by Peter Corris
Bright sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes savagely. 'God knows what their names are. The women probably got married. If the children were girls they'd have changed their names when and if they married, if they survived. That's a labyrinth.'
'True, but a pity,' Craft said.
Marsha removed the tape from the machine and labelled it carefully. 'Have to dub this fast. I recorded her singing, too, did you notice?'
'No,' Bright said. 'Smart. We might be able to use that. You realise, Randolph, that this explains Professor Devendish's reaction that I told you about. It must have devastated him. He never married. Great for the story, if we've still got a story.'
Randolph Craft stood, and swayed. 'The unmarried state is not necessarily a neurotic one. Would you mind telling me what you mean about the story?'
'The man's a monster, Randolph,' Bright said. 'I get the feeling Andy doesn't want to make a monster movie.'
'I can't decide,' Andy McKinnon said, 'whether I'm sorry you ever found that bloody book, Vic, or whether it's going to be the making of us all.'
'Go on, Andy,' Marsha said. 'Decide. Be a decisive Scot.'
McKinnon shook his head. 'It's incredible. This breeding and abortion story's just incredible. If it weren't you two I'd think I was being set up, like Hugh whats is name and the Hitler diaries.'
McKinnon looked uneasy as he sat in Vic's kitchenette, as if the space was too small for him. He had folded his overcoat and put it on the table. Now he fingered it as if he'd like to have it on his back and be walking out the door. He had fidgeted during the playing of the Maudie Darcy tape.
'What's the problem, Andy?' Bright said.
McKinnon plucked at the coat. 'The Pakistani's pulled out. Within his rights, of course, but a bit of a blow.'
'What about the other one?' Marsha said.
'Rock solid. He'll like all this.' McKinnon gestured at the tape recorder. 'Or what I tell him of it. He's not a problem. In fact the money's a wee bit easier now we don't have to go to Mongolia.'
'We don't?' Marsha said.
McKinnon spread his hands. 'I doubt we could've got in there anyway, to be truthful. It wasn't looking good. And this Randolph Craft and his mother's book's the good, solid stuff. I reckon Mongolia's covered.'
Bright looked at McKinnon closely. Years of dealing with dealers had made him suspicious of their formulations of advantage and disadvantage. But McKinnon's face was guileless, almost. 'Okay, Andy,' he said, 'you've made a saving and we can get by with one backer . . .'
'I didn't say that. I may have to hustle a little.'
Bright waved the object aside. 'Right. Who better to do it. So, what's worrying you? Because something is, I can smell it.'
'Would there be a drop of something in the house, Marty?' McKinnon said.
Marsha got up, took a glass from the sink and filled it with tap water. She put it on the table in front of McKinnon. 'Drink that. I'm sick of you men pissing on every time something worth talking about comes up. Drink that and tell us what's on your mind.'
McKinnon grinned, drained the glass and shuddered. 'Just this. Why did the Paki pull out? There has to be a reason and I wish I knew what it was. Could he have heard something about the way it's all turning out?'
'I can't see how,' Bright said.
McKinnon looked into the empty glass. 'Nor can I. It's worrying. I tell you, there's someone out there taking an interest. Again, I wish I knew who. Keep everything under lock and key, children, and watch your backs and fronts.'
'Marsha? It's Randolph.'
'Yes, Randolph. Where are you? What's all that noise? I thought you were supposed to working on the translation today.'
'Marsha, I'm at Gatwick. They're deporting me. They're allowing me one phone call and this is it. The plane leaves in ten minutes.'
Marsha was at the Hammersmith office labouring over a fax in German from Zurich. It appeared to deal with the tax responsibilities of resident aliens and she could not see what relevance it had to her earlier enquiry about the Craft clinic. She scribbled numbers on the fax sheet. 'Randolph, you have to make another phone call. Call the Highland Productions lawyer. Here's his number, 34—'
Craft cut her off. 'It's no good, Marsha. They won't allow it. I barely had time to pack my things.'
'What reason did they give, for God's sake?'
'They say I'm conducting business while here on a tourist visa. True enough, I suppose. But the haste is unusual. There's something behind it . . . Marsha, I have to go. I'll be in touch from Hong Kong. Keep smiling.'
The line went dead and Marsha imagined the fat, soft-spoken man doing as two Immigration Authority toughs told him. She swore and rang Bright, who was in Camden Town working on a revision of the film treatment which made a virtue of not shooting in Mongolia. The answering machine picked up the call but Bright interrupted when he heard the agitation in Marsha's voice. He swore in turn and said he'd contact McKinnon to arrange a meeting.
'They hadn't confiscated any papers or anything, had they?' Bright asked.
'He didn't say so.'
'It's a bastard! Geting a chance to stay in England was the main thing locking him in. If that's blown he could pull out. I'd better get onto the lawyers and make sure they've still got the photos and the journal.'
'Vic! He sounded frightened, and all you can think of—'
'Okay, okay, I'm sorry. Andy'll know what to do. Be there soon, love.'
McKinnon's face was serious when he arrived at the office some hours later. Bright and Marsha had learned nothing more about the deportation, except to confirm that a plane had left for Hong Kong ten minutes after Craft had made his call. The carrier would not reveal any details of the passenger list.
'He was on it,' McKinnon said. 'And the documents were at the lawyers. I admit I had thought our Randolph might've done a flit when he found out the size of things. Now I admit I was wrong.'
Marsha shook her head. 'Who do you trust, Andy?'
'Myself, most of the time. But we've got troubles, children. This is no coincidence. Someone with influence has put an oar in and is paddling our boat.'
Bright straightened yet another paper clip and dropped it into a wastepaper basket. 'There's been interference from day one. What d'we do about it?'
'Nothing,' McKinnon said. 'How's Zurich looking, Marsha?'
Marsha pulled a face. 'There's a possibility, a nurse who might know something.'
'Go there. Soon as you can,' McKinnon snapped.
'Hey,' Bright said. 'What's this?'
'You're going too, laddie. I've sorted out a few things at the American end. Enough to get you started. You've got a multiple-entry visa, haven't you?'
'Yes, but . . .'
McKinnon nodded. 'Good. Be on a plane tonight or tomorrow. We have to keep moving or whoever it is that wants to stop us will find a way.'
Bright fought down his resentment at being ordered around. He also felt alarm at the thought of separation from Marsha. He'd envisaged the project as a collaboration all along the line. But he could see the force of McKinnon's argument. 'What'll you be doing, Andy?'
'I'm very pissed off,' McKinnon said. 'I'll be trying to find out who's making me so unhappy.'
20
Extract from 'Culiacán to Death Valley: Explorations in Mexico and the U.S.A.', by Richard Craft, Journal of the Royal Exploration Society, Vol. 79, No 2:
It is one thing to conduct an expedition in a wild territory, far from civilised comforts and endure the hardships—to deliberately eschew those amenities is quite another. It imposes a different psychological pressure, perhaps a greater one.
On this 1,200-mile journey we were never more than several days' march from civilisation—the mining towns of Mexico, the border towns, the American rural centres—but we avoided them and stuck to our task of demonstrating that no environment, however harsh, cannot be overcome by determination and a capacity to 'learn the lessons' of the country through which one is travelling.
Extracts from Walking acr
oss the World by Basil Craft:
Travel writers, a breed which I cordially despise, will tell you of the relief they experience on leaving the arid country to the east of the Sierra Madre, crossing the mountains and arriving on the warm, moist fertile plain. The contrast is certainly striking, but appealing only to the soft-centred. My expedition went in the reverse direction—from lush Culiacán with its river and waving sugarcane fields, to the blasted landscape of the Sierra Madre rainshadow.
It is a universal law that, where precious metals are extracted from the resistant earth, bandits will be found. The law is anchored in human nature. Human beings divide into the industrious and the lazy. Only industry can win wealth from the earth and the bandit is the laziest, least productive creature on the planet.
Pedro Cordobes was the leader of a gang of cutthroats who, in the gamey days of the old south-west, would have been called Commancheros. They were an unstable piebald crew of Mexicans, negros, Indians, half-breeds and degenerate whites. Occasionally, they summoned the courage to raid a small-scale or isolated silver mine and make off with a pitiful haul. Invariably, they drank the proceeds of these banditries within days. Generally, they preyed upon travellers in Chihuahua province, most of whom were as unimaginative and poverty-stricken as themselves.
My encounter with Cordobes' Beasts, a loose translation of the grandiose title the band gave itself, was a classic instance of terror being turned upon the terroriser. We were surprised at night when camping in an arroyo east of Gealeano. The throat of one of the Mexicans supposedly on guard (I fancy the wretch was asleep and so passed unknowingly from this life to the next) was cut. I had trained myself to sleep very lightly and I heard the gurgle of air and blood in the man's windpipe. Three figures loomed in the darkness and I shot twice, scoring hits. I flung myself on the third bandit, threw him to the ground and ripped open his pants with my knife. I grabbed his testicles and let him feel the blade against them.
'Hombres,' I yelled. 'I can spill this man's cojones into my hand if that is what you want.'
I spoke in Spanish and the foul-smelling, thrashing villain I held pinned with my weight cursed me in the same language. I tightened my grip and he screamed to the others to obey me.
In the pistols-drawn, snarling conference that followed, it turned out that the man I had subdued was Pedro Cordobes. In the context it was as if Wellington had held his sabre to the privates of Bonaparte. Pedro Cordobes was to be of great service. He claimed to be an illegitimate son of the revolutionary Zapata. This was probably a lie but at least some of the other bandits and drink-crazed Apaches we encountered on our trek appeared to believe it . . .
To pass through Death Valley is no great accomplishment. Many had done it before us though a great number had perished in the attempt, especially in the gold-rush era when men's eyes and brains were nullified by gold fever.
In these times any well-informed, well-equipped party can complete the journey without undue difficulty. That is, as a single undertaking! Our achievement was to defy Death Valley as the final stage of a long journey which had taken its toll on our strength and resources.
My own health and that of my brother remained good but not so that of some of the members of our party. Some started with natural disadvantages, others weakened en route, and I count it one of my greatest distinctions that I lost not one human being to the ravages of nature. (The man killed by Cordobes' raiding party and the one shot in the encounter with the Arizona vigilantes should not be entered in this ledger.)
Los Dados (translates as 'The Dice') was a fitting place to end our journey. After the privations of the mountains and desert it seemed appropriate that we should plunge into the fleshpots like the legions of Alexander and the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan.
The state of Nevada had legalised gambling in 1931 and Los Dados, like its sister town Las Vegas, had developed as a mecca for those afflicted by this particular addiction. Add the influence of gangsters (the notorious Bugsy Spiegel had opened the Flamingo hotel casino in Las Vegas shortly after the war and established a similar operation in Los Dados), and the scene was set for a centre of vice to rival Sodom and Gomorrah.
As one used to talking his carnal pleasures in the sophisticated salons of Europe, I was unprepared for the rawness of prostitution in Nevada. Sex was on sale in the streets, in hotel lobbies and in clapboard apartment buildings around the clock. Only a eunuch, a monk or a homosexual could fail to be tempted by the range of goods on display . . .
21
Craft Project—Journal, Mexico and U.S., November
I deposited the Maudie tape and transcript along with some documents from Randolph Craft and notes on our conversations in the locker at the gym. Andy made what panic-button arrangements he could and Marsha flew to Zurich. I was worried about her delving into Craft matters on her own, given the pressure being exerted, but the days are gone when you can be a woman's protector. They do what they want to do, like men. We've turned into the naggers: I nagged her about doing as much as she could by phone from the hotel, about not going about her business at night, about locking her door. She said 'Don't worry'.
I packed my computer and the photostatted relevant parts of Basil Craft's book and Richard Craft's articles, and flew Continental to Mexico City. The best of Andy's contacts, Danny Brown, was an ex-Marine pilot who flew executives around Central America and the Caribbean in a Cessna Citation. We met in the lobby of a downtown hotel that had every amenity except parking space for visitors. Danny had parked his Cadillac a few blocks away and was worried that it would be just a little pile of nuts and bolts and a few grease spots when he got back. He fidgeted as I showed him the route the Crafts had taken over the mountains and north into the U.S.A.
'Any problems with this? I want to go to Culiacán and stay there for a few days, a week at most. Then fly over this course and come down low from time to time so's I can have a look at the ground.'
The careful way he studied the map, despite his anxiety about the Cadillac, gave me confidence. 'Not a one,' he said eventually. 'Course there just isn't any vacant air space these days but what you've got there comes damn close. 'Ceptin' there ain't much to see on that trip. It's just mostly desert.'
'I know. That's okay.'
Danny jotted figures on a brochure for Acapulco. 'One hundred and sixty-eight hours of fun per every week.' He circled a figure. 'I can get all the clearances for around a half million pesos, fees and bribes. Have to get 'em here in Mex City. Depart day after tomorrow for Culiacán. But you gotta give a guarantee you're clean. I mean not one speck of grass, not one grain of coke.'
I nodded. 'Computer, a camera, a travelling bag. That's it.'
He punched my upper arm as he stood. He was a small man, about forty, wiry with a seamed, sceptical face. 'Don't forget the tequila, buddy. Moment we touch down in Dados ol' Danny'll be ready to howl.'
We took off shortly after dawn and flew east. We passed over the mountains. The coastal plain was a narrow strip of green and brown and the Pacific Ocean stretched away to the west, blue and forever.
'Pretty little place,' Danny said as he prepared to land the plane at the airstrip outside of Culiacán. 'What's your business here, Vic?'
'I'm looking for some men who went on a trip from here. Forty-plus years ago.'
'That's a tall order. Place has changed a lot and life expectation here ain't all that sensationally high.'
He was right on both accounts. Culiacán was a pretty town. It spread out a modest distance along the east bank of the Sinaloa River and was the centre of a fruit and sugar growing district, a bit like a Queensland coastal town. Lazy-looking like that, but with a lot more churches. I spent four days questioning the police, several missions and tourist organisations about three men who, according to Walking Across the World, had gone with the Crafts from Culiacán over the mountains. A fundamental problem was that the names were common ones in Mexico—Hernandez and the like. They evoked no response. Culiacán seemed to be devoted to the future a
nd a gringo expedition of forty years before was ancient history and of little interest. There was a strong likelihood that they weren't from the district anyway. The Crafts' writings gave no clue on this. The only name to draw reaction was that of Pedro Cordobes, the bandit.
'Ah, yes, Senor Bright,' an elderly priest said, 'he was a famous bandito in the north, in Sonora and Chihuahua, I think.'
'That's right,' I said. 'Perhaps . . .'
The priest shook his head. 'The Federales shot him.'
'A family?'
Again, the headshake. 'The son of a whore. Perhaps brothers and sisters, perhaps many, but who would know? The banditos live like beasts in the hills and the cantinas—wife, no, children, no. Lost souls.'
I met Danny in the bar of our hotel and told him that I'd drawn a blank. He shoved the Scotch he had ordered across the table to me. 'Guess that means we push off tomorrow. I never drink before I fly; guess you need this more'n me anyway.'
He ordered ginger ale; I drank (and paid for) both drinks and a good few more. I had no good reason for getting drunk, other than missing Marsha and disappointment at not finding another Abdullah Hamil or Xian Zu. Perhaps that was reason enough. But another thing operating on me was the change in my attitude to the Craft project. I wasn't sorry to be flying over the route of the Mexico—U.S. expedition rather than following it at least partly on the ground the way we had in Africa. The more I learned about Basil Craft and the more I read sections of his book the less interested I became in his explorations of harsh territory. The travels and attitudes seemed to take on a brutal quality I hadn't been aware of before.
Take his description of the crossing of the stretch of desert in nothern Mexico known as the Silver Plate:
We crossed the Silver Plate at night which is the only way for an humane expedition leader to attempt it. By design, we were travelling at the hottest time of the year. What is the point of besting nature at a time when nature is doing her best? But the Silver Plate is an unnatural part of the planet and requires special measures. The fifty-mile strip of rock and sand had a peculiar mineral construction—a matter of micas and bauxites—which causes it to heat up to terrifying degree. The hooves of horses have been known to melt on this surface.