Greeks Bearing Gifts

FORTY-ONE

Spiros Reppas thumbed the button on the pearl handle of the switchblade and it sounded as harmless as a camera shutter, but when he came slashing and jabbing at me with the point, I guessed he didn’t want me to say cheese so I turned and ran down two flights of stairs three at a time with the idea of reaching the Webley on the table by the French windows. Of course, he couldn’t know the gun was empty but I wanted it because even an empty Webley will get you further than no Webley at all.

I heard his feet close behind me and, realizing I wasn’t going to make it to the Webley in time, I grabbed the navy peacoat off the banister to help me try to defend myself. When we reached the bottom of the stair, I spun around and using the coat, I smothered his first and second lunge with the knife. He took a step back, feinting with the blade, which he clearly knew how to use, drunk or sober, while I twisted the coat around my left forearm and prepared to parry a third thrust. Neither of us spoke. When two men have an honest difference of opinion it’s best to let them settle it with a more old-fashioned sort of dialectic than pure reason. The third time he came snarling at me like a rabid dog he went for my throat and I raised my thickly wrapped forearm to prevent his switchblade from slicing through my jugular. The navy peacoat absorbed most of the blade’s sharp length but it wasn’t thick enough to stop the tip of the knife from stabbing my arm. I yelled with pain, twisted my arm and the knife to one side, and then lashed at him with my right. It was a good punch, a big Schmeling uppercut that ought to have broken his jaw except that he ducked under it, clawed the coat away with the knife, and came at me again. There was fear and murder in his red-rimmed eyes and maybe just a hint of uncertainty now about the outcome; I expect I looked much the same way myself. Fortunately the knife came within reach now, a few inches from my nose, and high enough for me to clap my two hands hard on opposite sides of his arm simultaneously—one on the back of his hand and the other on the inside of his forearm—a fortunate bit of training I remembered from the Berlin police academy in the days when it seemed every punk on the streets thought he was Mackie Messer. I got lucky. Luckier than I deserved, given the injury to my own forearm. My right hand stopped his wrist from moving and my left smacked hard on the back of his big hairy paw, forcing the Greek’s fingers to open suddenly so that the knife flew out of his fist and clattered onto the floor. It was his turn to yell with pain; I might even have broken his right wrist but he stayed on his feet and even barged past me to grab the Webley off the table with his left.

Instinctively I took a step back and raised my hands long enough to discover blood was dripping down my left arm from where he’d managed to stick me. I knew I was going to need some stitches in a hospital, which would certainly spoil the rest of my evening and reduce my chances of sleeping with Elli. And that irritated me. But I let him think he had the upper hand for a minute in the hope of learning something more before I showed him the error of his ways and punched him very hard on the nose—the nose was probably best, there’s nowhere that can end things quite as abruptly as a good punch on the nose, especially when you’re least expecting it.

“So where is Professor Buchholz?” I asked.

Reppas thumbed back the hammer of the Webley as if he really meant to shoot me. I knew that all six rounds were safely in my pocket but even when you know a gun is empty it still makes you feel uncomfortable to have one pointed at you by someone who wants to murder you. You ask yourself if you really did empty every chamber, or if someone else might have reloaded the weapon while you were out of the room. Crazy stuff like that.

“Or shall we say Max Merten? What about him? My guess is that you and he have been lying low somewhere since the Doris went down. But where? Somewhere near Ermioni? Kosta, perhaps? Does he even know that his partner is dead? And that there won’t be any insurance money now.”

“I hope you’re insured, malaka,” said the Greek.

“Siegfried Witzel came back to Athens to claim on the insurance for the Doris, didn’t he? Leaving the pair of you safely down there. And he said he’d call you when he’d completed the paperwork. But when he didn’t, you got impatient or curious or even worried and so you decided to come and look for him. Is that how it was? Look, I didn’t shoot him. But the cops want the man who did on account of how he also killed a lot of Jews during the war.”

The next second Reppas pulled the trigger—I heard another harmless camera-shutter sound—and at that point I felt the hammer come down on my own shortening temper.

“I take that very personally,” I said.

Even while he was glancing dumbly at the Webley and realizing what had happened, I stepped forward and smashed his nose with the heel of my hand, which saves a lot of unnecessary wear and tear on the knuckles. The blow carried him across the table and through the open French window. He lay still for a moment in an untidy heap of bloody nose and broken glass and I cursed Bernhard Gunther’s stupidity for giving the man a fair chance in the first place.

You should have put the Bismarck to his thick head and saved yourself the bother. The old tried-and-tested ways are the best. You do it to the other guy before he does it to you. When are you going to realize that there’s nothing to be gained in trying to be decent in a situation like this? The war should have taught you that much, anyway. Malaka is right. This has cost you a good suit. Not only that but now you’re going to have to wait around until he’s stopped bleeding to get some answers.

I shook some life back into my stunned hand, took off my jacket, and checked the wound on my left forearm—which, while it wasn’t quite as bad as it felt, was still going to need a few stitches—and then collected the gun and the knife off the floor. I pocketed the knife and slid the lozenge-shaped barrel of the Webley under the waistband of my trousers. If there had been a clean towel to hand I might have wrapped it around my arm. Outside Reppas was groaning a little too loudly for comfort so I picked up a foot and started to drag him back into the house, just in case his neighbors were the sort of Greeks to complain about noise. What with the Persians burning the Acropolis and raping the priestesses in the temple they ought to have been used to it. Probably they thought it was just the sound of Reppas smashing some dinner plates at the end of a jolly evening, the way Greeks do when they’re having a good time. It makes you wonder what might happen if they ever got upset about something. As I pulled, his boat shoe came off, which meant I dropped his leg for a moment. So I picked it up again and, in spite of his horribly stinking sock, folded his foot under my arm and finished bringing him back into the house. I closed the French windows, switched on the light, took a close look at the strawberry jam mess I’d made of the captain’s face, and then his right wrist, which wasn’t broken after all. Concluding he no longer posed much of a threat, I searched his trouser pockets and, finding nothing, went to fetch his peacoat. I found his wallet, stepped out of the front door, and walked around to the side of the house, to speak to Elli.

She threw away the cigarette she’d been smoking, stood up, and took my arm gently. “You’re hurt,” she said.

“It’s really just a scratch.” Even as I said it, I doubted that it was true.

“Must have been some cat. What happened in there?”

“Not a cat. A shark with pearly white teeth bit me, dear. It’s my suit that’s ruined, not me. You didn’t hear anything?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“So who is it in the house? The Nazi?”

“No such luck. It’s Spiros Reppas. The captain of the Doris.”

“You didn’t kill him, did you? Only, there’s quite a lot of blood on your hands.”

She was a cool one, all right. The way she spoke made me think that it wouldn’t have bothered her very much if I had killed him.

“He won’t be sniffing any roses soon, but otherwise he’s fine. Just a headache and a broken nose.”

“Thank God for that. In my experience the Greek police take a pretty dim view of murder.”

“Look, go and fetch Garlopis, will you, angel?”

“All right. But I don’t like it here. This is hardly my idea of a night out. We could have been having a lot of fun if you weren’t an ex-cop.”

“I’m sorry about that. But we can’t leave. Not quite yet. I need to ask our seafaring friend some questions first. Up until now we were just exchanging blows. He’s been pacified so tell Garlopis the danger is over but that I need those clean towels he keeps on the car seats. I have to use one of them on my arm and the other on the captain’s face. And be nice. For a coward Garlopis is actually quite a decent fellow when you get to know him. I should know. Like I already told you, I’m often a coward myself.”

“I sincerely doubt that.”

“It’s true. The only reason I went in there was because I was afraid of what might happen if I didn’t. Believe me, sometimes bravery is just the very small space that exists between two kinds of fear: his and mine. Now go and get him like a good girl. And the towels. Don’t forget to bring those towels.”