“Where do you think they went?”
“I’d say you’ll find him listed on the manifest of some ship, out of some Greek port, maybe not here, maybe Athens, or Istanbul. As to where he went, it’s anybody’s guess. Argentina? America? Mexico?”
“Anywhere safe from the guns,” the detective said. “Are you feeling better, sir?”
“I am, thanks.”
“Maybe you need a day off.” Then, “What became of the dog?”
“With the maids. You might look for a car, though if they parked it at a dock somewhere it’s probably stolen by now.”
The detective began turning off the lights. “I’ll write this up as a theft from the bank. And issue a fugitive warrant.”
“Not much else you can do,” Zannis said.
They locked up the house and walked toward the detective’s car. This banker knew it was coming, Zannis thought. Knew somebody who knew somebody, and they told him, “Get out, while you still can.” And maybe he, or she, whoever it was, nameless, faceless, wasn’t wrong. Enough, Zannis told himself. Forget it, at least for today.
But it didn’t forget him, and he wasn’t done for the day. Because when he returned to the office, Sibylla told him that the telephone operator at a hotel in Basel was trying to reach him.
So Zannis couldn’t go home. He waited at the office, Sibylla left at five-thirty, and Saltiel went home an hour later. The phone didn’t ring until after nine. On the other end of the line, “Hello? Hello?” It was a bad connection, charged with crackling and static, the woman’s voice faint. Zannis put a hand to his other ear and said, “Yes? Can you hear me?”
“Hotel Mont Blanc operator, sir. I have to send a bellman to find your caller. Please hold the line.”
“Yes, fine,” Zannis said.
Three minutes later, another distant voice. “Hello? Herr Zannis?” The woman was almost shouting.
“Yes?”
“This is Emilia Krebs.”
“Hello. Are you all right?”
“I’m in Basel. I came here in order to call you.”
“Oh?”
“It’s about the two sisters. Called Rosenblum.”
“Who?”
“Two sisters, in their forties. They were librarians, in Berlin. Have they …”
The line went dead. Zannis said, “Hello? Hello?”
Then the static returned. “… to Salonika. Hello?”
“Hello. Yes, I’m here. What did you say?”
“I gave them your name.”
You did? “Of course, I see.”
“Have they called?” Her voice was tense, barely under control.
“No, I’m sorry, they …” Again, the line went dead, and this time it stayed dead. Zannis wasn’t sure what to do. Wait for the connection to return? Or hang up so the operator could make a new call? He looked at his watch, let two minutes go by, then placed the receiver back on the cradle. What had she done? Clearly she’d sent fugitives, two Jewish women from Berlin, to Salonika. Where he was to help them. She could have asked, at least. But maybe she couldn’t, he thought. He sat there, his mind working, staring out the window at a streetlamp on the Via Egnatia. Then the phone rang and he snatched the receiver.
“Hotel operator, Mont Blanc. Your call is reconnected, one mo-…”
The static was worse on the new connection. Emilia Krebs shouted, “Hello? Herr Zannis?”
“Listen to me.” Zannis’s voice was loud and urgent and he spoke quickly. “I don’t know where these people are, they haven’t contacted me, but if they do, I’ll send you a postal card. It won’t say anything special, simply a greeting from abroad.”
“Meaning they’ve arrived safely.”
“That’s it. Now, if you want to write to me, just buy Panadon tablets, the aspirin. Are they available in Berlin?”
“Yes.”
“Melt them in cold water, then write with the water between the lines of a letter and, if you get a letter from Greece, iron it, not too hot, the writing will appear.”
“How ma-…” Again, the line went dead.
It came back a few seconds later. Zannis said, “Hello?” and started to speak, but, after a click, a new connection. Now the voice of a woman, some operator in some country, spoke angrily in a language Zannis couldn’t identify, and then, with another click, the connection was cut off. He waited at the desk until ten-thirty, staring at the telephone, but it was silent.
He would never hear from the sisters, he was almost certain of that. Evidently they’d set out from Berlin, some days earlier, trying to make their way to Salonika, where Zannis could help them get to Turkey, or Palestine, or wherever they could manage to slip over a border. Slip over, or bribe their way over, because as Jews in flight they were welcome nowhere in the world. Nowhere. Not one single country. And now, not as adept and forceful as their friend in Berlin, they had vanished. Well, lately people did. And they were never heard of again.
Back in his apartment, Zannis couldn’t sleep. He was exhausted, had expected to be dead to the world the instant his head hit the pillow, but he’d been wrong. He tossed and turned, his mind racing. What had happened to him at the banker’s villa-that tight band across the chest? He’d always been healthy, he had to be, there was no choice. Now what? Or maybe it was just nerves, which was, he thought, maybe even worse. But it had reached him, he had to admit that, the almost certain knowledge that invasion was imminent. This banker was a certain type of man, a type Zannis knew well. He had friends who knew things, and you couldn’t plan an invasion-recall soldiers from leave, resupply your army with ammunition, medical stores, and everything else-without people finding out about it. So the banker fled, and fled in a hurry-grabbed all the money he could and ran. Sauve qui peut! Run for your life! Write a note to the maids, do something about the dog, lock up the house, and go. Poor dog. They were, the dogs, considered special spirits in Greece: faithful friends, fearless guardians. I’m sure I was right about the dog, Zannis thought, flipping his pillow over. The maids, the “good girls,” would take care of it.
And they were special spirits, faithful guardians.
Thus it was Melissa who figured it out, sensed it, before he did. Zannis must have dozed because, just after dawn, she growled, a subdued, speculative sort of growl-what’s this? And Zannis woke up.
“Melissa? What goes on?”
She stood at the window, out there, turned her head and stared at him as he unwound himself from the snarled bedding. What had caught her attention, he realized, were voices, coming from below, on Santaroza Lane. Agitated, fearful voices. Somebody across the street had a window open and a radio on. It wasn’t music-Zannis couldn’t make out the words but he could hear the tone of voice, pitched low and grim.
He opened the window. One of the ladies who sat in a kitchen chair on sunny days was standing in the street, her black shawl pulled tight around her head and shoulders, gesticulating with her hands as she talked to a neighbor.
Zannis leaned out the window, called her by name, and said, “What’s going on?”
She looked up at him. “The Italians,” she said. “They’ve invaded us.”
Poor Mussolini.
Such a puffed-up, strutting horse’s ass. Not a man to be ignored, the way he saw it. And surely he had been ignored. Left standing there, shouting slogans from the balcony, thrusting his chubby fist in the air, while that sneaky Hitler conquered the world. Took Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and Denmark. Now that was an empire!
And Mussolini? And his new Roman Empire? What glory had it won? Not much. Occupied Albania, publicly scorned as “a handful of rocks.” And Ethiopia. What would you call that, a handful of mud? And Libya, a handful of sand? And oh yes, not to forget that when Hitler invaded France, Mussolini rushed in ten days later and took … Nice! So now the doorman at the Negresco would have to bow down to the might of Rome.