“Obviously a murder had been committed and I was one of the investigating officers. Of course, we all knew it was the German SD who’d killed the man and for this reason there was no chance that we’d be able to do anything about it. We might as well have tried to arrest Hitler himself.
“But we still had to go through the motions and I managed to track down one of the other passengers. Eventually, I persuaded him to make a witness statement that I agreed to keep off the file until after the war and I quietly made it my business to find out more about the young SD captain who’d murdered Jaco Kapantzi in case one day I was in a position to bring him to justice.
“Perhaps this will sound strange to you now, Commissar. ‘Why bother?’ I hear you say. After all, what’s the fate of one man when more than sixty thousand Greek Jews died at Auschwitz and Treblinka? Well, to paraphrase Stalin—and believe me, there’s a lot of that in Greece—it’s the difference between a tragedy and a statistic, perhaps. And the point is this: Jaco Kapantzi was my case, my responsibility, and I’ve come to believe that in life it’s best to live for a purpose greater than oneself. And before you suggest there’s something in this for me, a promotion, perhaps, there isn’t. Even if no one ever knows that I have done this I would do it because I want to do something for Greece and I believe this is good for my country.”
It had been a while since I’d had any thoughts like that myself, but I found I could still appreciate finding them in the heart of another man even if it was a cop who was threatening to put me in jail.
“And if all that wasn’t enough, my father had worked for Jaco Kapantzi before moving to Athens. Indeed, it had been Mr. Kapantzi who’d generously helped my father get his new job and even loaned him his moving expenses. So you might also say I took his death personally.”
Leventis lit a cigarette; his voice had lowered now as if he was drawing on something deep in himself, and I saw that it wouldn’t be a good idea to make an enemy of this man.
“There’s no statute of limitations when it comes to murder in Greece. And the killing of Jaco Kapantzi remains open to this day. I’ll never know the names of the men who participated in the murders of my fellow countrymen in Auschwitz and Treblinka and besides, those crimes happened hundreds of miles north of here. But I do know the name of the individual SD captain who murdered Jaco Kapantzi on a Greek train. His name was Alois Brunner. Another German officer, an army captain, witnessed what happened, but I don’t suppose we’ll ever know who he was, only that my witness reports that he expressed some amused astonishment at Brunner’s behavior and advised that they should both leave the train. It’s said that all detectives have a case that gives them a lifetime of sleepless nights. I’m sure you had yours, Commissar. Alois Brunner is mine.
“Not much is known about him. What I do know has taken me the best part of ten years to find out. Brunner was just thirty-one years old when he murdered Jaco Kapantzi on that train. Born in Austria he was an early recruit to the Nazi Party and having joined the SD in 1938, he was assigned to the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna, where he became Eichmann’s close collaborator in the murder of thousands of Jews. After his time in Salonika, Brunner was named commander of the Drancy internment camp near Paris. This was in June 1943.
“I don’t know how much you know about this kind of thing, Commissar—more than you’ll ever admit, I expect, if the rest of your countrymen are anything to go by—but Drancy was the place where more than sixty-seven thousand French Jews were first confined and then deported to the extermination camps for resettlement. Seven years ago I took a short vacation in Paris and managed to find someone who’d been in Drancy—a German-Jewish woman who’d been hiding from the Nazis in the South of France until she was arrested. Her name was Charlotte Bernheim and somehow she survived Drancy and Auschwitz before returning to France. She remembered Brunner very well: short, poorly built, skinny—hardly your master-race type. She told me he seemed to have a physical detestation of Jews because once she saw a prisoner touch him accidentally and Brunner pulled out his pistol and shot him dead. Through both his eyes. And it was this particular detail that caught my attention because Jaco Kapantzi was also shot through the eyes.
“You begin to see my interest in the murders of Dr. Frizis and Siegfried Witzel. Of course, Frizis didn’t prick my curiosity until we found Witzel’s body and began to see the German connection, and then of course you mentioned how Witzel’s boat had been confiscated from a Salonikan Jew, which intrigues me even more. That and the killer’s modus operandi, of course. It begins to look like a sort of homicidal signature. The idea that Brunner may even be back in Greece is of course enormously important to me. I’d love to catch this man and see him face the
