From London Far

by Michael Innes

  The effect of this question was startling. Even in the darkness the man beside her could be seen to give a perceptible jump. ‘I am Captain von Schwiebus,’ he said, and hesitated. Then his voice broke out harshly: ‘Who gave you that? From whom did you have that sign?’

  Jean’s head swam. Could this conceivably be the password business again? Captain Nemo was the first nickname with which anyone of mildly literary inclinations would think to dub the piratical von Schwiebus; could it be that such a person had rashly embodied it in some system of signs and tokens? If so, Richard Meredith’s original role had now devolved upon her, and there was opening before her the first possibility of some obscure deception. Jean moved deliberately towards the dinghy. ‘Captain von Schwiebus,’ she said mockingly, ‘how funny you are. More absurd, even, than they suggested to me.’

  Von Schwiebus savagely kicked what might have been either the dinghy or the man rowing it. ‘Bitte,’ he said roughly, ‘nehmen Sie Platz.’ But his voice was uncertain – and to the uncertainty Jean hastened to add by stepping in with alacrity. Her shaken captor followed and dressed the boat. ‘They?’ he said. ‘Who are they?’

  Jean laughed. She did her best to make the sound as disturbing in its kind as had been von Schwiebus’ own laugh in the Seaway. ‘What is wrong with many Germans’, she said, ‘is nothing particularly Germanic. It is simply reading too much Byron. Why is so mediocre a poet celebrated all over central Europe? And you, my dear Captain, devoured him. The fluency of your English attests it. And I was told how you delighted in the outcast hero role.’

  Von Schwiebus breathed heavily. This, then, was mockery that went home.

  ‘But it inclines you to suppose that every man’s hand must be against you. Why did you behave in that ridiculous way in the fissure – shutting the grille and trying the effect of Satanic laughter? Didn’t it at all occur to you that I might be not a spy but – well, one of the common criminals, as you pleasantly put it?’

  Von Schwiebus swore at the man who was rowing. And Jean was aware that although he was nonplussed by this line at which she had dived something else was on his mind as well. He was looking at a wrist-watch. ‘Be pleased to explain yourself,’ he said abruptly.

  ‘Dear me, no. All this is much too amusing. But I assure you that matters will explain themselves in time.’

  ‘As time will be abundant,’ said Captain von Schwiebus, ‘that may well be so.’

  Jean’s heart misgave her. The retired hero was not so easy to rattle. And there is something particularly discouraging in the prospect of playing for time during an interminable voyage beneath the North Atlantic in an obsolete submarine. Still, things had seemed pretty hopeless before now. And for time, therefore, she would continue to play. ‘I suppose’, she asked carelessly, ‘that you have met our excellent Mr Neff? He has been buying stuff from Marsden’s people, I am sorry to say. But perhaps he will take the Horton Venus. Are you freighting it this trip, by the way?’

  ‘No, I’m not.’ By this knowing talk von Schwiebus looked like being quite impressed. ‘The quality this trip is poor. Indeed, it includes an Italian.’

  ‘A live Italian?’

  ‘I understand so. But as he has failed to turn up on time, he may well be dead.’ Von Schwiebus paused. ‘Perhaps’, he said suddenly, ‘you know his name?’

  ‘Yes – perhaps I do.’ Jean was not much struck by the success of her endeavour to put an enigmatic quality into this. But while she was still casting about for something more forceful the dinghy – it appeared to be a mere wood-and-canvas affair – bumped gently into the side of the submarine. She looked up and saw that the dark mass which had impended over it was gone. One more Flying Fox, in fact, had continued its bogus journey to Inchfarr.

  There was a moment of confusion, the grip of strong hands, and she was standing on a narrow cat-walk amid a group of silent men. They were peering intently into the east, and one of them was glancing at a wrist-watch as von Schwiebus had done. She realized that the submarine was in a hurry to get away – perhaps because of some factor in the tides, perhaps because Captain Maxwell’s Sunderland laddies were still in the air and safety demanded gaining deep water soon. A man with a shaded torch and a sheaf of papers had come up to von Schwiebus and in his low rapid German Jean caught references to the Italian and to the fountain. This latter was altogether mysterious – but perhaps, she thought, they had been alternating Byron with Mr Charles Morgan’s mysterious love story. And now von Schwiebus said something about herself, the men parted before her, and she saw that she was being invited or required to descend an iron ladder that ran perpendicularly down through a hatch. The submarine was already low on the water, so this would mean that she was sinking below the surface of these chill, faintly lapping waves. There was something peculiarly unnerving about the necessity – much as there must be about a first parachute jump, she thought – and she stopped to give one last look at the upper air. At the level on which she stood all was absolute darkness and this continued until, seemingly immensely high above her head, the great black curtain became a ragged semicircular silhouette against a moonlit sky. That jagged line marked the ruined ramparts of Castle Moila. And Jean turned to the hatch indifferently. For it was as if she was already miles beneath the sea.

  A low exclamation halted her. The waiting men had swung again to the east. She stood, unnoticed, and followed the line of their gaze. A small dark shape had appeared above the battlements; it grew larger and dropped lower, obscuring now one and now another star. Within seconds it had disappeared into the impenetrable darkness encircling them. Something began to vibrate directly overhead. The shape appeared again, startling close and low. It slowed down, and as it did so there was an intermittent creaking – such a sound as might be made by many oars swinging in the rowlocks of a long dark ship…

  Jean wondered how the Foxes could be so accurately stopped directly above the waiting submarine – and wondered too how they could be unloaded while hovering still in air. The men were hurrying forward and only von Schwiebus remained beside her, his eye fixed on his watch. There was the sound of laboured movement forward, a dull clang of steel, stifled exclamations. Jean glanced at von Schwiebus. He was frowning into the darkness and appeared to have forgotten her. Perhaps it really did go against the grain with him to be casting this loot –

  Jean ceased to speculate – it being revealed to her suddenly that it was now or never. She must jump and swim. She must jump, and then swim heaven knew where – out beyond the anchorage perhaps and round to a less precipitous shore. It was the thinnest of chances – but she must take it, now.

  She braced herself to spring. And as she did so the men forward parted, and for a fatal second she was rooted in astonishment to the deck. The submarine – she saw in the uncertain light of a low torch – appeared to have been invaded by a number of small naked boys. And the next instant she saw something queerer still. A familiar figure was striding up the deck, and in front of it moved a little red glow as from a sweetly smoking pipe. The glow disappeared – much as if some second thought had led to the hasty discarding of so Anglo-Saxon an object – and Richard Meredith advanced into a fuller light. He made straight for von Schwiebus and took him by the hand. ‘Pantelli!’ he exclaimed with Latin exuberance; ‘I am Signor Pantelli and arrived just in time.’ His glance turned to Jean and for a moment genuine amazement flooded his features. Then he threw himself forward. ‘Mia carissima sposa!’ he exclaimed, enraptured. ‘My dear, dear wife!’

  Part Three

  DOVE COTTAGE

  I

  The lakeside home of Otis K Neff tilted, slid, turned upon itself, and momentarily disappeared as the huge flying-boat banked and circled in order to land against the wind. Foam-flecked water pistoned upwards, hung suspended, fell abruptly into nether space just as the waters of the Gulf of Mexico had done hours before. They were climbing again. ‘Jes’ impossible,’ said Mr Drum
mey. ‘A whole blame regatta all over the place.’

  Richard Meredith peered downwards and saw that what he had taken for larger flecks of foam were the sails of yachts dispersed over a great area of water. He also saw once more the abode of Mr Neff. ‘Does he really live there?’ he asked. ‘It must take him an uncommonly long time to get around.’ In the Old World, he was reflecting, there were persons whom heredity and the pressure of custom constrained to live in structures of similar size and elaboration. But everything that lay below here Mr Neff had, it seemed, caused to be built himself. He had taken so many score acres of wooded lakeside and started from dot. Now there was this. And again Meredith incredulously peered. ‘Extraordinary!’ he murmured.

  ‘It sure is a beautiful home.’ Mr Drummey did not take his eyes from his instruments. His voice was expressionless. Nevertheless, Meredith was aware that he liked Mr Drummey, and that Mr Drummey was no more astray in the matter of evaluating Mr Neff’s splendours than a whole committee of editors of Juvenal and Martial would have been. ‘A swell home,’ said Mr Drummey. ‘It must be wonderful to feel you own all that after coming up the hard way. Hold on, there’s another turn.’ His eye was on half a dozen gauges at once. ‘Jes’ get yourself a home like that and you can be certain you’ve made good. If you get doubts in the night, you simply switch on the lights and start planning another wing. Architect yourself, perhaps – Signor Pantelli?’

  The intelligence of Mr Drummey was of the sceptical order. And the two young men who assisted him to navigate this aerial leviathan were discernibly sceptical too – much more so than the sombre Captain von Schwiebus had been at first. ‘An architect?’ said Meredith. ‘Dear me, no. I deal in pictures, and that sort of thing. And it’s an important moment for me to meet so big a collector as Mr Neff.’

  ‘Ah.’ Mr Drummey was looking down with distaste at the yachts that were keeping him airborne longer than need be. ‘I’ve been told he buys a lot – and I’ve ferried some for him, too. Yet somehow there aren’t too many on show down there.’ And he jerked a thumb in the direction of Mr Neff’s swell home. ‘I’ve sometimes wondered if he kind of misers them.’

  ‘Misers them?’

  ‘Treats them as if they were a store of gold beneath his mattress. There’s a story he has a whole gallery he never speaks about, and won’t let other folks speak about either.’

  ‘Dear me,’ said Meredith. ‘I hope he will have something to say about my Giorgiones.’

  ‘Giorgiones?’ Mr Drummey leant forward to turn a switch, offered some technical remarks to one of his assistants, and then looked full at Meredith. ‘Surely there aren’t so many of those around?’

  ‘Very few indeed, Mr Drummey. But I’ve got three. And as soon as I contacted Mr Neff’s agent in Tampico and heard there was a chance of a deal I wanted to have the pictures sent along. They ought to be down below there now.’

  ‘I see. Well, we’ll be going down now. Perhaps the Signora had better have a piece of barley sugar. Nothing like glucose.’

  ‘I certainly don’t want barley sugar.’ Jean Halliwell was gazing absorbedly downwards. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘it’s utterly monstrous, of course. But it can’t really be said to be in bad taste.’

  Mr Drummey raised an eyebrow. ‘Peddling Giorgiones?’ he asked.

  ‘Mr Neff’s house. It ought to be a howling horror. But really it’s more like a vast, polished, and at the same time high-spirited joke.’

  For the first time Mr Drummey laughed. ‘Ever been to Beverley Hills?’ he asked. ‘Crammed with darn fool people believing they’re living in one sort of solemn museum-piece or another. Tudor mansions, chunks of Versailles, Spanish Mission – all that. And really they’re all inhabiting good jokes. Just the architect having a little fun.’ Mr Drummey spoke absently, and while giving Jean a glance so swiftly appraising that she felt like an oil gauge or a speedometer. Suddenly he put out his chin like one whose mind is made up. ‘Say,’ he said, ‘what is all this, anyway?’

  The Signor and Signora Pantelli looked at each other. They looked at Mr Drummey and – more doubtfully – at his silent assistants. ‘I understand’, said the Signor cautiously, ‘that this is Mr Neff’s private plane, and that you are all employees of his?’

  ‘Yes.’ Mr Drummey, as if to give leisure for a little confidential conversation, was beginning a lazy sweep of some ten miles’ radius in air. ‘And we’ve known some darn tight squeezes through the arms of the law. Eh, Joe? Eh, John?’

  ‘Sure.’ Joe and John spoke in concert and without taking their eyes from their several tasks.

  ‘Faithful servants of the firm,’ said Mr Drummey. ‘Straight enough, in a way. You can’t work for someone big without putting through a few pretty cheap-looking deals.’

  ‘Dear me!’ Meredith was perplexed. ‘I should have imagined that to hold rather of working for someone small.’

  ‘You can’t’, Mr Drummey, ignoring this, continued, ‘work for a man at all without backing him against others of his own sort – can you? Wouldn’t be honest. And that naturally lands you with some pretty low jobs to do. You carry on while you can.’

  ‘You don’t stick your head out,’ said Joe.

  ‘On the other hand,’ said John, ‘you don’t close your eyes.’

  ‘You have to watch for the limit,’ said Joe. ‘And we kind of feel that while ferrying fake Wops is one thing–’

  ‘Fake Wops!’ Meredith, though most irrationally, was extremely indignant.

  ‘–abduction is quite another.’

  ‘Abduction?’ Jean looked at Joe in astonishment. ‘You don’t really think I’m being abducted?’

  ‘I do not.’ Joe frowned, apparently feeling that he had delivered this opinion more confidently than was polite. ‘Though you’d be worth it every time.’

  ‘It was an Englishman,’ said Mr Drummey. ‘Jes’ the other day. He was scared plumb mute, it seemed to me. But I guess he wasn’t making the trip anything like willingly.’

  Jean sat upright. ‘Did he tell you he was Higbed?’

  ‘He did. He came scrambling through a lot of crates aft there, looked as if they might be full of books. And “I’m Higbed,” he says. And at that the man Flosdorf – he’s one of Neff’s secretaries – leads him off and gives him a drink. Kind of nasty feeling about the whole thing.’

  ‘And mysterious,’ said John. ‘Seemed as if Neff wasn’t to know. Flosdorf had this Higbed and the crates landed way down by what’s called the Belvidere, and told us to keep our traps shut.’

  ‘Did you happen’, Meredith asked, ‘to notice anything about this Higbed’s physical condition?’

  ‘Bad.’ Mr Drummey was decided. ‘Looked as if he’d been dragged through somewheres several weeks on end. Which makes it queerer the way I saw him two or three days afterwards. Sitting by the lake sleek and pleased as anything, puffing at a cigar and watching some girls bathing from a boat. Really watching them, if you know what I mean, but doing it open and unashamed. Might have had some theory he was being only fair to himself that way.’

  ‘Well, it’s Higbed, all right.’ Jean glanced at Meredith. ‘The dafty in abeyance and the great male Higgy uppermost, once more. But it’s difficult to see what it all means.’

  ‘Difficult to see what fake Wops mean.’ And Mr Drummey looked at Meredith inquiringly. ‘Talking?’

  ‘Sure – that is to say: Yes.’ Meredith was momentarily confused by this impertinent intrusion upon another idiom. ‘A little talking would probably be an excellent thing.’

  ‘Then we’ll jes’ take another turn round the block.’

  And gently Otis K Neff’s flying-boat banked and began to describe a farther county-wide circle in air. Its hub, the lakeside home of Otis K Neff, showed still like a small, towering city far away below.

  ‘So this von Schwiebus really believed you were Mr and Mrs Pan
telli?’ Mr Drummey looked swiftly at Jean. ‘Quite early I figured it you two couldn’t be married.’

  Meredith smiled. ‘Well, with von Schwiebus the deception did not, in fact, continue for very long. He must always have been suspicious, and in the end he just found out. Perhaps Miss Halliwell and I were neither so Italianate nor – ah – so conjugal as we ought to have been. We were exposed, and von Schwiebus reported to the scoundrel Don Perez by wireless.’

  ‘By wireless!’ John, whose business was radio among other things, looked at Meredith wonderingly. ‘They could do that?’

  ‘Apparently so. And although at the time it appeared to seal our doom, in point of fact it has been an altogether fortunate circumstance. It means that at the headquarters of the International Society they are still quite unalarmed. A little dispirited, perhaps, but nevertheless feeling quite secure.’

  ‘I don’t get all this.’ Mr Drummey was frowning at his instruments. ‘For here you are, making a come-back as the Pantellis – and free as air, more or less.’

  ‘But that is only because of the misadventure that befell the submarine almost immediately afterwards. You must understand that as yet you have by no means heard the whole story.’ Meredith looked apologetic. ‘I hope that this is not occasioning an altogether unreasonable expenditure of petrol? Perhaps you would prefer to land in some quiet cove–’

  ‘The firm can stand the gas. And when you’re up it’s best to stay here. It’s the getting up that takes it out of the old crate.’