by Ray Connolly
From then on, everything Ronay did added to his wealth, with the exception of his hobby, which was beautiful women. Had Ronay been less conservative and Lady Sarah less Catholic, they might have reached a comfortable accommodation in the divorce courts. But that avenue was closed to Ronay, who grew increasingly attractive with middle age while his wife simply became homely. She retreated to the country and her dogs and horses, leaving her errant husband to float through Europe as he pleased.
“What are you thinking about?” Beta’s voice broke the silence. Hardin had thought she was sleeping.
“I was wondering why women as beautiful as you ask dumb questions,” he said, and bit her earlobe gently.
She laughed. “Don’t you know that there are only four apres-coitus questions in the entire world?” she said.
“Four?”
“Four. The first is, ‘Was it as good for you as it was for me?’ The second is, ‘What are you thinking about?’ The third is, ‘Do you love me?’ and …”
“And what?”
“And the fourth is, ‘Why don’t we do it again?’”
Hardin groaned and slipped his hands beneath her. “I thought you’d never ask,” he murmured softly.
Six
Quatre Bras had never been a jogger. He played tennis and squash like a demon of thirty, but in the morning he liked to walk, a regular brisk half-an-hour’s march across his tiny patch of lawn and on to the Place Joffre, which stood bare in front of the École Militaire, and then once around the perimeter of the Pare du Champ de Mars, the geometrically dissected city garden created by Monsieur Eiffel for the greater glory of his tower. This morning, Quatre Bras walked with greater vengeance than usual.
He had awoken at six, as always. Leaving the sleeping Madame Quatre Bras in their elegant calico, chrome, and glass bedroom overlooking the park, he had gone immediately to his study to examine the night’s Telex messages. He had never liked the telephone, and shunned it as much as possible. People used the telephone to lie, he would say. But the Telex was different. People had to think before they wrote, and over the years he found himself saving countless hours of wasted conversation by insisting that everything possible be communicated to him in writing.
All night long, as his worldwide empire went about its multimillion-dollar business, the Telex messages had been flowing into the Bourse, where a twenty-four-hour team of specially trusted employees sorted them for the various departments and retransmitted the most interesting items across Paris to the home of Quatre Bras.
There had been fourteen items that morning, ranging from an outbreak of gastroenteritis in Liberia to a shortage of vin ordinaire in Fiji and the fatal heart attack of a sixty-year-old Japanese teacher while swimming in the pool at the Singapore club. Quatre Bras flicked through them all carelessly until he read the message from Elixir, sent by Sharon Kennedy. Any bad publicity now could ruin all his plans for the American adventure.
He knew that the biggest problem facing the Bahamian government, as well as regimes on other islands, came from organized crime. Sharon Kennedy’s message confirmed everything he had already heard about the missing Dick Pagett.
Had he been a younger man, Quatre Bras would have taken the first flight to Elixir and set himself up as caretaker chief of the village, going through the place until he found exactly where the problem lay. At fifty-five he was hardly an old man, but the club had always prided itself on being a place for young people run by young people. He might not be old, but he certainly wasn’t young either. Besides, how could he leave Paris? Ever since Ronay had joined the board he had been looking for ways to extend his sphere of influence. Quatre Bras on sabbatical would leave the gate wide open for a Ronay takeover, and inevitably end his own plans for the Quatre Bras assault on America.
He had crossed beneath the Eiffel Tower and was beginning his walk home when suddenly he felt a presence at his side. At first, he took the shadow to be another jogger, and ignored it. But the shadow refused to be ignored. At last Quatre Bras turned to acknowledge his companion. He was a small, dark man with coiffured curly black hair that rose to a point across the top of his head.
“Monsieur Quatre Bras?” The accent was pure Marseilles.
Quatre Bras kept his pace, turning his eyes slowly toward the little man, carefully taking in the rest of the avenue. It was empty.
“Monsieur Quatre Bras, I wondered if I could have a few words with you in a business connection.” The man had the cockiness of a small-time hood—smart but cheap.
“I talk business only at the office,” grunted Quatre Bras, and kept on walking.
“This is business of a delicate nature,” continued the stranger. “My friends in Bonifaccio think we should have a little talk.”
That did it. The little creep had established his area of interest, one of the Corsican villages. Quatre Bras might have guessed. Ever since Corsican independence had resurfaced in the sixties, every company operating from Paris had been subjected to all kinds of blackmail and threats from people claiming to “represent the freedom of the Corsicans.”
“We can’t talk here,” Quatre Bras stalled. “People might see us.”
The little man raised an eyebrow. Quatre Bras continued walking.
“Where do you suggest then?”
Quatre Bras shrugged. Clearly his companion was not even a good amateur. “You know the Café de Liberation in Les Halles? Tonight. Ten o’clock.”
“Ten o’clock,” repeated the man. Putting a hand to his head, he saluted good-bye and turned abruptly away toward one of the intersecting pathways.
Quatre Bras watched him go. Another job for Girardot, he thought. Just a warning would be sufficient. Girardot was good at that. The little man wouldn’t need too much pressure. Not like some of the others.
Quatre Bras continued back to his home and the coffee which his wife, Francine, would have prepared for him. Club Village had steered a straight path for twenty-five years now. Nothing was going to change that. Nothing and no one.
Seven
Valerie the Vacuum was late for breakfast. She slopped down shortly before nine-thirty just as the last of the skiers were hurrying off on this most glorious of crisp and sunny alpine days. The Algerian kitchen staff eyed her grumpily as she helped herself to fruit juice, croissants, and coffee. But she did not see their expressions. She hardly saw anything, certainly not the dazzling blues and reds of the skiers as they slalomed down the slopes nearest to the club. Valerie saw nothing other than her own reflection in her eyes, and felt again the pain of being plain.
Once a year she would come to the club, telling herself that romance lay around the corner or that sex was worth it just for itself; and she tried to convince herself by convincing others. But it didn’t work that way. Last night had been an exercise in self-degredation to which she had more than contributed. To Hardin she had pretended to be self-confident and brash, but the truth was that she was desperate: desperately lonely. She had always been lonely. At school and then college she was always the jolly one who got the leftovers at parties and dances. She was popular but not because of her body, her face, or her personality. Other girls liked her because she presented no competition, and men liked her because they usually saw her as a sexless frump, until they were hard up or drunk, when anything was better than nothing. Why, she wondered, as every plain girl in the world wondered every day of her life, had God chosen to form her in this cloddish manner? She should be grateful for having her health and intelligence, she told herself. And she was. But why had she been born so plain? In the books she read lovemaking was some wondrous, mystical act performed between svelte-limbed women and kind, attractive, handsome men. But in all her experience it had been a series of grimy acts with men she hardly knew, men she had aroused purposely to fill the void of her loneliness. This morning her body ached, and her conscience sneered at her. She was grateful that she would be going home tomorrow. Last night, how many had there been … three, or was it four? They had pretended to form
a line, and she had tried to stay deaf to their sneering insults. The memory sickened her. She forced her mind away from the thought. It didn’t matter. No one in Zurich would know her secret. Once she was on the airplane she would again be anonymous. Just another plain girl, facing the inevitable loneliness of middle age and hating it; just another lumpy girl who had come to Club Village looking for romance when romance was forever reserved for the pretty and pert. And she wondered, as she always did the morning after, whether she would be taking a Club Village vacation next year.
There were always a lot of girls like Valerie at Club Village.
Eight
“You really sure you want to do this thing, Myron?” Rodney Calthrop was wearing his most insincere expression of kind solicitude. Now he sounded that way, now that it was too late.
Myron Bloomberg scratched the matted black hairs on his thighs, and nodded his large head vigorously. “Of course I want to!” he lied.
To admit that he would rather spend the day lying in the sun reading, or sleeping, or indeed doing anything except fooling around forty miles out into the ocean and thirty feet down would have been an admission of cowardice, something the last honestly committed Freudian practicing in New York City was not prepared to admit. So Myron just smiled … and prayed.
Today was to be his first experience scuba diving. Rodney Calthrop was his brother-in-law, a dentist by trade but a cowboy by temperament. The vacation in the rented house on Great Exuma had, of course, been all Rodney’s idea. Rodney liked what he called “action” vacations.
In the front seat of the hired Viking cruiser, Myron’s wife, Rosa, exchanged glances with her husband. She knows I’m terrified, thought Myron. Rodney’s second childhood was getting to her, too. But she wouldn’t betray Myron.
Suddenly Rodney was talking again. “Remember, we’re a team. You and me. Okay? Just stay close and you’ll have the biggest trip since Fellini’s Roma. Jesus … what a movie! Okay?”
Bloomberg nodded, not knowing whether he was agreeing with Rodney’s estimation of Fellini or his advice for the dive. “Okay,” he said, dully.
“And remember—” added Rodney, “don’t panic. No matter what happens … and nothing will happen … no matter what happens, we don’t panic.… Okay? The only thing to panic about is panic. Okay?”
Rodney had been through it all a thousand times. Myron knew that sharks were nothing to be frightened of, that there were lots of them and they’d probably come to take a look, but that they were just being curious and all you had to do was keep circling. Same thing with barracudas and stingray and grouper and every other kind of beast lurking down there around that reef. But Myron had read those Peter Benchley books, and cable television never seemed to stop showing movies where mad cellists accompanied great whites at thirty miles an hour forty feet down. Jesus, even the angelfish floating around down there looked menacing.
“Ready to go,” Rodney grinned, and with that the masks were pulled down and over they went.
At first the only thing Myron could think was how light it seemed to be, bright as day, really. And as he became familiar with the way he could move his arms and legs he began to feel like a spaceman sailing around outside his capsule. Looking up, he saw the belly of his boat, a secure refuge above. He looked over toward Rodney, who appeared to be smiling at him and was pointing toward the coral, a series of elkhorn formations tied together like a string of runner beans growing out of a drift of sand. Kicking with his flippers, Myron propelled himself toward the rocks. He looked over his shoulder. There were no signs of sea monsters. He kicked again, and watched the bubbles darting away behind him. Now enjoying his weightlessness, he moved closer to the elkhorn coral. Rodney was a little way ahead of him and to the right, gripping his underwater camera and looking for the find which would get him those elusive pages in National Geographic. Myron approached the elkhorn without fear. At this depth, with the boat right above him, he was actually beginning to feel almost confident.
Then he saw something that intrigued him. It didn’t look like anything for the National Geographic, more like a few rags bundled together, caught on one of the antlers of coral. Even here they had litter problems, he thought, and he moved closer for a better look so that his paddling flippers sent a current of water swirling around the rags. Slowly the bundle turned toward him. Gradually, almost as though his mind had gone into low gear, Myron Bloomberg realized that he was staring at the ragged, white corner of a gnarled hip bone. What he had taken for rags were articles of clothing hanging from the remains of a human body, casually caught up on this piece of rock, drifting backward and forward in a lazy, eddying motion as the current caught it. It was half a body actually, half eaten and torn apart and then left to float by the replete diners; half a body, with only half its face intact.
At that point Myron decided it was okay to panic.
The Bahamian Coast Guard came out to collect the body and to transport Myron Bloomberg to the Great Exuma hospital. Myron was suffering from shock. Even Rodney was in shock.
At two in the afternoon, as the sun baked hotter and hotter, the Coast Guard pulled alongside, four immaculately uniformed officers and two divers, all smiling happily as though pulling bodies off the coral were just another kind of scuba diving. But by two forty-five, when the bits and pieces of body had been collected and put into a plastic bag and then into a refrigerator on board the boat, the smiles had faded.
The Coast Guard had expected to find the remains of another Haitian illegal immigrant whose boat had not made it. They found them every week. But this was a white man, wearing what remained of Club Village shorts and T-shirt. They could throw Haitians into a hole and forget about them. But now there would have to be a postmortem and an inquest. As Myron was taken away, it occurred to Rodney that the Coast Guard were sorry the corpse had been discovered at all. Another day and there would hardly have been anything left to find.
Nine
Hardin got his traveling orders by Telex that same night. The message was simple. From midnight Jean-Paul Cartier was the new chef de village at Val d’Isabelle, with salary commensurate with his new responsibilities. Hardin was to report to Quatre Bras in his offices at the Bourse at noon the next day. A reservation on the nine-thirty Air France flight from Geneva had already been booked.
“What’s going on?” demanded Beta as she opened the door of Hardin’s room to find him packing.
He passed her the Telex.
“Do you think Ernst found out?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Don’t worry. I’ll deny everything. Your piggy banker won’t ever know.”
“I’m not worried about Ernst knowing anything,” she snapped. “I’m just sorry that our moment was so brief.”
“Me too,” he sighed. As he picked up his suitcase, he kissed her cheek.
“Will we see each other again, James?” she asked.
He hesitated, and then nodded. “But who knows where or when?”
Only later that night, when Beta lay sleeping by his side did Hardin have time to consider his sudden recall. Jean-Paul Cartier had been delighted by his sudden promotion, but there was a genuine sadness among the CVs and ski instructors over Hardin’s leaving. He was a popular chef de village.
At thirty-five, James Hardin felt he was at another crossroad, in his life. Not for the first time, he wondered whether Club Village was the life he really wanted. Years earlier, it had seemed an improvement over the gypsy life of the tennis circuit. But he had been in charge of Val d’Isabelle for only two months, and now he was being moved again.
He turned over and pushed his head deeper into his pillow. Quatre Bras had better have a good reason for fooling around with his life like this, he thought.
Ten
“Push … push … push …” Cassandra Mallinson forced her aching arms and legs onward through the pale green water. Her New Year’s resolution had been to swim twenty lengths every morning before breakfast at London’s Kensington New Pools, but she ha
d not reckoned on the competitive spirits of the male bathers who also chose that time and that pool for training. As she pushed on valiantly, mountainous waves made by the bullet-headed human torpedos alongside forced her to gulp and lift her head higher to avoid getting a lungful of water. It was twenty-five past eight, according to the large pool clock, and she was on her last length. This morning was going to be a slow time.
Reaching the end of the pool, she stood up and walked unsteadily to the steps. Perhaps twenty-nine was too old to start all this, she mused. In the pool, one of the bullet-heads watched her leave, with evident disappointment. She was aware of him, but purposely avoided giving any clue that she had noticed. She had better things to do than encourage young men along flights of fancy.
Recovering her bundle of clothes, she entered a changing cubicle and, stepping out of her simple black bathing suit, she rubbed her body vigorously with a towel. She was a lithe, slim woman, green-eyed, fair-skinned, and long-legged. Taking off her black bathing cap, she shook her long, subtly tinted brown hair to her shoulders. She dressed quickly in clothes too elegant for this run-down part of London and, shoving her wet towel and suit into a Piero de Monzi shopping bag, headed toward her black Renault 5, parked in a side street.
Her timetable never changed. Hurrying through the cold, wet streets to her basement flat in St. Petersburgh Place, Bayswater, she made herself a breakfast of Swiss müesli, toast, and coffee while listening to the news on the BBC.
To the observer she seemed a strong, apparently well-off, self-contained woman. She was pretty, even beautiful in an English kind of way, but she wore a remote expression. She was single and worked, and her life was a selfish one. Without commitments of any kind, she lived for herself and her work. Her parents, now in their midsixties, had retired to an English colony in the Algarve, after a lifetime’s devotion to Queen and country, and no man had come along with whom she had fancied setting up house.
