Chapter 16c

Buying land, even in one's own country, was not simply a matter of walking into a real estate office, writing a check, signing a few documents, and then walking back out again with ownership papers in hand. When such a purchase was being made in a foreign country, things became even more complex. Though to Jill, Jake seemed to be acting on foolish impulse, in reality he planned to proceed very carefully.

The first things Jake wanted done were to make sure of all the legalities involved in developing the land once it was purchased. He wanted to know that the power company would string electricity to him, that he would be allowed to dig wells and install a septic system. Most of all, he wanted to be sure that there really were no restrictions on the building of an actual house on the property, that Williams wasn't trying to rook him into buying a big chunk of environmentally protected land where building was forbidden. He wanted a survey done of the land itself so he would know its exact boundaries and its exact terrain features. He then wanted geologists and insurance specialists to look over the property to assess how vulnerable it was to landslides or flooding.

Assuming all of this checked out favorably, Jake would go forth with the purchase of the property and then move onto step two of the project: the actual design and construction of the house. Jake knew that word would soon pass throughout the South Island and particularly in the Christchurch area, that a famous rock musician had bought a huge chunk of hillside property and was planning to build a mansion there (although he wasn't really going for mansion at all, a nice three to four thousand square foot single-level would do nicely). Some people would be thrilled about this, others, perhaps even the majority, would be resentful. Jake hoped to mitigate this resentment to some degree by using nothing but locals for skilled and unskilled labor. He wanted a Christchurch architecture firm to design the house and Christchurch construction workers to build it. He wanted Christchurch electricians and Christchurch plumbers and Christchurch well diggers and Christchurch septic installers. All of the building materials that could feasibly be purchased from Christchurch sources, would be purchased from them. And, of course, since that was part of the plan, someone had to look into the reliability and reputation off all of these Christchurch designers and builders and material supply networks.

There was very much to be done and Jake only had three days before he needed to start back to Los Angeles. Three days was not even enough time to get the first phases of the land purchase rolling. For that reason, Jill would be left behind to act as his agent in all manners related to the property acquisition. She wasn't terribly thrilled about this — Jill was very much a home-town girl who disliked even traveling to Los Angeles once a quarter to meet with Jake and Pauline — but Jake was making it well worth her while to stay for six or seven weeks in the southern hemisphere during the winter. He was putting her up in the best hotel in Christchurch, giving her unlimited use of a luxury rental car, paying for all of her meals, and paying her a thousand dollars a week above her normal salary.

"You'll keep me updated on your progress?" Jake asked her (again!) as she dropped him off at the Christchurch airport on Wednesday morning.

"I'll call you weekly," she promised. "Even more if something warrants it."

"That's my twin," Jake said with a smile. He gave her a hug and then picked up his bags and headed for check-in.

He flew back to Auckland and then waited in the first class lounge for two hours until his next flight was called. Because of the vagaries of the air travel system in this part of the world, Jake had been unable to secure a non-stop flight back to Los Angeles for this particular day. The next non-stop from Auckland to LAX was not scheduled to depart until Sunday night, which would have gotten him home mid-afternoon on Monday, jet-lagged, burned-out, and six hours late for rehearsal. The only flights available mid-week went first to Nadi, Fiji and required a three-hour layover before getting on another ten and a half hour flight to LAX, making for a seventeen hour trip — assuming no delays. For this reason, Jake had decided to break up the return flight a little. He had booked a suite at a resort in Nadi so he could stay overnight and then fly direct to LAX in the morning.

His plane landed in Nadi at 1:30 PM, local time. Jake left the airport and jumped in a taxi. The driver was a dark-skinned Fijian wearing shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. His English was heavily accented but understandable.

"Where to, my friend?" he asked.

"Sheraton Fiji Resort," Jake told him. "Do you take American money?"

"American, French, Australian, I take it all," he said.

"Very good," Jake said, sitting back in the back seat and taking in the scenery as they left the airport. Jake would have thought that this was the off-season for a tropical resort — it was mid-August after all — but the streets were very crowded with tourists as they slowly made their way through the city. He asked the driver about this.

"Off season for Americans and Europeans maybe," the driver told him. "On season for Australians and New Zealanders and South Americans. Remember, when it summer in America, it winter in Australia."

Jake felt like slapping his own forehead in stupidity. Hadn't he just come from rainy Christchurch less than seven hours ago? "I guess you have a point there," he said, wiping some sweat from his forehead. He was still dressed in those winter clothes, in fact.

"Are you movie actor?" the driver asked him. "You look like someone I seen on the television."

"Nope," Jake said. "I'm not an actor. I've heard people say I look like Jake Kingsley though."

"Jake who?"

"Kingsley," Jake said with a smile. "He's an American rock singer. I honestly don't think I resemble him at all, but I get that a lot."

"Never heard of him," the driver said. "Are you sure you're not actor? Are you part of the movie they're filming on Malolo?"

"I'm quite sure," Jake said. "I don't even know what Malolo is."

"Island not far from here," the driver said. "Big Hollywood film studio has been here for past month filming movie picture there. Many of the actors and film people are staying at the Sheraton. Some very famous, they say."

Jake shook his head. "It's the first I've heard of it," he said. "I was on a business trip to Christchurch. I'm just staying overnight and catching a plane to Los Angeles in the morning."

"Ahh, I see," the driver said with a nod, as if he'd just been told the secret of the universe.

The Sheraton Resort was actually located on a small island separate from the city of Nadi. They drove across a long causeway and then down an access road that paralleled a stretch of sparkling beach crowded with tourists. The resort itself was spread out over several hundred acres directly on the beach. The driver pulled them into the entryway. Jake paid him the three dollars he asked for and added a ten for a tip. By the time he was done with this task, a bellhop had appeared to collect his luggage for him.

Jake's suite was as opulent and luxurious as he was accustomed to. It featured a view of the beach and the city of Nadi beyond it. He opened the doors to the balcony and spent a few minutes looking out at the scenery, his eyes drawn again and again to the many scantily clad female bodies playing in the surf or lying on beach loungers, some rubbing lotion on their skin. He realized that he was extremely horny. He hadn't had sexual contact with Helen in almost three weeks now, hadn't even whacked off in more than three days. How long would it take to go down to that beach and find some anonymous Australian tourist girl who would consent to a little action with Jake Kingsley? Maybe twenty minutes? Maybe less?

He shook these thoughts off, remembering how just such an encounter had caused the end of his relationship with Rachel the waitress. Maybe if he just got drunk instead? That had always been his catch-all solution for any of life's problems, hadn't it? And he was in the tropics on a beautiful tropical day after spending four days in the rainy squalor of New Zealand's winter. Shouldn't he enjoy the sun a little?

He thought so. Since he'd slept for two hours on the plane to Nadi, he felt almost refreshed. He opened his luggage and pulled out a bathing suit. He quickly stripped off his winter clothes and donned the suit. He put on his sunglasses and his favorite baseball cap, grabbed a towel from the suite's bathroom, and then headed downstairs.

He found a section of the beach that was relatively empty (meaning that the nearest group of people were only twenty feet away) and parked himself in a lounge chair. He put up a beach umbrella to guard himself from the worst of the sun's glare and then found a Fijian waiter who was willing to keep his rum and coke glass full at all times. He sat there, staring out at the water some of the time and staring at bikini-clad women most of the time. He smoked his cigarettes and sipped his drinks and before an hour had gone by he was pleasantly buzzed, working his way toward full-blown drunkenness.

Of course his presence on the beach did not go unnoticed for long. Soon, the tourists began to drift over to him, mostly women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, most Australian or New Zealanders. He chatted with them amicably, signed autographs for them, and even signed a breast or two. He was offered sex no less than ten times — sometimes with innuendo, sometimes explicitly — and though he would have dearly loved to have taken most of these women up on their offers, he held his ground and politely declined each time.

It was near six o'clock, as the sun was slowly sinking toward the western horizon, as he was just about to call it a day and head upstairs for some room service dinner and a few bottles of wine to cap off the day, that another woman approached him. She was dressed in a slinky white bikini that showed off an impressive body and an even more impressive set of breasts. It was a body that looked familiar to him in some way — intimately familiar. He noted a large — obscenely large — wedding ring on the woman's left ring finger. He looked up at her face and saw an oversized pair of dark sunglasses covering the woman's eyes and a large sunhat covering her hair. Though the disguise was enough to conceal her identity from the casual fan, it was not enough to conceal it from a man who had once kissed every square inch of that body, who had once ejaculated onto those perfect breasts.

"Mindy Snow," Jake said softly as he stared into her eyes. "Jesus fucking Christ!"

"Hi, Jake," Mindy said. "I heard some people talking about how you were here on the beach and I just had to come see for myself."

Jake sat up a little, still trying to convince himself that this was some sort of dream he'd fallen into. He hadn't seen Mindy Snow in person since the day she'd come to his apartment before he left for the Thrill Of Doing Business tour back in 1984 — more than five years ago. He hadn't talked to her since the day she called him in his hotel room out on that tour to let him know she was going to be discussing their relationship with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. That had been when she'd implied that Jake's abuse of her during their relationship had prepared her for her upcoming roll in Handle With Caution, a film about escaping from an abusive husband.

Mindy had starred or co-starred in seven films since then and was now one of America's most sought-after actresses. She had been nominated for five different Academy Awards — three for Best Actress and two for Best Supporting Actress — although she had yet to win one. Right after she had stopped dating Jake, she had started seeing and eventually became engaged to John Carlisle — a handsome character actor who was a favorite of producers making teen-oriented action/adventure flicks. They had broken up a few months after the engagement was announced and later that same year Mindy had married Jed Forthright — another action/adventure character actor — less than two months after meeting him. That marriage lasted for about eleven months before ending in the tried and true "irreconcilable differences". These days, if Jake had been following his Hollywood gossip correctly, she was about eighteen months into marriage number two — to Scott Adams Winslow, who was one of top five movie directors in Hollywood.

"What are you doing here, Mindy?" Jake asked, still reeling from the sight of her, from the idea of running into her in Fiji, which was about as far away from anything else in the world as you could possibly get.

"Making a film," she said simply. "We're working on a project called The Coming of the Dawn. A big chunk of the film takes place in a tropical jungle so we're shooting the scenes out on Malolo. They're shooting some scenes today that I'm not in, so I decided to hang out on the beach and soak up some sun."

"Ahhh," Jake said, remembering his cabbie mentioning that some Hollywood people were shooting a movie. He hadn't mentioned that Mindy Snow was one of the stars.

"What are you doing here?" she asked. "You can't imagine how surprised I was when I started hearing Jake Kingsley was on the beach. I thought they were mistaken, that some long-haired loser who resembled you was trying to score some action in your name. I was actually coming over here to out you if that was what was happening."

"Nope," Jake said, "it's really me."

"So what gives?" she asked. "Last I heard, you and the rest of the guys were putting together your next album."

Jake was surprised, and a little disconcerted to hear that she knew what was going on in his life. "I was taking care of some business in New Zealand," he told her. "There weren't any direct flights back so I decided to stop here for a day instead of waiting in the airport for three hours for my connection."

"So you're leaving tomorrow?"

"Yep," he confirmed. "I'm on the ten o'clock to LAX."

"Oh, I envy you," she said, smiling whimsically. "This place is nice but I've been here for four weeks now. I long for civilization."

"I'll give LA my regards for you," he promised.

She stared at him for a moment. Finally, she said, "Well?"

"Well what?"

"Aren't you going to invite me to sit down? Buy me a drink? Catch up on old times?"

"I wouldn't want people to think I was abusing you or anything," he said sourly.

She seemed to take this as a joke. "Oh you," she said, slapping playfully at his shoulder. "That's all water under the bridge, isn't it?" She walked over and pulled an empty lounger from a section of them a few yards away. After setting it up next to Jake's, she lay down on it and signaled for the nearest waiter.

"Yes, Ma'am?" he enquired.

"Bring me one of those tropical hurricanes please," she said. "And put it on Mr. Kingsley's tab."