Touch of Danger

by James Jones

  He appeared to be holding a block of black wood, a little longer than a finger. But then he pushed with his thumb, and a chrome knife blade winked and seemed to dart out of its end all by itself like the tongue of a snake. It wasn’t a switchblade. The blade came straight out of the end. Without jerking his hand. I’d never seen a knife like it. It looked positively murderous. He pressed the point against my side.

  “A lot of things could happen to you besides being shot at and missed.”

  “So that was you, too, was it.”

  “Who else?”

  “Well, a good knifing’s about the only thing that hasn’t happened to me,” I said easily.

  The blade snicked back into the knife without moving his hand. Kirk put it back in his pocket. “I just wanted you to understand.”

  “Don’t ever do that to me again,” I said quietly. “Or be prepared to push. Because I’ll take it away from you and break it on your teeth. So, we both know where we stand, hunh?” I turned and walked away, offering my back.

  I threaded my way through the messy tumble of gear and went down belowdecks again. In a minute Kirk came down too and grinned at me.

  Two attempts to scare me seemed to indicate a pretty big involvement on Kirk’s part of some kind. But did it mean he had killed two people?

  The smoky smelly party was still going on.

  Finally it was Jane Duval who broke it apart. She stood up and contemptuously removed her bikini bra and said she was going for a swim. She had fine boobs, and apparently was proud of them. She paraded up on deck, with just about everybody following and whooping and yelling, and kicked off her bikini pants. She stood straight and slim for a moment, to make sure everybody got a good look at all of her, and then dove out into the harbor water.

  I used the moment to quietly take my leave in the borrowed skiff.

  But as I rowed ashore, something seized one of my oars. It was Jane. She floated up onto the surface, feet together, so that the water rolled away from off her dark crotch, and smiled at me a smile that did not change her angry eyebrows.

  I didn’t respond, and waited patiently, and when she let go of my oar, I rowed on. She swam away with a laugh.

  Behind me, I heard other oars and then Sonny calling. He had come out in his own skiff to look for her.

  At the dock I tied the skiff and walked on home and went creakily to bed. I didn’t call Chantal. She wouldn’t even have been home yet, by the time I went to bed.

  Chapter 51

  MARIE’S FUNERAL WAS THE next day at noon.

  I spent an hour in the Port in the morning, sitting at a cafe and looking at the Polaris.

  Watch the Polaris, Gruner’d said. Polaris was moored at the wharf in the little harbor, exactly as Girgis had left her the last time he walked away from her. Apparently the little assistant was taking care of her, because she looked clean and bright, but I didn’t see him. I didn’t see anybody else, either.

  I found I kind of missed Gruner. He was the only one around here who had ever paid for a drink.

  But how the hell was I going to Watch the Polaris, without sitting at a cafe in the Port all day and all night every day?

  I had Sonny run me back to the yacht harbor, and put on my city suit and a tie to go to the funeral in.

  I probably shouldn’t have worn it. It felt strange and foreign when I put it on, and I realized how used I had gotten to being here. When I got up to the local graveyard, on a little knoll above the town, after Sonny had run us back to the Port in the Daisy Mae, I found I was the only one there in a suit except for the old ex-Ambassador, Pierson. But somehow I had felt I ought to wear it for Marie.

  The old Ambassador was the only one among the rich people and summer residents to show up. I had called Chantal earlier, but she begged off on the excuse that funerals upset her and she hated them. I couldn’t blame her for that. I hated them myself.

  There were about three Greeks. Almost all the others who came were hippies from the Construction, dressed in their regular clothes. Which was to say, weird outfits. And there weren’t too many of them there. But they looked more in keeping with the occasion than my suit did.

  Steve and Diane were there, and Sonny and Jane, and Georgina, and some of the others. I didn’t see young Harvey Richard. Slow John apparently had already checked out of the island. Marie’s landlady was there, conspicuous in a rusty long black dress. It wasn’t a great showing for Marie, but I figured she didn’t care.

  It was the landlady who had done most of the arranging. She spoke a little broken English and told me how nobody had claimed the body. Since there was no known address to send it to in America, she and the local priest had arranged burial here. She had gone around taking up a collection. Mr. Steve, the young man from the nightclub, had given generously. Well, believing what Steve believed, I thought he should. I gave her 2000 drachs from my pocket, and her eyes widened. She thanked me.

  It was hot and dusty in the sun. Almost no grass grew in the place. But you could see the green sea shading to blue out below the town. After the ceremony, the old Ambassador came over and shook hands.

  “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “I knew her a little,” I said.

  “I didn’t know her.” He smiled lamely. “But seeing as it was another American, I thought I ought to come.”

  “It was good of you,” I said. “She would have appreciated it.”

  “Oh,” he said vaguely, and smiled.

  “How are things with you, sir?” I said.

  “Things? With me? Oh, all right. Fine. Just fine.” He straightened himself in his white tropical worsted. “I’ve been upset by this murder business. But perhaps it will put a stop to some of this hashish smuggling for a while.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I hope so. But probably not for long.”

  “Probably not,” Pierson said, and looked off at the sea. “Well, it was nice seeing you again. If under these sorrowful circumstances. I enjoyed our lunch that day. I hope we see each other again before you leave.”

  I took his hand. “Yes, sir. I hope so too.”

  I watched him walk away in his pure white worsted. His house was only a little way away down the road. I walked back to the Port alone.

  Sonny Duval was in a group ahead of me, and when we got back to the cafe terrace I told him I might need him and to stick around with the boat. They all seemed subdued, as they sat down together at a table. But quite soon laughter was coming from the table crowded with drinks, where Georgina was again playing older sister and picking up the tab. I figured Con Taylor must make a lot of money in Athens, to support her hippie habit.

  I took a table alone beside the parapet among the moldering cannon, and stared down at the Polaris.

  I had not been sitting there fifteen minutes when Jim Kirk came up to the wharf and boarded her. A minute later Girgis’s little assistant came up and went aboard. As I watched, they unmoored her and fired her up. Then the assistant stepped back on shore and Kirk took her out through the harbor entrance. He headed in the general direction of the mainland, and he didn’t change course.

  Good old Gruner, by God. He hadn’t given me any bum steer. I didn’t know what it meant but I sure intended to find out, and I was beginning to have a suspicion. I knocked back the rest of my Campari, left money, and went to get Sonny at his table.

  “I want you to follow that boat,” I said when we came out of the harbor mouth.

  “The Polaris?”

  “That’s the one,” I said patiently. “That one there. You see any others?”

  It was still plainly visible, maybe three-quarters of a mile away.

  Sonny only looked puzzled, and settled in to follow her, almost exactly behind her and in her wake over the flat sea. “I wonder who’s taking Polaris out?” he asked.

  I didn’t much like taking him into my confidence, but he was going to find out eventually.

  “It looked to me like Kirk,” I said. I was watching him at the helm. He didn’t bu
dge it, and after a minute I stepped over to him. “Here, let me have that helm.”

  “Why? What’s the matter?” But he gave it to me.

  “Nothing,” I said. “But I don’t particularly want to advertise to him that we’re following him.” I veered us off to the eastward. Kirk was heading east of north in a straight line for the shoulder of the mainland east of Glauros, probably to round it and head north up the coast. We were headed toward nothing, there was nothing but open sea in front of us; but from where Kirk was, if he should happen to look back and check, he wouldn’t be able to read our angle and it would look as if we were heading due east for the Tsatsos yacht harbor.

  I let us run like that for a while.

  Sonny was watching me closely. I thought he was getting the idea. Anyway, I didn’t bother to explain it.

  “I wonder where he’s going in her?” he said.

  “Probably up to his boss’s,” I said. “Kronitis. Up the coast there.”

  It looked like I was right. When he reached the shoulder of the coast, Polaris cut north right up the coastline, pretty much the same route I had taken that day with Marie.

  “Why?” Sonny said.

  “Who knows?” I said.

  “Then why are we following him?”

  “Who knows that, either?” I gave him a grin. “Maybe I’ll think up a reason, if we stay out long enough.”

  He shut up.

  I let us run a little further, then cut straight back for Glauros on an acute angle with our former heading. After half a mile, I headed her east again, but this time almost due north-northeast instead of east-northeast as before. Now we were headed toward the island of Petkos, and hopefully would look like another boat entirely, going to Petkos.

  I wasn’t at all sure that Kirk was watching behind him.

  “Can you get this shade-awning down?” I said to Sonny.

  “Yes. I think so. Going this fast the canvas whips a lot, but I guess I can do it.”

  “All right. You be ready to get it down when I tell you. Without the awning we’ll look like a different boat entirely. Leave the forward part attached and roll it up, so we can just unroll it and put it up again when we want.”

  “I’ll take a look at it now,” he said.

  Kirk was almost below the horizon by now. And if I continued on my present course slightly away from him, Polaris would sink out of sight. When she was almost invisible, I turned us slightly north and jockeyed the Daisy Mae until we were heading parallel with her.

  “Okay, take the awning down,” I told Sonny, and let up a couple of turns on the throttle to aid him. Hopefully now we would look like an entirely other boat, heading north for Hydra which looked faint and blue like a mountain in the far distance.

  When the awning was secured, I just stood and let the boat run, the outside of my leg holding the helm steady.

  Maybe I was taking too many precautions. There was no reason to think Kirk would suspect he was being followed. But I would rather take a few precautions too many than have him spot us, and be alerted later on.

  “That’s pretty slick,” Sonny said beside me, the wrinkles of his eyes squeezing up. “Where did you learn all that?”

  “Tailing a boat? I learned it in the Caribbean. From a local Jamaican. On a case I worked on. He learned it from his father, who was one of the slickest rumrunners and hijackers in the Gulf of Mexico during Prohibition.”

  “Well, it’s pretty sharp.”

  Off on our left on the mainland coast Kronitis’s villa appeared, gleaming white at us. We watched the almost sea-down Polaris turn into the little cove.

  “All right,” I said. “Now we wait. We’ll run a mile on up the coast, and come back down with the awning up again.”

  While we waited I queried Sonny about aqualungs. He had just one old rig. The regulator leaked a bit, but it didn’t matter because he never went down in it more than ten feet, to clean his hulls. There was only one air bottle. It was maybe three-quarters full of air at the moment, he reckoned. The whole thing reposed in the back storeroom at Dmitri’s right now, he said, apologetically. Because he didn’t have room for it on the big caique. It wasn’t exactly the rig I would have chosen to work with, if I’d had my druthers.

  “Well, it’ll have to do me,” I said. “Our problem now is to get hold of it. Do you think you can find it quick at Dmitri’s?”

  He was sure he could. He knew just where it was. I told him we were going to wait and see, but if I knew what I thought I knew, we’d have a chance to run and get it when Kirk went back to the Port in the Polaris.

  I didn’t tell him why, which was that I figured Kirk would have to stop in at the Port to pick up Girgis’s old assistant, before he could go out and do any diving. If I had told him that, I would have had to explain why he would be diving, and if I explained that I would have had to go on and explain the whole story.

  “Was Girgis ever a skindiver that you know of?” I asked him.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, he was. He used to keep two or three lungs, and take people out diving, back at one point. But he gave it up, and concentrated on the tourist boat instead, because there just weren’t that many people who wanted to go diving or learn it.”

  “And there isn’t that much to go diving for, around here,” I added on.

  “Will you please tell me what the hell we are doing?”

  “No. I won’t tell you,” I said. “Mainly because I don’t know what we’re doing myself. And I won’t know exactly, until we get there and do it.” That was a lie. But he had to be satisfied with that.

  Kirk was gone for over half an hour. We made circles and figure-eights to keep way under us in the rising afternoon wind.

  Finally Polaris came nosing out of Kronitis’s cove, and started heading back. I followed, using the same techniques I’d used to follow him north.

  When Kirk rounded the mainland shoulder and headed straight in for Tsatsos Port, and didn’t vary his course, I veered us off a little to the south and when we were close to shore ran us in to the yacht harbor at the poor old Daisy Mae’s top speed, along the face of the town.

  While Sonny was getting his aqualung from Dmitri’s storeroom, I ran up to the house and got one of my guns out of my locked briefcase. I wrapped it in a polyethylene bag from the kitchen, and tucked it in my belt inside my shirt. When I got back on board, I put it carefully on one of the edged shelves below in the cabin.

  We arrived back at Tsatsos Port just as Polaris was pulling out of the harbor mouth, and turning west along the island coast. I immediately veered off toward Glauros.

  It was great to be back in action and doing something again, after sitting around so long and brooding.

  Chapter 52

  KIRK HEADED WEST. He appeared to be going on around the island, and he stayed pretty close in. I let him get half a mile ahead. Then I turned from my Glauros heading and ran back in close to shore. Until a point put me out of sight of him.

  I settled down to following him from close in to shore. I would throttle up along all the concave parts where he couldn’t see me. Then I’d throttle down and sneak around each point cautiously. I tried to time it so that he would just be disappearing around the next point ahead.

  It was easier tailing, in one way. The bad thing was that he might change course, and turn in somewhere when I couldn’t see him; and I might run up on him. That was the chance I had to take.

  But he didn’t. And I didn’t. It worked perfectly.

  I noticed Sonny watching me closely. I was having fun, and enjoying myself, and turned my head and winked at him. He didn’t grin back. He looked shocked, as though it upset him that I should be enjoying it.

  About a mile before he would have reached St. Friday’s Kirk did turn in. I cut my throttle immediately and cut in to shore out of sight. Under very slow throttle I sneaked up on him until I was only two coves behind him.

  We were around on the seaward side of the island now. Around here there was just about nothing. A couple
of points of the island stuck way out up ahead. There was a rocky islet about a mile off shore, bare and too small for trees. The rest was open sea. The only other thing visible anywhere was an old freighter beating its way west and flying a Turkish flag.

  I figured that had to be the boat.

  I had stopped us behind a rock spur that hid us from Polaris. Sonny had binoculars aboard and I took them and waded ashore and climbed the spur and stuck my head up over it.

  Kirk, with glasses of his own, was climbing up the headland he had stopped at. When he got to its brow he planted himself and put his glasses on the Turkish ship. I lay and watched him through my glasses while he watched the ship through his.

  The Turkish ship came on slowly, chugging through the flat sea. At about St. Friday’s it turned slightly inland and began to make a slight curve closer to the island.

  There wasn’t any doubt in my mind any longer. I put the glasses off of Kirk and onto the ship, and watched it.

  When the Turkish ship was not too far out from the rocky islet, I saw three flashes wink out from its side, and then saw something white hit the water. I marked the spot, as best I could, then swung back to Kirk.

  Kirk was watching the ship steadily, marking the spot in his own mind I guessed. Then he put his glasses down on their strap against his chest and started to climb back down to Polaris. Out at sea the ship began to curve slowly back onto its former course.

  I dropped my own glasses and scrambled down the rocks and waded back out to the Daisy Mae.

  I had figured Kirk wouldn’t dive for it right away, with the ship still there. I didn’t know if he would dive for it in a little while. If he did, I was screwed for getting a look at it, and could only continue following him.

  What I expected was that he would go out and maybe dive or swim around to locate it and drop a marker buoy on it and come back later and pick it up, maybe at dusk, or after dark without lights. When it was safer. But Kirk didn’t even do that.

  In a couple of minutes Polaris came chugging back, presumably heading back to Tsatsos Port. Apparently he had done the operation enough, with or without Girgis, to know exactly where to look. Or else he had a better sea eye than I did, which was probable. As Polaris chugged past our spur, I motioned Sonny down and we both froze. In another couple of minutes Polaris chugged on out of sight behind the next point.