“Thank you, dear lady.” And he kissed her hand, which she’d been sure he would do.
“This is Benjamin Bernard,” she said. “My press secretary.”
It was fascinating to watch. As the men exchanged greetings, Sassi saw the little mechanical eyes in Sir Albert’s head flick at Benny, assess him, realize he was neither important nor homosexual, and cross him off the list. The eyes seemed to go out of gear, like a car shifting into neutral, and Sassi knew Benny would never really exist for Sir Albert ever again.
Sir Albert turned back to Sassi, saying, “You must be tired from your trip. I’ll have you shown to your room, and you can freshen up. Come down any time, and if you want anything from the kitchen just dial seven on your telephone.”
Another hotel. Sassi said, “Thank you very much, Sir Albert.”
“And I hope you don’t mind,” the baritone rolled on, “but I’ve arranged a sort of welcoming party in your honor this evening. I hope you’ll feel like coming.”
“Benny told me about it,” Sassi said. “I’m sure it’ll be fun.” Sure.
After very little more talk, Sir Albert turned them back over to Bullworth Spence — “You can think of young Spence here as an extension of my right arm” — who took them through a cool dim white room to the foot of a broad flight of stairs, where he turned them over to a silent slender Negro, who showed them upstairs to their rooms.
Sassi’s windows faced the sea, an infinitely more beautiful view than Las Vegas, but she found it not much more pleasing. Even here she couldn’t get away from the pressure.
She’d been right, the studio was angling to do a loan-out. She was one of the last of the major stars still in a contractual situation with a Hollywood studio — her third analyst had said it was because she was looking for a father figure — and the contract still had two pictures to run, after which she intended to follow everybody else into free-lance work and maybe even her own production company. At thirty-two it was time for a girl to get over the need for a father figure.
At any rate, she had script refusal on her films, and she knew right now she wasn’t going to be happy with any script shown her by Sir Albert Fitzroy. There was something too efficiently predatory about the man, she wouldn’t be happy working for him, she could tell that already. And another thing she could tell already, Sir Albert wasn’t the sort to offer the hospitality of his house just for the fun of it. This invitation had to be the opening move in an attempt to get her for some property he had in mind, and since the studio had okayed the arrangement, they must be planning to have her work off her last two pictures on loan-outs, probably in deals that would help the studio in a lot of other ways. And the hell with that. She’d work on the lot she knew, with the production people she knew, in the country she knew, or she wouldn’t work.
But though she had no intention of working for Sir Albert, she couldn’t just tell him to go fly a kite, she would have to wait and watch him on the surely roundabout route he would take before reaching her with a direct offer, and then she would have to refuse with regret, and let him try to persuade her, and continue to smile and be polite and regretful all the way through the goddam movie festival, spoiling the whole thing.
Why couldn’t she just tell him no, right now? She was Sassi Manoon, wasn’t she? She was rich and powerful and important. Why not tell him no and switch to a hotel and give herself a chance to enjoy the stinking festival? Why not?
Well, in the first place, there wouldn’t be a hotel room this side of Fort Lauderdale, not during a major film festival. And in the second place, things aren’t done that way. Things are done politely. The effect is the same, she would not be making a movie for Sir Albert Fitzroy, but the method is slower and infinitely more painful.
Usually, an affair like this wouldn’t directly involve a meeting of the principals at all. A representative of Sir Albert’s, probably Spence, would contact Max Manning with the proposition, Max would offer it to Sassi, Sassi would say no, Max would say no, Spence would tell Sir Albert the answer was no, and Sir Albert would suggest a slightly different proposition instead. And so on. This way, Sir Albert was cutting out the middlemen, but the essential method would remain the same.
So she hadn’t gotten away from her life at all, had she? And tonight’s party should be a killer-diller, a huge garish bash full of boring people. Well, all she’d be expected to do was make a token appearance, somewhere around ten o’clock, and for the rest of the evening she could stay up here and read a book.
“That’s wonderful,” Sassi Manoon told the ocean. “That’s really great.”
(5)
Data
Pedaling his bicycle along Kent Avenue in the orange light of the setting sun, Robby gave himself over at last to brooding. There was nothing else to think about at the moment, so his thoughts turned to the black man’s burden, which was himself, the fact of his color, the anomaly of his position in the world.
Never before in his life had Robby felt that anomaly as strongly as today, being an American Negro on the island of Jamaica. All day he had felt ghostly, unreal, like those spirits in fantasy stories who cannot make themselves heard by the living. The natives he had moved among could tell by his clothes and accent that he wasn’t one of them, he was an American, his kinship was with the tourists; and the American tourists could tell from his skin that he wasn’t one of them, he was a Negro, his kinship was with the natives. With both camps assuming him to belong to the other side, he had wandered all day in his own private no man’s land, and whenever he had spoken to anybody he had felt as though his voice had an echo.
Not that things like that should bother him any more. Very soon none of that would matter at all, because he was going to have almost three hundred thousand dollars, and if there was anything on God’s green earth that could equalize a black man in white society it was gold. Why else would he take a chance on a wild scheme like this?
Robert “Robby” Creswel, son of a Boston doctor and his receptionist/nurse/wife, graduate of a fine old New England polytechnical college, veteran of three years’ peaceful duty in the Coast Guard, non-marcher, non-picket, non-sitter-in, had been a Negro all his life, and all his life he had believed that the only way to protect himself from the consequences of that fact was to somehow become a millionaire. Given enough money, he believed, a man could rise above any inconvenience, no matter how great.
Until Kelly had come along with this Starnapping plan, Robby’d had no idea how to go about attaining that goal of wealth. He was adapted neither to be a boxer nor to go into show business. Any large corporation in America would have been delighted to have such a credit to his race for their token Negro executive trainee, but what future was there in that? No millions, that was for sure. So Kelly and Starnap had been manna from heaven.
Of course, the Sassi Manoon kidnapping wasn’t a final answer in itself, but it was a damn good first step. A bright boy of any color with three hundred thousand dollars to invest can still do all right for himself, if he has a good tax lawyer. All Robby had to do was quadruple that original investment, and there was the million. After that, the money would take care of itself.
In the meantime, he was still naked in this world, he still suffered the slings and arrows of ourtrageous Caucasians, he still felt himself lost in the gulf between the planets when he moved around downtown Montego Bay, and while riding his rented bicycle back out to Kelly and the boat he still tended to fall into gloominess and brooding.