by Alan Furst
“No, not much. Do you care for sea bream?”
“It can be strong.”
“That’s polite, Captain. A woman friend of mine calls it ‘Neptune’s terrible secret.’”
“Well, after a couple of months of canned herring . . .”
They went on, from this to that, luncheon talk, until they’d made their way through the second glass of wine and started on the third, then DeHaan said, “When I was in Alexandria, in fact with your man there, I happened to meet a woman.” He paused, waited for Hallowes.
Whose “Yes?”—when it finally arrived—was a little ragged at the edges.
“Ah, nobody you know, I suppose. Know about.”
Hallowes was relieved, the subject was espionage, not, not God-only-knew-what. “No, Captain, not our style, but not a bad idea to wonder, the way the world goes these days.”
“Well, I did wonder.”
“Not German, was she? Russian? Hungarian?”
“Local, I believe.”
“Mm. Still . . .”
The ferry wasn’t in when DeHaan was driven back to Algeciras, so Hallowes’s driver left him at the Reina Cristina, the city’s good hotel, where he could wait in the bar. DeHaan would have liked to walk around, but the infamous Andalusian wind was swirling dust in the streets and the city was poor and grim and vaguely sinister, so, the barman promising to let him know when the ferry made port, he sat at the bar, ordered a beer, and lit up a North State.
It had been foolish to ask Hallowes about Demetria, he realized, on two counts. First of all, Hallowes could easily have lied, maybe had lied, and second of all, she was lost, no matter who she was or what he felt. Still, he would have liked to know, because the night they’d spent together had stirred him and he wanted more.
But she was in the past, now, would remain a memory. When they’d told him at Sphakia that he’d be in convoy back to Tangier, not Alexandria, he’d understood that he would never see her again. He might have found a way to get a letter to her, if he’d been clever and had eight weeks, but what would he have said? Book passage on a local destroyer and come see me in Tangier? No, their morning coffee in the room at the Hotel Cecil, when at last they’d had to admit to themselves that they’d made all the love they could, had been a last meal.
Like the one with Arlette. Late April of 1940, tragedy on the way, only a few weeks left but nobody knew that. “Our last night,” she’d said. “You will take me to dinner.” She chose the restaurant, the Brasserie Heininger, down by the Place Bastille, and DeHaan had known it was a mistake the moment they entered. It was much too splendid, white marble and red banquettes and gold mirrors, lavishly mustached waiters rushing past with platters of langouste and saucisson, the tables jammed with smart Parisians, laughing and shouting and flirting and calling for more wine, all of them wildly overheated with war-is-coming fever.
Not for us, he’d thought. She’d asked him to wear his uniform, hat and all, and he had, while she’d squeezed into an emerald dress from some earlier, leaner time. And, there they stood, behind a velvet rope, a rueful DeHaan now too well aware that they were meant for the bistro, not the brasserie. While they waited, a handsome couple swept in the door, said something clever to the matre d’, and seated themselves. The matre d’s look was apologetic, but these were people who did what they liked. DeHaan, battered captain’s hat hidden, he hoped, beneath his arm, just tried to look like he didn’t care.
Then the propritaire showed up. He could have been no one else, short and harassed, waiting uneasily for whatever would go wrong next. But this—this he could fix. “I am Papa Heininger,” he told them. He never said a word about it, but DeHaan knew it was the uniform, even a merchant captain’s uniform, which, to him, meant something. “Table Fourteen, Andr,” he said to the matre d’, shooing him off. Then, to DeHaan, “Our best, Captain, for you and madame.”
And so it was. Every eye followed the procession to the holy table—who are they? With a flourish, the matre d’ whipped away the rserv card, then seated Arlette with dramatic care, clasped his hands maestro-style and said, “To begin, I think, les Kirs Royales? And champagne to follow, of course, yes?”
Yes, of course, what else. And, after that, the perfection of excess. Choucroute, sauerkraut with bacon, pork, and sausage, again Royale, which meant more champagne, poured over the sauerkraut—the Roederer he’d ordered just wasn’t enough. And, when the old lady who sold flowers in the street came walking among the tables, he bought Arlette a gardenia. She put it in her hair, snuffled a little, kissed him, was laughing again a moment later, excited, happy, triste, drunk on champagne, all the things she liked best and all at once.
As they waited for their coffee, DeHaan nodded at the mirrored wall above the banquette. “I might very well be wrong,” he said, “but that hole in the corner looks as though it was made by a bullet.”
“It was,” she said.
“Wouldn’t they, repair it?”
“Never! It’s famous.”
Well, he thought, in the dim light of the Reina Cristina bar, there would be more.
He looked at his watch, where was the ferry? The barman brought him another beer. At a nearby table, two men were talking German. He could see them in the mirror; hard-faced types, smoking hard, coarse and loud and serious. A strange conversation, how some people got in over their heads, in hot water, didn’t know what was good for them. Almost as though it were a scene played for his benefit—they talked to each other, but they were really talking to him. One of them met his eyes in the mirror, lingered, then looked away. No, he thought, it’s nothing. Just this damned city, its harsh wind and shadowed streets, which had overheated his imagination.
Arlette, the brasserie. “Now, home,” she’d whispered to him as l’addition arrived on its silver tray. A particularly Gallic twist to this bill, in DeHaan’s eyes, because it was much too low, the Kirs Royales and champagne nowhere to be found. They had been, it seemed, honored guests, but not too honored—one didn’t eat for free, that wasn’t honor, that was decadence.
By then it was very late, the tables mostly deserted, and the propritaire opened the door for them as they left, letting in the cool April night. DeHaan thanked him, the propritaire shook his hand and said, “Au revoir, bientt.”
Goodby, we’ll see you soon.
1 June. Rue de la Marine, Tangier.
DeHaan found the office in a fine old building off the Petit Socco. A cage elevator moaned softly as it climbed, one slow foot at a time, to the third, the top floor where, down a long hallway of trading companies and shipping brokerages, a glass door said M. J. HOEK and, below a black line, COMMERCE D’EXPORTATION. Hoek’s secretary, a Frenchwoman in her forties, knew exactly who he was. “Ah, here you are—he’s been waiting for you.” She led him briskly down a corridor, trailing a strong scent of sweat and perfume. “Captain DeHaan,” she announced, opening the door to an inner office. A large room, lit by grand, cloudy windows that looked across the street to the Compagnie Belge de Transports Maritimes building, its name carved across the limestone cornice.
Hoek’s kingdom was crowded but comfortable—wooden filing cabinets topped by stacks of unfiled correspondence, a black monster of a nineteenth-century safe, commercial journals and directories packed together on shelves that rose to the ceiling, where an immense fan turned slowly, with a gentle squeak on every revolution. All of this ruled from a massive desk between the windows, where Marius Hoek sat in a swivel chair. His face lit up when the door opened and he wheeled himself around the desk to greet DeHaan. “Best office furniture they ever invented,” he said. The wheelchair, DeHaan saw, had been pushed into a corner.
“So,” Hoek said, moving back behind the desk, “the sailor home from the sea. Shall I send out for coffee? Pastry?”
“No, thank you,” DeHaan said, taking the chair on the other side of the desk.
They were silent for a time. It had been a long month, for both of them, since they’d met for dinner, and that was acknowledged
without a word being spoken. Finally, Hoek said, “They wired us that you’d be coming, something to do with a courier.”
“Yes—plans for his reception. Though it could be ‘her,’ now that I think about it.”
Hoek nodded—always the unseen possibility. “Details, details,” he said, almost a sigh. “You know, DeHaan, I had no idea . . .” He took off his glasses and rubbed the dents on the bridge of his nose. “Well,” he said, putting the glasses back on, “let’s just say it’s more work than I imagined.”
DeHaan was sympathetic. “And complicated.”
“Hah! You don’t know. Well, maybe you do. Anyhow, I barely have time to earn a living.” After a moment he added, “Supposing that I could—because the business has gone to hell all by itself, never mind this other nonsense.”
“No customers?” DeHaan said, incredulous.
“Oh, plenty of customers, customers crawling up the walls. The whole world wants the minerals, now more than ever, and they bought like crazy in the thirties, what with all the rearmament. ‘Strategic materials,’ that’s the gospel, and they’ll take whatever you have. Cobalt and antimony. Phosphates. Asbestos. Lead and iron ores. Turns out that anything you can dig from the earth either blows up or keeps you from being blown up, starts fires or stops them. So, there isn’t much you can’t sell, but just try shipping it. And, if you can, it’s torpedoed, or bombed, or hits a mine, or just disappears. Peace was a much better arrangement—for me, anyhow. But not for everybody, I’ll tell you that. They’re getting rich in Switzerland, the greedy bastards, because they’re buying for Germany.”
“And you won’t ship to Germany.”
“I never would have, believe me. But now I do, sometimes. Never direct, always to a third country, a neutral, but it’s no secret, no matter what the manifest says. I do it because I’ve been told to, by our imperious friends, in order to seem neutral. It makes me sick, but who cares.”
“They’re not wrong, you know,” DeHaan said.
“Maybe not, but, if that weren’t bad enough, suddenly I’m fighting for the British! Bless their valorous hearts and all that, but I signed up to fight for Holland.”
“We both did.”
“And now, it’s the same with you.”
“It is, and they didn’t ask. What happened to Leiden?”
“Shoved aside, I assume. ‘There’s a war on, sonny.’” Hoek spread his hands—the way of the world. “So now, they’re in charge of my life, as well as all the others who’ve joined up, though I can’t tell them that.”
“Still you’ve managed, to recruit.”
“I’ve tried. Too often—made a total ass of myself in the expatriate community. Which is small, and incestuous, and lives on gossip. I’m very indirect, but in the end you have to ask, and some of them are horrified. ‘Keep it to yourself,’ I tell them, but they won’t, not for long.”
“But, surely, a few . . .”
“Yes, a few. I had nine, two weeks ago, now I’m down to eight. One poor old bastard, that I used to play chess with, was run down by a truck as he was crossing the street. Either he was drunk, as he usually was, or he was murdered—how am I supposed to know? I’m an amateur, DeHaan, and this profession isn’t for amateurs. How long this war is going to last I don’t know, but I doubt I’ll see the end of it.”
“I think you will, Mijnheer Hoek, you are a very resourceful man. Which is why you were asked in the first place.”
“I certainly thought I was, now I’m not so sure. Though we have made some progress. Mostly through the efforts of Wilhelm, who is magnificent, and three more women, two Dutch housewives and a Canadian nurse, all of them fearless.”
“What are they doing—if you can tell me that.”
“Why not? We spies can at least talk to each other, no? Here we’re in the real estate business—villas, coastal villas. We try to contact the owners, the agents, the servants, even the plumbers. Anybody who might know what goes on with the tenants. Who are sometimes German operatives, using the villas to keep watch on the Strait. They’ve got all sorts of infernal devices in these places, electronics, whatnot, telescopes that see at night. The trick is to get inside and look around, but it’s very difficult. These aren’t nice people, and they are suspicious—Mevrouw Doorn, the dentist’s wife, knocked on a door to ask for directions and got bitten by a guard dog. Still, they do have to leave, one can’t stay home forever, and, when they do, we watch them. Some of them wear Spanish uniforms, and they have Spanish friends. One thing I have learned is that old Franco isn’t as neutral as he likes to pretend.”
“And, once you know something?”
“We wire our friends, then it’s up to them. Last Wednesday, for example, the Chalet Mirador, out by the Cap Spartel lighthouse, just blew up—the whole thing went into the sea, and took a piece of the bluff with it.” Hoek paused, then said, “Probably not a kitchen fire.”
“No,” DeHaan said, “probably not.”
Hoek drummed his fingers on the desk blotter and turned his chair sideways so that he faced his wall of journals. “The things I never thought I’d do,” he said.
When he didn’t continue, DeHaan said, “You aren’t the only one, you know.”
Hoek turned his chair back to face DeHaan. “Yes,” he said, “I know.”
“There is something I need to do here,” DeHaan said. “What with the raid and the convoy, I’ve lost three people, so I have to hire crew in Tangier. And my way of being indirect, as you put it, will be to sign them on for a normal voyage and explain later, out at sea.”
“Cuts down on refusals.”
“That’s the theory.”
“Even so, it can’t be easy to hire people, these days.”
“It is not, but I have to try. Some of my crewmen are serving double watches, and that can’t go on indefinitely. Now as it happens, we may already have one replacement, because a day out of Sphakia we discovered we had a stowaway. He’d managed to sneak aboard, somehow, while we were unloading cargo, and hid in the paint locker, where a couple of my ABs found him. He tried to run away—where he thought he was going I can’t imagine—but they ran him down and tied him up with a rope.”
“A sailor?”
“Soldier. A Greek soldier. Somehow he got separated from his unit, or they were all killed—we’re really not sure what happened. He’s just a poor little man, half-starved. We can barely talk to him, because nobody speaks the language, but my engineering officer’s a good soul and he says he can make him an oiler. Otherwise, we’d have to turn him over to the police and there isn’t much to be gained, doing that.”
“A deserter,” Hoek said.
“Not everybody can face it,” DeHaan said. “He couldn’t. Anyhow, if I keep him, I need two more. At least that—I’d like five, but that’s not reality.”
Hoek thought for a moment, then said, “I might have somebody who can help you. He’s a young Moroccan, very sharp and ambitious. I suspect he’s mixed up with Istiqlal, but that might not be so bad, if you think it through.”
“What’s Istiqlal?”
“Our local Independence movement—out with the Spaniards and the French, then a free Moroccan state. His name is Yacoub.” He spelled it, then said, “Do I need to write it down?”
“No, I’ll remember. Yacoub is his first name?”
“Last. Say it anywhere on the waterfront and they’ll know who you mean. He works down at the Port of Tangier office, a clerk of some sort, but he knows everybody and gets things done. There are surely merchant sailors in Tangier—maybe they aren’t at the hiring hall—but if they can be found, Yacoub will find them. He’s a gold mine, and, according to the British, he can be trusted.”
“Thank you,” DeHaan said. “Now, about our courier.”
“Yes, the courier. He’s to be here for forty-eight hours—don’t ask me why because I don’t know—so he, or she, will need a hotel. Probably best not to be secretive—the local people seem to know everything, and that will only sharpen their int
erest—so, someplace busy, lots of coming and going, where they don’t think about the clientele too much as long as they overpay. In that case, it’s not a hard choice: the Grand Htel Villa de France, to give it its full name, which is that gaudy old whore up on the rue de Hollande. You know it?”
“I don’t.”
“Well you will. Probably you should take a room there, the night he arrives, because he can’t go anywhere near the ship—in fact, you can’t be seen together. Do ship captains do that? Take hotel rooms?”
“Sometimes, for a long stay in port.”
“That’s what I would do. Now I’ll take care of the reservation, once they wire me a name and a date, and then I’ll get the information to you.”
“By wireless?”
“No, by hand.”
DeHaan thought back over the details, then said, “All right, it sounds like it will work.”
“Yes, doesn’t it. It always does, until something goes wrong,” Hoek said, clearly amused by all the things that went, unforeseeably, wrong. “And now, Captain DeHaan, I must insist you take a coffee with me.”
“Well, I’d like some,” DeHaan said. Work on the Noordendam would go on without him, for the time being, and he’d never liked being on ships in port.
After Hoek sent his secretary out for coffee, DeHaan asked for news of home.
Hoek opened a drawer and handed him a long sheet of paper. At the top it said, in heavy black letters, Je Maintiendrai, “I will maintain,” the motto of the Dutch royal family. DeHaan knew what it was—a resistance newspaper. Printers had always flourished in Holland, so that aspect of the resistance, at least, was widespread and well rooted. “May I keep it?”
“Pass it along, when you’re done.”
“How did you get it?”
Hoek looked smug. “Oh, it just found its way,” he said. “They give the best news they can, which isn’t much. We’re not getting it like the Poles—the Germans want a quiet occupation, for their Aryan brethren, so sheep’s clothing is still the uniform of the day, but they are methodically destroying the country. All the food goes east, and, the way the Germans have things fixed, the money goes with it. Their attitude, when they win wars, has never changed—vae victis, they say, woe to the conquered.”
