Midnight in Europe: A Novel

by Alan Furst

  Odessa, 3 July. It had been a hot day in the city but now, in the lingering summer dusk, warm air on the coast met the Black Sea’s cooling water, resulting in a mist that hung over the naval base, drifted through the glare of the port’s floodlights, and obscured the tops of the cranes. At ten in the evening, just as darkness gathered, the small trucks used by the Red Star Armoury began to carry wooden crates to a ship waiting at the dock. This was the Santa Cruz out of Tampico, Mexico, though the name of the vessel was hidden from view by a tarpaulin hung over the side of the freighter. An unusual visitor to the naval base; built long ago, hull streaked with rust, the paint on its smokestack blistered and crumbling.

  Leaning on the railing of the Santa Cruz, the freighter’s captain, Juan Machado, smoked cigarettes and watched the loading under way. A merchant mariner for thirty years, he was a compact man with gray hair and wore an old, blue suit jacket, had been in every port there was, had seen his share of storms at sea, had lost one ship but saved many others. Now he watched as the holds of his freighter were filled with pallets of crated ammunition. Did the owners of the Compañía Aguilar know what they were doing? He supposed they did, they usually did, it was a matter of money, though Machado could only imagine what the insurance for this voyage had cost.

  Some of the crew, many shirtless, a few wearing peaked caps, stood at the rail and watched the cargo handling. Normally they wouldn’t have bothered but their curiosity was provoked by certain unusual circumstances: the tarpaulin hiding the ship’s name and, down on the dock, guards in civilian clothing maintained a wide perimeter as the trucks were unloaded. Guards? Well, why not, nothing quite like Russia for unnamed threats and dangers. The crew had been looking forward to spending time ashore—good whoring to be had in Odessa, as well as good food and well-run gambling dens, where it took them a long time to steal your money so the excitement could last all night. But, Machado had told them, not this time.

  At the armoury, Lieutenant Commander Malkin had stationed himself by the open doors of the building and kept inventory by counting truckloads, while at his side an apparatchik from the inspection committee kept his own count. An hour into the cargo loading, a workman showed up at the doors and told Malkin there was an urgent telephone call for him at the armoury office. When he picked up the phone it was the port captain, calling from home, wanting to know what the hell was going on. Malkin said he wasn’t sure but he had filled out and signed an emergency authorization form.

  “At whose request?”

  “State security, this is their operation.”

  “Oh,” said the port captain. Then he hung up, swore a vile oath, and went to bed. This was the only challenge Malkin would ever hear. The best thing, in such situations, was to file a form and forget about it—nobody wanted to investigate what the secret police were up to and nobody did. As for the real NKVD, their officers were busy that night. Their officers were busy every night, treason was everywhere, and they cruised the streets of the city in their Emkas, going from apartment to prison, then starting out anew.

  At dawn, the rising sun struck the clouds a fiery orange and the Santa Cruz steamed slowly out of port in a heavy sea. On the dock, Vadik, hands in pockets, watched her go.

  In the Roumanian port of Constanta, Max de Lyon and Cristián Ferrar were having dinner on the terrace of the best restaurant in town. To de Lyon, the USSR was now forbidden territory, with such intense security he no longer dared to go there, so he waited with Ferrar in the Black Sea port and they would board the Santa Cruz when it docked, later in the evening. Which meant that for ten days they would be eating whatever was produced by the freighter’s galley. “We’ll manage,” de Lyon had said. “But we might as well have a good dinner tonight.” That it was, pork fillet stuffed with ham and mushrooms, and a bottle of dark, heavy Roumanian wine.

  “What did they say at the office?” de Lyon asked.

  “Not much. I told the managing partner I was taking two weeks of vacation and he didn’t seem to mind. ‘Be careful,’ he said, ‘if you’re doing work for the arms office.’ Nothing more. He has no idea what I’m actually doing—better that way.”

  The terrace looked out over the port, and they could hear music coming from the waterfront bars—an accordion, Gypsy violins. Out at sea, steamship lights twinkled in the foggy night air. De Lyon laid knife and fork on his plate and lit a brown cigarette. “When the Santa Cruz docks,” he said, “we’ll have a look at our cargo, just to make sure, and then I’ll signal Molina to wire payment to Vadik, using the SovExportBuro in Odessa.”

  “So, no Swiss bank account.”

  “Too complicated; Vadik has to share out the payment with his people, and he can’t sneak out of the country every time he needs money.” He paused, then said, “I hear it’s getting tighter every day in Russia, much tighter, and if Vadik shows up in Paris one of these days, I won’t be surprised.”

  They took a walk after dinner. On a summer night, the streets were crowded: people of the town, couples of all ages, sailors on their way to the next bar, prostitutes strolling arm in arm. Ferrar couldn’t stop looking at the beautiful Roumanian girls; small, dark, and lithe, they flirted with him, all shining eyes and pretty smiles.

  The Santa Cruz made port at eight-twenty. De Lyon had paid a clerk at the customs office to let them know when it docked and he came to their hotel, then walked them to the wharf. De Lyon and Ferrar climbed the gangway, found a sailor, and asked to see the captain. Machado was in his tiny office, perhaps a former closet, with just enough room for a desk. After they introduced themselves, he looked them over for a moment, then said, “You must be the passengers, the company wired your reservation.”

  “We are,” de Lyon said. “All the way to Valencia.”

  “Maybe you have something to do with the cargo,” Machado said.

  “It is ours,” de Lyon said. “We are serving the Spanish Republic.”

  “Well, that’s all right with me.” He stood and said, “Let me show you your cabin, it isn’t much to look at, but better than hammocks in the crew quarters.” At the end of a narrow passageway, a small room with a porthole and two cots.

  “Just right for us,” de Lyon said.

  “Good,” Machado said. “Passengers don’t work on freighters, but I wonder how you would feel about standing a watch? We’re two hands short, so it would help us out.”

  De Lyon and Ferrar glanced at each other, then Ferrar said, “We’ll be happy to help out.”

  “I had in mind the midnight-to-eight, split in half, four hours each and you can trade off if you like.”

  “Anything special we have to do?” Ferrar said.

  “Stay awake. I expect it will be a quiet voyage.” Machado looked at his watch. “We’ll be sailing in a few hours, we only came here to pick you up.”

  Machado returned to his office. Ferrar put his small valise at the foot of the cot next to the wall. He’d gone shopping in Paris for clothes to wear at sea—a long-sleeved cotton undershirt with three buttons at the neck, canvas trousers, and canvas shoes with rubber soles. When he started to change clothes, he saw that de Lyon was doing the same thing. “I’ll take the midnight-to-four,” Ferrar said.

  The Santa Cruz carried a crew of seventeen; mostly ordinary seamen and stokers—the ship was coal fired—a bosun who served as second officer to the captain, a radio operator, and a cook. Like many merchant marine crews, they came from everywhere: a few born in Mexico, others were Portuguese, Algerians with French passports, two Germans, three from Venezuela. They had signed on at various times, from seamen’s hiring halls in various ports, and spoke, like almost all merchant seamen, a kind of pidgin English that allowed them simple communication, especially in areas of work at sea.

  One of the Germans was called Horst. He’d had a number of last names over time, a conspirative necessity, because he’d been a member of the communist seafarers’ union in Hamburg, which had fought it out with the Nazis in the early thirties. That war they lost, and the survivors
had fled the Reich. Horst had managed to ship out on a Turkish freighter and then, two years later, had found a berth on the Santa Cruz. He was in his thirties, a thickly built stoker, his face scarred from fighting on the Hamburg docks.

  In Constanta, where the ship often called on its Black Sea voyages, he favored a bar in the port where you heard German spoken and the beer wasn’t bad—it wasn’t German beer but it wasn’t bad, and you could fall into conversation with other German sailors, many of whom had the same history as Horst. When Machado gave his crew a few hours’ liberty after they returned from Odessa, Horst made for his favorite bar. Soon enough, a fellow seaman, speaking German, settled down beside him at the bar and bought him a beer. “Just come into port?” he said.

  “Yes, about an hour ago.”

  “From …?”

  “Odessa.”

  “I’ve been there, not a bad place for sailors. But you have to watch out for the Russians; they drink and they look for a fight. And, if they hear you speaking German … well, you might have trouble.”

  “We didn’t have liberty in Odessa, not this time.”

  “Really? Why not?”

  Horst shrugged. “I don’t know, we weren’t there long, maybe twenty-four hours.”

  “Delivering goods?”

  “No, loading cargo.”

  “Really? Want another one of those?”

  “I wouldn’t say no.”

  “I’m called Emil.”

  “And I’m Horst. From Hamburg.”

  They turned on their barstools and shook hands. Horst had a hand that for years had held a shovel and his skin was like sandpaper. Emil, however, had a soft hand.

  “Not much gets loaded in Odessa,” Emil said. “Sometimes grain. Was that your cargo?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  Horst knew perfectly well what the Santa Cruz had in its holds but he wasn’t going to discuss that with a stranger. “I don’t know, some kind of machinery, in crates.”

  “Not the usual.”

  “Oh, we carry every damn thing there is. Not cattle. I did that once and I’ll never do it again, I’d rather get a job in a factory. Ever work on a cattle boat?”

  “No, so far I’ve been lucky.”

  “What ship are you on now?”

  “I’m waiting for a berth—that’s hard in Constanta.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Anything on your ship, the …?”

  “Santa Cruz, out of Tampico. We’re short crew but we aren’t hiring on, as far as I know. It’s the owners, saving a little money.”

  “That’s how they are, the bastards.”

  “You’re a socialist? You sound like one.”

  “I gave up on politics when I left Germany. But, before that, I was in the union in Rostock.”

  “So you had to leave, like me.”

  “That’s what happened, but maybe I did the wrong thing.”

  “Thinking of going back?” Horst said. Then he said, “My turn” and waved to the bartender.

  “Thanks. Pretty good beer they have in this place, right?”

  “I like it. Are you thinking about going home?”

  “Sometimes. I hear it’s not so bad, the wages are good, and all you have to do is say you’re sorry for your sins and that’s that. They need seamen, no doubt about it, so if you mind your manners it’s like you never left.”

  “Sounds like you’ve decided.”

  “Maybe I have. What about you?”

  “No, I’ll stay with my ship.”

  “Someone told me they even pay a bonus.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes. You ought to think about it.”

  “I’ll have this beer, then it’s time to be off. Nice meeting you, Emil.” You’re a spy, Emil, a Nazi spy. Now Horst was glad he hadn’t said anything about the cargo. Then he worried—maybe “machinery in crates” was too much, but he hadn’t wanted to lie, and he wasn’t good at it.

  The knock on Ferrar’s door came at ten minutes to four. From the passageway, “It’s Silva, I’m the bosun, watch in ten minutes, you awake?”

  “Be right there,” Ferrar answered, wrestling his way into the pullover shirt.

  Silva was waiting in the passageway, holding a hooded, rubber rain jacket, a pair of binoculars, and a flashlight. “Here’s what you’ll need,” he said, then led Ferrar up to the deck where an iron stairway climbed past the wheelhouse to a small platform with a railing. “You won’t see much at night,” he said. “Best to watch a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree arc. Also, once an hour, open the hatch above the holds and make sure of the cargo. We worry about fires in the holds, especially this trip, and that’s about it. There’s a helmsman and a radio operator in the wheelhouse, if you have any questions you can ask them.”

  Ferrar needed the rain jacket, even in July it was cold at night on the open sea, and the steady wind made it worse. Just below his feet, above the window of the wheelhouse, a searchlight cast a white beam on the black swells ahead of the ship. Now and then, when a rain squall blurred his vision, he wiped the droplets from the binocular lenses with his shirt—he would have to find a rag somewhere before his next watch. He swung the heavy binoculars left and right, then turned around and did it again, but the sky was overcast, there was no moonlight, and all he could see was darkness.

  •

  Istanbul had forever been a magnet for clandestine operations. Here, east met west and they spied on each other. A year earlier, the Abwehr—German military intelligence—had purchased a hotel with a view of the Bosphorus Straits and now used the top floor as a lookout point, watching traffic in the sea lanes that led to the Sea of Marmara and then to the Aegean. There were two observers that night, a lieutenant and a sergeant, who sat side by side in front of the window and tracked the busy strait with their binoculars. Some time after five o’clock in the morning, the sergeant said, “There’s an old tub for you.”

  “Where?”

  “Twenty degrees north, single stack.”

  “I see her, she’s the”—he worked to bring the name on the hull into focus—“Santa Cruz.”

  The sergeant thumbed through the shipping register by his side. “Out of Tampico,” he said. “Wonder where she’s been.”

  “Could be anywhere; Bulgaria, Roumania, Russia.”

  “The way she rides in the water she’s hauling cargo,” the sergeant said.

  “So she is.”

  “Is she worth an inquiry?”

  “Why bother? She’s just a freighter, headed for Greece probably.”

  “Look at her stack.” Gray smoke boiled from the mouth of the stack then blew away in the wind. “She’s doing the best she can.”

  “In a hurry,” the lieutenant said. “So what?”

  “I don’t know, I guess we’ll let her go.”

  “Hmm.” The lieutenant squinted through his binoculars. “Oh, what the hell, we might as well inquire.” He laid the binoculars on the ledge beneath the window and filled out a form for the wireless operator: date, time, name of ship. “I’ll take this down later,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind knowing the cargo and where she picked it up. Probably nothing we should worry about, but still …”

  •

  On the Santa Cruz, there were two seamen in the wheelhouse, a wireless operator and a helmsman. The radio operator wore headphones, a wireless key close at hand. When the Morse code started up, he wrote the message down in the radio logbook. “What is it?” the helmsman said.

  “An operator in Greece, naval base at the port of Salonika. Wants to know what we’re carrying and where we’re going.”

  The helmsman moved the wheel a few inches until the compass showed the correction. “Sounds official,” he said. “What do we say?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Better go ask Machado.”

  The radioman, moving quickly, descended to the captain’s cabin on the deck below the wheelhouse. When he knocked at the door, the captain called out, “Come
in.” He was on his cot, propped up on a pillow, reading a book.

  “A message from the naval base at Salonika. They want to know cargo and destination.”

  Machado thought it over.

  “What do I tell them?”

  “Acknowledge reception, nothing else. If they try again, do the same thing. We’re in international waters, we don’t have to tell them anything.”

  Piraeus Coaling Station, 1:30 A.M. In a light drizzle, a tugboat maneuvered the Santa Cruz to the dock where she would be resupplied with coal and fresh water. Silva came up to the watchman’s bridge above the wheelhouse and found Ferrar, who was standing the twelve-to-four. “Your job in port is to guard the head of the gangway,” the bosun said. “So you carry a sidearm.” He handed Ferrar a leather belt bearing a holstered revolver. Ferrar buckled it on, then went down to the lower deck and stood by the gangway, where Machado was talking to a stoker called Hector.

  The port of Piraeus was adjacent to Athens, but the coaling station was a long way from the commercial edge of the city. Thus an enterprising merchant had opened a small store, about a quarter of a mile down the road, that served the steamship crews as they docked for resupply. Machado was in the process of going over a shopping list. “Twenty cannisters of loose tobacco, rolling papers, and get us a few tins of aspirins.”

  “What kind?” Hector said.

  “It doesn’t matter. Maybe fifteen tins ought to hold us. Buy a few bottles of ouzo, every man will get a drink once a day while it lasts.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No. I don’t have Greek drachma, so here’s some Turkish lira, I’m sure they’ll take that. You have plenty of money, pay what they ask and bring the rest back to me.”

  “Aye, sir,” Hector said.

  “Off you go.”

  Hector descended to the dock, then, flashlight in hand, walked away down the dirt road that served the coaling station.