Carnival of Spies

by Robert Moss

  “There’s the old girl herself,” Kordt remarked as they entered a dark, cavernous loft, pointing at a weird statue of beaten tin and silver paper daubed with gaudy enamels. It was a female figure with pointed dugs that hung to its waist, a lolling, pointed tongue and a necklace of death’s heads. “Time the devourer. Chews her men up, that one. Pretty, isn’t she? Some of the black-asses who come here think she’s their patron saint.”

  He shot a sidelong glance at Johnny, to see if the boy was shocked.

  Johnny was drinking up the whole scene. Under the smudged light of blue lanterns filtered by hessian sacking, scores of men and women groped and gyrated to a scratchy recording. There were seamen from every port, with a high proportion of lascars and Chinamen. Some of them danced together, others with heavily rouged tarts or pale, overgrown girls who were bussed in at the end of their shifts from the big cement works at Altona. A sinuous creature of indeterminate sex wafted towards them. A pale arm flashed out and, before Johnny realized what was happening, the apparition was trying to shake hands with his private parts.

  He pushed the thing away, revolted.

  “Pretty, pretty,” it hissed at him.

  “Go away,” Helene said, draping her arm around Johnny’s shoulder. “He’s taken.”

  Johnny felt the warmth as his cheeks flushed red. Helene was laughing at him again, and he was furious that his embarrassment showed. He wanted to prove to Heinz that he was the equal of any experience life might throw in his path, not some callow boy who belonged back in school.

  Heinz found them an empty corner at a huge trestle table, and an Indian waiter brought foaming steins of Bremen beer.

  “You dance with Helene for a bit.” Heinz nudged Johnny. “There are some men I have to talk to.”

  The girl looked older in her red dress. It was real silk, one of Heinz’s trophies from the Orient. As they danced, she ground herself against his body. The insistent, repetitive pressure against his thigh became unbearable. He looked into her face, into those eyes like drowning pools. There was no hint there that she was remotely conscious of the physical effect she was having on him.

  Dammit, he thought. Is she trying to make me look a complete fool?

  He was rescued by Kordt, who got up from the table where he had been playing dice with a rough-looking crowd and signalled to him.

  “Johnny, this is Ernst.” Kordt introduced a man who was built like a beer keg. His head bulged out of his trunk with only the faintest suggestion of a neck. His stubby legs seemed to have been tacked on as an afterthought. His eyes were dark, narrow slits; the whites didn’t show at all.

  “There’s a Norwegian ship at the Kaiser Quai leaving for Frisco Bay tomorrow,” Kordt reported. “Ernst is chief stoker. He can get you signed on if he likes the look of you.”

  Ernst sized Johnny up and spat a wad of tobacco onto the floor. “Too soft,” he muttered, turning away.

  Johnny was outraged. He clutched at the stoker’s shoulder. “What do you mean, too soft?”

  Ernst grabbed his wrist, twisted it round, and pointed at the soft skin of the palm.

  “Smooth as a baby’s bottom,” he complained, addressing himself to Kordt. “He’s never done a day’s work in his life. You should know better than to bring me spoiled puppies like this.”

  “He’ll learn,” Kordt said. “Let’s have another beer.”

  The stoker rubbed the coarse stubble on his chin. “Pretty boys don’t last out the first watch on my tub,” he said, staring rudely at Johnny. Without warning, he struck out with his fist, aiming straight at Johnny’s face. He flattened the palm at the last moment so that he merely patted the boy’s cheek. “You know what I’m talking about?” he said mockingly.

  Johnny put his fists up straight away and delivered a quick jab to the stoker’s belly before he had got his guard up. Ernst swore and took a swing that would have laid the boy out had he not leaped nimbly aside. Johnny feinted with his right and landed two hard left punches. The stoker was winded and angry and came after Johnny with his arms outstretched. For a moment he had the boy caught in a bear hug, and Johnny felt his breath being squeezed out of him. But he wriggled free and a moment later landed a blow to the stoker’s jaw that sent him reeling backwards. He crashed into a table, sent the beer mugs flying and landed on his back, bellowing and flailing his stocky legs. His friends came running over, one of them armed with a bottle.

  Kordt pushed between them and Johnny.

  “I said the boy would learn,” he reminded Ernst as the stoker struggled to his feet, puffing, and began to dust himself off.

  “All right, he’ll do,” the stoker agreed grudgingly and shook Johnny’s hand.

  “And what do you say?” Kordt asked Helene, who had watched the scrap as if it were part of the routine entertainment at the Kali-Bar. She was tapping her foot in time to the music and munching at a big salted horseradish that had been served with the beer.

  She moved over to Johnny, light and surefooted as a cat, put her hands on his shoulders and purred, “Du bist eine Kanone.” Her voice sounded remote, and her hands were unnaturally cool. Her teeth were slightly irregular, and this gave her a primeval, almost animal, look. She opened her mouth so wide he could see its pink roof. Then she pounced on him, biting the side of his neck. It was a real bite, not a love graze, for when he put his hand to the spot he found a bead of blood on the tip of his finger.

  2

  Heinz saw him off at the docks after making him swallow a raw egg and a nip of brandy. “It’s the best antidote for a night like that,” the sailor assured him. Helene came too, and when Johnny, bundled up in the old peajacket Heinz had given him as a going-away present, hugged both of them, he felt, more keenly than the night before, that he was leaving his family.

  The squat figure of the chief stoker appeared at the top of the gangway, yelling at Johnny to get on board. He waved to his friends and patted the pocket where he had concealed another gift, a little tattered book with a red cover.

  “It’s about sharing,” Heinz had said.

  It had been a night of initiations, a night when everything was more important than sleep. The scent of the girl still travelled with him, so he imagined, in the folds of his skin. Heinz had left them alone for a few hours, to return before dawn with a couple of bottles and an immense thirst for strong liquor and stronger conversation.

  “Hey, give a man some room!” Heinz had boomed at them, lunging for the bed so unexpectedly that Johnny had had to hurl himself to one side to avoid his bulk. The sailor squeezed both of them and pulled the cork out of one of the bottles with his teeth. As he passed it back and forth, he studied each of them with an amused, assessing stare.

  “She likes you,” he pronounced at last. “Are you still set on going to sea?”

  “Yes.”

  But when the girl shrugged and said, “It’s all the same to me” between gusts of acrid smoke from a Turkish cigarette, Johnny felt bitterly disappointed. She was Heinz’s girl, but even so...

  “Let’s talk!” Heinz roared. “Let’s talk of what is and what ought to be!”

  For the rest of that magical night, he left no corner of silence where the sadness of parting could take root. He talked of things Johnny had never heard before, of organizing a seamen’s strike, of rum running across the Baltic, of staging a jailbreak in Batavia to get a comrade out of the hands of the Dutch colonial authorities. Johnny realized now that if his friend was a pirate, he was a pirate in the mould of the new century — a revolutionary ready to make war on the flags and totems of every nation in the old, decaying world. Heinz spoke with real passion, even eloquence, about a coming world upheaval that would sweep away all the doddering crowned heads of Europe, the monocles and the chimney barons, the paunchy capitalists of the Hamburg Shipowners’ Association. Seamen would be in the vanguard, according to Heinz, because their travels freed them from the narrow life of the tribe.

  But before revolution came, Heinz predicted, there would have to be
war.

  “That’s where your father’s wrong,” the sailor pursued. “The system won’t collapse under its own weight. But the kings and the capitalists are lighting a bomb under their own backsides. Wait and see. Europe is a heap of loaded rifles. Move one, and all the rest will go off. Then it will be our turn.”

  Johnny was drunk on the words, even more than on the brandy Heinz kept pouring down his throat. Bright yet indistinct, like a flash of sheet lightning over the brow of a hill, he could see a mission shaping itself for him.

  “And you?” he questioned Heinz. “What will you do?”

  “Oh, I’ll make myself useful somewhere or other. Now drink up! Any sailor knows it’s terrible luck to put the cork back in a bottle.”

  Before they left for the harbour Heinz pressed the dog-eared pamphlet into Johnny’s hand.

  “Here. Stick this in your pocket. But don’t let the officers see you, or they’ll turn you off the boat.”

  Johnny saw the title. The Communist Manifesto.

  “It’s about sharing,” Heinz went on. “But handle it gently. It’s not a book. It’s a bomb. A case of dynamite wrapped in forty pages. If you want to talk to someone about it, talk to Ernst. He’s a son of a bitch, but he’s on our side.”

  On board the Norwegian freighter Ula Johnny studied Marx and Engels in the breaks from heaving coal into a glowering furnace until his muscles ached and the sweat poured into his eyes. He found a sheltered spot in the lee of a lifeboat and read and reread the Communist Manifesto. He was excited by its coiled power. In a handful of pages the authors had compressed an arching theory of world history, a devastating indictment of a society made for the Rausches — a society founded on selfish calculation — and a program for revolutionary action. “Let the ruling classes tremble...”

  Johnny began to think of himself as a communist. When the Ula docked at San Francisco, Ernst took him to a meeting in a smoky hall where twenty men disputed in half a dozen languages. Johnny could follow some of the Yiddish; it was close enough to German. The rest was lost on him. A Javanese seaman got up and jabbered in a tongue that nobody else could understand. But when it was explained that he was pledging the support of the peoples of the Dutch East Indies for the anti-imperialist struggle, he was hailed with rapturous applause.

  They gave him leaflets to hand out to the men on the docks. Usually he was rebuffed, sometimes with blows and oaths. The harbour police came to chase him away, but each time he went back. He enjoyed the game of hide and seek. He told himself he was striking a blow for the cause.

  But when war came, the call of the tribe — as Heinz had called it disparagingly was stronger than the canons of Karl Marx.

  He was in a honkytonk in Panama drinking with Ernst, who had picked up a pair of olive-skinned girls. They had had to get off their last boat in a hurry after Ernst had led a mutiny against the first officer, a strutting martinet who would flog a man because he didn’t like the shine on the deck. The captain had broken out the rifles and threatened to shoot the troublemakers.

  Now they were looking for another boat and talking about the carnage in Europe that was reported in the American papers. Johnny felt edgy sitting in foreign bars, sailing under foreign flags, while his own people were fighting and dying in tens of thousands — whether or not the war was just. The Royal Navy was the most powerful on earth, and its arrogant admirals were trying to impose a blockade to starve the Germans into submission. His own family might go hungry. Germany needed sailors, needed them desperately, and a small voice inside him argued that he belonged there, not in a cheap bordello in Panama.

  There were French seamen at the next table, six or seven of them, all several sheets to the wind. Johnny heard muttering about les sales Boches, obviously directed at them. One of the Frenchmen got up and started bellowing the Marseillaise, beating out the rhythm on the table with his fist. The others joined in a ragged chorus.

  “Hey, you!” the first Frenchman called over. “Sausage-face! Stand up when we’re singing our anthem.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Ernst spat.

  Another French sailor jumped up and made a grab for Rosita, the girl sitting next to Johnny.

  “Get away from her!” Johnny snapped.

  The Frenchman pushed a paper into the girl’s hands. “Are you going to sit with these saligauds? See what they do?”

  Johnny snatched the paper away. It was a crude piece of war propaganda. The cartoon showed hoggish German soldiers in pickelhaube helmets skewering French babies on their bayonets.

  “They lie to you,” he appealed to the Frenchman in broken English. “Don’t believe this shit.”

  The Frenchman either did not understand or did not care. He looked like a real Marseilles harbour rat, spoiling for a fight. He clamped his paws round Rosita’s waist and started dragging her away. Johnny jumped to his feet, fists clenched. The sailor dropped the girl like a used rag and peeled a knife out of his sock.

  Johnny ducked the first lunge and got his hand around the sailor’s wrist, struggling for the knife. Other men’s shadows fell over him, closing in.

  Ernst did not waste any time. He seized the rum bottle in front of him by its neck, knocked off the bottom against the table edge, and advanced on the Frenchman behind a ring of jagged glass. The shadows started to recede.

  “Come on,” Ernst hissed. “Let’s beat it.”

  That might have been the end of it, but the barroom patriot wasn’t ready to call it a night.

  He hurled himself at Ernst as the stoker turned his back to go out the door.

  “Ernst!”

  Before Johnny’s warning had left his lips, the stoker, warned by some sixth sense, had wheeled round with an agility surprising in a man of his girth to meet the Frenchman with the broken bottle. Johnny saw the man’s face explode like a ripe watermelon hurled off a cart.

  “Klugscheisser,” Ernst swore. “Smart-shitter.” Then, to Johnny: “What are you gaping at? Run, before the cops arrive.”

  Johnny found himself running the way he had always run, towards the sea, sickened by the criminal waste of what had happened inside the bawdy house. Those men had been ready to cut out his liver for no better reason than that he spoke German. Now one of them had lost his face. This was the madness that was convulsing Europe. The war had followed him here.

  He now knew what he had to do.

  There was a German ship in port, bound for Hamburg. “Go your own way, then,” Ernst growled when Johnny announced his intentions.

  The stoker shook his head, but he lingered on the wharf, watching the boy clambering along the hawser, hand over hand. In the bright moonlight, Johnny should have been spotted at once; the lookout must have been snoring drunk.

  They were three days out into the Atlantic before he was discovered, living off bananas in a forward cargo hold crawling with spiders and cockroaches the size of his thumb.

  The captain was all for putting Johnny in the brig. But when the boy announced that he had stowed away because he wanted to get home to enlist in the Kaiser’s navy, the captain’s long brown face softened.

  “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen,” Johnny lied, promoting himself three years. “All right. You can work your passage. Germany needs lads with your spirit.”

  3

  The war changed Johnny and everything else.

  He sailed on the battleship Thüringen into a night of black horror off the coast of Jutland. Blinded by the North Sea fogs and the smoke blown back from their own stacks by the howling headwinds, the German navy battled the full might of the British Grand Fleet.

  “We’re on the devil’s anvil,” one of his shipmates muttered under the thunder of bursting shells.

  They were on deck trying to rescue the drowning men from a battle cruiser the British had sent to the bottom.

  The next instant, the sailor was silenced by a piece of flying shrapnel. Johnny caught the falling body and clasped his hands around his friend’s chest, trying to prop him up. The sa
ilor was curiously light. He stumbled with him towards shelter, oblivious to the warm stickiness that was seeping through his trousers.

  “Idiot!” one of the officers snapped at him. It was Lieutenant von Arnim, a wasp-waisted dandy who thought he was a ringer for Prince Rupprecht and who made the men’s life a hell. “Throw him over the side!”

  Dazed, Johnny staggered on with his burden.

  Klaus Behring, another Hamburg man, came hopping over the rolling deck and said gently to Johnny, “I’ll take him.”

  Only then did Johnny realize that he was carrying a detached trunk. The shrapnel had sawed his friend in two, just below the waist.

  The German battle fleet made its escape to its boltholes at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven, and the admirals came with boxloads of medals. The men were paraded in their bon-nets, the ribbons flapping in the breeze, and told they had won a famous victory for the Fatherland.

  Johnny got an Iron Cross for bravery under fire.

  What kind of victory? he thought sourly — with thousands of good men dead, a dozen ships sunk and the British in command of the seas, while at home German families gnawed on scraps of leather, waiting for shipments of food that will never come?

  Idleness was more subversive than action. Johnny had come home to fight, but after Jutland there was precious little fighting to be done in the German navy. Only the U-boats slunk out through the British patrols to prey on Allied shipping. The battle fleet stayed cooped up like a set of toy boats in a bathtub. The days passed in mindless, mechanical routine, drilling and scrubbing, with von Arnim lying in wait to reward the tiniest slip with a vicious flogging. In their free hours, denied home leave, the men were left to stew in fetid metal boxes. They were fed on slops while the officers dined on foie gras and fine wines. There was a contest to see who could count the largest number of maggots in his meat. Klaus Behring claimed the prize with a count of thirty-seven, but his record was soon broken.