A Touch of Danger

by James Jones

  “Sure. I’ve been beat up before, myself.”

  “Where’s all this peace and loving kindness of yours?”

  “A fist fight is not a dehumanized imperialist modern industrial war,” Sonny said.

  I just looked at him. He had an infallible ability for ruining the nicest of gestures with some slogan. “That’s true,” I said. “You’re absolutely right there.”

  “Do you want to go back in there?” Sonny said.

  “I guess not.” I looked up at the lights through the trees. “It wouldn’t add anything. I got what I wanted. I guess I’ll go on home.”

  “Come on. I’ll take you.” He put out an arm.

  “You will like hell.” I waved the arm aside, and winced. “Where were you all evening?”

  “I was home. To eat. I just came out. Jane, uh,” he half hesitated, “Jane didn’t want to come.”

  “Jane. Dear Jane. How is dear Jane? You go on up there with your friends.”

  His face clouded at my ironic mention of Jane, but he said only, “What shall I tell them?”

  “Tell them whatever you want. Join the celebration. It won’t bother me.” I turned away toward the cabs. “Tell them Lobo Davies survived.” I stopped. “They’re not bad kids,” I said. “Most of them. Just misinformed by Stevie-boy. And I deliberately antagonized them.”

  “I guess you won’t be wanting the boat tomorrow,” Sonny said.

  I grinned. “No. I guess I won’t.”

  He stood looking after me reflectively. When I got to the stand of cabs I walked on past them.

  “Aren’t you going to take a cab?” Sonny called.

  “To hell with them. Anyway, the walk will do me good.”

  I hoped it would. But I wasn’t sure. At least it would loosen me up. But my side was hurting more and more. Every breath was an agony, as they say. Actually, it wasn’t all that bad. It hurt, but I had learned about pain that if you would only go down inside of it, and sort of rummage around down there, and feel it in all its corners, it hurt much less than when you drew back from it and tried not to feel it at all.

  It was about a mile’s walk back to the edge of the Port, and it was quiet and tranquil in the night air. The cooler night air had freshened whatever flowers there were blooming and their odors mingled faintly in my nose. It wasn’t really all that late, only about ten o’clock.

  I had almost reached the end of the hotel grounds, and was passing under one of the infrequent streetlights, when there was a soft sound like a hard puff of air and a whack, and a piece of the whitewashed wall four feet from my head popped out and fell on the ground. It didn’t take vast experience to know what that was. Someone was shooting at me with a silencer.

  Another puff, another smack, another piece of wall popped out almost beside the first and a little higher.

  I didn’t wait. And didn’t stand on dignity. I cut and ran. In the old days discretion might be the better part of valor, but at the end of the twentieth-century publicity was the better part of heroism. And I didn’t have any PR people with me.

  There were two more puffs, two more pieces of wall popped out. I made a couple of zigzags. Wherever it was exactly, it was coming from inside the Xenia hotel grounds. I reached a corner and ducked around it.

  The gate entrances and doors were all barred or locked along here, but up the side street I found a deep-set one and flattened myself in it.

  Everything was still as I stood in my doorway. I saw no one. Nothing moved. The extreme corner of the Xenia gardens with their dark vegetation just overlapped the entrance of the side street. I had about as much chance of finding somebody in there as you would in any other jungle. Even assuming I could get back down to it, in safety, which I couldn’t.

  In the dimness down below nothing moved. After five minutes I took a chance and sneaked out of my doorway. I hotfooted it on uphill, hugging the wall, and holding my left arm against my side. Nothing happened. Nobody followed. There weren’t any more shots.

  Up above, on one of the cross streets, I walked back to my house thoughtfully. I was pretty careful at all the crossings.

  Chapter 36

  AS FAR AS I WAS CONCERNED the shooting made it a whole new ball game. Four feet from the head at 20 yards was pretty close for scare shooting. It implied something more was involved than I had yet figured out.

  Would Chuck have gone off and got a gun and come back to take a crack at me? It was entirely possible.

  At the house the first thing I saw as I came in the upper garden door was the yacht Agoraphobe, all lit up again out in the little harbor as if she might be getting ready to go to sea again.

  I went on in and wearily climbed the stairs with the ice bucket to see what I had to repair. I examined myself in the bathroom mirror, then started methodically to work. Icepacks for the swelling, a Band-Aid for a cut. I had gotten good at it over the years. My face wasn’t as badly marked as it felt. It would be nearly normal by tomorrow. The worst thing was the pain in my side but I could live with that. Anyway, I couldn’t do anything about it now. Maybe tomorrow I could get Georgina to help me tape it. That ought to titillate her.

  It was not yet eleven o’clock. Dmitri’s across the way was fit up and going full blast. With a drink in one hand and the icepack in the other I went to my bedroom and undressed to the skin and then turned off the lights. Then I stood in the window with my icepack to my face and watched the Agoraphobe.

  Whatever they were doing, they weren’t getting ready for sea. As I watched, the lights began to go out and the generator motors were turned off. As I stood there, I heard Kirk hail them from the deck and one of the crewmen ran down the ship’s ladder to the launch and went in to get him. I put down my icepack and got Con Taylor’s binoculars.

  I gave Jim Kirk a close looking at with them as the launch burbled back to the ship. I wanted to see if he had a gun on him. He didn’t. Not one that I could see. Then I turned them on the crewman, and received a slight shock of recognition.

  I was looking at the smartest one of the three men who had jumped me outside Chantal’s house that night. The one who had called off the moronic-looking blond boy when he flashed his knife.

  I supposed I owed him a small debt of gratitude. I didn’t feel like it.

  It had never occurred to me to look for my would-be muggers in Kirk’s crew. I swung the glasses back to the ship, and right away spotted the moronic blond boy in the crew on deck. The third man, the one whose nose I’d smashed with my forehead, wasn’t among them.

  I put down the glasses, and got my icepack and my drink. On board the yacht the rest of the lights went out, and I watched the crew pile into the launch and head for shore. Only Kirk and the blond boy stayed on board. I watched them go down the forward hatch to the crew’s quarters, where two lighted portholes stared back at me like eyes—the only lights left on the ship.

  With my icepack and my drink I sat down on the bed and sat there for a while, thinking. Down below the crew tied up the launch and dispersed. It was funny, but I hadn’t spotted a one of the three in town.

  I thought some more.

  After a while I got up and painfully began to dress. I didn’t want to. I went downstairs and got out one of my snub-nosed .38s from my locked briefcase and put it in my belt under my shirt. Then I took the flexible flathead sap from the briefcase and put it in the hip pocket of my jeans. It was old-fashioned, my flathead. But I preferred it to the round club-shaped ones. It was more precise, and it didn’t fracture as easily. One way or the other I meant to find out why those three had jumped me, and who had given the orders.

  If I found out something about the murder too, that was all to the good.

  Chapter 37

  THERE WAS A LOT OF CHATTER and laughter and clinking of cutlery out in front at Dmitri’s and the jukebox blared some Greek song out over the water. Nobody paid the slightest attention to me.

  The dock was beyond the taverna’s circle of light. I untied somebody’s skiff, and sculled it standing,
out past the gabbling terrace toward the quiet yacht. Every stroke of the oars built a new fire under my left arm.

  I didn’t head for the ship’s ladder. It was strictly illegal, what I was doing. At the stern I grabbed hold of the spring-line and stood in the skiff a while listening. Then I tied it and climbed stiffly but silently over the stern, trying not to grunt from the pain in my side.

  The door to the big deck house was wide open. I looked it over, then silently descended its set of ship’s stairs into the hold. I found myself in a long corridor running forward, with four cabin doors opening off either side. At the forward end light shone through a curtained half-door. From beyond it came low voices.

  It was certainly my dream yacht, all right. I’d have given just about anything to have been its master and owner. My forehead had broken out in a sweat from the pain of that climb over the stern.

  I didn’t know what I expected to find. Certainly no million-dollar caches of heroin, even of hash. Not, anyway, without moving a lot of gear and floorboards and making a lot of noise.

  Up forward the low voices hadn’t stopped. The galley was on my left and I looked it over with a pocket flash. Then I started forward through the cabins. The first one on the right was locked. I had looked into two of the other cabins when the overhead lights went on and a voice behind me said, “All right, hold it. Just hold it right there. Don’t reach for anything.” It was Kirk’s voice.

  I put my hands up to my shoulders and turned around. Kirk stood at the foot of the stairs wearing a mean grin, a big Luger in his hand.

  “Stephanos!”

  Behind me my moronic blond friend from the street fight appeared at the half-door. Kirk said something in Greek and the curtain dropped, and I heard feet scrambling up the ladder and running along the deck.

  “I told him to keep talking,” Kirk grinned. “Know how I cottoned to you? I felt it. The balance of the boat changed. I didn’t hear you. Yes, sir.” He looked pleased with himself.

  I walked along toward him. If I could get close enough. I wondered. My side was still hurting brightly from the climb over the stern. I wasn’t in my best fighting form.

  “There’s been a rumor going around Athens that there was some kind of an agent floating around Tsatsos,” Kirk said.

  The moronic blond boy had appeared behind him down the ship’s stairs.

  Kirk snorted. “That’s far enough. Let me just feel you up a little, Mr. Lobo Davies.”

  He patted me, found the pistol in my belt, stuffed it in his own belt, seemed about to quit, then felt behind me and found the sap.

  “Oho. A regular arsenal. You all ready to go to war, Mr. Lobo Davies.” He put the sap in his pocket and stepped back.

  “You look like somebody else has been using you for a punching bag too,” he grinned. Suddenly he stepped in, fast as hell, and slugged me on the jaw with a left hook. I lit on my butt, my side screaming, and slid a few feet bow-ward along the corridor. I sat still, shaking my head to clear it.

  “You wouldn’t be that agent, would you, Mr. Lobo Davies? Get up, Mr. Lobo Davies. What happened to your face?”

  I got up, using my left arm and side and turning to the left, although it hurt like hell. I didn’t want him to know I was incapacitated there.

  “A bunch of your hippie clients tried to remodel it for me,” I said. It was the first I’d spoken.

  “They’re not my clients.” He looked as if he was going to hit me again. Instead, he reached behind him with a key and unlocked the locked door I had tried earlier. “Let’s just step in here. This is my country. Stephanos!”

  The blond moved around behind me. Kirk backed into the cabin, the Luger steady on me. There wasn’t much I could do. The blond boy pushed me roughly. The push made my side flare with hurt.

  The cabin was almost severely austere, and scrupulously clean. The only furniture in it besides a tiny desk and chair was the bunk. The only adornment was a lovely color photo of Agoraphobe under full sail and heeled over. Kirk put my gun and sap up on a little shelf behind him over the bunk, then pulled the little chair out to sit on.

  But the captain didn’t sit on the chair just yet. As he straightened from pulling the chair against the outside wall, he extended the movement, turned it into a swing, and belted me on the side of the jaw again with his left hand.

  “Now, what are you doing on my ship?”

  The blow was half strength but it knocked me into the corner of the bunk, even though I rode with it. My side sent me several wild signals of pain. I straightened up, shaking my head. The punch carried a value ratio of about ten of the hippie blows earlier.

  “I want to know whether you’re that agent I’ve been hearing about,” Kirk said. “Are you?”

  “I’m a private detective,” I said. “On vacation.”

  He belted me again in the same place. I sat down on the bunk. I knew if I was going to do anything at all, I was going to have to do it soon. I clamped my teeth down on the pain from my side, holding it in and not letting it swerve me, and made myself get up.

  “I can hit a lot harder than that,” Kirk said with a flat mean grin. “And I can slap you around some with this,” he lifted the Luger. “That marks good. I can even shoot you, if I want. Nobody would ever know. Put a coat of chains on you and slip you over the side, they’d never find you. Water’s sixty feet deep here, and nobody ever goes down in it. Harbor’s too dirty. And nobody knows you’re here. You didn’t tell anybody you were coming. Now, say something. And say something important.”

  “I don’t think you’ll shoot me,” I said, making my voice hard. “I don’t even think you’ll pistol-whip me.”

  “You don’t, hunh?” Almost without lifting his hand, he hit me again, harder this time. I was knocked back into the corner, this time off my feet and onto the bunk.

  I sat up, shaking my head. My head was buzzing that sleepy buzz right behind the ears. Always a warning. The bright red and white flag of pain in my side was streaming in the wind again. But this time when I got on my feet, I was standing where I wanted to be. To the left and just a hair in back of the blond boy—who now was grinning all over his moronic, vicious face.

  “I can put this thing against your skin when I pull the trigger and nobody’ll ever hear it,” Kirk said. “I said, what are you doing on board my ship?”

  “I came here because I recognized two of your crew,” I said. “They’re two of the three guys who tried to beat me up the other night. I’m not in the habit of letting people get away with that. I want to know why.”

  “You want to know why, hunh?” Kirk snorted. This time he drew his fist back. Not much, but it was enough. In the cabin’s close quarters I slipped half a step to my right, grabbed the boy and shoved him at Kirk. The punch glanced off his shoulder. I pushed him harder, into Kirk. My side seemed to shriek out loud. But the two of them fell into a tangle onto the bunk, the Luger caught between their bodies.

  As they struggled, I booted the kid hard in the tailbone with my left foot, slammed my left knee into his back and stood on the knee, and reached my gun and sap down off the shelf above the bunk. I stepped back.

  “Let go of it,” I said. “Let me hear it hit the floor.”

  As I spoke the boy got his feet under him and sprang back up, turning. The kick on the tailbone had hurt him bad, and there were tears of pain in his eyes. That made me feel fine. That made me feel excellent.

  As he turned at me, I rapped him sharply on his right wrist with the sap. He collapsed to the floor, nursing a paralyzed hand. Behind him the Luger thudded on the deck.

  I scooped it up, straightened and stuck it in my belt. From the floor the kid started at me again. This time I rapped him hard on the point of the left shoulder. He collapsed again, with a paralyzed left arm. He sat holding his two arms in his lap.

  I had already sensed Kirk moving at me from the bunk. Tall or not, he loomed up like some kind of colossus. I stepped to meet him, and laid the barrel of my little .38 on him.

 
; He was anticipating the sap, but I didn’t want to knock him out. I hit him on the left side of his neck, just where the neck meets the skull. He sat down on the bunk, his eyes glazed, his mouth open and his tongue sticking out.

  “How does it feel?” I said.

  “Thanks for not cutting me,” he said in a dulled voice. It would have knocked any other man unconscious.

  “Go screw,” I said. “You’re entirely welcome.” I stepped back to the wall behind me, and put my back on it.

  “You take a lot of chances,” Kirk said from the bunk.

  “Not really,” I said. “You were handicapped. You didn’t want to shoot me. Even if you only cut me up with it, it wouldn’t do your reputation any good. I’d show it to Pekouris.”

  “You think he would help you, hunh?” Kirk said dully.

  I noted this little slip, if it was a slip. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was deliberate. I tried to ease my left side by pushing my back against the wall with my legs. “Now, maybe we can talk a little,” I said.

  Dully, Kirk nodded slightly toward the blond boy. “I don’t like to talk too much in front of him.”

  I looked at the boy. “He doesn’t understand English, does he?”

  “He’s a wharf rat from Piraeus. You never know with them. He may have enough English to figure out what we’re saying.”

  “I’ll fix that for you,” I said crisply. “I’ll be pleased to.” I shifted the gun and sap and stepped to the boy and rapped him with surgical precision above the left ear. Horrible to Chantal, maybe. Or to Sonny Duval. But it wasn’t horrible to me. And it wasn’t to Kirk. The boy’s head dropped like a stone, without a sound.

  Kirk grinned dully. “You’re pretty good with that sap.”

  “He won’t even have a headache,” I said. “At least, not any worse than the one you gave me.” I shifted the gun and sap. “Now, where were we?”

  “You were just saying maybe we could talk a little,” Kirk said. He rubbed his neck. “I think that’s a good idea.”

  I pushed my back against the wall again with my legs. My side was giving me real bloody hell. It was making my scalp tingle again. And Kirk’s face danced a little in front of me as I looked at him.