The Age of Exodus

by Gavin Scott

  “Why doesn’t he have his passport? We were told to bring them.”

  “He could have lost it in the dock.”

  “No, he still had his wallet. Does anybody else know Marks?”

  “I think Bernstein might.” And then there were footsteps and a door closed and Forrester waited a long moment before he opened his eyes.

  He was in a tiny steel-walled cabin crammed with double-tier bunks. His clothes steamed gently on a pipe that ran through the cabin close to the ceiling. Even the contents of his wallet, including the dollar bills he was carrying with him, had been meticulously spread out to dry. Beyond the single porthole there was nothing but blackness, but he could feel the steady roll of a vessel entering oceanic waters.

  They were clearly no longer in New York Harbour.

  Who the hell were these people, and where the hell were they taking him? There were backpacks and suitcases open on the other bunks. When he swung his legs over the edge of his he felt such a wave of nausea that he lay down again.

  For a long time he remained still, feeling the oddly reassuring roughness of the woollen blanket against his skin and registering the rhythmic pounding of the ship’s engine as a comforting constant as he drifted in and out of consciousness.

  Then he fell again into a deep sleep.

  * * *

  When he woke he sensed at once that something was different. The engines were still pounding but they were straining, and the ship was making odd corkscrew movements. There was a new noise too, which after a few moments he recognised as the wind, rising steadily in pitch. He could hear confused shouts and the pounding of feet in the corridor outside and suddenly a wave smashed against the porthole and the whole ship seemed to shudder. Forrester forced himself to get out of the bunk, clinging to the bunk-frame while he steadied himself. The ship was rolling violently now and suddenly he felt very vulnerable in his nakedness. Unsteadily, he made his way over to the steam pipe, found that his clothes were now dry, and slowly put them on. When he retrieved his shoes, he found that someone had stuffed them with newspapers to help soak up the water, and he found this housewifely gesture strangely reassuring.

  As he took the newspaper out of his shoes he realised it was written in Yiddish and dated only the day before. Eerily, as he smoothed it out, he saw the photograph of Narak in the middle of the page, and recognised the Hebrew characters spelling out his own name in the text. As another lurch almost threw him off his feet, he took a deep breath and tried the cabin door.

  To his surprise, it wasn’t locked – the shock came with what awaited him outside.

  A six-inch river of water was sluicing down the passageway and cabin doors were banging wildly as the ship twisted. Was the damn thing sinking? In an instant his weakness left him, and dodging the swinging doors, Forrester waded through the water until he emerged into a space that reminded him, bizarrely, of a ballroom. Wooden staircases with elaborate bannisters rose into the darkness and there was a little stage which looked as if it had been designed for a band. But this was no liner; more like a ferryboat, Forrester thought, a slightly grandiose ferryboat which had fallen on hard times. And the young men who appeared on the stairs, shouting at each other in panicked voices, did not look or sound like professional sailors at all.

  “The goddamn paint locker!” one of them yelled.

  “And the chain locker!” said another.

  And then there was a third voice: “There’s sixty-mile-an-hour winds out there now – this friggin’ tub’s going down.”

  And suddenly Forrester realised what was wrong. He grabbed the first man he saw, a twenty-something whose paper-white face contrasted vividly with the bright red of his wavy hair.

  “Did anybody seal up the hawsepipes?” he demanded.

  The young man looked at him, terrified.

  “What the hell’s a hawsepipe?” he asked.

  There were several frightened figures around them now and Forrester realised they were looking to him for answers.

  “They’re the holes where the anchor chains come into the ship, usually in the chain locker,” he said. “You’re supposed to seal them up when you leave port. Did anybody seal them up?”

  “Shoot!” said a broad-shouldered man with a broken nose. “That was what the cement was for, right?”

  “Come on,” said Forrester. “Let’s get to the chain lockers.”

  As they sloshed through the growing river of sea water Forrester wondered why the captain wasn’t taking charge of this, and then in his mind’s eye saw whoever it was up on the bridge trying to get this creaking, leaking old tub through an Atlantic storm, with no time to give a thought to what was going on below decks. And then they were passing through a wire-caged area and Forrester’s suspicion that the ferry must have been pressed into service during the war was confirmed. This had to have been the brig, where malefactors were locked up until the ship reached port. And now the brig was filled with water and sodden cartons of cigarettes were floating about, along with lifejackets, spare bedding and food.

  “Grab the blankets and the lifejackets,” said Forrester, “and bring them along.” Without demur, the young men did as they were told.

  “Should we put the lifejackets on?”

  “No,” said Forrester. “We’re going to use them to try and keep this damn thing afloat.”

  And then they were hauling open the door of the chain locker and standing back as a wall of water poured out down the passageway and Forrester knew his deduction had been correct: the sea was rushing in through the unstoppered holes for the anchor chains. The bags of cement which had been left there to stopper them lay unopened on the floor, soaked and useless.

  “Jam the lifejackets into the gaps around the anchor chains,” said Forrester, “and the blankets, and anything else you can find. Just stop that water coming in.” The young men threw themselves into the task with more energy than skill – it was now definite that none of them were seamen – but what they lacked in expertise they made up for in sheer determination, and before long the two hawsepipes were stuffed tight.

  “Okay,” said Forrester. “That’ll do for the time being. But the waves are going to keep smashing into all that stuff. Three of you stay here to keep it in place. Take turns – it’s going to be a long night.”

  “What about the rest of us?” said the red-haired man anxiously. Forrester had gathered by now that his name was Bernstein.

  “Three of you are going to do the same thing in the paint locker on the starboard side and the rest come with me to get a steam pump.”

  “What’s a steam pump?” asked a kid called Miller, who was much shorter than his big shoulders suggested he ought to be.

  “With any luck we should find it in the engine room,” said Forrester.

  So they sloshed their way down to the engine room, shutting the watertight doors behind them as they went, found the steam pump and manhandled it up to the chain locker. Here, with considerable difficulty because of the rolling of the ship, they got it connected to a steam pipe, and began pumping out the accumulated water. When the port locker had been pumped dry they turned their attentions to the starboard locker. Above them, the President Garfield’s wooden superstructure creaked ominously and below them Forrester could hear the screeching of loosened plates. That, he knew, had to be his next priority.

  * * *

  Now Forrester took the rest of his team on a methodical inspection of the ship to find the loose plates and jam them in place with timber baulks. As they worked Bernstein asked him if he was the guy they had fished out of the dock, and when Forrester said yes, the man with a broken nose, whose name was Cohn, asked who had been shooting at him out of the warehouse. Forrester answered, truthfully, that he did not know. Despite his English accent nobody asked him why he was there and he gradually began to realise this was a volunteer crew who had not sailed together before; they were strangers to each other, and none of them had any confidence either in the ship or its captain.

  “He�
��s drunk and we should never have left New York,” said Bernstein. “They weren’t halfway through the repairs.”

  “They had no option,” said Cohn. “The FBI was onto us, and they were going to impound the ship. That was probably who was after you.”

  “But why did they hire that drunk Schlegel as skipper?” persisted Bernstein. “He’s not even one of us.”

  “They had to take the captain who had been on the beach longest,” said Miller. “Union rules. And we needed a qualified man to get us out of port. As soon as we reach Marseille, we’ll drop him and Arontowitz will step up to take over.”

  “If we get across,” said Bernstein dolefully. “Look at this damn rust-bucket.”

  “There’s no point in worrying,” said Forrester decisively. “Our job is to keep the rust-bucket afloat. Come on, let’s get down and check the bilges.” But the truth was Forrester’s mind was elsewhere, because he had realised what this vessel was, who these volunteers were and where the ship was ultimately going.

  It was a blockade runner. And it was headed for Palestine.

  For two years now, the Jewish Agency had been pressing the British government to allow the hundred thousand Jews still in camps for displaced persons all across Europe to emigrate to Palestine. Fearful of Arab reaction, Britain had refused to let in more than a handful.

  In response to this, an organisation called Aliyah Bet, or second immigration, had created an underground network across Europe to move Holocaust survivors secretly out of the camps and down to southern ports in France and Italy. From here ships flying flags of convenience took them across the Mediterranean to try and make it past the British blockade to Palestine. Most were turned back by the British Navy and the would-be immigrants put in detention camps on Cyprus; just a few of the boats had successfully beached themselves on the shores of Palestine.

  The President Garfield, Forrester realised, must be intended to become one of these ships, now on the first leg of its journey to France, where it would secretly pick up the would-be immigrants. And if Arontowitz was in ultimate command, he was probably a member of the Jewish defence force, Haganah.

  This made Forrester’s own position on the ship a distinctly invidious one. If they discovered his links to the Foreign Office and concluded he was an agent of the British government, their best course of action, bearing in mind Britain’s antipathy to Jewish immigration, would be to throw him over the side. Even if they felt no malice towards him, it would be the expedient thing to do, and Forrester knew enough about Haganah to know it was nothing if not ruthless.

  He knew he was perfectly capable of dealing with these untrained, slightly naïve young men, but there would be other, tougher operators on board; and besides, he had no wish to hurt anybody. These people had just saved his life; they assumed he was on their side. He was reluctant to disillusion them by breaking their necks.

  While he was making up his mind what to do, he continued to keep his companions focused on stopping every leak they found, getting faulty pumps working, reinforcing every unstable plate and restoring as much order as possible to the chaos left by the ship’s initial encounter with the storm.

  Finally, when the pumps were operating effectively and Forrester had decided there was no more he could usefully do, he made his way to the bridge, where a fat red-faced man in a worn-shiny merchant navy uniform held himself upright by clinging to the binnacle, and issued orders in a slurred voice as the helmsman peered ahead through rain-lashed windows.

  This had to be the much-despised temporary captain, Schlegel. Beyond, in the night, all Forrester could see was an enormous wave up which the little ship was climbing like an ant on a mountainside. A wiry man who looked like a young Trotsky held onto one of the brass rails; Forrester guessed this must be Arontowitz and knew that, Haganah tough-guy or not, the man was struggling to master his fear.

  Forrester sympathised: they were only halfway up the face of the wave, and it looked as if they would topple back before they reached the top. Forrester positioned himself beside Arontowitz, and nodded briefly as if they had known each other all their lives. Arontowitz, unsurprisingly, was too preoccupied with the danger facing them to even acknowledge him, much less ask who he was. But Forrester knew he had established himself in the man’s consciousness as someone who had shared a moment of terror, and that was all he was aiming for right now: becoming a familiar face instead of a perceived enemy. And then, against all the odds, the President Garfield was over the top of the mountainous wave and sliding down the other side and Forrester knew that now, in this moment of maximum relief, was the time to speak.

  “Hawsepipes secure, Captain Schlegel,” he called out to the uniformed man. “Damaged plates baulked up, watertight doors shut, and we’ve got the steam pump working.”

  Schlegel turned to look at him with red-rimmed eyes, and Forrester knew the captain had given no thought to any of these issues; partly, of course, because he had been battling with the storm, and partly because he was clearly the drunk Bernstein had said he was. But Schlegel was not Forrester’s real audience. It was the man beside him he wanted to engage.

  Forrester turned cheerfully to Arontowitz. “You’ve got some good kids down there,” he said. “They just needed a bit of guidance.”

  Arontowitz looked at him properly now. “Who the hell are you?” he said.

  “Duncan Forrester.” He gestured at the bloody bandage still wrapped around his head. “The Englishman you fished out of the dock. For which, by the way, many thanks.”

  “What the hell were you doing there?”

  “Escaping from somebody who was trying to kill me,” said Forrester. “I thought you might be able to tell me who they were.”

  Arontowitz’s face hardened. “I don’t want any goddamn Englishman on this ship,” he said.

  “Maybe you don’t,” said Forrester. “But you’re damn lucky this one is here, because if it hadn’t been for me you’d have gone down half an hour ago. Captain Schlegel here didn’t order the hawsepipes stopped up before we left port, and the sea was pouring right in through the bows. Besides, I’ve helped you people before. In the Palmach training camp at Beer Sheva.”

  There was a subtle change in Arontowitz’s expression as he heard the name.

  “Beer Sheva,” he repeated.

  “Remember the SOE came to train Haganah fighters when it looked as if Rommel was going to overrun Palestine? I was one of the SOE people. Aubrey Eban knows me, he can vouch for me.” Again, Forrester could see the effect of the name in the man’s eyes. “We came across together on the Queen Mary on the way to New York.”

  “What for? Why were you going to New York?”

  “Attending the archaeology conference at Columbia. You may have read about it.” And he pulled the crumpled sheet of Yiddish newspaper from his pocket and pointed to his name below the picture of the Sumerian effigy. Arontowitz glanced at it, and looked again at Forrester.

  “You’re an archaeologist?” he said.

  “Ancient historian,” said Forrester. “But I dig things up when necessary.”

  “You know what this voyage is for?” said Arontowitz.

  “I’ve got a fair idea,” said Forrester, simply.

  Arontowitz considered. The ship rose up to the face of another wave, hesitated on the crest, and began to slide down the other side.

  “If I decide you’re working for British Intelligence, I will throw you over the side myself,” he said.

  “I’m not working for British Intelligence,” said Forrester, relieved to be able to speak the truth. “And I will do everything in my power to help you get safely across the Atlantic, because that suits me too. But as for running the blockade, count me out.”

  “Of course,” said Arontowitz with a touch of bitterness. “We won’t have room for you anyway. There’re a lot of people desperate to get on this ship, and we need all the space we have.”

  “All right,” said Forrester, “I’m going to go back down below and keep this thing afl
oat. I don’t know the number of my cabin, but if you need me Mr. Bernstein or Mr. Cohn will tell you where to find me.”

  “I’ll be asking you a lot more questions about what the hell you were doing on that dock as soon as this damn storm is over,” said Arontowitz.

  “I’ll be happy to tell you,” said Forrester, “because I’m very keen to find out who the hell was trying to kill me, and you might be able to help me figure it out.” And having subtly altered the direction of the coming interrogation, he left the bridge and went back down below.

  * * *

  Interrogation or no interrogation, a long night lay ahead of him, because the storm did not abate after he left the bridge; on the contrary, the waves and wind grew even higher. But now there was cohesion and backbone in the volunteer crew, and confidence that Forrester knew what to do and would get them through it. He kept to himself just how limited his knowledge was and how much of what he advised was based on a combination of childhood memories of time spent on Hull trawlers with his father and sheer common sense. Confidence was what these people needed now, and confidence was what he gave them, and somehow the President Garfield made it through the night.

  Afterwards Forrester learned that the storm had gripped the entire North Atlantic, that the crew of a fishing boat called the Catherine Brown had been rescued moments before it sank, that the freighter Georgia had lost her propeller in the mountainous seas, and that a coaster, the Santa Fe, had gone down off Cape Cod with all hands. It was not until six in the morning, as the winds finally died away and the sun rose, that he finally stripped off his sodden clothes, draped them once again over the steam pipe and fell back into the bunk.

  He also took care to straighten out the news clipping about Narak and spread that out to dry as well. It might well be the key to him surviving this voyage.

  * * *

  When he woke again and went on deck, the sky was blue, the sea was calm, and it was as if the storm had never been. The Atlantic stretched around him endlessly on every side, and somehow, perhaps because the President Garfield was so much lower than the Queen Mary had been, the ocean seemed much vaster. It was an amusing irony, he thought, that so soon after crossing the Atlantic in such luxury, he was going back in such straitened circumstances.