by Alan Furst
“We saw the smoke.”
“How’s your fuel?”
“Not bad.”
“Because we can’t give you any.”
“Are we leaving?”
“Soviet heroes will stand and fight the fascist dogs, of course. Until Thursday, the way it looks now-should take them about four days to break in here. We can’t hold it, we have one division facing Leeb’s Army Group North, so you and your crew may have to do a little fighting, we shall see. But, for the moment, perhaps you’ll tell me what you’ve been up to, sailing around the Baltic dressed as a Spaniard.”
“A mission for the British navy.”
“Our brave allies! We’ve always admired them-since midnight, anyhow. Care to tell me what and where?”
“You will understand, Kapitn Leutnant, that I can’t.”
Shalakov nodded- yes, I do understand. “Very honorable,” he said. “And we’ll grant you that luxury, for the time being. Now, had you shown up yesterday… But it isn’t yesterday, it’s today, and today everything is different, today you’re a valued ally, and we can always use an extra cargo ship.”
“Where would we go?”
“Maybe Riga, maybe-depends how fast the Wehrmacht move. More likely, the Liepaja elements of the Baltic Fleet will withdraw up to the naval base at Tallinn, in Estonia. We’ll have to take equipment, personnel, some of the civilians-we’ll save whatever we can, and that will be your job.”
“We can do that,” DeHaan said. “What about my crew?”
“They can stay as they are-we may interview your passengers, but, as for the crew, whatever you’ve got you can keep. But they’d better remain on board. As of this morning, the Latvian gangs are back in business-digging up their rifles in the chicken coops, and waiting eagerly for their German pals.” Shalakov paused a moment, then said, “What was it, DeHaan? Agents? To Denmark? Not neutral Sweden, I hope. Dropping off agents, I would guess. Certainly not picking them up.”
“Why not?”
“I admire the British navy, and I admire daring-as a quality in special operations, and I know the Germans are kicking the hell out of British merchant shipping, but there was no way under the sun that your ship was ever coming out of the Baltic.”
After dusk, the bombers came again. From loudspeakers mounted on the streetlamps, a staticky voice called out, “Attention! Attention! Attention citizens of Liepaja, we are having an air raid. Prepare to take arms and fight the invaders!” In Russian first-Kovacz translated-and then in Lettish. DeHaan put the fire crews on alert, hoses reeled out, and had Van Dyck make sure of the pumps. Then the sirens whined, for a long time, it seemed, fifteen minutes, and then, from the south, the first bombs-muffled, deep-voiced whumps that marched north toward the city. As the antiaircraft started up, hammering away from the ships in the military harbor and the roofs of Liepaja, DeHaan looked out on the pier, at the foot of the gangway. It had been guarded since they docked, two soldiers with rifles, but they were no longer there.
As S. Kolb hurried across the quay, an incendiary hit the side of the tractor factory and a fiery river of green phosphorus came after him. He ran away from it, but the bastards wouldn’t leave him alone that night. Fallback from the antiaircraft fire came rattling down on the pavement, so Kolb held his briefcase over his head as he ran.
Nonetheless, he was gleeful, thanked his lucky stars that he was off and away from that accursed iron sea monster and her laconic Dutchmen. Beans and canned fish, the smell of oily steam up his nose as he ate, slept, read his book. Did he have it? Yes, he did, the history of Venice-three pounds of Doges, now just snuggle up to a building wall so it doesn’t get skewered by some hot metal shard from heaven. Where the hell was he? The street signs were cut in stone on the corners of the buildings, so, here it was Vitolu iela — of course! Good old Vitolu iela, what happy times we had there! Had he ever in his life seen a street map of Liepaja? No. Who had? What sort of lunatic would ever come to such a place?
He heard the bomb whistle, his knees turned to water and he tucked his head down between his shoulders and scurried into a doorway. Sucked in his breath when the thing hit, a few blocks away. Hah, missed! He tried the knob on the door, but it was locked. A tarnished brass plate said the place was an art school, ichthyological illustration their specialty. So that’s what they do here, draw fish. Above the plate, someone had printed Closed on a card tacked to the door.
Somewhere ahead of him, a building on fire. The flames threw flickering orange light on the street and, for a moment, a shadow moved. What was that? No policemen, please. Again it moved-a woman, out of one doorway and into another. He moved up two doorways, and waited. Not long. She was breathless and fat, carrying a huge bowl with a dish towel stretched over the top. Was that soup? Oh yes, by God it was. Pea soup! Nothing else smelled like that. “Good evening, madam,” he said, in German.
She made a noise, a throttled scream, one hand rising to her throat.
Kolb lowered his briefcase and-the god of inspiration came to visit-tipped his hat.
The woman put her hand back on the bowl.
“Madam, can you tell me…” Two airplanes came roaring over the street, a hundred feet up, he couldn’t hear himself think. Then they were gone. “ Madam, ” he said, raising his voice but keeping it gentle. “ Can you tell me where to find the railroad station?”
“Vuss?”
“Be calm, my dear, nothing can hurt you tonight.”
She looked at him, then pointed.
“Railroad?”
She nodded.
“How far?”
“Zwanzig minuten.” Twenty minutes.
Again, Kolb tipped his hat. Do you have, perhaps, a spoon? “Good evening, madam,” he said, and hurried away up the street.
Now train stations were a poor choice during air raids, but Kolb only needed to be close-any caf or hallway would do-because the trains wouldn’t run until the bombers got tired and went home. He had no Soviet papers, but bribery was a way of life in this empire and, with Adolf pounding on the city gates, he sensed it wouldn’t be a problem.
Local or express, he’d be on a train tonight. A short run, up to enchanting Riga, “the Paris of hell,” then a call at the British consulate. Where he’d look up the passport control officer, almost always connected to the spy people, if in fact he wasn’t running the thing himself. Also at the consulate: secure W/T transmissions-or so they thought. I say, Brown, dear boy, one of your chaps has turned up here-headed for Malm, he says, but it seems he’s gone a bit wide.
So please advise.
And the loathsome Brown would surely have something in mind. Something dangerous, of course, unspeakably difficult and dreary.
Back in the street he’d just left, an explosion, then a faade fell off a building and came crashing down in a huge cloud of dust. Hadn’t hit the woman, had it?
Bastards.
23 June, 0630 hours. Port of Liepaja.
DeHaan paced the bridge, standing a restless port watch. Too far north, he thought, every heart had its compass and his pointed far south of here. Here it was not summer-a cold early sky above the city and the marshland beyond, bending reeds, black ponds, pine forest. And some shadow of a future darkness that fell over him. He felt it.
Slowly, the Noordendam came back to life. Kees, hobbling with the aid of a stick, led Van Dyck and a crew of ABs in the repair of the stern hull-a length of sheet tin cut to fit, then welded on. It looked awful but it would keep the water out. There was coffee in the wardroom at 0800, and when DeHaan mentioned the absent Kolb, Shtern said that he’d left, during the air raid.
“Where the hell did he find to go?” Ratter said.
Shtern didn’t know.
“He went back to work,” Kovacz said.
“What will become of us now?” Mr. Ali said.
“First we get out of here,” DeHaan said. “And then, part of the Soviet merchant fleet.”
Many the silences that had descended over wardroom tables in DeHaan’s year
s at sea, but this one had quite a heft to it. Certainly they’d foreseen this, individually. Now, however, it was said among them, and that made it worse. Because they’d all thought that somebody would have an idea, because somebody always did. But not now. Finally Kees said, “Maybe they’ll send us to Britain.”
“With what?” Kovacz said.
“Wheat, cattle.”
“They can’t feed their own,” Maria Bromen said. “How to feed Britain?”
“And we can’t get there,” Ratter said. “We can go north to Estonia, then Kronstadt, the naval base off Leningrad, but that’s it. The Germans will mine the whole Baltic now-if they haven’t already.”
“They claim they have,” Mr. Ali said. “In clear. On the radio.”
“Trying to scare the Russian submarines,” Poulsen said.
“What scares me,” Shtern said, “is years. In Russia.”
Cornelius came to the door and said, “Captain, sir? You are needed on the pier, sir.”
“Now, Cornelius?”
“Yes, sir. I think you better come. Russian soldiers, sir.”
DeHaan left, taking Kovacz with him as translator. At the foot of the gangway, an oiler and an AB stood sheepishly in the custody of a squad of Soviet marines. Called black devils, for their uniform caps, they wore striped sailor’s jerseys beneath army blouses in honor of their service.
The sergeant stepped forward as DeHaan and Kovacz came down the gangway. He spoke briefly, then Kovacz said, “‘Here are your sailors,’ he says. ‘Out last night after the raid.’”
“Thank them,” DeHaan said. “We’re grateful.”
Kovacz translated the answer as “Please to keep them where they belong, from now on.”
“Tell him we will. And we mean it.”
“One missing,” Kovacz said.
“It’s Xanos, sir,” the AB said.
“What happened?”
“Press-ganged. We went looking for a bar and he wandered off, and they told us he’d been grabbed by seamen from one of the ships in port.”
“Stas, ask them if they can find our sailor.”
Kovacz tried. “They say they can’t. Can’t search all the ships. They regret.”
The marines went off, and DeHaan sent the crewmen back to the quarters. “If you leave this ship again,” he told them, “don’t come back.”
2040 hours. Port of Liepaja.
In the cabin, DeHaan and Maria Bromen waited. Tried to read, tried to talk, but they could hear the fighting now, south of the city, faint but steady, like a distant thunderstorm. A German reconnaissance plane flew high above the port and some of the gunners tried their luck but he was too far above the flak burst. Then the cruiser started up, with its heavy turret guns, the detonations echoing off the waterfront buildings.
“Who are they shooting at?” Maria Bromen said.
“Helping their army, trying to.”
“How far, then, the battle?”
“Big guns like that? Maybe five miles.”
“Not so far.”
“No.”
She rose from the bed and went to look out the porthole, at the dock and the city. “We are leaving soon, I think.”
“We are?”
She beckoned him to the porthole. There was an army truck parked by the gangway. The canvas top was turned back and a few soldiers were wrestling with a bulky shape, pushing it toward the tailgate, while others waited on the pier to ease it to the ground. After a moment, DeHaan saw that what they were fighting with was a grand piano. Too heavy-when the weight shifted, the piano dropped the last two feet onto the stone quay. One of the soldiers in the truck picked up a piano bench, shouted something, and tossed it to the others.
With a sigh, DeHaan went up to the deck, where Van Dyck and some of the crew had gathered to watch the show. “Where do you want it, Cap’n?” Van Dyck said.
“Forward hold. Get a sling on it, then cover it with canvas.”
The soldiers had apparently intended to carry the piano up the gangway, but Van Dyck waved them off, pointed to the cargo derricks, and the soldiers smiled and nodded.
DeHaan went back to the cabin.
“So now,” she said, “we go north.”
“The Russian officer said Tallinn, the naval base.”
“How far?”
“A day, twenty-four hours.”
“Well,” she said, “you warned me, in Lisbon.”
“Are you sorry, that you didn’t stay?”
She smoothed his hair. “No,” she said. “No. It’s better like this. Better to do what you want, and then what will happen will happen.”
“It may not be so bad, up there.”
“No, not too bad.”
“They’re at war now, and we are their allies.”
She smiled, her fingers touching his face. “You don’t know them,” she said. “You want to think it’s a good world.” She stood, started to unbutton the shirt. “For me, a shower. I don’t know what else to do.” Looking out the porthole, she said, “And for you-out there.”
On the pier a crowd, twenty or so, men and women, peering up at the ship and milling around their leader, a man with a dramatic beard, a fedora, a cape. Some of them carried suitcases, while others pushed wardrobe trunks on little wheels.
DeHaan grabbed his hat and said, “I’ll be back.”
By the time he reached the deck, the bearded man had already climbed the gangway. “Good evening,” he said to DeHaan, in English. “Is this the Noordenstadt?”
“The Noordendam.”
“It says Santa Rosa.”
“Even so, it’s the Noordendam.”
“Ah, good. We’re the Kiev.”
“Which is what?”
“The Kiev. The Kiev Ballet, the touring company. We are expected, no?”
DeHaan started to laugh and raised his hands, meaning he didn’t know a thing, and the bearded man relaxed. “Kherzhensky,” he said, extending a hand. “The impresario. And you are?”
“DeHaan, I’m the captain. Was that your piano?”
“We don’t have a piano, and the orchestra is on the Burya, the destroyer. Where do we go, Captain?”
“Anywhere you can find, Mr. Kherzhensky. Maybe the wardroom would be best, I’ll show you.”
Kherzhensky turned to the crowd of dancers and clapped his hands. “Come along now,” he said. “We’re going to a wardroom.”
Twenty minutes later, two companies of marines showed up, singing as they climbed the gangway. Then came a truckload of office furniture, and a Grosser Mercedes automobile with a stove in the backseat, then three naval lieutenants with wives and children, two dogs and two cats. The deputy mayor of Liepaja brought his mother, her maid, and a commissar. A dozen trunks followed, their loading supervised by two mustached men in suits who carried submachine guns. A family of Jews, the men in skullcaps, arrived in a Liepaja taxi. The driver parked his taxi and followed them up the gangway. There followed a generator, then six railway conductors, and four wives, with children. “They are coming,” one of the conductors said to DeHaan. He took off his hat, and wiped his brow with a handkerchief. It was one in the morning when Shalakov arrived, looking very harassed, with his tie loosened. He found DeHaan on the bridge.
“I see you’ve got steam up,” he said.
“It seems we’re leaving.”
Shalakov looked around, the deck was full of wandering people, the mustached men sat on their trunks, smoking cigarettes and talking. “Did the messenger reach you?”
“No. Just, all this.”
“It’s a madhouse. We’ve had Latvian gangs in the city, and Wehrmacht commandos.” He took a deep breath, then gave DeHaan a grim smile. “Will be a bad war,” he said. “And long. Anyhow, here is a list of the ships in your convoy.” A typed sheet of paper, the names of the ships transliterated into the Roman alphabet. “Communicate by radio, at six point five, don’t worry about code-not tonight. We’re going to the naval base at Tallinn, there’s no point in trying for Riga no
w. You’ll wait for the Burya, the lead destroyer, to sound her siren, and follow her. All ready to go?”
“Yes.”
“I’m on the minelayer Tsiklon — cyclone. So then, good luck to you, and I’ll see you in Tallinn.”
0130. Scheldt at the helm, lookouts fore and aft and on the bridge wings, Van Dyck with the fire crews, Kovacz and Poulsen in the engine room, Ratter and Kees with DeHaan on the bridge. The bombing that night was to the south and the east, above Liepaja there was only a single plane in the sky, dropping clouds of leaflets, which fluttered in the breeze as they drifted down to the port. At 0142, a couple came running along the quay, the woman dressed for an evening at a nightclub. They shouted up to the freighter, pleading in several languages, and DeHaan had the gangway lowered and took them aboard. The woman, who had run with her shoes in her hand, had tears streaming down her face, and fell to her knees when she reached the deck. One of the dancers came over and put an arm around her shoulders. They were fighting in the city now, bursts of gunfire, then silence, and from the bridge they could see lines of red tracer, streaming from the top of a lighthouse and the steeple of a waterfront church. Good firing points, DeHaan knew, though they’d been built high for other reasons.
At 0220 hours, the siren.
DeHaan turned the engine-room telegraph to Slow — Ahead, and, without the aid of tugboats, they moved cautiously out of the harbor. They could see the Burya, a half mile ahead, and fell in between a motor torpedo boat and an icebreaker. On the last pier in the winter harbor, a crowd of people, standing amid bags and bundles and suitcases, yelled and waved at the ships as they steamed past.
Following the destroyer, Noordendam made a long, slow turn to the north and the land fell away behind them. By 0245 they were well out to sea; a stiff wind, a handful of stars among the clouds, a few whitecaps. DeHaan called for Full — Ahead, the engine-room bell rang, then he said, “Mr. Ratter?”
“Aye, sir?”
“Run up the Dutch flag, Mr. Ratter.”
There were twenty ships, to begin with, strung out along the wake of the Burya. The working class of a naval fleet-supply tenders, tankers and minelayers, torpedo boats, minesweepers and icebreakers, a few old fishing trawlers made over into patrol boats, a small freighter. A little after three in the morning they lost the freighter, which broke down and had to drop anchor. The passengers stood silently on the deck and watched the convoy as it went by. An hour later, the Burya began to maneuver, a long series of course changes. By then, Maria Bromen had joined Mr. Ali in the radio room, translating the orders as they came in. Bearing two six eight, bearing two six two. Scheldt spun the wheel as DeHaan called them out. “We’re in a Russian minefield,” Ratter said.
