“Only a brief one. He’s dead, by the way. Brunner shot him. But before Brunner turned up to spoil the show, Merten and the boss seemed to have it all worked out; we were going to sail to some shallow waters off the Peloponnesian coast, dive to the wreck of the Epeius, and bring up part of the Jewish gold under the cover of an expedition to find ancient Greek artifacts. You know about that, right?”
I nodded. “As much as I need to know, for now.”
“Not all of the gold, you understand. Just as much as we could get in a week or two—perhaps a couple of hundred bars—using just one diver: the boss. Everything looked perfect. We had the proper permissions from museums and ministries, which Merten, passing himself off as some important German professor of archaeology, had previously arranged. I have to admit he was very thorough. We were all set to sail when this fellow calling himself Georg Fischer shows up. He came aboard the ship while we were still moored at the marina in Piraeus, cool as you like, and it was obvious he and Merten knew each other, and that Merten was afraid of him. It soon became clear that Merten and Fischer had once been partners and that Fischer—it was only when we got to Spetses that I found out his real name was Alois Brunner—had been double-crossed by Max Merten during the war. Along with some other SS officers they’d stolen the gold from the Jews together. Now Brunner told Merten that he wanted his share and that he’d decided to come along on the expedition with us, just to keep an eye on things, but that he’d also decided to give himself an insurance policy by lodging a letter with a local lawyer explaining what Merten was really up to. If something happened to him and he didn’t return to Athens within thirty days, the letter would be sent to the Greek authorities. Merten agreed; well, he didn’t have much choice. Brunner said he’d even provide us with a genuine artifact to help with our cover story—just in case the coast guard showed up and started asking questions—because, conveniently for us, he was in the business of exporting art treasures. So we took delivery of a packing case with a Greek horse’s head inside, and that’s probably how we ended up taking the incendiary on board.
“As soon as Brunner left the boat the boss asked me to follow him and I tailed him back to his hotel, the Xenon, in Piraeus. Later on, I went back there again and, for a few drachmas, the hotel operator showed me all the telephone calls Brunner had made from his room. By ringing them, one after the other, I managed to find the name of Brunner’s lawyer in Glyfada, Dr. Samuel Frizis. The boss knew this local burglar called Tsochaztopoulos and we met up with him at the Chez Lapin club in Kastella. The boss gave him fifteen hundred drachmas to break into the lawyer’s office and steal Brunner’s letter, only he was supposed to do it without the lawyer ever finding out. Simple as that. Just find the file for a client named Fischer and steal what was in it. I waited outside the office while Choc went inside. Took him no time at all. Said it was the easiest fifteen hundred he’d made in a long while.
“I brought the letter back to the ship and we waited for Brunner to join us, as previously arranged. The plan was that by the time the lawyer discovered the letter was missing from his office Brunner would be at sea with us and we’d just chuck him over the side with the horse’s head tied to his feet. But something went wrong. I think Brunner had some thugs of his own and one of them saw me following him to his hotel. Anyway, the bastard smelled a rat and before joining us on board he asked his lawyer to check to see if he still had the letter. And when the lawyer couldn’t find it, Brunner must have figured he was going to be double-crossed by Merten a second time, because he came aboard secretly the night before we were to sail. Schramma disturbed him and the two exchanged gunshots. Schramma was killed and Brunner hightailed it off the ship and onto the quayside in Piraeus. Not long after that we set sail, and so it ended up being Christian Schramma’s weighted body we dropped over the side.”
“That’s the first bit of good news I’ve heard in a while.”
“You knew him?”
“Yes. And well enough to say he got what was coming to him. He murdered two people in Munich and got away with it, thanks to Max Merten. And I have to say, to me as well. I made a mistake there. I thought I was protecting Merten. I thought Merten was innocent. But he wasn’t. He never was.”
“Merten’s a crafty one, and no mistake. After we set sail we decided that since Brunner hadn’t any clue as to the area we’d planned to dive in—and don’t ask me where that is, honestly, I don’t know. Merten kept the exact longitude and latitude to himself for fear that we would double-cross him and now I realize why—we could lie low in Spetses for a while, just in case Brunner had blown the whistle on us. Then, when we judged things were safe, we’d go and look for the gold as planned. None of us had a clue that before he’d shot Christian Schramma and left the ship Brunner had activated some sort of delayed-action incendiary device in the packing case beside the horse’s head. Probably that was the real purpose of his coming aboard in the night. Anyway, it was a couple of hours before the thing went off. By which time we were far out to
