Jack Higgins - East Of Desolation

by East Of Desolation [lit]

  I hung there against the rail for a while, retching spasmodically, nothing left to come and finally managed to get some kind of control. When I got to my feet and turned she was standing a yard or two away looking strangely helpless, her face white, frightened.

  "What did you put into the tomato juice--- vodka?" I said wearily.

  "I'm sorry." Her voice was almost inaudible. "I didn't mean any harm."

  "What was I supposed to do, make a pass at you on one vodka?" I found a handkerchief, wiped my mouth and tossed it over the rail. "Something I omitted from the story of my life was the fact that I was once an alcoholic. That was as good a reason for my wife leaving me as all the romantic ones I gave you at Argamask. After I crawled back out of nowhere for the third time, she'd had enough. Her parting gift was to book me into a clinic that specialises in people like me. They did a very thorough job of aversion therapy with the aid of a couple of drugs called apomorphine and antabus. Just a taste of any kind of liquor these days and my guts turn inside out."

  "I'm sorry," she said. "You'll never know how much."

  "That's all right, Myra," I said. "You weren't to know. Part of that fantasy life of mine that we were discussing earlier today and I'm stuck with it. I suppose we all have things we don't care to discuss in mixed company."

  She had gone very still from the moment that I had used her real name and suddenly I felt bitterly angry and sorry for her, both at the same time.

  I grabbed her by the arms and shook her furiously.

  "You stupid little bitch--- just what are you trying to prove?"

  She struck out at me and wrenched herself free with a strength that was surprising. I staggered back, almost missing my footing and she turned and disappeared down the companionway. There was a murmur of voices and a moment later, Desforge appeared.

  "What in the hell is going on here?"

  "A slight disagreement, that's all."

  "Did you make a pass at her or something?"

  I laughed. "You'll never know just how funny that is.

  "But she was crying, Joe--- I've never seen her do that before."

  I frowned, trying to imagine her in tears and failed completely. Perhaps that other girl, the one in the graveyard at Argamask, but not Ilana Eytan.

  "Look, Jack, anything she got she asked for."

  He raised a hand quickly. "Okay, boy, I believe you. All the same, I think I'd better go and see what's wrong."

  He went down the companionway and the door of the wheelhouse opened and Sørensen came out, his face impassive although I realised that he must have seen everything.

  "I've got that met report for you from Søndre, Joe. Things look pretty steady for the next couple of hours, but there's a front moving in from the ice-cap. Heavy rain and squalls. You might just about beat it if you leave now."

  It gave me a perfect out and I seized it with both hands. "I'd better get moving. No need to bother Desforge at the moment, I think he's got his hands full. Tell him I'll see him next week. If he wants me to come for the girl before then you can always radio in."

  He nodded gravely. "I'll get the whaleboat ready for you."

  I went below for my things and when I returned, one of the crew was waiting to take me ashore. He dropped me on the beach and started back to the Stella straight away and I got ready to leave.

  I did the usual routine check then started the engine and ran the Otter down into the sea. I took up the wheels and taxied down-wind slowly, leaning out of the wide window and checking the water for ice floes before making my run.

  When I was about a hundred yards north of the Stella, I started to turn into the wind and found the whaleboat bearing down on me, Desforge standing up in the prow waving furiously. I cut the engine and opened the side door as the whaleboat pulled in alongside. Desforge tossed me a canvas holdall, stepped on the nearest float and hauled himself up into the cabin.

  "I've got a sudden hankering to see some city life for a change--- any objections?"

  "You're the boss," I said. "But we'll have to get moving. I'm trying to beat some dirty weather into Frederiksborg."

  The whaleboat was already turning away and I pressed down the starter switch and started to make the run. Twenty seconds later we drifted into the air and climbed steeply, banking over the Stella just as Ilana Eytan appeared from the companionway and stood looking up at us.

  "What about her?" I said.

  Desforge shrugged. "She'll be okay. I told Sørensen to make tracks for Frederiksborg tonight. They'll be there by tomorrow afternoon."

  He produced the inevitable hip flask, took a swallow and started to laugh. "I don't know what you did back there, but she was certainly in one hell of a temper when I went to her cabin."

  "I'd have thought you'd have wanted to stay and console her," I said sourly.

  "What that baby needs is time to cool off. I'm getting too old to have to fight for it. I'll wait till she's in the mood."

  "What's she doing here anyway?" I said. "Don't tell me she just came to deliver that letter. There is such a thing as a postal service, even in Greenland."

  "Oh, that's an easy one. She's hoping for the female lead in the picture I'm making." He grinned. "That's why I'm so sure she'll come round--- they always do. She'll be sweetness and light when the Stella arrives tomorrow."

  He leaned back in his seat, tilting the peak of his hunting cap down over his eyes and I sat there, hands steady on the wheel, thinking about Ilana Eytan, trying to imagine her selling herself, just for a role in a picture. But why not? After all, people sell themselves into one kind of slavery or another every day of the week.

  Rain scattered across the windscreen in a fine spray and I frowned, all other thoughts driven from my mind at the prospect of that front moving in faster than they had realised at Søndre. I pulled back the stick and started to climb.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Rain lashed against the glass in the hotel door, driven by a sudden flurry of wind and I turned and walked to the desk where Desforge was booking in.

  "I'd say we just made it in time."

  He grinned. "They can keep the great outdoors on a night like this. You'll have dinner with me?"

  "I've one or two things to take care of first. I'll see you in about half an hour."

  He went upstairs and I phone through to the air-strip to see if they had any messages for me. There was one--- an extra charter job for the following day. Nothing very exciting--- a short hop of forty miles down the coast to Intusk with machine parts for the canning factory. I checked the flight time, made a note of it and turned away.

  "Oh, Mr. Martin." The receptionist came out of her office quickly. "You've forgotten your mail."

  She held out a couple of letters. One was a bill, I could tell as much without opening it. The other was postmarked London and carried the name and address of a firm of solicitors in Lincoln's Inn. There was a slight, hollow feeling at the pit of my stomach, but I slipped the letter into my pocket and managed a big smile.

  "Thanks very much."

  "And there was a message," the girl said. "A Mr. Vogel would like you to contact him."

  "Vogel?" I frowned. "Never heard of him."

  "I believe he booked into the hotel early this afternoon," she said. "I didn't see him myself."

  I nodded. "All right--- I'll attend to it."

  Probably a wealthy tourist looking for some good hunting and prepared to pay through the nose for it. Not that I had any objections to that, but for the moment I had other things on my mind.

  I think I must have sat on the edge of my bed staring down at that envelope for at least five minutes before I finally decided to open it. The letter inside was beautifully typed, short and very much to the point. It informed me that my wife had been awarded a decree nisi in the Divorce Court on the grounds of desertion, that she had decided to waive her right to any maintenance and that a sum of two thousand, three hundred and seventy-five pounds, my share of the proceeds of the sale of a flat in the Cromwell Roa
d, jointly owned, had been credited to my account in the City Branch of the Great Western Bank.

  It was all very sad, but then the end of something always is and I sat there for a while remembering things as they had been once upon a time when the going was good and each day carried a new promise.

  But even in that I was being consciously dishonest, forgetting quite deliberately the other side of the coin which had also been present from the beginning. Still, it was over now, the cord finally cut, and there was no bottle to reach for this time, could never be again. Let that be an end to it.

  I didn't bother to change and simply took off my parka and flying boots and pulled on a pair of reindeer hide slippers. As I went out, Arnie Fassberg came up the stairs and turned along the corridor towards me, a bottle of schnapps in one hand.

  "And what might you be up to?" I asked.

  He grinned. "Gudrid's giving me a little supper party in her room."

  "What's wrong with your place?"

  "She's on duty till one a.m. tonight. I couldn't wait that long."

  He'd had a drink or two already, so much was obvious and swung me round like a schoolboy. "It's a great life, Joe. A wonderful life as long as you learn the big, big secret. Take whatever's going because you can never count on tomorrow."

  At that moment the door behind him opened and a woman emerged. Arnie cannoned into her and her handbag went flying. She was strikingly beautiful and could have been anything between thirty and thirty-five, with the sad, haunted eyes of a Renaissance Madonna. He stood there gaping at her, that well-known expression on his face and she smiled suddenly, the sort of smile that comes easily to an attractive woman when she realises that the man before her is putty in her hands.

  "I'm sorry," he said.

  He dropped to one knee, reaching for the handbag at the same moment that she did and she almost lost her balance so that I had to catch her.

  "Thank you," she said, glancing over her shoulder and then took her handbag gently from Arnie's hands as he stood there staring at her like a lovesick schoolboy. "Mine I think."

  As she walked along the corridor, her shoulders were shaking with laughter.

  "What a woman, Joe," Arnie breathed. "What a woman."

  "Aren't they all, Arnie?" I said and left him standing there and went downstairs.

  Desforge was already seated at a table in the far corner of the dining room and I moved towards him. The place was pretty full, mostly people I either knew personally or by sight, but there were three who were new to me--- the woman from the corridor and two men who were seated together at the table in the bow window that Ilana Eytan had used that morning. I glanced at her briefly on my way across the room and sat on the other side of the table from Desforge.

  He smiled. "You noticed her too?"

  "Is there a man in the room who hasn't? Who is she?"

  "I haven't had a chance to find out yet."

  "You will, Jack, you will."

  .....

  Desforge had a bottle of hock to himself and I shared a fresh salmon with him. We had reached the coffee stage when someone put a hand on my shoulder. I looked up and found one of the two men who had been sitting at the table by the window with the woman. I glanced across and saw that his companions had disappeared.

  "Mr. Martin--- Mr. Joe Martin?"

  He was of medium height and thickset and wore a two-piece suit in thornproof tweed that had been cut by someone who knew what he was doing. His English was excellent with just the trace of an accent that hinted at something Germanic in his background although, as I learned later, he was Austrian.

  I disliked him on sight and not for any particular reason. It was simply that I didn't care for solid middle-European-looking gentlemen with bald heads and gold-capped teeth and large diamond rings on the little finger of the left hand.

  I didn't bother getting up. "I'm Joe Martin--- what can I do for you?"

  "Vogel--- Hans Vogel. My card."

  It was an elegant strip of white pasteboard which announced that he was managing director of the London and Universal Insurance Company Ltd., with offices just off Berkeley Square.

  "What's it all about, Mr. Vogel?" I said. "This is Mr. Jack Desforge, by the way, a friend of mine."

  "There is no need to introduce Mr. Desforge." He reached across to shake hands. "A very great honour, sir."

  Desforge looked suitably modest and graciously waved him into one of the vacant chairs. Vogel sat down, took out his wallet and produced a scrap of paper which he passed across to me.

  "Perhaps you would be good enough to read this."

  It was a clipping from The Times only four days old and described an interview with the leaders of an Oxford University expedition which had just arrived back in London after successfully crossing the Greenland ice-cap from west to east. It seemed they had come across the wreckage of an aeroplane, a Heron, with a Canadian registration and a couple of bodies inside or what was left of them. Identification had been difficult, but according to the personal belongings and documentary evidence recovered, one was an Englishman called Gaunt and the other a man named Harrison. The expedition had buried the remains and continued on its way.

  Strange, but for the briefest of moments I seemed to see it lying there in the snowfield, the scarlet and blue of the crumpled fuselage vivid in the bright white light of the ice-cap. It was as if it had been biding its time, waiting for the moment when things were going well for me for the first time in years before drifting up from the darkness like some pale ghost to taunt me. But why hadn't it burned? With the amount of fuel left in the tanks it should have gone up like a torch.

  I don't know how I managed to keep my hands still, but I did and read the cutting through again slowly to give myself time.

  "What do you think, Mr. Martin?" Vogel's voice cut through to me.

  I passed the cutting to Desforge. "Interesting, but hardly surprising. Earlier this year a similar expedition four hundred miles further north came across an American transport plane that disappeared on a flight from Thule three years ago."

  "That seems incredible. Was no search mounted?"

  "As a matter of fact, a highly intensive one, but a million and a quarter square miles of ice and snow is a hell of an area to cover." I was getting into my stride now, my voice strong and steady as I kept up the flow. "It happens all the time. It's the uncertain weather conditions on the ice-cap that do it. One moment a clear blue sky, fifteen minutes later the bottom's dropped out of the glass and you're in the centre of a raging storm and in a light aircraft that can be disastrous. What's your interest in this, anyway?"

  "A large one, I'm afraid. My firm insured this plane, Mr. Martin. It disappeared more than a year ago on a flight from Grant Bay in Labrador."

  "What was the destination?" Desforge asked.

  "Ireland."

  I raised my eyebrows. "Then they were more than a little off course. Who was flying?"

  "Frankly, we don't know. The plane was owned by Marvin Gaunt. Who this man Harrison was I haven't the slightest idea, but that's what it said on the name tab inside his jacket. There was also a wallet containing seven hundred dollars and an American Diner's Club card in the name of Harvey Stein. As a matter of interest, when we checked that through their London office it turned out to be a forgery."

  "Curiouser and curiouser," I said. "I just like Alice."

  "The most puzzling thing is yet to come, Mr. Martin. The pilot for the flight as logged out of Grant Bay was a Canadian called Jack Kelso and the airport records definitely indicate that the plane only carried Gaunt and the pilot."

  "Sounds like a good storyline," Desforge put in.

  Vogel said: "But one with little humour in it for my company. After the statutory period had elapsed we paid Gaunt's next to kin--- his mother, as it happened--- the sum of twenty-five thousand pounds called for under the terms of the insurance policy."

  Desforge whistled softly. "I'd say that entitles you to some sort of explanation."

 
Vogel smiled thinly. "Exactly how we feel, Mr. Desforge. The whole affair is obviously far too mysterious. As I see it there are three questions which must be answered. Who was this man Harrison? What happened to Kelso? Why was the plane so far off course?"

  Desforge grinned and emptied the last of the hock into his glass. "I said it was a good storyline."

  Vogel ignored him. "As soon as I read the account of the find I contacted the Danish Embassy in London. They told me that eventually their civil aviation people would be inspecting the wreck, but that for various reasons there would probably be a considerable delay, perhaps even until next summer. Under the circumstances they obtained permission from the Ministry in Copenhagen for me to take a preliminary inspection myself."