KIRK HEADED WEST. He appeared to be going on around the island, and he stayed pretty close in. I let him get half a mile ahead. Then I turned from my Glauros heading and ran back in close to shore. Until a point put me out of sight of him.
I settled down to following him from close in to shore. I would throttle up along all the concave parts where he couldn’t see me. Then I’d throttle down and sneak around each point cautiously. I tried to time it so that he would just be disappearing around the next point ahead.
It was easier tailing, in one way. The bad thing was that he might change course, and turn in somewhere when I couldn’t see him; and I might run up on him. That was the chance I had to take.
But he didn’t. And I didn’t. It worked perfectly.
I noticed Sonny watching me closely. I was having fun, and enjoying myself, and turned my head and winked at him. He didn’t grin back. He looked shocked, as though it upset him that I should be enjoying it.
About a mile before he would have reached St. Friday’s Kirk did turn in. I cut my throttle immediately and cut in to shore out of sight. Under very slow throttle I sneaked up on him until I was only two coves behind him.
We were around on the seaward side of the island now. Around here there was just about nothing. A couple of points of the island stuck way out up ahead. There was a rocky islet about a mile off shore, bare and too small for trees. The rest was open sea. The only other thing visible anywhere was an old freighter beating its way west and flying a Turkish flag.
I figured that had to be the boat.
I had stopped us behind a rock spur that hid us from Polaris. Sonny had binoculars aboard and I took them and waded ashore and climbed the spur and stuck my head up over it.
Kirk, with glasses of his own, was climbing up the headland he had stopped at. When he got to its brow he planted himself and put his glasses on the Turkish ship. I lay and watched him through my glasses while he watched the ship through his.
The Turkish ship came on slowly, chugging through the flat sea. At about St. Friday’s it turned slightly inland and began to make a slight curve closer to the island.
There wasn’t any doubt in my mind any longer. I put the glasses off of Kirk and onto the ship, and watched it.
When the Turkish ship was not too far out from the rocky islet, I saw three flashes wink out from its side, and then saw something white hit the water. I marked the spot, as best I could, then swung back to Kirk.
Kirk was watching the ship steadily, marking the spot in his own mind I guessed. Then he put his glasses down on their strap against his chest and started to climb back down to Polaris. Out at sea the ship began to curve slowly back onto its former course.
I dropped my own glasses and scrambled down the rocks and waded back out to the Daisy Mae.
I had figured Kirk wouldn’t dive for it right away, with the ship still there. I didn’t know if he would dive for it in a little while. If he did, I was screwed for getting a look at it, and could only continue following him.
What I expected was that he would go out and maybe dive or swim around to locate it and drop a marker buoy on it and come back later and pick it up, maybe at dusk, or after dark without lights. When it was safer. But Kirk didn’t even do that.
In a couple of minutes Polaris came chugging back, presumably heading back to Tsatsos Port. Apparently he had done the operation enough, with or without Girgis, to know exactly where to look. Or else he had a better sea eye than I did, which was probable. As Polaris chugged past our spur, I motioned Sonny down and we both froze. In another couple of minutes Polaris chugged on out of sight behind the next point.
I waited fifteen or twenty minutes.
“All right, let’s go out and have a look at it,” I said.
I wasn’t as confident as I sounded. I’d expected Kirk would leave a marker buoy. I had made a rough triangulation by eye between the islet and the nearest point, but I could easily be four or five hundred yards off when I got out there. What bothered me most was how much air I had in the lung tank. I didn’t dare use it to search.
The only thing I could do was park the boat and make a series of widening circles around it with just a mask, flippers and snorkel. If I didn’t find it, I would have to have Sonny tow me around. That would be even colder. But I was sure the white flash I’d seen hitting the water was a marker panel to the drop itself.
Out by the islet I jockeyed the Daisy Mae back and forth, sighting from islet to point until I thought I about had it. Then I put on Sonny’s old sweatshirt and went into the water. The water was cold.
I found it on the third pass. I was already freezing cold. Swimming about a hundred yards out from the boat, I saw something white way off to my right. The bottom was 80 or 90 feet. The square package lay wedged between two dead coral ridges, the luminous white marker panel floating maybe twenty feet up, above the package. The white panel was what I had seen hitting the water. I waved for Sonny to bring the boat and got into the lung and wrapped a line around my arm and started down.
Almost immediately I had trouble with the leaky regulator. The whole dive would have made a great Red Skelton comedy. With me playing Skelton and Sonny playing Keenan Wynn.
There are two kinds of leaky regulators. One kind is temperamental and cranky near the surface, but gets better and harder and tighter and cleaner the deeper you take it. The pressure helps it. The other kind just leaks more and more as the pressure rises. Naturally, with Sonny, I had the second kind.
By the time I got to 60 feet I was having to gulp a swallow of water with every breath, and breathe very slowly to get any air through the bitter tasting water. I silently cursed Sonny’s slipshod way of living and swam on down. His goddamned regulator was indicative of his whole undisciplined life.
But after 60 feet it leveled off and didn’t get much worse, as they usually do. Good old Boyle’s law. I was glad I knew it. The volume of a gas is inversely proportional to its total pressure. If I hadn’t known it, I’d have given up at 60 feet.
On the bottom I warped the line around the package’s tie ropes. I took a quick glance at my depth gauge and saw it read the equivalent of 92 feet. I was shaking so hard from cold I could hardly tie the line.
I left the line warped to the package and started up breathing as little as possible. I watched the boat’s silhouette get larger gratefully.
Once again I realized about myself that only a moron would have tried what I’d just done, with a regulator that bad.
On deck I jumped up and down to try and get warm. At least my crotch wasn’t hurting me much any more. My side sent me occasional flashes. I ate Sonny out roundly and savagely for his slop-ass, mushy way of living. He only looked at me.
“What do you think he’s doing?” he said, when I’d finished. That was all it meant to him.
It was my turn to look at him. “It’s hard to say,” I said.
“Well, you must have some theory?”
“Did you see the ship?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see it signal?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what do you think he was doing?”
“I don’t know. Playing some cops and robbers game.”
“Well, what do you think I was doing down there, in your goddamned leaky regulator, taking a chance with my goddamned life?”
“I don’t know. Getting something.”
“Well, goddam it, haul it up, you dumb bastard, and find out!” I shouted.
By the time he got it to the surface I was in better shape. At least I wasn’t frozen. It was heavy, and from the surface to the deck I had to help him.
The package easily weighed 150 lbs, and was about the size of a sack of cement. It was elaborately wrapped with waterproof wrapping. I put myself to untying and unwrapping it carefully so it could be rewrapped without anyone knowing. Inside the waterproof wrapping was another waterproof sack. Inside the sack were smaller sacks of waterproof plastic. Inside these was a crumbly brown stuff that had the look and texture of brown sugar.
I picked some of it up and sniffed it.
“Well,” I said. “That’s it, all right.”
“What is it?”
“That’s morphine base. The stuff they make pure heroin out of.” I looked up at him, and saw he wasn’t getting the import of it. “They don’t refine this. They just change it chemically. In other words, it doesn’t diminish in bulk when it becomes heroin. So they’ve got themselves over 150 pounds of pure heroin here, when they put it through the lab. And you can set up a little lab anywhere. In an abandoned farmhouse,” I said, and looked off into the diminishing afternoon.
The sun was almost down to the horizon. “Or in an old villa,” I added.
I was thinking about something else, too. Kirk mightn’t have killed Girgis and Marie over a petty hashish racket. But he might have killed them over a million-dollar heroin operation.
I began to rewrap the package carefully.
“What are we going to do with it?” Sonny said.
“Nothing,” I said. “Put it back. Then we’re going to watch where they take it.”
“So you are a nark, after all!” Sonny said triumphantly. “Pete Gruner was right about you all along!”
I just looked at him, and didn’t answer. If he wanted to think I was a nark temporarily, I wasn’t going to stop him.
“How much is this worth?” He kicked the package lightly.
“As heroin, delivered in France, about $300,000,” I said. “But the price goes up, when it’s delivered in New York. And when it hits the street, it goes up a lot more.”
Sonny whistled. Then he began to slap his arms against his chest. “Jesus, I’m cold.”
“You’re cold!” I hollered. I had to bite my lip.
He was like all the rest of them. They were the ones who were always harping about sensitivity all the time. But when it came to the fact, their enormous sensitivity never extended more than six inches out beyond their own skins.
When we’d dumped the package back in the water, I ran us back to the rock spur we had hidden behind before.
Kirk was quite a long time coming back. It got dark.
“How long are we going to have to stay here?” Sonny said, after the first hour.
“Till Kirk comes,” I said.
“Well, at least let me have one cigarette.”
“No smoking,” I said sharply.
“Well, can’t I go below? And have just one puff?”
“Do you want to find yourself in the middle of a gun battle?”
“No.”
“Then don’t smoke. I want to smoke myself.”
He complained about just about everything else, too. He was tired. He was cold. He was hungry. He couldn’t complain about being thirsty, since there was plenty to drink, water as well as other things. I consoled myself with a couple of Scotches and listened to Sonny, and thought what a great thing a couple of years in the Army would have been for him. Or even a couple years in the Boy Scouts.
Kirk arrived about an hour after that.
He was running completely without lights. This was strictly illegal, but it wasn’t as illegal as what he was after. There were a couple of sudden bright sweeps of a search-beam out by the rocky islet, that struck at us like screams, in the darkness. Then the motor stopped. I caught a glow on the sea’s surface of a powerful underwater flash. Then silence. Ten minutes later the motor started up again.
I listened to the fading motor carefully. It was moving west, on around the island, and staying in very close. I was pretty sure I knew where they were going, if that was their heading.
“Aren’t we going to follow them?” Sonny said in a stage whisper.
“No,” I said. In a normal voice. “I think I know where they’re going. We’ll go around the other way. It’s a lot safer.”
I waited until I could no longer hear their motor and fired us up. For a little while I ran without lights, then switched the running lights on. We were headed back toward Tsatsos Port.
When we passed the town, it was all lit up and alive with people. Music and voices carried out to us across the water.
Further along at the yacht harbor the lights of Dmitri’s taverna came out to us, and the blare of his jukebox.
“It’s lonely, isn’t it?” Sonny said beside me.
“Like this? No. It’s great,” I said.
Around the sturdy little lighthouse, solidly throwing out its beacon to night mariners, Georgio’s taverna made another landmark, easy to steer by.
When we were almost to the point at the eastern corner, I let off on the throttle and steered us in, and ran us in on a moonlit beach. We dropped the anchor out behind us into the sand bottom. I tied the bow line to a tree. Before I got off, I got my gun out of the polyethylene kitchen bag and put it in my pocket.
We had to cross two ridges, wooded with scrub and a few low pines. I didn’t mind. I might have run us a little closer but I didn’t want to take the chance. Anyway, there was a nice comfortable path in the moonlight. Sonny Duval complained anyway.
When we got to the top of the second ridge, I motioned to Sonny and slowed us down.
When I peered over the crest, we were looking down on the old villa owned by Kronitis—or at least by one of his corporations—which I had noted so long ago with Chantal and filed away in my head.
Lights were on in the villa. And in the beautifully appointed little cove lay the launch from the Agoraphobe, and Polaris. Both were moored to the elaborate little concrete docks I had noted before. The whole cove was practically invisible, except for a few yards from directly out to sea. And even then it was hardly noticeable.
I knelt by a scrub clump and watched for five minutes. Men moved from the Polaris up to the villa carrying things in their arms. At the villa there was an outside cellar door with light coming from it. The men carried whatever it was they were carrying down into the cellar. Then three men ran down the long staircase of concrete steps to the cove and boarded the launch. Jim Kirk and two men stood on the patio at the top and waved them off. The launch pulled out and headed back north, toward the lighthouse and the yacht harbor, the way we had just come. Kirk and the other two went into the villa.
“Okay. Let’s go home,” I said.
Three-quarters of an hour later we rolled into the yacht harbor looking like two innocent men who had been out night fishing. It didn’t matter, there was almost no one there to see us. The taverna was closing up.
I sent Sonny off. Then I caught one of the last of the horsecabs left at the stand by the taverna, and told him to take me up to the house of the Countess Chantal von Anders.