“Suppose he shoots both of us,” I said as we left the car behind.
“Please don’t joke about such matters. I’ll be quite honest with you, Herr Ganz, and I’m only a little bit ashamed to admit it, but I am a coward, sir. All my life I’ve had to live down my given name: Achilles. For that reason I prefer to be called Garlopis, or Mr. Garlopis. But not Achilles. I am not nor ever could be a hero. Bravery is admirable but it belongs only to the brave and it often seems to me that the cemeteries are full of such brave men and not many cowards. Especially in Greece, where heroes are often as troublesome and combative as the gods themselves. It’s my opinion that heroes often come to what the English call ‘a sticky end.’ Theirs is a most creative language. It paints a picture, does it not? A sticky end?”
“I’ve seen a few of those in my time. In German and in English.”
Garlopis talked all the way up the hill and onto the corner of Pritaniou, and he even talked while we watched the house at number 11 for a cautious ten minutes from behind the corner of a little church. The street was empty, as if the rocky outcrop supporting the citadel above had been a volcano that was about to erupt. The Greek was nervous, of course, and why not? It was me who was at fault. I was the one taking risks that were beginning to feel almost unnecessary. Garlopis was acting in the way one would always have expected an insurance agent to act: with extreme caution, and wisely reluctant to leave the safety of his desk and his captain’s chair and the care of his voluptuous flame-haired secretary. But me—I suppose you could just say that old habits die hard. It was fun behaving like a cop again, to feel the sidewalk underneath my Salamanders as I watched a suspect’s house. I wasn’t worried about Witzel’s gun. When you’ve been around guns all your life they don’t seem quite so intimidating. Then again, that’s probably one reason why, sometimes, people get shot.
We approached the shabby, double-height door. There was no bell and no knocker and I was just about to bang on the woodwork when I noticed that the wrought-iron gate immediately next to it wasn’t locked, though it had been on my earlier visit. I pushed it open to reveal a narrow flight of stone steps that led underneath the bough of the evil-eye olive tree and up the side of the house and, thinking that this might afford us with the chance to spy on Witzel before we announced our presence, I went through the gate, tugging a reluctant Garlopis behind me. I might have left him but for the fact that he was easily the largest thing in the street. Anyone opening one of the upper-floor shutters and glancing down would have noticed him immediately. In his baggy green suit he might have been mistaken for Poseidon clothed in seaweed, but to anyone else he looked suspiciously like a man playing lookout for a burglar.
At the top of the steps we found a whitewashed wall with a wooden door that felt as if it was locked. Hauling myself up to check what was on the other side I saw a small courtyard with a door that was only bolted, a sleeping cat, a dry fountain, and several cracked terra-cotta pots that were home to some even drier plants. If the place was occupied it was by someone who cared very little about it. A rusted motorcycle lay in a state of disassembly underneath a vine on which the grapes had almost fossilized. I climbed over the wall, dusted myself down, and then unbolted the gate to admit Garlopis. By now he was the same color as his suit. Meanwhile the cat stood up, stretched a bit, and then left.
Ignoring what looked like the kitchen door I led the way down a couple of wooden steps to a pair of French windows that were so dusty they were almost opaque. One of the windows was ajar and, mindful of Witzel’s gun, I slowly pushed it all the way open before stepping inside the house. Under the stairs was a large plastic bag full of sponges. The radio was on, but low so that it was just a murmur. The place smelled of cigarettes and ouzo, Sportsman aftershave, and something more acrid and combustible perhaps, and there was a heavily stained Louis XV–style caned sofa with half the seat stuffing hanging down on the floor like a bull’s pizzle. An Imray sea chart lay open on a Formica-topped table next to a bottle of Tsantali, a packet of Spuds, and the cashier’s check I’d handed him back at the office. On one wall was a collection of cheap plaster masks of the kind you could have bought in any local souvenir shop and which featured a variety of grotesque gray and green rictus faces that might have had something to do with Greek tragedy. But what they certainly had in common was their close resemblance to the man lying on the floor whose face was distinguished by its empty eye sockets and gaping mouth, not to mention a very definite look of abbreviated pain. Abbreviated by his death, that is. It was Siegfried Witzel and he’d been shot twice. I knew that because each shot had gone through an eyeball.
Garlopis covered his mouth and turned quickly away. “Gamiméno kólasi,” he exclaimed. “O ftochós.”
“If you’re going to throw up, do it outside,” I said.
“Why would someone do that?”
“I don’t think it was his cologne. Although it is quite pungent. But I expect they had their reasons.”
The first bullet looked like it had come clean out of the back of Witzel’s skull and hit a framed photograph of a
