Greeks Bearing Gifts

THIRTY-EIGHT

After giving her a lot of extra background detail about Munich RE and the Doris that was mostly intended to furnish a supererogatory demonstration of my cooperation and prevent my getting shot, I said:

“But look here, it’s my impression that Meissner is a nobody. He’s not even German, just a poor Greek translator with a Kraut name who’s been left in the smokehouse by the Greek police in the absence of fish that are worth eating. Although he claims not to have seen Alois Brunner since the war, he did at least know him. And he told me some of Brunner’s favorite haunts here in Athens. I’ll write them down if you like.” Carefully I put my hand inside my coat, took out a notepad, and started to write. “One of those places might actually be relevant, given that I saw Brunner a few days ago in the bar at the Mega Hotel, on Constitution Square. Or maybe you already know about that from whoever it is at the Megaron Pappoudof who’s been feeding you information about what Lieutenant Leventis is up to.”

“I only know that you saw him. What does Brunner look like these days?”

“Not much different from an old photograph Leventis showed me. Thin, like before, not very tall, mid-forties, a heavy smoker, very deliberate manner, Austrian accent, badly bitten fingernails, gravelly voice, narrow dead eyes as if he’d been staring into a hurricane, a hooked nose, a short gray mustache and a chin beard, like an artist, you know. He was wearing a Shetland sport jacket, whipcord trousers, a plaid-gingham shirt, and a little cravat. A good watch, now I come to think of it; gold, maybe it was a Jaeger. And a gold signet ring on his right hand. He drank Calvert on the rocks and wore an aftershave. I can’t remember what brand. Oh, and he was reading a novel. There was a book on the bar. Something by Frank Yerby. Maybe there was a little hat on the stool beside him. I’m not sure.” I shook my head. “That’s about all.”

“And the conversation? Tell me about that, please.”

I tore off the note I’d written and handed it to her.

“I was having a drink and he started up a conversation. Just one German to another. In spite of what you said, we’re friendlier than people think, you know. But I never saw him before in my life. He told me his name was Georg Fischer and that he was a tobacco salesman for Karelia cigarettes. Gave me a pack of nails and this business card.” I handed it over. “Don’t bother calling the number, it’s out of order. I think he just hands it out for show. To make people like me think he’s a regular Fritz. But Leventis believes Brunner is behind two local murders on account of how the modus operandi is the same as an old murder that took place on a train between Salonika and Athens in 1943, when Brunner shot a Jewish banker called Jaco Kapantzi through both eyes.”

I paused for a moment considering the magnitude of what I’d said; talking about that brought back the memory of Siegfried Witzel lying on the floor of the house in Pritaniou, and probably looking not much better than I would look if the bandit queen’s marksman opened fire.

“One of these local murders was a boat owner called Siegfried Witzel who’d filed a claim for the loss of a ship. That’s where I fit into this whole damn mess. I came down here from Munich to adjust the insurance claim and got rather more than I bargained for. Story of my life, for what it’s worth.”

The lady from Ha’Mossad who wasn’t a lady nodded. “That Brunner likes to shoot his victims in their eyes is also my information. At the transit camp of Drancy, in Paris, in 1944, Brunner shot a man called Theo Blum in this same way. Brunner’s mother, Ann Kruise, may or may not have worked for an optometrist, in Nádkút. I know, it’s not exactly Sophocles. But there may be a psychological explanation for why he kills people in this manner that goes beyond simple sadism. I suspect we’ll only know for sure after we have him safely in a cell in Ayalon Prison. Go on, please.”

“Siegfried Witzel and a Munich-based lawyer named Dr. Max Merten—”

“He’s another person we’re interested in.”

“Those two had gone to a lot of trouble to convince the Greek government that they were going to dive in the Aegean for lost art treasures. Museum stuff. The gas mask of Agamemnon for all I know. Until this afternoon I’d started to believe that what they were really after was weapons. That the whole thing was a cover for an illegal arms deal. I was working on the assumption that Brunner was on board to supply stolen Egyptian and Assyrian art treasures in return for guns that could be secretly shipped to Nasser.”

I told her about the Hellenic horse’s head that had been delivered to the Doris.

“That makes sense, too. Almost certainly Brunner is involved with the Egyptian Mukhabarat. Our rivals, so to speak. An agent in Cairo reported Brunner had several meetings with a man named Zakaria Mohieddin, who was until quite recently the director of the Egyptian Intelligence Directorate. But it is our belief that he is secretly working undercover for your own West German intelligence service, the BND, at the behest of a German government minister named Hans Globke, who might even be looking out for him. We’d like to get our hands on that bastard, too. But there’s not much chance of it happening. If Adenauer protects his state secretary and security chief as well as he protected his minister of refugees, Theodor Oberländer, then we’ve little chance of making anything stick to Hans Globke.”

“What is it with you people?”

The bandit queen bristled a little. “What people do you mean, Herr Ganz?”

“Not Jews. Spies. There’s not one of you peekers knows how to walk in a straight line. Either way I now think I was wrong about all of that—about an illegal arms deal, I mean. I think it’s nothing to do with weapons. Merten and Witzel and perhaps Brunner were diving for something, all right, but it wasn’t archaic art treasures to put in a museum in Piraeus. Arthur Meissner told me a story in Averoff. And I’ll tell it to you now, if you like. Forgive me if I skip a few details but it’s hard to concentrate when a sniper has a bead on you.” I let out a breath and wiped my brow with the cuff of my shirt. I was sweating so much my coat was sticking to me like a butter wrapper. I felt like a man who’d been strapped into the electric chair.

“I should have thought the opposite was true. It’s always been my experience that the prospect of being shot focuses the mind as sharply as if one was looking down a telescopic sight. Besides, Herr Ganz, you’re perfectly safe as long as I keep a firm grip of this red handkerchief.”

“Well, just don’t sneeze. And don’t interrupt until I’m finished playing Homer. I wouldn’t like your rooftop pal to think you didn’t believe me. There are several holes in the rest of this story. You’ll have to forgive that on account of how I don’t want any extra holes in me.”

“All right. Let’s hear it.”

“According to Meissner, Alois Brunner was part of a corrupt syndicate that managed to rob Salonika’s Jews of hundreds of millions of dollars in gold and jewels in the spring of 1943. Also involved were Dieter Wisliceny and Adolf Eichmann. But the whole scheme was cooked up by Captain Max Merten, who was in charge of civilian affairs in the region. Merten made a nice friendly deal with the Jewish leaders in Salonika: that he would keep them from being deported in return for all of their hidden valuables. Fearing for their lives, the Jews paid up, only to find that they’d been double-crossed. With the help of Eichmann and Wisliceny, Merten secured the booty, and the treasure was loaded onto the Epeius. As soon as it sailed, the SS started to deport the city’s sixty thousand Jews.”

“I’ve heard this story,” said the bandit queen impatiently. “The ship set sail, struck a mine, and sank off the northern coast of Crete, and all of the gold belonging to the Jews of Thessaloniki went to the bottom of the sea. A message to this effect was received by the Regia Marina—the Italian navy at the Salamis Naval Base, near Piraeus. And by the Kriegsmarine in Heraklion. It was all investigated and verified by the Hellenic navy immediately after the war.”

“For all that that was worth,” I said.

“Maybe. Well?”

“Well, Meissner says different. Back in Salonika, Merten’s partners in the SD heard the bad news about the Epeius and began to smell a rat. Meissner says he overheard them airing their suspicions at the Villa Mehmet Kapanci; they then attempted to discover the true fate of the Epeius and found that yes, the ship had sunk, but not because it had hit a mine. Merten had double-crossed his partners just like he’d double-crossed the city’s Jews and had arranged to have the ship scuttled in shallow water in the Messenian Gulf, somewhere off the Peloponnese coast, between the towns of Pylos and Kalamata.

“The captain of the Epeius was a Greek named Kyriakos Lazaros; also on board was a German naval officer called Rainer Stückeln who Merten had cut in for a substantial share of the loot. Merten had previously arranged for a second ship, the Palamedes, to meet the lifeboat from the Epeius, and the Palamedes made its way to the western shore of Crete, where Lazaros and Stückeln and the crew transferred to another lifeboat and rowed ashore, for the sake of appearances, to report the loss of the Epeius.

“Subsequently Stückeln murdered Lazaros and the first mate, to ensure their silence about the location of the Epeius; and then he, too, was killed, in a bombing raid in Crete, but only after he had told Merten exactly where the ship lay. But before the three SD men in Thessaloniki could do anything about it the end of the war intervened. Eichmann, Wisliceny, Brunner, and Merten soon found themselves back in Germany, arrested or on the run. Eichmann and Wisliceny and Brunner were all wanted men after the war; but Max Merten, the lowly army captain, was quickly released and has been living openly in Munich for the last ten years, no doubt waiting for the moment when he judged it was finally safe to come back to Greece and retrieve his pension pot.

“Then, a few months ago, Merten chartered a ship belonging to a German scuba diver called Siegfried Witzel. That ship, the Doris, was insured by my company. Lots of ships are. MRE is a very good company. Perhaps the best in Germany. It’s my guess Merten and Witzel were planning to sail to the place where the Epeius went down to try to recover the gold. It’s also my guess that Brunner was tipped off by someone in the BND that Max Merten was planning to return to Greece and decided to try to reestablish their original partnership. But something went wrong, most likely another double-cross. Old habits die hard. The Doris sank—I’m not sure why, exactly—and the partnership was dissolved a second time, and with equally lethal effect. Brunner murdered Witzel and may be looking for Merten to murder him, too. I think maybe he just likes killing people. Then again, he’s a German.”

I shook my head with uncomfortable vigor, wondering how it looked at the cross point of the sniper’s reticle and noticing the bandit queen’s perfume now, which was her only concession to femininity. I couldn’t identify it beyond the fact that it was paradoxically vanilla and flowery in its base notes, which seemed like the very opposite of her.

“That’s it. The whole lousy story. For all I know Merten and Brunner aren’t even in Greece anymore. After what I just learned from Meissner, I’m surprised they had the nerve to come back at all.”

“That’s not so surprising, perhaps,” said the bandit queen. “It’s been suggested that there are some in this new Greek government who were informers for the Nazis and who were rewarded with businesses and property confiscated from Thessaloniki’s Jews. That could be why Merten chose to come back now. Perhaps he’s been able to blackmail some of these people.” She shrugged. “On the other hand, it’s not just this government that has failed Salonika’s Jews so dismally. In 1946 the Americans arrested Merten, locked him up in Dachau, and offered him for extradition to Greece. Incredibly, the Tsaldaris government said it had no interest in him. So after ten years of living openly in Munich, Max Merten may have decided that he was perfectly safe here after all. And who could blame him? You Germans have managed to draw a very thick line under the war and to start over again. The Old Man’s miracle, they call it. The Old Man’s whitewash, more like. It makes me sick. There’s no justice. Small wonder we’re forced to take the law into our own hands.”

She sneered and then looked away, as if she didn’t want to get any blood on her jacket after all.

“I certainly didn’t vote for him,” I said. “And please don’t give me a dirty look. I’m liable to get a headache. Speaking for myself, I never disliked Jews as much as I disliked a great many of my fellow Germans.”

“I’ve heard of the unicorn, the griffin, the great auk, the tart with a heart, and little green men from outer space. I’ve even heard of the good German, but I never thought to see one myself. You never voted for the Nazis and you never liked Hitler. I suppose there was even a Jew you helped to survive the war. You hid him in your lavatory for a couple of days. And of course some of your best friends were Jews. It amazes me how so many of us died.”

“I wouldn’t say I did anything to feel proud of, if that’s what you mean. But I’ll live with that.”

She lifted the fist with the red handkerchief and wiggled it meaningfully. “You hope.”

“You seem to have an appetite for revenge that makes me glad I’m not on your menu.”

“A menu? Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, we do have one. You know, getting Max Merten might almost be as good as catching up with Alois Brunner.”

“If I meet him again, I’ll let you know.”

“Again?”

“I knew him slightly before the war, when he was an ambitious young lawyer in Berlin, and then I met him again a couple of months ago. As a matter of fact it was Merten who helped to get me my job at Munich RE.”

“And they talk about Jews sticking together. You Germans could teach us a thing or two about looking after your own.”

“Believe me, if I see him I’m just liable to kill him myself. I had a nice quiet job in a Munich hospital before I thought to try and improve myself by joining the hazardous world of insurance. The people I was working with at Schwabing were as honest as the day is long. Never had any trouble with any of them.” I bit my lip. “But the minute I put a tie on again it’s like I started having to make compromises with myself. So. Can I go now? It’s getting a little chilly up here. But for the waves of hate coming off you I might need a coat. As it is I badly need a change of underwear.”

“Yes, you can go, Herr Ganz. You’re an interesting man. No doubt about it. There’s a lot more to you than meets the eye. You’re staying at the Grande Bretagne, right? Perhaps you have Hermann Göring’s bedroom. Or Himmler’s. That should make you feel at home. You’ll find the car is still waiting. My men will give you a ride.”

“No thanks. I’d prefer to walk if you don’t mind. It will give me a chance to clear my head of the idea that it’s about to receive an unwelcome visitor.” I stood up, carefully, with one eye on the red handkerchief in her hand. “Wasn’t it Sophocles who said that the end justifies any evil? I read that on a souvenir tea towel. Well, take it from one who knows. It doesn’t. It never does. Germany learned this the hard way. I sincerely hope you don’t have to learn the same lesson we did.”

The bandit queen shot me a sarcastic smile. “Go on. Get out of here. Take care of yourself, okay?”

“I’m German. That’s what we’re good at.”