"Me?" Iris laughed and shook her head. "Hurry and shower. Don't overdress. Hill crowd, week night, is sport shirt and Bermuda shorts Water buffaloes are all right."
"Iris, I thought I'd have dinner with you."
"I have a dinner date, dear. Heavy business." She waved her letter. "Go ahead. You'll tell me all about it tomorrow in Dingley Dell. I'll talk to Church about borrowing the cat."
"Look, Iris, can you sail a catamaran? I can't, any more than I can fly a B-52. If you want me to hire a motorboat-"
"A cat sails itself, more or less, sweetie. Getting it to come around can be sticky and beating upwind is rough, but I've had some practice. We'll have a marvelous time. Motors are so smelly and noisy."
"God, I'm looking forward to tomorrow, Iris."
"So am I, Norman Paperman."
6
It was dark when he set out for Broadstairs. Hassim, who was at the bar entertaining a young man in a cerise jacket without lapels, told Norman he had furnished every stick in Broadstairs, and gave him explicit directions. But Norman got lost in the dirt roads crisscrossing downward toward the sea, about five miles west of Georgetown, and only found the place by heading for a twinkle of far lights, amber and green and yellow in the starlit wilds. An arched stone gateway between poled flares, clustered about with Volkswagens, appeared just around a turn of the rutted road. He parked the Rover amid tall pipe cactus, and descended a grand stone staircase with elaborate curving balustrades, which, in the light of amber lamps set at knee height, looked like marble. A round-faced woman with unruly blond hair, a shapeless tub of a body and spindle legs, wearing a white shirt and yellow shorts, appeared at the bottom of the staircase. She held a large crystal tumbler in one hand and a spray can in the other. "Hello, there. You must be Mr. Paperman. I'm Bunny Campbell. Are you anointed? The sand flies are beastly tonight. Joys of waterfront property."
'They don't seem to bother me."
"Bless me, are you one of those lucky souls? I'm so sorry you can't see the gardens, it's so black dark. That's more or less the whole idea of our humble abode, the staircase and the gardens, but you'll have to come again by day, very soon." As Mrs. Campbell rattled on hoarsely in upper-class tones-Boston, or possibly Philadelphia, to Paperman's limited discernment-he followed her through a terrazzo-tiled foyer lined with paintings, including an unmistakable Degas, across a wide oblong room furnished partly with antiques and partly with good rattan furniture, and walled with paintings and oversize leather books. The far wall was all folding doors to a terrace facing the floodlit beach, tall palms, and the dark sea.
"Norman darling, you did come. How enchanting of you!" Imposing in a bottle-green evening dress with a very low neck, her red hair piled high above her head, Amy Ball came forging out of the crowd of drinkers on the terrace and sailed toward him. A powerful arm went around him, thickly painted lips smacked the air, and he smelled rose perfume and scotch.
"Come get a drink, love. I hear you've been having sheer bloody hell for weeks, and now Hippolyte's back and everything's humming. How marvelous that you've got Hippolyte! He's the jewel of the island. If that utter bastard Thor hadn't fired him, I'd probably still be here, running the Gull Reef Club. I didn't know when I was well off."
She took a fresh sizable tumbler of scotch at the bar, linked an arm in Paperman's, backed him into a corner of the terrace, sat him down, and poured out her woes. Mrs. Ball was drunk, but clear in her speech, although wide jolly smiles kept coming and going on her face with no relevance to what she happened to be saying. Also as she slumped toward Paperman for confidential passages of her tale, the neck of her dress fell away, and so far as he could see, there was nothing under the dress but Amy Ball, sagging, bare, and large. It made him nervous.
Thor, according to Amy Ball, was a brute, a horror, a deceiver, a vampire who had sucked her dry and cast her off. Once aboard Moonglow, she said, her two-year affair with him had come to an abrupt end. He loved the boat. He loved it as he had never loved her, as it was impossible for him to love any woman. He had pushed her bodily out of his cabin one night-Mrs. Ball said with a quick smile, "Of course we were lovers, dear, you knew that, I made no bones about it"-and he had humiliated her to the core by saying, "Dat stuff's no good on a boat." In Panama he wouldn't come off Moonglow. He made one excuse and another, always painting, hammering, sawing, or tinkering. When finally she had dragged him to a hotel one night, he had drunk himself senseless, lain like a log all night in his clothes, and returned to the boat at dawn.
"He never loved me," said Mrs. Ball, smiling and looking tragic in the same second, "never, never, never. He pretended for two years, just to get me to buy that boat. And I fell for it." She raised her glass. "Lycka tilll The utter bastard."
"Why don't you fire him and sell the boat?"
"Oh, darling, don't you Suppose I've thought of that? Dreamed of it? The utter bastard talked me into buying the boat in both our names. Some kind of tax gimmick it was, or he said it was. I adored the monster so, I never thought twice about it. And now every penny I have in the world is in that filthy abominable scarlet horror of a boat, and he's through the Canal and heading for Hawaii. And here I am. Lycka till! Let's have another drink. The utter bastard."
Tom Tilson was getting a drink at the bar. He did not appear to have changed the shirt, shorts, and sandals he had worn on the boat. Amy threw her arm around him, and kissed the air beside his ear. "Oh, Tom, how enchanting of you to come! I'm a defrauded, cast-off old bag, and Thor's turned out to be an utter bastard. Let's find a little corner and have a chat. Where's Letty?"
"We had a big day, Amy. She stayed at home."
Norman sat alone on the stone rail of the terrace, sipping his drink, and wondering why he had been invited. Amy Ball appeared to be guest of honor. She was clad more formally than the rest, and her return to Amerigo seemed the occasion for the dinner, if there was one. Possibly Mrs. Ball had been curious about him and the Reef; but she had had him alone for half an hour, and she had talked entirely about herself. Broadstairs was beautiful, to be sure, and this awkward glimpse was worth while in any case. At the center of the terrace a small fountain plashed. Begonias and geraniums grew around the fountain pool in a circular planter covered with blue-and-white tiles, where several guests sat with their drinks. Another wide balustrade staircase descended to the beach, and to a flagstone path leading to an enormous illuminated blue swimming pool.
Though the totally Gentile look of the party rather intimidated Norman, he nevertheless felt a peculiar relaxation here in Broadstairs, a new sense of being almost at home, or at least on familiar, non-Kinjan ground. He wondered whether it might not stem from the fact that the scene looked so much like a hundred New Yorker advertisements for rums and cigarettes, presumably consumed in such glamorous tropic settings. But, sitting there by himself, he puzzled out the real reason. Except for the two bartenders, and the servants setting up the buffet dinner, there was on the entire crowded terrace not one Negro face.
When dinner was announced Norman lined up with the others at the long oak table, and filled a plate with lobster and rice, a slice of smoked turkey, and another slice from a bright red roast beef. Tom Tilson, on the line right behind Norman, walked with him to the terrace rail, and they sat together and began to eat.
"What a magnificent place they have here," Norman said.
"Ya-a-as." Tilson wrinkled up his face at Norman. "No doubt this is also what you had in mind when you moved to the Caribbean. Only to have this you need to be a Campbell of the Columbus, Ohio, Campbells. You've heard of Campbell Ball Bearings?"
"Of course."
"I like your Reef better, anyway. You've got the town view and the lights at night. Freddy's got nothing out front but sand and ocean. He has to take to the hills if there's a hurricane. When the wind's wrong the seaweed drifts in thick, the beach gets disgusting, and the flies can carry you off. Then he needs a squad of gardeners to clean up. Of course, it's nothing to Freddy. Campbell Ball Bearings pays him a quarter million a year just to stay the hell away from Columbus, Ohio. He's an awfully decent boy, Freddy, but not bright."
"I had an idea Amy Ball was rich, too," Norman said, "and now she tells me she's broke."
Tilson said, "Hah!" and ate a large bite of roast beef. "Amy's going to take a while building up enough cash for her next foolishness, that's all. Her husband left her a bundle, but it's in a trust, and all she gets is the income, though she's had half the lawyers in London try to bust through to that capital. -Amy! Sit down, old girl. Tell us more about that utter bastard."
Mrs. Ball giggled and sat in a chair facing them. "You know, it's the most marvelous relief to cry on people's shoulders? I think if I tell it about four more times it's going to start seeming funny to me, and then I'll be fine." She ate some food voraciously. "I want to know what's going on at the Reef. Is Hippolyte really as clever as ever? That man knows every inch of the Club, Norman, every wire and valve and hole and conduit. Why, he is the Club. He's its soul. Don't laugh. Something went out of the Club when that utter bastard fired him, just because Hippolyte took one teeny swipe at him with a cutlash."
"That wouldn't bother me in the least," Paperman said. "Hippolyte can do no wrong, and I don't care how many headless policemen I find on my lawn."
"It's all nonsense," Tilson said. "Hippolyte Lamartine is a fair maintenance and construction man. In the United States there are twenty million of them. It's just that he's on Kinja. By contrast with what's available here, he looks as though he's jetting around with flames shooting out of his behind."
"Never mind, you stick to him," Mrs. Ball said to Norman. "He's docile as a schoolgirl if you just let him have his way. What I want to know is"-here she dropped her voice-"how about lovely Iris? How is she?"
"She's fine," Paperman said.
"Dear Iris. She's such a sweet thing, and she's so attractive, isn't she, Norman?" Mrs. Ball gave a loud sigh, and smiled, and stopped smiling, and smiled again. "It's such a pity about her. Isn't it, Tom?"
"Well, we're all peculiar here, Amy, and one peculiarity's as good or as bad as another. Talk doesn't help."
"Yes, but such a lovely woman, and an actual film star once, and still very pretty, actually-I mean don't you think it's sad, Norman?"
Paperman knew that this was his chance to find out whatever there was to know about Iris Tramm. The drunken woman was pushing him to ask one question; then would come the spill. He was about to ask the question (though ashamed of doing so) when a crowd of youngsters came cascading on the terrace with a great noise. Giggling, whispering, chirping, shouting, they swarmed up to the buffet. Most of them were girls, in yellow, white, and pink; some in flounced dresses, some in narrow pants that were mere stretched films over their blossoming behinds. They had three baby-faced boys with them, all over six feet tall, in dark suits with absurdly short trousers, and great growths of hair. These girls were the Sand Witches, Norman perceived, a bit the worse for their evening hairdos, but still unquenchably pretty with the prettiness of seventeen. Amy Ball leaped up when she saw them. "Great day, just look at those children! Aren't those the Sand Witches? Isn't that Maude Campbell? Why she's a woman, and a year ago she was an infant. Maude! Don't you remember your Aunt Amy? And isn't that Gloria Collins?" Mrs. Ball strode to the youngsters, and they swirled around, hugging her.
"The children's hour," Tilson said, flipping his cigarette stub from his holder to the sand below. "Bedtime for me, Paperman."
"I'll go too." Paperman put his plate down hastily. He made his farewells to Mrs. Campbell. She briefly expressed her desolation at his having to leave, and turned back to her little knot of gossipers. Norman was halfway up the wide stairway when he heard a voice from below, "Norman! Norman, love! Do wait up, there's a dear," and Amy Ball mounted the stairs on a rather weaving course. "Love, I abhor talking business at a party, but I'm so glad Bunny asked you, because there is just this one teeny thing."
"Perfectly all right."
"It's those silly old promissory notes, lover. I'm such a boob about money, but as I recall they're dated so that you don't start paying them till you've retired the bank loan, and that'll be a couple of years at least. Am I right?"
"Yes, Amy."
"Well, the point is, lover," said Amy, snuggling his arm to hers and teetering so that Paperman had to brace himself to keep from toppling down the stairs with her, "the point is, lover, two years from now I may be dead, do you know what I mean? Or you may be, or the nasty old Russkis may have blown the world to smithereens. You know? I mean ten or fifteen thousand dollars cash" would look a hell of a lot better to me right now than some silly little bits of paper that promise thirty-five thousand after I'm dead."
Paperman had drunk very little; and though he was no businessman, he realized that here was a sudden chance to cut the price of the Gull Reef Club almost in half. He also perceived why he had been invited to Broadstairs. "Well, Amy, that's something I have to think about."
