Bear Island

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘I could have been more circumspect at that, I suppose. You can have my apologies if you want them but I don’t see them being all that useful at this stage.’

  ‘I’m hardly in line myself for a citation for distinguished services, so we’ll leave the apologies be. Now that you’re here—well, I won’t have to watch my back so closely.’

  ‘So they’re on to you—whoever they are?’

  ‘Whoever they are are unquestionably on to me.’ I told him briefly all I knew, not all I thought I knew or suspected I knew, for I saw no point in making Smithy as confused as myself. I went on: ‘Just so we don’t act at cross-purposes, let me initiate any action that I—or we—may think may have to be taken. I need hardly say that that doesn’t deprive you of initiative if and when you find yourself or think you find yourself physically threatened. In that event, you have my advance permission to flatten anybody.’

  ‘That’s nice to know.’ Smithy smiled briefly for the first time. ‘It would be even nicer to know who it is that I’m likely to have to flatten. It would be even nicer still to know what you who are, I gather, a fairly senior Treasury official, and I, whom I know to be a junior one, are doing on this god-damned island anyway.’

  ‘The Treasury’s basic concern is money, always money, in one shape or other, and that’s why we’re here. Not our money, not British money, but what we call international dirty money, and all the members of the Central Banks co-operate very closely on this issue.’

  ‘When you’re as poor as I am,’ Smithy said, ‘there’s no such thing as dirty money.’

  ‘Even an underpaid civil servant like yourself wouldn’t touch this lot. This is all ill-gotten gains, illegal loot from the days of World War II. This money has all been earned in blood and what has been recovered of it—and that’s only a fraction of the total—has almost invariably been recovered in blood. Even as late as the spring of 1945 Germany was still a land of priceless treasures: by the summer of that year the cupboard was almost entirely bare. Both the victors and the vanquished laid their sticky fingers on every imaginable object of value they could clap eyes on—gold, precious stones, old masters, securities—German bank securities issued forty years ago are still perfectly valid—and took off in every conceivable direction. I need hardly say that none of those involved saw fit to declare their latest acquisitions to the proper authorities.’ I looked at my watch. ‘Your worried friends are scouring Bear Island for you—or a very small part of it, anyway. A half-hour search. I’ll have to bring in your unconscious form in about fifteen minutes.’

  ‘It all sounds pretty dull to me,’ Smith said. ‘All this loot, I mean. Was there much of it?’

  ‘It all depends what you call much. It’s estimated that the Allies—and when I say “Allies” I mean Britain and America as well as the much-maligned Russians—managed to get hold of about two-thirds of the total. That left the Nazis and their sympathizers with about a paltry one-third, and the conservative estimate of that one-third—conservative, Smithy—is that it amounts to approximately £350 million. Pounds sterling, you understand.’

  ‘A thousand million all told?’

  ‘Give or take a hundred million.’

  ‘That childish remark about this being a dull subject. Strike it off the record.’

  ‘Granted. Now this loot has found its way into some very odd places indeed. Some of it, inevitably, lies in secret numbered bank-accounts. Some of it—there is no question about this—lies in the form of specie in some of the very deepest Austrian Alpine lakes and has so far proved irrecoverable. I know of two Raphaels in the cellar gallery of a Buenos Aires millionaire, a Michelangelo in Rio, several Halses and Rubenses in the same illegal collection in New York, and a Rembrandt in London. Their owners are either people who have been in, were in, or are closely connected to the governments or armed forces of the countries concerned: there’s nothing the governments concerned can do about it and there are no signs that they’re particularly keen to do anything about it anyway, they themselves might be the ultimate beneficiaries. As lately as the end of 1970 an international cartel went on to the market with £30 millions’ worth of perfectly valid German securities issued in the ‘thirties, approaching in turn the London, New York and Zürich markets, but the Federal Bank of Germany refused to cash those until proper owner identification was established: the point is that it’s an open secret that those securities were taken from the vaults of the Reichsbank in 1945 by a special Red Army unit who were constituted as the only legalized military burglars in history.

  ‘But that’s only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak; the vast bulk of this immense fortune is hidden because the war is still too recent and people—the illegal owners—still too scared to convert their treasures into currency. There’s a special Italian Government Recovery Office that deals exclusively with this matter, and its boss, one Professor Siviero, estimates that there are at least seven hundred old masters, many of them virtually priceless, still untraced, while another expert, a Simon Wiesenthal of the Austrian Jewish Documentation Service, says virtually the same thing—he, incidentally, maintains that there are countless highly-wanted characters, such as top-ranking officers in the SS, who are living in great comfort from hundreds of numbered bank accounts scattered throughout Europe.

  ‘Siviero and Wiesenthal are the acknowledged legal experts in this form of recovery. Unfortunately, there are known to be a handful of people—they amount to certainly not more than three or four—who are possessed of an equal or even greater expertise in this matter, but who unfortunately are lacking in the high principles of their colleagues, if that is the word, who operate on the right side of the law. Their names are known but they are untouchable because they have never committed any known crimes, not even fraudulent conversion of stocks, because the stocks are always good, the claimants always proven. They are, nevertheless, criminals operating on an international level. We have the most skilful and successful of the lot with us here on Bear Island. His name is Johann Heissman.’

  ‘Heissman!’

  ‘None other. He’s a very gifted lad is our Johann.’

  ‘But Heissman! How can that be? Heissman? What kind of sense can that make? Why it’s only two years—’

  ‘I know. It’s only two years since Heissman made his spectacular escape from Siberia and arrived in London to the accompaniment of lots of noise and TV cameras and yards of newspaper space and enough red carpet to go from Tilbury to Tomsk, since which time he has occupied himself exclusively with his old love of film-making, so how can it possibly be Heissman?

  ‘Well, it can be Heissman and it is Heissman for our Johann is a very downy bird indeed. We have checked, in fact, that he was a movie studio partner of Otto in Vienna just before the war and that they did, in fact, attend the same gymnasium in St Polten, which is not all that far away. We do know that Heissman ran the wrong way while Otto ran the right way at the time of the Anschluss, and we do know that Heissman, because of his then Communist sympathies, was a very welcome guest of the Third Reich. What followed was one of those incredibly involved double and treble dealing spy switches that occurred so frequently in central Europe during the war. Heissman was apparently allowed to escape to Russia, where his sympathies were well known, and then sent back to Germany where he was ordered to transmit all possible misleading but still acceptable military information back to the Russians.’

  ‘Why? Why did he do it?’

  ‘Because his wife and two children were captured at the same time as he was. A good enough reason?’ Smithy nodded. ‘Then when the war was over and the Russians overran Berlin and turned up their espionage records, they found out what Heissman had really been doing and shipped him to Siberia.’

  ‘I would have thought they would have shot him out of hand.’

  ‘They would have, too, but for one small point. I told you that Heissman was a very downy bird and that this was a treble deal. Heissman was, in effect and actually, working throughout the war for the R
ussians. For four years he faithfully sent back his misleading reports to his masters and even though he had the help of the German Intelligence in the preparation of his coded messages, they never once latched on to the fact that Heissman was using his own overlaid code throughout. The Russians simply spirited him away at the end of the war for his own safety and allegedly sent him to Siberia. Our information is that he’s never been to Siberia: we believe that his wife and two married daughters are still living very comfortably in Moscow.’

  ‘And he has been working for the Russians ever since?’ Smithy was looking just faintly baffled and I had some fellow-feeling for him, Heissman’s masterful duplicity was not for ready comprehension.

  ‘In his present capacity. During his last eight years in his Siberian prison, Heissman, in a variety of disguises, has been traced in North and South America, South Africa, Israel and, believe it or not, in the Savoy Hotel in London. We know but we cannot prove that all those trips were in some way concerned with the recovery of Nazi treasure for his Russian masters—you have to remember that Heissman had built up the highest connections in the Party, the SS and the Intelligence: he was almost uniquely qualified for the task. Since his “escape” from Siberia he has made two pictures in Europe, one in Piedmont, where an old widow complained that some tattered old paintings had been stolen from the loft of her barn, the other in Provence, where an old country lawyer called in the police about some deed boxes that had been removed from his office. Whether either pictures or deed boxes were of any value we do not know: still less can we connect either disappearance with Heissman.’

  ‘This is an awful lot to take in all at once,’ Smithy complained.

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’

  ‘OK if I smoke?’

  ‘Five minutes. Then I’ve got to drag you back by the heels.’

  ‘By the shoulders, if it’s all the same to you.’ Smithy lit his cigarette and thought a bit. ‘So what you’ve got to find out is what Heissman is doing on Bear Island.’

  ‘That’s why we’re here.’

  ‘You’ve no idea?’

  ‘None. Money, it’s got to be money. This would be the last place on earth I’d associate with money and maybe that association would be wrong anyway. Maybe it’s only a means to the money. Johann, as I trust you’ve gathered by this time, is a very devious character indeed.’

  ‘Would there be a tie-up with the film company? With his old friend Gerran? Or would he just be making use of them?’

  ‘I’ve simply no idea.’

  ‘And Mary Stuart? The secret rendezvous girl? What could the possible connection be there?’

  ‘Same answer. We know very little of her. We know her real name—she’s never made any attempt to conceal that—age, birthplace and that she’s a Latvian—or comes from what used to be Latvia before the Russians took it over. We also know—and this information she hasn’t volunteered—that it was only her mother who was Latvian. Her father was German.’

  ‘Ah! In the Army perhaps? Intelligence? SS?’

  ‘That’s the obvious connection to seek. But we don’t know. Her immigration forms say that her parents are dead.’

  ‘So the department has been checking on her too?’

  ‘We’ve had a rundown on everyone here connected with Olympus Productions. We may as well have saved ourselves the trouble.’

  ‘So no facts. Any hunches, feelings?’

  ‘Hunches aren’t my stock in trade.’

  ‘I somehow didn’t feel they would be.’ Smithy ground out his cigarette. ‘Before we go, I’d like to mention two very uncomfortable thoughts that have just occurred to me. Number one. Johann Heissman is a very big-time very successful international operative? True?’

  ‘He’s an international criminal.’

  ‘A rose by any other name. The point is that those boys avoid violence wherever possible, isn’t that true?’

  ‘Perfectly true. Apart from anything else, it’s beneath them.’

  ‘And have you ever heard Heissman’s name being associated with violence?’

  ‘There’s no record of it.’

  ‘But there’s been a considerable amount of violence, one way or the other, in the past day or two. So if it isn’t Heissman, who’s behind the strong-arm behaviour?’

  ‘I don’t say it isn’t Heissman. The leopard can change his spots. He may be finding himself, for God knows what reason, in so highly unusual a situation that he has no option other than to have recourse to violence. He may, for all we know, have violent associates who don’t necessarily represent his attitude. Or it may be someone entirely unconnected with him.’

  ‘That’s what I like,’ Smithy said. ‘Simple straightforward answers. And there’s the second point that may have escaped your attention. If our friends are on to you the chances are that they’re on to me too. That eavesdropper on the bridge.’

  ‘The point had not escaped my attention. And not because of the bridge, although that may have given pause for thought, but because you deliberately skipped ship. It doesn’t matter what most of them think, one person or possibly more is going to be convinced that you did it on purpose. You’re a marked man, Smithy.’

  ‘So that when you drag me back there not everyone is going to feel genuine pangs of sorrow for poor old Smithy? Some may question the bona fides of my injuries?’

  ‘They won’t question. They’ll damn well know. But we have to act as if.’

  ‘Maybe you’ll watch my back too? Now and again?’

  ‘I have a lot on my mind, but I’ll try.’

  I had Smithy by the armpits, head lolling, heels and hands trailing in the snow, where two flashlights picked us up less than five yards from the door of the main cabin.

  ‘You’ve found him then?’ It was Goin, Harbottle by his side. ‘Good man!’ Even to my by now hypersensitive ear Goin’s reaction sounded genuine.

  ‘Yes. About quarter of a mile away.’ I breathed very quickly and deeply to give them some idea as to what it must have been like to drag a two-hundred-pound dead-weight over uneven snow-covered terrain for such a distance. ‘Found him in the bottom of a gully. Give me a hand, will you?’

  They gave me a hand. We hauled him inside, fetched a camp-cot and stretched him out on this.

  ‘Good God, good God, good God!’ Otto wrung his hands, the anguished expression on his face testimony to the fresh burden now added to the crippling weight of the cross he was already carrying. ‘What’s happened to the poor fellow?’ The only other occupant of the cabin, Judith Haynes, had made no move to leave the oil stove she was monopolizing, unconscious men being borne into her presence might have been so routine an affair as not even to merit the raising of an eyebrow.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said between gasps. ‘Heavy fall, I think, banged his head on a boulder. Looked like.’

  ‘Concussion?’

  ‘Maybe.’ I probed through his hair with my fingertips, found a spot on the scalp that felt no different from anywhere else, and said: ‘Ah!’

  They looked at me in anxious expectancy.

  ‘Brandy,’ I said to Otto. I fetched my stethoscope, went through the necessary charade, and managed to revive the coughing, moaning Smithy with a mouthful or two of brandy. For one not trained to the boards, he put up a remarkable performance, highlighted, at its end, with a muted series of oaths and an expression of mingled shock and chagrin when I gently informed him that the Morning Rose had sailed without him.

  During the course of the histrionics most of the other searchers wandered in in twos or threes. I watched them all carefully without seeming to, looking for an expression that was other than surprise or relief, but I might have spared myself the trouble: if there was one or more who was neither surprised nor relieved he had his emotions and facial muscles too well schooled to show anything. I would have expected nothing else.

  After about ten minutes our concern shifted from a now obviously recovering Smithy to the fact that two members of the searching party, Allen and Stryke
r, were still missing. After the events of that morning I felt the absence of those two, of all of us, to be rather coincidental; after fifteen minutes I felt it odd, and after twenty minutes I felt it downright ominous, a feeling that was clearly shared by nearly everyone there. Judith Haynes had abandoned her squatter’s rights by her oil stove and was walking up and down in short, nervous steps, squeezing her hands together. She stopped in front of me.

  ‘I don’t like it, I don’t like it!’ Her voice was strained and anxious, it could have been acting but I didn’t think so. ‘What’s keeping him? Why is he so long? He’s out there with that Allen fellow. Something’s wrong. I know it is, I know it.’ When I didn’t answer she said: ‘Well, aren’t you going out to look for him?’

  ‘Just as you went out to look for Mr Smith here,’ I said. It wasn’t very nice, but then I didn’t always feel so very kind to other people as Lonnie did. ‘Maybe your husband will come back when he feels like it.’

  She looked at me without speaking, her lips moving but not speaking, no real hostility in her face, and I realized for the second time that day that her rumoured hatred for her husband was, in fact, only a rumour and that, buried no matter how deep, there did exist some form of concern for him. She turned away and I reached for my torch.

  ‘Once more into the breach,’ I said. ‘Any takers?’

  Conrad, Jungbeck, Heyter and Hendriks accompanied me. Volunteers there were in plenty but I reasoned that not only would increased numbers get in one another’s way, but the chances of someone else becoming lost would be all the greater. Immediately after leaving the hut the five of us fanned out at intervals of not more than fifteen feet and moved off to the north.

  We found Allen inside the first thirty seconds: more accurately, he found us, for he saw our torches—he’d lost his own—and came stumbling towards us out of the snow and the darkness. ‘Stumbled’ was the operative word, he was weaving and swaying like one far gone in alcohol or exhaustion, and when he tried to speak his voice was thick and slurred. He was shivering like a man with the ague. It seemed not only pointless but cruel to question him in that condition so we hurried him inside.