Countercharacter 4 (from Septimus Grout) part 2

It was precisely six o'clock when I stepped through the entrance of the grand Raffles Hotel. The lobby was more or less deserted; casually leaning against a column with their arms crossed, three bellboys dressed in red, gilt-buttoned waistcoats were chatting in low voices. The porter, crossing the lobby diagonally, carrying two hefty suitcases and leading the way for a female guest who held a small dog in her arms.

The bar, surrounded by some kind of latticework partition decorated with tall green plants, was at the end above the lobby atop a wide central staircase. To my surprise there were no customers in the bar; no cigar smoke hung in the air to make the atmosphere almost opaque and somewhat stifling; instead of the muffled confusion I had expected, the noise of a score of conversations over insipid background music, there were only cleared tables neatly set out with place mats and gleaming brass ashtrays. Sitting behind a counter of dark wood and steel, a barman in a slightly crumpled jacket was reading the Georgetown Herald.

I went to sit at the back of the room. The barman raised his eyes momentarily from his newspaper and threw me a questioning glance; I ordered a gin sling. He brought it to me, dragging his feet. I noticed he was a very old man; his really very wrinkled hand shook a little.

'Not many people about,' I said, half to just say something and half because it really did perplex me.

He nodded, then suddenly asked me: 'Nuts?'

'Excuse me?' I said, not grasping.

'Nuts. Nuts to eat with your drink.'

'No, thank you. I never eat nuts. Give me a newspaper instead.'

He turned about, but evidently I had expressed myself badly, or he had not paid attention because, instead of going over to the newspaper racks hanging on the wall, he went back to his counter, put down his tray, and went out through a little door which must have given access to the pantry.

I looked at the clock above the bar. Only five past six. I got up and went to fetch a newspaper. It was the financial supplement to 'The Times', more than six months out of date. I glanced through it for a good ten minutes, as i drank my gin, quite alone in the bar.

You could not say that Victor Ruhoff was late; neither could you say that he was on time. All you could say, all you could surmise, was that with any appointment you had to allow a quarter of an hour for waiting around. I should not have needed to reassure myself, I had no reason to be anxious, but nonetheless Victor Ruhoff's absence made me uneasy. It was after six o'clock and I was in the bar waiting for him, whereas he should have been in the bar himself, waiting for me.

Towards twenty past six — I had abandoned the paper and finished my gin long since — I decided to leave. Perhaps there was a message for me from Victor Ruhoff at the reception desk, perhaps he was expecting me in one of the reading rooms, or in the lobby, or in his room; perhaps he was calling it off and proposing to defer the discussion until later? Suddenly there was a kind of hubbub in the lobby: five or six people burst noisily into the bar and sat down at a table. Almost simultaneously two bartenders emerged from behind the counter. They were young and I could not help noticing that the two put together would just about have made up the age of the man who had served me.

It was just as I was calling one of the waiters so I could pay for my drink — though he seemed too busy taking the orders of the new customers to pay any attention to me — that Victor Ruhoff appeared: a man who stops almost as soon as he entered a public place, looks all around with particular care, with an air of attentive inquisitiveness, and strides forward as soon as his eye meets yours, such a man can only be your opposite number.

He was a man of around forty-five, quite short, very thin, with a narrow, sharp-featured face and greying short-cut hair. He wore a dark grey twill suit, heavy for this climate. In so far as you can tell a man's profession by his appearance, he struck me as being not a doctor but rather a businessman, a senior bank manager or a lawyer.

He stopped a few inches from me.

'You are Johnathon Kande?' he asked me, but actually the sentence was barely a question, it was more a statement of fact.

'Er … Yes … ,' I replied idiotically, and made to stand up, but he stopped me with a wave of his hand.

'No, do stay seated: we shall be much more comfortable talking if we sit.'

He sat down. He considered my empty glass for a second.

'You like gin, I see.'

'Sometimes,' I said, not really knowing what to answer.

'I prefer tea.'

He turned slightly towards the counter, half raising a finger. The waiter descended straight away.

'A pot of tea for me. Would you like another gin?' he asked of me.

I acquiesced.

'And a gin and tonic for the gentleman.'

I was increasingly uneasy. Should I ask him if he was called  Victor Ruhoff. Should I ask him point blank what he wanted of me? I got out my packet of cigarettes and offered him one, but he refused.

'I smoke only cigars, and only after my evening meal.'

'Are you a doctor?'

Contrary to my naive expectation, he seemed not at all surprised by my question. He gave but the merest smile.

'In what way does the fact that I smoke a cigar only after my evening meal lead you to think that I might be a doctor?'

'Because that is one of the questions that I have had in my mind since I received your letter.'

'Do you have many others in mind?'

'Yes, some.'

'And what are they?'

'Well, for instance, what do you want of me?'

'That is indeed an obvious question. Do you wish me to answer it straight away?'

'I should be most grateful.'

'May I ask you another question?'

'Go ahead.'

'Did you ever wonder what became of the person who gave you your name?'

'I beg your pardon,' I said, not grasping.

'You do not understand?' Victor Ruhoff asked after a moment's pause, as he looked at me over his teacup.

'Let us say your question is ambiguous, to say the least.'

‘Ambiguous?'

'There is more than one person who, as you put it, gave me my name.'

'Since you think it necessary, I shall make my question more precise. I am not alluding to your father, nor to any member of your family or your community after whom you might have been named, as is, I believe, a fairly widespread custom. Nor am I thinking of any of the people who, five years ago, helped you to acquire your current identity. I mean, quite straightforwardly, the person whose name you have.'

'The person whose name I have!'

'You did not know him?'

'Indeed I did not. And what is he doing?'

'We would very much like to know. That is in fact the sole purpose of this meeting.'

'I do not see any way in which I could be of use to you. I always thought that the papers I had been given were forged.'

'At the time, Johnathon Kande was a child of eight. He was deaf and dumb. His mother, Laetitia, was a succesful singer in Vienna who had escaped to Canada during the war. Johnathon was a sickly, puny boy condemned by his disability to virtually total isolation. He spent most of his time crouching in a corner of his bedroom, ignoring the toys and presents that his mother and other family members gave him day in and day out, and almost always refusing to eat. His mother, in despair, decided to try to overcome her son's helplessness by taking him around the world; she thought that new horizons, changes of climate and tempo would have a beneficial effect on her son and might even set in train a process leading to the recovery of hearing and speech, since all the doctors they had consulted were quite clear on this point: there was no internal injury, no inherited disorder, no anatomical or physiological deformity to account for the boy being deaf and dumb; this could only be ascribed to some infantile trauma whose precise configuration remained obscure despite examination by numerous psychiatrists. All this, you may well say, does not have much to do with your own adventure and still does not tell you how you came to have the same identity as this poor child. To understand that, you should first appreciate that out of both caution and preference for neat work, the support organisation which took care of you never used forged papers, but only genuine passports, identity cards and stamps, all supplied by officials in sympathy with its cause. It so happens that the Quebec official who was going to deal with your case died three days before you got to Formosa before he had anything ready, but after all the stopovers and stages of your subsequent journey had been set up. The organisation was at a loss. That is when Laetitia Kande came into the picture; she belonged to the organisation, and was in fact one of its main officials in Canada. And that is why, since it was an emergency, you were given the scarcely amended passport which Laetitia had had issued a few weeks earlier for her own son.'

'And what about him?'

'International agreements allow for a child who is still a minor to be included in the passport of one parent.'

'But what would have happened later?'

'Nothing, I imagine. They would have done whatever was necessary for Johnathon to obtain another passport. I do not think they ever dreamt of asking to have yours back one day.'

'So why do you think that I might have met him?'

'Did I ever say anything of the sort? You have to let me finish. A few weeks after you had been through Formosa, when we were certain you were out of danger, Laetitia and Johnathon left for San Francisco, where they embarked on an eighty five foot yacht, the Finnlander, a superb vessel which could take them through the worst seas. There were six of them on board: Laetitia, Johnathon, Frederick Martzin (a friend of Laetitia's and who was in a sense the commanding officer), two Haitian sailors who also served as ship's steward and cook, and a young tutor, Arthur Stead, a specialist in the education of the deaf and dumb. Contrary to Laetitia's hopes, the voyage does not seem to have improved Johnathon's condition: most of the time he stayed in his cabin and only very rarely agreed to come up on deck and view the ocean. From the letters which Laetitia, Frederick Martzin, Arthur Stead and even Carlos and Felipe, the two sailors, wrote during that time, and which I came to consult for reasons you will shortly understand, there emerges over the months a great sense of poignancy: the voyage, intended as a cure, progressively loses its raison-d'être; it becomes increasingly obvious that it has been a useless undertaking, but neither is there any point in bringing it to an end; the boat wanders before the wind, from one shore to another, from port to port, stopping a month here, three months there, searching ever more vainly for the place, the watercourse, the vista, the beach, the pier where the miracle could happen; and the strangest part is that the longer the voyage goes on, the more convinced everyone on board seems to become that such a place exists, that there is, somewhere on the ocean, an isle or atoll, a rock or headland where it suddenly could all happen — the veil sundered, the light turned on; that all that is needed is a rather special sunrise, or sunset, or any sublime or even trivial event, a flight of birds, a school of whales, rain, a doldrum, the torpor of a torrid day. And each of them clings to this illusion, until one day, as it so happens, between the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea, they are hit by one of those sudden typhoons which are everyday occurrences in those parts, and the boat sinks.'

'And then?'

'What do you mean, 'and then'?'

'What have I got to do with this story, apart from having a namesake in it who drowns?'

'Nothing, for the time being. This is where I come into it, actually. The brief sketch of events that I have given may have led you to believe that I knew the Kandes intimately, or that I belonged to the assistance organisation which made it possible for you to find, in this very place, under the cover of a new identity, a degree of safety which nothing has put in jeopardy up to now. But nothing could be further from the truth. Until fifteen months ago, or more exactly up to May 9 last year, the most likely date of the shipwreck, your story and your namesake's story were quite unknown to me. Though I am something of a music lover, and despite her not inconsiderable reputation on certain stages, I had not heard of Laetitia Kande. On the other hand, though I had never had any direct dealings with it or with any of its members, I knew by name the assistance organisation which helped you and I was favourably disposed towards the considerable work it performed on every front. My sympathy was in a sense a professional one, and it is in a professional capacity that I involve myself today in Johnathon Kande's story and, by repercussion, in yours — I work, you see, for a Shipwreck Victim's Relief Society. It is a private international organisation funded in part by charitable bodies, in part by private donations, in part by government or municipal institutions, for example the Ministry of the Merchant Navy, or the Union of North Sea Chambers of Commerce, and most of all by insurance companies. It began as a kind of extension of the Bureau Veritas. You don't know what the Bureau Veritas is?'

'No,' I confessed.

'It is an organisation which was set up in the early nineteenth century and which publishes annual statistics on shipbuilding, maritime traffic, shipwrecks and damage at sea. At the end of the last century one of the Bureau's directors  expressed the wish in his will that a portion of the then very substantial subsidies paid each year to the organisation by governments be allocated to relieving the victims of shipwreck, instead of to just counting them. The proposal was quite outside the scope of the Bureau's constitution, but the fashion was at that time for relief and rescue societies, and the Board of Directors therefore resolved to set aside one half of one per cent of its annual budget to establish a philanthropic body responsible for collecting all the facts about vessels in distress and, in so far as its modest means permitted, for coming to their assistance. A little later, Lloyd's Register of Shipping and the American Bureau of Shipping, two of the Bureau Veritas' rival bodies, joined in this project and the Shipwreck Victims' Relief Society began to grow as best it could.'

'I do not really see how you can operate; when a ship goes down you are obviously not there on the spot!'

Victor Ruhoff looked at me fixedly for a few seconds without speaking. I realised that the bar was deserted again; the only person left, right at the back, was a barman in a black jacket (not the one who had served me, nor one of the ones who had come later); he was lighting candles and setting them out on the tables. I looked at the timepiece above the bar; it was nine o'clock. Was I still called Johnathon Kande? Or was I going to have to seek him out?

I glance up from the script at the small dark man smoking opposite me. Is this Johnathon Kande, I wonder, and, if so, which one? He looks across at me, winks rather disconcertingly and waves at me to continue reading.

'When a boat goes down,'  Victor Ruhoff continued at last, his voice now intimate, his intonation affecting me directly. as if it were me he was talking about, 'then either there is another ship not too far off that comes to her assistance — which is what happens in the most favourable case — or there is not, and the passengers must take their chances in small boats, rubber dinghies or whatever can be used as a raft, or they cling to spars or other wreckage and drift with the current. Most of them are swallowed up by the sea in the first three or four hours, but some kind of hope gives certain survivors the strength to live on for days, weeks even. Some years ago, one was found some five thousand miles away from where he had been shipwrecked, lashed to a barrel, half-eaten away by sea salt, but still alive after more than three weeks. You may have heard of a steward in the British merchant navy who survived on a raft for four and a half months, from 23 November 1923 to 5 April 1924,  after his ship sank in the Atlantic off  the Azores. Instances such as these are rare but they do happen, just as even now shipwreck victims do get washed onto reefs or desert islands, or find a fragile refuge on an ice floe that is shrinking by the day. Our help can be given most effectively to this type of victim. Large vessels follow known routes and rescue operations can almost always be set up quite rapidly, even for serious disasters and criminal damage. Our work is focussed primarily on isolated cases: yachts, small leisure craft, fishing trawlers that go down. Thanks to a network which is now established at all key points, we can collect the necessary information in record time and co-ordinate our rescue services. To our offices come the bottles thrown into the sea and their modern equivalents, the Maydays transmitted by sinking ships. Though our searches most often end, alas, with the discovery of corpses already half torn to shreds by seabirds, it can also happen that one of our rescue efforts arrives at the scene in time to save one or two lives.'

Story continues