Saturn Over the Water (17 page)

‘Not more than I do. I’ve spent the last week wondering what the hell it means, Mr Jones. But as long as you’re against these people at Osparas, I’ll tell you why I want that badge or whatever it is. I thought I might use it to bluff my way into that organisation down there, so that I could find out if my cousin’s there. That figure eight above a wavy line stands for something – ’

‘It replaces the swastika perhaps. A new secret Nazism.’ Mr Jones was friendlier now, almost his old self. ‘We have been warned to look for it. Southern Chile, around Valdivia, has had a German community for a hundred years, Mr Bedford. They speak German. They refuse to assimilate. Many of them were Nazi sympathisers in the war. What are your own political opinions, Mr Bedford?’

‘I’m anti-Communist,’ I replied promptly. ‘I’m also anti-capitalist. I’m anti the whole goddam political mess the world’s in nowadays – ’

‘That is childish, my friend – ’

‘Then I’m childish. And there are a whale of a lot of other people who are also childish, mostly the kind I like. But as you’ve called me your friend and have put that gun down, I’ll tell you something. When you call these people at Osparas and elsewhere so many new undercover Nazis, I believe you’re on the wrong track. I was told that in Peru, but after giving it some thought I turned down the idea. It’s too simple and it doesn’t fit all the facts.’

Here I was interrupted by Danelli, who was probably wondering what was happening to his party and was anxious too to settle the badge transaction. Mr Jones seemed to agree with whatever he said to him, and now handed over the badge and asked me to let him have some extra
pesos
. When I had passed him the notes, he said: ‘I will strike a bargain with you, Mr Bedford, a jolly good bargain from your point of view. You wish to find your cousin at Osparas, to rescue him perhaps – ’

‘I assure you that’s why I’m here. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’ll have a dam’ good try.’

‘I believe you, old boy,’ said Mr Jones solemnly. ‘But we strike a bargain. I come with you to Emerald Lake, I give you all the help I can – and I have some friends even in those parts – if I can question your cousin. And of course you too, after you have been to Osparas. You agree?’

‘All right, Mr Jones. We form a temporary alliance. You think these people are Nazis, I think they’re something else, though God knows what. But we’re against them. So – ’

‘We shake hands.’ He came off the bed with his hand outstretched. ‘Topping!’ We shook hands, and then I had to shake hands with Danelli and the two young men, comrades all. We had drinks all round, and ten minutes later the two young men were driving Mr Jones and me to my hotel. The same young men in the same car took us out to the airport in the morning.

And that is how I came to fly south, bumpily in an old Dakota, wedged in beside a fat Soviet agent called Jones. During the last two hours, the country we flew over, perhaps trying to match our expedition, quietly went mad. We might have been flying into one of those Chinese brush drawings in which mountains, volcanic peaks, lakes, waterfalls, trees and clouds are all dissolving into one another.

‘What did I tell you, old boy?’ said Mr Jones as we came bouncing to our last stop. It was dusk now over the field that served as Puerto Montt’s airport. ‘Jolly good scenery down here, topping stuff.’

‘I’ll bet.’ But all I felt just then was that I was a hell of a long way from anywhere.

10

I must hand it to Mr Jones: he saved me a lot of trouble and time. I don’t know how good he was as a secret agent, but as a courier and travel arranger he was superb. Everything we needed was laid on without any fuss. Various odd types would pop up, exchange a few words with him, then all would be settled. Whether they were Party comrades or merely old acquaintances, I never knew. We were driven from the airfield to a place called Puerto Varas, where we stayed at an hotel overlooking a lake I couldn’t see, the night being very dark. After dinner, in the bar, Mr Jones showed me a map of the district.

‘We are here, you see, old boy,’ he said, pointing. ‘At the most south point of Lake Llanquihue. In the morning we go by car along this shore of the lake to Ensenada, that small place there. Then we go – not so jolly good – to this very small place here, Petrohué. A motor boat will be ready for us at Petrohué.’

‘But why? We don’t want to go on
Lago Todos los Santos
,
do we?’

‘Absolutely, old boy.’ He chuckled. I know people are often described as chuckling when they’re not, but Mr Jones, being built for it, really could chuckle. By this time he’d had a good many drinks, but all they did was to increase his ration of ancient English slang and bring out his chuckles. He was one of those heavy men in their fifties who are perhaps never quite sober at any time but are able to drink for hours and hours without ever getting plastered. ‘This lake is so green that its other name is Esmeralda. Emerald Lake, old boy.’

As he looked at me in triumph and began chuckling again, I suddenly thought of poor Joe Farne scribbling that last letter and somehow, for all his obvious haste at the end, getting somebody to post it for him somewhere among these lakes and volcanoes. Then I was back in that train from Cambridge, looking at Joe’s odd list properly for the first time, then seeing Mitchell staring at me. I’d almost forgotten Mitchell. Where was he now?

Mr Jones, as I insisted upon calling him, even to myself, was pointing at the map. ‘Yes, that’s your Emerald Lake, old boy. Now look.’ His fat forefinger moved along the lake. ‘The motor boat takes us to the other end – there, to Peulla. It has an hotel for tourists, and that is where I shall be. Now you see the little road going round what is left of the lake up there? A few kilometres up that road is Osparas, where you are going, old boy.’

‘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 prove 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.