by Alan Furst
The barman waited. Then said, “And?”
“And it went cushhhhh.”
Both sailors grinned, and, after a moment, the barman managed a laugh.
“Cushhh, yes, it’s funny,” he said, and went off to see another customer.
The storyteller turned to DeHaan. “I don’t think he got it.”
“No,” DeHaan said. “He thought you were making fun of him.”
“Jeez,” the man said.
“It ain’t a Moroccan joke,” his friend said.
“I’m Whitey,” the storyteller said. “And this is Moose.”
The nicknames were a good fit, DeHaan thought. Whitey had long, pale hair, combed straight back, and Moose was broad and thick. “My name is DeHaan,” he said. “Captain of a ship out there.” He nodded toward the bay.
“Oh yeah? Which one?”
“Noordendam. Netherlands Hyperion Line.”
“Dutch.”
“That’s right.”
“What do you do?”
“Dry cargo tramping.”
Whitey nodded. “You in to bunker?” That was the old term, for the bunkers loaded with coal, still used for refueling with oil.
DeHaan said he was.
“We’re off the Esso Savannah, so maybe it’s our oil.”
“Could be. Actually, I’m in here to hire ABs.”
“Oh yeah? Well, that’s us, but we’re happy where we are.” He turned to his friend. “We like Standard Oil, right?”
“Yeah sure, we love it,” Moose said.
“No, really, it’s okay,” Whitey said. “Some guys always think it’s better somewhere else, but it’s all about the same. In the U.S., anyhow.”
“You’d be surprised, what we pay,” DeHaan said.
“On a Dutch tramp?”
“When we’re short crew, yes.”
“Well,” Moose said, “we won’t be on the Savannah too much longer.”
“No?”
“What he means,” Whitey said, “is that as soon as old Rosenfeld gets us into this war, we’re gonna go regular navy.”
“Are you sure they’ll let you?”
“Sure, why wouldn’t they?”
“Because, if the U.S. gets in, they’ll need every tanker they can get.”
A brief silence. The two sailors would be, in DeHaan’s version of the future, at sea in an enemy tanker, no longer protected by American neutrality. Finally Whitey said, “Yeah, may-be.” Then he downed the last of his beer and said, “Have one on us, Captain—boilermaker, shot’n-a-beer, okay?”
DeHaan would have preferred to stay with beer alone, but Whitey was too quick for him, and called out, “Hey, Hassan, three more down here.”
The shot was rye, sticky sweet, and bottled in Canada, according to the label. But DeHaan was too well aware that imported whiskey was an iffy proposition in foreign ports, and he could only hope that it hadn’t been brewed up in some garage in Marrakesh. Still, no matter what it was it worked, and, by the third round, DeHaan knew he would stagger when he got off the stool. Good for comradeship, though. Whitey and Moose let him know in no uncertain terms how sorry they felt for the people locked up in occupied Europe, and how they were itching to get a crack at the Nazis. They’d seen British tankers ablaze off the beaches of Miami, where the local citizens, excited by the idea of U-boats right out there, came down to the water to watch the show.
By eight-thirty, the bar was crowded and noisy, and DeHaan, despite the boilermaker fog, knew he had to go find his courier. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I believe it’s time I was on my way.”
“Nah, not now. You ain’t hired anyone yet.”
DeHaan looked around. A barful of drunken sailors, likely the most he’d manage was to get his nose broken. “I’ll try another night,” he said, swaying as he stood up. He reached in his pocket for money, but Whitey peeled a few dollar bills off a roll and tossed them on the bar. “That’s too much,” Moose said, as DeHaan said, “No, let me.”
Whitey waved them off. “Make it up to Hassan,” he said. “Cushhh.”
DeHaan laughed. He couldn’t wait to tell this joke—maybe the courier would like it. Moose looked dubious, but said, “Well, okay, I guess.” Then, to DeHaan, “Where you headed, pal? Down the port?”
“No, no. You fellows stay.”
“What? You gotta be kiddin’,” Whitey said. “Let you go out there alone? Us?” He shook his head, some people.
And he wasn’t wrong. They came out of the bar into a warm night, carefully descending the steps of the rue el Jdid. And Whitey, in a mellow tenor, was just getting started on his repertoire, having reached “Finally I found one, she was tall and thin/Goddamn, sonofabitch, I couldn’t get it in,” when two men stepped out of an alley. Hard to know who they were. They wore dark shirts and trousers and straw hats with the brims down over their eyes. Spaniards? Moroccans?
The two sailors didn’t like it. They turned around and stood still, while the two men took a few steps, then stopped, ten feet above them.
“You want something from us?” Whitey said.
DeHaan sensed they didn’t speak English. One of them put a hand in his pocket.
“He’s mine,” Moose said. “You take the other one.”
Whitey put his index and pinky fingers into his mouth and gave a sharp, two-note whistle. This produced a few silhouettes from the doorway of l’Ange Bleu at the top of the street, and a shout, “Somebody need help?” For a long moment, a stalemate, then, from the doorway of the bar, the sound of a bottle broken off at the neck.
That did it. The two men walked slowly down the steps, past DeHaan and the sailors. They were leaving, not running away. One of them looked DeHaan in the eye, then angled his head sideways, down and back, an appraisal. If it was just you. “And fuck you too,” Moose said, taking a juke step toward the men. One of them said something, the other laughed. They continued down the steps, fading into the darkness, their footsteps audible until they turned a corner at the bottom of the street.
5 June, 2105 hours. Room 13, Grand Htel Villa de France.
DeHaan caught the smell of burning while he was still out in the corridor, and it was strong in the room. “You’re DeHaan?” the courier said, closing the door.
“That’s right.”
“Where’ve you been?” He’d hung his jacket over the back of a chair and loosened his tie. A briefcase, straps unbuckled, lay on the bed by a few stapled booklets with green manila covers, an address book, and a service revolver.
“I did try earlier,” DeHaan said.
The courier was as Hoek’s man at the hotel had described him—young, and English. In fact, very young, and very tense, his face pinched and white. “Well, I had other business,” he said. He looked DeHaan over for a time, then said, “I believe you met a friend of mine the other day, over in Cadiz.”
DeHaan’s mind was not working at full speed, but eventually he realized what was going on and said, “No, not Cadiz. Algeciras.”
That satisfied the courier. “All right, then,” he said. “Been out celebrating, have you?”
“I had business in a bar. So, a bar.” Where he’d drunk a fair amount of beer. “Excuse me a minute,” he said.
The burning smell, he discovered, was coming from the bathroom. When he came out, he looked quizzically at the courier and said, “What the hell did you do in there?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
The courier’s face reddened. “One’s told to destroy papers by flushing them, or burning them. I thought to burn first, then flush. Both, you see, to make sure.”
“And set the toilet seat on fire.”
“Yes. You won’t tell Hallowes, will you?”
“No, I won’t tell anybody.” He covered his face with his hands, as though tired.
“I know,” the courier said.
“I’m sorry,” DeHaan said. He had to wipe his eyes.
The courier turned away and began to sort through his
papers. Finally he found what he wanted and handed DeHaan a yellow slip with numbers on it, three groups of three, and a megahertz frequency.
“You’ll keep radio silence, of course, but we’ll find ways to contact you, if we need to. You must under no circumstances attempt to contact us—with one exception. The line of code I’ve given you should be sent to that frequency, any time of day or night, and sent twice, if your ship is attacked or boarded, or if you believe the operation is going to be exposed. We would always help you, if we could, but it isn’t really for that, you see. It’s for other people, put in harm’s way if you are compromised. Quite clear, Captain?”
“Yes.”
“Then here are your orders.” He handed DeHaan a brown envelope. “I will wait while you read them.”
DeHaan took a single sheet of paper from the envelope and read it over, knowing he couldn’t really absorb the information until he’d had a chance to spend time on it. When he looked up, the courier was holding the address book open with one hand, and had a pen in the other. “You’ll sign for the codes and the orders, Captain.”
DeHaan signed. “What if I have questions?”
“I don’t answer questions,” the courier said. “I only place the documents in your hands.”
“I see,” DeHaan said.
“And there shouldn’t be questions,” the courier said. “It’s all quite specific.”
He went upstairs to his room and opened the door on the courtyard. Had he closed it, when he left? He didn’t remember, evidently he had. Down in the tearoom, the piano had become a quartet, with a saxophone. They were playing, with more enthusiasm than grace, a song he knew, a Glenn Miller song, “Moonlight Serenade.” Across the courtyard, a woman was sitting at a table and putting on makeup. DeHaan took off his jacket and shoes, lay down on the bed, and slid the sheet of paper out of the envelope.
MOST SECRET
For The Personal Use Of The Addressee Only
NID JJP/JJPL/0626
OAMT/95-0626 R 34 296 3B - 0900/2/6/41
From: Deputy Director/OAMT
To: E. M. DeHaan
Master/NV Noordendam
Most immediate
Subj: Hyperion-Lijn NV Noordendam
To sail 0400 hrs 7/6/41 port Tangier to anchor at pos. 3832′#8242;N/911′#8242;W to convert to steamship Santa Rosa. Thence to port Lisbon, 4.3 miles up river Tagus to wharf at foot rua do Faro marked F3. Contact shipping agent Penha, rua do Comercio 24, to load special cargo and receive manifest for cooking oil, tinned sardines and cork oak bound port Malmo. Sail port Lisbon 0200 10/6/41 for pos. 5520′#8242;N/1320′#8242;E one mile off Swedish coastal region Smygehuk. At 0300 21/6/41 await two green flashes, confirm two green flashes, for boarding of ARCHER to direct offload special cargo. Sail Smygehuk by 1800 21/6/41 to port Malmo pier 17 for cargo sawn pineboard bound port Galway. Sail port Malmo 27/6/41. While at sea, receive further instruction.
0626/1900/5/6/41+++DD/OAMT
PORTS OF CALL
The secret life of the Spanish freighter Santa Rosa had been betrayed on the twenty-eighth of May, in a brief conversation a thousand miles from Tangier.
It happened at the Baltic Exchange, on a street called St. Mary Axe, amid ancient merchant banks and assurance companies, in the commercial heart of London known as the City. There, beneath marble pillars and glass domes, the shipping and cargo brokers of London met every working day, from noon until two, to have a drink, to trade intelligence about the maritime world, and to fix dry-charter contracts. It needed only a handshake, and a cargo of coal or grain or timber was on its way.
Born as a coffeehouse in 1744, the Baltic had seen great and tumultuous times—the Napoleonic Wars, the Danish trade war, the frantic speculation in tallow of 1873, when cow fat lit the streetlamps of London and half the Continent. But no more. The grandeur remained—a liveried servant still stood at a pulpit and called out the names of brokers, but, these days, some did not answer. With so many ships under national supervision, with the oil people keeping to their offices and teleprinters, with American brokerage now done in New York, at the bar of the Downtown Athletic Club, it was lately a sparse crowd that gathered for the noon fixing.
Still, it continued; for Asian ports, for South America, for the European neutrals, cargos had to be transported, “lifted” in the local slang, and the brokers, men like Barnes and Burton, were grateful for whatever came their way. After all, this was what they did, had done, every day of their working lives, though Barnes and Burton, cargo broker and shipping broker, would have been horrified had they ever discovered what they did on the afternoon of the twenty-eighth. Because they were the staunchest of patriots, Barnes and Burton, maybe too old for military service, but they served as best they could—Barnes a London air-raid warden by night, Burton drilling every weekend with his Home Guard unit down in Sussex, where the Burtons had always had a house.
It was almost two when they met at the Baltic. Burton represented several of the smaller Spanish shipping lines, Barnes was that day brokering a cargo of Turkish salt, but finding an available tramp was proving difficult. “What about the Santa Rosa,” Barnes said. “I’ve heard she’s in the Mediterranean.”
“Wish she were,” Burton said.
“Where is she?”
“Done for, I’m afraid.”
“Really.”
“Yes, burned to the waterline, in Campeche.”
“You’re sure?”
“’Fraid so.”
“You don’t say.”
“Mm. A few days ago. And just about to sail, after repair.”
“Campeche?”
“That’s right. If you can hold on for two weeks, I might have the Almera.”
“It will have to do, I suppose.”
This was very odd indeed, Barnes thought. He paid great attention to shipping intelligence, and he’d heard, on the exchange floor, that the Santa Rosa had called at Alexandria. And that word had come from on high, from one of the magnificent old lions of the Baltic, a grizzled, fully bearded Scot, decorated twice in the last war, a man whose sources were everywhere, east and west, a man who had never been wrong. But he said nothing of this to Burton, the floor was not the place to contradict one’s colleagues.
Still, he fretted about it on his way back to the office. Walking along St. Mary Axe, where the Widows and Orphans Assurance Society was now a bombed-out shell, he was sharply reminded that it was 1941, and the days of the ghost ship were long gone. Only in boys’ books now, Strange Tales of the Sea, the old clipper ship seen entering a fog bank and never coming out—until ten years later. No, someone was simply mistaken, badly mistaken. Who?
Back at the office, he told the story to his secretary. “Doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Burton certainly seemed to know what he was talking about.”
“Maybe there are two of them,” she said. “Anyhow, why don’t you ask somebody else?”
By God he would! And, that very afternoon, sent a wireless message to an old friend, who ran a trading company in Alexandria.
He had an answer the next day. His friend had asked around, in the port, and the Spanish freighter Santa Rosa had, in fact, called there, one week earlier. His man at the ship chandler’s recalled the colors, and they’d had a look at Brown’s Flags and Funnels so, no doubt, Santa Rosa.
Just about there, Barnes began to suspect what was going on. Monkey business. Something to do with insurance, maybe—the shipping world had more than its share of rogues—or, even, government monkey business. Really, why not? Damned ingenious, he thought, and let the matter drop. As to which government, friend or foe or in between, he couldn’t say, but, at the end of the day, he was a cargo man, not a shipping man, and best not to pursue these sorts of things.
And nothing would have come of it, even though the listeners at the German B-Dienst transcribed the cable, which was in clear, and filed a report. A report of little interest—who cared that the British had chartered a Spanish tramp? No one would have bothered with it, bu
t for the fact that the German NID man in Alexandria reported that the Santa Rosa had come into port. And hadn’t come out. Now that was interesting. So then, where was she? Or, better, who was she?
DeHaan woke at dawn on the morning of the sixth. The sparrows were back, down in the courtyard, otherwise the hotel was pleasantly silent. By then, he’d virtually memorized the NID order, had taken it apart—the dates, the locations, the nautical miles from one port to the next, and found it tight, but possible. Everything would work as they’d directed—as long as everything worked. True, they’d left him a little time for breakdown or weather, but very damn little—it was Royal Navy time, not merchant marine time. Still, Kovacz and the sea gods willing, they could do it.
Would have to.
Because they did not have the traditional three-day opportunity for contact—that was timed to the hour. Which it had to be, because this was a bold, a brazen, operation. The southern coast of Sweden, particularly the barren beaches of the Smygehuk, were a hundred miles from the German naval bases at Kiel and Rostock, and he could expect patrols, by air and sea, so it was no place for Noordendam—as Santa Rosa or what-you-like—to be steaming back and forth. Dear God, he thought, let there be fog.
He looked at his watch on the night table, 5:10. So he’d be sailing in less than twenty-four hours. Better that way, less time to tie himself in knots. As for Noordendam, she was ready as she’d ever be—well bunkered and victualed, freshwater tanks topped up, new medical officer, and, now that they’d been shot at and survived, a veteran crew aboard.
