It was twenty years since he had left it. Telemachus, his son, whom he had left an infant, was now grown up. His wife, Penelope, had remained faithful to him, although he had been reported dead, and a number of nobles were endeavouring to force her to marry one of them. Believing him to be still alive, she had resisted their pressure by saying that she would choose a new husband only when she had finished weaving a beautiful shroud for old Laertes, Odysseus’s father. Each night she undid most of the work she had done on it during the day.
Odysseus might have been murdered by his wife’s suitors had he gone straight to his house alone and unarmed; but his natural caution led him first to appear as a castaway, so that he could find out what had been taking place during his absence. In turn, he revealed himself to his old shepherd, his father and his son, then he went to his own house as a beggar. No one there recognised him, except his old dog, who crept off a dung-heap to welcome him, then died at his feet. The place was filled with the suitors, who had taken it over and were wasting his substance in riotous living. While they were drinking at a banquet, Odysseus and Telemachus hid all their arms, then rallied their own faithful servants and exacted vengeance, slaying the leading interlopers with their arrows and driving the rest from the house.
As this bare outline of the greatest adventure story ever written ran through Robbie’s mind, he decided that he could not leave it out. By then, the aircraft had passed over the southern tip of Kos. To the right lay the marvellous prospect of the coast of Turkey, with its mile upon mile of mountains outlined against the blue sky. Before them, only a few miles off, lay the great island of Rhodes.
Sheltered by the Turkish mountains from the east, and further south than the mainland of Greece, it was, Robbie knew, one of the most favoured spots in the world. It was said not to have been there when Zeus had taken land as his Kingdom and had given Poseidon dominion over water, but to have been thrown up later by a volcanic eruption. Apollo had asked Zeus for it and it had been given to him. It was his own tiny province and he had made it a land of sunshine and roses.
The aircraft landed and the passengers walked across the tarmac to the small airport building. Then ensued the usual wait while the baggage was being unloaded. Robbie and Stephanie sat down at a table and had cups of coffee. While they were drinking it, one of the airport men came through carrying a big bundle of the morning’s newspapers which had just come off the plane. He was carrying one loose copy in his hand. Whistling cheerfully as he passed, he threw this copy on the bar counter. It did not land squarely and slipped off near Robbie’s feet. He picked it up and, as there was no one behind the bar at that moment to whom to hand it, he unfolded it.
The headline in heavy type on the front page was a cheerful one:
‘SOVIET AND U.S. ACCEPT INDIA’S OFFER TO MEDIATE’
Then, further down the page, another headline in smaller type caught his eye. It ran: ‘Police anxious to trace British Ambassador’s nephew.’
24
The Persistent American
The muscles round Robbie’s mouth tightened and he swiftly read the paragraph, which ran:
‘On Saturday evening last a fatal accident occurred on the Olympia-Tripolis road some miles west of Vitina. A Mercedes driven by Mr. Carl Cepicka, an official of the Czechoslovak Legation, ran into another car, sending it over the precipice. The second car is believed to have contained Mr. Robert Grenn, the nephew of the British Ambassador, and Mrs. Václav Barak, the wife of another official of the Czechoslovak Legation, who are known to have left Athens together on March 28th.
Mrs. Barak went over with the car, which was later found burnt out, and Mr. Cepicka is reported to have died shortly after the accident. Mr. Grenn, however, is said to have jumped from the car before it went over; but he has since disappeared, and the police are anxious to get in touch with him.’
Stephanie had leant over and also read the paragraph. Robbie re-folded the paper and put it behind him on the bar, then she said in a low voice: ‘We had to expect they would put something in, and it might be worse. Evidently the police have not yet let on to the Press about the way Cepicka met his death. They may think, too, that making it look as though they want to question you only about the accident will induce you to give yourself up. Anyway, this won’t start a public hue and cry after you.’
Seeing the paragraph had brought Robbie sadly down to earth; but he took such comfort as he could from her comment, and soon afterward recovered his spirits sufficiently to take an interest in the pretty country through which a taxi they had secured was taking them. The Airport lay inland, but the road from it led to the north-west coast, then ran right round the northern end of the island to the city of Rhodes, which faced east from its tip. The run gave them no sight of the city as the Hotel des Roses lay at its northern extremity, a palatial block surrounded by its own gardens and overlooking its private bathing beach.
They were there soon after eleven o’clock. Robbie duly signed the register for them as Monsieur and Madame Max Thévanaz of Basle and they were shown up to a comfortable room with twin beds, windows looking out on the sea and a private bathroom.
For the first time in his life Robbie was about to share a room with a girl, and the thought suddenly made him feel terribly self-conscious. To hide his embarrassment, he quickly pretended to be absorbed in the wonderful prospect of the deep blue sea and the Turkish coast, with its chain of snow-capped mountains. But Stephanie, being used to sharing a hotel room with her husband, took matters in her stride. As soon as the porter had brought up their luggage, she began to allot the ample cupboard and drawer space between Robbie and herself, then, humming a little tune, started to unpack.
Before lunch, they explored the amenities downstairs—a seemingly endless succession of spacious lounges, terraces, bars, a ballroom and two restaurants. But, for the size of the place, there were comparatively few people about, and when they went to the office to get a map of the town, an assistant manager told them gloomily that the war-scare had led to many cancelled bookings.
Immediately after they had lunched, they set off for the town and, in a half hour’s walk, were amazed by its contrasts. Rhodes and the other islands of the Dodecanese had been liberated from the Turks in 1912 and occupied by the French in 1915 with a promise that, after an Allied victory, they would be restored to Greece, but by the Treaty of Sevres they had been awarded to Italy. The Italians had then occupied them for over a quarter of a century, until expelled after the Second World War.
Whatever views one might hold about Mussolini, it was evident that Rhodes owed him a great debt. Between the des Roses and the ‘new’ town stood half a dozen splendid buildings of golden-yellow stone, erected by the Italians to house their Administration of the Dodecanese, and one for the Municipality of Rhodes with an arcade modelled on that of the Palace of the Doges in Venice.
The new town, too, had no resemblance to Tripolis or Argos. Instead of a maze of alleys for a market and streets of ramshackle buildings, its market stalls were housed in the long sides of one building that formed a hexagon, having a big open space and a bandstand in the middle. In the well-kept streets that surrounded the market, there were scores of modern shops.
Seaward of the new town lay the harbour of Mandrakhi, with the old castle of St. Nicholas at the end of its mole, and two statues of antlered deer gracing the pylons at either side of its entrance. Somewhere there, Robbie told Stephanie, had once stood the Colossus of Rhodes, which the ancients had accounted one of the Seven Wonders of the World. It had been a bronze statue of Apollo, over a hundred feet in height and with thumbs so large that only a big man could make his hands meet when embracing one in his arms. But it had been the pride of Rhodes—then a great sea-power—for only fifty-six years. In 224 B.C. it had been overthrown by an earthquake and all traces of it had long since vanished.
South of the new town lay the old city. It was entirely encircled by vast walls built by the Crusaders and dominated by their huge castle in the north-wes
t corner. To seaward of it lay the commercial harbour and it was there that the Bratislava must have discharged the cargo that she had for Rhodes. After a few enquiries, Robbie located the Port Authority and learned that she had docked on April 7th, sailing again the following evening. He also secured from the clerk who gave him this information the name and address of the shipping agent who had acted for the ship’s owners.
He was a Mr. Pilavachi and, when they found the street in which he had his office, Stephanie left Robbie on the corner. She then went on to the office and, presenting herself as Mrs. Sebesta, of the Czechoslovakian Travel Agency, enquired for Mr. Pilavachi. It transpired, as she had expected, that he had never heard of Mrs. Sebesta, but he had corresponded with Krajcir and had actually met Barak when he had flown to Rhodes to meet the Czech group landing from the ship.
Having established these mutual acquaintances, Stephanie said that she believed one of the engineers in the group was an old friend of hers, named Zdenek, and, as she was on a few days’ visit to the island, she would very much like to renew her acquaintance with him. Upon this, the Greek shipping agent made no difficulty about telling her that the Czech group was prospecting for oil in the bay of Monolithos, which lay on the south-west coast of the island, some eighty-odd kilometres distant.
When she rejoined Robbie, they walked along to a pleasant café on the water-front, with Venetian arches surrounding a square terrace, and over a drink there discusssed future plans. Both of them were only too well aware that, now the police were looking for Robbie, time was an all-important factor; so there could be no question of putting off until Sunday an attempt to find out what was going on at Monolithos.
As they thought it almost certain that Barak would believe Robbie either to be lying low in one of the small towns in the Peloponnesus, or in one of its ports endeavouring to get himself smuggled out of the country, it seemed very unlikely that the Czech group in Rhodes would have been specially alerted to keep a look-out for him. Even so, the chances of his being able to secure photographs of the site during a week-day seemed slender.
In consequence, Stephanie put forward the idea that she should go openly to the site and enquire for her mythical friend, the engineer Zdenek. Presenting herself as a Czech should allay the suspicions of whoever she talked to there and, although she would not be able to take any photographs of the site, she would be able to carry away in her mind a very full picture of it.
Robbie was naturally greatly averse to her exposing herself to danger, but the odds against Barak’s being there, or anyone else who knew her, were so long that he had to admit that the risk of her running into trouble was very small. As he could think of no other plan, he reluctantly agreed to hers.
That evening they made up for their past three days of privation by an excellent dinner, washed down with a bottle of the local red wine, Chevalier de Rhodes, which they found quite palatable. They followed it with two glasses apiece of another local product, the rich, sweet wine of Kamiros, which they thought really excellent.
There was dancing in the ballroom, but Stephanie evaded further contact with Robbie’s large feet by saying that, having got up so early that morning, she was tired out. Shortly before ten o’clock, she went up to bed.
He gave her the stipulated half hour, then followed. Although he had every intention of keeping his promise, he could not prevent his thoughts from running riot as he went up in the lift; but on entering their room he saw that she was lying in bed with a woolly bedjacket over her shoulders, reading a book, and she did not even give him a glance. He undressed in the bathroom then, while she continued to ignore him, slipped off his dressing gown and got into bed. For some ten minutes he lay there, not daring to look at her, then she yawned, put down her book, said: ‘Good night, Robbie. Let’s pray that we have good luck tomorrow,’ and switched off the light. For a time he lay awake; but he, too, was tired from his long day and, while still vaguely thinking of her as so near and yet so far, he dropped off to sleep.
He had already informed the office that he was one of those eccentric people who preferred to get up and have his breakfast sitting at a table downstairs; so when they were called at eight o’clock, he dressed himself in the bathroom, then left her in bed to enjoy her coffee, rose-petal jam and rolls.
They had decided that, as Monolithos lay some distance from any of the main roads in the island, they might have some difficulty in finding it if they hired a car for Stephanie to drive; so Robbie had booked one with a chauffeur.
At half past nine, with a picnic lunch on board, they set off, and they had not gone a mile before they found that their driver, Tino, spoke quite good English. As a Swiss couple of the educated class, it would have been absurd for them to pretend that they did not also speak English, and there was no escaping his determination to act as their guide.
Some thirty kilometres from Rhodes he insisted on pulling up and taking them round the partially overgrown ruins of Kamiros, which had once been the capital of one of the three. City-States of the island; but later they were amazed to find that, although he had not a good word for the Italians, the only decent buildings in the squalid little townships through which they passed had been Fascist Headquarters.
Believing them to be tourists, which they were in no position to deny, he took them on a long detour up to the Prophet Elias mountain, from which the whole island, set in its deep blue sea, could be seen. Half an hour later they left the main road, snaked inland through the Ataviros Mountains until, still at over two thousand feet above sea level, they passed through the village of Monolithos, turned into a rough track and, a few miles further on, came out of the woods to a flat piece of ground that was evidently a roughly-made car park. There Tino pulled up and, pointing to a ruined castle perched on a mound a hundred feet or more above them, announced: ‘We are arrived.’
When engaging him, Robbie had not realised that Monolithos, although off the ordinary tourist beat, was considered one of the beauty spots of the island, but naturally Tino imagined that to be the reason why he had been hired to bring them there. In the circumstances, and as they still had no idea in which direction from that spot lay the site at which the Czech group was operating, there seemed nothing for it but to accept the situation. By a steep, twisting path between stunted pines they climbed the hill and when, panting, they reached the ruin, they felt that their effort had been well worth it.
The view from the crumbling walls of this long-deserted stronghold was superb, but to them it awarded something more. To the left of the headland, near the shore on the long bay that curved away southward, they could see some scattered buildings. Near them rose a pylon that, from that distance, looked like a child’s piece of Meccano, and beyond the tiny line of creaming surf several boats were anchored. These indications made them confident that it was the place they were seeking.
Returning to the car, Robbie gave Tino his instructions. During the next twenty minutes, going slowly over devious stony ways, he brought them down to within a hundred yards of the buildings. There Stephanie got out and went forward on her own.
For some ten minutes Robbie remained in the car, a prey to considerable anxiety, until he saw Stephanie emerge from the largest of the cluster of buildings with a squat, broad-shouldered man beside her. When they reached the car Stephanie, now speaking Czech, introduced her companion as Comrade Rybáček, the engineer in charge of the group, and Robbie to him as Comrade Witold, a Polish travel agent who was making an exploratory tour of Rhodes with her.
Comrade Rybáček said that he and his two senior assistants had been just about to sit down to their midday meal, and he would be delighted if Comrades Sebesta and Witold would join them. It then emerged that the mythical Comrade Zdenek, for whom Stephanie had enquired, was not one of the group and that Comrade Rybáček did not recall his name as that of one of the hundred-odd passengers who had sailed in the Bratislava but, no doubt, he was in one of the other islands.
Stephanie, having introduced Robbie as a Pole
, protected him from discovery, through his accent, that he was not a Czech. He readily accepted Comrade Rybáček’s invitation and they spent the next hour very pleasantly with the three Czech engineers in a little house which for many generations had been occupied by a Greek family of modest means.
During the meal, Stephanie kept up her role as Krajcir’s principal assistant by mentioning Havelka, Nejedly and Barak with the respect due to Party bosses, but implying that she was well acquainted with them. She then asked innocently how the work was going.
It was Rybáček who replied: ‘As well as can be expected, Comrade, since we are working with an entirely new type of machinery. But, no doubt, our scientists know what they are up to and we shall strike oil in due course.’
From his answer it was impossible to guess if he really believed that his group was prospecting for oil by some new process, or if he was in the confidence of his superiors and blandly maintaining their cover plan. However, both on their way into the house and out of it, Robbie and Stephanie had ample opportunity for a good look round.
The plant being used was exactly similar to that at Pirgos: a single, hollow pylon formed of steel struts, inside it the big screw piercing the earth, nearby a crane for hoisting the weighty sections of screw into position and a powerful engine for driving down the screw; a light railway with tip trucks to run the excavated earth into the sea, and a pile of fifty or more as yet unused screw sections. At these Robbie was able to get a closer look than at those at Pirgos and he saw that, instead of being solid screws, they were more like drainpipes with spirals on their outside. The six-foot lengths were about a foot in diameter, and of that foot eight inches were hollow.
Mayhem in Greece Page 45
