A Touch of Danger

by James Jones

It was pretty plain she had never entertained any ideas about Sonny being the killer.

  I found it pretty hard to work up any sympathy for her, anyway.

  I turned my head and looked at her bleakly, but she didn’t say anything to me. So I didn’t speak either. She kept looking at Kirk. She was depending on him now. I wanted to boot her in the ass.

  “I would have killed him,” Kirk said, “if I could have. If you hadn’t got in the way.”

  I didn’t say anything. I could have sat there on that bench and let that wind blow me just about forever.

  “I’m getting too old for this business,” I said.

  “You don’t look too good. How do you feel?”

  I made myself get up. “How do you think I feel? I’m coming apart at the seams, that’s how I feel.”

  I turned to Jane. “Go on inside the house and wait there,” I said with male chauvinist authority.

  She went, without a word. But the look she left with me was not exactly loving.

  “I want you to take her back to town,” I said. “I don’t want her on the boat with me and Sonny, trying to cut him loose, and then the two of them trying to kill me a second time.”

  I couldn’t stand the thought of her on the boat with me.

  He leered. “I’ll take care of her. She’s very docile. Right now. I know just what she needs. What are you going to do with him?”

  “I’m turning him over to the local police chief, with a deposition. Then I’m calling Pekouris in Athens. I’m not at all sure Pekouris will be happy. It’s liable to upset his tourist trade.”

  Kirk grinned. I looked at him. I wanted just one thing from him. That was to get as far away from him as possible before he stole something from me. I allowed myself to sit down again.

  “By the way,” I said. “Your two crewmen from the Agoraphobe are still locked in the cellar. Don’t you think you should let them out?”

  He shrugged. “To hell with them. I’ll let them out after.”

  “I’ll be wanting depositions from you and the girl, too. So don’t be going off on any honeymoon with her yet. I want her in town this afternoon.”

  “I guess I’ll have to sign one,” he said. “Under the circumstances.”

  “I guess you will. When the police come around and ask for it.”

  “I guess you’ll be leaving the island now,” Kirk said, in a sudden crafty way. “Hunh? And leave us in peace? I hope so, anyway. Now you’ve found your killer.”

  Something about the way he said it made me furious. I’d done a lot of pretty low things. In my checkered career. But fronting for a heroin factory hadn’t been one of them, yet. I got a lot of my business because of people like Kirk. I spent about half my time picking up strayed dumb brats, and helping their dumb parents piece them together after they’d been shooting the H people like Kirk shipped into the Land of Promise. I would rather have not had the business.

  But talking to Kirk wouldn’t do me anything. Kirk was only the capo. I wanted to talk to the big boy. That meant Mr. Leonid Kronitis. I still found it hard to believe old Kronitis could be the head of all this.

  “You said something, before, about some powerful people protecting me,” I said.

  “Did I say that? I don’t remember saying that,” Kirk said. “I must have been excited.”

  “You must have been.” I got to my feet a second time. “Well, I guess that about does it.” I was bored and I was tired. This was like a hundred thousand other valueless conversations I had had with a hundred thousand other crooks and con-men. I gave him a dirty look, and asked him where I could find a doctor for my face and he told me there was one in Glauros, who had an X-ray machine and fluoroscope and a regular surgery.

  I thanked him. I didn’t offer to shake hands. Kirk didn’t seem to mind that at all.

  “That was one hell of a fight you put up down there,” he called after me as I went to the landing.

  I just moved my head. I was concentrating on getting down those stairs again. I started down. It looked just as long as it had coming up.

  From the Daisy Mae I looked back up at the bluff. Jane Duval had come back out of the villa, and was standing by Kirk on the edge of the patio. Kirk waved. I saw him urging Jane to wave, too. Finally, she did.

  I figured I might as well wave back.

  “Call Kronitis,” Kirk yelled down. “Before you do anything.” They turned away.

  I figured they’d be back in bed before we rounded the point.

  Chapter 59

  SONNY WAS GROANING a little bit when I climbed back on board. I left him alone. I suspected he was playing possum, and wasn’t really unconscious now at all. I didn’t really care.

  It made me crazy mad every time I looked at him. But there wasn’t anything to do about it. Just as there wasn’t anything to do about Marie, now, either. He had done it and it was done.

  I could no longer disguise that I was limping with my bad side. The pain just hurt me too much. I busied myself with getting us out of there. I took in the bow and stern lines, started the motor, backed into the slot Sonny had tried to use, and headed us out in the sunshine for the little white-water waves of the entrance.

  Sonny lay without moving. He groaned every once in a while. I hoped they were genuine groans. I had no sympathy for him at all. I hated everything about him.

  I had figured it out last night at Chantal’s. I had known who it was since then. But after that I had been so preoccupied with figuring out how to trap him, and then doing it, that it had become an abstraction. A game.

  Now, though, it was real enough. Looking at him lying there, alive and breathing and solid, just as if he still had the right to call himself a human being, it was plenty real.

  It was what Chantal had said about Jane Duval having an affair with Marie that had switched on the lightbulb inside my head.

  I had known about that, but I had never looked at it in that special light. Jane had had an affair with Marie. Jane had had an affair with Kirk. She had had an affair with Girgis. She had had an affair with Con Taylor. Two of them were dead. It was the juxtaposition.

  I had been looking for Girgis’s murderer in the area of his hashish and heroin smuggling. Marie, who had worked for him, had to be tied in. I hadn’t looked in the area of his amatory exploits. Nor in Marie’s.

  Once I saw it, it became clear as daylight.

  I couldn’t even legitimately blame myself for not saving Marie. I could feel guilty, and regretful. But it wasn’t rational, only personal. Sorry, Marie. Sorry I’m so stupid.

  But who would believe that on an island as chic and sophisticated on the one side, and as orgiastic and free love preaching on the other, somebody would kill two people over a piece of ass?

  Once I knew it it was easy to piece it together. Girgis had been killed the first night I had visited Chantal. That was the same night Sonny returned from Athens with Jane. He had been hanging around the taverna before dinner. When I came back later and met Kirk for the first time, Sonny was gone and had disappeared.

  Marie had been killed the day after my fight with the hippies outside the Cloud 79. It was Sonny who had found me. I had given him the next day off. He knew I was going to stay home. He had asked for the day off, in fact.

  So he was available both times.

  It was slim evidence. Slimmer than what Pekouris and I had against Chuck and his machete. But I didn’t need any more evidence. I knew Chuck hadn’t done it. And I knew Sonny was guilty; in exactly the same way I knew it was Marie’s body I was going to find when I walked out on the beach at Georgio’s.

  Sonny, the hippie. Sonny, the pacifist. Sonny the free-love advocate. Sonny the anti-violence man. Sonny the millionaire, who only lived off what he earned. Sonny, the boatman. My Sonny. My “Today the university, tomorrow the world” Sonny. Who in the past week had with great craftiness devoted himself to trying to become my friend. He wasn’t, I guessed, even worth being called despicable. But I sure didn’t like him.

  Every
time I looked at him, I saw Sweet Marie—Marie in the water, her nearly cut off arm spouting blood, trying to avoid Sonny’s speedboat, as it roared down to make its second pass. Marie trying to jerk her head away, and hold pressure on her spouting, ruined arm at the same time. I wondered again if she had known? Had she recognized the boat? Had she thought it was an accident, the first time? Had she seen Sonny?

  He pretended to come out of it as we came out the other side of the rough chop at the entrance. He began to groan more and more. Then he raised his head. Then he tried to move his arms. He pretended surprise. But he spoke too soon. He’d been faking, all right.

  “What happened?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Please untie me. Please get this rope off me. It’s killing me. I can’t stand it.”

  I didn’t say anything. We were about rounding the point.

  “I said, please untie me. At least let me sit up. This position is murdering me. I’m getting cramps.”

  I said nothing. I went on running the boat. It didn’t take much running, out here.

  “Please, at least let me sit up. I’m dying like this. I’m so uncomfortable it’s killing me, damn it!”

  I put the two holding ropes on the helm bar. I didn’t hurry. I untied the cord between his hands and feet and let him straighten out. I got him up on the bench and tied his hands to the stanchion behind him.

  “Can’t you untie my feet? My legs are cramping.”

  “No.” I sat back down. I left the holding ropes on.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “In to Tsatsos Port, to the police station.”

  “It won’t do you any good. I’ll deny everything.”

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “They won’t testify against me. Jane can’t, and I’ll buy Kirk off. It will be your word against mine.”

  “Fine.”

  “You hate me, don’t you?”

  “What would make you happiest? If I said yes, or no?”

  “If you said yes,” Sonny said.

  “Then, no. I don’t hate you.”

  “Yes, you do. I know you do.”

  “Stop playing games, Sonny,” I said. “You’ve been playing games too long. You’re the result of what we socio-criminologists call over-crystallized self-indulgence. I suppose you can’t help it. But I don’t give a shit.”

  He didn’t say anything to that, for a while.

  “You know what they’re going to do to you?” I said. “They’re going to take you out in the prison yard, and stand you up against the wall, and put a blindfold on you, and a squad of Greeks are going to shoot rifle bullets into your chest cavity. The trouble is they don’t know anything about indulgence in Greece yet. They’re not an affluent society. You should have waited till you got home to kill your wife’s lovers.”

  “Do you believe in the death penalty?” he said.

  “No. I don’t,” I said. “But I’m not a Greek. I’d lock you up for life and make a guinea pig out of you, and study you to see what went wrong with you somewhere back down the line.”

  “I believe in the death penalty,” he said. “I didn’t used to. But I’ve come around to it. Lately.”

  “Well,” I said, “you better. My advice to you is to think of it as a game, Sonny. Just a game. Like all the other games you play. Like when you ran down Marie in your speedboat. Or when you cut off Girgis’s head and buried it. It’s only a game. That way it’ll keep you from crapping and peeing in your pants when they stand you up.”

  “You’re a pretty cruel son of a bitch,” he said.

  “I guess that’s what I am,” I said. I let him breathe a while. “You want to talk about it?”

  He turned his head at me and glared. “I’ll tell you nothing, you fascist pig son of a bitch.”

  I let go the roped helm and stepped to him and all in one movement right-hooked him on the jaw. It slewed his head around until his tied hands brought him up short. It wasn’t much of a punch. I was too weak, and hurt too much. It probably hurt me more than it hurt him. But it gave me a great deal of satisfaction.

  “Mind your manners,” I said, and sat back down. I was trembling, but I didn’t know whether from fury, or my side, or plain fatigue.

  “That’s what I mean,” Sonny said. “You see what I mean? You’re supposed to treat criminal prisoners with humanity. I know my rights. I don’t have to talk.”

  “Okay. Don’t talk about it,” I said.

  Then he started to cry.

  “You don’t know what it was like,” he said after a while.

  I didn’t answer.

  “I used to lay awake nights,” Sonny said. “Night after night. Thinking about it. Thinking about her. And them. You didn’t any of you understand her. I was the only one. I knew her needs.”

  “Didn’t you have other women of your own?”

  “For a while. But I didn’t want them. I wanted her. I knew it was wrong, to want one woman. I couldn’t help it.”

  “When did you first decide to kill Girgis?”

  “Coming home on the plane from Athens. I was just sitting there. I decided to kill him first. He was such an evil bastard.”

  “And then you just went down the line,” I said.

  “No. I was going to take them chronologically. But it became too difficult. Then when you had that fight, I knew you wouldn’t be able to go out or go diving. And I knew Marie was going. Actually, Kirk came before Marie, chronologically. But it became too difficult to adhere to a strict chronology. So I took Marie second.”

  I bit my teeth together for a minute. “Why did you cut off Girgis’s head?”

  “That was an idea of the moment. I hated his guts so much. But then I thought it might make it look like a gang killing, for the hashish. It’s not as easy to do as you might think.”

  “No,” I said. “I guess not. Where did you bury it?”

  “It’s in that chapel yard, back from the head of the draw, in that grove of trees. I put it under one of those ancient altar stones in the yard. The knife’s with it.”

  “Did you kill him first? Or was it the knife killed him?”

  “I killed him first. I hit him with a rock, and then I choked him.”

  “Did the throat pump when you cut it, or did it just flow out?”

  “It pumped. But that doesn’t matter. He was already dead. To all intents and purposes.”

  “I guess you don’t feel bad about any of it, do you?” I said.

  “In a way I do. I hated to have to do it. You know, I never really minded the one-nighters, like Steve, and all the others. It was the ones like Girgis and Kirk and Marie, and Con Taylor, who tried to have real love affairs with her. And talk to her about love. And He to her. Those were the ones who really didn’t understand her.”

  “Marie didn’t talk about love to her,” I said. “Maybe she talked to Marie about it.”

  “Oh, yes she did. There’s no question in my mind about that.”

  I didn’t argue. “Just for the record, how many times did you have to hit Marie?” I said.

  “I hit her twice. But I think the once would have been enough anyway.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I think it would.”

  “I’m really a martyr, that’s the truth,” he said, as if he were trying on a new suit for size. “A martyr is what I am. Someday there will be freedom. Real freedom. Complete freedom.”

  “Did she yell?” I said. I found I had this thing about her, that I hoped she hadn’t panicked. That she had gone out cool and clean and thinking clearly.

  “No,” Sonny said. “Or if she did, I didn’t hear her. Of course, it would be hard to hear, with the motor.”

  What with all the pauses, we had passed Georgio’s and rounded the lighthouse, and now we were approaching the Port jetty, jutting out whitely into the blue water. Lots of small boats were out, and lots of people dotted the swimming beaches.

  “Well, this is where you get off, Sonny,” I said. I slacked off on the thr
ottle.

  “I guess you think I’m evil, hunh?” Sonny said. “People always think that of martyrs.”

  “I don’t know, Sonny,” I said, “I guess I do. I don’t know.”

  “You do. You people always do. Look at Savonarola. He was fighting the decadence of his time, too.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Savonarola was the one who made fanatic believers out of all the kids and got them to turn in their parents.”

  “Will you shake hands with me before I go in?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ll shake hands with you. But not until I untie you.”

  I pulled around the jetty and cut the throttle again, to enter the Port.

  Chapter 60

  WE CREATED QUITE a stir in the Port. Both of us were covered with splotches of my blood, and I was limping, and Sonny was tied. I had to walk him across the crowded quayside to the police post from the boat and before we got there there was a mob around us. Tourists, and hippies, and freaks, and Greeks.

  I was beginning to feel chipper again. I guessed getting rid of Sonny helped. I felt I was once again my inimitable, indestructible, bent but unbreakable self.

  I got out of there as fast as I could. I dictated my deposition to a Greek girl from one of the shops who spoke English, and signed it. I told the chief I was taking the Daisy Mae. He was pleased and delighted to let me. I wanted to go to Glauros and get my face sewed up.

  But when I got Daisy Mae outside the jetty, I brought her around to starboard and headed for the yacht harbor. I wanted to call Chantal. I wasn’t going to cover up for her heroin ring. And I wanted to tell her.

  Also I wanted to call Pekouris in Athens. The fat chief was calling him right now, from the town. But I hadn’t put anything about the heroin ring in my deposition, and I wanted to tell him what I’d discovered about it. Then we would see what he did.

  When I got upstairs to my trusty little bathroom mirror, and began the same old daily repair job, I saw my cheek was laid open from the point of the cheekbone back along the bone almost to my ear. You could see the white bone at the bottom, between the labia of the cut. This one was going to take a lot more than a year to fade.