Bear Island Read Online Free Page A

Bear Island
Book: Bear Island Read Online Free
Author: Alistair MacLean
Pages:
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Stuart but that wasn't her true name either: llona Wisniowecki she'd been christened but had prudently decided that it wasn't the biggest possible asset she had for making her way in the film world. Why she'd chosen a Scots name I didn't know: maybe she just liked the sound of it.
        "Mary dear," I said. "Abroad at this late hour and on such a night." I reached up and touched her cheek, we doctors can get away with murder. The skin was icily cold. "You can carry this fresh air fanatic bit too far. Come on, inside." I took her arm-I was hardly surprised to find she was shivering quite violently-and she came along docilely enough.
        The accommodation door led straight into the passenger lounge which, though fairly narrow, ran the full width of the ship. At the far end was a built-in bar with the liquor kept behind two glassed-in iron grill doors: the doors were kept permanently locked and the key was in Otto Gerran's pocket.
        "No need to frog~march me, Doctor." She habitually spoke in a low-pitched quiet voice. "Enough is enough and I was coming in anyway.”
        “Why were you out there in the first place?”
        “Can't doctors always tell?" She touched the middle button of her black leather coat and from this I understood that her internal economy wasn't taking too kindly to the roller-coaster antics of the Morning Rose. But I also understood that even had the sea been mirror-smooth she'd still have been out on that freezing upper deck: she didn't talk much to the others nor the others to her.
        She pushed the tangled hair back from her face and I could see she was very pale and the skin beneath the brown eyes tinged with the beginnings of exhaustion. In her high cheekboned Slavonic way-she was a Latvian but, I supposed, no less a Slav for that-she was very lovely, a fact that was freely admitted and slightingly commented upon as being her only asset: her last two pictures-her only two pictures-were said to have been disasters of the first magnitude. She was a silent girl, cool and aloofly remote and I liked her which made me a lonely minority of one.
        "Doctors aren't infallible," I said. "At least, not this one." I peered at her in my best clinical fashion. "What's a girl like you doing in those parts on this floating museum?"
        She hesitated. "That's a personal question.”
        “The medical profession are a very personal lot. How's your headache? Your ulcer? Your bursitis? We don't know where to stop."
        I need the money.”
        “You and me both." I smiled at her and she didn't smile back so I left her and went down the companionway to the main deck.
        Here was located the Morning Rose's main passenger accommodation, two rows of cabins lining the fore and aft central passageway. 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
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