The Sun Place

by Ray Connolly

  For eight years, since coming down from Cambridge with a middling degree in English, she had been working as a journalist, first on a London daily newspaper, and more recently as a European staff writer on Night and Day, a weekly magazine. Night and Day was the latest attempt by New York publishing interests to steal some prestige and revenue from Time and Newsweek. She was paid well, and courted frequently, and her life ran on the smooth wheels of the successful single woman, very discreet, short-lived affairs being interspersed with successions of men ever eager to take her to dinner.

  The telephone rang at nine-thirty. It was Kurtz, the London editor.

  “Cassandra, how do you feel about a vacation in the Bahamas?”

  “If it’s with you … no, thank you.”

  Kurtz laughed. He was in the middle of a divorce and had been trying to get Cassandra into bed for months. “No such luck. New York wants you to go on a Club Village vacation. They keep hearing rumors about a place called Elixir, and they think you should investigate.”

  “Why don’t they send someone from New York office?” asked Cassandra. It seemed silly to fly her all the way from London when the Bahamas were so near America.

  “They know your French is pretty good, and it’s a French organization. Apparently there’s no one available in New York now with good French. That’s a sign of the times, isn’t it?”

  “What’s the angle?” Cassandra was staring out of her basement kitchen at the domed Greek Orthodox Church across the road. A stream of water sprayed across the glass from a broken gutter.

  “It seems that there are all kinds of fun and games going on, sex and drugs parties, people missing … all that stuff. They want you to turn up as a regular girl on vacation and see what you can find out.”

  “Since when do I work for the National Enquirer?”

  “Come on, it isn’t like that. Club Village are expected to link up with one of the U.S. airlines soon and go American. New York want you to tell the people what they’ll be getting if they go on a Club Village vacation.”

  “Sounds like a nice way to pay the rent.”

  “Right. Book yourself a couple of weeks in the sun. There’s a Club Village office in Bond Street. Don’t tell them you’re a journalist unless you have to. Okay?”

  “Right. Do I get a couple of new bikinis on expenses?”

  “If I say no, you’ll do it anyway and I’ll never know. So I guess the answer is yes. But don’t forget it’s a working vacation. They want a five-thousand-word piece about life in a Club Village.”

  “No problem. Let’s hope they use it,” said Cassandra. Bidding Kurtz good-bye, she hung up.

  She drove the couple of miles to the Club Village booking office, where a French woman in elegant wire-thin silver necklace and bracelets greeted her.

  “Fifteen days in Elixir … yes. That should be all right. We’ll get confirmation from Paris this afternoon, so leave me your telephone number. I’m afraid you must pay in full today … if you want to leave tomorrow.”

  Cassandra passed her American Express card, and the booking clerk went to check on her credit.

  Cassandra looked around. The office had a twenty-first-century chrome-and-comfort Gallic elegance. On the walls huge pictures of beautiful creatures with batteries of white, even teeth and end-of-vacation tans, smiled and surfed in exotic settings.

  “You must understand that we don’t have single rooms in Club Village,” said the booking clerk as she sashayed back into the room. “We put all single guests in with someone with whom we think they will be compatible.”

  Cassandra’s eyebrows rose. “You mean I have to share?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you do single rooms? You must have a great many single people on vacation.”

  “It is our policy to encourage single people to make friends. Of course, sometimes people don’t like their roommates, or they meet someone else they would rather spend their vacation with … and then you can change rooms.”

  Cassandra shrugged and signed her bill. Nine hundred and thirty-five pounds, and she was going to have to share a room with a stranger.

  Eleven

  It was a busy morning as Quatre Bras waited for Hardin to arrive from Geneva. Girardot telephoned to explain that he had dealt quietly and effectively with the Corsican threat on the previous evening.

  “I told him that if one hair of a Club Village guest or employee was hurt we’d have his balls for the bourguignon,” he told Quatre Bras. Then Ernst Ronay burst in to demand a full explanation of the rumors going around the Bourse and Wall Street that Quatre Bras had already discussed a deal with Universal-American Airlines.

  “That is not true, Ernst,” said Quatre Bras, wishing to God that his prospective investors could learn to keep quiet.

  “But you have been involved in discussions.”

  “I have talked about the potential of the American zone,” Quatre Bras said guardedly.

  “Don’t you ever think that you owe your board the courtesy of knowing to whom you are talking?” replied Ronay.

  “No,” said Quatre Bras. “If we decide to go into the United States, then it will be a board decision. I don’t need a board decision to tell me to whom I may and may not talk.”

  Ronay shrugged his thin, high shoulders and strode out of the room, every inch of him displaying the unconscious class revulsion with which he regarded Quatre Bras.

  At precisely midday, Quatre Bras’ dark, plump, pretty secretary, showed Hardin into the room. Quatre Bras did not rise. Hardin did not offer his hand. He simply smiled and waited.

  “Sit down, James,” said Quatre Bras.

  Quatre Bras always insisted on calling his staff by their first names. Hardin looked him straight in the eye, not smiling. Quatre Bras liked that. He was uncomfortable with men who felt intimidated by him.

  “We have a problem, James, and I want you to solve it. Furthermore, I want you to solve it with the utmost discretion. Take your orders directly from me, and report only to me. Understand?”

  Hardin nodded. He had been noticing again the vast size of the older man’s shoulders.

  Blinking, Hardin tried to concentrate. Beta’s appetites during the night had robbed him of sleep, and it had been a two-hour drive that morning to catch the Paris plane. He had had a couple of midmorning Scotches on the flight, and was feeling a little light-headed. He hoped the secretary had not smelled the Scotch. If so, she would certainly report it to Quatre Bras. She was his eyes and ears, not because she was officially a spy, but becaused she loved her boss with a passion no wife could ever maintain—the passion of the sexually dispossessed.

  Quatre Bras was talking. Briefly he outlined the mysterious death of Pagett and the need for a chef de village who was completely unknown to all the CVs working in that village. The season files told him that Hardin had never worked with any of the Elixir people before, although it was possible he had run into one or two somewhere along the way.

  He handed Hardin a list of the Elixir staff. Quickly Hardin went through it. As always, Quatre Bras had done his homework. Hardin had never worked with any of them before.

  “What I want you to do, James, is to find out what is wrong at Elixir and put it right. I want you to clean it up. At the moment the Bahamian authorities are not too interested in what happened to Pagett. But if there is any more trouble, a lot of people will begin to take a close look at the village.”

  “Have you any ideas at all about what I might be facing?”

  Quatre Bras drummed his fingers on the table. “No, James. All I can ask you to do is to take care of yourself. Watch out. When a village goes bad it can get very sick before the cure is found.”

  Quatre Bras stood up. “I’m depending on you, James,” he said, and finally pushed out a hand to be shaken.

  Hardin pretended he hadn’t noticed. He was damned if he was going to shake hands with a man who was doing his best to place him in acute danger.

  Part II

  Twelve
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  The island of Elixir had been more or less overlooked for the best part of five hundred years. Columbus did not discover it in 1492, although Bahamians claim he bumped into San Salvador, which is about a hundred miles east, and neither the Spanish nor the British ever bothered to use it for anything more than a marker on their journeys to and from the larger islands of the West Indies. Just seventy miles north of the Tropic of Cancer, exactly halfway between the Exuma Cays and Conception Island, it was named through the misfortune of an epileptic from Bristol, who had been cast away there in 1595 and amazed the world by being rediscovered in 1655 by a ship of Cromwell’s fleet. “Truly this place is possessed of the Elixir of life,” the rescuing captain wrote in his log, ordering that the unfortunate, and now very feeble, old man be taken on board and given a hearty share of rations and rum … a diet that killed him instantly.

  Like most of the other islands in the Bahamas, Elixir was, until recently, of little obvious practical value. There was no natural harbor for large vessels, and the thin soil could hardly support a decent potato crop. Just five miles long and a mile and a half wide, it was in fact just a large overgrown coral reef. The local population of fewer than a thousand was made up largely of old people and women with their legions of children. Then, in 1977, one of the bright boys from forward planning at Club Village had suggested that with the cooperation being given to tourist operators by the Bahamian government, Elixir was ideal for an up-market village aimed specifically at the North American market. Within three years the club had become a reality, and Elixir began to enter the twentieth century.

  The news that Hardin was to replace Pagett did not fall on altogether welcome ears in Elixir. The chief accountant, Eugene Waterman, saw the Telex first, and relayed the news to Sharon Kennedy, whom he found in the boutique.

  “He’s that tennis player, isn’t he?” said Waterman, recognizing Hardin’s name. “This will give the tennis coaches something to think about.”

  Sharon Kennedy didn’t answer. She did not know how to respond. Death in a vacation village was an embarrassment, something which did not fit into the projected schemes. An hour after the news of the discovery of Pagett’s body, the CVs had been organizing games and races, giving dancing lessons, rehearsing entertainments, and exchanging pleasantries with the guests. Pagett was already history, and his successor on his way.

  Of course there would be an inquest, but that was a mere formality. The sharks had left little to investigate, and the story now circulating was that Pagett had fallen victim to a boating accident. And that, it seemed, was that. So what was Sharon to say?

  Thirteen

  Hardin noticed Cassandra when the plane touched down at Bermuda. There were forty minutes to spare while refueling, loading, and unloading were carried out, and passengers were invited to stretch their legs in the passenger terminal.

  “Are you going on to Nassau or Kingston?” he asked the pretty, green-eyed elegant woman sitting beside him in the waiting room. He had been late for the flight at London, and had not had his usual opportunity of surveying the women before boarding.

  The woman turned to him. Her nose was short and straight and her eyes were bright against her pale English skin.

  “Nassau,” she replied without a hint of encouragement. Then she turned back and examined the paper cup from which she was sipping water.

  Ordinarily that would have been enough of a warning off for Hardin. But, perhaps because he was bored by the long flight, he began to see this cold English woman as a challenge. So he persisted.

  “You’re going on business?” he asked. She looked extremely businesslike.

  “Vacation.” The reply was offered without a glance.

  “My name’s Hardin,” he said. And smiled a very broad grin.

  “Of course it is,” she replied, and looked him straight in the eye.

  He faltered. He didn’t like being made fun of. But he kept the smile. “And your name is …?”

  “Cassandra Mallinson,” she answered, after a long-suffering pause.

  “Well, Cassandra Mallinson,” he said, “you are not easy to talk to.”

  “Mr. Hardin … isn’t that what you said your name was? … Mr. Hardin, every time I take an airplane anywhere in the world I am accosted by men in terminals, in transit lounges, and in customs. And, Mr. Hardin, I do not enjoy being chatted up by strange men, nor do I understand why they attempt it.”

  Hardin gazed at her for a long moment. “In your case,” he said slowly, “neither do I.” Then he turned away.

  If Cassandra had been honest with herself she would have admitted that she found him attractive, and had actually noticed Hardin as he sat down on the plane in London. Although he had not been aware of her, she had cast him several examining looks during the flight. Like a silly ingenue, she had felt herself physically drawn to him from the moment she first saw him. Her abruptness was the only barrier she could find. Why she should wish to hide behind any barrier at all was a mystery even to Cassandra, but when she felt an attraction as strong as this it was always her initial response.

  Only when she was eventually back on board the plane did Cassandra realize that this time her brittleness had been a professional mistake. Hanging from one of the buckles of Hardin’s leather saddlebag was a Club Village baggage tag. Cassandra made up her mind quickly. She might have been able to fight her emotions, but she was not prepared to dispute her professionalism. Getting up, she moved down the aisle to the empty seat next to him.

  “I wanted to say I was sorry for being so rude,” she said. “Can I buy you a drink to make up for it?”

  It is nearly a thousand miles from Bermuda to Nassau, which is far enough for two people to get to know each other. After the shaky start Hardin and Cassandra got along famously, although, of course, they both told less than the truth. She told him she was an editor with a publishing company in London, while he admitted that he worked for Club Village but neglected to add that he was the new chief.

  Cassandra was fascinated by Hardin’s gypsy life. It was exactly the opposite of hers. Her own life was tied up in security and possessions and her home. The willful way Hardin had already jettisoned two careers appealed to her.

  Hardin, for his part, was drawn to her because of her independence. She had no man in her life, nor, apparently, did she need one. Her sudden change in attitude toward him was hard to understand but, as she had a pretty smile and seemed genuinely interested in him, he let it pass with no more than a small mental question mark.

  As Hardin collected his bags to pass through customs in Nassau, it occurred to him that he was facing a situation fraught with romance and mischief. He looked at Cassandra. Her suit was crumpled and she looked tired. But she was gamely hurling her suitcase off the conveyor belt and onto a trolley.

  “We’re too late to get across to Elixir tonight. I’m going to try to book a room here through the tourist agent. Do you want me to get one for you, too?”

  Cassandra nodded. “Thank you,” she said, thinking to herself, “and thank God.”

  Getting two rooms for the night was easy. Within half an hour of arriving in Nassau, Hardin and Cassandra were sitting side by side in the back of a voluptuous old Lincoln, being driven to the Balmoral Beach Hotel by a huge singing black man.

  The hotel was a large, pastel-colored, classically styled Colonial building, complete with tinkling cocktail pianist, British expatriates drinking gin, and middle-aged Americans on safari. A boy of about fifteen showed them to two adjacent suites in a bougainvillea-covered bungalow. Outside was a floodlit tennis court where a couple of near-geriatrics lobbed balls to each other at a mutually respectful rhythm.

  Hardin watched them with envy. He had hardly been on a court since giving up professional tennis. To him, tennis had been a way of making a living, and eventually all the enjoyment had gone out of it. Every shot had counted, every hour of training was hard preparation. These two gentle, elderly people, who hardly moved their feet, were enjoying themselv
es far more than he ever had.

  “Are we too late to eat?” Cassandra asked the boy porter.

  “If you’re quick, they’ll probably fix you a sandwich in the dining room.”

  Hardin passed the boy a five-dollar bill. “We’ll be quick,” he said. “Can you let them know we’re on the way?”

  The boy smiled and skipped off toward the dining room while Hardin and Cassandra went to their respective rooms for a quick wash and change.

  The sandwich was not exceptional, but neither of them was particularly hungry, and they soon left the dining room for a stroll along the beach.

  As they walked along a small wooden pier, lit by a chain of lamps, Hardin wondered whether he should put out a supportive arm toward Cassandra and add a physical element to their relationship, but he didn’t; while Cassandra wondered whether he would, and, if so, what the most suitable reaction from her should be. They were both guarded in one another’s presence, a factor which added dignity to their relationship.

  When they arrived back at the bungalow there was the inevitable pause before they said good night. By now jet lag was beginning to smother them both, but they each clung to the illusion of a romantic evening. They needed to. Tomorrow would be different. It always was.

  “If I’d known they gave such wonderful after-flight service I’d always have flown British Airways,” said Hardin.

  Cassandra smiled. “Perhaps you’ll be able to give me some tennis coaching when we get to the village,” she said.

  “I’d love to,” said Hardin, “but I believe they have a couple of coaches there. You may do better with them. I was never a very good teacher.”

  “That’s okay. I was never a very good student. We’ll complement each other.”

  Hardin grinned. “Okay. It’s a deal,” he said.