Greeks Bearing Gifts

by Philip Kerr

  “Any other tips? Besides not speaking German in Greece?”

  He toasted me with the whiskey he’d ordered.

  “Just one. Don’t drink the tap water. They’ll tell you it’s safe. That it’s made by the Americans. And it is—made by the Amis. Ulen & Monks; they own the Marathon Dam. But I’d stick to bottled if I were you. Unless you want to lose weight and fast.”

  I toasted him back. He handed me his business card.

  “Sounds like good advice.”

  “If you get into trouble or you need my help, then call this number. We Germans have to stick together, right? What does the proverb say? Caught together, hanged together.”

  SEVENTEEN

  –

  “What’s the movie they’re showing across the street?”

  Garlopis came to the open window of his office on Stadiou and glanced down at the poster on the front of the Orpheus Cinema. He had fetched me from my hotel more than an hour earlier and now we were awaiting the arrival of Siegfried Witzel, our insurance claimant. He was late.

  “The Ogre of Athens,” he said. “Do you like going to the cinema, Herr Ganz?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s quite a popular film here in Greece. At least it is now. It’s about a quiet little man who is mistaken for a murderer called Drakos. Enjoying this mistake, he rules over the underworld until the other crooks start to see their error.”

  It sounded a lot like Hitler, but I shook my head. “Not my kind of film. I prefer Westerns.”

  “Yes, there’s something about a Western that’s pleasantly timeless.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “Which would seem to be a concept with which Mr. Witzel is also familiar. Where is he, I wonder?”

  Outside the cinema a priest wearing a black surplice was cleaning his scooter; the whole city was plagued with them, like thousands of noisy, brightly colored insects. I watched him polishing the red clamshell body of the scooter and winced as its distant relation came buzzing along the street, while out of the corner of my eye I could see Mr. Garlopis feeling my struggle with the din of Athens and politely waiting to see if he should intervene on my behalf. When finally he did and closed the window, I almost breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Athens is very loud after Munich,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “The gods are the friend of silence. Which is why they chose to live on mountaintops. And why rich men who wish to emulate them buy houses on hills, I suppose.”

  On the walls were a large map of Greece and several photographs of the past and present Panathinaikos football team, and through the open door could be heard the sound of a secretary’s fingers tickling the keys on a big typewriter.

  “How long have you been working for MRE, Herr Garlopis?”

  “Five or six years. During the war I was an interpreter and then after that I worked for my cousin’s debt-collection agency. But that work is not without hazard. Bad debt is always a very sensitive subject.” He looked at his watch again and tutted loudly. “Where is that man?”

  “Does Herr Witzel have far to come?” I asked.

  “I really don’t know. He’s been most evasive about his present address. He told me that since the boat was also his home he’s been sleeping on the floors of various friends in the city. Although with his temper the idea that Herr Witzel has any friends at all seems wholly improbable. Would you like some Greek coffee, Herr Ganz?”

  “No thanks. If I drink any more coffee I’ll fly out this window. Has he got a lawyer?”

  “He didn’t mention one.”

  “We’ll need some sort of an address if we’re going to pay out thirty-five thousand deutschmarks. His girlfriend’s floor, Athens, won’t satisfy our accounts department.”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling him, sir.”

  “May I see the file on the ship?”

  I came back to the desk and Garlopis handed me the details on the Doris. While I glanced over the contents, he summarized the vessel’s specifications:

  “The Doris was a two-masted schooner, thirty meters long, with a beam of eight and a half meters, and a maximum draft of 3.8 meters. She had a single six-hundred-horsepower diesel engine with a cruising speed of twelve knots. Built in 1929 as the Carasso, with five cabins, she was all wood in her construction, which probably explains why the fire took hold so fiercely.”

  There was a single color picture of a ship at sea with about eight sails; to someone like me who knew nothing about ships, it looked handsome enough, I suppose, and according to the file had been the subject of a recent refit. From what was written down I couldn’t have said if the ship was seaworthy, but on a sea as smooth and blue as the one in the photograph she certainly looked that way.

  “There’s also a list of things kept on board that were lost that he’s claiming for,” added Garlopis. “Diving equipment, cameras, furniture, personal effects. More than twenty thousand drachmas’ worth of stuff. Fortunately for him, he seems to have been quite scrupulous in keeping us up-to-date with receipts.”

  A few minutes later we heard footsteps on the wooden stairs outside the office door and Garlopis nodded at me.

  “That must be him now. Remember what I said, sir. About not provoking him. He’s probably armed.”

  A tall, bearded man, with wavy hair as thick and yellow as a field of corn on a windy day and eyes as blue as Thor’s, opened the door and bowed stiffly. He had a round, tanned face, a bee-stung lower lip, and on his forehead above a slightly broken nose was an angry knot of muscles. He reminded me strongly of a painting I’d once seen by Dürer of an unidentified burgher: authoritarian, distrustful, severe—Witzel’s was a very German face. He wore a blouse-type jacket made of pale leather with wool knit sleeves and collar, wheat denim jeans, brown polo boots, and a brown suede cap. On his wrist was a Rolex Submariner with a black rubberized wristband, and between his heavily stained fingers was a menthol cigarette. He smelled strongly of Sportsman aftershave, which made a pleasant change from the whiff of Garlopis’s body odor that stuck to the Greek’s familiar green suit like the smell of naphthalene.

  “Herr Witzel, how nice to see you again,” said Garlopis. “This is Herr Ganz, from head office in Munich. Herr Ganz, this is Herr Witzel.”

  We shook hands in wary silence, like two chess players about to do battle. His hand was strong but quickly rotated over mine so that his palm was facing down and mine up, as if he meant to show that he intended to have the upper hand during our meeting. That was all right by me; this was only a conversation about insurance after all.

  “Please, gentlemen, sit down,” said Garlopis.

  Witzel sat down in front of the desk, crossed his legs nonchalantly, and tossed a packet of Spud and some keys onto an Imray nautical chart of Greece and the Peloponnese, which was when I noticed that in one of his ears was a little hearing aid about the size of a mint. And I wondered about the keys; for a man who claimed to be sleeping on a friend’s floor, there were several on the key ring besides the evil-eye fob that everyone in Greece but me seemed to possess and a little brass ship’s wheel.

  “In order to process your claim, Herr Witzel, I’m going to need some more details about your business and what happened to your ship. I know this is a matter of great urgency to you, but please try to be patient. I have many questions. At the end of our conversation I hope to be able to issue you with—at the very least—a provisional check, to cover your immediate expenses.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” As he spoke Witzel stared daggers in the direction of poor Garlopis, as if reproaching him for not doing the same earlier on.

  “You’re a diver, aren’t you?” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  “How did you get into that business?”

  “During the war I was in the German navy. With the Division Brandenburg, better known as the ocean warriors. Before that I trained with the Italian Deci
ma Flottiglia MAS, who were the leaders in the field of underwater combat.” He tapped the ear with the hearing aid. “That’s how I damaged this ear. A mine went off when I was in the water. After the war I bought the Doris, and stayed on down here, making underwater films, which was always my passion.”

  “Under the circumstances that seems like a brave decision. For a German, I mean.”

  “Not really. I did nothing during the war to feel ashamed of.”

  Clearly the concept of collective guilt didn’t feature in Witzel’s way of thinking.

  “Besides, I speak fluent Greek and Italian, and I’ve always gone out of my way to show the Greeks that I was certainly no Nazi.”

  I nodded attentively but I wondered exactly how you went about doing something like that.

  “As a result I always lived on the ship without any problems. Except for the usual ones, when you’re a filmmaker: a lack of money. All filmmaking is expensive. Underwater, especially so.”

  “What was the purpose of this specific voyage? I’m not yet clear about that.”

  “It was a private charter. I’d found a few small marble and bronze artifacts on a previous dive in some waters off the island of Dokos—on what looked to be possibly the wreck of an old Greek trireme—and, thinking I might make some money out of this discovery, I contacted the Archaeological Museum in Piraeus with a view to fitting out an expedition to look for more. Not my usual kind of thing but I needed the money. Like I said, filmmaking is expensive. Anyway, they told me that at present, financing is tight for that kind of thing—it’s not like Greece has a shortage of archaic bronzes and marbles, but they suggested that if I could find a German museum willing to put up the money, they would organize all of the necessary permissions in return for half of what we found. So I did exactly that. Professor Buchholz is a leading German Hellenist, and an old friend of a friend—someone I knew when I was at university in Berlin. Simple as that, really. Or at least it seemed it was until my ship sank.”

  “You’re a Berliner?”

  “Yes. From Wedding.”

  “Me too. What did you study?”

  “Law, at Humboldt. To please my father, of course. It’s a very German story. But he died halfway through my studies and I switched to zoology.”

  “Like Humboldt.”

  “Exactly.”

  Witzel stubbed out his cigarette and then hung another on his lower lip like a clothes-peg. Meanwhile I unfolded the chart, turned it toward him, and came around the desk to look over his shoulder.

  “Perhaps you could show me on the map where the Doris sank.”

  “Surely.” Witzel leaned over the map and moved his forefinger down the Greek coast, about thirty or forty miles south of Piraeus, as the crow flies. While he leaned over the map I had an excellent view of what looked like an automatic in a leather shoulder holster under his left arm. Quite why a man who was diving for archaic Greek bronzes felt the need to carry a gun was anyone’s guess.

  “It was just about here when we discovered the fire,” he said. “Latitude 37.30 north, longitude 23.40 east, off the eastern Peloponnese coast. It was late at night and dark, and so we put out an SOS; and while we fought the fire we tried to reach the mainland, but it quickly became clear that we would have to take to the life raft. The Doris is made entirely of wood, you see. She sank here in about two hundred and fifty meters of water. Too deep to dive for, unfortunately, otherwise I’d hire some equipment and go down to get some personal effects that are still on board.

  “In the life raft, we put in at Ermioni. Myself, two crew, and Professor Buchholz. Then we contacted the local coast guard and told them not to bother looking for the Doris as it was already gone.”

  I folded up the map again. “Now, about the fire. Any idea of the cause?”

  “The oil in the engine caught fire. No doubt about it. The engine was an American two-stroke diesel—a Winton, recently overhauled in the shop, and normally very reliable. But the Adrianos shipyard in Piraeus I used to take her to went bust and I had to get someone else in Salamis to do the most recent overhaul. My guess is that they cut a few corners to save money, that they used a cheap, low-viscosity oil instead of a more expensive, high-viscosity one, which was what you need for an engine like that. And the oil simply couldn’t deal with the high temperatures. Typical Greeks. You have to watch them like a hawk or they’ll rip you off. Of course, knowing that is one thing; proving it is something else. You’d be surprised at how quickly these bastards will close ranks when a non-Greek starts alleging incompetence. Especially a German. I don’t mind telling you, we’ve a lot to live down in this country.”

  “I suppose so. This shipyard you used. What’s the name of it?”

  “A shipyard in Megara. Megara Shipyards, I think they’re called.”

  “And the artifacts you found. Where are they now?”

  “They were on the ship. The Doris was my home. I kept everything of value there. Diving equipment, cameras, you name it.”

  “I notice that you didn’t put a value on the artifacts. In fact, they’re the only thing you didn’t put on the list of things for which you intend to make a claim.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “All the same, they must have been quite valuable if they inspired an expedition to return to this old shipwreck.”

  “I suppose so. But it hardly matters now, does it? I mean I don’t have the paperwork to prove I ever had them. Or even what they were.”

  “Oh, I don’t think that would be a problem,” I said helpfully. “Surely this Professor Buchholz could provide a value, couldn’t he? After all, he must have seen the pieces when you were looking to get the expedition financed. To whet his appetite. We can ask him. I’ll need to speak to him anyway, just in case he decides to make a claim against you, for whatever reason.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. But rest assured, you’re covered for that, too.”

  “He won’t be making a claim.”

  “You seem very sure of that, sir. May I ask why?”

  “He just won’t be. Take my word for it.”

  “Did he have an insurance policy of his own?”

  “I don’t know. But if he had, it’s nothing to do with me.”

  “You might think that. But if he claims against his insurance then they might easily make a claim against Munich RE. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t try to speak with him. Just to make sure of what you say. Where can I get in touch with him?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  “You must have had his address—when he first came to Greece.”

  “I believe he was staying at the Acropolis Palace, here in Athens.”

  “Well, perhaps he’s there now.”

  “Perhaps. But I think he may already have gone back to Germany.”

  “No matter. I can contact him there just as easily. I’m going back to Germany myself just as soon as I’ve settled your claim.”

  “So you are going to settle it, then?” he sneered. “Instead of just asking a lot of damn-fool questions.”

  “I’m surprised to hear you say that, given the sum of money involved.”

  “Look, about the artifacts, let’s forget about them, shall we? I don’t want to claim for those. Not least because I don’t want the museum in Piraeus chasing me for half their value. You can understand that, can’t you?”

  “I can understand. But it doesn’t change anything. They might not chase you for half the value. But they might feel differently about chasing your insurance company.”

  Until now I’d seen little sign in Siegfried Witzel of the ill temper Garlopis had mentioned, but this was about to change. Witzel was already grimacing and shaking his head irritably, which made Garlopis look nervous.

  “Look, what is all this shit? I expect the runaround from him.” Witzel jerked his
head at Garlopis. “He’s a damned Greek. But not from a fellow German. I’ve told you all I know.”

  “You might think so. But it’s also my job to find out the things you don’t know. To put the umlauts over everything. You’re an educated man, you understand that, surely.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Herr Ganz.”

  “It could even be that with your cooperation I find enough evidence to sue the shipyard in Megara for negligence.”

  “I don’t want to sue anyone. Look, friend, I have to live here. Imagine how things would be if I started suing these people. We Germans have a bad enough name already.”

  “Yes, I take your point. But I’m just doing my job. Looking after my employer’s interests. As well as yours.”

  “I’ve been a good customer. I’ve paid my premiums, regular as clockwork. And I’ve never made a claim before. You must be aware of that. The trouble with pen pushers like you, Herr Ganz, is that you think you can push people around just as easily as that Pelikan in your hand.”

  “I don’t push people around. Not even when I want to. But if I did, I’d think it better to be pushed around with a pen instead of with a gun like the one under your arm.”

  Witzel smiled sheepishly. “Oh. That.”

  “Yes. That. Frankly, it makes me wonder a bit about you. The Bismarck, I mean. Not many of our claimants carry guns, Herr Witzel.”

  “I’ve a license for it, I can assure you.” He shook his head. “When you’re in seaports late at night as often as I am, you might carry a gun or a knife in the same way that another man might carry a pen. Fishermen play rough. And not just them. Eight years after a civil war just as bitter as the one fought in Spain, it’s wise to go carefully on a strange island or in a big city. Fifty thousand people were killed in this country.”

  “I’ll buy that.”

  “I’m not selling it. That’s just a fact. Take it or leave it.”

  “What I would like to take is your present address. Or the name and address of your lawyer, if you have one. And please, the address for Professor Buchholz.”