The Sun Place

by Ray Connolly

  “Perhaps we could play Ping-Pong some time?” suggested Sacha as he graciously returned the smile.

  “That would be nice,” said Karen. This was the first CV who had suggested anything other than a walk in the dark, a drink, a dance, or, quite simply, a straightforward fuck.

  There was a momentary silence as the contagion of shyness threw its tentacles around them both. Then Sacha added: “Maybe we could have a game now. I think I see an empty table.”

  Again Karen smiled and together they walked across the village and up the steps toward the shaded corner which housed the Ping-Pong tables.

  “Are you good?” asked Sacha as he served a deliberately easy ball.

  “Better than that,” Karen replied as she smashed the ball off the edge of the table.

  “Ah, I see, a champion,” said Sacha, and began to play properly.

  Ping-Pong may not be recognized as one of the great courtship games of the twentieth century, but it does have its social values. Over table tennis two people can speedily strike up a friendship based on the tenets of sportsmanship and, unlike Ping-Pong’s big brother tennis, the participants are close enough to be able to exchange jokes, smiles, and words of mutual praise. For those who play it well, Ping-Pong is indeed a useful avenue for social progress in Club Village. By the end of their game Karen and Sacha were firm friends.

  “I have to go to work now, but perhaps I could see you again,” said Sacha as they lingered together after the game.

  Karen looked at him. He was extremely beautiful, but not pushy like the other CVs. He probably wanted to get into her pants like most men did but, at least he had the decency not to make it so obvious. That pleased her. She wasn’t looking for an affair, but if it happened, then that would be nice.

  “I’d like that very much,” said Karen, and, with another grin, hurried off toward her room to change for dinner.

  After she had gone, Sacha stood for some moments in the gardens. A lizard ran like quicksilver through some leaves. Carefully, Sacha broke off a twig and tickled its tail. Once again it made a dash, zigzagging first this way and then that, trying to escape from this playful tormentor. At last it disappeared under a hut, and Sacha gave up the chase and returned to the village theater to prepare for Saturday night’s ball.

  Hardin had been so disgusted with the level of the revues that he had decided to introduce the masked ball, which had been such a success in Val d’Isabelle. And Sacha, who did most of the club’s artwork, had been drafted to make the masks and decorations.

  Forty-Three

  Quatre Bras and Girardot saw two different cities when they each looked at New York. To Quatre Bras it was the main fortress in a nation yet to be conquered, and as he sat in the back of the black Lincoln Continental which drove him into Manhattan he felt the buzz of exhilaration which he had first known years earlier when first establishing his Club Village empire in Europe. He knew he would not, could not, relax until Club Village had become as much a part of America as it was of France. To him, the back-street boy brought up on a diet of Warner Brothers gangster films, America represented the future, and he was as starry-eyed about it as he had been on his first visit nearly thirty years before. Rich, aristocratic men like Ronay would never understand the special place which the born poor of Europe held for America. To Ronay New York was a vulgar city, a place of rootless immigrants, a dumping ground where the poor of the Old World had made themselves rich but had never taught themselves the right social graces. But to Quatre Bras America was still the land of opportunity, where the less fortunate had, in theory at least, a better chance of vaulting from their depths. At heart Quatre Bras was romantic about America.

  Girardot possibly should have shared his master’s enthusiasms, since they were from identical backgrounds, but Girardot was not a man for adventure. Now he was as conservative in his own way as was Ronay. Mostly it was the language that defeated Girardot. Quatre Bras had seen early in life how necessary it was for an empire builder to speak the international language of the world, and had worked hard at learning English. But Girardot, tunnel-visioned in his Frenchness, had never learned more than the words on chewing-gum wrappers.

  The New York office of Club Village had booked Quatre Bras and Girardot two adjacent suites in the Plaza Hotel, which was where Quatre Bras welcomed Anthony Scorcese, the president of Universal-American Airlines, to a private dinner.

  Contrary to popular belief, multimillion-dollar deals are rarely put together in vast boardrooms, chic villas, or ritzy restaurants. All of that comes later; the building blocks to the merging of capitalist empires are almost invariably set up over sandwiches and coffee. Room service dinner at the Plaza was slightly more elaborate than a sandwich, but the gastronome in Quatre Bras noted with satisfaction that better meals were served in virtually all his villages.

  Anthony Scorcese was an austere, middle-aged New Yorker, of recent Italian descent, who had built a career in several of the larger corporations by being a brilliant accountant, and who was convinced that the best future for Universal-American Airlines lay in expansion into the leisure and vacation fields. His hair was thick, and iron-gray in color, and his suit was of a determined sobriety. Quatre Bras had met him before, and liked him, despite his careful conservativeness and his refusal to touch even a drop of alcohol while doing business.

  “As I understand it, monsieur,” said Scorcese as Quatre Bras passed him a Perrier water, “you may be in a position to allow us to buy heavily into Club Village in return for our help in extending your organization in the American zone.”

  “That is correct,” said Quatre Bras, “subject, of course, to the approval of my board, who, as you know, can be somewhat Gallicly chauvinistic at times.”

  Scorcese nodded, a little gentle movement of his head downward, which intimated that he too had trouble with the less farsighted members of his own board. “Of course,” he said.

  Quatre Bras watched Scorcese closely. Quatre Bras knew that the other man would have made massive, although discreet, inquiries into the running of Club Village, just as he had done on the viability of Universal-American Airlines. The very fact that the two men were meeting at all meant that each thought there was the basis of a deal which would suit them both.

  Suddenly Scorcese smiled and pulled off his jacket. “Okay, Monsieur Quatre Bras,” he said, “let’s see if there’s a way of making a marriage out of this thing, shall we?”

  At two o’clock the following morning, Quatre Bras rang down for champagne. The basis of a deal had been reached. Both men had argued, fought, and pushed each other toward the brink before conceding so much as an inch. The details would be long and complex, and would involve the efforts of dozens of lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic, but the foundations were well laid.

  “Tell me, do you think that at my time of life a Club Village vacation would have any appeal for me?” asked Scorcese as the two men celebrated. “Or am I too old for it, perhaps?”

  “Too old? Of course not,” said Quatre Bras. Scorcese was younger than he was, and if he didn’t accept aging in himself, there was no way he could accept it in others. “What are you doing this weekend?”

  Scorcese shrugged. “Nothing exceptional,” he said.

  “In that case, why don’t we both go down to Elixir. We have a very nice village there. Our guests don’t live in palaces, but I think you might enjoy a few days in the sun of the Bahamas. After all, seeing is believing, isn’t it?”

  Scorcese grinned. “An excellent idea. It’s a long time since I took a vacation in January. I’ll have the Lear made available for us from tomorrow.”

  “Excellent,” Quatre Bras boomed, and shook the hand of his prospective business partner very firmly, hoping desperately that Hardin would have sorted out all the Elixir problems by the time they arrived.

  Forty-Four

  The news that Ernst Ronay, together with Beta Ullman, was due in Elixir on Saturday was the sort of surprise that Hardin could well have done without. Qui
te apart from seeing Beta again so shortly after his tryst with her in Switzerland, he needed much more time to get the village running efficiently before being visited by the top Paris brass.

  Throughout the first week he had tried to concentrate on the enormous amount of work to be done at Elixir, but the presence of Cassandra Mallinson interfered with his concentration. He would have liked to have been able to ignore her, as she appeared to be finding it so easy to ignore him. But that was impossible, and he wondered, among other things, whether the arrival of Beta would exorcise her from his mind.

  On Friday, at lunchtime, Winston Johnston, the senior of the two Bahamian police on the island, called at the village for a chat.

  Johnston shook his head emphatically when Hardin suggested there was something suspicious about Pagett’s death. “No, man, nothing suspicious at all. I’ve known people live all their lives in these islands, then one day they go out in a place they’ve been a thousand times before, get a little bit careless, catch their boat on a sharp piece of coral, and down they go before they’ve even had time to grab a lifebelt,” he said as he drank a tall glass of rum and fruit cocktail in Hardin’s office. “These waters can be treacherous even to those who know them well. I’m always surprised there aren’t more accidents with people from Club Village.”

  “But Pagett was a first-class boatsman and swimmer,” argued Hardin.

  The black man grinned widely.

  “Even Mark Spitz couldn’t swim the Atlantic,” he said. “If your boat goes down, even if you survive the cold and exposure, the sharks will get you.”

  Hardin knotted his hands and frowned. He could not imagine that Pagett could be the victim of such a simple accident. Perhaps he should have told the police about Brummer and Hillman and the Colombian connection, he mused, but just as quickly he dropped the idea. It wasn’t his job to patrol the seaways of the Caribbean. The supplies of dope that had gone into the States by this route were totally insignificant when measured against the billion-dollar industry between Colombia and the United States. All he wanted to do was to keep dope out of Club Village, to keep Elixir as clean as possible.

  For the twentieth time that week Hardin crossed his office and consulted the giant sea chart covering one entire wall. Pagett’s body had been found about thirty miles southwest of Elixir, in an area where the general current was in a north-to-south direction. With his forefinger Hardin traced a northerly direction from the cross that marked the site where Pagett had been found. Fifteen miles away was a small group of islands known as Dutch Cays.

  “What do you know about Dutch Cays?” he asked of Johnston, who was nearing the end of his drink.

  The chief of police wrinkled his nose. “There’s nothing there now. They’re just dots on the map. One time there were a couple of good houses, but the owners left twenty or thirty years ago. Cays ain’t good for nothing. Just a lot of swamp, I understand.”

  Hardin nodded and let the matter drop. There was no way he could go sailing around the whole Caribbean looking for clues to Pagett’s death.

  At that moment Sharon Kennedy walked in, carrying a Telex message. “Excuse me, but I thought you ought to know,” she said, passing it to Hardin.

  Quickly he read it. “Well, well, it never rains but it pours,” he said. “Not only are we to be blessed with the extremely unlikable Ernst Ronay and his guest, but also Quatre Bras and party are jetting down from New York. It looks like an exciting weekend.”

  Homer Wolford had been overgenerous when he had suggested to Cassandra that she might make the quarterfinals in the tennis tournament. In fact she was beaten 6-0, 6-0 in the third round by a tornado of a woman from Belgium. The standard of tennis at Club Village was far higher than Cassandra had imagined, and, as her opponent’s serves swerved and spun past her outstretched, flagging arm, she wished desperately that she had never allowed herself to be placed in such a position. Nor had off court distractions helped. At one point, when she had been 40-30 up on her serve, Cassandra had noticed Hardin watching her from the back of the spectators. Instantly, her concentration was broken, the game went to deuce, and then, in quick succession, she served two double faults and dismissed herself from the competition.

  The spectators applauded her politely, while the little Flemish whirlwind, all plaits and legs like molded steel, prepared for her next victim by going to an adjacent court and getting in some practice killing overhead smashes as the hydraulic tennis cannon lobbed balls to her.

  Relieved that the ordeal was over, Cassandra made her way back up the grassy slope toward the village. A figure slipped into step alongside her.

  “Goodness, you startled me,” she exclaimed as she found herself looking into the deathly white features of Hamlet Yablans.

  Yablans tried a smile, but succeeded only in grimacing.

  “You want I should carry your tennis racquet for you?” he asked, reaching to grab it.

  Cassandra snatched it away. “No, thank you,” she snapped, feeling a shudder run down her spine.

  “I was just trying a joke,” said Yablans. ‘You know, like the kid who wants to carry the girl’s books home from school.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “It’s funny because I don’t look funny. That makes it funny. Understand?” he said.

  “No,” said Cassandra, walking on as fast as she could.

  “You know, I’ve seen you before,” said Yablans, catching up with her.

  “I don’t think so,” said Cassandra.

  “I know so. I’ve seen your picture. You’re a writer, aren’t you?”

  “I work for a publisher.”

  “You work for a New York magazine called Night and Day” said Yablans.

  It was no use denying it.

  “Am I right, or am I right?” he asked.

  “What I meant was I worked in the London office of a publishing company,” said Cassandra lamely. “Anyway, I don’t see of what possible interest it is to you.”

  “You’re a reporter. You do investigations. I read one of your pieces last night, something about art forgeries in Europe. Your picture was in the magazine.”

  “I’m taking a holiday now.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What do you mean, ‘maybe’? I’m on holiday, and I shall be extremely grateful if you will kindly leave me alone and allow me to enjoy myself.”

  “I think you came here to do a story.”

  “I think you are being extremely offensive.”

  “I also think you came here to find out what happened to Dick Pagett.”

  Cassandra slowed her pace just a little. It did not look as though the weird little comic was about to molest her. “I understood that Dick Pagett was drowned in a boating accident.”

  “If you’ll believe that, you’ll believe goldfish wear roller skates,” said Yablans.

  “You’re saying he didn’t die in an accident, are you?” said Cassandra.

  “I’m saying there’s a crazy man in this village.”

  Cassandra looked at him sharply. With his porridge-colored face and dull, black-dyed hair his lips looked blue and his false teeth yellow. His black blouse had stain marks under the armpits and his leotard clung vulgarly around his crotch. He was disgusting. “And who is that crazy man?” she asked.

  Hamlet grinned at her, but said nothing. At that moment Hardin appeared around the corner of the infirmary. For a frozen second she looked at him.

  “Everything all right?” asked Hardin.

  “Everything is fine. Hamlet here tells me he thinks there’s a lunatic in the village. Isn’t that right, Hamlet?”

  Both Hardin and Cassandra stared at the clown. He faltered, as though unsure how to behave under their gaze. Then suddenly he laughed wickedly. “Hey, nonny, nonny-no,” he said. “Not me, Cassandra. I am but mad north northwest; when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.” And with that he slithered away and back up toward the village.

  “What the hell’s he talking about?” Hardin
asked.

  “I think you’ll find he was just living out his name,” said Cassandra.

  “That face you saw at your window the other night … was it Hamlet, do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” said Cassandra. “I don’t think so. It may have been. He told me he thought there was some madman loose in the village.”

  “I think it’s about time I had a little talk with Hamlet. I’m sorry you were bothered by him.”

  “That’s all right. He didn’t bother me, really.”

  “I’m sorry that you had such a tough draw in the tennis. I just haven’t had time to get around to playing with you, have I? Look, this weekend all the top brass are coming down here, so perhaps we could have dinner together tonight, before all my time gets taken up looking after them. That is, if you’ve nothing else arranged.”

  Cassandra grabbed her moment. “I’ve nothing at all arranged.”

  Hardin smiled. “Okay, so let’s say dinner in my bungalow at eight-thirty. It isn’t exactly Maxim’s, but the chef takes a little more trouble for me.”

  “I’ll look forward to it,” Cassandra smiled. And, clutching her tennis racquet, she went up to her room to shower and change.

  Forty-Five

  “Hey, how would you like to go for a cruise today?”

  Karen Sorensen opened her eyes and peered up into the sun. She had been sunbathing on the deck by the pool, and on the verge of falling asleep when the quiet, friendly voice of Sacha disturbed her.

  “If you’re interested, we could take one of the boats and a picnic and go visit some of the cays.” Sacha went on. “There are all kinds of places not too far from here that are still uninhabited.”