“Your contract specifies hair shirts?”
“No. Why? Does yours?”
“Solidarity of the working classes.” He smiled, looked at me with an oddly speculative glint in his eyes. “Letting the opera buffs down, aren’t you?”
“They’ll recover. Anyway, I always tell my patients that a change is as good as a rest.” The music ceased abruptly and I lowered my voice about fifty decibels. “Mind you, this is carrying it too far. Fact is, I’m on duty. Mr. Gerran is a bit concerned about you all.”
“He wants his herd delivered to the cattle market in prime condition?”
“Well, I suppose you all represent a pretty considerable investment to him.”
“Investment? Ha! Do you know that that twisted old skinflint of a beer barrel has not only got us at fire-sale prices but also won’t pay us a penny until shooting’s over?”
“No, I didn’t.” I paused. “We live in a democracy, Mr. Conrad, the land of the free. You don’t have to sell yourselves in the slave market.”
“Don’t we just! What do you know about the film industry?”
“Nothing.”
“Obviously. It’s in the most depressed state in its history. Eighty percent of the technicians and actors unemployed. I’d rather work for pennies than starve.” He scowled, then his natural good humour reasserted itself. “Tell him that his prop and stay, that indomitable leading man, Charles Conrad, is fit and well. Not happy, mind you, just fit and well. To be happy I’d have to see him fall over the side.”
I’ll tell him all of that.” I looked around the room. The Three Apostles, mercifully, were refreshing themselves with ginger ale: most of the audience were likewise refreshing themselves though clearly in need of something stronger than ginger ale. I said to Conrad: “This little lot will get to market.”
“Instant mass diagnosis?”
“It takes practice. It also saves time. Who’s missing?”
“Well.” He glanced around. “There’s Heissman-”
“I’ve seen him. And Neal Divine. And Lonnie. And Mary Stuart-not that I’d expect her to be here anyway.”
“Our beautiful but snooty young Slav, eh?”
“I’ll go halfway with that. You don’t have to be snooty to avoid people!”
“I like her too.” I looked at him. I’d only spoken to him twice, briefly. I could see he meant what he said. He sighed. I wish she were my leading lady instead of our resident Mata Hari.”
“You can’t be referring to the delectable Miss Haynes?”
“I can and I am,” he said moodily. “Femmes fatales wear me out. You’ll observe she’s not among those present. I’ll bet she’s in bed with those two damned floppy-cared hounds of hers, all of them having the vapours and high on smelling salts.”
“Who else is missing?”
“Antonio.” He was smiling again. “According to the Count-he’s his cabin-mate-Antonio is in extremis and unlikely to see the night out.”
“He did leave the dining room in rather a hurry.” I left Conrad and joined the Count at his table. The Count, with a lean aquiline face, black pencil moustache, bar-straight black eyebrows and greying hair brushed straight back from his forehead appeared to be in more than tolerable health. He held a very large measure of brandy in his hand and I did not have to ask to know that it would be the very best cognac obtainable for the Count was a renowned connoisseur of everything from blondes to caviare, as precisely demanding a perfectionist in the pursuit of the luxuries of life as he was in the performance of his duties which may have helped to make him what he was, the best lighting cameraman in the country and probably in Europe. Nor did I have to wonder where he had obtained the cognac from: rumour had it that he had known Otto Gerran a very long time indeed or at least long enough to bring his own private supplies along with him whenever Otto went on safari. Count Tadeusz Leszczynski-which nobody ever called him because they couldn’t pronounce it-had learned a great deal about life since he had parted with his huge Polish estates, precipitately and forever, in mid-September 1939.
“Evening, Count,” I said. “At least, you look fit enough.”
“’Tadeusz’ to my peers. In robust health, I’m glad to say. I take the properly prophylactic precautions.” He touched the barely perceptible bulge in his jacket. “You will join me in some prophylaxis? Your penicillins and Aureomycins are but witches” brews for the credulous.”
I shook my head. “Duty rounds, I’m afraid. Mr. Gerran wants to know just how ill this weather is making people.”
“Ah! Our Otto himself is fit?”
“Reasonably.”
“One can’t have everything.”
“Conrad tells me that your roommate Antonio may require a visit.”
“What Antonio requires is a gag, a strait jacket, and a nursemaid, in that order. Rolling around, sick all over the floor, groaning like some miscreant stretched out on the rack.” The Count wrinkled a fastidious nose. “Most upsetting, most.”
“I can well imagine it.”
“For a man of delicate sensibilities, you understand.”
“Of course.”
“I simply had to leave!”
“Yes. I’ll have a look at him.” I’d just pushed my chair back to the limit of its securing chain when Michael Stryker sat down in a chair beside me. Stryker, a full partner in Olympus Productions, combined the two jobs, normally separate, of production designer and construction manager Gerran never lost the opportunity to economise. He was a tall, dark, and undeniably handsome man with a clipped moustache and could readily have been mistaken for a matinee idol of the mid- “30s were it not for the fashionably long and untidy hair that obscured about ninety percent of the polo-necked silk sweater which he habitually affected. He looked tough, was unquestionably cynical and, from what little I had heard of him, totally amoral. He was also possessed of the dubious distinction of being Gerran’s son-in-law.
“Seldom we see you abroad at this late hour, Doctor,” he said. He screwed a long black Russian cigarette into an onyx holder with all the care of a precision engineer fitting the tappets on a Rolls-Royce engine, then held it up to the light to inspect the results. “Kind of you to join the masses, esprit de corps and what have you.” He lit his cigarette, blew a cloud of noxious smoke across the table and looked at me consideringly. “On second thoughts, no. You’re not the esprit de corps type. We more or less have to be. You don’t. I don’t think you could. Too cool, too detached, too clinical, too observant-and a loner. Right?”
“It’s a pretty fair description of a doctor!’
“Here in an official capacity, eh?” I suppose so.”
“I’ll wager that old goat sent you.”
“Mr. Gerran sent me!” It was becoming increasingly apparent to me that Otto Gerran’s senior associates were unlikely ever to clamour for the privilege of voting him into the Hall of Fame.
“That’s the old goat I mean.” Stryker looked thoughtfully at the Count. “A strange and unwonted solicitude on the part of our Otto, wouldn’t you say, Tadeusz? I wonder what lies behind it?”
The Count produced a chased silver flask, poured himself another generous measure of cognac, smiled and said nothing. I said nothing either because I’d already decided that I knew the answer to that one: even later on, in retrospect, I could not and did not blame myself for I had arrived at a conclusion on the basis of the only facts then available to me. I said to Stryker: “Miss Haynes is not here. Is she all right?”
“No, I’m afraid she’s no sailor. She’s pretty much under the weather
but what’s a man to do? She’s pleading for sedatives or sleeping drugs and asking that I send for you, but of course I had to say no.”
“Why?”
“My dear chap, she’s been living on drugs ever since we came aboard this damned hell ship.” It was as well for his health, I thought, that Captain Imrie and Mr. Stokes weren’t sitting at the same table. “Her own seasick tablets one moment, the ones you doled out the next, pep pills in between and barbiturates for dessert. Well, you know what would happen if she took sedatives or more drugs on top of that lot.”
“No, I don’t. Tell me.”
“Eh?”
“Does she drink? Heavily, I mean”
“Drink? No. I mean, she never touches the stuff.” I sighed.
“Why don’t cobblers stick to their own lasts? I’ll leave films to you, you leave medicine to me. Any first year medical student could tell you-well, never mind. Does she know what kind of tablets she’s taken today and how many-not that it could have been all that many or she’d have been unconscious by now.”
“I should imagine so.”
I pushed back my chair. “She’ll be asleep in fifteen minutes.”
“Are you sure? I mean-”
“Which is her room?”
“First on the right in the passageway.”
“And yours?” I asked the Count.
“First left.”