‘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