“Try me. I’m really quite broad-minded.”
I wondered about that.
“You asked for it. Well, when a woman says she wishes she knew what some man is thinking it’s because she can’t understand why he hasn’t made a pass at her.”
Elli laughed. “Is that what I’m thinking?”
“Probably. But I figure you’ll tell me what you’re thinking on that score soon enough. I’m not about to waste either of my two remaining wishes on trying to work it out on my own.”
“What happened to the third wish?”
“You’re here in this car, aren’t you?”
Elli looked out the window and smiled, and we were silent for a couple of minutes while I negotiated a winding stretch of high mountain road.
“Aren’t you just a bit interested to know if I want you to make a pass at me, or not?”
“Not anymore. You just satisfied my curiosity on that one.”
“And?”
“Now I’d like to get back to Mickey and Donald.”
Elli laughed again. “You are the most infuriating man I’ve ever met. Do you know that?”
“Yes. I’m what you lawyers would call incorrigible.”
She put her cool hand on the back of my neck, where it felt good.
“You’re also very nice. Much more human than I would ever have thought possible. You’re really rather a considerate sort of man, I think.”
“My fatal charm. It never fails. Except when I’m relying on it to get me out of a jam such as my whole life since 1945.”
“What did you do during the war, Christof?”
“Not enough. But here’s a useful tip when you’re speaking German in Brussels. Unless you’re talking to Bertolt Brecht or Albert Einstein never ever ask a German what he did during the war. Not everyone appreciates it when they’re told barefaced lies.”
THIRTY-FOUR
–
Ermioni was a small port town on the Aegean Sea that resembled every picture postcard of a Greek village I’d ever seen—all blueberry sea and robin’s-egg sky, sugar-lump houses and paper-white caïques. We parked the Rover and stretched our legs for a bit. It felt as if we were at the very edge of the known world, the kind of almost forgotten place where Themistocles, with one eye on the two islands of Hydra and Dokos that occupied the horizon like the gray clouds of an approaching storm, could once have sat on some high colonnaded terrace writing about an improbable victory over the Persians. Walrus-faced fishermen tugged on cigarettes and pipes as big as clay pots while they mended their nets and watched us with ancient eyes that might have witnessed the Greek navy boarding their biremes and triremes to fight mad King Xerxes. Flesh-colored squid dried in the sun like wet swimming costumes on sagging lines and stray cats dozed on the quayside or wandered between the tables of cafés as if waiting upon the day’s customers, who probably weren’t going to come. The late-morning air tasted of salt and smelled of Greek coffee and tobacco, and the otherwise perfect stillness was periodically jangled with the spilling-cutlery sound of a distant bouzouki. It was a long way from Berlin; I couldn’t have felt more German if I’d had a black eagle with red legs perched on my shoulder and a snarling Alsatian on a length of piano wire.
We had a drink in one place where we stroked the cats and spoke to a man with a face that was a sunbaked mosaic of cracks and fissures and who informed us that there was no coast guard’s office in Ermioni and that we’d best ask at the local harbormaster’s office in the main square, where all boat owners tying up in Ermioni were supposed to pay their mooring fees.
The office was a rusticated white building with a blue door and shutters and a Greek flag out front just in case the color scheme left room for doubt regarding anyone’s patriotism. The front door was guarded by a pair of seagulls as big as pterodactyls and probably just as fierce; certainly they showed no fear of a large black Labrador that lay asleep or possibly dead on the porch.
The harbormaster himself belonged to a species that was different from Ermioni’s other archaic humans, having a face with skin that hadn’t been supplied by the local leather factory. His name was Athanassios Stratis and he wore a black wool cap with a peak that was only a little less long and hairy than his nose. Explaining that I was from the ship’s insurance company in Munich, Elli did all the talking, and after a minute or two Mr. Stratis opened an ancient wooden filing cabinet that was as big as a coffin while she explained to me that he remembered the Doris and the German who’d owned it very well.
“He’s quite sure there was actually a ship that sank near here?”
“Several other people saw them coming ashore in the life raft that’s still moored to the quayside where they left it,” said Elli. “He’s been wondering what to do about it. He says he sailed his own boat out to the position given by the German the day after, to make sure that the wreck was not a hazard to local shipping, and found some flotsam—some debris in the water that had not been deliberately thrown overboard and was consistent with there having been some kind of accident. But the water is deep there and he thinks there’s zero chance of salvage.”
Mr. Stratis found a file in his cabinet and glanced over a handwritten report he’d made of the incident while he rescued a half-smoked cigarette that had got lost behind his ear and lit it again. But his every other look was reserved for Elli; she was that kind of woman—the kind that could cause a traffic accident merely by standing at a bus stop. Every time I looked at her I almost skidded to a halt myself.
“He says there were three
