The first twenty miles were easy. On the way up from the coast, over four months previously, we had planted big marker flags at intervals of half a mile. On a night such as this, with the moonlight flooding the ice-cap, these trail flags, a bright luminous orange in colour and mounted on aluminium poles stuck in snow beacons, were visible at a great distance, with never less than two and sometimes three in sight at the same time, the long glistening frost feathers stretching out from the poles sometimes twice the length of the flags themselves. We counted twenty-eight of these flags altogether—about a dozen were missing—then, after a sudden dip in the land, completely lost them: whether they had blown away or just drifted under it was impossible to say.
"Well, there it is, Jackstraw," I said resignedly. "This is where one of us starts getting cold. Really cold."
"We've been cold before, Dr Mason. Me first." He slid the magnetic compass off its brackets, started to unreel a cable from a spool under the dashboard, then jumped out, still unwinding the cable, while I followed to help. Despite the fact that the magnetic north pole is nowhere near the north pole—at that time it was almost a thousand miles south of it and lay more to the west than north of us—a magnetic compass, when proper variation allowances are made, is still useful in high latitudes: but because of the counter-acting magnetic effects of a large mass of metal, it was quite useless when mounted on the tractor itself. Our plan, therefore, was that someone should He with the compass on the dog-sled, fifty feet behind the tractor, and, by means of a switch which operated red and green lights in the tractor dashboard, guide the driver to left or right. It wasn't our original idea, it wasn't even a recent idea: it had been used in the Antarctic a quarter century previously but, as far as I knew, had not been improved upon yet.
With Jackstraw established on the sledge, I walked back to the tractor and pushed aside the canvas screen at the back of the wooden body. What with the faces of the passengers, drawn and pinched and weirdly pale in the light of the tiny overhead bulb, the constant shivering, the chattering of teeth and the frozen breath drifting upwards to condense and freeze on the wooden roof, it was a picture of utter and abject misery: but I was in no mood to be moved at that moment.
"Sorry for the delay," I said. "Just off again now. But I want one of you for a lookout."
Both Zagero and Corazzini volunteered almost in the same breath, but I shook my head.
"You two get what sleep or rest you can—I'm liable to need you very much later on. Perhaps you, Mr Mahler?"
He looked pale and ill, but he nodded silently, and Zagero said in a quiet voice: "Corazzini and myself too high up on the list of suspects, huh?"
"I wouldn't put either of you at the very foot," I said shortly. I waited till Mahler had climbed down then dropped the canvas and walked round to the driver's seat.
Theodore Mahler, strangely enough, proved only too anxious to talk—and keep on talking. It was so completely out of keeping with the idea I had formed of his character that I was more than surprised. Loneliness, perhaps, I thought, or trying to forget the situation, or trying to divert my thoughts and suspicions: how wrong I was on all three counts I wasn't to find out until later.
"Well, Mr Mahler, it looks as if the itinerary of your European trip is going to be upset a bit." I had almost to shout to make my words heard above the roar of the tractor.
"Not Europe, Dr Mason." I could hear the machine-gun-like chatter of his teeth. "Israel."
"You live there?"
"Never been there in my life.1 There was a pause, and when his voice came again it was all but drowned in the sound of the engine. I thought I caught the words 'My home'.
"You—you're going to start a new life there, Mr Mahler?"
Tm sixty-nine—tomorrow," he answered obliquely. "A new life? Let's say, rather, that I'm going to end an old one."
"And you're going to live there, make your home there—after sixty-nine years in another country?"
"Millions of us Jews have done just that, in the past ten years. Not that I've lived in America all my life. . . . "
And then he told me his story—a story of refugee oppression that I'd heard a hundred times, with a hundred variations. He was a Russian Jew, he said, one of the millions of the largest Jewry in the world that had been 'frozen' for over a century in the notorious Pale of Settlement, and in 1905 had been forced to flee with his father—leaving mother and two brothers behind—to escape the ruthless massacres carried out by the 'Black Hundreds' at the behest of the last of the Romanoff Tzars who was seeking scapegoats for his crushing defeat by the Japanese. His mother, he learned later, had just disappeared, while his two brothers had survived only to die in agony long years afterwards, one in the rising in the Bialystok ghetto, the other in the Treblinka gas chambers. He himself had found work in the clothing industry in New York, studied in night school, worked for an oil company, married and with the death of his wife that spring had set about fulfilling the agelong ambition of his race, the return to their holy land.
It was a touching story, pathetic and deeply moving, and I didn't believe a word of it.
Every twenty minutes I changed position with Jackstraw and so the long hours of the night dragged by as the cold deepened and the stars and the moon wheeled across the black vault of the sky. And then came moonset, the blackness of the arctic night rushed across the ice-cap, I slowed the Citroen gratefully to a stop and the silence, breathless and hushed and infinitely sweet, came flooding in to take the place of the nightlong clamour of the deafening roar of the big engine, the metallic clanking of the treads.
Over our black sugarless coffee and biscuits I told our passengers that this would be only a brief three-hour halt, that they should try to get what sleep they could: most of them, myself included, were already red-eyed and drooping from exhaustion. Three hours, no more: not often did Greenland offer travel weather like this, and the chance was not to be missed.
Beside me, as I drank my coffee, was Theodore Mahler. He was for some reason restless, ill at ease, jerky and nervous, and his eyes and attention both wandered so much that it was easy enough for me to find out what I wanted.
When my cup was empty, I whispered in Mahler's ear that there was a little matter that I wished to discuss privately with him. He looked at me in surprise, hesitated, then nodded in agreement, rising to follow me as I moved out into the darkness.
A hundred yards away I stopped, switched on my torch so that he blinked in its beam, and slid my Beretta forward until its barrel was clearly visible, sharply outlined in the harsh white glare. I heard the catch of the breath, saw the eyes widening in fear and horror.
"Save the act for the judge, Mahler," I said bleakly. "I'm not interested in it. All I want is your gun."
CHAPTER SEVEN—Tuesday 7 A.M.—Tuesday Midnight
"My gun?" Mahler had slowly lifted his arms until his hands were at shoulder level, and his voice wasn't quite steady. "I—I don't understand, Dr Mason. I have no gun."
"Naturally." I jerked the barrel of the Beretta to lend emphasis to my words. Turn round."
"What are you going to do? You're making a—"
"Turn round!"
He turned. I took a couple of steps forward, ground the muzzle of the automatic none too gently into the small of his back, and started to search him with my free hand.
He was wearing two overcoats, a jacket, several sweaters and scarves, two-pairs of trousers and layer upon layer of underclothes: searching him was easier said than done. It took me a full minute to convince myself that he wasn't carrying a weapon of any kind. I stepped back, and he came slowly round to face me.