by Alan Furst
DeHaan came to the bridge for the first half of the split dog watch. The repainting was still in progress, but getting toward the end. The crew, he thought, had never worked this hard. It had been decided, at the wardroom meeting, that they would be told only that the ship was headed north, its destination secret, with a call at Lisbon and no liberty. Was it the idea of a secret mission that inspired them? Something clearly had, because they put their backs in it, every single one of them, the full crew toiling away on the scaffolds, and working fast. And, this one time at least, the weather held. The idea that an important operation could be ruined by a few showers of ocean rain seemed almost absurd, but the history of war said otherwise and DeHaan knew it.
Ratter came loping up the ladderway with a burlap sack in one hand and a glint in his eye. “Care to see what I bought in Tangier?”
He reached into the sack and brought forth a round tin canister with hand-lettered marking at the center. FUTLIHT PARED, 1933, it said, then, JAMS CAGNI/JONE BLONDL.
“Ten reels,” Ratter said. “Probably all of it, or there’s another movie in there somewhere.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“Thieves market.”
Strange things wandered through the world of ports, DeHaan thought, living lives of their own. Had this walked away from a Tangier cinema? A passenger liner? A complicated journey of some sort, anyhow, to arrive on the Noordendam.
“I thought,” Ratter said, “we might show it as a reward, after the painting.”
“I can repay you, from the mess fund.”
“No, no. It’s my gift, to the ship.”
“Do we still have the projector?”
“It took some searching, but we found it in the hawser locker.”
“Of course, where else? Does it work?”
“Don’t know what will happen if we put film in it, but I hooked it up and it ran. There were rats living in the speaker, they’d eaten the wires, but Kovacz put it back together.”
The projector had been on the Noordendam before DeHaan came on as captain, nobody had any idea where it came from. “Movie at twenty-one hundred hours,” he said. “Have the bosun rig up a canvas screen on the foredeck.”
A lovely night for a movie; a great white sweep of stars spread across the black sky, a light headwind that snapped and billowed the canvas screen, so that James Cagney sometimes swelled, sometimes jerked violently, to great cheers from the audience. The projector worked, after the necessary ten minutes of fooling around, though it ran slightly fast, so that the actors appeared to be in a bit of a hurry. The sound, however, from the rewired speaker, was not so good, the voices muffled, as though the characters were eating bread, and sometimes the music swam, odd and otherwordly—Footlight Parade, the supernatural version.
None of it mattered. The officers and crew sat on a hatch cover and had a fine time—some of them couldn’t understand a word of it, but that didn’t matter either. It was a Busby Berkeley movie, so there was plenty to look at; crowds of girls in skimpy costumes and, soon enough, in bathing suits, forming and re-forming in a water ballet that ended in a grand climax, a fountain of swimmers, sleek and sinuous, waving their arms like graceful birds.
Ratter ran the projector and DeHaan sat by his feet. Looking out over the seated crew, it struck him how few they were, only a handful of men, really, on the vast reach of the deck, beneath an ocean sky. A few minutes into the movie, Maria Bromen appeared on deck, a little hesitant, uncertain where to sit. DeHaan waved her over and made space by his side. Evidently she’d washed her clothing and hung it up to dry, because someone had found her a pair of dungarees and a sweater, and she wore a scarf over her head, knotted beneath her chin. “Do you always have movies?” she said.
“Never. But the first mate found this in Tangier.”
After a moment, she said, “The English is difficult, for me.”
“James Cagney has trouble with his wife, but Joan Blondell, his secretary, is secretly in love with him.”
“Ah, of course.”
Then, a little later, “What happens now? He’s a sailor?”
“Plays a sailor, in the production number.”
“So. He fights!”
“Well, sailors in a bar.”
After the fight, a song:
Here’s to the gal who loves a sailor.
It’s looking like she always will.
She’s every sailor’s pal.
She’s anybody’s gal.
Drink a gun to Shanghai Lil.
10 June, 0300 hours. Port of Lisbon.
They had to have a pilot, entering the Tagus River, picked up off the town of Cascais, in order to cross the sandbars that built up at the mouth of the river. Pilots tended to be outgoing and talkative, seemed to enjoy that part of the job, and this one was no different. To DeHaan, he spoke English. “War has slowed down,” he said. “Except for Libya, and that goes nowhere. Advance, retreat, advance.”
DeHaan agreed. From the last newspaper he’d seen, and Ali’s reports of the BBC, it certainly seemed that way.
“It may be the time for diplomats, now,” the pilot said. “Hitler has what he has, and the British and Americans will find a way, with Japan. Is this how you see it?”
“One could say that.” DeHaan was being polite. “But the occupation is a hard thing, for Europe.”
“For some, yes. But it was not good before the war, with the communists, and men who could not find work.” He paused, then said, “You are not Spanish, are you.”
“Dutch.”
“I thought you could be German. How does it happen that you are captain of a Spanish ship?”
“The last captain quit, without notice, and I was what they could find. Likely it won’t last, though.”
“Crew is Spanish?”
“Some. You know how it is with the merchant tramps, everyone from everywhere.”
“Truly. And there is a lesson for the world, no?”
DeHaan agreed, and busied himself with the log, then spoke back and forth with the engine room. When they were safely in the Tagus, made fast to two tugboats, and the pilot boat came alongside, DeHaan wasn’t sorry to see him go.
Four in the morning, DeHaan on the bridge. With the tugs fore and aft, the Noordendam made slow way upriver, past pier after pier, while the city beyond lay still and silent, the final hour of its darkness broken only by streetlamps and a few lights dotted across the hills. Always, a part of him came sharply alive at these moments. To be awake while the world slept was a kind of honor, as though command of the imaginary night watch fell, for just that moment, to him.
By 0530 they had, as promised by the tugboat captain, tied up to the pier at the foot of the rua do Faro, a white F3 painted on the side of the cargo shed. DeHaan, in normal times, would have left the bridge for his cabin, but these were not normal times, and he stayed where he was. As the first light of dawn settled on the city, the waterfront came to life: stevedores, lunch boxes in hand, heading for a shape-up on the neighboring wharf, the night’s last whore going slowly home on her bicycle, the local seagulls coming to work, a sun-bleached black Fiat pulling up in front of the cargo shed, an army truck arriving next, a few yawning soldiers, lighting cigarettes and chatting among themselves, forming a ragged line at the foot of the pier, followed by an elderly couple with a suitcase, who stood back from the soldiers and settled in to wait. As DeHaan watched, more civilians arrived, until he’d counted forty or so, then stopped counting as the crowd grew.
At 0750, Kees showed up for the forenoon watch. “What goes on, out there?”
“I’m not sure. A crowd of refugees, it looks like.”
“I thought this was all a secret.”
“Well, keep an eye on it,” DeHaan said, heading for his cabin, anxious for a few hours of dead sleep.
But this was not to be, not right away. In the corridor that led to his cabin, the chartroom door stood open and Maria Bromen was seated on a stool. She stood when she saw him. “I came to say goodby
.”
She had repaired herself as best she could—her suit and shirt pressed, sensible shoes polished, hair pinned up. “They loaned me the iron,” she said. “It looks right?”
“Oh yes, looks perfect. But I thought you would leave at night.”
“Don’t you sail today?”
“We’ll try—we’re a few hours late, but there are things that have to be done, so it will be after midnight.”
“Still, I will go now, and I wanted to thank you. There is more I want to say, but I think you know. So, thank you, and I wish you safety, and happiness.”
“There’s some kind of commotion out there,” DeHaan said. “Maybe you’d better wait for a while.”
“Yes, refugees, I saw them. They want to get on your ship, to leave this city, but the army won’t let them. It has nothing to do with me.”
“They have no idea where we’re going.”
“They don’t care. There will be rumors—South America, Canada—and they will offer money, jewelry, anything.”
After a moment he said, “Well, good luck, and be careful. Is there anything you need?”
“I have everything, because of you. I will be richest Russian girl in Lisbon.”
DeHaan nodded and met her eyes, he wanted to keep her. “So then, goodby.” He extended his hand and she shook it, formally, Russian-style. Her hand was ice cold.
“Perhaps we will meet again,” she said.
“I would like that.”
“One never knows.”
“No.” Then, “You will be careful.”
“I must be, but, now that I am this far, I think it will turn out well. I know it will.”
“You don’t want to wait for night.”
She didn’t.
Stubborn. But it had kept her alive, waiting for luck. “At least let me take you past all that on the dock.”
“Alone is better. I will go right by the soldiers, they won’t care, their job is only people who want to leave.”
“Yes, you’re right,” DeHaan said.
They shook hands once more and she left. Halfway down the corridor she turned toward him, walked backward for a step or two, her face closed, without expression, then turned again and walked away.
DeHaan left the ship at 1030, headed for the rua do Comrcio, the office of the customs broker. At the end of the pier, the soldiers made a path for him through the crowd of refugees, shooing people aside, barring their rifles and pushing when they had to. They were not brutal, only doing what they’d been ordered to do, and there was a certain practiced feel to the way they went about it. It took no time at all, his passage, but long enough. Voices called out to him, in this language or that, someone offering a thousand dollars, someone else holding a diamond ring above the heads of the crowd. I can’t take you. Maybe he could, after a battle with the port officers, but he secretly agreed with Kees, that they’d never see longitude six-east, so where he would take them, more than likely, was to the bottom of the sea, or into a German camp.
“Is something wrong?” Penha, the customs broker, asked when he arrived. So, it showed.
DeHaan just shook his head.
Penha was short and dark, well dressed, and very nervous. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said. “I was here very late, last night.”
“We lost time,” DeHaan said. Their ship’s log instrument—a line run from a gauge in the chartroom into the water that calculated miles gained—had showed them losing way to strong current on the voyage to Lisbon.
“Your cargo is in the shed on the wharf. I’m supposed to let you in, and to give you this.” He had the false manifest on his desk, and gave it to DeHaan immediately, glad to be rid of the thing. “You are not what I expected,” he said.
“What did you expect?”
Penha shrugged. “Buccaneer—of some sort.” He used the French word, boucanier, oddly romantic, the way DeHaan heard it.
“Captain of a Dutch freighter, that’s all.”
Penha lit a cigarette. “This is not what I do, ordinarily.”
“No, I’m sure it isn’t,” DeHaan said. “And a month ago I would’ve said the same thing. And a year ago, my country just went about its life, but everything changed.”
Insufficient reason, from the look on Penha’s face. “This is a business where honor matters—trust, personal trust, is all there is. That is my signature, on that piece of paper in your hand.”
Shall I apologize? Penha was not acting out of conviction, he realized, had apparently been forced to do this. “There’s no plan to show this to anyone, Senhor Penha,” he said. “It’s a form of insurance—and likely will remain a secret.”
“A secret. Are you sure?”
“Yes, I would say I am.”
“Because I’m not so sure.”
After a moment, DeHaan said, “Why not?”
A long silence. Only sounds of the street outside the quiet office as Penha tried to decide what to do, went back and forth—tell, don’t tell—then caution won out. Finally he said, “There are reasons.”
DeHaan gave him time to change his mind, time to say more, but the battle was over. “I should be getting back to my ship,” he said, as he rose to leave.
“You will have to load tonight,” Penha said. “And I’m supposed to be there.” Unless you say otherwise.
“Is nine too early?”
“It will do.”
“I have to sail, as soon as possible.”
“Yes,” Penha said. “You should.”
It was a fifteen-minute walk, back to the pier at the rua do Faro. An unremarkable walk, through the commercial district behind the port, on the way there, but different on the way back. For whatever ailed Penha, DeHaan discovered, turned out to be contagious. For instance, the man idling in front of a shop window on the corner of the rua do Comrcio. Or the couple looking out over the river, who glanced at him as he passed. And, on the street side of the cargo shed, the Peugeot sedan, parked by the road that allowed trucks to drive down the pier. Behind the wheel, a plump, middle-aged man, smoking a pipe and reading a newspaper, spread out across the steering wheel. To DeHaan he seemed particularly content, perfectly at peace with the world, as though this was the best, really the only, way to read a newspaper, parked in one’s car by a cargo shed. As DeHaan came even with the car, the man looked up, stared at DeHaan for a few seconds, then rolled his window down. “Captain DeHaan?”
“Yes?”
The man leaned across the seat and opened the passenger door, then said, “Can you join me for a minute?”
What was this? When DeHaan hesitated, the man added “Please?” Not the polite version of the word, something less. The man put the pipe back in his teeth and waited patiently. Finally, DeHaan went around the front and climbed in the passenger side. Sweetish smoke filled the car, which had a fancy interior, with soft leather seats. “Much appreciated,” the man said. “If I say the name Hallowes—does that help?”
“Yes, I suppose.”
“My name is Brown,” the man said. “I’m at the embassy, here in Lisbon.”
“The naval attach office?”
“Mmm, no, not really. But what I do isn’t so different from your friend Hallowes. Same church, different pew, eh?”
“He asked you to speak with me?”
“Oh no, he didn’t do that. But we’re all on the same side, in the end, aren’t we. You understand?”
After a moment, DeHaan nodded.
“Good, best to have that out of the way. Now Captain, I’m here because I have a small problem, and I need your help.”
DeHaan waited. Inside, rising apprehension.
“The, ah, Santa Rosa sails tonight, I believe, for Sweden. Do I have that right?”
“For Malm, yes.”
“Of course, the official version. And very discreet, to put it that way.”
“Mr. Brown, what do you want?” This was blunt and direct and had no effect whatsoever.
“A friend of mine needs passage, up to Sweden. I w
as hoping you might do me the favor of taking him along.”
“I don’t recall that being in my orders, from the NID.”
“Oh, the NID,” Brown said, deeply unimpressed. “No, probably it wasn’t. Nonetheless, it’s what I’m asking you to do, and the NID needn’t know about it, if that’s what concerns you. He’s just a meager little man, you won’t even know he’s aboard.”
“And if I say no?”
“Is that what you’re saying? Because I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.”
“Why not?”
“Why not,” Brown said, as though to himself. “Have you noticed a Fiat automobile, parked on the pier?”
“Yes, I saw it.”
“Inside the car are two Portuguese men. Plain enough, nothing special about them, except that they are important. Powerful, that’s the better word. They can, for example, impound your ship and intern your crew, but neither of us would want that, would we, what with the war effort and all. You really must go to Sweden, but one extra soul on board will make no difference, certainly there’s room for him.”
Certainly there was. But if he did what Brown wanted, once, he had a feeling it might be twice, and that it wouldn’t end there. And Brown wouldn’t dare to impound his ship, his job wouldn’t survive doing something like that. All right then, get out of the car.
“You aren’t averse to taking a passenger, are you?”
The current running beneath his words had stiffened—this was barely a question, almost a statement, and DeHaan realized it was a reference to Maria Bromen.
“And I expect the welfare of, um, any passenger, would mean something to you, no?” And, in Lisbon, because I can do it, I will, friend.
“Yes, it would,” DeHaan said.
“Ah then, we have no problem at all.”
It took DeHaan a moment longer, then he said, “No.”
Brown nodded—this always works. “You are helping to win the war, Captain. Even if very little is explained, even if you don’t care for the way things are done in my part of the world, you are. We must all lend a hand, if we’re to prevail, isn’t that so?”
