Greeks Bearing Gifts

by Philip Kerr

  Merten breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Now that she’s left there’s no reason for us to stop being friends,” he said. “You were trying to do the right thing in her eyes. I understand that. But those beautiful eyes have gone. And nothing much is going to be served by handing me over to the Greek cops.”

  “Just for the record, we were never friends.”

  “Sure we were, Bernie. Hey, what was the name of that brandy bar you took me to once, near the Alex? The one near that weird hotel with the word ‘Hotel’ upside down? You know—that bar with the picture of the lion over the electric piano.”

  “The Grüne Quelle.”

  “That’s right. Do you remember the sign on the wall? ‘Roar like a lion roars when you need another shot.’ I could use a glass of that stuff now, couldn’t you, Bernie?”

  I didn’t answer but I remembered the bar, all right, and the taste of the brandy. I could even hear the tunes on the pianola, too: “I Kiss Your Hand, Madame,” followed by the Glorious Prussia March and everyone in the bar full of cheap brandy and singing along at the top of their voices. I even found myself recalling the taste of the giant fifty-pfennig steamed sausages they served. I missed it all and more than I cared to admit; I certainly wasn’t about to start reminiscing about the old days with a man who’d just scared off my girlfriend. It was important not to forget, but sometimes it was even better not to remember, to permit the new to overwrite the old.

  Merten was still full of talk about old Berlin but because I knew why he was doing it I’d almost stopped listening.

  “And surely you remember that little restaurant near the courts? Hessel’s, was it? You’d been giving evidence in a murder case—the Spittelmarket Murders. It was there you gave me the best advice I ever had. About not joining the SS.”

  “You should have taken it.”

  “But I did take it. I told you, I was just an army captain.”

  “Perhaps you didn’t join the SS, Max. And maybe you didn’t kill anyone, like you said. But what you did was as bad as anything any of those others did: Eichmann, Brunner, the whole rotten crew. You lied to all those people in Salonika. You took all their money and all their hopes and then you sent them to their deaths. That’s a terrible thing to have done.”

  “Nonsense. Look, the war is history. No one gives a damn about Hitler in Europe. That’s the whole point of this new EEC. So we can all forget about the horrors of the war and become good Europeans instead. Life is one enormous horror, Bernie, and periodically society proclaims its natural fascination with evil and then feels obliged to destroy itself. For the last time, there is no soul, there is no creator, there is merely this poor thing of flesh and blood called man, which, for whatever reason, other men feel compelled to gas and to burn. It’s been happening for centuries. Take my word for it: no one is going to remember the Jews of Salonika in a few years’ time. Hardly anyone remembers them now.”

  “You’re wrong about that, too, Max. It was another German, Heinrich Schliemann, who proved that the Trojan War was a real event in history. Homer was writing about it five hundred years after it probably happened. And we’re still talking about it today. It’s the same with the Second World War. This stuff isn’t going away in a hurry. We Germans are stuck with it, like the Greeks and the Trojans were. Whether we like it or not.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “You’re going to drive us into the center of Athens. To police HQ. And there you’re going to volunteer yourself as a witness in the ongoing trial of Arthur Meissner. After that it’s up to the Greeks what happens.”

  “Look, you’re still not thinking straight. Maybe she has gone, but there are plenty more fish in the sea. Think of the gold on that sunken ship. Think how many girls like her you could have with a proper share of that treasure.”

  “Maybe you weren’t listening but there is no proper share of money obtained like that, Max. And I just lost the only treasure I was ever likely to have. That’s the nature of real treasure. You just don’t know how precious it is until you lose it. So, drive.” I brushed his earlobe with the sights on the gun. “And please, Max, not another word until we get to police headquarters. If you can keep your mouth shut until then, you stand an even chance of staying alive for the rest of the day.”

  FIFTY-FOUR

  –

  Crossing the palatial lobby of the Grande Bretagne Hotel I saw her, seated underneath an enormous gilt mirror, with her back to the wall and facing the main entrance. It was the best place to sit if you wanted to see everyone who was coming in or going out and you were professional about this kind of thing and, given that profession, very serious about staying alive, which I had no doubt she was. On this occasion she was wearing a brown two-piece business suit with square chocolate patent buttons and a little brown beret.

  I thought about ignoring her and then decided against it. I thought it unlikely that she was alone and although I couldn’t see him I felt sure one of her more muscular men would have shepherded me to the empty seat beside her. So halfway across the marble floor I checked my walk and went back toward her. She stood and smiled pleasantly as if she’d been an ordinary housewife, there for a more prosaic purpose than revenge and murder, and extended a gloved hand for me to shake, which I did if only to show I was unafraid.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “Your sniper, of course. Behind the potted palm, I suppose. Or hidden among all of those liquor bottles in the bar. Just be careful he doesn’t put the wrong kind of optic to his eye. He’s liable to see things very differently.”

  The bandit queen smiled. She was smaller than I remembered and better looking, but not so you’d have wanted to do something about that. Her brown eyes were on me and then on someone I didn’t see, someone over my shoulder who stayed out of sight for the moment. I glanced around but didn’t make him; the lobby was full of largish men in cheap suits attending an air-conditioning convention in one of the hotel’s many conference rooms, and her armed guard could have been any one of them. Now that I was about to renew my acquaintance with the bandit queen I wouldn’t have minded a little extra air myself; just looking at her gave me a tight feeling in my chest, like someone was going to put a bullet in one of my lungs.

  “Good idea,” she said. “Alexander’s Bar, I mean.” She glanced at the steel Rolex on her bony wrist. “And not too early, perhaps. So. Let me buy you a drink, Herr Ganz.”

  “Sure. Why not? Poison’s more discreet in a place like this.”

  “If we wanted to do that you’d be dead already. Trust me on that. We’d have added a secret ingredient to your toothpaste. Radium, probably. That’s standard procedure in these circumstances. Radium adds a whole extra dimension to the idea of tooth decay. They say that victims have the cleanest teeth in the morgue.”

  “Maybe I should switch brands. Nivea doesn’t seem to shift tobacco stains very well. But you know, I don’t scare so easily in this place. For one thing I’ve started to carry a gun.”

  “You’ve nothing to fear from me, I can assure you.”

  “I’m pleased to hear it.”

  I followed her into the bar to a table in the quietest corner with a reserved sign and a waiter who was already hovering there, as if he’d been briefed to wait on us with extra vigilance. For all I knew he worked for the Ha’Mossad, too, but I couldn’t have said if he looked Jewish. As a copper who never once took a race education class under the Nazis, I wasn’t much good at identifying Jews. It has to be said that some people do look Jewish but neither the bandit queen nor the waiter did. We sat down and ordered a pair of large whiskeys. She found a packet of Tareytons in a tapestry handbag, lit one, and smoked it with what sounded like a sigh of relief, her first sign of weakness.

  “I’m trying to cut down so I make myself wait until I have a drink in my hand before I can light one.”

  “That’s
not the way to cut down.”

  “What would you recommend?”

  “You could try having a drink only when you’re celebrating murdering another old Nazi.”

  “To be honest we don’t do that anymore. We used to, of course. Grawitz, Giesler. Geschke. Back in the day we were very active all over Europe.”

  “Did they only give you the Gs? You’re making me nervous again. My name is Ganz, remember?”

  “These days we’re keen to show ourselves in a better light, as a democratic country with fair trials and proper legal procedure. That’s why we wanted Brunner, with a B. To give him a fair trial in front of the whole world before we hanged him.”

  “I like your idea of justice, lady. It doesn’t suffer from any nit-picking jurisdictional doubt. Trial first. Then the hanging. And to hell with any reasonable doubt.”

  “We can’t afford doubt. Not when we are surrounded by our enemies. Syria. Jordan. Egypt. Eventually we will have to defend ourselves, most likely against all three at once. This makes for a certain conviction in everything we do.”

  “I noticed that about you the last time we sat down together. Tell me something. Did you really have a guy with a rifle on the rooftop? Aiming at my head?”

  “We never make idle threats.”

  “Nothing wrong with a little idleness. Especially in the threat department. Too many people are in a hurry to hurt other people. That’s the way I look at it. I figure we could all use a little more humanity.”

  “I hope that works for you. But it didn’t work for us Jews.”

  The waiter came back with the drinks and she took hers like it was nothing stronger than an infusion of tea. I sipped mine more carefully; the demon drink was best handled with care when you were drinking with a genuine demon, albeit one who was currently behaving herself very well.

  “By the way, have you a name now? Or is that still not important?”

  “Rahel Eskenazi.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Mostly.”

  “But I’m right in thinking you are from the Ha’Mossad.”

  “We prefer to call it the Institute. Or just Glilot. It’s more discreet.”

  “As an insurance man I can certainly see the sense of that. Why take risks if you don’t have to?”

  The bandit queen looked up at the ceiling and nodded. “I always liked this hotel,” she said quietly. “The German insurance business must be good if they can afford to put you up here. In what was Göring’s favorite hotel. He knew a thing or two about luxury.”

  “It doesn’t spoil it for you? Knowing that?”

  “Knowing what happened to Göring, no, not at all. In fact, it makes me like the place all the more. It reminds me of how quickly a moral order can be restored. More or less. I like to think of Göring in his suite upstairs quite unaware that in the next room Nemesis awaits her chance to enact retribution against those like him who succumb to hubris. Yes, that’s what I think.” She smiled wryly. “I also think a man like you is wasted in the world of insurance.”

  “I get paid sufficient to drive a car, eat sausage, and drink enough beer to be drunk once a week, not necessarily in that order. In Germany we call that making a living.”

  “There are not many insurance men who carry a gun.”

  “They might sell a few more policies if they did.”

  “A living, perhaps. But not a life. Not for you, Christof.”

  I shrugged and let that one go. I figured if she was driving at something she’d pull up and let me take a peek at what was on the front seat, eventually.

  “I hear you have your passport back,” she said. “And that you’re leaving Athens today.”

  “That’s right. I was on my way out to visit the Acropolis when I saw you. All these weeks I’ve been here and I still haven’t been up to take a look at the thing. I hear it’s seen better days but that it’s worth a look.”

  “You can see it another time. It will still be there in a thousand years.”

  “Yes, but I’m not so sure I will.”

  “I also hear that Max Merten has been arrested by the Greek police.”

  “Not arrested. Not quite yet. But his passport has been taken away. And they’ve got him in a safe house in Glyfada. They’ll arrest him only after he starts to give evidence in Arthur Meissner’s trial. That’s the deal I made for him. Makes him look a bit better.”

  “In Greece? I doubt that. But it makes you feel a bit better, and that’s important, too, right?”

  “Also right.” I shrugged. “I’m only sorry I couldn’t deliver up Alois Brunner for you.”

  “We’ll get him one day.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “Sure. A man like Brunner gives all Germans a bad name. And who better than Germans to help find him? I can’t say I agree with Adenauer’s policy on this matter very much. I think it will come back to haunt us. That’s one of the reasons I persuaded Merten to give himself up to the Greeks.”

  “We’d have hanged him for sure.”

  “That’s the other reason.”

  FIFTY-FIVE

  –

  “It won’t stick, you know,” said the bandit queen. “The charges against Max Merten. Not in a Greek court. Not for long, anyway.”

  “I don’t see why. There must be plenty of witnesses still alive. People from Salonika, victims of genocide, men and women who came back from the camps, who’ll testify against him. Surely the Nazis didn’t kill all of them.”

  “You’re so naïve. This has nothing to do with justice or genocide or crimes against humanity. There’s too much going on behind the scenes you don’t know about. Sure, the Greeks will go through the motions of giving Merten a proper trial in open court. And the public will lap it up like cream. Toussis, the state prosecutor, will sound like Ajax when he narrates this country’s misfortune. The judge may even hand down a prison sentence. But Merten has too many friends in the government to serve any real jail time.”

  “Which government are you talking about?”

  “Good question. So then ask yourself why the Greeks have never before tried to extradite anyone from Germany for war crimes committed in this country.”

  “All right, I’ll play. Why?”

  “Until recently it was quite simple: The Greek government wanted the German government to pay reparations for its war crimes. They proposed an amnesty on all war crimes committed in Greece in return for half a billion dollars. An important part of those reparations was that gold stolen from the Jews of Salonika. But the government in Bonn refused. Called it blackmail. Which it was. And which is why Arthur Meissner was put on trial, as a very small and unimportant example of what might follow if Germany continued to drag its feet on this issue. After all, Greece is a NATO member state and it would be embarrassing if Greece started applying for the extradition of German nationals on the soil of other NATO members, as well they might.”

  “Max Merten is hardly small,” I objected. “He’s the real deal, I tell you. A genuine war criminal. Maybe he didn’t summarily execute any hostages. But he extorted hundreds of millions of dollars in gold from your people and then abandoned them to their fate.”

  “Oh, certainly. I didn’t tell you before but it’s always been our belief that the vast majority of this gold was actually sent to Germany aboard a special SS train in 1943 and currently remains on deposit in a Swiss bank; that the West German government is well aware of this fact; and that only a tiny percentage of the total amount was ever put on a boat privately owned by the likes of Merten and Brunner for their own nefarious use.

  “In spite of what you may have been told by Merten and Meissner, there is no vast hoard in a sunken ship off the Peloponnesian coast. Indeed, it’s my own suspicion that all the time he has been here in Greece Max Merten has been the secret agent of the West German go
vernment, witting or unwitting. That this whole scheme was cooked up by someone in the German intelligence service—most probably Hans Globke—to persuade the Greek government that Germany doesn’t have any of the gold looted from Greece back in ’43. I think you have been played, my friend. Played by your bosses in Munich, who were themselves doing the bidding of others in the West German government. My prediction is that Max Merten will be back home in Munich within the year, where he will find himself very well compensated for his trouble.”

  “I don’t believe that. Look, what you say doesn’t make any sense, Rahel, if that is your real name. Frankly, what you’re suggesting—it’s much too far-fetched. Merten financed this expedition by the commission of another crime in Munich. Why would he have to do that if the West German government was backing him?”

  “You’re talking about General Heinrich Heinkel, aren’t you? An old Nazi who was once of interest to us in the Institute. It so happens that your German BND wanted the Stasi man bankrolling General Heinkel removed, permanently. And having removed him, they decided that the money could be used to bankroll Merten instead. Christian Schramma worked, occasionally, for the BND. As an ex-policeman surely you understand that’s how these things operate. One covert operation is often wrapped into another for the sake of convenience. And state intelligence agencies usually employ a lot of criminals, like Schramma, at a lower level for the sake of deniability, so that they can carry out undercover work without revealing their true hands.”

  “Is that how you got the job with Ha’Mossad?”

  The bandit queen smiled patiently. More patiently than previous acquaintance might have led me to expect. “Formerly I was a colonel in Amman. Our military intelligence section. I’m telling you this because I want you to take me seriously since I have a favor to ask of you, Christof. If that’s your real name.”