At a dinner party one evening, Demiris had overheard a motion-picture producer refer to him as “that oily Greek.” Demiris bided his time. Two years later, the producer signed a glamorous internationally known actress to star in his new big-budget production in which he put in his own money. Demiris waited until the picture was half finished, and then charmed the leading lady into walking out on it and joining him on his yacht.
“It will be a honeymoon,” Demiris told her.
She got the honeymoon but not the wedding. The movie finally had to shut down and the producer went bankrupt.
There were a few players in Demiris’s game with whom he had not yet evened the score, but he was in no hurry. He enjoyed the anticipation, the planning, and the execution. These days he made no enemies, for no man could afford to be his enemy, so his quarry was limited to those who had crossed his path in the past.
But Constantin Demiris’s sense of dikaiosini was double-edged. Just as he never forgave an injury, neither did he forget a favor. A poor fisherman who had given the young boy shelter found himself the owner of a fishing fleet. A prostitute who had fed and clothed the young man when he was too poor to pay her mysteriously inherited an apartment building, without any idea of who her benefactor was.
Demiris had started life as the son of a stevedore in Piraeus. He had fourteen brothers and sisters and there was never enough food on the table.
From the very beginning, Constantin Demiris showed an uncanny gift for business. He earned extra money doing odd jobs after school, and at sixteen he had saved enough money to open a food stand on the docks with an older partner. The business flourished and the partner cheated Demiris out of his half. It took Demiris ten years to destroy the man. The young boy was burning with a fierce ambition. He would lie awake at night, his eyes bright in the darkness. I’m going to be rich. I’m going to be famous. Someday everyone will know my name. It was the only lullaby that could put him to sleep. He had no idea how it was going to happen. He knew only that it would.
On Demiris’s seventeenth birthday, he came across an article about the oil fields in Saudi Arabia, and it was as though a magic door to the future had suddenly opened for him.
He went to his father. “I’m going to Saudi Arabia. I’m going to work in the oil fields.”
“Too-sou! What do you know about oil fields?”
“Nothing, father. I’m going to learn.”
One month later, Constantin Demiris was on his way.
It was company policy for the overseas employees of the Trans-Continental Oil Corporation to sign a two-year employment contract, but Demiris felt no qualms about it. He planned to stay in Saudi Arabia for as long as it took him to make his fortune. He had envisioned a wonderful Arabian nights adventure, a glamorous, mysterious land with exotic-looking women, and black gold gushing up out of the ground. The reality was a shock.
On an early morning in summer, Demiris arrived at Fadili, a dreary camp in the middle of the desert consisting of an ugly stone building surrounded by barastis, small brushwood huts. There were a thousand lower-bracket workers there, mostly Saudis. The women who trudged through the dusty, unpaved streets were heavily veiled.
Demiris entered the building where J. J. Mclntyre, the personnel manager, had his office.
Mclntyre looked up as the young man came in. “So. The home office hired you, eh?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ever work the oil fields before, son?”
For an instant, Demiris was tempted to lie. “No, sir.”
Mclntyre grinned. “You’re going to love it here. You’re a million miles from nowhere, bad food, no women that you can touch without getting your balls chopped off, and not a goddamned thing to do at night. But the pay is good, right?”
“I’m here to learn,” Demiris said earnestly.
“Yeah? Then I’ll tell you what you better learn fast.
You’re in Moslem country now. That means no alcohol. Anyone caught stealing gets his right hand cut off. Second time, left hand. The third time, you lose a foot. If you kill anyone you’re beheaded.”