Dark Voyage

by Alan Furst

  “Is anyone here?”

  He said it just to say it, first in German, then again in French, knowing there was no point, knowing there would be no answer. And knowing, also, that whoever had been here was not coming back.

  Sick at heart, shaken, and very angry, he left the shed and walked away. Maybe someone was watching him, maybe not, he almost didn’t care. And he was a fool, he knew, for being without the Browning pistol, lying peacefully beneath his sweater, but he’d never thought to bring it. Well, he would fix that—if he lived through the night, if he ever saw his ship again, and if he were, ever again, tempted to leave it. He walked at full speed, almost a trot, but it was after ten by the time he reached the alleyway, the street of closed shops, and, at last, the pier. As he approached the cutter, Van Dyck said, “What happened?”

  “Not there,” DeHaan said. He stepped heavily into the boat, whipped the rope free of its cleat, and sat in the bow.

  Silently, Van Dyck handed him his hat, then went to start the engine, which chose that moment to balk. Both of them swore as Van Dyck fiddled with the choke, then tried again. “We’ll row the goddamn thing if we have to,” DeHaan said.

  “Take it easy, Cap’n. It’s just flooded.”

  DeHaan could smell that perfectly well, and settled in to wait. “Where’d she go?” Van Dyck said.

  “I don’t know. Maybe somebody took her.”

  Van Dyck was silent, but his face closed in a certain way—the world had grown more evil than he ever thought it would. Again he tried the engine, which coughed a few times, then started with a belch of black smoke. “That’s better,” Van Dyck told it, opening the throttle. He put the engine in gear, and, with a wide, sweeping turn, headed the cutter back toward the bay.

  They were a minute or two out when a car came roaring down the road from the port and, tires screeching, skidded to a stop at the edge of the pier. “Oh Christ,” DeHaan said. “Now we’re going to be shot.”

  “What?” Van Dyck said.

  DeHaan knelt on the floorboards and gestured for Van Dyck to do the same. But the shots never came. Instead, a man and a woman leapt from the car and ran to the end of the pier. He was an old man, and he could barely run, but he did his best, waving his arms, yelling words they couldn’t hear.

  “Cap’n?” Van Dyck said.

  “Better turn around.”

  0800 Hrs. 7 June, 1941. 3550′N/620′W, course NW 275. Fog and heavy SE following sea. Departed port of Tangier at 0340 hrs., w/41 crew aboard. Two eastbound vessels sighted. All well on board. E. M. DeHaan, Master.

  With his log entry completed, and Ratter taking the forenoon watch, DeHaan stood on the bridge wing with the AB lookout, who peered dutifully out into the gray mist through his binoculars, though he couldn’t see much of anything. DeHaan found his heart much eased, that morning—back at sea, back where he belonged, swaying with the roll of the ship, staring down at the foamy bow wave in gray Atlantic water. He didn’t mind the fog, which had its own smell, salty and damp—God’s own perfect air out here in the breeze. On the ocean liners, a few hours from landfall at the end of a voyage, passengers could always be counted on to ask the nearest steward about a certain unpleasant scent, decay perhaps, as the temperature climbed. “That’s land, sir,” the steward would say. “You can smell it long before you see it.”

  From somewhere north of them, the low moan of a foghorn. On the other side of the bridge door, Ratter reached up and pulled the cord above his head and their own foghorn, just aft of the bridgehouse, gurgled for a moment, sent a steaming spurt of water onto the roof, then produced a great shuddering bellow that rattled the glass in the windows. DeHaan looked at his watch—a wardroom meeting, at nine, so he could stay on his bridge. The morning log entry was true enough, all was well on board as Noordendam, steady and determined, steamed west through the fog, easily making her knots with a following sea.

  Maria Bromen was settled in Ratter’s cabin, next to his own, while his first officer had moved in with Kees. She’d taken a long shower the night before, DeHaan had listened to it through the bulkhead as he lay on his bunk and tried to read. A complicated story from Bromen, once she’d been seated in the cutter. She said that she and her refugee friend had returned to the shed just before eight o’clock, saw that someone had pried up the lock, and, without going inside, left in a hurry, going to the room of another refugee. There followed a nightmare—someone who had the use of a car would take her to the pier, but that someone, always at a certain caf, was not there, couldn’t be found, until it got so late he had to be found, and, finally, was, at last, though almost not in time.

  But all’s well that ends well. In a few hours they would anchor for repainting, then, as Santa Rosa, dock at Lisbon on the evening of the ninth. For Bromen, a chance to slip away into the night. After leaving her at the coffee shop, the day before, he’d stopped at Barclay’s Bank and obtained a substantial packet of American dollars, so she would disembark with money to spend, and DeHaan could at least hope she would find a way to survive. It was possible, he thought. As Spain was technically neutral but slanted toward Germany, Portugal was neutral but a quiet ally of Britain, an alliance that went back to the fourteenth century. So Portuguese officials might look the other way, might not be so eager to please their German friends. Thus, with false papers and a little luck, she could wait out the war in Lisbon. As long as the Organyi didn’t find her. There he couldn’t be sure, because they were, it was said, everywhere, and relentless. Still, a chance. And maybe, with very good false papers and a great deal of luck, she might even get across the ocean. To a much safer place.

  At 0900, a wardroom meeting. DeHaan presiding, with Ratter, Kees, Kovacz, Ali, Shtern, and Poulsen, the Danish fireman now serving as Kovacz’s provisional second engineer. Cornelius served coffee, it was almost like old times. Not like old times: a call at Lisbon for secret cargo—masts, lattice aerials, and three trucks, bound for Smygehuk, on the bare coast of southern Sweden.

  “Past the German bases on the Norwegian coast?” Kees said. “Then the Skagerrak and the Kattegat? The Danish pinchpoint? Shit oh dear. Minefields and E-boats every inch of the way. Very well, let’s have a betting pool. I’m putting ten guilders we never see six-east longitude. Ratter? In?”

  “Remember, we’re a Spanish freighter,” Ratter said bravely.

  “And I’m Sinbad the Sailor.”

  “It worked once.”

  “By God’s grace and luck’s good hand, it worked. With Italians.”

  “Please,” Shtern said, “what is the Kattegat?”

  “The channel between Denmark and Sweden,” Kees said. “Kattegat means the cat’s hole—it’s very narrow.”

  Under his breath, Ratter said, “And you would know.”

  “Who’s waiting for us?” Kovacz said.

  DeHaan shrugged. “A codename is all they gave me—could be anybody.”

  “So the Swedes don’t know about it, right? Otherwise, we’d be hauling the stuff into Malm.”

  “That’s how I read it,” DeHaan said.

  “Or do they, perhaps, choose not to know,” Ali said.

  “Neutral politics, Mr. Ali. Anything is possible.”

  “When do we have to be off Sweden?” Kovacz said.

  “Before dawn on the twenty-first.”

  There was a pause while they calculated.

  “We’ll just make it,” Kovacz said. “If we can get out of Lisbon by the eleventh.”

  “It should be fast,” DeHaan said. “We’re supposed to pick up a manifest, for cork oak and whatnot, going up to Malm, but we don’t actually load anything.”

  “After Sweden, what then?” Ratter said.

  “Then we do go to Malm, for sawn pine boards headed down to Galway.”

  After a moment, Ratter said, “Irish Free State, so, neutral to neutral, on a neutral vessel.”

  “That’s the idea. But we get further instructions at sea—I would bet that means a British port.”

  “And the end
of the Santa Rosa,” Kees said. “And then—convoys?”

  DeHaan nodded. Bad, but no worse than what they’d been doing.

  “Will we go down the Swedish side of the Kattegat?” Poulsen said.

  “Of course,” DeHaan said. “I’m not sure it matters, but we’ll try.”

  Kovacz said, “I can tell you it doesn’t matter. Not up in the Baltic—the Germans do whatever they like, and the Swedes don’t get in their way. Don’t dare. Otherwise, it’s blitzkrieg for them and they know it.”

  Mr. Ali tapped his cigarette holder so that an ash fell into the ashtray. “He’s right.” And I can prove it. Clearly, from his expression, Mr. Ali had a story to tell, and they waited to hear it. “For instance,” he said, “just yesterday morning, there was a French ship, wiring back to the owner in Marseilles. In clear, this was—the two of them going back and forth. And, from what I could make out, they were taking wolframite ore up to Leningrad, but a patrol ran them into port and now they’re stuck there. Not allowed to leave.”

  “Of course,” Ratter said. “That’s tungsten—armor plating, armor-piercing shells, very hard to get hold of, these days, so the Germans want it for themselves.”

  “No doubt,” Kees said. “But the Soviets are supposed to be their allies.”

  “Did the French ship give a reason?” DeHaan said.

  “The owner asked, then the Germans cut them off. Jammed the frequency, and, when the French radioman moved up to another, they jammed him there.”

  “That’s very strange,” DeHaan said. “If you think about it.”

  “Not so strange,” Kovacz said. “They’re getting tired of each other.”

  “Anything else on the radio?” DeHaan said. “BBC?”

  “Not much new. The fighting in North Africa, and the death of the Kaiser, in Holland, after twenty-three years of exile.”

  “Bravo,” Ratter said. “And may he roast in hell.”

  “He never liked Hitler, you know,” Kees said.

  “Said he didn’t. But his son’s an SS general—I’m sure he liked him.”

  “Anything else, Mr. Ali?” DeHaan asked.

  “Only the usual—Germans strengthening units at the Polish frontier.”

  Kovacz and DeHaan exchanged a glance. “Here it comes,” Kovacz said.

  5 June. Hotel Rialto, Tarragona.

  S. Kolb lay on the tired old bed and tried to read the newspaper. A knowledge of French didn’t really help, with a Spanish paper, and the one he’d been given at the cinema was dense and difficult, just his rotten luck, with only a few photographs and no comics. Spain’s version of Le Monde, maybe, with long, thoughtful articles. He preferred being unable to read brief, sensational articles, in the working-class tabloids.

  This might not have been such a bad hotel, he thought, once upon a time. Down on the nicer part of the waterfront, view of the Mediterranean, six stories high—the sort of place that might have been used by British travelers on a budget. But no longer. An artillery shell had hit the upper corner, during the war, so a few windows were boarded up, there was a black burn pattern on the wall above them, and, everywhere in the hotel, the evil smell of old fire.

  No matter, he wouldn’t be here long. In Stuttgart, he’d come back under Mr. Brown’s control, and damned thankful for it, at the time. Saved his worthless hide, no doubt. Truth was, if you had to live the clandestine life, you’d better do it in a clandestine system—you’d live longer, as a rule, because going it alone was almost impossible. Still, there’d come a moment, standing in front of that wretched painting in the museum, when he’d been tempted to disappear, to live some other way. Not now, he’d thought, not in the middle of a war, when everybody had to fight, on some side. But later on. Maybe.

  Such ingratitude! After all, they’d taken great pains to protect him. Like grandma’s precious china bowl—ugly thing, you hated it, but you took care not to break it. They’d slid him carefully out of Strasbourg, into the Unoccupied Zone, Vichy, and down the length of France, in an ambulance, a truck, even a horse-drawn vegetable wagon—Kolb with a smelly old farmer’s beret pulled over his ears. Handsome living, if you lived that way. Sharing the local food, whatever poor stuff they had. Once a pretty girl to sit with on a train. And, finally, into Port Bou—the Pyrenees border crossing—in a hearse. An assistant undertaker, thank God, the coffin they’d carried had been heavy and elaborate, lined with black satin, it didn’t look like there’d be all that much air to breathe in there. And who wanted to die in a coffin?

  Of course, when they spent time and money on you, they weren’t trying to save your life, rather trying to find some way you could lose it working for them. So, he thought, they had something in mind.

  In Lisbon, apparently. Earlier that evening, he’d seen their little man, come down from the consular office in Barcelona, he supposed, an hour north of Tarragona. Well, he hadn’t really seen him—it was dark in the cinema, a Spanish knight up on the screen bashing a few Saracen heads before breakfast—but he was a familiar presence. Rather heavy, with an asthmatic wheeze, and clearly regarding the man eight rows down one seat in from the aisle as little more than a package. Other than a brief protocol—“I trust this seat’s not taken, can you tell me?” “An old lady was there, but she’s gone away”—he’d only sat beside him for the requisite half hour before vanishing, the newspaper left behind on the seat.

  Would it have cost him so dearly to add a few words? A whispered Good luck, or something like it? Something human? No, not him, not even a comment about the moronic movie, just labored breathing, and a difficult newspaper with hand-lettered instructions on the inside of the back page—as always. Which added up to the night train to Lisbon, and then, no doubt, his next hotel, likely somewhere near the docks. The docks, the docks, always the docks, crowded with spies. There were some in his profession, he knew, who didn’t live that way at all—who traveled first class, who strolled through casinos with a woman on each arm, but that wasn’t his legend. Damn his genes anyhow. Born to a clerk, looked like a clerk, they’d made him a clerk. It was all a great clanking machine, wasn’t it, that went round and round with little puffs of steam and never stopped.

  Damn, he was hungry, his stomach gnawed at him. Didn’t help his mood much either. But the food in the seedy restaurants got worse as you moved south. At least in the north they fed on potatoes, here it was oil and beans, beans and oil, all of it laced with garlic, the sacrament of the poor, which didn’t agree with Kolb. And the same damn story in Lisbon, no doubt.

  The night train to Lisbon—more poetry than fact, that description. After a local up to Barcelona, S. Kolb spent the better part of two days on a broken wicker seat in a third-class carriage, in with the sausage eaters and the cranky infants, a few obvious refugees, and an endless parade of tired soldiers. The cast changed, but Kolb remained, as they puffed slowly across the Spanish countryside, standing in this station or that, or marooned far out in the middle of nowhere.

  It was after midnight when he finally arrived at Lisbon’s Estaco do Rossio and found the woman in the green scarf waiting for him on the platform. She drove him not to a hotel on the docks, but to what he took to be a rooming house, up in the Alfama district, below the Moorish citadel. No, not quite a rooming house, he was told, a hideaway for various agents, headed here or there, and best not to see the others, or let them see you. He did hear them, though they were quiet in their rooms, and broke the rule only inadvertently, opening his door at the same moment his neighbor did. A tall, spindly fellow, professorial, who stared at him for a moment, then stepped back inside and closed the door. A surprise to Kolb, the way he looked. Kolb had heard him, on the other side of the wall, moaning in his sleep, and had imagined a very different sort of man. Still, not so bad in the hideaway—at least they fed him—his beans in oil brought up on a tray, with a tiny chop that might have been goat. Stingy, the British Secret Intelligence Service.

  He saw Mr. Brown the following morning. Plump and placid, pipe clenched betwe
en his teeth, so you had to work like hell to understand his clenched words. But Kolb did, in fact, understand all too well. After hearing of his travels, while making notes on a pad, Brown said, “We’re sending you up to Sweden.” Kolb nodded, secretly very pleased. A neutral country, clean and sensible with large, accommodating women—a bit of Kolb Heaven, after all the hell he’d been through. “You don’t speak the language, do you?” Beyond Skoal! not a word, but Skoal! might be perfectly adequate.

  “How do I get there?” Kolb said.

  “We’re sending you up on a freighter. Dutch merchantman disguised as a Spanish tramp. They’ll let you off in Malm. Ever been there?”

  “Never.”

  “It’s quiet.”

  “Good.”

  “Then, perhaps, to Denmark.”

  Occupied. But politely occupied.

  “Of course from Denmark, one can easily travel to Germany.”

  “They may know who I am—I suspect Frulein Lena denounced me.”

  “We’re not sure she did, and she’s with the Valkyries now. Anyhow, you’ll have new papers.”

  “All right,” Kolb said. As if it mattered whether he agreed or not. Still, there was a glimmer of hope—Sweden, where, if they caught him, he would be interned. If they caught him? Oh they would catch him all right, he’d make damn sure of that.

  “Don’t mind?” Brown said, eyes narrowing for a moment.

  “A war to be won,” Kolb said.

  Brown may have sneered, he wasn’t sure, there was only a puff of smoke, rising from the bowl of his pipe. Could that have been a sneer? “Indeed,” Brown said, and told him he’d be leaving after midnight on the tenth. “You’ll be taken to the dock,” he said. “Can’t have you wandering around Lisbon, can we.”

  8 June, 1600 hours. At sea.