I had a pretty good idea of what we could do afterwards—especially as she’d already volunteered to come up to my hotel room—but I thought it best I give her another suggestion, one that didn’t sound like I was taking anything for granted.
“A drink,” I said to myself, as I rode the elevator car down to the hotel lobby. “But it might be best if it’s not here. It might look a bit obvious if you were to suggest the bar here. Look, she’s bound to know a late-night bar somewhere hereabouts. She’ll suggest this hotel if she’s comfortable with coming up to your room again. Always supposing she’s on the level. Either way Garlopis can drop us off and then we’ll see what we’ll see. That’s nice of you, Gunther. You can be a real gentleman when you think it might get you somewhere. I can call you Gunther, now that we’re on our own again, don’t you think?”
Elli slipped off the big sofa in the hotel lobby and smiled a smile that was as bright as the chandelier above her head. Her perfume already had me by the knot in my tie and was gently kicking my brain around inside my skull. Sometimes trouble can smell good, especially the expensive kind they keep stoppered up in little jars and bottles and sell to women, or to the men dumb enough to buy it for them. She was wearing black slacks, a clinging black pullover, and red shoes that looked like she really had been serious about dancing after all. The black leather bag she was holding looked big enough to carry a grand piano. Her hair seemed to have grown some and it was even more lustrous than before, as if she’d licked every bit of it clean herself. If I’d been around I could have saved her the trouble. She held me tight for a moment and kissed me fondly on both cheeks, and I came away thinking I was a lucky boy; too lucky probably but I was working on that, slowly. In Greece, it’s just standard practice to look a gift horse in the mouth.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“The owner of that boat we checked out in Ermioni,” I said.
“Siegfried Witzel.”
“I received a telephone call a few minutes ahead of yours. From Achilles Garlopis. It seems there’s someone poking around at the house where he got himself murdered. And it isn’t the cops. Could be the murderer come back to look for his monogrammed cuff links—a Nazi named Alois Brunner. Or maybe it’s another Nazi called Max Merten. Then again, it might just be Witzel’s ghost with nothing better to do than haunt the house. I don’t know. There’s a lot I don’t know. I may never know what I don’t know. That’s a given with a case like this. I could be the dumbest claims adjustor since Woodrow Wilson signed off on the Treaty of Versailles. But I thought I’d go and check it out. Only it might be dangerous, angel. If it is Brunner or Merten, they won’t like us turning up and asking questions or threatening them with cops. Could be you should stay in the car.”
At this point most normal girls would have cried off and pleaded an urgent appointment with a bottle of shampoo and a favorite book, but not Elli Panatoniou, who it seemed was made of the same Styx-dipped stuff as Achilles—although not, perhaps, Achilles Garlopis. And I certainly hadn’t forgotten the little Beretta in her briefcase she’d been carrying in the bar at the Mega Hotel.
“Okay,” she said simply, as if I’d just proposed nothing more dangerous than a late-night shopping trip or a visit to the local cinema.
Before, I’d been merely doubtful of her motives in befriending me; now I was as suspicious as if she’d been a shy blond spinster sent to my hotel by Alfred Hitchcock.
FORTY
–
If Garlopis was surprised to see Elli Panatoniou coming out the hotel front door with me he didn’t show it. Instead he smiled politely, wished her a good evening, and opened the car door for her while I ducked silently into the Rover’s front seat. But I could see he was nervous. Both of us knew that whoever it was at 11 Pritaniou, Greek or German, it probably spelled danger in either language. Near the Acropolis I told him to drive around a bit so that we could scout the area for police cars, but all we saw was an army truck near the entrance to the ancient citadel.
“The Parthenon is guarded at night by a small troop of soldiers,” he explained, “in case the Persians turn up and try to burn it again.”
“That’s the official reason,” added Elli. “The reality is that Greeks were stealing pieces of the temple and selling it. My own grandfather has a piece on his desk.”
Nearer the Acropolis we saw a few rough sleepers.
“Not so long ago it was the Armenians who fled to Greece,” explained Garlopis. “Then it was Turkish Greeks. This year, it’s the Hungarians and the Coptic Christian refugees who fled from Alexandria when the Israelis invaded the Sinai last October. Who knows who’ll come here next?”
“Why the Copts?”
“Whenever there’s a problem with Israel the Muslims take it out on the Copts. So they get on a boat—any kind of boat—and come to Greece. And to here in particular, where the tourist pickings are better.”
Elli said something in the backseat about British imperialists and Suez but I couldn’t have cared less. The older I got the less I cared about anything. Besides, it was much too late for politics. About twenty-five years too late in my case; but in Athens it was never too late for politics and it wasn’t long before Garlopis and Elli were arguing, in Greek.
“Park here,” I told him above Elli’s voice. “And not the Greek way either. Do
