Finisterre

by Graham Hurley

  For hour after hour the road followed the coast, winding up and down the long escarpment overhanging the rocks below, then dropping to sea level for yet another of the sparkling rias that took them dozens of kilometres inland. Stefan sat in the back with Erwin, gazing at the lushness of the landscape and the poverty of most of the villages. Once they’d crossed the border into Portugal the lives of these peasant people seemed to get even tougher. Donkeys pulling ploughs over the red ochre soil. Semi-naked kids hauling buckets of water. Old women squatting in the shade, staring into nowhere. Neither war nor electricity had touched this landscape and at night darkness settled on the land like a shroud.

  They reached Lisbon close to midday. The centre of the city overlooked the water, a sprawl of red-tiled roofs in the brightness of the sunshine. After the long journey south, Stefan was glad to be back among people, bustle, movement. Trolley trams rattled up and down the hills. Men in business suits conferred over tiny cups of coffee. A gypsy with a violin and a corner pitch begged for coins in the swirl of lunchtime passers-by.

  Erwin evidently knew the city well. He directed the driver down to the waterfront, then headed west for several blocks. Stefan gazed at the forest of masts and the broad sweep of the river beyond. The driver brought the car to a halt. Traffic was light.

  ‘Here …’ Erwin was indicating a line of fishing boats alongside a quay. ‘Santos dropped you before sunrise. There was no one about. You watched him putting to sea again. Maybe you waved. Up to you. But he’s gone.’

  ‘And the embassy?’

  ‘A ten-minute walk. A stroll. Nothing.’ He nodded inland, away from the road, and gave Stefan directions. ‘You arrived with a handful of coins,’ he said. ‘Enough for a bowl of soup and a little bread. Times are hard in this city. There’s not much to eat. You’ve walked around a little. Got the feel of the place. Maybe you’ve slept once the sun came up because the boat was uncomfortable. You found a park with benches. You won’t remember the name or even where it is. Your leg still hurts. You take things slowly. There’ll be people who speak German at the embassy and you’ll be glad of that. Portuguese is a mystery. Even worse than Spanish.’

  Stefan nodded, staring out at the fishing boats. This man had taken over his life and he felt resentment as well as helplessness. The way he’d organised the script, so meticulous, so much attention to detail, would doubtless serve some higher purpose but just now Stefan was glad that their relationship had come to an end. Only one question remained.

  ‘How do I get in touch with Eva again?’

  ‘When it’s all over, you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You go back to the village. O Barquero. Or you ask the English to pick her up. That’s where she’ll be.’

  ‘I have your word on that?’

  ‘Of course. You don’t trust me? You think this is all for nothing?’

  Stefan didn’t answer. His fingers had found the door handle. Erwin was looking at him, a smile on his face. He badly wanted Stefan to shake his hand. When Stefan opened the door, he tried to mask his disappointment.

  ‘Take care.’ Erwin put a hand on his arm. ‘Good luck.’

  Stefan limped away without a backward glance. He was wearing the clothes Erwin had supplied: faded blue overalls, frayed at the seams, pre-stained with engine grease that might have come from the boat, a pair of espadrilles that were falling apart, and a shapeless straw hat with a wide, floppy brim. Three days at sea, he should have picked up a tan. Thanks to the hat, his face above the growth of beard was still pale.

  He began to cross the road, just another refugee alongside thousands of other incomers who’d slipped their moorings and ghosted west until there was nowhere left to go. According to Erwin, this city was full of people like him, washed up by a war that had taken everything but the clothes on their backs – Jews, Communists, POWs, deserters, men and women fleeing for their lives – and to find himself suddenly part of that community was the strangest feeling.

  Safely across the road, he looked back but the Mercedes had gone. It was like a conjuring trick – here one minute, vanished the next – and the feeling of helplessness returned. He was briefly on his own at last, and that was a relief, but the last few weeks had put his life in the hands of strangers and he was left with an overwhelming sense of bewilderment he recognised from moments as a child when he stepped from the darkness of a Hamburg cinema back into the world outside. What was real and what wasn’t? Who should he trust and who was going to hurt him? There’d been nothing simple about going to war in a submarine but these questions had never troubled him before because life at sea was black and white. Now, in this world of shadows, he had nothing to rely on but the most primitive instinct of all. Survival.

  The embassy lay beyond a pair of green ornamental gates in a quiet, tree-lined street of grey cobblestones. It was a modest building, white stucco, two storeys, with circular windows on the top floor and a thicket of aerials sprouting from the roof. A pair of local policemen were stationed at the gate.

  One of them stepped into the sunshine and gestured for Stefan’s ID. Stefan shrugged and held his hands wide.

  ‘Nada,’ he said. I don’t have any.

  The two men conferred. They shook their heads. They waved him away. He didn’t move. Then the first man took a closer look. Something about Stefan evidently impressed him. He turned to the gate and unlocked it. Then he escorted Stefan to the building’s front door. The door was already open. A woman was on her knees inside, wiping clean the tiled wall. She stopped work as the visitors stepped past. She looked local, dark-skinned, blackened teeth in a wide smile. A desk lay beyond, dominated by a photograph on the wall behind. Stefan recognised the king and queen. George VI was German by ancestry, he thought. One of us, one of our people. So what are we doing fighting this hideous war?

  A woman appeared from nowhere. She was tall, not young. Black skirt, white blouse. She looked Stefan up and down, unsmiling, and then muttered something in Portuguese to the policeman. The policeman shook his head. She turned back to Stefan.

  ‘Can I help you?’ English this time.

  Stefan removed his hat and asked to see the military attaché.

  ‘Do you have an appointment?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘May I ask what brings you here?’

  ‘My name is Stefan Portisch. I’m a Kapitän in the Reichsmarine. Until very recently I was in command of a U-boat.’

  ‘You’re a serving officer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see.’ She hesitated a moment. ‘We normally expect a little more information.’

  ‘Of course. You have a military attaché?’

  ‘We do. He’ll need to know the nature of your business.’

  ‘Then I’ll be happy to tell him.’

  She nodded, rebuffed, and disappeared through a door at the end of the room. Stefan looked for somewhere to sit down. His leg had begun to throb again. Nerves, he told himself. Relax. Stay calm. You’ve survived far worse moments than this.

  The woman was back minutes later. She signalled for Stefan to follow her and led the way up a flight of stairs. It took Stefan a while to get to the top. More pictures lined the corridor on the first floor. Hunting scenes deep in the countryside. A shooting party on a windswept moor. The woman asked him to wait for a moment while she disappeared into an office at the end of the corridor.

  Stefan lingered beside an oil painting of the Thames. He’d been in this very scene as a naval cadet, showing the flag for the Reich. He recognised the Tower of London and the magnificent bridge behind it. The bridge had opened to admit his training vessel, and he and his crewmates had lined the decks, doffing their caps to a Royal Navy destroyer, moored in the tideway. Later, they’d played host to a long queue of visiting dignitaries and Stefan remembered circulating around the tiny mess room with an assortment of sausages on a silver tray. He thought he might have met an English admiral but he couldn’t be sure.

  ‘Mr Portisch? The lieutenant-
commander will see you now.’

  The woman held the door open. Stefan found himself in a small, comfortably furnished office with a view of a garden through the window. At the desk sat a man Stefan judged to be in his mid-thirties though it was impossible to be sure. He was medium height, not fat, not thin. Black hair grew in patches on the baldness of his skull and one side of his face was puckered with shiny pink scar tissue. The scar had altered the line of his mouth, making one corner droop, and when he got to his feet and extended a hand Stefan realised he’d been burned. His hands were like claws, more scar tissue, and the touch of flesh on flesh was no more than a gesture of courtesy.

  ‘English or German?’

  ‘I’m German.’

  ‘I meant languages. Which would you prefer?’

  Stefan said German. The strength of this man’s voice – warm yet full of authority – took him by surprise. He’d been expecting a croak. Far from it.

  ‘I understand you’re a walk-in. No offence but we get lots of those. Absolutely happy to help but you’ll know that time is one of life’s rarer commodities, especially now. So what can I do for you?’ Excellent German, perfectly accented.

  Stefan had spent the last couple of days toying with a number of ways to launch this conversation but sensed it was hopeless to be hemmed in by any kind of script. Start with the obvious, he thought. And see where it leads.

  ‘Until a couple of weeks ago, I was in command of U-boat number 2553.’

  ‘One of the Elektro boats?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The one that came to grief up in Galicia?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wicked coast. Can happen to anyone. I thought you all died?’

  ‘They all did. Except me.’

  ‘Good Lord.’ The grimace may have been a smile. ‘You need luck in situations like those and you’re talking to an expert. Forty-eight souls went down in that wreck, am I right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’re the forty-ninth?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then welcome again. Take a seat.’ Another token handshake, over the desk this time.

  Stefan settled back. He was on home turf. He was with someone who understood the ocean, understood what it was to take the war to sea. This might be easier than I’d thought, he told himself. Might be.

  He explained about the grounding, about getting his crew out, about finding himself alone with a senior SS officer who couldn’t swim.

  ‘He wanted you to save him?’

  ‘He wanted me to shoot him.’

  ‘Very SS. Take the bullet. Die for the Fatherland. So what did you do?’

  ‘I did his bidding. No one argues with these people.’

  ‘You shot him?’

  ‘I did.’

  A thin whistle escaped the slit of a mouth. It seemed to signal both surprise and approval.

  ‘So what did that feel like? Killing the man?’

  ‘Like nothing. You pull the trigger, bam-bam-bam, three shots, and he’s gone. Later it didn’t feel that way at all but at the time, as you might imagine, I had other things on my mind.’

  He described getting ashore, lying up for the night, then finding himself at the mercy of a peasant farmer and his wife. Everything hurt. His leg wouldn’t work. He had a gash the size of a Blutwurst in his thigh. They’d taken him into the village and left him in the hands of a doctor called Agustín.

  ‘And the rest of the crew?’

  ‘I never saw them again.’

  ‘Did you know they were dead?’

  ‘No, not then. I asked, of course, but no one knew.’

  The military attaché nodded and reached for a pad. He held the pen in his fist like a primitive tool. Then he looked up again.

  ‘You stayed in that village?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Did you make contact with anybody? The police, for instance? The mayor? Local officials?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about your crew?’

  ‘I knew they were all dead. The doctor told me. Their coffins passed beneath my window.’

  ‘But you still made no contact?’

  ‘No.’

  He nodded, another question on his lips. Then his eyebrows came together in a frown and he sat back.

  ‘I’m afraid I have a confession to make,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I don’t know the German for “desertion”.’

  *

  Gómez and Yolanda, by mutual agreement, spent two days in a cheap hotel in Tijuana. They got up at lunchtime both days in time for coffee in a bar across the road and then lunch at a shack at the scruffy end of the beach where the fishermen mended their nets and the kids played games with an old mooring buoy they’d found in the shallows. In no hurry to move on, Gómez told Yolanda she’d make a fine therapist. He needed to get back on terms with being a proper man again and the knowledge that she was happy to ride along on this journey pleased him immensely.

  They made love a great deal. To Gómez’s immense relief, her appetite was at least the equal of his own. She introduced him to pleasures he’d never known before and he was duly grateful. On the second evening, at the back of a diner they’d adopted as their own, he wondered whether they ought to get married.

  ‘You’re supposed to propose to a girl.’ She seemed amused. ‘There’s a script here. It includes roses and all kinds of pretty jewellery. A bended knee would be good. And more flowers. Plus a lifelong pledge that you ain’t gonna do this stuff with any other woman.’

  Gómez nodded.

  ‘You want another beer?’ he asked her.

  ‘Sure. And if I get to say yes to the other question does that make me someone else?’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘Like Mrs Gómez?’

  Gómez ducked his head a moment. He loved this woman.

  ‘You think I mean it?’ he asked.

  ‘I think you might.’

  ‘And if I said I did, what then?’

  ‘I’d say yes.’ She took his hand and gave it a squeeze. ‘Preferably a Bud, if it comes this far south.’

  Later, back in the hotel room, they lay naked on the bed and picked at a bag of popcorn in lieu of a meal. Yolanda said it would be bad karma to get married in Mexico. They’d need formal ID, and formal ID just might put Gómez back in a prison cell.

  ‘So we do it back in the States, yeah?’ Gómez was staring up at the ceiling, a rare smile on his face. ‘Somewhere in San Diego, maybe? Or Chicago? Or DC? Or any place else you fancy?’

  ‘Sure, baby. But when?’

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘You’re not answering my question. You mentioned Ciudad Juarez a couple of days back. What happens there that’s so important my brother writes you little notes?’

  ‘I dunno. That’s the fun with being a cop. You get to find out.’

  ‘You? Or we?’

  ‘We if you wanna come along.’

  ‘For the ride? Watch what happens?’

  Gómez shook his head, fed her the last of the popcorn, licked his fingers, then looked her in the eye.

  ‘Neither,’ he said. ‘I was thinking you were right.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Protection.’

  *

  Stefan spent nearly two hours with the military attaché in the British Embassy. Once he’d heard Stefan’s account of what had happened to U-2553, he asked for a list of the five principal officers on board, together with their home towns. Stefan made the list himself, rank, Christian name, surname, bold capitals, and the Englishman glanced briefly through it before lifting the phone and summoning the woman Stefan had met earlier. He handed her the list and when she raised an eyebrow he simply nodded. Within the hour she was back. Another nod, from her this time. The list, and the embassy’s latest walk-in, had evidently passed muster.

  In the meantime, Stefan had been sharing everything he knew about operational protocols, code procedures, deployment schedules, attack patterns, mainten
ance intervals, plus the ever-lengthening list of reasons why the new electric subs were such a disappointment. It was a difficult face to read over the desk but Stefan sensed that the military attaché probably knew most of this stuff already. What interested him more was the issue of morale.

  ‘We suspect all is not well with Uncle Karl’s little tribe,’ he said. ‘Might we be right?’

  Stefan nodded. The Allies had turned the corner last year, he said. Within a space of a single month – May 1943 – the advantage at sea had swung abruptly away from the U-boat packs. The convoys were better organised, better protected. Aircraft were appearing deep into the Atlantic, especially the new American four-engine Liberators, and it was unnerving for crews who’d only recently been so invisible to find themselves subject to attack after attack. After the D-Day landings, with the Americans pushing deep into Brittany, the situation became even worse. The approaches to the submariners’ home ports had become suicide zones, heavily patrolled day and night. Nowhere in the Bay of Biscay was safe any more and orders to intercept incoming convoys in the Western Approaches turned into a death sentence.

  ‘So how do the men feel?’

  ‘Resigned.’

  ‘And angry?’

  ‘Not really. Not angry enough to do anything about it. We’re like most fighting units. You’re doing it for your Kameraden, for each other. The Reich is history. Just the mention of Hitler at sea is like dropping a fart. You don’t do it. It smells bad. It upsets everyone.’

  ‘So how do you get by?’

  ‘You don’t. It’s nothing conscious. You know the odds are against you. You know it’s getting more likely by the month, by the week, that you’ll die but you never talk about it because death has become a given. Why? Because there’s nothing else left. We’ve known that for a while now and it’s probably the same for the men on the ground in the east. Barbarossa was a disaster, though no one ever has the guts to say so. You know how many men we lost at Stalingrad? Nearly a million. One of them happened to be my brother. And you know Goebbels’ answer? Totaler Krieg.’

  ‘Total war.’