This had been the area of the former fish-holds and although the place had been steam-washed, fumigated, and disinfected at the time of conversion it still stank most powerfully and evilly of cod liver oil that has lain too long in the sun. In ordinary circumstances, the atmosphere was nauseating enough: in those extraordinary ones it was hardly calculated to assist sufferers in a rapid recovery from the effects of seasickness. I knocked on the first door on the starboard side and went in.

Johann Heissman, horizontally immobile on his bunk, looked like a cross between a warrior taking his rest and a medieval bishop modelling for the stone effigy which in the fullness of time would adorn the top of his sarcophagus. Indeed, with his thin waxy fingers steepled on his narrow chest, his thin waxy nose pointing to the ceiling and his curiously transparent eyelids closed, the image of the tomb seemed particularly apposite in this case: but it was a deceptive image for a man does not survive twenty years in a Soviet hard labour camp in eastern Siberia just to turn in his cards from mal de mier.

"How do you feel, Mr. Heissman?"

"Oh, God!" He opened his eyes without looking at me, moaned and closed them again. "How do I feel?'

"I'm sorry. But Mr. Gerran is concerned-"

"Otto Gerran is a raving madman." I didn't take it as any indication of some sudden upsurge in his physical condition but, no question, this time his voice was a great deal stronger. "Crackpot! A lunatic!"

While privately conceding that Heissman's diagnosis lay somewhere along the right lines I refrained from comment and not out of some suitably due deference to my employer. Otto Gerran and Johann Heissman had been friends much too long for me to risk treading upon the delicate ground that well might lie between them. They had known each other, as far as I had been able to discover, since they had been students together at some obscure Danubian gymnasium close on forty years ago and had, at the time of the Anschluss in 1938, been the joint owners of a relatively prosperous film studio in Vienna.