When in Greece

by Emma Lathen

  Chapter 9

  Eureka!

  Hard as Greece was proving to be on Nicolls and Gabler, it was, in many ways, harder on Miss Corsa. Given the nature of events, it was she who relayed each unsavory development to John Putnam Thatcher.

  “There was a call, Mr. Thatcher,” she announced as he returned from a long conference with George Lancer.

  “About Greece?” he asked wearily. “If it’s another report of no progress, just file it and forget it!”

  Miss Corsa persevered. “Yes it’s about Greece.”

  “Of course it is,” said Thatcher. “What else could it be? If I’m not getting cables from Greece, I’m in conference about Greece.”

  Miss Corsa had no time to waste. “It’s from the State Department,” she told him. “They called to report that they have been informed by the Embassy in Athens . . .”

  “Oh my God! So many channels and so little information!” Thatcher snorted.

  Pointedly, Miss Corsa ignored this and reproduced a message announcing a second forcible entry into the Hotel Britannia. Again somebody had scoured Nicolls’ room. The Embassy was insisting on vigorous police action with a review of the activities of hotel personnel.

  Thatcher absorbed this, meaningless as it was, and involuntarily recalled his luncheon conversation with Paul Makris.

  “There must be some sort of mistake,” he said.

  Coldly Miss Corsa assured him that the message was absolutely accurate as it stood.

  “Hmm,” said Thatcher. “Well, God knows what it means, but we’d better get in touch with Gabler.”

  “I’ve tried,” Miss Corsa said, fatigue in her voice. “I haven’t been able to contact him.”

  “He’s probably cornered King Constantine and is busy giving him the third degree,” said Thatcher absently. “I wonder . . . do you think some of these Greeks have confused Nicolls with someone else? After all, he isn’t carrying diamonds—or atomic secrets! Why are they breaking in and searching his room—after killing him, for all we know, and turning out his pockets! Why are—”

  “Mr. Thatcher!” Miss Corsa cried out warningly.

  Too late. From behind him came a small moan. Thatcher turned. To his horror he found himself face to face with a young red-haired woman in an advanced stage of pregnancy.

  Jane Nicolls was staring at him with equal horror. Her coppery curls, carefully brushed into a tumbled swirl, accentuated the bluish pallor around her lips. She made a valiant attempt to maintain her self-control. Then: “You haven’t . . . you haven’t heard any news?”

  “My dear!” said Thatcher simultaneously cursing himself and hurrying to her side. “Of course we haven’t. I was simply speaking in the heat of the moment.”

  She rewarded him with a wan smile. “I was so frightened,” she said with a sigh. “I came because I had to find out . . .”

  Suddenly she broke off. Her expressive green eyes went blank for a moment. She put out a hand to steady herself against Thatcher’s arm.

  “Let’s go into my office,” he said anxiously.

  Her grasp on his arm tightened. She took a sharp breath.

  A hideous suspicion dawned. Thatcher looked closely at her, and then searched many years back in memory. Enlightenment came.

  “Good Lord!” he exclaimed. “Here, sit down, Jane. Fine, now don’t you worry. Miss Corsa, I’m going to need some help . . .”

  Miss Corsa started to rise.

  “No, no, the phone,” Thatcher directed her hurriedly. “Call the nurse! Call the limousine! Call the hospital! I’m afraid that we’re about to have a baby!”

  The next six hours were busy enough to enable Thatcher to do what he had been claiming he wanted to do, namely, put Greece totally out of his mind. It was doubtful, however, that he was suitably grateful since this entailed frenetic activity inappropriate to his age and station.

  “After all,” he said, quite late that night to an amused Lucy Lancer as he assuaged his near exhaustion with brandy in the Lancers’ apartment, “I have been through this three times before. That seems to me—and seemed to me at the time, I might add—enough for one man!”

  George Lancer tactfully refilled his vice-president’s glass but Lucy asked: “How are they?”

  Austerely Thatcher reported that mother and daughter were doing fine and braced himself for the usual sentimentality that accompanies birth.

  “How much did the little girl weigh?” Lucy cooed. Thatcher sincerely admired Lucy Lancer, but he knew about feminine foibles from his own wife and from his daughter Laura. He had long since learned to be kind, but firm.

  After exchanging a sneaking look with George, he said: “Lucy, I do not know how much the baby weighs. Please bear in mind that, through no fault of my own, I have been forced to race through the streets of New York . . .”

  “In a limousine, John,” Lucy reminded him. “It could have been a taxi.”

  “What difference does that make?” Thatcher began, but recollected horror brought him to a halt.

  In the limousine he had assumed that his chief problem was getting to the hospital in time. Hospitals, after all, were expressly designed for these emergencies. Miss Corsa, thank God, could be relied on to alert the hospital, the obstetrician, and the Nicolls’ home on Brooklyn Heights. With clenched jaw Thatcher had sat out the ride uptown, alternatively calculating their progress through heavy traffic and the alarming rate at which Jane Nicolls’ spasms were accelerating. He had forced words of encouragement through dry lips and patted a hand whenever it was available. When he had, at last, surrendered the expectant mother into professional hands, he had wiped his brow and congratulated himself that the worst was over.

  Sam, the chauffeur, who had been silent throughout while he had been praying for the absence of all traffic jams, joined in his relief.

  “In the nick of time, if you ask me, Mr. Thatcher,” Sam beamed.

  “Thank heavens!” said Thatcher devoutly. “But she’ll be all right now.”

  “I’ll have to move the car. You want me to find a place to wait?”

  “No, no. That’s all right. I’ll stay here. You go back to the Sloan. And, Sam!—Good work!”

  Sam grinned cheerfully, touched his cap, and pulled out into the street.

  Thatcher, now that he could catch his breath, asked for the nearest phone booth. The decent thing he decided would be to get the addresses of the grandparents so that he could announce the results as soon as they were available. But Miss Corsa proved strangely elusive.

  “I’m so sorry,” the switchboard operator said over and over again, “but Miss Corsa’s line is busy.”

  Finally, sounding shell-shocked, the operator said disbelievingly: “Miss Corsa says you’ll have to wait, Mr. Thatcher. She has some important calls to make.”

  Stunned, Thatcher obediently left the number of his pay phone and prepared to wait his secretary’s pleasure. Dimly he realized that the atmosphere, if not the event, was familiar. It had been over 35 years since this last happened to him, but he remembered that, in questions of childbirth, all women tended to dismiss all men as distracting non-essentials. With some justice, perhaps. But still, it was going a little too far when his secretary relegated him to the position of importunate suppliant. Particularly when she was safe at the Sloan while he, so to speak, was in the battle line.

  When the phone finally rang, he advanced with a few well-chosen words at the ready. But Miss Corsa beat him to the punch.

  “Mr. Thatcher how is Mrs. Nicolls?” she asked anxiously.

  “Fine!” said Thatcher at his brusquest. “Now look here, Miss Corsa—”

  “Good. Don’t let her worry about the baby.”

  “What do you mean? Don’t let her worry about the baby. What else do you suppose she’s worrying about?” he demanded.

  “I don’t mean your baby,” said Miss Corsa with uncharacteristic confusion. “I mean our baby.”

  Thatcher took a deep breath. “Maybe we had better start again from the begin
ning,” he suggested with iron control. “How many babies are you expecting?”

  “Oh, Mr. Thatcher, I’m sorry. But it’s so upsetting. I’m talking about the baby in Brooklyn Heights.” “There’s no one there now, except the cleaning woman. And she has to go home before her children get back from school.”

  “Ah!” At least Miss Corsa had not gone round the bend. But it was irritating to find her occupied with trivialities.

  “Well, Miss Corsa,” he said out of the depths of his experience 35 years ago, “you’ll just have to find another woman to come in for the night. Then, when you’ve done that—”

  It was Miss Corsa’s turn to exercise control. “Yes Mr. Thatcher,” she said repressively. “I have already made eight calls on the subject. But that’s all right. I think that the wife of one of the junior trust officers will be able to stay the night if necessary. And I have spoken with Mrs. Nicolls’ mother in Boston. Unfortunately the planes are rained out, but the train should get her here before midnight.”

  Feeling vaguely guilty, in fact feeling as if it were his entire fault somehow, Thatcher humbly asked for the phone number of the senior Nicolls in San Francisco. He knew that, nature being what it was, if the limousine had been delayed by fifteen minutes, Jane Nicolls would have had her baby on the spot. On the other hand, now that she was safe in the hospital it would be hours and hours before there was issue.

  Reconciled to the need for patience, and armed with the San Francisco number, he had proceeded to the obstetrics waiting room. There he had opened the door and stared, appalled.

  Unbelievably, the room was populated entirely by minors. He remembered the waiting room of 35 years ago. He had been exposed to it three times. It had always contained a motley collection of men—trim, taut executives; big, sweating blue-collar workers; tidy, worried little clerks—but all of them, indubitably, adults. And what did he find here, for Christ’s sake? Schoolboys! There were two of them, with book bags at their feet, actually doing homework! And every single one of them, it seemed, had a transistor radio slung over his shoulder. Thatcher tried to get a grip on himself. Was that so surprising? Our boys in Vietnam were taking their radios into the front lines—where presumably they had other things to occupy them. Why not into a waiting room? Grimly Thatcher sighted a chair, somewhat isolated from its fellows, and began to pick his way over shambling limbs. It was at this point he had realized that the occupants of the room were staring at him with mass disapproval.

  “Lucy,” he complained savagely to his hostess, “I had to pace around that room with a bunch of teenagers who looked on me as a dirty old man!”

  George Lancer could no longer contain himself. He broke down and howled.

  John Thatcher reviewed his afternoon and identified the culprit. “Charlie is going to pay for this!”

  George commented that it was a shame that Charlie had not been on duty.

  Lucy pointed out that Charlie, a born bachelor, would certainly have fainted at a critical juncture. “There’s nothing so helpful in these things as experience.” She looked severely at Thatcher. “And John, I am thoroughly ashamed of you. Think of that poor girl! Worrying about her husband, then having to go through this!”

  Gloomily Thatcher replenished his glass. In point of fact he had been able to think of nothing else. As soon as it became apparent that Jane Nicolls was in no danger and that the tiny daughter—six pounds eight ounces and exuberantly healthy, although he was not going to indulge Lucy with that information—had an endearing pink halo, it became unbearably cruel that young Nicolls should not be at their side. That he should be missing—or dead.

  Lancer shook his head. “What was that business about his room John?”

  “It was ransacked for the second time. This time his belongings were stolen as well.”

  Together they pondered this.

  “But why are people ransacking Nicolls’ room ad infinitum?” George asked the world at large.

  “I was thinking,” Thatcher said sadly, “before today’s little adventure, that somebody is making a bad mistake. Somebody thinks Nicolls has something of value. They . . . killed him, searched the body, didn’t find anything, then searched the room twice . . .”

  “Oh, no!” said Lucy in soft dismay. “Not with the baby . . .”

  Lancer cleared his throat. “I don’t like to ask this, John, but is there any chance that Nicolls was up to something?”

  He was not impugning Ken Nicolls’ personal integrity. The Sloan employed no one, in any capacity, with whom smuggled heroin or counterfeit currency was remotely conceivable. But it was simple realism, nonetheless; every firm with international operations knows all too well that various arms of the U.S. Government stake out patriotic claims and act, so to speak, as free loaders, turning bona fide businessmen into couriers—and worse.

  “And it saves them money, too,” said Thatcher irascibly. Cloak and dagger, like cops and robbers, irritated him immensely when played by adults. “I don’t know George. I do know that nobody ever approached Charlie.”

  “But Nicolls is younger and idealistic,” said Lancer obscurely. “Washington swears that they didn’t . . .”

  “But would Washington know? The CIA seems to have seceded from the nation,” Thatcher said brutally. Things were looking blacker and blacker. “There’s only one thing. These searches.”

  “Well?”

  “Why two of them? Doesn’t that suggest more than one group, looking for whatever it is?”

  But he got no direct answer. Instead, George rumbled “Makris” suggestively enough to tell Thatcher that here was another adherent of the Mephistophelean Makris theory.

  “Do you think Makris could have anything to do with Nicolls’ disappearance?” George asked deeply.

  Thatcher tried to be honest. “On the face of it, no. So far he’s been scrupulous with us about Hellenus. But there’s no denying that he has all sorts of irons in the fire in Greece. I do get the impression he knows more than he is saying.” He paused, and then added: “I also get the impression that he is suspicious of us.”

  “Us?” said George Lancer, genuinely indignant. The Sloan’s contribution to world peace and understanding was precious to him. “Why should he be suspicious of us? Good God, even this new Greek Government trusts us.”

  In the distance, a phone trilled.

  With rare pessimism Thatcher said, “George, I don’t have any answers. All I know is that I am beginning to fear the worst. Everett will move heaven and earth to find out what’s happened to Nicolls, but I’m not sure that will be enough.”

  The houseboy materialized in the doorway.

  “Mr. Thatcher? A Mr. Makris would like to speak to you, sir.”

  Thatcher arose. “Something new,” he said. “And in the very nature of things, bad.”

  The voice on the phone was low-pitched, almost hesitant. “Ah Mr. Thatcher. I am sorry to disturb you, so late. But, I have just received news that I think you will want to hear.”

  “Of course,” said Thatcher, smothering a yawn. He did not waste time inquiring how Makris knew where to find him. He would not be surprised to learn that Makris had already sent a bouquet to Jane Nicolls.

  “No, you are certainly not disturbing me. We are eager for any news you may have.”

  Makris was strangely apologetic. “An employee of mine in Athens has just called.”

  Thatcher made an encouraging noise.

  “Improbable as it may seem,” said Makris in an odd voice, “it appears that yesterday your Mr. Gabler was kidnapped in broad daylight. He has not been seen for 24 hours.”

  By pure act of will, Thatcher kept his voice free from any emotion.

  “Improbable indeed. Er . . . tell me, do you have any more details?”

  Makris did not have many. “According to my men in Athens, nobody—that is, nobody official—knows anything about it.”

  “Do you believe that?” asked Thatcher bluntly. “At the moment,” Makris said slowly, “I do not know what or
whom to believe.”

  “I see.” Thatcher paused, then said merely, “I need hardly ask that you relay any further information you receive.”

  With unimpaired politeness, Paul Makris agreed that he would.

  After mutual courtesies, Thatcher put down the receiver. He hesitated a moment in the decorous elegance of the Lancer hallway, trying to digest this latest outrage. Then suddenly invigorated, he rejoined his hosts and described the conversation.

  George was almost incoherent. “Ev. . . . Kidnapped? For God’s sake, I’ll call Washington! We’ll send in the Sixth Fleet . . .”

  Lucy, examining her guest, was more perceptive. “John, you’re relieved, aren’t you? You’re not so worried any more?”

  Thatcher considered this. “You’re right, Lucy. I am relieved, although I don’t know why!”

  But by the next morning, he did. With quick decision, he was explaining the situation. Stunned, Walter Bowman for once, was not taking things in.

  “They’ve kidnapped Ev?” Bowman repeated. “Ev?”

  “That’s what Makris says,” said Thatcher, checking a list, pressing the buzzer for Miss Corsa, and tearing open a cable. “And this does too,” he added, tossing the flimsy cable across the desk to Bowman.

  The U.S. Embassy in Athens now sounded demented.

  Bemused, Bowman read. “Ev! Why would anybody want to kidnap Ev?”

  “Exactly the point,” said Thatcher bracingly. “Ah Miss Corsa. Now let’s see . . . we’re going to be busy. Oh yes, flowers for Mrs. Nicolls . . . oh, you’ve already done that . . . good! Now, send off this cable to Trinkam, first thing. He’s to drop everything and get back as soon as possible. Good. Now when you’re through, hurry back.”

  Bowman bewilderedly stared. “John. Will you tell me . . .”

  Thatcher cut in. “Listen Walter this kidnapping proves it. Somebody is gunning for the Sloan—not for Nicolls. Obviously, if they’ve gone after Everett as well there’s a chance that Nicolls is safe . . .”