SONNY WAS GROANING a little bit when I climbed back on board. I left him alone. I suspected he was playing possum, and wasn’t really unconscious now at all. I didn’t really care.
It made me crazy mad every time I looked at him. But there wasn’t anything to do about it. Just as there wasn’t anything to do about Marie, now, either. He had done it and it was done.
I could no longer disguise that I was limping with my bad side. The pain just hurt me too much. I busied myself with getting us out of there. I took in the bow and stern lines, started the motor, backed into the slot Sonny had tried to use, and headed us out in the sunshine for the little white-water waves of the entrance.
Sonny lay without moving. He groaned every once in a while. I hoped they were genuine groans. I had no sympathy for him at all. I hated everything about him.
I had figured it out last night at Chantal’s. I had known who it was since then. But after that I had been so preoccupied with figuring out how to trap him, and then doing it, that it had become an abstraction. A game.
Now, though, it was real enough. Looking at him lying there, alive and breathing and solid, just as if he still had the right to call himself a human being, it was plenty real.
It was what Chantal had said about Jane Duval having an affair with Marie that had switched on the lightbulb inside my head.
I had known about that, but I had never looked at it in that special light. Jane had had an affair with Marie. Jane had had an affair with Kirk. She had had an affair with Girgis. She had had an affair with Con Taylor. Two of them were dead. It was the juxtaposition.
I had been looking for Girgis’s murderer in the area of his hashish and heroin smuggling. Marie, who had worked for him, had to be tied in. I hadn’t looked in the area of his amatory exploits. Nor in Marie’s.
Once I saw it, it became clear as daylight.
I couldn’t even legitimately blame myself for not saving Marie. I could feel guilty, and regretful. But it wasn’t rational, only personal. Sorry, Marie. Sorry I’m so stupid.
But who would believe that on an island as chic and sophisticated on the one side, and as orgiastic and free love preaching on the other, somebody would kill two people over a piece of ass?
Once I knew it it was easy to piece it together. Girgis had been killed the first night I had visited Chantal. That was the same night Sonny returned from Athens with Jane. He had been hanging around the taverna before dinner. When I came back later and met Kirk for the first time, Sonny was gone and had disappeared.
Marie had been killed the day after my fight with the hippies outside the Cloud 79. It was Sonny who had found me. I had given him the next day off. He knew I was going to stay home. He had asked for the day off, in fact.
So he was available both times.
It was slim evidence. Slimmer than what Pekouris and I had against Chuck and his machete. But I didn’t need any more evidence. I knew Chuck hadn’t done it. And I knew Sonny was guilty; in exactly the same way I knew it was Marie’s body I was going to find when I walked out on the beach at Georgio’s.
Sonny, the hippie. Sonny, the pacifist. Sonny the free-love advocate. Sonny the anti-violence man. Sonny the millionaire, who only lived off what he earned. Sonny, the boatman. My Sonny. My “Today the university, tomorrow the world” Sonny. Who in the past week had with great craftiness devoted himself to trying to become my friend. He wasn’t, I guessed, even worth being called despicable. But I sure didn’t like him.
Every time I looked at him, I saw Sweet Marie—Marie in the water, her nearly cut off arm spouting blood, trying to avoid Sonny’s speedboat, as it roared down to make its second pass. Marie trying to jerk her head away, and hold pressure on her spouting, ruined arm at the same time. I wondered again if she had known? Had she recognized the boat? Had she thought it was an accident, the first time? Had she seen Sonny?
He pretended to come out of it as we came out the other side of the rough chop at the entrance. He began to groan more and more. Then he raised his head. Then he tried to move his arms. He pretended surprise. But he spoke too soon. He’d been faking, all right.
“What happened?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Please untie me. Please get this rope off me. It’s killing me. I can’t stand it.”
I didn’t say anything. We were about rounding the point.
“I said, please untie me. At least let me sit up. This position is murdering me. I’m getting cramps.”
I said nothing. I went on running the boat. It didn’t take much running, out here.
“Please, at least let me sit up. I’m dying like this. I’m so uncomfortable it’s killing me, damn it!”
I put the two holding ropes on the helm bar. I didn’t hurry. I untied the cord between his hands and feet and let him straighten out. I got him up on the bench and tied his hands to the stanchion behind him.
“Can’t you untie my feet? My legs are cramping.”
“No.” I sat back down. I left the holding ropes on.
“Where are you taking me?”
“In to Tsatsos Port, to the police station.”
“It won’t do you any good. I’ll deny everything.”
“Go ahead,” I said.
“They won’t testify against me. Jane can’t, and I’ll buy Kirk off. It will be your word against mine.”
“Fine.”
“You hate me, don’t you?”
“What would make you happiest? If I said yes, or no?”
“If you said yes,” Sonny said.
“Then, no. I don’t hate you.”
“Yes, you do. I know you do.”
“Stop playing games, Sonny,” I said. “You’ve been playing games too long. You’re the result of what we socio-criminologists call over-crystallized self-indulgence. I suppose you can’t help it. But I don’t give a shit.”
He didn’t say anything to that, for a while.
“You know what they’re going to do to you?” I said. “They’re going to take you out in the prison yard, and stand you up against the wall, and put a blindfold on you, and a squad of Greeks are going to shoot rifle bullets into your chest cavity. The trouble is they don’t know anything about indulgence in Greece yet. They’re not an affluent society. You should have waited till you got home to kill your wife’s lovers.”
“Do you believe in the death penalty?” he said.
“No. I don’t,” I said. “But I’m not a Greek. I’d lock you up for life and make a guinea pig out of you, and study you to see what went wrong with you somewhere back down the line.”
“I believe in the death penalty,” he said. “I didn’t used to. But I’ve come around to it. Lately.”
“Well,” I said, “you better. My advice to you is to think of it as a game, Sonny. Just a game. Like all the other games you play. Like when you ran down Marie in your speedboat. Or when you cut off Girgis’s head and buried it. It’s only a game. That way it’ll keep you from crapping and peeing in your pants when they stand you up.”
“You’re a pretty cruel son of a bitch,” he said.
“I guess that’s what I am,” I said. I let him breathe a while. “You want to talk about it?”
He turned his head at me and glared. “I’ll tell you nothing, you fascist pig son of a bitch.”
I let go the roped helm and stepped to him and all in one movement right-hooked him on the jaw. It slewed his head around until his tied hands brought him up short. It wasn’t much of a punch. I was too weak, and hurt too much. It probably hurt me more than it hurt him. But it gave me a great deal of satisfaction.
“Mind your manners,” I said, and sat back down. I was trembling, but I didn’t know whether from fury, or my side, or plain fatigue.
“That’s what I mean,” Sonny said. “You see what I mean? You’re supposed to treat criminal prisoners with humanity. I know my rights. I don’t have to talk.”
“Okay. Don’t talk about it,” I said.
Then he started to cry.
“You don’t know what it was like,” he said after a while.
I didn’t answer.
“I used to lay awake nights,” Sonny said. “Night after night. Thinking about it. Thinking about her. And them. You didn’t any of you understand her. I was the only one. I knew her needs.”
“Didn’t you have other women of your own?”
“For a while. But I didn’t want them. I wanted her. I knew it was wrong, to want one woman. I couldn’t help it.”
“When did you first decide to kill Girgis?”
“Coming home on the plane from Athens. I was just sitting there. I decided to kill him first. He was such an evil bastard.”
“And then you just went down the line,” I said.
“No. I was going to take them chronologically. But it became too difficult. Then when you had that fight, I knew you wouldn’t be able to go out or go diving. And I knew Marie was going. Actually, Kirk came before Marie, chronologically. But it became too difficult to adhere to a strict chronology. So I took Marie second.”
I bit my teeth together for a minute. “Why did you cut off Girgis’s head?”
“That was an idea of the moment. I hated his guts so much. But then I thought it might make it look like a gang killing, for the hashish. It’s not as easy to do as you might think.”
“No,” I said. “I guess not. Where did you bury it?”
“It’s in that chapel yard, back from the head of the draw, in that grove of trees. I put it under one of those ancient altar stones in the yard. The knife’s with it.”
“Did you kill him first? Or was it the knife killed him?”
“I killed him first. I hit him with a rock, and then I choked him.”
“Did the throat pump when you cut it, or did it just flow out?”
“It pumped. But that doesn’t matter. He was already dead. To all intents and purposes.”
“I guess you don’t feel bad about any of it, do you?” I said.
“In a way I do. I hated to have to do it. You know, I never really minded the one-nighters, like Steve, and all the others. It was the ones like Girgis and Kirk and Marie, and Con Taylor, who tried to have real love affairs with her. And talk to her about love. And He to her. Those were the ones who really didn’t understand her.”
“Marie didn’t talk about love to her,” I said. “Maybe she talked to Marie about it.”
“Oh, yes she did. There’s no question in my mind about that.”
I didn’t argue. “Just for the record, how many times did you have to hit Marie?” I said.
“I hit her twice. But I think the once would have been enough anyway.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I think it would.”
“I’m really a martyr, that’s the truth,” he said, as if he were trying on a new suit for size. “A martyr is what I am. Someday there will be freedom. Real freedom. Complete freedom.”
“Did she yell?” I said. I found I had this thing about her, that I hoped she hadn’t panicked. That she had gone out cool and clean and thinking clearly.
“No,” Sonny said. “Or if she did, I didn’t hear her. Of course, it would be hard to hear, with the motor.”
What with all the pauses, we had passed Georgio’s and rounded the lighthouse, and now we were approaching the Port jetty, jutting out whitely into the blue water. Lots of small boats were out, and lots of people dotted the swimming beaches.
“Well, this is where you get off, Sonny,” I said. I slacked off on the throttle.
“I guess you think I’m evil, hunh?” Sonny said. “People always think that of martyrs.”
“I don’t know, Sonny,” I said, “I guess I do. I don’t know.”
“You do. You people always do. Look at Savonarola. He was fighting the decadence of his time, too.”
“Yes,” I said. “Savonarola was the one who made fanatic believers out of all the kids and got them to turn in their parents.”
“Will you shake hands with me before I go in?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll shake hands with you. But not until I untie you.”
I pulled around the jetty and cut the throttle again, to enter the Port.