“Then you should feel sorry for me. Besides, I’m a victim of my own upbringing. The fact of the matter is that I come from a broken home. All Germans do, you know. My home’s been broken so many times it looks like the Parthenon.”
Elli was quiet for a while, during which time she bit her lip a lot as if she was trying to prevent herself from telling me something important and I let her alone in the hope that, eventually, she would; but when she did speak again it was to tell me something much more personal than I might have expected, and that brought a tear to her eye.
“You really want to know why I carry a gun?”
“Sure. But I’ll settle for your explanation.”
“My father gave it to me.”
“Beats a bottle of perfume and a doll, I suppose.”
“He gave it to me because last year, not long before he died—on the Ochi Day, which is the national anniversary of General Metaxas telling Mussolini to go and screw himself—a man tried to rape me, in Athens. He was a much younger man than you—a mutamassir, which is to say an Egyptianized Syrian who’d been living in Alexandria before being expelled from the country by Nasser. I made the mistake of trying to help him find a job with the Red Cross. He made me do things—horrible things—and he would certainly have raped me if he hadn’t been interrupted by George Papakyriakopoulos.”
“Meissner’s lawyer.”
“That’s right. George has been a pretty good friend to me ever since.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“There’s a lot of rape these days in Greece and I carry a gun to make sure it doesn’t happen again or, if it does, that I’m able to take my immediate revenge. But I also carry it in case I ever run into the bastard who almost raped me.”
“You didn’t report it to the police?”
“This is Greece. Reporting a rape, or an attempted rape, is almost as bad as the actual act. Not that I’ve ever seen him again. He disappeared, I’m glad to say. But if I ever do see him again I intend to kill him and to hell with the consequences. In the meantime I like older men like you because I think your sex drive isn’t nearly as strong as that of younger men like him, which means you’re more likely to take no for an answer. Especially if I have a gun in my hand. Does that make sense? I hope so. There. Now you know my dirty secret.”
FORTY-SIX
–
I might have laughed at the way she’d ended her story with a joke at my expense—if it was a joke. Instead I uttered an audible, sympathetic sort of sigh and handed her my handkerchief. “I’m sorry, Elli.” I nodded firmly. “Makes perfect sense now that you’ve explained it. The men in this country being what they are.”
“I don’t know that they’re much different anywhere else.” She threw the handkerchief back at me almost as if I’d insulted her.
Of course, I didn’t quite believe what she’d told me. It wasn’t that I doubted Elli so much as I doubted my own capacity for trusting anyone. Which is to say that I’d believed other women before. Of course, these days honesty is a joke, thanks to politicians, and men just lie because they have to in order to stay alive. But long before Hitler and Goebbels and Stalin and Mao, all women were liars and all women lie unless they’re your own dear mother when they always tell you or your father the unvarnished truth even though you and he really don’t want to hear it. No one could mind the gentle nurse with a heart of gold who lies out of kindness to your best friend because she can’t bring herself to tell him that the shell took away both his legs and that he’s never going to walk again. But the rest of them lie like Cretan Jesuits with a college degree in amphibology, and about everything, too, including why they’re an hour late showing up to a restaurant, their weight, their delight at the present you just bought them, and the pleasure you gave them as a lover. There’s nothing they won’t lie about if they think you’ll swallow it and if it advantages them in some way. But mostly women lie and they don’t even know when they’re doing it, or if they do, then you had surely left them with the clear and unequivocal impression that you didn’t ever want to know the truth, which means it’s your fault, of course; or else they simply believe they have a God-given right to lie since being a woman gives them that right whereas you are just a poor dumb fool called a man.
So there was the fact that women are just natural liars and the fact that I was German and, given everything we’d done to the Greeks in 1943, it was hard for me to imagine there were Greeks like Elli Panatoniou who were prepared to put all of that history behind them. Which is to say I didn’t think it was healthy to believe her because I was going up against Max Merten and I was worried I might find a small hole in my back just because I was German like him. Knowing what I did about how Germans had behaved in Greece I could hardly have blamed her for wanting a bit of revenge. But because I had to be absolutely sure of Elli, I needed to furnish her with a motive that might make the woman reveal her true hand, if she had one, which meant telling her a dirty little secret of my own, and this had me shaking like a dice box.
“Since you showed me
