‘Uplavnik,’ he murmured. ‘Tomorrow, we set off for Uplavnik. But first, you said, a good night’s sleep.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘A traveller’s moon.’
‘A traveller’s moon,’ he echoed.
He was right, of course. Travel in the Arctic, in winter, was regulated not by daylight but my moonlight. And tonight we had that moon – and we had a clear sky, a dying wind and no snow at all. I turned to Joss.
‘You’ll be all right alone?’
‘I have no worries,’ he said soberly. ‘Look, sir, can’t I come too?’
‘Stay here and stay healthy,’ I advised. ‘Thanks, Joss, but you know someone must remain behind. I’ll call you up on the usual schedules. You might get a kick out of the RCA yet. Miracles still happen.’
‘Not this time, they won’t.’ He turned away abruptly and went below. Jackstraw moved across to the tractor – we didn’t say another word to each other, we didn’t have to – and I followed Joss down to the cabin. No one had moved an inch, as far as I could see, but they all looked up as I came in.
‘All right,’ I said abruptly. ‘Get your stuff together and pile on every last stitch of clothes you can. We’re leaving now.’
We left, in fact, just over an hour later. The Citroën had been lying unused for the better part of a fortnight, and we had the devil’s own job getting it to start. But start it eventually did, with a roar and a thunderous clatter that had everybody jumping in startlement then looking at it in dismay. I knew the thoughts in their minds, that they’d have to live with this cacophony, this bedlam of sound assaulting their shrinking eardrums for no one knew how many days to come, but I wasted little sympathy on them: at least they would have the protection of the wooden body while I would be sitting practically on top of the engine.
We said our goodbyes to Joss. He shook hands with Jackstraw and myself, with Margaret Ross and Marie LeGarde, and, pointedly, with no one else. We left him standing there by the hatchway, a lonely figure outlined against the pale light of the steadily climbing moon, and headed west by south for Uplavnik, three hundred long and frozen miles away. I wondered, as I knew Joss was wondering, whether we would ever see each other again.
I wondered, too, what right I had in exposing Jackstraw to the dangers which must lie ahead. He was sitting beside me as I drove, but as I looked at him covertly in the moonlight, at that strong lean face that, but for the rather broad cheekbones, might have been that of any Scandinavian sea-rover, I knew I was wasting my time wondering. Although nominally under my command, he had only been lent me, as other Greenlanders had been lent as an act of courtesy by the Danish Government to several IGY stations, as a scientific officer – he had a geology degree from the University of Copenhagen and had forgotten more about the ice-cap than I would ever know – and in times of emergency, especially where his own pride, and he had plenty of that, was concerned would be extremely liable to do what he thought best, regardless of what I thought or said. I knew he wouldn’t have remained behind even if I had ordered him to – and, if I were honest with myself, I was only too damned glad to have him along, as a friend, as an ally, and as insurance policy against the disaster that can so easily overtake the careless or the inexperienced on the ice-cap. But even so, even though I quieted my conscience as best I could, it was difficult to push from my mind the picture of his dark vivacious young schoolteacher wife and little daughter, the red and white brick house in which I’d lived for two weeks as a guest in the summer. What Jackstraw thought was impossible to say. He sat immobile as if carved from stone, only his eyes alive, constantly moving, constantly shifting, as he probed for sudden dips in the ice-cap, for differences in the structure of the snow, for anything that might spell trouble. It was purely automatic, purely instinctive: the crevasse country lay, as yet, two hundred and fifty miles away, where the ice-cap started to slope sharply to the sea, and Jackstraw himself maintained that Balto, his big lead dog, had a surer instinct for crevasses than any human alive.
The temperature was dropping down into the minus thirties, but it was a perfect night for arctic travel – a moonlit, windless night under a still and starry sky. Visibility was phenomenal, the ice-cap was smooth and flat, the engine ran sweetly with never a falter: had it not been for the cold, the incessant roar and body-numbing vibration of the big engine, I think I would almost have enjoyed it.
With the wide tractor body blocking off the view behind, it was impossible for me to see what was happening there: but every ten minutes or so Jackstraw would jump off and stand by the side of the trail. Behind the tractor body and its shivering occupants – because of the tractor fuel tank beneath and the spare fuel drums astern the stove was never lit while we were in motion -came the sledge with all our stores: 120 gallons of fuel, provisions, bedding and sleeping-bags, tents, ropes, axes, shovels, trail flags, cooking utensils, seal meat for the dogs, four wooden bridging battens, canvas sheets, blow-lamps, lantern, medical equipment, radio-sonde balloons, magnesium flares and a score of minor items. I had hesitated over including the radio sondes, especially the relatively heavy hydrogen cylinders for these: but they were ready crated with tents, ropes, axes and shovels and – this was the deciding factor – had saved lives on at least one occasion when a trail party, lost on the plateau with defective compasses, had saved themselves by releasing several balloons in the brief daylight hours thereby enabling base to see them and send accurate radio bearings.
Behind the heavy transport sled was towed the empty dog-sled, with the dogs on loose traces running astern of it, all except Balto who always ran free, coursing tirelessly backwards and forwards all night long, one moment far ahead of us, the next ranging out to one side, the next dropping astern, like some destroyer circling a straggling convoy by night. When the last of the dogs had passed by him, Jackstraw would run forward to overtake the tractor and jump in alongside me once more. He was as tireless, as immune to fatigue, as Balto himself.
The first twenty miles were easy. On the way up from the coast, over four months previously we had planted big marker flags at intervals of half a mile. On a night such as this, with the moonlight flooding the ice-cap, these trail flags, a bright luminous orange in colour and mounted on aluminium poles stuck in snow beacons, were visible at a great distance, with never less than two and sometimes three in sight at the same time, the long glistening frost feathers stretching out from the poles sometimes twice the length of the flags themselves. We counted twenty-eight of these flags altogether – about a dozen were missing – then, after a sudden dip in the land, completely lost them: whether they had blown away or just drifted under it was impossible to say.
‘Well, there it is, Jackstraw,’ I said resignedly. ‘This is where one of us starts getting cold. Really cold.’
‘We’ve been cold before, Dr Mason. Me first.’ He slid the magnetic compass off its brackets, started to unreel a cable from a spool under the dashboard, then jumped out, still unwinding the cable, while I followed to help. Despite the fact that the magnetic north pole is nowhere near the north pole – at that time it was almost a thousand miles south of it and lay more to the west than north of us – a magnetic compass, when proper variation allowances are made, is still useful in high latitudes: but because of the counter-acting magnetic effects of a large mass of metal, it was quite useless when mounted on the tractor itself. Our plan, therefore, was that someone should lie with the compass on the dog-sled, fifty feet behind the tractor, and, by means of a switch which operated red and green lights in the tractor dashboard, guide the driver to left or right. It wasn’t our original idea, it wasn’t even a recent idea: it had been used in the Antarctic a quarter century previously but, as far as I knew, had not been improved upon yet.
With Jackstraw established on the sledge, I walked back to the tractor and pushed aside the canvas screen at the back of the wooden body. What with the faces of the passengers, drawn and pinched and weirdly pale in the light of the tiny overhead bulb, the constant shivering, the
chattering of teeth and the frozen breath drifting upwards to condense and freeze on the wooden roof, it was a picture of utter and abject misery: but I was in no mood to be moved at that moment.
‘Sorry for the delay’ I said. ‘Just off again now. But I want one of you for a lookout.’
Both Zagero and Corazzini volunteered almost in the same breath, but I shook my head.
‘You two get what sleep or rest you can – I’m liable to need you very much later on. Perhaps you, Mr Mahler?’
He looked pale and ill, but he nodded silently, and Zagero said in a quiet voice: ‘Corazzini and myself too high up on the list of suspects, huh?’
‘I wouldn’t put either of you at the very foot,’ I said shortly. I waited till Mahler had climbed down then dropped the canvas and walked round to the driver’s seat.
Theodore Mahler, strangely enough, proved only too anxious to talk – and keep on talking. It was so completely out of keeping with the idea I had formed of his character that I was more than surprised. Loneliness, perhaps, I thought, or trying to forget the situation, or trying to divert my thoughts and suspicions: how wrong I was on all three counts I wasn’t to find out until later.
‘Well, Mr Mahler, it looks as if the itinerary of your European trip is going to be upset a bit.’ I had almost to shout to make my words heard above the roar of the tractor.
‘Not Europe, Dr Mason.’ I could hear the machine-gun-like chatter of his teeth. ‘Israel.’
‘You live there?’
‘Never been there in my life.’ There was a pause, and when his voice came again it was all but drowned in the sound of the engine. I thought I caught the words ‘My home’.
‘You – you’re going to start a new life there, Mr Mahler?’
‘I’m sixty-nine – tomorrow,’ he answered obliquely. ‘A new life? Let’s say, rather, that I’m going to end an old one.’
‘And you’re going to live there, make your home there – after sixty-nine years in another country?’
‘Millions of us Jews have done just that, in the past ten years. Not that I’ve lived in America all my life …’
And then he told me his story – a story of refugee oppression that I’d heard a hundred times, with a hundred variations. He was a Russian Jew, he said, one of the millions of the largest Jewry in the world that had been ‘frozen’ for over a century in the notorious Pale of Settlement, and in 1905 had been forced to flee with his father -leaving mother and two brothers behind – to escape the ruthless massacres carried out by the ‘Black Hundreds’ at the behest of the last of the Romanoff Tzars who was seeking scapegoats for his crushing defeat by the Japanese. His mother, he learned later, had just disappeared, while his two brothers had survived only to die in agony long years afterwards, one in the rising in the Bialystok ghetto, the other in the Treblinka gas chambers. He himself had found work in the clothing industry in New York, studied in night school, worked for an oil company, married and with the death of his wife that spring had set about fulfilling the agelong ambition of his race, the return to their holy land.
It was a touching story, pathetic and deeply moving, and I didn’t believe a word of it.
Every twenty minutes I changed position with Jackstraw and so the long hours of the night dragged by as the cold deepened and the stars and the moon wheeled across the black vault of the sky. And then came moonset, the blackness of the arctic night rushed across the ice-cap, I slowed the Citroën gratefully to a stop and the silence, breathless and hushed and infinitely sweet, came flooding in to take the place of the nightlong clamour of the deafening roar of the big engine, the metallic clanking of the treads.
Over our black sugarless coffee and biscuits I told our passengers that this would be only a brief three-hour halt, that they should try to get what sleep they could: most of them, myself included, were already red-eyed and drooping from exhaustion. Three hours, no more: not often did Greenland offer travel weather like this, and the chance was not to be missed.
Beside me, as I drank my coffee, was Theodore Mahler. He was for some reason restless, ill at ease, jerky and nervous, and his eyes and attention both wandered so much that it was easy enough for me to find out what I wanted.
When my cup was empty, I whispered in Mahler’s ear that there was a little matter that I wished to discuss privately with him. He looked at me in surprise, hesitated, then nodded in agreement, rising to follow me as I moved out into the darkness.
A hundred yards away I stopped, switched on my torch so that he blinked in its beam, and slid my Beretta forward until its barrel was clearly visible, sharply outlined in the harsh white glare. I heard the catch of the breath, saw the eyes widening in fear and horror.
‘Save the act for the judge, Mahler,’ I said bleakly. ‘I’m not interested in it. AU I want is your gun.’
SEVEN
Tuesday 7 a.m.–Tuesday midnight
‘My gun?’ Mahler had slowly lifted his arms until his hands were at shoulder level, and his voice wasn’t quite steady. ‘I – I don’t understand, Dr Mason. I have no gun.’
‘Naturally.’ I jerked the barrel of the Beretta to lend emphasis to my words. “Turn round.’
‘What are you going to do? You’re making a—’
‘Turn round!’
He turned. I took a couple of steps forward, ground the muzzle of the automatic none too gently into the small of his back, and started to search him with my free hand.
He was wearing two overcoats, a jacket, several sweaters and scarves, two pairs of trousers and layer upon layer of underclothes: searching him was easier said than done. It took me a full minute to convince myself that he wasn’t carrying a weapon of any kind. I stepped back, and he came slowly round to face me.
‘I hope you’re quite satisfied now, Dr Mason?’
‘We’ll see what we find in your case. As for the rest, I’m satisfied enough. I have all the proof I want.’ I dipped the torch beam to illuminate the handful of sugar I’d taken from the pocket of his inner overcoat – there had been well over a pound in either pocket. ‘You might care to explain where you got this from, Mr Mahler?’
‘I don’t have to tell you that, do I?’ His voice was very low. ‘I stole it, Dr Mason.’
‘You did indeed. A remarkably small-time activity for a person who operates on the scale you do. It was just your bad luck, Mahler, that I happened to be looking directly at you when the theft of the sugar was mentioned back in the cabin. It was just your bad luck that when we had our coffee just now it was dark enough for me to have a swig from your cup without your knowledge: it was so stiff with sugar that I couldn’t even drink the damn’ stuff. Curious, isn’t it, Mahler, that such a tiny thing as giving way to a momentary impulse of greed should ruin everything? But I believe it’s always the way: the big slip-up never brings the big criminal to book, because he never makes any. If you’d left that sugar alone when you were smashing up the valves, I’d never have known. Incidentally, what did you do with the rest of the sugar? In your grip? Or just thrown away?’
‘You’re making a very grave mistake, Dr Mason.’ Mahler’s voice was steady now, and if it held any trace of worry or guilt I couldn’t detect it. But I was now far beyond the naïve stage of expecting to detect anything of the sort. ‘I didn’t touch those valves. And, apart from the few handfuls I took, the sugar bag was quite intact when I left it.’
‘Of course, of course.’ I waved the Beretta. ‘Back to the tractor, my friend, and let’s have a look at this case of yours.’
‘No!’
‘Don’t be crazy,’ I snapped. ‘I have a gun, Mahler. Believe me, I won’t hesitate to use it.’
‘I believe you. I think you would be quite ruthless if the need arose. Oh, I don’t doubt you’re tough, Doctor, as well as being headstrong, impulsive and not very subtle, but because I rather respect your efficient and selfless handling of an awkward and ugly situation for which you were in no way responsible, I don’t want to see you make a complete fool of yourse
lf in public’ He lifted his right hand towards the lapel of his coat. ‘Let me show you something.’
I jerked the Beretta forward, but the gesture was quite needless. As he pushed his hand under his topcoats, Mahler’s gestures were smooth and unhurried, just as smooth and unhurried when he brought his hand out again and passed over to me a leather-covered card. I stepped back a few feet, flipped open the card and glanced down at it.
That one glance was enough – or should have been enough. I’d seen these cards scores of times before, but I stared down at this one as if I’d never seen one in my life. This was a completely new factor, it knocked all my preconceived notions on the head, and I needed time, time for reorientation, for understanding, for quelling the professional fear that came hard on the heels of that understanding. Then, slowly, I folded the card, pulled down my snow-mask, stepped close to Mahler and pulled his down also. In the harsh glare of the torch, his face was blue and white with the cold, and I could see the jutting of the jaw muscles as he clamped his teeth together to keep them from chattering uncontrollably.
‘Breathe out,’ I said.
He did as I asked, and there was no mistaking it, none at all: the sweet acetone breath of the advanced and untreated diabetic can’t possibly be confused with anything else. Wordlessly, I handed him back the card and thrust the automatic into my parka pocket.
At last I said quietly: ‘How long have you had this, Mr Mahler?’
‘Thirty years.’
‘A pretty advanced condition?’ When it came to discussing a man’s illness with him, I had little time for the professional reticence of many of my colleagues: besides, the average elderly diabetic had survived to that age simply because he was intelligent about the dietary and medical treatment of his trouble, and usually knew all about it.
Night Without End Page 13