by James Jones
I put my glass down somewhere, and began getting out of my own clothes with a style which, if not as elegant, I hoped at least complemented hers. It was the least I could do. Fortunately, I was not one of those men who at almost fifty had to hold in their stomachs and breathe shallow.
“You’re beautiful, Lobo,” she said from the bed.
“Beautiful? Beautiful is hardly the word for me. But you’re beautiful.” And she was. But it’s always good to tell them that.
When I had an arm around her she turned to me, chest on chest, and smiled. A large, tremulous smile. It had a certain radiance. “Beautiful? An old woman like me? I’m an old woman. Or very nearly am. I used to be beautiful.”
I kissed her to shut her up.
She was as elegant in the bed as she had been getting into it. There wasn’t anything new that either of us could teach the other. But her love-making had the same style and class as the rest of her.
I didn’t mind if she squeezed my sore ribs. I didn’t mind if she rubbed her head against my facial abrasions. I didn’t mind if I got a little salt in my cut lip.
I don’t suppose I had ever been to bed with a woman before who could be elegant and animal at the same time.
I woke just shortly before first light, because I’d set my little internal alarm in my head.
The bedside lamp was still on, my empty drink glass beside it. I took it to the bottle and poured myself a measured drink. There was no drink in the world like that one, when after a night of satisfactory love-making you are preparing to get dressed and go home from some lady’s private apartment. I took it back to the bed with me and sat down to savor it.
When I finished it, I kissed her gently on the cheek and stood up. When I stood up, her arm came out, and her hand grabbed me by my handle.
Still half asleep, her eyes still shut, she said, “Don’t take him away,” and yawned.
“It’s just about dawn,” I said.
“Then goodbye, darling, call me this afternoon,” and she rolled over, with a look of deep satisfaction about her shoulders and her back.
I started to dress. Then I was outside, in the air, and walking down the hill toward the harbor. But outside I wasn’t so happy, nor so gentle feeling. I knew I shouldn’t be getting involved with any woman. Especially any woman who kept hedging her bets, and wouldn’t tell me what she was really into. She was supposed to be my client. And now I’d accepted my fee. Passing a hanging branch of a flowering tree drooping over a wall, I took a sudden savage, angry punch at it, scattering petals.
The blush of first light was just mounting in the east, over the sea and the black bulky islands. I could see it all from up here. Now and then I could see the yacht harbor below me.
By the time I got there the real dawn was growing. The taverna was opening, fishermen were stopping by for a coffee their oars on their shoulders, boats were coming in from night fishing. I stood for a while at the top of my rented garden, inside the upper street door, and looked at it all. This was what it all was about.
There was always such a great new false hope for everybody. At the start of each new day’s dawn. It wasn’t a human emotional thing so much as a fact of nature. I walked down to the taverna for a coffee myself.
When I sat down and looked out at the harbor, I noticed the empty space the Agoraphobe had left in the harbor moorings. That guy sure liked to do his port making and putting out in the dead of night.
I gave Sonny Duval half an hour. When the half hour was up, I rowed out to the boat and knocked on the hull.
It wasn’t Sonny who came up, but Jane Duval. She was just putting on the pants of her bikini. She already had the bra on. Jim Kirk had not been kidding me about her body. It was magnificent, and young. Young, young, young.
“Tell Sonny I’m waiting at the taverna,” I told her brusquely.
“Isn’t it kind of early?” she said sleepily. Then she stretched and yawned, and I realized she was aware I was looking at her body. So she stretched it for me and showed it to me.
“I told him I wanted to go early,” I said and shoved the skiff off and set the standing-up-type oars.
“Well, I’ll tell him,” she said and went back down below. I didn’t like her any better than I ever had.
I rowed back angrily to the dock.
When Sonny came up on deck, I called to him to get the boat ready, and to get a lunch at the taverna. We were going out together, alone. But first I wanted to go to town and buy some stuff.
At the house I changed. No one was up. Sonny was at the taverna, but the rest of the boats slept on their anchorlines. I caught myself looking hungrily out at the water. In town I bought myself a mask and snorkel, flippers and a speargun. And a depth gauge. I had to go to every shop in town that handled masks to find the depth gauge.
“No people,” I said to Sonny as we headed out. “No people all day.” Sonny grinned.
“People are always trouble,” he informed me. “And they never give a warning. The sea,” he said and spread his arm, “the sea always gives you warning before the trouble.”
I thought that was pretty pompous. Especially since I’d learned he didn’t even do his own dirty work. The big peace medal hanging on his chest on its rawhide cord caught the sun and glinted at me.
“What did you do to your face?” he asked.
“I bumped it on my electric razor,” I said.
Chapter 19
WE SPENT THAT WHOLE DAY out. We anchored off a tiny islet Sonny knew about to the east and didn’t move except to change the boat. I avoided thinking about Chantal. I spearfished, or loafed and rested in the shade of the tarp. Sonny mostly loafed, and listened to rock music on his battery-operated radio. I kept having to tell him to turn it down.
He dived a little, but it was clear right away he was no adept with flippers or speargun, and had no interest in it. This was Tarkoff’s “expert spearfisherman.”
I tried hard to reach 60 feet. I had set 60 feet as an arbitrary limit because I thought I ought to be able to do that. Though I hadn’t done any, for four years. But the best I could do was 40 or 45. My new depth gauge was calibrated in meters and I kept having to recalculate into feet how deep I’d been. It was a pretty disheartening performance. The bottom wasn’t very interesting. There were few fish. My whole catch was two medium-sized grouper. I looked at them ruefully on the deck when we packed it up to go in, and commented that there weren’t many fish.
“Boom, boom,” Sonny said. “The local fishermen dynamite. And of course kill the young fish along with the big fish. They know nothing about ecology or conservation.” Sonny was against spearfishing for sport, too.
I made no comment. I was feeling grim enough already.
“Education is very important to understanding,” Sonny said.
But when he fired up the motor, I looked around at the sea and the rocky little islet with real regret. Frustrating as it was, it still seemed the best moments I had spent since I got here. The being without people was the best part. Being without Sonny would have been even better. Unfortunately, he owned the boat.
By the time we got back to the taverna dock I knew what I was going to do about Chantal.
I waited until we had cleaned up. But then I went straight in to the telephone booth at Dmitri’s and called her at her house and told her not to expect me at her dinner.
There was a pause at her end. “Again?” she said. “All right, I’ll tell them.” Another pause. “Will you be coming by my house later, then?”
“I’m afraid I won’t be able to. Something’s come up. I’m sorry.”
Silence from Chantal. Then, finally, “You’re a great one for letting people down easy.”
I didn’t answer.
“Shall I call you tomorrow, then?” she said.
“Yes. That’s a good idea. Call me in the morning.”
“All right. Goodbye.” The phone clicked dead.
I must have come out with a savage look on my face. Old Dmitrios looked at me,
anyway. Relief was what I felt, suddenly. With the anger, relief. I took a couple of deep breaths of the relief. Sonny was battening down the boat. I told him I would let him know later what time I wanted to go out tomorrow.
I went back to the house and changed. Then I just went out and walked in the town. There was not anything I had to do. It felt great.
It was not yet six o’clock. At the yacht harbor a group of night fishermen were preparing to go out. At the Port breakwater another group of night fishermen were preparing their boats. In between, at the two bathing beaches, people were having an evening swim. The cafe terrace was crowded. The old-fashioned nineteenth-century British hotel on the water across the Port harbor had two parties of English middle class out in front having drinks, almost lost in the vastness of its terrace.
Finally I came to the Xenia. Xenia was the same name used for a whole chain of government-owned hotels on all the islands and all over Greece. This was the one I had seen from the ferry coming in. Just beyond it was the hill with the Construction where the hippies lived. Smoke from open fires rose from it in columns. I decided to go there.
The entrance was around the headland on the road, where there was a little cove and a beach. I walked right in. Right away I got myself stared at. Without exception I received a sullen cold shoulder from the hippies, not all of whom were young. If I asked directions or information, I got sullen grudging replies.
It was all like some weird, crazy surrealistic Hooverville. They were cooking their suppers over the open fires. A goodly number of filthy children were running around without discipline. Toilet facilities were nowhere visible; people went trudging off with shovels in their hands. Open construction ditches still passed before or behind, or both, many of the four- and six-family units. People either jumped them or climbed down into them and up out of them and over the hump of earth on the other side.
When I had looked it over to my satisfaction, I left. I did not see Steve or Chuck and their gang anywhere. I did not receive any welcoming rapport of brotherhood.
Back out on the road I stopped a moment. I was curious all of a sudden as to what it was that had irked me so. I had nothing against camping out. I had been doing it all my life, and using a shovel to dig my own toilet. I did believe that children needed discipline. More, that they actually craved it, desired it. But that difference of opinion couldn’t account for my truculence. What put my back up was the sense of unfriendly superiority. They put camping-out up onto a level of moral righteousness like a religious mysticism, and then sullenly waited hopefully for you to hate them and martyr them for it.
Down below where I stood on the road, through the foliage, I noticed the little beach below had a number of late bathers in the evening, fading light. Almost without exception they were nude. A few girls wore the pants of bikinis. A number of children, washed clean by the sea, were running naked and screaming. The girls’ nude bodies, long and lean with youth, were exquisitely beautiful in the red light. From where I stood, it was an exquisite beautiful scene through the leaves.
Old man that I was, I stood and looked. It gave me an unbelievable gnawing feeling of pain. This scene was something I had never had. I was too warped by my parents’, and my society’s, foolishness. Maybe I was oversexed because of that but the scene had an enormously haunting sexual beauty for me. I wanted to have each girl. Then I recognized Sweet Marie as one of the girl bathers. Marie was one with nothing on. The dark V of her crotch was tantalizingly attractive. Taller than most, she had a long lean rounded line of flank. After a few moments of watching her in particular through my screen of leaves, I turned away back to the road. I felt put down, left behind, out of everything, pretty damned ancient.
Right in front of me a group in their weird outfits were strolling back from town. Three boys and two girls. The tallest boy grinned at me.
“What are you doing, old dad? Catching up on your peeping?” They all laughed.
I didn’t say anything. I went on along the curving road. What could I have said? Another act of gratuitous human cruelty. Who cared? I was used to it.
At least it got my adrenal juices to flowing again.
By the time I got back to the Xenia Hotel it was dark. Stake lights were on in its grounds, which contained large clumps of tropical jungle garden. The gravelled road ran through the edge of its grounds. On an impulse I turned and walked up the stake-lighted walk to the lobby.
Inside, the lush new hotel was weirdly empty. A massive, expensively done ground floor was totally deserted. In the dining room one lone couple was eating. One clerk stood behind the reception. He had on a green uniform with gold braid. I asked him for the bar. He pointed for me. I followed his finger, down a long luxe corridor-like room with expensive gaming tables down each side, the whole done in rich green and white marble. Every other gaming table fight was on, and not a soul sat at any of them.
The whole place was so in keeping with my mood it was almost unreal. Beyond the gaming tables was an equally luxe open patio, equally deserted. The bar was on the right. A young lone barman leaned against the wall with his arms folded, smoking, in the same green and gold braid uniform. I went over.
“A Scotch and soda,” I said.
He put down his cigarette and mixed the drink with a professional flourish, without a word.
I crawled up onto a stool and drank and then stared down into the wide glass as if it were some crystal ball of my future. If it was, it didn’t tell me anything. I looked back up. “You don’t seem to have much business.”
The boy shrugged contemptuously. He had picked back up his cigarette, and refolded his arms. “There will be some more in August,” he said in perfect English.
“How does everybody stay alive until August?”
With the same contempt he said, “We are paid a salary, monsieur. A momentous salary. By the government. We were all trained in the school in Mikonos.” The irony was too heavy, and without any humor.
I didn’t grin. This whole place was like that. I swung around and, elbows on the bar, looked around at the empty, expensively fit patio.
A tiny bellboy in the same green with yellow braid, but with a green and gold pillbox hat, walked by and smiled at me. He was the only one with any energy I had seen in the place. He went on off the edge of the patio. I swung back around and hunched over the bar.
Just at that second there was a strangled, terrorized yell from the garden. Both the barman and I jumped. The little bellboy came scrambling up the steps out of the dark, gabbling Greek. Behind the bar the barman gripped the edge of the counter.
“What’s he saying?” I said.
The tiny boy went into English.
“Please! Come! A dead man!” He paused, his eyes wide. “He has no head!”
I got him by his arm. His eyes had dilated so that I didn’t think he could even see me. “Okay. Just take it easy. Take it easy. Come on. Show me,” I said.
He led me to the edge of the patio and the steps, and then stopped. “I can’t,” he whispered. He came up exactly to my elbow. He couldn’t have been over nine.
“Then point where,” I said.
For a minute I thought he couldn’t even do that. Then the little boy pointed out into the dark to a clump of jungle grass. Behind me the young barman made no move to come out from behind his bar and help.
“For Christ’s sake, come here and hold onto this kid,” I called. “He’s scared out of his wits.”
I patted his shoulder, and went down into the dark onto the Bermuda grass lawn toward the grass clump.
At first I couldn’t see anything in the darkness. Then just inside the clump I spotted a bare foot. I parted the tall grass and peered inside. Beyond the foot was a leg, and beside that another leg drawn up, and beyond that was the body. Where the neck should have been there was nothing.
For half a minute I just stood and looked at it. The neck had been cut off at the base, and whoever had done it had not done a very good job of it. In the darkness it was impossible
to see if there was blood on the ground, or on the grass. I stepped a little farther in and felt the grass near the severed neck and looked at my fingers. There wasn’t any blood. I stepped back out.
The no blood meant that the killing had not been done here, in the clump. That did not necessarily mean the head would not be here, though. I looked around, and found the sandal that belonged on the bare foot. I didn’t touch it. I did not find the head. I was glad, because I thought I already knew who it was.
I came back to the edge of the clump beside the bare foot and stood looking at the body again. There was something very familiar about it. There was a bulge in one of the hip pockets. I snaked the wallet out without touching anything else and took a look at it. A mariner’s card stared back at me in the gloom of the bad light with Girgis’s picture on it. There was plenty of money in the wallet. I snaked the wallet back and stood up.
Behind me off the patio some American dance music was playing softly on the hotel’s intercom speaker system.
It was as if I had known all along that it was going to happen. I hadn’t known when, and I hadn’t known who, and I hadn’t known where, or how. And there wasn’t a damned thing in the world I could have done to prevent it. But the whole thing had somehow smelled of something like this from the start. And now here we were.
It was an especially gruesome one. I was pretty sure the head had been cut off after the body was dead. It just looked like it. But that didn’t make any difference. There was a special indignity about mutilation of that sort.
There was something specially pathetic and indecent about the bare feet of a corpse, too. I had seen that before, and knew about it. A guy who had been blown out of his shoes and socks by a big mortar shell in my war. It was funny until you remembered the guy was dead. I had seen decapitations before, too. We had had some men in my outfit decapitated by the Japanese and left with their heads sitting on their chests for us to find.
I suddenly remembered Girgis standing in his bare feet on his afterdeck in the heavy sun, getting ready to blow his klaxon. The bare feet had looked all right then. I hadn’t even gotten to know him. But there was something effervescent and attractive about him, bad boy or not. I didn’t hate death. There wasn’t much point in that. But I hated wanton death. And murder was almost always wanton death.