Touch of Danger

by James Jones

  “Well, I wish you’d try to understand that Jane’s a believer. She believes.”

  “That’s great,” I said sourly. “So were the Spanish Catholics believers in the days of the auto-da-fé. Give me a cynic any time. My life’s safer with him.”

  “I’m sorry you won’t try and understand us. I was hoping we could become good friends,” Sonny said.

  That was all it meant to him, apparently. That was all he’d gotten out of what I’d said. Or tried to say. Good friends. Or not good friends.

  I stood looking at him, and I could feel the corner of my mouth twitch, with irritation, with anger, finally with disgust. I turned away and went and sat down on the coach-roof.

  “You’re too old to be a hippie,” I called.

  “No, I’m not. Nobody’s ever too old for anything, to be anything. If they’ve got the courage—Here we are!” he called. “We’re coming in!”

  Chapter 24

  THE GLAUROS FERRY DOCK was a rough-poured concrete ramp down into the water. I never ceased to be amazed at how badly the Greeks and the French handled concrete. The ferry itself, a U. S. Army surplus LCT painted blue and white, rocked at its dock with its ramp down. Beside this was a normal dock for caiques. We tied up there.

  Up on the road where some taxis were parked, the biggest, blackest Rolls-Royce limousine I’d ever seen sat solidly like a tank. The taxi drivers, a sinister-looking lot with sideburns and dark glasses, stood around it. When we walked up the little grade, a liveried chauffeur came forward from beside it. I immediately noticed the extra weight he carried under his left arm. It looked like a lot of weight. A .357 Magnum, maybe.

  “Mr. Davies?”

  I nodded, and he opened the door of the limousine for me. Behind me Sonny Duval whistled, a long-drawn-out nasty comment.

  At the door, I stuck out my jaw at him. “Just because I have to dress cheap, you think I haven’t got rich friends, hunh?” I got in.

  Through the tinted window glass, I got some glimpses of the town of Glauros as we went past it, not through it, up the hill. Glauros wasn’t big enough to go through. On top we hit the main road—which appeared to be little more than a slightly blacktopped, very hole-filled cowpath. The town below resembled nothing so much as a jerry-built Western town in the Arizona desert country, except for one thing: a big horribly modern glass-and-green-marble tourist hotel, which crouched at the near end of it. There was a row of bars nobody with 50 cents in his pocket would want to go in, a nineteenth-century brick town hall, and little else. It seemed little more than a way station for the ferry to the islands nearby.

  I tapped on the glass between me and the chauffeur. The chauffeur opened it.

  “That’s Glauros?”

  “Yes, sir.” He had an upper-class English accent, too.

  “What do they do there?”

  “Very little, sir.”

  “Then why the hot-shot hotel?”

  “People come down from Athens, sir.” He shrugged. “And there are tourists.”

  “To do what?”

  “There are a number of ruins in the neighborhood, sir.”

  “How many is a number?”

  “In the entire area? Four. Perhaps five, sir. There are two fairly close by.”

  “That’s all?”

  “There is a casino at Petkos, sir.”

  “I see. You’re English?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tell me, why do you carry a gun?”

  “Orders, sir,” the chauffeur said promptly. “The country is quite wild hereabouts.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “It’s nice to know one is in good hands.”

  “Will that be all, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you, sir.” He closed the glass.

  He certainly had nice manners. With that cannon he was carrying, I was glad. And he could always be telling the truth. We had been driving mainly uphill, and had reached a plain. From it you could see down to the sea all around. The sea disappeared as the car moved inland. The chauffeur made some confusing turns, then turned off back downhill. Below us a sea vista opened up, in the center of which was a breath-taking villa. It had everything. It had its own electric plant. It had a king-sized swimming pool. It might even have had its own fresh water plant, to turn sea water into fresh. It was that elaborate. As we got down closer to it, the place looked more and more like an armed fortress. There was a big iron grill gate, chained, with a gateman. There was a whitewashed high wall, with dangerous looking glass cemented on top. I leaned forward and tapped the glass. The chauffeur opened it.

  “Tell me, is that the casino?”

  There was the tiniest pause, then the modulated voice, “No, sir. That is Mr. Kronitis’s estate.”

  “That’s where we’re going?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I forgot to bring my bathing suit.”

  Again the tiny pause, before the voice, “I’m sure there are some available, sir.”

  “Thank you.”

  I guess he thought me irreverent. I felt irreverent.

  This time the chauffeur didn’t close the glass. Ahead of us the gateman recognized us and had the gate open before we rolled up to it. He touched his cap like a well-bred peasant as we went through.

  “You’ve got well-bred peasants here,” I said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  My ire was still rising, as the chauffeur turned me over to a butler. It was enough to almost make you a Communist. The ire went up further, as the butler led me through an elaborate living area, out beside the big delicious marble pool, and into an annex and turned me over to the male secretary I had spoken to earlier. He didn’t say a word to me, except a polite, “Mr. Davies.” It was a good thing for him he didn’t. He escorted me from his own small office into a huge one. Far across it, beside windows that looked on the sea, a tall, stooped, gray-haired man sat behind a desk the size of a small hockey rink.

  With an effort, I waded across the thick-napped carpet. Kronitis got up, smiling.

  “Please sit down, Mr. Davies. Why are you walking so strangely?”

  “I always do that when I can’t see my ankles,” I said. “Then, too, I was scared of maybe tripping over a small log that might have been mislaid down in there.”

  Kronitis stared at me puzzled, still smiling. “Oh. Yes. One of your jokes. Freddy Tarkoff told me about your jokes.” He indicated a chair before the desk, one of several white leather ones scattered about the room. “Please sit.”

  “Well, hardly a joke. Carpets that thick frighten me,” I said. “Are you sure I won’t get this dirty?” I looked at the chair. “If all this has been done to impress me, I’m impressed.”

  Kronitis laughed, “Ha, ha, ha,” a polite, but rather mirthless laugh. “Freddy Tarkoff has told me all about you, Mr. Davies. But I had rather expected we would meet in another situation, under different circumstances.” He was a very dry man. Sec, the French would say. He probably spoke perfect French.

  “You mean like at Ambassador Pierson’s for dinner.”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “I prefer the ruder, more exotic fisherman’s hovel. What do you want to see me about, Mr. Kronitis?” I had sat down. Now I deliberately placed one dusty bare sandaled foot on the other knee.

  “I want to hire you, Mr. Davies. I want to employ your services to find out who killed, who murdered, my man Girgis Stourkos. I’m prepared to pay you handsomely.” He opened a desk drawer.

  “Hold on. It’s not that easy, Mr. Kronitis,” I said. “I don’t usually take jobs I don’t know about, from people I know nothing about, either. And you don’t know anything about me.”

  Kronitis remained poised, hand still in desk drawer. “I know all I need to know about you from Freddy Tarkoff.”

  “He never mentioned you to me,” I said.

  “No reason that he should. But I’m prepared to tell you everything about me you want to know. Certain high-finance arrangements of mine, of course, I can’
t talk about.”

  I grinned. “No. I wouldn’t expect that.” I remembered who he made me think of. It was an aged mathematics professor I had at Denver.

  “But anything else.”

  “I wouldn’t even know where to start. You own the Polaris, Girgis’s boat, don’t you, Mr. Kronitis?”

  “That’s correct. Or, rather, I own most of it. I gave Girgis Stourkos twenty percent of it as an inducement.”

  I had been wrong about one thing, anyway. The old man was no common heroin smuggler.

  “Well, would you perchance know that Girgis was running a very profitable illegal hashish-smuggling operation from the Polaris? And if so, would you be owning eighty percent of that?”

  Kronitis’s face had become very still. He looked genuinely surprised. “No, sir, I wouldn’t. The answer is no to both questions. I had no idea of that.”

  He was surprised, all right. “It seems to be the truth,” I said. “Would that affect your wanting to hire me?”

  “No, it wouldn’t. Not in the least.”

  “Not even if the smuggling became public?”

  Kronitis thought a moment. His hand was still poised in the drawer. “No. No, it wouldn’t bother me. I had nothing to do with it, and know nothing about it. I’m genuinely shocked. And I still want whoever killed him caught and punished.”

  I nodded. “Fine.”

  “Well, he worked for me, Mr. Davies.” He reached his hand on in the drawer. “I try to look after people who work for me, Mr. Davies.”

  I suddenly decided not to mention Kirk to him. The old gent seemed straight enough. Certainly his surprise about the hashish was straight. And I didn’t want to lose Kirk his job. Certainly not if he was innocent. And especially not if he was guilty. Not yet.

  Kronitis pulled out a nice sheaf of new $100 bills. “I have four thousand dollars here, Mr. Davies. In cash. Which I’m prepared to give you this morning as a retainer.” He spread the bills in a row on the desk in front of me. They looked mighty good, and mighty genuine. And Kronitis knew it.

  I pursed my lips in a soundless whistle for him. “That’s a lot of money to me, Mr. Kronitis. That’s more than I get for two missing kid jobs in New York.”

  “You would charge your usual fee and expenses. In addition to this retainer.” Before I could answer, he murmured, “I suppose it was all those hippies up there on the hill. He just couldn’t resist the temptation.”

  “Yes, sir. It would seem so. Well, what would you say if I told you that the prime suspects in the murder case so far are also people who work for you?”

  At this Kronitis’s eyebrows went up. He still had his hand poised among the $100 bills, carefully squaring them in line, like my mathematics professor used to do his books.

  “I’m referring,” I said, “to two of those same hippies. An American boy named Steve, and his sidekick called Chuck. Would you still want to hire me?”

  Kronitis stared at me fixedly, a stormy look. He sat back.

  “Some kind of gang killing, then? About who owns the hashish rights?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You’re also referring, Mr. Davies, I imagine, to that night club of theirs I helped them start? Yes, sir, I would still want to hire you.”

  “Well, would you mind telling me why you financed that night club, and how much of it you own?”

  “I own all of it. That’s required by Greek law. But we split the profits of it 50-50. That was my deal with Steve. I thought it would not be wise to favor him too much, and give him all the profits. As to why I did it, this boy Steve came to me about it. I thought it would be better if I financed it, than if some unsavory outside element came in from Athens.

  “You may not know it, Mr. Davies, but Tsatsos is a vanishing type among the Greek islands. It has kept to the old ways, and so far it hasn’t been exploited. Mostly that is because it was a resort for Athenian Greeks long before the Americans and Europeans started touristing our country in large numbers. Some of us hope to keep it as the quiet, sleepy, backward place it’s always been.

  “Naturally, any outside unscrupulous money from Athens getting an opening foothold through a night club would begin to jeopardize that. Yet there was a natural need for such a night club. I thought backing this boy Steve would take care of it. Also, he seemed to be able to control the hippie colony fairly well.”

  That sounded square enough to me. “Do you have any idea why this hippie colony has been tolerated as long as it has, Mr. Kronitis?”

  “No, I don’t. The Greek government has its own reasons for doing what it does. These are ticklish times, Mr. Davies. Almost certainly the present government will not last forever. I am not privy to the government’s thinking. But I would imagine the money brought in by the hippies is a consideration. They aren’t poor.”

  “That sounds fair enough,” I said. I paused. “If I take your money, and your job, Mr. Kronitis—to use a metaphor that may be in bad taste—the heads will have to fall where they may.”

  Kronitis wrinkled his nose. A fastidious man, clearly. Well, he could afford it. “I would not expect anything different. That’s the very reason I want to hire you, Davies,” he said just the same. He reached out and shuffled the bills together. “Here.”

  “One minute. I’ve got another question. Would you happen to know anything about why three men, from off the island as far as I can find, would come to Tsatsos wanting to work me over?”

  “Work you over?”

  “Beat me up.”

  “Is that what happened to your face?”

  “Yes. But I thought it didn’t show any more.”

  “Just a little. A little bruise. Under the skin. So they beat you up?”

  “They tried. They didn’t succeed. But why, I don’t know. Maybe to scare me into leaving?”

  Kronitis’s big jaw came out. My old math professor had a big jaw too, when he wanted to use it. Above the jaw Kronitis grinned. “I would think that would be precisely the way to guarantee that you stayed, Mr. Davies.”

  “As a matter of fact, it would. But you wouldn’t know anything about it?”

  “No, sir. I would not.”

  “Okay. My fees are a hundred and fifty a day and expenses.” I got up. “I’ll take your money, Mr. Kronitis.” I put the money in my wallet and got one of my cards out of it. “I’ll write you a receipt on this.” The money felt nice and thick.

  I passed the receipt across the desk. “Why don’t you trust the local police? To get the guy.”

  “I trust them. I am acquainted with Inspector Pekouris for a long time. I would also like to know a man of your caliber is working on it, too.”

  “Would you mind if I told them you’ve hired me?”

  Kronitis was silent a moment. “I would rather they did not know. If there is a choice.”

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to tell them.”

  “All right. Tell them, then.”

  I straightened up. I took my time putting my fat wallet away. Then I said, softly, “Mr. Kronitis, if I found there was anything fishy about the reason you hired me, I’d drop the case like a hot rock. And you wouldn’t get your retainer back.”

  “That’s fine,” Kronitis stood, and put out his hand, “perfectly fine. I find you are everything Freddy Tarkoff said you were.”

  “If he told you that for my fee I give good service to honest clients, he’d be right, too,” I said. I took the hand. It was as sec as the rest of him. “Goodbye. I’ll be in touch.” I began the long plod back across that carpet.

  His head was already bent over his desk as I shut the door softly behind me.

  Outside, the man secretary looked at me questioningly, but I stared him down with a blank face.

  Then the same routine to get me back out of there began all over again just the same, this time in reverse. The secretary handed me off to the butler. The butler carted me out through that establishment. I went through my momentary Communist proclivities again. The butler passed me to the chauffeu
r. The chauffeur lateraled me into his Rolls.

  I was a football. Or a baseball, in the old double-play routine: Tinker to Evers to Chance.

  Back at Glauros I stopped the chauffeur at the end of the main drag, before we rolled out onto the dock. Pekouris had said he was going back to his office. After the chauffeur opened and closed the door for me, still wearing his big piece of iron, he touched his cap.

  I gave him a grin, and on the spur of the moment snapped him back a tight little half-military Army salute. I supposed it was all right if a very rich man wanted his English chauffeur to sport a .357 cannon. Especially down here in the wilds of the lower Greek finger peninsulas.

  My salute didn’t faze him a bit.

  I started on into the tiny town, toward the nineteenth-century town hall of brick.

  Chapter 25

  THE WHOLE PLACE WAS DESERTED, except for a few bored tourists on the veranda of the ugly marble hotel. For a split second down in the dirt street I felt like Wyatt Earp walking down the dusty main drag of Tombstone looking for a showdown with somebody.

  Behind me, Sonny Duval came galloping up, and fell into step. “Where are you going? I’ll go with you.”

  I stopped in the rutted street. “No, you won’t. I’ve got an errand to do. I want to do it by myself.”

  “Well, gee,” Sonny said. He was putting on a fake boyishness, to hide his anger. “Gee whiz. Phooo. Okay, boss. Yes, sir, boss.” He turned back toward the dock.

  I looked after him grimly. Sometimes he could try even my superb patience.

  I went on to the city hall. Inside, it was dirty, unswept, empty. It looked and smelled about like any county courthouse I’d ever been in in the United States. Rolls of dirt that my mother used to call slut feathers lay in the corners of the marble floor. Its dimness gave a false impression of cool in the heat. A sign pointed to the Police Inspector’s office. I knocked, and went in. Inside Pekouris was at a desk, and one other man sat at a live, but silent radio apparatus. Pekouris had taken off his suit coat but not his tie, and sat in his short-sleeved white shirt.