Touch of Danger

by James Jones

  “You were too bruised and wounded. I know. Nobody’s talking about anything else. I’ve had five phone calls. They’re all delighted to call me. My new boyfriend. And out fighting with children.”

  “Lay off it about children,” I said sharply. There was a slightly startled pause; I can make my voice quite sharp. “I wanted to come. And while we’re on it, I’m getting tired of seeing you only late at night, after your social evenings, like some hired stud. Lobo Davies Stud Service. Available At All Hours. Satisfaction Guaranteed.”

  That slowed her down a little. “That’s a nasty thing to say. But then you never were noted for your manners.”

  I wouldn’t answer that.

  “Well, do you have another fight scheduled for tonight?” she said in a less bitchy tone.

  “No,” I said. “But I’m not coming up to your house for just a little late sex after the servants are sent off. You want to see me, you can have a date with me.”

  “I can arrange it for you to come to this dinner party. Very easily. But you don’t like my dinner parties.”

  “No. I don’t. That’s not good enough.”

  “Well, do you want me to meet you somewhere after?”

  “I’ll meet you at Georgio’s,” I said. “The one you call the dancing taverna. That’s near where you’ll be.”

  There was a pause. “All right,” she said. Another pause. “But you had better be there when I get there. I’m not going to go in and sit at a table alone, there, and wait for you.”

  “Whatever you say, Countess,” I said.

  We arranged the times, and hung up. I went across and lay down on one of the couches in front of the fireplace. I didn’t know if I was up to meeting anybody anywhere. The constant hot scream in my side was gone. But it was replaced by a vast monstrous toothache down there, with roots all the way down to my crotch.

  I had not been down long enough to doze, when the phone rang. I got up stiffly and went over to answer it. It was Kronitis.

  Pekouris had called him, all right.

  But first I had to go through the long and dismal formalities the old man seemed to dote on. First, I had the male secretary, who meticulously checked if I was me. Then the old man himself, with all his how-are-yous.

  “What do you think you ought to do?” he asked me finally. It sounded very cautious.

  “Well,” I said irritably, “it would seem to me that when the police are dropping it is when you ought to want to go ahead. Assuming you want the murder solved. But I’ll do whatever you instruct me. I can return your retainer tomorrow.”

  “No, no. No, no. That retainer is yours. That was the way I made the arrangement.” A pause. “As for the rest, I guess I had better just leave it up to you.

  “But Pekouris said he would throw you out of Greece if you didn’t stop your investigations. I wouldn’t like that to happen. Nor would Freddy Tarkoff.”

  “I’d like to keep on nosing around,” I said. “For a few days. If that’s all right with you.”

  “You don’t think it would be better to just give up the whole thing?” Again, it sounded excessively cautious.

  “Only if you say so.”

  “Very well. I’ll authorize that,” he said. “What you said. It’s whatever you think, Mr. Davies.”

  “You know, I got myself shot at last night,” I said.

  There was a sharp intake of breath at the other end. “You mean, with a gun?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “With a real gun.”

  “Isn’t that awfully, uh, professional?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “They missed me. You wouldn’t have any ideas on that, would you, Mr. Kronitis?”

  “No.” A pause. “No, I certainly wouldn’t.”

  We went through a long and excessively courteous formality of saying goodbye which could have been done in two words.

  I lay back down on the couch. Finally I was able to doze, after a couple of stiff Scotches.

  I ate the old woman’s lousy cooking for lunch again, and hobbled around the house most of the afternoon. My side hurt too much to read with any pleasure. I slept a little. For dinner I ate the same greasy lambstew at the taverna. The Greeks never seemed to have any other kind of meat. My teeth and jaws were beginning to hunger after a good thick sirloin. American-style.

  At eleven I caught a horsecab in front of the taverna to take me up the hill and across the point to Georgio’s.

  Chapter 39

  I HADN’T BEEN BACK there since the night I’d accosted Girgis outside. The place didn’t seem to remember me. It didn’t remember Girgis, either.

  The huge jukebox still blared the same Greek songs interspersed with foxtrots.

  There were a lot of the Greek tourists. After a little, you learned to recognize them. I took a table where I could watch the door for Chantal.

  I had to admit she was a beauty, when she came in. Her shortish hair looked just right for a hot summer night. And she always had that look of class. She was dressed ingeniously in an outfit that did not look out of place at Georgio’s, and at the same time would look right at home at the Danish count’s. At that distance, with make-up, and with clothes on, you could never have told her age.

  I saw her before she saw me. My table happened to be camouflaged from her. So I watched her change her roles at the door.

  It was like watching an actress shake herself and change her personality before stepping on stage. From a hard-eyed, suspicious, acquisitive European woman, totally self-concerned, she became a youngish, carefree, flighty, rich man’s plaything, too cheerful and spoiled to remember her last bank-account balance.

  I got to my feet.

  She had been so openly hostile and angry the several times on the phone that I had forgotten the feeling of deviousness she always gave me when she was in front of me in the flesh.

  “This isn’t the place I would have picked, but it doesn’t matter.” She gave me a cute grin. “It’s good to see you any way at all.” She was a little high.

  I got my drink and we moved to a table at the very back, where we could look out over the outdoor patio and the sea beyond. The moon made a twinkling ladder at us off the water.

  “I’m drinking cognac,” Chantal said.

  I ordered two.

  “I’ve got a few items of news for you. Then I’ve got a couple of things I want to talk to you about,” I said.

  She was looking around the place. She seemed hardly to have heard me. “I didn’t know you had taken up the Greek dancing?”

  I shrugged. It made me wince involuntarily.

  “Oh. You’re really hurt.”

  “Nothing that won’t heal overnight,” I said.

  She looked at me with large eyes. “You’re so stupid, really. They all say you were knocked completely unconscious.”

  I made a face.

  “What is hurt?”

  “My back,” I lied. “I sprained it.”

  “Must we go through all this dating routine, before I can get you home and get my hands on you?” she smiled. “I suppose we must. The male vanity must be appeased.”

  “It’s good to see you outside your bastion once in a while,” I said. “I was beginning to forget what you looked like with clothes on.”

  She was smiling. “Oh! You really are the bastard. Aren’t you?”

  “If you say so.”

  “And that’s what women love about you; and you know it; and you play it; Lobo Davies, the lovable bastard. What’s all this news you have?”

  I looked out at the yellow moon path. “Would you like to take a walk outside first?”

  “If you like.” She got up.

  I followed her. The waiter arrived just then with the cognacs. I motioned him to leave them. Outside we walked back and forth on the stone patio. It was a little cooler out there, but not much. When I turned to her, she reached out to put her arms around me. I steeled myself not to wince when she squeezed me. But she drew back.

  “What’s this? What’s that
on your side?”

  “Adhesive tape. For the back. It’s nothing.”

  “Oh, you really are such a fool. I’m not even going to ask you why you were up there. Or what you did, to have a fight.” This time she put her arms around me carefully, and didn’t squeeze. I kissed her. She felt good, and natural, under my hands, as if it was on a woman her age that my hands belonged. But I couldn’t forget that first look on her face back there at the door.

  “Oh, that’s good!” she said when I let her go. “Come on, let’s go back inside. I want my cognac.”

  As we walked back to the steps, I looked down at the water and saw something floating in the edge of the moon path that looked like a log. The wavelets nudged it repeatedly against the sand. I stopped, but my side was hurting too much to bother going to look at it. Anyway, I wasn’t doing any driftwood sculpture this year. I followed Chantal in.

  She grabbed her glass. “What’s all this news, now?”

  “Well, first, I’ve been hired by someone, to find Girgis’s killer. And for a goodly sum.”

  “Oh, really?” She kept on looking at me. She didn’t seem so surprised. “Who might that be?” I had a sudden, weird hunch that she already knew.

  “You’d never guess in a million years.”

  “I might.” She looked at me speculatively. She seemed to be deciding whether to make her guess. The only one who could have told her was Kronitis. He was the only one who knew, besides Pekouris. She dropped her eyes. “No, I guess I couldn’t guess.”

  “Try,” I said.

  “No. I never would guess it,” she said without raising her eyes.

  I chalked up one for my side.

  “The second thing, that I found out,” I said, “is that Jim Kirk has been pushing a little H on Tsatsos.”

  “Jim Kirk?” She looked up, and her eyes had that startled-deer look I’d seen them get before at the mention of Kirk. I chalked up another one. “You mean the captain of the Agoraphobe?”

  “The very same,” I said mildly. “I wonder if old Mr. Kronitis knows about that?”

  “I have no idea,” Chantal said. “I wouldn’t think so. I would think he’d fire Kirk right away.” She looked away from me, outdoors. “Isn’t the moon path lovely?”

  “Did you know that old Ambassador Pierson is an H addict?” I said.

  She looked back at me crossly. “You really are a nosy bastard, aren’t you? Freddy Tarkoff was quite right about you.”

  “That’s what people pay me for,” I said.

  “Well don’t be proud of it. Nobody’s paying you to check up on poor old Ambassador Pierson.”

  “I haven’t told anybody but you,” I said. “And you already knew.”

  She jerked her shoulders at me, as if something had pricked her in the back. “All right! I did it as a favor to Kirk. He asked me because he knew about the hashish and Girgis. I also did it as a favor for the old Ambassador. But I didn’t get a penny for doing it!”

  “That doesn’t make any difference in the eyes of the law.”

  “And I know all that, too. I’d still do it again!”

  “How long have you known about the old Ambassador?”

  “Oh. Oh, a long long time. Everybody I know on the island knows about it.”

  “But how did Kirk find out about it?”

  “That, I don’t know. Maybe the old gentleman went to him.”

  I didn’t try to refute that, but it wouldn’t hold water. If Pierson went to Kirk himself, Kirk wouldn’t need Chantal as a carrier. I said nothing.

  “Sources for heroin have been drying up in Europe lately, with the Americans running all over,” Chantal said. “I guess the old gentleman was having trouble getting it through his regular channels.”

  “It interests me how Kirk gets it so easy.”

  Again she got that still, startled-deer look. “Kirk apparently has all sorts of avenues for all sorts of things in Athens. And I’m sure Leonid Kronitis doesn’t know about any of it.”

  “I’m sure he doesn’t. Was that the, quote, further secret, unquote, that you’ve been holding back on me all this time?”

  She looked at me as if she didn’t understand me.

  “You could have told me that,” I said gently.

  She still looked as if she didn’t understand. Then she drew in a deep, deep breath, which she held for several long seconds before she finally spoke. As if thinking, or deciding. “Yes. Yes, as a matter of fact, it was. I wanted to tell you about it. I wanted to tell you that same night I told you about the hashish and Girgis. But I just couldn’t stand the thought of implicating the poor old Ambassador. I’d do anything in order not to hurt him.” Lying, again.

  “Don’t worry about me hurting him,” I said.

  “But how did you find out about it?” she said thinly.

  I was getting irritated. All these damned convolutions. But I swallowed it down. Chantal obviously didn’t know about Sweet Marie’s carrying H for Kirk to the addicts at the Construction, or she wouldn’t even have asked me that. I fell back on Pekouris another time.

  “I have my little ways,” I said.

  “Yes. Yes, you certainly do,” Chantal said. “Sometimes I wish you’d never come to this island. Sometimes I wish you’d go away. Just leave, right now, without worrying about finishing your vacation. You’re like a damned bulldog. When you get your teeth into something.”

  “A moray eel,” I said. “They won’t even let go when you cut off the head. You have to pry the jaws apart with a knife or a screwdriver. And their bite is poison.”

  “Ambassador Pierson picked up his heroin addiction in the Far East, when he was serving your country there,” Chantal said.

  “A casualty in the line of duty,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  “It’s what we call the Oriental’s Revenge,” I said. “It’s the way they figured out to get even with us, for all the terrible things we’ve done to them.” I grinned. “It’s all a Chinese plot.”

  She just looked at me.

  Maybe it all seemed too tough to her. But I was beginning to feel tough. As far as that went, she was pretty tough herself.

  But there was no opportunity to go any further into all that. So I did not get to tell her how I was against the Vietnamese war, just on military principles alone, the logistics, the length of supply line, if for no other reasons, and that we had no business there, and never had had, and that we were maintaining a criminal government there, which was also making a fortune selling us heroin on the side, as well as ruining our own economy on the operation.

  There was no opportunity to tell all that, because outside on the edge of the outdoor patio by the water a man had started to holler something in Greek. In a voice of awful urgency.

  “Voitheia!” the man hollered. “Voitheia! Voitheia!”

  I had picked up a few Greek words and I knew that word meant Help. “Help, help!” he was hollering.

  “Voitheia! Voitheia!” he called again.

  I was on my feet before I remembered Chantal. There was no mistaking the urgency. Or the shock. It was a young couple who had passed our table going out to walk on the patio the same way we had. On my feet I could see them both standing silhouetted against the twinkling moon path. The man was by the water, the woman a few yards back.

  “Wait here,” I said.

  “No, I’ll come,” Chantal said behind me. I didn’t stop to argue.

  I didn’t know how, but I knew before I got there. Probably it was a combination of associations. The sea. Sonny’s boat. Seeing the low taverna from out there on the water. That was when I had first seen the figure. Coming back we had passed the building again, but the black figure and its little float had been miles away by then. This stretch of coast was apparently her private bailiwick.

  It was her, all right. The man had rolled her over face up, and then seen there was nothing to do. She was wearing the foam rubber helmet and the wet suit. The mask was gone.

  In the moonlight, against al
l that black, the skin of her face was as pale as tanned skin can get. Paler than ivory. It was easy to see why. There wasn’t any blood left in her.

  I could hear people running up behind me, as I had run. I had forgotten my side. I knelt on one knee in the skim of water.

  It was easy enough to read. The wet suit was buoyant. She wore enough lead to give her a hair less than neutral buoyancy. Dead, she had floated a foot or two below the surface, until the wind and the sea had rolled her up here.

  Her left arm had been nearly amputated at the elbow; and her right shoulder had been torn wide open, down into the neck. A rubber wet suit was no armor for the kind of force that had hit Marie. I looked at the wounds closely. She had been bled completely empty long before the sea rolled her up on this sand.

  Nothing, no fish, had touched her or nibbled her. She had not been in the water long enough yet to begin to swell. Except for the wounds, she lay there just as perfect as she had ever been. Except, of course, she was dead.

  “Oh, no,” I heard Chantal say behind me. “Oh, no.”

  The nail polish on the manicured fingers looked black in the moonlight, against the paleness of skin. I felt sick. There wasn’t anything, not a damn thing I could do for her. My stomach seemed to have fallen completely away out from under me.

  There was a growing murmur of other voices behind me. “Karcharias, karcharias,” some of them were muttering. Shark, shark. I looked around at Chantal for confirmation. “Shark,” she said. I nodded, and looked at the wounds and the rest of her again. They were dead wrong. I knew better. I had seen shark bite. A shark’s serrated teeth were as sharp as a well-honed knife blade. And no shark in the world would swim off and leave all that dead meat uneaten.

  What had hit Marie was something heavy, and blunt-edged, and turning at high speed. Like a boat propeller. And it hadn’t hit her just once but twice. The boat driven by the man, or woman, who had hit Marie had turned and come back and hit her a second time. She hadn’t been killed by any accident. She’d been murdered.

  I got up and walked away. My wet pantsleg slapped against my shin. Water sloshed in my shoes. I had a sudden flash memory picture of her striding nude into the sea at the hippie beach that day, and went sick again all over. Those heavy-hanging, pointed breasts, and the lean rounded rump. That beautiful lifeful stride.