Undertow

by Desmond Cory

  “You forget I wasn’t educated in a public school.”

  “. . . I think,” said Elsa, turning back towards them rather abruptly, “I will now. show you our diving equipment. That’ll interest you more, won’t it? It isn’t science, after all, so much as sport.”

  “Sport, eh?” said Trout enthusiastically, back-pedalling to let her move past him. “Bang on. We definitely care for that.” They went back into the corridor. Elsa locked the door carefully behind her, then led the way towards the foredeck; stopping outside a white-painted door on the port side bearing the stencilled inscription, ALMACEN. It wasn’t locked. The room behind it was smaller than the other; most of the available space within was taken up by stacks of compressed-air cylinders; on the shelves to the right were a half-dozen or so rubber diving masks, and hanging from hooks on the walls was a varied selection of harpoon-guns, hand-nets and barbed spears of a sufficiently murderous appearance. “Sport,” said Trout, “I thought you said? Looks more like the tribal arsenal of the Chippeway Indians.”

  “Here we keep our diving gear,” said Elsa, ignoring him. “Aqualungs and so forth. Nowadays we study marine biology in the field as much as we can, just as other naturalists do. This equipment makes it possible. Here you see the case for the underwater camera. Very important and very expensive, I’m afraid. The Klieg lights we use are stored on the rack above. They are very powerful. They have to be. These tubes contain compressed air. A diver normally carries two of them and each one lasts about an hour. In fact we hardly ever dive for more than forty-five minutes. Longer is sometimes dangerous, psychologically speaking. Have you ever done any diving, Mr. Fedora?”

  “I’ve been down once or twice,” said Johnny. “That was in England, though. I had a frogman’s suit.”

  “A frogman, yes, that’s what you call it. Well, but here we work at quite shallow depths and the water is warm, especially in the summer, so we don’t need special suits. I usually wear a bikini.”

  “Ah,” said Trout. “Now we see what you meant.”

  “These are geological hammers,” said Elsa, picking one up purposefully. “Hammers and chisels, for taking rock samples. We label them and keep them in specimen cases for classification later. These are tape pleasures. Accurate measurements are very important, Mr. Trout, particularly when one wears a bikini. Mine are 36-23-35. I can therefore wear a two-foot belt, like this one; you load them with lead weights according to the depth you expect to be swimming at. Yours would need to be about three foot six, I imagine.”

  “Oh here! I say!” said Trout.

  “Under water, you can check your depth with this instrument which you strap to your wrist like a watch. It measures the hydrostatic pressure. We also have photo-electric instruments for measuring the amount of light reaching any given surface. Very sensitive, of course, for undersea work. Our equipment is really very complete. In the far comer is the high explosive.”

  “High explosive?” said Trout, startled. “Where?”

  “Plastic eight-oh-eight. It’s quite safe, it won’t go off unless it’s detonated. We use it to clear superficial sand from a rocky surface, or to break up rock specimens, and sometimes to kill all the fish within a given area so that we can check on them statistically. Fish are very sensitive to vibrations, and you can kill an awful lot of them with a very little H.E. You’d be surprised.”

  “I am,” said Trout. “I am. And the, er, harpoons?”

  “For single specimens. We don’t use them a lot, though. The main advantage of the aqualung equipment is that it enables us to study the living animals in their natural habitat. Once they are dead, they’re laboratory cases.” She shrugged. “Of course, there’s plenty of work to be done in the laboratory still. Dissection, analysis of organs, classification. But field study is much more interesting. It’s very beautiful, down there in the water. If you’ve only tried it in the north you’ll have no idea how clear the Mediterranean can be. We could dive now for a few minutes, if you liked.” Fedora was in fact already trying on one of the masks. It seemed to fit him snugly enough; a circle of stiff rubber that moulded itself to his forehead, cheeks and upper lip with a six-inch oval of mica before his eyes, giving him a wider field of vision than he had expected. “We haven’t any swimming trunks,” he said regretfully.

  “Oh, I can lend you some. Not mine, of course. Mine wouldn’t fit. But we have some spares.”

  Johnny pulled off the visor, looked at Trout. “What do you think? Care for a dip?”

  “I rather think so,” said Trout. “Sounds more fun than analysing organs.”

  MALAGA was sweltering in the morning sunshine. The street outside the office was deserted. When the bald man reached to lower the blind, the little room was instantly tinged with greenish light like the inside of a grotto or of a tank in an aquarium. Feramontov was instantly reminded of the specimen tank aboard the Polarlys; Bruniev’s great hairless dome, swimming uncertainly to and fro in the sudden dimness, certainly bore a resemblance to the bell of a jellyfish. The idea was fanciful, though; Feramontov abandoned it at once.

  “If I’m not mistaken,” he said, as the other man sat down at the desk and began to leaf abstractedly through the folders there, “Fedora is what on our side we should call a liquidator. And a good one.”

  “A good one,” said Bruniev, “and a lucky one. Yes.”

  “But just how lucky?”

  “I’ve got the report here,” said Bruniev, his shiny head lowered now over the papers. “It seems he started off with the Special Operations Executive when he was barely twenty years old. And this is the liquidation list. Gailland, the collaborationist. Hartmann of the Gestapo. Kreisler, who was on the Lagenunabhangige torpedo project, and Mohr who was on the V.2’s. Busch and Schnee, just when they thought they’d got the answer to the British microwave radar. Kiefer of the Gestapo. Those are all definite. There’s a dozen more ‘attributed’. Then after the war, he broke up neo-Nazi groups running in England and Paris, he killed Karl Mayer in Austria and Panagos in Trieste, and he spoilt one of our little efforts when he shot Gino Palli. He killed Per Gunnar Holmgren up in Sweden while our agents were still dithering about in Venice, and he’s thought to have had a hand in that funny business last year down in Argentina. All in all, he’d make for quite a nasty problem if his removal was ever considered necessary. Even for someone like Moreno. As it is,” he said, closing the folder with a little flip, “I’m not convinced that it is necessary, or even advisable.”

  “You can’t believe that he’s there in Marbella purely through coincidence?”

  Bruniev lifted his hands into the air like a Spaniard—a gesture so conscientiously rehearsed as to seem altogether natural. “Coincidences happen. All our agents’ reports seem to indicate that he’s there by chance. I don’t feel that Head Office would accept any change of plan because he’s there. It’s just an incidental hazard like any other.”

  “I’m sorry you take that point of view.”

  “What point of view do you expect me to take? You have your instructions and I have no authority to rescind them. Quite the reverse.”

  Feramontov nodded. “But you have the authority to delegate me a few expert assistants, should I decide them to be necessary.”

  “On a liquidation project?”

  “That’s what we were talking about, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, but. . . . Yes. I have.”

  “Good. That was the point I wished to clarify. You’ll realise that we can’t involve Moreno in the matter; he’s far too valuable. Except possibly. . . .” Feramontov allowed the corners of his mouth to turn briefly upwards in something not very like a smile. “Elsa is at this moment persuading them to take up skin-diving. Elsa can be very persuasive, when she chooses. And at fifteen or twenty fathoms’ depth, accidents have been known to happen to inexperienced divers.”

  “You like to slant the odds.”

  “Naturally. That’s common sense. Fedora may be up to Moreno’s weight on land,” said Feramontov, st
retching himself luxuriously, “but I doubt if he’ll be as good in the water. Or as lucky. Thirty feet down—that’s where we want him.”

  “Thirty feet down,” said Bruniev dubiously. “I see. . .

  . . . But Fedora, in a mild way, was enjoying himself.

  He was absolutely alone. He was as though tucked away inside a tiny glass-fronted case; he was inside the glass, everything else was outside. Everything, including his own body. His hands, appearing from time to time a foot or so in front of his face, no longer seemed to belong to him; they were strange inanimate objects whose movements were somehow co-related to his own muscular contractions. Elsa was swimming a couple of yards to his left and slightly lower, Trout rather farther to his right; neither of them mattered; they had nothing to do with him, nothing whatsoever. Fedora was a pair of eyes and a brain behind a vaseline-smeared plastic panel; human beings no longer had any connection with him, because he was no longer human. He was disembodied spirit. He was something between a bird, a space traveller and a fish.

  At first, swimming on the surface and watching the smoothly wrinkled sands move by some twenty feet beneath him, he had felt a powerful and unpleasant sense of vertigo; but once they had all three tucked down their heads and dived to the harbour floor, his unease had disappeared and he had become—in a paradoxical way—at home. The lead weights in his belt no longer tugged him downwards, his stomach no longer felt as though it might at any moment be sucked down and away from him in an invisible spiralling vortex. He was, in fact, no longer conscious of weight at all.

  Experiment showed that he could roll over on to his back, sit on the water with his feet just clear of the sand at the bottom, spin himself round and round like a diving aeroplane—all without the slightest difficulty or discomfort. It wasn’t tiring. It was relaxing, if anything. And Elsa had been right about the beauty of the sea bottom. Fedora, as it happened, was normally unappreciative of natural beauty, but the world of the sea bed fascinated him—perhaps because its beauty wasn’t natural at all; it was un-natural, fantastic.

  Looking up, he could see the sunlight broken by the wavelets on the surface into shuddering, boiling bands and flecks, into streamers of bright gold and orange that became suddenly alive with all the colours of the prism; and he could see the bubbles of his own breath rising swiftly, colourless like pearls, then glinting as though with flame as they reached that surface froth, mingled with it and disappeared. Around him he could see fish, fish like grey ghosts, fleeing and twisting through the dim depths of the harbour; a whole shoal glinting like a shower of silver daggers as they turned together away from the approaching swimmers. The sea bed there was of fine white sand, almost free of seaweed, but on isolated clusters of rock he saw an occasional blaze of writhing colour, of red and blue laminaria fronded like palm leaves and moving in the undercurrents as in a slow, strong wind. On the sand itself, small crabs scuttled to and fro, vanishing as his shadow loomed over them, and ugly, tiny fishes like blennies with great staring eyes burrowed deep down and out of sight. He saw no big fish, nothing of more than a foot in length, but he hadn’t expected to. No jellyfish either, thank goodness. If any were about, they would be higher up, near the surface.

  Elsa led them round the harbour in a slow, swinging circle until they came up against the wall; they turned then to follow it round to where the yacht lay moored. Fedora was aware, in that strange dissociated way, of the general direction they were taking as he was aware of Elsa’s movements to his left; sometimes she was close, almost brushing his elbow, at other times shooting casually forward like a torpedo with a few quick stabs of her blue flippers, pivoting in mid-flight to flash down to sand level and to dig her outstretched fingers into the soft sea floor. She was seeing numberless things that he was missing, but then she knew exactly what to look for. This was like the African jungle that Fedora knew so well; underwater, one had to learn to use one’s eyes all over again. Like the Congo, but not so dangerous, of course. Or was it? . . .

  She showed him one of her captures before slipping it into the fine-mesh string bag she wore clipped to her belt. It looked like a snail, a large white snail. Nothing dangerous there, certainly. Fedora gestured with one hand to convey his congratulations, and swam on. Suddenly, a vast dark shadow clouding over the surface. . . . What the hell would that be? He peered upwards, perplexed, though not for more than a moment. The hull of the Polarlys, of course; they were back at their starting-point. He looked to his left and saw Elsa’s brown near-naked body swinging upwards, rising towards the surface with the speed of a demon king disappearing in the last act of a pantomime; then Trout, making rather heavier weather of it, rising in pursuit. Johnny, too, began to plough his way upwards; another strange sensation—having to swim for the surface instead of bobbing straight up like a cork. The lead weights, of course. Might be awkward, that, if one were tired.

  Even so, he broke surface fast enough to throw his arms and shoulders clear of the water, and one of his ears gave a disapproving pop. Elsa was already scrambling up the rope-ladder that led to the deck; Trout was treading water at the foot, waiting for him. He spat the breathing-tube out of his mouth, pulled fresh air into his lungs. “Good, wasn’t it?” he said. “We ought to have tried it before.”

  “Well, we have,” said Trout.

  “I know, but it’s different here. You can see things. I’m going to take this up.”

  “It’s one way of keeping out the rain.”

  They climbed up to the deck, carrying their flippers looped over their left forearms. Elsa had spread out on a canvas the contents of her bag, and the Professor was kneeling beside her in a posture suggestive of a broody hen about to lay an egg. He and Elsa poked the various specimens to and fro with their fingertips and conversed in staccato German; Johnny leaned over Elsa’s bare brown shoulder to examine the collection more closely. “What was the one you showed me?”

  “This. A burrowing snail. Common, but not always easy to find.”

  “It looked different down there.”

  “Yes. Prettier. They always do.”

  The Professor picked up the smooth white shell, traced its convolutions with a fingernail. “Natica,” he said, “Natica alderi. Yes, is very widespread. Carnivorous, you know. Will attack small bivalves; bores a hole through the shell, inserts proboscis, eats up. A fierce animal, you see.” He chuckled obscenely into his beard. “Is interesting as it bores its hole by means of chemical agencies contained in special gland. The dog-whelk—you remember I tell you about the dog-whelk, nucella?—it does the same thing but bores with a lingual ribbon. Process is mechanical.” He paused to consider for a moment, as though suspecting that the topic of methods of boring might hold some other, unrelated connotation. “Nucella and natica are two very terrible killers, although they don’t look it. In the sea is the same law as on the land. Kill or be killed. You will have thought the life underwater to be calm, peaceful, tranquil. Not so.”

  Elsa stood up and moved casually a pace or two, removing her swimming-helmet and letting her hair fall loose to her shoulders in a rich, dark, sun-catching cascade. “I suppose,” said Johnny, watching her, “there’s nothing in these waters dangerous to human beings?”

  “Oh no,” said the Professor. “Fish are like wild animals. They rarely attack unless they are first attacked, or unless there is blood in the water. Sharks, not even. Though some fish, of course, are curious. Especially the octopus. The octopus is . . . is . . .” He looked at Elsa. “. . . Wissbegierig.”

  “Inquisitive.”

  “Yes, yes, is an inquisitive animal. Are many in these waters, but very small ones. They don’t represent a danger.” His eyes again grew pale and thoughtful behind their pebbled lenses, as though some other new idea had entered his mind; then he, too, got to his feet, wiping his fingers on the front of his shirt. “. . . Tonight, gentlemen, we have a little party. This is for members of the expedition, strictly speaking. But we shall be pleased if you will also come.”

  “A party?
”

  “Yes, yes, a little wine-drinking, that’s all, but we shall be pleased to have you.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yes, tonight,” said Elsa. “Please come. It is nice for us to entertain strangers. It makes a change.”

  “Well, thank you,” said Fedora. “We’d like to come.”

  THREE hundred feet above the coastline, the Sikorsky helicopter shuddered as it ploughed through the afterdusk vectors of warm rising air; Valera, crouched down in the cupola, was beginning to feel a little sick, though naturally he did his best to conceal that fact. It had been a long flight; Malaga to Cadiz, and now back again, with innumerable investigatory detours and circlings. Nothing to report Now it was dark, or very nearly, and the sea a black pall of sullen movement stretched out to the south. The darkness made little difference from the patroller’s viewpoint; the radar picked out with perfect accuracy every spot on the sea larger than a floating seagull. But the radar was the concern of one man only, its operator; Valera could see nothing now, and he felt tired, useless, hungry, cramped and bored, more or less in that order of urgency.

  The radio ticked out a message somewhere in front and, after a pause, the observer turned in his seat to hand Valera the scrawled message. Nothing unaccounted for; the same as usual. The coast patrols would be broadcasting the same message on their walkie-talkies. Valera glanced sideways at his companion, uncertain whether or not to wake him up; then saw that the round toad-like eyes with their flat lids were wide open. “Nothing unaccounted for,” he said. “That’s from Bible Four at Estepona. We won’t hear anything else from them before we get to Malaga.”

  Acuña yawned. “Awwwwww,” he said.

  “We’re drawing a rain cheque, aren’t we? Either he’s sitting good and tight, or else he’s got away already.”

  “Or else,” said Acuña lazily, “he’s got a good cover. What did you expect?”