Stoll had no sooner boarded the ship than he left it again followed by eight men, most of whom were wearing sweaters, or shirts without ties, under shapeless jackets. The cheap, fibre suitcases or bulging grips they carried also indicated that they were low-grade technicians or labourers. Stoll led them over to the Customs shed, but they were not inside it long. In less than ten minutes, they emerged and piled into the small bus.
By this time, one of the lorries had been loaded and the others were more than half-full. Robbie was faced with the question— should he wait until all the packing cases had been loaded and follow the lorries, or follow the bus? Deciding for the working party, he told his driver to keep fifty yards behind the bus then pass it when it halted.
The bus did not go far. It pulled up outside a small hotel called the Ionia, the major part of the ground floor of which consisted of a narrow cafe with a long bar. When Robbie's taxi had carried him some way beyond it, he asked the driver to pull up and paid him off. He was just in time to see the tail end of Stoll's party disappearing into the Ionia, so had no doubt that it was to be their quarters for the night.
It was now close on seven o'clock, and he made up his mind to pay a visit to the Ionia later that evening. If he returned to the Cecil in his old clothes and Stephanie saw him in them, that would call for an explanation which was going to be difficult to think up and, for his foray later, he would need to put them on again. In consequence, he decided to leave her to dine on her own, and have something himself at some little taverna.
While walking back towards George I Square, it occurred to him that, if he did succeed in getting a look at the contents of the crates when they were unpacked, the odds were that they would consist of machinery which would mean nothing to him. The obvious answer was to try to photograph it, then send the picture to Luke. But he had no camera and had never owned one.
After traversing several arcades, he found a shop that sold cameras. When he went in to buy one, he was amazed to learn how costly the most expensive kinds can be. He had half a mind to leave his purchase till the next day, when he could draw more money from the local branch of the Bank of Greece; but the man who was serving him very honestly told him that, if he had never used a camera before, he would do better to buy a medium-Priced one. So he bought an ordinary Kodak, which the salesman showed him how to operate, and three rolls of film.
At a small restaurant nearby, he dined off keftedes—balls of rice crisply fried outside and with a centre of minced meat— followed by a large slab of cake which seemed mainly to consist of assorted preserved fruits and Turkish delight. As it was still early, he followed it with two brews of thick, Turkish coffee, and fortified himself for his coming venture with three goes of a local liqueur made from tangerines.
At nine o'clock he walked back to the Ionia. He thought it almost certain that, even if the Czech workmen had not been forbidden to leave their hotel, they would not have enough money to go out on the town. And he proved right. All eight of them were sitting at two marble-topped tables, obviously eking out two carafes of cheap wine between them.
Only one table was occupied: at it, two Greeks were sitting with two girls. Two more girls were at the bar but, evidently having already discovered that the Czechs could not afford to pay for their attentions, were carrying on an earnest argument together. When Robbie came in, they broke it off and eyed him hopefully; but he was too unused to that sort of thing to smile at them and shake his head. Quickly he looked away, ordered a drink and remained standing at the bar, straining his ears to overhear what the Czechs were saying to one another.
Those at the table nearest to him were arguing quietly about, as far as he could make out, the football results of their favourite teams during the past winter. But at the other table a young fellow with a mop of ginger curls was declaiming loudly against the 'bosses'. It emerged that he hotly resented having been ordered to come on this expedition, because he had had to leave his girl. Another supported him, but said he would not so much mind having been separated from his wife if they were to have the good time in Greece that they had been led to expect; but here they were, the very first evening, left without money, and no arrangement made to take them round the town.
At that, Robbie pricked up his ears. He had ample money on him and was only too willing to do the honours of Patras for this little party if he could manage to scrape acquaintance with it. Nerving himself for the effort, he picked up his glass and walked with it over to the table at which the red-haired young man was sitting.
As he approached, the Czechs fell silent and looked up at him a shade suspiciously; but he managed a smile, greeted them in Czech and added: 'I could not help hearing the language you were speaking, and one doesn't often meet Czechs in Patras.'
The eldest of the party, a man with a scar on his forehead and grizzled hair, said: 'You are not a Czech, though, are you?'
'No, oh no,' Robbie hastily admitted. 'But my mother was. She taught me Czech and told me a lot about her country, so I always enjoy talking to people who know it.' There followed an awkward pause, then he said hesitantly: 'Will you allow me to stand you another carafe of wine?'
His offer met with an instantaneous response from the grizzled man. 'Why yes, Comrade. That is handsome of you. Come and sit down and tell us all about yourself.'
The football fans at the next table had been listening, so they promptly moved their table round to make it one large party. Robbie ordered two carafes of wine and a chair was produced for him. The barman drew the wine from a cask and brought it over. Glasses were filled and Robbie's health ceremoniously drunk. Like all the cheapest w'ines in Greece, resin had been put into it—the theory being that this prevents the peasants from becoming drunk when, owing to the intense heat, they drink great quantities of it while working in the fields—but although harsh, it was not unpleasant.
For a while, Robbie had to cope with a barrage of questions: 'Did he live in Patras?' 'How did he earn his living?' 'What was life like in Greece?' 'Was it true that the Capitalist Imperialist Industrialists lived in great luxury, while the bulk of the people slaved for them on starvation wages?'
As they had assumed him to be a Greek, Robbie did not have to go further into his nationality. He said that he was only on a visit to Patras, and was a professional writer seeking local colour. As far as the Greek people were concerned, he told his hearers that they had only to walk through the streets to see that the great majority was well clothed and well fed, and the amount of goods in the shops was ample evidence that, at all events in the towns, only a small minority could not afford to buy everything in reason that they needed.
A small, wizened man, with a face like a dried apple, insisted that, even if this were true, the workers v/ere still not receiving their proper share from the resources of the State, otherwise there would not be millionaires like the oil king Onassis.
Robbie was about to reply that Mr. Onassis made his money not out of producing oil, but by transporting it in his great fleet of tankers from place to place. Before he had a chance to do so, the young, red-headed man gave a guffaw and declared:
'He does not know what is coming to him. Within a few months we will have many more oil-wells than he has in Greece. We will Hood the market, undersell him and put him on the rocks.'
To this statement, Robbie made no reply. Putting aside the men's obvious ignorance of Mr. Onassis's principal activities, it Presented a new conundrum. Had the Czechs really discovered, by some new scientific device, that there were great oil resources in Greece, and were about to exploit them? Or was that only the belief of these technicians—a cover plan that they had been sold by their bosses, only a small inner ring of whom were as yet aware of their Government's true intentions?