Pressing my finger into the blood on the moth-eaten Persian carpet and then into the dead man’s mouth, I said, “The blood’s dry but the body’s not yet cold. I’d say he’s been dead for no more than a couple of hours.” I opened his jacket; the holster was still there but the gun was gone and when I lifted his heavy, muscular arm to check for any sign of rigor and lividity I saw that the Rolex Submariner was still on his wrist. “I think we can discount the possibility that this was a robbery. He’s still wearing his diver’s watch. By the look of things the killer’s long gone. It appears as if you might have been right about the Jews after all, Garlopis. That maybe this was a revenge killing. I don’t know, but that’s not my problem. The local cops can try to figure out a motive. Which means we’d better make ourselves scarce. It would certainly make a nice tidy parcel if the cops could blame the murder of one German on another.”
I was talking to myself. Garlopis had returned to the backyard and was already smoking a cigarette to steady his nerves.
I wiped my fingers on the dead man’s jeans and instinctively checked his pockets. All of them. As a beat cop in Berlin it was common practice to supplement your meager wages with some of what you found in a murder victim’s billfold and it was only after I made detective that I stopped doing it, but old habits die hard, and anyway, Witzel’s pockets were empty of everything except the keys for the Simca and what looked like the front door. Besides, this time I was only looking for information, but if he’d possessed a wallet I couldn’t see it. I stood up and took another look around; on the floor I found a spent brass case for an automatic: it was rimless, tapered, probably from a 9-mill automatic, and I’d seen a thousand of them before. I dropped it back onto the floor and went over to the table. The map open on the table was a different chart from the larger-scale one we’d spread out back in Garlopis’s office. This one was for the Saronic and Argolic Gulfs, and had been marked up with ink, which wasn’t all there was on it. There was blood on the chart, too, and it didn’t look like it was spatter from the head shots; this was one large globular spot that looked as if it had dripped onto the waterproof paper while someone had been leaning over it.
I called out to Garlopis. “There’s one good thing about this, I suppose,” I said. “It means we can relax. My job’s over. With all due respect to your country, I can go and see the Parthenon now and then return home to Munich. Even if I was inclined to settle his claim there’s no one here to pay. It’s not our fault if Siegfried Witzel wouldn’t give us the name of his next of kin, or a lawyer. Dumbo will be delighted, of course. Not to mention Mr. Alzheimer. There’s nothing those guys like better than adjusting a loss to zero. This will probably make their weekend.”
Garlopis didn’t answer. I looked out the French window and saw him standing stiffly in the garden with his arms by his sides, like a statue; he seemed shocked and bewildered, as if he was more upset about Witzel’s death than I would ever have imagined. But perhaps it was just the sight of a dead body, after all. I didn’t blame him for that. Even in the land of Oedipus and Jocasta it’s not everyone who can tolerate the sight of a man without eyes.
“What’s your problem?” I asked, hoping to help restore him to his previous good humor. “You never liked the guy anyway. At least now you don’t have to worry about him shooting you. This is one loss that nobody can adjust. So we’re done. You can go back to ogling that secretary of yours. And why not? She’s very nice. I might ogle her myself for a couple of minutes if you’ve no objection.”
I lit a cigarette and moved closer to the French windows but froze when I saw an arm with a revolver pointed squarely at the Greek’s head. I turned around to see if I could locate Witzel’s own gun before deciding what to do but stopped and put myself in aspic jelly when I saw that there was a loaded Smith & Wesson pointed at me, too. I knew the gun was loaded because I was staring right down the barrel, as if the first shot might have gone through my own eye. I let the cigarette drop from my mouth. The last thing I wanted the man with the gun to think was that I didn’t take him or it very seriously. And just in case I’d forgotten, there was a body on the floor to remind me of just what a large-caliber revolver can do at close range. At the same time I wasn’t at all sure if I was relieved or alarmed
