New York Station

by Lawrence Dudley

  On the radio, Ventnor continued, “The Roosevelts want to adopt loser countries the way batty old ladies take in stray cats. Folks, don’t let them pull the wool over your eyes with their so-called facts. I’ll give you a fact: we’re mad and we don’t care. Nobody can touch us. Remember what happened when he tried to fill the Supreme Court full of crackbrained party-line socialists like himself? We let the Senate know what we thought. We had ’em shaking in their boots, they were afraid we were gonna come down there after ’em. With us fillin’ their sails, they began knocking down one crazy scheme after another.” People started cheering again. “That, ladies and gentlemen, was the end of his so-called big deal New Deal, and there aren’t gonna be any more of his crazy big government—”

  To hear the American president talked about this way. Astonishing, Hawkins thought. In Britain. On the continent, even inside Germany, oftentimes, for men and women Hawkins’ age, Franklin Roosevelt’s name brought a glow to faces, hushed tones to voices, things that came with hope. All abruptly seemed dark again, the brilliant sunshine notwithstanding.

  “We don’t need anybody for anything. The biggest break we ever had was when that old wooly headed, wooden head Woodrow, you know who I mean”—even over the little speaker you could hear the audience giggling and cackling along—“that old schoolmarm President Woodenhead Woodrow Wilson thought the best thing America could do was run to a so-called League of Nations and negotiate forever on bended knee with a bunch of foreigners for permission to exercise our sovereign rights as Americans. Why, he wanted us to agree to negotiate before we even knew what we were gonna negotiate about! Now how does that make any sense?”

  That stirred Fred. “I sure hope we don’t. I’ve been over there to Berlin and they’re locking everything up in big cartels hooked into the top Nazi leaders. You wouldn’t believe the bribe one of Göring’s aides demanded, just to get in and make a pitch. Not to the big guy either,” he said unironically, “but to the next flunky up the ladder. I walked out. Crooked bunch of bastards.”

  That roused Ludwig. “Sir, I …” then he seemed to change his mind.

  More applause. The radio boomed on. “And you know what? The average Jacques and Jacqueline don’t care jolly squat either because they know their government wasn’t doing them any damn good at all. What the French had there in June is a sort of little election where they let the Germans come in and help clear out the politicians for ’em. They got a new government going on down in Vichy now, and when they canned the old one people in the galleries stood up and cheered. That’s how the French feel about it.”

  How the French feel about it? Hawkins thought. For a moment he saw Paris. Marie. That old soldier crying in the street. People fleeing. The men and women back at the safe house drawing lots …

  Then a woman’s cry, piercing enough to shatter a plate-glass porthole. The Dane, her eyes red with tears, was shouting up the spiral staircase to the flight deck, bracing her hands on the doorframe.

  “Tuvrn dat hoff! Tuvrn dat hoff! Hvow can he say dat! Dey stole my chountry! Dey stole my chountry! Dey lied and said dey’d leave us ahlone then dey came wit thanks in de mittle av da night—they took my vather to a kamp! A journalist! Oh, he vas so dangerous, little Danmark so dangerous to big, helpless Germany!”

  She started sagging into the doorway, crying uncontrollably. Hawkins and Fred caught her short of the deck. The captain spun down the stairs, an appalled expression on his face.

  “Shut the bloody thing off!” Hawkins said.

  Two stewards rushed to carry her into the forward sleeping compartment. Hawkins and Fred returned to the lounge. Ludwig had collected the cards. He sat playing solitaire as if nothing had happened. Fred slammed down next to him.

  “Jesus!”

  “Is the young lady all right?” Ludwig said.

  “I don’t know,” Hawkins said. “She may never be all right.”

  Ludwig kept playing solitaire, almost musing as he spoke, “She’ll get used to it.”

  The intercom clicked in.

  “This is the captain,” the voice clipped and short, “we’ll be landing in Bermuda shortly.”

  “Thank God!” Fred said.

  Ludwig shuffled the cards and began arranging them on the small table again. He didn’t invite anyone else to play.

  -12-

  The pitch of the motors shifted down. Bermuda, finally. A few banks and a circle over Great Sound. The mossy green islands in Hamilton Harbor began rushing up. A bob up, then a dip down. The Clipper’s long keel snagged the waves with a heavy thud. Everyone shook from side to side and forward in their seats.

  The plane taxied to the terminal on Darrell’s Island. Hawkins cautiously tarried until the other passengers deplaned. Jamming his hat as close to his eyes as possible, he stepped out onto the floating pier and into the blazing sun.

  A Royal Navy ensign was waiting, face creased with worry. It wasn’t every day they had orders to rush a Clipper passenger—and a civilian, no less—into the colony outside of customs and passport control.

  Hawkins followed the ensign along the pier and up and over the crest of the small island to a dock on the north side. There, out of sight of the big flying boat and the prying eyes of its passengers, waited a triple-cockpit Hacker launch: thirty-eight feet of gleaming mahogany, chrome, green leather and brass with the hotel’s name still in gold leaf on the stern. An overweight Royal Army officer in khaki shorts over tanned hairy knees and an immaculately dressed female RAF officer were facing each other in the back cockpit. The woman nervously fussed with her aide’s shoulder rope. She quickly stopped when they saw him coming. They looked surprised.

  But Hawkins presented an at-odds sight in the tropics in August. He was wearing a black double-breasted suit topped by a dark charcoal fedora tossed on his head as casually as a beret. His hair was cut in such a longish Continental style that there was something rather bohemian about him, in a polished Parisian way. His blue eyes were relentlessly in motion, soaking in everything around him. Pacing rapidly ahead, he almost overran the ensign, impatiently swinging his arms and shoulders as if he wanted to pick the man up and set him aside. He’d nearly step on the ensign’s heels, then pause, checking himself, barely letting the ensign stay ahead, lending a tinge of syncopated agitation to his movements. He kept blinking in the bright light—the startled impression given by a large, powerful owl caught in the daylight and not liking it.

  Hawkins almost flew over the rail, only lightly touching it with his hand, landing easily and gracefully in the back of the boat.

  “Mr. Hawkins? I’m Brigadier James Houghton, Chief of the Imperial Posts and Telegraph Censorship Station here in Bermuda.” Hawkins shook Houghton’s hand. The woman stood too, greeting Hawkins military style, a snappy white-gloved salute. “And this is Flight-Lieutenant Stroud, my aide-de-camp.”

  “My pleasure! And to be out here,” Hawkins said, shaking her hand. He smiled. “A breath of fresh air.”

  “Yes, miserable things, those planes, rather go by liner anytime,” Houghton said.

  “Not me. Haven’t the patience.” Hawkins turned back to her and winked. “Couldn’t be a sailor. Too slow.”

  “Then I have just the thing for you.” Stroud laughed, reaching down, drawing a blue Royal Air Force officer’s jacket and folding service cap from under the seat.

  “A little camouflage,” Houghton said.

  “I think I heard once we’re all supposed to have reserve commissions of some sort,” Hawkins said. “I’ll have to ask for RAF now. Exactly what am I?”

  “A squadron leader,” Stroud said. “And you have the cap on backward.”

  The launch cast off. They began quietly motoring out onto Great Sound and into the main channel to Hamilton Harbor. Both Stroud and Houghton were looking at him with the same quizzical expression: What is that accent?

  “Are you a Canadian, Mr. Hawkins?” she said.

  “No. I’ve dual nationality. My mother’s English, father’s an Ameri
can. Obviously, I travel exclusively under a US passport.”

  “Oh! I see. Your accent sounded a bit … off. Sorry. I took you for one of those irritating men who like to affect Americanisms. But you are a Yank!”

  “Halfway there, anyway—come to think, that’s why I can’t take that commission. My doing this is very illegal back home—uh …” Stroud’s right eyebrow rose a tick. “I mean, here—there. In the States. You’re supposed to lose your citizenship automatically.”

  “Aren’t you worried?” she said.

  “No. They could never find out. They don’t have an intelligence service.”

  “You’re not career Service, then?” the general said.

  “No, they recruited me in ’38 when all the trouble started.”

  “How extraordinary! I mean, you could go off to America, avoid all this fuss and bother.”

  -13-

  “Don’t think I don’t …” Hawkins was leaning toward the lieutenant, only half paying attention to Houghton, one arm up on the seat back. He caught himself and stopped, frowning. General Houghton nodded slightly, almost knowingly. Flight-Lieutenant Stroud surveyed his expression intently, if blankly. In a second Hawkins picked up again, “… know. I”—struggling over his answer—“sort of grew up in England, mostly. My father was based in London, although we lived for a year or two in Paris and Zurich. England’s my mother’s country. It’s where I mainly went to school. Then two years of college in New York. When the tensions rose the valve business went down …”

  “That’s what you were in?” Houghton said.

  “Yes, industrial valves, Bolley Manufacturing, I was their European representative. I couldn’t help seeing things for myself. And then there was my father. He died shortly before I went to Europe. Had to drop out of school. He got gassed in the last one. At first he was fine. But he got hydrochloric acid in his lungs from the chlorine, like all the others, and it rotted them out. It took a long time.”

  In his mind’s eye Hawkins could see his father in the oxygen tent, spine heaving, trying to force a breath into wasted lungs. A long time.

  “So. The Secret Service?” the general said.

  “Oh. Right. Not long after I went over I started getting calls from Germany. They were very interested in Bolley’s line of high temperature, high pressure industrial valves. Rather odd, special-purpose things, mostly for the oil and chemical industries. Valves are a surprisingly difficult engineering problem. If they don’t seat right under a wide range of heat and pressure conditions, a minuscule trickle you can hardly measure gets through, your factory blows up. They’re at the center of everything.”

  “Oh! Of course. And so were you,” the general said.

  “Exactly. You couldn’t miss that the Germans were going full tilt into munitions, synthetic fuels, these new plastics, all that lot. The last straw was a plant in East Prussia. Actually gave me a tour. Didn’t think I could figure out what they were making. Or else they didn’t care.”

  “Which was?”

  “Gas.” Stroud actually gasped. “Phosgene, to be exact. Went to the American embassy—couldn’t even get an appointment. The US was neutral and out of the spying business, the secretary told me. Very huffy about it, actually. So one day an offer came to join MI6.”

  “I see … huffy, you say?”

  “Oh yes, quite. Snooty, actually.”

  “Remarkable. By the way,” the general said, “you’ll be amused to know that island to starboard is named Hawkins Island.”

  Hawkins had no sooner turned to check the semieponymous spit of rock and palm when a flash came dead ahead, outside the opening of the sound. A dull thud, not quite a boom, followed an instant later.

  The general shouted at the ensign. He opened up the throttle full on. In seconds the boat was slicing through the waves, the roar drowning out any conversation. A mixture of anger, fear and worry roiled the general’s face. Within a few minutes they reached the entrance of Great Sound and what amounted to front-row seats.

  A dense black column of smoke was rapidly billowing up from an island of dark orange fire just outside the bay, past the Royal Naval Dockyard, perhaps a mile or two away. Another explosion followed. The black silhouette of a ship’s bow lifted out of the flames and water for a second, rolled slightly and disappeared back into the smoke.

  Hawkins had to lean in to the general’s ear. “What is it?”

  “A tanker, down from New York with a load of oil for the colony,” the general said.

  Skipping and hydroplaning, the boat approached the ship, turning slightly, all four passengers holding their hands up to shield their faces from the heat. They were a few hundred yards from the edge of the burning slick when a wide bubbling roiled the waves between them and the tanker. A black U-boat abruptly breached, bow first, leveling off in a second, diesels blasting to life, cruising in a circle around the burning tanker, throwing a huge wake sending the speedboat up and down hard into a trough. Two officers popped out of the conning tower, watching the tanker, scanning the sky, backs to the speedboat. Then a third man, a seaman swinging an ammo box, rushed out to man the rear AA mount. The speedboat mounted the wake’s crest. He spotted them, turning to call his skipper, gesticulating back, slapping the box into the gun.

  Houghton shouted, “Hats! Get down!”

  The general and Stroud ripped off their service caps, throwing themselves to the deck. The ensign turned the helm hard, gunning the motor. Hawkins sat erect, staring at the sub. Stroud reached up and grabbed his cap off, “Get down!” then ducked again, crouching below the seat. The wind caught Hawkins’ hair. He kept gazing at the U-boat, an idle, almost expectant expression on his face.

  “Hawkins, in the name of God get down!” Houghton shouted.

  The U-boat’s officers glanced over their shoulders and shrugged. The sailor charged the machine gun and let go a few rounds, sending small plumes of water zipping alongside the speedboat. The ensign swerved. One of the officers on top of the conning tower waved and whistled at the gunner. He instantly stopped and began stowing his gun, pulling the ammo box off, darting up and back down into the submarine. The U-boat turned toward open water. The two officers took one more nervous glance around at the sky, then slipped down the hatch. Within seconds the U-boat slid into the water like a letter into an envelope and vanished.

  “They’re leaving,” Hawkins said. “You can get up now.”

  The general and the flight-lieutenant shakily climbed up, tugging their hats back on. Stroud picked up Hawkins’ cap and held it out, a horrified and quizzical expression on her face. He glanced down, took the hat and put it back on as if nothing had happened.

  She turned to Houghton. “Should we go pick up survivors?”

  “No. We have to get back. We’ve risked him enough already!”

  Hawkins said nothing, calmly watching the black smoke rising. U-boats blockading Bermuda? Well, that figures, he thought. They weren’t content with running me out of France or chasing me from the shores of Europe. They’re following me to the beaches of the New World, right to Hawkins Island, no less.

  -14-

  Hawkins followed Houghton and Stroud up the path to the Princess Hotel, staring at the pink building and its green lawns, palm trees and flower beds—a merry, sensual riot of color. Pink. Incredible, he thought. In London or Paris everything came in tasteful shades of gray. There was something quite obscene about the hotel’s celebratory quality, simply not right at all. Not after what he’d just seen, after everything since the beginning of June.

  “This cockamamie place is your HQ?”

  “That’s right,” the general said. “Actually, it’s one of British Intelligence’s biggest centers.” They settled into wicker chairs on a terrace. In the distance a siren slowly wound up a tardy warning, followed by some imbecile frantically blowing a ship’s whistle. The general ordered iced teas.

  “Think there are many survivors?” Stroud said.

  “What, from that?” the general said. “No one
got off alive. When those tankers go up like that they boil the water around them. Nothing escapes.”

  “Are U-boats out there all the time?” Hawkins said.

  “No. We know they’re not. The navy sweeps constantly. Must have slipped in after dark and sat on the bottom to wait. They knew in advance to be there, then. There’s got to be a spy in that damn town,” jabbing a finger toward Hamilton.

  “Nowhere else on the island you can go?” Hawkins said.

  “No. Facilities are scarce. Water, housing, big problem. At least we lucked out on one thing. For a moment we thought they were sending the Duke and Duchess of Windsor here, but we got them to make him the governor of the Bahamas instead. That’s the last thing I need, two high-ranking Nazi sympathizers on the island.”

  “On?”

  “Yes. On. We’ve been getting intel the Germans are thinking of installing them as king and queen in an occupied Britain. Those two would play along. Especially her, very pro-Nazi. We can’t take a chance of anything like that happening.”

  “Too bad no one told me in Lisbon, I could’ve settled it.”

  “What do you mean?” Houghton said.

  “Bullet in the head. Simple matter. I’d have gotten in.”

  “You’re talking about the man who was our king!” Stroud said.

  Hawkins shrugged. “Just two more Fifth Columnists as far as I’m concerned. I don’t know what the big deal is. I don’t give a damn about his choice of women or him quitting as king, but he didn’t have to go to Berlin and make friends with Hitler and Göring.”

  “That’s true, but there’d be a scandal if we shot them. The whole world would know we did it,” Houghton said.

  “Put them on the plane, then, I’d have taken it down,” Hawkins said. “It’d look like an accident.”

  “But you’d die! And what about the passengers?” Stroud said.

  “My chances of living through this war are piss poor anyway. And innocent people are dying left and right, by the tens of thousands. At least I volunteered for it.”