“What is it with you people?”
The bandit queen bristled a little. “What people do you mean, Herr Ganz?”
“Not Jews. Spies. There’s not one of you peekers knows how to walk in a straight line. Either way I now think I was wrong about all of that—about an illegal arms deal, I mean. I think it’s nothing to do with weapons. Merten and Witzel and perhaps Brunner were diving for something, all right, but it wasn’t archaic art treasures to put in a museum in Piraeus. Arthur Meissner told me a story in Averoff. And I’ll tell it to you now, if you like. Forgive me if I skip a few details but it’s hard to concentrate when a sniper has a bead on you.” I let out a breath and wiped my brow with the cuff of my shirt. I was sweating so much my coat was sticking to me like a butter wrapper. I felt like a man who’d been strapped into the electric chair.
“I should have thought the opposite was true. It’s always been my experience that the prospect of being shot focuses the mind as sharply as if one was looking down a telescopic sight. Besides, Herr Ganz, you’re perfectly safe as long as I keep a firm grip of this red handkerchief.”
“Well, just don’t sneeze. And don’t interrupt until I’m finished playing Homer. I wouldn’t like your rooftop pal to think you didn’t believe me. There are several holes in the rest of this story. You’ll have to forgive that on account of how I don’t want any extra holes in me.”
“All right. Let’s hear it.”
“According to Meissner, Alois Brunner was part of a corrupt syndicate that managed to rob Salonika’s Jews of hundreds of millions of dollars in gold and jewels in the spring of 1943. Also involved were Dieter Wisliceny and Adolf Eichmann. But the whole scheme was cooked up by Captain Max Merten, who was in charge of civilian affairs in the region. Merten made a nice friendly deal with the Jewish leaders in Salonika: that he would keep them from being deported in return for all of their hidden valuables. Fearing for their lives, the Jews paid up, only to find that they’d been double-crossed. With the help of Eichmann and Wisliceny, Merten secured the booty, and the treasure was loaded onto the Epeius. As soon as it sailed, the SS started to deport the city’s sixty thousand Jews.”
“I’ve heard this story,” said the bandit queen impatiently. “The ship set sail, struck a mine, and sank off the northern coast of Crete, and all of the gold belonging to the Jews of Thessaloniki went to the bottom of the sea. A message to this effect was received by the Regia Marina—the Italian navy at the Salamis Naval Base, near Piraeus. And by the Kriegsmarine in Heraklion. It was all investigated and verified by the Hellenic navy immediately after the war.”
“For all that that was worth,” I said.
“Maybe. Well?”
“Well, Meissner says different. Back in Salonika, Merten’s partners in the SD heard the bad news about the Epeius and began to smell a rat. Meissner says he overheard them airing their suspicions at the Villa Mehmet Kapanci; they then attempted to discover the true fate of the Epeius and found that yes, the ship had sunk, but not because it had hit a mine. Merten had double-crossed his partners just like he’d double-crossed the city’s Jews and had arranged to have the ship scuttled in shallow water in the Messenian Gulf, somewhere off the Peloponnese coast, between the towns of Pylos and Kalamata.
“The captain of the Epeius was a Greek named Kyriakos Lazaros; also on board was a German naval officer called Rainer Stückeln who Merten had cut in for a substantial share of the loot. Merten had previously arranged for a second ship, the Palamedes, to meet the lifeboat from the Epeius, and the Palamedes made its way to the western shore of Crete, where Lazaros and Stückeln and the crew transferred to another lifeboat and rowed ashore, for the sake of appearances, to report the loss of the Epeius.
“Subsequently Stückeln murdered Lazaros and the first mate, to ensure their silence about the location of the Epeius; and then he, too, was killed, in a bombing raid in Crete, but only after he had told Merten exactly where the ship lay. But before the three SD men in Thessaloniki could do anything about it the end of the war intervened. Eichmann, Wisliceny, Brunner, and Merten soon found themselves back in Germany, arrested or on the run. Eichmann and Wisliceny and Brunner were all wanted men after the war; but Max Merten, the lowly army captain, was quickly released and has been living openly in Munich for the last ten years, no doubt waiting for the moment when he judged it was finally safe to come back to Greece and retrieve his pension pot.
“Then, a few months ago, Merten chartered a ship belonging to a German scuba diver called Siegfried Witzel. That ship, the Doris, was insured by my company. Lots of ships are. MRE is a very good company. Perhaps the best in Germany. It’s my guess Merten and Witzel were planning to sail to the place where the Epeius went down to try to recover the gold. It’s also my guess that Brunner was tipped off by someone in the BND that Max Merten was planning to return to Greece and decided to try
