The Sun Place

by Ray Connolly

  “Hello, John, I like your ice-cream jacket,” grinned Joanna as she and Ruth pried themselves apart.

  Arrowsmith flinched uncomfortably. There was always a bantering sexuality to all of Joanna’s exchanges with him. She couldn’t even be mildly, playfully insulting without fixing him with a look that said, “Do you remember that night?”

  “Listen, why don’t you guys go and have coffee while I check our bags,” said Arrowsmith.

  “We already checked ours,” said Roeg, as though scoring a point.

  Arrowsmith began to push his baggage trolley to the back of the line. Although they were over an hour early for the flight, at least a hundred people for the Continental charter to Nassau were already milling around the departure lounge. There seemed to be a fair number of attractive young women, and muscular, flat-stomached young men.

  Alongside him in line stood a girl of about twenty. Her hair had once been permed, and once dyed blond, but now both processes had grown out, giving her a piebald look, straight dark hair reaching to her neck and then turning into a mass of blond frizz. She was wearing a pair of scuffed Calvin Klein jeans, and a pretty white lace blouse under an olive linen jacket. Around her neck hung a thin silver band. She looked straight, gone scruffy.

  With embarrassment, Arrowsmith found that she was returning his gaze.

  “You going to Elixir, too?” he asked, realizing that the girl was probably half his age.

  Grinning widely, she said, “Did you ever fly on amyl nitrite?”

  “Excuse me?” Arrowsmith wondered if he had heard right. He decided to joke his way through it. “Is that a Middle Eastern airline?”

  “Better than Quaaludes.”

  Arrowsmith edged nearer to the check-in counter. The girl followed him.

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said lamely.

  The girl thought for a moment and then smiled. “I used to hate flying,” she said. “I was a stewardess with American Airlines, and every time the pilot talked about ‘final approach’ and the ‘terminal building’ I used to go shitless. All the words they use … they’re just another way of saying, ‘Prepare yourself for the big D.’”

  Arrowsmith looked again at the girl. She was actually very pretty, in a used and abused kind of way. She had the hallucinogenic smile of a Hare Krishna freak. He tried a reassuring smile. “A lot of people are afraid of flying,” he said.

  “Especially people who fly a lot,” she replied, still wearing the inane grin. “Do you know that the highest level of alcoholism in any profession is among airline pilots?”

  “Is that so?” said Arrowsmith, trying to sound as though he believed her.

  “You know why? Because they know that the fucking planes they fly aren’t safe.”

  Together they edged nearer the check-in counter again.

  Arrowsmith tried again. “Come on, now, planes these days are very safe,” he said.

  She looked at him knowingly, and then she gave him a long, sly wink. “Okay,” she said, “if that’s what you want to believe, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Still grinning happily, she turned to the couple in line behind her and extended the conversation to include them.

  Arrowsmith lifted his bags on to the weigh-in scales. Club Village certainly had to be complimented in sorting out the kooks from the crowd, he thought.

  Twenty-Five

  Cassandra barely slept at all during that first night in Elixir. Her glimpse of the smirking reptile face at her window had banished the possibility. Surprisingly, no one heard her scream, so no one rushed to her aid.

  Her first thought was to summon help by telephone, until she remembered that Club Village did not provide telephones in the rooms. So instead she armed herself with a heavy glass ashtray, turned on all the lights in the room, and then, huddling under the sheets, waited for the security that morning light would bring.

  From time to time she heard the whispers and footsteps of late-night revelers as they made their way back to their rooms, but she did not call out. As the hours passed she began to wonder whether the face had been merely a cruel joke. Perhaps Club Village encouraged the CVs to play Halloween pranks on newcomers.

  But the cruel delight she had seen in the face told her that if it was a joke, it was very sick. Although she had seen the face for only a moment, she had recognized irrational malevolence there, a spiteful desire to frighten and hurt.

  Morning came suddenly, without the grayness of warning with which she was familiar in Europe. There were few birds to sing a welcome in this isolated comer of the Caribbean. But the sun saturated everything in color, turning the hanging wisteria blossom which twined around her cabin window into delicate bunches of petaled mauve grapes. They gave her a reassuring welcome when she finally worked up the courage to raise the blind.

  Feeling safe again, she ventured out and wandered alone through the village. Early morning in the Caribbean has its own delicately washed freshness, and in January, when the nights are cold, the new sun is crisp and cleansing. For the first time, Cassandra was fully able to appreciate the careful planning that had gone into the village. All the buildings, the sleeping blocks, the chiefs bungalow, the infirmary, theater, and restaurant had been arranged in a semicircle on the top of a hill, so that no one need ever be more than a hundred yards from the pool and its adjacent bar and boutiques. Down one side of the hill lay the path which ran to the marina, while the track in the opposite direction led through a fifty-yard screen of pine forest to the beach. At this point the island could have been no more than a half a mile wide, half a mile separating the Caribbean from the Atlantic.

  Once out of her room, Cassandra’s confidence began to return. She still thought she ought to report the intruder, but not yet. She could hardly go hammering on the door of the chief of the village at six in the morning to tell him that six hours earlier she had been frightened out of her wits by a face at her window.

  Leaving the village, with its white buildings and red tiled roofs, she picked a cautious way through the spongy, needle-covered, sparse pine forest, and headed down to the beach. It was, she thought, probably the most perfectly proportioned and unspoiled beach she had ever seen, a full mile of pink and white sand running in a huge arc into which the waters of the Atlantic washed.

  She explored the beach for an hour, and returned to the village at seven o’clock to swim in the pool. If she did twenty lengths in the Olympic-size pool in London she would need to do at least forty here. She worked hard for thirty minutes, until the pool got too crowded. Then she headed back to her room to dry and change for breakfast.

  “How are you today?” a quiet voice asked at her side as she turned to climb the steps to her room. It was Hamlet Yablans, the white-faced, black-bloused comic with bad breath. Cassandra shuddered. The paleness of Hamlet’s complexion and the thin-sliced lips were repulsive. She had seen him the previous evening at dinner, when he had moved from table to table with an empty box, asking in his high-pitched, feminine voice whether anybody had seen Yorick in his ghost’s disguise. For some reason, Hamlet amused most of the guests, but he did not amuse Cassandra.

  “I’m just fine, thank you,” she said, and hurried on past him. Hobgoblins in the night had been enough.

  By the time the new guests arrived from New York at four in the afternoon, Cassandra had decided not to report the face at her window, not officially at any rate. She was there as a working journalist, and she did not wish to draw attention to herself. The bright, sunny atmosphere of the day, the two sets of tennis she had played, and the charming, diffident manners of the boy Sacha, with whom she had played a round of chess before lunch (he won), all persuaded her that the events of the previous night had been some kind of joke. She resolved to push the encounter to the back of her mind until she could have a quiet word with Hardin.

  The first busload of new guests to arrive from the airport contained the Arrowsmiths, the Roegs, the piebald girl, and about another twenty self-conscious New Yorkers. From behind
a long cool glass of Planter’s Punch, Cassandra watched herself appraise the new arrivals, much as she had been appraised just a day earlier. Was it really only two days since she had left London? she asked herself. All that seemed so far away.

  Although guests were expected to carry their own suitcases, Cassandra could not help noticing that some of the prettier girls already seemed to have made friends with some of the male CVs, who were clambering over each other in their enthusiasm to help the newcomers to their rooms. They were, Cassandra recognized, the same bunch of beautiful layabouts who had serenaded Hardin at the airport the previous morning. On consideration, she reached the conclusion that meeting the prettiest guests off the planes, and hopefully cementing instant relationships with them, had to be one of the more delightful perks of the job. And wickedly she wondered for a second whether the infirmary would have sufficient supplies of penicillin to cope with an epidemic of lovers’ infections.

  “May I join you?” Cassandra had not seen Hardin approach the pool. He was wearing a pair of Club Village white swimming shorts and a pale blue T-shirt with the red mermaid motif.

  Cassandra pulled her sunglasses and towels from an adjacent chair and smiled a welcome. “How’s your day been?” she asked.

  “Busy.” He shook his head. “Sometimes I don’t think anyone works around here. There’s a carefree attitude that bothers me.”

  For a moment Cassandra debated telling him about the previous night. The sensible side of her won, and she quickly recounted the details, with a suggestion that it might not be the best game to be played on nervous, single women.

  Hardin listened in astonished silence. “If that was a game,” he said, “it’s a game that no one on the senior staff knows anything about. We don’t go in for anything like that. And we certainly don’t try to frighten the women.” Then, very carefully, he made her recall in as much detail as possible everything she could remember about the encounter.

  “I only wish to God I’d known about this last night,” he said.

  “You don’t think it was a hoax?” asked Cassandra, once again feeling chilled.

  Hardin smiled reassuringly. “Probably,” he said, “but those kind of hoaxes can backfire, and we don’t need them here. Don’t worry about it. I’ll scout around and box a few ears.”

  Cassandra was not impressed with his lighthearted denials. The incident had obviously worried him.

  “Someone at dinner last night was telling me that you came out to replace a chief who was killed,” she said.

  “He drowned,” said Hardin, rather too quickly.

  Cassandra said nothing.

  Hardin was quiet for a moment. Then he changed the subject. “Will you be entering the tennis tournament, or the pareo-tying competition, or the ladies’ volleyball championship, or …?”

  Cassandra laughed and shook her head. “I’m not really very competitive, not in sport, anyway.”

  “This must be a strange place to come on vacation,” retorted Hardin. “Club Village is all about enjoying competition.”

  “I enjoy being a spectator to competition,” returned Cassandra. “Right now I’m enjoying watching the competition among the CVs to get off with the best-looking new arrivals. Aren’t you afraid you’ll miss your place in the queue, or does the chief of the village practice a kind of droit du seigneur?”

  Without her intending it, Cassandra’s manner had again become brusque. This time Hardin didn’t wait to be insulted.

  “I suppose you could say something like that,” he said, and, getting up, he made an excuse about having to talk to the chef before dinner. He wandered away toward a group of young women, recent arrivals who were trying out the pool.

  Cassandra watched him, angry with herself, and a murmur of jealousy ran through her as she noticed how easily he joked with the girls. All were younger and prettier than she was.

  There was something about Hardin that always brought out her sharp rebukes and silly, rude replies. “You know your trouble, Cassandra Mallinson,” she told herself. “Your trouble is that you are attracted to him and are afraid to show it, in case you make yourself look silly.” That was her trouble, all right. It usually was.

  Twenty-Six

  It was after eleven when Matt Hillman slipped quietly away from the bar and made a reluctant way down to the marina. He was sorry to leave for two reasons. One was that he felt that the odds against the continuation of the business he and Willem Brummer had built up had increased drastically since the arrival of Hardin.

  The other reason was personal. For the third time since he had been on Elixir, he had fallen in love, or at least into a state of infatuation. The object of his attentions was an elfin-looking boy from Quebec, an urchin of a fellow with gypsy looks. He was a rogue, Matt could see that instantly, but he found himself compelled to seek his presence, mesmerized by his capricious flirting with girls and boys alike. His name was Michel, and he had arrived that afternoon with a charter load of Canadians. As soon as Matt saw him he felt an awkward, gnawing, and yet exhilarating attraction.

  Matt was not a handsome man. He was too tall and too thin, and the bones of his chest protruded like railings under his gaunt skin. But he made the best of himself. His deep tan disguised the acne on his shoulders, and he washed his long hair daily. He knew that Michel was playing with him, probably even mocking him behind his back, but somehow it had to be worthwhile. They had picked out each other at the bar with a series of looks and alternating displays of interest, and conversation had flown freely and easily. Michel was everything Matt would wish for himself: a pretty puppy dog of a boy who sparkled with a teasing humor and possessed a lithe grace.

  All evening long Matt had bathed in Michel’s wit and banter. Michel had quickly attracted a little posse of admiring girls, and when it came time for Matt to keep his rendezvous with Willem Brummer, Matt found himself violently jealous of the girls who would have the gypsy’s sole attentions. Not for the first time did Matt Hillman wish he had never become involved in his illegal trade.

  Brummer was waiting for him in a small copse of fern trees behind the marina restaurant. The marina lay on the only part of the Elixir coastline which resembled anything approaching a natural harbor, a small semicircle of high coral cliffs which faced westward, toward the Caribbean.

  “You’re sure you weren’t followed?” asked Brummer, staring edgily back up the path toward the village. He was chewing nervously on a matchstick.

  Hillman shook his head, somewhat relieved to discover that Brummer was more tense than usual. Perhaps they would be able to avoid the meeting that night after all.

  “We’re taking the Bayliner,” said Brummer. He toyed with a set of keys in his hand. Since he was in charge of all transport in the village, he had access to the keys of every vehicle.

  “You know … I’m really not sure anymore,” Hillman began to stammer.

  Brummer spat his matchstick from his teeth. “You told me. We’ve been through it all already, but you knew what you were getting into when we started. All we have to do is carry on delivering. They’ll close us down before long and we’ll be out of it and a fucking sight richer.”

  “How can you be so sure they’ll close us down before the Coast Guard or the Bahamian police get to us?” asked Hillman, although it was Hardin’s face that swam in his mind.

  Brummer shrugged. “Listen, our friends out there in Bogotá have a big investment in their little cruises around the islands. We’re only a small part of it. They don’t want us to get caught any more than we do. They’ll stop our line well before it gets too dangerous. Right now all we have to do is keep our heads and do the job.”

  Hillman shrugged his thin shoulders. He was still scared.

  Satisfied that he had dealt with Hillman’s little show of emotion, Brummer led the way down the dock. The Bayliner was lying in the deepest water at the end of the floating boardwalk. Stealthily, the two men clambered aboard. From the village came the music of the local reggae band. This was alwa
ys a good time to go out, because the band covered the sound of the engine. As Brummer started the motor, Hillman quickly untied the rope and pushed the boat away from the jetty. A pale moon shone through the cumulus clouds, and a cold light fell on the marina. Carefully, the boat was steered away from the island and made its way out into the bay. All the time Hillman scanned the shoreline for any signs that they were being observed. But he saw nothing.

  This was the eighth time the two men had borrowed a boat to make a pickup. When they had each become involved in Club Village two years earlier, a dope-smuggling connection had not been part of their plan. When they met, they had not liked each other, but they had both quickly realized that with their combined knowledge of boats and airplanes, and the street wisdom of men who knew how to get jobs done quickly and cheaply, they would make a formidable team.

  Then, just as the Elixir village was nearing completion, along had come an offer. One day, when they were in Nassau together loading a cargo boat, they were approached by a suave gentleman of Latin appearance and invited for a drink. The man, who refused to give his name, suggested a business deal. Once every two months a trawler set off from Barranquilla on the northeastern coast of Colombia for a cruise among the islands. On its way it made numerous calls on friendly entrepreneurs. The task of the entrepreneurs was to ferry the cargo over to the States, where it would be recovered and distributed by a well-organized network of eager ancillaries. The rate for the job was 2 percent of the street price. In addition, said the businessman, there would be a nice little cache of goodies for home consumption. For Matt Hillman, that had settled the matter.