Bear Island (3 page)

    Even on the blackest night, and this was incontestably one of the blackest, it is never wholly dark at sea: it may never be possible precisely to delineate the horizon line where sea and sky meet, but one can usually look several vertical degrees above or below the horizon line and say with certainty that here is sky or here is sea: for the sea is always darker than the sky. Tonight, it was impossible to say any such thing and this was not because of the violently rolling Morning Rose made for a very unstable observation platform nor because the big uneven seas bearing down from the cast made for a tumbling amorphous horizon: because tonight, for the first time, not yet dense but enough to obscure vision beyond two miles, smoke frost lay on the surface of the sea, that peculiar phenomenon which one finds in Norway where the glacial land winds pass over the warm fiord waters or, as here, where the warm Atlantic air passed over the Arctic waters. All I could see, and it was enough to see, was that the tops were now being torn off the waves, white-veined on their leeward sides, and that the seas were breaking clear across the foredeck of the Morning Rose, the white and icy spume hissing into the sea on the starboard. A night for carpet slippers and the fireside.

    I turned foreword towards the accommodation door and bumped into someone who was standing behind the ladder and holding on to it for support. I couldn't see the person's face for it was totally obscured by windblown hair but I didn't have to, there was only one person aboard with those long straw-coloured tresses and that was Mary dear: given my choice of people to bump into on the Morning Rose I'd have picked Mary dear any time. "Mary dear', not "Mary Dear': I'd given her that name to distinguish her from Gerran's continuity girl whose given name was Mary Darling. Mary dear was really Mary Stuart but that wasn't her true name either: llona Wisniowecki she'd been christened but had prudently decided that it wasn't the biggest possible asset she had for making her way in the film world. Why she'd chosen a Scots name I didn't know: maybe she just liked the sound of it.

    "Mary dear," I said. "Abroad at this late hour and on such a night." I reached up and touched her cheek, we doctors can get away with murder. The skin was icily cold. "You can carry this fresh air fanatic bit too far. Come on, inside." I took her arm-I was hardly surprised to find she was shivering quite violently-and she came along docilely enough.

    The accommodation door led straight into the passenger lounge which, though fairly narrow, ran the full width of the ship. At the far end was a built-in bar with the liquor kept behind two glassed-in iron grill doors: the doors were kept permanently locked and the key was in Otto Gerran's pocket.

    "No need to frog~march me, Doctor." She habitually spoke in a low-pitched quiet voice. "Enough is enough and I was coming in anyway.”

    “Why were you out there in the first place?”

    “Can't doctors always tell?" She touched the middle button of her black leather coat and from this I understood that her internal economy wasn't taking too kindly to the roller-coaster antics of the Morning Rose. But I also understood that even had the sea been mirror-smooth she'd still have been out on that freezing upper deck: she didn't talk much to the others nor the others to her.

    She pushed the tangled hair back from her face and I could see she was very pale and the skin beneath the brown eyes tinged with the beginnings of exhaustion. In her high cheekboned Slavonic way-she was a Latvian but, I supposed, no less a Slav for that-she was very lovely, a fact that was freely admitted and slightingly commented upon as being her only asset: her last two pictures-her only two pictures-were said to have been disasters of the first magnitude. She was a silent girl, cool and aloofly remote and I liked her which made me a lonely minority of one.

    "Doctors aren't infallible," I said. "At least, not this one." I peered at her in my best clinical fashion. "What's a girl like you doing in those parts on this floating museum?"

    She hesitated. "That's a personal question.”

    “The medical profession are a very personal lot. How's your headache? Your ulcer? Your bursitis? We don't know where to stop."

    I need the money.”

    “You and me both." I smiled at her and she didn't smile back so I left her and went down the companionway to the main deck.

    Here was located the Morning Rose's main passenger accommodation, two rows of cabins lining the fore and aft central passageway. This had been the area of the former fish-holds and although the place had been steam-washed, fumigated, and disinfected at the time of conversion it still stank most powerfully and evilly of cod liver oil that has lain too long in the sun. In ordinary circumstances, the atmosphere was nauseating enough: in those extraordinary ones it was hardly calculated to assist sufferers in a rapid recovery from the effects of seasickness. I knocked on the first door on the starboard side and went in.

    Johann Heissman, horizontally immobile on his bunk, looked like a cross between a warrior taking his rest and a medieval bishop modelling for the stone effigy which in the fullness of time would adorn the top of his sarcophagus. Indeed, with his thin waxy fingers steepled on his narrow chest, his thin waxy nose pointing to the ceiling and his curiously transparent eyelids closed, the image of the tomb seemed particularly apposite in this case: but it was a deceptive image for a man does not survive twenty years in a Soviet hard labour camp in eastern Siberia just to turn in his cards from mal de mier.

    "How do you feel, Mr. Heissman?”

    “Oh, God!" He opened his eyes without looking at me, moaned and closed them again. "How do I feel?' "I'm sorry. But Mr. Gerran is concerned-”

    “Otto Gerran is a raving madman." I didn't take it as any indication of some sudden upsurge in his physical condition but, no question, this time his voice was a great deal stronger. "Crackpot! A lunatic!"

    While privately conceding that Heissman's diagnosis lay somewhere along the right lines I refrained from comment and not out of some suitably due deference to my employer. Otto Gerran and Johann Heissman had been friends much too long for me to risk treading upon the delicate ground that well might lie between them. They had known each other, as far as I had been able to discover, since they had been students together at some obscure Danubian gymnasium close on forty years ago and had, at the time of the Anschluss in 1938, been the joint owners of a relatively prosperous film studio in Vienna. It was at this point in space and time that they had parted company suddenly, drastically and, it seemed at the time, permanently, for, while Gerran's sure instinct had guided his fleeing footsteps to Hollywood, Heissman had unfortunately taken off in the wrong direction altogether and, only three years previously, to the total disbelief of all who had known him and believed him dead for a quarter of a century, had incredibly surfaced from the bitter depths of his long Siberian winter. He had sought out Gerran and now it appeared that their friendship was as close as ever it had been. It was assumed that Gerran knew about the hows and the whys of Heissman's lost years and if this were indeed the case then he was the only man who did so for Heissman, understandably enough, never discussed his past. Only two things about the men were known for certain-that it was Heissman, who had a dozen prewar screenplays to his credit, who was the moving spirit behind this venture to the Arctic and that Gerran had taken him into full partnership in his company, Olympus Productions. In light of this, it behooved me to step warily and keep my comments on Heissman's comments strictly to myself.

    "If there's anything you require, Mr. Heissman-"

    I require nothing." He opened his transparent eyelids again and this time looked-or glared-at me, eyes of washed-out grey streaked with blood. "Save your treatment for that cretin Gerran.”

    “Treatment?”

    “Brain surgery." He lowered his eyelids wearily and went back to being a medieval bishop again so I left him and went next door.

    There were two men in this cabin, one clearly suffering quite badly, the other equally clearly not suffering in the slightest. Neal Divine, the unit director, had adopted a death's door resignation attitude that was strikingly similar to that favoured by Heissman and although he wasn't even within hailing distance of death's door he was plainly very seasick indeed. He looked at me, forced a pale smile that was half apology, half recognition, then looked away again. I felt sorry for him as he lay there but then I'd felt sorry for him ever since he'd stepped aboard the Morning Rose. A man dedicated to his craft, lean, hollow-checked, nervous, and perpetually balanced on what seemed to be the knife edge of agonising decisions, he walked softly and talked softly as if he were perpetually afraid that the gods might hear him. It could have been a meaningless mannerism but I didn't think so: no question, he walked in perpetual fear of Gerran who was at no pains to conceal the fact that he despised him as a man just as much as he admired him as an artist. Why Gerran, a man of indisputably high intelligence, should behave in this way, I didn't know. Perhaps he was one of that far from small group of people who harbour such an inexhaustible fund of ill will towards mankind in general that they lose no opportunity to vent some of it on the weak, the pliant or those who are in no position to retaliate. Perhaps it was a personal matter. I didn't know either man or their respective backgrounds well enough to form a valid judgement.

    "Ah, "tis the good healer," a gravelly voice said behind me. I turned round without haste and looked at the pyjama-clad figure sitting up in his bunk, holding fast with his left hand to a bulkhead strap while with the other he clung equally firmly to the neck of a Scotch bottle, three parts empty. "Up the ship comes and down the ship goes but naught will come between the kindly shepherd and his mission of mercy to his queasy flock. You will join me in a post-prandial snifter, my good man?”

    “Later, Lonnie, later." Lonnie Gilbert knew and I knew and we both

    knew that the other knew that later would be too late, three inches of

    Scotch in Lonnie's hands had as much hope as the last meringue at the vicar's tea party, but the conventions had been observed, honour satisfied. "You weren't at dinner, so I thought--”

    “Dinner!" He paused, examined the word he'd just said for inflexion

    and intonation, decided his delivery had been lacking in a proper contempt and repeated himself. "Dinner! Not the hogwash itself which I suppose is palatable enough for those who lack my esoteric tastes. It’s the hour at which it's served. Barbaric. Even Attila the Hun-”

    “You mean you no sooner pour your aperitif than the bell goes?"

    "Exactly. What does a man do?"

    Coming from our elderly production manager, the question was purely rhetorical. Despite the baby-clear blue eyes and faultless enunciation Lonnie hadn't been sober since he'd stepped aboard the Morning Rose: it was widely questioned whether he'd been sober for years. Nobody least of all Lonnie-seemed to care about this, but this was not because nobody cared about Lonnie. Nearly all people did, in greater or lesser degrees, dependent on their own natures. Lonnie, growing old now, with all his life in films, was possessed of a rare talent that had never bloomed and never would now, for he was cursed-or blessed-with insufficient drive and ruthlessness to take him to the top, and mankind, for a not always laudable diversity of reasons, tends to cherish its failures: and Lonnie, it was said, never spoke ill of others and this, too, deepened the affection in which he was held except by the minority who habitually spoke ill of everyone. "It's not a problem I'd care to be faced with myself," I said. "How are you feeling?”

    “Me?" He inclined his bald pate forty-five degrees backwards, tilted the bottle, lowered it and wiped a few drops of the elixir from his grey beard. "Never been ill in my life. Who ever heard of a pickled onion going sour?" He cocked his head sideways. "Ah!”

    “Ah, what?" He was listening, that I could see, but I couldn't hear a damned thing except the crash of bows against seas and the metallic drumming vibration of the ancient steel hull which accompanied each downwards plunge.

    "The horns of Elfland faintly blowing," Lonnie said. "Hark! The Herald Angels."

    I harked and this time I heard. I'd heard it many times, and with steadily increasing horror, since boarding the Morning Rose, a screechingly cacophonous racket that was fit for heralding nothing short of Armageddon. The three perpetrators of this boiler-house bedlam of sound, Josh Hendriks's young sound crew assistants, might not have been tone stone deaf but their classical musical education could hardly be regarded as complete as not one of them could read a note of music. John, Luke, and Mark were all cast in the same contemporary mould, with flowing shoulder-length hair and wearing clothes that gave rise to the suspicion that they must have broken into a guru's laundry. All their spare time was spent with recording equipment, guitar, drums, and xylophone in the foreword recreation room where they rehearsed, apparently night and day, against the moment of their big breakthrough into the pop-record world where they intended, appropriately enough, to bill themselves as the Three Apostles.

    "They might have spared the passengers on a night like this," I said.

    "You underestimate our immortal trio, my dear boy. The fact that you may be one of the most excruciating musicians in existence does not prevent you from having a heart of gold. They have invited the passengers along to hear them perform in the hope that this might alleviate their sufferings." He closed his eyes as a raucous bellow overlaid with a high-pitched scream as of some animal in pain echoed down the passageway outside.

    "The concert seems to have begun.”

    “You can't fault their psychology," I said. "After that, an Arctic gale is going to seem like a summer afternoon on the Thames."

    “You do them an injustice." Lonnie lowered the level in the bottle by another inch then slid down into his bunk to show that the audience was over. "Go and see for yourself."