Touch of Danger

by James Jones

  “Probably I wouldn’t have done it that way, today,” I said. “I was younger then, and I was angry. Today I’d probably take him in. And six months later he would be back out on the Street, terrorizing and extorting other black people, and bragging about how he fooled us whiteys. If he ever went to jail at all.”

  “I don’t understand you,” Chantal said crisply, from the bed. “I would have killed him without any compunction. He killed your friend, didn’t he? And tricked him?”

  “He was black.”

  “Why does that make any difference?”

  “It shouldn’t. I kind of liked him,” I said. “And he probably had had a hard life. Liking him was about comparable to liking a rattlesnake you found by the road.”

  In the bed, she shrugged.

  “And you were a local hero for a while because of this adventure?”

  “About three months. But I milked it for a lot longer. I could have milked it even longer, and gotten a lot more out of it, if I’d wanted to stay in Chicago.”

  “I don’t understand you Americans,” Chantal said. “No European would have left like that. Here you had all this acclaim and opportunity, and you had earned it. You had the right to get everything out of it you could. A European would have.”

  “We’re an odd breed,” I said. “Some of us, at least, I guess. Anyway, that was how I met my wife. She was a Lake Forest socialite. Or, rather, she was a would-be socialite. Her grandfather did very well, in Lake Forest, in the ’twenties. But Samuel Insull’s stock mergers put him under. Her father never recouped.”

  “So she transferred all her social ambitions onto you?” Chantal said.

  “You might say.” I took a long, deep breath, and drank down some whisky, then pouched out my lips and blew the breath out through them.

  “You said you were falling in love with me. I thought I’d better tell you all this.”

  “So that it would make me fall less in love with you?”

  “It ought to, shouldn’t it? All this old dirt? It’s not a very heroic tale.”

  “You’re either dumb. Or else you’re a lot smarter than I’ve given you credit for: That kind of life story, told by a bundle of muscle like you, only makes a real woman fall more in love. Not less.”

  “You’re awfully sure you’re a real woman,” I said.

  “That’s one thing I’ve never really had to worry about,” Chantal said. She slid over in the bed, and touched the place beside her. She had nothing on, under the sheet. “Come on in. Do you want me to prove it?”

  I stood up and began taking off my clothes. I was suddenly dead beat and dog tired.

  “My God, look at that side of yours,” she said.

  “I’m not sure I can do you any good,” I said as I got out of my pants. “After all this whisky. And after this—” I didn’t know what to call it. I didn’t want to say, Murder. “After what’s happened.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Chantal said softly. “Shh. Shh. Just rest a while.”

  I started by kissing her, and running my hands over her breasts. They lay a little flatter than a young girl’s, maybe. I didn’t mind that. I liked it better. I put my nose against her hair by her ear. The faint odor of perfume and light female sweat in the night heat was soothing, and delicious.

  “Don’t worry about making love,” she said. “Just lie quiet.”

  “I’m sick,” I said to her ear without moving my nose. “I’m sick all over. I get sick in my heart and sick in my guts and sick at the base of my skull, when I think about her out there in the water, bleeding, and that damned boat propeller coming down on her a second time. It makes me sick in the middle of my crotch and right under my toes on the soles of my feet. My toes curl up.”

  “I know. It’s sad. It’s terrible,” Chantal said. “But there’s nothing we can do.” One of her hands was kneading the small of my back. Right where the tension was.

  “Not a damn thing,” I said. “Not for her, anyway. But there’s damn sure something I can do for me.”

  “You’ll do it,” Chantal said, soothingly. “You’ll do it.”

  “I mean to.” I ran my hand over her left breast again. Its nipple was puckering up and tightening and rising. Almost of its own volition. As if it had its own little mind. So it seemed.

  And oddly enough it was happening to me. I was getting hard. I wasn’t even thinking about sex. I was thinking about Marie, bleeding. Bleeding in the water, and the boat turning to come back.

  It was as if all the little cells in both of us had lives of their own, without ever caring what we thought or felt. As if both of us were nothing but collections of undersea hydroids and zooids and medusa buds swimming around in the salt water, cells mindlessly mating, mindlessly breeding, mindlessly forming chains, mindlessly producing the polyps that produced the free-swimming medusae that bred polyps again. The picture was so cruel it brought me up short. The ferocity and raw greed and unconcern of simple cellular life shocked me. Poor Marie.

  I raised up on my elbow and looked down at Chantal, and suddenly her head turned into the head of my wife. Joanie’s head went on talking to me and soothing me.

  “You’ll do it. It’s all right.”

  I made myself blink, but Joanie’s head didn’t change back to Chantal’s. It went right on talking to me, trying to soothe. It wasn’t any fantasy. It was the real head. The body was Chantal’s. I wondered if I was losing my marbles, what few of them I had left.

  Before I could react, the head changed again. Joanie’s head became Marie’s head and went right on talking, crooning to me.

  “It’s all right. It doesn’t matter.”

  I decided to risk wiping my eyes with my hand. I did. Marie’s head went on crooning to me. And suddenly I wanted to weep, for all of them. For Chantal, for Joanie, for Marie. For everybody. For anybody, and everybody, but mainly for me.

  What a situation our race had got itself into. Condemned to separation. Not wanting to be separated. But loving it. Hanging onto it for dear life. Anyway we had no choice anyway. Cellular collections. Zooids and hydroids. We would be laughable, if it didn’t hurt so much.

  The head on Chantal’s body now was Chantal’s. I took it in my hands and kissed her on the mouth, before it could get away.

  “You don’t have to talk to me,” I said.

  “I don’t mind,” she said. Her hand groped my crotch. “What do you want? Do you want me to do something special for you?”

  “No. I’ll do something special for you,” I said. “Don’t do anything. Just lie back.”

  I started at her breasts, and worked down. I took a long time. The tiny blonde hairs on her skin, invisible except up this close, seemed to quiver all on their own. Separately. I tried to put into my lips and tongue and teeth and nose all the sad delightful things I’d never been able to say to any of them, to any woman. Women were so valuable—to men. Her navel pulsed, like a pursed mouth, contracted to meet my mouth. From above me she moaned. I had her going, and that was what I wanted to give her. Her crotch hair tickled my nose, crisply, like curly endive lettuce when I’d held batches of it to my face to sniff it. And then the woman smell: faintly perfumed, faintly pissy, faintly polecat, faintly something else.

  “Oh. Oh God. It’s never been like this,” Chantal said above me. “Oh God. Oh. Nothing’s ever been like this.”

  She was right. I’d never done it like this. I’d gone down on a lot of women, but not like that. It was for all of them. For Marie. And for Joanie. And for Chantal. For a hundred others. All the ones I’d failed with, and who had failed me. All the ones I’d wanted, but hadn’t got. All the ones I’d wanted and got, but had left, or who had left me. All the ones I’d only seen, and wanted. All the wounded ladies. It was for all of them. Chantal reaped the benefit.

  Her legs jerked under my forearms. “UNNHH. NNHHNN. AARR. NNHHH! NN! AAARRRGGHHH!” Chantal called.

  I let my head rest on her belly and through my ear felt the muscle contractions diminish and fade.
r />   “Oh, fuck me!” Chantal said from above me. “Oh. Fuck me, Lobo, fuck me. I want you inside me. I want to feel it in me.”

  I rolled around and mounted her. I could feel the inside parts of her come down to touch me. “Oh. Oh.” Her eyes stared up at me sightlessly. I don’t know what she was seeing. Herself, maybe. Her portrait mirrored in my eyes. Then I came myself, exploding.

  After a while I rolled off of her.

  “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll stay the night,” I said dully.

  “Stay as long as you want,” she said. “Stay forever,” and she put one arm under my head and pulled my face against the dampness of her armpit.

  Chapter 42

  I WAS UP ONLY A LITTLE after the sun was. Chantal didn’t mind any more if the maids saw me. But I had things to do. I wanted to see Pekouris about Marie. And I wanted to talk to Pete Gruner about heroin. Also it was time I had some sort of a face-to-face with crazy Chuck. If he was still here, I meant to find him and have it.

  I rolled out stifling a groan. The taping had helped my side a lot in a day, but it sure as hell hadn’t by any means cured it.

  I made the walk down to the harbor in the sun-bright, fresher morning air. At the house I changed to a fresh outfit, and washed the last scents of sexuality off me in the lousy showerless bathtub, being careful of the bandage.

  What had she said? Stay forever? Well. It was endemic in people to say things in the sack that they wanted to bite their tongues for later on, when the heat was gone. As for love, love seemed doomed to be crushed by the law of gravity like strength and beauty. All you had to do was wait around long enough. Sometimes it wasn’t so long.

  I wasn’t sure I could trust her even now. Was the old Ambassador’s heroin the last of her “further secrets” she was holding out on me? I had a hunch that it wasn’t.

  I hadn’t seen my boatman Sonny since he helped me after the fight. I waited around on my porch until he came up on deck and rowed ashore. He came up pretty late. I went and got him and had him take me to town.

  Sonny already knew about Marie. He had heard it last night at Dmitri’s. But he still thought it was a shark that killed her. Also, Sonny told me, Girgis had not been killed at the Xenia. The true story was that Girgis had fled the country because the police were after him for selling hash, and the headless body found at the Xenia was that of a hairless South American monkey which was the pet of one of the guests.

  So much for the truth. I silently tipped my hat to Pekouris.

  But at the Port I found the knowledge Marie had been hit by a boat had passed around during the morning. Nobody was talking about anything else.

  I took my newspaper across the shade-mottled terrace to the table where I usually sat. I didn’t feel much like reading it. I concentrated on my Campari. A longhair with a beard came up the rise from the produce jetty past the kiosk, heading for Georgina’s table of kids until he saw me and stopped. After a moment, he came sidling over.

  “Hello?” He said it all like a question, “It’s a nice morning?”

  “I guess it is,” I said. “Who are you?” I asked it with an upward inflection, gently.

  He was a scrawny kid. I thought I could probably put one hand around both of his wrists. And my hands weren’t that big. Narrow shouldered. Long thin fragile head, bulging at the top. Enormous eyes. A great plow blade of a nose hanging out. His beard was scraggly and woefully thin.

  “I’m Harvey Richard,” he said. “May I sit down?”

  He was the first one who had ever asked me, that I could remember. “Sure,” I said. “Sit down, Harvey.”

  He eased himself with great trepidation into a chair. And I suddenly remembered his face. He was the young hippie in Georgina’s garden, about the first night I was here, the night Chuck broke somebody’s nose, who had pointed out Jason the Paris “recording star” for me with such awe in his voice.

  “What can I do for you, Harvey?” I said.

  “I think you know my father. I think he’s a friend of yours. In New York?” He smiled nervously. “Arthur Richard?”

  “Hell, yes. Why, sure.” I looked at him again. The resemblance was there, all right. It was just hard to see. He was almost a physical caricature of his father, who was a healthy husky extrovert of a man. Big player of tennis. Arthur Richard owned the Volkswagen distributorship for half the Eastern seaboard. I had known him for ten years. “Do we know each other? You and I?”

  “We’ve met several times at our house. But I was a lot littler. You probably wouldn’t remember me. I didn’t remember you either, at first.” He had an authoritative way of talking, despite his nervousness.

  “I remember you,” I said. “Well. What’s on your mind, Harvey?”

  “I was just down at the police post below,” he said in a precise way. “They just got a notification that Sweet Marie’s death has officially been declared accidental. I heard them talking about it.”

  I thought this over. “You speak and read modern Greek?”

  “A little. We have a Greek butler at home.”

  I nodded. “Why bring it to me?”

  “I was on my way to tell Georgina and the gang at her table, and I saw you sitting over here.”

  “But why tell me?”

  He shrugged his thin shoulders tortuously. But his eyes were steady, and rather piercing. “I thought you’d like to know. I saw Marie talking to you the other night at the Cloud 79. And I saw you talking to her here. I knew you had taken her skindiving. I just thought you’d want to know they said her death was accidental.”

  “Do you have any reason to believe it wasn’t accidental?”

  “Me? Gee, no.” He looked at me with round eyes. “I just thought you were a friend of hers, and that you’d want to know.”

  “Well, thanks a lot, Harvey,” I said. “Remember me to your father when you get back to New York.”

  “I sure will. He’ll be glad to know I ran into you while I was here in Greece.” He made as if to get up, then didn’t. “Mr. Davies, I was one of the ones who beat you up the other night. I thought I ought to tell you.” He looked scared, but resolute.

  “You weren’t the one who kicked me, were you?” I said.

  “No. I wasn’t. I didn’t even see that. I don’t know who kicked you.” He made his tortuous shrug. “But I wouldn’t tell you if I did know, Mr. Davies.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to,” I said. “Well, thanks for thinking of me just now, and say hello to your father.”

  “I didn’t know who you were then, that night,” Harvey said. “Or of course I wouldn’t have done it.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Harvey,” I said. “I didn’t know you either.”

  “Well, see you, Mr. Davies,” he said, with his resolute eyes, and got up and started to sidle off. I called him back.

  “How are you making out with Jason, the Paris recording star, Harvey?” I said.

  He gave me a lopsided grin. “Oh. Yeah. It was me who pointed him out to you at Georgina’s. He sure is drunk or stoned a lot of the time. He’s run out of money. He sure wouldn’t be much without electronics to bolster up his voice.”

  I winked at him. “What are you studying in school, Harvey?”

  “Well, I’m majoring in philosophy, and ecology.” He made the tortuous, apologetic shrug. But his eyes were not at all apologetic. “With a minor in social studies.

  “But what I’m interested in going into is video cassettes for TV. It’s going to be a very big thing, soon, and there are enormous technological difficulties to iron out.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Well, see you around, Mr. Davies,” he said, and went sidling away. Apparently his sidle was a chronic thing, and not just a temporary, acute thing of the moment. It was probably some signal of pacifism he affected. I watched him go, and thought about his father. Harvey would just be beginning his senior year at Harvard in the fall, if I remembered right.

  Thank God something or other protected them. Maybe it was
just simply their own naivety. Or maybe their intelligence. It didn’t always protect them, though, did it? No, it didn’t. So Pekouris had already gone ahead and declared it accidental.

  Pekouris’s move did not upset me. I had rather expected it. It stood to reason that, if he was backing off on Girgis’s murder, he wasn’t going to saddle himself with another one to declare unsolved. But young Harvey’s information did get me to moving.

  There didn’t seem to be any more I could learn in the square. Sonny had joined the table around Georgina, and I signaled him. When he came over, I told him I wanted to make a run to Glauros.

  Pekouris was in his office, at the end of the Wyatt Earp gunslinger’s street.

  He was packing. Two huge briefcases lay opened out flat on tables and Pekouris was separating stacks of papers and putting them first in one and then in the other. The radio man was sitting there just like before. The big radio console was still buzzing pregnantly, but not saying anything.

  This time I ignored the radio man. If Pekouris wanted him not to hear what we said, he would have to arrange it himself.

  “You’re leaving a little early,” I said.

  “Yes, I’m sorry about that.” He shrugged. “Orders from above.” He looked at the radio man, and nodded, and said something in Greek. The radio man got up and went out. “Have you something for me? I do not see any packages.”

  “No. I haven’t,” I said. “I haven’t been able to do anything about the machete.”

  “I will give you a telephone number. It is where you can always reach me in Athens.” He took a scrap of paper and wrote a number down and handed it to me. “If I am not there, tell them who you are and I will call you. I will fly down as soon as you call me. Or perhaps you would prefer to come up to Athens to me. As my guest,” he added, and smiled.

  “Okay,” I said. I put the paper in my pocket. “Thanks.”

  He picked up his papers, and then stopped and looked at me; I smiled. “Was that all?”

  “Actually, I came about something else.”

  “Yes? What?”