“He was my friend. But he wasn’t a good lawyer. To be precise, he was the kind of lawyer who gives lawyers a bad name. The rich, cut-corners kind of lawyer who was much more interested in money than in justice. And not above a bit of bribery.”
“The kind of bribery that might go wrong if it didn’t work?”
“Enough to get him killed, you mean? I don’t know. Perhaps. I suppose it would depend on the size of the bribe.”
“Any German connections?”
“Like me, he didn’t speak a word of it. And he lived in Athens all his life.”
“But how could he do that? He was a Jew, wasn’t he?”
“Someone hid him, for almost two years. There was a lot of that here in Greece. Jews were never unpopular until more recently, when our governments started to become much more right-wing. This new fellow we’ve got now, Karamanlis, is a populist who talks about Greece’s European destiny, whatever that is. He sees himself as the Greek version of your Chancellor Adenauer.”
The woman who’d come into the bar approached us, and Dr. Papakyriakopoulos got off his stool, kissed her on both cheeks, spoke in Greek with her for a minute or two, and then introduced us.
“Herr Ganz, this is Miss Panatoniou. She’s also a lawyer, albeit one who works for a government ministry. Elli, Herr Ganz is an insurance man, from Germany.”
“Pleased to meet you, Herr Ganz.”
She said this in German I think but I hardly noticed because it seemed to my eyes that she reached into me with hers and strolled around the inside of my head for a while picking up things that didn’t belong to her and generally handling all there was to find. Not that I minded very much. I’m generally inclined to let curious women behave exactly how they want when they’re riffling through the drawers and closets of my mind. Then again, this was probably just my imagination, which always slips into overdrive when a voluptuously attractive woman in her thirties gets near my passenger seat. I shook her hand. And the two spoke some more in Greek before Papakyriakopoulos came back to me in English.
“Well, look, it was good to meet you, Herr Ganz. And I’ll certainly speak to my client about what you have proposed. Where are you staying?”
“At the Mega.”
Clearly he wanted Miss Panatoniou all to himself, and I couldn’t blame him for that. Every part of her was perfectly defined. Each haunch, each shoulder, each leg, and each breast. She reminded me of a diagram in a butcher’s shop window—one of those maps concerning which cut comes from where, and I felt hungry just looking at the poor woman. I finished my drink and quickly went outside before I was tempted to take a bite of her.
Garlopis had gone to fetch the Oldsmobile and, after a brief talk with the lieutenant, during which I agreed that he should look after my passport and he agreed not to arrest me for a while, I hailed a cab back to the hotel. Unlike Berlin taxi drivers, who never want to take you anywhere, Greek taxi drivers were always full of good ideas as to where they might drive you after they’d cut through the knotty problem of delivering you to your stated destination. This one suggested that he should drive me to the Temple of Zeus, where he would wait and then drive me back to the hotel, and maybe come back for me again later on and take me to a nightclub called Sarantidis, on Ithakis Street, where I could be entertained by some lovely ladies for a very special price. Unreasonably, he thought, I declined his kind invitation and went back to the Mega, where I took a much-needed bath and called up the Athenian telephone number on Fischer’s business card—80227—but it was out of order. At least that’s what I think the Greek operator was saying to me. After some time in Greece I’d decided that it wasn’t just the Trojan War that had lasted ten years but Homer’s telling the story of it, too.
TWENTY-SEVEN
–
If Captain Alois Brunner was back in Greece this was hardly my concern, in spite of what Lieutenant Leventis had said, albeit rather admirably, too: moral duty was something for philosophers and schoolmasters, not blow-in insurance men like me. All I wanted to do now was get back to Munich with my pockets full of expense receipts and before I managed to find myself with more trouble than I could reasonably handle. To this end I’d decided I urgently needed Dumbo Dietrich to go and find Professor Buchholz in Munich and get his side of what had happened on the Doris. Because it seemed obvious now that the loss of the Doris and the murder of Siegfried Witzel were intimately connected and probably only Buchholz could shed light on that. If he was still alive. Already I had more than a few doubts on this particular score. So when I went into the office the following morning I sent a telegram to MRE, after which I apologized to poor Garlopis for the peremptory way I’d spoken to him in Brettos.
“That’s quite all right, sir,” he said. “And I don’t blame you in the least for that. It’s my experience of speaking to the police that any situation can quickly become a whore’s fence post, as we say in Greece. This cop could make your life a real roller skate if you’re not careful. Your life and mine.”
“Let me buy you a drink and I’ll feel better about it.”
“Just a quick one, perhaps. It wouldn’t do to be drunk before lunch.”
“I might agree if lunch didn’t involve Greek food.”
“You don’t like Greek food?”
“Most of the time. Lunch is usually a little much like dinner for my taste. But with a drink inside me that doesn’t seem to matter so much.”
We
