The Sun Place

by Ray Connolly

  The chef, a Mateus-colored Parisian with a small goatee, emerged from the kitchens and stood challengingly behind the thirty-yard-long table from which lunch would be served. He had been with the club for nearly twenty years, but still regarded every meal as a personal challenge. Hardin allowed his eyes to travel appreciatively along the table: There was poached turbot in mousseline sauce, trout with almonds, guinea fowl in port, beef in red wine stew, stuffed veal hearts, iced liqueur mousses, rum and lemon sorbet, a virtual orchard of fresh fruit, and a dozen cheeses. The chef waited for the verdict. “Excellent, Charles,” Hardin smiled. The chef’s eyes twitched momentarily as he absorbed the compliment. Then, like the martinet he was, he turned and began scolding a young Algerian who had inadvertently overfilled a huge tureen and was now in danger of flooding the dining room. Hardin moved away and headed toward the doors to greet the guests. A particularly high management profile was called for at mealtimes.

  Suddenly, in a Coppertan deluge, the doors opened and the diners were upon him. Hardin smiled a welcome to all, shook hands when they were offered, and exchanged a multilingual smattering of bonhomie. There was a spinster music teacher from Paris, who, he suspected, had struck up a most unlikely relationship with the Turkish head-waiter; various athletic-looking couples; a German mortician of fifty who had come with his dumpy librarian daughter; all kinds of secretaries from all over Europe; couple of divorced ladies in their thirties who wore too much eye makeup for lunchtime eyelash flutterings; and a dozen or so single men.

  “Ladies and gentlemen … just one announcement.” The voice of Jean-Paul Cartier, the head of indoor entertainments, boomed from a speaker. There was a general wincing at the noise level, and Hardin made a mental note to have the amplifier adjusted. “Tonight’s entertainment is a masked ball, to which everybody is invited. If you don’t have a mask, ask the CV at your table. Thank you.”

  Cartier stepped down and moved gracefully toward his table. He had been a dancer before Club Village had seduced him away from his vocation. Now he was that most privileged of Club Village employees, captain of the CVs. The CVs, Club Villagers, as they had originally been known, were the backbone of the club. At Val d’Isabelle there were over seventy, young men and women who worked fourteen hours a day, six days a week, who shared in virtually all the benefits of the guests, and for whom life was one long working holiday.

  Hardin had been a CV himself at first. It was a hectic, never-ending job of organizing entertainments, games, expeditions, travel timetables, and the other hundred things required in a village. And it was a dangerously seductive life. After two years as a CV Hardin had begun to realize that he had lost all sense of reality outside the club. He had been in Mexico, Sri Lanka, Corsica, and Yugoslavia, but nothing that happened in the outside world had any relevance to his own life. All decisions about eating and sleeping were made for him, and since the club did not, by policy, encourage guests to buy newspapers or watch television while on vacation, he had found himself becoming alarmingly isolated from the world outside. For a young person, the life of a CV seemed to offer paradise: no money worries, total security, work that seemed more like play, and as much sex as was desired. But the dangers were immense. People who had been CVs too long became prisoners of Club Village, afraid to go out into the world, shy of mixing with people who were not on vacation, increasingly unable to make decisions for themselves, and terrified of being alone. In the club no one was ever alone.

  Hardin had been made aware of the dangers when a sudden call to his father’s funeral took him back to Washington and he found himself having to cope with the real world. He had stayed away six months, rediscovering the outside world, and when he had rejoined the club, it was to run a booking bureau in Lisbon. The life of a CV was for people who never wanted to grow up. But the club had a way of becoming disenchanted with its perpetual Peter Pans, and Hardin had seen many CVs gradually frozen out of an organization which had outgrown them. An empire built around the promise of endless youth tolerated uneasily those who lingered too long in growing up.

  Selecting a small helping of poached turbot, Hardin peered around the room for an empty place. He chose one between an optician from Brussels who was holidaying with his son, and a German-Swiss secretary. She was a healthy, outdoor woman of around thirty-three, with long legs and heavy, muscular shoulders. Her nose was putty-shaped, and looked as though it had been pushed onto her face as an afterthought, and her cheeks were crimson with windburn. Around her eyes were large owlish white patches where her goggles had protected her eyes.

  “May I join you?” he said as he laid his plate on the table. It was the duty of the chief of the village to seek out the less integrated guests and make them feel welcome. “We haven’t been introduced. I’m James.”

  “Valerie,” the girl grinned back.

  “I understand you work for the Bank of America in Zurich,” Hardin went on politely.

  “Chase Manhattan, actually,” she said. Her English was perfect, but somehow accentless, the product of a tape-recorded education. She sounded neither English nor American.

  Hardin dug into his fish. “And why did you come on a Club Village vacation?” he asked.

  “To be quite honest,” said Valerie, leaning forward conspiratorially with a smile as wide as the Alps, “I came to get laid.”

  Hardin, determined not to show surprise, sipped a glass of mineral water, aware of the conflicting feelings of pity and admiration he was feeling for the girl. He suspected that if they were honest with themselves 90 percent of the single guests would admit that the lure of sex and/or romance had drawn them to the club, and it was refreshing to hear someone actually come out and say it. But looking at her, at the lopsided face and carelessly assembled features, and the ungainly, clownish, pear-shaped body, he knew that she would inevitably be one of the last-chance choices for married men, unsuccessful CVs, and kitchen staff. Every week brought two or three girls like her, and every week they would hang around by themselves, chat to each other at dinner, and be overenthusiastic on the slopes. Until, toward the end of their vacations, their standards would lower, and, desperate not to leave without at least the mirage of romance, they would inevitably accept the attentions of the most unsuitable of companions and spend joyless yet grateful nights having their bodies explored by men frustrated and saddened by their own lack of success with the popular and beautiful.

  The lie of romance had an awful lot to answer for, considered Hardin, but he didn’t say that. Instead he smiled graciously. “Then I suspect some lucky young man is going to be in for a very nice surprise,” he said, trying to sound as though he meant it.

  The girl shrugged with an indifference born out of a lifetime’s plainness. “You’re lying, James. I’m here to vacuum up the leftovers, and you know it. Don’t worry, though. This is my eighth Club Village in five years, and I’ve no complaints so far. In fact, some of the best nights of my life have been spent in the club. Even the leftovers here can make a pretty incredible team.”

  Three

  In Paris the snow of the afternoon was turning to rain as Quatre Bras climbed into the back seat of his stretched Citroën Prestige for the evening drive from his office in the Club Village headquarters to his apartment near the École Militaire in the Seventh Arrondissement. Around him the sound of pneumatically luxurious French cars rose and fell as they inched forward through the inevitable jam which surrounded the Bourse and stretched out into the avenues and streets of the capital every evening at this time.

  Quatre Bras stared calmly through the tinted window of his car. He was a rich and powerful man, some said one of the most insidiously powerful men in France, and others said far too powerful, but nothing he could do would dissolve the metallic congestion which was twining around him like some kind of steel creeper. He shrugged his square shoulders. He had more to worry about than traffic jams, and opening the slim doeskin briefcase he always carried, he pulled out a sheaf of papers.

  In the seat in front of
him, Michel Girardot negotiated the Place Vendôme and headed for the Rue de Rivoli. Girardot had been with the General, as Girardot liked to call Quatre Bras, for forty years, ever since they had turned what might have been, in other circumstances, considered adolescent delinquency into deeds of daring patriotism as they tormented the occupying German Army with acts of larceny, arson, and eventually violence and terrorism. By the end of the war the two street fighters from Les Halles, instead of being in reform school, had become exalted public heroes. From then on the career of Quatre Bras had been a steady, accelerating drive toward wealth and influence, while Girardot had remained his faithful lieutenant.

  Now Quatre Bras was wholly respectable, and the details of his early, prewar life of delinquency surfaced only occasionally in the more salacious French gossip newspapers. But to Michel Girardot, he and his friend were both still street boys.

  Through the rearview mirror Girardot examined the traffic. The snarlup was virtually complete. He swore softly to himself.

  Quatre Bras looked up and caught Girardot’s eye, turning the sides of his own mouth down in a comic expression of fatality. “Don’t worry so, Michel,” he called to his driver. “You’ll give yourself a coronary.”

  Girardot didn’t answer. Nothing ever seemed to ruffle Quatre Bras. He had always been like that. Once, when disturbed by a German foot patrol as they had been loitering near a gasoline dump, he had calmly walked into the glaring floodlights and the line of possible fire, and begun to discuss an exchange of black-market goods with an astonished German corporal, leaving Girardot to escape. Girardot had expected never to see his friend again, but within hours Quatre Bras had turned up unharmed, with a contract to provide girls, liquor, and fresh meat for his new business partners! For years after, Quatre Bras boasted that his major contribution to the war effort had been in infecting half the German garrison in Paris with gonorrhea and dysentery. The extraordinary deals he arranged and the facility with which he tricked the Germans had become legendary throughout the French Resistance and had resulted in his being nicknamed “Quatre Bras,” a name which had become even more appropriate as his business career had flourished. Now only tax men and enemies addressed him by his real name—Alain de Salis.

  In the back of the car, Quatre Bras sucked carelessly on a Gitane, allowing the heavy gray ash to cascade across his navy blue Christian Dior cashmere overcoat. He was a large, heavily built man, with hooded, impassive blue eyes, hair like polished steel, and a thick, powerful bull neck. At fifty-five he was still attractive and his permanent suntan glowed in the twilight of the reflected street lamps.

  Always a man of few words, Quatre Bras was unusually quiet tonight. Years earlier, Girardot had given up any attempts to follow the intricate business deals and empire building that had taken Club Village from a few straw huts near Cannes to a massive worldwide vacation institution, but he was always ready whenever his old friend wished to talk about a problem. On such occasions, Girardot would take his cue from his boss, nodding sagely or shaking his head according to the inflection in Quatre Bras’ voice. Eventually, after an hour or so of self-examination, Quatre Bras would suddenly jump to his feet and thank his old friend warmly for his wise and loyal advice.

  So it was not with any surprise that Girardot felt a gentle tap upon his shoulder and heard a request that they go home. Whenever Quatre Bras spoke of home, he didn’t mean the opulent apartment he owned in the exclusive Eiffel Tower area, but one of the small bars around Les Halles which had survived all the rearranging the Paris planners had wrought on the area in the past few years.

  “We have a problem,” said Quatre Bras to his friend as they hunched over a red checkered tablecloth in a shabby back-street cafe. At the bar a couple of French West African laborers watched a soccer match on a black-and-white television. In a corner, a desolate middle-aged prostitute drank an espresso slowly, sheltering herself meekly from the cold and rain.

  Michel Girardot nodded his agreement. Once again, despite their St. Laurent suits and Gucci shoes, they were a couple of street urchins plotting an exploit.

  “An American problem—or maybe two or three American problems. Do we go in, or do we stay out? What do you say, Michel?”

  Girardot did not say. The question was, of course, rhetorical. Quatre Bras valued Michel’s silence and secrecy, not his advice. It had always been that way.

  “My feeling is that we go in. Go in big. Thirty Club Villages spread across the United States in three years, and ten new ones in the Caribbean. Total investment if we move now is, maybe, 350 million francs. Ninety to a hundred million dollars.”

  Girardot moved his Scotch around in his mouth before swallowing it. Quatre Bras always enjoyed talking in millions.

  “Yet the board urges caution. They say we must consolidate before we go American. They say we should do what we know best, that if we Americanize, then the whole concept of Club Village will be bastardized into some kind of summer camp with McDonald’s hamburgers and Coca-Cola for dinner.” He stopped speaking and examined his nine polished fingernails and the stump of his right little finger, which had been severed in a bobsled accident.

  “And you say?” Michel always knew when to prompt. He pushed his black hair away from his forehead and waited.

  “I say that if we don’t move now, someone else will. Perhaps Club Med, or maybe even Holiday Inn or Sheraton will steal our concept. For twenty-five years we have been growing. If we stop now, we will begin to go backward.”

  “And the funding?”

  “Universal-American Airlines. They’re interested in buying into the whole Club Village. They would want 30 percent of the shares.”

  At last, Girardot began to understand something of the dilemma. The club was already largely owned by a loosely knit consortium of French and Swiss banks. Quatre Bras, the chairman and life president, held a substantial minority of the nonvoting shares, and three out of ten of the voting shares. He had never once been defeated in a boardroom battle. He was known as the man who had started Club Village, and so far his judgment had always been good enough to gain the support of the board when he needed it. To go now into the American zone would require massive American funding. That, in turn, would lead to a further redistribution of the shares and inevitably, to several more seats around the boardroom table. And that meant that his personal power would be reduced. Even Girardot, with his elementary grasp of economics and tribal warfare, could appreciate the delicacy of the situation. But Quatre Bras could never stand still. He had to keep expanding his empire. It was the nature of the club, and it was the nature of Quatre Bras.

  “You said there were other problems?” prompted Girardot again.

  Quatre Bras shrugged, a huge, expansive movement which seemed to come from deep within his diaphragm. “Unions,” he said, as though mentioning an irritating allergy. “In America a week’s work is not what we’re used to. When did we ever work an eight-hour day, Michel? Never!”

  Girardot nodded, watching his friend carefully.

  Something else was obviously worrying him. For the first time Girardot wondered whether in fact the board were not right to be wary of the American adventure. The first trial village in the Caribbean had already been the cause of considerable notoriety because of some hyped-up New Yorkers who had chartered down for fifteen days of sun, sex, and illegal substances.

  Girardot glanced over at the prostitute. She had finished her espresso, and the barman was suggesting that she find another place to shelter. In a few more years, considered Girardot illogically, such women might be nearly obsolete. The prospect saddened him, but better an honest hooker anytime than a devious little liberated lady.

  Quatre Bras had also noticed the altercation. Standing up he walked with dignity and authority across to the prostitute. “Madam,” he said, with the air of a man who has spent a lifetime charming women, “my colleague and I would be flattered if you would care to join us.”

  The woman looked up warily, ready for the double cross, t
he cruel insult. Then, suddenly recognizing Quatre Bras from the thousands of newspaper photographs and television appearances, her lips cracked open in a smile, revealing a jagged array of decaying and broken teeth. Girardot winced, but Quatre Bras kept his smile, holding his arm out kindly, “We would be very flattered …”

  Overcoming her bashfulness, the woman joined them and bathed herself in whiskey, freely poured for a good hour, as she, Quatre Bras, and Girardot recalled the old days in Les Halles. Finally Quatre Bras made polite murmurs of regret and, standing, slid a couple of thousand-franc bills across the table to the protesting lady and insisted that she treat herself to a new outfit as a gift from an old boyfriend. Despite her affectation of pride, she was pleased to accept.

  It wasn’t until Girardot was parking the Citroën outside Quatre Bras’ apartment in the Avenue Frederick Le Play, pulling onto the cobbles and under the bare, knobbed chestnut trees, that he picked up their conversation.

  “And the other problem, General?” he asked as Quatre Bras swung his long legs cut it onto the shining pavement. “The real problem.”

  “The real problem … I don’t know. Perhaps I’m imagining it, Michel, but the chef de village at Elixir is missing. He disappeared yesterday afternoon while out in one of the outboards. There’s an air-and-sea search out for him, but … I don’t know. He’s too experienced to get lost. Something is wrong. I don’t know what it is, but I sense it.”

  Four

  If Quatre Bras was worried, Sharon Kennedy was approaching desperation as she sat alone in the office she shared with the chief of the village of Elixir. It was now late afternoon in the Caribbean, just a day since Dick Pagett had failed to return from what he had described as a “quiet afternoon’s tour around the cays.” There was no word from him. Since dawn the Bahamian Coast Guard and the local U.S. Navy Air Base on Eleuthera had been flying sorties over the area, but in a part of the world speckled with cays, rocks, and uninhabited islands, it was not unusual for small boats to be missing. What was unusual was for someone of Pagett’s experience to run into difficulty.