Classes resumed after the Easter break and May was a busy month in the department. A list of voithi, instructors with new classroom duties as of the following fall, was posted on the bulletin board and both Kiki and Cassandra were among them. As Theo explained to me, it didn’t mean any more pay for them but it did mean more teaching on their own and thus more prestige within the system. A week later an official notice from the Ministry of Education, signed by the Minister and Karamanlis himself, appeared on the same board. It proclaimed the establishment of a professorial chair for the department and appointed Stathis Estathiades, currently teaching at the University of Athens, to be the first person to fill it as of the following fall term. During the next few days I heard rumors that Vanidis was taking the unexpected appointment rather badly, spluttering with angry remarks about outsiders with political influence whenever the subject came up, but Pappas seemed to be accepting the sudden turn of events with philosophical equanimity. When I met him in the hall and brought up the surprising nature of the appointment he merely smiled and said he doubted that his world would have changed very drastically even if he had gotten the chair and he was reasonably sure the department would survive as well. He also mentioned that the new man was a first-rate scholar and he thought that that was a good thing for all concerned.
On the Monday after our weekend on Thassos -- the short crossing from Kavala had been rough and both Talya and I had been ill for the first half day, but Bruce knew some breathtakingly beautiful spots on the island’s most isolated coast so the weekend turned out well after all -- I overheard some students talking about a demonstration that was being organized for that week. I caught Pappas’ name and Cassandra’s and the name Iannis something-or-other and quite a few angry references to American imperialism and Karamanlis’ lack of courage and a legitimate set of parents. My Greek was still poor so much of the conversation was beyond me and normally I would have ignored the whole thing anyway, but it was a rather unusual group and there was one among them who had, as far as I knew, no connection with the university at all. The student head of the university’s Socialist Union, a bright and sensitive young man who was in one of my classes, was huddled with the president of the campus’ Communist League -- a strange alliance to start with as it was no secret that the two groups usually would have nothing to do with each other -- and several students who I recognized as active members of groups I had always thought of as centrist or just slightly left of center. One of these was a heavy woman who always sat in the front row during my lectures and who invariably asked the most intelligent questions when I finally stopped talking; she seemed to be listening now with rapt attention to whatever was being said by Alexi, the dapper tobacco company man I had met at Ron Jackson’s apartment.
He was talking slowly but in a very low voice and the only things I could be absolutely sure of were references to Herkalion and Citibank and the need to be careful with the dynamite before I decided to move on and leave them to their own devices.
Theo was not in the office when I got there so I had nobody to talk to about my unintentional eavesdropping -- there had been no way to back out during the first few minutes of my coming upon the group, though after that my curiosity had gotten the better of me -- and I gnawed on the problem for more than an hour. It was, finally, the talk of dynamite which made my decision and, to a lesser extent, the presence of Alexi in the group.
Jackson wasn’t at his own office and his secretary wasn’t sure where he could be reached. I phoned the consulate and Blackbridge told me Jackson had just left and was on his way home. I waited ten minutes and then called him at home and said I had something to tell him.
“About Walsh?” he asked, expectantly, and I decided he was either a very careless civil servant or he knew something about the Greek telephone system that I didn’t.
“I’m on my way home in a few minutes and I can stop off at your place, if you like, or you could come up here to my office. Any preference?”
“Why not stop here,” he offered, “and we can have a drink before you go on out to Karabounaki?”
He had his cook bring in some hastily prepared mezedes when I arrived and I nibbled on a few and sipped an ouzo and water until she left and then I told him what I had heard, being careful to leave out all the participants’ names except Alexi’s and emphasizing that it was about an imminent event and that mention was made of dynamite and Heraklion and Citibank and American imperialism and Karamanlis. I didn’t say anything about Pappas or Cassandra and when he asked if that was all I could remember I told him I heard the name Iannis mentioned once or twice as well.
“Nothing at all about the Walsh affair, I suppose?” he asked, clicking the top of his ballpoint pen but leaving the pad he’d been writing in open on the coffee table in front of him.
“No, not a thing, and this doesn’t seem to have much to do with him either. I hope this dynamite stuff can be tracked down in time though. The groups represented in that huddle don’t normally pal around together -- might be something worth looking into.”
“I’ll get this on to Athens right way -- I left some papers back at the consulate that I have to pick up anyway -- and they can decide what do. Thanks for coming by.”
I heard no more about any demonstration that week and Jackson never called or stopped in to let me know if there’d been any response from our embassy down in Athens to the information I’d given him. On the last day in May, just a week before Talya and I left Greece to return to the States, all the newspapers had banner headlines and all classes at the university were cancelled for an indefinite period of time in the hope of avoiding any organized student repercussions. According to the papers, there had been a series of demonstrations the previous night in Athens, Thessaloniki and Heraklion on Crete and the army and the police had been called out in force in all three places. On Crete students had marched against an American airbase and had managed to tear down the front gate and enter a communications building before the Greek police had opened fire. Four people were believed to have died, three of them students, and twenty-nine were injured seriously enough to have been taken to a hospital. In Athens the demonstration began at the American embassy but quickly spread to several parts of the city, including a housing complex that catered to NATO personnel. Estimates were still rather tentative -- tanks had been called in and special riot police were still rounding up some of the demonstrators -- but it was thought that at least twelve people had been killed, six of them police, and several hundred had been injured, most of them students from the University of Athens. In Thessaloniki the demonstration had begun as a peaceful march along Tsimiski Street and then had become a riot when someone threw a homemade bomb through the front window of the American-owned Citibank building. The explosion destroyed most of the front half of the building and injured dozens of people in the street, many of them critically. There were conflicting eye-witness reports, but several agreed that the person who threw the bomb looked very much like the current Greek manager of the bank, a man who had actively opposed the rule of the colonels when he had been a student leader at the University several years earlier. One local paper listed the man’s name. Iannis Vagionis, along with the names of others who were suspected of being the leaders of the demonstration when it first began.
The following day the same Thessaloniki newspaper printed the names of those who were seriously injured and those who died in what the press was now calling the Tsimiski Riot. Cassandra’s name was on the injured list and Niko Pappas was among the dead. It wasn’t until we called to say goodbye to Bruce and Rodanthi Meadows a few days later that I learned that an American who had been at the front of the march had been killed in the Citibank explosion; Bruce was sure that Theo’s name had been omitted from the newspaper list as the result of political pressure from our embassy in Athens.