A Touch of Danger

by James Jones

  I stood and watched her swim back to her float for her gun. Then I started up the motor and put it in gear. The float diminished sternward. We didn’t say anything for several minutes.

  “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen you like that,” Chantal said finally after a while.

  “Like what?”

  “Eager. Excited. Interested. You were almost warm, for a few minutes.”

  I grinned. “I guess I forgot myself. I loved skindiving.”

  “Why don’t you do it then? If you love something that much? Just give everything up and go and do it?”

  “Anngh,” I growled. I thought about my wife. My ex-wife. “I’ve got a very big alimony to support. I have two teen-age girls in school.”

  “Responsibilities, in other words.”

  “Call it guilts. What’s the difference? The effect’s the same. I figure I owe it. It was my own fault.”

  “Like all the rest of us,” she said softly.

  “No, not like all the rest of you,” I said. “One thing about me you’ll learn. I always pay what I think I owe. I’ll pay it if it kills me.”

  “Which in your business it might just someday do.”

  “A gross canard,” I grinned. “People in my business never get killed—unless they drive their own cars or fly their own helicopters. I always travel by public conveyance whenever possible.”

  She looked like she didn’t know quite how to take that. My unwillingness to play serious talk games with her still irritated her.

  “Listen, where is this place we’re going? How far is it?” I said.

  She had looked away from me. As if I had insulted her. “Not too far now,” she said over her shoulder. She went on looking ahead of us. So I looked ahead of us, too. The boat ran on, over the glassy water, under the dead-quiet stunning sun.

  I could remember that long, slow, silent, dreamlike ascent swimming up. You could look down between your feet and see the bottom diminishing and fading, or look up at the wavery glare of the surface far above and see the boat’s bullet-shaped shadow over you. I expected that, as well as needing to come up for air, she wanted to see who was visiting, because she would have seen us above her. Down below you could hear a boat’s motor a long way off, warning you. In the States the little spar on Marie’s float would have had on it the red diver’s flag with the diagonal white slash across it, but not here. Not in the Caribbean either, where I used to dive. Always, coming up from any of the deeper dives, your mask, pressurized at depth with air from your nostrils, would belch out air bubbles of its own, and you could look up and see them rocketing and dancing up to the surface above you like flattened balls of mercury. I had been able to do 80 and 90 feet before I left Jamaica. Under the tutelage of one of the Caribbean masters. An American, who had stated emphatically that I was the best pupil he had ever had. But that had been ten years ago. And I had been ten years younger.

  “Tell me about this American girl,” I said.

  “Her name is Marie something. Sweet Marie, the hippies call her. She makes her living selling the fish she spears. She is also the hashish runner for Girgis.”

  “Girgis uses a runner? There isn’t that far to run, around here.”

  “He doesn’t like the hippies. He also doesn’t like to be seen with them. So he hires her to deliver the stuff and collect the money for him.” Her voice sounded reproving. “And she also has slept with everybody on the island. And I mean everybody. Boys and girls alike.”

  “Are you being jealous, Chantal?” I teased.

  “Of her? I guess between her two jobs she makes herself a good enough living. For her. Last summer she made enough to stay on through the winter.”

  “It takes a lot of nerve to stay out offshore alone like that all day swimming without a boat. Almost as much as it would take to stay here through the winter, I’ll bet,” I said.

  Chantal shuddered. “You’re right about that part. I don’t think the diving takes much nerve on her part. I think it’s an escape for her. From something.”

  I looked at her curiously. I felt she might almost be talking about herself without knowing it.

  “Aren’t there any police around this place?”

  “There are four. One fat chief, and three muscular young morons hoping to get fat. They’re called the constabulary.”

  “Is that all?”

  “There’s a real Police Inspector over at Glauros on the mainland. When he’s not in Athens.”

  “Well, there isn’t all that much money, or interest, in hashish anyway. Heroin is the big deal.”

  I didn’t particularly expect any reaction to that from Chantal. I didn’t get any. “I suppose,” she said. “There’s our taverna up ahead.”

  The taverna lay in the middle of a long shallow beach between two hills. The hills fell in cliffs to the sea and were covered with pine woods. The place looked cool and inviting in that sun. I unscrewed the wing nut on Sonny’s throttle. Then I saw that Girgis’s boat the Polaris was one of the three tourist boats tied up at the single, rickety jetty.

  “Would you rather not go in here?”

  Chantal’s chin came up and her face took on its aloof Countess look. “Are you joking?”

  “I can’t tie up there by the other boats anyway,” I told her, and ran us in 30 or 40 yards down.

  “Swim a little?” I said, when I came back.

  “Yes.”

  We did, and the water was delicious and crystal clear. All around us in the water and on the beach were tourists from Girgis’s boat, and tourists from the other boats, mostly Greeks from Athens, fat big-bellied women, paunchy vain men, loudmouth teen-age boys and girls. Under an inadequate pine tree two sunburnt autobuses owned by the municipality languished in insufficient shade. The taverna tables were crowded under their vine-covered lattices.

  “I think if we stay here and have a drink and wait,” I said, “the boats will go soon.” They did, all but Polaris. The two hot, overcrowded autobuses left on the dusty gravel road, groaning at the steep climb. As the two of us walked up the sand of the beach toward the taverna, a figure rose languidly from the bench below the Polaris’s rail. It was Girgis, in diminutive trunks and his raunchy black captain’s cap. He leaped down agilely onto the shaky jetty. Behind him a blonde, a new one, rose adjusting her hair and her swimsuit.

  “Going to eat?” He flashed white teeth at us from his tanned face. “Going to eat myself.”

  But that was all he said. He and the girl, who sounded English, joined a group of Greeks. Chantal led us to a table much farther away. There was plenty of room, now.

  “He has a new one every week. Always blonde. Always American or English. He teaches them the Greek dancing. It’s his equivalent of showing etchings. It’s a joke all over the island.”

  “Why not?” I said. “It’s a big romantic lark for them. A handsome Greek boat captain, with his own boat.”

  “He had quite a fling with Jane Duval last year.”

  I felt my ears perking up. “He did, did he? And did she try to run away to Athens with him, too?”

  “No. There wasn’t any question of running anywhere with Girgis, I’m afraid.”

  I was studying her quizzically. Maybe for the first time it entered my head that she might have had an affair with him herself. “He doesn’t seem like a bad fellow.”

  “Bad? Bad is not even the word for it. He wouldn’t have been a bad fellow if he had stayed a fisherman. America ruined him.”

  “Your title is showing again,” I said. “Don’t blame America, either. He looks like he might ruin easy. America gets blamed for everything nowadays. My God, even Girgis.”

  She laughed, her eyes bright on me. Then openly, for him to see, she put her hand on my bare forearm on the table. I looked at it, looked up at her, then winked. Helping her out, I put my own hand over hers.

  “People see the good things in life all around them, and they want to get some of them,” I said with my No. 2 sorrowful smile. “It’s what keeps me in bus
iness.”

  The lunch was nothing to brag about. But it was good to eat it out in the open under the lattice and the trees, with the sea nearby. The highlight of the lunch was when Girgis got up with his new girl and danced to the jukebox. The girl was hopeless but Girgis put on a superb exhibition of the Greek dancing. The tourists from his boat clapped and pounded their tables with their wine glasses in approval. I appreciated his grace, and his superb reflexes. He did not glance at us, and he did not seem even to know we were there.

  We lingered on a while after Girgis’s boat left. I tied us up to the jetty and we lay on the cabin roof under the tarpaulin.

  “There are a couple of blankets down below,” I said. “We could take one of them up on that hill and lie under the trees a while.”

  Chantal seemed to stiffen. “Certainly not,” she said, in her Countess voice.

  I was surprised again. “Oh,” I said, amiably. “Okay.”

  After a minute she said, “Did something, or someone, give you the idea I am some kind of an easy lay?”

  That angered me. “Oh, come off it. I’m not trying to corrupt you. You’re old enough to know what you want. You don’t want? Fine. Leave it at that.” I paused. “I’ll still protect you from your blackmailer. I’m that kind of sucker.”

  “That was nasty.”

  “I meant it to be. Okay, we go back, hunh?”

  After we were back out on the water, she seemed to relent a little. She seemed pensive. She came and sat by me in the stern. “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, forget it.” I was getting bored with the subject of her ass.

  “No. I don’t want to forget it. I’ve got a dinner arranged for us again tonight. At Tarquinia Hall’s. She’s the older one who leads the ladies in Greek dancing. You come up to my place after dinner.”

  “You mean I can take you home from dinner?” Big deal.

  “No. That’s just what I don’t mean. I’ll go home with the Sandersons again. Then around midnight you come to my house.”

  I thought about that for half a minute. “Okay. Fine. But let me beg off on the dinner, then.”

  “You don’t want to come?”

  “No. I don’t get any kick out of that. That’s no vacation. Sitting around watching those people struggling to have a good time. They work as hard at it as those poor people on the beach. I appreciate the poor ones better. I’m more nearly one of them than I am your rich friends. I only work for the rich.”

  “Just tell them you can’t come?”

  “Tell them whatever you like.”

  “You are strange.”

  “Only to a social butterfly like you.”

  A pause. “What you like is skindiving. And girls in tight black suits.”

  I grinned. “Sure. And in bikinis. All men do.” I reached and snapped the leg elastic of her suit gently. “If women could only realize how much pleasure they give men, they’d be—furious.”

  Chantal laughed out loud. “You didn’t imagine I would go up on that hill with you with a blanket with those taverna people all watching us, did you?”

  “I never thought about it,” I said. “One way or the other.”

  I gave her a wink. She was mollified. I was mollified. What a pair of middle-aged fools. We were running closer to shore than on the way out and a little farther on we saw the float again, farther out, small. Marie was still out there fishing. She had covered a good five or six miles.

  Almost immediately after, we passed a small, tight, rocky little cove, with an elaborate concrete landing dock built in it, and a tiny beach beside it. I hadn’t noticed it before because we had come by it much farther out. A tumbling rolling cliff led up to an old-looking, locked and shuttered villa, high above. Concrete steps had been built up the cliff face to an open veranda beside the villa. It was quite a cozy place.

  I might have never noticed it at all, or paid any attention to noticing it, if I hadn’t happened to look right at it. But having noticed it, I studied it closely. Somewhere in the back of my old cop’s nose something seemed to twitch, and tickle at my mind. I guess because it was so damned cozy.

  “Is this place by any chance owned by Mr. Leonid Kronitis?” I said.

  Chantal looked surprised. “Why, yes. It is.” Then she looked perplexed, and corrected herself. “Actually, it’s not owned by him personally. I think it’s owned by some corporation he’s vaguely connected with. Rich men come down from Athens in a big boat apparently, with lots of blondes, and have big parties there occasionally. The gossip is that some big businessmen bring their American associates there to wine, dine and woman them.”

  I nodded.

  “How do you know about Kronitis? What do you know about him?”

  I shrugged. “Me? Nothing. People mentioned him. He’s supposed to be the great local philanthropist. He owns Girgis’s boat, and he owns that big yacht Agoraphobe. He owns the hippies’ bar. He’s rich.”

  I made a little circle with the Daisy Mae and went back past it a second time and studied it again. It certainly was a great place for some kind of nasty skullduggery and chicanery, my nose told me. It was so damned cozy, out here on the other side of the island all by itself. The villa, too. Smuggling, for example. But smuggling what?

  Well, it wasn’t my affair. I ran the boat on.

  “But what made you guess this place might be owned by Leonid Kronitis?”

  “Just a hunch.” I grinned at her.

  Behind us the little cove wheeled out of sight behind the headland it nestled against. The same headland hid the villa from us up above. The tremendous, heavier-than-air sun heat had diminished considerably, I noticed. Out in the water the little orange float of Sweet Marie the hippie skin-diver had disappeared from our sight, too.

  “Do you know him?” I said. “Kronitis?”

  “Why, yes. But only very slightly. He comes to parties here on the island sometimes. But he doesn’t live here.”

  “I know. He has a big villa over behind Glauros on the mainland. Bight?”

  She nodded. “That’s right. My God, Freddy Tarkoff said you were a nosy individual.”

  I just nodded. I screwed Sonny Duval’s wing nut throttle down a couple of turns tighter.

  Chapter 14

  SONNY DUVAL WAS NOT back from Athens when we arrived back at the yacht harbor. Chantal went on home and I went to work cleaning up the boat. It was just as much fun as when I had done it that morning.

  After I finished I walked back up to the house and made myself a stiff drink. We had had plenty at lunch, plus some wine, but I felt I needed another. Thus I was in position in my regular grandstand seat to see and hear Sonny’s return.

  His speedboat came roaring in from roughly the direction of Glauros over on the mainland. Both Jane in her grubby Mother Hubbard and the baby in its grubby face were in the boat with him. Sonny ran the boat right on in to the dock and gassed it and then took it out to the big caique off the house and tied it up. At this point I ducked back in off my porch and watched the rest through the French doors. I suspected he might come looking for me and I didn’t feel up to him yet.

  At the caique they all three climbed up on board and went down below. Sonny seemed to have a grim look on his face. In a few minutes Sonny came up on deck and got in his skiff and headed for the dock. At that point I beat it upstairs to my bedroom and lay down.

  When the doorbell rang I did not get up and I did not answer it. After a while it stopped and the ringer went away.

  I made a halfhearted effort to get up and go take a bath in the tub, but gave up on it. The dried saltiness from the sea water felt crinkly and good on my naked body. Why wash it off?

  I drifted toward sleep. My homemade computer went over and over all this new information about this man Kronitis and always came up with the same key: insufficient data. My old copper’s instinct was getting enlarged with age to the point of mild paranoia. What did I care anyway? This rich old man. I automatically thought of him as old. Anybody that rich ought to be old if he was
n’t.

  What about Chantal. What was I going to do if this Girgis character did not stop hitting her up for money? I hadn’t decided on anything yet. What could I do to him?

  And what about Chantal herself? There wasn’t any question she was still lying to me about something. And protecting her sweet favors, at the same time, like some tiger kitten. What kind of subterfuge and evasive tactic would she come up with tonight?

  I made up my mind that if she pulled one of her routines on me tonight I would give the whole thing up for good. I didn’t really care all that much about making her, anyhow. Her island society dinners and lunches bored the hell out of me.

  Chantal irritated me. A woman her age being that coy like that. Anyway, did I even care that much?

  Would you believe a raunchy Midwesterner who was true to his wife for fifteen years of marriage? That was me. And in the last three of the eighteen-year span, which hardly counted due to our increasing estrangement, my infidelities hadn’t been all that frequent, either.

  I still felt I’d failed with Joanie. That was part of what I wanted to avoid thinking about, too, in Tsatsos. She was a cold woman. God only knows what kinds of checks and blocks and snaffles and bits they’d put on her when they saddle-broke her. She became another of these social butterfly types. The right guests at dinner was more important. And down inside this woman was that other woman just begging to get out, be let out. Totally unaware of itself, and only I knew it.

  I tried to arouse her, and failed. Maybe she wasn’t arousable. Or maybe, just because I was her husband, I wasn’t capable of accomplishing it. I appreciated the irony that some other man who didn’t care for her could, and probably would, accomplish what I couldn’t. In spite of that, we probably would have stayed together if it hadn’t been for my work.

  Chantal had been a lot more right in her analysis of our peculiarly American difficulties than I was willing to admit to anybody. But what did that make Chantal to me? The other women I had had in the last three years didn’t make that much difference one way or the other. They didn’t count. They were either good, or less good.