The investigation concluded that he’d dined with his murderers at a seaside taverna. Forgive me, but that hypothesis doesn’t hold water. There is simply no dining establishment in Salonica that would serve lobster with green peas. They may know a thing or two about mussel pilaf and stuffed peppers, but that’s as far as it goes. There’s tangible evidence to the contrary, too: the Greek police searched the bins of every restaurant and taverna as far as Mihaniona. They turned over every leaf and found no trace of that dish.
Which means that Talas must have dined in a private home. The aspersions they cast on me later, that only at the home of a British citizen would he have been treated to a meal of that sort, that one way or another I must have been involved — these were merely attempts to blacken my name. If it ever becomes an official accusation, I’ll take the appropriate measures.
As for Talas, you know what there is to know. He was aggressive and headstrong in his reporting, and uncompromising in what he wrote. An American through and through. He advertised his integrity far and wide, to the point of making himself unpleasant. Wherever he went, he left a trail of ruins and wounds. He pointedly ignored the press releases of the Greek administration. He did his own research, trusted in no one.
When he asked me for information about the General, I hesitated to answer him. I preferred to keep my knowledge for someone else, someone more judicious, some colleague of his who would have a better understanding of what was at stake. Talas was an excitable amateur, not an experienced correspondent.
Don’t forget, he also wrote pieces against British policy in the Middle East. People in the British foreign service took note, and rightly so. They asked their American colleagues to rein him in. But there wasn’t much the Americans could do. Their admonitions fell on deaf ears. The British weren’t pleased, but they had to keep things in balance.
Whoever told you that Talas was the first western reporter to fall victim to the Cold War apparently had no idea what was really going on.
Talas, my dear, went looking for a fight. He saw the glint of the knife and rushed straight at it.
THROUGH OTHER EYES
The Americans readily accepted the explanation that the murder had been committed by communists trying to put the administration and its allies in a difficult position, with the ultimate goal of turning Americans against Greeks. This theory was challenged by a lack of forensic evidence, or hard evidence of any kind. That was the biggest sticking point in the investigation.
In those days of mayhem and rage, one well-respected newspaper published an editorial that lay the facts on the table. If, God forbid, the perpetrators were found to be affiliated with the right, the Americans would hold the entire Greek government responsible. Consequently, there was only one solution. And as the government is weak, powerless, and sickly, having only just managed to get back on its feet, the administration is terrified that this situation might add other troubles to its already long list. So it crosses itself and prays that the murderers turn out to be communists — because if they aren’t, we’re lost, wrote the shrewd publisher, and many of his readers bit their lips with worry.
Around that time, Rimaris’s son, the one who’d been studying in New York and had perhaps gotten mixed up with embezzled funds, went to visit Zouzou at home. He urged her to tell the newspapers that her husband had been killed by communists. Zouzou started to cry, declaring that if she’d had a gun, she would have killed herself already. Rimaris’s son laughed at the widow’s tears and overblown words. He pointed out that there was a perfectly fine window for her to jump out of — he even opened it ostentatiously and stood there, waiting.
Meanwhile at the offices of the Security Police they were tailoring Gris’s file to suit their needs. They made him an officer of the Communist Party of Greece, with the General as his mentor. They said he’d been trained in Moscow, and circulated a rumor that he killed a police officer during the Axis Occupation. The investigation wasn’t turning up any evidence, but that problem could be solved easily enough. His refusal to cooperate became unquestionable proof of his guilt. He walked toward slaughter with his head bowed.
His statement kept changing, to come increasingly in line with the events. Once the accusation against his mother for collaboration had been dropped, none of the eminent lawyers who got involved in the case seemed to notice that the only basis for a ruling against him was a confused, nearly incomprehensible confession.
Gris had given that confession on his feet, over the course of several hours. His sentences ran amok, they had no consistency; his statement was packed with borrowed language, with the vocabulary of the security police. He spoke in the name of his country, praising its mighty past, expressing his abomination of communist ideals, taking the weight of the world on his shoulders. I was a communist, I was a member of the Communist Party of Greece, and I declare that Greece my Fatherland is innocent of the murder of Jack Talas, which has been unjustly laid at its feet. I impeach and indict the Communist Party of Greece and Cominform and Moscow as perpetrators of this crime. When a person becomes a Greek, he speaks the truth and nothing but the truth, and I have decided to become a Greek. As I sat in my cell my eyes were opened and I became a Greek. A person becomes Greek only once in his life.
Tzitzilis couldn’t have put it better himself. It was a statement of values, less confession than manifesto. Salonica was under strict martial law. The city slept and woke with a pistol to its head. The communists had bombed it, the citizens’ sleep was dogged by fear. Tzitzilis was the city’s protector.
Meanwhile, foreigners living in the city recorded their impressions and sent their reports to distant, carefree countries. One of them, Wallace Chilly — a Swiss-born British citizen with a degree in classical philology from Oxford and five foreign languages on his résumé, a distinguished rhetorician well-versed in ambiguous language and sophistry, an interrogator of prisoners of war, and therefore an expert torturer without consideration or shame, as Cavafy would have it — had the foresight to flee to Finland and lay low. His absence was covered up, though some commented on how he’d vanished off the face of the earth right after the murder took place, indeed even before the corpse was dragged from the sea.
Chilly’s superiors protected him: this was no time for Britain to get mixed up in a case that was, after all, an American affair. When his name was mentioned and the poison-penned reporters started sniffing around, the British officer under whose authority the issue fell announced — unofficially but emphatically enough for all interested parties to take note — that Chilly had the habit of undertaking dangerous spy operations. That was the reason I requested his transfer, he clarified, even before the Talas case broke.
Rumors that Chilly had murdered Talas elicited sarcastic smiles and sharp comments from those in the Foreign Office. The British often relied on unconventional characters, people who jumped out of airplanes without parachutes and didn’t hesitate to use extreme measures if they thought circumstances demanded it. Chilly was a perfect example. He and his men were waging a propaganda war against the communists. Fraudulent techniques were their bread and butter.
The situation was critical. Greece considered the United States its savior, and had welcomed the Americans with hosannas and wreaths of laurel. The negotiations regarding the Marshall Plan brought hope to the broken country. NATO was just beginning to take shape, and the Berlin blockade wasn’t far in the future. None of the involved parties, Greek, British, or American, wanted Talas’s murder to knock any of that off course.