Touch of Danger

by James Jones

  “Is Jane Duval trying to get Sonny released entirely?” I asked.

  “I think,” Kronitis said, “I uh think if she had her choice, if she could pick the ending she wanted, she would have Duval committed somewhere to an institution for the criminally insane. Preferably in the United States.”

  I shook my head. You had to admire it.

  “I think there is some reason for thinking him perhaps slightly deranged,” Kronitis said softly.

  “Yes. There’s reason,” I said. “And is she ever happy there is.”

  Kronitis raised his shoulders again, and spread his hands. He didn’t speak.

  “So,” I said. “That lays it all in my lap.”

  “Exactly,” Kronitis said.

  I didn’t have to think about it. I had been thinking about it already. Ever since he first mentioned Chantal. They had me up the back. Unless I wanted to just say screw it.

  “This is the way they do it when the big shots and money get involved,” I said, and grinned at them. It hurt my cheek. “Everybody saves a little something. I keep forgetting that, when I’m picking up pieces in my dirty little job down in the East Village. That’s the way we used to do it in Chicago. Horse trading, my dad would call it.”

  I guessed I didn’t really mind it.

  “It’s one of the reasons I left Chicago,” I added.

  It wasn’t really such a bad solution. I didn’t really want to see Sonny executed. And I didn’t want to see Chantal ruined. The one I really wanted, the one who had really murdered both Girgis and Marie, was untouchable. Jane Duval. There was no way I could touch her.

  “Okay,” I said. “You’ve got yourselves a deal. Except that I’m a pretty good horse trader myself. And I’ve got a couple of conditions of my own.”

  “What are they?” Freddy Tarkoff said.

  “First, I want Chantal out of your racket, and your influence. She told me she wanted out. And I told her I’d get her out. I want a promise that you’ll never try to use her as a carrier again, under any circumstances.”

  Tarkoff smiled. “What if she changes her mind, and comes and asks us someday?”

  “Even then.”

  Freddy shrugged.

  “Second, I want this thing broken up. Here on Tsatsos. Totally. Dismantled, dismembered, shut down.”

  “There’s not much question of that,” Freddy said ruefully. “You’ve already successfully accomplished that. Inadvertently, maybe. But nonetheless completely. When Kirk goes back, he’s taking everything out and dumping it way off shore in the sea. I think we can guarantee you both of those, Lobo.”

  “For this week,” I said. “I’m thinking about next month. I’ll keep an ear to the ground, Freddy. If I ever hear about you starting up again, here or anywhere, I’ll come back around and blow you sky-high, by God. I’ll go to Washington, even. I’ve got some contacts there. You guys didn’t know it but you had a Narcotics Bureau man working undercover right under your noses. You very nearly hired him to work on the Polaris.”

  They looked at each other. Freddy gave Kronitis a hard look.

  “God,” Kronitis said. “That man Gruner? Was a Narcotics fellow?”

  “I can’t prove it,” I said. “He denied it. But I’d bet my bottom dollar on it.

  “The truth,” I said, “the truth is, you’re a couple of rank amateurs. You may be good at figures,” I said to Kronitis, “but you don’t know anything about handling the creatures of the lower depths like Kirk. He’s robbed and cheated you all around the horn.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” the old man said. “I had no idea about anything.”

  “But you’re the one I really don’t understand,” I said to Tarkoff. “You’re on the City Anti-Drug Commission. You make trips to Washington to help fight the drug traffic. You make speeches at the universities against drugs. I don’t understand you.”

  “They are two different things,” he said, and smiled. “This was business. The other was a social duty.”

  “So you’re the angry citizen, fighting the criminal drug traffickers. Who turn out to be yourself,” I said. “Do you ever catch you? You must be some kind of a schizophrenic.”

  “Maybe I am,” Freddy said. “But it was business. And a damned good business. And if I didn’t do it, somebody else would. The other,” he shrugged. “Well, I’m against the heroin traffic, in principle.”

  “You’re a wheeler-dealer,” I said contemptuously. “You may blow yourself all apart someday.”

  “Actually, it was you who gave me the idea,” Freddy said and gave me a rueful smile. “Running around with you on your cases showed me what a really great market it was, in America. I had the rest of it, the contacts and the geographical position, all just waiting for me here, by accident. As they get tougher and tougher on the French labs in Marseille, it’s beginning to spread out to other quieter areas.” He shrugged. “It was a natural.”

  “Was any of that money I helped you recover in Athens part of this?”

  He gave me an unreadable look. “A little. But only a very small part of it. That’s the truth, Lobo.”

  “You must be nuts, sending me down here for a vacation,” I said.

  He shrugged again, sorrowfully. “Who knew some nut was going to start killing people, and blow it open? Normally you would have come and gone, and never noticed a thing.”

  “I’m not trying to understand it,” I said. “Or you. I don’t even want to try. But if I ever hear of you starting anything else up down here, or getting Chantal von Anders involved in anything, I’ll hound you all the way to the moon. I mean that.”

  “I know you do. And I know what you’re like when you get your teeth in something.” He gave me a sad smile. “I’m just sorry all this happened. But there’s not much chance of that, now,” he said. “We’re getting out of it. Entirely. Like you said, I’m afraid we’re amateurs.

  “Will you shake hands with me?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “I shook hands with Sonny Duval, but I wouldn’t shake hands with you. You’ve done me a lot of harm that you don’t even know about. As far as I’m concerned you’re not my friend. I never knew you. Maybe ten years from now I might be able to think about it. Shaking hands with you. Think about it, not do it.

  “Well, I guess that winds it up, gentlemen,” I said. I hit the Gentlemen hard. I looked both of them in the face for a long moment. They both looked like sheep-killing dogs, as my old granddad would have said.

  “Oh, there’s one more thing,” I said. I stepped to the desk and picked up the still crisp sheaf of $100 bills. “I’m taking this.”

  “But, please,” Kronitis offered.

  “No. Don’t ‘Please’ me,” I said. “I’m taking it. You’re not giving it. You’ve got nothing to do with it. You couldn’t even stop me. Try to think of it like that. Think of it as though I’ve got a pistol at your head, and I’m taking it, and there’s nothing at all you can do about it.”

  “If you like,” Kronitis said. “If that’s how you prefer to think of it.”

  “That’s how,” I said. “I prefer to think of it as if I’m holding you up and robbing you.”

  I put the sheaf of bills back into my wallet, and felt it grow fat again. I put it back in my pocket.

  “You’ve still got my bill,” I said to Kronitis. “Send the check to New York. Goodbye, Gentlemen,” I said, and went across the long room over their thick carpet to the door. There wasn’t a sound behind me.

  I went out the door and turned myself back into a football for delivery at Glauros and the Daisy Mae.

  Chapter 62

  THERE WASN’T MUCH LEFT to do. Just pack my bag.

  I thought of calling Chantal. But then thought Oh, to hell with it. She had lied to me enough times. In fact, she was batting just about .1000. Why give her a chance to ruin that by being honest once?

  I enjoyed the lone run back across the channel. At the last minute I veered off from the harbor, and took her out around the lighthouse point and
back. When I tied up at the taverna and put the fenders over and stepped on shore and gave the keys to Dmitrios to hold, I felt like a grounded flier.

  I started the dusty walk up to the house, then stopped and looked back once at the stocky little caique. It was never dusty, out on the water.

  I half-hoped Pekouris would be waiting for me in my living room. But he wasn’t. He was much too smart for anything like that. There wasn’t anything he wanted from me now. I was sure he had been on the phone with Kronitis.

  I left 2,000 drachs under a plate on the kitchen table for the old woman. More tip than she’d earned.

  Then I got myself a big drink and went out and sat on my porch.

  It wasn’t such a bad finale really. It was not such a bad arrangement really, either. I supposed some years back I would have been incensed at the bald indecency of it. At least Chantal was all right, with this arrangement. Anyway, it was the best I could do for her.

  I had a last minute thought, and went in and called Tarkoff at Kronitis’s and told him I wanted him and Kronitis to pay Chantal $6000. Call it a separation pay, I said. He agreed. He was too guilty not to, and I used that on him. I didn’t know why I chose the arbitrary figure of $6000. Instead of $5000, say, or $7000.

  I still had my bag to pack. But when I got upstairs I found the upper floor was full of some kind of smoke. It smelled like garbage smoke. When I looked out the window, I saw that they were burning trash in an oil drum out behind Dmitri’s. The freshening breeze was carrying the great clouds of acrid evil-smelling smoke straight across the vacant lot into my house. I stood at the window looking at it. I thought it was a fitting farewell, along with all the rest.

  I finished the suitcase and strapped it down and took it down and set it in the living room.

  I got my briefcase out of the locked closet to put with the suitcase and saw Chuck’s machete sitting there. I took it and took it downstairs and gave it to Georgina to give to Steve and Chuck. When she asked me if I wanted to leave any message with it, I thought a minute, then said no. What the hell was I going to tell those two? I didn’t like them any better now than I had when I’d saved their ass from a bum murder rap.

  “They’re really good boys, you know,” Georgina said.

  I just looked at her. “You don’t know your ass from a bull fiddle, Georgina. That’s the truth,” I said. “They’re a couple of bums. The percentage of phonies among hippies is no higher and no lower than any other given group. In other words, about 89.9%. That’s what we insurance adjusters call a continuing statistic.”

  “Isn’t this smoke terrible?” she said.

  “You ought to do something about that,” I said. “But don’t do it on my account.”

  I shook hands with her, and escaped back upstairs.

  I was content to sit on my porch with my drink till time for the ferry. Smoke or no smoke.

  I didn’t hear the door open, but I heard the steps on the little stairs.

  “I couldn’t let you go like that,” she said coming out through the living room. “Don’t you even want to kiss me goodbye?”

  “Sure,” I said. I put down my drink and put my arms around her, and gave her a medium-light, passionless kiss.

  “Is there any chance I might see you in Paris?”

  “I don’t see how,” I said. “We don’t run in the same circles.” I stepped back, and looked at her a minute. Her lower lip was trembling. “Anyway, you’re out of your thing,” I said. “They may even give you a little severance pay.”

  “I don’t know whether I’m glad or not,” she said. “What will I do now?” She worked up a smile. “I guess I can sell my hot body to a rich old Greek. But I’m getting a little too old even for that.”

  “There must be some around,” I said. I slugged back the rest of my drink. “I’ve got a horsecab waiting, honey. You go down and have a drink with Georgina.”

  I went past her and got the suitcase and my briefcase.

  “Tell me something, will you?” I said from the door.

  “Yes. If I can, I will.”

  “Why did you come to me with that phony made-up story about Girgis blackmailing you?”

  She stood and looked at me. “I made it up on the moment. Because I wanted to get close to you. I had a little thing for you. And I wanted to interest you.”

  I nodded. I went out and shut the door.

  At the ferry dock in the Port I went on board and put my suitcase down on deck and went to the rail. Nobody had come to say goodbye, just as nobody had come to say hello when I arrived.

  Above my head the big horn hooted twice. I remembered my next alimony payment was due in two weeks.

  A Biography of James Jones

  James Jones (1921—1977) was one of the preeminent American writers of the twentieth century. With a series of three novels written in the decades following World War II, he established himself as one of the foremost chroniclers of the modern soldier’s life.

  Born in Illinois, Jones came of age during the Depression in a family that experienced poverty suddenly and brutally. He learned to box in high school, competing as a welterweight in several Golden Gloves tournaments. After graduation he had planned to go to college, but a lack of funds led him to enlist in the army instead.

  Before war began he served in Hawaii, where he found himself in regular conflict with superior officers who rewarded Jones’s natural combativeness with latrine duty and time in the guardhouse. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, which Jones witnessed, he was sent to Guadalcanal, site of some of the deadliest jungle fighting of the Pacific Theater. He distinguished himself in battle, at one point killing an enemy soldier barehanded, and was awarded a bronze star for his bravery. He was shipped home in 1943 because of torn ligaments in his ankle, an old injury that was made much worse in the war. After a period of convalescence in Memphis, Jones requested a limited duty assignment and a short leave. When these were denied, he went AWOL.

  His stretch away from the army was brief but crucial, as it was then that he met Lowney Handy, the novelist who would later become Jones’s mentor. Jones spent a few months getting to know Lowney and her husband, Harry, then returned to the army, spending a year as a “buck-ass private” (a term which Jones coined) before winning promotion to sergeant. In the summer of 1944, showing signs of severe post-traumatic stress—then called “combat fatigue—he was honorably discharged.

  He enrolled at New York University and, inspired by Lowney Handy, began work on his first novel, To the End of the War (originally titled They Shall Inherit the Laughter). Drawing on his own past, Jones wove a story of soldiers just returned from war, presenting a vision of soldiering that was neither romantic nor heroic. He submitted the 788-page manuscript to Charles Scribner’s Sons, where it was read by Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe. Perkins rejected it, but saw promise in the weighty work, and encouraged Jones to write a new novel.

  Jones began writing From Here to Eternity, a story of the war’s beginning. After six years of work, Jones showed it to Perkins, who was fully impressed and acquired the novel. After Perkins’s death, the succeeding editor cut large pieces from the manuscript, including scenes with homosexuality, politics, and graphic language that would have been flagged by the censor of that era, and published the novel in 1951. The story of a soldier at Pearl Harbor who becomes an outcast for refusing to box for the company team, it is an unflinching look at the United States pre-WWII peacetime army, a last refuge for the destitute, the homeless, and the desperate. The book was instrumental in changing unjust army practices, which created a public outcry when it was published. It sold 90,000 copies in its first month of publication and captured the National Book Award, beating out The Catcher in the Rye. In 1953 the film version, starring Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift, won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and made Jones internationally famous.

  He returned to Illinois to help the Handys establish a writers’ colony. Whi
le living there he wrote his second novel, Some Came Running, which he finished in 1957. An experimental retelling of his Midwestern childhood, it stretched to nearly 1,000 pages and drew little acclaim.

  In 1958, newly married to Gloria Mosolino, Jones moved to Paris, where he lived for most of the rest of his life, spending time with his old friend Norman Mailer and contributing regularly to the Paris Review. There he wrote The Thin Red Line (1962), his second World War II epic, which follows a company of green recruits as they join the fighting in Guadalcanal; and The Merry Month of May (1970), an account of the 1968 Paris student riots. The Thin Red Line would be brought to the screen by director Terrence Malick in 1998.

  Jones and his wife returned to the United States in the mid 1970s, settling in Sagaponack, New York. There Jones began Whistle, the final volume in his World War II trilogy, which was left unfinished at the time of his death. However, he had left extensive notes for novelist and longtime editor of Harper’s Magazine Willie Morris, who completed the last three chapters after Jones’s death in 1977. The book was published in 1978.

  A young Jones, riding his bike in 1925.

  Jones and his sister, Mary Ann, nicknamed “Tink.”

  A fifteen-year-old Jones, in 1936.

  Jones at the trailer camp where he worked while writing From Here to Eternity in the late 1940s.

  Jones working in the room where he wrote the majority of From Here to Eternity. The room was built specifically for Jones by a family friend in Robinson, Illinois.

  Jones in 1951, around the publication of From Here to Eternity.

  James and Gloria Jones on their wedding day in Haiti, February 1957.

  Newlyweds Jones and Gloria, still in Haiti. The couple stayed at the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince.

  The cast of the film From Here to Eternity in Hawaii. Back row, left to right: Montgomery Clift, Frank Sinatra, Deborah Kerr, and Burt Lancaster. The movie was released in 1953 and won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture.