Isvik (42 page)

‘If you
are
Iris's brother, Eduardo Connor-Gómez, please signify.' There was a note of tension in his voice now as he repeated the request slowly in Spanish.

Still no reply, and I looked at the table where the Uzi lay. But if it had been Ángel he wouldn't have stayed silent like this. A man so full of braggadocio would have needed to explain himself. He would have wanted to talk himself out of the present situation while he thought up some safer way of dealing with us. So it had to be one of the Disappeareds. Not necessarily Eduardo, but one of the poor devils incarcerated on this hulk. I was thinking then about what must be going through his mind as he stood there, just the other side of that door, with somebody inside the cabin, where he had spent so many months alone, talking to him in English and halting Spanish. The shock of it would be enough to strike any man dumb.

‘
Eeris
.' The name stumbled from his mouth. ‘You say – Eeris is – with you?'

‘She is with the boat.' Iain spoke in English, I suppose with the idea of distancing himself from any possible connection with the man's captors.

‘
El barco
.' The voice was hoarse, like the croak of a frog. ‘Where is – this boat?' It was obvious he was quite unaccustomed to the sound of his own voice, the English coming very slow and hesitant.

‘Three days' march across the ice,' Iain answered slowly, sticking to English. ‘South of here.' And he named the three people who had been left on board with her. ‘Ah take it you are Eduardo Connor-Gómez?'

There was a long pause, then – ‘
Si
.'

‘What is her married name?'

‘You think I am lying?'

‘Just being careful. Ye tell me her married name and Ah'll be satisfied.'

Another pause, and I wondered whether he had forgotten it in all the years he had been in captivity. ‘It is – Sunderby.' And he spelt it out, slowly.

‘Okay, Eduardo. There's my gun.' His weapon clattered to the floor close to the half-open door. ‘Pete, throw that Uzi down, too.' And when I had done so, he said, ‘We are unarmed now. Ye have nothin' to be afraid of. So come in please. Ye must be very tired. It has been a long night fur ye. And fur us,' he added.

The door was suddenly pushed open wide and out of the dark rectangle came the same voice asking us if we had any matches. ‘There is a lantern in the stores room. Light it please and put it on the table so I can see you.'

I relaxed then, for that, more than anything, convinced me he had preserved his sanity, despite the loneliness and the terrible cargo he had had to live with. But when the lantern was lit, and he advanced out of the darkness into the cabin, I wasn't so sure.

He was quite a small man with sad, wild eyes that peered at us myopically out of a tangle of hair. He looked so much older than his sister, and yet he couldn't be much over thirty, perhaps less. He looked almost senile, his body stooped, his hair gone grey, thin on top, but reaching to his shoulders in greasy wisps. An unkempt beard tucked into the open neck of a threadbare blue uniform shirt. And he stank. That was the thing about him that struck me most forcefully. He stank of stale sweat, excreta and something else, a fishy smell that I gradually identified as coming from the sealskin jerkin draped over his thin shoulders.

He pulled up a chair and sat down facing us. His skin was dark as a gypsy's, what little of it showed through the matted hair. He didn't say anything for a while, his hands trembling slightly as he listened to Iain's slow, careful explanation of how we came to be here, his high forehead creased in the effort of trying to understand and adjust to the fact that this was the end of his ordeal, the door of his Antarctic prison finally open.

Iain told him how his sister's husband, Charles Sunderby, had caught a glimpse of the ship just before his plane crashed, how that was the start of her determination to mount an expedition to prove that the ship really existed. ‘She didn't know about ye. She thought ye were dead. It was yer brother who led us here.' Iain was leaning forward then, his eyes fixed on the man as he told him how Ángel had flown a plane on a test flight, searching out the ship's position, how he had persuaded Iris to let him join the expedition, and in the end had led us here. ‘What are ye goin' to dae about him? Ye can't just leave him to die of starvation –'

‘My brother!' The words burst from him. ‘You call that man my brother?'

‘Step-brother then.'

‘No!' It was an explosion of wild fury. And when Iain pointed out, very quietly, that his name was Ángel Connor-Gómez, the man shook his head furiously. ‘No, I say. Is not my brother. Is nothing to do with me.'

‘Then who is he?'

‘There was a woman – Rosalli Gabrielli.'

Iain nodded. ‘Yes, Ah know about her.'

‘Then you know there was a marriage. It last a very short time. She was already pregnant. The father of that boy is a very evil man, a Sicilian, Roberto Manuel Borgalini. Ángel is no connection with me, or Iris, or with my father.' He had become very excited, waving his hands about. His nails were very long and very filthy, the smell emanating from his clothing almost overpowering.

‘Aye, Ah thought it was somethin' like that.' Iain leaned further forward, tapping the man on the knee. ‘But we can't leave him there.'

Eduardo stared at him, his mouth open.

‘Ye dropped the trap on him. Ye shut him in, down among the dead men.'

The other nodded. ‘Of course.'

‘Well, ye can't leave him there. We'll go for'ard in a wee while and let the poor devil –'

‘You don't understand.' The tone of his voice was almost hysterical.

‘What don't Ah understand, laddie?'

‘Nothing. Nothing. You don't understand nothing.' That was when Eduardo began to talk. Iain had finally got through to him. He had broken through the crust of over two years of total isolation, and once Eduardo began to talk he couldn't stop, even though he was using a language other than his own. It poured out of him, the whole appalling story, from Porton Down and Montevideo, through the solitary confinement cell at the
Escuela Mecánica
to the prison huts east of Ushuaia and the start of the
Andros
voyage. Wellington had guessed correctly. This was the
Andros
, and the voyage the reconditioned frigate made to the Southern Ocean must rank with one of the most extraordinary and dreadful any vessel has been forced to undertake.

Eduardo had been seized in Montevideo, and it was only after he had been taken on board the frigate that it gradually dawned on him why he was there. The men incarcerated in the prison huts we had stumbled on were all left-wing activists, men who had fallen under the Ché Guevara spell, the hard core of the Disappeareds. Many of them were apparently shot and dumped into a deep bog in the mountains behind the camp. A total of twenty-seven had been kept back, and it was these who had been embarked on the
Andros
, in the fore part of the hold. Sheep had already been packed into the after part. He remembered their incessant, pitiful bleating. ‘Is like the cry of lost souls.'

He had not been put in the hold with the others. He had been taken to the cabin we were in now. That was when he discovered that the man organising the whole thing was the one who had masqueraded as his brother, who had set fire to the Gómez family store in BA and who had murdered his father. ‘I have no proof, you understand, no absolute proof, but that is what I believe happened. Not suicide. He kill my father.' And he added, speaking very slowly, ‘But that is not why you cannot let him out of that hold. Now listen. It is something quite different.'

He got suddenly to his feet, very agitated, speaking fast again, and his voice high, on the edge of hysteria. ‘He is a dead man now. That is why. And so are you if you go near him, so are we all.' And, still on that high note, he switched to something he had seen as a child in the Opera House in Buenos Aires. ‘It was light opera, very English, and it has a phrase in it, something about fitting a punishment to the crime.' He laughed then, quite wildly, staring towards the stern windows, at the blur of white that was the starlit pack ice. ‘Down there with the dead, that is very right, that is the punishment to fit the crime.' He swung round on us. ‘I tell you now what his crime is. It is a much more terrible crime than when he kill my father, for he is one of those that were the cause of so many disappearing. But worse than that, much worse. You know about anthrax? There is an island where they try it out during the last great war.'

And then he was telling us how, when he was brought into the cabin here, Ángel Borgalini was waiting for him. ‘Because I was his “brother” – he is smiling when he say that – my life is to be spared. All I have to do is administer antidote serum to those who are spraying the anthrax spores into the hold, then monitor their condition until they make their escape from the Falkland Islands.'

The wickedness of the plan was almost unbelievable, yet knowing a little about the effects of chemical poisons and biological infections on insects, I knew it would work. The object was to make the Malvinas uninhabitable for sheep and for humans. Anthrax would do both. Having lost the war, these men, who had been involved in the seizure and disappearing of people for years past, saw it as a most suitable fate for the islands they had coveted so long and could not have. Anthrax would be infinitely more effective than the plastic-encased mines their forces had scattered in such profusion.

He was being given a death sentence. He knew that. The ship's after guard consisted of a captain, who was ex-
Escuela Mecánica
, a navigating officer, a sailing master, who had been involved in the sea training of young naval entrants, and six crew. He would ensure their health until such time as the cargo of humans and sheep had been let loose on the Falklands and the ship was aground. It was a condition that both officers and crew had insisted on, and once they had got safely away, in good health, he would be free to go ashore himself. That was the deal he was offered, and he had accepted, hoping that somehow, in the three or four days it would take to reach the islands, he would have an opportunity to save the twenty-seven men battened down in the hold below the gun-deck.

But no such opportunity occurred. He was shown a medicine chest. It was in what we had thought of as the pantry for the big cabin and was well stocked with everything a doctor would require to deal with ordinary shipboard ailments and any straightforward accidents. They had taken it for granted that, as a chemical and biological scientist, he would know how to use them. The cylinders containing the anthrax spores under pressure were on the floor there, and the antidote serum, in case something went wrong, was in a heavily sealed metal box on the shelf above. The Captain himself had shown it to him and specifically asked whether he knew how to administer the serum, and when he had said he did, he had been asked to repeat it in front of two other officers and the crew.

By then Borgalini had gone. At no time did he refer to Ángel by any name other than Borgalini. Perhaps it was the way he said it, but somehow Borgalini seemed to fit the personality of the man.

They had sailed that same night with the moon in its last quarter, a clear sky, and a light breeze from the west. The vessel had no engine, of course. It had been stripped of all metal furnishings and equipment in the hopes that the radar station on Mount Alice, in the south-west of West Falkland, would fail to pick them up. If they were stopped, then they would co-operate and proceed to Port Stanley, or East Cove, wherever they were ordered to go. By then, of course, both the sheep and the human cargo would have breathed in the anthrax spores.

‘Do you know what that means? Do you know what sort of a death it is?' He was standing up now, the lamplight making his eyes shine wildly out of black, shadowed sockets, his beard, now lying loose on his chest, giving him the appearance of some Old Testament prophet. And when we just stared at him in silence, he went on, very agitatedly, ‘It is a spore-bearing bacillus –
Bacillus anthracis
. Breathe it in and it will attack the lining of the lungs, destroying them. It is like a septicaemia. You can get it by contact also, through cuts, abrasions, any breakage of the skin. In the case of the lungs, or of the intestines, death is very painful. There is a tough envelope around the bacilli that makes them very resistant to changes of temperature and humidity and to disinfectants. The result is that they are almost indestructible. That is what is down there in that hold. Without the serum you cannot go down there. You cannot breathe the air Borgalini is now breathing. Anthrax septicaemia causes you to spit blood. You die like you do with pneumonia, only worse, and there is vomiting, diarrhoea. Terrible pain like you die when you have eat that Death Cap fungus
Amanita phalloides
.'

At that stage I was wide awake, visualising the horror of it, the way those wretched men had died. The last of the Disappeareds – what a way to go! But I was so damn tired, and the man going on and on, constantly digressing, my eyelids closing; each time they closed I would jerk myself awake to hear him digressing into his family history, how the Portuguese side of the family had come to South America over a century and a half ago, Pedro Gómez being a young fisherman from Setúbal, just south of Lisboa, talking about the shipping business this great-grandfather of his had founded, the way their sea connections had continued, so that there had always been sailing vessels of some sort. ‘They had become yachts when I was born. We had a succession of them, you understand, so I grew up knowing about the sea and how to handle big sailing boats. That is how I am connected with the Navy when I am a kid.' He was explaining how he was able to navigate and keep the
Andros
going when he was on his own.

I had been drifting in and out of sleep while he had been explaining how he came to be the only man on the ship left alive. The result is I am a little vague about the details, though the rough outline of what happened is reasonably clear in my mind. I asked him to fill in on the details for me later, of course, but he wouldn't talk about it then. Nor would Iain. What I am least clear about is his relationship with the Captain and the rest of the crew.