The 34th Degree

63

D usk was already falling across the forty acres of park when Andros had Nasos deliver him to the Royal Gardens for his rendezvous with the SOE. Children were still at play in the shadows of the Parliament and Hotel Grande Bretagne while German soldiers strolled about in small groups.

He was buoyed by the joy of his reconciliation with Aphrodite. The masks had been dropped, their true feelings confessed. They were of one mind. She hadn’t let him down. All he had to do was make sure he didn’t let her down.

He passed an old Greek in a tattered army uniform, selling rotten chestnuts beneath a canopy of trees. The man was resting on a wooden leg, having lost his own in the war, though from the looks of the veteran, Andros suspected it was the Great War. He reached into his pocket and tossed the veteran a silver sovereign. Then he wandered down a path that opened into a flower circle. There by an ancient stone seat was a row of shoe shiners, mostly young boys and a few old men.

How anybody could make money shining shoes these days in Athens seemed impossible to Andros, until he noticed a couple of German soldiers walk up to the first boy in line. One of them put his jackboot on the small pedestal and pointed to it with a thick finger. The boy started shining as if his life depended on it.

“Shoe shine, shoe shine!” said the fourth boy down the row as Andros walked by. “Shoe shine, mister?”

The boy himself had no shoes, only a smiling face black with soot and two large animated eyes. Andros stopped to look. The street kid started to perform all sorts of acrobatics with his brushes, juggling them in the air with a spin and catching them behind his back.

“Where is your family?” Andros asked.

The boy shrugged as if to say he didn’t have any.

“Where do you live?”

“Everywhere. Do you want a shine or not?”

Andros paused, wondering why the SOE would resort to using children instead of some of the older men down the line. With some hesitation, he proceeded to place his shoe on the stand. “Like a glass darkly.”

The boy smiled. “But soon face-to-face.”

The boy started scrubbing away, and Andros looked about the park and its ponds, green with thousands of exotic plants Queen Amalia had brought in from all parts of Greece and Italy in the 1840s.

When the boy finished, Andros paid him not in hyperinflated drachmas but with a silver sovereign. The boy responded by giving him change in drachmas. Pasted on one coin was a note instructing Sinon to follow the path to his right to a certain fountain.

Andros had started to leave when he heard an argument. He turned. The two soldiers had refused to pay the first boy for shining their boots, and now the boy was tagging along, demanding payment. The one German swung his heavy hand across the boy’s face, sending him to the ground. The other soldier laughed, and they both walked on. But the shoe-shine boy was determined to get his drachmas. He got up and ran after the big German, wrapping himself around his leg. For several paces, he was dragged across the pavement before biting the German’s leg.

“Ach!” cried the German, and hit him on the head. The boy, like a little dog, kept clinging.

To save the boy from dying from another blow to the head, Andros approached them. “See here,” he said to the boy. “I’ll pay you.”

He handed the boy a silver sovereign, and the little boy, more dirty and bloodied than ever, grabbed it. Before he could run, the German gripped his wrist and squeezed until the boy screamed and opened his tiny fist. The coin dropped with a dull clink, and the other soldier picked it up.

“You rob little children now?” Andros asked, barely able to suppress his rage at the sight of the boy being beaten by these animals.

“Save yourself, man,” said the big German in broken Greek.

Andros took off his hat as if to seek his pardon, but he secretly pulled the pin from above the rim. Without thinking, he rammed it into the German’s neck like Erin Whyte had taught him, killing him instantly. The other soldier, shocked to see his companion fall to the pavement without a sound, reached for his gun, but Andros drew his father’s dagger and shoved it into the soldier’s stomach. The coin that the dying soldier clutched rolled onto the pavement, and the little boy grabbed it and ran.

Andros heard a whistle and saw another German soldier some way down the park avenue wave his hand. A whole group of Germans came into view and moved toward him. Andros started running. He ran past the fountain toward the street. A glance over his shoulder showed the Germans closing in on him.

He reached the street only to find his way blocked by a black Mercedes. Several members of the Security Police got out, pointing machine guns.

The commanding officer, a colonel, smiled at Andros with fiendish glee. “My, aren’t we in a hurry tonight?” He nodded to one of his underlings, who proceeded to shove Andros into the backseat with the barrel of his gun.

Andros looked over his shoulder again and saw the pack of angry soldiers slow down as they approached the curb. The SP colonel flashed his papers to the sentry with the whistle and asked for a count of the wounded.

“Two of our own dead, Standartenfuhrer,” the sentry reported, trying to look into the Mercedes and glimpse the killer’s face. But the SP man with the machine gun pushed Andros farther back, out of view. “That man there.”

The SP colonel nodded. “We have him now.”

“ Zu Befehl, Standartenfuhrer. We know the drill.”

“Then get it over with,” snarled the SP colonel. He got into the front of the Mercedes, next to the driver.

Andros looked out through the rear window as they started to pull away. The soldiers who had chased him were grabbing innocent passersby, women and children, and lining them up against a wall. He looked in front. “What are they doing?”

“Retribution,” the SP colonel explained. “Your heroics have just cost your countrymen their lives.”

“But women and children?”

“You killed two Germans. I wouldn’t be surprised if they executed the first hundred Greeks who happen to walk by.”

Andros heard the gunfire and screams as he looked back. “You bastards.”

“Yes,” said the SP colonel. “We bastards just saved your life.” They passed Hadrian’s Arch, and the driver cut the lights before swinging a hard right down a side street toward the Plaka district.

“Where are we going?” asked Andros.

“Stissihorou Street,” said the SP colonel. “Gestapo headquarters.”

“But Stissihorou is the other way.”

The SP colonel nodded and addressed the man with the machine gun in back. “Burger…”

Andros saw the butt of the gun and felt a tremendous crack against his skull. Then all went black.