There was a silence then she said dully: If you know so much, what’s the good in pretending any more.” She pushed back a little and looked at me through defeated eyes. “You’re not a real doctor?”
“I’m real enough, but not in the ordinary way of things, for which any patients I might have had would probably feel very thankful as I haven’t practised those past good few years. I’m just a civil servant working for the British Government, nothing glamorous or romantic like Intelligence or Counter-Intelligence, just the Treasury, which is why I’m here because we’ve been interested in Heissman’s shennanigans for quite some time. I didn’t expect to run into this other busload of trouble, though.”
“What do you mean?”
“Too long to explain, even if I could. I can’t, yet. And I’ve things to do.”
“Mr. Smith?” She hesitated. “From the Treasury, too?” I nodded and she went on: “I’ve been thinking that.” She hesitated again. “My father commanded submarine groups during the war. He was also a high Party official, very high, I think. Then he disappeared–”
“Where was his command?”
“For the last year, the north-Tromso, Trondheim, Narvik, places like that, I’m not sure.” I was, all of a sudden I was, I knew it had to be true.
I said: “Then disappearance. A war criminal?” She nodded. “And now an old man?” Another nod. “And amnestied because of age”
“Yes, just over two years ago. Then he came back to us-_Mr. Heissman brought us all together, I don’t know how.”
I could have explained Heissman’s special background qualifications for this very job, but it was hardly the moment. I said: “Your father’s not only a war criminal, he’s also a civil criminal-probably an embezzler on a grand scale. Yet you do all this for him?”
“For my mother.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry for all the trouble I’ve given you. Do you think my mother will be all right?”
I think so,,” I said, which, considering my recent disastrous record in keeping people alive, was a pretty rash statement on my part.
“But what can we do? What on earth can we do with all those terrible things happening?”
“It’s not what I’ve can do. I know what to do. It’s what you are going to do.”
“I’ll do anything. Anything you say. I promise.”
“Then do nothing. Behave exactly as you’ve been behaving. Especially towards Uncle Johann. But never a word of our talk to him, never a word to anyone.”
“Not even to Charles?”
“Conrad? Least of all to him.”
“But I thought you liked–”
“Sure I do. But not half as much as our Charles likes you. He’d just up and clobber Heissman on the spot. I haven’t,” I said bitterly, “been displaying very much cleverness or finesse to date. Give me this one last chance.” I thought a bit about being clever, then said: “One thing you can do. Let me know if you see anyone returning here. I’m going to look around a bit.”
#
Otto had almost as many locks as I had keys. As befitted the chairman of Olympus Productions, the producer of the film and the de facto leader of the expedition he carried a great number of bits and pieces of equiprnent with him. Most of the belongings were personal and most of these clothes, for although Otto, because of his spherical shape, was automatically excluded from the list of the top ten best-dressed men, his sartorial aspirations were of the most soaring, and he carried at least a dozen suits with him although what he intended to do with them on Bear Island was a matter for conjecture. More interestingly, he had two small squat brown suitcases that served merely as cover for two metal deed-boxes.
Those were haspbound with imposing brass padlocks that a blind and palsied pick-lock could have had opened in under a minute and it didn’t take me much longer. The first contained nothing of importance, nothing of importance, that was, to anyone except Otto: they consisted of hundreds of press clippings, no doubt carefully selected for the laudatory nature of their contents, and going back for twenty-odd years, all of them unanimous in extolling Otto’s cinematic genius: precisely the sort of ego-feeding nourishment that Otto would carry around with him. The second deed-box contained papers of a purely financial nature, recorded Otto’s transactions, incomes and outgoes over a good number of years and would have proved, I felt certain, fascinating reading for any Inland Revenue inspector or law-abiding accountant, if there were any such around, but my interest in them was minimal: what did interest me though, and powerfully, was a collection of cancelled chequebooks and as I couldn’t see that those were going to be of any use to Otto in the Arctic I pocketed them, checked that everything was as I had found it and left.
Goin, as befitted the firm’s accountant, was also much given to keeping things under lock and key but, because the total of his impediments didn’t come to much more than a quarter of Otto’s, the search took correspondingly less time. Again as befitted an accountant, Goin’s main concern was clearly with matters financial and as this Goincided with my own current interest I took with me three items that I judged likely to be handsomely rewarding of more leisured study. Those were the Olympus Productions salary lists, Goin’s splendidly padded private bankbook and a morocco diary that was full of items in some sort of private code but was nonetheless clearly concerned with money for Goin hadn’t bothered to construct a code for the columns of pounds and pence. There was nothing necessarily sinister about this: concern for privacy, especially other people’s privacy, could be an admirable trait in an accountant.
In the next half hour I went through four cubicles. In Heissman’s I found what I had expected to find, nothing. A man with his background and experience would have discovered many years ago that the only safe place to file his records was inside his head. But he did have some innocuous items-I supposed he had used them in the production of the Olympus manifesto for the film-which were of interest to me, several large-scale charts of Bear Island. One of those I took. Neal Divine’s private papers revealed little of interest except a large number of unpaid bills, I0Us, and a number of letters, all of them menacing in varying degrees, from an assortment of different bankers-a form of correspondence that went well with Divine’s nervous, apprehensive, and generally down-trodden mien. At the bottom of an old-fashioned Gladstone in the Count’s room I found a small black automatic, loaded, but as an envelope beside it contained a current London licence for the gun this discovery might or might not have significance: the number of law-abiding people in law-abiding Britain who for divers law-abiding reasons consider it prudent to own a gun are, in their total, quite remarkable. In the cubicle shared by Jungbeck and Heyter I found nothing incriminating. But I was intrigued by a small brown paper packet, scaled, that I found in Jungbeck’s case. I took this into the main cabin where Mary Stuart was moving from window to window-there were four of themkeeping watch.
“Nothing?” I said. She shook her head. “Put on a kettle, will you?”
“There’s coffee there. And some food.”
“I don’t want coffee. A kettle-water-half an inch will do.” I handed her the packet. “Steam this open for me, will you?’
“Steam-what’s in it?”
“If I knew that I wouldn’t ask you to open it.” I went into Lonnie’s cubicle but it held nothing but Lonnie’s dreamsan album full of faded photographs. With few exceptions, they were of his family-clearly Lonnie had taken them himself. The first few showed a dark attractive girl with a wavy shoulder-length I930s hairdo holding two babies who were obviously twins. Later photographs showed that the babies were girls. As the years had passed Lonnie’s wife, changing hair styles apart, had changed remarkably little while the girls had grown up from page to page until eventually they had become two rather beautiful youngsters very closely resembling their mother. In the last photograph, about two-thirds of the way through the album, all three were shown in white summer dresses of an unconscionable length leaning against a dark open roadster: the two girls would then have been about eighteen. I closed the album with that guilty and uncomfortable feeling you have when you stumble, however inadvertently, across another man’s private dreams.
I was crossing the passage to Eddie’s room when Mary called me. She had the package open and was holding the contents in a white handkerchief. I said: “That’s clever.”
“Two thousand pounds,” she said wonderingly. “All in new five-pound notes.”
“That’s a lot of money.” They were not only new, they were in consecutive serial number order. I noted down the first and last numbers, tracing would be automatic and immediate: somebody was being very stupid indeed or very confident indeed. This was one item of what might he useful evidence that I did not appropriate but locked up again, resealed, in jungbecles case. Men a man has that much money around he’s apt to check on its continued presence pretty frequently.