Dark Voyage

by Alan Furst

  “It’s the rainy season—a steambath when it stops.” They’d taken a cargo of greenheart and mora wood, used for wharves and docks, from Dutch Guiana up to the Spanish port of La Corua, then sailed in ballast—mostly water but some scrap iron—for Tangier.

  “Lose anybody?”

  “Only one, an oiler. A Finn, or so his book said. Good oiler, but a terrible drunk. Hit people—he was pretty good at that too. I tried to buy him out of jail, but they wouldn’t do it.”

  “In Paramaribo? They wouldn’t take a bribe?”

  “He hit a pimp, a barman, a bouncer, a cop, and a jailer.”

  “Christ!” A moment later, Terhouven smiled. “In that order?”

  DeHaan nodded.

  Terhouven finished his lamb and bread, wiped his mouth, then made a face. “Too dumb to live, some people. You replace him?”

  “Couldn’t be done. So, as of this evening, we’re at forty-two.”

  “You can sail with forty-two.”

  “We can.” But we need more and you know it.

  “It’s the war,” Terhouven said.

  “Pretty bad, lately, everybody’s undermanned, especially in the engine room. On a lot of ships, when they reach port, they have the crew on deck after midnight, waiting for the drunks to come out of the bars. ‘Climb aboard, mate, we get bacon twice a day.’”

  “Or somebody gets hit on the head, and wakes up at sea.”

  “Yes, that too.”

  Terhouven looked over the tray to see if there was anything else worth eating. “Tell me, Eric, how come no uniform?”

  “All I knew was ‘a dinner,’ so . . .”

  “Is it wrecked?”

  “No, it lives.”

  “You can have another made here, you know.”

  Across the table, Wilhelm said to Hoek, “Well, I went to the flower market but he wasn’t there.”

  DeHaan was done with dinner, had had all he wanted and liked it well enough. He’d been everywhere in the world and eaten bravely, but he could never quite forget his last plate of fried potatoes and mayonnaise in a waterfront caf in Rotterdam. He took out a packet of small cigars—a Dutch brand called North State, cigarette-shaped but longer, the color of dark chocolate, and offered it to Terhouven, who declined, then lit one for himself, inhaled the brutal smoke, and coughed with pleasure. “Wim,” he said, “what is this dinner about?”

  Terhouven hesitated, was about to tell all, then didn’t. “The Hyperion Line is going to war, Eric, and the first step is taken here, tonight. As for the details, why not wait and see—don’t spoil the surprise.”

  The waiters returned, the first holding the door, the second bearing a tray piled high with mounds of little pastries that glistened with honey, the third carrying two bottles of champagne in buckets of ice. He raised the buckets proudly and grinned at the dinner guests. “Celebration!” he said. “Open both bottles?”

  “Please,” Hoek said.

  When the waiters left, Hoek opened the briefcase by his feet and unfolded a Dutch flag, red, white, and blue in horizontal bars, took it by the corners, and held it above his head. Commander Leiden rose and drew from an inner pocket a sheet of good paper with several typed paragraphs, cleared his throat, and stood at attention. “Captain DeHaan,” he said, “would you stand facing me, please?” From somewhere in the neighborhood, the sound of whining Arabic music was faintly audible.

  Leiden, in a formal voice, began to read. This was admiralty language, stern and flowery and impressively antique—herebys and whereases and shall not fails, a high wall of words. But plain enough to DeHaan, who blinked once but that was all: Leiden was administering the oath of enlistment in the Royal Dutch Navy. DeHaan raised his right hand, repeated the phrases as directed, and swore his life away. That done, the conclusion was not long in coming. “Therefore, in the name of Her Royal Majesty, Queen Wilhelmina, and by order of the Commissioners of the Admiralty of the Royal Naval Forces of the Netherlands, it is our pleasure to appoint to commission the present Eric, Mathias, DeHaan, to the rank of Lieutenant Commander, in the sure and certain knowledge that he shall perform with full honor and endeavor . . .”

  It went on for a time, then Leiden shook his hand and said, “You may salute, now,” which DeHaan did, and Leiden returned the salute as Terhouven and Wilhelm applauded.

  Looking at Terhouven, DeHaan saw a joker’s delight, thought, why no uniform indeed, you sly bastard, but saw also eyes that shone brighter than they should.

  They ate the pastries and drank the champagne and talked about the war. Then, at midnight, the man who worked as Hoek’s attendant and chauffeur, a pink-cheeked migr called Herbert, arrived and Wilhelm and Hoek left them. They could hear the chair bumping along the cobbled alley toward a car parked in a nearby square.

  “Quite a character,” Leiden said. “Our Mijnheer Hoek.”

  “A big heart in him,” Terhouven said.

  “Surely that.” Leiden paused to finish the last of his champagne. “He has never married, officially, but it’s said that two of his servants are actually his wives, and that the children in the house are his. It’s not unknown here. In fact, if he were Mohammedan, he could have four wives.”

  “Four wives.” From his tone of voice, Terhouven was considering the domestic, not the erotic, implications.

  “Only two, for Hoek, and it’s no more than gossip,” Leiden said. “But he does maintain a large household, which he can easily afford.”

  “Well,” DeHaan said, “why not.”

  “We agree. Whatever their peculiarities, you soon discover, as part of a government in exile, the importance of patriots who have their wealth abroad.”

  “And want to spend it,” Terhouven said.

  “Yes, but not only that. What you saw here tonight was the North African station of the Royal Dutch Navy’s Bureau of Naval Intelligence.”

  Terhouven and DeHaan were silent, then Terhouven said, “May one ask how you found them?”

  One may not—but Leiden never said it. Terhouven was himself a patriot of this category and that, by the slimmest of margins, bought him an answer. “They volunteered—at the consul’s office in Casablanca. There were others, of course, more than you’d expect, but these two we decided we could trust. If not to be good at it, at least to be quiet. This sort of connection excites people, in the beginning, and they simply must tell, you know, ‘just one friend.’” He spoke the last words in the voice of the indiscreet, then turned to DeHaan and said, “You can depend on them, of course, but one of the axioms of this work is that you don’t abandon your, ah, best instincts.”

  DeHaan began to understand the dinner. For a time, he’d thought he might be asked to serve on one of the Dutch warships that had escaped capture in 1940 and gone on to fight alongside the British navy. Now he knew better. Yes, he was newly a Luitenant ter Zee 1ste Klasse, but—and Terhouven’s presence confirmed his suspicion—it was the Noordendam that was going to war.

  “And Wilhelm?” Terhouven said.

  “Our wireless/telegraph operator. And, just as important, she knows people—migrs and Moroccans, plain folk and otherwise. An artist, you see, can turn up anywhere and talk to anyone and nobody cares. Very useful, if you’re us. She was among the first to apply, I should add, and her father was a senior officer in the army. So, maybe it’s true, blood will tell and all that.”

  “Are they to give me orders?” DeHaan said, not sounding as neutral as he thought.

  “No. They will help you—you will need their help—and they may serve as a retransmission station for our instructions to you.”

  “Which are?”

  “What we want you to do, and this is the broad answer, is to carry on the war. We, which is to say Section IIIA of the Admiralty General Staff, currently find ourselves crammed into two small rooms in D’Arblay Street, in Soho. Some of us have to share desks, but, frankly, we never had all that much space in The Hague, and we’d learned, over the years, to accept a certain, insignificance. With Holland a
neutral state, as she’d been in the Great War, the government had better things to do with its money than to buy intelligence. We had the naval attachs in the embassies, ran a small operation now and again, watched a few ports. Then the roof fell in and we lost the war in four days—the army hadn’t fought since 1830, nobody anticipated attacks by parachute and glider, the queen sailed away, and we surrendered. We were humiliated, and, if we didn’t believe that, the British found ways to let us know it was true. In their eyes, we stood with the French, the Belgians, and the Danes—not the ‘brave but outmanned Greeks.’

  “So now, in London, we are left to simmer in the exile stew—de Gaulle demands this, the Belgians want that, the Dutch navy turns the heat down and wears sweaters, because gas is expensive. Thank God, is all I can say, for our tugboat rescue service and for the ships of our merchant fleet, which sail, and are too often lost, in the Atlantic convoys. But Britain needs more—she needs America is what she really needs but they’re not ready to fight—and now she has decided, and we may have given her a little help in seeing it, that she needs us, D’Arblay Street, thus we need our friend Terhouven here, and we need you. Special missions, Lieutenant Commander DeHaan, at which you shall succeed. Thereby casting some very timely glory on Holland, the Royal Navy, and its beloved Section IIIA. So then, will it be ‘yes’ or ‘no’? ‘Maybe,’ unfortunately, is at present not available.”

  DeHaan took a moment to answer. “Is the Noordendam to be armed?”

  This was not a bad guess. Germany had armed merchant freighters and they’d been more than efficient. Sailing under false flags, with guns cleverly concealed, they approached unsuspecting ships, then showed their true colors, took the crews prisoner, and sank the ships or sent them off to Germany. One such raider had recently captured an entire Norwegian whaling fleet, which mattered because whale oil was converted to glycerine, used for explosives.

  But Leiden smiled and shook his head. “Not that we wouldn’t like to, but no.”

  “Well, of course I’ll do it, whatever it is,” DeHaan said. “What about my crew?”

  “What about them? They serve on the Noordendam, under your command.”

  DeHaan nodded, as though that were the answer. In fact, such business as Leiden had in mind was first of all secret, but sailors went ashore, got drunk, and told whores, or anybody in a bar, their life story.

  Leiden leaned forward and lowered his voice—now the truth. “Look,” he said, “the fact is that all Dutch merchant ships that survived the invasion are to come under the control of what’s called the Netherlands Ministry of Shipping, and most will then be under the management of British companies, which would put the Noordendam in convoy on the Halifax run, or down around the Cape of Good Hope and up the Suez Canal to the British naval base at Alexandria. But that won’t happen because the Royal Dutch Navy has chartered her from the Hyperion Line, at a rate of one guilder a year, with a Dutch naval officer in command.”

  DeHaan saw that Leiden and Terhouven were looking at him, waiting for a reaction. “Well, it seems we’ve been honored,” he said, meaning no irony at all. They truly had been, to be chosen in this way, though he suspected it would be honor bought at a high price.

  “You have,” Terhouven said. Now live up to it.

  “It’s not final,” Leiden said, “but there’s a good possibility that your sister ships will be run by British companies.”

  “Lot of nerve, they have,” Terhouven said. “What’s the old saying—‘nation of pirates’?”

  “Yes,” DeHaan said. “Like us.”

  They all had a laugh out of that. “Well, it’s just for the duration,” Leiden said.

  “No doubt,” Terhouven said sourly. The Netherlands Hyperion Line had come into existence in 1918, with Terhouven and his brother first chartering, then buying, at a very good price, a German freighter awarded as part of war reparations to France. Governments and shipowners, over the centuries, forever had their noses in each other’s business—bloody noses often the result.

  “You’ve been at this a long time,” DeHaan said to Leiden.

  “Since 1916, as a young ensign. I tried to get out, once or twice, but they wouldn’t let me go.”

  This was not necessarily good news to DeHaan, who’d taken some comfort in Leiden’s being, from the look of him, an old seadog. But now Leiden went on to describe himself as “an old deskdog,” waiting a beat for a chuckle that never came.

  “Haven’t been to sea all that much. Not at all, really,” Leiden said. Then smiled in recollection and added, “We never got out of Holland—six of us from the section—until August. Snuck down into Belgium one hot night and stole a little fishing smack, in Knokke-le-Zoute. Hardly any fuel in the damn thing—that’s how the Germans keep them on the leash—but there was a sail aboard and we managed to get it rigged. All of us were in uniform, mind you, because we didn’t want to get shot as spies if they caught us. We drifted around in the dark for a time—there was a good, heavy sea running that night—while our two amateur sailing enthusiasts had a, spirited discussion about which way to go. Then we realized what we looked like, ‘bathtub full of admirals’ somebody said, and we had to laugh. Office navy, that’s us.”

  DeHaan glanced at Terhouven and saw that they’d both managed polite smiles—Leiden may have been “office navy” but they were not. Terhouven said, “Might as well kill this,” and shared out the last of the gin, while DeHaan fired up one of his cigars.

  “All right,” Leiden said, acknowledging a comment that had not actually been spoken, “maybe we better get down to business.”

  It was after two in the morning when they left the little room and walked back down the rue Raisuli, which had grown steeper during dinner. Terhouven and Leiden were staying at a private home near the Mendoubia gardens, while DeHaan was headed for the waterfront. It was a warm night, a spring night, with a breeze off the water and a certain lilt to the air, well known to the town’s poets but never named. Anyhow, the cats were out, and the radios turned down—likely out of consideration for the neighbors.

  A man in a doorway, the hood of his djellaba up so that it shadowed his face, cleared his throat as they passed by and, when he had their attention, said, “Bonsoir, messieurs,” his voice cheerful and inviting. He hesitated a moment, as though they knew who he was and what he was there for, then said, “Messieurs? Le got franais, ou le got anglais?”

  It took DeHaan a moment to think that through, while a puzzled Terhouven said, “Pardon?”

  “Le got,” DeHaan said, “means taste, preference, and franais means that it is a woman you have a taste for.”

  “Oh,” Terhouven said. “I see. Well, gentlemen, it’s on the Hyperion Line, if you care to make a night of it.”

  “Another time, perhaps,” Leiden said.

  They came, a few minutes later, to the rue es Seghin, where they would part company. Terhouven said goodby, adding that they might be able to meet the following day. Leiden shook hands with DeHaan and said, “Good luck, then.” He held DeHaan’s hand a moment longer, said, “We . . .” but did not go on. Finally he said, “Well, good luck,” and turned away. He was, as he’d been all night, bluff and brisk, professional, yet just for an instant there’d been an edge of emotion to him, as though he knew he would never see DeHaan again, and Terhouven’s glance, over the shoulder as he walked off, confirmed it.

  DeHaan headed for the Bab el Marsa and the port. Le got hollandais, he thought. Drunk and lonely and sent off to die at sea. But he found that thought offensive and made himself take it back. In the North Atlantic, and everywhere in Europe, all sorts of people had their lives in their hands that night but there was always room for one more, and as to who would see the end of war and who wouldn’t, that was up to the stars. When DeHaan was fifteen, his father, captain of the schooner Helma J., had gone copra trading in the Celebes Sea, taking rafts up the jungle rivers, buying at native villages, bringing the copra out in burlap sacks. Then one day he went up the wrong river and was nev
er seen again and, for a horribly awkward half hour, the head of the Helma J. syndicate had sat in their parlor in Rotterdam, staring at the floor, mumbling “poor man, poor man, his luck ran out,” and leaving an envelope on the hall table. One year later, through floods of his mother’s tears, DeHaan had gone to sea.

  It was almost three in the morning by the time DeHaan reached the dock. The port launch was long ago tied up for the night but his chief mate had sent the Noordendam’s cutter for him, crewed by two ABs, who wished him good evening and started the engine. DeHaan sat silent in the bow as they chugged off through the harbor swell, past dead fish and oil slicks lit by moonlight.

  0800 Hrs. 4 May 1941. 3512′N/610′W, course SSW. Low cloud, light NE swell, w/wves 4/6 feet. No vessels sighted. All well on board. J. Ratter, First Officer.

  For the time being, he thought, reading the first officer’s entry as he began the forenoon watch, which ran from eight to twelve in the morning. A traditional captain’s watch, like the four-to-eight, and the dreaded midwatch. Midnight to four, which called for endless mugs of coffee, as one stared into the night and waited for dawn, but he’d never sailed on a ship where it was any other way. At “the hour of the wolf,” when life flickered, and sometimes went out, a captain had to be on his bridge.

  He said good morning to the new helmsman—always an AB, able-bodied seaman—at the wheel, and saw that Ratter, his first officer, hadn’t gone down to his cabin at the end of his watch but was out on the starboard wing of the bridge, sweeping the horizon with his binoculars. U-boats might well be out hunting, even this close to the British air cover from Gibraltar, and from the open deck of the bridge wing you could see much better than on the enclosed bridge. Not that it mattered, DeHaan thought, they couldn’t run and they couldn’t fight. They could break radio silence, a hard-and-fast rule for merchant ships since the beginning of the war, but that wouldn’t save the Noordendam.