The Last Passenger

by Manel Loureiro

  The taxi stopped in front of the main building’s entrance. A uniformed serviceman was waiting, holding a wide umbrella.

  “Welcome to Denborough Naval Depot!” The man’s voice sounded loud enough to project over a hurricane. “I’m Commander Collins. I believe we spoke by phone this morning.”

  “I’m Kate Kilroy.” Kate extended her hand to the officer, who grasped it with surprising gentleness for a man of his size.

  “I don’t detect any Irish accent,” he remarked.

  “Kilroy is . . . was my husband’s surname. My maiden name is Soto. I’m Spanish. From Barcelona.”

  “Ah,” murmured Collins. He didn’t require any further explanation for the time being. “Please, come inside. It’s a terrible evening out.”

  The interior of the office was an unexpected change from the outdoor chaos. Everything was pristine and in order, as if at any moment the Queen herself might stop in for an inspection. A coffeemaker gurgled in the corner, a delicious aroma wafting through the air. The room was equipped with a few tables and filing cabinets but little more. The bluish glow of computer screens melted into the white light cast from the ceiling fixtures.

  “Please, have a seat.” Collins graciously drew out a chair for Kate to sit down. “We don’t get many visitors here in the Junkyard, so please forgive our lack of comforts.”

  “The Junkyard?” Kate raised an eyebrow.

  “Just a nickname we’ve given the base,” replied Collins. “I suppose you’ve already guessed why.”

  “The truth is it’s very . . . quaint.” Kate chose her words carefully and took off her coat.

  “It’s disgusting is what it is,” confessed Collins with a wide grin. “This is the Royal Navy’s dumping ground. This is where all the rubbish ends up that nobody wants. That includes me. I always liken it to that drawer we all put our useless junk in. But we dare not throw any of it away lest we have a need for it in the future.”

  Kate smiled, captivated by the officer’s sincerity and merriment. “I’m getting the picture. I also have a junk drawer like that in my house.”

  “Ah, but this is the largest junk drawer in all of England!” He raised his hand and signaled out the window. “At this very moment I must have eight destroyers docked here that saw action in the Falklands, nearly a dozen patrollers from the 1960s, three minesweepers, and if I’m not mistaken, about twenty other kinds of ships. That’s not even counting the tons of obsolete equipment strewn about.”

  “You’re the head of a small army, Commander,” Kate laughed.

  “I have enough materials to declare war on a small country.” Collins shrugged, then smiled. “That, of course, is if any of it works. Would you care for some coffee?”

  Kate realized she had not eaten anything since lunch. Next to the coffee machine was a box of doughnuts. Her stomach rumbled. Embarrassed, she felt the blood flow to her cheeks.

  “I like it when a person can get to the point,” joked Collins with a hearty laugh. He passed Kate the doughnuts and coffee. “Now let’s dispense with the pleasantries. You’re here because you want to know about the Sinful Siren, right?”

  “The Sinful Siren?” replied Kate with half a doughnut in her mouth.

  “The Big S, the Crusher, Hitler’s Vixen. It’s had many names over the years.”

  He removed a manila file from his desk drawer and opened it to the first page. It was an old black-and-white photo of the Valkyrie. The foreground showed two men in uniform posing in very different ways. The older of the two, wearing the captain’s stripes, seemed quite comfortable, whereas the younger man standing at his side wore an expression of worry and fatigue.

  “The ship’s official name is the Valkyrie. It was built in 1938 by the Blohm und Voss shipyard in Hamburg for an organization called KDF.” He looked up at Kate. “Do you have any idea what that might be?”

  Kate shook her head and took a sip of her coffee.

  “As stated in the report, it made its inaugural voyage on the twenty-third of August in 1939, with two hundred and seventeen passengers and fifty-five crew members aboard. Five days later, a coal liner called the Pass of Ballaster came across the luxury cruiser adrift at sea. Neither the ship nor its engines had power when it was found eight hundred miles off the coast of Newfoundland.”

  “Adrift? Was there an accident?”

  “That’s the peculiar thing,” answered Collins. “No one knows. They found nobody on board.”

  “Nobody? But that’s impossible. What about all the passengers and the crew? All those people don’t just vanish without a trace!”

  “I agree,” Collins said, furrowing his brow. “But we do know that before the Pass of Ballaster towed the ship back to Bristol, they spent twelve hours searching the area in which they found the Valkyrie without finding a clue. There wasn’t a single lifeboat missing. It’s quite the mystery.”

  “OK, let me see if I’ve got this straight.” Kate set her coffee on the table and laced her fingers together. “A coal liner finds an empty cruise ship floating in the middle of the ocean. There’s no trace of anyone. The ship gets towed to port, and nobody opens an investigation? How did this not make headlines in every major newspaper? Shouldn’t this story be better known?”

  “The fact is a few days later Germany invaded Poland, sparking the beginning of the Second World War. England and France declared war on Germany, and before anyone knew about it, the newspapers had much more interesting headlines. There was no room for a strange story about a ship found abandoned at sea. A German ship, mind you.”

  “I see.” Kate was taking notes as the colonel spoke. “So I take it there was never any kind of official investigation.”

  “Are you kidding?” Collins smiled sadly. “During the next twelve months, Hitler’s submarines nearly finished off England’s navy. In the span of fifteen weeks, hundreds of transport ships were sunk, ships that had supplied raw materials to the islands. Thousands of Allied sailors disappeared at sea. Nobody even considered mounting an investigation regarding the Valkyrie. The story lost all importance before it was even born.”

  “What happened to the ship during all this?”

  “The Valkyrie was internalized. That’s military jargon for civil ships that are captured from an enemy nation.” Collins rifled through the pages of the report. “However, there was a bit of a legal snafu. Since the ship had been seized four days before the war started, it technically couldn’t be considered an internalized ship. But it also couldn’t be categorized as a rescued ship because it sailed under the enemy flag. A sort of bureaucratic tangle, you see.”

  “I suppose it was no favor to the owner of the towing ship, the”—Kate consulted her notes—“Pass of Ballaster. Did he get his finder’s fee?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so.” Collins raised up a packet that was taking up nearly half the dossier on the Valkyrie. “He spent nearly four years in litigation against the Royal Navy in pursuit of the reward money, but it was in vain. During the war there were bigger fish to fry. Facing a scarcity of ships, the Admiralty decided to commission the Valkyrie for the transportation of soldiers, and well, this is where things get strange.”

  Kate leaned forward. She was enthralled with the curious nature of the colonel’s story. A flash of lightning lit up the room.

  “What happened?”

  “For starters, nobody could get the engines to work. The best mechanics from London were called in. They took the motors apart piece by piece and put them together again, but to no avail. The engines simply refused to work. They tried replacing them with British engines, but the setup of the cams the Germans had used was so specialized that it proved impossible. Eventually, they realized the ship would not be leaving Liverpool, so they turned it into a floating antiaircraft vessel.”

  “A floating antiaircraft vessel?”

  “Yes, to defend the port against shelling from the German Luftwaffe. Eight antiaircraft cannons were installed on deck and assigned a crew to oversee them, and the navy anch
ored the Valkyrie near the port’s refinery. That way it would be as close as possible to the resources it was meant to protect. But in case the German forces did manage to fly over unimpeded, the ship could be cut loose and allowed to drift away with the tide.”

  “So what happened?”

  “The dark legend of the Valkyrie began taking shape.” Collins was holding an old draft of a report that looked fragile enough to disintegrate in his hands. “In August 1940 a German bomb fell on one of the cannons, killing all servicemen in the act. Unbelievably, the Valkyrie sustained little damage. The following month a powder keg exploded in cannon number four. Sixteen sailors that had been loading missiles were killed in the blast. Again the Valkyrie escaped nearly unscathed, only losing a couple of bulkheads. The cause of the explosion was never discovered.”

  “Sounds like a ship with a curse on it,” Kate said, scrawling down every word. “I suppose nobody wanted to be stationed there.”

  “Just wait. It gets better.” Collins looked at her seriously. “The twenty-first of November in 1940 was the worst night of the German Blitz on Liverpool. Hundreds of people died that night alone. However, according to reports, at two forty in the morning, at the height of the bombing, the cannon on the Valkyrie ceased firing. At first it was believed that the ship had received a direct hit and had been sunk. But from the refinery it was confirmed that it was still there, floating in the dark, and that the artillery had simply quit working. Now take a guess.”

  Kate suddenly noticed how dry her mouth was. This was all too bizarre to be true. “That would mean—” she stopped short.

  “Exactly. When they went aboard the Valkyrie, they found that the crew assigned to oversee the cannons had completely vanished. As if they had never existed.”

  VII

  “People don’t just disappear like that,” murmured Kate. “I suppose they were found later, right?”

  “They most certainly were not. At least that’s not what the report says,” answered Collins.

  “Are you saying the ship swallowed them up like it did the passengers?” Kate’s voice was skeptical.

  “Not at all. Are you familiar with Occam’s razor?”

  “I believe it states that when there are two or more competing hypotheses regarding a single event—”

  “The simplest one has the highest probability of being correct,” Collins finished the phrase.

  “So what is your theory?”

  “First, the artillerymen were a part of Home Guard. That means they weren’t even trained military.” Collins set the file on the table and began listing on his fingers. “Shop owners, attorneys, and milkmen dressed in uniform and put in charge of a few little cannons to defend against the Luftwaffe? Put yourself in their shoes. They were last seen at night aboard a dark ship with a reputation for being cursed. A vicious bombing campaign was unfolding, and they were stationed next to millions of gallons of combustible fuel. I propose that, very simply, facing the risk of being scorched to death, the sailors on duty that night shit their pants and got the hell out of there as fast as they could.”

  “You think they deserted?”

  “In those days everything was in chaos, and there was little oversight, especially with the men from Home Guard. They probably hurried home and reenlisted the next day. Or maybe they ended up in the army. It’s hard to say. In any case, would you agree my theory makes more sense than thinking they were swallowed by a ship?”

  Kate nodded, reflective. The story made sense. “What happened afterward?”

  “Very little.” Collins shuffled his papers as if he were looking for some hidden order in the dossier. “By the end of the war, the company that owned the Pass of Ballaster no longer existed. The same can be said of the Nazi government, the original owner of the Valkyrie. No one laid claim to the ship. While things were being resolved, the ship was towed temporarily to the naval depot at Denborough. It was placed in dry dock until they figured out what to do with it. But given its nature and origin, the navy decided not to make its location or existence public, in case Communist Germany wanted to reclaim it. It was the Cold War, you understand? So here it has stayed for the past sixty-eight years.”

  “No one’s discovered the Valkyrie for nearly seventy years?” Kate lifted her head up from her notepad, stunned. “How is that possible?”

  “It was a civil ship docked at a military base in the middle of a nation fresh from war. Plus, in the fifties, commercial flights started between America and Europe. That left passenger liners like the Valkyrie with little relevance. After so much time exposed to the elements, the Valkyrie’s hull has deteriorated substantially, making it too expensive to repair. In the sixties, some thought about using it as a floating target, but they abandoned that idea for some reason. It was easier just to leave it where it was and take care of other business.”

  “So it’s just been sitting there all of these years? Hasn’t anyone gone aboard?”

  “All the hatchways except a few were sealed to keep thieves from breaking in and stealing the wiring or other valuable materials. Plus, that helped keep the moisture from filtering in and ruining the remaining furnishings. Early on, they made monthly rounds through the ship. But after a while, even those stopped.”

  “Why’s that? More disappearances?”

  “Nothing that creepy.” Collins laughed out loud. “The guards began suffering dizziness and vomiting from nothing more than going aboard. Some even became seriously ill. A committee ruled that the condensation from the toxic gases emanating from the bilge was to blame. They decided to seal up the ship entirely.”

  Just then the door opened, and a heavyset man walked in wearing a military raincoat. Grumbling, he shook off the water that was sliding down his jacket and pulled it over his head.

  “Blasted weather! Stupid, shitty rain,” he sputtered from beneath a thick gray mustache, without noting Kate’s presence. “I’ve got two years till retirement, and that next day, I swear, I’m going anywhere you can’t see a single fucking cloud anywhere. I’ve had it up to . . . Oh, dear!”

  “Miss Kilroy, I’d like to introduce you to Sergeant Major Lambert.” Collins stood up as the portly sergeant blushed clear up to the edge of his receding hairline. “He’s usually a little more polite in front of a lady, but it seems today is not his day.”

  “Please, forgive me. I had no idea we had a visitor,” he said in embarrassment. “Here at the Junkya—I mean the depot—we don’t get many visitors. At least we didn’t use to.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” said Kate, smiling. The sergeant relaxed a bit. “I suppose that’s normal when you spend too much time in a place like this. Are there many stationed here?”

  “Five guards on the perimeter, two assistants to Sergeant Major Lambert, and the two of us,” answered Collins. “More than enough to keep this place out of God’s hands.

  “Miss Kilroy is a reporter from London,” Collins explained while the sergeant major poured himself a cup of coffee. “I was just telling her the story of the Big S.”

  Lambert nodded before saying, “I was glad to see them get that thing out of dry dock and take it away. I waited fifteen years to see it go.”

  “Who took it?” asked Kate, feeling she had begun to approach the crux of the matter. “Why? How?”

  “Its new owners took it. You see, next year the Royal Navy will be terminating half of the Trafalgar-class submarine fleet,” answered Collins. “They’re monsters built in the eighties, filled with asbestos and so many other pollutants that it’s going to be a major headache to scrap them. Someone in the Admiralty realized they would need a quiet, remote place to do the dirty work. Naturally, they chose here.”

  “For the first time in sixty years, we’ve been ordered to make space,” added Lambert. “It came down from London that the dry dock holding the Valkyrie along with three other old ships had to be cleared out, and those ships were put up for auction to the highest bidder.”

  “In other words, after sixty years outsid
e the public eye, the Valkyrie suddenly resurfaced from oblivion.” Kate began to grasp why Robert had thought there was something bigger to this story.

  “Essentially, yes.” Collins took out the topmost file from the folder and handed it to Kate. Its brilliant white contrasted starkly with the yellowed pages contained within the rest of the folder. Apparently, it had not been there too long. “A public statement announcing the auction was released six months ago. It ran in print ads and on the ministry’s website. Not to mention the other usual media. I think it even appeared in your newspaper.”

  “I see from this that there were three bidders.” Kate’s eyes fell on one of the names. “Garrison and Sons . . .”

  “That’s a scrapping firm that has over thirty years’ experience,” explained Collins. “Normally, they’re the only ones who bid when one of these old ships comes up for auction. They’re close by, which makes transport cheaper for them. But in this case, they didn’t win. The other two bidders made exorbitant offers for the Valkyrie.”

  “I see.” Kate scanned the other two names. “Feldman Inc. is obviously Isaac Feldman’s company, but who is this other one? Who is Wolf und Klee?”

  “I believe that would be a German company, and it would appear they had been determined to make off with the Valkyrie at all costs. Before the auction they sent a group of technicians to inspect the ship and take tons of photos. They were all German and all quite keen on the Valkyrie.”

  “It’s true,” added Lambert. “They ran around her like headless chickens. They acted like it was some marvel instead of a cursed heap of junk from the thirties.”

  “But in the end Feldman won,” countered Kate. “How did he pull it off?”

  “He had the highest bid.” Collins’s eyes sparkled playfully. “He must have wanted that old ship more than anything because he paid dearly for it. He only managed to make the Germans acquiesce once he entered a bid of one hundred and fifty million pounds.”

  Kate’s eyes grew big. “That’s an incredible sum for a broken-down ship.”