The Golden Keel / The Vivero Letter
Page 58
He stared at me as I sat up. ‘Dead!’
I nodded wearily. ‘Fallon’s still alive—I think. He’s over there.’ I grabbed his arm. ‘Jesus! Katherine’s down in the cenote—in a cave. I’ve got to get her out.’
He looked at me as though I had gone mad. ‘In a cave! In the cenote!’ he echoed stupidly.
I shook his arm. ‘Yes, you damn fool! She’ll die if I don’t get her out. We were hiding from Gatt.’
Pat saw I was serious and was galvanized as though someone had given him an electric shock. ‘You can’t go down there—not in your condition,’ he said. ‘Some of these boys are trained swimmers—I’ll go see the teniente.’
I watched him walk across to a group of the soldiers, then I got to my feet, feeling every pain of it, and limped to the cenote and stood on the edge, looking down at the dark water. Pat came back at a run. ‘The teniente has four scubatrained swimmers and some oxygen bottles. If you’ll tell them where the girl is, they can take oxygen down to her.’ He looked down at the cenote. ‘Good Christ!’ he said involuntarily. ‘Who’s that?’
He was looking down at the body of Gatt which lay sprawled on the wooden dock. His mouth was open in a ghastly grin—but it wasn’t really his mouth. ‘It’s Gatt,’ I said unemotionally. ‘I told you I’d kill him.’
I was drained of all emotion; there was no power in me to laugh or to cry, to feel sorrow or joy. I looked down at the body without feeling anything at all, but Harris looked sick. I turned away and looked towards the helicopters. ‘Where are those bloody divers?’
They came at last and I explained haltingly what they were to do, and Pat interpreted. One of the men put on my harness and they jury-rigged an oxygen bottle and he went down. I hoped he wouldn’t frighten Katie when he popped up in the cave. But her Spanish was good and I thought it would be all right.
I watched them carry Fallon away on a stretcher towards one of the choppers while a medico bandaged me up. Harris said in wonder, ‘They’re still finding bodies—there must have been a massacre.’
‘Something like that,’ I said indifferently.
I wouldn’t move from that spot at the edge of the cenote until Katie was brought up, and I had to wait quite a while until they flew in proper diving gear from Campeche. After that it was easy and she came up from the cave under her own steam and I was proud of her.
We walked to the helicopter together with me leaning on her because suddenly all the strength had left me. I didn’t know what was going to happen to us in the future—I didn’t know if such an experience as we had undergone was such a perfect beginning to a marriage, but I was willing to try if she was.
I don’t remember much about anything after that, not until I woke up in a hospital in Mexico City with Katie sitting by the bedside. That was many days afterwards. But I vaguely remember that the sun was just coming up as the chopper took off and I was clutching that little gold lady which Vivero had made. Christ was not to be seen, but I remember the dark shape of the Temple of Yum Chac looming above the water and drifting away forever beneath the heavily beating rotors.
I would like to thank Captain T. A. Hampton of the British Underwater Centre, Dartmouth, for detailed information about diving techniques.
My thanks also go to Gerard L’E. Turner, Assistant Curator of the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, for information on certain bronze mirrors, Amida’s Mirror in particular.
Theirs the credit for accuracy; mine the fault for inaccuracy.
POSTSCRIPT
To write about one’s own novels is risky, indeed. On those few occasions when my editor has asked me to write a blurb my mind has gone blank and I have become tongue—or, rather, typewriter-tied. Of course, then I was to write about a current book which was much too close for objectivity; here I feel detached and distanced enough in time for it to work—perhaps.
The first novel here, THE GOLDEN KEEL, was the first to be written and, as is often usual with the first effort of the apprentice hand, contains many autobiographical elements. In the early 1950s I worked in an office in Durban, South Africa, and a colleague told me a curious yarn. During the war he had been captured at Tobruk and transferred to a prison camp in Italy from which he had escaped to join the partisans fighting behind the German lines. During that period he, another South African, and some Italians had ambushed a convoy of German trucks and found it to contain a quantity of gold and other goodies which they had promptly buried.
Now came the question: would I go with him to Italy and help him recover the loot? Not averse to a bit of adventure I agreed, but nothing came of it because there was a report in the Natal Mercury to the effect that 16 Italians had just been jailed for alleged complicity in the disappearance of Mussolini’s treasure. My friend called off the project.
But the incident remained in my mind and ten years later I used the incident to write THE GOLDEN KEEL which turned into a sea story and was written in Johannesburg, about as far from the sea as one can get in Southern Africa. One character, Metcalfe, more of an anti-hero than a villain, was a composite of two of the biggest con men and scallywags ever to hit South Africa. I had some strange friends in those days.
Drunk with the success of my first book, I was resting on my laurels when it was gently brought to my attention that my publisher expected another book, and I had not an idea in my head. KEEL had been written in the first person but I wanted to tackle a novel in the third person, something I had never tried. So, one morning I slipped a sheet of paper into the typewriter and began to write in the third person, very much as a pianist might practise five-finger exercises. At the end of the day I was interested enough to continue and by the end of the third day I realized I had a novel on my hands. I stopped for necessary research and completed the book with my study being taken apart around me in preparation for a journey to England. I carried that one-and-only copy of the first draft to Britain, doing revisions on the way, and it became HIGH CITADEL.
THE VIVERO LETTER was my fifth book and I was now much more professional and confident though still not wellbreeched enough to actually go to the places I was writing about. However, I did start off the book in Totnes, Devon, where I then lived. When I wanted to enquire about police procedure I walked into the friendly neighbourhood police station, approached the desk sergeant, and said baldly, ‘I want to talk about a murder’
He went very still, then leaned forward and said gently, ‘Yes, sir; what have you to tell me?’ It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. It turned out that there had not been a murder in Totnes within living memory and he would have to look up the details in the books.
In writing this novel I studied the geography of Yucatan, Mayan architecture, deep diving techniques, the Spanish Armada and a few other things. Two years after the book was written I was pleased to see photographs which showed that the archeological techniques I had devised in my own head were in actual use. I was even more pleased the other day when I gave a copy of VIVERO to one of the experienced divers from HMS Inslow, the naval diving tender, and asked him to point out any flaws in the diving techniques described. He could not find any, so I must have done something right.
Later, RUNNING BLIND was the first book I researched on the ground and the improvement in authenticity of background was immediately apparent. All subsequent books have been so researched leaving my seat in the library to others. It was my first espionage book and was written just after the death of Ian Fleming whose James Bondery had hitherto made the writing of a serious spy story impossible. Set in Iceland it was my attempt to illustrate the utter absurdity of the international espionage scene and I think that, in part, I succeeded, although it is most difficult to satirize the antics of the CIA—one cannot satirize the already ludicrous. Again I had apparently done something right—the novel was adapted as a three-part serial by the BBC.
While the task of writing novels is as lonely a job as being a lighthouse keeper there are associated compensations, the biggest of which is the oppo
rtunity to travel once one is away from the typewriter keyboard. This is a real bonus. When I wrote RUNNING BLIND I was bitten by the travel bug; I have visited Greenland, crossed the Sahara, been to the South Pole by courtesy of the US State Department and the US Navy, and travelled in every continent except Asia.
In these countries there is the opportunity to find interesting places and to meet interesting people. On a recent visit to North America I did a night patrol in a police car in Pasadena, drifted over Los Angeles at an incredibly low altitude in one of the Sheriff’s helicopters, rode an airboat through the Florida Everglades, went over the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California from which the Voyager/Jupiter and Viking/Mars unmanned space shots are controlled, visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and played with computers in Toronto. It is from these experiences that I weave my tales.
Referring to computers I suppose I must mention my own which has attracted a certain amount of journalistic attention. These days one can hardly pick up a newspaper without finding an article about word processing and text editing controlled by machines using the ubiquitous silicon chip. Some years ago, when I installed my computer, I suppose I was ahead of my time, although not ahead of Len Deighton.
The computer is a data manipulating machine. I can write the first draft of a novel into the computer and then make changes selectively without having to type out the whole thing again. I can alter or switch about words, sentences, paragraphs or whole chapters. I can even change the names of characters if the names I have chosen are unsatisfactory and the machine will run through the whole book and make the alterations automatically. Then, when everything is to my satisfaction, I instruct the computer to print the whole book which it does largely unsupervised.
The computer also looks after the business side of my career, so much so that my publisher now complains that I know more about his business than he does. And on a rainy Saturday afternoon I can play an eighteen hole round of golf on the computer or land a spaceship on Venus.
But when all is said and done the computer remains merely an electronic quill pen, taking the donkey work out of writing and leaving more time for creativity. It is hard to convince journalists that this is so and that the machine does not actually plot and write my books for me.
I hope you have as much fun reading my books as I had in the writing.
DESMOND BAGLEY
1979
About the Author
THE GOLDEN KEEL
THE VIVERO LETTER
Desmond Bagley was born in 1923 in Kendal, Westmorland, and brought up in Blackpool. He began his working life, aged 14, in the printing industry and then did a variety of jobs until going into an aircraft factory at the start of the Second World War.
When the war ended, he decided to travel to southern Africa, going overland through Europe and the Sahara. He worked en route, reaching South Africa in 1951.
Bagley became a freelance journalist in Johannesburg and wrote his first published novel, The Golden Keel, in 1962. In 1964 he returned to England and lived in Totnes, Devon, for twelve years. He and his wife Joan then moved to Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Here he found the ideal place for combining his writing and his other interests, which included computers, mathematics, military history, and entertaining friends from all over the world.
Desmond Bagley died in April 1983, having become one of the world’s top-selling authors, with his 16 books—two of them published after his death—translated into more than 30 languages.
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‘I’ve read all Bagley’s books and he’s marvellous, the best.’
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By the Same Author
Flyaway AND Windfall
High Citadel AND Landslide
Running Blind AND The Freedom Trap
The Snow Tiger AND Night of Error
The Spoilers AND Juggernaut
The Tightrope Men AND The Enemy
Wyatt’s Hurricane AND Bahama Crisis
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This omnibus edition 2009
FIRST EDITION
The Golden Keel first published in Great Britain by Collins 1963
The Vivero Letter first published in Great Britain by Collins 1968
Postscript first published in Great Britain by Collins 1979
Desmond Bagley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of these works
Copyright © Brockhurst Publications 1963, 1968, 1979
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