October 27, 1985

The small snapshot could be a tourist's memento. It shows several people sitting around a wooden picnic table in a Greek town. The sun is bright, and the vines and lush Mediterranean vegetation give the sense of an arbor in the garden behind. There are several older Greek women, their hair tied by scarves, peasant-style, their faces weathered and lined, and at least two apparent tourists, a man and a striking young woman with short blond hair. The man is Nicholas Gage, whose book ''Eleni'' chronicles the torture and murder of his mother in 1948 by Communist guerrillas during the Greek civil war, and his own return to Greece some 30 years later to search for his mother's killers. Some of the village women are his relatives, peasants who still live in the village of Lia where his mother's martyrdom occurred. The blond woman is the actress Kate Nelligan, who joins the town's ranks temporarily to play Eleni, who gave her life so that her children might escape to freedom, in the film version of Mr. Gage's book. The film, in which John Malkovich co-stars as Mr. Gage, opens Friday at Cinema 1.

Subduing the Dollar Will the attack on the dollar, mounted a month ago by the Group of Five industrial nations, bring down the currency's value enough to stimulate exports and ease the Congressional pressure for protectionism? So far, that achievement is not in sight. At best, the steps taken amount to a quick and temporary fix, says Edward Yardeni, chief economist for Prudential-Bache Securities Inc. True, the currency is down about 18 percent, on a trade weighted basis, from its February peak, with most of the slide coming since Sept. 22, when the United States, Japan, France, Britain and West Germany announced they would intervene by selling dollars in international markets to lower the currency's value. And the group's agreement did slow Congress's drive for protectionist legislation - a delay that ''temporarily reduced the downside risks for the economy,'' said Mr. Yardeni. Like many economists, he fears that fallout from such laws - inflation and retaliation on the part of trading partners, for example - could produce an economic slowdown in the United States.

SEVERAL decades ago, when tax assessors would show up at airports around the state, a lot of the planes they wanted to tax weren't there. Many plane owners, in what was known as the ''Oct. 1 Flyaway'' would take their planes out of the state to avoid paying the local property tax. Over the years, there have been state legislators who wanted to get all the planes they could on the local tax rolls and who tried, and failed, to replace the property tax with a registration fee. Another attempt will be made this year, but for the first time the lawmakers will be armed with statistics to back up their suspicion of widespread avoidance of the tax. Those statistics indicate that taxes are being collected on only half of all the planes in the state. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, 2,578 planes were registered in the state last year, but according to state officials, taxes were paid on only 1,244 planes.

A new medical building in which doctors will be able to rent space by the hour is to open next month in Murray Hill a block and a half from the New York University Medical Center complex. Among the project's developers is Dr. Michael Reitano, a 27-year-old internist, who came up with the idea of renting space on a time-use basis after he was unable to find affordable midtown office space for himself.

Stunningly, incredibly, the Kansas City Royals staged their comeback of comebacks tonight. The St. Louis Cardinals were two outs from winning the World Series, and the Royals snatched the game from their grasp. The teams will learn Sunday night if the Royals grabbed the Series as well. The Royals forced the seventh and deciding game because Dane Iorg, batting for only the second time in the Series, looped a pinch-hit, broken-bat, two-run single to right field in the ninth inning that gave Kansas City a 2-1 victory and evened the Series at three games each. The Royals had been down three games to one, but then, they also had been down three games to one to Toronto in the American League pennant playoff and won. Before that, they had to catch and overtake the California Angels with a month to go in the regular season for the American League West championship.