When in Greece

by Emma Lathen

  “Bah!” said Thatcher, becoming more xenophobic by the moment.

  “Everett’s in Istanbul,” said Charlie quickly. “His bond issue should be just about tied up. Why don’t we alert him to stand by, and get over to Athens as soon as he can?”

  This, in turn, produced a cable from Turkey.

  ANKIST BOND SET STOP PREPATH STOP MAKRI DOUBTS STOP INFOSEEK STOP GABLER

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” muttered Charlie when Thatcher passed this document on to him. Everett Gabler’s admirable frugality was frequently tinged with parsimony. One of the passions of his life was testing the outer limits of cable code.

  Not that translation was difficult; the Ankara-Istanbul monorail debenture arrangements were nearing satisfactory culmination. Gabler was available to move on to Athens. He wanted to know what was going on.

  And, being Gabler, he could not help reminding those present of his frequent and bluntly phrased doubts about Hellenus and, more significantly, about Paul Makris & Son. Gabler’s doubts were so often in evidence that they did not always carry much weight; this, however, did not keep Everett from citing their presence on the record with great regularity.

  “I’ll airmail Ev a letter, filling him in,” said Charlie resignedly. He had already heard Everett’s views on the whole subject. “Makridoubts! I don’t know what Ev has against Makris!”

  But he did know, just as Walter Bowman did and John Thatcher did. Paul Makris & Son was a firm of great respectability and financial integrity. Otherwise the Sloan and others, including two governments, would not be associated with it. Certainly Makris in Manhattan was an impressive collection of engineers, accountants, and consultants—all housed in simple, expensive elegance. Makris’ legal affairs were handled by Carruthers and Carruthers, one of Wall Street’s doughtiest and staidest law firms. Thatcher knew that Makris Ltd London and Makris et Cie Paris must be similarly impeccable. Charlie had already assured him that Makris Athens was the very model of the modern international firm.

  It was, despite Everett, all open and above board, as it had been for many years.

  Yet, adhering to Makris was the whiff of something else, something elusive, quick silvery, ephemeral. Was its flexibility too supple for Wall Street? The quickness that had something of the cobra’s strike about it? Thatcher had heard others besides Everett hint darkly that the Makris Empire was like an iceberg, seven-eighths hidden from view.

  Thatcher himself continued to believe, quite privately, that Paul Makris, who was a small, sallow, totally bald and pleasantly reserved, man encouraged this reputation. It was worth millions.

  “No matter what Everett thinks about Makris, he’ll go in once the negotiations begin! Now, I propose to forget about Greece for a while!”

  They scattered, returning to their routine chores and wrenching their attention away from Greece according to ability. The looming menace of Caracas and volatile oil interests made it reasonably easy for Trinkam. Walter Bowman got caught up in a complex and felonious situation unfolding with SEC assistance, on the American Exchange.

  But John Thatcher was scheduled to lunch in the executive suite with the Sloan’s president, Bradford Withers, and to think of Withers was to think of foreign climes. Temporarily at loose ends, he was currently occupying his magnificent offices at the bank, but he was certainly the prize world traveler on the premises.

  “Greece?” Withers asked vaguely, interrupted in his measured denunciation of New York weather. “I make it a point to drop in whenever I’m in the vicinity. Did I tell you about the time Carrie and I were having tea with the king?”

  Realistically, Thatcher wrote off Withers as a source of useful information. This was a shame, he thought; given normal perceptions and a very mild interest in banking, Withers could justify his endless peripatetics by producing a serious challenge to the research department’s intelligence-gathering prowess.

  But Walter Bowman and his staff were in no immediate danger. “. . . seemed like a very nice chap,” Withers was saying.

  Hastily, Thatcher apologized and asked who this particular nice chap was.

  “That economist fellow they’ve arrested. He had just come back to Greece when Carrie and I were there, and we had tea with him and the king! Now he’s in jail! He didn’t look like a radical to me, John, although they tell me he taught up at Harvard before he went out to California.”

  Thatcher was not fool enough to interject a comment.

  “Some of our Greek friends told us,” Withers confided, “that all the trouble began when the young man picked up an American wife!”

  As might be expected this told Thatcher more about Bradford Withers and Carrie than about the reform movement in Greece.

  Later that afternoon, however, he was privileged to get more useful tidings.

  Looking mildly pleased, Miss Corsa announced an overseas call.

  “Nicolls,” Thatcher told himself with pleasure. He liked to see the Sloan’s young men performing creditably. Not even garbled remarks from London and Geneva dulled this satisfaction.

  It was certainly a wholesome American voice that ultimately greeted him. But it did not belong to Ken Nicolls.

  “Mr. Thatcher? This is Riemer from the Embassy. The Ambassador asked me to get through to you, sir. Something rather strange has come up here, and we thought you should be informed immediately.”

  “Yes,” said Thatcher encouragingly.

  Riemer, distant and mildly apologetic, was also, it seemed, desperately tired. At any rate, he had trouble forming sentences.

  “It’s the police. I mean the civil police, not the military. We’ve just had a visit from them . . .”

  “Go on,” Thatcher said tightly.

  There was a buzz. Then Riemer said: “They want to question Ken Nicolls about a murder.”

  “What!”

  “Now, we’re not altogether sure of what has happened,” Riemer said earnestly, “but the story seems to be that the police—the civil—oh, I already explained that, didn’t I—well, the civil police have found a corpse!”

  Now it was Thatcher who could not form a sentence.

  Riemer continued. “Shot as I understand it. Well, it’s all very confusing, but the police say they want to know about a business card they found on the body. Ken Nicolls’ it says, ‘Sloan Guaranty Trust.’”

  As the crumpled body of Dr. Elias Ziros lay untidily on the asphalt, confusion reigned in the baggage yard of the Salonika railroad station. It was fully a minute before Ken could think clearly enough to realize that not one of the soldiers held a gun. At the same moment that his own jarred faculties returned to life, the officer exploded into action. Barking at his subordinates, he himself ran to the body now lapped in an enormous pool of blood. The subordinates, in their turn barked.

  Ken did not understand a word, but a rifle butt in the kidneys is an infallible communication device. Almost without knowing it, he was being propelled into the wagon. His fellow prisoners were less recalcitrant. Once they grasped the fact that someone out there was shooting prisoners, their desire to put sheet steel between themselves and the world outstripped that of their captors. The doors banged closed within seconds of Ken’s entrance, a heavy metal bar dropped into place and they were in motion.

  There was no light in the interior of the wagon and no windows. The five prisoners were in total darkness. To add to their discomfort, the driver switched on his siren and proceeded to take the corners of downtown Salonika with demonic abandon. His passengers caromed off the walls and off each other like so many billiard balls. Even when they were all on the floor, the sudden sharp tilts piled them mercilessly into one corner after another.

  Ken tried to persuade himself that these things could not possibly be happening to him. He was a respectable banker, progressing steadily, if not brilliantly, in his chosen profession. His evil genius at this point was prompted to recall some of the folklore of the Sloan. It was Innes, the bank’s South American specialist, who had escaped, by the skin of his teet
h, achieving international fame as the first Wall Street banker to be shot by Venezuelan security forces as an anti-American revolutionary. Innes, himself, had been less concerned by the closeness of his brush with death than by the implied criticism of his appearance.

  “I ask you, in God’s name I ask you,” he had stormed upon his safe return, “do I look like a guerrilla?”

  For once a question couched in these terms could be answered without evasion. Innes, in Homburg and charcoal grey, did not look like a guerrilla.

  Incongruously Ken was reminded that he himself was getting to look more and more like a desperado. Now that he came to think of it, all his spare clothing, like his reading material, reposed at the feet of an unknown lady in that hellish railroad station that they were so rapidly leaving behind.

  It was not until they were on the Athens-Salonika highway that conditions in the truck improved enough to permit speech. He was indebted to an English-speaking neighbor for the information.

  “They are taking us to Larissa,” said the unknown alertly. “That is military headquarters for the North of Greece. There they will undoubtedly shoot us.”

  This calm declaration produced a howl of protest from a further corner, a howl that resolved itself into a torrent of yet another unfamiliar language. Finally the speaker controlled himself and resorted to English.

  “They cannot shoot me! I am a Turk! An innocent Turkish tobacco buyer. Istanbul will never tolerate such an atrocity.”

  Ken’s neighbor, who had appointed himself an all-purpose translator, spoke briefly in Greek. His fellow-countrymen responded vigorously.

  “They say that if we are to talk of atrocities, Istanbul has much to answer for.”

  “Are we then in the nineteenth century?” demanded the Turk passionately. “No! I repeat my government will not permit this!”

  More Greek.

  “They say,” said the interpreter with bright detachment, “that that is not how things are done anymore. The Greek Army saves itself unnecessary trouble. They do not tell Istanbul they are going to shoot you. First, they shoot you. Then they apologize to Istanbul and say it was all a mistake. They mistook you for a Greek. What government is going to waste time protecting the rights of a dead national? It would be wasteful, deplorably wasteful.”

  The Turk became inarticulate in his protestations. He could scarcely have felt worse at this disclosure of Greek practices than Ken. For one glorious moment there had been a vision of a warm, protecting American ambassador. That vision died a quick death. Where, thought Ken savagely, is our much vaunted technical progress?

  In the nineteenth century, an Englishman could fall afoul of the Ottoman Empire and, in spite of the weeks necessary for communication, London would learn of his peril and dispatch a leisurely gunboat which would arrive in time to effect his rescue. And rightly so, thought Ken, whose views on gunboat diplomacy were becoming more imperial by the minute. But now, in the midst of radio, telephone, nuclear submarines, and Telstar, what happens? He was going to be shot out of hand and then the Greek Army would explain that all along they thought he was Andreas Papandreou.

  Unless, of course, they had already shot Papandreou, in which case it would be embarrassing to explain away two of them. But they had made some 6,000 arrests already. There was an almost unlimited number of Greeks, undesirable in the eyes of the present de facto government, for whom Ken Nicolls could be conveniently mistaken.

  The interpreter was trying to calm the Turk by the force of pure reason, never a wise proceeding.

  “You saw what they did to the old one, did you not? Shot him out of hand. Why, then, do you say they cannot do it to us?”

  “That poor old one,” declaimed the Turk emotionally. “I was speaking to him ten minutes before he was shot. I even gave him my copy of Der Spiegel.”

  Ken’s head swung up suddenly. He broke in without hesitation. “But I spoke with Dr. Ziros only about 20 minutes or so before I was arrested. Quick, ask the others, if they had anything to do with him.”

  The interpreter was so excited that he almost forgot his self-appointed mission. “But I too . . . no, wait, I must tell the others.”

  The babble of interest presently arising made it clear that Ken had hit the nail on the head.

  “They say they all spoke with him at the station. The doctor here had coffee with him at the snack bar.”

  “And I myself met him at the information window. That is very good.” The interpreter sounded genuinely pleased. “You have given us a reason for this occurrence. Why should the military go into a crowded railroad station, seize four Greeks, a Turk, and an American at random and proceed to shoot them? It is nonsensical. But now we know that it was not at random. They simply watched Elias Ziros, then seized him, and everyone with whom he spoke. That explains everything!” he ended on a note of triumph.

  Nicolls was unable to join the triumph. He did not want reasons; he wanted rescue.

  “It is monstrous!” said the Turk roundly.

  A rumbling from the medical man expressed equal disapproval.

  “He is from Athens,” the interpreter explained.

  “He says what can you expect from Macedonians and Thessalonians. They are all barbarians. I am a Macedonian myself. I understand the problem. It is all because the coup was made by the colonels instead of the generals.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand,” said Ken wearily.

  “It is simple. Everyone has a coup ready to prevent Papandreou from winning the May elections. That is, everyone on the right. The National Radical Union party has a coup ready, the king and the generals have a coup, and these miserable colonels have a coup. Now, if the king and the generals have their coup, what happens? Everything stays the same, is it not so? The party stays in power, the king stays on his throne, the generals and the colonels stay generals and colonels. So everyone is happy! No one is nervous! There is no need to shoot!”

  “But,” said Ken, faint but pursuing, “if Papandreou was going to win the election, then most of the electorate is unhappy.”

  “Oh, that!” said the other airily. “People may want something new, but they don’t become genuinely unhappy unless you take away what they already have. And that is what has happened. Look! The party people are in jail. The king doesn’t know what’s going to happen to him. And even a general knows something’s wrong when the colonels are running the country.”

  “Yes, yes, I can see that.”

  “So what happens? The generals want to crush the colonels, the colonels know it and are nervous. The result is that we get shot! Now what kind of a coup is that?”

  “A totally unsatisfactory one,” Ken had no hesitation in replying.

  This satisfied his companion, who then diverted the stream of his lucidity to the other Greeks. Ken was left to the only constructive exercise he could think of, namely reviewing his formidable life insurance coverage for the benefit of his wife and children. He was certainly not going to waste the few remaining hours of his life trying to penetrate the thickets of Grecian politics.

  As part of his conscientious preparation for his first overseas assignment he had reviewed the economic and social reforms proposed by the younger Papandreou, and they had not startled him by their wildly Marxian flavor.

  But he was through with that kind of idiot conscientiousness. Cliff Leonard knew nothing about Greece. He would emerge from the coup alive. A little of that sort of detachment might mean some hope for Nicolls. This was an avowedly rightist government. He was a representative from the bastion of capitalism. If he got the slightest chance, he was going to have to push himself as a bloated capitalist, a prop to fading monarchies and arrivist military juntas. Being from America wasn’t going to get him anywhere. Being from Wall Street might possibly save his neck.

  This possibility he did not care to measure in statistical terms. It would probably work out at something like one in 10,000. The overriding probability was that he would be hauled out of this wagon and shot before he c
ould find anyone who spoke English. Nicolls set his teeth grimly. He had damn well better shout, then. It might bring the odds up to two in ten thousand.

  It was just as well that Ken had set his teeth. It would have helped if he had braced his legs as well. Suddenly, without warning, there was a tremendous jolt which brought them all sliding forward in their billiard game again as the truck smashed to a halt.

  Then, even more terrifying, the whole body of the truck seemed to rise on its springs and leap lightheartedly up and down like a joyous young elephant trying out pogo sticks. The steel plating groaned and cracked like pistol shots as the successive stresses weakened its fabric. Then there was one last furious report and a cool lash of air entered with a view of starlit sky. One of the rear doors sagged drunkenly from its remaining hinge.

  Shakily they began to rise and make their way backward, clutching at smooth walls for support.

  “I don’t know what this is all about,” the interpreter whispered, his brightness finally and entirely deflated, “but me I leave while I have the chance.” He spoke for all of them. Willing shoulders pushed the half doors open. For a moment they hesitated, trying to make out how much the truck was canted over in the uncertain light. Then, as they dropped to the ground, it heaved galvanically upward to meet them.

  “Oh, my God,” screamed the Turk in startled horror. “It’s an earthquake!”

  Chapter 5

  O Attic Shape!

  “. . . A tremor of three on the Richter scale,” read Charlie aloud. “Fordham University experts say this indicates moderate-to-severe earth tremors rather than a major earthquake . . .”

  Bowman was pursuing another account. “Here, listen to this!” he interrupted, “According to Greek military authorities, there have been many casualties, although the exact number is not yet known. Communications have been disrupted. The injured and homeless . . .”

  Bowman continued through ruined bridges, impenetrable passes, and blocked roads while Charlie located the follow-up story in the inner portions of the Times. “. . . The Red Cross, medical teams and aid from nearby U.S. military installations airlifted to stricken areas. . . .”