by Alan Furst
A turn around the deck. He told the helmsman to stay on course and left the bridge. The sea had grown stronger overnight, Noordendam’s prow nosing through heavy swells as spray flew high above the bow and sent up little puffs of steam as it hit the deck. DeHaan stood dead still. This couldn’t be what he knew it was. He trotted forward and knelt down, the salt spray stinging his eyes, and pressed a hand against the iron surface. Then he ran for the bridge.
The siren’s wail produced both fire crews, sprinting for their hoses, and Ratter and Kees. Shouting over the siren, he told them where it was. Ratter got there first, wrapped his hand in his shirttail and spun the wheel that opened the hatch to the number one hold. When he threw the hatch cover back, gray smoke poured up from below. “Get a hose over here!” Kees yelled. An AB poked a nozzle into the opening and DeHaan had to grab him as he pulled the lever back and the high-pressure stream whipped the hose and almost sent him into the hold. “Give me that,” DeHaan said and Kees handed him a flashlight. But, lying on his stomach and peering down into the darkness, he could see only a shifting cloud of smoke.
“What the hell is it?” Ratter said.
No answer. Hold fires were caused by spontaneous explosions, from dust, or slow combustion in damp fibers. “There’s ammunition in those crates,” Kees said. “Or worse. It’ll blow us open.”
Ratter put a foot on the first of the perilous steps, iron rungs, that descended into the hold. It was thirty feet, three stories, to the keel, sailors died when they fell down there, and the rungs extended only six inches—the shipyards didn’t sacrifice space needed for cargo. Ratter coughed as he climbed down and, as DeHaan followed, said, “I’ll thank you not to step on my fucking hands, Eric.”
“Sorry.”
Kees slithered backward off the deck and DeHaan watched his foot turn sideways, probing for purchase on a slippery rung. Above them, the AB adjusted the hose so that the white stream of water hissed past their heads—one slip of the hand and all three of them were finished. Someone on deck, maybe Kovacz, growled, “You’re too close.”
Some intelligent soul now turned on the lights—which meant the electrical system hadn’t burned, and revealed one of the trucks, with its hood and cab in flames. “Turn off the hose and hand it down,” Kees yelled.
“Don’t try it,” DeHaan shouted.
“Don’t worry about that,” Kees shouted back.
The light helped them go faster. Too fast, DeHaan’s foot skidded off a rung and he grabbed the one above him with both hands, the flashlight clattering as it landed below.
By the time they reached the bottom, all three were breathing through handfuls of shirt. Kees turned the hose on and played the stream over the burning truck. The fire in the cab went out immediately, but burning gasoline in the engine kept coming back to life. They moved forward, sloshing through an inch of brown water, finally lying down in it and sending the stream up into the engine from below. That did it. “Should I hit the crates?” Kees said.
“No, better not,” DeHaan said.
Standing in front of the charred, smoking hood, Ratter said, “Trucks catch fire by themselves. Happens all the time.”
“You didn’t drain the tank?” DeHaan said to Kees.
“I thought they’d need to drive it right away.”
DeHaan walked over to the crate nearest the truck, one of the eight-by-eights, and felt for heat. The wood was smoke-blackened and warm to the touch, but no more than that. “Would’ve caught, in time,” he said.
“Sabotage,” Ratter said.
“Maybe.”
“That little German.”
Like a graceful bear, Kovacz clambered quickly down the rungs, a rag tied bandit-style over his nose and mouth, then stood with them and stared at the burnt truck. “It catches fire? All by itself?” he said, taking a pair of fireman’s gloves from his back pocket and putting them on. He walked over to the truck, waving the smoke away from his face, and yanked the door open. “Ignition switch is on,” he called out. “Maybe the wires heated up.”
“Too much time since we loaded,” Ratter said. “Battery wouldn’t last that long.”
“Ever hear of it?” DeHaan said.
After a moment, Kees said, “Once. On the Karen Marie, some kind of big touring car.”
“So it can happen,” DeHaan said. Then called out to Kovacz, “Anything in there that doesn’t belong?”
“Not that I can see.”
“Get rid of him,” Ratter said, meaning Kolb.
“How would I do that?” DeHaan said. “Hang him from a crane? With the crew assembled?”
“You can, you know,” Kees said. “And quietly, if you have to.”
“That’s crazy,” DeHaan said. But Kees wasn’t entirely wrong. DeHaan was, according to the Dutch Articles, “Master next to God,” and that meant he could do pretty much anything he wanted.
Kovacz backed out of the cab, then opened the hood. All four of them peered at the engine, the smell of burned rubber hose heavy in the air. “Nothing,” Ratter said. “How the hell did he do it?”
“Wait a minute,” Kovacz said. He reached below the engine and peeled a black scrap of fabric off the metal. “Oily rag?”
Silence. They stared at each other, all of them with tear streaks running through the soot below their eyes. Kees coughed and said, “Maybe the woman did it.”
“Or somebody in the crew,” DeHaan said. “Or maybe it was in there when we loaded it.”
“Ignition switch on?” Kovacz said.
“If it stalled on the dock, and nobody checked . . . ,” DeHaan said. Stranger things had happened, they all knew that, and hold fires were often mysterious. “Anyhow, they have two more,” he said. “Let’s hope that’s enough. Johannes, I want you to take a walk around the ship—paint locker, places like that, you know what I mean.”
Ratter nodded. “What do we tell the crew?”
“Oily rags,” DeHaan said.
2010 hours. Off the Irish coast.
True Atlantic weather, now, barometer falling, maybe a storm system up north. Kolb didn’t show up for dinner, but in this kind of sea the ship’s pitch and roll could keep passengers in their cabins. “Feeling all right?” DeHaan asked Maria Bromen as they left the table.
“It doesn’t bother me.”
“Go up on deck and watch the horizon, if you have to.”
“I will do that,” she said. Then, “Could you tell me, maybe, where we are?”
When they reached the chartroom, he unlocked the door, turned on the light, and spread a chart out on the slanted top of the cabinet. She stood close to him, he could smell soap. Nice soap, nothing they had on the ship. “We’re about here,” he said, pointing with the calipers.
“So tomorrow, here?”
“Sea’s against us. We’ll be lucky to be off Donegal Bay.”
“Do you have, a certain time, to be somewhere?”
“Yes, but in this business you give yourself an extra day. Always, if you can.”
“And you mustn’t tell me where we’re going.”
“I shouldn’t,” DeHaan said, feeling slightly silly.
“Who I would tell? A whale?”
DeHaan smiled and slid the chart back in its drawer. “Don’t you like surprises?”
“Oh, some, yes. This one, I don’t know.”
He turned the light off and held the door for her. Once again, they stood by their cabin doors and said good night. DeHaan’s was halfway closed when she said, “It’s possible . . .”
He came back out. “Yes?”
“You have a book, I could read?”
“Come and see if there’s something you like.”
He closed the door behind her, started to sit on the bunk, then leaned against the bulkhead as she looked over the library.
“Dutch, French, more Dutch,” she said, disappointed.
“There’s some in English—don’t you read it?”
“Hard work, for me, with dictionary. What’s this?”
> “What?”
“This.”
He walked over to the bookshelf. She had her finger on a Dutch history of eighteenth-century naval warfare. “I don’t think . . .” he said.
When she turned around, her face was close to his and her eyes were almost shut. That sullen mouth. Dry, but warm and extravagant, and very soft. And delicate—they barely touched. She drew away and ran her tongue over her lips. Not so dry, now. For a time they stood apart, arms by their sides, then he settled his hands on her hips and she moved toward him, just enough so that he could feel the tips of her breasts beneath the sweater. By his ear, her breath caught as she whispered, “Turn off the light.”
He crossed the cabin and pulled the little chain on the lamp. It took only a few seconds but when it was done she’d become a white shape in the darkness, wearing only underpants, long and roomy, almost bloomers. She stood still, waiting while he undressed, then said, “Take them down for me.” He did it as slowly as he could, finally kneeling on the floor and lifting each foot to get them off. She liked him down there and hugged him for a moment, a strong hug, arms around his neck, then let him go and ran for the bed.
Where it was all rather forthright, to begin with, but that didn’t last.
The Noordendam creaked and groaned in the night sea. Much better than a room, he thought, the rough blanket wound tight around them, the two of them wound tight around each other.
“They brought it aboard in Rangoon,” he said. “The last item in the shipment, a big wooden barrel. Some poor Englishman, they said, colonial administrator, going home to his family burial ground in England. They’d filled the barrel with brandy, you could smell it, to preserve the body. So we put it down in the hold but we had a bad storm, in the South China Sea, and it got stove in and began to leak. Well, we couldn’t leave it like that, not in high summer, so we opened it up and there he was, in his white tropical suit, along with some watertight metal boxes, packed with opium.”
“What did you do with it?”
“Overboard.”
“And him?”
“Got him a new barrel, an old paint drum, and filled it with turpentine.”
“I grew up in Sevastopol,” she said. “So I am Ukrainian, Marya Bromenko. ‘Maria Bromen’ came later. I thought, for Western journals, maybe better. Such ambition I had. My parents had great hopes for me—my father kept a little store in the port; tobacco, stamps, whatnot. For me he wanted education, not so easy but we managed. We managed, we managed—better than most. Always we had something on the table—potatoes, in the bad times, potato pancakes, in the good, as you can see.”
“See what?”
“I am big down below, not so much on top, a potato.”
He ran his fingers down her back. “Mm, not much like a potato.”
“I know you think so. I knew the first time I saw you, how you felt.”
“It showed?”
“To a woman, we know. But still, I was as I was, never to be a ballerina, and I hated the idea of becoming one more teacher. So, a journalist. I went to the university, in Moscow, for a year, but 1919, you know, the civil war, sometimes no class, or you had to march. And you had to say the right thing, because they would ask you about the other students, who’s a spy, and you had always provocation—‘Don’t you hate that bastard Lenin?’—and I got tired of it, weary, and afraid, and I thought, maybe better, go home to Sevastopol. I think I had, even then, a premonition, that I would get in trouble with these people.
“But my dear father wouldn’t give up—he got me a job, with a little journal we had there, news of the port and the ships. I worked hard, and eventually I found a good story, about the Lieutenant Borri, a French minesweeper that brought troops to Odessa, and her captain, one of those French adventurers who write novels. Claude Farrre, he was called, a villain, but interesting. It was this story that got me hired at N’a Vakhte, where, to begin with, I wrote from the woman’s view. What do you eat, on board your ship? Do you miss your sweetheart, at sea? Small stories, soft at the edge. Like Babel, though not so good, more like, maybe, Serebin. They are called feuilletons, leaves, that’s the technical name. You always had to put in a little communism—the food is better than under the czar, I miss my sweetheart but I am working to build socialism. We all did that, you learned how to do it, to keep the commissars quiet.” She yawned, then stretched.
“It’s getting late,” she said. “You have to work soon, no?”
“Not until midnight.”
“Must make you tired, to sleep in two parts.”
“You get used to it.”
“Still, I should let you sleep.”
“I have my whole life to sleep.”
When they were quiet, they could hear the wind sighing at the porthole and the rain beating down on the deck. “It’s a storm outside,” she said.
“Not too bad, just ocean weather.”
She yawned again, then moved around until she was comfortable. “Would you like to touch me a little?”
“Yes.”
15 June, 1810 hours. Off Glasgow.
DeHaan was in the chartroom when he heard the plane, the whine of a small engine passing above them, which faded away, then returned. He hurried up to the bridge wing, where a small biplane was circling back toward them in a cloudy sky. A two-seater, some kind of reconnaissance aircraft he didn’t recognize, with British insignia on the fuselage. Kees opened the bridge door and said, “He’s been signaling to us.”
“How?”
“Waving out the window, pointing to the foredeck.”
The plane passed over the bridge, flying so slowly that DeHaan wondered it didn’t stall. The pilot held something out the window, swooped low over the foredeck, dropped it on the hatch cover, then waved again as he flew away.
DeHaan and the watch AB went forward and recovered a zippered canvas bag. Inside, a chunk of kapok, that would have kept the bag afloat had it landed in the sea, and a sheaf of papers in a plastic envelope.
DeHaan took it back to the bridge. “What is it?” Kees said.
He wasn’t sure. Typed instructions, with courses and positions underlined, and routes between fields of tiny crosses marked out in red pencil. Finally he said, “Minefields. In the Skagerrak. It’s very precise.”
“Up-to-date,” Kees said.
“Looks like it.”
“So top secret—not even for the radio.”
“No, I don’t imagine they’d want anybody to know they have this.”
Kees studied the maps, then, with a tight smile, said, “You know, I just might lose my bet.”
“I think you might,” DeHaan said. “This gets us well beyond six-east.”
“Well, I won’t pay off just yet.”
“No, I wouldn’t, just yet.”
DeHaan called a senior officers’ meeting at eight, and Ratter, Kees, and Kovacz joined him in the wardroom. He chased Cornelius, cleaning up after dinner in the mess area, then laid out the minefield maps and routes on the table.
“What I wonder,” Ratter said, “is how we would do this if we were a real Spanish freighter.”
“By radio, once we were in the North Sea. That’s a guess, but I don’t think the Kriegsmarine gives out maps—not to neutrals.”
“Not many of them,” Kees said. “Only a few blockade runners. They aren’t led through, are they?”
“I don’t think so. There’s quite a lot of traffic up there, once you get past the Norwegian coast—Swedes down to Germany with iron ore, Norwegians and Danes, hauling all sorts of cargo. And however they do it, we’ll be in among them, just one more freighter.”
“Recognition signals?” Kovacz said.
“God I hope not. The British would’ve warned us, if there were. Could they do that? Every Argentine and Portuguese tramp going into the Baltic?”
Kovacz shrugged. “Hardly any go, like Kees said. British blockade maybe works better against Germany—they have to depend on Sweden, Russia, the Balkans.”
“That’
s what Adolf always carried on about,” Ratter said. “Geography.”
“Nazi lies, Johannes,” Kovacz said. “It was always about Wehrwille and it still is.” It meant the will, the desire, to make war.
Leaning on his elbows and looking down at the maps, Ratter said, “They need this cargo, don’t they. Really need it.”
“I hope so,” DeHaan said.
“They need it all right,” Kovacz said. “For U-boats. For, ah, what’s the word, signatures. The British have direction-finding antennas everywhere—Iceland, Newfoundland, Gibraltar, Cape Town, other places, just look at a map and think it through. So they get all the signals, and plot positions on charts, and maybe make a kill, but this station, in Sweden, is for U-boats. Built in Kiel and Rostock, then tested, worked up, in the Baltic. Each radio operator is different, has his own signature, the way he uses the transmission key, so, once you recognize him, you can figure out which U-boat is where. What the NID wants to do is write the life story of each submarine, find out its number, maybe even the name of its commander. They want to watch it from its birth, at the Baltic yards, to its death. Because if U-123 is in the Indian Ocean, it isn’t on the Atlantic convoy routes.”
Ratter lit a cigarette and shook out the match. “Stas, how do you know all this?”
“When I was in the navy, in Poland, we had people at work on these things. The earth is four-fifths water, that’s a lot of room to hide, so the great trick of naval warfare has always been to find the enemy before he finds you. You’re finished, if you can’t do that, and all the courage and sacrifice in the world simply adds up to a lost war.”
North, and north. Into the heart of the storm on the evening of the sixteenth, where the wind shrieked and thirty-foot waves came crashing over the deck and sheets of driven rain sluiced down the bridge-house windows. It was DeHaan who took the storm watch, but Ratter and Kees were on and off the bridge all night long, everybody in oilskins, including the helmsman, hands white on the wheel, who stood a two-hour shift before DeHaan sent him below and had a fresh one take over. The force of the storm blew out of the west, and DeHaan kept giving up a grudging point at a time, fighting for his course, because Noordendam couldn’t take it full on the beam. Finally Kees said, “Turn into the goddamn thing for Christ’s sake,” and DeHaan gave the order, swinging due west and heading up into the wind. Mr. Ali came up, now and again, blinking as he wiped his glasses with a handkerchief, to report distress calls coming in on the radio—the North Atlantic taking hold of the war that night and trying to break it in half. Then a savage gust of wind snapped the aerial and Ali appeared no more.
