by James Jones
“Come on,” Con Taylor said. “I’ll take you up and show you the house and how everything works.” He smiled in a smug way.
I followed him up the walk. It was nice to get out of that tension.
The house was very nice, though much too big for a lone man. Inside the front door three steps on the right led up to a long living room with a fireplace, French windows and tile floor. One huge long beam supported the ceiling of the room. At the other end a fine porch showed the harbor beyond thick stone arches that gave it a pleasant cave-like feeling. Everything was made of wood and chintz and materials that would stand up against mold in the wet sea air. The bedrooms were on a second floor. It was the kind of place where you expected James Mason and the Flying Dutchman might walk in and pour themselves a brandy at any moment.
Taylor showed me where the electric fuses and the circuit breaker were, and how to turn on and off the French-style hot water heater for the bathtub. There was no shower. I also inherited from the Taylors a Greek woman who sniffed at my one bag as if it had dead rats in it, as she took it upstairs to unpack it.
“I’m sorry I have to leave tonight,” Con Taylor said before he left. “But I’ll be back in two weeks. And then I’ll be here two weeks for my summer vacation.”
I said that was just wonderful. We shook hands.
A little later, after I had looked at the bedrooms and was standing on my new porch with a drink in my hand, I heard the Taylors arguing in the basement apartment below, as Con packed a bag. It was about a woman, naturally.
So here I was. And my landlords were fighting. And they were keeping their basement apartment. And I was supposed to say Fine. I raised my glass of Scotch to toast the waxing moon. Below, Con Taylor came out slamming the door to rush down the walk and take a horsecab to the ferry. The moonlight was beautiful on the susurrating waters of the little harbor.
Chapter 3
I PLEASED MY GREEK housekeeper enormously by telling her she didn’t have to cook dinner for me. I ate a plate of lamb-stew guk at the lighted taverna across the vacant lot. I was again standing on my cavey porch with a glass of Scotch in my hand looking at the moonlit harbor, when Georgina Taylor called up to me from below.
“Are you up there all alone?”
Politely I invited her up for a drink. It was a definite mistake and I knew it. Inviting people in for a nightcap is one of the slower forms of suicide.
She was already a little drunk. And once she was there, inside, she began to put away the Scotch like an NFL linebacker on the night after a losing season. It was Scotch they had thoughtfully provided for me, along with the bill. She got quite drunk on it, quite soon.
It was as if she could hardly wait till the amenities were over before plunging in and pouring out her story.
“It’s a shame you should be here all alone like this on your first night here.”
“I don’t mind it,” I said.
“How are you finding the house?”
“It’s a little big for one man.”
“I told them that. You must have done something quite remarkable for Freddy Tarkoff.”
“We’re old friends.”
On the second large whisky she dispensed with the subterfuge of soda altogether, but did accept ice.
“Are you really a private detective?”
I gestured.
“I ought to hire you to get the goods on Con for me.”
“I don’t take divorce cases. They get too messy.”
“No? Doesn’t matter. I’ve got the goods on him myself, anyway. He’s never bothered to try and hide them.”
“What you need is a lawyer, then.”
“Oh,” she said inconclusively. Then, “I suppose I shall never do anything about it. It really is a lovely night, out.”
“Lovely.”
“You don’t talk a great hell of a lot, do you?”
I didn’t answer that.
She thrust out her glass. She accepted a third large one, with ice, before launching herself.
“Con is having an affair with Sonny Duval’s ‘wife,’” she said. She twisted the word Wife savagely, to make sure I understood Jane Duval wasn’t one.
“And I’m supposed to say I’m sorry about that, is that it?” I said. I made it blunt.
She ignored it completely. “They aren’t really married, ‘the Duvals,’” Georgina Taylor said. “They don’t believe in getting married.” She looked at me, evidently for some comment. I didn’t make any. At this point it wasn’t going to make any difference whether I did or not.
“This is not the first affair Jane Duval has had on the island. But this time she seems to have flipped. I suppose that’s my Con. He could honey-talk the devil himself. Anyway, she claims Con promised to take her away. Away from ‘all this.’ Con, who has no intention of doing any such thing, has had to flee to Athens. And now Jane is threatening to follow him. And, as usual, it’s being left to me to get him out of it.”
She looked at me again. I didn’t say anything. Her voice took on a plaintive wail.
“I think this is all very un-chic of Sonny and Jane, who are millionaires incidentally. American millionaires. And who claim to believe in free love and free sex all over the place.”
This time she didn’t hold out her glass but reached for the bottle herself, on the little tray. “Don’t bother with the cubes,” she said hoarsely.
I got up, hoping she would get up too. She did. But then she took a step toward me, still holding tight to her glass, and leaned against me.
Where I come from women don’t lean against you indiscriminately. If they do, they live to think about it, if they don’t regret it.
Her unbound breasts in her faded shirt jiggled against my lower chest. “I guess you must know there’s not anything at all I can do about it,” I said, and pushed her gently away from me.
She was wiping her eyes with one hand, and sipping Scotch with the other. “I’m sorry. I apologize. I really do. I shouldn’t come up here and lay all this on your back. Please believe it won’t happen again.”
“I do. I believe it. After all, all I did was to come here and rent your house,” I said.
She laughed.
“I’ll be going.”
But it took a while to get her out. She was required now by something or other to maintain a pretense that she came up only to see how I was making out and not to confess her current misery and she would not stop talking.
I learned several things. I learned that Con was short for Constantine, and not for Conrad. I learned that Georgina Taylor was indeed English and had met Constantine Taylor in Alexandria during the war, where he was a naval officer. I learned they had a 22-year-old son, now living in London.
When she finally went out the door, she staggered a little as she handed me the slim remains of her fifth large whisky.
I shut the door. I thought I could see now why the cabman made his malicious laugh.
I turned off all the lights and took the whisky bottle upstairs with me and went down the bare hall hung with bad paintings to my bedroom. I was sleeping in the bedroom over the living room, overlooking the harbor. I did not turn the lights on and stood looking out over the still-moonlit harbor and tried to calm my ears. I was wide awake. I poured myself a stiff drink, while listening to my insides complain to me that I had poured too much whisky in them already today.
From down below, I could hear music playing on Georgina’s record player. Then a bottle clinking. I stepped out on the flat porch roof with my drink and stood a long time, brooding. The yacht harbor was still beautiful in the moonlight.
Some vacation. I could boot Freddy Tarkoff right in the butt. All the unpleasant things were clamoring in my head again. My life. My job for Tarkoff. My divorce. All jostling each other to be the first one out.
I still wasn’t ready to think about any of it yet.
Among the yachts and boats in the harbor was one big one, a beauty. A ketch. It was all dark, and looked all locked up. It must have
had a 90-foot mast, and had the long lines of an ocean sailer. You could go anywhere on that. As it rocked, its huge mast made an enormous arc across the bright star-marked sky.
I tried to imagine what it must be like to have enough money to own a boat like that, and failed. Enough money to live on it, and go where you wanted, and leave when you felt like it. I couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t imagine having that much money.
After a while I went back inside and got into the rather lumpy bed.
All I did was toss among the lumps. So I made myself think about the yacht again. It was either that, or the other stuff. I went over every line of her, and every cable, and every stay. I went over every furled sail on her, and over all their lashings.
Then I went over every extra sail that must be in her sail locker. I went over every cabin in detail. I had never seen the cabins. It didn’t matter. I made them up as I would have had them and went over them.
It was a trick I had learned during the war. My war. When you did not want to think about something, think about something you wanted. But it had to be something you wanted badly. Back then it had been a cabin I had once seen up in the Wind River Range. I had never seen the inside of that, either. But I had made it up a thousand times. And it had worked back then.
Now I did the same thing with the yacht. It worked again.
It took a long time. But my head stopped, and I got to sleep.
Chapter 4
THE NEXT MORNING I felt a lot better. With the beautiful yacht harbor before the house, and the boats, and people working on them, and the sea far off, it was hard not to.
The sun woke me early and I sat on my porch with strong Greek coffee prepared by my housekeeper and watched the activity of the harbor below me.
Jane Duval sat with her head down looking sullen and mistreated on the seawall a hundred feet away toward the taverna. The baby played in the dirt at her feet, ignored.
As I watched, Sonny collected his “wife” and kid and marched away. At the taverna’s dock he bustled them into his skiff and rowed them out to his fat, 60-foot, unkempt-looking Greek caique which was springlined to the seawall twenty yards offshore in front of the house. Georgina had already told me this was where they lived. A small but good-looking speedboat was tied up to it.
I watched him put Jane and the kid on board and row back to the taverna. He tied up the skiff and clambered on board a 32-foot fisherman’s caique tied up at the dock and began putting it in shape. This was my boat evidently, and he was getting it ready for me.
Behind me, the doorbell rang, and the Greek housekeeper let somebody in. I came back in, half blinded by the supercharged sun. The figure of a woman was coming toward me. It took my eyes a minute to adjust. That’s another thing that age does for you. Your eyes don’t adjust as fast.
When I could see, I saw the housekeeper had come up the three steps from the hall and into the room, and that she was all blushy and flustered. She made a big thing out of the name.
“The Countess fon Hannders,” she intoned. Her English had a distinct German accent. The same was true of all the older, poorer Greeks on the islands that had been occupied.
The woman, now that I could see her, was wearing a light but expensive summer print. A few carefully selected pieces of jewelry flashed. Her hair was neither short nor long, and fluffed out cutely. A handsome aristocratic woman in her late 40s, slim, elegant. Elegance wafted from her, as they say. For her age she was still all hung together, at least the parts I could see. Under the elegant exterior there appeared to be a sexy, still attractive female. Just the right age for a broken-down private eye turning 50.
“She makes a big thing out of the name,” I said.
“They all do that,” von Anders said, “with titles. They love to name them. We prefer not to use them.”
I gave her a grin. “I never use them myself.”
She didn’t know whether she liked that or not. “Anyway, I don’t have any right to it, being divorced.”
So this was the woman Tarkoff had said would take care of me, be my guide and entrepreneur on the island, rent everything for me. This was also the woman who had not met the ferry.
“I’m sorry about not meeting the ferry,” she said as if reading my mind. “Actually, I got the date wrong.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” I said. “I didn’t mind sleeping on the jetty.”
“Good heavens, did you really? Oh, I’m so sorry. Did you really have to?”
“No, not really,” I said. “I had Georgina Taylor’s name.”
She looked relieved. But it was hard to tell if she was out-acting me. “How do you like the house? Is it adequate?”
“More than. For a lone man.”
“Is the housekeeper all right?”
“She’s fine with me. I don’t know if I’m so fine with her.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I only brought one suitcase.”
She smiled all the way this time, a perky smile. “She’s a dreadful snob. They get that way after they work a while.”
“We all do,” I said.
She gave me a quizzical grin. “You’re very fast with the wisecracks. Freddy Tarkoff warned me about that.”
There was a fast and easy answer to that: Did Freddy also warn her about other sides of me? I didn’t make it. But she didn’t seem to be expecting it. She moved around me, to the nearest window. She pointed down at the taverna dock.
“That’s the boat I’ve rented for you. One really needs one here. The man’s American. He doesn’t really need the money. But he’s good enough with a boat, and he has the added advantage of speaking English.”
“Is he a good fisherman? Spearfisherman? Freddy told me he was an expert fisherman.”
“I don’t really know that. Shall we go down and meet him, and ask him?”
“I’ve already met him. And his wife.”
“Ah. You’ve met Jane.”
“Yes, I’ve met her,” I said. I said it in a voice that expressed no opinion.
The Countess smiled. It was a pure and pristine bitch’s smile. It seemed to light up her whole face with delight, and seemed to show all her tiny little teeth. It seemed to stay on there after it had disappeared. It was the smile of the high-placed lady who loved a good cat fight, and would roll up her sleeves for it.
“Charming thing, isn’t she?” she said.
It was my own fault. I had mentioned Sonny’s woman. She hadn’t. But it was a formidable response just the same.
This was also the woman, I remembered, who Freddy’s tone of voice had intimated he knew better than a friend. Was Tarkoff thinking of her along the same lines for me? I didn’t like it. I didn’t mind the idea. But I didn’t like Freddy’s presumption. If it was presumption.
“Chantal,” I said. “That’s French, isn’t it? Somehow I had the idea you were English.”
She laughed. “I am English. But my mother was French. And I spent most of my childhood in France. But don’t ever think the English can’t be as bitchy as the French.”
“So I’ve heard,” I said. I liked her.
She went on talking about the house, its advantages and disadvantages, its housekeeping problems. She talked about the housekeeping part as if she was an expert housekeeper herself. I was sure she was. But underneath all the housekeeping talk she seemed very jittery, nervous. And seemed to get more so. Then she asked me to lunch.
“It won’t be exciting,” she added hastily. “It’s only a bunch of old biddies that I call my Greek Chorus, and one old gent. But the food is good. And I want to talk to you about something.”
“Why don’t we talk about it here?” I said. “That doesn’t sound much like my kind of lunch.”
“I don’t want to talk about it here,” von Anders said.
I was beginning to recognize symptoms. Being a private dick is a lot like being a doctor. Whenever a doctor shows up at a party, the people all start telling him all their newest symptoms. When a private dick shows up, they
start telling him all their secret worries. It gets to be an awful drag. I put up my hands.
“Look, I’m down here on vacation,” I said. “I’m not down here looking for business.”
“Is blackmail bad enough?” von Anders said.
That was certainly straightforward enough. “All right, I’ll come to your luncheon,” I said. “But I won’t promise any more than that. Okay? Now you should go home. And I want to go to town in my new boat with my new boatman.”
She held out her hand, in a sudden shy way. It was warm and dry and lean. An expensive bracelet winked at me. She was certainly an attractive woman. At least to older men like me. Or Freddy. As she walked away, I found myself wondering if her bottom was as firm as it seemed in the dress. There was only one way to find out and clothes, even a thin summer print, were not part of it. Cut it out, I growled at myself; go and get dressed for the boat.
I was not down here to play games with countesses. I didn’t know what I was down here for but it wasn’t that. Engage in hit-and-run short-term love affairs that squirted emotion all over the place. All that was just ego-tripping, as the kids said. Not for me. Not for a hard-nosed old romantic. I would be laughable.
On my way out through the walled yard, Georgina gave me a deep-circled, haunted look when I said hello.
Chapter 5
AT THE BOAT, which was called the Daisy Mae, Sonny Duval was ready and waiting for me. He hauled the boat in to the dock by its painter, and held out his hand to me. I ignored it and long-stepped aboard quite handily by myself.
I figured we better get this point about my knowledge of small boats out of the way right at the start.
“Thanks,” I said.
He just looked at me. Then shrugged. He went aft and backed the boat and threaded his way out through the boats and anchored yachts, and started to run down along the shore lined with the high-walled white houses that I had passed along in the horsecab the night before.