Bear Island Read online

  ‘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 sea-sickness 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 sea he would insist on proof of the existence of some disease which, in conjunction with sea-sickness, 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 wheel-house. ‘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 find 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 bo’sun—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 these 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 function 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 fortune-teller.’ 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 these parts, vague and not very encouraging. They haven’t,’ he added 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 come-down. Don’t you find it so?’

  ‘Touché.’ I could dimly see the white 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 find 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 antiCommunism— Otto prospered mightily in the American film industry on the strength of a handful of nauseatingly super-patriotic pictures, which had the critics in despair and the audiences in raptures. In the mid-fifties, 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 barmy to me. Fishy, at least.’

  ‘The film world, Smithy, is full of barmy 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.

  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 the violently rolling Morning Rose made for a very unstable observation platform nor because the big uneven seas bearing down from the east 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 fjord 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 for’ard 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 wind-blown 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: Ilona 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. ‘Aboard 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-grilled 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 these 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 sea-sickness. 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 opposite 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 mer.

  ‘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 h
is voice was a great deal stronger. ‘A 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 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 pre-war 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—’