A Touch of Danger

by James Jones

  “See that guy? That’s our local pusher,” Sonny said beside me when the klaxon stopped and we could hear again. He made the gesture of someone smoking a reefer. “That’s Girgis. He’s a local star. Screws nothing but blonde English and American tourist girls. Girgis is not only Master of the Polaris. He is also quite big in another business.” Again he made the gesture of smoking a reefer. I was beginning to get the point.

  “Looks healthy, doesn’t he?” he said with a kind of bitter relish. “He’s about as healthy as a syphilitic spastic.”

  He nodded. “Look at him. Girgis is blowing his klaxon. Girgis wants his people there. But he won’t leave for another hour. The people will sit there. Girgis covers every loophole.” He grinned.

  We climbed up onto the stone wharf. The quay we stepped onto immediately swallowed us into its live activity. Tourists and hippies strode up and down, buying fruits and vegetables from the little caiques like ours, which had brought the stuff to town. One of the ferry ships was in and loading cargo, and a gang of local men carried crates of melons and huge tomatoes and green vegetables out the jetty to it. Right in front of us was an ugly building marked BANK.

  “I’ve got to present some letters and open an account,” I said. “Where shall I meet you?”

  Sonny pointed. “Up at one of the cafes. I’ve got some friends I want to see.”

  The man in the bank had the cold watchdog stare behind rimless glasses of all loyal bank clerks who love protecting their bosses’ money from the depredations of tongue-tied workingmen. I stared back at him just as hard, and cut him off when he started to give me his lip about his regulations. Hell, you’d think it was his money. When I stepped outside several minutes later, something made me stop dead. I stepped back into the shade of the bank front.

  Just in front of me on the wharf, just going down the stone steps to the little embarkation stage, was Jane Duval with her child. The child had difficulty with the high wharf steps. They got onto the boat which—the sign said—was loading passengers to take over to the little airport on the mainland for the morning small-plane flight to Athens. I stayed in the doorway while the boat backed and turned and headed out. The local plot at Georgina Taylor Haus was thickening, it looked like.

  I stepped back out into the sun. Well, it wasn’t any of my business. The Port was infested with hippies. I made my way up the rough cobbles of the little rise to the terrace of cafes under the trees. It was hard to find a table. Seated, I saw Georgina Taylor stand up across the terrace and shout at me, and motion me to come over.

  Sonny Duval was with her, and a whole raft of the kids. Three of them stood out. A tall, skinny youth with very thick glasses and close-cropped hair; a blond Adonis with a sleepy drugged-out stare, and a lion’s mane of hair; and another sullen girl in another shapeless robe, like Jane Duval. They seemed to be together. They all three stared at me, as I waved back at Georgina and shook my head.

  I had no desire to talk juvenile philosophy. Briefly, I wondered if Sonny knew his wife was fleeing the coop. I suspected he didn’t.

  After I ordered coffee, I asked the waiter for the men’s room. This turned out to be a noisome stall back in a narrow alley and behind the cafe, a lean-to against the back wall with a plank door that wouldn’t close. It smelled like a Dow Chemical plant. Coming out of it, I heard voices, and the sound of a woman crying, and stopped.

  In the alley Girgis was being importuned by an American hippie girl who wanted to buy some hashish on credit. The girl was sniffling. Girgis spoke good English. But he was rude and tough with the girl. I stood and listened. I didn’t like it. After she left, crying, he became aware of me.

  “You were pretty hard on the little girl, weren’t you?” I said. “For a little hash?”

  He looked me over. He moved like a star rooster. I would have dearly loved to hit him. “Her boyfriend sent her,” he said amiably, “not having guts enough to come himself. And it was not hash they wanted from me, as the gentleman seems to think, but to rent my boat Polaris for what they call a picnic. But which usually ends up to be an orgy. I have no use for the hippies, and they like me as little.”

  “Do you have to have a license to sell hashish on this island?” I said. “Or can just anybody sell it?”

  “Selling hashish is strictly illegal, and that is why I would never touch it.”

  “But I could sell it. If I wanted to,” I said. “If I had some with me?”

  He grinned. “The police are very tough here.” The grin widened. “If you do not know them.”

  “I’m sure it helps to know them,” I said.

  He was looking threatening, with his grin. So I smiled and inflated my chest a little for him, too.

  He came a little closer.

  “You are new here,” he said. “I have not seen you around Tsatsos before.”

  “Just arrived,” I said. “Here on a vacation. But that’s the only thing that’s new about me.”

  This time his inspection of me was a little more professional.

  “You have moved in at Georgina Taylor house.”

  “That’s me.”

  He was taller even than Sonny Duval, and had a tendency to seem to tower over me. But I could left-hook him in the belly beautifully from just where I stood. He bared his teeth at me but I couldn’t honestly call it a grin.

  “There have been rumors in Athens about a new American narcotics agent, moving around. Who might pay us a visit in Tsatsos.”

  “You don’t say so,” I said.

  “We are very small here. Being small makes us close together. We do not like strangers, unless they are tourists coming to spend money. People have been known to disappear and never be heard again. The sea around us is very big. If I were you, I wouldn’t even finish my vacation. I would turn around and go right back to Athens, Mr. —?”

  “Davies,” I said. “Why, I do believe you’re threatening me.

  “Not threatening,” Girgis said. “Just advising.” He stepped back and bared his teeth again. Then he stalked off, still graceful as always. There was a big bare dry field back there they had labeled a park. He went across it.

  Back at the alley entrance I found Sonny Duval had been standing there, apparently ready to help me fight. I began to like him better.

  “He’s a tough guy,” Sonny said.

  “Sure. They all are,” I said, and began to like him less again. I had heard that descriptive definition used of men about as many times as I wanted to. Usually it was true enough. You had better believe they were, in any case. It was safer than believing you were tougher. “Sit down and have a drink with me, Sonny,” I said.

  “I can’t. I have to get back to the yacht harbor and make sure Jane is okay,” he said.

  I looked at him. I did not mention I had seen Jane. He didn’t seem to know about her.

  I asked the waiter for a Scotch and sat back down. Sonny told me how to get to Chantal von Anders’ house back up in the town, pointing out the street I was to take up the hill, and left.

  I fingered my cold glass and sat looking after him, puffing out my lips thoughtfully. It was a habit I had. I did it when I was thinking and the thinking was not too fruitful nor too joyously elated. I usually only did it when I was alone.

  Chapter 8

  I SAT AND WATCHED the Port’s harbor bake. The glare of the all-out sun was harsh, retina-stunning, from the shade. There was something funny about this island that I could not put my finger on, and I didn’t like it. I paid the liverish young waiter and left.

  The town climbed steeply from the Port. I walked uphill on narrow walled cobbled streets. As soon as I left the district of shops the number of hippies got noticeably less. The heavy sun bore down on the white houses and walls, and leaned hard on me. It was quiet. Some gardens had green showing over their walls, but most of them looked dry and tinderish, as if they would go up at the touch of a cigarette butt.

  Von Anders’ house was nearly at the top of the town, and it was some house. It looked as if
it had been the old time castle of the place, from which the head brigand sortied forth to make all the other littler brigands cough up and pay off, and they couldn’t do a thing about it because he could sortie right back in again and they couldn’t touch him.

  It had thick, ancient, stone rooms with lancet arches over the doors and arched ceilings, a portion of old crenelated wall between the house proper and a low tower in the garden, a stone terrace on one level, a well-tended garden on two levels, a couple of ancient unused wells. It was definitely not the house of a poor girl.

  I was let in at the garden door-gate by an enormously fat, somber Greek woman of about twenty-four, who waddled. The assembled company was already assembled. They were on the stone terrace, under vine-covered lattice, and were drinking Bloody Marys. I figured a little tomato juice on top of my Scotch wouldn’t hurt anything.

  In the living room, which was all stone, hung a portrait of von Anders when she was young, under what was a perpetual light apparently. The dimness of the living room with its small windows almost warranted the eternal lamp, but not quite. If that was what she looked like when she was young, she must have been really something. That apparently meant a lot to her.

  “I hope you’ll survive the luncheon,” she breathed after she greeted me. She was cute with two strong Bloody Marys under her belt.

  The luncheon was even worse than I expected. The main topic was the hippies and dope. The four old biddies were hard to tell apart. I had difficulty separating one from another. The fact that they all thought exactly alike didn’t make it easier. The old gent was easier to distinguish because he had short hair, although one of the ladies almost matched him there. He was a retired American Diplomatic Corps fella. They all called him Ambassador because he had been one. Ambassador Pierson. He was a nervous old gent, and said little. If he hadn’t been an ambassador I would have bet he was some kind of hophead.

  “It is the dope they bring in, rather than the young vagabonds themselves, that is scary,” one of the ladies said in synthesis.

  “Absolutely,” said the Ambassador.

  “Dope?” I put in. “Or hashish?”

  “Hashish!” the lady said. “Isn’t that dope?”

  I decided not to go into that with her. I knew about a million people who no longer considered hashish and pot to be serious dope. Just about everybody I knew in New York smoked both.

  I shut up and listened and learned this was the third year they had come, the kids. Like migratory birds. There never used to be a hashish problem. Now all the children had access to it, if they wanted it. Most of the ladies had teen-age children, or grandchildren, who came in the summer. The older people didn’t like the influence. They were losing all their control over the young. It was getting worse every year. Et cetera, et cetera. I felt like a fish who has been jerked out of the water and left to flop on the bank when all he did was bite at a worm, his natural function. I didn’t know where all of them had been the last few years. But their concern was genuine.

  Afterward, when they all left, von Anders took me for a walk up the hill to an old temple ruin. A lovely place, and stony quiet. It was another one of those sites that had been an ancient-Greek pagan temple. But here even the later Christian Orthodox chapel had been let go back to grass and mold.

  The Countess seemed to be quite taken with me. “You were really something. Freddy Tarkoff told me you were something different, But he gave me no idea how much.”

  “Didn’t I do my part well?”

  “Too well. You were so polite.” Suddenly she giggled. “You were like a big black bear in a kindergarten. You looked as if, if you took one deep breath and forgot yourself, you would blow them all away. And my luncheon table, too.”

  “Light lunches with old ladies is not my best thing.”

  “It certainly isn’t.”

  “And you find that exciting about me?”

  “Well, it’s certainly all male.”

  Well she was certainly all female. There wasn’t anything overt about her come-on. If it was a come-on. But there was a deep glow in her eyes of flirtation. She was even willing to imply, by the way she used his name, that she knew Tarkoff on better than just friendly terms. Women don’t often do that.

  I steered us back to the reason I was here in the first place.

  “What about this secret that’s so deep and dark you can’t talk about it in front of my housekeeper?”

  “It’s just what I said. I’m being blackmailed.”

  “For a lot of money?”

  “Quite a lot. Enough.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Well, let me tell you about blackmail. Blackmail is always dirty business. Because the person being blackmailed has always done something bad. Something against the law or something he doesn’t want people to know about. Otherwise, the blackmailer couldn’t blackmail him. Could he?”

  She looked perplexed.

  I spelled it out for her. “Do you want to tell me what you’ve done bad? Maybe you’d rather not tell me.”

  “I want to tell you everything.” But she seemed hesitant. I didn’t say anything. “The bad thing I’ve done is that I’ve been buying some hashish,” she said finally. “There is a man in the village called Girgis.”

  “I’ve already met him,” I said.

  “You do move fast. Freddy said you did. Well, he has been selling me hashish, and now he is threatening to tell people. And I am paying him not to.”

  I waited. “Is that all?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “It doesn’t sound very bad.”

  “You don’t understand. You saw those people at lunch. What if they found out? Those people, and others like them, are my whole social life on this island.”

  “Countess, if those people are your whole social life, I would say you are in deep trouble. Blackmail or no.”

  She simply stared at me.

  “A woman with your looks,” I added.

  She flushed. But she came right back. “This isn’t something to joke about. I want to retain you. I want you to do something about that man.”

  “You’re sure that’s all there is?”

  She didn’t quite bite her lip, but she wanted to. “Yes, that’s all.”

  I had no doubt she was lying, now. I leaned toward her, and took her hand. “Countess, my retainer is fifteen hundred dollars. I don’t think you want to pay me that. Besides, I’m on vacation. I’m not here to work. Besides, private detectives never, never charge their close and dear friends. I suggest you just stop paying this Girgis. If that’s all it is. I will take a look around. I promise nothing bad will come of it for you. Okay?” I grinned.

  “You’re a mean man,” she said. There was a distinct impression that she would allow her hand to continue to be held. “Please don’t call me Countess. Call me Chantal,” she said in a weak voice. That was the only signal she would allow herself, I guessed. But there was a distinct impression she would even allow herself to be kissed, maybe. I let go of the hand.

  Off in the distance was the “Construction” where the hippies had installed themselves. I had had a good view of it from the ferry coming in. But here the view of it was superb. An abandoned government building project, started by the state as vacation apartments for government workers apparently, or so they’d said at lunch.

  “So that is where the celebrated hippies have taken up abode?” I said.

  “That? Yes. They just seem to come. It’s like those caves in other parts of Greece. They hear about it. And they come. It’s changing the entire island. It’s to them that Girgis sells his hashish.”

  “Where did you get your hash before the hippies?”

  “Oh.” She looked flustered. “From Girgis. But it wasn’t a big business then. It was just a—just a favor. So to speak.”

  “I see.” I folded my arms and went on looking at the “Construction.”

  “How much do you charge, Lobo?” She let her voice play with my name a little.

  “Hundred and
fifty bucks a day, and expenses,” I said without moving my gaze. I unfolded my arms and smiled. “We better go down.”

  “Yes. I—I still want to retain you. But I can’t pay that much.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” I could so easily have used the old line about taking it out in trade. I almost did. “And don’t you be terrorized by such a little thing.” I gave her a quizzical look.

  “I have gotten you invited to one of the summer resident dinner parties tonight, with me,” Chantal said. “I’ll meet you at the taverna by your house at eight.”

  We were almost at her house.

  I walked back down the hill alone, whistling ominous ditties to myself under my breath. She was probably mixed up in something. What could you be mixed up in living on a Greek island vacation paradise?

  I wondered a little at the fact that she said she couldn’t afford to pay me my regular fee. A lady who lived in a house that fantastic, and lived there that well, should certainly be able to pay my fees. How bad could it be, whatever it was she was mixed up in? Well, I had told her I would look into it.

  Back at my own rented mansion, that I rattled around so in, another installment in the Taylor-Duval drama was on, playing to a capacity audience. A bunch of kids I had seen that morning in town were sitting around in Georgina’s yard. Sonny was out on his big caique, and Georgina was at the seawall shouting at him. I nodded to her and went straight on inside and got myself a drink. I prepared to watch the show from my porch.

  Below in the harbor, Sonny flung himself over to his boarding ladder and got angrily into his speedboat and zoomed ashore in it. He went charging up to one of those public phone booths. Georgina left the seawall and followed me into the house.