by Philip Kerr
XV
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 1943,
THE ATLANTIC OCEAN
BELOW TURRET ONE, with its triple 16-inch battery, I stood on the main deck watching the bows of the Big Stick’s hull slip through the white-capped sea. I turned my back on the freshening breeze for a moment, placed a cigarette between lips rimed with ocean salt, and, behind the windbreak of my coat collar, took a light from the Dunhill.
Paying little or no attention to me, sailors worked steadily on the slowly moving deck, swabbing its sun-bleached wooden planks, setting antiaircraft batteries, stowing ropes, shifting ordnance, or just sitting on the pelican hook stoppers that secured the anchor chain, enjoying their smokes and bottles of Coca-Cola from the soda fountain in the enlisted mess. At a mile or two’s distance, the destroyer escort broke the horizon, while high above me, atop the main conning tower, the air-search radar antenna kept on turning in a monotonous circle.
Somewhere a bell rang and several smaller gun turrets turned to starboard, lethally erect, like the gum-chewing, wisecracking, sex-starved sailors that manned them, reminding me that this was a place bereft of females. And one female in particular. For a moment I wondered what she was doing, and then I remembered what I had seen through the window of her living room.
Feeling the cold now, I went forward to the primary conning tower and met John Weitz coming along the corridor outside my cabin. He was wearing the same Yale bow tie under a pea jacket that looked a size too big for him and carrying a brown paper parcel under his arm. He smiled nervously, and for a moment I thought he would walk by without saying anything. Then he stopped and, moving his weight uncomfortably from one leg to the other, tried to look apologetic, only it came out shifty.
“My laundry,” he said, awkwardly lifting the parcel. “I got kind of lost on my way back to my cabin.”
I nodded. “You certainly did,” I said. “The laundry room is at the back of the ship. I believe the people who know about these things call it the stern.”
“Listen,” continued Weitz, “I’m awfully sorry about what happened to Ted. I feel pretty dreadful about it. Especially in view of what I said.”
“You mean about wanting to kill him?”
Weitz closed his eyes for a moment, and then nodded. “Naturally I didn’t mean any of it.”
“Naturally. All of us say things sometimes we don’t really mean. Cruel things, stupid things, reckless things. Saying things we don’t really mean is one of the things that makes conversation so interesting. Something like this happens, it just reminds us to be more careful the next time we open our big mouths. That’s all.”
Despite what I had said to the Secret Service, John Weitz was near the top of my list of potential murderers. If someone had pushed Ted off the boat, then John Weitz looked as good a suspect as anyone else. The bow tie certainly didn’t help his case in my eyes.
Weitz stretched his lips back from his teeth. “Yes, I suppose you’re right.” He tried again for a little absolution.
“I feel pretty bad about it, all the same. There was no need for me to say what I said. Calling him a fellow traveler like that.”
“Yes, that was unnecessary,” I said. “It’s a horrible phrase. And under the present circumstances you might just as well call the president a fellow traveler.”
Weitz winced again. “That doesn’t seem so very far-fetched to me,” he said. “I’m a Republican. I didn’t vote for Roosevelt.”
“So you’re the one.”
He would not be drawn into another argument. “The worst part of it is that Captain McCrea has asked me to write to his wife.” He sighed. “Since I’m the only other guy on this ship from State.”
“I see. Did you know him well?”
“That’s the thing. No, I didn’t. We were colleagues, but never close.”
There was no movie theater on the Iowa. There was no radio in my room. And I didn’t much like the book I was reading. I decided to let out some line and play with him a little more.
“I’m not surprised. Since that Sumner Welles business in the summer, it doesn’t pay to be too close to anyone in the State Department. Especially on a crowded ship like this one.”
“Meaning?”
I shook my head. “You were telling me how you and Ted weren’t intimate friends.”
“He was a Russian affairs analyst. And I’m a linguist. As well as Russian, I speak Byelorussian and Georgian.”
“That explains everything.”
“Does it?”
“No. Actually, I’m puzzled. How is it that you don’t actually like Russians and come to speak these languages?”
“My mother is a White Russian émigré,” he explained. “She left St. Petersburg before the revolution and went to live in Berlin, where she met my father, a German-American.”
“Then we have something in common. I’m German-American, too.” I smiled. “We should find some leather shorts and drink some beer sometime.”
Weitz smiled. He must have thought I was joking.
“One of those damned Secret Service men virtually accused me of being a German spy. The Polack.”
“You must mean Pawlikowski.”
“That’s him. Pawlikowksi. Son of a bitch.”
“So that’s what Pawlikowski means. I wondered.” I shook my head. “They’re all kind of jumpy since the Willie D. incident.”
“Oh, that. That’s history. I was just speaking to the guy in the laundry.” He pointed his thumb back over his shoulder, up the gangway, in the wrong direction. I leaned against the wall and looked over his shoulder as if the laundry really had been where he was pointing. What was he doing so far from his own cabin, up forward, and equally far from the laundry, which was near the stern?
“It seems there’s a German sub operating in this area. Two of our escort destroyers picked up a German broadcast right in this area. At 0200 this morning.”
“That’s curious.”
“Curious? It’s damned alarming, that’s what it is. Apparently they’re going nuts about it up on the bridge.”
“No, I meant in a kind of why-didn’t-the-dog-bark sense.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Never mind. Look, I’ll write to Ted Schmidt’s widow, if you like.”
“Would you? I’d appreciate it. It’s kind of hard to write to a guy’s wife when you never really liked him, you know.”
“Are you married?”
His eyes flickered. “No.”
“Me neither. Ted wasn’t a bad guy, you know.”
“No, I suppose not.”
I stepped into my cabin and closed the door behind me. I stood perfectly still, or as still as I could manage with the swell that was under my feet. The minute I saw dry land again I was going to kneel down and kiss it, like it was Ithaca and my middle name was Odysseus. I didn’t remove my coat. I was too busy trying to decide if someone other than me had been in there. The door was not locked. Santini, the sailor who brought me a cup of coffee in the morning, might have come in and dusted some, I supposed. Or could Weitz have come in and searched it while I was up on deck? Not that he would have found anything of importance. Donovan’s suitcase remained locked. And Debbie Schmidt’s letter to her husband, detailing her affair with Thornton Cole, was safely in my pocket. None of this concerned me unduly. It was what Weitz had said about the German sub in the area that really interested me now.
Leaving the cabin again, I went to look for Captain McCrea and found him on the bridge, behind turret two, with his phone talker and watch officer. “I wonder if I might have a word with you, Captain. In private.”
“I’m a little busy right now,” he said, hardly looking at me.
“It might be important,” I said.
McCrea let out a tutting, matronly sort of sigh, as if I had told him I’d thrown up on my bedroom slippers, and led me back through the control room and into the corridor beyond. “All right, Professor. What is it?”
“Forgive me, Captain, but I’m cur
ious about this submarine.”
He sighed again. It was bed for me with no supper if I wasn’t careful.
“What about it?”
“It’s my understanding that our two escort destroyers picked up a German broadcast in the area at around 0200 hours this morning.”
McCrea stiffened perceptibly. “That’s right.”
“I don’t mean to be impertinent,” I said, enjoying my impertinence, “but it was my understanding that the Iowa is equipped with the very latest sonar and radar technology.”
“It is,” he said, inspecting his shiny fingernails. Probably he had a young sailor polish them and the ship’s brass every morning at six bells.
“Which makes me wonder why it was that the Iowa did not pick up the same broadcast?”
McCrea glanced over his shoulder and then ushered me into the head. As he closed the door behind him, I toyed with the idea of saying that he had made a mistake, that I wasn’t one of the pansies and cookie pushers employed by the State Department he’d heard about from FDR and Harry Hopkins. Instead I kept my mouth shut and waited.
“I’ll be frank with you, Professor,” he said. “It seems that the radio seaman on duty at the time left his post without authorization. The man has been disciplined and I consider that the matter is now closed. In view of what happened with the Willie D. Porter, I decided that confidence in this voyage would best be served if the incident was not mentioned to the president or the Joint Chiefs.”
“I’m sure you’re right, Captain,” I grinned. “And you have my word that I won’t mention it to anyone. Most of all to Admiral King. All the same, I’d like to satisfy myself with one or two questions I have regarding what happened.”
“Such as?”
“I’d like to speak to the radio seaman who left his post.”
“May I ask why?”
“I’m a specialist in German intelligence, Captain. It’s my job to scratch an itch when I get one. I’m sure you understand. So if you could send the man in question along to the radio transmitter room? Don’t bother to escort me there. I know the way.”
McCrea could see the ace sticking out of my sleeve. And there was nothing he could do about it. The last thing he wanted was Admiral King hearing about this latest incident. His voice dropped a couple of fathoms.
“Very well. I trust that you’ll keep me informed of your observations.”
“Of course, sir. Be my pleasure.”
McCrea nodded curtly and returned to the bridge.
I went along to the RT room and knocked at the door. Entering, I explained my mission to the radio communications officer on duty, a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant named Cubitt. Tall, swivel-eyed, with a wooden sort of expression—which is to say no expression at all—a sharp nose, pale skin, and a woman’s red lips, he looked like Pinocchio’s smarter brother. But only just.
The lieutenant was on the point of asking me to leave when the telephone rang. He answered it and I overheard McCrea ordering him to cooperate with “the asshole” and, when “the son of a bitch” was through, to come and tell him what I had wanted to know.
I smiled at one of the two radio seamen who were in the room with Cubitt. Each man sat in a swivel bucket seat in front of one of six operating positions and was wearing headphones and a microphone around his neck. It was like a hotel switchboard. As well as a set of bookshelves, I could see a safe where I guessed the codebooks were stored, and a large battery cabinet.
“Loud, isn’t it?” I said when Captain McCrea had finished speaking to the lieutenant. “The telephone, I mean. I could hear every word.” I looked more closely at the phone, which was made by Western Electric. “About how many of these are there on board a ship of this size?”
“About two thousand, sir,” the lieutenant replied, trying to contain a stammer that was accompanied by a fit of blinking.
I whistled quietly. “That’s a lot of phones. And all this equipment.” I waved my hand at more than a dozen receivers and transmitters. “What do we have here? Talk between ships, ship-to-shore, direction-finding equipment, transmitters, receivers, all on different frequencies, am I right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right, Lieutenant, let’s talk about submarines. German submarines.”
“Sir, the North Atlantic is ringed with a network of radio direction-finding stations. Using Adcock direction-finding antennae—”
“Spare me the textbook tour. I’m talking about German subs in the immediate vicinity. What happens? How do all these toys function to keep us safe?”
“Operators listen in on assigned frequencies. These frequencies are listed in numbered sets called a ‘series.’ The U-boats tend not to change their frequencies very often. On hearing a U-boat transmission, the intercepting operator presses a foot pedal, which activates his microphone. He then shouts a coded warning to other ships in the convoy to tune in to the intercepted frequency. Bearings are then obtained, at which point the idea is to chase down the bearing and take countermeasures.”
I nodded. His succinct explanation had earned a nod at least. “Those countermeasures being depth charges and other assorted fireworks. I see. And did any of this take place last night?”
Lieutenant Cubitt’s swivel eyes swiveled like they were on gyroscopes.
“Um . . . up to a point.”
“Explain, please.”
“Sir, our destroyer escort ships picked up a transmission on a key. You know, Morse code. They started to get a bearing, but before a fix could be obtained the signal stopped. So they tried to get a handle on the U-boat’s own homing beacon, but nothing doing there, either. That’s not uncommon; the homing beacon diffuses quite rapidly.”
“Am I correct in thinking that had this RT room been manned, you would have been able to triangulate the bearing and get a fix on the U-boat?”
“Yes, sir. Only, the radio seaman on duty at the time, Radio Seaman Norton, had left his post without orders.”
“Why did he do that?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Let me put it another way. What was his explanation?”
“He claims that there was a telephone call from me, summoning him urgently to the radar room.”
“Strange, don’t you think, Lieutenant, that he should have been summoned away at that particular moment?”
“In point of fact, it was just before the first transmission was picked up on the key.”
“Exactly what bearings were obtained for the U-boat, before the signal stopped?”
Lieutenant Cubitt showed me a map. “Here are the two escort destroyers, the Iowa, and the bearings, sir,” he said.
“These bearings would seem to indicate that the U-boat was in the immediate vicinity of the Iowa.”
“Yes, sir.”
“In which case I can quite understand why the captain wanted this kept quiet. On the face of it, we’ve had a lucky escape.”
Cubitt’s stammer kicked in again. So did the blinking eyelids and the swiveling eyeballs.
“Take your time, Lieutenant,” I told him gently.
“A U-boat would be ill-advised to attack three warships in close formation, sir. That would be to risk being destroyed. They’re after much easier prey. Merchant shipping, mostly. That doesn’t fight back.”
“Worth the risk, I’d have thought.”
“Sir?”
“A chance to kill the president and the Joint Chiefs. That is, if one of our own escort destroyers doesn’t do it first.”
One of the radio seamen thought that was pretty funny.
There was a knock at the door of the RT room and a small, slim, pale man with blond hair and a hunted, furtive look came in and saluted smartly. He wasn’t much older than twenty, but there were some worry lines on his forehead that looked like the grille on a Chevrolet. Someone had been giving the boy a hard time.
“This is Radio Seaman Norton, sir,” said Cubitt. “Norton, this is Major Mayer. From Intelligence. He has one or two questions for you.”
I lit a cigarette and offered one to Norton. He shook his head. “Don’t smoke,” he said.
“Last night at 0200 you were the only man on duty,” I said. “Is that standard practice? To have just one man on duty?”
“No, sir. Normally there would be two of us on the night watch. But just before we came on duty, Curtis went sick. Food poisoning, it looks like.”
“Tell me about the telephone call you claim you received.”
“The man on the phone said he was Lieutenant Cubitt, sir. Honest. I’m not making this up. Maybe one of the guys was winding me up, I don’t know, but it sounded just like him. What with the stammer and—” Norton stopped speaking and glanced at the lieutenant. “Sorry, sir.”
“Go on,” I told him.
“Whoever it was ordered me to report immediately to the radar room. So I did.”
“You left your post,” said Cubitt. “Contrary to orders. But for you we might have got a fix on that sub. Instead of which, it’s still out there.”
Norton grimaced with the pain of his guilt and nodded.
“Radio Seaman Norton,” I said. “I’d like you to take me to the radar room.”
“What—now, sir?”
“Yes, now.”
Norton glanced at Cubitt, who shrugged and then nodded.
“Follow me, please, sir,” Norton said and hurried to comply with my request.
It took us the best part of six minutes to get down to the main deck, walk aft of the second uptake, and then climb several stairs to the rear conning tower, where, underneath the main battery director, the radar room was located.
“And now, if you don’t mind,” I said, “I’d like you to lead me back to the radio transmitter room.”
Norton gave me a look.
“It’s important,” I added.
“Very well, sir.”
Arriving back at the RT room, I glanced at my watch.
“Was the radio room empty upon your return here?”
“Yes, sir. You do believe me, don’t you?”
“Yes, I believe you.” I opened the door and sat down opposite the transmitting key, which wasn’t much more than a piece of black Bakelite about the size of a small doorknob attached to a metal plate screwed to the operator’s desk. “Which transmitter does this use?” I asked Cubitt.
