"MacLean, Alistair - Bear Island" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Alistair)

"No place for dreamers in the Barents Sea. How the Americans ever managed to put a man on the moon-"
УOur 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 End 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."
УOtto 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."
УIt 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 anti-Communism-Otto prospered mightily in the American film industry on the strength of a handful of nauseatingly superpatriotic pictures, which had the critics in despair and the audiences in raptures. In the mid-'50s, 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.Ф
УBut 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 balmy to me. Fishy, at least."
"The film world, Smithy, is full of balmy 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 of the violently rolling Morning Rose made for a very unstable observation platform nor because the big uneven seas bearing down from the cast 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 fiord 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 foreword 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 windblown 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: llona 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. "Abroad 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 grill 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.Ф
УWhy were you out there in the first place?Ф
УCan'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 those parts on this floating museum?"
She hesitated. "That's a personal question.Ф
УThe 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.Ф
УYou 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 seasickness. 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 apposite 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 mier.
"How do you feel, Mr. Heissman?Ф
УOh, 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-Ф
УOtto 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. "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 the 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 prewar 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.Ф
УTreatment?Ф
УBrain 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 seasick 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-checked, nervous, and perpetually balanced on what seemed to be the knife edge of agonising 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?Ф
УLater, 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--Ф