Mayhem in Greece Page 2

  To have got there and found the right steps in the huge port would have taken at least half an hour and by then, Robbie felt, MacLean would have decided that something had prevented his keeping the appointment, and have returned to the carrier. Very disappointed at having literally ‘missed the boat’, he made his way to one of the restaurants and ordered lunch for himself.

  As is customary in all but the smarter restaurants in Greece, he went straight to the kitchen to see what was to be had. The restaurants at Toyrcolimano specialise in fish and have little else to offer, apart from cheese and fruit as a second course; but he was shown a fine array of mullet, lobsters, octopus and fresh sardines. Having selected a large lobster, he went out to a table on the wharf and, to while away the twenty minutes while his lunch was being cooked, ordered an ouzo.

  As it was a day in mid-week, and the tourist season had not yet started, few of the tables were occupied; but the old men who earned a precarious living selling roast peanuts or the favourite Greek sweet, sticky nougat, were, as usual, meandering hopefully from table to table. From one of them he bought a bag of peanuts to munch with his drink, then he began casually to scan the people who were already lunching in his vicinity.

  At the table just in front of him there were two men. One was in profile to him; he was dark-haired, tallish, wiry-looking, about thirty-five; had lean, sunken cheeks, a hard jaw and a hair-line moustache. The other, who had his back to Robbie, was older, fatter, broad-shouldered and bald, but for a fringe of brown hair round the sides and back of his head.

  That bald head rang a vague bell in Robbie’s mind, then he realised that the two men were talking in Czech. At that the penny dropped. Robbie had not actually met him, but the man had been pointed out to him at one of the many Embassy cocktail parties as the First Secretary at the Czechoslovak Legation.

  No noise of traffic or street vendors calling their wares penetrated to the secluded bay beneath the cliffs. The silence was broken only by the gentle lapping of water against the sides of the yachts as they lay at their moorings, and the occasional clatter of a knife or fork; so the voices of the two men, although low, came quite clearly to Robbie. Had they been speaking Greek, he would probably have ignored them, and have lapsed into one of his frequent, happy day-dreams. But it was over a year now since he had practised his Czech, so he deliberately listened to their conversation, just to see how well he could follow it.

  With considerable pleasure, he soon found that he could understand what they were saying without the least difficulty. They were talking about tobacco and oil. Neither was a subject in which he took any interest so, at the time, when it emerged that the Czech Government had just purchased the Greek tobacco crop and, as part of the deal, acquired rights to prospect for oil in Greece, that meant nothing to him.

  In due course his lobster arrived. When he was half-way through it, the two men paid their bill and got up to go. As the elder, bald-headed man turned round, seeing him face to face confirmed Robbie’s belief that he was the First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Legation. Neither of them gave him more than a bare glance as they passed his table, and as he went on with his lunch his mind turned to matters more interesting to him.

  He began, not for the first time, to speculate on why Aphrodite, the Venus of the Greeks, the loveliest of all the goddesses, should have chosen for a husband the lame, ill-featured, soot-begrimed Hephaestus, the blacksmith of the gods, who spent eternity labouring at a forge.

  Since his middle teens, Robbie had suffered the pangs of love for a succession of young lovelies, mostly a little older than himself; but he had never even kissed a girl, let alone had an affaire with one. On the few occasions when the opportunity had offered, he had felt terribly tempted to take the hand of his divinity-of-the-time-being and blurt out his feelings for her; but he had been too shy to tell her quietly that he loved her, and had feared that if once he touched her the overwhelming desire to seize and devour her with kisses would prove too much for him. Tongue-tied, and blushing furiously at his thoughts, he had let those few chances slip, and had sublimated his passion into endless day-dreams in which, as a knight in shining armour, he had rescued these fair and mysterious creatures from dragons, ogres, witches and an infinite variety of more down-to-earth perils.

  As he thought about Aphrodite and her ugly, crippled husband, he recalled reading somewhere that the gods and goddesses of the Greek Pantheon were no more than larger-than-life human beings, conjured up by the imagination of a simple people, and that the acts with which they were credited portrayed the normal tendencies inherent in men and women. If that were so, it argued that sometimes the loveliest girls could fall in love with men whom other people considered lacking in attraction. Conscious as he was that, although everybody seemed to like him, it was largely due to pity because they really regarded him as a good-natured but awkward, useless fool, Robbie thought that perhaps, after all, one day the gods would make up to him for all he lacked by causing some beautiful girl to prefer him to all her other suitors, however amusing, distinguished and sought-after they might be.

  Having nothing to do and all day in which to do it, he decided to spend the afternoon wandering about the Piraeus; so when he had finished his lunch he climbed the steep steps up to the corniche road and caught a bus that took him across the peninsula and down through the city. On its far side lay the two great basins, crowded with ships of all kinds and descriptions. For a while he strolled about the wharves, then went to the market, as the activities there had always fascinated him.

  The market consisted of a warren of narrow alleys and broader arcades covering such a big area that it was almost a town in itself. As it was now the siesta hour, there was little going on, although most of the shops were still open, their owners dozing behind stalls but ready enough to do business should a potential customer appear.

  The goods on sale presented a curious blend of East and West that was typical of modern Greece. Facing the harbour was a line of a dozen shoe shops, and most prominent among all their displays were ladies’ shoes of the latest fashion. Hard by them was a group of sweet-makers, offering Turkish delight, almond paste and nougat of a dozen flavours, exactly similar to the sweetmeats being sold in the bazaars of Cairo and Baghdad. There was a score of wireless shops crammed with television sets, and as many others which dealt in hand-embroidered costumes of the richest hues, made after patterns hundreds of years old. On the slabs of the fish shops, in addition to the more usual type of fish, were great piles of sea-urchins, baby squids and, here and there, a fearsome-looking spiky monster of the deep. Prominent in the butchers’ shops hung long lines of legs of baby lamb, for the pasture in Greece is so poor that farmers cannot afford to rear many lambs to sheep, so are compelled to slaughter them while still in their infancy. For the visitor from Western Europe they provide a special delight, since they are as tender as chicken and, when cooked with herbs, much more delicious. Many of the shops sold only plastic gadgets for the most modern kitchens, while others carried on the ancient trade of scent distillers, tempting the women with big glass jars of lemon-verbena, gardenia, stephanotis and attar-of-roses.

  While Robbie, his broad shoulders a little stooped, wended his way between the long lines of stalls, he was surrounded by a little group of children, who pestered him continually with shrill cries for largesse. Most people would have found them an annoyance and sought to drive them away, but he was used to being followed by such urchins, and many of them were so pretty that he always thought of them as cherubs. It was typical of his good nature that, in his left trouser pocket, he always carried a store of drachma copper coins, to toss from time to time, with a wide-mouthed grin, to these importunate little devils.

  Soon after four o’clock he decided to return to Athens, so caught a local bus that would take him back to the other side of the Piraeus. At the terminal there he took one of the bigger buses that plied between the port and the capital. When it had covered a quarter of a mile along the coast road it passed the
great oil refinery that had recently been erected as a part of the N.A.T.O. programme to supply the Fleets of the Western Powers.

  The sight of it brought back to him the conversation he had overheard at lunch, and raised several questions in his mind. The oil for it was, he had always assumed, brought from the Middle East by the tankers that were frequently lying off it. He had certainly never heard that there were any oil wells in Greece. Yet if oil deposits were lying under Greece why had they never been tapped and exploited?

  The multi-millionaire Aristotle Onassis was a Greek. He controlled the greatest tanker fleet in the world, so he should know more about oil than most people. Moreover, he was a patriot. Recently, regardless whether he made or lost money, he had financed Greece’s Olympic Airways, improving their efficiency and comfort to a degree that would enable them to compete with the best airlines in Europe, and this solely with the object of bringing more visitors to Greece so that more money should be spent in his fascinating but impoverished country. Since he had done that, why should he not have used some of his millions to open up for Greece a great natural source of wealth—the oil that the two Czechs had conveyed the impression that they believed to be there for the getting?

  The bus rattled on through the ten kilometres of built-up area that separated Athens from the sea. Long ago it had been a broad corridor, enclosed by two long walls. In the fifth century B.C. Sparta had been the great land power in Greece, and Athens’ only hope of survival lay in keeping open her communications with her powerful fleet which still held the seas. The great Athenian Themistocles had decreed the building and garrisoning of these thirteen miles of walls and so, by bringing the Piraeus within the fortification of the capital, saved his city.

  A few centuries later the conquering Romans had destroyed those walls, so that only a few vestiges of them now remained, and the strip of territory had gradually become a backyard of the city, dotted with suburban villas, rows of shops, garages, plots of land for sale and modern churches. Whenever the bus passed a church several of the passengers in it crossed themselves, as great numbers of Greeks are still deeply religious. But Robbie hardly noticed them or the uninspiring buildings that lined both sides of the road. His mind was slowly revolving the question of why Mr. Onassis should have neglected to exploit the oil resources of his own country, and he could find no answer to it.

  As Robbie entered the Embassy. Euan Wettering was crossing its spacious hall. He was another permanent guest there, and a nephew of Lady Grenn, so he and Robbie were cousins by marriage. He was a few years older than Robbie, and two young men could hardly have differed more in both physique and character. Euan was small and frail-looking, but he made up for his lack of inches by an aggressive, even bumptious, manner. He was extremely clever, having achieved a double First at Cambridge, and he had taken up archaeology as a profession. On learning of Sir Finsterhorn’s appointment, he had promptly wangled a post with the British School of Archaeology in Athens, feeling confident that his aunt would invite him to make his home in the Embassy. Having established himself there, he took every advantage of the prestige it gave him and used it freely to entertain his friends, thereby saving his own money. Secretly he envied Robbie both his fine physique and his fortune, but scarcely bothered to hide the fact that he despised him as a half-wit.

  ‘Euan!’ Robbie called, as his cousin made for the stairs. ‘Just a moment, please.’

  ‘Well; what is it?’ Euan replied impatiently.

  ‘Tell me something. Have you ever found any traces of oil during your archaeological digs?’

  ‘Good lord, no! I only wish we had. We’re always kept disgracefully short of funds, and to strike a gusher would be a godsend.’

  ‘Do you think there’s any chance of doing so?’

  ‘No. There’s not the least likelihood of finding oil anywhere in Greece. But I must rush or I’ll be late for the Swanson’s cocktail party.’ Turning away, Euan ran swiftly up the stairs.

  Three hours later they met again at dinner. Lady Grenn had recently left for England to be with her elderly mother who was about to undergo a serious operation, and it so happened that this was one of the comparatively rare nights when Sir Finsterhorn was neither entertaining nor dining out, so the party consisted only of him and the two young men.

  The Ambassador was a tall, thin man with a prominent forehead from which the hair had receded, and a grey moustache that drooped at the ends. He was reputed to be extremely shrewd and had a very courteous manner, but he had no hobbies, few intimates and, as far as Robbie knew, had never been known to unbend. His father had been a famous mountaineer, and had met his mother while she was on holiday in Switzerland. His name was an Anglicised version of Finsteraahorn, and was given him in memory of his father’s having proposed on the lower slopes of that mountain.

  Dinner ran its normal course, with Euan Wettering and the Ambassador talking of events and their acquaintances, while Robbie made a silent third. That was not because either of the others had any intention of being rude to him, and when there were dinner parties at which the conversation was general, he always made a minor contribution to it; but early in his stay, it had been found that his knowledge of the matters usually discussed when they were dining en famille was so sketchy that it was a waste of time to ask his opinion, so he had become quite used to being ignored.

  It was not until the dessert had been put on the table that Euan suddenly addressed him.

  ‘What’s this bee you’ve got in your bonnet, Robbie, about there being oil in Greece?’

  Robbie looked up with a start. ‘Oh—er—well, it isn’t my idea exactly, but the Czechs seem to think there is.’

  ‘The Czechs?’ repeated Sir Finsterhorn, with a sharp glance from under his shaggy eyebrows.

  With a nod, Robbie proceeded to give an account of the conversation he had overheard that day while lunching at Toyrcolimano.

  ‘Oh, come!’ exclaimed Euan when he had done. ‘You don’t expect us to believe that, do you? I bet you made it up.’

  ‘I’m not given to making up stories.’ Robbie protested mildly.

  ‘Yes, you are. Lounging about all day as you do, your head gets full of nonsense. All these stories you are digging up about the gods and heroes for your book are only myths, yet you look on them as though they had really happened in some distant past. And now it seems you’ve started day-dreaming about oil and the Czechs.’

  ‘No, honestly, Euan, I really did hear those chaps talking, just as I’ve said.’

  ‘Do you mean to tell me that you understand Czech well enough to have taken in all they said?’

  Attacked on his one accomplishment, Robbie bridled at last and retorted: ‘You may be cleverer than I am in lots of ways, but even your Greek is lousy and—’

  Euan opened his mouth to snap at him, but the Ambassador raised a hand, silencing them both, and said:

  ‘We are all aware of your talents as a linguist, Robbie. On that account I find it all the more regrettable that you don’t avail yourself of them to secure some suitable employment, instead of idling about and wasting your time trying to write a book. I don’t wish to be unkind but, for all of us who know you, there is no escaping the fact that you are quite incapable of producing a work of literature.’

  With a frown, Robbie looked down at his plate and muttered: ‘I like doing it, sir; and I don’t care what anyone says. I’m going to finish it. Anyway, Euan asked me about this business of the oil and the Czechs and what I have told him is the truth. He can believe it or not, as he likes.’

  ‘Then we’ll accept your word for that.’ Sir Finsterhorn said more mildly, ‘and I’d like you to describe those two men to me again.’

  When Robbie had complied, the Ambassador nodded. ‘I don’t know who the tall, dark man would be, but you are right about the other being the Czech First Secretary. His name is Alois Nejedly. Are you quite sure that he said that his Government had purchased the Greek tobacco crop?’

  ‘Quite certain, sir. He
referred to it more than once.’

  The Ambassador frowned. ‘It’s strange that I’ve heard no rumour about that.’

  ‘If it’s true, the Greeks must be cock-a-hoop,’ put in Euan. ‘Why should they be, about selling it to the Czechs rather than to anyone else?’ Robbie enquired.

  His uncle gave him a pitying look. ‘My dear boy, surely you know that a considerable percentage of the Greek peasantry depends almost entirely on tobacco-growing for its living. If their Government cannot dispose of the crop for these people at a fair price, they would starve. To sell has become more difficult year by year, ever since the First World War, when so many people took to smoking Virginia cigarettes and the so-called “Turkish” went out of fashion.’

  Euan nodded. ‘But why in the world should the Czechs want to buy Macedonian leaf when all the Iron Curtain countries are supplied by Russia from the tobacco plantations in the Crimea?’

  ‘Surely that’s obvious.’ Robbie looked across at him brightly. ‘It must be because the Greeks included in the deal the right to prospect for oil.’

  ‘But there is no oil in Greece,’ the Ambassador and Euan shot at him almost simultaneously.

  ‘Then there must be something else behind it,’ said Robbie with simple logic.

  Sir Finsterhorn gave him a slightly supercilious look. ‘Since that is your opinion, perhaps you can suggest what?’

  Robbie returned a blank stare. ‘I haven’t an idea, sir. How could I have?’

  ‘It was you who overheard this conversation. If you are right in your assumption, during this talk they might have dropped some hint.’