by Philip Kerr
“Do you like Greece, Herr Ganz?” said Leventis as he riffled through his case files.
“It seems very nice to me.”
“Our women?”
“Those I’ve seen seem very nice, too.”
“How about our wine?” he murmured.
“I like it. At least I do when I manage to get over the taste of the stuff. It tastes more like tree sap than actual wine. Still, the effect seems to be much the same and after the first bottle you hardly notice the difference.”
Garlopis smiled. “That’s very good,” he said. “Most amusing.”
I didn’t think Leventis was really listening, but I carried on anyway: “They say the Romans used to make wine in the same way. That would certainly explain the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.”
He didn’t answer and, after a while, I said, “You know why we were at the house in Pritaniou. Why were you there, Lieutenant?”
“This morning one of the neighbors reported hearing the sound of an argument, followed by two shots. A patrol car found the body and then summoned me. The witness, who was cleaning the Glebe Holy Sepulchre Church opposite number 11, claims she saw two men leaving the house just before midday but couldn’t describe them in any useful way.”
“Any idea yet who owns that house?”
“The neighbor thinks that Witzel might have been living there without the owner’s knowledge. Squatting. It may even be that the owner has died. We’re investigating.”
Leventis came back to his desk and sat down, smiling, but this time there was no cruelty in his smile, which made a nice change; only he wasn’t yet through with threatening us.
“All of what I’m about to tell you now is confidential,” he said. “I should hate to read about any of this in a newspaper. If I did I should certainly assume that one of you was responsible and have you both sent to Haidari Barracks. My captain—Captain Kokkinos, would insist on it.”
“We won’t breathe a word of what you tell us, Lieutenant. Will we, Herr Ganz? You have our word. And let me just add that we’re very happy to cooperate with you and Captain Kokkinos in any way you see fit.”
Leventis ignored him as he would probably have ignored a mosquito, or the relentless sound of Greek traffic.
“If,” persisted Garlopis, “earlier on I gave you the impression that I was less than happy to help I should like to correct that now. We’ll do anything we can to make sure that this murderer is caught, and soon. Anything. Including, might I add, paying a small fine or compensation for the illegal entry we made at the house in Pritaniou. In cash, of course. And whatever amount you think is appropriate. You yourself might give it to the owner when eventually he is found.”
“That won’t be necessary,” said Leventis. He knew perfectly well what was being suggested but, generously, he chose to ignore that, too. “Now then, to business. About a week ago, a lawyer was found murdered. In the suburb of Glyfada. His name was Dr. Samuel Frizis.”
“I think maybe I read about that in The Athens News,” I said.
“Yes,” said Leventis. “But the paper didn’t publish any specific details. We’ve been keeping those back deliberately. You see, Dr. Frizis was shot through both eyes, just like your friend Siegfried Witzel.”
“I wish you’d stop calling him our friend. Neither of us liked him, did we, Garlopis?”
“Indeed no. He was a most disagreeable fellow. Very bad-tempered. We were both afraid he might shoot one of us. Ironic when you think about it. Given what happened. But life’s like that sometimes, isn’t it?”
Leventis handed me a sheaf of color photographs from the file. They showed a man lying dead on a plush-looking couch. There were several autopsy shots, which made for unpleasant viewing. All the blood in his head had drained away from his blackened eyes onto one shoulder of his tweed suit, while the other shoulder was quite unspoiled. On the marble table in front of the sofa was a little bronze statue of the goddess Diana holding a spear. It almost looked as if she might have inflicted the damage to the dead lawyer’s eyes. Cruelly, I offered one of the photographs to Garlopis, who shook his head and then looked away uncomfortably.
“The killer used a rimless, tapered, 9-mill round just like the one that you found on the floor at the house in Pritaniou Street. My guess is that the ballistics people back at the Gendarmerie will find they were fired from the same gun. Most likely a Luger pistol, they tell me. We’ve been through Frizis’s client list and appointment book and found nothing of any interest. So this new murder is a break for us, since it’s very likely these two murders are connected. Although I really don’t have any idea how.
“Back at the house in the old town you suggested that Witzel was possibly killed by Jews, in revenge for the confiscation of their property by the Nazis. But I must tell you that I think it’s unlikely that Dr. Frizis was murdered by Jews, not least because he himself was a Jew. And until Witzel was killed we had even considered the possibility that Dr. Frizis might have been murdered because he was a Jew. I am sorry to tell you that this is becoming quite an anti-Semitic country. Anyway, Siegfried Witzel’s murder also puts paid to that particular theory.”
“What kind of a lawyer was he anyway?” I asked.
“He must have been a good one if he could afford to live in Glyfada,” said Garlopis. “That’s the most expensive part of town. Everyone in Athens aspires to living in Glyfada.”
“He may have been a good lawyer,” said Leventis, “but he wasn’t particularly honest.”
“You won’t hear me arguing that one down,” I said. “No good lawyer is particularly honest, in my experience. But dispensing with a lawyer is usually more straightforward. Withholding payment will do the job most effectively.”
Leventis took off his glasses and raised a finger. “Fortunately, I have another theory. It’s about who killed him, if not why he was killed. It’s a little bit far-fetched, perhaps, but, well, see what you think, Commissar. But first I need to tell you a story.”
TWENTY-FOUR
–
“I’m not a Jew but I was born in Salonika and lived there as a boy and had many Jewish school friends until I was thirteen years old, when my father got a job with the Commercial Credit Bank here in Athens. To some extent, I’ve always regarded Salonika as my real home. Whenever I go back, it’s almost as if I once had another life, that I’ve been two people: that I had a Salonikan childhood and an Athenian manhood, and the two seem entirely without connection. Now, whenever I’m back there, I can’t help thinking that life isn’t just about working out who we are and what makes us tick, it’s also about understanding why we aren’t where we ever expected to be. That things might have been very different. It’s the best antidote to nostalgia I know.”
I nodded silently. This was the Greek lieutenant’s story but, in this particular respect at least, it was mine as well, and for a fleeting second I felt a strong, almost metaphysical connection with this man I hardly knew.
He looked distant for a moment—as if his mind was back in Salonika—and rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. The hair on his head was dark and shiny, with just a hint of silver, and, in the light from the tall office window, it resembled the skin of a mackerel. I guessed he was about forty-five. His speaking voice, which sounded like dark honey, relied a great deal on his hairy hands, as if he’d been trying to negotiate the price of a rug. The tunic of his uniform was tailored and it was a while before I perceived the size of the shoulders it was concealing. They were strong shoulders and probably capable of delivering great violence—a true copper’s shoulders.
“As a boy I wanted to play basketball for Aris Thessaloniki—to be like my hero, Faidon Matthaiou. Not to become a policeman in Athens.”
“A great player,” agreed Garlopis. “The patriarch of Greek basketball.”
“But here I am. A long way from home.”
“I know what you mean, Lieutenant,”
I said, hoping to push us all back onto the path of his story.
“Salonika was established by Alexander the Great’s brother-in-law, Ptolemy of Aloros, to be the main port for Macedonia; it’s also been of central importance to Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, even the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But most lastingly, for five centuries it was the Ottoman Turks who controlled the city and gave it a near autonomous status that allowed the Jews to become its most dominant group, with the result that, at the turn of the century, of the hundred and twenty thousand people who lived in Salonika, between sixty and eighty thousand were Jews. This was perhaps one of the largest numbers of European Jews to be found outside Poland; certainly it was the oldest community of Jews in Europe. And it’s not an exaggeration to say that Salonika was the Jerusalem of the Balkans, perhaps even the Mother of Israel, since so many who once lived there are now in Palestine.
“I won’t detain you, Commissar, by trying to explain how, over the many centuries, so many Jews in the diaspora, fleeing one persecution after another, ended up in Salonika; nor will I take up your time to explain what happened between the two wars and how Salonika became Thessaloniki and Greek, but in this most ancient city where change was a way of life, everything changed when the German army arrived and, I’m sorry to say, that change became a way of death. The alacrity with which the Nazis began to take action against Salonika’s Jews was astonishing even to the Greeks who, thanks to the Turks, know a bit about persecution, but for the Jews it was devastating. The Nuremberg Laws were immediately implemented. Prominent Jewish citizens, including some friends of my own father, were arrested, Jewish property was subject to confiscation, a ghetto was built, and all Jews were subjected to violent abuse and sometimes summary execution. But of course much worse was to come.
“Following a series of military disasters for the Axis powers, Hitler reorganized his Balkan front and, as part of this process, it was decided to ‘pacify’ Salonika and its hinterland. Pacify: you Germans have always had a peculiar talent for euphemism. Like ‘resettlement.’ The Jews of Salonika soon found out that these words meant something very different in the mouth of a German. A decision was made at the highest level that the Jews of Salonika should be removed and deported to Riga and Minsk, for eventual resettlement in the Polish death camps. The city’s Jewish community now came under the direct control of the SS and the SD in the person of an officer called Adolf Eichmann. He and several other SD and German army officers set themselves up in some style in a confiscated Jewish villa on Velissariou Street. The villa had a cellar they used as a torture chamber. There, wealthier Jews were interrogated as to where they’d hidden their wealth. Among these was a banker by the name of Jaco Kapantzi in whom the local SD took a special interest since he was also one of the richest men in Salonika. It infuriated these sadists that Kapantzi steadfastly refused to reveal where he’d hidden his money, so they decided to have him transferred by train to Block 15 at the Haidari Barracks in Athens. There, a notorious SS torturer by the name of Paul Radomski could go to work on Kapantzi night and day.
“But something must have happened on the Athens train to infuriate the SD and, in front of several other rail passengers, Kapantzi, still wearing his pajamas and dressing gown, was shot. Perhaps he tried to escape, perhaps he said something, I’m not entirely sure what, but I think perhaps Kapantzi had probably realized that his best chance to escape further torture was to provoke the SD captain in whose custody he was traveling from Salonika into killing him. With his gun in his hand and the body still bleeding on the floor the SD officer asked the other passengers if anyone had seen anything and of course nobody had. The officer got off the train at the next stop and returned to Salonika. When the train eventually arrived in Athens, the man’s dead body was still lying on the floor of the carriage, and there it became the responsibility of the Attica City Police.
“Obviously a murder had been committed and I was one of the investigating officers. Of course, we all knew it was the German SD who’d killed the man and for this reason there was no chance that we’d be able to do anything about it. We might as well have tried to arrest Hitler himself.
“But we still had to go through the motions and I managed to track down one of the other passengers. Eventually, I persuaded him to make a witness statement that I agreed to keep off the file until after the war and I quietly made it my business to find out more about the young SD captain who’d murdered Jaco Kapantzi in case one day I was in a position to bring him to justice.
“Perhaps this will sound strange to you now, Commissar. ‘Why bother?’ I hear you say. After all, what’s the fate of one man when more than sixty thousand Greek Jews died at Auschwitz and Treblinka? Well, to paraphrase Stalin—and believe me, there’s a lot of that in Greece—it’s the difference between a tragedy and a statistic, perhaps. And the point is this: Jaco Kapantzi was my case, my responsibility, and I’ve come to believe that in life it’s best to live for a purpose greater than oneself. And before you suggest there’s something in this for me, a promotion, perhaps, there isn’t. Even if no one ever knows that I have done this I would do it because I want to do something for Greece and I believe this is good for my country.”
It had been a while since I’d had any thoughts like that myself, but I found I could still appreciate finding them in the heart of another man even if it was a cop who was threatening to put me in jail.
“And if all that wasn’t enough, my father had worked for Jaco Kapantzi before moving to Athens. Indeed, it had been Mr. Kapantzi who’d generously helped my father get his new job and even loaned him his moving expenses. So you might also say I took his death personally.”
Leventis lit a cigarette; his voice had lowered now as if he was drawing on something deep in himself, and I saw that it wouldn’t be a good idea to make an enemy of this man.
“There’s no statute of limitations when it comes to murder in Greece. And the killing of Jaco Kapantzi remains open to this day. I’ll never know the names of the men who participated in the murders of my fellow countrymen in Auschwitz and Treblinka and besides, those crimes happened hundreds of miles north of here. But I do know the name of the individual SD captain who murdered Jaco Kapantzi on a Greek train. His name was Alois Brunner. Another German officer, an army captain, witnessed what happened, but I don’t suppose we’ll ever know who he was, only that my witness reports that he expressed some amused astonishment at Brunner’s behavior and advised that they should both leave the train. It’s said that all detectives have a case that gives them a lifetime of sleepless nights. I’m sure you had yours, Commissar. Alois Brunner is mine.
“Not much is known about him. What I do know has taken me the best part of ten years to find out. Brunner was just thirty-one years old when he murdered Jaco Kapantzi on that train. Born in Austria he was an early recruit to the Nazi Party and having joined the SD in 1938, he was assigned to the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna, where he became Eichmann’s close collaborator in the murder of thousands of Jews. After his time in Salonika, Brunner was named commander of the Drancy internment camp near Paris. This was in June 1943.
“I don’t know how much you know about this kind of thing, Commissar—more than you’ll ever admit, I expect, if the rest of your countrymen are anything to go by—but Drancy was the place where more than sixty-seven thousand French Jews were first confined and then deported to the extermination camps for resettlement. Seven years ago I took a short vacation in Paris and managed to find someone who’d been in Drancy—a German-Jewish woman who’d been hiding from the Nazis in the South of France until she was arrested. Her name was Charlotte Bernheim and somehow she survived Drancy and Auschwitz before returning to France. She remembered Brunner very well: short, poorly built, skinny—hardly your master-race type. She told me he seemed to have a physical detestation of Jews because once she saw a prisoner touch him accidentally and Brunner pulled out his pistol and shot him dead. Through both his eyes. And it was
this particular detail that caught my attention because Jaco Kapantzi was also shot through the eyes.
“You begin to see my interest in the murders of Dr. Frizis and Siegfried Witzel. Of course, Frizis didn’t prick my curiosity until we found Witzel’s body and began to see the German connection, and then of course you mentioned how Witzel’s boat had been confiscated from a Salonikan Jew, which intrigues me even more. That and the killer’s modus operandi, of course. It begins to look like a sort of homicidal signature. The idea that Brunner may even be back in Greece is of course enormously important to me. I’d love to catch this man and see him face the death penalty. Yes, we still execute our murderers, unlike you West Germans who seem to have discovered a new squeamishness about killing criminals. I’d give anything to see this man meet the end he deserves. These days we shoot murderers, but we used to send them to the guillotine. For a man like Brunner I’d start a petition to bring the guillotine back.
“But to continue with the story. In September 1944, Brunner was transferred from Drancy to the Sered Concentration Camp in Czechoslovakia, where he was tasked with the deportation of all the camp’s remaining Jews—some thirteen thousand people—before the camp was finally liberated by the Red Army in March 1945. I’ve not found anyone alive from Sered who remembers Brunner. You Germans did your work too well there. After the war, Brunner disappeared. For a while it was even thought he was dead, executed by the Allies in Vienna in May 1946. But this was a different Brunner. It was Anton Brunner, who conveniently also worked for Eichmann in Vienna, who was executed. And my friends in the National Intelligence Service of Greece tell me that they strongly suspect that the American CIA and the German Federal Intelligence Service—the BND—may have deliberately helped to muddy the waters around Anton Brunner’s end to protect Alois Brunner’s postwar work for Germany’s own intelligence services. Yes, that’s right, it’s not just German insurance companies that employ old Nazis.”