Page 106 of Villa of Secrets

Before my target had hit the ground, the other soldier dived into the wall of trees. I fired blindly, running. Kopay burst through the trees and we both gave chase. The grenade exploded. Andartes rushed out of the house and I could hear them behind me. Being smaller than the soldier, Kopay and I had an advantage through the scrub. We closed rapidly, but then a branch knocked the gun from my hand.

Defenceless, I raced on. Thorns scratched my face and arms and tore my dress as I punched through the undergrowth. The dog bounded ahead and attacked the soldier’s ankle, unbalancing him. He fell, firing his weapon as he went down. I dropped to the ground. Fearless, Kopay attacked his wrist. The soldier let go of his machine gun and tried to beat off the dog. I grabbed the firearm. When I leapt up and aimed at him, the soldier appeared astonished.

‘Kopay, off!’ I ordered after stepping back, keeping the machine gun trained on the soldier. The German lay on his back, his wrist a mess of ragged flesh, bleeding heavily, his other hand raised in defence. Kopay danced with excitement. I stood my ground until the Andartes caught up.

Chapter 44

Adrenalin pumped through Naomi’s veins as she turned the page. She wondered how her grandmother ever survived. A sheet of newsprint, carefully folded into quarters, lay between the next pages. She teased the layers apart and read the front cover of a Rhodes newspaper.

The child, fatally shot on Sunday in the village of Marietta, has not been identified. The girl, aged between twelve and fourteen years old, and believed to be called Evangelisa, will be buried in the cemetery of Filerimos tomorrow. Police are asking for anyone with information relating to this tragic death to come forward. Seventeen-year-old Xanthi Streusel, a young Rhodian woman, found fatally shot on Mount Filerimos, was buried in the town cemetery at 11 a.m., yesterday.

Naomi flipped the newspaper and scoured the reverse side but saw nothing about a murdered German soldier. Some mother’s son, how tragic. Perhaps simply another naive idealist eager to end the war, or a white supremacist on a witch hunt, or just an army boy with no choice but to follow orders.

‘Naomi!’

She looked up from the diary to see Marina running across the road. ‘Naomi, you’ll never guess what I’ve found! Grandpa’s wetting himself; he wanted to tell you himself but had a little job to do at the church.’

‘What is it?’

‘I was surfing, looking for angles on your products and, as Bubba is Jewish, I hit on a Jewish website out of curiosity.’ She gulped, beaming. ‘It’s the official papers that prove you own the property in town. It looks like they’ve been found!’

Naomi thought for a second. ‘Sorry, Marina, but you must be mistaken. In Bubba’s diaries, she said they had to hand their documents to the Nazis in L’Aeronautica. They confiscated and destroyed everything.’

Marina could hardly speak for excitement. ‘No, no! This is what I’ve just read. You know the big police station in town, the headquarters?’

‘Opposite the fire station?’

‘Right on. Well, according to this website, decades back, a former employee of the Greek bureaucracy – I forget his name – kept pestering to have a storeroom in the police station unlocked, but they refused permission. Nobody wanted to reveal the contents of the sealed room. Finally in 2002, out of frustrations, he began writing to people higher up.’

Naomi wondered where this was leading.

‘This guy, well, he claimed that Rhodes police headquarters contained a locked vault full of old files and records, all of the utmost importance to historians. One of his letters landed in the archives office of the Dodecanese Islands.’

‘And . . . did anyone do anything about it?’ Naomi asked.

Marina shook her head. ‘No way. At least not for the next ten years. In 2012, a new boss, a woman, got appointed as director of the Dodecanese State Archives. Now, here’s the cool bit: at the same time, an Italian historian carried out research on the island, because Rhodes used to belong to Italy, remember?’

Naomi nodded.

‘The historian had also come across rumours about the same locked room. He wondered what could be in there. Finally, the historian and the Archives’ director got together, and in 2013 they managed to get permits to have the vault opened.’

‘A search warrant for Rhodes police headquarters? That must have been difficult.’

‘Exactly,’ Marina said.

‘What on earth did they find?’

‘Some records had rotted away with the damp, but around ninety thousand documents from the years between1912 and 1946 were rescued.’

Naomi blinked at her. ‘What an incredible discovery!’

‘Well . . . yes, it is.’ Marina beamed.

‘I’m finding all this hard to take in,’ Naomi said. ‘Such an important historical find. Why didn’t we know about it? Why wasn’t it on TV, splashed all over the national news, or at least in the local papers?’ She had a vague recollection of Georgia and Heleny gossiping about a secret door on the day she posted the first gun part to Rebecca. Was this what they were prattling on about?

Marina shrugged. ‘Grandpa said we have to come to our own conclusions about that.’

‘Iced tea?’ Naomi asked, reaching into the fridge.