The thought of Fabre reminded me that I still had his passport. I fished it from a pocket and offered it to the forger. He could always use French passports, he said, and would gladly pay me fifty dollars for it. One hundred, I suggested. We settled on sixty-five.
I took money and passports and left. Mine was perfect, good enough to carry me anywhere. I felt a good deal better having it in my possession; I could walk through the streets of Athens without the feeling that at any moment some policeman might tap me on the shoulder and ask for identification.
But I still didn’t feel very good about Kotacek. He was, according to his passport, a Brazilian national named Pedro Costa. But could he speak Portuguese well enough to fool them at Lisbon immigration? And could he refrain from speaking Slovak or German? And could he keep his mouth shut all the way? And, worst of all, would they by any chance recognize him? The Portuguese had certainly heard a lot about Kotacek recently. The abduction, the scheduled trial, the disappearance – it stood to reason that they might have published his photograph in the newspapers from time to time, and that the men in the customs and immigration service might well have seen it, and even studied it. If he was recognized, the game was up.
I went back to the house. He was waiting for me, delighted to see me. He intended to take a little nap, he informed me, but first he wanted me to see about getting him something to eat. I did, and he ate a hearty meal and had me poke some insulin into him.
“I have made a decision,” he said. “We are not going to Lisbon.”
“Oh?”
“We go instead to the United Arab Republic. Think of it – would it not be absurd for me to return to Lisbon? The Czechs know my address there. They would make another attempt to abduct me.”
“But they think you are dead.”
“So let them think so. It would not do for me to reappear there. No, we will go to Egypt. Have you ever been to Egypt? Cairo is a beautiful city, very modern, very clean. We…”
I was sure I could talk him out of it but I didn’t even try. Because he would only talk himself into it some other time. And he would speak German to the stewardess and Slovak to the immigration officer, and everybody would recognize him, and he would shout “Heil Hitler” at some inopportune moment and deliver one of his little speeches about Jews to some Hassidic rabbi, and all the way, while I worried about all the embarrassing things he might do, he would talk and complain and boast and eat and drink and urinate.
The past week had spoiled me. I was used to having him unconscious, and now I had to contend with a wide-awake Kotacek all the way from Athens to Lisbon. It would be several hours’ worth of maneuvering him through situations in which he would have to maintain a front for the benefit of others. I was not at all sure he could do it.
“Listen,” I said, “just tell me where to get my hands on your records. Then maybe you can go on to Cairo after all, and I’ll go to Lisbon -”
“Ha! No, I think not. We will both go to Cairo.”
I hadn’t really expected that to work. I picked up his Brazilian passport and had a look at it. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t the most perfect work in the world, either. If you held it so that the light hit it just right you could see where some of the writing had been removed and a new inscription added. It didn’t look too great right around the photograph; the original photo had been just a shade larger, and it looked funny there, as though someone had messed around with it, as indeed someone had.
These were minor flaws, and I didn’t think they would matter much in the normal course of events. Immigration officers and customs inspectors see hundreds of passports every day, and I doubt that one in ten thousand is a phony. So why should they look for it? A passport normally rates a glance and nothing more.
Unless something attracts their attention. And Kotacek seemed a good bet to attract attention. If only I could put him out, if only he could make the trip in the corpse-like state that I found so infinitely preferable to his real self. Alive, he was a pain. Dead, he was good company.
But there was a difference between palming him off as a drunk on a milk train from Naousa to Athens and playing the same game on an international airline.
Unless…
I left the house and took a cab to the airlines terminal. I bought a pair of tickets to Lisbon. Lufthansa, the German line, had the best schedule, an early evening flight with no intermediate stops between Athens and Lisbon. I bought two tickets in the tourist section, one for Evan Tanner, one for Pedro Costa.
That night Kotacek went to sleep an hour or so after dinner. He seemed to need a great deal of sleep. Ten hours at a stretch during the night, and always a nap or two in the course of a day. Between this and his cataleptic fits, it struck me that the man might as well be dead. He only got to use a few minutes of the day anyway.
I stayed up with Sarkan. We played several games of backgammon, all of which he won, and did some not too serious drinking. We drank ouzo, which is one of the things I cannot drink too much of. Sarkan gave up eventually and went to bed, and I stayed downstairs reading and sipping coffee through the night. When dawn broke I went up to Kotacek’s room. I found my flashlight and sat in a chair next to his bed waiting for him to wake up.
When he did, he got the light in his eyes. Flicker flicker flicker, and back he went to dreamland.
I let him lie there for a while. Then, when I heard Sarkan moving around in the kitchen, I hurried downstairs. “You’d better call a doctor,” I said. “My friend seems to have had a heart attack.”
“Is it very bad?”
“I think he’s dead.”
The doctor was an Armenian and an old friend of Sarkan’s. He came in a hurry, rushed to our patient’s side, examined him at length, and began to massage his heart. That worried me – suppose it worked? But it didn’t, and he didn’t think to cut open Kotacek’s chest and try a fancier method of heart massage. He confirmed that Kotacek was dead, and wrote out a certificate of natural death which testified that Pedro Costa had died of coronary thrombosis.
They were very understanding at the airlines. They sent me to the proper officials and had me fill out the proper papers. Mr. Costa had died in Greece, and of course I would want to ship him back to Brazil for burial. No, I explained; he was a Brazilian citizen, but had originally lived in Portugal and would want to be buried in his family plot in Lisbon. It was all arranged. He would fly on the same plane with me, the Lufthansa flight that very evening. There would be no problem.
They refunded the difference between tourist passage and the fee for shipping a corpse, which turned out to be considerably less costly. With the difference I bought a sturdy pine box. I had the box delivered to Sarkan’s house, where we loaded Kotacek into it. I was a little worried about how he would travel. If the luggage compartment was not pressurized, he might get himself killed in there. I wasn’t sure how it would work. And, if the luggage was not secured some way, he could get badly knocked around.
I called Lufthansa and asked them about it, explaining that I would not want the corpse disfigured. They were understanding again. There was no danger, they assured me. The compartment in which he would travel was fully pressurized and quite comfortable. After all, it was what was used for transporting pets, dogs and cats and such, so it had to be safe.
That helped. It covered all the bases but one. There was still the possibility that Kotacek would come to somewhere between Athens and Lisbon, in which case we were in worlds of difficulty. No one would hear him bellowing down there, but there was a good possibility that he would suffocate.