Touch of Danger

by James Jones

  “Something about your eyes, that level way you look at everybody, it’s so like the way my dad looked at people.” She shrugged suddenly, a large wild shrug. “I’ve been going over and over my life ever since. Whatever happened to it. How it got in the mess it’s in. Gee, I don’t know.”

  “Is it in a mess?”

  “You see that boy over there? With the glasses? The one I’m with? I’m living with him. This month. This week. This twenty-four hour period. They call him Slow John. You know why? Acid. Too much acid, too long. He’s very rich. And he’s an amoeba. He picked me up here this summer, when he first arrived. He’s got lots of money. So what. I know one day, sooner or later, he’ll up and leave—when Tsatsos bores him, or some other stimulus moves him in some other direction.”

  “Are you in love with him?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know. What does it matter? What difference does that make? That’s the wrong question. He doesn’t love me. He doesn’t love anybody. He can’t. He’s an amoeba. And he’s too worried about his spiritual welfare. And his money. He loves him. And I’ll still be here on Tsatsos. And sometimes I wonder where it all went. What happened to it all? I used to think it was such fun. How did it wind up like this? If it wasn’t for my skindiving sometimes I’d—

  “Besides—”

  “Whoa, whoa,” I said.

  She paid no attention. “Besides, he’s an orgiast. That’s the only way he can get it up. He likes more than one girl. Okay. That’s all right. All that’s fine. I’ve been around a lot. A lot, Mr. Davies. But a time comes in your life when you get tired of all that fun and games shit and you want something else. And you wonder where did it all go?”

  She stopped. Finally. And I was silent, too. Stunned by her outburst. “I don’t know anything to tell you,” I said in a low voice finally. “If you’re asking me. I wonder the same thing sometimes myself. Where did it all go? None of it turned out like you wanted it to, like you imagined it. But I don’t have any answer. I don’t know what to tell you.”

  The girl dashed her hand across her eyes again. “Gee, I didn’t mean to bend your ear like this. I don’t know what happened to me. That something about your eyes. I’m really sorry. I guess that’s what you get for making me think of my dad.”

  “Would you like to go somewhere and talk about it?”

  “No. No, I can’t. I really can’t. But you’re sweet to ask me. I just can’t. He’s sitting over there. Old Slow John.” She gave me a long look, and then suddenly reached across and squeezed my hand with both of hers. “I really can’t. But would you mind if I came and talked to you some more sometime while you’re here? You sort of do me good.”

  I gave her a long look back. “Not if it will help.”

  “God, am I getting incestuous in my old age?” Marie tossed her hair back, and laughed but it sounded hollow. “You won’t mind if I come look you up?” She got up, dashing her hand across her eyes again. I realized suddenly that everything had been said between us in extremely low voices, just like an ordinary conversation. I was surprised.

  “I’m really sorry,” she said. “Please excuse me.”

  I made a gesture. “That’s why I have big shoulders.”

  “My daddy used to say that to me, Oh, gee. You really—Well, bye.” And off she went, in her long-legged, half-coltish walk.

  I sat and looked at my drink.

  It was as if a tornado had passed. There was always a great calm after, and quiet, but it was a calm full of screaming nerves and broken teeth and limbs, and downed trees, and peoples’ smashed houses and cars and heads, and always there was an ambulance wailing in the distance: Somebody’s hurt. That was the kind of calm it was.

  Suddenly I puffed out my lips. I puffed them out again and let my breath out through them in a long sigh. I was feeling pretty beat up, pretty much a failure. Pretty powerless to help anyone. Pretty old.

  Chapter 17

  I WAS NOT IN THE BEST mood to have the bearded gent come over to my table.

  Actually, I would have left, but my attention got diverted by the boy singing star Jason who was approached at his table by one of the three scrawny American boys on the boathouse bandstand and asked to sing a song. Jason demurred, but was importuned, and got on the stand and took one of the guitars. Heard over an amplifier his fragile voice was much stronger, had more body and phrasing. He was certainly a lot better than the scrawny trio who, I found out later, not only brought all their own equipment but paid the Greek bar owner for the privilege of playing on his boathouse stand.

  It was while Jason was playing that the tall man with the long hair got up and came over. When he got to the table, I realized he wasn’t any taller than me but just looked taller.

  “You mind if I sit down a minute?”

  I just stared at him. I was not feeling very charitable at the moment. “I don’t see why not,” I said finally. “Everybody else around here seems to.”

  That didn’t upset him much. The man smiled, and took his time. He slipped into a chair. “You probably don’t remember me. But I met you at Georgina’s yesterday. And I was at the table in the plaza this morning.”

  “I remember you,” I said grouchily. “Have you got a name?”

  “I’m Pete,” the man smiled.

  “Great. Is there any last name to go with it?”

  He shrugged. “They don’t go by last names around here much. But it’s Gruner. I asked after you at Dmitri’s. They said you might be here.”

  “Well, I’m here. What’s on your mind?”

  “I wanted to meet you.” He ordered a drink from the waiter.

  “That girl friend of yours didn’t seem so anxious to meet me,” I said, and gave him a mean grin.

  On the boathouse stage, Jason finished his number and went back to his table to light applause. Actually, he looked too slight, and too beat, to even hold a guitar. Let alone play on it and sing. His whole generation must be thanking God for amplifiers and all the new electronics developments.

  “Oh, her. That one never wants to do or meet anything interesting,” Pete said. He spoke like a man who was required to maintain an important but uninteresting bit of camouflage.

  “Well, you’ve met me,” I said. “What do you want?”

  “Just to meet you.”

  “And what do you do, Gruner, pray tell? What line of work?” I thought I could already smell it.

  “A little of this. A little of that. I’m a dropout from a Madison Avenue ad agency.” It sounded a little like a prepared speech. “I didn’t like the life. I didn’t like America much any more. So I cut out for Europe. I’m a cook. On yachts. I worked with a French archaeological diving crew, for a while, as cook and helper.”

  “And what happened to them?” I said. “It sounds like something did.”

  “Well, they turned out to be running raw heroin stock. The raw morphine base. Stuff from Turkey. I didn’t even know about it. And—they got picked up. Fortunately for me, I had already left them at the time. After that, I worked on a couple of private yachts.”

  “Very interesting.” I was suddenly back in my old milieu again, the old professional. I took a slow drink from my glass. “Is that the story you tell around here?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “And they believe you? Jesus,” I said. I took another drink. “You know what you smell like to me, Gruner? You smell like cop.”

  Pete smiled coolly, his eyebrows amused. “How do cops smell?”

  “Old,” I said, with a false croak. “And sore-footed. And frustrated. From either kicking people too much to no avail, or from walking around and around in bad shoes trying to help them and failing. You smell like T-man, or CIA, or a Narcotics man.”

  Pete was still smiling. “Not me.”

  “You’re not a cop?”

  “No, I’m not. You wouldn’t expect me to tell you if I was one, would you?”

  I was supposed to answer that by saying Fair enough. I didn’t feel like it. I just looked at him. T
he three young Americans were playing bad music again. “What do you want from me?”

  “Nothing. I was just wondering if you were down here on something special? Or just looking around in general? Or what? And for who?”

  “I’m on vacation.”

  “Sure. I heard that. Like every private op from America in Athens comes to Tsatsos on vacation. You are a private op?”

  “You want to see my license?”

  “Me? No. I don’t have any authority, man. Like I told you, I’m a dropout. I just work a while, until I save some money. Then I come here and stay until it’s spent. But I live here, man. I’m interested.”

  “Yeah, you live here, and there’s an awful lot of hash coming onto this island where you live. But I suppose that wouldn’t interest you so much, would it? Heroin might, though.”

  He just smiled, and chose to deliberately misread me. “Heroin I don’t know anything about, and it doesn’t interest me. I’ve never tried it. I like to smoke a little hash, though, now and then. But just moderately. Heroin is bad medicine.” He had plenty of cool on him under that little beard.

  I wondered what he would say if I told him what my old last-century nose had begun to sniff at suspiciously around the bootheels of Mr. Leonid Kronitis.

  “Heroin is bad medicine,” I said. “But heroin has never been one of my problems. Nor one of my assignments. Does that help you any?”

  “Not much.” He was certainly a smiler, this Pete. “What would help me, maybe, would be to know why an American private cop obviously in Athens for the first time would decide to take a month’s vacation on the island of Tsatsos, which has hardly ever been heard of by anybody except millionaires, hippies and Athenian Greeks.”

  “Maybe I know a millionaire. It’s possible.”

  “That could explain it.”

  I didn’t like his damned officious attitude. “You really want to know?”

  “I don’t know if I do or not. It depends.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” I said confidentially. “I picked it out. By myself. You want to know how?”

  “How?”

  “With an eyedropper on a map. Now. How’s that? I just took the old eyedropper and held it over the map and shut my eyes, and ping. Tsatsos. That answer your question?”

  “Sure. That answers my question. Well,” he got up, still smiling. He put money on the table. “Here’s for my drink. Everybody pays his own tab here.” He moved his head backward, to include the town, “See you around.”

  “You’ll see me around for exactly two weeks, or three. Till my vacation’s over. If I can hack it that long.”

  He just nodded. Still smiling. He was certainly good-looking enough, in his hippie outfit. Slowly, still with full self-appreciation of himself, he wandered off toward the path.

  I motioned for the waiter and paid. I wandered out toward the path myself. I hoped I did it with one half the dash Pete did it with. I knew I didn’t. Marie waved at me from her table.

  On the road the others had disappeared. There was nobody, no Pete, no mother and daughter, no horsecabs, no nothing. I started to walk back toward Dmitri’s.

  So. Now we had a new wrinkle. Pete Gruner. The dropout cop. By process of elimination he almost had to be a nark. There didn’t appear to be anything political around, to call for a CIA. Would the Treasury send a man to check on local summer American millionaires? Not likely, not efficient. So he almost had to be a nark, and that meant heroin.

  Was there a big heroin operation going on here? Girgis and Kirk wouldn’t fool around with vest-pocket hash running if they were involved in something like big-time heroin smuggling. Would Kronitis be? A man that rich? In something that dangerous? Didn’t seem logical.

  Or maybe Pete Gruner was just traveling, and sniffing in general, without any specific target? There was probably a lot of stuff going on in all these islands so close to Turkey. Or maybe Pete Gruner was just gumshoeing addicts, to make a traceback. How many H addicts might there be up there on the hill at the Construction, I wondered suddenly. There ought to be a few. That boyfriend of Marie’s, Slow John. A blown acid head. And rich. He was almost a natural for an H addiction. And if there were some, where were they getting their stuff? Maybe Gruner was working on that?

  Hell, it was all beginning to sound more and more like my stamping ground in the East Village.

  And why would he come up and expose himself like that to me. Maybe he didn’t think he was exposing himself, at first? But he certainly didn’t get very nervous when I tumbled to him. But then who would I tell about him? Marie, and Georgina, and Chantal? Ambassador Pierson? Who else did I know? And who was going to believe me?

  Maybe he wanted me to tell somebody? Some big shot he thought I might be down here working for. In order to flush somebody?

  It didn’t any of it make much sense. Ahead of me the lights of Dmitri’s taverna became specific lights, instead of just a general glow. There wasn’t so much noise from it now, it was almost midnight.

  I walked in under the fall of light from the overhead lamps, thinking that I was going to be due at Chantal’s soon, and then saw that the big man who was captain of the Agoraphobe, Jim Kirk, was standing just at the opposite edge of the lightfall.

  It was a curious configuration, Dmitri’s taverna. Largely because the one-track seawall road ran right through the middle of it, so to speak. The road ran right against the front of the building, so that the waiters had to cross this hard-dirt-and-gravel road to get to the dining tables which were on the other side and built out over the water. The horsecabs and the few official jeeps and trucks were liable to drive right through the middle of your dinner leaving a film of dust on your food.

  Thus, Kirk and I found ourselves standing in the opposite edges of the light at the opposite ends of this unoccupied one-laner road, that ran through the place like a tunnel. We looked like the perfectly staged final shootout scene from some Greek Western. And me not wearing any iron.

  Kirk wasn’t doing anything. He was just standing there and looking at me. He might have been waiting for me to appear exactly where and when I did appear, but I couldn’t be sure of that.

  The place wasn’t crowded, but it wasn’t empty. There were three or four occupied tables out by the water, and in the open, roofed-over patio room beside the taverna building under the bright lights there were three or four others.

  Suddenly Kirk began to caper. He started to prance up and down on his tiptoes, and fling his arms around over his head, his back all hunched down like some dwarf, an enormous leer of a grin on his face.

  Kirk was a big man but he wasn’t a very tall man. He was only maybe five foot ten. But he was an enormously broad man, both in the shoulders and in the hips, and meat bulged from him everywhere. His head at his ears appeared to be narrower than his neck.

  He certainly looked peculiar. Like that. With legs like treetrunks and huge bulging arms, he capered up and down in front of me at the other edge of the light.

  And more peculiar still, nobody at any of the occupied tables seemed to pay the slightest bit of attention to him.

  I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t figure out if he was trying to put me on and make fun of me? Vanity made my ears burn. I couldn’t very well turn around and walk away. For a moment my aging persecution complex, thickened and lumpy from years of being kicked by clients’ enemies and clients themselves, made me wonder if all of them weren’t banded together in a complot to make me a laughingstock.

  I started to walk ahead.

  Kirk was still capering, and flinging his arms around. “Hi, there!” he shouted, in a kind of low-volume bellow, his voice a sort of basso falsetto, if such a thing was possible. “Hi, there! I’m back from Athens! I had a talk with her! I had a talk with him! Naturally I brought her back with me! Do you think it’s fair for a man to threaten a girl with suicide! I don’t think it’s much class!”

  Not a soul at any of the tables seemed to be paying the slightest attention. Then I got what it
was. He was mimicking Sonny Duval’s conversation with me of an hour before. But how had he heard it? There hadn’t been anybody near us. Had Sonny told him what he’d said? Had Kirk been standing out in the dark beyond the end of the taverna listening?

  And why didn’t the people at the tables pay even the slightest attention to us? Were they used to him as some kind of nut? Was he some kind of nut?

  I went on walking toward him. He went on capering. He was directly between me and the path to my house, but I could easily walk right around him. Then I decided I didn’t want to. Some facts I wanted might come out of this. Chantal could wait a little.

  I sat down at an empty table not far from him and motioned for the waiter. Kirk immediately stopped prancing and came striding over to me, and stuck out his hand and sat down.

  “Jim Kirk,” he said.

  I took the hand. My hand wasn’t small, but it seemed to disappear completely. His voice had the rumble of a fired-up volcano. It seemed to come from somewhere down near the backs of his knees. “Lobo Davies,” I said. But it was a perfectly normal, sane, everyday tone he had; and he wasn’t at all grinning.

  And all around us not one person had turned his or her head to even glance at us.

  “What do you want to drink?” I said.

  “I’ll have a double Scotch. On the rocks,” Kirk said evenly. “Or, if you think you can afford it, a triple. On the rocks.”

  “That was some exhibition you just put on.”

  “I wanted to be sure of catching your attention,” he said without expression.

  I told the waiter a triple Scotch on the rocks. “Well, you did,” I said. “Do you do that often?”

  “That depends on the people. You mean because nobody paid any attention to us?”

  “Yes.”

  “They know me around here. So they know what to expect.”

  “Well, it’s certainly a novel way of attracting someone’s attention,” I said.

  “I invented it. It’s all my own. Of course I don’t always do it the same.”