by Alan Furst
“I fear for my family,” DeHaan said. “It’s very hard to know about it, and to know there’s nothing you can do to help.”
“Yes, but ‘nothing’ is not quite what you’re doing, is it.” He leaned forward, and lowered his voice. “I have to tell you, Captain, that you should be careful, in this city. Because I believe they are in the early stages of knowing about us. Perhaps just bits and pieces, at the moment, a few papers on a desk somewhere and there are, no doubt, more pressing papers on that desk, but someone is working on it, and, when he’s satisfied, something will be done, and done quickly, and there won’t be time for discussion.”
“Months?”
“Maybe.”
“But not weeks. Or days.”
Hoek shrugged. How would I know?
2 June. Office of the Port Administration, Tangier.
DeHaan knew who Yacoub was the moment he saw him. He belonged to a certain tribe, native to the port cities, to Penang and Salonika, to Havana and Dar es Salaam. It was a tribe of young men, young men of humble origin who, with only their wits to help them, meant to rise in the world, and, to that end, had obtained a suit.
They wore it all day, every day, and, because they were rarely the original owner, worked hard to keep it looking the best it could. Next, with help from an old book or an old man, they taught themselves a foreign language, maybe two or three, and practiced at every opportunity. Then, at last, to go with the suit and the language, they learned to smile. How glad they were to see you! What did you need? Where did you want to go?
In the port office, hidden away in a maze of piers and drydocks, Yacoub’s suit was gray, his smile encouraging, his English good, his French better. He looked at the clock, and hoped DeHaan would not mind waiting for him at the small souk just off the corniche for, say, twenty minutes? Not too long? His apologies, but he did have some work that had to be finished.
A small souk, but crowded—stalls packed together in a narrow alley, where a thin stream of black water ran down a drain in the pavement, and the smell, aging goat hide and rotten fruit, was almost visible. A good place for the ancient flywhisk, DeHaan thought, brushing at his face, and a good place for recalling the time-honored clichs about the eyes of veiled women. He bought an orange, and enjoyed it almost as much as the act of dropping the peels in the street, according to local custom. When he’d finished it, and found the water pipe and rinsed his hands, Yacoub fought free of the crowd.
He led DeHaan from stall to stall, from camel saddle to copper pot, as though he were a guide and DeHaan a tourist. They spent a minute on the weather, then DeHaan asked about hiring crew. Yacoub was not optimistic. “They have vanished, sir. The war has taken them.”
“And the hiring hall?”
“You may visit, and see for yourself.” What he would see, according to Yacoub, were a few murderers and thieves, and a one-legged drunk with one eye—“Formerly a Lebanese pirate, some say”—if he hadn’t already shipped out.
This was highly embroidered, but DeHaan got the point. “There must be a few,” he said. “Not quite murderers and thieves. War or no war, men leave ships.”
“Not many, these days. And often enough they don’t go back to sea. This is, after all, Tangier; here you can hide from the war, find a woman, find a way to make a little money—sailors are good at many things, as you know—in a city that doesn’t care what you do.”
“But, surely not all of them stay ashore.”
“Never all. But, of those few who leave, fewer still wish to change ships, and they don’t last long. The blackboard at the hiring hall is covered with jobs, Captain, top to bottom.”
DeHaan declined to offer on a wellworn prayer rug. The merchant looked up to heaven and lowered the price, then Yacoub hissed a few words under his breath and the man went away.
“I will ask my friends,” Yacoub said. “My friends who know things, but there is perhaps one other possibility. Tangier has many sailors’ bars, all sorts, the famous Chez Rudi, for example, and various others, some of them dangerous. But there is one, in a small street in the medina called rue el Jdid, that is known as l’Ange Bleu, the Blue Angel, though it has no sign. Sometimes sailors go there to look for old friends, if they see their ship in port, and sometimes they go to look for a new berth. Quietly. And if the master of a ship were to offer good money, it’s said, the man might be interested. And, even if he’s not, he will tell his friends about it.”
They walked out of the shadowed souk and onto the corniche. A fine morning in June, the wind soft and suggestive, legions of strollers out to faire le promenade. For that moment, at least, the romantic soul who’d called the city “the white dove on the shoulder of Africa” had got it right. And Yacoub, inspired by the day, now began a discourse on the local gossip—rich Englishmen and Americans, lovers in love with the lovers of their lovers, poets and lunatics, intrigues at the sultan’s court. And scheming pashas, who conspired with foreigners in their reach for power.
“Always foreigners,” Yacoub said. “Perhaps we deserve our history, but heaven only knows the blood we’ve spilled, trying to stop them from coming here. Spanish armies, French legions, German agents, British diplomats—since the turn of the century, fighting us and each other. And then, at last, that special curse all its own, French bureaucrats, so in love with power they made rules for snake charmers.”
“It is their nature,” DeHaan said. “Nobody really knows why.”
“I believe that Holland, also, is a colonial nation.”
“Yes, in the East Indies, we are.”
“And South America as well, no?”
“There too—in Suriname, Dutch Guiana.”
“Do you think it just, Captain?”
“It began a long time ago, when the world was a different place, but it can’t go on forever.”
“So we believe, and some of us hope that Britain will help us, if we help them to win this war.”
“Nobody can see the future,” DeHaan said, “but promises are sometimes kept, even by governments.”
“Yes, now and then,” Yacoub said.
Politics, DeHaan thought. Too often the destiny of Yacoub’s tribe. Because, with the suit, and the language, and the smile, they had turned themselves, unwittingly, into perfect agents. Knowing everyone, going everywhere, they were recruited for this scheme or that, for national independence or foreign ambition, given money, made to feel important, and then, all too often, sacrificed.
Yacoub was silent for a time, as they walked past the Club Nautique and the ship chandlers’ warehouses, headed for the pier that led to the Port Administration building. When they paused at the foot of the pier, he said, “If you would care to accompany me to the office, Captain, I believe there is mail being held for you.”
On the harbor launch that took him out to the Noordendam, at anchor a mile offshore, DeHaan had time to read, and consider, two letters. The first was a copy of a bank draft, sent to him from the Tangier branch of Barclay’s Bank, received by wire from their office in London. The draft, from the Hyperion Line, with a London address, could be read as a response to his earlier wire to Terhouven, informing him of the ship’s change of administration. A substantial amount, a number familiar to DeHaan, it was sufficient for refueling and stores, as well as the paying off of the crew.
Crews were traditionally paid off at the end of a voyage—formerly that meant Rotterdam but those days were gone—so Terhouven had chosen a call at a Moroccan port as a substitute. What else did it mean? He wondered. His next destination was an unnamed port in the Baltic, pending the arrival of the courier, but it seemed he would be going north in ballast—except for the secret apparatus—so, logically, he would be taking on cargo in the Baltic, then heading he knew not where.
But, now that the crew was to be paid, it would not be their new home port—which he assumed was London, maybe Liverpool, or Glasgow. They had to be going somewhere, once their mission was completed, but Hallowes had not been specific, saying only that it would
be the final voyage as the Santa Rosa. He hadn’t meant that it was to be the Noordendam’s final voyage, had he? No, they would never do that. Britain, desperate in the grip of the U-boat blockade, needed every merchantman afloat. So DeHaan told himself.
The second envelope bore no stamp. It was addressed to Captain E. M. DeHaan, NV Noordendam, with By Hand written in a lower corner. This was in typescript, produced, it appeared, by an old portable machine that lived a hard life—the ribbon had not much ink left to it, the top of the a was broken, and the t had lost its bottom curl. Inside, a sheet of cheap lined paper, not folded but very carefully torn off, saving the other half for later use. The language was English—the Russian version.
1 June, 1941
Captain DeHaan: As you are in port, could you grant me interview? I talked with you in Rotterdam, in 1938, for newspaper article. Thank you, I am at Hotel Alhadar.
Best wishes,
Then, signed in pencil, Maria Bromen.
He remembered her well enough, a Russian maritime journalist who wrote for Na Vakhte, On Watch, a shipping newspaper published in Odessa, as well as for Ogonyok, the illustrated weekly, sometimes for Pravda, and occasionally for the European communist dailies. This was not conventionally a job for a woman, and Bromen was young, in her thirties, but she was, it turned out, determined and serious and knowledgeable about the shipping trade. DeHaan, too well aware of the Comintern—the agency in charge of subversion in the seamen’s unions, probably would not have met with her, but she’d found some way to get at Terhouven and he’d asked DeHaan to go ahead with it. “Tell her Hyperion is an enlightened employer,” he’d said. “We don’t ignore the welfare of our crews.” DeHaan had done his best. And, formal and rigorous at first, she’d relaxed as the interview proceeded, was, he realized, simply intent on doing her job, and not at all the Soviet sourpuss he’d expected. In the end, DeHaan was honest with her and, though he never saw the article, Terhouven had, and declared it “not so bad.”
DeHaan looked up from the letter and saw the rust-streaked hull of his ship, looming above the launch. Hallowes, he thought, the Germans at the Reina Cristina bar, his conversations with Hoek and Yacoub, now this. Why don’t you all go to hell and let me sail the seas.
The launch sounded two blasts on its horn and, eventually, the Noordendam’s gangway was lowered a few feet, froze, was taken back up, then lowered again.
Over the next three days, business as usual. The crew was paid off and, after dire warnings from the officers to keep their yaps shut, went ashore and raised the usual hell, found the offerings on Tangier’s sexual bourse more than equal to their imaginations, then drifted back to the ship in twos and threes, pale and placid and hungover. At least they all came back, and DeHaan and Ratter were spared visits to the local jails. Shtern diagnosed an oiler’s fever as malaria, patched up two ABs after a fight in a bar, and treated their Greek soldier, Xanos, after he managed, while tending the lone active boiler, to have his shoe catch fire. “Don’t ask me,” Kovacz growled, “because I don’t know.” DeHaan granted himself leave, stayed in his cabin, read his books, played his records, and tried to keep the world on the other side of the door.
Where it stayed until the afternoon of the fifth, when Yacoub appeared with the news that Hoek wished to see him, and was waiting at his office. DeHaan knew what that meant, allowed himself one deep breath, then dog-eared the page in his book. Since the launch was already waiting, they returned to Tangier together.
In Hoek’s office, the windows rattled as the chergui, the local wind, blew hard from the east. After polite conversation, Hoek said, “Well, he’s here. Checked into the Villa de France last night. In Room Thirteen.”
DeHaan and Hoek exchanged a glance, but let it lie.
“Tonight, then,” DeHaan said.
“Yes. He’ll be waiting. According to my source at the hotel, he’s young, English, and carries only a briefcase. In short, he looks like a courier.”
“I guess they know what they’re doing.”
Hoek’s expression meant they’d better.
“As long as I’m here,” DeHaan said, “what do you think of this?” He handed Hoek the note from the Russian journalist.
“Christ, just what we needed,” Hoek said. “Russians.”
“Any chance it’s innocent?”
“Hardly. What’s she doing here?”
“They’re everywhere, in the ports. Just keeping up with the maritime news, is the way they put it.”
“In other words, spies.”
“Yes. What’s your opinion? I’m inclined to do nothing.”
Hoek thought it over, then said, “I’d see her.”
“You would?”
“To find out what it’s about, yes. If she’s trying to confirm something she’ll have to ask you—maybe over the river and through the woods, but she’ll get there.”
“Well,” DeHaan said. Why court trouble?
“Not responding is a kind of answer, you know.”
DeHaan nodded, still reluctant.
“It’s up to you,” Hoek said, “but if you see her, could you send a note with Yacoub?”
DeHaan said he would.
“Has he been any help?”
“He suggested a sailors’ bar—l’Ange Bleu. Maybe I’ll try it.”
“Might as well,” Hoek said. From the outer office came the sound of a teleprinter, tapping out a long message with a chime at the end of every line. Hoek looked at his watch. “So then,” he said, “you’ll be sailing right away.”
“In a few days, unless they’ve called it off.”
“They haven’t.”
DeHaan stood, and said, “I’d better walk over to the hotel. While they still have rooms.”
“Oh, it’s a big hotel,” Hoek said. “Of course, you know,” he paused, then said, “we may not see each other again.”
DeHaan didn’t answer, then said, “Not for a while.”
“No, not for a while.”
“Maybe when the war is over, I’ll be back. We’ll have another dinner,” DeHaan said. “With champagne.”
“Yes, a victory dinner.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“Oh, I expect we’ll win, sooner or later.”
“A lot to do, in the meantime.”
From Hoek, a very eloquent shrug, and the smile that went with it.
Then they said goodby.
At three in the afternoon, DeHaan checked into the Grand Htel Villa de France. It was, as Hoek had put it, a gaudy old whore—green marble lobby, bright rosy fabric on the furniture, gilt torchres on the walls by paintings of desert caravans. But it was also, unexpectedly, a quiet old whore. In the vast lobby there was only a single guest, an Arab in robe and burnoose, rattling his newspaper. And in the courtyard, when DeHaan got to his room and opened the French door, there was that curious hush of provincial hotels in the afternoon, broken only by twittering sparrows.
DeHaan tipped the bellboy, who’d carried his small canvas bag, waited a few minutes, then took the staircase to the floor below, and, down a long carpeted hallway, found Room 13. He knocked, discreetly, then, after a minute, knocked again. No answer. He returned to his room, hung his jacket in the closet, lay on the bed, and stared at the ceiling. Four o’clock, five. Tried again. No response. Was this the right room? He looked around, saw only closed doors up and down the silent corridor. Maybe the courier had other business in Tangier. DeHaan went back to the room.
By seven, the hotel had come to life. A piano, downstairs in the tearoom, began playing what sounded like songs of the Parisian boites, bouncy, almost marchlike. In the courtyard, doors opened and closed, somebody coughed, lights went on behind the drawn curtains. DeHaan, meanwhile, despite his status as clandestine operative, wanted dinner. But he had no intention of appearing in the dining room, so tried Room 13 once more, and, after listening at the door and hearing only silence, set off to find l’Ange Bleu. A more productive way to spend his time, he thought, than waiting in his room.
He had to ask directions but, in the heart of the medina, he eventually discovered the rue el Jdid, a street of wide steps, and, near the top, a bar with no sign. He entered, sat on a wooden stool and waited for the Moroccan barman, busy with a couple of patrons on the neighboring stools. The barman glanced at him, raised a finger, back in a minute, and came over to DeHaan, who ordered a beer and asked if there was anything to eat. No, nothing to eat, but the beer, a Spanish brand called Estrella de Levante, was dark and filling.
The barman returned to his other customers—sailors, DeHaan thought, one of whom resumed the telling, in English, American English, of what seemed to be a long and complicated story. “Now nobody on the ship knew what the cushmaker did,” he said, “but they didn’t want to let on, so they asked him what he needed, and he said he needed a metal shop and a lot of tin. Well they had that so they gave it to him and he seemed happy enough. Worked away in there day after day, welding that tin together. If anybody asked about it, they said ‘Oh, he’s just the cushmaker,’ but day after day they wondered, what’s he doing? Weeks went by, the whole ship waited. Finally, they saw he’d built a big ball of tin, all the seams welded real good, flat, you know? So next thing the cushmaker goes to the captain and says, ‘Captain, now I need a derrick and a blowtorch.’ Captain says okay, and, next morning, the cushmaker gets a couple of guys to help him and they roll that tin ball, it’s big, maybe ten feet around, out of the shop and onto the main deck, where the derrick is. Next he hitches the ball to the derrick cables, and has it swung out just where he can reach it, but it’s over the water.”
The barman looked around, checking on his other customers, then leaned his elbow on the bar. The story had apparently been going on for quite a while. “Over the water, see?” the man continued. “Then he takes this blowtorch and he begins to heat the ball, it’s big, like I said, but he doesn’t quit, just keeps that blowtorch going. By now, the whole ship is watching—guys up from the engine room, guys who just happen to have something to do on deck, everybody. Finally, the tin ball begins to glow, a little bit at first, then bright red. The cushmaker stands back and rubs his chin, like this. Is it hot enough? Is it ready? Yeah, he thinks, it’s just right. He puts the blowtorch down and he signals the guy on the derrick, let go! The derrick man pulls the release lever, and the ball drops right into the sea.”
