Филип Керр - Greeks Bearing Gifts

“The only thing that beggars belief,” she said, “is your arrogance.”

“I, on the other hand,” he persisted, “a humble army captain and no one’s idea of an entertaining Nazi houseguest, was sent here, to Greece. Please note the fact that I was never in the SS or in the SD or the Gestapo. Nor did I receive any medals or promotions. This much is easily verified. Even Bernie will admit that much, surely. It’s true I stole some gold from SS men who’d already stolen it from Salonika’s Jews. But that’s the limit of my felony. I never killed anyone. The only time I ever saw anyone get shot was when Alo Brunner killed that poor man on the train from Salonika. Meanwhile, Bernie went on to do special work for Heydrich and the minister of propaganda, Josef Goebbels himself, no less; he was even sent to Croatia with some sort of carte blanche from the minister in his pocket. You would think he’d had enough killing but not a bit of it; in Croatia he assisted the fascist Ustase in murdering many thousands of Serbs and Gypsies, to say nothing of Yugoslavia’s Jews.”

“You’re good, Max. Smearing me in the hope that some of this mud sticks.”

“It’s exactly what any unscrupulous lawyer would do,” said Elli. “If he was really desperate.”

“You know I really do think she loves you, Bernie. Or at least she thinks she does. Look, Elisabeth, I can see that it might be hard to accept all of what I’ve just told you about a man you’re fond of. I can’t say I blame you. Believe me, after the war many German wives had the same problem. Could my dear Mozart-loving husband Fritz really have murdered women and children? Tell me you didn’t shoot any children, dear husband mine. Please, tell me you had nothing to do with that.”

“Didn’t you hear me, you lying malaka ?” she said loudly. “I don’t believe a word of it.”

“But you can certainly believe this, Elisabeth dear: Bernie also has a wife. Perhaps he’s already told you about her? She lives in Berlin. You didn’t know? No, I thought not. In which case you’re in for an even bigger surprise. You might say it’s a coincidence and maybe a convenient one at that — since he should have no trouble remembering your name. I expect it was hard enough remembering his own, or at least the one written on his passport. You see his wife’s name is Elisabeth, just like yours.”

Elli had stopped the car and switched off the engine. We were in a western suburb of Athens and surrounded by a strange landscape of fuel tanks and gasometers. In the distance we could just see the range of mountains that guarded the peninsula of Attica like the giant walls of a more ancient Troy. A beggar came to the window of the Rover and Elli shook her head angrily, which sent him away. She gripped the steering wheel firmly and stared straight ahead of her as if she’d been planning to crash into one of the storage tanks so that we could all die in the explosion like the final scene of White Heat . She probably found my silence even more deafening. I know I did. Merten stayed silent, too. He’d done his worst and this was all that was required; it was obvious to everyone in the car that anything else said by him would have been redundant, not to mention the fact that it would have earned him a punch in the mouth. It was also obvious that Elli was upset. There was anger in her eyes and her voice sounded hoarse, like she was getting a cold. Suddenly I was feeling pretty cold myself.

“Is it true?” she asked, after a while. “ Do you have a wife in Berlin?”

“Yes, but we’re estranged.”

Even before I’d finished this short sentence Elli had got out of the car. She collected her bag off the passenger seat, slammed the door behind her, leaned back on the wing, and lit a cigarette angrily. I followed her outside.

“She left me more than a year ago while I was living in France, and went home to Berlin. Unlike her, I can’t ever go back there. At least not while the communists are in charge. The Stasi is every bit as bad as the Gestapo. Worse, probably. Anyway, the last conversation I had with my wife she told me she wanted a divorce. And for all I know she’s already got one. Given the fact that the city is surrounded by the GDR, communication is difficult, to say the least, so we haven’t spoken in a long while. A letter I had last year turned out to be a put-up job by the communists trying to lure me back to Berlin.”

“And is her name Elisabeth? Like that Nazi bastard said it was?”

“Yes.”

She stared down at the ground for almost a minute while I stumbled, badly, through the rest of my explanation: since my wife and I hadn’t seen each other in months I’d ceased to think of myself as married and so, I imagined, had she; we’d known each other as friends for more than twenty years; we’d married for the sake of convenience as much as anything else since we both needed to escape from Berlin at around the same time; this wasn’t very long ago — 1954 — which ought to have provided a useful snapshot of just how inconvenient the convenience of our marriage had become when, finally, she lit out for Germany and home. It wasn’t much of an explanation, but it was the only one I had.

“When were you thinking of telling me?” she asked. “If at all?”

“I should have mentioned it before,” I admitted.

“Yes, you should. You could have mentioned it last night, for instance. Before we checked into a double room at the Poseidonian Hotel. But you didn’t. You were oddly silent about your wife back then.”

“You’re right. But in my own defense, yesterday I still half-believed you were going to shoot me with your little Beretta. I’d only just started to believe in you and me so it didn’t seem to be that important. It felt like a small thing. At least while I was trying to put that rat Merten in the bag. As if I couldn’t concentrate wholly on you, the way you deserved, until Max Merten was properly out of the picture. But I would certainly have told you eventually. When we were both back in Athens. Made a better job of it, too, with dinner and chocolates and flowers. I could still do that, you know.”

“Flowers wouldn’t have helped this.”

When she said nothing more, I felt obliged to add an explanation about everything else Merten had told her.

“As for the rest of what he said, there was less than ten percent truth in any of it. I was a detective at police headquarters in Berlin and I did work for the Nazis but only under considerable duress, and while I did meet some of those people he talked about I never murdered anyone, Elli.”

“Damn that man,” she said angrily. “Damn him for finding the weak spot. And not yours. This is my weak spot. That’s the irony. He was looking for yours and he found mine. Look, I’m sorry but I don’t like married men. Especially when they’re married to someone else. Maybe I should have mentioned that last night. A few years ago I had an affair with a married man, someone in the ministry, and I swore then I would never get involved with a married man again. That’s not your fault. But it’s just how it is, do you see?”

“I told you; we’re separated. And we’re getting a divorce.”

“That one’s as old as the Odyssey ,” she said. “You should read it sometime. In the end Ulysses goes back to his wife. I have to say that this is what happened to me.”

“That isn’t going to happen with me.”

“Like everything else, I’ve only got your word for it.”

“And my word won’t do, I guess.”

“If you didn’t happen to be a man it would probably do just fine.”

“So where does this leave us?” I asked.

“I’m not sure where it leaves you, Bernie, or whatever your real name is, but I already know the way out of this particular labyrinth. Me, I’m going home. On my own. Leaving you and your fat friend to sort things out between you.”