It was an open Chris-Craft runabout which would have photographed exactly like any other similarly expensive standard model, except in color. The color was a brilliant purple which no shipyard can ever have been asked to apply to a hull before. And to offset it, the upholstery of the cockpit and the lounging pad covering the engine hatch were an equally brilliant orange. As an aid to identifying the owner of this chromatic monstrosity, the sides of the craft were emblazoned with a large capital J nestling inside a still larger capital U, the monogram being surrounded by a circle of large golden metal stars.
The owner of the boat and the initials, Sir Jasper Undine himself, sat on the port gunwale controlling the course with one hand. Apparently to insure that he would not be eclipsed by his own setting, he wore fluorescent green shorts, a baggy fluorescent crimson windbreaker, and a long-peaked fluorescent yellow cap. Under its exaggerated eye-shade he wore a pair of huge white-plastic blue-lensed sunglasses which, with the help of a torpedo-sized cigar clamped in his mouth and the gray goatee below it, balked any analysis of his features even at that comparatively short range: one had mainly the impression of some goggle-eyed, balloon-torsoed, spindle-legged visitor from Outer Space which had arrayed itself in human garments selected to conform with the prismatic prejudices of Alpha Centauri. But no one who paid any attention to the sophisticated chatter of those times would have been so misled as to fail to identify Sir Jasper Undine, whose ostentatious eccentricities (suitably embroidered and broadcast by a tireless press agent) had established him as the most garish current character in a coterie which has seldom been distinguished by coyness and self-effacement.
Sir Jasper Undine was, in fact, at that moment one of the indisputable kingpins of the entertainment world in Europe. The story of his rise from part-time usher in a run-down movie theater in South London, to his present control of a complex of motion picture and television producing and distributing companies with ramifications in five countries, in versions flattering or calumnious according to their source, has been told too often to need repeating here. It certainly vouched for an outstanding talent, although some stuffy critics might say that this leaned more towards a ruthless dexterity at brain-picking, idea-stealing, cheating, finagling, and double-dealing, than to any creative or artistic ability. But having achieved success, he had made a second career of indulging every appetite it would gratify, up to and including the knighthood which had cost him many expensive contributions to good causes with which he had no sympathy.
“Is he really as horrible as one would think?” Simon asked.
“Even worse, I believe. But he’s got the final say-so on a job that I need very much.”
“Don’t you have an agent to handle things like that?”
“Of course. My agent’s got everything on the contract except Undine’s signature. And Undine won’t make up his mind about that without meeting me himself.”
Maureen Herald was an actress. She had entered Simon’s life with a letter from David Lewin of The Daily Express:
Dear Saint,
Enclosed please find Maureen Herald. I don’t need to tell you who she is, but I can tell you that I wish everyone I know in show business was as nice a person. She has to go to St Tropez to talk to someone who is not so nice. She doesn’t know anyone else there, and she can’t go places alone, and she may well want a change of company. I’ve told her that you also are a good friend and comparatively nice and can behave yourself if you have to. No wonder some people think I’m crazy.
She had gray eyes and what he could only have described as hair-colored hair, something between brown and black with natural variations of shading that had not been submerged by the artificial uniformity of a rinse. It was a perfect complement to her rather thin patrician features, which would only have been hardened by any obvious embellishments. She had a gracefully lean-moulded figure to match, interestingly feminine but without the exaggerated curvature in the balcony which most of the reigning royalty of her profession found it necessary to possess or simulate. His first guess would have been that she had started out as a high fashion model, but he learned that in fact she had been a nurse at the Hollywood Hospital when a famous director was brought in for treatment of an acute ulcer and offered her a screen test before he left. Her rise to stardom had been swift and outwardly effortless.
“But my last two pictures were commercial flops,” she told Simon candidly. “I say they were stinkers, of course, but some other people found it easier to blame it on me. A nice girl, they said, but death at the box office. And just when my first contract had run out—it was no star salary to start with—and I should have been able to ask for some real money. They just aren’t bidding for me in Hollywood at the moment, and if I don’t do something soon I could be washed up for good.”
“That would be a pity,” he said. “And nothing but a few annuities to live on.”
“That isn’t even half funny,” she retorted. “After taxes and clothes and publicity and all the other expenses you have to go for, there’s very little left out of what I took home. And I’ve got a mother in a sanatorium with TB and a kid brother just starting medical school. I can’t afford not to get this part.”
The purple speedboat veered closer to the shore, farther along. There was another man in the cockpit, but he had hardly been noticeable as he sat down, even though he had ginger hair and a complexion exactly the tint of a boiled langouste, they could not compete with the gaudy coloration surrounding him. Now he got up and began throwing out water skis and a tow-rope. He was short and scrawny, and his torso was fish-white up to where his narrow shoulders turned the same painful pink as his face.
Three girls had come down to the water’s edge nearest the boat, shouting and giggling. They had almost identical slim but bubble-bosomed figures displayed by the uttermost minimum of bikini. One was raven-haired and the two others were platinum-bleached. One of the blondes began to put on the skis while the other two girls waded out to the boat and climbed in.
“Sir Jasper seems to be casting starlets too, if I recognize the types,” Simon remarked. “And he doesn’t seem to have much difficulty picking them up.”
“When I phoned him this morning for an appointment he said he’d be busy all day until cocktail time.”
“He probably figures it’s good psychology to keep you cooling your heels for a while. And after all, he is busy.”
“From what I’ve heard, next to making money that’s his favorite business.”
The Saint recalled photos that he had seen published of Sir Jasper Undine in various night clubs and casinos, where he was always accompanied by at least one conspicuously glamorous damsel and frequently two or three. It was also common gossip that he did not merely cultivate the impression that he lived like a sultan but aspired to substantiate it.
“I wonder if I could resist the temptation, if I were in his position.”
“You’ve probably had plenty of practice resisting temptations,” Miss Herald said. “But I’m not looking forward to this interview.”
The two dolls who were riding deployed themselves artistically on the orange coverings, the red-haired factotum scrambled down again into insignificance, the Chris-Craft’s sulky muttering rose to a hearty roar, the tow-rope tightened, and the skier came up out of the water a little wobbly at first and then steadying and straightening up and skimming out of the wake as the boat came to planing speed.
Undine drove at full throttle, curling across the bay on a course that seemed cold-bloodedly improvised to score as many near-misses as possible on all the pedalos, floaters, dinghies, and other slower vessels in the area.
“Do you water-ski?” Simon asked, as they watched.
“I’ve tried it. But I don’t much like being whipped around like the tail of a kite, wherever the boat takes you. If someone would invent a way of steering the boat yourself while you’re skiing, it might be fun.”
“Water-skiers must be the worst kind of exhibitionists. Haven’t you noticed tha
t their whole fun is in showing off? If they just enjoyed water-skiing for its own sake, they could do it all over the ocean without bothering anyone. But no. They always have to work as close as they can to what they hope is an admiring audience, and half-swamp anyone who’s only trying to have a quiet peaceful time on the water.”
“But the girl who’s skiing isn’t doing that,” Maureen pointed out. “It’s Undine who’s driving.”
“Using her to get more attention.” The skier fell off then, trying to jump the wake, and Simon sat up with a short laugh. “What a pity that wasn’t him! But I’m sure he wouldn’t ski himself and risk anything so undignified…Come on, let’s forget him for a while and have a dunk.”
She swam well and with surprising endurance for her slight build, not with the brief burst of speed fizzling out into breathlessness that he would have expected. He followed her for about five hundred yards, and when they turned around she seemed quite capable of making it five kilometers.
“I won all the athletic prizes in school,” she said when he complimented her. “That’s probably my trouble, being the good sister instead of the home-wrecker type.”
“If I treat you like a brother,” he said, “it’s only because David stuck me with it.”
After the sun had dried them again she said, “I don’t want to spoil your day, but I’m not tanned like you are, and it might ruin everything if I meet Undine this evening looking like a raspberry sundae.”
“It’s lunch-time, anyway. I have an idea. Let’s drive up to Ramatuelle. There’s a little restaurant there, Chez Cauvière, where they make the best paella this side of the Pyrenees and perhaps the other side too. Then I’ll take you back to the hotel for a siesta, and by seven o’clock you’ll feel fit to cope with a carload of Undines—if you can stand the thought.”
The ambrosial hodge-podge of lobster, chicken, octopus, vegetables, and saffron-tinted rice was as good as he boasted; the unlabelled rosé of the house was cool insidious nectar; and by the end of the meal they were almost old friends. He felt an almost genuinely brotherly concern when he left her and had to remember that all this had been only an interlude.
“Is there anything else I can do?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about it. Do you suppose you could come by the café about eight o’clock, and say hullo to me? Then if it seems like a good idea by that time, I can make like we had a date. It might get me out of something. Even just as a card up my sleeve, it’d do a lot for my morale. That is, if you aren’t already tied up—”
“I can’t think of anything better,” he smiled. “You can count on me.”
She had already told him which café was referred to. The quais which face the harbor of St Tropez are lined almost solidly with restaurants and cafes, where everyone who knows the routine turns out in the evening to be seen and to see who else is being seen, but ever since “Saint-Trop” became known as the rendezvous of a certain artistic-bohemian set for whom the Riviera westward from Cannes was either too princely or too bourgeois, “the” café has always been the Sénéquier, and the others have to be content with its overflow—which is usually enough to swamp them anyway. Although many of the original celebrities have since migrated to less publicized havens, the invading sightseers who put them to flight continue to swarm there and stare hopefully around, most of the time at each other. But even in this era a permanently reserved table at Sénéquier was still a status symbol which Sir Jasper Undine would inevitably have had to display, whatever the price.
Simon strolled slowly along the Quai Jean-Jaurès a little before eight, allowing himself a leisured study of the scene as he approached.
It was impossible not to spot Undine at any distance: he stood out even amidst the rainbow patchwork of holiday garb on the terrace with the help of a blazer with broad black and yellow horizontal stripes, which with the help of his oversized sunglasses made him look something like a large bumblebee in a field of butterflies—if you could imagine a bumblebee wearing a red-and-white-checkered tam-o’-shanter.
Besides the ginger-haired young man who had served as mate on the speedboat in the morning, and two of the shapely playthings they had picked up (or two almost indistinguishable chippies off the same block), Sir Jasper’s entourage had been augmented not only by Maureen Herald, who had been privileged to sit on one side of him, but also by a reddish-blonde young woman with a voluptuous authority that made the starlet types look adolescent.
As he came closer, Simon recognized the sulky sensual face as that of Dominique Rousse, a French actress whose eminence, some competitors asserted, was based mainly on certain prominences, which contrived to get uncovered in all her pictures on one pretext or another. On her other side was a black-browed heavy-set individual who seemed to be watching and absorbing everything with brooding intensity but to be deliberately withholding any contribution of his own.
As Simon came within earshot, Undine was saying, “…and rub his nose in it. The banks don’t make any loans on artistic integrity, and a producer who isn’t as tough as a bank better learn to print his own money. I know what I can do for anyone and I figure what they’ve got to do for me to pull their weight in the package, or I’m not interested—”
He broke off, cigar and goatee cocked challengingly, as the Saint stopped at the table.
Maureen Herald’s face lighted up momentarily, and then masked itself with a kind of cordial restraint.
“Oh, hullo, Simon,” she said, and turned smoothly to the others. “This is Mr—Thomas.” The hesitation was barely perceptible. “Sir Jasper Undine. Mr and Mrs Carozza—that is, Dominique Rousse.” The dark withdrawn man, then, was the lush actress’s husband. “I’m afraid I didn’t get all the other names—”
Undine did not bother to supply them. He stared at the Saint steadily. The impenetrable sunglasses hid his eyes, but at this range it could be seen that his nose was fleshy and his mouth large-lipped and moist.
He asked brusquely, “Any relation of the Thomas brothers—Ralph and Gerald—the directors?”
“No,” said the Saint, pleasantly.
“Not an actor?”
“No.”
“You can sit down, then. Get him a chair, Wilbert.”
The carroty young man gave up his own seat and went looking for another. He was the only customer in the place who was a wearing a tie, and even a shiny serge jacket as well. They were like symbols of servitude amid the surrounding riot of casual garb, and obviously defined his part in Undine’s retinue.
“There’s nothing wrong with actors except when they’re trying to get a job, and then there’s a limit to how many you can ’ave around at the same time,” said Sir Jasper. His origins revealed themselves in his speech more consistently through its intonation and subject matter than by the dropping of h’s, which he did only occasionally. “One day somebody’ll make a robot that you just wind up and it says what you put on a tape, and then they can all butter themselves. Get him a drink, Wilbert.”
“And who would make the tape recording?” Simon inquired, mildly.
“The writers would be glad to do that themselves. They always know ’ow their precious lines ought to be spoken better than anybody else—don’t they, Lee?”
The taciturn Carozza, whose profession was thus revealed, gave a tight-lipped smile without answering. Now the Saint remembered having seen his name in print as one of Europe’s avant-garde new dramatists, but was vague about his actual achievements. It was not a sphere in which Simon Templar had more than a superficial interest.
“These brainy chaps can do anything,” Undine pursued. “Look at him. There’s Dominique, who gets made love to by all the matinée idols—on the set, of course—and papers her bathroom with mash notes from millionaires, and I could go for her myself, but she falls for his intellectual act. He’s hired to work on my script, and she wants to play the lead in it, but he goes and marries her. That’s what you do with brains.”
“You promised me the
part before that,” said Dominique Rousse sullenly.
“I said you were the best bet I’d seen. But what am I betting on now? All you’ll be thinking about is what Lee wants, not what I want. I’m kidding, of course.”
If he was, it was with a touch that tickled like a club.
“Does that mean you were kidding when you asked me to come here for an interview?” Maureen Herald asked.
“Get me another cigar, Wilbert.” Undine brought his opaque gaze back to her. “Listen, you remember in ’Olly-wood about six years ago, right after the premeer of your first picture, which I saw—I was giving a party, and I sent you an invitation, but you didn’t come then.”
“I’d never met you, and I happened to have another date.”
“I knew it couldn’t’ve been because you felt too grand for the likes of me. After all, you came all the way here this time, didn’t you?”
“So all this was just your way of getting even?” she asked steadily.
“Now why would I go to all that trouble? I’m reminding you, that’s all. I didn’t let it make any difference when I told my lawyers to go ahead and draw up a contract with everything your agent was able to get out of me. I rang ’em up this afternoon and they said they’d already sent it off. It should be here in the first post tomorrow. Then all I got to do is make up my mind to be big-’earted and sign it.”
“But if—”
“Who said you and Dominique couldn’t both be starred? There’s two female parts in the script that could be built up equal, if we can stop Lee trying to give all the best of it to his wife.”
“I’m sorry,” Carozza said, speaking at last. “But I don’t see that.” He had only a trace of accent, which was as much Oxford as Latin. “Unless Messalina dominates everything—”
Sir Jasper clutched his temples.
The Saint in the Sun (The Saint Series) Page 4
