THE LUNCH CROWD WAS GONE and Sonny Duval was sitting waiting at the taverna like a big mustachioed frog, when we arrived back. He and Jane had gotten back from the Construction, he said, and Jane was out on the big caique cooking the baby’s supper.
Marie sat and had a drink with us, and spent five minutes telling Sonny what a great guy I was and what a great skin-diver. I hustled her into a horsecab with her duffel bag and sent her back to town, and told her I would see her later. I would leave the fish with Dmitrios for her, for her to sell. I paid the driver.
“The police were up at the Construction all afternoon,” Sonny said when I sat back down. “They went through everything, and everybody, like a finetooth comb. They wanted to know what we were doing up there. They checked our papers.”
“What did you expect? You didn’t have to go up there.”
“We wanted to,” Sonny said. “Jane wanted to.”
“Then don’t complain.”
“They’re coming down here to the boat to see us. Probably tomorrow.”
I was hardly even listening to him. I was still thinking regretfully about Marie, back there on the beach. And I was thinking about something else: I was thinking about what she’d told me about those two giants of hippie living, Chuck and Steve.
“Listen, there’s something I’d like for you to do for me,” I said. “I want to go up to the Construction. I want to go to Steve’s pad. Can you take me there?”
“I guess so. But are you sure you want to go up there? You’re not very popular up there.”
“That’s why I don’t want to ask directions. You can direct me.”
“All right,” he said, grudgingly. “But it’s hard to land the boat up there.”
“Well take a horsecab. There’s a couple here.”
In the horsecab he was silent for a while. If he was embarrassed by my having observed the unsubtle return of Kirk and Jane at noontime, he didn’t show it. Then he said, “When are we gonna go spearfishing again?”
“We went yesterday. You weren’t even interested. I don’t know,” I said. “In a couple of days.” At the moment I didn’t care if I ever went spearfishing again.
“I didn’t know you were supposed to be so good. Listen, I suppose it’s useless, as well as an imposition, to ask,” he began.
“Nothing special,” I said. “I just want to see him in his natural habitat. He interests me.”
“Sure,” derisively. “If you want to know what I—”
“I don’t,” I said.
“Pete says he thinks you’re a U.S. Government man, posing as a private eye.”
I looked at him. “Pete Gruner said that?” I was mad. If Pete Gruner was going around bad mouthing me as a Government man, it was a sure sign he was one himself. Or was it? And it was about as low as you could get.
“Pete’s a guy who’s been around. Although there are things about him I don’t like. But I’m beginning to think he’s right, about you.” He grinned, “Jane thinks so.”
“Let me tell you something about Jane,” I said brusquely. “What Jane doesn’t know about everything would fill many large volumes at Bennington. Jane is a spoiled brat.”
“You just don’t want to understand Jane. None of you do. She’s a threat to all you male supremacists.”
I stared at him in a kind of amazement. I had to snort. “Male supremacist? That’s me, all right.” I thought about Marie. If this was bait for an argument, I wasn’t going to bite. But wait till I got hold of damned Pete Gruner.
“Listen, the U. S. Government wouldn’t be sending an agent down here because of a bunch of dropouts living in an abandoned Greek construction site and smoking hash,” I said. “Agents are expensive.”
“There might be other things,” Sonny said with a secretive leer.
“Yes? We must talk about that,” I said. But when he opened his mouth, I put my hand up and added quickly, “Some other day.”
The horsecab was just passing the good old Hotel Xenia, scene of so much excitement in the life of Lobo Davies. In another minute he let us off at the foot of the same draw I had stood at the foot of that morning, with Pekouris.
I paid him off. We started to climb the same little path I had climbed in the morning.
It was dusk now, and falling dark fast. We climbed past cook fires, and hippie people moving around them. A smell of stew meat carried to us. We were climbing along the outside edge of the construction site. Sonny stopped.
“It’s right up there,” Sonny said, pointing. “Fourth row from here, the second door in. You’ll have to go around to the back to find the stairs.
“I’d stay away from those fires and getting recognized by any of these kids, if I were you,” he added.
“Okay. Thanks. I’ll go ahead alone from here.”
“You might get into a fight, you know.”
“If I do, I’ll run.”
He scuffed his foot in the raw dirt. “I suppose there’s no use in asking to go with you?” He looked at me and saw there wasn’t. “Do you want me to wait for you down below?”
“There’s no reason. I can find my own way back. Assuming I get back.” I grinned.
He stood a moment reluctantly.
“Don’t worry, I’ll pay for your horsecab back,” I said.
As if that clinched it, he turned and started down off the hill.
I looked after him, then started to climb on. Around me the hippies were moving about their fires. At one fire I saw Georgina Taylor’s sun-dried prune face and pop eyes, laughing and drinking something from a tin cup. At another a whole row of young American faces shone at me in the flickery light. Someone chorded a guitar and sang folk music. I didn’t know how I could tell they were American, but I could tell. Perhaps because of their inordinate naïveté. Maybe they weren’t so innocent, American kids. But they were sure as hell naïve.
Nobody was paying the slightest attention to me. I stopped and stepped in under one of the units on stilts, to watch a moment. It all seemed innocent enough. It certainly wasn’t any orgy. Not even of folk music. It was hard to believe that they might all jump on me and start beating the hell out of me, if they knew I was there. But I believed it to be at least a strong possibility.
Then I heard a voice nearby that I recognized. It was coming from one of the housing units over my head, and it was the voice of Chuck, Steve’s myopic sidekick.
No one was noticing me, so I sneaked around until I could see into the unit through one of the window holes that nobody had ever put a frame on.
Inside, Chuck and his glasses were sitting on a pile of cushions made from rags and old blankets. They were smoking a hookah and had a homemade turban on their head.
The hookah obviously contained hash. And Chuck was high. Four chubby, wholesome-faced, little American college girls were rushing around ministering to his every demand. And his demands were many. The little girls looked pathetic, as well as unattractive, in their loose-flowing, dirty Mother Hubbard dresses. They all undoubtedly had fat thighs.
The scene was so bizarre that I stood a few moments transfixed, looking at it. One of those aluminum pack frames with sack attached leaned against the wall near Chuck, and leaning by it was a big South American type machete in a wood scabbard. The famous machete. Under the circumstances, it stood out.
I stood looking another minute, mainly at the machete. The police hadn’t picked it up this afternoon? Then I slipped away, and headed up along the outside of the debris-strewn construction site, to the row of units Sonny had pointed out to me.
A light flickered from the apartment unit I was seeking, and I could hear voices and the low strumming of a guitar. Further up and around to the back I found the stairs Sonny had mentioned, and followed them up to the outside terrace along the front of the 4-unit building.
Standing on the porch-terrace I was now 30 feet above the sloping ground. There was no railing.
I made no attempt to hide myself when I came to the right door.
I had no idea what I was going to say. I hadn’t come up here with anything in particular to say. I had just decided to come and play it by ear.
The light was coming from two short candles stuck onto saucers. By them, young Steve was reading some kind of gibberish hippie poetry about the hard life of a longshoreman, from a mimeograph-printed poetry magazine.
There were six people in the room. Three young men and another girl, in addition to Steve and Diane. It was the new girl who was strumming the guitar, in a sort of accompaniment to Steve’s reading. Steve, bare to the waist, was truly beautiful physically, with his fine build and blond mane, until he looked up with those dead-seeming, non-seeing eyes.
“Hello! Is this a private party?” I said in a chirpy way. I stepped inside. “Or can any old square sit in on it?”