and as the bear reared up above him I squeezed the trigger and the heavy bullet blew off the top of its head. It went down like a tower falling, blood and brains scattering across the ice and Desforge fell on to his hands and knees on the shore.
He lay there for a moment as the hunters rushed forward to catch the carcase before it went under the ice. When I dropped to one knee beside him he grinned up at me, the teeth very white in the iron-grey beard as he wiped blood from his forehead with the back of one hand.
‘I always did like to do my own stuntwork.’
‘A great script,’ I said. ‘What are you going to call the film – Spawn of the North?’
‘We could have got some good footage there,’ he said seriously as I pulled him to his feet.
They hauled the bear on to the shore and the headman pulled out the broken shaft of Desforge’s harpoon and came towards us. He spoke to me quickly in Eskimo and I translated for Desforge.
‘He says that by rights the bear is yours.’
‘And how in the hell does he make that out?’
‘The harpoon pierced a lung. He’d have died for sure.’
‘Well that’s certainly good news. Presumably we’d have gone to the great hereafter together.’
‘They want to know if you’d like the skin.’
‘What would be the point? Some careless bastard seems to have ruined the head. Tell them they can have it.’
I nodded to the headman who smiled with all the delight of a child and called to his friends. They formed a circle and shuffled round, arms linked, wailing in chorus.
‘Now what?’ Desforge demanded.
‘They’re apologising to the bear for having killed him.’
His head went back and he laughed heartily, the sound of it echoing flatly across the water. ‘If that don’t beat all. Come on, let’s get out of here before I go nuts or freeze to death or something,’ and he turned and led the way back along the shore.
When we reached the whaleboat he got in and rummaged for a blanket in the stern locker while I pushed off. By the time I’d clambered in after him and got the engine started, he had the blanket round his shoulders and was extracting the cork from a half-bottle of whisky with his teeth.
‘Looks as if they carry this with the iron rations,’ he said and held it out. ‘What about you?’
I shook my head. ‘We’ve been through all this before, Jack. I never use the stuff, remember?’
I had no way of knowing exactly how much whisky he had put away by then, but it was obvious that he was fast reaching a state where he would have difficulty in remembering where he was and why, never mind make any kind of sense out of past events. I knew the feeling well. There had been a time when I spent too many mornings in a grey fog wondering where I was – who I was. At that point it’s a long fast drop down unless you have enough sense to turn before it’s too late and take that first fumbling step in the other direction.
‘Sorry, I was forgetting,’ he said. ‘Now me – I’m lucky. I’ve always been able to take it or leave it.’ He grinned his teeth chattering slightly. ‘Mostly take it, mind you – one of life’s great pleasures, like a good woman.’
Just what was his definition of good was anybody’s guess. He swallowed deeply, made a face and examined the label on the bottle. ‘Glen Fergus malt whisky. Never heard of it and I’m the original expert.’
‘Our finest local brew.’
‘They must have made it in a very old zinc bath. Last time I tasted anything like it was during Prohibition.’
Not that he was going to let a little thing like that put him off and as I took the whaleboat out through the pack ice, he moved down to the prow. He sat there huddled in his blanket, the bottle clutched against his chest, staring up at the mountains and the ice-cap beyond as we skirted an iceberg that might have been carved from green glass. He spoke without turning round.
‘Ilana – she’s quite a girl, isn’t she?’
‘She has her points.’
‘And then some. I could tell you things about that baby that would make your hair stand up on end and dance. Miss Casting Couch of 1964.’ I was aware of a sudden vague resentment, the first stirrings of an anger that was as irrational as it was unexpected, but he carried straight on. ‘I gave her the first big break, you know.’
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.
