Saturn Over the Water (22 page)

But the beginning of that escape from Osparas was almost slapstick. About quarter to two, the door was unlocked and in came the big German, Otto and Rother, followed by two waiters, one carrying a tray of food, the other a drink tray like the one we’d had the night before. The waiters put their stuff down and then left. The big German didn’t lock the door but stayed near it. I looked at the lunch, which included a large bowl of soup. Then I looked at Rother, who was hovering around and not looking very happy. The big German caught my eye, grinned again, and said ‘Blackjack,’ tapping his pocket.

Otto was impatient. ‘There is not so much time to waste,’ he said to me. ‘Eat the lunch if you do not want to see it taken away.’

‘You may not have much time, Otto,’ I said, ‘but I’ve lots of it. Go away – if you’re in a hurry. Anyhow, I want a drink first.’

‘Of course,’ cried Rother, prompt on cue. ‘Will you have
pisco
or whisky?’ He held up the
pisco
bottle as he spoke but I reached for the whisky.

At that moment a truck arrived outside the hut. Though it stopped, its engine was kept running. Otto and the big German stared and frowned at each other. The big German swung open the door but then immediately came backing in, his hands going up. It was the same nasty-looking automatic I’d seen in Santiago that Mr Jones was holding. Then before Otto, who’d no luck, could make a move, Rother had knocked him senseless with the
pisco
bottle he was still holding. It was my turn now and, putting down the whisky bottle, I took the blackjack out of the big German’s pocket and hit him nearly as hard as he’d hit me. ‘We go like bloody hell now, chaps,’ cried Mr Jones, clearing the doorway. Rother rushed out, and I stayed just long enough to grab my canvas bag and the whisky bottle.

Mr Jones had gone round to the front, to sit with the driver. Rother and I scrambled into the back, under cover. It was the same truck that had brought me here, and the same driver, Eugenio’s chum. What exactly happened on our way out of Osparas I never discovered. Rother and I were bouncing about at the back among sacks and old iron and decaying vegetables. I saw some fellows waving and running, and heard a few shouts above the bangs and rattling. Eugenio’s chum, who didn’t seem to need any encouragement from Mr Jones, knew all about rough going at full speed and charging round any sort of bend. He turned and twisted, banged across all manner of
verboten
places, and at one point seemed to crash a wooden barrier. Then we were roaring down the road through the woods to Peulla. I felt battered, bruised, half-deafened by the time we stopped at the lakeside. But I was out of Osparas.

We shook hands with Eugenio’s chum. We shook hands with Eugenio, waiting with his motorboat. The truck shot off in the opposite direction from Osparas. We got into the boat, which seemed smaller than ever now there were four of us, even if Rother didn’t take up much room. As the boat began to move out, very slowly and already pitching a bit, Rother drew himself up, sniffed the breeze, then said: ‘Gentlemen, I smell something I had almost forgotten. I think it is freedom.’

‘If so, your jolly old nose is deceiving you,’ cried Mr Jones. ‘But at least you have got away from those stinking Nazis.’

I asked him how the rescue had been planned.

‘O-ho, you think the gorgeous topping Countess helped me.’ Mr Jones wagged his head. ‘Yes, I saw her this morning at the rock. A capitalist-imperialist vamp. But she had nothing to do with our rescue operation, Bedford old boy. It had already been planned. With the help not of countesses but of waiters and cleaners, the people who are never noticed, who seem to the bosses part of the machinery. But they are men, they are women, they have eyes and ears and they wish to serve the Party. My friend, this is how we come to know so much. We have invisible eyes and ears in our service. That is how it was in Osparas. These little dark men in little white coats – they look all the same to big tall bosses – so who cares about them? We do, old top. Now you savvy?’

‘I twig, old bean. And I’m very grateful.’ I waited a moment. The boat was already lurching and shuddering. ‘Now I must tell you that my visit to Osparas was a dead failure. I saw the man I was looking for – Joe Farne. In fact they showed him to me as one of your men in little white coats. But then they spirited him away again – this time to Argentina, Dr Rother thinks.’

‘He is wrong,’ said Mr Jones. ‘That is what they may all think and say, but they talk out of their hats. Farne was brought down to Peulla by a waiter called Pablo Mandoza who was going home for a little holiday – to Puerto Montt. Pablo took Farne with him. I spoke with them myself at Peulla, the night before last. He is a sick man, this cousin of yours, Bedford old boy. Pablo was sorry for him. So was I. Now you will find him in Puerto Montt.’

‘Mr Jones, that’s wonderful,’ I cried, feeling immensely relieved. ‘You’re a marvel, you really are.’

‘I have been told so before, old chap,’ said Mr Jones complacently. But then his wide smile vanished. ‘I must speak with Eugenio.
He is not happy.’ Very slowly and carefully, for the boat was anything but steady now, he moved to where Eugenio was balancing himself behind the half-covered cockpit. As they talked in anxious whispers, I saw them look over their shoulders several times.

Then above the sound of the wind, which was rising, the chugging of the engine, the slapping and occasional crashing of the waves, I heard the roar of an engine far more powerful than ours. A big motorboat, probably one of the cabin cruisers, was somewhere behind us and rapidly catching us up. I began looking back too, but didn’t see anything at first. The waves were rising with the wind; a lot of spray was being whipped across; dark emerald ridges, with gleaming white tops, rose behind us. Poor Rother was no longer standing erect and filling his nostrils with the sweet smell of freedom; he was slumped down, his face nearly as green as the water. I made my way towards Mr Jones and shouted above the din to ask him what was wrong.

‘Eugenio says it is the big Osparas boat,’ he yelled. ‘They are after us – the Nazi blighters.’

We looked back together. Then it suddenly came roaring out of the mist and spray and tumbling water, a fast cabin cruiser, looking enormous. Unable to check itself at that speed, it went round us once in a wide circle, and then came in closer. Eugenio shut off his engine. Though the big boat had slowed up now, it went past us, but then the turbulent water threw us together. As we went shuddering into one trough, its twin propellers, high on the next ride of water, roared and glittered in the air. Both boats seemed to stay like that for some time, like two ships in an old picture, though I don’t suppose it could have been longer than twenty seconds. But it was long enough for Mr Jones to fire six shots from his automatic at those propellers.

I didn’t know what the damage was or what was happening aboard the cabin cruiser, because, as Eugenio set us going again, we suddenly took a bad roll, first away from the other boat, then dipping so deep towards it that Mr Jones and I were flung down, holding on to anything we could find. It was then we heard a burst from the big boat, probably from a sub-machine-gun, pinging over our heads and then cracking into something. The water rose like a sudden darkness between us and the other boat. Neither Eugenio nor his engine had been hit, and between them they sent us crashing and shuddering, high water piling up behind us, at least out of sight, if not out of range. But Rother had been hit twice, through the left shoulder and somewhere near the right lung.

The next four hours were slow murder. We had to do what we could for Rother, and doing the simplest thing, just getting a shirt out of my bag and tearing it for bandages, wasn’t easy in that boat. Mr Jones and I had done similar jobs before but neither of us was in the hospital orderly class, and even the Royal College of Surgeons wouldn’t have been very neat and deft on Emerald Lake that afternoon. But we got poor Rother tied up somehow, at least stopping the flow of blood. Then, past caring whether it was good or bad for wounds, we poured some of that whisky I’d brought into him, and, after some choking and retching and general misery, he passed out. We waited until Eugenio was able to steady the boat down a bit, and then between the three of us we managed to wedge our poor little casualty into the cockpit, packing him round with our canvas bags and some sacks, and leaving Eugenio only barely sufficient space in which to attend to that half-hearted old engine of his. But Rother was warm in there and wouldn’t be bounced overboard. He looked terrible, the ghost of a gnome. Mr Jones said he’d live, but I doubted it. He and I and Eugenio then took turns at the whisky bottle.

An hour later I was beginning to wish I’d passed out with Rother. It was a hell of a trip. Clouds boiled round the mountains; winds came whistling through the passes; and that damnable green lake lashed itself into a fury. It would have been no joke in any kind of craft; even that big cabin cruiser we’d knocked out and left behind would have done plenty of pitching and rolling, bouncing and quivering; but in that little old motorboat, hardly moving forward sometimes, only up and down and almost round and round, we took a murderous beating. I don’t know what Mr Jones and Eugenio felt – we didn’t try to talk any longer – but I know that I felt cold, battered, sick and terrified. I’d been in some dangerous situations before, probably closer to death than I was that afternoon, and I hadn’t felt too bad. But this was different. Once the boat was swamped or we were all swept over the side, that mad green lake, probably a mile deep and ice cold, had us for ever. And it was all such a hell of a way from anywhere. Nobody would ever know what had become of me. ‘Never see Tim Bedford around these days,’ they’d say at the club, while the last bits of me were being chewed by deep lake monsters. And if only cowards die a hundred deaths, then I go with the cowards. That treacherous bitch of a lake, suddenly turning itself into the North Atlantic, shot me up, sent me shuddering down, banged and battered and bashed me, wearing out all fortitude, hammering the old gold of manhood into the thinnest quivering leaf.

Eugenio, the giggler, the dark skeleton, the minimum ration of leathery dried flesh, was the hero that afternoon. He was Man against all the bitter elements. He was the unconquerable spirit. His engine tried to pack it up time and time again; his boat lost all hope under the weight and crash of the waves, was ready to turn in circles, split or be swamped, go down for ever; but the indomitable Eugenio was still their master, and never once did he give any sign of despair. And at last he brought us into the calmer waters within sight of Petrohué. I made him finish what was left of the whisky. He said ‘Goot ’ealt’,’ and giggled.

Before we landed I had a row with Mr Jones. I said Rother must be taken to the nearest hospital at once. Mr Jones wouldn’t have it. He said the journey to Puerto Montt or Valdivia would do Rother no good, and that he knew a quiet farm only a few miles from Ensenada where Rother could be visited by a doctor and could rest until he recovered. On the other hand, as soon as Rother arrived in hospital with two bullet wounds, the police would be called in, the Osparas people would be asked for their evidence, and he, Mr Jones, he declared emphatically, would ‘be in the soup, old chap.’ We argued all the way into Petrohué about this. He won in the end only because he brought Eugenio in on his side, Eugenio having an equal dislike of dealing with the police, and also because he persuaded me, against my earlier and sounder judgment, that poor Rother was really in better shape than he appeared to be. Indeed, Mr Jones talked about ‘clean bullet wounds’ almost as if they did a man good. So I gave in. Though immensely relieved to be out of that emerald nightmare, I wasn’t feeling in the best of shapes myself. I was soaked through. So were Mr Jones and Eugenio, but I was shivering and letting my teeth chatter, and they weren’t. Either they were tougher than I was, or I was too far from my home ground. There wasn’t much here at Petrohué, just a few buildings between the end of the lake and the wooded slopes, and on what there was of it darkness and rain were now falling.

While Mr Jones and Eugenio went off to make their arrangements for getting Rother away, I sat in the cockpit with him. He was very weak but conscious again. He didn’t know what had happened between the two boats – he’d been feeling deathly sick at the time Mr Jones used his automatic on the propellers – and that had to be explained to him, as well as the decision about not taking him to hospital. Here, to my surprise, he agreed with Mr Jones, and he gave me the impression that he preferred taking any risk so long as von Emmerick didn’t learn where he was. He spoke slowly, in a faint voice, but I couldn’t stop him talking.

‘It is funny how life works out,’ he said. ‘I was a young chemist, a scientist, a young man who believed in reason. A citizen of the new reasonable German Republic. I remember making a long speech – one of those long speeches young men like to make when they are in love and have had a few glasses of wine. I made it to Anna just before we married. I said there was now a life, founded on reason, shaped by it, waiting for us, for everybody. So!’ The little oil lamp gave us just sufficient light for me to see the ironical smile on his ghostly gnome’s face. ‘That is what I said, what I believed. A rational life for us, for all. And ever since I have been at the mercy of madmen. First, Hitler and Göring, Himmler and Goebbels. And now the Arnaldos Institute and Osparas, outposts of some organised madness. Even if I escape it is with Mr Jones, who behind his fatness and little jokes is also a madman. So I go somewhere to recover. For what? For whom? Why?’

He never did recover. He didn’t want to. I remember the young doctor, an undercover Party member Mr Jones discovered for us somewhere in the neighbourhood of Puerto Montt, telling me that, two or three days later. It was a few hours after little Rother had turned his face to the wall to die. By that time I was a patient too, kept in bed because I was now running a high temperature. It was a very uncomfortable bed, out of which two children had been turned, in a bare back room, cold yet fusty and rank, as if a hundred children had been emptying their bowels and bladders in it for years. Some tattered fowls and a goat kept wandering in and out. The doctor was too young and very worried. He had one of those paper-thin faces that have prominent and too-vulnerable eyes, set like the eyes of some peculiar delicate animal. When my temperature was very high and nothing made any sense, for two or three days following the death of Rother, and he came close to peer at me, his face might almost have been painted on a Chinese lantern, swaying and bobbing in a breeze. But even then I could sense the baffled anxiety in him. Several times since, when sleep must have released a similar feeling in me, I’ve been back in that room returning the stare of a dream face like his. I don’t know whether I needed the powerful anti-biotics he finally fed me with, but about ten days after our rough passage on Emerald Lake, I was up again, feeling empty and shaky, and a mile deep in a black depression.