There was nothing else for it. Stiffly, numbly, I climbed down, took a couple of steps towards Smallwood, stopped as the pistol steadied unwaveringly on my chest.
“You’ll be with your friends in a few hours,” I told Smallwood. “You could leave us a little food, a portable stove and tent. Is that too much to ask?”
“It is.”
“Nothing? Nothing at all?”
“You’re wasting your time, Dr Mason. And it grieves me to see you reduced to begging.”
“The dog sledge, then. We don’t even want the dogs. But neither Mahler nor Miss LeGarde can walk.”
“You’re wasting your time.” He turned his attention to the sledge. “Everybody off, I said. Did you hear me, Levin? Get down!”
“It’s my legs.” In the harsh glare of the searchlight we could see the lines of pain deep-etched round Levin’s eyes and mouth, and I wondered how long he had been sitting there suffering, saying nothing. “I think they’re frozen or sleeping or something.”
“Get down!” Smallwood repeated sharply.
“In a moment.” Levin swung one of his legs over the edge of the sledge, his teeth bared with the effort. “I don’t seem to be able-”
“Maybe a bullet in one of your legs will help,” Smallwood said unemotionally. “To get the feeling back.”
I didn’t know whether he meant it or not. I didn’t think so -gratuitous violence wasn’t in character for this man, I couldn’t see him killing or wounding without sound reason. But Zagero thought differently. He advanced within six feet of Smallwood.
“Don’t touch him, Smallwood,” he said warningly.
“No?” The rising inflection was a challenge accepted, and Smallwood went on flatly: “I’d snuff you and him like a candle.”
“No!” Zagero said, softly and savagely, the words carrying clearly in a sudden lull in the wind. “Lay a finger on my old man, Smallwood, and I’ll get you and break your neck like a rotten carrot if you empty the entire magazine into me.” I looked at him as he crouched there like a great cat, toes digging into the frozen snow, fists clenched and slightly in advance of him, ready for the explosive leap that would take him across that tiny space in a split second of time and I believed he could do exactly what he said. So, too, I suspected, did Smallwood.
“Your old. man?” he inquired. “Your father?”
Zagero nodded.
“Good.” Smallwood showed no surprise. “Into the tractor cabin with him, Zagero. We’ll exchange him for the German girl. Nobody cares about her.”
His point was clear. I couldn’t see how we could offer any danger to Smallwood and Corazzini now, but Smallwood was a nan who guarded even against impossibilities: Levin would be a far better surety for Zagero’s conduct than Helene.
Levin half-walked, was half-carried into the tractor cabin. With Corazzini and Smallwood both armed, resistance was hopeless: Smallwood had us summed up to a nicety. He knew we were desperate men, that we would fling ourselves on him and his gun a moment of desperate emergency: but he also knew that we weren’t so desperate as to commit suicide when no lives were in mediate danger.
When Levin was inside, Smallwood turned to the young [German girl seated opposite him in the cabin. “Out!”
It was then that it happened, with the stunning speed and inevitability that violent tragedy, viewed in retrospect, always seems to possess. I thought perhaps that it was some calculated plan, a last-minute desperate effort to save us that made Helene Fleming act as she did, but I found out later that she had merely been driven and goaded into a pain-filled unreasoning anger and resentment and despair by the agony she had suffered in her shoulder from having had her arms bound for so many long hours in the cruel jolting discomfort of the tractor cabin.
As she passed by Smallwood she stumbled, he put up an arm either to help her or ward her off, and before he had realised what was happening – it must have been the last quarter from which he expected any show of violence or resistance – she kicked out blindly and knocked the gun spinning out of his hand to land in the snow beneath. Smallwood sprang after it like a cat – the speed was unnecessary, the low growl of warning from an armed Corazzini put paid to any ideas we might have had of taking advantage of the situation – picked up the gun and whirled round, the gun lining up on Helene, his eyes narrowed to slits against the beam of the searchlight, his face twisted into an unrecognisable snarl, the lips drawn far back over the teeth. I’d been wrong once more about Smallwood – he could kill without reason.
“Helene!” Mrs Dansby-Gregg was the nearest to her, and her voice was high-pitched, almost a scream. “Look out, Helene!” She plunged forward to push her maid to one side, but I don’t think Smallwood even saw her: he was mad with fury, I knew he was, and nothing on earth was going to stop him from pressing that trigger. The bullet caught Mrs Dansby-Gregg squarely in the back and pitched her headlong to fall face down in the frozen snow.
Already Smallwood’s moment of uncontrollable rage was spent as if it had never been. He said not another word, just nodded to Corazzini and jumped up on to the tail of the tractor cabin to keep us covered with searchlight and gun as Corazzini gunned the motor, engaged gear and lumbered off into the darkness to the west. We stood in a forlorn huddled little group and watched the train pass us by, the tractor, the tractor sled, the dog sledge and finally the huskies themselves, running on the loose traces astern.
I heard Helene murmur something to herself, and when I bent to listen she was saying in a strange, wondering voice: “Helene. She called me ‘Helene’.” I stared at her as if she were mad, glanced down at the dead woman at my feet then gazed unseeingly after the receding lights of the Citroen until both the lights and the sound had faded and vanished into the snow-filled darkness of the night.
CHAPTER ELEVEN – Friday 6 P.M. – Saturday 12.15 P.M.
The white hell of that night, the agony of the bitter dreadful hours that followed – and God only knows how many hours these were -is a memory that will never die.
How many hours did we stagger and lurch after that tractor like drunk or dying men – six hours, eight, ten? We didn’t know, we shall never know. Time as an independent system of measurement ceased to exist: each second was an interminable unit of suffering, of freezing, of exhausted marching, each minute an son where the fire in our aching leg muscles fought with the ice-cold misery of hands and feet and faces for domination in our minds, each hour an eternity which we knew could never end. Not one of us, I am sure, expected to live through that night.
The thoughts, the emotions of these hours I could never afterwards recall. Chagrin there was, the most bitter I have ever known, an overwhelming mortification and self-condemnation that I had all along been deceived with such childish ease, that I had been powerless to offer any hindrance or resistance to the endless resourcefulness of that brilliant little man. And then I would think of Mrs Dansby-Gregg, and of Margaret bound and hostage and afraid and looking at Smallwood in the dim light of that lurching tractor cabin, looking at Smallwood and the gun in Smallwood’s hand, and with that thought anger would flood in to supplant the chagrin, a consuming hatred and a fury that flamed throughout my entire being, but even that anger wasn’t all exclusive: it couldn’t be, not so long as fear, a fear such as I had never before known, was the dominating factor in my mind. And it was.
It was, too, I should think, in Zagero’s mind. He hadn’t spoken a word since Mrs Dansby-Gregg had died, had just flung himself uncaringly, ruthlessly, into what had to be done. Head bowed, he plodded on like an automaton. I wondered how many times he must have regretted that impetuous slip of the tongue when he had betrayed to Smallwood the fact that Solly Levin was his father.
And Jackstraw was as silent as we were, non-committal, speaking only when he had to, keeping his thoughts strictly to himself. I wondered if he was blaming me for what had happened but I didn’t think so, Jackstraw’s mind just didn’t work that way. I could guess what he was thinking, I knew the explosive temper that slumbered under that placid exterior. Had we met an unarmed Smallwood and Corazzini then, I do not think we would have stopped short of killing him with our hands.
I suppose, too, that we were all three of us exhausted as we had never been before, frost-bitten, bleeding, thirsty and steadily weakening from lack of food. I say ‘suppose’, because logic and reason tell me that these things must have been so. But if they were I do not think they touched the minds of any of us that night. We were no longer ourselves, we were outside ourselves. Our bodies were but machines to serve the demands of our minds, and our minds so consumed with anxiety and anger that there was no place left for any further thought.