Greeks Bearing Gifts

TWENTY-SEVEN

If Captain Alois Brunner was back in Greece this was hardly my concern, in spite of what Lieutenant Leventis had said, albeit rather admirably, too: moral duty was something for philosophers and schoolmasters, not blow-in insurance men like me. All I wanted to do now was get back to Munich with my pockets full of expense receipts and before I managed to find myself with more trouble than I could reasonably handle. To this end I’d decided I urgently needed Dumbo Dietrich to go and find Professor Buchholz in Munich and get his side of what had happened on the Doris. Because it seemed obvious now that the loss of the Doris and the murder of Siegfried Witzel were intimately connected and probably only Buchholz could shed light on that. If he was still alive. Already I had more than a few doubts on this particular score. So when I went into the office the following morning I sent a telegram to MRE, after which I apologized to poor Garlopis for the peremptory way I’d spoken to him in Brettos.

“That’s quite all right, sir,” he said. “And I don’t blame you in the least for that. It’s my experience of speaking to the police that any situation can quickly become a whore’s fence post, as we say in Greece. This cop could make your life a real roller skate if you’re not careful. Your life and mine.”

“Let me buy you a drink and I’ll feel better about it.”

“Just a quick one, perhaps. It wouldn’t do to be drunk before lunch.”

“I might agree if lunch didn’t involve Greek food.”

“You don’t like Greek food?”

“Most of the time. Lunch is usually a little much like dinner for my taste. But with a drink inside me that doesn’t seem to matter so much.”

We went along to the bar at the Mega not because it was better than any other I’d been in but because I was still keeping an eye out for Georg Fischer and because after lunching out of a bottle I was planning to read the newspaper and then take a nap in my room, like a good salaryman. Garlopis had one and then got up to leave while I was ordering another gimlet.

“I’d best go back,” he explained. “Just in case head office decides to answer your telegram.”

“Good idea. But I’ll wait here.”

“Herr Ganz?” Garlopis smiled politely. “Forgive me for saying so. You’re able to consume cocktails during the day and still do your job?”

“I’ve always had irregular habits, my friend. Back when I was a detective we used to pull an all-night shift at a crime scene and go for a drink at six o’clock in the morning. Being a cop changes your life forever like that. And not in a good way. More than ten years after I left the Murder Commission my liver still behaves like it’s close to a badge and a gun. Besides, this is the only one of my irregular habits that doesn’t get me into trouble.”

Garlopis bit his lip at the mention of a gun and then left me in the care of Charles Tanqueray. I waited a while but there was no sign of the man who’d called himself Georg Fischer so I called the barman over and tried some questions, in English.

“The other night. I was in here. Do you remember?”

“Yes, sir. I remember.”

“There was another man at the bar. He spoke pretty good Greek. Do you remember him, too?”

“Yes. He was German, too, I think. Like you. What about him?”

“Ever see him in here before?”

“Maybe.”

“With anyone?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Anything you can tell me about him?”

“He learned his Greek in the north, sir. Not here in Athens. Okay, now I remember something else. One time he was in here with some guys and maybe they were speaking French and Arabic. Egyptians maybe. I dunno. One of them had a newspaper—a copy of Al-Ahram. It’s an Egyptian newspaper. The Egyptian embassy is not far away, opposite the parliament, and some of those guys come in here for a drink.”

“Anything else? Anything at all.”

The barman shook his head and went back to polishing glasses, which he was certainly better at than making cocktails. Having tasted his gimlet I figured mixing paint was more his forte than mixing alcohol. I was just about to finish work at the bar when in she walked, Elli Panatoniou, the probable siren of Dr. Papakyriakopoulos.

Nobody had warned me about this woman, or tied me to the mast of my ship, but when I looked at her a second time the parts of my brain usually allocated to thinking seemed to have been affected by some strong aphrodisiac. Normally I’d have called this alcohol, especially as there was still a glass in my hand at the time but I won’t entirely discount the scent of her perfume, the glint in her eyes, and the well-stocked baker’s tray she had out in front of her. Still carrying her briefcase, she moved toward me like Zeno’s arrow in that there were parts of her that seemed quite at rest and others that were perpetually in motion. There are small breasts and there are large breasts—which were almost a joke if the cartoonist in Playboy was anything to go by—there are high breasts with nipples that are almost invisible and there are low breasts that could feed a whole maternity ward, there are breasts that need a brassiere and breasts that just beg for a wet T-shirt, there are breasts that make you think of your mother and breasts that make you think of Messalina and Salome and Delilah and the Ursuline nuns of Loudun, there are breasts that look wrong and ungainly and breasts calculated to make a cigarette fall from your mouth, like the breasts that belonged to Miss Panatoniou—perfect breasts that anyone who liked drawing impressive landscapes like the hills of Rome or the Heights of Abraham could have admired for days on end. Just looking at them you felt challenged to go and mount an expedition to conquer their summits, like Mallory and Irvine. Instead, I climbed politely off my bar stool, told myself to get a grip of what laughingly I called a libido, tore my eyes off the front of her tight white blouse, and took her outstretched hand in mine. She was trying hard to make it seem accidental, her walking into the bar like that, but the fact is she wasn’t as surprised to see me in the Mega Bar as I was to find myself there at lunchtime. Then again, I’m a suspicious son of a bitch since they started selling losing lottery tickets. But when I decide to make myself look like an idiot there’s very little that can prevent me. Seeing her in front of me and holding her hand in mine made it very hard to use my head at all, except to think about her.

“This is a surprise, Miss—?”

“Panatoniou. But you can call me Elli.”

“Christof Ganz. Elli. Short for Elisabeth? Or are you named after the Norse goddess who defeated Thor in a wrestling match?”

“It’s Elisabeth. But why were they fighting?”

“They were Germans. We’re like the English. We never need much of a reason to fight. Just a couple of drinks, a few yards of no-man’s-land, and some half-baked mythology.”

“We’ve got plenty of that in Greece. This whole country’s rotten with mythology. And most of it was written after 1945.”

She was wearing a tailored two-piece black business suit with piano keyboard lapels and a gathered waist, and a long pencil skirt that fitted her like the black gloves on her hands and she looked and sounded very smart indeed. She was tall and her dark brown hair was as long as Rapunzel’s and I was seriously thinking of weaving it into a ladder so that I might climb up and kiss her.

“Are you here to see me or do you just like this bar?”

She gave me and then the bar a withering look of pity and sat down, adjusting herself for comfort a couple of times, which gave me a second to appraise her nicely shaped backside; that was perfect, too.

“My boss is having a meeting with someone upstairs and I was bringing him some business papers he claimed he needed. We both work for the Ministry of Economic Coordination, on Amerikis Street. This hotel has always been popular with journalists and all sorts of people in the government, for all sorts of reasons and not all of them respectable. It’s just as convenient as the Grande Bretagne but a lot cheaper.”

“Well, I should fit right in. Expensive things don’t interest me. Except when I don’t have them, of course.”

“How did you happen to pick this place, anyway?”

“My colleague picked it.”

“He must really dislike you. In case you didn’t know, this is the kind of hotel where not a lot of sleeping gets done. It’s not a complete flophouse but if a man wants to meet his mistress for a couple of hours and wants her to think well of him, then he brings her here. In other words it’s expensive without being too expensive. Also it’s where a member of parliament comes when he needs to have a meeting in secret with another member of parliament but he doesn’t really want it to be a secret—if you know what I mean—then he arranges a meeting in the bar here. That’s why my boss is here. He wants the prime minister to think he’s thinking of switching political parties, which of course he’s not. This place is like a talking drum.”

“Won’t the PM know this is what your boss is up to?”

“Of course. It’s my boss’s way of sending Karamanlis an important message without sending him a memo and without it being held against him later on. A memo would formalize his dissatisfaction. A meeting in here just hints at it, politely.”

“I’d no idea that Greek politics were so subtle.”

“You’ve heard that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Of course you have, you’re German. Well, politics is just another way of being Greek. Aristotle certainly thought so and he should know. He invented politics. If I were you I’d move to the GB. It’s much more comfortable. But don’t move there before you’ve bought me a drink.”

I waved the barman over and she said something to him in Greek; until then she’d been speaking to me in German.

“You speak good Greek. For a German.”

She laughed. “You’re just being kind. For a German.”

“No, really. Your German is all right. Especially your accent. Which is to say you have no accent at all. That’s good, by the way. German always sounds better when it’s spoken by a nice-looking woman.”

She took that one on the chin and let it go, which was the right thing to do; it had been a while since I’d been equal to the task of speaking to any kind of woman at all, least of all to the task of handing out compliments. My mouth was too small for my wit, as if my tongue had grown too big and ungainly like some slavering Leonberger.

“My father worked for North-German Lloyd,” she said. “The shipping company. Before the war he was the chief officer on the SS Bremen. When it caught fire and sank, in 1941, he came home to Greece. He taught me German because he thought you were going to win the war and rule in Europe.”

“Hey, what happened there? I know I should remember.”

“You may have lost the war but—and this is a first, I think—it looks like you’re going to win the peace. Germany is still going to help rule Europe as part of this new EEC. Greece is already desperate to join. We’ve been trying to be good Europeans since the fall of Constantinople. And mostly succeeding, too, I’m happy to say, otherwise I’d probably be wearing a veil and covering my face.”

“That would be a tragedy.”

“No, but it would be a hardship, for me at least. In Greece, tragedies usually involve someone being murdered. We practically invented the idea of the noble hero brought low by some flaw of character.”

“In Germany we’ve got plenty of those to go around.”

“This is Greece, Herr Ganz. We’re not about to forget any of those.”

“And yet you still want to join our club?”

“Of course. We invented hypocrisy, too, remember? As a matter of fact I’m hoping to be part of the Greek delegation in Brussels when we lobby the Germans and the French for membership next year. My French is good. On account of how my mother is half-French. But you’re wrong about my German. I make lots of mistakes.”

“Maybe I can help you there.”

“I didn’t know it was possible to insure against those kinds of mistakes.”

“If it was I certainly wouldn’t be your man, Elli. I don’t sell insurance. I just check the claims. Disappointing people is usually part of my job description. But only when they’ve disappointed me. There’s something about insurance that brings out the worst in people. Some people can just smell dishonesty. I’m one of those, I guess.”

“Papakyriakopoulos said you used to be a cop. In Berlin. Not a German-language teacher.”

“That’s right. But I wouldn’t mind talking to you, Elli. In German or in French. We might meet from time to time and share a cup of coffee or a drink. In here since it’s so public. When you’re not too busy, of course. We could have some German conversation.”

“That’s one I certainly haven’t heard before. Hmm.”

“Does that mean you’re thinking about it?”

“You amuse me, Herr Ganz.”

“Next time I’ll wear a straw hat and carry a cane if it will help.”

“I bet you would, too. If you thought I’d like that.”

She should have said no, of course. Or at the very least she should have made me work a little harder for the pleasure of her company. She could have asked me what the German was for “pushy” and I wouldn’t have minded in the slightest because she’d have been right. I was being pushy. So I let her off the hook for a moment wondering if she’d hitch up her skirts and wriggle her way back onto it.

“But what about your father? Don’t you speak German to him?”

“He’s dead, I’m afraid.”

“Sorry.”

“But maybe you’re right. We could meet, perhaps. For a little conversation.”

“Those are the best kind.”

“You don’t like to talk?”

“It depends.”

“On what?”

“On who I’m talking to. Lately I’ve gotten out of the habit of saying very much.”

“I find that rather hard to believe.”

“It’s true. But with you I could make an exception.”

“Somehow I don’t feel flattered.”

“Haven’t you heard? There’s nothing like speaking a language with a native to get better at it. You could think of yourself as the horse and me as the emperor Charles V.” Still testing her. The insult was deliberate.

She laughed. “Didn’t he have an unfeasibly large jaw?”

“Yes. In those days you didn’t get to be a king unless there was something strange about you. Especially in Germany.”

“That probably explains our own kings. They’re Germans, too, originally. From Schleswig-Holstein. And they have the biggest mouths in Greece. But as it happens, you’re right. There’s not much German conversation to be had here in Greece. For obvious reasons.”

“Lieutenant Leventis speaks quite reasonable German. Almost as well as you. Maybe we could ask him along to our little class.”

“Lieutenant Leventis?” Elli smiled. “I couldn’t meet him without half of Athens getting to hear about it and drawing the wrong conclusion. Besides, his wife might object. Not to mention the fact that he and I hold very different political opinions, so we’d probably spend most of the time arguing. He’s rather more to the right than I am. Only don’t tell anyone. I try to keep a lid on my politics. Konstantinos Karamanlis is hardly a great friend of the left.”

“There’s no film in my camera, Elli. Politics don’t interest me. And in Greece they’re beyond my understanding. The left most of all.”

“Maybe it could work,” she said, persuading herself some more. “Why not? I might even get to understand the German people a little better.”

“I know that feeling.”

“You don’t think it’s possible?”

“I’m not sure. But let me know when you think you’ve got a handle on us. I’d love to get a few clues as to why we are who we are.”

“My father used to say that only the Austrians are really suited to being Germans; he said that the Germans themselves make excellent Englishmen, even though they all secretly wish they could be Italians. That this was their tragedy. But he liked Germans a lot.”

“He sounds like a great guy.”

“He was.”

The barman brought her something green and cold in a glass and she toasted me pleasantly.

“Here’s to the new Europe,” she said. “And to me speaking better German.”

I toasted her back. “You really believe in this EEC?”

“Of course. Don’t you?”

“I quite liked the old Europe. Before people started talking about a new Europe the last time. And the time before that.”

“It’s only by doing away with the idea of nation states that we can put an end to fascism and to war.”

“As someone who’s fought in all three, I’ll drink to that.”

“Three?”

“The Cold War is all too real, I’m afraid.”

“We’ve nothing to fear from the Russians. I’m sure of that. They’re just like us.”

I let that one go. The Russians were not like anyone, as anyone in Hungary and East Germany would have told you. If Martians ever did make it across the gulf of space to our planet with their inhuman plans for conquest and migration they’d feel quite at home in Soviet Russia.

“But if we meet,” she added, “for conversation, let’s avoid politics. And let’s not make it in here.”

“Your boss?”

“What about him?”

“He might see you.”

She stared at me blankly, as if she had no idea what I was talking about. But that could just have been my German.

“In here,” I added. “With me. Having a conversation.”

“Yes. You’re right. That would never do.”

“So. You suggest somewhere. Somewhere that isn’t cheap. I have an expense account and no one to take to dinner this weekend except Mr. Garlopis. He’s MRE’s man in Athens. But he’s a man. A fat man with an appetite. So it will make a nice change. These days I’m alone so much that I’m surprised when I find someone in the mirror in the morning.”

“If he’s the one who booked you into the Mega then I’d say you should have him fired. I bet he’s got a cousin in the hotel business.”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“Everyone in Greece has a cousin. That’s how this country works. Take my word for it.”

But I didn’t know if I would. Seated at the very bar where I’d already been duped by one liar, I wasn’t sure I believed what she’d told me but she seemed like a nice girl and nice girls didn’t come my way that often. Then again, the truth is never best and seldom kind so what did it really matter why she was there? A lot of lies are just the oil that keeps the world from grinding to a halt. If everyone suddenly started being scrupulously honest there’d be another world war before the end of the month. If Miss Panatoniou wanted me to think our meeting again was purely accidental then that was her affair. Besides I could hardly see what there was in it for this woman to deceive me. It wasn’t like Siegfried Witzel was alive or that she had an insurance claim against MRE I might settle in her favor. I really didn’t have any money or any powerful friends. I didn’t even have a passport. Nor was I about to persuade myself that she was just one of those younger women who are attracted to much older men because they’re looking for a father figure. I was attracted to her, sure, why not? She was very attractive. But the other way around? I didn’t buy that. So I searched her briefcase when she went to the ladies’ room, like you do and, to my surprise, I found something more lethal than a few critical reports about the Greek economy. I’d been around guns all my life and about the only thing I didn’t like about them was when they were hidden in a woman’s bag. Suddenly everyone in town seemed to have a gun except me. This one was a six plus one, a .25-caliber with a tip-up barrel and it was still wrapped in the original greaseproof paper, presumably to protect the lining of her bag from gun oil. They were called mouse guns because they were small and cute. At least that was always the rumor. My own feeling about this was somewhat different. Finding a woman with a Beretta 950 was like discovering that she was the cat and that maybe I was the mouse. I figured there were plenty of moths around to put holes in my clothes without finding one in my guts as well.

When she came back to the bar smelling of soap and yet more perfume I thought about mentioning the Beretta and decided not to bother. Who could blame her if she was carrying a Bismarck? By all accounts Greek men weren’t very good at taking no for an answer, so maybe she needed it to defend those magnificent breasts. I told myself everything would be fine between us just as long as I didn’t try to put my hands on those, and that her little mouse gun would certainly stop me making a fool of myself, which was probably a good thing. So I ordered another round of drinks and while I was looking at the barman I tried to twist my eyes to the farthest corners of their sockets so that I might at least look down the front of Miss Panatoniou’s cleavage, but discreetly, so she wouldn’t notice what I was up to, and shoot me simply for being the swine I undoubtedly was. In March of 1957 that was what I called my sex life.