I TOLD THE DRIVER I wanted to go to Georgio’s taverna. I figured Chantal deserved that much protection. Since she was being so careful of her reputation.
The night sky was bright above the open cab. The land breeze had brought cooler air down from the pines on the hills. The moon either had set, or hadn’t come up yet. It was quiet with the clop of the horse.
Halfway out the one main road that ran along the hill face, I told the driver to stop and paid him off. I waited until he disappeared. Then I started walking straight uphill, on the street to Chantal’s.
There were very few street lights up here. The narrow cobbled street was walled on both sides. You could smell the flowering trees and bushes. I was thinking, with my professional’s mind, what a great place it would be to waylay somebody when three men stepped out of the shadows into the light of the street lamp 30 yards ahead of me and started to walk down to me.
I felt my native combativeness spring out all over me. A happy red gorge rose at the back of my swallowing mechanism. It always made my ears ring a little, and it always made my jaw come out and gave me a kind of rictal grin. I couldn’t help it, I liked it.
Of course, I could always turn around and run back down the hill and let them chase me. I could also get down on my knees and beg them not to hit me. Of course, maybe they weren’t after me at all. But I didn’t believe it. Maybe it was the way they weren’t talking, that tipped it. I licked my lips and grinned up at them as I climbed up to them.
When I was five yards from them the two on the out-sides darted in toward me, and the one in the middle ran right at me. I knew what to do with that. I ran head-on straight at the guy in front of me. That already put the other two a few feet behind me. The surprised man in front of me tried to slow up. I didn’t give him a chance. I caught him by his shirt front with both hands and yanked him to me and hit him full in the face with the top of my forehead. I got one glimpse of his startled face, before my head hit him. He went down without a peep. I’d heard the bone in his nose break and knew he wouldn’t want any more fighting tonight.
The other two had had to change their line of run, costing them a few seconds. I tried to jump over the downed man and move forward to get room to turn around but I wasn’t quite agile enough. Age, again. One of them pinned my arms from behind and the other jumped in front of me and began to slug me in the face and belly. I could feel the downed man struggling feebly under us to try and get out of the way.
That kind of thing seems to go on and on. But it doesn’t really. Six, eight, ten, twelve punches. Most people don’t realize the number of hard punches you can take. Especially if you are moving all the time and can roll with some of them. Both of these guys were young. The one in front, a blond, looked like a semi-moron. I managed to break loose, by bull strength mostly, and swung around and left-hooked the one behind me to his knees, then swung around to the other. The blond was rushing me. Instead of ducking I stepped to meet him, grabbed him by the lapels and jerked him in and hit him in the face with my forehead, too. I didn’t get as good a shot at him, and hit him somewhere below the nose in the teeth. But it was enough to put him down and I knew he would have a few loose teeth for a week. The other man was back on his feet and I turned and traded punches with him until he staggered and backed off. The blond, half-blinded, was on one knee when I turned back to him. A switchblade knife glittered open in his hand. I started toward him but the second man called something in Greek and the blond backed away. Crablike, he circled around me to get downhill to his friend. We stood and looked at each other.
The downed man was still feebly trying to crawl away out from under the fight. I backed off a couple of steps, to let them come get their friend, and together they backed off down the street half-dragging the friend, with me standing there watching them. There hadn’t been one word said, except that one call in Greek.
At the main road, which was the first corner, they rounded the corner out of sight. But they didn’t turn back down toward the Port, they turned toward Georgio’s. I did not know what that might signify.
Chantal’s was only a couple of doors away up the hill beyond the light. I moved there, and leaned back against the wall for a minute trying to figure it out. Figure it out who these guys were, and what they wanted with trying to beat me up. Obviously they were hired. Obviously the beating was to be a warning. But while these guys might be fairly accomplished street fighters, they certainly weren’t professional hoodlums.
Leaning against the wall, I was still breathing raggedly, and bleeding a little. I had cut my forehead on a tooth when I head-punched the second guy. And I had a cut lip and a couple of nice facial abrasions that were beginning to swell. My ribs hurt, too. I hadn’t felt so satisfied and so peaceful in a long time. I hadn’t felt this satisfied since before the little Greek attorney in Paris.
In fact, I had to keep my teeth clamped together to keep from laughing out loud in the street. By God, I wasn’t so bad off after all, old age or not. I could still hit a moving target.
Some people, I knew, like Sonny Duval for instance, wouldn’t like to hear me say something like that. Well, I couldn’t help it. I tried the garden door and it was open and I went on in and up the steps.
Chantal was there, all right. She was waiting for me all alone on her garden terrace. Apparently the rest of the house was asleep. She was wearing one of those summer dresses and no jewelry. The night was still beautiful. She apparently hadn’t heard any sounds of the fight. She motioned with her finger to her lips for me to be quiet. Then she saw my face.
“My God, what happened to you?”
I had my handkerchief out. “A couple of punks tried to give me a working over. Three of them. They weren’t very professional about it. Do you mind if I sit down?” I was suddenly feeling very gay, and had to hold myself down. I gave her a cautious grin. “I don’t come back quite as fast as I used to. But I still like it.”
She looked horrified. “You look awful.”
“You should see the other guys. Actually, I don’t feel bad. I just feel like somebody ran me through the wringer of their washing machine.” I wiped the trickle from the cut on my forehead and patted my bloody lip. “Who knew I was coming here?”
“Why, no one.”
“You didn’t tell anybody?”
“Would I be likely to tell anyone you were coming to my house late at night?”
“I don’t know. You might.”
That hurt her feelings. “Well, I didn’t.”
“Then somebody sure made an inspired guess.” I guess I was just barely aware I had hurt her. I didn’t care if I had. I was not about to go into another long involved explanation about how I couldn’t really trust her because she didn’t tell me the truth about herself. “A very inspired guess.”
I guess she realized how I felt. Anyway, she swallowed the hurt pride. “How do you mean?”
“Well, who would figure I was coming here? At all? After midnight? Second place, who would figure out I would leave the horsecab on the main road, like I did, and walk up? To protect your ‘good name’? That’s pretty smart figuring.”
“But who would want to do something like that to you?”
“I don’t know. Your friend Girgis might. This hippie guy Steve might. But those three weren’t hippies.”
I straightened up on the bench and grinned at her. “It might even have been Kirk.”
“Kirk?” she said weakly.
“The captain of the Agoraphobe. You don’t know him?”
“I know who he is. How do you know Kirk?”
“He introduced himself to me tonight,” I said, and gave her another grin. “Apparently I’ve made a whole raft of friends on Tsatsos.”
Now, why would the mention of Kirk affect her so? I said, “My guess is that it was Girgis. But how he would guess I was—”
I didn’t finish, because she looked distressed. I looked at her. She didn’t seem to want to meet my eyes. And I suddenly knew for no other reason than that, that she had told Girgis, or somebody, about me. She might not have told them I was coming up here on any specific night at any specific hour, like tonight, but she had told them enough so that they could plan out the rest.
“Do you think we could have a drink?” I said softly. It seemed to me I had just divined an old affair between her and Girgis. I had speculated about that once before. But I certainly wasn’t going to mention it. “A Scotch?”
“I’ve got them all ready for us,” she said stiffly, and got up to go to the rolling bar in the patio corner. When she came back with them, she had straightened out her face. She said, “You really like it, don’t you? This fighting. You don’t even mind being beaten up, do you? You enjoy it.”
“I must. Otherwise I’d change my way of making a living, wouldn’t I?”
“It’s very boyish. It’s like a group of boys at boys’ school. All male vanity and ego. Pummeling and punching each other.”
“This kind of fighting wasn’t boyish,” I said.
“I’ve never met anyone quite like you.”
“Yes. You keep saying that. Could I have a Band-Aid for my head?”
“There are some upstairs.”
“Well, let’s go upstairs. That’s where we’re going, isn’t it?”
Chantal looked as if she had been slapped in the face. I didn’t care. She half-opened her mouth. But then she closed it. I was glad she did. Because I was ready to tell her to go to hell and leave. If she had gotten indignant and put on her Countess look and started yapping, I would have.
I hadn’t intended to insult her. But I was plenty mad. Her secretiveness and her hedging and her lying didn’t make any sense, if she really meant for me to help her. And they had very nearly gotten the hell beaten out of me.
But she didn’t. Instead, quietly, almost demurely, she got to her feet. Shyly, almost like a girl—which seemed silly to me, after Freddy Tarkoff, and that husband of hers, and God knew who all else—she led the way inside and upstairs, turning on and off the lights for us as we went. A couple of times she motioned me for silence.
In the arched, thick-walled living room, I paused a minute, glass in hand, and looked again at the portrait of her when she was younger. She must have been a real beauty back then.
Just what the hell was the matter with her, anyway?
In her bedroom, without a word, her back to me, she began to undress. She took off the summer dress, and the half-slip she wore under it, and hung them up neatly. She did it modestly, quietly, matter of factly, elegantly, with no coyness, just as she might have if she had been alone. I stood and watched her and felt my mad slipping away out of me. She was elegant as hell and I admired it. I noted she had thought to have an ice bucket and booze and glasses on a tray on her dressing table. Whatever else about her, she had real class. Class up to her eyebrows.
“You’ll have to be careful of me,” I said with a grin. I could catch glimpses of the front of her in the mirrors.
“Yes. I just bet every woman has to be careful with you. You look as if you would break so easily.”
“I’m pretty sore.”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to leave at daylight. I’m sorry about that.” She took off her panties, and then her bra. She put them neatly where they belonged.
“I think I’d better leave a little before that,” I said.
“What are you going to do?”
“About what?”
“About those three men.” She took whatever pins there were in her hair out and shook it loose.
“What three men? Oh, them. I don’t know.” I was still catching glimpses of her in the three angled mirrors. She had a beautiful dark bush.
Then she turned around facing me. “You’re really very tough. Aren’t you.” Then, the voice softening, and mocking, “Aren’t you? Very tough?”
“Sure. I took a course in it at school,” I said. “I don’t feel very tough at this moment.”
“Now’s the time to be tough.” A funny little shy smile played at the corner of her mouth. “Now, more than any time.” Lithely, without haste, she walked to the bed and curled down onto it. She stretched out on top of the cover and then, with a curious little modesty that had great class, crossed her ankles. Just the ankles. And there she was. She still had a marvelous body. The whole thing was the most elegant damn thing I thought I’d ever seen. “Will you be tough with me?”
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.