“Ask him if one of the men on the boat—one of the Germans—could have been this man,” I said, and provided a description of the man who’d posed as Professor Buchholz, Max Merten.
After a while Stratis nodded and said that it sounded like it was the same man. Then he and she talked a while and laughed and that was fine, too, because he was only a man after all and it made me think that she’d get more out of him if she made him feel like one. It had certainly worked on me.
“What happened to them after they left this office?”
“One of them, Witzel—he caught the ferry to Piraeus. That’s the quickest and least expensive way. The other two took a taxi farther down the coast somewhere. He doesn’t know where. But he thinks the driver would probably remember. His name is Christos Kammenos and we’ll find him sitting in a black Citroën on the other side of the peninsula, in front of the local chandler’s shop.”
I thought for a moment. “The flotsam,” I said. “This debris he found floating on the surface of the sea at the place where the Doris went down. Anything interesting there?”
“Some papers, that’s all,” said Elli. “He dried them and kept them in case they were important.”
Stratis produced a large waterproof envelope from the drawer.
“If he likes, I’ll look after those,” I said.
The harbormaster handed them over without demur, but to Elli. I asked some more questions but learned nothing new and so we thanked him and went outside; the seagulls had gone but the dog performing the great dead-animal act was still there; as soon as I saw its diaphragm move I found myself stifling a yawn and envying the creature. It was a two- or three-hour drive from Athens. And a two- or three-hour drive back there.
She handed me the envelope. The papers were all in Greek and Elli looked at them and said they were nothing important, just Siegfried Witzel’s identity card and some invoices. But being German and therefore punctilious about these things I asked her to describe the invoices in detail and found she was right—they were nothing important, mostly bills for food and drink and scuba tanks full of oxygen, which I supposed was quite important if you happened to be underwater at the time. But one of these wasn’t an invoice at all and its importance was immediately obvious, at least to me. It was a waybill for a consignment sent to the Doris at the Marina Zea, in Piraeus, by none other than Mr. Georg Fischer, and which gave his address as Constitution Square in Athens, and while the waybill didn’t actually identify the hotel, I recognized the Mega’s telephone number: 36604. Clearly Alois Brunner was more often in the Mega Hotel than I’d been led to believe. The contents of the consignment were very interesting, too: Witzel had taken delivery of a bronze Hellenistic horse’s head from about 100 BC which was, I told Elli, the equivalent of bringing owls to Athens.
“That’s a real German phrase?” she asked.
“Absolutely.”
“You’re making fun of me.”
“No, I’m really not. And the reason I’m saying this is because the specific purpose of Witzel’s expedition was to sail to the site of a sunken ship and there to dive for ancient Greek artifacts. Which begs the question why someone had such an artifact sent to the Doris on the day before he sailed. It seems the wrong way round.” I frowned. “And here’s another thing. Witzel didn’t ever mention this horse on his insurance claim with MRE. But it was almost two thousand years old. Yesterday, Dr. Lyacos at the Archaeological Museum in Piraeus said that a good Roman bust of the second century might be worth as much as fifty thousand dollars. This horse has to be worth some serious money, too. So why didn’t he make a claim for that, I wonder?”
We started to walk up the hill to cross over to the other side of the Ermioni peninsula; the little winding streets were deserted and quiet, which made me quiet while I thought about this latest discovery.
“Unless the whole expedition was only meant to be a cover for something else,” I said after a while.
“Like what?”
“There were some smaller artifacts that Witzel didn’t want to claim for, either. And I thought this was because he was trying to prevent me from contacting Professor Buchholz. But now I’m thinking that maybe there was an extra reason. Dr. Lyacos told me there’s a thriving trade in black market antiquities through the port of Piraeus. Museums in small American cities want them to keep up with their richer neighbors. Apparently there’s nothing like a marble bust of Socrates to make people think that Boise, Idaho, is the cultural equal of New York and Washington. Lyacos told me he’d even heard that Colonel Nasser was using ancient Egyptian art to pay for illegal weapons. Now that he’s nationalized the canal he’s going to have to force people to pay to go through it, I guess. So maybe that’s what they were up to. Maybe there were some other antiquities already on the Doris. Maybe they were taking those somewhere quiet to exchange them for weapons destined for Nasser. German weapons, I shouldn’t wonder. On a remote island, perhaps. Greece has got lots of those.”
On the south side of the peninsula we found Christos the taxi driver, who rubbed a chin that might have doubled as a magnet for iron filings and then said he didn’t remember a German traveling with a Greek, at least until I gave him a few drachmas. I didn’t blame him for his poor memory; it looked like he’d
