Jack Higgins - East of Desolation

I nodded. ‘She was telling me about that on the flight in. Some war picture you made in Italy.’

He laughed out loud, lolling back against the bulwark as if he found the whole thing hilariously funny in retrospect. ‘The biggest mistake I ever made in my life, produced and directed by Jack Desforge. We live and learn.’

‘Was it that bad?’

He was unable to contain his laughter. ‘A crate of last year’s eggs couldn’t have smelled any higher.’

‘What about Ilana?’

‘Oh, she was fine.’ He shrugged. ‘No Bergman or anything like that, but she had other qualities. I knew that the first time I met her.’ He took another pull at the bottle. ‘I did everything for that girl. Clothes, grooming, even a new name – the whole bit.’

I frowned. ‘You mean Ilana Eytan isn’t her real name?’

‘Is it hell,’ he said. ‘She needed a gimmick like everyone else, didn’t she? I started out myself as Harry Wells of Tilman Falls, Wisconsin. When I first met Ilana she was plain Myra Grossman.’

‘And she isn’t Israeli?’

‘All part of the build-up. You know how it is. Israeli sounds better. It did to her anyway and that’s the important thing. She’s got a complex a mile wide. Her old man has a tailor’s shop in some place called the Mile End Road in London. You ever heard of it?’

I nodded, fighting back an impulse to laugh out loud. ‘It’s a funny old world, Jack, has that ever occurred to you?’

‘Roughly five times a day for the last fifty-three years.’ He grinned. ‘I’m only admitting to forty-five of those remember.’ And then his mood seemed to change completely and he moved restlessly, pulling the blanket more closely about his shoulders. ‘I’ve been thinking. Did Ilana have anything for me?’

‘Such as?’

‘A letter maybe – something like that.’

It was there in his voice quite suddenly, an anxiety he was unable to conceal and I shook my head. ‘Not that I know of, but why should she confide in me?’

He nodded and raised the bottle to his mouth again. It was cold now in spite of the sun and the perfect blue of the sky. A small wind lifted across the water and I noticed that the hands trembled slightly as they clutched the bottle. He sat there brooding for a while, looking his age for the first time since I’d known him and then quite unexpectedly, he laughed.

‘You know that was really something back there – with the bear I mean. What a way to go. Real B picture stuff. We don’t want it good, we want it by next Monday.’

He took another swallow from the bottle which was now half-empty and guffawed harshly. ‘I remember Ernie Hemingway saying something once about finishing like a man, standing up straight on your two hind legs and spitting right into the eye of the whole lousy universe.’ He swung round, half-drunk and more than a little aggressive. ‘And what do you think of that then, Joe, baby? What’s the old world viewpoint on the weighty matter of life and death, or have you no statement to make at this time?’

‘I’ve seen death if that’s what you mean,’ I said. ‘It was always painful and usually ugly. Any kind of life is preferable to that.’

‘Is that a fact now?’ He nodded gravely, a strange glazed expression in his eyes and said softly, ‘But what if there’s nothing left?’

And then he leaned forward, the eyes starting from his head, saliva streaking his beard and cried hoarsely, ‘What have you got to say to that, eh?’

There was nothing I could say, nothing that would help the terrible despair in those eyes. For a long moment he crouched there in the bottom of the boat staring at me and then he turned and hurled the bottle high into the air and back towards the green iceberg. It bounced on a lower slope, flashed once like fire in the sunlight and was swallowed up.

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