Dennis Wheatley: Mayhem in Greece

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.