Touch of Danger

by James Jones

  Jim Kirk was certainly a suspect. But he simply wouldn’t have killed Girgis over the hashish trade. It wasn’t worth that much to him.

  That left the two kids. It was possible they were in it together, but I didn’t believe it. It was more likely crazy Chuck had done it on his own, thinking in his crazy way that he was helping his pal, the same way he had broken that boy’s nose that night, and now Steve was trying to cover up for him hoping to squeak him out of it. Given all the other facts we knew about Chuck, it was a high probability.

  That was the only answer I could come up with. And after working on it for eight straight hours, I was inclined to accept it. The thing that bothered me was that it was completely circumstantial.

  The only other possibility was that there was another motive, with a vastly greater element of gain in it, which had been so cleverly concealed that I had received no inkling of it at all since I had been here.

  In a way I hated it to be Chuck because I hated crazy murders. I would rather it was Kirk. It would have been so much cleaner. So much more human.

  It was five A.M. when I locked up my briefcase, and locked it away in the lock-up closet. I had eaten six greasy pork sandwiches that had nearly destroyed what digestion I had left, smoked two packs of cigarettes that put me that much further along the road to lung cancer, drunk five carefully measured drinks that hadn’t helped me at all as I intended they shouldn’t, and I was tired. Chantal had not come by. I made myself a really important drink and went upstairs and went to bed.

  It was after ten A.M. when Pekouris arrived down below in the jeep with two other policemen, to check out Sonny Duval. He waved up at me, before they walked down to the dock.

  I sat on my porch over the harbor with my coffee, and watched Pekouris show off in his blue suit and row them out, standing up in the skiff with the long, push-type oars. Everybody in Greece, or at least everybody I knew, seemed to be able to row a dinghy like a professional.

  The other two officers were strangers I had never seen before.

  I watched all three of them climb up Sonny’s ladder. It was hot and sunny where we were at the yacht harbor, but off over Sonny’s caique above the mainland a long bank of dark yellowish cloud was moving down from the northeast, and there was a stillness and absence of breeze that presaged some weather.

  Half an hour later they rowed back to the dock and Pekouris drove the jeep over to my side of the vacant lot and parked it in the grass. He left the other two sitting in the sun. On his way up he made an elaborately polite greeting to the leathery Georgina who was pottering around in her hot garden.

  “Do you want a drink?” I said when he came in.

  He just looked at me.

  He had a genius for rubbing me the wrong way.

  “Then to hell with you,” I said. “I’ll have one myself without you, then, Pekouris.” I called to the housekeeper. “Mama-san. Ice.”

  “I came to ask about your investigations. What have you found out?”

  “Not too much,” I said. “I haven’t done too much. Did you find a lot of incriminating evidence on Sonny’s boat?”

  He gave me his superior thick-lipped smile. “That was only a routine call. He is, as you say, clean.”

  “Well, you upset him enough by it,” I said.

  He grinned. “I hope so. He is not a man I find I can like easily. Nor his wife. But he is clean. I did not expect to find anything.”

  I smiled. “So you just wanted to blow his mind a little?” I didn’t know if I liked that or not. I guessed I did. “I’ve been doing some homework, though,” I said, “if I haven’t done much else. And I’ve about reached the same conclusion you already arrived at. It looks like it has to be that boy with his machete.”

  “I do not think there is any doubt,” Pekouris said.

  “He’s got a machete with him here, you know,” I said.

  Pekouris nodded.

  “Well, just curiosity, but why didn’t you pick him up?”

  “He was not there when we were there. He had gone off around to Ayia Paraskevi.”

  I didn’t know what it was about him that I just couldn’t cotton to. But I just couldn’t appreciate him. Couldn’t he give a straight answer, once?

  “Wouldn’t it have been easy to run around there in a boat and pick him up?” I said patiently.

  Pekouris made a nastier than usual smile. “Yes. Yes, it would. But I do not think you understood my Athens directive yesterday, when I told it to you, Davies. I was told by Athens to: Solve it, but solve it fast. The emphasis was on the Fast.”

  Apparently calling me just “Davies” like that was some form of slightly more intimate address that meant equality, to him. But to me it sounded condescending, dictatorial, domineering, superior, and snotty. I didn’t like that about him, either.

  “I see. So?”

  “Well, is it not self-evident? If I pick this boy up now, an American, there would be an enormous publicity in the press, and a long drawn-out court case. I might not even convict him. If he were a Greek.” He shrugged. “It would be a different matter. But he is not. And that is not solving it fast, as my directive ordered me.”

  He suddenly looked a little peaked, Pekouris. Like a man being pulled two ways by exactly equal forces. But he wasn’t going to admit that to me. There was his duty as he liked to conceive it, and his duty as his Athens superiors preferred him to conceive it. I wanted to feel sorry for him. But it wasn’t easy.

  “I need some real evidence. Or a confession. A confession would be best. That would be perfect.”

  “And in the meantime, these two boys may just up and hightail it out of here on a small boat, to Turkey.”

  “Highly unlikely. Believe me, they would never get there.” It sounded like a face-saving pronouncement to me. But maybe he could back it up.

  “Well,” I said. “Listen, speaking of evidence. I happened to be with someone yesterday.”

  Pekouris smiled. “Yes, I know.”

  I blinked once at him, slowly. “And this somebody told me something interesting. Not long ago a bunch of these kids stole some goat and killed it and roasted it. This boy Chuck decapitated it with his machete. Fine. But then he went around with the goat’s blood on the machete without washing it off, and bragging about it.”

  Pekouris was watching me intently. “Yes? I do not entirely follow your reasoning.”

  “Well. If he would do that with goat’s blood, isn’t it just possible he might do the same with human blood?”

  Pekouris nodded. “I see. Yes, it’s just possible. Especially with a crazy man.”

  “Is there any way of separating and distinguishing dried goat’s blood from dried human blood on a knife?”

  “I would have to ask a doctor about that.”

  “I don’t know enough, medically.”

  “Nor do I. Anyway, do not concern yourself with that. I will find out all about that from our laboratory. It’s an excellent idea.

  “But I am not going to arrest the boy and confiscate the machete now. First, I want to find out what the laboratory tells me.”

  “Well, I can hardly confiscate it for you,” I said. “Or steal it for me.”

  “I do not ask you to,” Pekouris said, humorless to the end. “This just might solve all our problems,” he said, more to himself than to me. Clearly, he meant his problems.

  “I’m not holding it up as any great possibility,” I said.

  He moved away from the chair he had been standing beside. “I’ll be in touch with you about the laboratory.” He pronounced it like the English: laboratory. Ponderously, in his ponderous way, he moved toward the three steps down into the hallway to the door.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” I said. “What about Jim Kirk? What are you doing about him?”

  Pekouris turned. “He is being looked into.”

  “You know he was in with Girgis, don’t you? He’s a suspect, too, you know.”

  He blinked at me solemnly. “No stone is being left unturned, D
avies,” he said. He turned and went down the steps.

  I watched him go out. Then I walked out to my porch to watch him drive away. He was just about not believable. I watched him climb into the jeep’s driver’s seat, beside his two hot cops, who were still sitting there obediently in the sun.

  After he was gone, Sonny Duval walked up along the seawall from the taverna, looking up at me. He didn’t come inside the gate.

  “You saw?” he called. “I’ve been given a clean bill of health.”

  I just nodded.

  “Listen,” he called up. “Will you be wanting the boat? It looks like one of those quick summer storms. We almost never get them. But when we do, they blow like hell for a couple of hours.” As he spoke, the first fingerlings of rising breeze blew dust swirls up from around his feet in the dry graveled road. It was hotter now, if anything. Muggy heat.

  I looked off toward the bank of cloud to the northeast. You could see the blue sheets of rain falling from it in long parallelograms. “No, I won’t want it,” I called down.

  He shrugged his shoulders up once, then turned and stalked off toward the taverna again. I went inside and picked a book in English off one of the shelves. It was something called Bitter Lemons, by Lawrence Durrell, about Cyprus.

  I sat down with it on the porch and told the old Greek woman to bring me some whisky, and that I’d eat lunch there.

  Chapter 31

  THE PROSPECT OF A rainy day made me feel I didn’t have to do anything. My lunch was the first meal my Greek housekeeper had made for me. It was pretty hard to ruin plain scrambled eggs, but she managed it. I put down a whole bottle of red wine with it, and took my book back out on the protected porch with a brandy.

  Chantal had not called. I was sort of glad.

  The bank of yellow cloud had continued to come on out of the northeast, and the excited feeling of a storm had fallen over the harbor. A steady rain began to fall. The wind hadn’t abated and the sea was up, making the boats rock in the harbor, and the high masts toss wildly. Everything was battened down and seemed suddenly empty of people. I sat and watched it like you would watch an exciting movie.

  Outside in the rain the ship’s bell over the upper garden gate jangled, and then the front door bell rang. The old Greek woman opened it. A tallish long-legged long-haired blonde young woman in skintight blue jeans and a bra-less thin cotton shirt came in. She said hello to the maid in Greek.

  “Hello there, Mr. Davies!”

  My dirty black old heart sort of skipped a beat.

  I stood up, out on the porch, as she came leggily down the living room toward me, slightly damp. She obviously knew the house.

  And I, standing drink in hand, suddenly saw that long body nude, the way I had seen it yesterday pulling off the black wet suit. And the day before yesterday, striding naked into the water at the hippie beach. And today? Well, today—such a nice quiet cozy rainy today—was such a great day for it, wasn’t it?

  “Gosh it’s raining!” she said breathlessly, in her half-childish way. “A lot of wind! But I think it’ll blow over by this evening!”

  That eternal cheerfulness, on that perpetual brink of disaster.

  “Yes,” I said. “Well, come on out. You didn’t go out today, hunh? Didn’t go spearfishing?”

  “No. Actually, it’s all right on the lee side out of the wind. But I don’t like it somehow, in the rain. It puts me down. And anyway I somehow found myself thinking about you all morning. Somehow.”

  “You did, did you?” I said.

  “So I thought I’d come pay you a visit! You told me to, once, if I ever felt like it. And I thought you probably wouldn’t be out on your boat today!”

  “It’s funny. I was just thinking about you, too,” I said. “Would you like a drink?”

  “No.” She looked down at her body. “Gosh, I’m all damp.” She was, and it made the cotton shirt cling closer to her. She went over to the railing and looked up at the sky. “Yes, this’ll blow over! Tomorrow’ll be clear!” Then, much softer, “What were you thinking about me?”

  “You want me to be blunt?” I said.

  “Be blunt,” Marie said. “I like you when you’re blunt.”

  “I was thinking about how you’re affected by this killing. You’re very likely to be out of a job, do you know it? Because this thing is going to put an end to the hashish business for some time. That’s going to put a bad cramp in your sources of income.”

  “Yes, it sure is. That’s what’s so good about you, you know it? You clear all the shit away fast. Actually, that was part of what I came to talk to you about.” She looked straight at me, open-eyed, honest. “That, and the fact that I’ve been thinking about you so.”

  Suddenly she shrugged her hands out, then slapped them against her thighs. “But I’d rather not talk about it all here.”

  “I don’t know where we could go,” I said. “Some bar?”

  “We could go to my little place,” she said. “I have a room in a private house, where I lived last winter. I’m not using it much now in the summer. I stay up at the Construction. But I have the key?”

  I didn’t say anything. It was funny, you didn’t have to do a thing. They would do it all for you. If they decided they wanted a chunk of you.

  I gave her a long moment’s look. She looked straight back. There wasn’t much doubt about the rest of it. The silent rider was attached, all right.

  “All right,” I said. “Let me finish my drink.” I tossed it off.

  Suddenly she giggled. I looked up at her in time to catch something dark that flashed out at me from her eyes. For a split second she looked like an old whore soliciting in a dark hotel doorway.

  At the door she said, “You better put something on. In this rain.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m wet already. Anyway, I don’t mind it. I like it. And I can change down there.” Again the silent rider.

  I put on my old trenchcoat. Then my beat-up old New Yorker’s hat. In the hall mirror I suddenly looked tougher, older, more mean, more like a cop. The hat and trenchcoat looked weird, over my resort clothes and sandals.

  “Now I look more like what I am,” I said.

  “And more like my daddy,” Marie said smiling.

  I smiled wryly. “The middle-aged private dick. Who no longer believes in anybody. And wouldn’t give his own grandmother change of a dollar. For fear of being shortchanged. And rightly so.”

  Still smiling she opened the door for us.

  Her room was down in toward the town. So we took the upper street, above the house. Twice, when flurries of rain hit us, she huddled against me. But mostly she walked openly in the rain. Twice she put her head back and closed her eyes, lifting her face to feel it. When we got to the house, her hair was wet and her clothes half soaked. But by then I was out of the game.

  I didn’t know what had changed my mind. Was it the look I had suddenly got of myself in that hall mirror? Maybe it was the way she threw back her head to the rain. I could never have done that, not without laughing.

  Whatever it was, I knew I couldn’t go through with it.

  Maybe it was the way she huddled against me, for protection, when the rain flurries hit us. I remembered my own two daughters huddling against me in the exact same way, when some tiny disaster in their lives had hit them and they didn’t know what to do about it. Except huddle against daddy. Like Marie. Only, Marie’s disaster was a big one.

  Maybe mostly, it was because I was too old. Old enough to be ridiculous.

  The house was a nondescript one, with the regular walled garden. She led me back along a walk beside the house to a private door. Inside, it was a poor cheap little room with nothing of anything in it. She had added nothing of herself to it. She could have moved out in five minutes.

  The room hurt me, too. Only her diving gear, in one corner, scrupulously cleaned, marked it as hers.

  “Such as it is,” Marie said. She shut the door. I turned around and stripped off my tren
chcoat and hat, wanting to be rid of the personality they inflicted on me.

  When I turned back Marie was standing looking at me with that open, childish face. Maybe she was breathing a little fast. For a split second that same strange, odd, dark look crossed her face. Then it was gone.

  To describe it as whorish was too strong, but I guessed it had that in it. A masochism, maybe. Of some special female kind? A kind of whorish delight.

  “I’d better change,” she said, and half-sitting on the little bed, stripped off her shirt and picked up a towel.

  She never wore a bra, of course. Her breasts were young, and the size of a large cup. There was a shy, vulnerable movement about her, as she dried herself. She dried the breasts first. She didn’t look at me.

  “And I’d better dry my hair,” she said. The breasts jiggled deliciously, as she moved the towel. Especially when she bent forward to do her hair.

  I felt like a man under some attack. I hadn’t had time or a chance to move. I stood with my back jammed back against the door. I felt my face getting tighter.

  “Do you want to help?” Marie asked, looking up through her hair.

  “No thanks.” I said it harsher than I meant.

  The towel around her shoulders, she tossed her hair back, and stood up. That funny odd “whorish” look was back on her face openly. She unbuckled her jeans belt and unzipped the fly, and pushed her jeans down and stepped out of them. She began to dry her legs, and her belly.

  I just stood there. It was one hell of a body she had on her. If she knew how bad I wanted it, I guessed she would be pleased. My hands were jammed down tight and clenched in my pockets. I relaxed them. She straightened, holding the towel in front of her, but not at all protectively, and looked at me.

  “Cut it out,” I said hoarsely. “Put some clothes on.”

  “You don’t like me?”

  “I like you a lot. Now cut it out. It wouldn’t work.”