This brief address was received, not unsurprisingly, in total silence. Otto, predictably, was the one to break the silence: he cleared his throat and said carefully: "You claim to know this man's identity?"
I do."
`You can substantiate this claim!'
"Prove it, you mean?"
"Yes.
"No, I can't."
"Ah!" Otto said significantly. He looked around the company and said: "You're taking rather much upon yourself, are you not?"
In what way?"
"This rather dictatorial attitude you've been increasingly adopting. Good God, man, if you've found, or think you've found our man, for God's sake tell us and don't make this big production out of it. It ill becomes any man to play God. Dr. Marlowe, I would remind you that you're but one of a group, an employee, if you like, of Olympus Productions, just like-"
I am not an employee of Olympus Productions. I am an employee of the British Treasury who has been sent to investigate certain aspects of Olympus Productions Ltd. Those investigations are now completed."
Otto overreacted to the extent that he let his drop. Goin didn't react much but his smooth and habitually bland face took a wary expression that was quite foreign to it. Heissman said incredulously: "A government agent! A secret service-"
"You've got your countries mixed up. Government agents work for the U. S. Treasury, not the British one. I'm just a civil servant and I've never fired a pistol in my life far less carry one. I have as much official power as a postman or a Whitehall clerk. No more. That's why I'm asking for cooperation." I looked at Otto. "That's why I'm offering you what I regard as the courtesy of a prior consultation."
"Investigations" " Clearly, I'd lost Otto at least half a minute previously.
"What kind of investigations? And how does it come that a man hired as doctor Otto broke off., shaking his head in the classic manner of one baffled beyond all hope of illumination.
"How do you think it came that none of the seven other applicants for the post of medical officers turned up for an interview? They don't teach us much about manners in medical school but we're not as rude as that.
Shall we go?"
Goin said calmly: "I think, Otto, that we should hear what he has to say."
I think I'd like to hear what you have to say, too," Conrad said. He was one of the very few in the cabin who wasn't looking at me as if I were some creature from outer space.
"I'm sure you would. However, I'm afraid you'll have to remain. But I would like a private word with You, if I may. I turned without waiting for an answer and made for my cubicle. Otto barred my way.
"There's nothing you can have to say to Charles that you can't say to all of us."
"How do you know?" I brushed roughly by him and closed the door when Conrad entered the cubicle. I said: I don't want you to come for two reasons. If our friends arrive, they may miss me down at the jetty and come straight here-I'd like You in that case to tell them where I am. More importantly, I'd like you to keep an eye on Jungbeck. If he tries to leave, try to reason with him. If he won't listen to reason, let him go-about three feel?. If you can kind of naturally happen to have a full bottle of Scotch or suchlike in your hand at the time then clobber him with all you have. Not on the head-that would kill him. On the shoulder, close in to the neck. You'll probably break the odd bone: in any event it will surely incapacitate him."
Conrad didn't as much as raise an eyebrow. He said: I can see why you don't bother with guns."
"Socially and otherwise," I said, "a bottle of Scotch is a great leveller."
I'd taken a Coleman storm lantern along with me and now hung it on a rung of the vertical iron ladder leading down from the conning tower to the interior of the submarine mock-up: its harsh glare threw that icily dank metallic tomb into a weirdly heterogeneous melange of dazzling white and inkily black geometrical patterns. While the others watched me in a far from friendly silence I unscrewed one of the wooden floor battens , lifted and placed a ballast bar on top of the compressor and scraped at the surface with the blade of my knife,
"You will observe," I said to Otto, "that I am not making a production of this. Prologues dispensed with, we arrive at the point without waste of time." I closed my knife and inspected the handiwork it had wrought.
"All that glitters is not gold. But does this look like toffee to you?"
I looked at them each in turn. Clearly, it didn't look like toffee to any of them.
"A total lack of reaction, a total lack of surprise." I put my knife back in my pocket and smiled at the stiffening attitudes of three out of the four of them. "Scout's honour, we civil servants never carry guns. And why should there be surprise even at the fact of my knowledge-all four of you have been perfectly well aware for some time that I am not what I was engaged to be. And why should any of you express surprise at the sight of this gold-after all, that was the only reason for your coming to Bear Island in the first place."
They said nothing. Curiously enough, they weren't even looking at me, they were all looking at the gold ingot as if it were vastly more important than I was, which, from their point of view, was probably a perfectly understandable priority preference.
"Dear me, dear me," I said. "Where are all the instant denials, the holier than-thou clutching of the hearts, the outraged cries of "What in God's name are you talking about'? I would think, wouldn't you, that the unbiassed observer would find this negative reaction every bit as incriminating as a written confession?" I looked at them with what might have been interpreted as an encouraging expression but again-apart from Heissman's apparently finding it necessary to lubricate his lower lip with the tip of his tongue-I elicited no response, so I went on: "It was, as even your defending counsel will have to admit in court, a clever and well-thoughtout scheme. Would any of you care to tell me what the scheme was?"
It is my opinion, Dr. Marlowe," Otto said magisterially, "that the strain of the past few days has made you mentally unbalanced."
"Not a bad reaction at all," I said approvingly. "Unfortunately, you're about two minutes too late in coming up with it. No volunteers to set the scene, then? Do we suffer from an excess of modesty or just a lack of cooperation? Wouldn't you, for instance, Mr. Goin, care to say a few words?
After all, you are in my debt. Without me, without our dramatic little confrontation, you'd have been dead before the week was out."
I think Mr. Gerran is right," Goin said in that measured voice he knew so well how to use. "Me? About to die?" He shook his head. "The strain for you must have been intolerable. Under such circumstances, as a medical man, you should know that a person's imagination can easily-"
"Imagination? Am I imagining this forty-pound gold ingot?" I pointed to the ballast bars below the battens. "Am I imagining those other fifteen ingots there? Am I imagining the hundred-odd ingots piled in a rock shelf inside the Perleporten? Am I imagining the fact that your total lack of reaction to the word Perleporten demonstrates beyond question that you all know what Perleporten is, where it is, and what its significance is? Am I imagining the scores of other lead-sheathed ingots still under water in the Perleporten? Let's stop playing silly little games for your own game is up. As I say, quite a clever little game while it lasted. What better cover for a bullion-recovery trip to the Arctic than a film unit-after all, film people are widely regarded as being eccentric to the extent of being lunatic so that even their most ludicrous behaviour is accepted as being normal within its own abnormal context? What better time to set out to achieve the recovery of this bullion than when there are only a few hours" daylight so that the recovery operation can be carried out through the long hours of darkness? What better way of bringing the bullion back to Britain than by switching it with this vessel's ballast so that it can be slipped into the country under the eyes of the Customs authorities?" I surveyed the ballast. "Four tons, according to this splendid brochure that Mr. Heissman wrote. I'd put it nearer five. Say ten million dollars, justifies a trip to even an out-of-the-way resort like Bear Island, I'd say. Wouldn't you?"