Saturn Over the Water

by J. B. Priestley

  ‘I don’t see Osparas.’

  ‘Because everything there has been built since this map was made. All in the last ten years. But there it is. I have seen it.’

  ‘I’m delighted to hear you say so, Mr Jones my friend. Because otherwise, I’d never have believed anything could be up there. What a place to choose!’

  He did his chuckling act again. ‘Perfectly potty for an honest manufacturing company of course. Why not Santiago, Valparaiso, Concepcion? But now look. Follow that road over the little pass, not more than twenty kilometres. See! The western end of that very large lake. And where is that, old boy? In Chile? Not bloody likely. In Argentina. So they are only twenty kilometres from a nice back door into Argentina. And then you tell me these people are not Nazis. O-ho, they are just timid shy people. Timid shy Direktor-General von Emmerick. Bedford, old boy, I like you – I believe you are a nice English artist – but you have not a political mind and so you are naïve.’

  ‘I’m fairly naïve, I agree, but I know too much to believe that the people running Osparas and some other places are simply Nazis.’

  ‘What do you know?’

  ‘It chiefly consists of odd bits, Mr Jones, and I don’t propose to try putting them together for you at this time of night. And anyhow you wouldn’t change your mind.’

  He suddenly gave me one of his broadest grins. ‘If these are the Fascist rotters I think they are, they have already killed your cousin perhaps, and now they may kill you. Are you also naïve about this or jolly brave?’

  ‘Neither.’ I was glad of a chance to explain what I felt, if only because I hadn’t really sorted it out yet for myself. ‘I have an idea, though I haven’t much evidence, that these Wavy Eight people don’t want to do any killing. Not because they aren’t ruthless but because it wouldn’t pay them.’

  Mr Jones made a contemptuous face and raised his shoulders so that what little neck he had now completely vanished. ‘Because of police inquiries, you think? I say balls to that, Bedford old boy. I know too much about police cases in bourgeois societies. You disappear up there at Osparas, which of course for them is money for jam. Only I know you went there. Twenty of them will swear they never saw you, never heard of you. Who will be believed?’

  ‘Too easy, of course. But I never said they’d be afraid of the police. The real reason is quite different. If you’re running some sort of big secret organisation, then if you kill a man because you think he knows too much, you can never find out how much he knew or what he might have done with his knowledge. You just leave yourself feeling uneasy, wondering what’s leaking out. If I wasn’t banking on that, I wouldn’t go near Osparas. I’m no hero, Mr Jones. I’m just keeping a promise and trying to satisfy my curiosity.’

  ‘My friend, you are not so naïve.’ He struggled out of his chair. ‘One of the waiters here is a local contact,’ he said, lowering his voice. ‘I am seeing him on the terrace. You will wait?’

  ‘No, I’m going to bed.’

  The view next morning wasn’t out of a Chinese brush drawing but a Japanese print. Only a few rosy tatters of cloud broke the cerulean of the sky. Across the lake, a deep turquoise, the volcanoes soared to sharp snowy peaks. It was like a silent conference of Fujiyamas. Hokusai would have gone barmy trying to cope with such a prospect. I had just time to do a quick sketch before Mr Jones hurried me away. The same car that had brought us from Puerto Montt airfield, the night before, now took us along the shore of Lake Llanquihue to Ensenada, where we stopped for a drink and a sandwich. While Mr Jones was meeting one of his mysterious ‘local contacts’, I walked a little way up the road going beyond Ensenada and saw there a kind of graveyard of blackened dead trees, sharply silhouetted against the snows of the great volcano, Osorno, quietly biding its time. (It erupted about a year afterwards, burying everything I saw on land that day.) The journey over the little pass, from Ensenada to Petrohué on the Emerald Lake, didn’t take very long but was rough while it lasted. We bumped and bounced our way through dense woods and across mountain streams and wet rock. At Petrohué a character called Eugenio was waiting for us, with his motorboat.

  I didn’t think Eugenio important at the time, but as I do now I’d better say something about him. He was as near to a cheerful dark skeleton as I ever hope to get. His bones seemed enormous and they were covered with the minimum of leathery, mahogany-coloured flesh. He dressed carelessly but sombrely: a sepia shirt, indigo pants. To crown all, he was a giggler. When they met, obviously as old acquaintances, he and Mr Jones did so much giggling and chuckling they could hardly exchange any words. I must confess that I took a dim view, that morning, of Eugenio as our boatman and pilot across twenty-five to thirty miles of unfathomable lake water. His boat was small and anything but new, and compared with the big cabin cruiser, waiting for the next batch of tourists, it looked almost like a shabby toy. I felt that Mr Jones, who must have weighed well over two hundred pounds, and I, who am no lightweight, and my two biggish suitcases would settle that boat so deep into the water that very soon, if we ran into the smallest bit of trouble, we might be baling for dear life.

  But here, before we set out, Mr Jones showed a lot more sense than I did, as I realised afterwards. He was against my taking the two suitcases, which for various good reasons, he said, had better be left behind at Petrohué. All I needed was a small holdall like his, and he went off with Eugenio to find one, while I took out of one of my cases all I required for a night or two. They came back with an old brown canvas thing that I packed while Eugenio went to store my suitcases somewhere. Then we were off.

  It was now about two o’clock, the afternoon as clean and bright as a daisy. There was no nonsense about that lake. Its popular name was dead right, with no exaggeration at all. It didn’t look faintly like emerald, it was emerald, a solid emerald green, not terre verte or viridian, but an exact shade of bright emerald, every yard of it. Off we went, chug-chugging away. The volcanic mountains that hemmed us in were thickly and darkly wooded on their lower slopes and then went up to blue and charcoal grey heights, the peaks misted with cloud. Mr Jones went to sleep. Eugenio fussed with his engine, which refused to be left very long without attention. I tried to think about von Emmerick and the possible setup he had at Osparas and what line I ought to take with him, but the monotonous movement, the surface glitter and green depths of the water, the mountains that seemed to rise higher and higher, the whole afternoon, they all discouraged thinking. We seemed to be chug-chugging along for days.

  Actually it was just after five when we landed at Peulla, where I went with Mr Jones into the hotel. After he’d registered and gone poking round somewhere at the back, to talk to some friend of Eugenio’s, we had a drink on a balcony upstairs, where the lake shone greenly between the trees below. There we made our final arrangements. A truck was leaving for Osparas just before six, and it would give me a lift. Roughly halfway, Mr Jones said, there was a big reddish rock on the lake side of the road, and I was to look out for it because that was where Mr Jones would be at eleven o’clock next morning.

  ‘I will wait half-an-hour, Bedford old boy,’ said Mr Jones, very much in earnest now. ‘If you are not there by half-past I shall conclude that something has happened to you. This is the only way to do it, I know from jolly good personal experience. So you must promise not to forget. If you have no motor transport, it does not matter, you have only a few kilometres to walk. We meet at the big red rock. Agreed? Topping! So now I take you to the truck. The driver is a great friend of Eugenio.’

  The road climbed steeply out of Peulla, through thick woods, with a mountain river flashing below on our left. I looked out for and then saw the big reddish rock, a good meeting place. I must confess I was glad to see it, and to remember that Mr Jones would be there in the morning, because for all my confident talk the night before I was feeling uneasy. This place seemed much further away from anywhere than the Institute; I wasn’t a multi-millionaire’s guest here; and I couldn’t help feeling that von Emmerick would prov
e to be a much tougher type than the Soultzes and Schneiders of the Institute. Besides, I didn’t know what information about me might have been passed on. I was ready to bluff it out, but it didn’t follow that von Emmerick was equally willing to be bluffed. I’ll admit I felt apprehensive as Eugenio’s friend turned off the road to the right, and we finally arrived in the centre of what was a brand-new small town.

  It was the rummest place to find miles from anywhere in South America. The man who’d designed it and then had it built must have been feeling a deep nostalgia for the Black Forest, where I’d once spent a few days. Behind the main central buildings there seemed to be some concrete sheds on strict utility lines, but here where we stopped I felt I might have arrived at any small town in the Black Forest. Here were the same steep roofs, heavy timbered walls, and even some fair imitations of the old hanging signs of the Black Forest towns. I was so surprised and then amused that I stopped feeling apprehensive. I hopped out of the truck, carrying my little brown canvas bag, and ran up the steps of what seemed to be the main building, even though it looked more like a giant cuckoo clock than an administration department.

  I told the rather piggy white-eyelashed German girl who I was and that I wanted to see von Emmerick, whom I’d met at Mrs Tengleton’s in Westchester. She understood English, though we had to work a bit at Mrs Tengleton and Westchester. I was left sitting just inside the entrance while she took her fat little legs up a staircase. It must have been nearly five minutes before she returned, to take me up the stairs and into the presence of the Herr Direktor, who was sitting bolt upright in a large room that was half an office and half a missing scene from Die Meistersinger. He looked exactly as he had done that afternoon in Mrs Tengleton’s hothouse – the same carved old wood face, the same cold military eye that ought to have had a monocle; but this time he was wearing a linen jacket that might have made anybody else look informal. He gave me the impression I’d come to sell something he didn’t want. I realised this was going to be tricky, so I pulled out all the stops at once.

  ‘Probably you’ve forgotten meeting me that afternoon – there were so many people milling around – but I was with a girl called Marina Nateby – ’

  ‘I know Miss Nateby – yes – ’

  ‘Oddly enough I discovered she’s a friend of Rosalia Arnaldos. I’ve just been staying with Mr Arnaldos in Peru – I’m a painter, by the way – and either he or his granddaughter suggested I should come and look at this lake country down here – and pay a visit to Osparas – ’ That was about as much as I could manage, without some encouragement, and anyhow I felt a fool standing there still holding that silly little bag.

  For a moment or two, after I’d dried up and he still stared at me in silence, he had me wildly guessing. Was he going to ask me to stay or was he about to ring for three SS types to throw me out? But then just as I was ready, in my despair, to start babbling again about Arnaldos or Rosalia or Marina Nateby or Mrs Tengleton, he smiled frostily.

  ‘You would like to spend a day or two with us here, Mr Bedford?’

  ‘I know I ought to have written to you first – but if it’s possible – and I won’t be a nuisance – ’

  ‘No, it is easily arranged. We have many guests here, a few even from London. But you will have to excuse me now, Mr Bedford. This is a busy time for me. I have a conference with my staff every working day at this time. I will ask one of my assistants to take charge of you. Then we shall meet again at dinner.’ He barked some German commands into the intercom thing, and after a minute or two they brought into the room a hefty pink young man, who behaved as if he were in uniform and not in grey flannels. His name was Otto Barlach and he had those pale empty eyes that are probably the most sinister things in Europe. As a matter of fact he’d never set foot in Europe, as he told me afterwards in his slow careful English. Three generations of his family had lived in the town of Valdivia, here in Chile. But he was German through and through, the whole echt Deutsch bag of tricks, including too much deference to his superiors, which fortunately included me at the moment, and too little consideration for his inferiors, girl secretaries and maids at whom he barked like another von Emmerick.

  Otto took me across the street, wide enough to be called a square. Blue dusk was filling it now. Lights were flickering on. First, he showed me the building, like a Black Forest inn, where I would find the Speisesaal for the Herr Direktor’s guests, and also the Great Hall, in which at nine o’clock there would be music. ‘Not this night our music we make,’ Otto explained, ‘but discus – on a new machine – hi-fi stereo – wunderbar!’ The small guest house was next door. After barking at a frightened middle-aged woman, Otto led me up two crooked flights of steps, for the house had been carefully designed to be quaint and higgledy-piggledy, and finally showed me into a room that was all polished wood and sweet-smelling and might have been intended for Hansel and Gretel. By pretending to be a vague genius, I managed to keep Otto for a few minutes answering questions. The setup, I gathered, did include a genuine Gesellschaft, with one of those long German names like a goods train passing, and it employed some first-rate chemists and was now manufacturing some new and expensive drugs, chiefly of the tranquilliser type. Though not a chemist himself, von Emmerick was head man, creator and now administrator of the whole Osparas Gemeinschaft, embodying, Otto said, the true old noble German spirit. I let it go at that, promising to be in the Great Hall, for a drink before dinner, at seven-forty-five.

  I was a bit late, having had some trouble finding a bathroom in that elves’ nest, and when I went into the Great Hall about ten people were standing in front of a massive long table, knocking back sherries and pisco sours. The style was definitely Teutonic baronial. Göring could have used it as a hunting lodge. There were even antlers, swords and pieces of armour, shields with coats-of-arms painted on them. Or at least that was my immediate impression, the only impression I ever had, for I never saw the place again and I was only in it a few minutes. And I didn’t spend that little time looking around, for as soon as I arrived among those ten people I discovered that two of them were Sir Reginald Merlan-Smith and Countess Nadia Slatina.

  Otto was there, ready to look after me, but I’d shakily lifted and downed two piscos, which God knows I needed, before I allowed him to start introducing me to anybody. And even after that he hadn’t to do anything, because when I turned from the table – there were Sir Reginald and Nadia smiling at me. His smile was the real thing, not friendly of course because he hadn’t it in him, but genuinely amused and perhaps a bit triumphant. But I thought, though I may have been kidding myself, that I detected a flicker of anxiety in Nadia’s smile.

  ‘Well, well, Bedford,’ said Sir Reginald, still the patronising patron. ‘Didn’t expect to see you here. Get around, don’t you?’

  ‘We all seem to do, don’t we?’ I said. ‘But then you said you were going to Argentina, which isn’t far from here, they tell me. And I’ve been staying with old Arnaldos up at that Institute of his. He’s a friend of my New York dealer, and I think he wanted somebody to tell him what was wrong with his granddaughter’s painting.’ I was rushing out all the stops again, of course.

  Sir Reginald gave me another smile but his eyes told me I hadn’t a hope of fooling him. However, Nadia came in with some personal feminine stuff. She wasn’t as elaborately tarted up as she’d been in London, but in a thin woollen suit of pale indian yellow, setting off her soft grey hair and eyes, she looked as deliciously wicked as ever. ‘She is very stupid, don’t you think, that girl Rosalia?’ She used the same low seductive tone, as if we were exchanging the most intimate and delectable secrets. ‘She has no talent, no temperament. A spoilt child, don’t you think, Mr Bedford?’

  ‘She certainly didn’t take criticism very well. And the old man may have spoilt her. But I liked her better before I left. By the way, I met von Emmerick at a party up in Westchester, while I was staying with my dealer in New York. Sam Harnberg.’ I was looking at Sir Reginald again now. ‘You may
know his gallery in 57th Street.’

  ‘As a matter of fact I do. I bought a Jackson Pollock from him, a few years ago.’ He turned away for a moment because a very good-looking blonde youth was now offering him a drink. Nadia flashed a meaning look at me as he accepted the drink. It’s just possible that Sir Reginald sensed that we’d exchanged this look, because now his manner suddenly hardened and his voice was curt and contemptuous. ‘Look, Bedford, don’t work so hard trying to connect everything up socially, to explain why you’re here. You’re not so stupid, so why do you imagine we are?’ He moved away with the good-looking youth, who’d been waiting for him.

  Nadia drew me away in the opposite direction, as if she wanted me to admire one of the worst pictures of the Rhine that can ever have been painted. ‘Pretend you are looking at it,’ she hissed in my ear. ‘I have been wishing to talk to you ever since that night in London. And now you are here it is very important. Point at the picture.’

  I pointed. ‘Probably the most metallic greens of all time. Go on, Nadia. Where do we talk?’

  ‘After dinner there is music here and a lot of people. I will slip out and meet you outside the guest house. Let us say at quarter past nine. Now we must go back. You have seen the picture.’

  Direktor von Emmerick, who had changed into a dark suit, now made a big entrance. I lost Nadia and accepted another drink from Otto, and then we all went along a corridor behind the massive table, to the dining-room. It was in the same style as the hall, though not quite so ambitious, suitable for a minor baron. Even so there was plenty of room for thirty diners, and as there were only a dozen of us, this evening, we were spread rather widely around one table. Otto showed me my place, which was on the inferior side of the table, facing the entrance from the kitchen, and of course not the side where von Emmerick, Nadia and Merlan-Smith were sitting. I had Otto on my right; on my left the middle-aged wife of one of the German chemists. By this time I was feeling hungry, otherwise I’d have felt I was in for a dreary hour, which wouldn’t pass any faster because I was impatient to keep this date with Nadia.