Greeks Bearing Gifts

FORTY-SEVEN

We parked the Rover in Kosta and then traveled by water taxi to Spetses, a journey that took all of ten minutes. I wanted to leave Max Merten with the impression that we were escaping the island by the skin of our teeth, so I paid the boatman approximately five times the going rate on the understanding that he would be waiting on the quayside before six the following morning for the return trip to the mainland. It was a beautiful island and I was sorry not to stay longer, especially with Elli, who told me she’d been to the island several times before because, in summer, it was a popular bathing resort much frequented by Athenians, which was also why there was a first-class hotel on the island, the Poseidonian, with a hundred beds and a good restaurant, which had recently opened again after being closed for the winter. We checked in, and while I kept a low profile by staying in the room—I hardly wanted to run into Max Merten on the street—Elli went out to buy a little flashlight and to reconnoiter the address Spiros Reppas had given us.

“I walked past the house several times in case anyone was watching, the way you told me,” said Elli, while, later on, we ate a dinner that might have been described as typically Greek except that it was good. “It’s a small fisherman’s cottage with two floors, and more or less typical of the houses on the island. A little dilapidated. The curtains were drawn and no one went in and no one came out, but there was wood smoke coming out of the chimney and there was a light burning in one of the bedrooms. By the way, I’m certain it’s someone German in there.”

“How did you work that out?”

“Because there was a washing line in the little front garden, and one of the shirts still drying on it had a German label, from somewhere called C&A.”

“That was smart of you.”

“Don’t worry, I didn’t actually go in the garden, I just leaned over the front wall and took a quick look. It was quite a large shirt, too. You said Merten is fat? The collar on the shirt was a size forty-five. And not well-washed either; there was still grime on the inside of the collar, like he’d forgotten to take a bar of soap and a stiff brush to it, the way you’re supposed to. My guess is that it’s a man who’s living alone because there’s also a burned saucepan left out on the kitchen step. A man like you, probably. And then there’s the fact that a woman would have remembered to take in the washing. A woman like me, perhaps.”

“You’re very observant. And you saw all this in the dark?”

“There’s a small bar opposite, which was closing up, but all the lights were on.”

“Anyone suspicious hanging around?”

“Only me.”

“Were you seen near the cottage?”

“No. I got a couple of comments on the seafront, but any girl expects that in Greece.”

“You’re not any girl. Not in my eyes. If Paris was here now he’d sling you across his shoulder and leg it for the ships.”

“You need to get out more.”

“Take the compliment. Please. Was there anyone suspicious in the town? Anyone like me?”

“You mean any Germans? No.” She sipped at a glass of white wine and then frowned, but not because of the taste; it was a good Mosel we were drinking. “I wish I knew what you’re going to do. I expect you want me to stay here in the hotel safely out of the way. Well, try and get it through your square German head, I’m not going to do that. Not now that I’ve come all this way. I’m in this until the end.”

“I didn’t see it happening any other way.”

“Besides, it’s the only way I can be sure of killing you both with my spare gun. Brunner, too, if he should decide to put in an appearance while we’re there.”

“Another present from your father, no doubt.”

“I was never one for playing with dolls.”

“Just make sure you shoot to kill, sugar. Brunner’s not the type you can only wound.”

“Of course. There’s no other way with a rat like that. But just for the record, schnucki, I shall regret having to shoot you. Schnucki. Did I say that right?”

“Sure. By the way, your German is much improved.”

“I’ve a good teacher. Shame I’ll have to end the lessons, and so abruptly, too. What does it mean anyway? Schnucki.”

“It doesn’t mean anything very much except that you don’t want to shoot me, schnucki. It’s generally held to be a term of affection.”

We went to bed and after a few hours we got up early, very early, which is to say at the kind of uncivilized hour the Gestapo—and you don’t get more uncivilized than them—used to favor when they decided to make an arrest, because experience had demonstrated that people put up less resistance to the police when they’re still fast asleep.

Leaving the Poseidonian Hotel we walked through the necropolis-like white town and along a narrow street and then up a steep hill to the address Elli had already reconnoitered. The front of the gray cottage belonging to Reppas was covered with a lot of bright blue tiles and on top of the twin gate pedestals were a couple of crouching stone lions painted yellow; it looked like a cut-price Ishtar Gate. There were no lights and the shirt with the German label was still hanging motionless on the line where Max Merten had left it, as described by Elli. Behind the gatepost was a cardboard box containing several empty schnapps bottles, which led me to suppose that Merten hadn’t been entirely wasting his time on the island.

As soon as I opened the front door with the key Spiros Reppas had given me and I moved the flashlight around a bit I knew for sure Merten was living there. The place was pungent with the smell of the same distinctive Egyptian-style Fina cigarettes Merten had been smoking back in Munich. There was a copy of an old German magazine called Capital on the floor by the sofa and a half-empty bottle of Schladerer on the coffee table. There was a hat and an overcoat with Munich labels lying on the sofa, but no gun in the pocket. On the wall was a picture of King Paul, and a framed Imray chart of Greece and its islands. There was plenty of light through the window—enough to conduct a search of the place—and I whispered to Elli to look around for the Walther automatic that Spiros Reppas had mentioned back in Athens; then I headed for the carpeted stairs. Every step was furnished with a pile of books, as if the cottage belonged to a keen reader who didn’t own any shelves; most of the books were cheap paperbacks, crime novels and thrillers by English and American writers for whom choosing a red wine with fish was probably the kind of clue that would reveal the socially maladroit murderer’s identity to the very clever detective. I wondered if any of them had advice on how to approach a sleeping man with a gun. I placed my foot on the first step and tested it for sound with my weight. The wooden step stayed silent so I tried another; and then another, until I was at the top of the stairs with my heart in my mouth. I turned and looked down and saw Elli standing there looking up at me; she shook her head as if to say No gun, and I nodded back and prepared to open one of the bedroom doors in the knowledge that Merten probably had the gun on the bedside table; that was certainly where I would have left mine if Alois Brunner had been looking for me. And you didn’t have to be much of a shot with a Walther to hit someone coming through your bedroom door. A three-legged cat could have made a shot like that.

The master bedroom was empty, but had recently been occupied by Spiros Reppas; there was a picture of him and Witzel on the bedside table and, on the wall, a small icon and a photograph of the Doris. The bathroom door was open, which left only one other room; that door was closed but, on the other side, I could hear a man snoring as loudly as an angry rhinoceros. So far everything was much as I’d imagined in my mind’s eye; I told myself the Webley would only have slowed me down: With the gun in one hand and the flashlight in the other, I’d have needed a third hand to grab hold of Merten’s Walther before he could use it. Taking a sleeping man alive when you also take a gun has its pitfalls and I hoped he’d had enough schnapps from his bottle to slow him down even more than deep sleep.

I turned the loose doorknob and pushed firmly on through the deafening sound of the creaking hinge and my own heavy breathing, until I could see Merten’s body lying on its side in the bed. How he didn’t wake up I didn’t know. Possibly the racket caused by his own snoring was louder than any commotion I could have made. A Panzer tank would have made less noise. At this point I might have hit him on the head with something hard to stun him while I searched for the gun but I wanted to avoid this if I could, if only because transporting a man with a head injury back to Athens might prove to be difficult. I pointed the beam from the flashlight at the bedside table, where there was a light without a shade, a copy of a novel by Ian Fleming, a pair of spectacles, a glass of something stronger than water, and, ominously, an open box of 9-millimeter ammunition.

Still looking for the gun I bent carefully over Merten’s head; his loud snoring smelled strongly of cigarettes and schnapps, while his rotund body was sour with the smell of sweat. From the way his hand was under the pillow I concluded that it was probably holding the Walther, which also meant that unless he was very nervous indeed, or just foolhardy, the safety catch had to be on. The safety on a Walther was usually stiff and might give me another vital second if we had to wrestle for it. I considered rolling him out of bed unceremoniously, and then rejected the idea, thinking he might still be holding the gun when he hit the floor on the other side of the bed. I was considering my next option when the naked man stirred, let out a loud grunt, and turned onto his other side, and I caught a glimpse of something black under the pillow. As the snoring resumed I reached for the object quickly, and came up with a leather-bound New Testament, as if he’d been reading it before or after reading the copy of Casino Royale. I wondered if perhaps there was a useful text in there for the spiritual guidance of someone who had helped to engineer the deaths of sixty thousand Jews after robbing them blind. My father, an enthusiastic Nazi but all his life a churchgoing man, could probably have told me what it was.

I stepped back from the bed and glanced quickly around the malodorous room and this time I spotted the Walther on a table by the window, next to another bottle of Schladerer and a packet of Finas. With some relief I fetched the gun, checked the safety, and dropped it into my jacket pocket. Sweeping the table with the flashlight I also found Merten’s passport and some ferry tickets as far as Istanbul, and from there, a first-class ticket aboard the Orient Express to Germany. From the dates on the tickets, Merten would have been back home in Munich in just a few days. I pocketed these, too, thinking I might use them myself if things got desperate. Feeling a little more relaxed, I switched on the overhead light, helped myself to a drink and a cigarette, sat down in the room’s only armchair and while I waited for the sleeping man to stir under the glare of the bare bulb, I glanced over his passport; Merten was only forty-six but looked ten years older. Not much of a testament to a complete lack of conscience, I thought. After a minute he groaned a bit, sat up, yawned, belched, rubbed his bloodshot eyes, and frowned at me blearily. He looked like a crapulous Buddha.

“Gunther,” he said, scratching his pendulous breasts and large belly. “What the hell are you doing here?”