A Touch of Danger

by James Jones

I washed myself, and put on clean clothes and put the bloody ones to soak in cold water, and put a fresh compress bandage on the gash, and went to call Chantal.

  It was five o’clock and she should have just gotten home from her afternoon bridge game with the Greek Chorus ladies.

  She had.

  She wasn’t going to be very happy when she heard what I had to tell her.

  “I’ve had an interesting afternoon,” I said. “How was yours?”

  “Fine. I won a few drachmas.”

  “Well, I caught my murderer,” I said. “He’s all tied and taped and delivered to the local police.”

  There was a frightened sounding pause from her end. “You did?”

  “Aren’t you going to ask who it was?”

  “Who was it?”

  “Sonny Duval. He’s already confessed. He killed them both, because they had affairs with his wife. And he intended also to kill Con Taylor and Jim Kirk. How about that?”

  “Oh, no!” Chantal said, in a kind of helpless wail. “Oh, no!”

  “You don’t sound very pleased,” I said grimly.

  “Oh, I am. I am. I really am. I just wish that I’d known, is all.”

  “You thought all along it was Kirk, didn’t you?”

  “Well, it looked that way. Didn’t it?” she said. “Well, damn!” In that wail again.

  “That wasn’t why I called you, though.”

  There was that frightened sounding pause again. I cleared my throat. “I’m calling Pekouris in a little while about the murders, and I’m telling him all I know about your heroin ring. I’m telling you so you can leave and get out of town for a while.”

  “So you’re turning me in,” she said.

  “I’m turning in the operation. Not you,” I said. “I’m sorry you’re mixed up in it. But the operation I am turning in, yes.”

  “Turning us in, then,” Chantal said bitterly.

  “If that’s the way you want it. If you’d seen what heroin has done to too many people in my town, too many dumb-ass kids, you’d know why I can’t do anything else.”

  I took a breath. “I’m sorry about you. But I don’t give a damn what happens to Kronitis and the others. Kronitis will probably buy his way out of it, anyway. But I’d like to see Kirk and the rest of them go to jail for a good long time.”

  “Well,” she said, slowly. “I suppose there’s nothing I can do to dissuade you. You’re just ruining my life, is all.”

  “Go away for six months or a year,” I said. “That’s why I’m calling you. When you come back, it will all be blown over. They probably won’t even book you then.”

  “But my life will still be ruined among my friends, and everywhere I’m known. Paris. Rome.”

  “Maybe not. You may even become a minor hero. A celebrity. That’s the way things work nowadays. Get yourself on a New York TV program.”

  She didn’t say anything for a little bit. I listened to her thinking. Then she said, “Well, I guess I’ve got something to tell you, too, then. In this connection. If that’s the way you’re going to handle it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Has Leonid— Has Kronitis called you yet?”

  “No. But you promised me you wouldn’t call him today.”

  “I didn’t call him! He called me.”

  “So?”

  “He will certainly be calling you. He may have already. While you were out solving murders.” She laid a heavy bitterness on the Murders. Then she paused and took a breath. “Freddy Tarkoff is here.”

  “Tarkoff?” I said.

  “Yes, Tarkoff. And he’ll almost certainly be wanting to see you. He flew in from New York this morning, and flew down in a private plane. He’s at Leonid’s villa.”

  “Tarkoff,” I said, and another lightbulb flashed on somewhere. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  “Yes! Yes, Tarkoff! Who did you think has been running this whole thing and masterminding it? Surely you didn’t think it was poor old Leonid? It was Freddy’s idea. And he’s been running it from the beginning.”

  “Tarkoff?” I said. “Well, I will be damned. My Freddy Tarkoff.”

  “It was Freddy who got me to be his runner for him. It was Freddy who organized everything. That was how I lied to you last night. I let you think it was Leonid. I’d sworn not to tell you.”

  “That was what Kirk meant when he said powerful people had been protecting me,” I said.

  “When things began to go really bad yesterday, and we thought it was Kirk, and thought you were going to take him in, Leonid called Freddy in New York. He took the first plane he could get.”

  “Freddy Tarkoff,” I said inanely.

  “Maybe you will think twice before you call Pekouris. I suggest you talk to Freddy before you do.”

  “I’m putting the call in anyway,” I said, shortly. “Also, I’m leaving tonight on the seven o’clock ferry.”

  “You mean because Freddy came?” Chantal said. “He wants to see you.”

  “I was planning it, anyway,” I said abruptly. “But now I’m certain.”

  I could hear her voice still coming out of the instrument, as I hung up on her.

  I went over to my bar and made myself a big, stiff Scotch which I only wetted with soda. I had already made one big one when I first came in. This one tasted better. I looked around the place with it in my hand. There wasn’t much around to mark that I had ever stopped there. I was not caring. I raised the glass and toasted the portrait of one of Georgina’s stuffy English burgher nineteenth-century ancestors over the fireplace, but I was really toasting Freddy Tarkoff.

  Then I went over and placed my call to Pekouris. A secretary’s voice, in excellent English, told me the Inspector had already left his office for Tsatsos and would be there within two hours. He had moved faster than I expected. A lot faster. Well, I would catch him here, later. I was even willing to miss my ferry to see him.

  I had not hung up the phone very long, before it rang again the long distance ring, and Kronitis came on. I went through the whole rigmarole of politeness with him. I listened respectfully to what he had to say. I said I would be delighted to come over to his place, right away, to see my old and dear friend Freddy Tarkoff.

  Then, and only then, I told him I had just returned from capturing my murderer. Or rather, Girgis’s and Marie’s murderer. I had just delivered said murderer to the local police chief. There was a long silence on the phone. The murderer was Sonny Duval, an American millionaire who lived on an old boat here in the harbor. I thanked Mr. Kronitis for calling me and I hung up the phone.

  Then I made myself another drink and shouldered into my clean shirt, not without some wincing, and unlocked my closet and took Mr. Kronitis’s $4,000 retainer out of my briefcase and put it in my wallet. It felt marvelously fat and comfortable in the wallet. I tried to avoid thinking how wafer-thin the wallet was going to feel later. Screw his lousy blood money. I went out and fired up the Daisy Mae to go to Glauros.

  But before I did I had one more quick drink.

  Chapter 61

  I REALIZED AS I RAN her out into the freshening breeze and sparkling sea toward the mainland, that it was the first time I had ever had Daisy Mae out alone. Always before there was somebody with me, Sonny, or Chantal, or Marie. I loved being alone on her.

  I would have loved to take her up along the coast exploring by myself.

  Instead, I ran her to Glauros.

  The chauffeur and the big black Rolls were waiting on the dock. It was going to be the same routine, with me the football again. Well, I had had some practice being a football lately. I told the chauffeur he was going to have to wait a bit for kickoff time.

  “Very good, sir,” he said, with English unruffleability. He was still sporting his big .357 Magnum in his armpit.

  The doctor was down the single street of Western storefronts. He had a snazzy waiting room. His receptionist took me ahead of several poor-looking Greek women with haggard faces, when she saw my face. It took him abo
ut ten minutes to sew me up. Nine stitches.

  But it was when he looked at the X-ray of my ribs that he got excited.

  Unfortunately, he spoke English. He also had that overdeveloped sense of his own importance the medical profession gives a man who gets used to being vastly overpaid for helping humanity.

  “When did this happen?” Sternly.

  “Four days ago,” I said.

  “My dear sir, you have been walking around for four days with two broken ribs. Your physical activity, whatever it has been, has aggravated them considerably. You should be in bed. Instead, it appears you have been in some kind of a fight. You have this strange abrasion on your back that looks like a human bite.”

  “Doc,” I said. “What can you do for the ribs?”

  He shrugged. “Tape them up. Then go to bed. Take care of yourself until they can knit.”

  “I’ll do that, Doc, as soon as I can,” I said.

  “You must do it now,” he said brusquely. “By the way, that was an excellent bandage, that you had there. Who did it?”

  “I did it myself.”

  He stared at me.

  “Well, I instructed a friend how to do it. She actually did the taping.”

  He gave me a sort of Don Juanish look. So I gave him back one of my merry winks.

  “And now, Doc, if you will just tell me what I owe you for all this humanitarian aid and advice. I’ll pay you and let you get back to fleecing your regular customers.”

  His eyes turned to black flint. He grabbed a piece of letterhead paper that must have cost a dollar a sheet and wrote on it and handed it to his girl. Outside, as if all this part was too lowbrow for the doctor’s sensibilities, she read me what was on it. I paid, but bitterly.

  It was pretty high, for nine stitches, an X-ray, and a lecture.

  Kronitis’s chauffeur was still waiting patiently by his big Rolls. He opened the door for me and I got in and we started the routine. We went up and over the same dry, sere hills. The same peon was at the gate, or anyway he had the same face.

  When I came into the big deep-carpeted office, there were two men in it now, instead of one. Kronitis was behind the desk.

  The other man turned to me, as the male secretary shut the door. He had a rueful, sorrowful smile on his face.

  Tarkoff was tanned, slim and muscular. But he was always tanned, slim and muscular. His New York suit pants and white shirt and tie stuck out like a sore thumb here. He had taken the suit coat off.

  “Hello, Freddy,” I said.

  “Hello, Lobo,” he said, warmly, and stepped toward me with his hand out.

  I put my hands in my pockets.

  “Let’s do this fast,” I said. “There’re only a couple of things. I’m returning Mr. Kronitis here his $4000 retainer, because he fired me before I finished the case. I’ve made out a bill for my daily fees and expenses up to the time he fired me. He can send a check to my New York account.”

  I took Kronitis’s bills out of my old wallet. It collapsed. I put it away.

  “The other thing is that I’m turning over to Pekouris all the information I’ve turned up on this little heroin operation of yours. I don’t honestly know what Pekouris will do with it. Or whether he’ll do anything. You guys can take it from there.”

  They both started to talk at once. Freddy held up a lean, tanned hand. “First, the money.”

  “I told him he should keep it, Freddy,” old Kronitis said. He came out from behind the desk. Between us two he looked elderly.

  “Then you should keep it,” Freddy said, and looked at me.

  “I don’t figure I earned it,” I said. I stepped to the desk and laid out the forty $100 bills in a leafed row. They were only a little more wrinkled than when Kronitis gave them to me brand new. “Anyway, it’s pretty dirty money,” I said. It didn’t look dirty.

  “As for Pekouris,” Freddy said, “we don’t have any special dealings with him.”

  It was not as if a look passed between them. It didn’t. It was more that they seemed to particularly avoid movement that might even be construed as a look passing between them. At the moment, that seemed enough evidence to me.

  “So we don’t know either, what he will do with your information,” Freddy said. “We assume he’ll have to put it on into the grinding machine. If it’s laid in front of him baldly.”

  “I’ll believe that,” I said, “because two such honest upright gentlemen like yourselves tell it to me.”

  “That’s a bit harsh,” Kronitis said.

  I gave him a stony look. “Is it?” I said. I shook my head at him. “You had me fooled, Mr. Kronitis. You fooled me completely. That hurts my vanity a little. I just couldn’t believe an upstanding decent old gentleman like you could be an international heroin trafficker. I believed you were being honest with me. That’s my fault.”

  “The reason you believed him,” Tarkoff said, “was just because he was being honest. He didn’t know anything about Kirk and Girgis Stourkos being involved in a stupid local hashish racket. He told you the truth.”

  “He didn’t tell me the truth about anything else,” I said.

  “He wasn’t asked,” Freddy said.

  “That’s true. And that’s my fault.” I turned to Freddy. “Naturally, I didn’t make any connection between Mr. Tarkoff here and the heroin ring. My fault again.”

  “I’m sorry as hell this had to happen, Lobo,” Tarkoff said.

  I gestured at the money, and then at Kronitis. “I’m out of it. You gentlemen have to take it from here.” I started to turn to the door.

  “Hold on,” Kronitis said. “We would like to talk to you just a little bit about this whole thing.”

  “I’m out of it,” I said. “You talk to Pekouris.”

  “Have you told him yet?” Kronitis asked.

  “Not yet,” I said. “But it’s only because I missed him in Athens. He should be arriving here any time.” They were a good team. They worked well together. It was like the Russian cop routine. If Tarkoff had asked me that, I would have told him to go to hell.

  “Will you just listen to us for five minutes?” Kronitis said, in his cool mathematician’s voice.

  I didn’t answer. Behind me Freddy stepped to me and put his hand on my shoulder. “Lobo.”

  “Don’t do that,” I said sharply. His hand went away.

  “We would only like for you to listen,” Kronitis said levelly. “I think that’s reasonable.”

  I turned back. “I’ll listen,” I said. “But nothing is going to change my opinion.”

  “We don’t want to change your opinions,” Kronitis said patiently.

  “My opinion is that you are a couple of low, sneaking, lying, conniving, criminal bastards,” I said.

  “We still wouldn’t want to change your opinions,” Kronitis said. “But we’d like for you to listen just a little to some factual aspects of this whole situation.”

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Tell me some factual aspects.”

  “First,” Kronitis said, “we have talked to Kirk.”

  I stared at him. “How the hell could you have talked to Kirk?”

  “He came here,” Kronitis said in his dry matter-of-fact way. “As soon as you left the villa with Duval in the Daisy Mae, he came here in the Polaris. He went around the island the other way. He brought the girl, the uh woman, Jane Duval, with him. We have also talked to her.”

  I just looked at him.

  Freddy Tarkoff, who knew my facial expressions pretty well, said, “That’s the God’s truth, Lobo.”

  “Oh, it’s the truth,” Kronitis said hastily. “They’re still here. If you’ll look out the window, you’ll see Polaris down at my dock.”

  I went to the window. I could see the top half of her at the man-made cove below the house. She sat there rocking quietly. Nobody was visible on her. Her cabin windows stared back blindly.

  “He’s a shrewd son of a bitch,” I said grudgingly.

  “They’re waiting on board,” Kronitis
said.

  “I don’t want to see them,” I said quickly. “I might punch both of them in the head. And I’m not up to it.”

  “You don’t have to see them,” Freddy said.

  “The point is,” Kronitis said patiently, “we have talked to both of them. Kirk can keep the girl quiet. It will cost us something.”

  “Kirk is not famous for his generosity or honesty,” I said.

  “As I’ve learned,” Kronitis said patiently. I suddenly had the feeling I was talking to a well-programed, well-oiled computer system, walking around posing as a man. “But we’ll have to pay the girl, too. In any case, the girl is willing to keep her mouth shut about the villa and our business affairs there. She will keep it out of her deposition, to protect Kirk, and she’ll keep it out of her testimony at the trial.”

  “I see,” I said. “But what about Sonny?”

  “I think I might be able to arrange a trade with Duval,” Kronitis said. “I’m not without influence in Athens, and I think I can arrange to guarantee him that he will not get a death sentence. In return, of course, he will have to keep his mouth shut about our business interests. The girl assures me that he will co-operate on such a deal.”

  “So that leaves only me,” I said.

  “That is right,” he said, and smiled his thin dry smile.

  “I don’t expect to be here for the trial,” I said. “Sonny’s confessed, anyway. But I would fly back for it if it meant the difference in getting a conviction.”

  “You’re a hard man, when you set your mind to something, aren’t you,” Kronitis said. It was not a question.

  “Are you going back to New York, Lobo?” Freddy Tarkoff said.

  “I don’t know,” I said shortly.

  “The girl is very shrewd,” Kronitis said. “If there is no deal, if you give your information to Inspector Pekouris or the other law-enforcement people, and implicate Kirk, she will tell everything she knows at the trial. She expressly mentioned Chantal von Anders. She seems to know about your feeling for Chantal.”

  “Who told her that?” I said.

  Kronitis raised his shoulders. “I can only assume that Kirk told her, when he briefed her, on their way here.”

  I didn’t believe him. I didn’t believe him at all. But it didn’t make much difference.