by Alan Furst
Ali glanced at the clock on his panel. “A few minutes yet, Captain,” he said.
By 0850, Kovacz had the engine back up to full steam. DeHaan calculated that the convoy had gained, in three and a half hours, twenty-one miles, which the Noordendam could make up—eleven knots to the convoy’s eight—in seven hours. For that time, they would sail alone. An inviting target, for anybody who happened to be in the neighborhood, but if they hadn’t been attacked by now, DeHaan guessed, they were probably safe. Either Covington’s ASDIC sounding had been a false contact—a sunken ship, perhaps—or the submarine had been driven off. Meanwhile, the storm was gaining on them; heavy clouds turned the morning dark, and a curtain of rain spanned the southern sky where dazzling forks of lightning fired off two and three at a time, with distant claps of thunder. The wind was rising, but they had also a following current, which added speed as they chased the convoy.
DeHaan, unable to fight Germans or weather, and running as fast as he could, had to do something, so turned his attention to morale. They’d taken on fresh beef at Alexandria, and he ordered it served for lunch, with mustard sauce—the cook’s one good trick—and potatoes, a double beer ration, and fresh pineapple for dessert. Then he had the officers rounded up for coffee.
Kees had to remain on forenoon watch, as did the Danish fireman, Poulsen, now serving as apprentice second engineer, but Ratter, Kovacz, Ali, and Shtern—the creases still evident in his work shirt and trousers, a blue officer’s cap set squarely on his head—all gathered in the wardroom.
When they were settled, DeHaan announced that by 1600 hours they should be rejoining the convoy.
“Didn’t you tell me,” Ratter said, “that we would have air cover?”
“I did. But, as you see . . .”
“They’re in trouble,” Kovacz said. “We’re lucky to have anything.”
“True,” Mr. Ali said. “The eight o’clock BBC had that certain sound to it.”
“What sound?” Shtern said.
“The sound of losing. ‘Enemy attacks in great strength.’ ‘British forces making a stand.’ What they said about France in ’40.”
“What if they lose Sphakia?” Ratter said.
“They’ll let us know,” DeHaan said.
Ratter’s grin meant are you sure?
“Better be ready for it,” Kovacz said. “What they have on Crete are British and Greek troops evacuated from the Peloponnesus, three weeks ago. Some of them ran all the way from Albania, and you know what retreat is, it’s chaos, lost weapons, missing officers, busted vehicles—this isn’t a stand on Crete, it’s a last stand.”
“You saw it, Mr. Kovacz, in ’39?” Shtern said.
“Some of it, yes. All I wanted.”
“They might hang on,” DeHaan said. “They don’t think they’re finished. More coffee, Dr. Shtern?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“There’s cream and sugar—better enjoy it while it lasts.”
Shtern took a spoonful of sugar. DeHaan asked Ratter how Cornelius was coming along—the mess boy had replaced Patapouf as assistant cook.
“Can’t say. The cook mumbles to himself all day, but then, he always did. Food’s the same.”
“This cook,” Shtern said, then wasn’t quite sure how to put it.
Mr. Ali laughed. “May I smoke?” he said.
“Below deck, certainly,” DeHaan said.
Ali fitted a cigarette into his holder. “Life at sea, Dr. Shtern, you’ll get used to it.”
A knock at the wardroom door produced one of the AB lookouts, binoculars around his neck. “Mr. Kees wants you, Captain.”
The AB was badly shaken, and everyone looked at DeHaan. Who wanted to sigh, but couldn’t, so said, “I’ll be back,” and put his saucer on top of his cup. Rising, he checked his watch—life had returned to something like normal for one hour, no more.
On deck, a dozen crewmen stared silently out to sea, where a tower of black smoke rose two hundred feet in the darkened sky, thick smoke, stronger than the wind, driven by heavy orange flame that boiled and rolled at its base. DeHaan held out his hand and the AB gave him the binoculars. It was the Greek tanker Evdokia, down at the stern.
When he reached the bridge, Kees said, “That was our torpedo, you know. I’ve been wondering where it was.”
“Any survivors?”
“Haven’t seen any. Navy would’ve picked up what was left.”
Fourteen thousand tons of oil, aviation gas, whatever they had. The sea around Evdokia was covered with burning oil.
“They’ll always take a tanker, if they can get one,” Kees said.
That was true. DeHaan had heard of convoys where a tanker was literally roped between two destroyers. He raised the binoculars and swept them across the burning sea, but all he found was an upside-down rubber raft, its fabric stained with age.
He gave the binoculars back to the AB. “There might still be someone in the water,” he said.
“Aye-aye, sir,” the AB said. He swallowed once, then turned to keep watch.
DeHaan headed for the wardroom.
Later, he took the four-to-eight, and worked Noordendam through the storm. She rode like a pig, with all her weight, wallowing in the valleys, nosing up the oncoming wave and hauling herself over. As Ratter came up to relieve him they sighted the Ellery, a mile or so behind the convoy, and the destroyer changed course in order to guide them in. As they fell into line behind the Maud McDowell, they saw her hit by lightning, and, for an instant, a ball of blue fire danced on the lightning rod at the masthead. Which worked, apparently, guiding the charge down to the sea, and not into the holds. Had that happened, they would have known.
As the storm passed over them, DeHaan returned to his cabin, where he tried to sleep. He was desperately tired, down to nothing—the other sense of exhausted, and various parts of him throbbed and ached. So, sleep, he told himself. But he couldn’t. In fact, insomnia was nothing new. As a child, he’d nightly tricked himself to sleep by imagining that he was on a train, the last car of a train, which was filled with beds, where everybody he knew lay safe and asleep, where it was up to him to close the door at the back of the car, and, making sure it was closed, he could then climb into the last bed, and go to sleep.
But that was a long time ago.
So he turned on the lamp and stood before the forty-book library. Who wants a job? France, war, the travails of the Van Hoogendams, dog-eared at page 148. A legacy, a sinister uncle, the beauteous Emma, and, then, oblivion.
25 May, 1830 hours. Port of Sphakia.
It had been lovely here, once upon a time. A Mediterranean fishing village, with tall, narrow houses jammed together in a circle around the port, their peeling, sun-bleached walls ochre or Venetian red, apricot or pastel green, nets hung to dry over rough cobbles, fishing boats bobbing in cerulean water. You can only get fish—the travelers would say, returning to a cold summer in Rotterdam—bread and figs and goat cheese and wonderful bad wine, and the mail comes once a week if it comes at all but the sun shines and the sky is blue.
Now, one of the houses had lost its front wall, you could see old wallpaper and unmade beds, while its neighbors were missing the glass in their windows, and the one over the taverna had a charcoal-colored blast pattern on the third floor.
At the western end of the little bay they’d handled cargo. One tall derrick was bent in the middle, and from another came showers of blue sparks as the welders worked in the dusk. But it was, at least, deep. Enough so that the freighters could tie up to the pier, as camouflage-painted trucks arrived to take the cargo away. DeHaan counted four cranes that looked like they still worked, and a tender was attempting to fix a line to a small trawler, floating hull up where the wooden timbers of the dock had burned for a time before they were extinguished. Out in the bay, the Ellery and the Covington joined a heavy cruiser, and various corvettes and minesweepers, all of them guarding what DeHaan suspected might be the last usable port on Crete.
Moments after t
hey tied up, a naval warrant officer, who looked like he’d been awake for days, came aboard and found DeHaan. “We’ll unload the Greek ship first,” he said, “except for your planes, we’ll want those right away.”
“Are we under fire here?” DeHaan asked him.
“Now and then,” the officer said. “It’s been, in general, pretty thick.”
From the mountains behind the port, DeHaan could hear artillery exchanges, the echoes bouncing off the slopes before they reached the harbor.
When the planes came, a few minutes later, it turned out that the town of Sphakia was the proud owner of a siren. It wasn’t much of a siren, some tired old thing the mayor bought, that climbed up and down in a bass voice, cracked and hoarse, and got the dogs barking. The alarms from the warships in the bay were far more convincing, klaxons sounding a series of shrill bleats as the sailors ran for their battle stations.
DeHaan had, at that moment, walked the warrant officer to the gangplank and waited courteously until he reached the dock. He was a fair-skinned man with reddish hair, not placid but steady, and surely hardened to mishap, and he seemed, as he turned and searched the sky, more than anything else, annoyed. Not frightened, not furious, it was simply that what was coming his way would cause him work and irritation, was the last straw, and he pressed his lips together and slowly shook his head, then strolled off down the dock toward the Maud McDowell.
The planes were Junkers 87s—Stukas, single-engine dive-bombers with fixed wheels in curved wells on wide struts. Three of them, coming in from the north, from Maleme, maybe twenty miles away, skimming over the treetops at five hundred feet and clearly headed for the port. By then, the navy had been radioed by British troops on the front lines so, from the cruiser, from both destroyers and the smaller ships, came a blizzard of antiaircraft gunnery. Oerlikon guns, firing at a rate of five hundred rounds a minute—eight-second bursts from sixty-round drums, changed quickly by the loader—and Bofors guns, a hundred and twenty rounds a minute, but with heavier shells. Every fifth round, on both weapons, was a tracer, so the fireworks were spectacular, dozens of long red streams flowing over the Noordendam, then tracking downward as the planes dove. DeHaan stood transfixed, tracer whizzing above his head, lower, and lower.
The bombers attacked three abreast, and the one in the middle blew up right away, the second crashed into the forest on the lower slopes, setting the resinous pine trees ablaze, while the third pilot veered, too much fire in his face, got rid of his bomb—which blew up a stable behind the town—slanted over the water to the east of the ships, trailed smoke for a moment, and cartwheeled into the sea.
The second wave did better. Following the curve of the mountain, then turning sharply over the port. One bomb raised a giant waterspout between the Triton and Maud McDowell, a second, hit by gunfire, blew up its plane a hundred feet above the Noordendam, showering the deck with burning metal, and the third—well, nobody saw what happened to the third.
Where’s the RAF? Not here. Except for the two Hurricanes on the Noordendam, tied down with steel wire. Otherwise, only a new set of Stukas. But the navy was doing well, the hammering and drumming was frantic, and constant, though some of it hit the houses in the port, white puffs of plaster blowing off the walls.
DeHaan scrambled up the ladderway to the bridge, where Kees and an AB were watching the show. Then he was on his back, the AB lying across his legs, both of them covered with glass, while outside it was raining iron, first a light patter, then a heavy downpour. As DeHaan tried to free himself, he realized he’d gone deaf in one ear and shook his head like a dog, but it didn’t help. Then Kees appeared, blood running from his nose and flowing down either side of his mouth, and, once he managed to get DeHaan stood upright, he cupped a hand beneath his chin and spit out the stub of his pipe.
Looking around, DeHaan realized that there was no glass in the windows, which made it easier to see flames, up by the bow, and, as he watched, a bright yellow flash. So, they were on fire. And that’s that. He tried to run, but he was very wobbly, and staggered like a drunk out onto the bridge wing. Somebody had set off the fire siren, and he could make out dark figures dragging a hose toward the bow. Going forward, he met Van Dyck, who led one of the firefighting crews, hanging on to a high-pressure hose, which sent a thick stream of water onto one of the tanks, which was burning, and periodically firing a shell into the sky from a hole in its front deck.
“Maud McDowell,” Van Dyck shouted.
DeHaan looked for it but he couldn’t see it. He saw the Triton, but not the Maud McDowell, because it wasn’t there. It wasn’t burning, it wasn’t sinking. It wasn’t.
30 May. Port of Tangier.
Wilhelm made tea with a flourish, raising and lowering the kettle as the stream of water splashed onto the mint leaves packed in the bottom of a glass. “My tea ritual,” she said. “This time every day.”
The sun was setting in the window of her studio. Lying back on a divan, her model, wearing only a blanket with tiny silver mirrors hanging from threads, smoked a cigarette and watched like a cat.
“Right, Leila?” Wilhelm said in French. “Time for tea.”
“Is it always poured like that?” DeHaan said.
“It cools the water,” Leila said. “So you don’t break the glass.” She was beautiful, strangely so, and though she’d covered herself modestly with the blanket, Wilhelm’s easel revealed what lay beneath it. In heavy pencil shaded with scribbles, her hip curved as she reached for an orange in a bowl beside the divan. DeHaan looked for the bowl, but there was only a stack of books.
“We wondered when we would see you again,” Wilhelm said, now in Dutch. DeHaan turned his head as she spoke—only some of his hearing had returned on one side.
“You almost didn’t see me at all,” he said. “She doesn’t understand Dutch, does she?”
“No.” The idea was faintly amusing. “I wouldn’t think so.” She finished pouring the tea and left it to steep, an oily cloud rising from the leaves in each glass. From the pocket of her faded cotton shirt she took a cigarette. “Care for one?”
It was a Gauloise—what British seamen called a golliwog—and DeHaan lit it with particular pleasure. “And life here?” he said.
“We are, how to say, fully engaged—is that the military term?”
“Yes.”
“Leila dear,” Wilhelm said, “I think there’s hot water now.”
Leila put out her cigarette, gave Wilhelm a complicit smile—very well, I’ll leave you alone with him—and padded off into the other room. A moment later, the sound of a shower.
“Anyhow, it’s good to see you,” Wilhelm said.
“I had to get away from that damn ship,” DeHaan said. “We’re ordered to anchor here, for the moment, but I expect we’ll be off again soon enough.”
“Was it terrible?”
DeHaan was surprised, but apparently it showed. “We were in the war,” he said. “A few close calls. Other people had it much worse, but it was bad enough. We had a tank, deck cargo, catch fire—we weren’t sure how that happened, maybe an antiaircraft round—and we had two hoses on it, a lot of water, but every time we stopped it glowed red. The people in Alexandria had loaded it fully armed, a crazy thing to do, and the ammunition kept going off. It should’ve gone over the side, but we couldn’t get near it, and it was too heavy anyhow. The deck got very hot, and we had bombs under there.”
“Was anybody hurt?”
“Earlier, we lost a man.”
“I’m sorry, Eric.”
“Yes, I am too, but we were lucky not to lose more.” He believed in the modern idea that it was good to talk about bad experiences but now he saw that it wasn’t really so, not for him. “What do you mean, ‘fully engaged’?”
“Oh, something big’s going on here, we’re only a small part of it, but we’ve bribed half the clerks at the electric company.” She paused, then said “Who knows” in a dark, ironic voice, as though she were telling a ghost story.
“Thi
s is coming from Leiden’s office?”
“No, it’s the British now. We’ve either been promoted, or demoted, or maybe just under new management, it’s hard to know. Whatever it is, it’s grown, and they ask all the time, in that crusty way they have, if we can get help. Which isn’t so easy, but we’ve tried. And been turned down, more than once, which makes poor Hoek furious.”
“Can I do something?”
“I doubt they’d like that. Maybe lucky for you, because the police have been around. Someone’s not happy.”
“Moroccan police?”
“Spanish. Anyhow, they say they’re police, show you a badge, but . . .”
“What do they want?”
“They ask about so-and-so, who you’ve never heard of. I get the feeling they just want to get in the house and have a look, and maybe scare you a little.”
“Does it work?”
“Of course it does, these men in their suits, very serious, it makes you wonder what they know.” She shrugged.
In the other room, the shower was turned off. “So, then,” Wilhelm said, “the price of cheese.”
30 May. Baden-Baden.
For S. Kolb, the nightmare continued.
Now in a nightmare spa town, amid crowds of SS officers dripping hideous insignia—skulls, axes, god-awful stuff—chins held high, girlfriends hanging on their arms. Their left arms—the right was reserved for saluting, for heilhitlering each other, every thirty seconds. Nazi heaven, he thought.
Three weeks earlier, he’d been marooned in Hamburg, waiting for his case officer, the Englishman who called himself Mr. Brown, to find him a way out of nightmare Germany, as the ship he was to take to Lisbon had been inconveniently sunk. There he’d moldered, in a sad room on a sad street near the docks, waiting for the agent Frulein Lena to return, and, alone for days with only newspapers for company, had been overwhelmed by fantasies about this woman—stern, middle-aged, corset-bound, but more wildly desirable lonely hour by lonely hour. She only seemed to be a stuffy doughmaiden of the Mittelbourgeoisie, he decided. Beneath that whalebone-clad exterior, banked fires smoldered, secret depravities lurked.
