When in Greece

by Emma Lathen

  Dr. Ben Carlson, Thatcher’s son-in-law. Stays quietly in the background.

  Laura Thatcher Carlson, Thatcher’s daughter & family organizer.

  Jane Schneider Nicolls, wife of Ken.

  Sam, Sloan Chauffer.

  Billings, the sardonic respectful elevator operator.

  Characters only in When in Greece

  Dr. Lorna Jones & Dr. Kate Murphy, two fabulously fun and astute archaeologists who pull the Sloan’s chestnuts out of the fire in Greece.

  Mrs. Andreades, Greek shopkeeper who hosts Ken.

  Lycurgos Diamantis, Assistant Night Manager of Hotel Britannia, who has goings on with the Sloan from Mr. “Thatchos” to Gabler & Nicolls.

  Stavros Bacharias, the Ministry Rep who handles the Hellenus project the Sloan is invested in.

  Cliff Leonard, the American field engineer and Ken’s counterpart onsite at the Hellenus Project.

  Bill Riemer, The American Embassy Rep saddled with dealing with all of the goings on.

  Peter Chiros, Paul Makris & Son’s man in Athens.

  Paul Makris, the founder of Paul Makris & Son, that flourishes with a whiff of intrigue.

  Emma Lathen Political Mysteries

  Emma Lathen: As R. B. Dominic

  1.Murder Sunny Side Up 1968. Agriculture.

  2.Murder in High Place 1969. Overseas Travelers.

  3.There is No Justice 1971. Supreme Court.

  4.Epitaph for a Lobbyist 1974. Lobbyists.

  5.Murder Out of Commission 1976. Nuke Plants.

  6.The Attending Physician 1980. Health Care.

  7.Unexpected Developments 1983. Military.

  Tom Walker Mysteries

  Patricia Highsmith Style

  Deaver Brown, Author

  01.18. Football & Superbowl.

  02.Abduct. Sexual Misconduct.

  03.Body. Planned Eliminations for Money.

  04.Comfortable. Avoiding Consequences.

  05.Death. Wrong Place at the Wrong Time.

  06.Enthusiast. Opportunity Murder.

  07.Fraud. Taking Your Chances.

  08.Greed. Heirs Who Know Better.

  09.Heat. Heir Arrogance.

  10.Prodigy. Tom Walker’s First Case.

  A similarly popular Simply Media mystery series.

  Financial & Other Facts

  Emma Lathen is all about the money not the emotion. In that light:

  1.To provide financial incentives for collectors, Simply Media and others savings on groups of 6 eBooks, and the SuperSku (learning from the Star Wars franchise) “all in” collection.

  2.Trust that we have all enjoyed this. But as Willie Nelson, Oscar Wilde, and others have said, we aren’t above the money. Stay well. And thanks from all of us on the Emma Lathen team.

  Deaver Brown, Publisher & Editor.

  www.simplymedia.com

  Chapter 1

  Honor

  Wall Street is the greatest money market in the world. This means, among other things, that it is a quivering communications network, plucking information from the air, putting it on high-speed tickers and speeding it to people who make or lose millions of dollars by knowing things before the rest of the world. The first tremor of turmoil in Germany sets gold dealers on Broad Street cabling branch offices in London, Geneva or Delhi. Gossip about a British cabinet minister can trigger frenzied activity on Blair Street. No banks in Vienna have failed recently, but Wall Street retains an indelible memory of what happened when one did.

  In a word, Wall Street routinely deals with news that does not break into print. Intelligence crucial to the peace of the world, to the fortunes of men, and the fate of nations is grist to the financial world’s mill.

  It does not always form the subject of Wall Street’s conversation.

  “Damned cold for spring,” said Tom Robichaux of Robichaux & Devane, investment bankers.

  His lunch partner was John Putnam Thatcher, Senior Vice President of the Sloan Guaranty Trust, the third largest bank in the world. As director of the Sloan’s trust and investment departments, Thatcher probably dealt in knowledge more recondite than most. He agreed that it had been an unusual April.

  “Rainy too!” Robichaux grumbled over his deep-dish apple pie.

  Tactfully Thatcher repressed a smile. The sodden spring had been oppressive, but in the past 35 years Tom Robichaux had been able to sustain his ebullience in the face of greater catastrophes, including the Great Depression and several divorce-court appearances. Thatcher suspected that Robichaux’ peevishness stemmed from his failure to sell Thatcher on Bingham Corporation, producers of instant hair dryers.

  But after they parted outside the Midtown Club and Thatcher began to stride through the clammy drizzle toward the Sloan, he realized he might be doing Robichaux an injustice.

  First it was aged Bartlett Sims, still inflicting his sharp tongue upon Waymark-Sims.

  “Filthy weather,” Sims harrumphed, observing the pedestrian flow on Exchange Place with open contempt. “Haven’t seen a spring like this for God knows how many years.”

  Thatcher moved out of the path of a flying wedge of secretaries and agreed that it was not a pleasant day.

  “Day?” Bartlett Sims snorted. “More like a month! And don’t try to tell me that the weather isn’t changing. It’s getting worse and worse. Just like most things.”

  With this, he stomped off. Thatcher had long since abandoned attempts to tell Bartlett Sims anything. He proceeded, reflecting that beneath the thin skin of concrete, steel and glass, Wall Street was not very different from the country store of his boyhood in Sunapee, New Hampshire.

  “Well, the drought’s over.”

  The voice in his ear belonged to Walter Bowman, the Sloan’s large enthusiastic chief of research. He was just leaving the bank for a late lunch which would be devoted, Thatcher knew, to milking some acquaintance of inside information to be laid, like a trophy, at the feet of the Sloan’s investment committee. When weather replaced dollars and cents in Walter Bowman’s conversation, it was hypnotically powerful.

  Or, Thatcher mused as he entered the Sloan’s great lobby and gave the dog-like shake which had become habitual during this endless deluge, perhaps he was overhasty. Walter Bowman might have sound professional reasons for interest in the elements; the commodity market, for example, or firms manufacturing irrigation pipe.

  But Billings, the elevator operator, certainly did not. In the brief voyage from the lobby to the sixth floor, he expanded his customary remarks.

  “Good day to stay indoors, Mr. Thatcher.”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Thatcher heartily as the pneumatic doors opened. He made his way to his corner suite of offices, past illicit drying umbrellas, and arrived to find his Miss Corsa waiting for him.

  “Terrible weather, Miss Corsa,” said Thatcher, removing his raincoat.

  But although Tom Robichaux, investment banker, Bartlett Sims, broker, Walter Bowman, analyst, and Billings, elevator operator, might be farm boys at heart, Rose Theresa Corsa was a Wall Streeter to her very core. Dismissing weather as another one of her employer’s frivolities, she reported the news that had just flashed over the ticker tape:

  “There has been,” she said precisely, “a revolution in Greece!”

  Several hours later, Thatcher contemplated Charlie Trinkam and Walter Bowman, summoned for consultation. Bowman scowled as he put his personal information retrieval system to work.

  “Blood doesn’t seem to be flowing in the streets of Athens,” he said, with an inquiring look at Charlie Trinkam.

  Charlie shrugged. “As I understand it, it’s a right wing group of reactionary Greek Army officers. They’ve just rolled in the tanks, and taken over! There hasn’t been any sort of resistance, according to these latest reports!”

  Charlie, one of Thatcher’s senior staff, combined business ability and extracurricular gusto. His untrammeled pursuit of pleasure led him to worlds undreamed of by his conservative colleagues. At the same time, innate financial orthodoxy i
mmunized him against the waves of enthusiasm that sometimes afflicted Walter Bowman. Usually, he was worth considerably more than his weight in gold to the Sloan. Oddly enough, he was currently its ranking expert on Greece.

  With an apologetic look, Walter Bowman added that the news services were reporting thousands of arrests.

  “Just who,” he asked Charlie, “would they be arresting?”

  Charlie began to enumerate. “The entire opposition in the election scheduled for next month. That includes the Central Union party, the trade unions, most newspaper writers, almost all intellectuals, half the civil service—oh yes, and a large part of the diplomatic corps, too.”

  “Perhaps it would be more efficient to concentrate on those the army won’t arrest?” Thatcher suggested.

  Charlie grinned. “You know these military types! The only ones they won’t arrest are other colonels!”

  “Charlie,” said Thatcher threateningly, “we’d better make a lot of money out of Hellenus! This was your brainstorm!”

  “Some brainstorm!” said Charlie ironically.

  Three years earlier Charlie had, somehow, sniffed out an investment possibility, a multimillion dollar project to be located in the mountains near Salonika, Greece. In time this would include a multipurpose dam, extensive hydroelectric power installations and an ambitious transportation-communication system.

  Charlie had reported on this, the Sloan’s investment committee had studied the situation and from such small beginnings had come conferences, negotiations, and preliminary agreements—all culminating in a consortium, that is, a temporary financial partnership between the Government of Greece, the Sloan and Paul Makris & Son, and International Development Engineers. Future financial aid was expected from several agencies of the United States and the United Nations.

  Unbelievable as it may seem, this colossus, known as Hellenus Company, was a perfectly routine venture for a giant bank like the Sloan Guaranty Trust. Sloan money—to the tune of over thirty million dollars—was going to help Hellenus grow in the north of Greece and help profits grow nearer home.

  Nothing in the past year had shadowed this bread-and-butter goal. On a pilot project, large modern edifices were rising in areas previously reserved for goats. Provisional summaries, cost estimates, and revised tax allowances all gave rise to endless conferences and provided satisfaction to the interested parties. With the pilot project nearing completion, Hellenus stood ready to forge ahead and start yielding returns.

  Charlie looked as worried as he ever could. “It’s hard to tell what’s up,” he said. “Just that there’s been this army takeover. Of course, Wilhouse wasn’t happy about the political situation when he got back from his last trip . . .”

  Thatcher was not inclined to take Wilhouse seriously. Almost everybody who had been commuting between Athens, New York, Washington, and London had commented on the deteriorating political situation. The emergence of young Andreas Papandreou—sometime American citizen and professor of economics, who had left the University of California to assist his father in reorganizing Greece’s largest political party—was regarded as so much fuel on the fire.

  But specialists, Thatcher knew, regarded all political situations with disapproval. Kings, parliaments, imperialism, independence—all were so many roadblocks between the Sloan and its single-minded pursuit of the lira, the pound, the peso or, as in this case, the drachma. Until bullets started flying, political ideology did not count.

  “Well, we’ll have to wait and see,” said Thatcher.

  “It’s a shame you’re not in Athens, Charlie. Who’s over there for us?”

  Not that his colleagues wished Charlie ill, far less surrounded by Greek insurgents; but long experience had taught everybody that, during civil disturbances, floods and other cataclysms, it was helpful to have a top man representing the Sloan Guaranty Trust.

  Charlie winced slightly. “Ken Nicolls,” he reported.

  Since Ken Nicolls was very junior indeed, nobody said anything at all. They did not have to.

  Trinkam believed devoutly in nongeographic exploration. Since he was a bachelor living in considerable luxury—not a suburban husband with house, children, lawns and mortgages—he had no reason to hanker after protracted business trips to Romantic Rome, Exotic Cairo, Fun-Filled Frankfurt or Swinging London. Even so, Charlie’s responsibilities took him far too often to places he preferred leaving to vacationing college students or retired Peoria car dealers. The last two years had given Charlie Trinkam his fill of Greece.

  On his last return, while he was sourly pointing out that business offices and Hilton hotels are the same throughout the world, he had glanced up in time to spot the gleam in Ken Nicolls’ eye. Nicolls—tall, blond, seriously devoted to climbing the banking ladder for the sake of wife and infant son—was gazing straight at Romance.

  Bouzoukis. Unspoiled villages. Flowers tumbling over whitewashed walls. Mimosa perfuming the air. A simple, hospitable peasantry. Wine dark seas.

  The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!

  “I thought it would do him good,” Charlie said, sinking other, generous motives. “After all, it’s just a question of routine for the next couple of weeks. The real horse-trading won’t start until the consortium renegotiation.”

  Walter Bowman hitched himself forward. “I don’t know much about Hellenus,” he said untruthfully, “but all this business of tanks rolling into Athens—you don’t think that there’s going to be a real civil war, do you?”

  “With Greeks, you never can tell,” said Charlie slowly. “But I wish I knew what the hell was going on at Hellenus right now.”

  Chapter 2

  Procrustean Bed

  The Coup D’état found Ken Nicolls on location thirty miles north of Salonika, surrounded by Greeks, instead of the sixth floor of the Sloan Guaranty Trust. As a result, the event was less momentous to him than to John Putnam Thatcher and Walter Bowman. They had Charlie Trinkam, who had picked up an amazing grab bag of gossip and speculation in his many trips; when they finished with Charlie they had television bulletins and newspapers rich with analysis and speculation. They had reports from world capitals. They had protests from the American Economic Association. They had the comments of touring Greek actresses.

  Ken had nothing to match, and had been feeling generally disgruntled even before the violence. He had set off on his first European trip for the Sloan in exaltation. Sternly reminding himself that he was a promising banker, not Lord Byron, he had taken his big news home to Brooklyn Heights and presented the trip as a professional plum and nothing else.

  Jane, his wife, knew better. All she said was: “Marvelous! And you’ll need a new two-suiter. You’re going to be back in time, aren’t you?”

  “Mm? Oh sure,” said Ken, dragged back from thyme-covered mountains to the imminent enlargement of his family. “I’ll be back in three weeks.”

  “If you’re not,” said Jane Nicolls sweetly, “stay away for the next 21 years.”

  But anticipation had proved a good deal more gratifying than reality; after TWA finally transported Nicolls to Paris, Rome, and Athens, it seemed that the total upshot was to move him from one conference room to another. The Hotel Britannia was as near exotic Greece and the romantic Mediterranean as he ever came and, as generations of well-heeled English and American tourists could have told him, at the Britannia both exotica and romance were kept on a darn tight rein.

  Otherwise, the Ministry of the Interior, the Bank of Greece, and Paul Makris & Son constituted Ken Nicolls’ Greece, and pretty tiring he found it: long tables and breakeven studies are the same throughout the world.

  Nor did he get much opportunity to explore the night life he had read about; with Hellenus operations in progress for almost two years, the festive phase was long since over. The large cast of financial and technical experts had left wining and dining behind; some old-timers even invited Ken home for real American food. He trudged gloomily from garden apartment cookouts to dull hotel dinners with
German cement specialists and hydroelectric experts, regularly retiring early enough to satisfy the most demanding wife.

  What little of Greece he managed to see was as he waited in front of the Britannia for the official car or from that car’s windows. Athens was crowded, colorful, and busy. But then so is New York.

  Meanwhile the political cauldron boiled on without attracting his attention. The language he heard in hotel and conference room was English and nobody was using it to discuss Greek politics.

  Having been carefully briefed before he left New York, Ken knew that the election coming soon marked a confrontation between right and left. Otherwise, since the Greek alphabet was beyond him, the posters he saw defacing every available surface might just as well have been selling Coca Cola.

  So after two tiresome weeks, Ken was not sorry to leave Athens for the Hellenus site. The flight in a Greek government plane did not give him an opportunity to see the country. And Hellenus offered only the organized chaos of a huge construction site.

  True there were noble mountains in the background, but there are mountains in the background in his home state of California too.

  Visitors to Hellenus were housed in a low rambling building like an inferior motel. As the Sloan’s engineering experts could have told Ken, this was simply a supra-national large-scale enterprise. But Ken, noting the swarms of sun-blackened workers who sported colorful head wrappings, the eternal Greek bureaucrats, the endless representatives of many organizations, simply plunged into his work, regretting that it was not taking place on Wall Street.

  On the morning of April 21, he presented himself at the administrative building as usual; there, he found the compound virtually deserted. The only sign of life was the cluster of guards intent on the radio. They looked up as he approached and burst into dramatic pantomimes, long incomprehensible speeches, and sweeping invitations to proceed, proceed. Then they returned to their listening.

  Wondering if there was some Greek holiday he had overlooked, Ken went into the office set aside for his use and sat in solitary bewilderment for one hour before he was joined by the American field engineer assigned to the project.