“Try me.”
“You’ll only laugh, sir, and think me a very credulous fool.”
“No, not even if I thought so.”
Garlopis talked some more and I shortly formed the impression he was one of the most superstitious men I’d ever encountered, but no less likable for that. To my surprise he believed supernatural beings continued to inhabit the country’s mountains, ancient ruins, and forests. The sea was no different, for he also believed in the Nereids—sea nymphs that did the will of Poseidon—and seemed more than willing to attribute all manner of disasters to their interference. This struck me as unusual in an insurance agent and I wondered how Mr. Alzheimer would react if I sent him a telegram explaining that the Doris had been sunk by a sea nymph.
“Sometimes,” said Garlopis, “that’s as good an explanation as any. The waters around these islands are strange and treacherous. It’s not every ship that disappears that can be properly accounted for. You’ll forgive me, sir, if I suggest that it’s a fault of you Germans to believe that absolutely everything has a logical explanation.”
“Sure, only it was the Greeks who invented logic, wasn’t it?”
“Ah yes, sir, but if you’ll forgive me again, it’s you Germans who have taken logic to its most extreme. Dr. Goebbels, for example, when he made a speech advocating the waging of total war—in 1943, was it not?
“Yes, I know, you’ll tell me he was just echoing von Clausewitz. Nevertheless, it can be argued that it was this mentality that condemned Germany to a futile squandering of life on an unprecedented scale when the reality is—you should have surrendered.”
I certainly couldn’t argue with that. For a superstitious man, Achilles Garlopis was also an educated one.
“In this case, however,” added Garlopis, “I’m sure we’ll find a better explanation for what happened to the Doris, one that will suit Mr. Alzheimer and Mr. Dietrich.”
“Let’s hope so. Because I think the only monster Mr. Alzheimer believes in is probably Mrs. Alzheimer.”
“You’ve met her?”
“I saw a picture of her on his desk. And I think she was probably frozen for millions of years before he found her.”
Garlopis smiled. “I’ve taken the liberty of asking Mr. Witzel to come to the office at ten o’clock tomorrow. You can question him then and form your own conclusions. I’ll come by the hotel at nine and walk you there. Will you require an early-morning call, sir?”
“I don’t need an early-morning call, Mr. Garlopis. I’ve got my bladder.”
SIXTEEN
–
The Mega Hotel was in Constitution Square, named after the constitution the first Greek king, Otto, had been obliged to grant to the leaders of a popular uprising in 1843. It was situated opposite the Old Royal Palace, which now housed the Greek parliament, and the Grande Bretagne Hotel, which was a lot nicer than the one I was in. I took a walk around the tree-lined square after Garlopis had left me, to stretch my legs, see a bit of Athens, and get a lungful of the local carbon monoxide. The eastern side of the square was higher than the western and was dominated by a set of marble steps that led up to the parliament, as if you might have to make some kind of effort getting to democracy. In front of this lemon-colored building a couple of soldiers called evzones were making fools of themselves to the delight of a group of American tourists, only they called it changing the guard. Dressed like Pierrots, they made a very big thing out of not doing very much, regular as clockwork. I guess it was no more ridiculous than anything you could have seen performed by soldiers of the National People’s Army outside the New Guardhouse on Unter den Linden in what was now East Berlin, but somehow like a lot of things in Greece, it was. Call me a xenophobe but there seemed to be something inherently comic about two very tall men each wearing a fez, a white kilt, and red leather clogs with black pompoms marking time and waving their legs in the air with an almost tantalizing uncertainty; indeed, it was almost as if these two were trying to send up the whole ceremony, which only seemed to make it all the more amusingly photogenic.
I bought some Luckys, a map, and a copy of The Athens News—the only English-language newspaper (there wasn’t a German one)—and took these back to the bar at the Mega to have a drink and a smoke and to acquaint myself with what was happening in the ancient Greek capital. A lawyer in Glyfada had been murdered. There had been a spate of burglaries in Amaroussion. Some Greek cops from police headquarters had been arrested for taking bribes. The Hellenic Police Internal Affairs Division reported that ninety-six percent of the population believed the Greek police were corrupt. And a German called Arthur Meissner was about to go on trial accused of war crimes. Apart from the relentlessly cheerful Greek music on some speakers above the bar, I felt quite at home.
Even more than I might have expected.
“How do you like those smokes?” said a voice speaking German.
“They’re all right. I’ve been smoking them for so long I hardly notice, except when I have to smoke something else.”
“So you’d smoke something else if you liked them better?”
“There are a lot of things I might do if I liked them better,” I said. “I just don’t know what they are yet.”
The man at the opposite end of the bar was German, or perhaps Austrian, and in his mid-to-late forties. He was slim with a thin hooked nose, a short mustache and a chin beard, a high forehead, eyes with a strong hint of oyster, and, as far as I could
