I TOLD THE MAID I would wait.
In the low stone thick-walled living room I looked again at the portrait of the young Chantal. I thought it said a lot about her life, hanging there with its light that was never turned off. It dominated the medieval room. Not that she had centered everything around it. She hadn’t. She had hung it off by itself, and then directed everything away from it. So that it dominated by indirection. Very shrewd.
On an antique table I picked up an expensive illustrated picture-book history of the von Anders family, in German. Obscure publisher. 300 numbered copies. Obviously, a paid-for book. I settled down with it. Might as well learn something about my client, if I could. The illustrations went all the way back to medieval engravings. Castles. Ancestors in armor. Later, photographs. War of 1870. War of 1918. War of 1940. Periods in-between. Near the end there was a big family portrait, in which I recognized Chantal, and a guy I assumed was her husband, amongst brothers, sisters, cousins, nieces and nephews. And the stern old patriarchal couple.
Quite a family. I still found it difficult to appreciate Germans. I mixed myself a drink, and went back to the book. I dozed a little. Finally, I heard a door slam outside, some whispering. Chantal came in.
“What a pleasant surprise,” she said, much too sweetly. “So you did decide to visit me after all.”
I deliberately didn’t get up. I slid the book on the table.
“I see you’ve been reading up on Gunther’s family history. It’s quite an array of Germans, isn’t it?” she added, bitterly, “German nobility. I think there’s even one of me in there.”
“I saw it.”
“I didn’t know you read German.”
“I don’t.”
Since I didn’t get up, she made herself a drink and sat. I said nothing. I studied her openly. I had to admit she was charming, as she blew a strand of hair back out of her eyes and looked at me.
“To what do I owe this great good fortune? Did the other one stand you up? Or did you feel you had to leave her side through pity and come and see me. At least, I am getting to know your preferences. You like them very young, and very long-legged. You like skindiving dope pushers.”
“Pots calling kettles,” I said. “Just take it easy. I’m here on business. Serious business, for you.” I paused. “Do you know that Girgis has been killed? Murdered?”
Chantal’s face grew pinched. “You’re not serious?”
I nodded. “I found him. Well, me and a couple of hotel kids. In the bushes at the Xenia. And the only way we could tell it was Girgis was by his wallet, because there wasn’t any head on the body.”
“Oh, but that’s horrible,” she whispered after a moment. She wasn’t acting this time.
“Horrible or not,” I said. I sighed silently, and blew out my lips. I got up and busied myself making myself a drink to give her a little time. “So,” I said, my back to her, “I’m here as your representative. To tell you to keep your mouth shut. About Girgis and everything you might know about Girgis.” I sat back down. “I thought it important enough to come right away. I feel a certain moral responsibility for you. Since you ‘hired’ me.”
She didn’t seem as though she was sure she had heard me. Her face was white, and she had her hands to her cheeks and was staring off across the corner of the floor. I looked at her closely. They will sometimes suddenly get sick all over themselves over a shock like that, sensitive protected ladies like her. I got up and poured her a shot of brandy. “Here.”
She took it and looked at it and then drank half of it. “I’m, uh—I’m all shocked. It’s hard to believe. I don’t know what to say. I can’t understand it. Why would somebody want to do that to him?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. Drink the rest of that. It’s not any of it my affair. Except to protect you and help you keep out of it as much as they will let you. Of course, they may not even bother you.”
“But cutting off his head? Why do a horrible thing like that?”
“I admit the head part’s pretty gruesome. I haven’t the slightest idea about why,” I said.
She drained off the rest of the snifter of brandy. “What’s going to happen?”
“I haven’t any opinion about that, either. I thought you might be able to tell me more about that than I can.”
Chantal swung around in her chair to look at me, and set the glass down. “Well, surely you don’t think I did it?”
“No. Not unless you’re a lot stronger than you look. There was almost no blood near the body. That means somebody had to carry Girgis quite a way. And he isn’t small. Even without his head.” I grinned bleakly at her.
“You’re horrible. You have no sensitivity at all.”
“It’s all been knocked out of me over the years.” I peered at her over my glass. “Now, are you going to do what I tell you?”
“Well, naturally, I’ll do what you tell me.”
“Good.” I put aside my glass and got up. “First, don’t talk to the police or any of your friends. The other thing is that I want to know everything that took place between you and Girgis. And that means everything.”
Chantal leaped to her feet. “I’ve told you a hundred times.” But she stopped when I seized her by the elbows, and squeezed her just a little.
“I said I meant everything. And I’m perfectly capable of shaking it out of you, if I have to.” I moved her gently back and forth. “So start. I think you’ve been working for him, in some capacity. So does Inspector Pekouris, I would bet.”
Chantal’s head drooped and she looked at the floor. But now she was acting again, I suspected. “Well, it’s true. I have been. I was his ‘contact,’ his ‘carrier,’ for my friends on the island who wanted hash.” Her face brightened. “You’d be surprised. There’s a lot of them.” Then she drooped again. “And—And I had an affair with him.”
“What else?” I said.
“That’s all.”
“Are you sure?”
“I didn’t want to tell you that last part. You can appreciate that. I’m not too proud of it. I’m not too proud of either, for that matter.”
“I think there’s more,” I said grimly. But I let her go. She sank onto the couch.
“There isn’t.”
I shook my head slowly. “It doesn’t make sense that way. Not any way I can figure.”
“He was blackmailing me with it! How do you think I would feel to have people know I had an affair with that upstart fisherman? That I was actually peddling hashish for him, and taking money for it?”
“Let’s start with that part. How did that happen?” I said.
“It was simple enough. I winter in Paris every year. I leave here in November, and I come back in March.”
“That’s expensive,” I said. “That takes money. If you can’t afford to pay me fifteen hundred dollars, and you need money from Girgis, how can you afford to winter in Paris every year?”
She just sort of looked at me and went on. I didn’t think it was a good idea to stop her.
“I smoked hashish in Paris. Everybody does. And I liked it, so I thought I’d try and buy some here. I asked Girgis one time, when I was renting his boat for a party, and we were discussing the arrangements. He said he’d sell me some. People smoked it at my place, and asked me if I could get them some. It just sort of happened. I never went around with it soliciting. They always came and asked me. When Girgis realized it, he was pleased. It opened up a new market for him. He said if I would handle it for him, talk about it, promote it sort of, he would give me 40 percent.”
“That sounds like a lot.”
“Actually, he said 20 percent at first. But I held out for 40.”
I looked at her in disbelief, then had to laugh. I shook my head. “I thought you didn’t need the money.”
“I always need money.”
“I thought you got a big alimony.”
She made a helpless gesture. “I entertain a lot. It goes. Honestly I don’t know where it goes.”
“And you can still afford to winter in Paris? All right, what about the affair?” I said.
Chantal looked appealingly helpless, like a small child caught at something innocently bad. “Actually, I’d rather not talk about that.”
“Okay,” I said. “Don’t talk about it.”
“It happened at the beginning of last summer. In the spring, really. When I came back. I had been ‘working’ for Girgis for a year. I was just getting over a thing with Freddy Tarkoff. Freddy had sort of left me. Well, I had always known he would. I expected him to. But it hurts just the same. And Girgis was there. I saw him a good bit because of the hashish. And he is good looking.” She paused.
I didn’t say anything.
“He came here a few times, very late at night. We met in chapels in the hills. In the woods. Sometimes on the mainland, back in from Glauros. It was all so sort of exciting, at first. For me. The selling hashish part, too. It was a lark.”
For a woman who didn’t want to talk about it, I thought she was doing a very good job.
“But as a lover, he was a good bit of a peasant,” Chantal said, and looked at me.
For a second I couldn’t believe it. It was so outrageous and such a ploy. I wondered what she would say about me some day. I had to grin, then had to laugh. “Is that supposed to imply that I am not?”
She looked at me a long moment. “Well, yes. It is,” she said defiantly. “If you insist that I spell it out for you. Anyway, why not? It’s the truth.”
I did not react. I was still trying to sniff out the truth of the whole thing. There was something wrong with it somewhere. But I couldn’t put my finger on it.
“What happened to stop it?” I said.
“He started to blackmail me,” Chantal said promptly. She was incredible. But then, she went on. “And I was tired of him. Oh, I’m sure he was tired of me, too. But I told him I wanted to stop working for him.” She seemed to perk up suddenly. “You see, that was what the blackmail was. He wasn’t blackmailing me only for the money. He was blackmailing me to go on working for him.”
There was a silence. She seemed to be waiting for me to react. I pursed my lips. “Well, you’re out of it now. Stay out.”
Another silence. “Do you think they’ll try to involve me?”
“Honestly, I don’t think they will. But that’s what I don’t know. If they go digging deep into his hashish operations, you might become involved. Who else knows about all this?”
“No one. No one at all.”
“How about that Greek sidekick of his, that works on the Polaris with him?”
She shook her head.
“How about Kirk?”
Suddenly she had an odd alert look about her, like that of a startled deer.
“That was why I wanted to tell you first,” I said. “If there was any shock. It’s a good thing I did. If you reacted like you did.”
“I’m grateful. I’ll be careful.”
“I wanted to tell you not to say anything. To anyone. About any of it.”
“Were you planning on staying?” Chantal said. “I mean, after you finished your business?”
I turned my head to look at her. Actually, I hadn’t been. I thought I had made up my mind on that in the afternoon, when I had called her. But it took a lot of balls, or whatever the feminine equivalent, for her to come right out and ask me.
I knew damn well she wasn’t doing it to pay me anything. For all my trouble. I remembered the satisfaction her back showed last night when she rolled over to go back to sleep. She just liked to have a man around.
Chantal swung on me suddenly. “Let me tell you something about you,” she said, defiantly. “Why can’t you just screw me and stop worrying? You Americans are all so much alike. You don’t owe me anything. Any more than I owe you anything. I haven’t asked you for anything, have I? Why do you Americans all have to go through all this self-torture? You all have had the same thing beaten into your heads by somebody.”
I had to grin. I hoped my face didn’t look haggard. “You’re absolutely right,” I said. I nodded. “You are. Absolutely.”
“Well?”
“Yes,” I said. “I was. In actual fact. I was thinking about staying.”
“And that’s what you’ve been standing there brooding about so lugubriously?” she demanded.
Actually, it wasn’t. Actually, I had been thinking about that nude bathing scene I had witnessed so long ago, this evening. Sweet Marie sweetly nude, and all those other girls nude, and all of it. Youth. What was it about a young body? Why did a young body seem so much better than an old body?
“Yes. No. Actually,” I said, “I was worrying because I was afraid of becoming too involved with you.”
“Well, don’t. I wouldn’t have you on a platter. As a husband. And you don’t have to be afraid of me.” She came across to me, and crept herself into my arms. “I’m glad you’re staying. I’m all shaken up. I’m a little scared.”
I looked down at her, and then, gently, wrapped her up in my big strong manly arms.
I was pretty sure it was going to be as elegantly animal tonight as it had been last night.
I wasn’t disappointed.