Greeks Bearing Gifts

by Philip Kerr

  “Samuel Frizis was a friend of mine. We were at law school together. Naturally I should like to see his murderer caught. This puts a different complexion on the matter under discussion. He’s a decent man, Stavros Leventis. An idealist. But what kind of a policeman were you, may I ask?”

  “A detective. I was a commissar with the Berlin Criminal Police.”

  “At the risk of being facetious, all the German police who were in Greece seem to have been criminals. That was certainly my client’s experience.”

  “There’s some truth in that, yes.”

  “I’m glad you say so.” He sipped his ouzo and seemed to catch the eye of a woman carrying a briefcase who was standing in the open doorway like a cat, wondering if she should come in or not. She looked worth catching, too, and not just her eye. “I read a lot of German history, Herr Ganz. I’m fascinated with this whole period, and not just because of this case. Correct me if I’m wrong but it’s my information that the Berlin Criminal Police came under the control of the Reich Main Security Office in 1939. That you were in effect under the control of members of the SS. And that you often worked in conjunction with members of the Gestapo. Is that right?” He paused. “If I sound curious about this it’s because I like to know exactly who I’m dealing with. And exactly how they might be of assistance in mounting an effective defense. For example, it’s also my information that many members of Kripo were operationally obliged to become members of the SD. In other words, when you were put into uniform, you were only obeying orders. Much like my client.”

  “Take a walk, would you?” I asked Garlopis.

  “A walk? But I haven’t finished my drink. Oh, I see. Yes, of course, sir.” Garlopis stood up awkwardly. “I’ll wait in that café across the street, with Lieutenant Leventis.”

  Garlopis went out of the bar looking like a sheepish schoolboy who had been told to play somewhere else. I told myself I was going to have to make it up to him later.

  “You’re well informed, Dr.—” I shook my head. “I don’t think I’ll even try to pronounce your name.”

  “I try to be. Where did you see active service? It wasn’t Greece, I’ll be bound. If you’d been here you’d hardly have come back.”

  “France, the Ukraine, Russia. But not Greece, no. I wasn’t a Party member, you understand. And I think you’re right. Germany behaved abominably in this country. The man Leventis is looking for—the one who committed a murder during the war—he was also in the SD. That’s why Leventis thinks I can help.”

  “Set a fox to catch a fox, eh?”

  “Something like that. If I’m leveling with you now it’s so you know that I’ll do the same with Arthur Meissner.”

  “Well, I appreciate your honesty. And as I said, I’m very keen to help catch the murderer of Samuel Frizis. Although connecting it with a murder that took place during the occupation looks like a much more difficult task. After all, there were so many.”

  “True, but there’s no doubt in my mind or his that catching this particular fox would take a great deal of the heat off your client. Not to say all of it.”

  “Interesting idea.” Dr. Papakyriakopoulos nodded at the woman in the doorway, who seemed to have been awaiting his permission, and she came inside the bar.

  “What kind of a lawyer was he?” I asked.

  “He was my friend. But he wasn’t a good lawyer. To be precise, he was the kind of lawyer who gives lawyers a bad name. The rich, cut-corners kind of lawyer who was much more interested in money than in justice. And not above a bit of bribery.”

  “The kind of bribery that might go wrong if it didn’t work?”

  “Enough to get him killed, you mean? I don’t know. Perhaps. I suppose it would depend on the size of the bribe.”

  “Any German connections?”

  “Like me, he didn’t speak a word of it. And he lived in Athens all his life.”

  “But how could he do that? He was a Jew, wasn’t he?”

  “Someone hid him, for almost two years. There was a lot of that here in Greece. Jews were never unpopular until more recently, when our governments started to become much more right-wing. This new fellow we’ve got now, Karamanlis, is a populist who talks about Greece’s European destiny, whatever that is. He sees himself as the Greek version of your Chancellor Adenauer.”

  The woman who’d come into the bar approached us, and Dr. Papakyriakopoulos got off his stool, kissed her on both cheeks, spoke in Greek with her for a minute or two, and then introduced us.

  “Herr Ganz, this is Miss Panatoniou. She’s also a lawyer, albeit one who works for a government ministry. Elli, Herr Ganz is an insurance man, from Germany.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Herr Ganz.”

  She said this in German I think but I hardly noticed because it seemed to my eyes that she reached into me with hers and strolled around the inside of my head for a while picking up things that didn’t belong to her and generally handling all there was to find. Not that I minded very much. I’m generally inclined to let curious women behave exactly how they want when they’re riffling through the drawers and closets of my mind. Then again, this was probably just my imagination, which always slips into overdrive when a voluptuously attractive woman in her thirties gets near my passenger seat. I shook her hand. And the two spoke some more in Greek before Papakyriakopoulos came back to me in English.

  “Well, look, it was good to meet you, Herr Ganz. And I’ll certainly speak to my client about what you have proposed. Where are you staying?”

  “At the Mega.”

  Clearly he wanted Miss Panatoniou all to himself, and I couldn’t blame him for that. Every part of her was perfectly defined. Each haunch, each shoulder, each leg, and each breast. She reminded me of a diagram in a butcher’s shop window—one of those maps concerning which cut comes from where, and I felt hungry just looking at the poor woman. I finished my drink and quickly went outside before I was tempted to take a bite of her.

  Garlopis had gone to fetch the Oldsmobile and, after a brief talk with the lieutenant, during which I agreed that he should look after my passport and he agreed not to arrest me for a while, I hailed a cab back to the hotel. Unlike Berlin taxi drivers, who never want to take you anywhere, Greek taxi drivers were always full of good ideas as to where they might drive you after they’d cut through the knotty problem of delivering you to your stated destination. This one suggested that he should drive me to the Temple of Zeus, where he would wait and then drive me back to the hotel, and maybe come back for me again later on and take me to a nightclub called Sarantidis, on Ithakis Street, where I could be entertained by some lovely ladies for a very special price. Unreasonably, he thought, I declined his kind invitation and went back to the Mega, where I took a much-needed bath and called up the Athenian telephone number on Fischer’s business card—80227—but it was out of order. At least that’s what I think the Greek operator was saying to me. After some time in Greece I’d decided that it wasn’t just the Trojan War that had lasted ten years but Homer’s telling the story of it, too.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  –

  If Captain Alois Brunner was back in Greece this was hardly my concern, in spite of what Lieutenant Leventis had said, albeit rather admirably, too: moral duty was something for philosophers and schoolmasters, not blow-in insurance men like me. All I wanted to do now was get back to Munich with my pockets full of expense receipts and before I managed to find myself with more trouble than I could reasonably handle. To this end I’d decided I urgently needed Dumbo Dietrich to go and find Professor Buchholz in Munich and get his side of what had happened on the Doris. Because it seemed obvious now that the loss of the Doris and the murder of Siegfried Witzel were intimately connected and probably only Buchholz could shed light on that. If he was still alive. Already I had more than a few doubts on this particular score. So when I went into the office the following morning I sent a telegram to
MRE, after which I apologized to poor Garlopis for the peremptory way I’d spoken to him in Brettos.

  “That’s quite all right, sir,” he said. “And I don’t blame you in the least for that. It’s my experience of speaking to the police that any situation can quickly become a whore’s fence post, as we say in Greece. This cop could make your life a real roller skate if you’re not careful. Your life and mine.”

  “Let me buy you a drink and I’ll feel better about it.”

  “Just a quick one, perhaps. It wouldn’t do to be drunk before lunch.”

  “I might agree if lunch didn’t involve Greek food.”

  “You don’t like Greek food?”

  “Most of the time. Lunch is usually a little much like dinner for my taste. But with a drink inside me that doesn’t seem to matter so much.”

  We went along to the bar at the Mega not because it was better than any other I’d been in but because I was still keeping an eye out for Georg Fischer and because after lunching out of a bottle I was planning to read the newspaper and then take a nap in my room, like a good salaryman. Garlopis had one and then got up to leave while I was ordering another gimlet.

  “I’d best go back,” he explained. “Just in case head office decides to answer your telegram.”

  “Good idea. But I’ll wait here.”

  “Herr Ganz?” Garlopis smiled politely. “Forgive me for saying so. You’re able to consume cocktails during the day and still do your job?”

  “I’ve always had irregular habits, my friend. Back when I was a detective we used to pull an all-night shift at a crime scene and go for a drink at six o’clock in the morning. Being a cop changes your life forever like that. And not in a good way. More than ten years after I left the Murder Commission my liver still behaves like it’s close to a badge and a gun. Besides, this is the only one of my irregular habits that doesn’t get me into trouble.”

  Garlopis bit his lip at the mention of a gun and then left me in the care of Charles Tanqueray. I waited a while but there was no sign of the man who’d called himself Georg Fischer so I called the barman over and tried some questions, in English.

  “The other night. I was in here. Do you remember?”

  “Yes, sir. I remember.”

  “There was another man at the bar. He spoke pretty good Greek. Do you remember him, too?”

  “Yes. He was German, too, I think. Like you. What about him?”

  “Ever see him in here before?”

  “Maybe.”

  “With anyone?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Anything you can tell me about him?”

  “He learned his Greek in the north, sir. Not here in Athens. Okay, now I remember something else. One time he was in here with some guys and maybe they were speaking French and Arabic. Egyptians maybe. I dunno. One of them had a newspaper—a copy of Al-Ahram. It’s an Egyptian newspaper. The Egyptian embassy is not far away, opposite the parliament, and some of those guys come in here for a drink.”

  “Anything else? Anything at all.”

  The barman shook his head and went back to polishing glasses, which he was certainly better at than making cocktails. Having tasted his gimlet I figured mixing paint was more his forte than mixing alcohol. I was just about to finish work at the bar when in she walked, Elli Panatoniou, the probable siren of Dr. Papakyriakopoulos.

  Nobody had warned me about this woman, or tied me to the mast of my ship, but when I looked at her a second time the parts of my brain usually allocated to thinking seemed to have been affected by some strong aphrodisiac. Normally I’d have called this alcohol, especially as there was still a glass in my hand at the time but I won’t entirely discount the scent of her perfume, the glint in her eyes, and the well-stocked baker’s tray she had out in front of her. Still carrying her briefcase, she moved toward me like Zeno’s arrow in that there were parts of her that seemed quite at rest and others that were perpetually in motion. There are small breasts and there are large breasts—which were almost a joke if the cartoonist in Playboy was anything to go by—there are high breasts with nipples that are almost invisible and there are low breasts that could feed a whole maternity ward, there are breasts that need a brassiere and breasts that just beg for a wet T-shirt, there are breasts that make you think of your mother and breasts that make you think of Messalina and Salome and Delilah and the Ursuline nuns of Loudun, there are breasts that look wrong and ungainly and breasts calculated to make a cigarette fall from your mouth, like the breasts that belonged to Miss Panatoniou—perfect breasts that anyone who liked drawing impressive landscapes like the hills of Rome or the Heights of Abraham could have admired for days on end. Just looking at them you felt challenged to go and mount an expedition to conquer their summits, like Mallory and Irvine. Instead, I climbed politely off my bar stool, told myself to get a grip of what laughingly I called a libido, tore my eyes off the front of her tight white blouse, and took her outstretched hand in mine. She was trying hard to make it seem accidental, her walking into the bar like that, but the fact is she wasn’t as surprised to see me in the Mega Bar as I was to find myself there at lunchtime. Then again, I’m a suspicious son of a bitch since they started selling losing lottery tickets. But when I decide to make myself look like an idiot there’s very little that can prevent me. Seeing her in front of me and holding her hand in mine made it very hard to use my head at all, except to think about her.

  “This is a surprise, Miss—?”

  “Panatoniou. But you can call me Elli.”

  “Christof Ganz. Elli. Short for Elisabeth? Or are you named after the Norse goddess who defeated Thor in a wrestling match?”

  “It’s Elisabeth. But why were they fighting?”

  “They were Germans. We’re like the English. We never need much of a reason to fight. Just a couple of drinks, a few yards of no-man’s-land, and some half-baked mythology.”

  “We’ve got plenty of that in Greece. This whole country’s rotten with mythology. And most of it was written after 1945.”

  She was wearing a tailored two-piece black business suit with piano keyboard lapels and a gathered waist, and a long pencil skirt that fitted her like the black gloves on her hands and she looked and sounded very smart indeed. She was tall and her dark brown hair was as long as Rapunzel’s and I was seriously thinking of weaving it into a ladder so that I might climb up and kiss her.

  “Are you here to see me or do you just like this bar?”

  She gave me and then the bar a withering look of pity and sat down, adjusting herself for comfort a couple of times, which gave me a second to appraise her nicely shaped backside; that was perfect, too.

  “My boss is having a meeting with someone upstairs and I was bringing him some business papers he claimed he needed. We both work for the Ministry of Economic Coordination, on Amerikis Street. This hotel has always been popular with journalists and all sorts of people in the government, for all sorts of reasons and not all of them respectable. It’s just as convenient as the Grande Bretagne but a lot cheaper.”

  “Well, I should fit right in. Expensive things don’t interest me. Except when I don’t have them, of course.”

  “How did you happen to pick this place, anyway?”

  “My colleague picked it.”

  “He must really dislike you. In case you didn’t know, this is the kind of hotel where not a lot of sleeping gets done. It’s not a complete flophouse but if a man wants to meet his mistress for a couple of hours and wants her to think well of him, then he brings her here. In other words it’s expensive without being too expensive. Also it’s where a member of parliament comes when he needs to have a meeting in secret with another member of parliament but he doesn’t really want it to be a secret—if you know what I mean—then he arranges a meeting in the bar here. That’s why my boss is here. He wants the prime minister to think he’s thinking of switching po
litical parties, which of course he’s not. This place is like a talking drum.”

  “Won’t the PM know this is what your boss is up to?”

  “Of course. It’s my boss’s way of sending Karamanlis an important message without sending him a memo and without it being held against him later on. A memo would formalize his dissatisfaction. A meeting in here just hints at it, politely.”

  “I’d no idea that Greek politics were so subtle.”

  “You’ve heard that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Of course you have, you’re German. Well, politics is just another way of being Greek. Aristotle certainly thought so and he should know. He invented politics. If I were you I’d move to the GB. It’s much more comfortable. But don’t move there before you’ve bought me a drink.”

  I waved the barman over and she said something to him in Greek; until then she’d been speaking to me in German.

  “You speak good Greek. For a German.”

  She laughed. “You’re just being kind. For a German.”

  “No, really. Your German is all right. Especially your accent. Which is to say you have no accent at all. That’s good, by the way. German always sounds better when it’s spoken by a nice-looking woman.”

  She took that one on the chin and let it go, which was the right thing to do; it had been a while since I’d been equal to the task of speaking to any kind of woman at all, least of all to the task of handing out compliments. My mouth was too small for my wit, as if my tongue had grown too big and ungainly like some slavering Leonberger.

  “My father worked for North-German Lloyd,” she said. “The shipping company. Before the war he was the chief officer on the SS Bremen. When it caught fire and sank, in 1941, he came home to Greece. He taught me German because he thought you were going to win the war and rule in Europe.”

  “Hey, what happened there? I know I should remember.”