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.
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.
“See that guy? That’s our local pusher,” Sonny said beside me when the klaxon stopped and we could hear again. He made the gesture of someone smoking a reefer. “That’s Girgis. He’s a local star. Screws nothing but blonde English and American tourist girls. Girgis is not only Master of the Polaris. He is also quite big in another business.” Again he made the gesture of smoking a reefer. I was beginning to get the point.
“Looks healthy, doesn’t he?” he said with a kind of bitter relish. “He’s about as healthy as a syphilitic spastic.”
He nodded. “Look at him. Girgis is blowing his klaxon. Girgis wants his people there. But he won’t leave for another hour. The people will sit there. Girgis covers every loophole.” He grinned.
We climbed up onto the stone wharf. The quay we stepped onto immediately swallowed us into its live activity. Tourists and hippies strode up and down, buying fruits and vegetables from the little caiques like ours, which had brought the stuff to town. One of the ferry ships was in and loading cargo, and a gang of local men carried crates of melons and huge tomatoes and green vegetables out the jetty to it. Right in front of us was an ugly building marked BANK.
“I’ve got to present some letters and open an account,” I said. “Where shall I meet you?”
Sonny pointed. “Up at one of the cafes. I’ve got some friends I want to see.”
The man in the bank had the cold watchdog stare behind rimless glasses of all loyal bank clerks who love protecting their bosses’ money from the depredations of tongue-tied workingmen. I stared back at him just as hard, and cut him off when he started to give me his lip about his regulations. Hell, you’d think it was his money. When I stepped outside several minutes later, something made me stop dead. I stepped back into the shade of the bank front.
Just in front of me on the wharf, just going down the stone steps to the little embarkation stage, was Jane Duval with her child. The child had difficulty with the high wharf steps. They got onto the boat which—the sign said—was loading passengers to take over to the little airport on the mainland for the morning small-plane flight to Athens. I stayed in the doorway while the boat backed and turned and headed out. The local plot at Georgina Taylor Haus was thickening, it looked like.
I stepped back out into the sun. Well, it wasn’t any of my business. The Port was infested with hippies. I made my way up the rough cobbles of the little rise to the terrace of cafes under the trees. It was hard to find a table. Seated, I saw Georgina Taylor stand up across the terrace and shout at me, and motion me to come over.
Sonny Duval was with her, and a whole raft of the kids. Three of them stood out. A tall, skinny youth with very thick glasses and close-cropped hair; a blond Adonis with a sleepy drugged-out stare, and a lion’s mane of hair; and another sullen girl in another shapeless robe, like Jane Duval. They seemed to be together. They all three stared at me, as I waved back at Georgina and shook my head.
I had no desire to talk juvenile philosophy. Briefly, I wondered if Sonny knew his wife was fleeing the coop. I suspected he didn’t.
After I ordered coffee, I asked the waiter for the men’s room. This turned out to be a noisome stall back in a narrow alley and behind the cafe, a lean-to against the back wall with a plank door that wouldn’t close. It smelled like a Dow Chemical plant. Coming out of it, I heard voices, and the sound of a woman crying, and stopped.
In the alley Girgis was being importuned by an American hippie girl who wanted to buy some hashish on credit. The girl was sniffling. Girgis spoke good English. But he was rude and tough with the girl. I stood and listened. I didn’t like it. After she left, crying, he became aware of me.
“You were pretty hard on the little girl, weren’t you?” I said. “For a little hash?”
He looked me over. He moved like a star rooster. I would have dearly loved to hit him. “Her boyfriend sent her,” he said amiably, “not having guts enough to come himself. And it was not hash they wanted from me, as the gentleman seems to think, but to rent my boat Polaris for what they call a picnic. But which usually ends up to be an orgy. I have no use for the hippies, and they like me as little.”
“Do you have to have a license to sell hashish on this island?” I said. “Or can just anybody sell it?”
“Selling hashish is strictly illegal, and that is why I would never touch it.”
“But I could sell it. If I wanted to,” I said. “If I had some with me?”
He grinned. “The police are very tough here.” The grin widened. “If you do not know them.”
“I’m sure it helps to know them,” I said.
He was looking threatening, with his grin. So I smiled and inflated my chest a little for him, too.
He came a little closer.
“You are new here,” he said. “I have not seen you around Tsatsos before.”
“Just arrived,” I said. “Here on a vacation. But that’s the only thing that’s new about me.”
This time his inspection of me was a little more professional.
“You have moved in at Georgina Taylor house.”
“That’s me.”
He was taller even than Sonny Duval, and had a tendency to seem to tower over me. But I could left-hook him in the belly beautifully from just where I stood. He bared his teeth at me but I couldn’t honestly call it a grin.
“There have been rumors in Athens about a new American narcotics agent, moving around. Who might pay us a visit in Tsatsos.”
“You don’t say so,” I said.
“We are very small here. Being small makes us close together. We do not like strangers, unless they are tourists coming to spend money. People have been known to disappear and never be heard again. The sea around us is very big. If I were you, I wouldn’t even finish my vacation. I would turn around and go right back to Athens, Mr. —?”
“Davies,” I said. “Why, I do believe you’re threatening me.
“Not threatening,” Girgis said. “Just advising.” He stepped back and bared his teeth again. Then he stalked off, still graceful as always. There was a big bare dry field back there they had labeled a park. He went across it.
Back at the alley entrance I found Sonny Duval had been standing there, apparently ready to help me fight. I began to like him better.
“He’s a tough guy,” Sonny said.
“Sure. They all are,” I said, and began to like him less again. I had heard that descriptive definition used of men about as many times as I wanted to. Usually it was true enough. You had better believe they were, in any case. It was safer than believing you were tougher. “Sit down and have a drink with me, Sonny,” I said.
“I can’t. I have to get back to the yacht harbor and make sure Jane is okay,” he said.
I looked at him. I did not mention I had seen Jane. He didn’t seem to know about her.
I asked the waiter for a Scotch and sat back down. Sonny told me how to get to Chantal von Anders’ house back up in the town, pointing out the street I was to take up the hill, and left.
I fingered my cold glass and sat looking after him, puffing out my lips thoughtfully. It was a habit I had. I did it when I was thinking and the thinking was not too fruitful nor too joyously elated. I usually only did it when I was alone.