“Anything interesting or important about Kosta?”
“Nothing much,” came the answer, via Elli. “But there’s a small private airport near there, in Porto Heli.”
“But he didn’t drive them there,” I said. “Or he’d have said so.”
“No,” said Elli, “he says he dropped them in the center of town. At a hotel in the main square.”
We got in the back of the Citroën and told him to take us to Kosta. It seemed quicker than finding the place ourselves. Besides, MRE was paying. The Citroën was a Traction Avant, beloved of the Gestapo in Paris, and for a moment or two it was easy enough to imagine myself back there in the summer of 1940; Elli was as beautiful and smelled as good as any Frenchwoman I’d ever seen, or inhaled. I smiled at her a couple of times and she smiled back and once she took my hand and squeezed it; it seemed as if I was making more progress with her than I was with the case.
It took us less than half an hour to find ourselves in another Greek port town that was a little less picturesque than Ermioni. The harbor looked more sheltered than the one we’d just left behind and was perhaps shallower, too, as the sight of a boat that was only half-sunk in the water seemed to confirm. At the main hotel we asked about Professor Buchholz and his Greek friend and learned only that they’d stayed just one night. Where they’d gone after leaving, the proprietor had no idea and it was clear she didn’t care to speculate, either, when she heard Elli speaking German to me.
We had Christos drive us back along the meandering coast to Ermioni and there we ate a simple lunch at a little restaurant facing the calm sea on the south quay with more cats for company and enjoyed the pleasant change in the weather almost as much as we enjoyed some Greek food and wine.
“So how is this trip connected with Arthur Meissner?” she asked.
“I was wondering when you’d ask me about that. Tell me something first: what’s your connection with this whole flea circus?”
“Dimitri Papakyriakopoulos. Meissner’s lawyer. I help him out sometimes, doing a bit of legal work to make some extra cash.”
“Is that all you do for him?”
“So far. He’s curious, that’s all. I’m kind of curious myself.”
“No, I think you’re just fine. In spite of the fact that you’re a lawyer and a bureaucrat.”
“What I am above all is a single woman, Christof. I need the money. Economic coordination doesn’t pay very well in this country. Greeks tend to resist most kinds of coordination. Yes, we gave the world democracy but people tend to forget we also gave the world anarchy.”
“I’ve always been a bit of an anarchist myself. It was easy enough when we had a ruler like Hitler and authority like the Nazis. But lately I’ve been slipping. I’m seriously thinking of hanging up the black flag and getting myself socially stratified. I think I might enjoy it.”
“Anyway, that’s not why I came today. I mean, I didn’t come to pump you for information about your interest in Arthur Meissner. I just fancied a day off, in a nice car, with a nice man.”
“To be perfectly honest, I don’t know that I am interested in Meissner,” I said, ignoring the compliment, at least for the moment. “But that cop, Leventis, is pressuring me to try and help him solve a case.”
“Samuel Frizis.”
“Yes.”
“Why does he think you can help? Because you were a cop?”
“There’s that, yes. And the fact that I’m German. Witzel, my claimant and fellow countryman, got himself murdered and Leventis seems more inclined to make me a suspect instead of a witness. Either I help him or I don’t get my passport back.”
“As a lawyer I have to tell you that he has that power.”
“I know. I spoke to another lawyer already.”
“Anyone I know?”
“A firm in Piraeus.”
“Piraeus. That doesn’t sound very promising. You’d better let me help you out if you get into any trouble.”
“Sounds better. Thanks. I appreciate it.”
“But where’s the connection between Frizis and Witzel?”
“I can’t tell you that. Leventis wouldn’t like it. But there is one.”
“Fair enough.”
“So why did you come today?”
“I told you. I came along for the German. And I don’t mean the grammar.”
“I should warn you about my grammar, Elli. Like everything else I have it’s a little old and out-of-date. This is your teacher telling you now. So listen. I’m much too old for you, Elli. I drool when I sleep and sleep when I ought to be awake, and my heart feels like it needs a wheelchair to get around.”
“You should let me be the judge of that.”
“I’m serious. I look at my wristwatch and I don’t see what time it is, I see the time that was.”
“Or perhaps you just don’t like me.”
“I’d probably like you a lot more if I disliked myself a little less.”
“You’re better than you think you are. Anyway, whatever happens, we’re having a good time, aren’t we? I know I am. Nothing else seems to matter right now. Being here today is lovely.”
“I don’t disagree about that. The last time I enjoyed myself this much, a witch was baking my sister Gretel in a pie.”
“It’s great to be out of the ministry for a while. To be away from Athens. It really does feel a lot like spring. Makes you feel lucky to be alive.”
She was right. It did feel like spring and I did feel lucky to be alive, which was not unusual for me, and this might be why, on the short walk back to where I’d left the Rover, I kissed Elli Panatoniou under an ancient olive tree and maybe it was also why she let me.
It had been a long, cold, lonely winter.
