Touch of Danger

by James Jones

  “You know boats, hunh?” he said after a while, amiably enough.

  “I used to do a fair amount of small-boat running.” I grinned. The truth was I was happy as hell to be out in one again.

  Sonny studied me. “A lot of people say that.” Under his bushy brows, which echoed that Elliot Gould mustache, his small eyes looked away from me. “You like to try her?”

  I wasn’t expecting that. “Sure. Why not?” I said. “If you wouldn’t mind.”

  I moved aft and he passed me the helm and I settled down to get the feel of her. It was not a wheel helm but an old-fashioned bar helm: a two-by-five adzed down to round it off and bolted-in into the rudder. I used to love them in the Caribbean.

  It was a nice smooth boat. All those Greek boats were. After a minute I maneuvered it, running out deeper and quartering the incoming swell cleanly. When I turned her, I did it on the top of a swell, instead of turning her in the trough and taking the swell broadside and making her roll. She winged back nicely. So I took her closer in, and did the same thing to starboard, and brought her back out. I gave the bar back to him.

  “That was nice,” Sonny said. “Very deft. Very deft. You want to try docking her, when we get to the Port?”

  I was not expecting that, either. “Sure. I guess so. If you think I can.”

  “I think you can.”

  “Aren’t you afraid I’ll smash up your boat?”

  “I don’t think so. You won’t smash it.” He grinned. I did not know what he was trying to prove. He seemed indifferent, not even to care. Maybe it was because he was so rich and he could afford to buy another boat, or two of them. I knew I certainly would not let any new man run my boat in to dock it until I had tested him more than he had tested me.

  It was all more than I could fathom, around here. I didn’t know what was going on. You gave people a paradise like this and they immediately tried to turn it into a club, with all sorts of secret games. I didn’t like it worth a damn.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll take her in, then.”

  We settled down to the ride. I stripped off my shirt and stretched my arms along the rail behind me. I am built pretty rough, and I noted Sonny noticing this. He was strongly built himself, but had gotten flabby. I looked back at the land, and at all of the different houses. No two of them were even remotely alike. I liked that. All of them were pretty in the sun. At one spot there was an Orthodox church, with widely spaced olive trees in its sere yard down the slope to the road and the water, and a low whitewashed wall around the yard. A goat was tethered in the yard by the white wall. All the masonry around here was white-lime-washed.

  It was a beautiful day, and a beautiful view, and a beautiful ride.

  I didn’t know why my problem of Freddy Tarkoff’s job I had done for him picked just that moment to seize me, and come to the fore of my mind, and demand to be looked at. But it did.

  Chapter 6

  I GUESS I HAD ALREADY looked at it from most of the possible positions. No matter how you looked at it I didn’t look good. No matter how I tried to dress it up, it was not going to win me any gold Oscars for liberal humanitarianism.

  You had to have some kind of code. The only code I had ever found that worked was that as long as you worked for him and took his money, the client was right. If you didn’t think the client was right, or if you didn’t like what he wanted you to do, you didn’t take the job.

  Tarkoff’s case was simple enough. Tarkoff had a lot of money invested in Greece. A part of it was handled for him by a wealthy Greek attorney. The Greek had power of attorney. With it, he embezzled $130,000 of Tarkoff’s money in a year, put all his own property in his wife’s name, and absconded from Greece, all Tarkoff’s money spent. On women and high living, apparently. This did not keep him and his wife from sticking together, when it came to his own estate. Tarkoff, unable to get anything out of the still wealthy wife, had the Greek traced and found him to be living in Paris, broke and working as a concierge in a cheap hotel in the rue Amsterdam in Pigalle. A hard situation. The Greek was out of the country safe. The wife refused to assume responsibility for his debts. Nothing could be done in the Greek courts.

  It was a pretty slick job. I was a graduate lawyer myself; so was Tarkoff. We could both appreciate the cheap, sniveling, very crooked, very shrewd, lawyer’s dexterity of it. Undoubtedly, the Greek put it together after the money was already spent, in order to save his family.

  Tarkoff was not the kind of man to accept such crooked treatment passively. He was not known as one of the young Turks of Wall Street for nothing. My job was to find the Greek and somehow, no matter by what means, get the money back, or as much of it as possible.

  Clearly the money must be squeezed from the wife some way. “There’s no reason you shouldn’t have the job and go over there and do it,” Tarkoff said. “Instead of my paying someone else. Some international type. In fact, you’re probably the only one who can swing it. I don’t think any ordinary guy could.” Freddy liked to make a tin hero out of me. He would pay me a lot of money, and expenses.

  I accepted the case. I accepted it because I agreed with Tarkoff’s analysis of it. He said the Greek was depending on human decency to let him off the hook. There was no question I was working for the right side. He had embezzled other people too, it turned out, for smaller sums.

  I had known Freddy about five years by then. He was probably the richest man I knew in New York. He had looked me up first because of his secretary. Some satisfied client gave him my name. The lady was being blackmailed by a former boyfriend turned small-time hood, and Freddy hired me to get the guy off her back. He liked the way I handled that and we became friends. He found it funny that a graduate lawyer with a degree could be a private eye. So did I, sometimes. I did a couple of mainly research investigations about business deals for him. I never asked him why he was so interested in protecting his secretary. He was married, very socially, to a very social girl, but he liked to hang around with me on my beat in the hood bars. A lot of my time was spent hunting lost kids down in the East Village and Freddy liked to tag along with me down there.

  I do not know if our friendship had very much to do with my accepting. I could try that on for size as an excuse, but I won’t. He was offering me an awful lot of money. And right then I needed it badly. My divorce had gone through, and I was having to pay through the nose. Though it was my wife who had wanted the divorce. That plus two teen-age daughters going to ritzy schools made a considerable lump I was having to lay out every month. Freddy knew all this, of course.

  I left for Europe prepared to do anything I had to do to complete my assignment. In New York, where except for professionals like myself it’s not safe to walk the street at night, and where even for us it sometimes isn’t, I was feeling more and more like a displaced person. I was glad to get away.

  But when I stepped off the plane in Europe, I felt more displaced. Standing in the Orly Airport I realized suddenly that all Europeans were displaced persons. They had lived like that for a hundred generations. There was no security and they didn’t expect any and it showed in their faces. They looked as though they were born knowing at birth that even their own relatives would screw them. I felt right at home.

  In Europe, I took an exploratory trip down to Athens, and looked up the wife. She had a town house in Athens, an imposing seaside villa, and a lot of valuable farm land. There was no knowing what she had put away in cash. But she had a lot more than enough to pay back Tarkoff.

  Back in Paris I hunted down the Greek. He was still there in the same sleazy hotel in the rue Amsterdam. He was a fat little man with a mean smile. He was willing to admit everything. He would even sign a paper admitting everything. But he couldn’t pay any of it back. He had no money. We both looked around the damp little room. How could he pay? And there was no use trying to get anything from his wife. She hated his guts. “Naturally enough,” he smiled. “Wouldn’t you, sir? If you were she?”

  He smiled his shrewd, me
an smile at me. He had it all figured out. He had had his fun while it lasted. And he had given everything up for it. And here he was. There wasn’t anything more to do to him. He had forgotten one thing. A man named Freddy Tarkoff, who never forgot anything.

  I hadn’t talked much. There wasn’t much point. I had just made my points, carefully. Without any warning I hit him. Then I proceeded methodically to beat him up. As he probably expected me to. I didn’t honestly know what he expected. That I would go away and leave him alone, maybe. But he knew the underworld rules as well as I did.

  I knew all the tricks. You picked them up. I did it carefully so as not to cause any serious damage or break any bones. He didn’t yell. He didn’t fight back. When I left, he was just about unconscious on his flavorsome bed.

  There was nothing to fear from the police. The French police knew all about him already. They didn’t like him, either. Neither of us was going to any police.

  When I went back next night, there was a new man on the desk. The Greek was in his room sick, he said. When I went in, he was there. Only now he was black and blue. He put on his nasty smile like a threadbare trenchcoat. For a lawyer, he pleaded quite a case. Beating him up wouldn’t change his wife. I could kill him, and it would not help. I would get nothing. And I could go on beating him up forever, he pointed out.

  He was almost eloquent.

  I nodded grimly. “Quite true. And I may. Do you have any children?” I’d already checked.

  His eyes widened. “You wouldn’t . . . ?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “You would never do that,” the Greek said.

  “What you need is some incentive,” I said. “And don’t forget, I can go on doing this forever, too.”

  Talking, I gagged him. I didn’t even bother to tie him up. I kept telling myself I was doing this for good old Freddy Tarkoff. Then methodically I broke one of his fingers.

  He screamed, or would have if it hadn’t been for the gag. For a moment I thought he was going to faint. But he didn’t. Instead, he fell back on the bed and his eyeballs rolled up white and his eyelids fluttered down over them.

  When I ungagged him, he groaned. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” I told him. “And we’ll discuss it more. Maybe you won’t need any more incentive. Don’t bother to try running away. I’ll follow you.” I left him moaning.

  Outside in the street I was sweating. My hat felt as if it didn’t want to stay on straight. This kind of work just wasn’t my best thing. I hoped I had hidden that from the Greek. Because I knew I could never do it again.

  It was a chilly spring night in that awful, evil part of Paris. There was a steady French mist falling and the street cobbles were slick and dank and shone. Hookers were standing in the doorways of other sleazy hotels, with their teased hair high and their big purses hanging on shoulder straps. For a second I thought of going up with one of them, to forget about the whole thing, and then wanted to gag. I stopped myself from slamming my fist into the clammy brick wall. Melodramatic self-indulgence. I didn’t want to damage my hand. And the hookers were watching. I walked away.

  Down at the first lighted corner I stopped in a little cafe-bar filled with pimps to have a couple of stiff drinks.

  The only real thought I had in my mind at the time, as I remember, was that I thanked my good luck that I was not him. I would not have wanted to be him, in that sour-smelling, awful, evil, lonely area of Paris, for anything in the world. If I had been him, I would have been totally terrorized.

  I suppose he was. When I returned, he was willing to talk to his wife, anyway. He had his hand in a cast. I was as polite as hell to him. A meeting was arranged with the wife in Zurich.

  Talk about a displaced person. He had it over me. But he, at least, had gotten to squander $130,000 for his. I had gotten to take care of a wife and two kids for mine.

  The wife was about as sorry a human specimen as the husband. After a long talk with him in a cafe, shadowed by me, she asked to see me. Was I the man who was threatening to kidnap her children? I didn’t know what she was talking about; I was only a friend. She snorted and said $80,000 was all she could scrape together. I asked about her seaside villa. “Not my seaside villa!” she cried. Anyway, she would have to sell it, and that would take time. I pointed out it wasn’t mortgaged; borrow money on it now and sell it later. I wouldn’t give her an inch. Inside of a week, the full sum was transferred from the wife’s Swiss account to a Swiss account I opened, the little Greek was back in Paris, and I was back in Athens arranging transfer of the money to Tarkoff the way he wanted it.

  He congratulated me profusely on the phone. He suggested the Tsatsos vacation. I had told him I had no desire to go back to New York just yet. I suppose he thought it had to do with my divorce. Well, maybe it did: Too: In a way. It also had to do with my whole life.

  Sitting on Sonny Duval’s boat, and moving with the delicious motion as he quartered the swell, I clamped down the lid on my mind, and blocked off the other two items. My divorce. And my life. I had already let one of my imps out of the box.

  I was sweating in the heavy sun. The motion of the boat was delicious. We were just about to come in. I put my shirt back on.

  The thing that kept coming back was the way his eyeballs had rolled back, and how his eyelids fluttered down over the whites, when I broke his finger.

  The terrible thing was I could do it again if I had to. If I ever got myself into the same situation. I intended never to get myself into the same situation.

  You did their dirty work for them, and then you were supposed to take your money and shut up. That was part of the contract. They didn’t want to hear the gory details. Well, hurray for them.

  We were just coming to the end of the long concrete jetty which protected the Port from the swell. The long swell slapped against it and splashed white water as high as its floor, and ran rolling down its length to the shore.

  Chapter 7

  WE CAME AROUND THE JETTY and at once the swell stopped and we were in quiet water.

  So here I was. I much preferred thinking about how to go about enjoying my vacation. Enjoy some of all that money Freddy Tarkoff was laying out on me.

  The boat moorings of the Port were a couple of hundred yards ahead of us. Sonny Duval slacked off on his throttle and grinned at me. He still wanted me to dock his boat. He waved for me to come aft.

  I took my time, and looked at the Port first. It was a lovely little port in the daytime. I had only seen it at night. Bright-colored caiques bobbed at their moorings. The two lines of trees shaded the cafe-terrace, along the top of the wall. Useless ancient cannon peered out myopically through the notches on its crenelated top. Awnings had been run out over the tourist shops and other cafes. There was a sense of everything baking cleanly in the still, clean sun. I got up and went back aft.

  “You’re not very nervous, are you?” Sonny said.

  “Should I be?”

  “Here,” he said, grinning, and gave me the helm.

  Was he testing my nerve? Trying to break me down and make me chicken it? He didn’t know me very well. I would rather ruin his boat and kill us both. But you wondered didn’t he care about his boat? Or was he too rich for that? He had stepped back, but not very far back.

  The moorings were in a man-made hollow with rocks on both sides that made a slight bottleneck. I went through that.

  “See that empty slot? There? Twenty-five yards out from it, you drop your anchor. Then use the anchor line to snub her up as you go in.”

  I nodded. “I’ve done it that way in the Caribbean.” My mouth was tasting truculence, and aggressiveness. Maybe my adrenaline was up. He must know I was out of practice.

  Anyway, I felt like doing it so, suddenly, I looked up at him from the helm; and gave him my solid-gold, No. 1, sudden flashing, bloodthirsty grin. That was the one I usually saved back, and reserved for hesitant teetering clients, where it might earn me a retainer. If he thought I would back down at the last minute, he had lost his bet.r />
  It was easy, if you were calm. Even without practice I didn’t have any trouble. His throttle was a difficult-looking homemade affair but it worked fine. Throttle was controlled by a long-armed wing nut on a long screw-tapped rod. You screwed the wing nut down for more throttle, and unscrewed it upward to let off. It made it hard to gun the motor, but I didn’t need that. I simply kept slacking off on the wing nut. When she was 20 feet out I put the motor in neutral and let her glide in. When her nose was a foot or two from the stone wharf, I simply tightened my grip on the anchor’s line. I had already dropped the anchor over. I didn’t even have to belay the line on the cleat.

  Sonny just stood and looked at me. Then he ran forward and warped the bow line to the big iron ring. I backhitched the anchor line to the starboard cleat. She was neatly snugged in between the two caiques on both sides, with a foot to spare on either side, without having touched a thing.

  “Very deft,” Sonny said coming back. “Very, very deft.” That seemed to be a word he liked.

  “In my misspent youth I was a bootlegger off the Florida coast,” I said.

  He stood and looked at me. “Aw, come on,” he said. “You’re not that old.” I decided he was not long on the wit, Sonny. It irritated me. Was he kidding me?

  He was only about five years younger than I was. When he grinned and pulled up his mouth, you noticed how old he was. Despite his hippie outfit and the long hair and mustache and the big peace medal. The grin made wrinkled pouches of it under his eyes and at the angle of his jaw.

  “That was a strange thing to do,” I said. “Let a total stranger run your boat in like that.”

  His eyes glinted at me. He did not answer.

  Suddenly, across the Port, a tall handsome sunburnt young Greek standing in the sun on the raised poop of a large caique name-plated Polaris started to work a huge klaxon horn fastened to his taffrail. A small mob of people were waiting to board his boat. As the klaxon belched its message, more started to come down from the rise of tree-shaded terrace. Over the gangplank was a sign painted in English saying, PICNIC-SWIMMING-LUNCHEON TRIPS TO GLAUROS, PETKOS, ETC. He seemed to be enjoying the noise he was making. Naked to the waist in blue jeans and sideburns and barefooted, he looked clean and healthy and graceful. Looking at him made me suddenly remember my age again. Sonny shouted and the Greek grinned and waved back but didn’t stop working the klaxon. Its eructations shattered the quiet sunny air of the Port like huge glass slivers.