“I’d best go back,” he explained. “Just in case head office decides to answer your telegram.”
“Good idea. But I’ll wait here.”
“Herr Ganz?” Garlopis smiled politely. “Forgive me for saying so. You’re able to consume cocktails during the day and still do your job?”
“I’ve always had irregular habits, my friend. Back when I was a detective we used to pull an all-night shift at a crime scene and go for a drink at six o’clock in the morning. Being a cop changes your life forever like that. And not in a good way. More than ten years after I left the Murder Commission my liver still behaves like it’s close to a badge and a gun. Besides, this is the only one of my irregular habits that doesn’t get me into trouble.”
Garlopis bit his lip at the mention of a gun and then left me in the care of Charles Tanqueray. I waited a while but there was no sign of the man who’d called himself Georg Fischer so I called the barman over and tried some questions, in English.
“The other night. I was in here. Do you remember?”
“Yes, sir. I remember.”
“There was another man at the bar. He spoke pretty good Greek. Do you remember him, too?”
“Yes. He was German, too, I think. Like you. What about him?”
“Ever see him in here before?”
“Maybe.”
“With anyone?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Anything you can tell me about him?”
“He learned his Greek in the north, sir. Not here in Athens. Okay, now I remember something else. One time he was in here with some guys and maybe they were speaking French and Arabic. Egyptians maybe. I dunno. One of them had a newspaper—a copy of Al-Ahram. It’s an Egyptian newspaper. The Egyptian embassy is not far away, opposite the parliament, and some of those guys come in here for a drink.”
“Anything else? Anything at all.”
The barman shook his head and went back to polishing glasses, which he was certainly better at than making cocktails. Having tasted his gimlet I figured mixing paint was more his forte than mixing alcohol. I was just about to finish work at the bar when in she walked, Elli Panatoniou, the probable siren of Dr. Papakyriakopoulos.
Nobody had warned me about this woman, or tied me to the mast of my ship, but when I looked at her a second time the parts of my brain usually allocated to thinking seemed to have been affected by some strong aphrodisiac. Normally I’d have called this alcohol, especially as there was still a glass in my hand at the time but I won’t entirely discount the scent of her perfume, the glint in her eyes, and the well-stocked baker’s tray she had out in front of her. Still carrying her briefcase, she moved toward me like Zeno’s arrow in that there were parts of her that seemed quite at rest and others that were perpetually in motion. There are small breasts and there are large breasts—which were almost a joke if the cartoonist in Playboy was anything to go by—there are high breasts with nipples that are almost invisible and there are low breasts that could feed a whole maternity ward, there are breasts that need a brassiere and breasts that just beg for a wet T-shirt, there are breasts that make you think of your mother and breasts that make you think of Messalina and Salome and Delilah and the Ursuline nuns of Loudun, there are breasts that look wrong and ungainly and breasts calculated to make a cigarette fall from your mouth, like the breasts that belonged to Miss Panatoniou—perfect breasts that anyone who liked drawing impressive landscapes like the hills of Rome or the Heights of Abraham could have admired for days on end. Just looking at them you felt challenged to go and mount an expedition to conquer their summits, like Mallory and Irvine. Instead, I climbed politely off my bar stool, told myself to get a grip of what laughingly I called a libido, tore my eyes off the front of her tight white blouse, and took her outstretched hand in mine. She was trying hard to make it seem accidental, her walking into the bar like that, but the fact is she wasn’t as surprised to see me in the Mega Bar as I was to find myself there at lunchtime. Then again, I’m a suspicious son of a bitch since they started selling losing lottery tickets. But when I decide to make myself look like an idiot there’s very little that can prevent me. Seeing her in front of me and holding her hand in mine made it very hard to use my head at all, except to think about her.
“This is a surprise, Miss—?”
“Panatoniou. But you can call me Elli.”
“Christof Ganz. Elli. Short for Elisabeth? Or are you named after the Norse goddess who defeated Thor in a wrestling match?”
“It’s Elisabeth. But why were they fighting?”
“They were Germans. We’re like the English. We never need much of a reason to fight. Just a couple of drinks, a few yards of no-man’s-land, and some half-baked mythology.”
“We’ve got plenty of that in Greece. This whole country’s rotten with mythology. And most of it was written after 1945.”
She was wearing a tailored two-piece black business suit with piano keyboard lapels and a gathered waist, and a long pencil skirt that fitted her like the black gloves on her hands and she looked and sounded very smart indeed. She was tall and her dark brown hair was as long as Rapunzel’s and I was seriously thinking of weaving it
