Bear Island - Alistair MacLean

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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

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