Two other people in Norrsbruck will recognize that tune. Shaftoe looks for Enoch Root in his church cellar, but he is not present, his bed and lamp are cold. Maybe the local chapter of Societas Eruditorum holds its meetings before dawn—or maybe he’s found another welcoming bed. But trusty old Günter Bischoff can be seen, leaning out the window of his seaside garret, elbows in the air and his trusty Zeiss 735 binoculars clamped over his face, scanning the lines of the invading ship.
The Swedes stand with arms folded for a minute or so, regarding this apparition. Then they make some kind of collective decision that it does not exist, that nothing has happened here. They turn their backs, pad grumpily into their houses, begin to boil coffee. Being neutral is no less strange, no less fraught with awkward compromises, than being a belligerent. Unlike most of Europe, they can rest assured that the Germans are not here to invade them or sink their ships. On the other hand, the vessel’s presence is a violation of their sovereign territory and they ought to run down there with pitchforks and flintlocks and fight the Huns off. On the third hand, this boat was probably made out of Swedish iron.
Shaftoe fails, at first, to recognize the German vessel as a U-boat because it is shaped all wrong. A regular U-boat is shaped like a surface vessel, except longer and skinnier. Which is to say it has a sort of V-shaped hull and a flat deck, studded with guns, from which rises a gigantic conning tower that is covered with junk: ack-ack guns, antennas, stanchions, safety lines, spray shields. The Krauts would put cuckoo clocks up there too if they had room. As a regular U-boat plunges through the waves, thick black smoke spews from its diesel engines.
This one is just a torpedo as long as a football field. Instead of a conning tower there’s a streamlined bulge on the top, hardly noticeable. No guns, no antennas, no cuckoo clocks; the whole thing’s as smooth as a river rock. And it’s not making smoke or noise, just venting a little bit of steam. The diesels don’t rumble. The fucking thing doesn’t even seem to have diesels. Instead there is a dim whine, like the sound that came out of Angelo’s Messerschmidt.
Shaftoe intercepts Bischoff just as the latter is coming down the steps of the inn carrying a duffel bag the size of a dead sea lion. He’s panting with exertion, or maybe excitement. “That’s the one,” he gasps. He sounds like he’s talking to himself, but he’s speaking English, so he must be addressing Shaftoe. “That’s the rocket.”
“Rocket?”
“Runs on rocket fuel—hydrogen peroxide, eighty-five percent. Never has to recharge its verdammt batteries! Clocks twenty-eight knots—submerged! That’s my baby.” He’s as fluttery as Julieta.
“Can I help you carry anything?”
“Footlocker—upstairs,” Bischoff says.
Shaftoe stomps up the narrow staircase to find Bischoff’s room stripped to the bedsprings, and a pile of gold coins on the table, weighing down a thank-you note addressed to the owners. The black locker rests in the middle of the floor like a child’s coffin. A wild hollering noise reaches his ears through the open window.
Bischoff is down there, heading for the pier beneath his duffel bag, and his men, up on the rocket, have caught sight of him. The U-boat has launched a dinghy, which is surging towards the pier like a racing scull.
Shaftoe heaves the locker up onto his shoulder and trudges down the stairs. It reminds him of shipping out, which is what Marines are supposed to do, and which he has not actually done in a long time. Vicarious excitement is not as good as the real thing, he finds.
He follows Bischoff’s tracks through a film of snow, down the cobblestone street, and onto the pier. Three men in black scramble out of the launch, onto the ladder, up to the pier. They salute Bischoff and then two of them embrace him. Shaftoe’s close enough and the salmon light is bright enough, that he can recognize these two: members of Bischoff’s old crew. The third guy is taller, older, gaunter, grimmer, better-dressed, more highly decorated. All in all, more of a Nazi.
Shaftoe can’t believe himself. When he picked up the locker he was just being considerate to his friend Günter—an ink-stained retiree with pacifist leanings. Now, all of a sudden, he’s aiding and abetting the enemy! What would his fellow Marines think of him if they knew?
Oh, yeah. Almost forgot. He is actually participating in the conspiracy that he, Bischoff, Rudy von Hacklheber, and Enoch Root created in the basement of that church. He comes to a dead stop and slams the locker down right there, in the middle of the pier. The Nazi is startled by the noise and raises his blue eyes in the direction of Shaftoe, who prepares to stare him down.
Bischoff notices this. He turns towards Shaftoe and shouts something cheerful in Swedish. Shaftoe has the presence of mind to break eye contact with the chilly German. He grins and nods back. This conspiracy thing is going to be a real pain in the ass if it means backing down from casual fistfights.
A couple of sailors have come up the ladder now to handle Bischoff’s luggage. One of them strides down the pier to get the footlocker. Shaftoe recognizes him, and he recognizes Shaftoe, at the same moment. Damn! The guy’s surprised, but not unpleasantly so, to see Shaftoe here. Then something occurs to him and his face freezes up in horror and his eyes dart sideways, back toward the tall Nazi. Shit! Shaftoe turns his back on all of this, makes like he’s strolling back into town.
“Jens! Jens!” Bischoff hollers, and then says something else in Swedish. He’s running after Shaftoe. Shaftoe keeps his back prudently turned until Bischoff throws one arm around him with a final “JENS!” Then, sotto voce, in English: “You have my family’s address. If I don’t see you in Manila, let’s get in touch after the war.” He starts pounding Shaftoe on the back, pulls some paper money out of his pocket, stuffs it into Shaftoe’s hand.
“Goddamn it, you’ll see me there,” Shaftoe says. “What is this shit for?”
“I am tipping the nice Swedish boy who carried my luggage,” Bischoff says.
Shaftoe sucks his teeth and grimaces. He can tell he is not cut out for this cloak-and-dagger nonsense. Questions come to his mind, among them How is that big torpedo full of rocket fuel safer than what you were riding around in before? but he just says, “Good luck, I guess.”
“Godspeed, my friend,” Bischoff says. “This will remind you to check your mail.” Then he punches Shaftoe in the shoulder hard enough to raise a three-day welt, turns around, and begins walking towards salt water. Shaftoe walks towards snow and trees, envying him. The next time he looks at the harbor, fifteen minutes later, the U-boat is gone. Suddenly this town feels just as cold, empty, and out in the middle of nowhere as it really is.
He’s been getting his mail at the Norrsbruck post office, general delivery. When the place opens up a couple of hours later, Shaftoe’s waiting by the door, venting steam from his nostrils, like he’s rocket-fuel-powered. He receives a letter from his folks in Wisconsin, and one large envelope, posted yesterday from somewhere in Norrsbruck, Sweden, bearing no return address but inscribed in Günter Bischoff’s hand.
It is full of notes and documents concerning the new U-boat, including one or two letters personally signed by John Huncock himself. Shaftoe’s German is slightly better than it was before he went on his own U-boat ride, but he still can’t follow most of it. He sees a lot of numbers there, a lot of technical-looking stuff.
It is your basic priceless naval intelligence. Shaftoe wraps the papers up carefully, sticks them in his pants, begins walking up the beach towards the Kivistik residence.
It is a long, cold, wet trudge. He has plenty of time to assess his situation: stuck in a neutral country on the other side of the world from where he wants to be. Alienated from the Corps. Lumped in with a vague conspiracy.
Technically speaking, he has been AWOL for several months now. But if he suddenly turns up at the American Embassy in Stockholm, carrying these documents, all will be forgiven. So this is his ticket home. And “home” is a very large country that includes places like Hawaii, which is closer to Manila than is Norrsbruck, Sweden.
&
nbsp; Otto’s boat is fresh in from Finland, bobbing on an incoming tide, tied up to his bird’s nest of a jetty. The boat, he knows, is still loaded up with whatever Finns are exchanging for coffee and bullets at the moment. Otto himself is sitting in the cabin, drinking coffee naturally, red-eyed and plumb wrung out.
“Where’s Julieta?” Shaftoe says. He’s starting to worry that she moved back to Finland or something.
Otto turns a bit greyer every time he drives his tub across the Gulf of Bothnia. He looks especially grey today. “Did you see that monster?” he says, then shakes his head in a combination of wonderment, disgust, and world-weariness that can only be attained by hardened Finns. “Those German bastards!”
“I thought they were protecting you from the Russians.”
This elicits a long thunder-roll of dark, chortling laughter from Otto. “Zdrastuytchye, tovarishch!” he finally says.
“Say what?”
“That means, ‘Welcome, comrade’ in Russian,” Otto says. “I have been practicing it.”
“You should be practicing the Pledge of Allegiance,” Shaftoe says. “Soon as we get done taking down the Germans, I figure we’ll just kick her into high gear and beat the Russkies all the way back to Siberia.”
More laughter from Otto, who knows naïveté when he sees it, but is not above finding it charming. “I have buried the German air-turbine in Finland,” he says. “I will sell it to the Russians or the Americans—whoever gets there first.”
“Where’s Julieta?” Shaftoe asks again. Speaking of naïveté.
“In town,” Otto says. “Shopping.”
“So you’ve got cash.”
Otto looks seasick. Tomorrow is payday.
Then Shaftoe’s going to be on a bus, headed for Stockholm.
Shaftoe sits down across from Otto and they drink coffee and talk about weather, smuggling, and the relative merits of various small fully automatic weapons for a while. Actually, what they are talking about is whether Shaftoe will get paid, and how much.
In the end, Otto issues a guarded promise to pay, provided that Julieta does not spend all of the money on her “shopping” trip, and provided that Shaftoe unloads the boat.
So Bobby Shaftoe spends the rest of the day carrying Soviet mortars, rusty tins of caviar, bricks of black tea from China, Lapp folk art, a couple of icons, cases of pine-flavored Finnish schnapps, coils of vile sausages, and bundles of pelts up out of the hold of Otto’s boat, down the dock, into the cabin.
Meanwhile, Otto goes into town, and still has not come back long after night has fallen. Shaftoe sacks out in the cabin, tosses and turns for about four hours, sleeps for about ten minutes, and then is awakened by a knocking at the door.
He approaches the door on hands and knees, gets the Suomi machine pistol out of its hiding place, then crawls to the far end of the cabin and exits silently through a trap door in the floor. There is ice on the rocks below, but his bare feet give him enough traction to clamber around and get a good view of whoever is standing there, pounding on the door.
It is Enoch Root himself, nowhere to be seen this last week or so.
“Yo!” Shaftoe says.
“Bobby,” Root says, turning around, “I gather you heard.”
“Heard what?”
“That we are in danger.”
“Nah,” Shaftoe says, “this is just how I always answer the door.”
They go into the cabin. Root declines to turn on any lights and keeps looking out the windows like he’s expecting someone. He smells faintly of Julieta’s perfume, a distinctive scent that Otto has been smuggling into Finland by the fifty-five-gallon drum. Somehow, Shaftoe is not surprised by this. He proceeds to make coffee.
“A very complex situation has arisen,” Root says.
“I can see that.”
Root is startled by this, and looks up blankly at Shaftoe, his eyes glowing stupidly in the moonlight. You can be the smartest guy in the world, but when a woman comes into the picture, you’re just like any other sap.
“Did you come all this way to tell me that you’re fucking Julieta?”
“Oh, no, no, no!” Root says. He stops for a moment, furrows his brow. “I mean, I am. And I was going to tell you. But that’s just the first part of a more complicated business.” Root gets up, shoves hands in pockets, walks around the cabin again, looking out the windows. “You have any more of those Finnish guns?”
“In that crate to your left,” Shaftoe says. “Why? We gonna have a shootout?”
“Maybe. Not between you and me! But other visitors may be coming.”
“Cops?”
“Worse.”
“Finns?” Because Otto has his rivals.
“Worse.”
“Who then?” Shaftoe can’t imagine worse.
“Germans. German.”
“Oh, fuck!” Shaftoe hollers disgustedly. “How can you say they’re worse than Finns?”
Root looks taken aback. “If you’re going to tell me that Finns are worse, pound for pound, than Germans, then I agree with you. But the trouble with Germans is that they tend to be in communication with millions of other Germans.”
“Okay,” Shaftoe mutters.
Root hauls the lid off a crate, pulls out a machine pistol, checks the chamber, aims the barrel at the moon, peers through it like a telescope. “In any case, some Germans are coming to kill you.”
“Why?”
“Because you know too much about certain things.”
“What certain things? Günter and his new submarine?”
“Yes.”
“And how, may I ask, do you know this? It has something to do with the fact that you’re fucking Julieta, right?” Shaftoe continues. He’s bored rather than pissed off. This whole Sweden thing is old and tired to him now. He belongs in the Philippines. Anything that doesn’t get him closer to the Philippines just irritates him.
“Right.” Root heaves a sigh. “She thinks highly of you, Bobby, but after she saw that picture of your girlfriend—”
“Snap out of it! She doesn’t give a shit about you or me. She just wants to have all of the good parts of being a Finn without the bad parts.”
“What are the bad parts?”
“Having to live in Finland,” Shaftoe says. “So she has to marry someone with a good passport. Which nowadays means American or British. You might have noticed that she didn’t fuck Günter.”
Root looks a little queasy.
“Well, maybe she did then,” Shaftoe says, heaving a sigh. “Shit!”
Root has rooted an ammo clip out of another crate and figured out how to affix it to the Suomi. He says, “You probably know that the Germans have a tacit arrangement with the Swedes.”
“What does ‘tacit’ mean?”
“Let’s just say they have an arrangement.”
“The Swedes are neutral, but they let the Krauts push them around.”
“Yes. Otto has to deal with Germans at each end of his smuggling route, in Sweden and in Finland, and he has to deal with their navy when he’s out on the water.”
“I’m aware that the fucking Germans are all over Europe.”
“Well, to make a long story short, the local Germans have prevailed upon Otto to betray you,” Root says.
“Did he?”
“Yes. He did betray you…”
“Okay. Keep talking, I’m listening to you,” Shaftoe says. He begins to mount a ladder up into the attic.
“. . . but then he thought better of it. I guess you could say he repented,” Root says.
“Spoken like a true man of the cloth,” Shaftoe mutters. He’s into the attic now, crawling on hands and knees over the rafters. He stops and sparks up his Zippo. Most of its light is absorbed by a dark green slab: a crude wooden crate with Cryllic letters stenciled on it.
Root’s voice is filtering up from below: “He came to, uh, the place where Julieta and I, uh, were.”
Were fucking. “Get me the crowbar,” Shaftoe shouts. “It’s in Otto’s t
oolbox, under the table.”
A minute later, the crowbar rises up through the hatch, like the head of a cobra emerging from a basket. Shaftoe grabs it and begins assaulting the crate.
“Otto was torn. He had to do what he did, or the German could have shut down his livelihood. But he respects you. He couldn’t bear it. He had to talk to someone. So he came to us, and told Julieta what he had done. Julieta understood.”
“She understood!?”
“But she also was horrified at the same time.”
“That is truly heartwarming.”
“Um, at that point, the Kivistiks broke out the schnapps and began to discuss the situation. In Finnish.”
“I understand,” Shaftoe says. Give those Finns a grim, stark, bleak moral dilemma and a bottle of schnapps and you could pretty much forget about them for forty-eight hours. “Thanks for having the guts to come out here.”
“Julieta will understand.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Oh, I don’t think Otto would hurt me.”
“No, I mean—”
“Oh!” Root exclaims. “No, I had to tell you about Julieta sooner or later—”
“No, goddamn it, I mean the Germans.”
“Oh. Well, I didn’t even begin to think about them until I was almost here. It was not courage so much as a lack of foresight.”
Shaftoe’s pretty good at foresight. “Take this.” He hands down a heavy steel tube of coffee-can diameter, a few feet long. “It’s heavy,” he adds, as Root’s knees buckle.
“What is it?”
“A Soviet hundred-and-twenty-millimeter mortar,” Shaftoe says.
“Oh.” Root remains silent for a while, as he lays the mortar down on the table. When he speaks again, his voice sounds different. “I didn’t realize Otto had this kind of stuff.”
“The lethal radius of this bitch is a good sixty feet,” Shaftoe says. He is hauling mortar bombs out of the crate and stacking them next to the hatch. “Or maybe it’s meters, I can’t remember.” The bombs look like fat footballs with tailfins on one end.
“Feet, meters… the distinction is important,” Root says.
“Maybe it’s overkill. But we have to get back to Norrsbruck and take care of Julieta.”
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