The sentry waved me through the gate to the main door, where I rang the bell as if I’d been selling brushes, and waited. After a moment or two, a smaller door opened in the bigger one and I showed the prison guard a letter Leventis had written for me. Then I was taken to a small windowless room where I was searched carefully and ushered through several locked cage doors, to a room with four chairs and a table. There I sat down and waited, nervously. I’d been in enough prison cells in my time to get a sick feeling in my stomach just being there. The only window was about three meters above the floor and on the wall was a cheap picture of the Parthenon. A temple dedicated to the goddess Athena seemed a long way from a squalid room in Averoff Prison. After a while the door opened again to admit a small dark handsome man in his forties and I stood up.
“Herr Meissner?”
When he nodded I offered him a cigarette and when he took one I told him to keep the pack. That’s just good manners when you’re meeting anyone behind bars. He smelled strongly of prison, which as anyone who’s been a convict could tell you is a cloying mixture of cigarettes, fried potatoes, fear, sweat, and only one shower a week.
“You’re Christof Ganz?”
“Yes.”
“I’m here because Papakyriakopoulos told me I had nothing to lose by meeting with you,” said Meissner, pocketing the pack for later. “But I can’t see that I’ve got anything much to gain either. After all, it’s not like you’re anyone important in this fucking country.”
Meissner spoke German with a slight Berlin accent—his father’s, probably, and very like my own.
“That’s rather the point, I think. I’m not with the police. And I’m not a member of the legal profession. I’m just a private citizen. I’m only here because Lieutenant Leventis has my balls in his hand and, because I used to be a cop in Berlin, he thinks that you might have something to tell me that you wouldn’t tell him. And perhaps since you can tell me in German I guess he believes you can speak in confidence. I don’t know. But you could even say I’m an honest broker. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, and all that shit.”
“So what does he want me to say to the good German?”
“I’ll come to that. What he wants me to say first is that he thinks you’re small fry.”
“Tell that to the judge.”
“That there are more important fish out there still to be caught.”
“You got that right, Fritz. I’ve been saying that for months, but no one ever listens. Look, for your information, I was just a translator. A mouth for hire. I never murdered anyone. And I never robbed anyone. And nor did my girlfriend, Eleni. Yes, I took a few bribes. Who didn’t? This is Greece. Everyone takes bribes in this fucking country. Some of those bribes I took were to bribe a few Germans, to help people, Jews included. This fellow Moses Natan, who says he bribed me to help his family. Well, I really did try to help him, but the way he talks now you’d think my help came with guarantees. If you were a cop, then you must know what that was like. Sometimes you tried and succeeded, but more often you tried and failed. None of the people I succeeded in helping have turned up to speak on my behalf. Just the ones I failed.
“As for those rape charges. They’re nonsense. The cops know that, too. The trouble is that I’m the only one they’ve ever managed to put on trial in this fucking country for what happened during the occupation. Me. The translator. You might as well charge some of those women who were chambermaids at the Grande Bretagne Hotel when the German High Command was living there. The barmen and the fucking porters, too. But the Greeks want someone to blame. And right now I’m the only scapegoat they can find. So they’re throwing the book at me. I’m charged with twelve thousand murders. Did you know that? Me, a man who’s never even held a gun. The way they’re talking I’m the man who told Hitler to invade Greece. As if the Germans would ever have listened to me. It’s a fucking joke. All those Nazi officers—Speidel, Student, Lanz, Felmy—they’re the ones who should be on trial here, not me.”
“Oh, I get that. And look, I won’t say I’m on your side. But I kind of am because getting you to talk might put me in good odor with Leventis. Helping you helps me. He can’t come out and say so to you in person—that would be political suicide for him, not to mention illegal—but he’s assured me that if you assist him, he’ll speak to Mr. Toussis.”
Toussis was the name of the man prosecuting Meissner’s case in court.
“Get the charges reduced,” I added. “Thrown out, maybe.”
“That’s all very well, but right now it’s possible I might be safer in here than I would be on the outside. Seriously, Ganz. I’m a dead man the minute I leave this place. I’ve got less chance of going back to my house in Elefsina than I have of becoming the Greek prime minister.”
“Safe conduct on a plane to Germany. I’ll even go with you myself. I want out of here as much as you do. How does that sound?”
“It sounds great. But look, here’s the biggest obstacle to making all that happen. I don’t know that I know anything very important. If I did I would have spilled my guts before now, believe me.”
“Leventis is after someone in particular. One of those big fish. A
