When in Greece

by Emma Lathen

  Accompanying this melancholy recital was steady pelting rain.

  “Yes, yes,” said Thatcher, gazing at the blurred window pane. “I gather that a small portion of Greece has been shaken by an earthquake—oh, all right, Charlie, a moderate-to-severe earth tremor. Frankly, I cannot see why it has made such a large impression.”

  On balance, Thatcher was inclined to worry more about the announcement that Ken’ business card had been found on a body in the Salonika railroad yards than about seismological oddities. No explanation immediately suggested itself, but Nicolls’ unavailability was now something more than one of the inevitable disadvantages of doing business abroad. Possibly it was more menacing. The U.S. Embassy agreed. No sooner had Mr. Riemer relayed his tidings than mighty wheels began turning, telephones began ringing and officialdom was alerted. But unfortunately, while questions were raised in many circles, answers were not forthcoming.

  “Ziros, Elias Ziros,” repeated an aide of Colonel Patakos. “Outrageous! But my government knows nothing! No, nothing at all!”

  The American Embassy sternly told itself that what happened to Greeks was not its proper concern. It continued to express anxiety about Ken Nicolls.

  “How do we know?” screeched the aide. “We find his card on a body! Then he disappears! No, we know nothing of where he is. Yes, of course we seek him! But these are busy days! We seek many people . . .” Private enterprise, like the Government, was worrying about Nicolls. In the Athens office of Makris, a man gaped at the phone unbelievingly.

  “And he’s from the Sloan? You’re sure of that?” he demanded.

  His informant produced solemn assurances.

  “And the Army simply drove away? There’s got to be more to it than that. It sounds like a conspiracy to me.”

  The informant said it usually was these days.

  “You’re going to have to find out,” the man said firmly. “And fast!” He put down the receiver with an authority that bordered on incivility.

  But there his decisiveness ended. For a moment he stared blankly out the window, many thoughts revolving in his mind. Going to a row of file cabinets by the wall, he removed a folder and studied it, looking for something that was not there. The frown on his face deepened steadily.

  Without knowing it, he started to scrawl a list on the desk pad.

  Hellenus—sixteen million! Sloan

  Coup d’état May 17

  Demetrios?

  As he finished the last word, the point of his pencil broke and he threw it from him with an impatient exclamation. Then, reluctantly, as if it were something he had been putting off, he reached for the phone and started to dial a number that set a buzzer ringing in a palatial villa 20 miles from Athens.

  “Paul?” he asked, then broke off. It was a moment before he went on jerkily. “It’s come. What you were waiting for. The Army arrested a man from the Sloan. And Demetrios!”

  “Aha!” the telephone said thoughtfully, then asked if he knew more.

  “Not yet. If he is still alive, we will soon hear. You know we can trust Demetrios.”

  “I hope so. I hope so very much.”

  When it was borne in upon the Sloan that one of its young men was currently being hunted by the Greek Government, Thatcher thought that George Charles Lancer, Chairman of the Board, might forget his commitment to international peace. Indeed, at one point, Thatcher found himself defending the current state of affairs.

  “No, no, George,” he told his fulminating chief.

  “I’m convinced this is a simple mixup, of some sort. Of course, George! The Greek Government has assured us most solemnly that they will contact us as soon as they locate Nicolls. No doubt this unfortunate earthquake has made communication . . . er . . . even more dubious . . .”

  “Let them,” Lancer growled, “let them harm one hair of his head!”

  Scratch a foreign policy thinker, Thatcher reflected, and you find John Paul Jones.

  Yet despite his soft words in the board room, Thatcher was not happy with the latest turn of events. Nor was Charlie Trinkam.

  “It sounds to me,” Charlie said glumly, “as though somehow Ken stumbled into one of their goddam political messes. But what the hell was he up to?”

  “And,” asked Walter Bowman, raising the question nobody wanted to contemplate, “where is he now?”

  Charlie was beginning to feel the burden of guilt. “How is Jane Nicolls taking this latest?” he asked.

  “She’s a level-headed young woman,” said Thatcher evasively. “Naturally, she’s concerned. But she’s taking heart from the Embassy reports that no Americans have been hurt in the earthquake. And I haven’t felt it necessary to inform her about this—this murdered man!”

  “I should hope not!” said Charlie, horrified.

  Pityingly. Thatcher looked at him. “Charlie, we might as well be realistic. We may have to break even worse news to Jane Nicolls.”

  Distraught, Charlie ran a shaking hand through his hair. “Why the hell? . . . Listen, I’ll scrub this trip to Caracas. I’d better fly to Athens to find Ken myself. God knows what the Embassy is doing. And things are beginning to look lousy.”

  Charlie was offering himself as a human sacrifice. Or, perhaps a hostage to uncertain Greek fortune.

  Thatcher was patience itself. “Charlie, you’re going to Caracas if I have to put you on the plane myself,” said Thatcher. “God knows what’s going to happen to Hellenus! I don’t want a Greek revolution to play havoc with our South American operations too! Now, why don’t you two get some work done while I check around again . . . .”

  In short, by virtue of the prerogatives of seniority, Thatcher managed to speed Trinkam and Bowman back to their desks. He could do without their keening and lamentation. His own predilection was to reduce complexities to manageable proportions. But, such simplification left him more disquieted than he cared to confess. Rightly or wrongly, he could dismiss Greek political upheaval as irrelevant. Rightly or wrongly, he could dismiss Greek earthquakes as fortuitous. Yet pruning only emphasized the stark outlines of the basic question: Where was Nicolls?

  Thatcher swiveled around to gaze bleakly at the continuing downpour. If Ken had fallen before revolutionary bayonets or before seismic disaster then all the telephone calls in the world were futile; there was nothing that the Sloan—or anybody—could do.

  Quite automatically, Thatcher turned back to his desk and to his responsibilities.

  “Miss Corsa,” he told the intercom without emotion, “will you send off that cable to Gabler? Tell him to proceed directly to Athens. We’ll forward instructions about Hellenus. And circulate the usual memos, Miss Corsa.”

  Almost immediately, he was back staring at the endless gray of the New York afternoon. No matter what happened to Nicolls, the Sloan and Hellenus must continue. Having taken steps to insure this, Thatcher returned to the problem at hand.

  One trouble, among many, was the number of lips mouthing the same meaningless sentiments.

  “No Americans are involved.”

  Come hell or high water that was about the best the Athens Embassy could do.

  “Progress at Hellenus is expected to continue.”

  So said governments, economists and assorted technicians.

  “Greece is peaceful, happy and welcomes American tourists.”

  And was that the way a colonel should talk?

  “Bah!” said Thatcher disagreeably. A brief review of the statements from the other side shed no further light.

  “Free Papandreou!”

  “Democracy is Dead in Greece!”

  What he needed, Thatcher realized, was an unprejudiced, fresh, and above all, different view of Greece.

  No sooner had this notion visited him than he was struck with one of those sudden unwelcome insights into exactly where his duty lay.

  Without enthusiasm, Thatcher returned to the intercom.

  “Miss Corsa, will you please get my daughter Laura for me?”

  “Of course t
hose saddles take some getting used to,” Cardwell Carlson was saying. Click. Click. “Here’s a good shot of Agnes. We’re going up to Mychrovladas to see the ruins.” Click. Click. “Oh, here’s a good one. That old fellow is the man who owned the donkey. Now this will amuse you . . . .”

  Thatcher shifted slightly in the darkness of his daughter’s large recreation room and reflected philosophically that all of this was his own fault.

  Professor Cardwell Carlson, now happily installed amidst several thousand dollars’ worth of photographic equipment, was training brilliant pools of color onto the large screen. He was the noted classicist of Columbia University, editor of a new edition of Menander, indefatigable contributor to Studies in Classical Epigraphy and well known as a controversialist in the columns of Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker.

  He was the father of Dr. Ben Carlson, Laura’s husband; he was fundamentally an admirable man, kindhearted to a fault, generous, enthusiastic, and even-tempered.

  He was also appallingly long-winded. When Thatcher joined family holiday gatherings he tended to devote most of his attention to his grandsons or his second daughter, Elizabeth, interested in banking.

  “Now, here’s our hotel room in Sparta,” Carlson was saying happily.

  Laura had more of her late mother in her than he realized Thatcher reflected. She was genuinely delighted to inject a dinner for the grandparents into her busy life, but she did want to know why. She had already assimilated her father’s very moderate appreciation of Cardwell Carlson’s extended analyses of whatever situations were current.

  “Oh, Greece!” she had said upon hearing Thatcher’s cautious explanation. “Father Carlson knows all about Greece.”

  At the time these words struck Thatcher as ominous. But as usual, reality outstripped his direct forebodings. Upon learning of Thatcher’s interest in Greece, Professor Carlson had taken the trouble to equip himself. In addition to large and cumbrous machines, which he lugged in from the car with unfeigned pleasure, he had brought slides. Thousands of them.

  Laura had produced an excellent dinner, deftly dispatched the children to distant places, borne off her mother-in-law since both ladies had seen the slides before and left the gentlemen with coffee, brandy, and a veritable library of transparencies, each one of which elicited happy memories and exhaustive explanations from Cardwell Carlson.

  Thatcher had now been part of a colorful wedding party in Crete—“You’ve never seen such dancing. Here, let me go back. Look at those coins. The women, you see . . .” He had eaten delicious dolmades in a taverna in Nauplia—“Otto of Bavaria, you know. Beautiful harbor. It’s a shame that I overexposed this one . . .” He had uncovered a third-century thimble in excavations near Mycenae—“There, down in the corner, you can see that little spot, can’t you? Well, just a few minutes later, Pezmoglu brought up . . .”

  Now he was climbing a mountain aboard a donkey. Side-saddle.

  “Yes, yes,” said Thatcher, duty bound to prove that he was awake at intervals. “I can see that it is a spectacular country. What I wanted . . .”

  “It’s unbelievable,” said Cardwell Carlson, causing Greek Islands to pound after each other in a dazzling kaleidoscope of blues. “Of course, you can’t really catch the color, even with the best of film. Now here. You see that door? Well, that door was really more of a crimson. Not the coppery color that I’ve got here . . . .”

  When, at long last, the lights came on, Cardwell Carlson rested from his labors, refreshed himself with a brandy, and moved on to analysis of the Greek ethos.

  “. . . A truly simple, unspoiled peasantry. Why, John, as you walk along a village street, small children come out to give you flowers. Poor as they are, they want to share what few things they have. You know, of course, that the word for stranger is also the word for guest.”

  “Of course,” murmured Thatcher drowsily. He was trying to muster enough energy to ask Carlson about the less exclusively rural aspects of modern Greece. But Ben’s father, frowning into the brandy, swept on: “I have always deplored the overemphasis on the mercantile aspects of the Greek character,” he said with classroom judiciousness. “In part, I’ve always thought, it was because of the tremendous energy of the Greeks in America. I don’t know whether you’ve ever realized, John, but most of them have tended to go into business.”

  Perhaps feeling that this was beyond Thatcher’s grasp, he expanded: “I mean, they haven’t become farmers.”

  “So few people have,” said Thatcher with admirable self-restraint.

  “But I feel that this has distorted our view of Greece,” Carlson ruminated. “Perhaps putting undue emphasis on the materialistic. But in Greece—and Agnes will bear me out—there is still a strong sense of the spiritual, non-material basis for values. There is a real disposition to explore human relations. I have seen a simple, humble peasant stopping to smell a rose . . .”

  For a rocky spread of land notable for its lack of fertility, Greece seemed to be strong on flowers, Thatcher reflected. Not that he believed for a moment that the inhabitants of the country spent as much time sniffing blossoms or distributing them to passing strangers as Carlson believed. But then, he did not believe the word picture that was slowly unfolding: a happy, healthy peasantry, breaking into colorful dances at the drop of a handkerchief; noble intellectuals indifferent to sordid gain and advancement; brawny sailors who dreamed only of returning to their native isles.

  Thatcher should have known all along. Asking Cardwell Carlson about labor conditions, hydroelectric plants or taxes in Greece would simply be unkind. As far as Cardwell Carlson was concerned, if you couldn’t record it on film, it wasn’t Greek.

  “. . . My one fear,” said Carlson, just as the ladies rejoined them.

  “Oh, what was that?”

  “I wouldn’t like to see Greece Americanized,” said Cardwell Carlson.

  “But why are you interested in Greece, John?” asked Agnes Carlson, a plump and efficient creature who managed her husband kindly and thoroughly. “Are you thinking of making a trip?”

  “At the moment,” said Thatcher with truth, “nothing could be further from my thoughts.”

  By the next morning, Thatcher saw Charlie off to Venezuela with real relief. As news of earthquake victims trickled across the wires without uncovering a Nicolls or anyone who sounded remotely like him, Charlie might have been expected to grow slightly less lugubrious. On the contrary, he seemed to be taking the position that no news was bad news; Thatcher in fact suspected that he was harboring saintly thoughts about devoting the rest of his life and earnings to the avuncular care of Jane Nicolls and her children.

  Ignoring the atmosphere of incipient martyrdom, Thatcher produced the cable just received from Everett Gabler. Deciphered, it reported that Gabler was ready to depart for Athens. He was going to interview the police, and everybody else he could find. He wanted preliminary drafts of all agreements that Nicolls had been carrying. He would keep in touch.

  Thatcher rather hoped that this impressive combat readiness would spark the competitor in Trinkam. If it did, it was only briefly.

  “I’ll bet the food will play hell with Ev’s stomach,” said Charlie, cheering for a moment. “But, you know, that’s what Ken said. That he’d keep in touch. I hope to God that Ev doesn’t drop into a pit, too. Now, listen John, you’ll keep me up to date won’t you? I can always jet back . . .”

  “You don’t want to miss your plane,” said Thatcher, firmly escorting him out into the hallway and as far as the elevator. “You will be the first to hear any good news.”

  “And bad news too,” said Charlie Trinkam.

  “Oh, get out of here!”

  When Thatcher got back to his office he addressed an editorial aside to Miss Corsa. “I certainly hope that the bright lights of Caracas bring Trinkam back to his senses.”

  Miss Corsa, who disapproved of bright lights on principle, honored Mr. Trinkam for his feelings in the matter of Mr. Nicolls’ inexplicable disappeara
nce. But she had well-founded doubts about overnight conversions. She compromised by looking rather reproachful. Whatever she might have been going to say was forestalled. Walter Bowman burst into the office behind Thatcher. Something had restored his normal spirits. As Thatcher suspected, it was a piece of news.

  “John,” he said portentously. “One of my people has just picked up a rumor. Paul Makris is back in town.”

  Miss Corsa had, after all, borne the brunt of the local discomfort caused by the Greek imbroglio. She turned the full force of her redoubtable personality on Bowman and punctured his pretensions with a few well-chosen words.

  “As I was about to say, Mr. Thatcher,” she reported, “I’ve just taken a message requesting you to call Mr. Makris, at your convenience.”

  Bowman was too big a man to let this stealing of his thunder deflect him. He plunged into active speculation. “I wonder what that means,” he said. “You know, I had the impression that Makris himself was in Athens. Not that you could get anything out of his office. They keep pretty close-mouthed about his comings and goings. But he wants you to get in touch, does he? I wonder what that means.”

  Among other things it meant lunch. Two hours later Thatcher sat across the table from Paul Makris. They were in the unexotic quarters of the Bankers Club and Makris, a spare contained man, had greeted Thatcher with standard business courtesy. It was all a great relief from the Byzantine suspicion prevailing at the Sloan. But, Thatcher noticed, they were drawing attention. Makris always did. The phenomenon of Paul Makris would not have raised so much speculation on Wall Street if he had appeared on the American scene in one of the two standard ways—arriving on Ellis Island as a penniless youth in the twenties or steaming into New York Harbor in the owner’s suite of his oil line’s flagship.

  Instead, he had risen like a phoenix after the Second World War. Not from ashes, however, but from a modestly prosperous trading business in Beirut. The original small office in New York had grown into a world-wide empire, much respected up and down the Street.