Freewheeling: Writing on Crete: Book Iv

By Tom Foran Clark

Writing on Crete, the fourth and last book of the Freewheeling series, opens on Emery, having departed Spain alone, making his way to Grez-sur-Loing, France, where he learns the George Sand Bookshop proprietor Walt Lowen has something he wants his vagabond friend to do for him. It involves Emerys traveling to Crete on Lowens behalf and, at his expense, writing back to him up close about certain vague, intriguing things apparently going on there, in which Lowen, even from his distance, has somehow got himself entangled.
Old Lowen got Emery a flight out of Paris on a 1-300 B4 plane seating 315 people. The plane was soon twelve meters up, flying 870 kilometers an hour, passing over the snow covered Austrian Alps, next flying over Yugoslavia, then Albania, and on to Athens where luminous, delicious oranges were being sold on bleak, ashen streets. The grim city was surrounded on three sides by rough mountains Mount Parnitha, Mount Penteli, and Mount Hymettos. At the core of the congested city was Plaka. In Plaka there were cheap flop houses with communal bedding for half a dollar, where local wines cost seven cents a glass.
In the morning, Emery took a bus to Piraeus on the Saronic Gulf, hidden by clouds. He enjoyed early morning coffee at a harbor front cafe. Black-haired, brown-eyed sailors in green uniforms stood idly about. Emery had evening tickets for Heraklion, and so had time to kill. He'd be on the ferry traveling overnight to Heraklion. He walked to the town center. He ate bread and Feta cheese. It was very cloudy, very chilly. Back at the docks in the evening, he boarded the ferry, the Knossos.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503598553

Tom Foran Clark

Tom Foran Clark, a native Californian born in Burbank, went to public schools, completed his undergraduate studies in Logan, Utah, and graduate studies in Boston, Massachusetts. He has also lived in New Hampshire, Western Massachusetts, France, and Germany. Beyond his writing and vagabonding, Clark has worked, variously over the years, as a graphic artist and copy editor in advertising firms, as a quality assurance engineer for assorted eBooks and marketing firms and, occasionally, off and on, as a public library director. Long a bookman, he has for many years been the proprietor of the online bookstore The Bungalow Shop. Clark is the author of The Significance of Being Frank, a biography of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, the 19th century Concord, Massachusetts schoolteacher, radical abolitionist, and chronicler and biographer of the lives and times of John Brown, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. Clark is also the author of another collection of stories, The House of Great Spirit, and the novel Jacob’s Papers.

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Copyright © 2015 by Tom Foran Clark.

Library of Congress Control Number:      2015913753

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5035-9857-7

      Softcover      978-1-5035-9856-0

      eBook      978-1-5035-9855-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Thank you to Robert D. Morritt for permission to use content about ancient Minoa from his book Stones That Speak, © 2010, in this book.

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Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

For Steve Mailloux

There is no continuous transition from the absolute to the actual. The origin of the phenomenal world is conceivable only as a complete falling away from absoluteness by means of a leap.

– Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

CHAPTER ONE

Richard Mark Emery, having traveled from Italy over North Africa into Spain, intending next to go north into Scandinavia, was again in Grez-sur-Loing, France, dropping in on the cranky expatriated American octegenarian Walt Lowen, proprietor of The George Sand Bookshop. Emery was hoping to go back to work for him a while and find a desk and time to do a little writing, to sort out and type up some of the things that had been going on lately.

The shop now boasted a shiny new computer at the front desk. Lowen reassured Emery right away that he could stay at the shop but, before they got going on any project, he had more urgent news for him. It was all on his computer.

So soon as he’d got his computer, Lowen had started getting a flood of e-mails. Someone had told an antiquarian art seller about Lowen, saying he’d be someone who’d be interested in buying certain kinds of art. "But I wasn’t interested in buying any art, except book arts art, Lowen insisted. Still this guy kept writing. Finally I gave in and had a look at a certain web site, which led to one of those big online auction web sites, which I opened up – and I got ensnared. Lowen told Emery of his having succumbed to the purchase of two attractive women."

I had no idea who would have steered this guy toward me, about as unlikely a candidate as you could find for the purchase of antique figurines. But lo and behold, I did end up falling for that whole thing. I bought a pair of antique goddesses from a guy named McLaren – one Dennis McLaren, an American living on Crete. Lowen had managed to make the purchase online, and things seemed to be going okay, but then there were problems. Lowen showed Emery the e-mails:

January 2. From: Dennis McLaren. To: Walter Lowen. Subject: Auction Item #76972328888. Dear Walter Lowen, Congratulations on your winning online bid. Thank you for your lightning fast payment. Your twin goddess figurines, Adrasteia and Ide, have been sent to you. Yours, Dennis McLaren.

March 1. From: Walter Lowen. To: Dennis McLaren. Subject: Re. Auction Item #76972328888. Dear Dennis McLaren: There’s a problem. I paid for the twin goddess figurines in January. I paid the winning bid amount at once. It is now March and the merchandise has not yet arrived in my hands here. If you would be so kind as to look into this matter I would appreciate it, Walter Lowen.

March 1. "Dear Walter Lowen: Sorry. I’m disappointed the goddesses haven’t arrived there yet. Please let me know if they have not arrived by the end of the week or, on the other hand, let me know if they do before the end of the week (to put my mind at ease). Thank you, Dennis McLaren.

March 4. All right. I will keep my eyes peeled for them. Walter Lowen.

In his auction listing, Dennis McLaren had described the beautifully photographed Adrasteia and Ide figurines as "similar, both made of ivory, wood, and, apparently, gold. One figurine is a narrow-waisted woman in an extraordinary apron and long skirt with flounces, her breasts completely bared. She is holding up two snakes, one in each hand, apparently shaking them like Mexican maracas – the snakes, I mean."

Dennis McLaren, who’d claimed to have purchased the two small figurines in Crete at a gift shop in the western part of the island, at Chania, had gone on to point out subtle differences – like the snakes in the hands of each the young women. "The shorter of the two goddesses – probably Ide – has two snakes on her person, both diminutive, held tightly in her clutches, McLaren had written. The taller of the two goddesses – probably Adrasteia – also has two snakes on her person, but only one of them is in her clutches. She holds the head of this very long snake in her right hand. The rest of the snake is entwined around her right arm, slung over her shoulder, dropping down one side of her back, across her buttocks, and up the other side of her back, then over her left shoulder, and around her left arm. The goddess holds the snake’s tail in her left hand. On top of her head is the head of the second snake. The body of this snake passes by the goddess’s left ear, curves around the outside of her left breast, continues to below her waist, slithers across her belly, then extends back up the right side of her body where its tail is looped around her right ear, suggesting, that this girl, like her twin, Ide, holds the key to enormous potent rapture and fertility."

On the auction web site the seller claimed to be an antiquities scholar from New England who’d graduated from the University of California at Irvine, California. He had got work, he’d told Lowen in e-mails, at the J. Paul Getty Institute, which had been so generous as to send him overseas in the first place. He said he’d been in Crete for the previous three months, participating in excavations at a site that had been called, in ancient Minoan times, Kydonia.

Basically, Lowen said, This man McLaren totally botched his simply sending them here to me. He just completely botched it. Now the twin goddess figurines, Adrasteia and Ide, are missing – misplaced, Lowen said. I never got the figurines. McLaren apparently sent them to Denmark, Lowen said, to Copenhagen.

March 8. Walter, All I wanted was to get those goddesses to you in mint condition expeditiously in a nice way. That’s it. If I failed, you’ll get your money back. It is possible I sent the goddesses to the wrong address. I thought I sent them to France. But I sent them to Denmark in error. A fellow in Copenhagen who bid on the goddesses and has won some jewelry and other figurines from me in the past and on the same day as you won your goddesses may have received them, my mistake. I sent him his jewelry and also Adrasteia and Ide in error. I’ve tried contacting him, no luck yet. I’m only saying I meant well and did my best. I am going to get to the bottom of this. Dennis McLaren.

March 12. "Mr. Lowen, there are plenty more where those came from. Come to Crete and be my guest to look at all my wares. Right now I’m flying to Copenhagen to meet the man who has you’re your figurines, among other things ill-got. I’ve had dealings wiyh him before, you should know. I apologize. I know you’re a bigshot objet’s ‘d art collector ther in France. I’ll let you in on this, but not just yet. It’s complicated. You’re involved now."

"I’m a book man, Lowen reminded Emery. I’m no collector of objet’s ‘d art. I was lured into going on the Internet, to that web site. Those two women simply caught my eye. How involved could I be?"

McLaren had next e-mailed Lowen to say he’d flown from Crete to Denmark. He’d moved into a room in Copenhagen at an apartment building a block up from the central Cathedral. In a surprise phone call, he said the Danish police had shown up at the room in the night, pulling up suddenly in cars with their lights flashing and the sirens wailing. McLaren said he had jumped from the second floor room’s one window to the ground. Wounded, on the lam, he’d telephoned Lowen in France. Gasping for breath, MacLaren had shouted to the flummoxed old bookseller on the other end something that had sounded, according to Lowen, like (he’d written down his best guess), Fire cracker. Indiscreet kamikaze. Fevery bare goo.

Lowen showed him his note. "Crazy, yes?" Lowen asked Emery rhetorically, obviously.

So time passes and then, one day, into the shop comes this girl, Lowen went on. But wait – I’m getting ahead of myself. You can come back to work for me, but on one condition. You have to do something for me. It has to do with Adrasteia and Ide, those goddesses, of course, Lowen said. You have to go to Crete and figure out what in hell happened to MacLaren and to my goddesses.

"Why Crete? Emery wondered. McLaren got shot in Copenhagen. "If you’d said you want to send me to Copenhagen, that would be good news. But Crete?"

Emery told Lowen he was only in town to work at the shop a little while, hopefully to do a little writing and then to head north to Scandinavia – Copenhagen would be fine, Stockholm would be better – for a reason of his own: to go find a particular young woman – who was not a figurine, but real – the girl of his dreams.

"The girl of your dreams, Lowen echoed. I see. I see. Well, Emery, as I was saying before, when I was talking about how this girl came into my shop… This girl of your dreams – maybe her name is Frida?"

Emery shuddered. "How do you know that?"

Well, hold onto your hat. I’m pretty sure you’re going to be taking up my offer of my sending you to Crete. It wasn’t long after you left here last time, to go off with that guy to ride a bike in Italy, Lowen remembered, pulling thoughtfully on his goatee. "This shining girl came in, alone – startlingly beautiful – blonde, luminous, grinning cheek to cheek, green eyes sparkling, wearing diaphonous white cloth and gold earrings and a gold necklace. She – this Frida – asked about you. She asked if I remembered you. She told me she’d met you in Italy and you had mentioned me. She was herself going home again, to Stockholm.

Then, some time later, Lowen continued, months later, she was back in here again. Not too long ago. She’d been in Stockholm, and she’d been in Copenhagen, too. She asked me if I’d heard anything new from you lately, and of course I hadn’t. She said that if I did hear from you, I should tell you that she was going to Crete. That was amazing to me, of