guy, this Wehrmacht captain, had been in Pylos in the summer of 1939 and had dug up the walls where they were sitting on Epano Englianos—I couldn’t believe the shit they were telling me. I held my gun on the guy and told John to take the Luger from his holster and give it to me.

“‘What have you got in your hand?’ I asked John.

“They smiled and John took this mud brick and handed it to me with the Luger. I could just make out some markings on the thing. And in the dirt where they’d been sitting, they had been drawing similar marks with a stick.

“‘It’s an ancient language, Nestor, what your people spoke over three thousand years ago. What you’re holding in your hand is a voice, perhaps a story, a life from three thousand years ago. We have a slight problem, though: We can’t read it. The language is lost.’

“This German, Karel, tried to explain it to me, and I could see how stuck they were—words without meaning. He was tall as John, spoke perfect Greek, even English like a Brit. Very elegant, with a long nose, and impatient, darting eyes. He wore his officer’s uniform under a sheepskin coat. I didn’t like the look of him, and it took a lot of talk from John to change my mind, and even then I didn’t like him; I still don’t like him.”

“Karel Hollar had an actual Linear B tablet with him?” I said, agog at the thought.

“His ‘lodestone,’ he called the thing.”

“They were colleagues,” I explained. I looked at Laura, who seemed puzzled at this turn of events. “Rivals in the field of Bronze Age Greece. Karel had signed on to an American team from the University of Cincinnati under Carl Andersen and they dug those first trenches in July and August of ’39. They were the discoverers of Nestor’s Palace and also, more important, hundreds of Linear B tablets. An astonishing discovery because, up to that time, the tablets had been found only on Crete. Karel Hollar died in a Soviet POW camp at the end of the war. The excavations of Nestor’s Palace weren’t resumed again until 1955.”

Nestor eyed me over his wine. “Another Communist dead—that’s good news.”

“He was a Communist?” I asked. “And I thought he was Czech.”

“Are you kidding—and in a German uniform?” Nestor smiled what for him was an ironic smile. “He was British SIS—military intelligence—but in my book all those guys were Communist sympathizers.”

My mind was scrambling for context. I remembered my father’s letters to his mother in which he’d mentioned Karel Hollar’s Communist sympathies in the early thirties. Many of Hollar’s professional journal articles had been couched in Marxist analysis, but by 1936 or thereabouts, it had become more balanced and technical; one assumed, given the rise of the Nazis, he wasn’t going to flaunt his ideology in German archaeological circles. But professionally, given his obsession with Greek Bronze Age archaeology, Hollar couldn’t avoid involvement with British specialists in the field like Sir Arthur Evans and his protégée Nigel Bennett at Cambridge. What I hadn’t realized and would only learn months later was that Nigel Bennett had run British SIS and their code-breaking operation during the war. So, this extraordinary scene that Nestor described on a moonlit night in wartime Greece began to make sense of a sort—but something was fishy.

“Hollar was a secret agent for British intelligence?”

“Like the fucking war was a big joke, something that had spoiled their little game, distracted them from the important things in life!” Nestor looked from Laura to me in a conspiratorial manner. “To be honest, I wasn’t sure which one was crazier. They seemed like different people when they were together, or John did. They offered me cigarettes; they wanted to let me in on their little deal, like there was a pot of gold beneath the earth. I had interrupted them, you see—all their drawing in the dirt; they were building palaces out of thin air.”

After an hour of their exasperating talk and scratchings in the dirt, Nestor told my father he’d had enough.

“‘How can you trust a man wearing that uniform: The Germans murdered my wife; she was only nineteen.’”

At this, Karel Hollar had turned to Nestor, “like some kind of Cambridge gentleman in his London club.”

“‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I’m from the Sudetenland. My father is Czech, my mother Viennese . . . Jewish, although she hides it magnificently.’”

Nestor looked at my father and was galled to see a twinkle in his eyes.

“‘The only thing that matters is that you’re wearing that uniform.’ I told Hollar.

“‘Karel, I think what Nestor is trying to say is that it’s a difference without a distinction.’

“Karel Hollar opened his sheepskin coat and examined his uniform and made a face.

“‘The tailoring leaves something to be desired, I fear. Nevertheless, its fits well enough that I am sure it will get me killed sooner or later— what do you think, John?’

“‘Nestor, Karel is with us. He’s been working for the Brits from at least ’37, if I’m not mistaken.’ Your dad even winked at the bastard as he produced a piece of paper from his pocket. ‘Here’s the Wehrmacht’s complete order of battle for the Peloponnese and the islands, including the disposition of naval forces and airfields. The battle for Kos is going on as we speak. I just spent the hour before you showed up putting it to memory, and when we get back, I’ll get Malcolm to radio the contents to Cairo HQ.’

“‘Impressive,’ I told them. Your father read off the lists while I checked the sheet. Then he took out his Zippo and set it on fire, dropping it to the ground so as not to give off more light.

“‘We both have the same orders, as I’ve told you a dozen times. The royalist and republican Resistance and the Communist Resistance must join to fight the Germans.’

“‘The Communists are not on our side,’ I told him; ‘they’re on their side—your pal’s side, and waiting to slit our throats.’

“‘They’ve been on our side since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.’ “‘Fine, leave them to kill one another—they do fine at that, too.’ “‘Karel is in touch with the Greek Communists, ELAS in the Peloponnese. We must try to bring about reconciliation. As you know, those are my orders: a joint front against the Germans.’

“‘Easy for you two to say. When you’re back on Fifth Avenue and your pal is back in Berlin or Prague or Vienna or wherever, the Communists here will hunt us down like animals.’

Karel smiled, Nestor told us, “the smile of a guy who knows he’s got everybody at the table beat.”

“‘Nestor—may I call you Nestor?—the Communist Party and comrade Stalin want a free Europe and a better future, with equality and opportunity for all peoples. The Nazis are finished; they are being bled dry on the Eastern Front by the armies of the Soviet Union. It is only a matter of time.’

“That Karel was such a smooth talker. I waved my gun barrel in his face.

“‘Where did you get that scar . . . there and there?’

“‘Ah, street fighting. I think 1933. I believe I killed at least one Nazi brownshirt.’

“‘Karel . . . did you really?’

“The German smiled and shrugged at John. ‘I didn’t want to harm your sensibilities,’ he said.”

Nestor, noting the surprise in my father’s voice, decided Karel Hollar was bad news from start to finish. He raised his gun.

“‘You killed Nazis and now you are one of them?’

“‘I’m first a Sudetenland Czech—possibly Austrian, and then an antifascist freedom fighter.’

“‘A fucking mongrel Communist. Show me your identity papers.’ “‘I’m afraid I can’t do that.’ “‘You will unless you want me to blow your fucking head off.’ “‘As you wish.’

“Karel Hollar opened his arms as if to welcome my bullet.”

“‘John, if you ran into a guy like this in New York, who fills your mind with so much fucking bullshit, what would you do, hand him the keys to your apartment?’

“‘Nestor, this isn’t Seventy-third and Lexington.’

“‘Damn right, it’s not, and you need to get something straight: I can smell Communists a mile away. If he was killing Nazis before the war, he had to be a Communist. Once a Communist . . . the tiger never loses his stripes, even if he is British SIS, even if he is a Wehrmacht captain, even a pal of yours. Even a rookie cop would be the first to tell you: a highly suspicious person with no fixed address.’”

Karel smiled at Nestor’s little joke.

“‘Even in New York, the times are difficult for good men who defy the forces of tyranny and servitude. Tell me something, Nestor, do you allow Negroes in your restaurants?’

“‘What kind of question is that?’

“‘Are they still lynching Negroes in America?’

“‘Not in my neighborhood, buddy, and we serve all kinds—as long as they can pay.’

“‘The Communists and Jews in Germany are all dead, or hiding.’ Karel Hollar gestured to his face as if miming a mask. ‘So, you see—’

“‘So, Karel Hollar is not your official name, your army name?’

“‘Nestor, Karel has already put his life in danger coming here to give us this information. I don’t need to know what name is on his identity papers—if one of us is captured, we will be tortured for that name, endangering every SIS operative in Greece.’

“‘Jesus, you Communists change your names like your underwear. I should just kill you right here and save the three-ring circus.’

“‘But my dear Nestor, surely you understand how the Wehrmacht does business these days: You shoot me and they will massacre an entire village. The SS are soulless beasts. That’s why I came here, to destroy them, to remember better times, ja, John, when the world was young . . . and Crete and Venice.’

“‘Spare me the schmaltz. Are you telling me’—and I looked from one to the other—‘you boys didn’t just stumble upon each other . . . so SOE and SIS and OSS had this all arranged?’

“Your father smiled like a guilty schoolboy, like he did when he and his mother came by my restaurant for dinner.

“‘Talk to Cairo HQ. Although in some ways I prefer to think of it as a peculiar working of fate that two so-called enemies can find each other in such a beautiful place in the middle of all this madness, and remember what is really important.’”

This insouciant tip-off from my father’s went right over Nestor’s head.

“‘Spare me. The Germans have been killing my people for two years now. You fucking starved my wife to death in Athens.’

“‘I’m sorry—truly.’

“‘Nestor, I’ve known Karel since I was a schoolboy. Over the years, we’ve spend months together in Leipzig and Cambridge, Crete and Venice. We’ve authored journal articles together. If you can’t trust him, you can’t trust me. Besides, the time has come to act. We must put aside our differences for the common good. And Karel can help us—’

“‘A freedom-loving German, are you? Is there such a creature?’

“‘My father, too, is of Jewish extraction. Perhaps you understand better?’

“‘A Jew and a Communist: well, now we’re getting somewhere.’”

Nestor bounced a flat palm off his forehead, as if more amazed than ever.

“‘John, you should have stayed in New York,’ I said. ‘Hell, I should have stayed in New York. This whole continent has lost its mind. You can’t believe anybody—in anything.’

“Karel nodded. ‘As you say, I’ve been conspiring against my own family since I was a child.’

“‘So, German, Jew, Communist, SIS. What exactly do you do for the Wehrmacht?’

“‘As you see, my Greek is perfect and I am a mechanical engineer and demolition expert.’

“‘Nestor, Karel’s orders are to help us. We’ve got a plan.’

“‘Jesus, John, how can you believe anything this guy tells you? New York is one thing—love, hate, or something in between—but business is business and no one cares as long as you don’t welsh on a deal, and you’re not fucking his wife. But here—a Communist is a Communist.’

“Karel laughed. ‘Ah, John was right about you, to give you such a name. A born philosopher.’

“‘Fuck you, buddy. I’m not done with you yet.’”

That was when Nestor first got wind of the attack on the E-boat base in Kalamata—a plan that had Karel Hollar’s fingerprints all over it. Karel provided both a sketch of the base’s defenses and detailed diagrams for placing the explosives in the ships. My father was enthusiastic because it required a joint operation of Nestor’s EDES republican Resistance fighters and the main ELAS Communist units around Kalamata, precisely the kind of thing Cairo was encouraging. Nestor admitted they were all sick of sitting around and watching the war go by. Hollar’s schematic plans of the torpedo boats—three Type 37 Flottentorpedoboots—based in the harbor of Kalamata were beautifully detailed, “like an artist’s.”

“Hollar explained: ‘Even limited damage will make them inoperable, and the Kriegsmarine don’t have the technicians, parts, or facilities to repair them in Greece. As good as if they were sunk in a thousand meters.’”

Karel Hollar proposed a quick surgical attack at dusk, which would result in limited casualties. The demolition teams could be in and out within twenty minutes. If the teams were thought to be a British or American commando unit, wearing official uniforms, the chances of retribution against the civilian population would be minimized.

Nestor had spun his worry beads: “At least it would be Kalamata that suffered reprisals and not Pylos.”

The plan required the Communist Resistance forces around Kalamata to cover the escape route back to Pylos and hold up the arrival of German reinforcements. And Hollar could deliver the Communists.

“You see, your father trusted this guy Hollar, because they spoke the same language, shared the same dreams—like smarty-pants Einsteins without street smarts, heh.”

“‘Nestor,’” John explained to me, “‘it’s the best way to show HQ in Cairo what we can do. Now we have the explosives. And if the Greek Resistance fighters can make common cause, who knows, maybe the Allies might opt for a push up the Thessalonica gap. Sounds to me like the Americans and British are bogged down in Italy. The German occupation here could go on for years. And how many more winters of starvation can your people take?’”

Nestor shook his head, even taking Laura’s hand for moral support, as if needing more than Dutch courage to spit out the name of his nemesis, then head of the Communist Resistance in Kalamata, later a commander of ELAS in northern Greece.

“Kostas Kelayias, may his soul rot in hell. I told your father he couldn’t trust Communists, not Hollar, not Kelayias—give up such thoughts! I told him up north in Epiros the Communists were murdering our people right under the noses of the Germans, their own families, for Christ’s sake—for their crackpot ideas. Even in New York, the Communists were the most vicious union organizers. They’d beat up your employees; they despised the business owners.”

I saw Nestor squeeze Laura’s hand, as if apologizing for his language; he then slipped into what seemed a more confessional mode. He stared down the length of the table to where the tall, longhaired woman sat, her eyes blank flaming shadows in a rigidly set yet lovely face.

“But I was just a restaurant owner, uneducated, and they were scholars, so what the fuck did I know? Up there on Epano Englianos, those two were like gods with their heads in the clouds. One minute we’re discussing torpedo boats at Kalamata, the next, stories of palaces rising out of the dust, grand entrance gates, water supplies and cisterns, citadel walls. This Hollar, the talented engineer, had it all set up in his mind. They couldn’t stop blabbing, those two. Hey, I admit it: I was impressed, Hollar carrying around this clay tablet like a charm, fingering it, stroking it as he talked, needing to make me understand about a language no one could understand. Maybe the source for Homer? Maybe a lost tale from the Iliad? Crazy stuff. Those two began describing it to me, something about polished stones, a white throne shining with oil. What a pair of dreamers.”

“They were talking Linear B?” I asked. “In the middle of all that, they were talking shop?”

“Until the morning’s first light.”

“And Hollar had an actual tablet with him?” 

“Two, one in each pocket.” 

“Two . . .” 

But Nestor had turned to Laura, patting her hand while she looked at him with wide, beaming eyes. 

“Old Nestor”—she paused and recited the rest—“took his seat on the polished stones, a bench glistening white, rubbed with glossy oil, placed for the king before his looming doors.”

Nestor kissed her hand. “What about looming doors?” 

“The throne of King Nestor, from the Odyssey.” 

“Not you, my dear—a scholar, too?” 

“No, just a dancer, but I once loved a writer of words.” 

Laura shot me a knowing look. She was playing Nestor for all he was worth. 

When he got on the subject of Kostas Kaleyias, Nestor’s worry beads went into overdrive as the uncertainties mounted and the shadows in the arbor lengthened and darkened, as the cooking fire died to embers. How well I knew that feeling: when you try to explain to yourself or others the pattern of events that were once fixed in your mind, but that on the telling, and retelling, begin to slip around.

The worry beads clattered on the table as he reached for his refill.

“Who would have thought that Kostas Kaleyias would end up being the worst of them? Eyes like the blackest Kalamata olives, watching you from the cave of his skull. Hey, but wonder of wonders—another scholar, just like Hollar and your dad—as if I needed any more educated God’s gifts in my life. Kaleyias was slick, an architect. And get this: His headquarters was under a large British army tent, perfectly camouflaged, in the hills above Kalamata. He had this huge green typewriter on a table. He was typing when John and I entered, and he kept typing, as if we didn’t exist, as if the most important thing in the war was to produce more words. But you see, he was an educated man and a scholar; he had studied in Bologna—French philosophy and classical architecture. His father was a wealthy olive oil merchant in Kalamata, and it was soon clear how much he thought of his old man and his wealthy friends. They were all dead by 1945—Kaleyias saw to that.

“When he finished, he jumped up and told us to sit—‘Any allies of the Soviet Union are our friends’—on British-issue camp stools. Where did he get all the equipment? That’s what I asked myself. We had no tents, no camp stools—and no coffee; Kaleyias got us wonderful coffee. Before a minute had passed, he and John were on first-name terms. And their ideas were flying fast and furious. My heart groaned— scholars! That Kaleyias, so serious, never any laughter—not even a little joke now and then. You talk to people who knew him and they’ll tell you how calculating he was. I guess it takes a proud man to run the party of the poor and oppressed. How else to triumph over the capitalist ‘bloodsuckers’ and our cowardly Glücksburger king? How he went on. But without laughter, there is no humanity, nothing of the earth and the Greek soul. Books, books—those Communists learned it all from books and Moscow.”

Nestor glared down the table toward the tall woman at the far end, who sat rigid, like a silent goddess, and listened intently.

The negotiations were long and painful, according to Nestor. Kaleyias didn’t want to risk any of his forces for an attack that only produced “suffering for the Greek people.” He talked my father and Nestor into upping the ante on their side: more men to make sure of success. Then another hour of logistics and exchanging maps. Nestor finally had had enough and brought up the subject of revolutionary justice in the north of Greece.

“‘Commissar Kaleyias’—I thought he would enjoy my use of such an esteemed title—‘have you ever been to Moscow? I hear everyone in Moscow is very pleased with Stalin’s revolutionary justice.’

“I saw the look in his eyes, the hungry wolf watching until your back is turned.

“‘Moscow is fighting heroically on a front a thousand kilometers long. As we are fighting the monarchofacists. And, by the way, how are Zervas and his imperialist cronies? Perhaps they will escape to New York, where you can serve them American hamburgers. You would keep them well fed, no doubt, with all your hundreds of restaurants—Amerikana.’

“He tried to laugh at his little joke. At that moment, I knew I was personally marked for death; I was one of the bloodsucking exploiters of the people with my hundreds of restaurants.”

Once they had a basic agreement, my father shared with Kaleyias the diagrams Hollar had made of the defenses of the E-boat base; Kaleyias was impressed, especially with the sketches of the torpedo boat and instructions for laying the demolition charges in the engine room.

“‘What a skillful draftsman!’ exclaimed Kaleyias. ‘Your man is a brilliant artist.’

“‘So,’” I asked our new Communist ally, “‘of course you know our German Wehrmacht friend. Ah, what is his name now? The name escapes me.’

“I watched his face carefully, just the beginning of a smile.”

“‘Did you notice the new Mannlicker and Mauser rifles my men carry? It is good to know who one’s friends are.’”

Nestor turned with utter disgust from the table and made a show of spitting behind him. And for a moment, he just stared off into the surrounding darkness, as if something out there were stalking him—after all the years, its tracks still leading in circles. He lowered his voice.

“You understand, I’m not saying John was a pushover. He could be tough with Kaleyias, charming but firm, thoughtful in practical matters. And Kaleyias was far from a fool on military affairs—a fox who survived to the very end. He took us through the nearby village and across to the crest of a hill, where Kalamata was spread out below us. We spent time with binoculars examining the roads and approaches to the base. He advised us on the best path through the mountains, and the best roads into Kalamata, where we wouldn’t be noticed by informers. He pointed out where his men would block the approaches from the east to prevent German reinforcements so our men could retreat into the mountains.

“By the end of the day, we were drinking to one another’s health and those two were practically dancing the Kalamantianós in celebration of a united front against the fascists. Then they were on to modern architecture and how it relates to the classical orders. It was your father and Hollar all over again. I thought I was losing my mind.”

Nestor’s voice rose with sudden emotion, as if the elusive thing was again failing his grasp.

“They spoke the same language. . .” Nestor pointed a forefinger at his head and pulled a trigger. “The moment we left that British army tent, the typewriter was going again, spewing poison—good God, like there was no tomorrow.”