FORTY-TWO

I threw one of the clean towels at Spiros Reppas, who was now seated quietly on the battered sofa, and waited for him to wipe his ruined face; his nose looked like a butcher’s elbow and his eyes were full of whatever protein-filled plasma fills them when you rearrange a man’s face for the worse. Aqueous humor, I suppose, but nobody was laughing. With my left forearm wrapped in another towel, I was seated at the table and had the Webley right in front of me hoping it might underline my questions and lack of patience with the way things had gone up until now; but the gun was still unloaded because I’d shot people before who tried to murder me and I didn’t want any more blood spilled. A broken nose and a cut on a forearm were enough splash for one evening.

Elli and Garlopis were hovering in the doorway beside the stairs, uncertain and uncomfortable witnesses to an interrogation they’d rather have avoided. They probably wondered if I was capable of hurting Reppas again. I was wondering the same thing. In the bedroom upstairs the radio was playing another jolly Greek tune and Elli was quietly humming along with it until I shot her a narrow-eyed, irritated look that was supposed to make her desist. She was nervous, I guess, and trying to hide it. The sight of guns and knives and quite a bit of blood will do that to some women. On the other hand, maybe she just didn’t see that this was hardly the time or the place to have a song in your heart.

“Why don’t you go upstairs and turn that damn radio off?” I said. “It’s irritating me.”

“Don’t you like Greek music?” she asked.

“Not particularly. And while you’re up there, have a peek around and see what you can find.”

“What am I looking for?”

“You’ll know it if you see it.”

“There speaks the great detective.”

“Whatever gave you that idea?”

“I had the strange idea that Leventis believes you are.”

“Everyone looks like a great detective to a cop like him. Even an old Kraut like me.”

“You’re not so old, for an old guy.”

She went upstairs. She moved like a black panther—rare, beautiful, and still steeped in unfathomable mystery—and after a while the radio went quiet, which left some room for my brain to untangle itself.

I tossed the injured man’s wallet to Garlopis. I’d already looked through it, but everything inside was printed in Greek.

“See what this can tell us,” I growled at him, still irritated but now more with myself, mostly for being irritated at Elli. Then again, someone trying to shoot you will do that sometimes. I lit a couple of cigarettes, because a cigarette is the perfect panacea for injured forearms and broken noses, a heal-all nostrum that requires no medical training and always works like magic. I tucked one between the captain’s bloodstained lips and smoked in silence for a moment, remembering something Bernhard Weiss had told me when he was still the boss of the Murder Commission at Berlin’s Alex:

“Make the silence work for you,” he’d said. “Just look at the way Hitler makes a speech. Never in a hurry. Waits for the audience to settle, and the expectation to mount. ‘When will he speak?’ ‘What will he say?’ It’s the same with a suspect. Have a cigarette, check your fingernails, stare at the ceiling, like you’ve got all the time in the world. Your suspect will be telling himself that he’s the one who’s supposed to have nothing better to do, not you. Chances are your man will say something even if it’s to tell you to go and screw yourself.”

After a minute or two Reppas wiped his nose again, inspected the amount of blood on the towel, removed the cigarette from his mouth, and spat a scarlet gob to one side. Cigarette and psychology were evidently working well.

“So what happens now, malaka?”

“That’s up to you, Captain.”

“Says the man with the gun.”

“Look, friend, it’s your gun, not mine. And if you hadn’t pulled the trigger on me you might still be breathing straight.”

“It doesn’t work unless you pull the trigger.”

“That was your second stupid mistake. The first was leaving it lying around where someone could come along and unload it.”

He looked at the gun, then at me. “So if it’s not loaded then why am I sitting here and listening to you? What’s to stop me throwing you out of here right now?”

“Me. That’s what. Look, your nose is already broken. Be a shame if I had to break your arm as well.”

“Maybe I’ll risk it.”

“If you do I’d advise you to take out lots of insurance first. You’re still drunk and already in quite a bit of pain. That gives me all the edge I need.”

Reppas nodded. “So what else do you advise?”

“Only that you give me a short history lesson. Recent history. There’s no need to relive the glory that was Greece. Just everything that happened since Max Merten showed up in Attica. You see, there’s this cop called Lieutenant Leventis at the Megaron Pappoudof on Constitution Square, here in Athens. He’s the one who found your boss dead in this house, probably murdered by Alois Brunner, also known as Georg Fischer. A tenacious sort, he’s been very anxious to speak to anyone regarding Brunner’s present whereabouts. So anxious that he’s been strong-arming me to do some of his investigative work for him. Working a murder case is a little outside my current terms of employment but what could I do? The lieutenant can be a very persuasive fellow. He’s holding my passport as collateral. I guess he concluded that since Siegfried Witzel was a fellow German and a client of my company in Munich, I could help him clear up this whole damn mess. I imagine this might be your job now. Then he can ask you all the awkward pain-in-the-ass questions he’s been asking me. So one possibility is for me to call him up and have him come here to arrest you. Because let’s face it, you know more than I do what this is all about. I’m just a claims adjustor from Germany who wishes he’d stayed home.

“All of that is on one side of the actuarial balance sheet. Maybe you’re a talker and perhaps you can gab your way out of trouble. I won’t argue about it. I’ll leave that to you and Lieutenant Leventis. He likes to talk, and to argue. For hours. But on the other side is that I have a small claim of my own against Max Merten. But for him I wouldn’t be in this mess. So I was thinking I might be persuaded to let you walk out of this house without involving cops. I might even return your wallet and pretend you’d never been here. You could take off on that motorcycle and disappear for a few weeks, while I go and visit Max Merten. Only you’d have to tell me where I can find him. And then, when all this is over, you can come back here and pick up the pieces of your life.”

I shifted some of the shards of glass under my feet as if to make a metaphorical point.

“If I might interrupt you, sir.” Garlopis was holding up an identity card. “According to his ID this man—Spiros Reppas—he lives on Spetses. That’s a small island just a few kilometers south of Kosta, which is where the taxi from Ermioni went after the Doris sank. Mpotasi Street, number 22.”

Garlopis continued to search the wallet.

“That fits. Anything else?”

“Just some money. A ferry ticket. A driving license. A business card that describes a scuba diving business, also on Spetses.”

“Spetses. Is that where Max Merten is hiding, Captain?”

“Maybe,” said Reppas. “Maybe not. Maybe you just want to kill him, too.”

“From what I’ve heard concerning what he did to the Jews of Salonika, he needs killing, badly. Only that’s not up to me. I’m an insurance man, not an assassin. Frankly I’d much prefer to make a gift of Merten to the Greek people. Lieutenant Leventis tells me that he would dearly like to arrest Alois Brunner and put him on trial for war crimes. But I’m guessing that Leventis will probably settle for getting Max Merten in his place. The way I see it, if I can deliver Merten to him on a plate then it will be a big feather in his cap; he’ll give me my passport back and I can go home again. Simple as that.”

“You’d do that? For me?” Reppas grinned a sarcastic sort of grin that almost made me want to break his nose again.

“No, not for you. But for the people of Greece, yes, I would. Only you’d better hurry up and spill your guts before my friend over there finds any more useful information in your wallet. Now that I have an address your own currency is shrinking faster than a wad of wet drachmas, Spiros.”

“All right, all right. But first just tell me exactly what happened to Siegfried Witzel. Please. He was my friend for twenty years. A good friend, too. For a German.”

“Exactly, I don’t know. Like I said, I’m just the fellow from the insurance company. We came to this house to make Witzel an interim payment, pending final settlement, and found him dead on this floor. He’d been shot through both eyes. There was a cop here, too. Since when that cop’s been inclined to pretend that we had something to do with it, as a means of catching the real culprit. Plugging his victims through the eyes is the signature of Alois Brunner, the Nazi war criminal. I think Brunner used me to lead him to this house because he was after Witzel. That’s as much as we know about what happened here.”

“What happened to the body?”

“The body?”

“Is Siegfried buried yet? Cremated, or what?”

“I have no idea.”

Reppas nodded somberly. “That’s a pity. He was a good friend to me.”

“So far this is me patiently answering your questions, Captain Reppas. What’s more I’ve a cut on my arm that’s in urgent need of repair. Not only that but it’s telling me to see if I can’t straighten your nose with my fist if you don’t tell me what I want to know, and soon.”

The room was silent. Reppas gave no clue as to his thoughts. Then, just as I was about to make a fist and tap him with it, he said: “All right. I’ll tell you everything.”

“Make sure you do. And by the way I already know the real purpose of your expedition wasn’t to dive for an ancient Greek treasure but for a modern Jewish one. And I might as well tell you that it’s not just the Greek police who would love to meet you, my friend. There are some Israelis in town who are interested in this story, too. You wouldn’t want to meet them. Not because they’re Jews. But because they’re not as patient as me. Can’t blame them for that, I guess. History has taught them that if it is going to repeat itself, this time they’re going to be the ones with the guns and the hard faces and the bloody-minded will to come out on top.”

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