Mayhem in Greece

by Dennis Wheatley

  ‘Stop!’ Robbie croaked. ‘For God’s sake stop, and I’ll listen.’

  Barak released him, then spoke sharply to the other men, ordering them out of the shed. All but one of them trooped out, and the exception was standing a yard or so away from Robbie’s left shoulder. Screwing his head round, Robbie got a quick glimpse of him. First he saw a fat little paunch, then the pink face and pig’s features of Cepicka.

  ‘Now, Mr. Grenn,’ Barak began in a harsh voice. ‘This meeting with you gives me very special pleasure. You have caused us a considerable amount of trouble, and we are determined that you shall cause us no more. I warned you in Patras to keep your nose out of our affairs. You chose to ignore my warning, but I should have thought your narrow escape from having to spend some months in hospital in Corinth would have made you see sense. Had you a grain of intelligence in that thick head of yours, nothing would have induced you to come here again after learning yesterday that the lady you knew as Miss Stephanopoulos is a Czech agent. But that is just why you must be regarded as dangerous. By your amateurish blunderings, you may learn much more about our secrets than the N.A.T.O. professionals who are paid to do the job. Therefore, Mr. Grenn, now that you have so stupidly thrown yourself into our arms, we should be lacking in our duty to our country if we failed to take this opportunity to eliminate you.’

  ‘Do you mean … that you intend to kill me?’ Robbie asked hoarsely.

  ‘Exactly,’ Barak nodded and drew a finger along one side of his little tooth-brush moustache, ‘and I cannot say that I am in the least sorry that your folly has landed you in this situation where your death has become necessary to protect the interests of my country. In fact, Mr. Cepicka and I spent most of last night in a train coming from Athens, on the off-chance that, within the next few days, you would pay this place another visit. You see, I wished to be, as I think you say in England, “in at the kill”.’

  ‘You bloody swine,’ Robbie muttered.

  Barak gave a slightly twisted smile, then shook a warning finger in front of Robbie’s nose. ‘Do not become abusive, Mr. Grenn, otherwise I might forget myself. Or, rather, recall too vividly that I have a personal score to settle with you. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to smash your face to pulp; but we have to remember that we are in a foreign country. Therefore your body, should it be washed up, must show no marks of violence in excess of such buffets it might receive through being thrown about by the waves.’

  ‘So … so … you’re going to drown me?’

  ‘Yes. Presently I shall send one of my people into the town to buy the largest size in men’s swimming trunks for you. At the quietest hour—shall we say three o’clock in the morning—Mr. Cepicka and I will come to you here. We shall take off your clothes and put you into the swimming trunks, then we shall take you down to the motor-boat we have here in our little harbour, run you out to sea and drop you overboard.’

  Robbie’s heart lightened a little. He thought it unlikely that they would take him out more than four or five miles and, unless there was a very strong current against him, he felt sure he could swim that distance back.

  Next moment his hopes were dashed. With another slightly twisted smile, Barak went on: ‘Miss Stephanopoulos tells me that you are a very powerful swimmer; so naturally we shall take precautions against any chance of your swimming ashore. In that, too, we must be careful not to leave tell-tale marks on your body. A loop of hose under your armpits, with its end stoutly wired so that you cannot undo it with your fingers, will serve. By it we shall troll you behind the boat, just as one trolls a hooked fish. Now and again we shall haul you in, to find out how you are standing up to the treatment. It will be interesting to see how long you take to drown. When we are quite satisfied that there is no longer life in your body we shall cut the wires at the neck of the loop of hose and cast you off.’

  As Robbie listened his eyes were lowered and, when Barak spoke of trolling him in a noose of hosepipe, he noticed that his wrists were secured to the elbows of the chair in which he was sitting by short lengths of smooth, rubber hose. That ensured that, however much he wriggled his wrists, the skin would not become broken and cut as it would have against rope or cord. In consequence, when he was thrown out of the motor-boat, the only mark on his body would be a bruising where Barak had hit him under the chin and that, when he was washed up, would be taken as one of the bruises that a body normally receives through being tossed by the waves on to a beach. All this made it obvious to him that the manner of his death had been carefully planned in advance and, as he thought how idiotically foolhardy he had been to come to Pirgos again after Stephanie had returned to her employers, Barak gave him the final details of their arrangements.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘we shall collect your car and drive it a few miles further down the coast. Then we shall leave your clothes and an unmarked towel on a quiet stretch of beach. When your body is washed up and identified, the authorities can take their choice. Either that fine swimmer, Mr. Grenn, became bored with bathing in a pool of the river Alfios, so decided to run down to the sea for a real swim and had the misfortune to swim too far out; or that Mr. Grenn had been desperately in love with his pretty secretary, and her desertion had disturbed the balance of his mind, so he had chosen this way of putting an end to his life.’

  This mocking reference to Stephanie turned the knife in Robbie’s mental wound, and he was about to hurl curses at Barak when Cepicka, who had so far remained silent, gave a titter and added: ‘How such a high-spirited girl survived three weeks of boredom with this fool, I cannot imagine. I congratulate you, Comrade Barak, on her fine sense of duty in not leaving him before she had to.’

  So that, thought Robbie, was the impression of him that Stephanie had given these friends of hers. He could have wept with rage and humiliation, but managed to control himself by the thought that, if he showed how deeply he was hurt, they would only bait him further.

  Barak gave an abrupt laugh and said to Cepicka: ‘Come along, we will leave him now.’ Then, when they had stepped out through the doorway, he glanced at his wrist-watch, turned and said to Robbie:

  ‘It is now a little past three o’clock, Mr. Grenn, so you have just about twelve hours to live.’

  A minute later, the door was shut and padlocked, and Robbie was left to his bitter thoughts, fears and self-reproaches. He realised now that he had been mad to pay another visit to Pirgos. He should have left Olympia and gone down to Kalamai, or across to Crete, where other groups of Czechs would not have been expecting him.

  Thinking it over, he decided that the shock of finding out that Stephanie was betraying him, and all that followed, must have robbed him temporarily of all sense in handling the affair. Evidently, though, she had counted on his being fool enough to come there again, otherwise they would not have been waiting in ambush for him. How they could have found out that he intended to pay a second visit to the factory that afternoon remained a mystery. He could only suppose that their secret was of such importance to them that they had decided to lie in wait between one o’clock and four every day, in the hope of capturing him.

  The fact that they had succeeded had, at first, dismayed but not particularly frightened him. But as Barak had given particulars of their programme for the coming night, it had become more and more clear that the Czech was not simply trying to scare him and that, in the end, he would get off with a very nasty beating up. By the time they had left the shed, he no longer had any doubts that they really meant to murder him. As his mind grasped the fact, real fear caused the sweat to break out on his palms and forehead.

  As soon as he had regained consciousness, he had automatically attempted to free himself, only to find that he could move neither his wrists nor ankles more than half an inch. In addition, the chair to which he was bound appeared also to be made fast to a stout wooden crosspiece, immediately behind it, that formed part of the framework of the shed; for he could jiggle the chair about, but not stand up with it still tied to his ba
ck.

  A more careful examination of his bonds showed that through each length of hose there ran a wire, the protruding ends of which were twisted together a dozen times below the elbows of the chair and a good six inches beyond the reach of his finger tips, however hard he stretched them. His ankles, secured to the chair legs, were even more impossible to get at. For five or six minutes he jerked the chair back and forth, hoping that he might loosen it from the wooden strut, but at the end of that time it was as firmly fixed as ever.

  By squinting upward, he could see the big rent in the corrugated iron roof of the shed. Evidently several sheets had been brought down in the earthquake, and the roof had never been repaired; but as long as he remained bound to the chair it was futile to think of getting out that way. Apart from a heap of sand in one corner and a few old wooden boxes, the shed was empty; so, even if he could have moved his chair, there was no sharp metal angle in it against which, by rubbing his bonds, he might have worn them through.

  In less than a quarter of an hour, he had examined and exhausted every possibility for regaining his freedom. At last he sat quiet, endeavouring to resign himself to the fate in store for him. Although Barak had said he intended to drown him, and he knew that the Czech meant that, his brain still refused to accept as a fact that in a few hours his lifeless body would be drifting about in the sea, and that he, Robbie Grenn, would be finished and gone from this world for ever.

  Hour after hour through the long afternoon he sat there, his mind forming an endless series of pictures with thoughts appropriate to each: Stephanie laughing with him across a dinner table; his uncle’s anger on hearing that he had got a job with the Czechs; the wan face of his beloved Aunt Emily as she lay in bed during her last illness; Stephanie naked and bending forward with one foot raised and the other through the leg of her bathing skirt just before he had seized her; the square head and pale blue eyes behind the pince-nez of the tutor whom Aunt Emily had engaged to help teach him German; the back of Nejedly’s bald head and Barak’s face beyond it, as they had sat lunching together that fatal day at Toyrcolimano; Stephanie wearing an absurd piece of blue veiling on her chestnut curls as he had first seen her; the sacred olive tree up on the Acropolis; old Nanny Fisher peeling an apple for his breakfast; and so on, and so on, until, in spite of the threat that hung over him, he dropped off to sleep.

  For how long he slept he had no idea, but when he awoke night had fallen, and his limbs felt very stiff. As the realization of his position flooded back to him, he panicked and made frantic efforts to break free; but his bonds were unbreakable. After a few minutes of futile struggling, he slumped back exhausted and, from fear of what might now happen to him at any moment, began to weep.

  Gradually his tears ceased, and another series of mental pictures, similar to those of the afternoon, began to drift through his mind. From time to time, he now began to feel rather hungry and distinctly thirsty. It must, he reckoned, be at least eight hours, perhaps more, since he had finished lunch, and evidently his captors did not think it worth while to bring food and drink to a man they had condemned to death. Had they come to tell him that he could have anything he chose for his last meal, he felt sure that he could not possibly have done justice to a lavish dinner; but to try and keep his mind off what it would be like to find oneself choking and gasping without hope in the sea, he began to think of all his favourite dishes.

  It was not completely dark in the shed, as faint starlight came through the open portion of the roof, yet it was sufficiently dark for him to notice instantly a pale line of light that appeared about four feet up, where the double doors of the shed met. Next second he heard the key turn in the padlock. His heart gave a thump. The door was pulled open and his eyes were dazzled by the glare of a torch that was directed full on him. Sweat again broke out on his forehead. At the thought that his murderers had come for him, he began to shake with terror.

  The beam of the torch swung away from him. By its diffused light he saw the outline of its bearer, who had turned at that moment to close the door. In was neither Barak nor Cepicka, but Stephanie.

  Instantly hope flamed in his mind. She could have come only to rescue him. He strove for words to cry out to her his gladness and relief, but his mouth had become so dry that, for a moment, his tongue seemed to rasp in it. Before he could speak, she said in a hard voice:

  ‘I take it you don’t like the idea of dying.’

  Her tone and words abruptly quashed his hope. He now felt certain that she had come there only to taunt him: to tell him what a fool she had always thought him; to say how perfectly he had demonstrated that belief to her friends by so readily blundering into this trap; to compensate herself for the way in which he had humiliated her by enjoying the sight of his fear. She hoped, perhaps, to hear him scream for mercy as Barak and Cepicka stripped him and dragged him down to the motor-boat.

  He swore to himself that he would not give her that satisfaction, then replied in a surly tone: ‘Of course I don’t want to die. Who would?’

  ‘Well’—her voice still held no touch of warmth—‘if I save you—if I release you—will you give me your signature on a document?’

  His heart bounded again. She meant, after all, to give him his life—provided he was prepared to ransom it. But what did having to pay up matter? Anything, even ruin, was preferable to being dragged at the end of a hosepipe from a motor-boat until one drowned. He gave an abrupt, unnatural laugh, and said:

  ‘I’m ready to do a business deal. It’s no good asking for a sum beyond my ability to pay, but you must know that I’m pretty well off. Ask anything in reason, and if it’s within my means I’ll sign on the dotted line.’ Then, in his bitterness, even though he might pay for it with his life, he could not resist adding: ‘That you should be one ahead of your pals in this is hardly surprising. Double-crossing people comes so naturally to you.’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied sharply. ‘I am double-crossing them, and at considerable risk to myself. But only because I don’t like the idea of being a party to murder. From the very beginning I did my utmost to persuade you to stop running into danger, but you wouldn’t listen. I’m not out to rob you of your dirty, unearned, capitalist money, either. The paper you are going to sign—that is, if you still wish to be alive tomorrow morning—has to do with this absurd amateur spying of yours. Here; read it.’

  Thrusting a paper under Robbie’s nose, she held her torch so that the light fell on it. The document was in her own writing, in Czech, and read:

  I, Robert Grenn, hereby take oath and swear by everything I hold sacred that, as from midnight on Friday, the 18th of April, I will cease from the investigation into Czech affairs on which I have been engaged for the past month. I further undertake to return forthwith to Athens, to leave Greece within forty-eight hours and not to return to that country during the next six months.

  Well, Robbie thought, there it is. The only person I’ve ever been committed to is Pallas Athene, and she can hardly expect me to throw away my life. When she spoke to me of carrying things through to the bitter end, she must have meant the bitterness in which my association with Stephanie has ended. At least, when I pass through Athens, I can see Luke, tell him what has happened to me, and impress upon him that the Czechs being prepared to commit murder in order to guard their secret is proof enough that it must be something worth his getting our professionals to investigate. To Stephanie he said:

  ‘Very well. I know when I’m licked. Undo me, and I promise not to lay a finger on you. Then I’ll sign this thing, and carry out its stipulations.’

  Moving away, she put two of the empty boxes one on top of the other, and on the rough table so formed laid the paper and her torch. She then produced a pair of wire cutters from the pocket of her skirt and, after something of a struggle, cut the wires that ran through the short lengths of rubber pipe that kept his wrists and ankles in place.

  At his first attempt to lift his arms, pains shot through them, causing him to give a low moan and quic
kly lower them again. He found that he was so stiff from sitting for so many hours in one position that he could hardly move. But she showed little compassion.

  Stepping up to him, she said: ‘Come on. We haven’t all night, and I don’t want to be caught here. If we are, it will be curtains for you; so this is no time to sit pulling faces just because you have pins and needles.’ Then, seizing his arms, she began to pinch and pummel them vigorously.

  For a few minutes, her rough ministrations caused him agony; but he managed to get to his feet, upon which she thrust a Biro pen into his hand and he signed the document.

  Instead of picking it up, she left it there on the top of the box, produced a letter from her pocket, which she laid beside it, and said: ‘When they find those, I’m hoping they’ll be satisfied, and not come after us. One can’t guarantee that, because after what you did to Barak in Corinth he is thirsting for your blood; but I’m hoping that Cepicka will persuade him that my having spiked your guns in my way, it would be pointless to take any further action. Now follow me, and for God’s sake keep those big feet of yours from making more noise than you can help.’

  Having switched out her torch, she led the way from the shed and, keeping in the shadow of other buildings alongside it, led him to a corner of the big yard where there was a double gate. A quick glance round had shown him that there were no lights in the little house or in any other part of the ruined factory. The gate was not locked and, after they had stepped through it, he closed it carefully behind them. Beyond the gate lay the flat, stony surface of what had once been an outer yard. Two lorries and three cars were parked there. Stephanie led the way over to one of the cars, and he recognised the Ford Zephyr. As she got in, she said in a low voice:

  ‘If you really believe in your Immortals, now is the time to pray to them. Barak and the others went early to bed, to get some sleep before having to get up in the small hours to settle your business. If the noise of the engine wakes them, we’ll be in trouble. That big Mercedes of his would overhaul us before we had gone five miles.’