Greeks Bearing Gifts

THIRTY-NINE

I took a cab back to the office but there was no sign of Garlopis, so I found some cigarettes and a bottle in his drawer, typed a two-page report for Lieutenant Leventis on Telesilla’s English machine concerning my visit to see Arthur Meissner, and then, on my way back to the hotel, handed it in at the Megaron Pappoudof. Not being arrested and detained in Haidari seemed almost as important as not being plugged between the eyes by some trigger-happy kibbutznik. In my report I’d told the lieutenant nearly all of what I’d already told the bandit queen but since it asked more questions than it answered I didn’t think it was going to be enough to get my passport back. I was never much for paperwork, even when I was in the Murder Commission. Anyway, I didn’t mention the bandit queen; I wasn’t sure that would have helped my cause.

Constitution Square was the usual human menagerie of lottery-ticket salesmen, pretzel vendors, cops, soldiers, pickpockets, beggars, musicians, and office workers hurrying to their bad-tempered buses and then home. Athens’s answer to Alexanderplatz had everything to divert the unwary citizen and I stopped for a short while to watch as a skilled pavement artist sketched out a grotesque picture in chalk that made me think of a picture by George Grosz and served to remind me only of how much I missed the old Berlin with its Biberkopfs and Berbers, its bear and its beer. There’s no one quite like George Grosz to make you think you need a stiff drink or, for that matter, that you’ve already had one. I knew this better than anyone, given my old acquaintance with George Grosz. I hurried into the hotel and found Achilles Garlopis waiting on one of the big sofas under a crystal chandelier. He got up like a beetle struggling to right itself and walked nimbly across the marble floor to greet me.

“Thank God you’re all right,” he said, crossing himself in the Greek way. “When those men picked you up outside Averoff Prison I did my best to follow them in the Rover, but they lost me at the traffic lights. Not that I’d have known what to do if I had caught up with them. They were a tough-looking bunch.”

“That they were.”

“They didn’t look like police.”

“No. They weren’t police.” I didn’t offer any further explanation; the less he knew about the bandit queen the better it would be for him. “Look, let’s just forget it, can we?”

“Surely, sir, surely.”

“No, let’s get a drink. I have a craving to shrink my liver. Walking here just now it was all I could do not to drink the contents of my cigarette lighter.”

“Then let me buy you one. On second thoughts, let me buy you two.”

“At these prices? We’ll have MRE pay for the damage. It’s what they’re good at.”

We sat down at the horn of alcoholic plenty that was the GB bar and summoned a waiter, whereupon I pointed at the tapestry of Alexander the Great. A boy on an elephant was holding up a hip flask and a couple of slaves were walking beside the chariot with what looked like a large pitcher full of wine on a stretcher. Another fellow with red hair was sucking on a golden bottle of Korn and trying to pretend it was a trumpet, the way you do after a good night out. Alexander himself was smiling and trying to stay upright and Great in the chariot he was standing in, like he’d already downed a glass or two of something warming.

“I’ll have what he’s having,” I told the barman.

“I’ll have the same,” said Garlopis, and then ordered two large whiskeys on the rocks, which seemed likely to produce the equivalent result.

“Did Meissner tell you anything important? Anything useful? Anything that will satisfy Lieutenant Leventis?”

“No, nothing that will help us. I fear we’re going to have to bribe the bastard after all. Either that or I use the money to buy myself a new passport.”

The drinks arrived and almost immediately we ordered two more, as insurance.

“A Greek passport? I wouldn’t know how to help you do that, sir. Every Greek is equal to the task of giving or taking a bribe to a public official. Indeed no one would regard such a thing as criminal. But obtaining a false passport is something else, sir.”

“Then we’d better just stick to a bit of honest bribery.”

“So we’ll cash the company’s certified check tomorrow,” said Garlopis. “We’ll drive to the Alpha Bank in Corinth, like we planned.”

“You’re sure the banks are open on a Saturday?”

“From nine until twelve, sir. I think you’ll enjoy it in Corinth.” He chuckled. “Especially when we’ve cashed the check and we’re on the road back to Athens.”

“What’s wrong with bribing Leventis on Sunday?”

“Oh no, sir. That wouldn’t do at all. You couldn’t bribe someone on a Sunday. Not in Greece. Never on a Sunday. No Greek could tolerate that. And it will have to be done with great skill and diplomacy. Indeed, it’s my considered opinion that we should bribe this man not just with money but with appreciation and esteem. We’ll have to polish his ego with a soft cloth. ‘I wouldn’t insult you, Lieutenant, by offering you a few hundred, or a thousand,’ that kind of thing. ‘For a man like you, Lieutenant, one would feel obliged to offer five thousand.’ That would not be an insult. Five thousand would be respect. Five thousand would be diplomacy. He will understand this kind of figure.”

“Suppose he wants more.”

“Of course, we can pay ten thousand. We should keep this in the toga sleeve, so to speak. Believe me, sir, for any more than ten thousand we could get the minister of justice himself. But like any Greek official, Lieutenant Leventis is wise enough to know his true value. One more thing. If you’ll permit me to say so, I think it’s best a Greek such as myself handles this matter. Speaking as a translator, it’s been my experience that when you’re paying a man his fakelaki it’s best there’s no linguistic room for doubt. And no loss of face. One Greek bribing another is commonplace, but somehow a German doing it seems unpatriotic.”

“Sure. I’ll buy that.”

“Let us hope we can buy our peace of mind.”

We had a couple more drinks and then I said good night and went upstairs. As I walked back to my room I wondered if Heinrich Himmler really had stayed at the GB or if it was a rumor; Greece had plenty of those. I had a hot bath—I could see the Megaron Pappoudof from the window after all—went to bed, read a book for three minutes before it fell from my hand, closed my eyes, and found myself somewhere blacker than mere darkness, as if death itself had swallowed me whole and I was struggling for breath. That was when Göring walked into the room with a lion cub under one chubby arm and demanded I move to another hotel. He was wearing a sleeveless green leather hunting jacket, a white flannel shirt, white drill trousers, and white tennis shoes. He was insisting that the room was always his whenever he came to Athens and that if I didn’t leave he’d have his personal sniper shoot me when I was next taking a bath. Naturally I refused, at which point the telephone started ringing and Göring explained that it was probably the hotel management offering me Himmler’s room instead. The Reichsführer-SS was still in Berlin or dead and wouldn’t need it. I reached across the bed in the slowly clearing darkness, and answered it and found it was only Garlopis calling to tell me something about the house in Acropolis Old Town, 11 Pritaniou. I sat up, switched on the light, tried to clear my head, told him I was asleep even though I was awake, gulped some air into the tar pits I called my lungs and with it, some more sense into my sleep-confused brain.

“I said, one of my aunts left a message for me earlier on this evening,” repeated Garlopis. “It’s about the house at 11 Pritaniou. In Acropolis Old Town. Remember when we went there and found Herr Witzel’s body and Lieutenant Leventis?”

“Maybe I can remember if I try very hard.”

“He said a witness who was cleaning the Glebe Holy Sepulchre Church around the corner had reported seeing two men at the house. That witness was my aunt Aspasia, who lives not very far away from there. She’s been cleaning the Holy Sepulchre church for thirty years. I didn’t say so at the time because I didn’t want to cause her any problems with the cops that might have been occasioned by my being related to her. They might have thought there was something fishy about that.”

“How many goddamn relations have you got, Garlopis? I never knew a man with so many cousins.”

“If you take a minute to think about this, sir, you’ll realize that every one of my cousins must have a mother. And every one of those mothers is an aunt to Achilles Garlopis. Aunt Aspasia is the mother of my cousin Poulios, who works at Lefteris Makrinos car hire, on Tziraion Street, the same people from whom we hired the Rover. I have six aunts and uncles on my mother’s side and seven on my father’s. And for the record I have twenty-eight cousins. This is normal in Greece. But listen, sir, my aunt Aspasia, she left a message that there is someone in the house in Pritaniou again. Now. That’s why I’m calling you so late. And she is sure it’s not the police or the Gendarmerie.”

“How is she sure?”

“Because she doesn’t like the police, sir. Not since the civil war. She thinks they’re all thieves. And because she doesn’t trust them she keeps a careful eye on them, too. She only reported hearing the shots that killed Witzel because she felt she had to. Since then, when the police were at the house in Pritaniou they had a uniformed man guarding the front door. And now there’s no one. Also, there’s a motorcycle parked in front—a red Triumph with a burst saddle that she thinks might belong to the owner.”

“Is that so?” I sat up, wide awake now, and looked at my watch. “Can you pick me up outside the hotel?”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes, sir.”

I went into the bathroom, ran my head under a cold shower, drank a glass of water, and dressed hurriedly. I was just on my way out the door when the telephone rang again and I answered it, thinking it was Garlopis to say he’d arrived a bit early. But it wasn’t Garlopis. It was Elli Panatoniou and her voice felt like ambrosia in my ear.

“Hey, I thought we’d arranged to go dancing.”

I looked at my watch again. It was still almost midnight. Suddenly I felt very old indeed. “We did? At this time?”

“This is Athens. Nothing happens in Athens before eleven o’clock. Still, you’re right. It wasn’t a firm arrangement. But I thought I’d drop by anyway. I just wanted to see you.”

“I’ll be down in two minutes.”

“I could come up to your room if you like. But you’ll have to call the front desk and tell them.”

I cursed my fortune. It’s not every night that a beautiful young Greek woman offers to come up to an old German’s hotel bedroom. Suddenly things felt a lot like the two jars that Homer says Zeus kept by his office door, one containing good things and the other bad; he gave a mixture to some men and to others only evil, but to some he gave good that felt like it had been simultaneously snatched away in the course of the same beguiling late-night telephone call. For now I would have to deal with it as best I could, which gave me a new understanding of the concept of the heroic outlook. Suddenly I wanted to stick a javelin between a Trojan’s ribs.

“No, I can’t do that. As a matter of fact I just got a telephone call from Achilles Garlopis, and I have to go out, but now that you’re here maybe you could come along with us. And perhaps we could do something afterwards.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Look, I’m coming downstairs. We’ll discuss it then.”

I had a pretty good idea of what we could do afterwards—especially as she’d already volunteered to come up to my hotel room—but I thought it best I give her another suggestion, one that didn’t sound like I was taking anything for granted.

“A drink,” I said to myself, as I rode the elevator car down to the hotel lobby. “But it might be best if it’s not here. It might look a bit obvious if you were to suggest the bar here. Look, she’s bound to know a late-night bar somewhere hereabouts. She’ll suggest this hotel if she’s comfortable with coming up to your room again. Always supposing she’s on the level. Either way Garlopis can drop us off and then we’ll see what we’ll see. That’s nice of you, Gunther. You can be a real gentleman when you think it might get you somewhere. I can call you Gunther, now that we’re on our own again, don’t you think?”

Elli slipped off the big sofa in the hotel lobby and smiled a smile that was as bright as the chandelier above her head. Her perfume already had me by the knot in my tie and was gently kicking my brain around inside my skull. Sometimes trouble can smell good, especially the expensive kind they keep stoppered up in little jars and bottles and sell to women, or to the men dumb enough to buy it for them. She was wearing black slacks, a clinging black pullover, and red shoes that looked like she really had been serious about dancing after all. The black leather bag she was holding looked big enough to carry a grand piano. Her hair seemed to have grown some and it was even more lustrous than before, as if she’d licked every bit of it clean herself. If I’d been around I could have saved her the trouble. She held me tight for a moment and kissed me fondly on both cheeks, and I came away thinking I was a lucky boy; too lucky probably but I was working on that, slowly. In Greece, it’s just standard practice to look a gift horse in the mouth.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“The owner of that boat we checked out in Ermioni,” I said.

“Siegfried Witzel.”

“I received a telephone call a few minutes ahead of yours. From Achilles Garlopis. It seems there’s someone poking around at the house where he got himself murdered. And it isn’t the cops. Could be the murderer come back to look for his monogrammed cuff links—a Nazi named Alois Brunner. Or maybe it’s another Nazi called Max Merten. Then again, it might just be Witzel’s ghost with nothing better to do than haunt the house. I don’t know. There’s a lot I don’t know. I may never know what I don’t know. That’s a given with a case like this. I could be the dumbest claims adjustor since Woodrow Wilson signed off on the Treaty of Versailles. But I thought I’d go and check it out. Only it might be dangerous, angel. If it is Brunner or Merten, they won’t like us turning up and asking questions or threatening them with cops. Could be you should stay in the car.”

At this point most normal girls would have cried off and pleaded an urgent appointment with a bottle of shampoo and a favorite book, but not Elli Panatoniou, who it seemed was made of the same Styx-dipped stuff as Achilles—although not, perhaps, Achilles Garlopis. And I certainly hadn’t forgotten the little Beretta in her briefcase she’d been carrying in the bar at the Mega Hotel.

“Okay,” she said simply, as if I’d just proposed nothing more dangerous than a late-night shopping trip or a visit to the local cinema.

Before, I’d been merely doubtful of her motives in befriending me; now I was as suspicious as if she’d been a shy blond spinster sent to my hotel by Alfred Hitchcock.