Greeks Bearing Gifts

by Philip Kerr

  “I expect you’re right,” I said. “About the coincidence. But it’s giving me an itch that I guess I’ll have to keep on scratching for a while. Either way I’ve already decided—more or less—to delay settling Herr Witzel’s claim. There’s too much here that doesn’t bear scrutiny. At least, that’s what I’m going to tell Dumbo at head office, so later on today I’ll need to send a telegram. Not that I’m planning to tell Siegfried Witzel any of this. At least I don’t think so—not yet. And not without a bulletproof vest.”

  “I’m very relieved to hear it, sir. Myself, I want to be as far away as possible from that man when he hears any bad news.”

  “Having said all that, Mr. Garlopis, I do want to see his reaction when we surprise him at that address in Pritaniou. Which is where we’re going now. If you’re game, that is. Who knows? Perhaps we’ll get lucky and find the professor there, locked in the bedroom. And he can tell us what really happened to the Doris. Seriously, though, I’ve an idea that our just being there will provoke Witzel to say something out of turn or make a mistake.”

  Achilles Garlopis bit his knuckle, crossed himself, and grimaced. “That’s what I’m afraid of, sir. Look here, now that you know his address, couldn’t you write to him and tell him that you’re delaying settlement? The man’s obviously dangerous.”

  “What can I tell you? You might be right. You can wait outside in the car, if you like. I’ll handle it. In which case maybe I’ll tell him after all. It wouldn’t exactly be the first time I’ve been the bearer of bad news.”

  “If you don’t mind me asking, aren’t you scared?”

  “Since the Ivans got the bomb? All the time. But of Witzel, no. Besides, disappointing people is what I’m good at. I’ve had a lifetime of practice.”

  We drove back into Athens and to the old town at the base of the Acropolis. The green Simca was there but I told Garlopis to find another street and park. He drove down a few streets and pulled up on the sidewalk behind an empty police car and opposite what he said was the old Roman marketplace, although if he’d told me it was the Parthenon, I wouldn’t have known any different. Of late I’d been neglecting my studies of late Bronze Age Hellenism.

  “Why don’t you stay here and watch the car?” I told Garlopis. “Maybe some Hungarian beggars will turn up and you can shoo them away before I get back.”

  “And suppose you don’t come back?”

  I pointed at the empty police car. “You could tell the cops.”

  “And if they leave before you return? What then? I should feel obliged to go and look for you, on my own. No, sir, I think it’s better that I accompany you now. Then I’ll know for sure that you’re all right, or that you’re not, and I won’t be presented with a difficult decision like that. At least this way there’s some safety in numbers.”

  “Suppose he shoots both of us,” I said as we left the car behind.

  “Please don’t joke about such matters. I’ll be quite honest with you, Herr Ganz, and I’m only a little bit ashamed to admit it, but I am a coward, sir. All my life I’ve had to live down my given name: Achilles. For that reason I prefer to be called Garlopis, or Mr. Garlopis. But not Achilles. I am not nor ever could be a hero. Bravery is admirable but it belongs only to the brave and it often seems to me that the cemeteries are full of such brave men and not many cowards. Especially in Greece, where heroes are often as troublesome and combative as the gods themselves. It’s my opinion that heroes often come to what the English call ‘a sticky end.’ Theirs is a most creative language. It paints a picture, does it not? A sticky end?”

  “I’ve seen a few of those in my time. In German and in English.”

  Garlopis talked all the way up the hill and onto the corner of Pritaniou, and he even talked while we watched the house at number 11 for a cautious ten minutes from behind the corner of a little church. The street was empty, as if the rocky outcrop supporting the citadel above had been a volcano that was about to erupt. The Greek was nervous, of course, and why not? It was me who was at fault. I was the one taking risks that were beginning to feel almost unnecessary. Garlopis was acting in the way one would always have expected an insurance agent to act: with extreme caution, and wisely reluctant to leave the safety of his desk and his captain’s chair and the care of his voluptuous flame-haired secretary. But me—I suppose you could just say that old habits die hard. It was fun behaving like a cop again, to feel the sidewalk underneath my Salamanders as I watched a suspect’s house. I wasn’t worried about Witzel’s gun. When you’ve been around guns all your life they don’t seem quite so intimidating. Then again, that’s probably one reason why, sometimes, people get shot.

  We approached the shabby, double-height door. There was no bell and no knocker and I was just about to bang on the woodwork when I noticed that the wrought-iron gate immediately next to it wasn’t locked, though it had been on my earlier visit. I pushed it open to reveal a narrow flight of stone steps that led underneath the bough of the evil-eye olive tree and up the side of the house and, thinking that this might afford us with the chance to spy on Witzel before we announced our presence, I went through the gate, tugging a reluctant Garlopis behind me. I might have left him but for the fact that he was easily the largest thing in the street. Anyone opening one of the upper-floor shutters and glancing down would have noticed him immediately. In his baggy green suit he might have been mistaken for Poseidon clothed in seaweed, but to anyone else he looked suspiciously like a man playing lookout for a burglar.

  At the top of the steps we found a whitewashed wall with a wooden door that felt as if it was locked. Hauling myself up to check what was on the other side I saw a small courtyard with a door that was only bolted, a sleeping cat, a dry fountain, and several cracked terra-cotta pots that were home to some even drier plants. If the place was occupied it was by someone who cared very little about it. A rusted motorcycle lay in a state of disassembly underneath a vine on which the grapes had almost fossilized. I climbed over the wall, dusted myself down, and then unbolted the gate to admit Garlopis. By now he was the same color as his suit. Meanwhile the cat stood up, stretched a bit, and then left.

  Ignoring what looked like the kitchen door I led the way down a couple of wooden steps to a pair of French windows that were so dusty they were almost opaque. One of the windows was ajar and, mindful of Witzel’s gun, I slowly pushed it all the way open before stepping inside the house. Under the stairs was a large plastic bag full of sponges. The radio was on, but low so that it was just a murmur. The place smelled of cigarettes and ouzo, Sportsman aftershave, and something more acrid and combustible perhaps, and there was a heavily stained Louis XV–style caned sofa with half the seat stuffing hanging down on the floor like a bull’s pizzle. An Imray sea chart lay open on a Formica-topped table next to a bottle of Tsantali, a packet of Spuds, and the cashier’s check I’d handed him back at the office. On one wall was a collection of cheap plaster masks of the kind you could have bought in any local souvenir shop and which featured a variety of grotesque gray and green rictus faces that might have had something to do with Greek tragedy. But what they certainly had in common was their close resemblance to the man lying on the floor whose face was distinguished by its empty eye sockets and gaping mouth, not to mention a very definite look of abbreviated pain. Abbreviated by his death, that is. It was Siegfried Witzel and he’d been shot twice. I knew that because each shot had gone through an eyeball.

  Garlopis covered his mouth and turned quickly away. “Gamiméno kólasi,” he exclaimed. “O ftochós.”

  “If you’re going to throw up, do it outside,” I said.

  “Why would someone do that?”

  “I don’t think it was his cologne. Although it is quite pungent. But I expect they had their reasons.”

  The first bullet looked like it had come clean out of the back of Witzel’s skull and hit a framed photograph of a racehorse; the spent bullet had cracked the glass and
stained it ever so slightly with blood and brain matter. I bent down beside the body to take a closer look. The second bullet had been fired at closer range when the man was already lying on the floor; you could tell that from the amount of blood and gelatinous aqueous humor that had erupted out of Witzel’s eye socket. From what I saw that second shot had been gratuitous and an act of pure sadism, designed, perhaps, to inflict an extra level of punishment and humiliation. Because if Siegfried Witzel had a next of kin it would be hard for them to stomach the sight of him like this. A closed coffin, then. No last kisses for Siegfried. Not without him wearing a pair of dark glasses.

  Pressing my finger into the blood on the moth-eaten Persian carpet and then into the dead man’s mouth, I said, “The blood’s dry but the body’s not yet cold. I’d say he’s been dead for no more than a couple of hours.” I opened his jacket; the holster was still there but the gun was gone and when I lifted his heavy, muscular arm to check for any sign of rigor and lividity I saw that the Rolex Submariner was still on his wrist. “I think we can discount the possibility that this was a robbery. He’s still wearing his diver’s watch. By the look of things the killer’s long gone. It appears as if you might have been right about the Jews after all, Garlopis. That maybe this was a revenge killing. I don’t know, but that’s not my problem. The local cops can try to figure out a motive. Which means we’d better make ourselves scarce. It would certainly make a nice tidy parcel if the cops could blame the murder of one German on another.”

  I was talking to myself. Garlopis had returned to the backyard and was already smoking a cigarette to steady his nerves.

  I wiped my fingers on the dead man’s jeans and instinctively checked his pockets. All of them. As a beat cop in Berlin it was common practice to supplement your meager wages with some of what you found in a murder victim’s billfold and it was only after I made detective that I stopped doing it, but old habits die hard, and anyway, Witzel’s pockets were empty of everything except the keys for the Simca and what looked like the front door. Besides, this time I was only looking for information, but if he’d possessed a wallet I couldn’t see it. I stood up and took another look around; on the floor I found a spent brass case for an automatic: it was rimless, tapered, probably from a 9-mill automatic, and I’d seen a thousand of them before. I dropped it back onto the floor and went over to the table. The map open on the table was a different chart from the larger-scale one we’d spread out back in Garlopis’s office. This one was for the Saronic and Argolic Gulfs, and had been marked up with ink, which wasn’t all there was on it. There was blood on the chart, too, and it didn’t look like it was spatter from the head shots; this was one large globular spot that looked as if it had dripped onto the waterproof paper while someone had been leaning over it.

  I called out to Garlopis. “There’s one good thing about this, I suppose,” I said. “It means we can relax. My job’s over. With all due respect to your country, I can go and see the Parthenon now and then return home to Munich. Even if I was inclined to settle his claim there’s no one here to pay. It’s not our fault if Siegfried Witzel wouldn’t give us the name of his next of kin, or a lawyer. Dumbo will be delighted, of course. Not to mention Mr. Alzheimer. There’s nothing those guys like better than adjusting a loss to zero. This will probably make their weekend.”

  Garlopis didn’t answer. I looked out the French window and saw him standing stiffly in the garden with his arms by his sides, like a statue; he seemed shocked and bewildered, as if he was more upset about Witzel’s death than I would ever have imagined. But perhaps it was just the sight of a dead body, after all. I didn’t blame him for that. Even in the land of Oedipus and Jocasta it’s not everyone who can tolerate the sight of a man without eyes.

  “What’s your problem?” I asked, hoping to help restore him to his previous good humor. “You never liked the guy anyway. At least now you don’t have to worry about him shooting you. This is one loss that nobody can adjust. So we’re done. You can go back to ogling that secretary of yours. And why not? She’s very nice. I might ogle her myself for a couple of minutes if you’ve no objection.”

  I lit a cigarette and moved closer to the French windows but froze when I saw an arm with a revolver pointed squarely at the Greek’s head. I turned around to see if I could locate Witzel’s own gun before deciding what to do but stopped and put myself in aspic jelly when I saw that there was a loaded Smith & Wesson pointed at me, too. I knew the gun was loaded because I was staring right down the barrel, as if the first shot might have gone through my own eye. I let the cigarette drop from my mouth. The last thing I wanted the man with the gun to think was that I didn’t take him or it very seriously. And just in case I’d forgotten, there was a body on the floor to remind me of just what a large-caliber revolver can do at close range. At the same time I wasn’t at all sure if I was relieved or alarmed to see that it was a uniformed police officer holding it.

  TWENTY-TWO

  –

  After we’d been searched, the cops sat us on the disemboweled couch. There were three of them and it looked like they’d heard us coming over the back wall and had hidden in the kitchen until they were ready to make their move. Garlopis was already talking too much, in Greek, so I told him to shut up, in German, at least until we knew if the police were disposed to treat us as suspects or not. That’s in the Bible so it must be true: Be sensible and keep your mouth shut: Proverbs 10:19. The officer in charge was a tall man whose dark, high-cheekboned face was part boxer, part Mafia don, and part Mexican revolutionary with more than a hint of Stanley Kowalski—at least until he found a pair of thick-framed, lightly tinted glasses and put them on, at which point he stopped looking dim-witted and thuggish and started to look thoughtful and smart.

  “Find anything interesting?” The Greek’s German wasn’t nearly as good as that of Garlopis, but it wasn’t bad either because it’s not the end of the world when you don’t use the best grammar. He had our wallets in his hands and so he already knew our names.

  “Just the guy on the floor. And you, of course.”

  “Where are you staying, Herr Ganz?”

  “Me, I’m at the Mega. In Constitution Square.”

  “You should have stayed at the Grande Bretagne. But I suppose either one of them would be convenient for the old Gestapo building in Merlin Street.”

  I grinned, trying to enjoy his joke. “His cousin works at the Mega,” I said, looking at Garlopis. “So I guess that’s just my bad luck.”

  “So what are you two doing here?”

  “If I told you we were selling insurance you’d probably think I was being sarcastic and I can’t say as I would blame you very much. But that’s not so far from the truth. I’m a claims adjustor. The dead man is a German called Siegfried Witzel. He owned a boat called the Doris that was insured with my company for almost a quarter of a million drachmas. I have a business card in my wallet that will help to establish those credentials. You can telegraph my office in Munich and they’ll vouch for me and for Herr Garlopis. Witzel’s boat caught fire and sank, he made a claim, and we came here today to tell him I thought there was something fishy about it.”

  “Do you always climb over the back wall to sell insurance?”

  “I do when I’ve become aware that the insured party carries a gun. Frankly, I wanted to see what kind of company he was keeping before I said hello again. Especially as I was now the bearer of bad news. In view of what’s happened here I would say that my caution was well founded, wouldn’t you?”

  “You speak any Greek?”

  “No.”

  Garlopis started talking in Greek again. The Greeks have a word for it. So the saying goes. In fact, they usually had several words for it, too many in fact, and Achilles Garlopis was no exception. The man could talk without stopping for hours, the way a Belgian could ride a bicycle. So I told him to shut up, again.

  “Why do you tell him to shut up?”

/>   “The usual reason. Because he talks too much.”

  “It’s every citizen’s duty to help the police. Perhaps he’s just trying to be helpful.”

  “Yes,” said Garlopis. “I am.”

  “I can see how that might help you,” I told the police officer. “But I think you’re smart enough to see how that might not help us. You’re a busy man and you’ve got a murder to solve. And right now, in the absence of anyone else, you think we might be good for that.”

  “I think it would be smart if you were to tell us everything you know about this man.”

  “Oh, sure. Look, I know what to say. I just don’t know if I should say it. That’s just smart getting wise.”

  The officer lit a cigarette and blew some of the smoke my way, which I didn’t like.

  “Do you speak English?” he said. “My English is better than my German.”

  “You’re doing all right so far,” I said in English. “What, were you a cop during the war?”

  “Right now, I’m the one asking the questions, okay?”

  “Sure. Anything you say, Captain.”

  “Lieutenant. So why were you going to turn down his claim?”

  “There were too many inconsistencies in his story. There was that and the gun he was carrying.”

  “We didn’t find a gun. Not yet.”

  “Maybe not. But he’s not wearing a shoulder holster because his wallet was so heavy. I think he was scared of someone, and it wasn’t Munich RE.”

  “Like who maybe?”

  “That’s obvious. Like the man who killed him, I expect.”