The U-boat captain may have been on the active service side of middle age, but he died an old man. Without benefit of the Book, Nash delivered him and his companion to the deep. Back to the Waterland, said Rose. And Bennett’s log did not record either the taking or the demise of their prisoners.
An inner voice insisted that he get as many of his old crew as possible to come on the expedition. The muster roll, more complete than expected, lacked only a wireless operator, and even he had been easy to find: ‘I heard this chap whistling morse in a pub, and knew I’d got my man,’ he said to Nash.
The voice talked against the power of rain, louder when his lips didn’t move and the words turned inwards, and he heard the water no more. He was only really alone when he sensed his inner voice clearly. Even footsteps on the creaking floor as he walked from the chart-covered table to the door and back again did not break the sentences that came against him like files of soldiers storming a building. He had called the nucleus of his crew together because a scratch-gang of all-comers taken from any quarter would not have been reliable. He could not have created a team in the time available. On the other hand, the chances of success being about even, it would have been kinder to let any but members of his old crew take part. If without them there was no hope of success, to have them was halfway to murder. He was using them for his own ends, though by employing them he was putting more money in their way than they could earn anywhere in the same length of time. Those who invested the money would also benefit, and though Bennett knew he was not worthy of his crew’s devotion, such people deserved it even less. He felt tainted by the issue.
Black market money floating about after the war was ready for investment in such projects. He had his proof, and they believed him. He went around clubs and hotels where food was served that he had not seen in a decade. Banquets with good wine and big cigars. He broached his scheme, promised evidence, and they listened. His eloquence turned into sharp business talk. Though he accepted their food and wine he wanted to wipe them from the face of the earth. His hesitation was their safety. Those who would have felt no such uncertainty were dead. Either that, or they would have been glad to see that the good life goes on, and take part in it.
When Harker-Rowe gave him the nod, he knew that his worries were about to begin. The gesture marked another stage in life. There were periods when he couldn’t sleep. During the war sleep had been available the moment he returned from a raid. He almost fell into oblivion during tedious debriefings. Four hours of rest performed a miracle. Dreams, like the cities he had flown to, were wiped out and ploughed with salt. The day before was scorched from memory. Tomorrow never came. It was always today. Sleep was so close to the surface that he could stand up in his subconscious and not drown. But below that, the space was without limit. He called it sleep, which seemed, on waking, to be something you went into and came out of at the flick of a switch.
When there was a memory which sleep could not erase, the ease of sleep abandoned you. No way of winning it back. The innocent person slept like a baby – so it was said. Others did so who were unable to admit that they were anything but innocent. Lacking the moral sophistication to understand that they were not innocents made them more depraved than those who knew very well why they were guilty. The crime that had initiated the expedition was such that it could not be condoned. The action had come out of a centre whose evil he had never suspected. Erupting flames had been impossible to beat back, short of burning both hands to ash.
His hair had changed colour, but such iron-grey, when he visited business offices to arrange finance for his venture, had shown him as someone in whom they could have confidence. What he told them went across as honest and feasible. Once the gold was secure in the hold of the flying boat they knew it would not disappear into the bank vaults of Panama or Zurich. His half share would make him a rich man. Trust in him was firm, but even if it were not, his wife and children would guarantee a safe return. If the flying boat’s engines failed on the way back, and Bennett’s crew found the grave they dreaded, would Harker-Rowe and his consortium think he had followed some preconceived dead-reckoning plan and made a break with the known world? If he did not allow for the equally complete vanishing of his wife and children, might they not see his disappearance as merely an effective way of getting the final divorce from family life that every married man dreams about? It would be no more cruel than the way in which he had first come by his knowledge of the treasure, or than the steps he had taken to ensure that only he should know of it.
A conscience was not the worst problem. The crime might not have been as final and efficient as he had assumed. A supply ship must have refuelled the submarine close to the island before the trip back to Germany could be attempted. Though not knowing exactly what the submarine had carried, perhaps the ship’s captain took the tale to the known world, so that the secret of the golden hoard was in someone’s brain and yet to be acted on.
‘What reasons do you have,’ Harker-Rowe asked, ‘for thinking the stuffs still there?’
Two men with bowler hats, rolled umbrellas, pink faces and impeccable accents were also at the meeting, go-betweens whose sense of humour was limited to the fact that they only laughed with Harker-Rowe. Because neither smoked, Bennett did not trust them. He said there had been one submarine. Not only had the captain of the U-boat and the other survivor separately informed him, but it was also written into the documents he produced. There could be no doubt. How do you know the gold was ever put there? Even Bennett laughed.
But he hated their guts. ‘How do you know,’ he smiled, ‘that I’m not a confidence trickster of the most blue-eyed cunning? Not playing a hoax for money, you understand, because money would mean nothing to the kind of super con-trick which I’m trying to swing, which is to get my hands on the controls of a flying boat and hear the voices of my old crew over the intercom for the last time, because the doctor said I had cancer of the liver and only six months to live, and that before I die I want to go on the longest trip, from Cape Town to Singapore via the Kerguelen Islands and Freemantle, all at your expense, one last adventure before the disease gets such a grip that I can do nothing except drag myself into bed and die. I want to hear those four engines and see the endless sea from the flight deck at eighteen thousand feet. That’s the reason I cooked up this cock-and-bull yarn, so that you would charitably – although unknowingly – supply the finance.’
He almost wished it were true. He would then have felt better when they stopped laughing. Humour had to be on their terms or not at all. Their pink skins gave an ugly tinge to such regular yet chinless features. ‘Perhaps you’ll now be good enough to sit down and tell me what you’ve heard,’ Bennett said from his armchair. ‘I want all the information, otherwise the expedition will be called off.’
‘I don’t sit,’ Harker-Rowe smiled. ‘Do too much of it in my life.’ Neither did his bowler-hatted guards. One stood at the door and the other concealed himself by the window, observing the street so as not to be seen – as if, Bennett thought, he had been an instructor in street-fighting during the war.
‘If you don’t,’ Bennett said, ‘I’ll pull out. The crew will understand.’