Bear Island (2 page)

    "Shelter? Shelter from what? Why, I remember-"

    "Mr. Gerran and his company haven't spent their lives at sea, Captain," I said.

    "True, true. Heave to? Heaving to won't stop the waves. And the nearest shelter is Jan Mayen-and that's three hundred miles to the west-into the weather."

    "We could run before the weather. Surely that would help?"

    "Aye, we could do that. She'd steady up then, no doubt about it. If that's what you want, Mr. Gerran. You know what the contract says-captain to obey all orders other than those what will endanger the vessel."

    "Good, good. Right away, then."

    "You appreciate, of course, Mr. Gerran, that this blow might last another day or so?"

    With amelioration of the present sufferings practically at hand Gerran permitted himself a slight smile. "We cannot control the caprices of mother nature, Captain."

    "And that we'll have to turn almost ninety east?"

    In your safe hands, Captain.”

    “I don't think you are quite understanding. It will cost us two, perhaps three days. And if we run east, the weather north of North Cape is usually worse than it is here. Might have to put into Hammerfest for shelter

    Might lose a week, maybe more. I don't know how many hundred pounds a day it costs you to hire the ship and crew and pay your own camera crew and all those actors and actresses-I hear tell that some of those people you call stars can earn a fortune in just no time at all-' Captain Imrie broke off and pushed back his chair. "What am I talking about? Money will mean nothing to a man like you. You will excuse me while I call the bridge."

    "Wait." Gerran looked stricken. His parsimony was legendary throughout the film world and Captain Imrie had touched, not inadvertently, I thought, upon his tenderest nerve. "A week! Lose a whole week?"

    “If we're lucky." Captain Imrie pulled his chair back up to the table and reached for the malt.

    "But I've already lost three days. The Orkney cliffs, the sea, the Morning Rose-not a foot of background yet." Gerran's hands were out of sight but I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd been wringing them.

    "And your director and camera crew on their backs for the past four days," Captain Imrie said sympathetically. It was impossible to say whether a smile lay behind the obfuscatory luxuriance of moustache and beard. "The caprices of nature, Mr. Gerran."

    "Three days," Gerran said again. "Maybe another week. A thirty-three day location budget, Kirkwall to Kirkwall." Otto Gerran looked ill, clearly both the state of his stomach and his film finances were making very heavy demands upon him. "How far to Bear Island, Captain Imrie?"

    "Three hundred miles, give or take the usual. Twenty-eight hours, if we can keep up our best speed."

    "You can keep it up?"

    I wasn't thinking about the Morning Rose. It can stand anything. It's your people, Mr. Gerran. Nothing against them, of course, but I'm thinking they'd be more at home with those pedal boats in the paddling

    ponds."

    "Yes, of course, of course." You could see that this aspect of the business had just occurred to him. "Dr. Marlowe, you must have treated a great deal of seasickness during your years in the Navy." He paused, but as I didn't deny it, he went on: "How long do people take to recover from sickness of this kind?"

    "Depends how sick they are." I'd never given the matter any thought, but it seemed a logical enough answer. "How long they've been ill and how badly. Ninety rough minutes on a cross-Channel trip and you're as right as rain in ten minutes. Four days in an Atlantic gale and you'll be as long again before you're back on even keel."

    "But people don't actually die of seasickness, do they?”

    “I've never known of a case." For all his usual indecisiveness and more than occasional bumbling ineptitude which tended to make people laugh at him-discreetly and behind his back, of course-Otto, I realised for the first time and with some vague feeling of surprise, was capable of a determination that might verge on the ruthless. Something to do with money. I supposed. "Not by itself, that is. But with a person already suffering from a heart condition, severe asthma, bronchitis, ulcerated stomach-well, yes, it could see him off."

    He was silent for a few moments, probably carrying out a rapid mental survey of the physical condition of cast and crew, then he said: I must admit that I'm a bit worried about our people. I wonder if you'd mind having a look over them, just a quick check', Health's a damn sight more important than any profit--hah! profit, in those days!--that we might make from the wretched film. As a doctor I'm sure you wholeheartedly agree."

    "Of course," I said. "Right away." Otto had to have something that had made him the household name that he had become in the past twenty years and one had to admire this massive and wholly inadmirable hypocrisy that was clearly part of it. He had me all ways. I had said that seasickness alone did not kill so that if I were to state categorically that some member or members of his cast or crew were in no condition to withstand any further punishment from the seas he would insist on proof of the existence of some disease which, in conjunction with seasickness, might be potentially lethal, a proof that, in the first place, would have been very difficult for me to adduce in light of the limited examination facilities available to me aboard ship and, in the second place, would have been impossible anyhow for every single member of cast and crew had been subjected to a rigorous insurance medical before leaving Britain: if I gave a clean bill of health to all, then Otto would press on with all speed for Bear Island, regardless of the sufferings of "our people" about whom he professed to be so worried, thereby effecting a considerable saving in time and money: and, in the remote event of any of them inconsiderately dying upon our hands, why, then, as the man who had given the green light, I was the one in the dock.

    I drained my glass of inferior brandy that Otto had laid on in such meagre quantities and rose. "You'll be here? ",

    "Yes. Most co-operative of you, Doctor, most."

    "We never close," I said.

    #

    I was beginning to like Smithy though I hardly knew him or anything about him: I was never to get to know him, not well. That I should ever get to know him in my professional capacity was unthinkable: six feet two in his carpet slippers and certainly nothing short of two hundred pounds, Smithy was as unlikely a candidate for a doctor's surgery as had ever come my way.

    “In the first-aid cabinet there." Smithy nodded towards a cupboard in a corner of the dimly lit wheelhouse. "Captain Imrie's own private elixir. For emergency use only."

    I extracted one of half a dozen bottles held in place by felt-lined spring clamps and examined it under the chart table lamp. My regard for Smithy went up another notch. In latitude 70" something north and aboard a superannuated trawler, however converted, one does not look to End Otard-Dupuy VSOP.

    "What constitutes an emergency?" I asked.

    "Thirst."

    I poured some of the Otard-Dupuy into a small glass and offered it to Smithy who shook his head and watched me as I sampled the brandy then lowered the glass with suitable reverence.

    "To waste this on a thirst," I said, "Is a crime against nature. Captain Imrie isn't going to be too happy when he comes up here and finds me knocking back his special reserve."

    "Captain Imrie is a man who lives by fixed rules. The most fixed of the lot is that he never appears on the bridge between 8 P.m. and 8 A.M. Oakley-he's the bosun-and I take turns during the night. Believe me, that way it's safer for everyone all round. What brings you to the bridge, Doctor--apart from this sure instinct for locating VSOP?"

    "Duty. I'm checking on the weather prior to checking on the health of Mr. Gerran's paid slaves. He fears they may start dying off like flies if we continue on this course in those conditions." The conditions, I'd noted, appeared to be deteriorating, for the behaviour of the Morning Rose, especially its degree of roll, was now distinctly more uncomfortable than it had been: perhaps it was just a factor of the height of the bridge but I didn't think so.

    "Mr. Gerran should have left you at home and brought along his palm reader or fortuneteller." A very contained man, educated and clearly intelligent, Smithy always seemed to be slightly amused. "As for the weather, the 6 P.m. forecast was as it usually is for those parts, vague and not very encouraging. They haven't," he aided superfluously, "a great number of weather stations in those parts."

    "What do you think?"

    ”It's not going to improve." He dismissed the weather and smiled. "I'm not a great man for the small talk but with the Otard-Dupuy who needs it? Take the weight off your feet for an hour then go tell Mr. Gerran that all his paid slaves, as you call them, are holding a square dance on the poop.

    “I suspect Mr. Gerran of having a suspicious checking mind. However, if I may--?"

    "My guest."

    I helped myself again and replaced the bottle in the cabinet. Smithy, as he'd warned, wasn't very talkative, but the silence was companionable enough. Presently he said: "Navy, aren't you, Doc?"

    "Past tense."

    "And now this?"

    "A shameful comedown. Don't you find it so?"

    "Touche." I could dimly see the white of teeth as he smiled in the half dark. "Medical malpractice, flogging penicillin to the wogs, or just drunk in charge of a surgery?"

    "Nothing so glamorous. ‘Insubordination’ is the word they used."

    "Snap. Me too." A pause. "This Mr. Gerran of yours. Is he all right?"

    "So the insurance doctors say."

    “I didn't mean that."

    “You can't expect me to speak ill of my employer." Again there was that dimly seen glimpse of white teeth.

    "Well, that's one way of answering my question. But, well, look, the bloke must be loony-or is that an offensive term?"

    "Only to psychiatrists. I don't speak to them. Loony's fine by me. But I'd remind you that Mr. Gerran has a very distinguished record."

    "As a loony?"

    "That, too. But also as a film-maker, a producer."

    “What kind of producer would take a film unit up to Bear Island with winter coming on?"

    "Mr. Gerran wants realism."

    "Mr. Gerran wants his head examined. Has he any idea what it's like up there at this time of year?"

    "He's also a man with a dream."

    "No place for dreamers in the Barents Sea. How the Americans ever managed to put a man on the moon-"

    “Our friend Otto isn't an American. He's a central European. If you want the makers of dreams or the peddlers of dreams there's the place to End them-among the headwaters of the Danube."

    "And the biggest rogues and confidence men in Europe?"

    "You can't have everything."

    "He's a long way from the Danube."

    “Otto had to leave in a great hurry at a time when a large number of people had to leave in a great hurry. Year before the war, that was. Found his way to America-where else-then to Hollywood-again, where else? Say what you like about Otto-and I'm afraid a lot of people do just that you have to admire his recuperative powers. He'd left a thriving film business behind him in Vienna and arrived in California with what he stood up in."

    "That's not so little."

    “It was then. I've seen pictures. No greyhound, but still about a hundred pounds short of what he is today. Anyway, inside just a few years chiefly, I'm told, by switching at the psychologically correct moment from anti-Nazism to anti-Communism-Otto prospered mightily in the American film industry on the strength of a handful of nauseatingly superpatriotic pictures, which had the critics in despair and the audiences in raptures. In the mid-'50s, sensing that the cinematic sun was setting over Hollywood-you can't see it but he carries his own built-in radar system with him-Otto's devotion to his adopted country evaporated along with his bank balance and he transferred himself to London where he made a number of avant-garde films that had the critics in rapture, the audiences in despair, and Otto in the red."

    "You seem to know your Otto," Smithy said.

    "Anybody who has read the first five pages of the prospectus for his last film would know his Otto. I'll let you have a copy. Never mentions the film, just Otto. Misses out words like "nauseating" and "despair" of course and you have to read between the lines a bit. But it's all there."

    "I'd like a copy." Smithy thought some then said: "If he's in the red where's the money coming from? To make this film, I mean."

    "Your sheltered life. A producer is always at his most affluent when the bailiffs are camped outside the studio gates-rented studio, of course. Who, when the banks are foreclosing on him and the insurance companies drafting their ultimatums, is throwing the party of the year at the Savoy? Our friend the big-time producer. It's kind of like the law of nature. You'd better stick to ships, Mr. Smith," I added kindly.

    "Smithy," he said absently. "So who's bankrolling your friend?"

    "My employer. I've no idea. Very secretive about money matters is Otto.”

    “But someone is. Backing him, I mean."

    "Must be." I put down my glass and stood up. "Thanks for the hospitality."

    "Even after he's produced a string of losers? Seems balmy to me. Fishy, at least."

    "The film world, Smithy, is full of balmy and fishy people." I didn't, in fact, know whether it was or not but if this shipload was in any way representative of the cinema industry it seemed a pretty fair extrapolation.

    "Or perhaps he's just got hold of the story to end all stories."

    "The screenplay. There, now, you may have a point-but it's one you would have to raise with Mr. Gerran personally. Apart from Heissman, who wrote it, Gerran is the only one who's seen it."

    #

    It hadn't been a factor of the height of the bridge. As I stepped out on to the starboard ladder on the lee side-there were no internal communications between bridge and deck level on those elderly steam trawlers I was left in no doubt that the weather had indeed deteriorated and deteriorated sharply, a fact that should have probably been readily apparent to anyone whose concern for the prevailing meteorological conditions hadn't been confronted with the unfair challenge of Otard-Dupuy. Even on this, what should have been the sheltered side of the ship, the power of the wind, bitter cold, was such that I had to cling with both hands to the handrails: and with the Morning Rose now rolling, erratically and violently, through almost fifty degrees of arc-which was wicked enough but I'd once been on a cruiser that had gone through a hundred degrees of arc and still survived-I could have used another pair of arms.