Dark Voyage

PORTS OF CALL

The secret life of the Spanish freighter Santa Rosa had been betrayed on the twenty-eighth of May, in a brief conversation a thousand miles from Tangier.

It happened at the Baltic Exchange, on a street called St. Mary Axe, amid ancient merchant banks and assurance companies, in the commercial heart of London known as the City. There, beneath marble pillars and glass domes, the shipping and cargo brokers of London met every working day, from noon until two, to have a drink, to trade intelligence about the maritime world, and to fix dry-charter contracts. It needed only a handshake, and a cargo of coal or grain or timber was on its way.

Born as a coffeehouse in 1744, the Baltic had seen great and tumultuous times-the Napoleonic Wars, the Danish trade war, the frantic speculation in tallow of 1873, when cow fat lit the streetlamps of London and half the Continent. But no more. The grandeur remained-a liveried servant still stood at a pulpit and called out the names of brokers, but, these days, some did not answer. With so many ships under national supervision, with the oil people keeping to their offices and teleprinters, with American brokerage now done in New York, at the bar of the Downtown Athletic Club, it was lately a sparse crowd that gathered for the noon fixing.

Still, it continued; for Asian ports, for South America, for the European neutrals, cargos had to be transported, “lifted” in the local slang, and the brokers, men like Barnes and Burton, were grateful for whatever came their way. After all, this was what they did, had done, every day of their working lives, though Barnes and Burton, cargo broker and shipping broker, would have been horrified had they ever discovered what they did on the afternoon of the twenty-eighth. Because they were the staunchest of patriots, Barnes and Burton, maybe too old for military service, but they served as best they could-Barnes a London air-raid warden by night, Burton drilling every weekend with his Home Guard unit down in Sussex, where the Burtons had always had a house.

It was almost two when they met at the Baltic. Burton represented several of the smaller Spanish shipping lines, Barnes was that day brokering a cargo of Turkish salt, but finding an available tramp was proving difficult. “What about the Santa Rosa, ” Barnes said. “I’ve heard she’s in the Mediterranean.”

“Wish she were,” Burton said.

“Where is she?”

“Done for, I’m afraid.”

“Really.”

“Yes, burned to the waterline, in Campeche.”

“You’re sure?”

“’Fraid so.”

“You don’t say.”

“Mm. A few days ago. And just about to sail, after repair.”

“Campeche?”

“That’s right. If you can hold on for two weeks, I might have the Almera.”

“It will have to do, I suppose.”

This was very odd indeed, Barnes thought. He paid great attention to shipping intelligence, and he’d heard, on the exchange floor, that the Santa Rosa had called at Alexandria. And that word had come from on high, from one of the magnificent old lions of the Baltic, a grizzled, fully bearded Scot, decorated twice in the last war, a man whose sources were everywhere, east and west, a man who had never been wrong. But he said nothing of this to Burton, the floor was not the place to contradict one’s colleagues.

Still, he fretted about it on his way back to the office. Walking along St. Mary Axe, where the Widows and Orphans Assurance Society was now a bombed-out shell, he was sharply reminded that it was 1941, and the days of the ghost ship were long gone. Only in boys’ books now, Strange Tales of the Sea, the old clipper ship seen entering a fog bank and never coming out-until ten years later. No, someone was simply mistaken, badly mistaken. Who?

Back at the office, he told the story to his secretary. “Doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Burton certainly seemed to know what he was talking about.”

“Maybe there are two of them,” she said. “Anyhow, why don’t you ask somebody else?”

By God he would! And, that very afternoon, sent a wireless message to an old friend, who ran a trading company in Alexandria.

He had an answer the next day. His friend had asked around, in the port, and the Spanish freighter Santa Rosa had, in fact, called there, one week earlier. His man at the ship chandler’s recalled the colors, and they’d had a look at Brown’s Flags and Funnels so, no doubt, Santa Rosa.

Just about there, Barnes began to suspect what was going on. Monkey business. Something to do with insurance, maybe-the shipping world had more than its share of rogues-or, even, government monkey business. Really, why not? Damned ingenious, he thought, and let the matter drop. As to which government, friend or foe or in between, he couldn’t say, but, at the end of the day, he was a cargo man, not a shipping man, and best not to pursue these sorts of things.

And nothing would have come of it, even though the listeners at the German B-Dienst transcribed the cable, which was in clear, and filed a report. A report of little interest-who cared that the British had chartered a Spanish tramp? No one would have bothered with it, but for the fact that the German NID man in Alexandria reported that the Santa Rosa had come into port. And hadn’t come out. Now that was interesting. So then, where was she? Or, better, who was she?

DeHaan woke at dawn on the morning of the sixth. The sparrows were back, down in the courtyard, otherwise the hotel was pleasantly silent. By then, he’d virtually memorized the NID order, had taken it apart-the dates, the locations, the nautical miles from one port to the next, and found it tight, but possible. Everything would work as they’d directed-as long as everything worked. True, they’d left him a little time for breakdown or weather, but very damn little-it was Royal Navy time, not merchant marine time. Still, Kovacz and the sea gods willing, they could do it.

Would have to.

Because they did not have the traditional three-day opportunity for contact-that was timed to the hour. Which it had to be, because this was a bold, a brazen, operation. The southern coast of Sweden, particularly the barren beaches of the Smygehuk, were a hundred miles from the German naval bases at Kiel and Rostock, and he could expect patrols, by air and sea, so it was no place for Noordendam — as Santa Rosa or what-you-like-to be steaming back and forth. Dear God, he thought, let there be fog.

He looked at his watch on the night table, 5:10. So he’d be sailing in less than twenty-four hours. Better that way, less time to tie himself in knots. As for Noordendam, she was ready as she’d ever be-well bunkered and victualed, freshwater tanks topped up, new medical officer, and, now that they’d been shot at and survived, a veteran crew aboard.

So, down to the port, take the launch out to the ship, and farewell Tangier, native maidens waving from the shore. One maiden who would not be waving was the Russian journalist, and for that he was thankful. Because he had been wondering about her. Something wrong with that letter, he thought. What’s she doing here, really? Of course he did have some time, maybe the morning, to do whatever he wanted-rare pleasure, for him. But no time for that, surely. That meaning the typical Soviet nonsense. What do you think about the world situation? Would you work for peace and justice? Maybe you’ll talk to us now and again. Need money? No, with all the details he had to think about, he didn’t need to subject himself to that. Though if he were honest with himself he would have to admit she’d been perfectly correct the last time they’d met. Straight as a stick, she was. Slavic and serious. What else?

6 June, 0820 hours. Hotel Alhadar.

Hard to find, in an alley off an alley, grim and dirty and cheap. The desk clerk sat behind a wire cage, worry beads in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and, beneath his tasseled fez, a mean eye- who the hell are you? “She is not here,” he said.

DeHaan retreated, feeling foolish and betrayed and annoyed with himself. Then she appeared, as if by magic, catching up to him as he hurried down the alley. “Captain DeHaan,” she said, out of breath. “I saw you go into hotel.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, good morning.”

“We go in here,” she said. A few steps led down to a tiny coffee shop, dark and deserted. DeHaan hesitated, he didn’t like it.

“Please,” she said. “I must get off street.”

What? He followed her in, they sat down, a young boy came to the table, and DeHaan ordered two coffees. “I hoped you would come,” she said. It wasn’t courtesy, she meant it.

Across the little table, she was much as he remembered her, though now he realized she was older than she was in his memory. No one would ever call her pretty, he thought. But you would look at her. A broad, determined forehead, high cheekbones, eyes a severe shade of green, almost harsh, a small mouth, down-curved, ready for anger or disappointment, thick hair, a dulled shade of brown, like brown smoke, swept across her forehead and pinned up in back. She wore a pale gray suit and a dark gray shirt with a wide collar-shapeless and lax, as though worn for a long time-and carried a heavy leather purse on a shoulder strap. But the detail that stood out, above everything else, was the presence of some inexpensive and very powerful scent, the sort of thing to use if you were unable to bathe.

He took out his packet of North States and offered her one. “Yes, thank you,” she said. Even in the cellar gloom of the coffee shop he could see shadows beneath her eyes, and, when she held the small cigar to his match, her hand trembled.

“Is there to be an interview?” he said.

“If you like.” For a moment she pressed her lips together, then turned her face away.

“Miss Bromen,” he said.

“A moment, please.”

She concentrated for a few seconds, then pushed the hair back off her forehead. “I read your ship was in Tangier, and I remembered it. I remembered you.”

“Yes? From Rotterdam.”

“Yes, Rotterdam.”

He waited for more, but she inhaled her North State and said, “It’s hard, not to have cigarettes.”

Silence. Finally, DeHaan said, “You’re writing stories, in Tangier?”

Slowly, she shook her head.

“Then…”

The coffee arrived, thick and black, in tiny cups, with a bowl of brown, crystalline sugar in broken lumps. She put one in her cup and stirred it as it fell apart, started to take a second, then didn’t. “I am running away,” she said, her voice casual, without melodrama. “It is not easy. Have you ever done it?”

“No,” he said. Then, with a smile, “Not yet.”

“Better you don’t.”

“I’m sure of that.”

“You must take me away from here, Captain, on your ship.”

“Yes,” he said. When her face changed, he hurried to add, “I mean, I understand. Of course there’s no possibility of my doing that.”

She nodded-she knew that perfectly well.

“You do understand,” he said.

“Yes, I know.” She paused, then lowered her voice and said, “Is there some thing, some thing I could do? I don’t care what.”

“Well…”

“I will work. They have women, who work, on Russian ships.”

“And sometimes in Holland as well, on the tugboats and barges. But Noordendam is a freighter, Miss Bromen.”

She began to answer him, to argue, then gave up, he saw it happen. After a moment she said, “Is there food here, maybe?”

That he could do. He signaled to the boy and asked him for something to eat.

“Beignets?” the boy said. “There is a bakery nearby.”

As DeHaan reached into his pocket for money, he wondered how much he had. Quite a lot, actually, and of course he would give it to her. When the boy left, he said, “Miss Bromen, what happened to you? Can you tell me?”

“I am running from Organyi, ” she said, with a sour smile- what else? The Russian word meant the organs of state security, secret police. “It’s a game you must play, in my work. They want to use you because you are a journalist, and journalists talk to foreigners.”

“You worked for them?”

“No, not completely. They asked me to do things, I said I would, but I did not do well, was not-clever. I did not defy them, you cannot, but I was stupid, clumsy-any Russian will understand this. And I never became important, never spoke to important people, because, then… And was better to be a woman, weak, though they wanted me to go with men. Then I would say I was virgin, would almost cry. But they never went away, until purge of 1938, then one was gone, another came, then he was gone.

“But, it did not last and, one day, in Barcelona, here comes the wrong one, for me. He did not believe I was stupid, did not believe tears, or anything. He said, ‘You will do this,’ and he said what would happen if I did not do it. With him, one and one made two. So then I ran. Left everything I had, got on train to Madrid. Maybe France was better idea, but I was not thinking. I was frightened-you know how that is? I had come to the end of my courage.”

She paused, remembering it, and drank the last of her coffee. “But they did not chase me, not right away. I think maybe the bad one in Barcelona did not want to say, to report, what happened, but later he had to, probably because there was someone above him who also knew how one and one makes two. Then, one day in Madrid, I saw them, and the one friend I had did not want to talk to me anymore. It was then second week in May, and again I ran. To Albacete. By then, I had very little money. I had sold watch, pen, Cyrillic typewriter. I learned from refugees, from Jews, how to do it. It was strange, how I found them. When you are running away you go to the city, and then to a district where you feel safe, and there they are, they have done the same thing, found the same place. Not with rich, with poor, but not too poor so that you don’t belong. Then, in the markets, in the cafs, you see them. Ghosts. And you, also, are a ghost, because the self you had is gone. So it is recognition, and you approach them, and they will help you, if they can. But I think you know all this, Captain, no?”

“It is on my ship,” DeHaan said. “Any ship-we are part of the world, after all. So most of my crewmen can’t go home. Maybe never again in their lives.”

“Can you?”

“No. Not while the war goes on.”

The boy returned from the bakery with a plate of fried twists of dough sprinkled with powdered sugar. He placed it on the table and DeHaan gave him a few more dirhams-too many, evidently, the boy’s eyes widened, and he said thank you in the most elaborate way he knew.

The beignets were freshly made, still warm, and smelled very good. Bromen said, “I see these every morning-they carry them through the streets on a palm leaf.” She ate carefully, leaning over the table.

“They’re good?”

She nodded with enthusiasm. He tried one, she was right. “Excuse me,” she said, licking the sugar off her fingers.

“So,” DeHaan said, “you came to Tangier.”

“A dream to the refugees, North Africa. You can go anywhere, from here, if you have a lot of money. You can even work. It’s hard in Spain, after the war they had, people are poor, very poor, and police are terrible. So I came here, my last hope, one week ago. No money, nothing left to sell, only passport. I stole, sometimes, little things-some of the refugees have the gift, but I don’t.”

“I will help you, Miss Bromen. Let me do that, at least.”

“You are kind,” she said. “This I knew in Rotterdam, but I fear it is too late now, for that.”

“Why too late?”

“I have been seen, found. Not conveniently, for them. On the avenue that comes out of Grand Socco, they were in car going the other way, and by the time they stopped, I had run away down a little street and I hid in a building.”

“How could you be sure it was them?”

“It was them. Once you know them, you can recognize.”

DeHaan found himself thinking about the Germans at the Reina Cristina.

“They saw me, Captain DeHaan, they stopped their car. Right where it was, they stopped. That was all I saw, I didn’t wait, so maybe I was wrong. But next time may be when I don’t see them. And then, well, you know. What will happen to people like me.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Do you? They will not kill me, not that minute,” she said. There was more, but she hesitated, perhaps unwilling to use the words she used with herself, then did it anyhow, her voice barely above a whisper. “They will degrade me,” she said.

They will not. DeHaan leaned forward and said, “Let me tell you about money, Miss Bromen, sea captains and money. They have it, but, other than giving it to their families, they have no way to spend it. Only in port. Where you can spend like a drunken sailor-certainly I have spent like a drunken sailor-but those pleasures just aren’t that expensive. All this to tell you that I will buy your freedom, you can tell me what it costs, and it will be my pleasure to buy it for you. A new passport, ship passage, we’ll take a piece of paper and add it up.”

“Will cost time, ” she said. “I know, I have seen them, the richest ones, waiting, and waiting. For months. All the money in the world, can bribe, can buy gifts, but still they wait. If you don’t believe, ask the refugees, I will introduce you.”

“And so?”

“So must be a ship at night. To a neutral port. No passport control going out, no passport control getting off. Disappearance. With no tracks to sniff.”

From DeHaan, a sour smile. “Is that all.”

“I know ports, Captain. I know how they work.”

She was right, and DeHaan knew it.

“No other way can work,” she said. “I am sorry, but is true.”

Then they were silent for a long time, because there was nothing more to be said, and all that remained for him was to stand up and walk away. And he told himself to do precisely that, but it didn’t take. Instead, he made a wry face and muttered angrily to himself. What he said was in Dutch, and not at all nice, but she knew what it meant, and rubbed her eyes with her fingers. Keeping a promise to herself, he suspected.

6 June, 2105 hours. Bay of Tangier.

He’d enlisted, for this brief mission, his best, the bosun Van Dyck, who sat in the stern and steered the ship’s cutter. It was choppy on the bay that evening and DeHaan braced himself against the gunwale as they neared the lights of the city. In his pocket, a rough map, penciled on a scrap of paper. Simple enough, she’d said, there was a small, unused pier at the foot of the rue el Khatib, and a street that led to an old section of the port, where, in time, he would find a row of large sheds that faced an abandoned canal, the fourth one down occupied by a Jewish refugee who managed to exist by adjusting compasses aboard merchant vessels. DeHaan had only to knock on the wooden shutter and someone would open it.

He’d asked her, more told her, to leave with him then and there, for safety’s sake, and go immediately to the ship, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Almost pleading, she said there were a few small things to be retrieved from the hotel but, most of all, she had to tell people, people who had cared for her, that she was leaving. When he tried once more, she offered to take the port launch, but he couldn’t let her do that-the Spanish police had a passport control at the dock. No, he would pick her up in the ship’s cutter. Back on board at noon, he’d looked up the rue el Khatib in Brown’s Ports and Harbors, where, on the map of Tangier, it lay at the very edge of the page, on the ragged eastern border of the port-no longer a port at all, really, long ago deserted by commerce and left to crumble away. The map had a small street coming in from the west, while the street leading away from the port, on her map, was not shown.

Van Dyck slowed the engine as the pier came into view. By now, the lights of the main port were well west of them, but, by dead reckoning based on the flashing Le Charf beacon, they’d found the foot of the rue el Khatib. He hoped. This was not the most sensible thing he’d ever done, and Van Dyck didn’t like it, had been particularly uncommunicative since they’d left the ship. Ratter didn’t like the idea either-a woman passenger on board-but it was only for two days, DeHaan explained, until they reached Lisbon. From Ratter, at that point, a quizzical, one-eyed glare- why are you doing this?

No choice, he thought, as they neared the shore. And, really, what did it matter, one more lost soul? Kovacz, Amado and his mates, Shtern, Xanos the Greek soldier, his German communists, all of them really, fugitives in one way or another, set to wandering the world. Always room for one more on the good ship Noordendam.

Van Dyck cut the engine and used the boat’s momentum to glide alongside the dock. DeHaan stood, ran a rope around a cleat, and tied them off. It wasn’t long for the world, this pier-the boards rotten and sprung, one side sagging toward the water, the corner post nowhere to be seen.

“Is this it?” Van Dyck said.

“Yes, it should be.”

“Will you want me to come along?”

“No, you stay with the boat.”

“Safe enough to leave it, Cap’n.”

“I know, but no point in both of us going.”

Van Dyck held the cutter against the pier as DeHaan stepped off. “Want me to hold on to that?” he said, pointing to DeHaan’s head.

DeHaan took off his captain’s hat and tossed it to the bosun. Who was right, he thought-alone at night on the docks, it was better to be just a common sailor.

At the end of the pier, a lone streetlamp cast a circle of yellow light. DeHaan paused beneath it, a swarm of night moths attacking the bare bulb above him, squinted at the map, put it in his pocket, and set off down a silent street of closed shops. No lights here, no radios, only a few stray cats. The street stopped dead at a high wall, but the map told him to turn left, and he found an alleyway, just wide enough to walk through, between the wall and the last building. The end of the alleyway disappeared into shadow, and he hesitated briefly, then went ahead, running his hand along the wall as he walked. At the far end, a dirt path bordered by underbrush led to a sandy field, then passed beneath an immense tank that had once been used for oil storage. Here the path widened to a dirt road, then turned sharply and ran beside an ancient brick warehouse with black broken windows.

Which went on forever, it seemed. He kept walking, past boarded-up entries and loading platforms, another wall now on his right. Penned in, he thought. Likely there was a road on the opposite side of the building that went down to the bay, but there was no sense of water here, only night, and deep silence, but for a few cicadas beating away in the darkness. At last, he reached the end of the warehouse and found a railroad track, weeds grown up between the ties, a faint odor of creosote still lingering in the air. As it used to. When he was twelve, in the port of Rotterdam, brave with his friends, amid rusting machinery and alleys that led nowhere. He stopped for a moment, took the map from his pocket, and lit a match. Yes, that carefully drawn ladder meant a railroad track, with crosshatched lines showing three canals beyond it. Where were they?

He reached the first one a few minutes later. Dead fish, dead water, an Arab dhow half sunk at the far end. Again he lit a match to look at the map, then, just as he shook it out he heard, thought he heard, a voice. Just for an instant, a high voice, one or two notes, like singing. But, as he tried to figure out where it was coming from, it stopped, and the silence returned-a complete hush now, the cicadas gone.

At the end of the canal, he found a tributary, a second canal, with a cinder path beside it and a long row of sheds that disappeared into the darkness. It was the fourth in line that he wanted-she’d put an X in a box on the map. He counted four, and stood before a heavy wooden shutter. Could there be people inside? He heard nothing. He put a tentative hand on the shutter, then knocked. The shutter moved. He stepped back and stared at it. On one side of the shutter, an iron ring that took a padlock had been pried free, leaving three screwholes in a patch of yellow, splintered wood, freshly gouged, while the metal hasp, with closed lock still on the ring, had been bent back on itself. He knocked again, waited, then took the bottom of the shutter in both hands and rolled it up, to reveal a doorway.

“Hello?” He said it in a whisper, then again, louder.

Nothing, and the door stood ajar.

He pushed it open, and counted to ten. Go back to the pier. You do not want to see what is inside this shed. But he had to, and stepped through the door to find a square room with plaster walls, the air heavy with mildew. There was a straw mattress with a blanket on it, and a row of books at the foot of the wall, held up by rocks used as bookends. On the opposite wall, on a rough pine table, a lantern lay on its side in a puddle of kerosene, which had wicked up into a sheaf of papers and half a bread. On the floor, a few more papers.

“Is anyone here?”

He said it just to say it, first in German, then again in French, knowing there was no point, knowing there would be no answer. And knowing, also, that whoever had been here was not coming back.

Sick at heart, shaken, and very angry, he left the shed and walked away. Maybe someone was watching him, maybe not, he almost didn’t care. And he was a fool, he knew, for being without the Browning pistol, lying peacefully beneath his sweater, but he’d never thought to bring it. Well, he would fix that-if he lived through the night, if he ever saw his ship again, and if he were, ever again, tempted to leave it. He walked at full speed, almost a trot, but it was after ten by the time he reached the alleyway, the street of closed shops, and, at last, the pier. As he approached the cutter, Van Dyck said, “What happened?”

“Not there,” DeHaan said. He stepped heavily into the boat, whipped the rope free of its cleat, and sat in the bow.

Silently, Van Dyck handed him his hat, then went to start the engine, which chose that moment to balk. Both of them swore as Van Dyck fiddled with the choke, then tried again. “We’ll row the goddamn thing if we have to,” DeHaan said.

“Take it easy, Cap’n. It’s just flooded.”

DeHaan could smell that perfectly well, and settled in to wait. “Where’d she go?” Van Dyck said.

“I don’t know. Maybe somebody took her.”

Van Dyck was silent, but his face closed in a certain way-the world had grown more evil than he ever thought it would. Again he tried the engine, which coughed a few times, then started with a belch of black smoke. “That’s better,” Van Dyck told it, opening the throttle. He put the engine in gear, and, with a wide, sweeping turn, headed the cutter back toward the bay.

They were a minute or two out when a car came roaring down the road from the port and, tires screeching, skidded to a stop at the edge of the pier. “Oh Christ,” DeHaan said. “Now we’re going to be shot.”

“What?” Van Dyck said.

DeHaan knelt on the floorboards and gestured for Van Dyck to do the same. But the shots never came. Instead, a man and a woman leapt from the car and ran to the end of the pier. He was an old man, and he could barely run, but he did his best, waving his arms, yelling words they couldn’t hear.

“Cap’n?” Van Dyck said.

“Better turn around.”

0800 Hrs. 7 June, 1941. 3550? N/620? W, course NW 275. Fog and heavy SE following sea. Departed port of Tangier at 0340 hrs., w/41 crew aboard. Two eastbound vessels sighted. All well on board. E. M. DeHaan, Master.

With his log entry completed, and Ratter taking the forenoon watch, DeHaan stood on the bridge wing with the AB lookout, who peered dutifully out into the gray mist through his binoculars, though he couldn’t see much of anything. DeHaan found his heart much eased, that morning-back at sea, back where he belonged, swaying with the roll of the ship, staring down at the foamy bow wave in gray Atlantic water. He didn’t mind the fog, which had its own smell, salty and damp-God’s own perfect air out here in the breeze. On the ocean liners, a few hours from landfall at the end of a voyage, passengers could always be counted on to ask the nearest steward about a certain unpleasant scent, decay perhaps, as the temperature climbed. “That’s land, sir,” the steward would say. “You can smell it long before you see it.”

From somewhere north of them, the low moan of a foghorn. On the other side of the bridge door, Ratter reached up and pulled the cord above his head and their own foghorn, just aft of the bridgehouse, gurgled for a moment, sent a steaming spurt of water onto the roof, then produced a great shuddering bellow that rattled the glass in the windows. DeHaan looked at his watch-a wardroom meeting, at nine, so he could stay on his bridge. The morning log entry was true enough, all was well on board as Noordendam, steady and determined, steamed west through the fog, easily making her knots with a following sea.

Maria Bromen was settled in Ratter’s cabin, next to his own, while his first officer had moved in with Kees. She’d taken a long shower the night before, DeHaan had listened to it through the bulkhead as he lay on his bunk and tried to read. A complicated story from Bromen, once she’d been seated in the cutter. She said that she and her refugee friend had returned to the shed just before eight o’clock, saw that someone had pried up the lock, and, without going inside, left in a hurry, going to the room of another refugee. There followed a nightmare-someone who had the use of a car would take her to the pier, but that someone, always at a certain caf, was not there, couldn’t be found, until it got so late he had to be found, and, finally, was, at last, though almost not in time.

But all’s well that ends well. In a few hours they would anchor for repainting, then, as Santa Rosa, dock at Lisbon on the evening of the ninth. For Bromen, a chance to slip away into the night. After leaving her at the coffee shop, the day before, he’d stopped at Barclay’s Bank and obtained a substantial packet of American dollars, so she would disembark with money to spend, and DeHaan could at least hope she would find a way to survive. It was possible, he thought. As Spain was technically neutral but slanted toward Germany, Portugal was neutral but a quiet ally of Britain, an alliance that went back to the fourteenth century. So Portuguese officials might look the other way, might not be so eager to please their German friends. Thus, with false papers and a little luck, she could wait out the war in Lisbon. As long as the Organyi didn’t find her. There he couldn’t be sure, because they were, it was said, everywhere, and relentless. Still, a chance. And maybe, with very good false papers and a great deal of luck, she might even get across the ocean. To a much safer place.

At 0900, a wardroom meeting. DeHaan presiding, with Ratter, Kees, Kovacz, Ali, Shtern, and Poulsen, the Danish fireman now serving as Kovacz’s provisional second engineer. Cornelius served coffee, it was almost like old times. Not like old times: a call at Lisbon for secret cargo-masts, lattice aerials, and three trucks, bound for Smygehuk, on the bare coast of southern Sweden.

“Past the German bases on the Norwegian coast?” Kees said. “Then the Skagerrak and the Kattegat? The Danish pinchpoint? Shit oh dear. Minefields and E-boats every inch of the way. Very well, let’s have a betting pool. I’m putting ten guilders we never see six-east longitude. Ratter? In?”

“Remember, we’re a Spanish freighter,” Ratter said bravely.

“And I’m Sinbad the Sailor.”

“It worked once.”

“By God’s grace and luck’s good hand, it worked. With Italians.”

“Please,” Shtern said, “what is the Kattegat?”

“The channel between Denmark and Sweden,” Kees said. “Kattegat means the cat’s hole-it’s very narrow.”

Under his breath, Ratter said, “And you would know.”

“Who’s waiting for us?” Kovacz said.

DeHaan shrugged. “A codename is all they gave me-could be anybody.”

“So the Swedes don’t know about it, right? Otherwise, we’d be hauling the stuff into Malm.”

“That’s how I read it,” DeHaan said.

“Or do they, perhaps, choose not to know,” Ali said.

“Neutral politics, Mr. Ali. Anything is possible.”

“When do we have to be off Sweden?” Kovacz said.

“Before dawn on the twenty-first.”

There was a pause while they calculated.

“We’ll just make it,” Kovacz said. “If we can get out of Lisbon by the eleventh.”

“It should be fast,” DeHaan said. “We’re supposed to pick up a manifest, for cork oak and whatnot, going up to Malm, but we don’t actually load anything.”

“After Sweden, what then?” Ratter said.

“Then we do go to Malm, for sawn pine boards headed down to Galway.”

After a moment, Ratter said, “Irish Free State, so, neutral to neutral, on a neutral vessel.”

“That’s the idea. But we get further instructions at sea-I would bet that means a British port.”

“And the end of the Santa Rosa, ” Kees said. “And then-convoys?”

DeHaan nodded. Bad, but no worse than what they’d been doing.

“Will we go down the Swedish side of the Kattegat?” Poulsen said.

“Of course,” DeHaan said. “I’m not sure it matters, but we’ll try.”

Kovacz said, “I can tell you it doesn’t matter. Not up in the Baltic-the Germans do whatever they like, and the Swedes don’t get in their way. Don’t dare. Otherwise, it’s blitzkrieg for them and they know it.”

Mr. Ali tapped his cigarette holder so that an ash fell into the ashtray. “He’s right.” And I can prove it. Clearly, from his expression, Mr. Ali had a story to tell, and they waited to hear it. “For instance,” he said, “just yesterday morning, there was a French ship, wiring back to the owner in Marseilles. In clear, this was-the two of them going back and forth. And, from what I could make out, they were taking wolframite ore up to Leningrad, but a patrol ran them into port and now they’re stuck there. Not allowed to leave.”

“Of course,” Ratter said. “That’s tungsten-armor plating, armor-piercing shells, very hard to get hold of, these days, so the Germans want it for themselves.”

“No doubt,” Kees said. “But the Soviets are supposed to be their allies.”

“Did the French ship give a reason?” DeHaan said.

“The owner asked, then the Germans cut them off. Jammed the frequency, and, when the French radioman moved up to another, they jammed him there.”

“That’s very strange,” DeHaan said. “If you think about it.”

“Not so strange,” Kovacz said. “They’re getting tired of each other.”

“Anything else on the radio?” DeHaan said. “BBC?”

“Not much new. The fighting in North Africa, and the death of the Kaiser, in Holland, after twenty-three years of exile.”

“Bravo,” Ratter said. “And may he roast in hell.”

“He never liked Hitler, you know,” Kees said.

“Said he didn’t. But his son’s an SS general-I’m sure he liked him.”

“Anything else, Mr. Ali?” DeHaan asked.

“Only the usual-Germans strengthening units at the Polish frontier.”

Kovacz and DeHaan exchanged a glance. “Here it comes,” Kovacz said.

5 June. Hotel Rialto, Tarragona.

S. Kolb lay on the tired old bed and tried to read the newspaper. A knowledge of French didn’t really help, with a Spanish paper, and the one he’d been given at the cinema was dense and difficult, just his rotten luck, with only a few photographs and no comics. Spain’s version of Le Monde, maybe, with long, thoughtful articles. He preferred being unable to read brief, sensational articles, in the working-class tabloids.

This might not have been such a bad hotel, he thought, once upon a time. Down on the nicer part of the waterfront, view of the Mediterranean, six stories high-the sort of place that might have been used by British travelers on a budget. But no longer. An artillery shell had hit the upper corner, during the war, so a few windows were boarded up, there was a black burn pattern on the wall above them, and, everywhere in the hotel, the evil smell of old fire.

No matter, he wouldn’t be here long. In Stuttgart, he’d come back under Mr. Brown’s control, and damned thankful for it, at the time. Saved his worthless hide, no doubt. Truth was, if you had to live the clandestine life, you’d better do it in a clandestine system-you’d live longer, as a rule, because going it alone was almost impossible. Still, there’d come a moment, standing in front of that wretched painting in the museum, when he’d been tempted to disappear, to live some other way. Not now, he’d thought, not in the middle of a war, when everybody had to fight, on some side. But later on. Maybe.

Such ingratitude! After all, they’d taken great pains to protect him. Like grandma’s precious china bowl-ugly thing, you hated it, but you took care not to break it. They’d slid him carefully out of Strasbourg, into the Unoccupied Zone, Vichy, and down the length of France, in an ambulance, a truck, even a horse-drawn vegetable wagon-Kolb with a smelly old farmer’s beret pulled over his ears. Handsome living, if you lived that way. Sharing the local food, whatever poor stuff they had. Once a pretty girl to sit with on a train. And, finally, into Port Bou-the Pyrenees border crossing-in a hearse. An assistant undertaker, thank God, the coffin they’d carried had been heavy and elaborate, lined with black satin, it didn’t look like there’d be all that much air to breathe in there. And who wanted to die in a coffin?

Of course, when they spent time and money on you, they weren’t trying to save your life, rather trying to find some way you could lose it working for them. So, he thought, they had something in mind.

In Lisbon, apparently. Earlier that evening, he’d seen their little man, come down from the consular office in Barcelona, he supposed, an hour north of Tarragona. Well, he hadn’t really seen him-it was dark in the cinema, a Spanish knight up on the screen bashing a few Saracen heads before breakfast-but he was a familiar presence. Rather heavy, with an asthmatic wheeze, and clearly regarding the man eight rows down one seat in from the aisle as little more than a package. Other than a brief protocol-“I trust this seat’s not taken, can you tell me?” “An old lady was there, but she’s gone away”-he’d only sat beside him for the requisite half hour before vanishing, the newspaper left behind on the seat.

Would it have cost him so dearly to add a few words? A whispered Good luck, or something like it? Something human? No, not him, not even a comment about the moronic movie, just labored breathing, and a difficult newspaper with hand-lettered instructions on the inside of the back page-as always. Which added up to the night train to Lisbon, and then, no doubt, his next hotel, likely somewhere near the docks. The docks, the docks, always the docks, crowded with spies. There were some in his profession, he knew, who didn’t live that way at all-who traveled first class, who strolled through casinos with a woman on each arm, but that wasn’t his legend. Damn his genes anyhow. Born to a clerk, looked like a clerk, they’d made him a clerk. It was all a great clanking machine, wasn’t it, that went round and round with little puffs of steam and never stopped.

Damn, he was hungry, his stomach gnawed at him. Didn’t help his mood much either. But the food in the seedy restaurants got worse as you moved south. At least in the north they fed on potatoes, here it was oil and beans, beans and oil, all of it laced with garlic, the sacrament of the poor, which didn’t agree with Kolb. And the same damn story in Lisbon, no doubt.

The night train to Lisbon — more poetry than fact, that description. After a local up to Barcelona, S. Kolb spent the better part of two days on a broken wicker seat in a third-class carriage, in with the sausage eaters and the cranky infants, a few obvious refugees, and an endless parade of tired soldiers. The cast changed, but Kolb remained, as they puffed slowly across the Spanish countryside, standing in this station or that, or marooned far out in the middle of nowhere.

It was after midnight when he finally arrived at Lisbon’s Estaco do Rossio and found the woman in the green scarf waiting for him on the platform. She drove him not to a hotel on the docks, but to what he took to be a rooming house, up in the Alfama district, below the Moorish citadel. No, not quite a rooming house, he was told, a hideaway for various agents, headed here or there, and best not to see the others, or let them see you. He did hear them, though they were quiet in their rooms, and broke the rule only inadvertently, opening his door at the same moment his neighbor did. A tall, spindly fellow, professorial, who stared at him for a moment, then stepped back inside and closed the door. A surprise to Kolb, the way he looked. Kolb had heard him, on the other side of the wall, moaning in his sleep, and had imagined a very different sort of man. Still, not so bad in the hideaway-at least they fed him-his beans in oil brought up on a tray, with a tiny chop that might have been goat. Stingy, the British Secret Intelligence Service.

He saw Mr. Brown the following morning. Plump and placid, pipe clenched between his teeth, so you had to work like hell to understand his clenched words. But Kolb did, in fact, understand all too well. After hearing of his travels, while making notes on a pad, Brown said, “We’re sending you up to Sweden.” Kolb nodded, secretly very pleased. A neutral country, clean and sensible with large, accommodating women-a bit of Kolb Heaven, after all the hell he’d been through. “You don’t speak the language, do you?” Beyond Skoal! not a word, but Skoal! might be perfectly adequate.

“How do I get there?” Kolb said.

“We’re sending you up on a freighter. Dutch merchantman disguised as a Spanish tramp. They’ll let you off in Malm. Ever been there?”

“Never.”

“It’s quiet.”

“Good.”

“Then, perhaps, to Denmark.”

Occupied. But politely occupied.

“Of course from Denmark, one can easily travel to Germany.”

“They may know who I am-I suspect Frulein Lena denounced me.”

“We’re not sure she did, and she’s with the Valkyries now. Anyhow, you’ll have new papers.”

“All right,” Kolb said. As if it mattered whether he agreed or not. Still, there was a glimmer of hope-Sweden, where, if they caught him, he would be interned. If they caught him? Oh they would catch him all right, he’d make damn sure of that.

“Don’t mind?” Brown said, eyes narrowing for a moment.

“A war to be won,” Kolb said.

Brown may have sneered, he wasn’t sure, there was only a puff of smoke, rising from the bowl of his pipe. Could that have been a sneer? “Indeed,” Brown said, and told him he’d be leaving after midnight on the tenth. “You’ll be taken to the dock,” he said. “Can’t have you wandering around Lisbon, can we.”

8 June, 1600 hours. At sea.

DeHaan came to the bridge for the first half of the split dog watch. The repainting was still in progress, but getting toward the end. The crew, he thought, had never worked this hard. It had been decided, at the wardroom meeting, that they would be told only that the ship was headed north, its destination secret, with a call at Lisbon and no liberty. Was it the idea of a secret mission that inspired them? Something clearly had, because they put their backs in it, every single one of them, the full crew toiling away on the scaffolds, and working fast. And, this one time at least, the weather held. The idea that an important operation could be ruined by a few showers of ocean rain seemed almost absurd, but the history of war said otherwise and DeHaan knew it.

Ratter came loping up the ladderway with a burlap sack in one hand and a glint in his eye. “Care to see what I bought in Tangier?”

He reached into the sack and brought forth a round tin canister with hand-lettered marking at the center. FUTLIHT PARED, 1933, it said, then, JAMS CAGNI/JONE BLONDL.

“Ten reels,” Ratter said. “Probably all of it, or there’s another movie in there somewhere.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Thieves market.”

Strange things wandered through the world of ports, DeHaan thought, living lives of their own. Had this walked away from a Tangier cinema? A passenger liner? A complicated journey of some sort, anyhow, to arrive on the Noordendam.

“I thought,” Ratter said, “we might show it as a reward, after the painting.”

“I can repay you, from the mess fund.”

“No, no. It’s my gift, to the ship.”

“Do we still have the projector?”

“It took some searching, but we found it in the hawser locker.”

“Of course, where else? Does it work?”

“Don’t know what will happen if we put film in it, but I hooked it up and it ran. There were rats living in the speaker, they’d eaten the wires, but Kovacz put it back together.”

The projector had been on the Noordendam before DeHaan came on as captain, nobody had any idea where it came from. “Movie at twenty-one hundred hours,” he said. “Have the bosun rig up a canvas screen on the foredeck.”

A lovely night for a movie; a great white sweep of stars spread across the black sky, a light headwind that snapped and billowed the canvas screen, so that James Cagney sometimes swelled, sometimes jerked violently, to great cheers from the audience. The projector worked, after the necessary ten minutes of fooling around, though it ran slightly fast, so that the actors appeared to be in a bit of a hurry. The sound, however, from the rewired speaker, was not so good, the voices muffled, as though the characters were eating bread, and sometimes the music swam, odd and otherwordly- Footlight Parade, the supernatural version.

None of it mattered. The officers and crew sat on a hatch cover and had a fine time-some of them couldn’t understand a word of it, but that didn’t matter either. It was a Busby Berkeley movie, so there was plenty to look at; crowds of girls in skimpy costumes and, soon enough, in bathing suits, forming and re-forming in a water ballet that ended in a grand climax, a fountain of swimmers, sleek and sinuous, waving their arms like graceful birds.

Ratter ran the projector and DeHaan sat by his feet. Looking out over the seated crew, it struck him how few they were, only a handful of men, really, on the vast reach of the deck, beneath an ocean sky. A few minutes into the movie, Maria Bromen appeared on deck, a little hesitant, uncertain where to sit. DeHaan waved her over and made space by his side. Evidently she’d washed her clothing and hung it up to dry, because someone had found her a pair of dungarees and a sweater, and she wore a scarf over her head, knotted beneath her chin. “Do you always have movies?” she said.

“Never. But the first mate found this in Tangier.”

After a moment, she said, “The English is difficult, for me.”

“James Cagney has trouble with his wife, but Joan Blondell, his secretary, is secretly in love with him.”

“Ah, of course.”

Then, a little later, “What happens now? He’s a sailor?”

“Plays a sailor, in the production number.”

“So. He fights!”

“Well, sailors in a bar.”

After the fight, a song:

Here’s to the gal who loves a sailor.

It’s looking like she always will.

She’s every sailor’s pal.

She’s anybody’s gal.

Drink a gun to Shanghai Lil.

10 June, 0300 hours. Port of Lisbon.

They had to have a pilot, entering the Tagus River, picked up off the town of Cascais, in order to cross the sandbars that built up at the mouth of the river. Pilots tended to be outgoing and talkative, seemed to enjoy that part of the job, and this one was no different. To DeHaan, he spoke English. “War has slowed down,” he said. “Except for Libya, and that goes nowhere. Advance, retreat, advance.”

DeHaan agreed. From the last newspaper he’d seen, and Ali’s reports of the BBC, it certainly seemed that way.

“It may be the time for diplomats, now,” the pilot said. “Hitler has what he has, and the British and Americans will find a way, with Japan. Is this how you see it?”

“One could say that.” DeHaan was being polite. “But the occupation is a hard thing, for Europe.”

“For some, yes. But it was not good before the war, with the communists, and men who could not find work.” He paused, then said, “You are not Spanish, are you.”

“Dutch.”

“I thought you could be German. How does it happen that you are captain of a Spanish ship?”

“The last captain quit, without notice, and I was what they could find. Likely it won’t last, though.”

“Crew is Spanish?”

“Some. You know how it is with the merchant tramps, everyone from everywhere.”

“Truly. And there is a lesson for the world, no?”

DeHaan agreed, and busied himself with the log, then spoke back and forth with the engine room. When they were safely in the Tagus, made fast to two tugboats, and the pilot boat came alongside, DeHaan wasn’t sorry to see him go.

Four in the morning, DeHaan on the bridge. With the tugs fore and aft, the Noordendam made slow way upriver, past pier after pier, while the city beyond lay still and silent, the final hour of its darkness broken only by streetlamps and a few lights dotted across the hills. Always, a part of him came sharply alive at these moments. To be awake while the world slept was a kind of honor, as though command of the imaginary night watch fell, for just that moment, to him.

By 0530 they had, as promised by the tugboat captain, tied up to the pier at the foot of the rua do Faro, a white F 3 painted on the side of the cargo shed. DeHaan, in normal times, would have left the bridge for his cabin, but these were not normal times, and he stayed where he was. As the first light of dawn settled on the city, the waterfront came to life: stevedores, lunch boxes in hand, heading for a shape-up on the neighboring wharf, the night’s last whore going slowly home on her bicycle, the local seagulls coming to work, a sun-bleached black Fiat pulling up in front of the cargo shed, an army truck arriving next, a few yawning soldiers, lighting cigarettes and chatting among themselves, forming a ragged line at the foot of the pier, followed by an elderly couple with a suitcase, who stood back from the soldiers and settled in to wait. As DeHaan watched, more civilians arrived, until he’d counted forty or so, then stopped counting as the crowd grew.

At 0750, Kees showed up for the forenoon watch. “What goes on, out there?”

“I’m not sure. A crowd of refugees, it looks like.”

“I thought this was all a secret.”

“Well, keep an eye on it,” DeHaan said, heading for his cabin, anxious for a few hours of dead sleep.

But this was not to be, not right away. In the corridor that led to his cabin, the chartroom door stood open and Maria Bromen was seated on a stool. She stood when she saw him. “I came to say goodby.”

She had repaired herself as best she could-her suit and shirt pressed, sensible shoes polished, hair pinned up. “They loaned me the iron,” she said. “It looks right?”

“Oh yes, looks perfect. But I thought you would leave at night.”

“Don’t you sail today?”

“We’ll try-we’re a few hours late, but there are things that have to be done, so it will be after midnight.”

“Still, I will go now, and I wanted to thank you. There is more I want to say, but I think you know. So, thank you, and I wish you safety, and happiness.”

“There’s some kind of commotion out there,” DeHaan said. “Maybe you’d better wait for a while.”

“Yes, refugees, I saw them. They want to get on your ship, to leave this city, but the army won’t let them. It has nothing to do with me.”

“They have no idea where we’re going.”

“They don’t care. There will be rumors-South America, Canada-and they will offer money, jewelry, anything.”

After a moment he said, “Well, good luck, and be careful. Is there anything you need?”

“I have everything, because of you. I will be richest Russian girl in Lisbon.”

DeHaan nodded and met her eyes, he wanted to keep her. “So then, goodby.” He extended his hand and she shook it, formally, Russian-style. Her hand was ice cold.

“Perhaps we will meet again,” she said.

“I would like that.”

“One never knows.”

“No.” Then, “You will be careful.”

“I must be, but, now that I am this far, I think it will turn out well. I know it will.”

“You don’t want to wait for night.”

She didn’t.

Stubborn. But it had kept her alive, waiting for luck. “At least let me take you past all that on the dock.”

“Alone is better. I will go right by the soldiers, they won’t care, their job is only people who want to leave.”

“Yes, you’re right,” DeHaan said.

They shook hands once more and she left. Halfway down the corridor she turned toward him, walked backward for a step or two, her face closed, without expression, then turned again and walked away.

DeHaan left the ship at 1030, headed for the rua do Comrcio, the office of the customs broker. At the end of the pier, the soldiers made a path for him through the crowd of refugees, shooing people aside, barring their rifles and pushing when they had to. They were not brutal, only doing what they’d been ordered to do, and there was a certain practiced feel to the way they went about it. It took no time at all, his passage, but long enough. Voices called out to him, in this language or that, someone offering a thousand dollars, someone else holding a diamond ring above the heads of the crowd. I can’t take you. Maybe he could, after a battle with the port officers, but he secretly agreed with Kees, that they’d never see longitude six-east, so where he would take them, more than likely, was to the bottom of the sea, or into a German camp.

“Is something wrong?” Penha, the customs broker, asked when he arrived. So, it showed.

DeHaan just shook his head.

Penha was short and dark, well dressed, and very nervous. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said. “I was here very late, last night.”

“We lost time,” DeHaan said. Their ship’s log instrument-a line run from a gauge in the chartroom into the water that calculated miles gained-had showed them losing way to strong current on the voyage to Lisbon.

“Your cargo is in the shed on the wharf. I’m supposed to let you in, and to give you this.” He had the false manifest on his desk, and gave it to DeHaan immediately, glad to be rid of the thing. “You are not what I expected,” he said.

“What did you expect?”

Penha shrugged. “Buccaneer-of some sort.” He used the French word, boucanier, oddly romantic, the way DeHaan heard it.

“Captain of a Dutch freighter, that’s all.”

Penha lit a cigarette. “This is not what I do, ordinarily.”

“No, I’m sure it isn’t,” DeHaan said. “And a month ago I would’ve said the same thing. And a year ago, my country just went about its life, but everything changed.”

Insufficient reason, from the look on Penha’s face. “This is a business where honor matters-trust, personal trust, is all there is. That is my signature, on that piece of paper in your hand.”

Shall I apologize? Penha was not acting out of conviction, he realized, had apparently been forced to do this. “There’s no plan to show this to anyone, Senhor Penha,” he said. “It’s a form of insurance-and likely will remain a secret.”

“A secret. Are you sure?”

“Yes, I would say I am.”

“Because I’m not so sure.”

After a moment, DeHaan said, “Why not?”

A long silence. Only sounds of the street outside the quiet office as Penha tried to decide what to do, went back and forth-tell, don’t tell-then caution won out. Finally he said, “There are reasons.”

DeHaan gave him time to change his mind, time to say more, but the battle was over. “I should be getting back to my ship,” he said, as he rose to leave.

“You will have to load tonight,” Penha said. “And I’m supposed to be there.” Unless you say otherwise.

“Is nine too early?”

“It will do.”

“I have to sail, as soon as possible.”

“Yes,” Penha said. “You should.”

It was a fifteen-minute walk, back to the pier at the rua do Faro. An unremarkable walk, through the commercial district behind the port, on the way there, but different on the way back. For whatever ailed Penha, DeHaan discovered, turned out to be contagious. For instance, the man idling in front of a shop window on the corner of the rua do Comrcio. Or the couple looking out over the river, who glanced at him as he passed. And, on the street side of the cargo shed, the Peugeot sedan, parked by the road that allowed trucks to drive down the pier. Behind the wheel, a plump, middle-aged man, smoking a pipe and reading a newspaper, spread out across the steering wheel. To DeHaan he seemed particularly content, perfectly at peace with the world, as though this was the best, really the only, way to read a newspaper, parked in one’s car by a cargo shed. As DeHaan came even with the car, the man looked up, stared at DeHaan for a few seconds, then rolled his window down. “Captain DeHaan?”

“Yes?”

The man leaned across the seat and opened the passenger door, then said, “Can you join me for a minute?”

What was this? When DeHaan hesitated, the man added “Please?” Not the polite version of the word, something less. The man put the pipe back in his teeth and waited patiently. Finally, DeHaan went around the front and climbed in the passenger side. Sweetish smoke filled the car, which had a fancy interior, with soft leather seats. “Much appreciated,” the man said. “If I say the name Hallowes-does that help?”

“Yes, I suppose.”

“My name is Brown,” the man said. “I’m at the embassy, here in Lisbon.”

“The naval attach office?”

“Mmm, no, not really. But what I do isn’t so different from your friend Hallowes. Same church, different pew, eh?”

“He asked you to speak with me?”

“Oh no, he didn’t do that. But we’re all on the same side, in the end, aren’t we. You understand?”

After a moment, DeHaan nodded.

“Good, best to have that out of the way. Now Captain, I’m here because I have a small problem, and I need your help.”

DeHaan waited. Inside, rising apprehension.

“The, ah, Santa Rosa sails tonight, I believe, for Sweden. Do I have that right?”

“For Malm, yes.”

“Of course, the official version. And very discreet, to put it that way.”

“Mr. Brown, what do you want?” This was blunt and direct and had no effect whatsoever.

“A friend of mine needs passage, up to Sweden. I was hoping you might do me the favor of taking him along.”

“I don’t recall that being in my orders, from the NID.”

“Oh, the NID, ” Brown said, deeply unimpressed. “No, probably it wasn’t. Nonetheless, it’s what I’m asking you to do, and the NID needn’t know about it, if that’s what concerns you. He’s just a meager little man, you won’t even know he’s aboard.”

“And if I say no?”

“Is that what you’re saying? Because I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.”

“Why not?”

“Why not,” Brown said, as though to himself. “Have you noticed a Fiat automobile, parked on the pier?”

“Yes, I saw it.”

“Inside the car are two Portuguese men. Plain enough, nothing special about them, except that they are important. Powerful, that’s the better word. They can, for example, impound your ship and intern your crew, but neither of us would want that, would we, what with the war effort and all. You really must go to Sweden, but one extra soul on board will make no difference, certainly there’s room for him.”

Certainly there was. But if he did what Brown wanted, once, he had a feeling it might be twice, and that it wouldn’t end there. And Brown wouldn’t dare to impound his ship, his job wouldn’t survive doing something like that. All right then, get out of the car.

“You aren’t averse to taking a passenger, are you?”

The current running beneath his words had stiffened-this was barely a question, almost a statement, and DeHaan realized it was a reference to Maria Bromen.

“And I expect the welfare of, um, any passenger, would mean something to you, no?” And, in Lisbon, because I can do it, I will, friend.

“Yes, it would,” DeHaan said.

“Ah then, we have no problem at all.”

It took DeHaan a moment longer, then he said, “No.”

Brown nodded- this always works. “You are helping to win the war, Captain. Even if very little is explained, even if you don’t care for the way things are done in my part of the world, you are. We must all lend a hand, if we’re to prevail, isn’t that so?”

“When does he arrive?”

“Oh, that’s up to you, Captain. When do you want him?”

“Before nine, we’ll be busy after that.”

“I’ll have him here. And we’re both very grateful, believe me. And, I should add, any difficulties here in Lisbon, you need only get in touch.” He reached into the pocket of his jacket and handed DeHaan a blank card with a telephone number written on it. “That’s the British Embassy-they’ll know how to contact me.”

It occurred to DeHaan, as it was meant to, that he was now owed a favor, and he wondered if it could be used to help Maria Bromen-it might even get her to Britain. But he sensed that would open a certain door, in her life, to what Brown called his world, a door that didn’t open from the other side. DeHaan put the card in his pocket and got out of the car.

“Goodby, Captain,” Mr. Brown said. “And thanks again.”

2035 hours.

A pair of headlights turned the corner of the cargo shed, then went off as the car drove slowly to the end of the pier.

2130 hours.

The cargo shed was vast, seen from the inside, its ceiling thirty feet high. DeHaan, accompanied by Kees and Kovacz, followed Senhor Penha past mountains of stacked drums and bales until he found their consignment-an island of raw wood crates circled by a wire with a metal seal. Without ceremony, Penha took a wire cutter from a leather case and snipped off the seal. “Now it’s yours,” he said. He produced a paper for DeHaan to sign- cork oak, sardines, cooking oil — and departed, his hurrying footsteps receding down the length of the shed, followed by the emphatic slam of a door.

“Not much, is it,” Kees said, squatting to inspect one of the crates. By freighter standards, hardly anything at all. The twenty-footers were no doubt sections of tower, the lattice aerials flat, and ten feet across. There were also a dozen square crates, eight by eight, and three flatbed trucks, painted matte black.

“We’ll have to manhandle this stuff to the end of the dock,” DeHaan said. “Our crane will get it aboard from there.”

“The trucks, for the twenty-footers,” Kees said. “The one on the end facing backwards, and driving in reverse. We’ll need crew to get them on there.” He put a hand on one of the eight-foot squares. “What’s in here?”

“No idea,” DeHaan said. “Supplies, maybe.”

Kees took a prybar from his belt, the nails squeaked as a board came free and a hard-edged shape in oiled paper bulged through the opening. “Smell the cosmoline?” he said. He opened a clasp knife, slit the paper and peeled it back, revealing gray steel shining with lubricant. “This will be a submachine gun, I think, if you can find the magazine.”

“I’m sure it’s packed, in there somewhere,” DeHaan said.

“That’s what my wife used to say,” Kovacz said.

“Go get help,” DeHaan said to Kees, as he hammered the board back on.

As Kees left, Kovacz climbed into the nearest truck. “I wonder if they drained the tank,” he said. He felt around for the ignition switch, then the engine came to life with a huge hammering roar that echoed off the high ceiling. “Christ, what’s in here?” he shouted over the noise. He shifted into first gear, there was a loud metallic bang as it engaged, then the truck crept forward, a slow foot at a time. “That’s all of it. I bet it’ll do fifteen, downhill.”

“Regeared,” DeHaan yelled back. “All torque, no speed.”

Kovacz drove a few feet more, then stopped and turned the engine off. “My uncle Dice has a farm in Leszno, he’d love this thing.”

“He’ll have to wait,” DeHaan said.

When Kees returned, he had half the crew with him. Together they heaved and cursed until the first section of a tower rolled onto the truck bed. DeHaan, driving the backward-facing truck, didn’t get reverse on his first try, which caused a mass shout of alarm until he stamped on the brake. He got it right the second time and the two trucks crept through the broad doors at the end of the shed and moved slowly down the pier.

When he climbed down from the cab, Ratter was waiting for him. “Awake, O Lisbon,” he said, grinning.

“Can’t be helped,” DeHaan said.

“We’ll have police,” Ratter said. Then he peered into the darkness, nudged DeHaan with an elbow, and nodded back toward the cargo shed, where a lone figure stood in the shadows. “If that’s who I think it is,” he said, “you better go back there.”

It was loud and busy at the cargo shed, so DeHaan led her away, to the dark edge of the pier where the river current lapped at the pilings. “Forgive me,” she said. She was very tired, her voice soft with regret. “Maybe if I had waited for the night…”

“What happened?”

She took a deep breath, tried to steady herself. “They arrested me.” Of course, what else. “I never even got to street. Two men, in a car. Not the regular police, some other kind, the political kind, I think.”

“And?”

“And they took me to an office, and told me that I did not have visa for Portugal, so, if I choose to stay, I will be interned. They were polite, not angry-it is just the way their law is.”

“What does that mean, exactly? Did they explain it to you?”

“A camp, it means. Somewhere east of the city-they said the name but I forgot it. It isn’t like Germany, they said, but I would have to stay there until I could go somewhere else.”

“Where would you go?” DeHaan said.

“Back to Russia, they said. Or back to Tangier, if the Spanish would let me. Or wherever I could get permission to go. I could write letters, they said. All the internees write letters, although the mail is irregular.”

“But they let you come back here.”

“Yes, in time. They kept me in the office all day, brought me a sandwich, then they told me I could come back here-it would be as though I never entered the country, they said, if I returned to the ship.”

Was this, DeHaan wondered, Mr. Brown at work? He tried to figure it out, if this, then that, but it was a tangle of possibilities-including the possibility that he knew nothing about it. “Miss Bromen,” he said. “Maria. What we are going to do is very dangerous. You were on the ship when we repainted, and you know what that means.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Then you know it may not succeed, it may end in a bad way. If we’re caught, we’ll be taken under guard to a German port. Or sunk. So it’s possible that life in a Portuguese internment camp would be better, much better, than what can happen if you are aboard my ship. You would be alive, and then there is always hope. And they can’t keep you there forever. This war will end, sooner or later, they all do, and, even if the British capitulate, there would be some kind of settlement, treaties, arrangements.”

“I don’t think I can live in a camp,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “But that’s what you think I should do, isn’t it.”

“I don’t want you hurt, or dead. I don’t want you in a German prison.”

She shrugged and said, “I don’t care. If there is a chance to escape, to find a place where they will leave me alone, I will take it. There’s no time to explain, but I grew up in a country that was a prison, and it happened that I was one of the ones who couldn’t bear it. So I managed, with my work, to get away. Not far enough, but almost.” She looked at him. “Almost, right?”

“Yes, almost.” It surprised him, how angry he was. He wouldn’t let her see it, but to be this close, the lights of the evening city just beyond the wharf, made him angry. What difference would it make, if she were there?

“I know it is inconvenient,” she said. “To take me-wherever you are going. You can say no, I won’t argue. They are waiting for me, the two men in their car, out on the street. They expect me to return, that’s what they told me.”

“No,” he said. “I won’t send you back. But you may not thank me, later on, for taking you away.”

She raised a hand, as though to touch him, then didn’t. “Then I’ll thank you now,” she said. “Before anything happens.”

They walked back down the pier, toward the Noordendam, past the slow, rumbling trucks with a few sailors sitting on a long crate. At the ship, the bosun was directing the attachment of steel cables that hung down from the crane, and, as DeHaan and Maria Bromen went up the gangway, the first section of a tower rose slowly into the air.

11 June, 0240 hours. At sea.

“Steady on course three one zero.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

“We’ll bear northwest for an hour or so. And make full speed.”

The helmsman shoved the arrow to Full — Ahead, two bells sounded and, a moment later, the answering bells came back from the engine room. Behind them, the pilot boat, returning to port, and the fading lights of the coast. Cornelius came to the bridge with a mug of coffee and a can of condensed milk. DeHaan drank off some of the coffee, added the thick milk, and stirred it with the end of a pencil. “How’s everything below deck?” he said.

“We’re glad to be away, Cap’n.”

“Yes, me too,” DeHaan said.

Cornelius stood by his side for a time, watching the sea ahead of them. When he turned to go, DeHaan said, “Coffee’s good today, tell the cook I said so.”

Cornelius said he would, and left the bridge. DeHaan looked aft, at the Spanish flag flapping in the wind, and their wake, phosphorescent in the moonlight. An eight-day voyage lay ahead of him. According to Brown’s Almanac, Lisbon to a point due west of Glasgow was eleven hundred nautical miles, a hundred hours, four days at their speed of eleven knots. There were two routes to choose from, after that, Elsinore-by-Kiel Canal-Elsinore the British, rather Shakespearian form of the Danish port Helsingr, while the Kiel Canal ran through the northern heart of Germany. But that idea was beyond brazen. Instead, they would take Elsinore-by-Skaw, which meant the port of Skagen on the northern tip of Denmark. There was a shorter route, by way of what were called “the belts”-channels through the Danish islands-but the curve around to the Baltic would’ve swung them too close to the German coast. Going further east, down the three-mile pinchpoint between Helsingr and the Swedish coast, it was less than a day to Malm, and only a few hours east to the Smygehuk.

Back up to Malm for the sawn boards, he thought. And Kolb’s departure, then on to Ireland, in theory, and Maria Bromen’s departure. Another week, if they got there. So then, for two weeks, she would be in Ratter’s cabin.

1900 hours, dinner in the officers’ mess. All the officers, except for Kees on dog watch. Maria Bromen, back in dungarees, black sweater, and canvas deck shoes; and their traveling spy, Mr. Brown’s “meager little man.” He was certainly that-short and seedy, bald, with a fringe of dark hair, eyeglasses, and sparse mustache. And very diffident. He was, DeHaan observed, rather adept at diffidence. As everyone gathered for dinner, Kolb waited to see who went where, waited cleverly, shifting about, until all the others were seated, then took the remaining place. DeHaan said, “Miss Bromen has rejoined us for the voyage north, and we have one more passenger, Herr Kolb.” DeHaan went around the table with names, and Kolb nodded and mumbled, “Pleased to meet you, sir,” in heavily accented English.

“From where do you come, Herr Kolb?” Mr. Ali said.

“From Czechoslovakia,” Kolb said. “Up in Bohemia, where it’s German and Czech.”

“You are German, by birth?”

“Some part,” Kolb said. “It’s all very mixed, up there.”

“And your work?” Kovacz said.

“I am a traveler in industrial machinery,” Kolb said. “For a company in Zurich.”

“Business goes on,” Ratter said. “War or no war.”

“It does seem to,” Kolb said, not quite reluctantly-it wasn’t his fault. “War or no war.”

Cornelius served the dinner: barley soup, black sausage and rice, and Moroccan oranges. Maria Bromen, using a thumbnail, deftly carved the skin off her orange, then ate it in sections.

When dinner was over, and DeHaan headed for his cabin, Ratter caught up with him in the passageway. “Who is he, Eric?”

“A favor for the British, he’s going to Malm.”

“Is he dangerous?”

“Why do you say that?”

“I don’t know. Is he?”

“He’s just a passenger. I didn’t really want to take him, but they insisted, so here he is.”

“Everybody’s been wondering, since yesterday.”

“Let them wonder,” DeHaan said. “One more unknown, leave it at that.”

“You’re aware that he toured the ship, this morning? He went everywhere, down to the engine room, crew’s quarters.”

“I didn’t know, but so what? What’s he going to do? Put it down to curiosity and forget it, we have more important things to worry about.”

12 June, 0510 hours. Off Vigo.

A hundred miles east of them, in the dawn mist. DeHaan had always liked the port-a huge bay, easy docking, a town that welcomed sailors. A Dutch fleet had taken Vigo, during one of the eighteenth-century wars, fighting alongside a British squadron. The instructor at the naval college had shown them an old map, drawn in the odd perspective of the period, a line of big ships riding little semicircle waves. Then, during the Napoleonic Wars, it had played some role, what? The British? The French fleet?

There was a knock on the port window of the bridge. Ruysdal, the lookout, was motioning for him to come out on the wing.

“Over there, Cap’n.”

Rising and falling on the low swell, a cluster of drifting shapes. DeHaan squinted through his binoculars. “Put a light on it,” he said.

Ruysdal worked the searchlight, and a yellow beam settled on the cluster. Bodies. Maybe twenty of them. Some of them in dark clothing, others wearing skivvy shorts-they’d been asleep when it happened, a few wore life jackets, and two of the men had roped themselves together at the wrist. DeHaan looked for insignia, for some identification, but, even with the searchlight, the gray dawn hid it from him. “Can you see the name of a ship? Anything?”

“No, sir.”

There was more; debris, pieces of wood, a strip of canvas, a white life preserver-but if there was a name on it, it floated face down.

“Stop the ship, sir? Put out the cutter?”

DeHaan watched, looking for a sign of life as the bodies lifted and turned in the ship’s bow wash and slipped away astern. “No,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do.”

Ruysdal kept the light focused on the bodies until they disappeared from the edge of the beam. “Damn shame, sir, whoever they are.”

“I’ll note it in the log,” DeHaan said, returning to the bridge.

13 June, 1920 hours. Off Brest.

The dinner conversation was in English, mostly, but sometimes German, for Kovacz and Poulsen. They managed-everybody helped their neighbor, it was better than silence, and better, come to that, than the smoked fish and beans.

“Where are we tonight, Captain?” Kolb said.

“Off Brest, approximately. Well off, about two hundred miles.”

“The minefields,” Ratter explained.

“Yes,” Kovacz said. “Big naval base at Brest.”

“And submarines,” Mr. Ali said.

“They come out of La Rochelle, I think,” Ratter said. “Not that it makes any difference, they’re all watching us.”

“Easy prey,” Kolb said. “But why bother?”

“They’ve sunk neutral ships, both sides have,” Ratter said. “Maybe somebody just wants to put another mark on their score, so they push a button.”

“Or, a bad mood,” Mr. Ali said.

“Yes,” Ratter said. “Why not?”

Nobody had a reason why not-such things did happen, and always would.

“It is vile, this war,” Maria Bromen said. “All of them.”

“It will end,” DeHaan said. “Some day.”

“War?” Kolb said.

“This war.”

“Have you heard the one about Hitler and the end of the war?” Kolb said. “He’s in his office and he’s looking at his portrait, and he says to it, ‘Well, they’re trying to get rid of me, but you’re still hanging there. What will become of us, when the war is over?’ And the portrait says, ‘That’s easy, Adolf-they’ll get rid of me and hang you.’”

A translation followed, with a few laughs. Mr. Ali gave a BBC report, and comment on that held out until dessert. More oranges, gratefully received, then Ratter went to the bridge to relieve Kees and the rest returned to their cabins. DeHaan and Maria Bromen were the last ones in the passageway, standing in front of their doors.

“So then, good night,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “Sleep well.”

Claudine in Paris? DeHaan stood musing in front of his library and tried a paragraph. Long Atlantic rollers now, below him, the ship taking her time on the way up, engine at work, then down into the trough.

14 June, 0645 hours.

RAF skies, today. They’d crossed 50N latitude at dawn, if they were on schedule. The ship log seemed to think so, though he wouldn’t feel certain until Ratter shot the noon sunsights. Something of a border, fifty-north, France falling away to the south, the English Channel off the starboard beam as Noordendam swung away from the minefields that guarded the Western Approaches. Swung away, as well, from the lights of neutral Ireland, a safe haven. Better that they couldn’t see them, he thought-he’d certainly considered putting Bromen ashore there, before they curved over Britain into enemy waters, but they had no time to make port, couldn’t abandon her alone in the cutter, and, come to that, couldn’t afford to abandon the cutter either.

So she had to stay aboard. His passenger. Of course he’d hoped for more, but that hope had climbed some interior hill, then tumbled down the other side-the midnight knock at the midnight door to remain locked away in his imagination. Because she would say no. Say it tenderly, no doubt, but he very much didn’t want to hear her say it. And having her so near him made it much worse. Proximity. One of Desire’s great inventions, wasn’t it. Office partition, apartment wall, bulkhead-one would not, in fact, become a spirit and float through to the other side, but the thought was there.

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.

It backed off, the morning of the seventeenth, with a violent red-streaked dawn, and DeHaan staggered down to his cabin, stripped off his clothes, and crawled into bed. He woke, some time later, to find something soft and warm in there with him, and spent a few seconds being exceptionally happy about that before he fell back asleep. Woke again, alone this time, he thought, until he came up from under the blanket and saw her standing at the porthole and gazing out. He watched her till she felt it and turned around, wiping her eyes. “You are looking at me,” she said.

“I am.”

“Well then,” she said. And came back to join him.

They were a day and a half late, steaming up past the Hebrides and swinging around the Orkney Islands into the North Sea, but there was still time to reach the Smygehuk by the twenty-first, as long as the weather held fair. Which it did, but for a series of line squalls in the wake of the storm that neither DeHaan nor the Noordendam took very seriously. These had been busy sea-lanes before the war, but no longer-only a few fishing boats, a British destroyer in the distance, a corvette that came up on their starboard beam and stayed with them for twenty minutes, then found something better to do. They were alone after that, in choppy gray waters, cold and grim, running south-southeast between Britain and Norway, with the Skagerrak, portal to the German Empire, lying some twelve hours to the east.

At dusk, DeHaan took a commander’s tour around the ship-a campfire-to-campfire, night-before-the-battle tour. Slow and easy, with all the time in the world, he stopped to smoke a North State with some off-watch ABs, had a salt-beef sandwich and cold tea in the crew’s mess, sat on a bench in the workshop that adjoined the engine room and chatted with the oilers and firemen. He grew prouder of his crew as the evening wore on-there was none of the usual griping and bitching, no tales of thievery or fistfights. Nothing quite like danger, he thought, to cure the bullshit of daily life.

He took Amado aside and told him he might be on stage once more, in the coming days. He asked Van Dyck if he could rig a communication line from the bridge to the radio room, and Van Dyck said he could, using spares kept on hand for the bridge/engine-room system. “It’ll look like hell,” the bosun said. “Tube running down the helm and across the deck.”

“Do it anyhow,” DeHaan told him.

He visited with Shtern, in a former storage locker, heavily whitewashed and made over into an infirmary, a red cross painted on the door, and finally with S. Kolb, found reading in the wardroom.

“Good book, Herr Kolb?”

Kolb held the spine up for DeHaan to see. H. Kretschmayr, Geschichte von Venedig. “A history of Venice,” he said. “I found it at my hotel in Lisbon.”

“Wars and trading fleets?”

“Doges.”

In those hats.

“It goes only to 1895,” Kolb said. “But maybe that’s not so bad.”

“We will be entering German waters, tonight,” DeHaan said. “I thought I’d let you know.”

“Am I to be assigned-an action station?”

DeHaan was diplomatic. “We don’t expect to be doing very much fighting, Herr Kolb, but, if something happens, we know where to find you.”

“I can work a radio, sir.”

I bet you can. “Oh? Well, we’ll keep that in mind.”

Ratter shot starsights at 2100 hours, and calculated they would cross a line parallel to Stavanger, Norway-six degrees east longitude-not long after midnight. “Their front door,” he said.

“Yes, if we’re going to be stopped, it will happen there.”

“Ship dark? In midstream?”

“No, all lit up, and six off the Norwegian coast.”

At 0018 hours, on 20 June, 1941, the NV Noordendam entered German-occupied Europe, curving around a welcoming minefield that served, on this sea border, as barbed wire. DeHaan noted it in the log with particular care, because he sensed they would not be coming out. A dark shore, to the north. Blacked out. No lighthouses, no lightships, no bells or horns or signal buoys-none of the navigational apparatus that had helped mariners find their way for centuries. Still, with nothing more than a sickle moon, it should have been like any night sea voyage-ship’s bells on the half hour, engine full ahead, wake churning behind them-but it wasn’t, because whatever was watching and waiting out there could be felt. Calm down, DeHaan told himself, but it didn’t help, and Ruysdal, beside him at the helm, wasn’t doing much better. “Bearing zero nine five, Cap’n,” he said, for absolutely no reason.

“Steady as she goes,” DeHaan answered. Like dogs, he thought, barking at the night.

Then all hell broke loose.

From the coast, huge searchlight beams went stabbing into the sky and DeHaan grabbed his binoculars, followed the beams, saw nothing. But a distant hum to the west deepened, as he searched, to a low rumble, then swelled to the full roar of a bomber formation. In answer, antiaircraft cannon: dozens of them drumming together, with pinprick flashes from the shore and flak burst high above-slow, silent puffs turned ash-gray by the searchlights. The first bombs were like sharp thunder, single explosions that broke over the rhythm of the cannon and rolled across the water, then more, and louder, all run together as the main body of the formation came over target. With, clearly, at least some incendiaries, which, whatever they hit, produced great pillars of orange fire as smoke poured up into the sky.

A shadow sliced through the lower edge of a beam and Ruysdal said, “Dive-bomber.” Its engine screamed as it fled away, lights chasing it until it banked hard and came howling out over the sea, toward the Noordendam, where a crowd of sailors on deck cheered wildly and waved as though the pilot could see them. “Brave sonofabitch.” This from Ratter, standing over the green binnacle light, which lit up his face from below as though he were a kid with a flashlight.

DeHaan turned back toward the shore in time to see a second dive-bomber-or the first, back for more-a black flash against the firelight, followed by a beautiful white starburst, with smoke trails that arched high in the air, and one blurred snapshot of what might have been a superstructure. “Ship?” he said.

“Looks like it, sir,” Ruysdal said.

“They’re after the naval base at Kristiansand,” Ratter said.

It continued. Stuttering antiaircraft, the night lit by fire. “I think there’s a possibility,” Ratter said, “that this is for us.”

“They wouldn’t do that,” DeHaan said.

“Are you sure?”

After a moment he said, “No.”

One of the searchlight beams had found a bomber, a thin line of smoke streaming from the fuselage beneath its wing. A second searchlight joined in, then a third. They were very good at it now-they’d pin this bastard against the clouds as long as they liked. Not so long. The plane rolled over, very slowly, then tumbled like a falling leaf, this way and that, until it plunged into the sea and left no more than steam.