Bear Island (40 page)

    The opening in the wall, no more, really, than an indentation hardly distinguishable from one or two already passed, was, at its deepest, no more than six feel?, but it was bounded by an odd Hat shelf that varied from two to five feet in width. It looked as if it had been manmade but, then, there were so many curiously shaped rock formations in those parts that it might just possibly have resulted from natural causes. But there was one thing about that place that absolutely was in no way due to natural causes: a pile of grey-painted metal bars, neatly stacked in crisscross symmetry.

    Neither of us spoke. Conrad switched on the other two torches, pivoted their heads until they were facing upwards and placed them all on the shelf, flooding the tiny area with light. Not without some difficulty we scrambled on to the shelf and looped the painter round one of the bars. Still without speaking I took the boat book and probed for bottom: it was less than five feet below the surface and a very odd kind of rock it felt, too. I guddled around some more, left the hook strike something at once hard and yielding and hauled it up. It was a half-inch chain, corroded in places, but still sound. I hauled some more and the end of another rectangular bar, identical in size to those on the shelf and secured to the chain by an eye bolt, came into sight. It was badly discoloured. I lowered chain and bar back to the bottom.

    Still in this uncanny silence I took a knife from my pocket and tested the surface of one of the bars. The metal, almost certainly lead, was soft and yielding, but it was no more than a covering skin, there was something harder beneath. I dug the knife blade in hard and scraped away an inch of the lead. Something yellow glittered in the lamplight.

    "Well, now," Conrad said. "Jackpot, I believe, is the technical term.”

    “Something like that.”

    “And look at this." Conrad reached behind the pile of bars and brought up a can of paint. It was labeled Instant Grey.”

    “It seems to be very good stuff," I said. I touched one of the bars. "Quite dry. And, you must admit, quite clever. You saw off. the eye bolt, paint the whole lot over and what do you have?”

    “A ballast bar identical in size and colour to the ballast bars in the mock-up sub."

    "Ten out of ten," I said. I hefted one of the bars. "Just right for easy handling. A forty-pound ingot."

    "How do you know?"

    "It's my Treasury training. Current value--say thirty thousand dollars. How many bars in that pile, would you say?"

    "A hundred. More."

    "And that's just for starters. Bulk is almost certainly still under water. Paint brushes there?"

    "Yes." Conrad reached behind the pile but I checked him.

    "Please not," I said. "Think of all those lovely fingerprints."

    Conrad said slowly: "My mind's just engaged gear again." He looked at the pile and said incredulously: "Three million dollars?"

    "Give or take a few percent."

    I think we'd better leave," Conrad said. "I'm coming all over avaricious."

    We left. As we emerged into the little circular bay we both looked back at the dark and menacing little tunnel. Conrad said: "Who discovered this?"

    I have no idea."

    "Perleporten. What does that mean?"

    "The Gates of Pearl."

    "They came pretty close at that."

    "It wasn't a bad try." The journey back was a great deal more unpleasant than the outward one had been, the seas were against us, the icy wind and the equally icy snow were in our faces and because of that same snow the visibility was drastically reduced. But we made it inside an hour. Almost literally frozen stiff but at the same time contradictorily shaking with the cold, we tied the boat up. Conrad clambered up on to the jetty. I passed him the black box, cut about thirty feet off. the boat's anchor rope and followed. I built a rope cradle round the box, fumbled with a pair of catches and opened a hinged cover section which comprised a third of the top plate and two-thirds of a side plate. In the near total darkness switches and dials were less than half-seen blurs but I didn't need light to operate this instrument which was a basically very simple affair anyway. I pulled out a manually operated telescopic aerial to its fullest extent and turned two switches. A dim green light glowed and a faint hum, that couldn't have been heard a yard away, came from the box.

    “I always think it's so satisfactory when those little toys work," Conrad said. "But won't the snow gum up the works?"

    "This little toy costs just over a thousand pounds. You can immerse it in acid, you can boil it in water, you can drop it from a four-story  building. It still works. It's got a little sister that can he fired from a naval gun. I don't think a little snow will harm, do you?"

    “I wouldn't think so." He watched in silence as I lowered the box, pilot light facing the stonework, over the south arm of the pier, secured the rope to a bollard, made it fast round its base and concealed it with a scattering of snow. "What's the range?”

    “Forty miles. It won't require a quarter of that tonight.”

    “And it's transmitting now?”

    “It's transmitting now."

    We moved back to the main arm of the pier, brushing footmarks away with our gloves. I said: I wouldn't think they would have heard us coming back, but no chances. A weather eye, if you please."

    I was down inside the hull of the mock-up sub and had rejoined Conrad inside two minutes. He said: "No trouble?”

    “None. The two paints don't quite match. But you'd never notice it unless you were looking for it."

    #

    We were not greeted like returning heroes. It would not be true to say that our return, or our early return, was greeted with anything like disappointment, but there was definitely an anticlimactic Mr. to it, maybe they had already expended all their sympathies on Heissman, Jungbeck, and Goin, who had claimed, predictably enough, that their engine had broken down in the late afternoon. Heissman thanked us properly enough but there was a faint trace of amused condescension to his thanks that would normally have aroused a degree of antagonism in me were it not for the fact that my antagonism towards Heissman was already so total that any deepening of it would have been quite impossible. So Conrad and I contented ourselves with making a show of expressing our relief to find the three voyagers alive while not troubling very much to conceal our chagrin. Conrad, especially, was splendid at this: clearly, he had a considerable future as an actor.

    The atmosphere in the cabin was almost unbearably funereal. I would have thought that the safe return of five of their company might have been cause for some subdued degree of rejoicing, but it may well have been that the very fact of our being alive only heightened the collective awareness of the dead woman lying in her cubicle. Heissman tried to tell us about the marvellous backgrounds he had found that day and I couldn't help reflecting that he was going to have a most hellishly difficult job in setting up camera and sound crews within the extraordinarily restrictive confines of the Perleporten tunnel: Heissman desisted when it became clear that no one was listening to him. Otto made a half-hearted attempt to establish some kind of working relationship with me and even went to the length of pressing some Scotch upon me which I accepted without thanks but drank nevertheless. He tried to make some feebly jocular remark about open pores and it being obvious that I didn't intend venturing forth again that night and I didn't tell him, not just yet, that I did indeed intend to venture forth again that night but that as my proposed walk would take me no farther than the jetty it was unlikely that all the open pores in the world would incapacitate me.

    I looked at my watch. Another ten minutes, no more. Then we would all go for that little walk, the four directors of Olympus Productions, Lonnie, and myself. just the six of us, no more. The four directors were already there and, given the time Lonnie normally took to regain contact with reality after a prolonged session with the only company left in the world that gave him any solace, it was time that he was here also. I went down the passage and into his cabin.

    It was bitterly cold in there because the window was wide open and it was wide open because that was the way that Lonnie had elected to leave his cubicle which was quite empty. I picked up a torch that was lying by the rumpled cot and peered out the window. The snow was still falling steadily but not so heavily as to obscure the tracks that led away from the window. There were two sets of tracks. Lonnie had been persuaded to leave: not that he would have required much persuasion.

    I ignored the curious looks that came my way as I went quickly through the main cabin and headed for the provisions hut. Its door was open but Lonnie was not there either. The only sure sign that he had been there was a half-full bottle of Scotch with its screw top off. So much for Lonnie and his mighty oath taken with his hand on a vat of the choicest malt.

    The tracks outside the hut were numerous and confused: it was clear that my chances of isolating and following any particular set of those was minimal. I returned to the cabin and there was no lack of immediate volunteers for the search: Lonnie had never made an unwitting enemy in his life.

    It was the Count who found him, inside a minute, face down in a deep drift behind the generator shed. He was already shrouded in white, so he must have been lying there for some time. He was clad in only shirt, pullover, trousers, and what appeared to be a pair of ancient carpet slippers. The snow beside his head was stained yellow where the contents-or part of the contents-of yet another bottle, still clutched in his right hand, had been spilt.

    We turned him over. If ever a man looked like a dead man it was Lonnie. His skin was ice-cold to the touch, his face the colour of old ivory, his glazed unmoving eyes were open to the falling snow, and there was no rise and fall to his chest but on the off.-chance that there might just be some substance in the old saw that a special providence looks after little children and drunks I put my car to his chest and thought I detected a faint and far-off murmur.

    We carried him inside and laid him on his cot. While oil beaters, hot water bags, and heated blankets were being brought in or prepared-apart from the general esteem in which Lonnie was held, everyone seemed almost pathetically eager to contribute to something constructive-I used my stethoscope and established that he did indeed have a heartbeat if such a term could be applied to something as weak and as fluttering as the wings of a wounded captive bird. I thought briefly of a heart stimulant and brandy and dismissed both ideas, both, in his touch-and~go condition, were as likely to kill him off. as to have any good effect. So we just concentrated on heating up the frozen and lifeless-seeming body as quickly as was possible while four people continuously massaged ominously white feet and bands to try to restore some measure of circulation.

    Fifteen minutes after we'd first found him he was perceptibly breathing again, a shallow and gasping fight for Mr., but breathing nevertheless. He was now as warm as artificial aids could make him so I thanked the others and told them they could go: I asked the two Marys to stay behind as nurses, because I couldn't stay myself: by my watch, I was already ten minutes late.

    Lonnie's eyes moved. No other part of him did, but his eyes moved. After a few moments they focussed blearily on me: he was as conscious as he was likely to be for a long time.

    "You bloody old fool!" I said. It was no way to talk to a man with one foot still halfway through death's door, but it was the way I felt. "Why did you do it?”

    “Aha!" His voice was a far-off. whisper.

    "Who took you out of here" Who gave you the drink?" I was aware that the two Marys had at first stared at me then at each other but the time was gone when it mattered what anyone thought.

    Lonnie's lips moved soundlessly a few times. Then his eyes flickered shiftily and he gave a drunken cackle, no more than a faint rasping sound deep in his throat. "A kind man," he whispered weakly. `Very kind man."

    I would have shaken him except for the fact that I would certainly have shaken the life out of him. I restrained myself with a considerable effort and said: "What kind man, Lonnie?”

    "Kind man," he muttered. "Kind man." He lifted one thin wrist and beckoned. I bent towards him. "Know something?" His voice was a fading murmur.

    "Tell me, Lonnie.”

    “In the end--" His voice trailed away.

    "Yes, Lonnie?"

    He made a great effort. “In the end"--there was a long pause, I had to put my ear to his mouth--"in the end, there's only kindness." He lowered his waxen eyelids.

    I swore and I kept on swearing until I realised that both girls were staring at me with shocked eyes, they must have thought that I was swearing at Lonnie. I said to Mary Stuart: "Go to Conrad-Charles. Tell him to tell the Count to come to my cubicle. Now. Conrad will know how to do it."

    She left without a question. Mary Darling said to me: "Will Lonnie live, Dr. Marlowe?"

    “I don't know, Mary.”

    “But-but he's quite warm now—“

    “It won't be exposure that will kill him, if that's what you mean."

    She looked at me, the eyes behind the horn-rims at once earnest and scared. "You mean-you mean he might go from alcoholic poisoning?”

    “He might. I don't know."

    She said, with a flash of that almost touching asperity that could be so characteristic of her: "You don't really care, do you, Dr. Marlowe?”

    “No, I don't." She looked at me, the pinched face shocked, and I put my arm round the thin shoulders. I don't care, Mary, because he doesn't care. Lonnie's been dead a long time now."

    I went back to my cubicle, found the Count there and wasted no words. I said: "Are you aware that that was a deliberate attempt on Lonnie's life?”

    “No. But I wondered." The Count's customary cloak of badinage had fallen away completely.