Greeks Bearing Gifts

by Philip Kerr

  “Try me. I’m really quite broad-minded.”

  I wondered about that.

  “You asked for it. Well, when a woman says she wishes she knew what some man is thinking it’s because she can’t understand why he hasn’t made a pass at her.”

  Elli laughed. “Is that what I’m thinking?”

  “Probably. But I figure you’ll tell me what you’re thinking on that score soon enough. I’m not about to waste either of my two remaining wishes on trying to work it out on my own.”

  “What happened to the third wish?”

  “You’re here in this car, aren’t you?”

  Elli looked out the window and smiled, and we were silent for a couple of minutes while I negotiated a winding stretch of high mountain road.

  “Aren’t you just a bit interested to know if I want you to make a pass at me, or not?”

  “Not anymore. You just satisfied my curiosity on that one.”

  “And?”

  “Now I’d like to get back to Mickey and Donald.”

  Elli laughed again. “You are the most infuriating man I’ve ever met. Do you know that?”

  “Yes. I’m what you lawyers would call incorrigible.”

  She put her cool hand on the back of my neck, where it felt good.

  “You’re also very nice. Much more human than I would ever have thought possible. You’re really rather a considerate sort of man, I think.”

  “My fatal charm. It never fails. Except when I’m relying on it to get me out of a jam such as my whole life since 1945.”

  “What did you do during the war, Christof?”

  “Not enough. But here’s a useful tip when you’re speaking German in Brussels. Unless you’re talking to Bertolt Brecht or Albert Einstein never ever ask a German what he did during the war. Not everyone appreciates it when they’re told barefaced lies.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  –

  Ermioni was a small port town on the Aegean Sea that resembled every picture postcard of a Greek village I’d ever seen—all blueberry sea and robin’s-egg sky, sugar-lump houses and paper-white caïques. We parked the Rover and stretched our legs for a bit. It felt as if we were at the very edge of the known world, the kind of almost forgotten place where Themistocles, with one eye on the two islands of Hydra and Dokos that occupied the horizon like the gray clouds of an approaching storm, could once have sat on some high colonnaded terrace writing about an improbable victory over the Persians. Walrus-faced fishermen tugged on cigarettes and pipes as big as clay pots while they mended their nets and watched us with ancient eyes that might have witnessed the Greek navy boarding their biremes and triremes to fight mad King Xerxes. Flesh-colored squid dried in the sun like wet swimming costumes on sagging lines and stray cats dozed on the quayside or wandered between the tables of cafés as if waiting upon the day’s customers, who probably weren’t going to come. The late-morning air tasted of salt and smelled of Greek coffee and tobacco, and the otherwise perfect stillness was periodically jangled with the spilling-cutlery sound of a distant bouzouki. It was a long way from Berlin; I couldn’t have felt more German if I’d had a black eagle with red legs perched on my shoulder and a snarling Alsatian on a length of piano wire.

  We had a drink in one place where we stroked the cats and spoke to a man with a face that was a sunbaked mosaic of cracks and fissures and who informed us that there was no coast guard’s office in Ermioni and that we’d best ask at the local harbormaster’s office in the main square, where all boat owners tying up in Ermioni were supposed to pay their mooring fees.

  The office was a rusticated white building with a blue door and shutters and a Greek flag out front just in case the color scheme left room for doubt regarding anyone’s patriotism. The front door was guarded by a pair of seagulls as big as pterodactyls and probably just as fierce; certainly they showed no fear of a large black Labrador that lay asleep or possibly dead on the porch.

  The harbormaster himself belonged to a species that was different from Ermioni’s other archaic humans, having a face with skin that hadn’t been supplied by the local leather factory. His name was Athanassios Stratis and he wore a black wool cap with a peak that was only a little less long and hairy than his nose. Explaining that I was from the ship’s insurance company in Munich, Elli did all the talking, and after a minute or two Mr. Stratis opened an ancient wooden filing cabinet that was as big as a coffin while she explained to me that he remembered the Doris and the German who’d owned it very well.

  “He’s quite sure there was actually a ship that sank near here?”

  “Several other people saw them coming ashore in the life raft that’s still moored to the quayside where they left it,” said Elli. “He’s been wondering what to do about it. He says he sailed his own boat out to the position given by the German the day after, to make sure that the wreck was not a hazard to local shipping, and found some flotsam—some debris in the water that had not been deliberately thrown overboard and was consistent with there having been some kind of accident. But the water is deep there and he thinks there’s zero chance of salvage.”

  Mr. Stratis found a file in his cabinet and glanced over a handwritten report he’d made of the incident while he rescued a half-smoked cigarette that had got lost behind his ear and lit it again. But his every other look was reserved for Elli; she was that kind of woman—the kind that could cause a traffic accident merely by standing at a bus stop. Every time I looked at her I almost skidded to a halt myself.

  “He says there were three men who came ashore in the raft,” continued Elli. “Two Germans and a Greek. One of the Germans was the boat owner, Mr. Witzel. The Greek was the ship’s captain, Mr. Spiros Reppas. Mr. Stratis says the other man didn’t give his name and said nothing very much.”

  “Ask him if one of the men on the boat—one of the Germans—could have been this man,” I said, and provided a description of the man who’d posed as Professor Buchholz, Max Merten.

  After a while Stratis nodded and said that it sounded like it was the same man. Then he and she talked a while and laughed and that was fine, too, because he was only a man after all and it made me think that she’d get more out of him if she made him feel like one. It had certainly worked on me.

  “What happened to them after they left this office?”

  “One of them, Witzel—he caught the ferry to Piraeus. That’s the quickest and least expensive way. The other two took a taxi farther down the coast somewhere. He doesn’t know where. But he thinks the driver would probably remember. His name is Christos Kammenos and we’ll find him sitting in a black Citroën on the other side of the peninsula, in front of the local chandler’s shop.”

  I thought for a moment. “The flotsam,” I said. “This debris he found floating on the surface of the sea at the place where the Doris went down. Anything interesting there?”

  “Some papers, that’s all,” said Elli. “He dried them and kept them in case they were important.”

  Stratis produced a large waterproof envelope from the drawer.

  “If he likes, I’ll look after those,” I said.

  The harbormaster handed them over without demur, but to Elli. I asked some more questions but learned nothing new and so we thanked him and went outside; the seagulls had gone but the dog performing the great dead-animal act was still there; as soon as I saw its diaphragm move I found myself stifling a yawn and envying the creature. It was a two- or three-hour drive from Athens. And a two- or three-hour drive back there.

  She handed me the envelope. The papers were all in Greek and Elli looked at them and said they were nothing important, just Siegfried Witzel’s identity card and some invoices. But being German and therefore punctilious about these things I asked her to describe the invoices in detail and found she was right—they were nothing important, mostly bills for food and drink and scuba tanks full of oxygen, which I supposed was quite
important if you happened to be underwater at the time. But one of these wasn’t an invoice at all and its importance was immediately obvious, at least to me. It was a waybill for a consignment sent to the Doris at the Marina Zea, in Piraeus, by none other than Mr. Georg Fischer, and which gave his address as Constitution Square in Athens, and while the waybill didn’t actually identify the hotel, I recognized the Mega’s telephone number: 36604. Clearly Alois Brunner was more often in the Mega Hotel than I’d been led to believe. The contents of the consignment were very interesting, too: Witzel had taken delivery of a bronze Hellenistic horse’s head from about 100 BC which was, I told Elli, the equivalent of bringing owls to Athens.

  “That’s a real German phrase?” she asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  “You’re making fun of me.”

  “No, I’m really not. And the reason I’m saying this is because the specific purpose of Witzel’s expedition was to sail to the site of a sunken ship and there to dive for ancient Greek artifacts. Which begs the question why someone had such an artifact sent to the Doris on the day before he sailed. It seems the wrong way round.” I frowned. “And here’s another thing. Witzel didn’t ever mention this horse on his insurance claim with MRE. But it was almost two thousand years old. Yesterday, Dr. Lyacos at the Archaeological Museum in Piraeus said that a good Roman bust of the second century might be worth as much as fifty thousand dollars. This horse has to be worth some serious money, too. So why didn’t he make a claim for that, I wonder?”

  We started to walk up the hill to cross over to the other side of the Ermioni peninsula; the little winding streets were deserted and quiet, which made me quiet while I thought about this latest discovery.

  “Unless the whole expedition was only meant to be a cover for something else,” I said after a while.

  “Like what?”

  “There were some smaller artifacts that Witzel didn’t want to claim for, either. And I thought this was because he was trying to prevent me from contacting Professor Buchholz. But now I’m thinking that maybe there was an extra reason. Dr. Lyacos told me there’s a thriving trade in black market antiquities through the port of Piraeus. Museums in small American cities want them to keep up with their richer neighbors. Apparently there’s nothing like a marble bust of Socrates to make people think that Boise, Idaho, is the cultural equal of New York and Washington. Lyacos told me he’d even heard that Colonel Nasser was using ancient Egyptian art to pay for illegal weapons. Now that he’s nationalized the canal he’s going to have to force people to pay to go through it, I guess. So maybe that’s what they were up to. Maybe there were some other antiquities already on the Doris. Maybe they were taking those somewhere quiet to exchange them for weapons destined for Nasser. German weapons, I shouldn’t wonder. On a remote island, perhaps. Greece has got lots of those.”

  On the south side of the peninsula we found Christos the taxi driver, who rubbed a chin that might have doubled as a magnet for iron filings and then said he didn’t remember a German traveling with a Greek, at least until I gave him a few drachmas. I didn’t blame him for his poor memory; it looked like he’d had a lean morning of it. Pocketing the note he told us that he’d driven two men to Kosta, which was another small port town, about twenty kilometers south of Ermioni.

  “Anything interesting or important about Kosta?”

  “Nothing much,” came the answer, via Elli. “But there’s a small private airport near there, in Porto Heli.”

  “But he didn’t drive them there,” I said. “Or he’d have said so.”

  “No,” said Elli, “he says he dropped them in the center of town. At a hotel in the main square.”

  We got in the back of the Citroën and told him to take us to Kosta. It seemed quicker than finding the place ourselves. Besides, MRE was paying. The Citroën was a Traction Avant, beloved of the Gestapo in Paris, and for a moment or two it was easy enough to imagine myself back there in the summer of 1940; Elli was as beautiful and smelled as good as any Frenchwoman I’d ever seen, or inhaled. I smiled at her a couple of times and she smiled back and once she took my hand and squeezed it; it seemed as if I was making more progress with her than I was with the case.

  It took us less than half an hour to find ourselves in another Greek port town that was a little less picturesque than Ermioni. The harbor looked more sheltered than the one we’d just left behind and was perhaps shallower, too, as the sight of a boat that was only half-sunk in the water seemed to confirm. At the main hotel we asked about Professor Buchholz and his Greek friend and learned only that they’d stayed just one night. Where they’d gone after leaving, the proprietor had no idea and it was clear she didn’t care to speculate, either, when she heard Elli speaking German to me.

  We had Christos drive us back along the meandering coast to Ermioni and there we ate a simple lunch at a little restaurant facing the calm sea on the south quay with more cats for company and enjoyed the pleasant change in the weather almost as much as we enjoyed some Greek food and wine.

  “So how is this trip connected with Arthur Meissner?” she asked.

  “I was wondering when you’d ask me about that. Tell me something first: what’s your connection with this whole flea circus?”

  “Dimitri Papakyriakopoulos. Meissner’s lawyer. I help him out sometimes, doing a bit of legal work to make some extra cash.”

  “Is that all you do for him?”

  “So far. He’s curious, that’s all. I’m kind of curious myself.”

  “No, I think you’re just fine. In spite of the fact that you’re a lawyer and a bureaucrat.”

  “What I am above all is a single woman, Christof. I need the money. Economic coordination doesn’t pay very well in this country. Greeks tend to resist most kinds of coordination. Yes, we gave the world democracy but people tend to forget we also gave the world anarchy.”

  “I’ve always been a bit of an anarchist myself. It was easy enough when we had a ruler like Hitler and authority like the Nazis. But lately I’ve been slipping. I’m seriously thinking of hanging up the black flag and getting myself socially stratified. I think I might enjoy it.”

  “Anyway, that’s not why I came today. I mean, I didn’t come to pump you for information about your interest in Arthur Meissner. I just fancied a day off, in a nice car, with a nice man.”

  “To be perfectly honest, I don’t know that I am interested in Meissner,” I said, ignoring the compliment, at least for the moment. “But that cop, Leventis, is pressuring me to try and help him solve a case.”

  “Samuel Frizis.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why does he think you can help? Because you were a cop?”

  “There’s that, yes. And the fact that I’m German. Witzel, my claimant and fellow countryman, got himself murdered and Leventis seems more inclined to make me a suspect instead of a witness. Either I help him or I don’t get my passport back.”

  “As a lawyer I have to tell you that he has that power.”

  “I know. I spoke to another lawyer already.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  “A firm in Piraeus.”

  “Piraeus. That doesn’t sound very promising. You’d better let me help you out if you get into any trouble.”

  “Sounds better. Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  “But where’s the connection between Frizis and Witzel?”

  “I can’t tell you that. Leventis wouldn’t like it. But there is one.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “So why did you come today?”

  “I told you. I came along for the German. And I don’t mean the grammar.”

  “I should warn you about my grammar, Elli. Like everything else I have it’s a little old and out-of-date. This is your teacher telling you now. So listen. I’m much too old for you, Elli. I drool when I sleep and sleep when I ought to be awake, and my heart feels like it ne
eds a wheelchair to get around.”

  “You should let me be the judge of that.”

  “I’m serious. I look at my wristwatch and I don’t see what time it is, I see the time that was.”

  “Or perhaps you just don’t like me.”

  “I’d probably like you a lot more if I disliked myself a little less.”

  “You’re better than you think you are. Anyway, whatever happens, we’re having a good time, aren’t we? I know I am. Nothing else seems to matter right now. Being here today is lovely.”

  “I don’t disagree about that. The last time I enjoyed myself this much, a witch was baking my sister Gretel in a pie.”

  “It’s great to be out of the ministry for a while. To be away from Athens. It really does feel a lot like spring. Makes you feel lucky to be alive.”

  She was right. It did feel like spring and I did feel lucky to be alive, which was not unusual for me, and this might be why, on the short walk back to where I’d left the Rover, I kissed Elli Panatoniou under an ancient olive tree and maybe it was also why she let me.

  It had been a long, cold, lonely winter.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  –

  It was almost five p.m. when I got back to the office to check my messages and telephone Lieutenant Leventis after driving Elli to her own office at the ministry on Amerikis Street. It seemed we both had to work late that night.

  “Call me,” she’d said. “30931. Extension 134. Maybe we can go and have a drink tomorrow. Or we could go dancing at Kalabokas, perhaps. That’s a club I know. Do you dance?”

  “It depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On who’s pulling the strings. The way I see it, when you’ve got to dance you’ve got to dance.”

  “Next stop Broadway, huh?”

  “As soon as I can get out of Greece.”

  “Don’t be in too much of a hurry. That kiss this afternoon. I liked it. I’d like some more.”

  “Good. Extension 134. I’ll arrange it.”