Trick or Treat Part 20

'No, I've got an address for her. She's staying in Carlton. She might have a chance if she ditches her family. Nothing known, by the way. So that's the state of play at the moment. Quarantine has cleared your bakery and you're free to start trading whenever you like.'

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'I think I might leave it for the rest of the week.' I had considered this. 'I haven't had any time off since I started Earthly Delights. Until we find out what's going on with the soul cakes. No point in starting up and having to stop again.'

'And give the punters time to forget about those headlines,' said Ms Bray. 'Well, better get on. Say farewell to your puddy-tats, Helen. We have to talk to Corinna's witch. She'll probably turn us into frogs.'

'I think she does toads,' I told her. 'Just loose Ms Vickery on Belladonna and Meroe will be fine. She trusts Belladonna's judgment.'

'So, who's Belladonna?' asked Ms Bray, getting up and brus.h.i.+ng cat fur and crumbs off her blue skirt.

'Her cat,' I said, a little surprised. 'Her black cat.'

I shut the door on her astonished face and went to have a bath. I hoped Meroe wouldn't find it necessary to turn Ms Bray into a toad. I liked her.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

When your day is not planned, it structures itself around tasks and meals, I found. I hadn't had a holiday since I opened the shop, and now that I was free of suspicion, I was elated and felt like doing something just for fun. I rang Jason and told him we were clean.

He whooped. He was going to be employed a.s.sembling Mrs Dawson's flat-pack bookcase. 'I've got my own allen keys,' he said proudly. I just hoped that by the end of the day he would still have (1) all his fingers and (2) his temper intact.

I bathed in lush vanilla foam. I washed my hair. I sat out on the balcony to dry it as the day warmed towards summery temperatures. The tall green indestructible plants which Trudi had put into the blue glazed pots appeared to be thriving. The city hummed around me, busy and self absorbed. People went into Heavenly Pleasures, the chocolate shop, and came out with tiny wrapped parcels full of delight. I reminded myself that I must buy a small selection of their treasure. Daniel came in just as I was thinking that I ought to go for a nice brisk walk to make room for lunch.

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'Ketschele,' he said, kissing the top of my head. 'I love the scent of your hair.'

'Darling,' I replied, 'thank you for the flowers.'

'Flowers?'

'The tulips. They are beautiful.'

'They are beautiful,' he agreed, 'but they aren't from me.'

'No?'

'No.'

'Or the croissants?'

'Not them either. It seems,' said Daniel, with a gratifying edge to his voice, 'that you have a secret admirer.'

'And one who knows me very well,' I said. I could not feel threatened by parrot tulips. 'I have good news. Earthly Delights has been inspected and declared free of any contaminant whatsoever.'

'Wonderful!' Daniel hugged me.

'And I am taking the rest of the week off, because I've not had a holiday, and because the soul cake mystery still isn't solved,' I told him. 'Now, how about you?'

'When I woke and found you gone without a note,' he said, 'I feared that something awful had happened. I was just going to scour the city for you when you came home.'

'Yes,' I said, and explained. He listened intelligently.

'I see,' he replied. 'And you took Mr Wyatt home. That was kind of you.'

'Not entirely,' I said, and detailed what I had found out about him, and for good measure threw in all of Ms Bray's information. Which was what the techno geeks call an info dump, and had to be digested slowly, with a bracing pot of chai and a few biscotti. While he was thinking about it, he produced from his pocket the jewelled plate I had last seen in Barnabas's hands and gave it to me.

'Ephod means "s.h.i.+eld",' he said. He had uns.h.i.+pped his laptop and was typing into it, recording all this new information.

I examined the ephod. It was beautiful. Solid. Studded with all the stones which the Bible had required. I could see that it was meant to hang in the middle of someone's chest, suspended by heavy chains from both top corners. It felt very old, though possibly not as old as Mrs Dawson's Mycenaean brooch. I turned it over and found that Hebrew letters had been engraved on the back, which was otherwise unfigured.

'What does this say?' I asked Daniel 'Rechoosho Shel Beit Kneset Kal Yashan,' he said, still typing.

'Which means?'

'Property of the Kal Yashan Synagogue.'

'And the Kal Yashan Synagogue was in Salonika?'

'Yes, metuka.'

'What does metuka mean?'

'Sweetheart.'

He kept typing. I thought about it. Chrysoula's chain, extorted from a Greek family in Thessaloniki. The ephod, stolen from a synagogue in Thessaloniki. Both stolen by the n.a.z.i administrator, Max Mertens. In, as it happened, Thessaloniki. What had happened to the treasure subsequently? Old Spiro had been Mertens' translator, the old beast. If he knew, it was too late to ask him without a specially equipped fireproof medium. What had Max Mertens done with his treasure? Had it been stolen from him? Had Chrysoula indeed seen him in sailor's clothes, near her home village late in the war?

As if in answer Daniel, still typing with one hand, reached into his pocket with the other and gave me a small bundle of 221.

papers. I set them on the table and pinned them under Horatio's tail, always a useful paperweight.

I had photographs. Black and white, blown up from old ones. A clean-cut man in a uniform. Max Mertens. I always stared into the faces of known monsters, trying to find something in the shape of the face, the expression, the eyes, which told me that this was a man who had shoved the Jews of Salonika into trains and sent them off to dreadful death. Every day, for weeks, until he ran out of Jews. I had never found it in n.a.z.is. They just looked like people. It was the most frightening thing about them. Mertens looked like a moderately well-groomed, self-important man in a uniform, and that was all you could say about him from the outside.

Then I had a photo of a ledger, which I could read because it was in German. Underlined was 'Temple jewellery from Kal Yashan'-Tempel schatz aus Kal Yashan-and under that Goldene kette mit lowenkopf aus Karamboulis, Mary, Venezianisch, meaning a gold chain figured with lions' heads, Venetian, from Mary Karamboulis. Chrysoula's mother's dowry chain and the ephod on the same page. This must have been Mertens' capital acquisitions journal.

Under that was another photo, a blurry face blown up from a smaller picture. It might have been Mertens. He was wearing a Greek fisherman's cap, which one should not wear unless one is both Greek and a fisherman. He was standing on the deck of a small boat, grinning and holding up a big fish. The sign over the pier read Faneromeni in English and Greek and someone had written 1935 on the back. So Max, if this was Max, had been to Greece before the war and knew Faneromeni well. Wherever that was. I could look it up later. I had a Jet Lag guide to Greece somewhere.

Next I found a copy of a bill or account, I thought, but it was in Greek and I couldn't read it. There followed several other accounts, and then a newspaper cutting from the h.e.l.lenic Times, a newspaper published in Greece for a while to educate English speakers as to events in Greece, much like the South China Morning Post. I had always loved it for its flexible interpretation of the language. I was rather sorry when Greece got all modern and the h.e.l.lenic Times started employing people who really spoke English, and even proofreaders, which much diminished its Grauniad charm. Then, of course, it went out of business. The exact date was missing but the year was 1957. There was a large black headline: 'Startling Event in Kalamata Yesterday!' The article went on: In the main market of Kalamata, which is famed for its olives which everyone in the world knows are the best, Mr George Hammadis (72), well known and respected grandfather of seven and proprietor of Hammadis Fis.h.i.+ng Tours You Will Enjoy, was making some small purchases in the market from Mrs Ariadne Loukas (71), widow, whose stall carries the best broad beans in their season from the farm of her son, Vasi (32). Imagine what was Mr Hammadis' surprise when he saw in that market a man who he had never expected to show his guilty face in Greece again, scared as he must be of the righteous vengeance of the brave h.e.l.lenes!

Mr Hammadis was taken aback. His heart beat faster. His face went white. Mrs Loukas offered to fetch him a chair. But, old man as he was, he went straight up to the villain. 'Thou art the man!' he declared fearlessly, pointing the recreant out to the policeman present, who was Constable Costas 223.

Elounda (31), son of Mr Petros Elounda (53) of the Post Office. The man thus denounced attempted to get away but was seized by the growing crowd, who had also recognised him as Max Mertens, n.a.z.i administrator of Thessaloniki, thief and murderer.

Mertens protested his ident.i.ty but Mr Hammadis was honest and sure. He had often seen the villain Mertens in Thessaloniki during the war, when he managed the extinction of the Hebrew h.e.l.lenes and also extorted much valuable treasure from the hapless Jews and the Greeks trying to escape n.a.z.i butchers. Constable Costas Elounda (31) arrested the monster forthwith and sent his a.s.sistant, Probationary Constable Fillipo Pangrati (19), only son of the widow Pangrati (39) of Koroni, to the Post Office to make an urgent telephone message to the police chief in Kalamata.

Then Constable Elounda removed the rascal to the cells in the police station as the people of the market were increasing their protests. We are told that the G.o.dless beast Mertens will be sent to Kalamata and thence to Athens for trial. Readers of the h.e.l.lenic Times will be informed of all new developments in this case as they happen.

Well, well. There ought to be a record of the trial of the G.o.dless beast Mertens, if indeed he was tried. Wasn't 1957 a bit late for war crimes trials? Then again, when had Mossad kidnapped Eichmann? I found my copy of The House on Garibaldi Street. 1957. Well, well, not too late at all. It was time I got dressed. With a nice walk in mind, I put on jeans and suitable walking shoes and my favourite t-s.h.i.+rt.

It was emblazoned with medieval ladies on horseback and the legend said 'Well-behaved women seldom make history'. I put on my woolly jacket and checked the pockets for emergency money and tissues.

Daniel was still typing. I had more bits of paper. Another picture. An account of an earthquake in Kalamata in 1986. Calamitous Kalamata, they called it. That whole sea is ringed with faults, but this one sounded like a particularly bad earthquake, toppling houses, felling sea-walls, killing twenty-two people and injuring hundreds.

The last bits of paper were addresses and phone numbers, written in a variety of inks and crossed out, one after another. Pages from someone's address book, it seemed. They all related to someone called Yanni.

Just as I laid down the last piece of crumpled paper, Daniel pressed save and closed the laptop.

'You were with the raiders who took this ephod from Barnabas, weren't you?' I asked. 'That's how you cut your hand.'

'Yes,' he said. 'I was with them.'

'And you can't tell me who your fellow raiders were?'

'No, I can't.'

'But there's nothing to stop me guessing,' I told him.

'Nothing in the world,' he responded.

I took a good look at him. He looked tired but excited. His eyes were smudged underneath but bright. He was one day unshaven, his jaw darkened. A very attractive combination.

'I've read all the papers you gave me. I love that h.e.l.lenic Times. The style is inimitable. Was Max Mertens actually tried in Athens?'

'He was. That's a matter of public record. They found him guilty and sentenced him to twenty-five years in jail.'

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'Good for them! But, hang on, 1957, isn't that the time of the troubles?'

'Yes, and Max Mertens was sold back to Germany for a huge load of aid. The Germans nailed the money for Greece to the floor and wouldn't release it until they had their Max back. Don't hold it against them too harshly.'

'I don't,' I said. 'Putting Mertens in jail was a nice gesture, though. But what was he doing in Greece? That was bold. There was a picture in your pile that showed he had been to Greece before the war-someone was bound to recognise him.'

'Bold. Or desperate.'

'Why did he want to go back so badly?'

'For that,' said Daniel, 'we first have to see an elderly German and then another elderly Greek. Can you cope?'

'If you can,' I said. 'Though I'm not feeling very pro-German at present. Is the Greek likely to be as bad as Old Spiro?'

'G.o.d, I hope not.'

'This would be Yanni of the many addresses?'

'It would.'

'First,' I answered, 'I must see how poor Mr Wyatt is.'

'He's ruined,' said Daniel. 'According to you, someone in his bakery made the soul cakes.'

'No, there's ergot on his floor, that's all we know,' I said. 'It might have come from that contaminated sack of rye mix, if that was what was wrong with it, and we don't know that. d.a.m.n, I forgot to make a note of his phone number. But I left him mine.'

'He'll call if he needs you,' said Daniel. 'Now, what about this secret admirer of yours? What else has he sent you?'

'Oh, this and that,' I said coyly. To my own surprise.

I didn't know that I did coy. 'All perfect little things, to make me feel better. I felt sure that it was you,' I said truthfully.

'Why did you need to be made to feel better?' demanded Daniel.

'Because of Georgie, of course. And the contamination of my shop and the ruin of my life. Not important at the time, perhaps, but it upset me.'

'Of course,' he said, not taking offence at my tone. 'I'm really sorry about Georgiana. I just didn't notice.'

'No, you didn't.'

He slid an arm around my shoulders and I leaned into his embrace. Sweet Daniel. Now, what was my new Hebrew word?

'Metuka,' I said into his chest, 'let's not worry about it. Where do we find your elderly n.a.z.i?'

'In a nursing home,' said Daniel with a sly grin. 'How's your German?'

'Pretty average,' I replied. My girls' school had been good at languages and they offered outings and cultural evenings as well. Though that had introduced me to Wagner, of course. And Caspar David Friedrich.

'Helmut wasn't a n.a.z.i,' Daniel told me. 'He was only a sailor.'

'Oh, good. I'll just call Meroe and see how she got on with the cops.'

'And I'll call up Timbo,' said Daniel, and reached for his mobile phone.

Meroe answered the shop phone, which meant that she had not been arrested. I listened for background croaking but couldn't hear anything except the pacific tinkle of wind chimes.

'I told them everything,' she said listlessly. 'All I knew about all of it. They attended politely and made notes.

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Belladonna liked that young woman, Helen. So they won't misuse what I said.'