by James Jones
“You know, somebody shot at me a while ago,” I said.
He only grinned. “They did? Somebody must not like you, hunh?”
“I guess not. They seemed pretty serious about it.”
I pulled his Luger out and sniffed it. It didn’t smell strong, but it had been cleaned recently. With Hoppe’s #9.
“It wasn’t that one,” Kirk said.
“First,” I said, “I want to know who was behind your three lovable characters trying to knock me over the other night.”
“I don’t mind answering that. That was Girgis.”
“Blame the dead. Why haven’t I seen any of them in the town?”
He grinned, and hitched himself up a little on the bunk. He was coming out of it. “I thought I’d better give them a few days off.”
“Where’s the third one?”
“He didn’t come back. You gave him a pretty sore nose. They had to pull a lot of it back out of his eyes.”
“Girgis wanted to scare me off of him, was that it?”
“That was the general idea. He asked me to do it. I did it for him as a favor.”
“And he asked you to have your hard boys handle me. And you did it as a favor. But your boat left Tsatsos for Athens that same evening. Before I got jumped, Kirk.”
“I stopped at the next port ten miles up the coast, and came back and picked them up. It’s an easy run back down here in the launch.”
“And Girgis was killed the same night. It would have been easy to do both jobs on the same trip. Or even to make a second trip in the launch, alone,” I said.
“It would have at that. But I didn’t do that. Hell, I told you, Girgis and I were pals.” He grinned.
“I heard you were such good pals you might have wanted to take over that paying trade of his for him.”
Kirk shook his head. “You didn’t hear that. Who would have told you that? It wouldn’t have worked. I’m not here enough. I don’t know any of these kids here the way Girgis did. You have to be here. That was his problem. He couldn’t get away enough to get all the stuff he wanted. So I started bringing it down from Athens for him.”
I tried another tack. “Did it ever occur to you that the person or persons who knocked off Girgis may be trying to muscle in? And that you might be on the list?”
He grinned benignly. “No. It didn’t. And it still don’t. There’s nobody here that big. And there isn’t that much money in hash. Nobody gives a damn. Nobody would risk a murder for it.”
I couldn’t fault that. So I gave him the rest of it. “That’s the point. That’s a very good point. But there is also a little heroin involved, it seems.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Kirk said promptly. “If Girgis was selling H, I never heard about it. And I wouldn’t touch it. Heroin is dangerous stuff nowadays. With all these American agents running around all over Europe.” He looked at me sanctimoniously.
I didn’t answer. Marie had explicitly said he was bringing in small amounts of H for those who had to have it. And more, that Girgis himself refused to touch it.
“If Girgis was selling H, I don’t know anything about it,” Kirk said again.
“What about this boss of yours?” I said. “What’s his name? Kronitis? Is he in on this whole deal? He owns the Polaris, too.”
“Mr. Kronitis? If he found I was in anything like selling hash, he’d fire me like a shot. The same goes for Girgis.” There was a sudden fervency in his voice, that made it sound like the truth.
I probed it further. “Kronitis must know about the hash you guys have been handling.”
“For God’s sake, don’t go and tell him,” Kirk said. “You’ll have me out of a job.” He meant it.
Beside us on the floor the blond boy began to stir a little. He groaned. I looked down at him. My legs were beginning to tremble. Partly from holding my back so tight against the wall.
“I guess I might as well be going,” I said. “His anesthetic seems to be wearing off.” I grinned at Kirk. “Unless you want me to put him to sleep again and talk more.”
He didn’t answer me. He just looked down at the boy, apparently lost in thought. Then he shook his head.
“But get one thing straight,” I said. “I’m no agent. I’m a private detective. I’ve been hired by a client to find out who killed Girgis Stourkos, and that’s what I’m trying to do. I don’t give a damn about anything else.”
“It’s easy enough to guess your rich client,” Kirk said with a leer. “Chantal von Anders’s been screwing Girgis for over a year. I know all about that.”
I shook my head. “Wrong guess. Anyway, I never tell who my clients are.”
“Well, I’d like to find out who killed Girgis, too. I’d like to help you. Why do you think I’m talking to you?”
I wanted to laugh. But I was afraid of what it would do to my side. I was remembering when he had had the gun, and the drop, and the upper hand. Some help. “I ought to break your jaw with this,” I said, pulling the Luger out of my belt again. “I’ll leave it up on the wheel housing for you, instead.”
I pushed the blond boy out of the way with my foot to get the door open. The movement sent a pain shooting through my side again. It suddenly occurred to me that if Kirk had wanted to talk longer, I couldn’t have done it anyway. I opened the door and looked back at them.
“Hey, no hard feelings, hey?” Kirk said. He rubbed his neck. “You’re a tough hombre. You hurt my neck.”
“What do you think you did to my jaw?” I said. “No. No hard feelings,” I lied. I shut the door behind me.
Up on deck I ejected the magazine from the Luger, and looked at it. It was full except for one. I drew back the elbow-type receiver, and a shell popped out onto the wheel housing. He had had it loaded, all right. I left the three objects on the housing.
When I climbed down over the stern to the skiff, I thought I wasn’t going to make it. It was all I could do not to groan out loud. When I sculled the skiff back in, standing up, the lights of the taverna danced wildly in front of my eyes. I gritted my teeth and kept sculling.
After I tied the skiff, I walked quietly through the still-rioting late drinkers at the taverna and went home and went to bed. I wouldn’t be any good to Chantal or anybody else, this night.
I had been beaten unconscious, rib-kicked, shot at and missed, then beaten nearly unconscious again on the jaw until I could hardly touch it, and then threatened with killing. I had certainly earned my pay from Kronitis today, even if I hadn’t found out anything significant. What else could happen to me?
What else could happen to me was that I couldn’t sleep. Whenever I moved the pain in my side woke me. My whole side was hot with fever when I touched it.
I passed a fitful night, as they say in the newspapers about sick Presidents and other world leaders. Nobody came by and wrote it up.
Chapter 38
THE BAD THING ABOUT INJURIES and bruises is they’re still there when you wake up the next morning. They don’t go away. I was barely able to crawl off the bed in the morning. Shaving loosened me up a little. But my side made it almost impossible for me to move. I hobbled downstairs and downed some strong coffee and went down to the basement apartment to Georgina.
“Do you think you could help me tape up my side,” I said, “if I showed you how?”
“Why, of course.” She was delighted, in fact. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Just a bad sprain,” I said. “But it’s uncomfortable.”
Con Taylor had all sorts and sizes of adhesive tape lying around. I chose a roll of two and a half inch Johnson & Johnson’s. I tore the strips off the roll for her, stuck them by their ends to the edge of the table, had her put the scissors beside them.
“My God, you’re beat up,” Georgina said when I took off my shirt. She touched my shoulders. “You have a very manly torso, sir,” she said. “I’ve never been up this close.”
She loved every second of it. I stood in the middle of the room with my arms up li
ke some grotesque flower stalk, while Georgina buzzed and darted around me like a hummingbird on a flight mission in a stand of hollyhocks. She tried to pump me about the fight, but I clammed up.
Women always seem to love to help you when you’ve been hurt much more than when you’re unhurt. I think it gives them some kind of weird, secret sadistic sexual gratification of some sort.
I kept up a running comment of instruction.
“That’s it. No, start around further to the back. That’s it. A little lower. Now, pull it tight. Pull it as tight as you can. That’s it. Never mind about hurting me. Now, smooth it down. Never mind the loose end. We’ll cut them later. That’s it. Now, put the next one two-thirds up the first one, overlapping it. That’s it. Pull it tight.” I didn’t know if she knew this particular bandage was the bandage for busted ribs. She didn’t ask. And I didn’t tell her.
When we finished, I was trussed up my left side like some mummy. But I felt almost immediate relief. In the mirror I looked like some right-handed gladiator putting on his suit to go out in the ring. I put my shirt back on.
I figured, with a little rest, I could get by like that and do almost anything I had to do. I certainly wasn’t about to give Kronitis back his retainer.
I kissed Georgina on the forehead, thanked her and went back upstairs.
About ten minutes later Pekouris roared up down below in the police jeep. He was alone this time. He wasted no time on preliminary ceremonies.
“Is this what you call keeping your investigations quiet? Getting in a public brawl with that gang of hippies?”
“I’m sorry about that,” I said. “There wasn’t anything I could do. They jumped me.”
I had already decided I wouldn’t mention my set-to with Kirk, nor the shooting either.
“My informants inform me you provoked it so strongly no one but a saint could have avoided fighting you,” Pekouris said coldly.
“I guess there’s some truth in that,” I said after a moment.
My unwillingness to leap in with irrefutable explanations seemed to set him back. He was too used to the European style, I guessed, which considered vehement counteraccusation the best defense for everything.
“Do you want to prefer charges?”
“No,” I said. “I wouldn’t remember any of their faces.”
“Against the hippie Steve? Or the place?”
“It happened outside his place. No,” I said. “Unless, of course, you want me to prefer charges.”
“I confess I do not understand you, Davies,” he said. “You are certainly not the Greek idea of what a police officer should be.”
I felt like saying thank you.
“I found out what I wanted,” I said. “Which was that this Chuck is crazy. I think homicidally crazy.”
“I told you all that,” Pekouris said. “Before. I did it by deduction. You did not have to prove it.
“Well, I have some news for you in this department, Davies,” he said. “Some good, and some of it bad.”
“Let me have the bad news first,” I said. “What did the laboratory say?”
“That is the good news. Our laboratory in Athens thinks it is highly probable that they can find and distinguish any human blood that might be on the machete mingled with goat’s blood. They are not sure they can determine the human blood type, though, under those circumstances.”
“That’s good news. Are you going to pick him up?”
“I would not have done that in any case,” Pekouris said disdainfully. “If they could not determine the blood type. But all this is an academic question now.”
“What do you mean, academic?”
“I have been on the telephone twice with Athens this morning,” Pekouris said. “In addition to the laboratory. They are dropping the case. They have ordered me to close it out as unsolved and to send in the dossier.” He looked dismal suddenly, Pekouris. Not in any moral or idealistic way. But like a bloodhound who has suddenly been pulled away off a hot scent and put back on the leash. Like the bloodhound, his jaws appeared to ache.
“Closing it out!” I said. “But it’s only been three days! What the hell?”
“There is no mystery about it,” Pekouris said. “Our main tourist season for the summer begins in ten days. They do not want to risk the bad publicity and the resulting cancellations. Our tourist season is very important to us.”
I turned to stare at him. My belly began to tickle with wanting to laugh. I couldn’t help it, I began to laugh out loud. “Poor Pekouris,” I said.
“Not at all,” he said stiffly. “I am the same thing as a soldier. I obey my orders. Theirs is not to reason why. Theirs is but to do, and die.”
“I didn’t see the movie,” I said. “But I read the book.”
He only frowned. “In fact, I quite agree with them. Our national tourist season is much more important than the murder of some petty hashish smuggler. Right at this moment, a rumor is going out that it was not a person who was killed in the Xenia gardens at all, but a white hairless monkey from South America which was somebody’s pet. And that the boy who found the headless body was confused.”
“It’s you who is putting this out?” I said.
He simply blinked at me, and pressed his thick lips together tightly. “It will confuse. It will inject an element of doubt. Right now, it is being spread around all day. By tonight two-thirds of the people on Tsatsos will believe there was no murder. The other third wouldn’t care anyway.”
“Too bad Girgis’s so well known,” I said dryly.
“Yes. But that can’t be helped.”
“I’m being paid to find the killer,” I said.
Pekouris leaned against the wall with folded arms. “I’ve been ordered to tell you to stop your investigations.”
I gave him a look. “You know I’m not going to do that.”
He nodded at me, “You have no choice. I already have been given the authority to put you on a plane and throw you right out of Greece, if you do not. To make sure, I am placing a telephone call to Mr. Kronitis this morning.
“Officially; officially, you are ordered to cease any action of yours having to do with this murder.”
“Go ahead and call him.”
“I mean to.”
“Well, this is a gas,” I said, and grinned at him. “You and me enemies, Pekouris.” I pouched out my lips. The whole thing sounded like something out of Dick Tracy. That rumor, about a hairless South American monkey, that knocked me out.
“Unofficially,” Pekouris said. He looked around for the housekeeper. “Unofficially, there is still one thing that might be done. Just between us two chickens.”
“And what’s that?” I thought I could guess.
“If I can get hold of that machete,” he smiled. “Some way or other. If I can have it tested, and the tests come out right, there is a good chance I can cause the thing still to work. I think Athens would back me up, with evidence like that. But, naturally, I cannot confiscate it, myself.” He suddenly looked like some Lebanese banker.
“You’re asking me to steal it for you?”
“I am asking you nothing. I am not even offering a suggestion. And if you say I did, I—”
“I know. You’ll deny it,” I said. “Hell, Pekouris, I can’t do that. I’m liable to get myself killed, if I go up in there again. The younger generation takes a very dim view of me. You saw what they did to me last night.”
“I don’t mind admitting it would be a large feather in my cap in Athens,” he smiled.
“I’ll bet.”
“You would not get credit. But you would have the satisfaction of a job well done.”
Before I could even jeer, he put his hands up and tilted his head on one side, like some character out of The Merchant of Venice. “But I’m asking nothing.”
“You’re appealing to my conscience? You’re a bad judge of character. I’m famous for not having any.”
“No, but you want to keep on getting paid by Kronitis.”
“Of all the Machiavellian, Levantine, middle-European,” I had to pause, “shenanigans.” I was forced to grin. “I’m promising nothing, Pekouris,” I said.
“No one is asking.” He pushed away from the wall and straightened his blue suit coat. “Just remember, any bit of notoriety attached to you, any word about you investigating those boys again or anybody else, just one bit, and—” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the sparkling horizon we could see through the open doors, out beyond the shaded porch, and the sun-faded little harbor.
“I’m expecting to go to Athens in a couple of days. On business. For quite some time.”
“I see,” I said.
“Anything that happens must happen before then.”
I walked out on the porch to watch him drive away another time. Portly, heavy-shouldered, an excellent eater, Pekouris. He sat his jeep like it was some old-time charger, and herded it down the road the same way.
I went back inside.
He wore with enormous vanity his certain measure of power, did Pekouris. And he would use it without scruple when he could. He was willing to swallow it down humbly when he couldn’t. He was the personification and spit and image of my picture acquired over fifty years of what the whole human race stood for and was worth.
It was a pretty dismal image to put up against fifty years. If you couldn’t laugh at it, you would want to go away and shoot yourself.
I sat down and called Chantal. My mind was a complete blank. I had no plans toward any scheme. And I wasn’t going to work up any for Pekouris.
Morning was the only time to be sure of getting Chantal, and she was in. But she had a lunch date, a date to play bridge in the afternoon, and a dinner for the evening.
“I didn’t get up there last night,” I said.
“I know all about it. You got yourself into another fight. The great tough private detective. Fighting with a bunch of children.”
I was a little stung. “They didn’t hit and kick like children,” I said mildly. “Anyway, I didn’t come.”