by Philip Kerr
“You really don’t like insurance, do you?”
“Could be. But most of all I don’t like you. I’ll probably think of a good reason why after you’re bleeding to death on the floor.”
“Look, friend, there’s no need to be as stupid as you look. I can see you haven’t yet understood the principle of risk. You’d be surprised at how many idiots are injured getting out of a bath—although that obviously wouldn’t ever happen to you—or just walking across a bedroom floor. But I promise you that’s exactly what’s going to happen unless you put away the toothpick.”
“Say your prayers, malaka, because you’re the one who’s going to get injured.”
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 wi
th 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.”
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.”
