Dark Echo (11 page)

‘Unless my dad knows,’ I said. ‘He claims to have read every volume of the log.’

Suzanne smiled and lit another cigarette. She was chain-smoking, well above her self-permitted ration of ten a day. ‘I doubt Gubby Tench committed a single line to the log during his voyage,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he was much of a stickler for any sort of seagoing protocol. And I don’t get the impression he was much of a diarist.’

He arrived in Havana running a high temperature. Epidemics were common in pre-war Cuba. The floor manager of one of the casinos, supervising the blackjack tables, thought that Gubby Tench looked like a man incubating cholera. He was sweating heavily and his breath was a shallow wheeze. But such diseases were generally confined to the slums and contagion rare among high-rolling American visitors. And this visitor had only just disembarked. Nevertheless, the comment was made later by more than one witness that Tench looked feverish and ill. But it didn’t affect his form at the tables. On his first night, he won big. On his second, he won even bigger. On his third evening, drawing a crowd by now, he turned from blackjack to roulette and took on the house, betting consistently on the black, taking close to one hundred thousand dollars in winnings by the time the spell broke at around four thirty in the morning.

‘By the time the spell broke?’

‘That was what the other gamblers and the table operators said it was like. They said it was as though Tench gambled in a trance. They said it was as though he could not lose.’

‘I’m surprised he was permitted to go on winning,’ I said. ‘I’m surprised he was permitted to go on playing. Weren’t all the Cuban casinos of the period owned by the Mafia?’

‘Some,’ Suzanne said. ‘The Cuban dictator, Batista, leased some casinos to the Mafia. The rest were run by his cronies and owned indirectly by him. But they were happy to ride out the odd big win. Nobody ever really beats the house if they keep coming back. And streaks like the one Tench enjoyed have always kept the serious punters coming.’

Except that Gubby Tench did not exactly seem to be enjoying his own run of good fortune. On his fourth evening he was so ill, he was attended to at the roulette table by a doctor. He was running a fever of 105. His blood pressure was off the scale. He was soaked in sweat and breathing in shallow, alarming gasps. His speech was slurred when he spoke, though no one saw him so much as sip from the complimentary drinks lined up at his elbow. He drank only from a glass of iced water and the rocks in it chinked audibly with the tremor in his hand whenever he picked it up to sip from it.

Yet still he won. By the conclusion of his fourth night at the tables, he had accrued enough chips to need a barrow to take them to the cashier. They sat in a gaudy hill of painted ivory in front of him on the baize. And he smiled and took a revolver from the pocket of his tuxedo. And he flicked out the cylinder over the baize and shook out six bullets. He blinked at the people around him through the six circular bores he’d made empty. He winked at a girl waiting tables with his tongue lolling and a look so emptily
lascivious that she didn’t sleep afterwards for a week. Then he picked up a single bullet and loaded it into a chamber and gave the cylinder a spin. He cocked the hammer and put the barrel to his temple with a grin and pulled the trigger.

‘All the other players left the table,’ Suzanne said. ‘Nobody wanted to get spattered in Tench’s gore. But they all stayed to watch. These were very free and easy times in Havana, in the 1930s. And they were all gamblers present. And it was an arresting sight, to see a man take a happy punt on his own life.’

Gubby Tench squeezed the trigger. And the revolver’s hammer clicked on an empty chamber. And he blinked and a cloud of disappointment seemed to drift across his dazed features. He fumbled among the bullets on the baize in front of him. In total, he loaded five bullets into the six chambers of the revolver’s cylinder. He grinned and gave it a spin and brought the weapon up once more to his temple. Somebody screamed. He squeezed the trigger.

‘And the hammer clicked on the one empty chamber,’ I said.

Suzanne nodded. ‘He did it five times. He did it once for every bullet that the gun possessed. Then he shook out the shells and gathered his chips in a tablecloth from the bar and cashed them as his stunned audience clapped him out of there.’

‘He was very lucky.’

‘He wasn’t lucky at all,’ Suzanne said. ‘Luck had nothing to do with it. Five to one is lucky. But five to one to the power of five? Nobody beats those odds.’

‘The only plausible explanation is that the ammunition in the pistol was dud.’

‘It wasn’t his pistol. He took it surreptitiously from the shoulder holster of a gangster working a security shift on
the floor. He seemed to be capable of conjuring tricks, of any feat of dexterity or sleight of hand or legerdemain. He paid a half a dollar that evening for a ride back to his bunk aboard a tobacco boat working the bay as a water taxi. The pilot said the money was wasted. By that stage they believed he could have walked upon the ocean back to the
Ace of Clubs
.’

Which was, of course, Spalding’s
Dark Echo
. It was merely masquerading as another craft.

Gubby Tench did not return the next night to the casinos, or the night after that. After four days, the smell was noticed coming from his anchored boat in the bay. Havana was hot and the corruption of death quick and almost overpowering. Police and militia boarded the vessel, assuming that they would find a dead victim of robbery. And they duly found a corpse. But Tench had not been murdered by thieves. Nobody had been aboard the boat but its master. Or nobody had been aboard, at least, who had left any trace of themselves behind.

Tench had sat at the chart table in the master cabin and put the barrel of a Very pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Dollars and gold and silver ingots and promissory notes and even some casino chips lay before him in a bright hoard on the tabletop. He was still attired in his dress shirt and tuxedo. They were sweat-stained, yellow, the garments stretched over his bloating corpse, the fabric of his shirt pulled to reveal a pale torso in elliptical glimpses of flesh between the buttons. The flare had not gone off when Tench had fired the pistol. But the release of the flare had been of sufficient force to blow off the top of his skull. Skull fragments and bits of brain matter were painted across the ceiling and rear wall of the cabin. It was a death as inexplicable as it was messy. There were, of course, no witnesses. And there was no note to cast light on the suicide’s motive. He had
sought to destroy everything of himself in an inferno in Havana harbour amid his riches, aboard his little floating domain. He had succeeded only in self-murder of a particularly messy kind.

‘It’s why I didn’t laugh earlier,’ Suzanne said, ‘when you shared your vision or dream or whatever it was concerning the blaze that destroyed the
Dark Echo
logs. The mention of a distress flare reminded me of the awful fate of Gubby Tench.’

I was silent. There was nothing to say. It was very late, now. Cigarette smoke had crept around the little room despite the efforts of the electric fan, and the air in there felt stale and dead.

‘I wonder whether they knew one another,’ Suzanne said.

‘Who?’

‘Spalding. Waltrow. Tench.’

‘Where was Gubby Tench from?’

‘New Orleans.’

‘Then it’s unlikely,’ I said. ‘Boston and New York are fairly far apart. Distances were much greater in those days before regular domestic airline flights. New Orleans is positively remote from both of those places, even now. You could argue that banking and financial speculation are sister occupations. But Tench was a professional gambler. He’s not only geographically distant from Spalding and Waltrow. Culturally, he’s in a different universe.’

But she wasn’t really listening to me. ‘They were all three the same age,’ she said, ‘give or take a year or two. I wonder if they met in the war.’ She looked at me and I sensed a complication coming. ‘War makes a nonsense of demographics, Martin. It has no respect for barriers of class or culture. I’d very much like to see your father’s photograph of the Jericho Crew.’

I did not answer her.

‘That’s funny.’

‘What is?’

Suzanne had turned to the radio. ‘They’ve just played this. They’re playing the same song again. They’re repeating it.’

I recognised the song myself. It didn’t sound like jazz. She had the radio permanently tuned to a jazz station. The song was ‘When Love Breaks Down’, by Prefab Sprout. The failed priest, Paddy McAloon, was singing it. According to Suzanne, he was reprising it. It did seem strange. But it was a small strangeness, a domestic oddity, after the tale of Gubby Tench. I walked over to the radio and switched it off. ‘I think it’s time for bed,’ I said. I put my arms around Suzanne for the comfort of her. Her hair smelled of smoke and her skin of stale perfume and the recycled air you’re obliged to breathe aboard aircraft. But her body was warm and yielding and wonderful against mine. I closed my eyes and thanked God again for her. It was God, not the Shadwell Posse, I believed I had to thank for Suzanne. And I thought I heard a single, plangent chord of McAloon balladry from the radio on its shelf. But I must have imagined that because Suzanne stayed softly pressed against me with her hands linked in the small of my back.

I did not want her going anywhere near the Jericho Crew. They were long dead, as my father had pointed out. But to me they were feral ghosts that could maraud across the decades, given the right encouragement. They were malevolent and restless and waiting in an impatient pack behind their hungry leader. No, the Jericho Crew were best left to history and themselves. All my instincts told me so. I untangled myself from Suzanne and went and brushed my teeth and then got into bed and listened to her shower. We finally fell asleep, thankfully dreamless, wrapped in one another’s arms in the Lambeth night.

I was awoken the following morning by an agitated phone call from my father. I looked at my watch and at Suzanne’s sleeping head, her hair raven black on the crumpled white of the pillow. It was just before six thirty.

‘Appreciate it if you’d get round here, Martin. Pronto, if you’ve no engagement more pressing. Bring your under-achieving Scandinavian motor car with you. Once again, we face a day apparently beyond the capabilities of rotorblades.’

Groggily, I opened the curtains a chink. I did not want to awaken Suzanne after her trying day and exhausting evening. The weather was foul, our little glimpse of river grey and turbulent in the wind, the cloud low and the rain splattering on the panes and thrumming on the road outside in big, percussive drops. What a dismal month March was turning out to be.

‘What’s the problem?’

‘Frank Hadley seems to be in the throes of some sort of breakdown.’

I cleared my throat. I still wasn’t fully awake. ‘I take it you know about the fire, Dad?’

‘I know about it. Hadley doesn’t. The charred log is not the problem.’

‘What is?’

‘Just get over here, Martin.’ As was his perennial habit, he then hung up on me.

Without telling him anything of what I had experienced for myself or recently learned, I tried on the drive to the Hamble to sow doubts in my father’s mind. I told him that it was fair from what we both knew to call the
Dark Echo
accident-prone. Our prospective voyage seemed foolhardy.

He pondered what I’d said without immediate comment. He took out his cigar case, chose a cigar and smoked for a while. I did not get the explosion from him with which he usually blustered his way out of a corner. This was not out
of respect for me, I knew. It was because the evidence was compelling and seemed despite his wishes to be mounting all the time.

‘A thing is only ever cursed in retrospect,’ he said eventually. ‘And bad reputation is always a matter more than anything of interpretation. If mountaineers are killed attempting to climb a Himalayan peak, and the attempt fails, the expedition is cursed. They’ve crossed the yeti, or antagonised the mountain gods, or some other similar nonsense impossible to substantiate or refute. If, by contrast, the attempt to scale the peak is a success, it doesn’t much matter what happens to the team on the way down. The expedition is judged a success. The objective was achieved. Nothing was cursed. Do you see my point?’

‘Not really.’

‘In 1970 an expedition organised by Chris Bonington was successful in climbing the South Face of a Himalayan peak called Annapurna. It was the last great unconquered mountain challenge the roof of the world had to offer. Annapurna had always possessed the reputation of an unlucky mountain. One morning, a thousand feet from the top, the climbers Don Whillans and Doug Scott, leading the ascent, left their tent and achieved the summit. On the way down to base camp, two of the party were killed in separate accidents. Was the expedition cursed? Was the mountain unlucky?’

The road to our destination on the Hamble was clear but the driving hard in atrocious visibility and streaming surface water. ‘You tell me, Dad.’

‘Bonington was a skilled enough climber in his own right. He climbed the North Face of the Eiger. With Whillans, he shared the first ascent of the Central Pillar of Freney. But his chief talents were as an organiser and a manipulator of the media. Annapurna was not cursed.
The expedition was a triumph, because that’s how Bonington was able to present it.’