Episode on the Riviera Page 3

  Steve said now, “Look, Conny, I’ve got to get my tourists together and get them off to London, then I’ve got to meet the incoming plane with the new batch. Can we talk this over later?”

  “Any time at all, Steve,” the Greek said smoothly. “Sorry to bother you about such mundane things.” He hung up.

  “Oh, Lord,” Steve grumbled. He turned to Elaine, who had been pretending not to listen, but who now had a distressed expression on her face. “Elaine, take over. Phone all the hotels where we have tourists and be sure arrangements have been made to get them to the airport. Be particularly sure that pair of lesbians at the Mira-monte are rounded up. They’re as nutty as fruitcakes and probably don’t realize it’s Friday. I’ll pick up the clients we have at the Pavilion Budapest in my station wagon. Right?”

  “Okay,” Elaine said. With her Provençal accent, it came out, “Okéy.”

  Steve hurried out to the Citroën and tooled it back in the direction of Beaulieu. That damn Conny! He was probably as mad as a Russian diplomat at the United Nations. Steve would have to figure out some way to smooth things over. He knew the Greek basically liked him, and he returned the feeling.

  At the Nice-Côte d’Azur airport, Steve Cogswell had his average handful of confusion. Sixty-seven of the Far Away Holidays vacationists had to be shepherded together, their luggage and gift purchases all organized and then given a final farewell talk and hustled into the departing passengers’ waiting room. Once in there, he was safe. There was no way they could escape. His responsibilities were over. Next stop, London, and the boys there could take over.

  Sixty-five new tourists were incoming on the turbo-jet Viscount which Far Away Holidays chartered each week for the London-Riviera run, to take one batch of clients, pick up another. The Viscount was one of the neatest tricks in air travel. Four turbo-props, three stewardesses, two large rest rooms, and excellent cuisine; the British United Airlines, which leased the craft to the tourist concern, did themselves proud.

  Most of Steve’s clients were fairly experienced travelers who utilized the package vacations because of both economy and the efficiency with which its representatives took over the everyday worries of foreign travel.

  No need to bother with customs, passports, hotel reservations, tipping, selecting restaurants and all the rest of the routine. Far Away Holidays handled it all. The swankest in international living-it-up for a mere seventy pounds a week — less than two hundred dollars — including transportation to and from London. You couldn’t beat it.

  The experienced ones gave Steve little trouble. They knew the ropes and were inclined to take things in stride. The emergencies came with the first-trippers — those who had never been out of England or the United States, as the case might be, and were flustered at being in a foreign country.

  When they disembarked, Steve led them to a medium-sized waiting room, picking up their passports from one of the stewardesses who had gathered them up in flight. He submitted the passports — the American ones green, the British, blue — for French inspection and gave orders for the luggage to be brought into customs. Then he stood up on a handy bench and gave them a short talk.

  It was routine. Explanation of the local money and what the new French franc was worth in terms of dollars and pounds. Explanation of the fact that the new franc was worth one hundred times as much as the old one. Explanation of how Far Away Holidays buses would take them to their respective hotels in Nice, Monaco or Menton. He distributed a small brochure which listed side tours they could take. He gave them a brief rundown on the value of his tours of the night clubs and casinos, warned the single ladies about gigolos and pick-ups on the beaches, warned the single men about ladies of the evening — all with an amused smirk, of course, which brought the expected giggles and snickers.

  By the time the luggage was through customs and the passports stamped, Steve Cogswell had come to the end of his little speech. He wound up by taking the passenger list and reading off their names, telling each, in turn, in which hotel he was scheduled to stay.

  The last name of the list was Nadine Whiteley, who was to stay at the Pavilion Budapest. It was the first time Steve Cogswell became aware of the existence of Nadine Whiteley, but it was a name destined to loom largely in his immediate future.

  Chapter Two

  Saturday, August 6th

  Nadine Whiteley drifted into that half-land between sleep and waking. It was early morning, she was aware, and already the heat of the coming day was warmly comfortable.

  She didn’t want to awaken and enter the world of reality. She was conscious of the fact that the bed in which she lay was a strange one. Where was she? She didn’t want to emerge completely from sleep, but she did wonder where she was. And when. What had happened yesterday?

  She entered a sort of game which she had played with herself since early childhood when she emerged from sleep into this half-dream state. She started at the first memory that came immediately to her and worked forward in time from that point.

  Even in her semi-sleep a pang struck her. Her father’s death. Now she was alone. Her mother had died twenty-seven years ago when Nadine had been born. And now Dad was gone and Nadine was sole owner of the furniture factory, and, for all practical purposes, of the little semi-feudalistic town which housed it. For three generations the Whiteleys had owned Samara — the factory, the land, the houses, even the stores. It was a type of factory town rapidly disappearing in the United States, but still to be found occasionally in New England and more often in the South.

  But she could remember more recently than that. Ah, yes. The party at the artist’s house in Woodstock and meeting Gerald Silletoe. She stirred uncomfortably in her half-sleep. Jerry Silletoe — big, squarely handsome, unusually well groomed and with a sophistication far beyond that of Nadine, who, except for school, had seen little beyond the Catskills.

  She had never really found out anything about Silletoe, but his background struck her as vaguely sinister from the beginning — an impression increased by the fact that he never talked about it. He once let slip the fact that his childhood had been spent on the tougher streets of Brooklyn, but later denied even this. He never referred to his occupation or source of income, and she never met any of his friends. That day in Woodstock she heard hints from other guests that Silletoe had underworld connections, but she dismissed the rumors because one just didn’t meet gangsters at artists’ cocktail parties.

  Still there was something brutal about the way he carried his big body and a glint of cruelty lurked in his dark, probing eyes. Once during the party, when the conversation veered to a certain notorious mobster who was currently having income tax trouble, she caught an expression of cynical amusement and cunning flicker across Silletoe’s heavy face. It occurred to Nadine for a crazy instant that if there was any role this man seemed custom-built for, it was that of a crime syndicate hood — smooth, secretive and ruthless.

  Yet she had found him fascinating, and dismissed her misgivings as girlish fantasy. She was probably just romanticizing the man’s aura of potent sensuality, the sense of violence which actually excited her.

  However, his behavior at their final scene together tended to confirm her dark suspicions. There was definitely something lawless and dangerous about Jerry Silletoe.

  She stirred now, uncomfortably, as that scene came back to her. She hadn’t discouraged him. How could she have been expected to? She was twenty-seven years of age. Twenty-seven and fully normal, with a woman’s body and a woman’s instincts and capacity for love, lacking only in experience.

  It had taken place in the living room of the big house in Samara after Martha and William had gone to bed. In the big house atop the hill and overlooking the town. For a time caught up in the excitement and the passion, caught up in the engulfing needs of her body and in the compelling forcefulness of Jerry’s demanding arms and lips and his caressing hands. For a time wanting him, needing him, waiting for him.

  Then the stark terror at the act
ual moment of reception. The startled surprise in Jerry’s face. Then, as the fear swept her and rose higher and higher and she beat at his naked chest with her clenched fists, beat at him and cried her refusal. How then his expression of surprise had turned to impatience and then dull anger, and he had tried to force her.

  She screamed in hysteria, terrified at the threat of penetration. “No! Please, God, no!”

  “Stop it!” he growled. His voice was savage. “It’s too late, now!” He held her down.

  “No!” Her voice broke and the words became incoherent, but her screams climbed in a crescendo of fright.

  William and Martha, incongruously dressed in the night-clothes of half a century ago, were at the door and suddenly the room was bright with light.

  “Sir!” William had shouted, his aged voice high with alarm and anger. He hurried forward, his feet shuffling in ancient slippers. “Miss Nadine … are you all right?”

  Jerry Silletoe had come to his feet, his clothes still disarranged, his face dark with anger. “Get out of here,” he said heavily, dangerously, to William.

  “Sir,” the old man said tremulously but defiantly, “I must order you to leave immediately or I shall summon the authorities.”

  Martha was comforting Nadine, trying to rearrange her clothing. It must have looked like sheer rape to the elderly servants. Her brassiere was stripped from her body, her skirts up about bare white thighs.

  Jerry’s eyes had gone from Nadine to the servants, and savagely back. He muttered some obscenity and strode rapidly toward the door.

  Now, Nadine squirmed in her semi-sleep, wanting even less to emerge into full wakefulness. The horror of it, the disgrace of it. William and Martha had been aghast.

  And the following day Nadine had gone to old Dr. Levine, who had brought her into the world and her mother before her.

  She had told him her story from the beginning. From the very beginning. Of Uncle Nathaniel and the time he was more than ordinarily drunk and Nadine no more than twelve years of age. Her mind tried to refuse the memory, but she knew it had happened in all its disgusting detail.

  She’d been alone in the house with Uncle Nat, and, as usual by this time of evening, he had been well into a quart of the locally produced applejack. She had come into the living room wearing nothing but her bathrobe, the summer heat being such that everyone slept nude. She should have seen sooner that something was wrong.

  She had sat on his lap, artlessly, and didn’t particularly mind when he had, seemingly unconsciously, stroked her legs and caressed her even then rounded bottom, as he talked to her.

  Then he had pretended to make it a game.

  “Do you ever let the boys touch you there?”

  “Uncle Nat! Don’t do that.”

  “Or kiss you like this?”

  At first there had been a timid curiosity, and then she had let him go beyond the turning point. She could still remember scraps of the conversation — if it could be called conversation.

  “Oh, no, Uncle Nat. Oh, please don’t. I’ll tell father. Don’t hurt me. No … oh, no. It’s so big. No, no, please …”

  Afterward, there was the pain and the fright, and the blood on her legs and clothing. Still later, Uncle Nat, had gone stumbling off to drive his car full tilt into the Ashokan Reservoir. On purpose? She’d never know. Before that night of horror, he’d been her favorite relative.

  Dr. Levine had listened to the full recital. Of how she had progressed through the usual high school and college romances, but never going further than light petting. Of her underlying fear of ever going further than perhaps a secretly fondled breast. Then Roger Stuart and their engagement, which had lasted a full six months and had terminated only days before the wedding when they had decided to consummate it with a premarital experiment.

  It was then, on the lawn of the Stuart family, that Nadine had discovered that sex was not for her. Until the moment of attempted penetration, she was seemingly normal, as desirous of fulfillment as the most passionate. But then it became so utterly impossible, and the hysteria struck. Instead of gentle, easygoing, goodlooking Roger, her fiancé, it suddenly seemed to become Uncle Nat, and the pain, and the fear, and the blood, and then, next morning, the news of his accident — or suicide.

  Dr. Levine had listened to it. Old, tired Dr. Levine, who had seen all of life in his nearly seventy years — had seen it all and been saddened by it.

  He had told her gently that she was a beautiful, sensitive woman, needful of love and needful of satisfying the normal sexual appetites of her body. He recommended she see a psychiatrist in New York. Before that, however, he pointed out to her that although he could hardly recommend she have an affair out of wedlock, it would not be fair for her ever to marry under existing conditions. Her husband-to-be couldn’t become aware of her neurosis, of her fear of the act of love, except on the night of their wedding. This must be conquered before marriage….

  Nadine was beginning to emerge from her half-sleep now, beginning to remember where she was. She hadn’t taken the doctor’s advice about the psychiatrist. She couldn’t face revealing her experiences to an outsider.

  Instead, she had coolly planned a campaign to settle her difficulties. She must leave Samara for it. She could hardly risk the possibility of more scandal. It had been bad enough that William and Martha had seen her with Jerry.

  So she had conceived the trip to the French Riviera. She was to be here a week. During that time she would find a stranger, an attractive man without strings. One who would welcome a short holiday affair with an American girl. One who knew nothing of her background, would make no demands upon her and expect her to make none on him.

  Now she was suddenly wide-awake.

  She was here at last. The jet flight across the Atlantic was behind her, and the two days in London where she had picked up her Far Away Holidays reservation for the package luxury vacation. The trip down on the Viscount. Their being met at the airport by that pleasant-looking tourist representative who had given them the amusing little talk about enjoying themselves on the Riviera. And then the drive here to her room at the Pavilion Budapest. It had been a beautiful drive from Nice, the Mediterranean, impossibly clear, on the one side, the mountains of Provence on the other.

  Nadine Whiteley looked up at the ceiling high above her. This villa, the Pavilion Budapest, she decided must have once been a very wealthy person’s joy. It had the antique beauty of yesteryear, the furnishings and paintings, the drapes and rugs of an era more ostentatious perhaps than our own, but with a comfortable beauty that our present generation has lost.

  For a brief moment, she allowed herself to doubt. The scheme was all so fantastic. Imagine flying three thousand miles with no purpose in mind other than deliberately allowing oneself to be seduced. Why, it was ridiculous!

  No, it wasn’t. She steeled herself. She was twenty-seven years of age and had all the normal instincts in regards to love and offspring. She had every reason to believe that she would make a desirable wife, a devoted mother. She owed it to herself, to her eventual husband, and to the children to come. She must, somehow, break this barrier. She was convinced that if she could bring herself to the act, just once, only once, then forever after her fears of sex would be gone.

  Nadine sat upright, swung her legs about and to the floor and came to her feet, stretching. She wore a short nightgown and for a wicked moment wondered how her sought-for lover would feel if he could see her now.

  Had she known it, he would have been moved indeed. Nadine Whiteley, at twenty-seven, was the epitome of American womanhood. Her breasts were high and full, her waist captivatingly narrow, her hips blooming out, to flow, in turn, into legs that would have shamed any Venus ever laved by the waters of the Mediterranean.

  She hustled to the bath and began her preparations for her campaign.

  • • •

  Steve Cogswell reflected with satisfaction that Carla’s little stretch of beach was one of the best this side of Cannes. Actually, co
ntrary to popular belief, Riviera beaches are strictly second-rate compared to those of Florida, California or Hawaii. Nice, so famous as a resort, has such a narrow one, and so pebbly, that it is all but impossible, in season, to find a spot to recline and all but unbearable on the feet to walk down to the water. The small Monte Carlo beach is man-made and has continually to have more sand dumped upon it.

  But the contessa’s property was one of the most favorably located for miles around. Guests swam in a cove, a half-acre of sand so shielded by rocky cliffs on both sides that prying eyes were forever barred. Not that nude bathing was practical, usually, since there were twenty or so paying guests at the Pavilion Budapest at any given time and the waters of the Mediterranean were attractive to them all.

  As a matter of fact, one of them was approaching now. A bikini-clad girl whom Steve vaguely placed as one of his Far Away Holidays tourists who had arrived the day before. What was her name, now? He couldn’t remember, in spite of the fact that he had driven her over from the airport himself. An American girl, as he recalled, but, confound it, what was her name? The tourists liked you to have their names on the tip of your tongue.

  He emerged from the water and took up his towel as she approached.

  “Morning,” he called. “Beautiful day for a swim.”

  She smiled back. “Are you leaving? I’m not driving you away, am I? Let me see, you’re Mr. Cogswell.”

  “Steve Cogswell,” he said, taking in her figure, and telling himself that here was a girl who was really stacked. Whoever had invented the bikini had surely had this sort of thing in mind. Her figure was that of Elizabeth Taylor, her face that of Ingrid Bergman back when that star had been in her twenties. He toweled himself quickly. “I have to get into the office in Monte Carlo, Miss …”

  “Nadine Whiteley,” she replied. Less obviously than he, she had taken in his own masculine figure. In spite of the hedonistic life of the past few years, Steve Cogswell in his early thirties still cut a pleasing figure in his Hawaiian-style bathing shorts. He made a point of daily swims, occasional tennis at the Sports Club in Monaco, and fifteen minutes each morning with weights. It countered his admittedly too heavy drinking.