by Jack Finney
Then Moreno and I slumped in our chairs, heads resting on the backs, our faces upturned, still gasping. Rosa stood before us, a wrung-out towel in each hand and washed our faces — roughly and mercilessly, not sparing the bruises. She flung the towels in our laps then, telling us to sponge ourselves off, and stood, her weight on one hip, arms folded on her chest, grinning down at us. "Idiots," she said. "Stupidi! Look at you; like pigs in the mud. I wouldn't touch either of you with gloves. Clean yourselves up!" Then she walked out.
We mopped away at our chests and arms for a little time, our breathing quieting down. Then Moreno said, "You're out of condition, lieutenant; if you could of gone one more round you could of killed me."
"One more round would have killed me," I muttered, glancing up at him; then our eyes met, and Moreno grinned.
"I was mad," he said. "Really mad. I'd of killed you." He smiled and shook his head. "But the fight must of drained it out of me; I got nothin' left now. Maybe it's Rosa who needs a boot in the tail."
I nodded. "I wouldn't be surprised."
We were silent for a moment; I wanted a cigarette, but didn't feel like moving. Then Moreno said quietly, "Let's cut it out now; that all right with you? There's too much at stake to fool around."
"Suits me." I nodded.
"O.K. It's my fault; I'm crazy jealous. I can't help it. But I got no real claim on Rosa. It's your fault, too, for stirring things up. Now let's stay on the job; Frank's heard from Argentina, the news is good and we're about ready to roll."
"What's he heard?" I asked.
Moreno grinned, but he didn't answer directly. He heaved himself out of the chair with his hands, like an old man, then stepped to the open door and yelled down to the dock. "Frank! … Vic. … Linc! Come on up here; Brittain's back!"
He waited at the door. Then we heard the murmured voices and the scrape of shoes on the rocky path. They came in then, glancing curiously from my face to Moreno's, but no one saying anything. Frank pulled an opened envelope from the hip pocket of his denim work pants, dropped it in my lap, and I picked it up. It was addressed to Frank, care of general delivery at the local post office and bore a canceled Argentine stamp, the envelope imprinted for airmail in both English and Spanish. I pulled out the letter inside, and there were four snapshots lying in the fold. I picked them up, and Frank reached for the letter in my hand. "This is in German," he said. "I will tell you what it says." Then he stood waiting as I studied the photographs, and Linc came around to the back of my chair to study them,
The top one was best; it showed a man lying back in a lounge chair, wearing shorts and some sort of pull-over jersey, and reading a book. In the background were plants, a short palm tree, and a high garden wall of whitewashed brick or perhaps adobe. The snapshot was about three by five inches and a good one. The sun struck the man's face from the side and well overhead; he wasn't squinting, and the features were clear. It was the heavy face of a man in his early fifties, with a full head of dark hair turning gray at the sides; and I felt I would know him if I saw him.
The others were clear, too, but taken at greater distances and from different angles. They'd all been taken at the same time obviously; the man lying back in his chair, reading in the garden. I looked up at Frank, and he nodded at the photographs in my hands. "This is Reinhold Kroll," he said, "reading peacefully in the garden of his villa in a Buenos Aires suburb only a few days ago." He grinned suddenly. "You will know him when you see him?"
I grinned, too, and nodded. "Yeah," I said. "These are good." And I handed the snaps up to Frank. "Who took them?"
Frank nodded at the letter in his hand. "Walther, the man who writes me. He is employed in the Kroll household; he is there twelve days now, as a sort of houseman. Highly recommended to Herr Kroll" — Frank grinned again — "by a man who quit suddenly two weeks ago. Walther took his photographs from inside the house through windows above the garden; he is a competent man."
Frank opened the letter and began scanning the angular script. "Kroll comes to New York at some time in the next two days, Walther says. He will fly from Buenos Aires, bringing his trunk, in a private plane belonging to a friend — simply to visit New York, as far as American officials are concerned, and entering on his own Argentine passport. But actually he will leave the United States almost immediately, using the name and American passport of someone else. This is all Walther has been able to learn; whose passport this will be, he does not know, but Kroll does not have it now. He will receive it in New York; Walther does not know where, or where he will stay. Walther gives his description." Frank looked down at his letter again. "Kroll is of medium height, weighs about a hundred and sixty pounds, a little heavy in the belly, and he has brown eyes and black hair, turning gray at the sides and back." He looked up, glancing around at all of us. "We will find him all right."
"Yeah," I said, "if he's there to find. What if he flies, Frank? And why shouldn't he? He's flying here; why not all the way? Why come to New York at all, in fact? Why not go directly from Buenos Aires?"
"No." Frank shook his head, smiling a little. "He must come to New York in order to leave on an American passport — with hundreds of other American tourists, inconspicuously and secretly under a false name. Reinhold Kroll cannot openly leave Argentina directly for Europe; he might not be welcomed on the other side. Nor can he fly from New York in a commercial plane; it is impossible; Walther has heard this discussed a little." I raised my brows questioningly, and Frank softly explained. "The trunk, Hugh; it is too big, too heavy. You are allowed only hand luggage to keep with you on a commercial plane overseas; the trunk he would have to send separately by air freight, and undoubtedly not even on the same plane. And this is unthinkable; Kroll will not do that. The trunk must be with him at all times." Frank smiled. "Do not worry; he will not fly past New York. He will travel as arranged, Walther assures me."
Very softly Linc murmured, "So we're all set," almost as though he'd never quite believed, until now, that we would be. Then, while Rosa began fixing supper, Frank, Vic and I studied the photographs, passing them around among us, memorizing the heavy face of Reinhold Kroll.
We worked that night, but only till about ten. Frank had knocked together a set of deck gratings during the afternoon, and now, propping them up against the end of the dock, he and Vic began to paint them — black. And I rigged my chargers down in the sub and got them started. But mostly we just wandered through the sub, looking her over, fooling with this or that, not doing much of anything, really. There wasn't much left to do any more, and we had two more days and nights left; this was May fourteenth, and we were to sail on the morning of the seventeenth.
We tested the sub around noon the next day. We moved out as before, this time towing the rowboat, and found a hundred feet, sounding with the boat's anchor line. Then Vic and I climbed into the boat, untied her and rowed clear. Moreno was back at the dock finishing up his torpedoes; Lauffnauer and Linc were going to make a stationary test dive.
Linc climbed down, and we heard the hatch slam after him. Then, waiting a hundred and fifty yards clear, Vic and I saw the deck lower and disappear; then the water crept up the rusting side of the tower and closed over it. We waited — five minutes, then six, then seven. Suddenly the water boiled, continued to boil, and the conning tower broke surface, then the decks, the water gurgling from the sub's drain holes. Linc broke open the hatch then and waved his arms, hands clasped together, and we paddled over to her.
She'd tested out as we'd expected, yet after the sub was back in the dock, drying from black to dull orange again, I stood staring down at her with the others, wondering what was going to happen out in the ocean in this little boat far beyond any help. She was so little! Standing on the dock beside her, I knew I could jump over onto her bow and actually make her bob in the water from my weight. "Damn it!" I said, swinging angrily to the others. "Let's get this thing painted so it at least looks like a sub!"
Moreno, standing beside me, arms folded on his chest, nodded.
"Yeah," he said, and grinned, "I'll feel better too. You get the paint, Frank?" Frank nodded, and Moreno said, "We'll paint her today, soon as she's dry, right after lunch. Maybe the paint'll help hold her together."
The next day, the sixteenth, there was almost nothing to do. We'd painted her the day before, right down to the water line at low tide, using ordinary gray house paint and just slapping it on; we didn't care how long it lasted.
Around three in the afternoon we loaded the torpedoes in, lowering them down into the sub one at a time with the chain hoist in the dock, then manhandling them forward until we could lift them with the sub's hoist in the forward compartment. We loaded the first two right into the firing tubes, and Moreno scratched an X into the paint just above one of the tubes. "This is the one we'll try first," he said. "I think it's in the best condition."
Then suddenly, in the late afternoon, there was nothing more to do. Rosa brought down a plastic hamper full of waxed-paper-wrapped sandwiches, fruit and cookies. And she had three vacuum bottles washed and drying on the drainboard of the sink, ready to fill with hot coffee in the morning. At supper we ate almost in silence, each of us quiet with thought. When Rosa had finished the dishes, she and Moreno set up an extra cot, in the kitchen; Rosa was staying here tonight. Then Moreno, Linc and Rosa began a rummy game, sitting on a cot, dealing the cards out on a blanket, while Vic, Frank and I lay on our cots.
But around nine-thirty the rummy game died, and Moreno stood up. "Let's have a drink," he said, and Rosa got our half-filled whisky bottle from a cupboard. Standing in the little kitchen area then, we all had a drink — straight, without ice or water. "Here's luck," Vic said. Moreno growled, "We'll sure need it." And we all grinned wryly and tossed the drinks down.
Then Moreno set his glass on the wooden drainboard of the sink. "Celebration's over," he said. "In bed now — everybody." From his pocket he brought out a little brown-tinted bottle, unscrewed the white plastic top and began shaking the little capsules it contained toward the bottle mouth. "Here," he said, offering them around. "These are sedatives; I want a full night's sleep for everybody," and we all held out our palms. I was glad to have one; I was wide-eyed and tense — rigid — with excitement, and sleep would have been impossible without it. We went to bed then, sleeping half dressed; Rosa in her black slacks and sweater, sleeping fully dressed; and before ten o'clock the little shack was silent. Then I was asleep.
TO BE CONTINUED
The Saturday Evening Post, September 12, 1959, 232(11):43, 100, 102-103, 105-106, 108
The U-19's Last Kill, Part Five
To the U-Nineteen!" said Vic, raising his glass. "May she have better hunting her second trip out."
Frank Lauffnauer had found the little sub lying under 100 feet of water off Long Island, where, in 1918, as a young German sailor, he had abandoned her. But, even after more than forty years, the sub was still watertight. Through hard labor Frank and his confederates — Vic, Moreno, Linc, Rosa and Hugh — raised the U-19 and restored her to operating condition. Frank's plan was to use it somehow to seize $1,500,000 from a man named Reinhold Kroll. Once a notorious Nazi, Kroll was taking the money to Germany to use in establishing his own neo-Nazi regime.
When Hugh joined Lauffnauer's project, he cast aside Alice Muir, the girl who loved him. But ahead lay even greater sacrifices. Here Hugh describes the tension as the U-19 put to sea on her astounding escapade.
V
We sailed in the dark, just past high water on the ebb tide. Our one alarm clock had rung thirty minutes before, in the dead of night, and I turned my face into my pillow, shaking my head; suddenly I didn't want to wake up to this day. Almost immediately Moreno shut off the alarm; it was beside his bed, and he must have been lying awake waiting for it. Someone moaned, coming out of sleep -- Linc, probably; he'd done it before. Then I heard the slap of bare feet, Frank Lauffnauer, and the overhead light snapped on, a single naked glaring bulb, and I wanted to shout at him to turn it off. Vic said, "Well, this is it!" parodying the worn-out phrase, and I knew he was alive with excitement, actually happy, and I could have killed him. Moreno growled, "Yeah," and I heard Rosa mutter something.
A little later, all of us dressed and standing in the kitchen, drinking coffee, Rosa said irritably, "Someone should wear a black eye patch; you look like pirates." We all wore heavy, knit pullover sweaters, mine and Linc's gray, the others navy blue. Vic, Lauffnauer and I wore navy-blue pants, and Linc and Moreno blue denims, and we all had heavy, high-topped work shoes of unfinished leather, our pants stuffed into them and bloused over their tops. In appearance, anyway, we were a submarine crew — hard, dangerous and competent — and that's what we were in fact, too, I thought, feeling a little better now, the coffee inside me.
"All right, let's move," Moreno growled, setting his empty cup on the drainboard of the little sink. The sub was ready. There was nothing to do but start. Even the dive planes were already in position, and, all of us but Moreno, who stayed in the tower, climbed down into her, and I went directly back to the engines. They were cold, of course, and it took me several minutes to start them. I cursed at them, but all the time in the back of my mind lay the hope that somehow they wouldn't start at all. Then presently they stuttered into life; I nursed them along, warming them, then shouted up to Moreno, "Engines ready!"
"All right," he called down, "let's go." And now, the old diesels growling rhythmically, we moved out of the dock to sea. A thousand yards out, curving onto a northeast course, Moreno ordered, "Blow main ballasts," and the air surged into the tanks, the deck pushing against my feet. Now we rode high in the water, as we would till dawn.
There wasn't much to do now. I had my engines to watch, making sure they didn't run too hot, but they seemed allright, and I walked forward to the switchboard just aft of the control room and checked my batteries; they showed a good, full charge. Lauffnauer had the trim tanks to handle, adjusting them as needed to compensate for fuel loss. Linc sat at his radio in the control room, his headset covering one ear only just now, slowly twisting a dial, monitoring whatever transmissions he could hear, which weren't many, he said. Vic sat at the rudder wheel, and Rosa stood by.
Moreno called down occasionally, whenever he saw running lights. But he saw very few, and never very close; we were well out to sea now. We moved on, a black speck crawling steadily across the vast face of the ocean in the beginning dawn; and for hour after hour through the morning we continued, at a steady eight and a half to nine knots, the coast just visible far to port. Twelve times we sighted ships — freighters, an ocean-going tug, a Navy transport, two destroyers, several Coast Guard cutters. But they were far off, and we knew that our little tower, half submerged now, was invisible to them.
Sometime around noon Rosa began laying out sandwiches from the hamper she'd brought and opening warm soft drinks on the drainboard of the little galley sink. I was sitting on the control-room deck, hands loosely clasped around my knees, staring absently at Vic sitting on the periscope seat idly rubbing at the brass housing with a thumb. Now I got to my feet and stepped over the control-room coaming into the aft compartment to check my batteries.
At least I told myself that's what I was doing, and I did; they were O.K. I turned and looked at Rosa, her back to me, for a moment; then I stepped over beside her, and she looked up at me questioningly. I put my hands on her waist, just over the swell of her hips, and turned her toward me. Then my arms moved around her, and I drew her to me. She neither resisted nor helped; her hips close to mine, she hung back from the waist, almost limply.
"We are coming closer now," she murmured very quietly. "Soon it will begin, and you are frightened." After a moment I nodded. I was frightened — not panically, but with a perfectly, healthy fear, a realistic awareness of what was coming — and now Rosa nodded too. "And I may be the last woman you'll have a chance to touch," she said then. "All right; I am frightened, too, now. Go ahead, Hugh," she whispered, "hold me, kiss me," and she lifted her arms to my neck and drew herself tight to
me. I kissed her then, and she kissed me hard, and we had a long, long moment in which everything else was blotted out and disappeared.
Then our arms relaxed, she drew back again, and we stood, eyes searching each other's face. I began to draw her toward me again, my breathing shallow and rapid, but Rosa stepped back, twisting out of my hands. "There must be no more trouble," she said; "not today. Go back to your engines — and wipe your face." Then she turned to the little sink, uncapped a bottle, and I walked back toward my engines, pulling a handkerchief from my hip pocket; I felt fine, ready for whatever was going to happen.
It was much later, well after three o'clock, when Lauffnauer in the control tower with a sextant — he'd relieved Moreno for the last forty minutes — called down a sighting. Vic worked out our position, then called through the ship, "We're there; or close enough, anyway." Moreno had the rudder wheel now and called for quarter speed and, as I walked back toward the engines, he began heaving on the wheel, turning the bow into the swell.
No one pretended now that he wasn't nervous. Moreno, in the tower again, checked our drift regularly, occasionally calling for a change in position, singing out the commands; then we'd maneuver the sub, getting her back into position. Later, Vic was spelling Linc at the radio, and I decided to go topside. I climbed the ladder and stepped out into the little tower beside Lauffnauer, who had relieved Moreno on the bridge.
We were riding high now, the decks above water. The sky, I saw, was clear, and the sun was warm on my face. We lay riding the gentle swell, the choppiness and spray gone, and I climbed out onto the deck. Smiling, Lauffnauer said, "Let us just stay here, Hugh, all of us, out at sea forever; there is nothing on the land for any sensible man."