‘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 his 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—’
‘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 sea-sick 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-cheeked, nervous and perpetually balanced on what seemed to be the knife-edge of agonizing 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 hogswash 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 apéritif 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 45 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 gurus’ laundry. All their spare time was spent with recording equipment, guitar, drums and xylophone in the for’ard recreation room where they rehearsed, apparently night and day, against the moment of their big break-through 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.’
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 troubadours 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 synchronize rather well with the pitching and rolling of the Morning Rose. Rather conservatively, if oddly, clad in blue jeans and psychedelic caftans, 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 per cent 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 ear-plugs, 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 were very clearly the worse for 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’ 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 hairshirts?’
‘No. Why? Does yours?’
‘Solidarity of the working classes.’ He smiled, looking 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?’
