Bear Island (4 page)

    So I went and saw for myself and I had been doing them an injustice. The Three Apostles, surrounded by that plethora of microphones, amplifiers, speakers, and arcane electronic equipment without which the latter-day troubadors will not-and, more importantly, cannot-operate, were performing on a low platform in one corner of the recreation room and maintaining their balance with remarkable ease largely, it seemed, because their bodily gyrations and contortions, as inseparable a part of their art as the electronic aids, seemed to synchronise rather well with the pitching and rolling of the Morning Rose. Rather conservatively, if oddly, clad in blue jeans and psychedelic kaftans, and bent over their microphones in an attitude of almost acolytic fervour, the three young sound assistants were giving of their uninhibited best and from what little could be seen of the ecstatic expressions on faces eighty percent concealed at any given moment by wildly swinging manes of hair it was plain that they thought that their best approximated very closely to the sublime. I wondered, briefly, how angels would look with earplugs, then turned my attention to the audience.

    There were fifteen in all, ten members of the production crew and five of the cast. A round dozen of them very clearly the worse for the wear but their sufferings were being temporarily held in abeyance by the fascination, which stopped a long way short of rapture, induced by the Three Apostles who had now reached a musical crescendo accompanied by what seemed to be some advanced form of St. Vitus's Dance. A hand touched me on the shoulder and I looked sideways at Charles Conrad.

    Conrad was thirty years old and was to be the male lead in the film, not yet a big-name star but building up an impressive international reputation. He was cheerful. ruggedly handsome, with a thatch of thick brown hair that kept falling over his eyes: he had eyes of the bluest blue and most gleamingly white perfect teeth-like his name, his own-that would have transported a dentist into ecstasies or the depths of despair depending upon whether he was primarily interested in the aesthetic or economic aspects of his profession. He was invariably friendly, courteous, and considerate, whether by instinct or calculated design it was impossible to say. He cupped his hand to my ear, nodded towards the performers.

    "Your contract specifies hair shirts?”

    “No. Why? Does yours?”

    “Solidarity of the working classes." He smiled, looked at me with an oddly speculative glint in his eyes. "Letting the opera buffs down, aren't you?”

    “They'll recover. Anyway, I always tell my patients that a change is as good as a rest." The music ceased abruptly and I lowered my voice about fifty decibels. "Mind you, this is carrying it too far. Fact is, I'm on duty. Mr. Gerran is a bit concerned about you all.”

    “He wants his herd delivered to the cattle market in prime condition?”

    “Well, I suppose you all represent a pretty considerable investment to him.”

    “Investment? Ha! Do you know that that twisted old skinflint of a beer barrel has not only got us at fire-sale prices but also won't pay us a penny until shooting's over?”

    “No, I didn't." I paused. "We live in a democracy, Mr. Conrad, the land of the free. You don't have to sell yourselves in the slave market.”

    “Don't we just! What do you know about the film industry?”

    “Nothing.”

    “Obviously. It's in the most depressed state in its history. Eighty percent of the technicians and actors unemployed. I'd rather work for pennies than starve." He scowled, then his natural good humour reasserted itself. "Tell him that his prop and stay, that indomitable leading man, Charles Conrad, is fit and well. Not happy, mind you, just fit and well. To be happy I'd have to see him fall over the side."

    I'll tell him all of that." I looked around the room. The Three Apostles, mercifully, were refreshing themselves with ginger ale: most of the audience were likewise refreshing themselves though clearly in need of something stronger than ginger ale. I said to Conrad: "This little lot will get to market."

    “Instant mass diagnosis?”

    “It takes practice. It also saves time. Who's missing?”

    “Well." He glanced around. "There's Heissman-”

    “I've seen him. And Neal Divine. And Lonnie. And Mary Stuart-not that I'd expect her to be here anyway.”

    "Our beautiful but snooty young Slav, eh?”

    “I'll go halfway with that. You don't have to be snooty to avoid people!”

    "I like her too." I looked at him. I'd only spoken to him twice, briefly. I could see he meant what he said. He sighed. I wish she were my leading lady instead of our resident Mata Hari.”

    “You can't be referring to the delectable Miss Haynes?”

    “I can and I am," he said moodily. "Femmes fatales wear me out. You'll observe she's not among those present. I'll bet she's in bed with those two damned floppy-cared hounds of hers, all of them having the vapours and high on smelling salts.”

    “Who else is missing?”

    “Antonio." He was smiling again. "According to the Count-he's his cabin-mate-Antonio is in extremis and unlikely to see the night out.”

    “He did leave the dining room in rather a hurry." I left Conrad and joined the Count at his table. The Count, with a lean aquiline face, black pencil moustache, bar-straight black eyebrows and greying hair brushed straight back from his forehead appeared to be in more than tolerable health. He held a very large measure of brandy in his hand and I did not have to ask to know that it would be the very best cognac obtainable for the Count was a renowned connoisseur of everything from blondes to caviare, as precisely demanding a perfectionist in the pursuit of the luxuries of life as he was in the performance of his duties which may have helped to make him what he was, the best lighting cameraman in the country and probably in Europe. Nor did I have to wonder where he had obtained the cognac from: rumour had it that he had known Otto Gerran a very long time indeed or at least long enough to bring his own private supplies along with him whenever Otto went on safari. Count Tadeusz Leszczynski-which nobody ever called him because they couldn't pronounce it-had learned a great deal about life since he had parted with his huge Polish estates, precipitately and forever, in mid-September 1939.

    "Evening, Count," I said. "At least, you look fit enough.”

    “’Tadeusz’ to my peers. In robust health, I'm glad to say. I take the properly prophylactic precautions." He touched the barely perceptible bulge in his jacket. "You will join me in some prophylaxis? Your penicillins and Aureomycins are but witches" brews for the credulous."

    I shook my head. "Duty rounds, I'm afraid. Mr. Gerran wants to know just how ill this weather is making people.”

    “Ah! Our Otto himself is fit?"

    "Reasonably.”

    “One can't have everything.”

    “Conrad tells me that your roommate Antonio may require a visit.”

    “What Antonio requires is a gag, a strait jacket, and a nursemaid, in that order. Rolling around, sick all over the floor, groaning like some miscreant stretched out on the rack." The Count wrinkled a fastidious nose. "Most upsetting, most."

    “I can well imagine it.”

    “For a man of delicate sensibilities, you understand.”

    “Of course."

    “I simply had to leave!”

    “Yes. I'll have a look at him." I'd just pushed my chair back to the limit of its securing chain when Michael Stryker sat down in a chair beside me. Stryker, a full partner in Olympus Productions, combined the two jobs, normally separate, of production designer and construction manager Gerran never lost the opportunity to economise. He was a tall, dark, and undeniably handsome man with a clipped moustache and could readily have been mistaken for a matinee idol of the mid- "30s were it not for the fashionably long and untidy hair that obscured about ninety percent of the polo-necked silk sweater which he habitually affected. He looked tough, was unquestionably cynical and, from what little I had heard of him, totally amoral. He was also possessed of the dubious distinction of being Gerran's son-in-law.

    "Seldom we see you abroad at this late hour, Doctor," he said. He screwed a long black Russian cigarette into an onyx holder with all the care of a precision engineer fitting the tappets on a Rolls-Royce engine, then held it up to the light to inspect the results. "Kind of you to join the masses, esprit de corps and what have you." He lit his cigarette, blew a cloud of noxious smoke across the table and looked at me consideringly. "On second thoughts, no. You're not the esprit de corps type. We more or less have to be. You don't. I don't think you could. Too cool, too detached, too clinical, too observant-and a loner. Right?”

    “It's a pretty fair description of a doctor!'

    “Here in an official capacity, eh?" I suppose so.”

    “I'll wager that old goat sent you.”

    “Mr. Gerran sent me!" It was becoming increasingly apparent to me that Otto Gerran's senior associates were unlikely ever to clamour for the privilege of voting him into the Hall of Fame.

    "That's the old goat I mean." Stryker looked thoughtfully at the Count. "A strange and unwonted solicitude on the part of our Otto, wouldn't you say, Tadeusz? I wonder what lies behind it?"

    The Count produced a chased silver flask, poured himself another generous measure of cognac, smiled and said nothing. I said nothing either because I'd already decided that I knew the answer to that one: even later on, in retrospect, I could not and did not blame myself for I had arrived at a conclusion on the basis of the only facts then available to me. I said to Stryker: "Miss Haynes is not here. Is she all right?”

    “No, I'm afraid she's no sailor. She's pretty much under the weather

    but what's a man to do? She's pleading for sedatives or sleeping drugs and asking that I send for you, but of course I had to say no.”

    “Why?”

    “My dear chap, she's been living on drugs ever since we came aboard this damned hell ship." It was as well for his health, I thought, that Captain Imrie and Mr. Stokes weren't sitting at the same table. "Her own seasick tablets one moment, the ones you doled out the next, pep pills in between and barbiturates for dessert. Well, you know what would happen if she took sedatives or more drugs on top of that lot.”

    “No, I don't. Tell me.”

    “Eh?”

    “Does she drink? Heavily, I mean”

    "Drink? No. I mean, she never touches the stuff." I sighed.

    "Why don't cobblers stick to their own lasts? I'll leave films to you, you leave medicine to me. Any first year medical student could tell you-well, never mind. Does she know what kind of tablets she's taken today and how many-not that it could have been all that many or she'd have been unconscious by now."

    “I should imagine so."

    I pushed back my chair. "She'll be asleep in fifteen minutes.”

    “Are you sure? I mean-”

    “Which is her room?”

    “First on the right in the passageway.”

    “And yours?" I asked the Count.

    "First left."

    I nodded, rose, left, knocked on the first door on the right and went inside in response to a barely heard murmur. Judith Haynes was sitting propped up in her bed with, as Conrad had predicted, a dog on either side of her-two rather beautiful and beautifully groomed cocker spaniels: I could not, however, catch any trace of smelling salts. She blinked at me with her rather splendid green eyes and gave me a wan smile, at once tremulous and brave. My heart stayed where it was.

    "It was kind of you to come, Doctor." She had one of those dark molasses voices, as effective at close personal quarters as it was in a darkened cinema. She was wearing a pink quilted bedjacket which clashed violently with the colour of her hair and, high round her Deck, a green chiffon scarf, which didn't. Her face was alabaster white. "Michael said you couldn't help.”

    “Mr. Stryker was being overcautious." I sat down on the edge of the mattress and took her wrist. The cocker spaniel next me growled deep in its throat and bared its teeth. "If that dog bites me, I'll clobber it.”

    “Rufus wouldn't harm a fly, would you, Rufus, darling?" It wasn't flies I was worried about but I kept silence and she went on with a sad smile: "Are you allergic to dogs, Dr. Marlowe?”

    “I'm allergic to dog bites."

    The smile faded until her face was just sad. I knew nothing about Judith Haynes except what I'd heard at secondhand and as all I'd heard had been from her colleagues in the industry I heavily discounted about ninety percent of what had been told me: the only thing I had so far learnt with any certainty about the film world was that back-biting, hypocrisy, double-dealing, innuendo, and character assassination formed so integral a part of its conversational fabric that it was quite impossible to know where the truth ended and falsehood began. The only safe guide, I'd discovered, was to assume that the truth ended almost immediately.

    Miss Haynes, it was said, claimed to be twenty-four and had been, on the best authority, for the past fourteen years. This, it was said darkly, explained her predilection for chiffon scarves, for it was there that the missing years showed: equally, she may just have liked chiffon scarves. With equal authority it was stated that she was a complete bitch, her only redeeming quality being her total devotion to her two cocker spaniels and even this backhanded compliment was qualified by the observation that as a human being she had to have something or somebody to love, something or somebody to return her affection. She had tried cats, it was said, but that hadn't worked: the cats, apparently, didn't love her back. But one thing was indisputable. Tall, slender, with wonderful Titian hair and classically beautiful in the sculptured Greek fashion, Miss Haynes, it was universally conceded, couldn't act for toffee. Nonetheless, she was a very hot box office attraction indeed: the combination of the wistfully regal expression, which was her trademark, and the startling contrast of her lurid private life saw to that. Nor was her career in any way noticeably hindered by the facts that she was the daughter of Otto Gerran, whom she was said to despise, the wife of Michael Stryker, whom she was said to hate, and a full partner in the Olympus Productions company.