A Touch of Danger

by James Jones

  I waited fifteen or twenty minutes.

  “All right, let’s go out and have a look at it,” I said.

  I wasn’t as confident as I sounded. I’d expected Kirk would leave a marker buoy. I had made a rough triangulation by eye between the islet and the nearest point, but I could easily be four or five hundred yards off when I got out there. What bothered me most was how much air I had in the lung tank. I didn’t dare use it to search.

  The only thing I could do was park the boat and make a series of widening circles around it with just a mask, flippers and snorkel. If I didn’t find it, I would have to have Sonny tow me around. That would be even colder. But I was sure the white flash I’d seen hitting the water was a marker panel to the drop itself.

  Out by the islet I jockeyed the Daisy Mae back and forth, sighting from islet to point until I thought I about had it. Then I put on Sonny’s old sweatshirt and went into the water. The water was cold.

  I found it on the third pass. I was already freezing cold. Swimming about a hundred yards out from the boat, I saw something white way off to my right. The bottom was 80 or 90 feet. The square package lay wedged between two dead coral ridges, the luminous white marker panel floating maybe twenty feet up, above the package. The white panel was what I had seen hitting the water. I waved for Sonny to bring the boat and got into the lung and wrapped a line around my arm and started down.

  Almost immediately I had trouble with the leaky regulator. The whole dive would have made a great Red Skelton comedy. With me playing Skelton and Sonny playing Keenan Wynn.

  There are two kinds of leaky regulators. One kind is temperamental and cranky near the surface, but gets better and harder and tighter and cleaner the deeper you take it. The pressure helps it. The other kind just leaks more and more as the pressure rises. Naturally, with Sonny, I had the second kind.

  By the time I got to 60 feet I was having to gulp a swallow of water with every breath, and breathe very slowly to get any air through the bitter tasting water. I silently cursed Sonny’s slipshod way of living and swam on down. His goddamned regulator was indicative of his whole undisciplined life.

  But after 60 feet it leveled off and didn’t get much worse, as they usually do. Good old Boyle’s law. I was glad I knew it. The volume of a gas is inversely proportional to its total pressure. If I hadn’t known it, I’d have given up at 60 feet.

  On the bottom I warped the line around the package’s tie ropes. I took a quick glance at my depth gauge and saw it read the equivalent of 92 feet. I was shaking so hard from cold I could hardly tie the line.

  I left the line warped to the package and started up breathing as little as possible. I watched the boat’s silhouette get larger gratefully.

  Once again I realized about myself that only a moron would have tried what I’d just done, with a regulator that bad.

  On deck I jumped up and down to try and get warm. At least my crotch wasn’t hurting me much any more. My side sent me occasional flashes. I ate Sonny out roundly and savagely for his slop-ass, mushy way of living. He only looked at me.

  “What do you think he’s doing?” he said, when I’d finished. That was all it meant to him.

  It was my turn to look at him. “It’s hard to say,” I said.

  “Well, you must have some theory?”

  “Did you see the ship?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see it signal?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what do you think he was doing?”

  “I don’t know. Playing some cops and robbers game.”

  “Well, what do you think I was doing down there, in your goddamned leaky regulator, taking a chance with my goddamned life?”

  “I don’t know. Getting something.”

  “Well, goddam it, haul it up, you dumb bastard, and find out!” I shouted.

  By the time he got it to the surface I was in better shape. At least I wasn’t frozen. It was heavy, and from the surface to the deck I had to help him.

  The package easily weighed 150 lbs, and was about the size of a sack of cement. It was elaborately wrapped with waterproof wrapping. I put myself to untying and unwrapping it carefully so it could be rewrapped without anyone knowing. Inside the waterproof wrapping was another waterproof sack. Inside the sack were smaller sacks of waterproof plastic. Inside these was a crumbly brown stuff that had the look and texture of brown sugar.

  I picked some of it up and sniffed it.

  “Well,” I said. “That’s it, all right.”

  “What is it?”

  “That’s morphine base. The stuff they make pure heroin out of.” I looked up at him, and saw he wasn’t getting the import of it. “They don’t refine this. They just change it chemically. In other words, it doesn’t diminish in bulk when it becomes heroin. So they’ve got themselves over 150 pounds of pure heroin here, when they put it through the lab. And you can set up a little lab anywhere. In an abandoned farmhouse,” I said, and looked off into the diminishing afternoon.

  The sun was almost down to the horizon. “Or in an old villa,” I added.

  I was thinking about something else, too. Kirk mightn’t have killed Girgis and Marie over a petty hashish racket. But he might have killed them over a million-dollar heroin operation.

  I began to rewrap the package carefully.

  “What are we going to do with it?” Sonny said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Put it back. Then we’re going to watch where they take it.”

  “So you are a nark, after all!” Sonny said triumphantly. “Pete Gruner was right about you all along!”

  I just looked at him, and didn’t answer. If he wanted to think I was a nark temporarily, I wasn’t going to stop him.

  “How much is this worth?” He kicked the package lightly.

  “As heroin, delivered in France, about $300,000,” I said. “But the price goes up, when it’s delivered in New York. And when it hits the street, it goes up a lot more.”

  Sonny whistled. Then he began to slap his arms against his chest. “Jesus, I’m cold.”

  “You’re cold!” I hollered. I had to bite my lip.

  He was like all the rest of them. They were the ones who were always harping about sensitivity all the time. But when it came to the fact, their enormous sensitivity never extended more than six inches out beyond their own skins.

  When we’d dumped the package back in the water, I ran us back to the rock spur we had hidden behind before.

  Kirk was quite a long time coming back. It got dark.

  “How long are we going to have to stay here?” Sonny said, after the first hour.

  “Till Kirk comes,” I said.

  “Well, at least let me have one cigarette.”

  “No smoking,” I said sharply.

  “Well, can’t I go below? And have just one puff?”

  “Do you want to find yourself in the middle of a gun battle?”

  “No.”

  “Then don’t smoke. I want to smoke myself.”

  He complained about just about everything else, too. He was tired. He was cold. He was hungry. He couldn’t complain about being thirsty, since there was plenty to drink, water as well as other things. I consoled myself with a couple of Scotches and listened to Sonny, and thought what a great thing a couple of years in the Army would have been for him. Or even a couple years in the Boy Scouts.

  Kirk arrived about an hour after that.

  He was running completely without lights. This was strictly illegal, but it wasn’t as illegal as what he was after. There were a couple of sudden bright sweeps of a search-beam out by the rocky islet, that struck at us like screams, in the darkness. Then the motor stopped. I caught a glow on the sea’s surface of a powerful underwater flash. Then silence. Ten minutes later the motor started up again.

  I listened to the fading motor carefully. It was moving west, on around the island, and staying in very close. I was pretty sure I knew where they were going, if that was their heading.

  �
�Aren’t we going to follow them?” Sonny said in a stage whisper.

  “No,” I said. In a normal voice. “I think I know where they’re going. We’ll go around the other way. It’s a lot safer.”

  I waited until I could no longer hear their motor and fired us up. For a little while I ran without lights, then switched the running lights on. We were headed back toward Tsatsos Port.

  When we passed the town, it was all lit up and alive with people. Music and voices carried out to us across the water.

  Further along at the yacht harbor the lights of Dmitri’s taverna came out to us, and the blare of his jukebox.

  “It’s lonely, isn’t it?” Sonny said beside me.

  “Like this? No. It’s great,” I said.

  Around the sturdy little lighthouse, solidly throwing out its beacon to night mariners, Georgio’s taverna made another landmark, easy to steer by.

  When we were almost to the point at the eastern corner, I let off on the throttle and steered us in, and ran us in on a moonlit beach. We dropped the anchor out behind us into the sand bottom. I tied the bow line to a tree. Before I got off, I got my gun out of the polyethylene kitchen bag and put it in my pocket.

  We had to cross two ridges, wooded with scrub and a few low pines. I didn’t mind. I might have run us a little closer but I didn’t want to take the chance. Anyway, there was a nice comfortable path in the moonlight. Sonny Duval complained anyway.

  When we got to the top of the second ridge, I motioned to Sonny and slowed us down.

  When I peered over the crest, we were looking down on the old villa owned by Kronitis—or at least by one of his corporations—which I had noted so long ago with Chantal and filed away in my head.

  Lights were on in the villa. And in the beautifully appointed little cove lay the launch from the Agoraphobe, and Polaris. Both were moored to the elaborate little concrete docks I had noted before. The whole cove was practically invisible, except for a few yards from directly out to sea. And even then it was hardly noticeable.

  I knelt by a scrub clump and watched for five minutes. Men moved from the Polaris up to the villa carrying things in their arms. At the villa there was an outside cellar door with light coming from it. The men carried whatever it was they were carrying down into the cellar. Then three men ran down the long staircase of concrete steps to the cove and boarded the launch. Jim Kirk and two men stood on the patio at the top and waved them off. The launch pulled out and headed back north, toward the lighthouse and the yacht harbor, the way we had just come. Kirk and the other two went into the villa.

  “Okay. Let’s go home,” I said.

  Three-quarters of an hour later we rolled into the yacht harbor looking like two innocent men who had been out night fishing. It didn’t matter, there was almost no one there to see us. The taverna was closing up.

  I sent Sonny off. Then I caught one of the last of the horsecabs left at the stand by the taverna, and told him to take me up to the house of the Countess Chantal von Anders.

  Chapter 53

  I HADN’T TELEPHONED AHEAD, and Chantal’s place was battened down for the night. I didn’t mind. It was only a little after midnight. I was sure Chantal wasn’t home yet. I banged on the garden door and hollered.

  The whole thing was falling into place. I didn’t have all the threads yet, but I had enough to see the shape of the tapestry. I didn’t have my murderer yet, was all.

  In a few minutes the fat, middle-aged Greek maid of twenty-four came waddling down the patio steps. I listened to her putting the chain on the door inside, before she opened it.

  I didn’t have to say who I was. The minute she saw me she started to simper and slipped the chain. She locked the door behind me and led me up, turning on lights as she went. She had thrown a dingy robe over her enormous udders in her flimsy nightgown and her hair hung in a thick rope over one shoulder. I had only seen her maybe twice, but she knew me. She knew me well enough to know I was Madame’s new lover.

  That was how she treated me. She simpered and offered to make me coffee or something to eat, and when I said no, left me in the living room with the bar.

  I couldn’t stand it in there. I was too highed up from the boat, and following Kirk, and the villa. I got myself a drink and went outside and sat in the overhead swing in the shadows on the patio.

  That was where I still was when Chantal came in and locked the garden door.

  Her eyes widened when she saw me sitting in the shadows. I guessed I was a formidable figure. I felt formidable.

  I didn’t beat around any bushes. I told her I knew all about the heroin ring that was operating out of Tsatsos. Her eyes widened again.

  “I know more than that,” I said grimly. “I know where the ring headquarters are. I know Kirk and the Agoraphobe are involved. I know Girgis with the Polaris was the pick-up man for the operation. I know Kronitis is the money man. Or they wouldn’t be using ‘his’ villa. Now. What else have you got to tell me?”

  She put her purse down on the outdoor table, and sat down on an outdoor chair. “There isn’t any more to tell, I guess.”

  “Oh, yes there is,” I said. “There’s a lot more. Let’s start with where you are in it.”

  “I’m not in it,” she said in a low voice.

  “You’ve got to be,” I said. “All right; later. Who’s the boss? The big boss? Who’s the general?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Maybe you’d like for me to get you a drink first?” I said.

  “I would like a drink.” She was lovely in her evening make-up.

  “I’ll get us both one,” I said. “If you’ll promise on your Scout’s Honor not to run off somewhere. I’d hate to come back and find you gone.”

  Her eyebrows fishhooked, and her eyes flashed anger. “You don’t have to be nasty.”

  I didn’t answer that. If I went into why I thought I had a right to be nasty, it might take a very long time. I went and got the drinks and brought them back.

  “I want to know, first off, who the boss is.”

  “I suppose Jim is the real boss,” she said.

  “No, he’s not. Kirk may be the field general. But he’s not the big boss.”

  “Then I suppose it’s Leonid. But he doesn’t do anything.”

  “Oh, yes he does,” I said. “He arranges to have shipments of over 150 pounds of morphine base dropped off Tsatsos by Turkish freighters. He pays for that. He puts his old villa, owned by some dummy corporation, at the ring’s disposal for a lab and drop-off place. He arranges, I assume, to get the H the lab makes out of the morphine base to Europe, or to America. I would say he does a lot.”

  Chantal didn’t say anything, and drank. “Would you get me another drink, please?”

  I went and got it. “What about the hashish operation? Did Kronitis know about that?”

  “No. He knew nothing about it at all. He was shocked when you told him about it.”

  “So whose idea was it?”

  “Girgis’s. He wasn’t satisfied with what he was making from the heroin thing. He wanted more. He opened up the hashish running on his own.”

  “And you went along with it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Kirk went along with it?”

  “Yes. It was money. It was there. The hippies were there. The market was there. If we didn’t do it, someone else would have.”

  “And you were greedy,” I said.

  “Leonid was terribly angry when he found out from you. He called Jim in and made him swear he wouldn’t do anything like that again. Jim lied to Leonid and put all the blame on Girgis, and said he had nothing to do with it. Leonid never suspected me.”

  “He was absolutely right, Kronitis,” I said. “The police were bound to come around eventually, looking into the hashish racket. And if they did, they might stumble onto the much bigger heroin deal by accident. I’m surprised they haven’t been around before. Where does Pekouris fit into it?”

  She looked up. “Pekouris? I don’t k
now anything about Pekouris.”

  “All right,” I said. “Forget that. What about the heroin for the Ambassador?”

  “That was Jim’s idea. He approached the Ambassador himself.”

  “He was stealing the heroin from the stock at the villa,” I said.

  She nodded. “Yes. Later, he came to me and asked me to carry it for him, as a favor. He didn’t want to be seen too much with the Ambassador.”

  “And you did it.”

  Again her eyebrows fishhooked at me. “I only did it as a favor to the Ambassador. Jim said he would stop otherwise. I didn’t take any money for it.”

  “And Girgis threatened to tell Kronitis about the heroin?” I said.

  “No. I don’t know he did that.”

  “He was blackmailing you, wasn’t he?”

  “Not about that. He was threatening to tell people I was working for him.”

  “There was bad blood between Kirk and Girgis, wasn’t there?”

  “Yes. Jim wanted a bigger share of the hashish money.”

  “And he’s preparing to go right back into it, as soon as the heat is off.”

  She shrugged. “Yes.”

  “What a lovely trio,” I said. “The three of you. Even your own crooked boss couldn’t trust you.”

  She looked up and shook her head. “But he wouldn’t do something like that. Kill him and—and cut off his head.” She shook her head again.

  “You think so,” I said. “Let’s get back to where you are in it.”

  “I told you,” she began but I interrupted.

  “Don’t lie to me. One more lie to me from you and I’ll lump your pretty jaw. You’ve got to be involved in it. You know too much, and you’re too close to it all.”

  She hung her head and looked down at the stone flags of the patio floor.

  “I carry it for them to Europe. To Paris.”

  I almost yelped. “What! You what?”