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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 gunwhale 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