Dance on a Sinking Ship

by Kilian, Michael;

  “I want everyone in life jackets!” Kees said. “Now! This must not happen again.”

  A few of them began to comply, but most simply sat stupidly.

  “People, please!” Kees said. “I want no more lives lost! Put on your life jackets!”

  Olga watched as the others, prince and count and lord and lady, dumbly complied—small sleepy children dressing on mummy’s orders upon awakening.

  One life. All she needed, all she asked, all she required of this awful sea voyage was the loss of one life, a wasteful, redundant, pointless, and intolerable life. Instead this idiot boy had drowned, as simply and easily as an expended breath.

  She had her pistol in a pocket of her heavy wool skirt. It was as useless on this little boat as a Japanese lantern or French pastry. All she had needed to do was to get her victim over the side and into the sucking sea. She could have done it in the night in the midst of the rain. A bashing rap on the skull and then a shove and he would have been gone, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics would have been free of the ugly, incipient menace he represented.

  There would be another night. They did not seem near rescue.

  Reichscommissioner Goering was at lunch, an enormous Mittagessen of Leberknödelsuppe, smoked Forelle, Bratwurst, Gefülte Kalbsbrust, Kartoffelsalut, and Rotkohl, washed down with Riesling and to be finished with Blätterteiggeback. But he did not get to finish. A servant entered, carrying nothing.

  “Oberst von Glaube is here, sir,” the man said.

  “I am not to be disturbed while eating. Never!”

  “Jawohl, mein herr Reichscommissioner. But he insists it is a matter that requires breaking that rule.”

  Goering had been in such a good mood. The Führer had informed him that morning that he was to become colonel general of the new Luftwaffe.

  As usual with the Führer’s telephone conversations, Goering had not actually talked with Hitler himself. A secretary spoke the leader’s words into the telephone for him as he sat nearby and related Goering’s responses. The Führer never talked directly into the telephone. He feared that the mouthpieces of these devices were acrawl with germs.

  When he suspected he could no longer trust a secretary’s discretion, the Führer would have him or her sent to a camp or shot. The secretary who somehow managed finally to achieve and maintain his full trust would likely become one of the most powerful persons in the Reich.

  “What does the oberst want? Why does he disturb me?”

  “He did not say, mein herr Reichscommissioner. He said only that he must.”

  “Go ask him why.” When the servant left, Goering took advantage of the delay to devour the rest of the stuffed breast of veal. Then he drained another full glass of wine.

  The servant returned. “Mein herr Reichscommissioner, the oberst wishes …”

  “More wine!”

  “Jawohl, mein herr Reichscommissioner.” The men leapt to his duty, then set down the bottle, standing at attention. “The oberst wishes to say that it concerns a Dutch trans-Atlantic liner.”

  Goering dropped his fork onto his plate. “Send him in at once!”

  The colonel was one of Goering’s most able intelligence aides. He had been one of the first members of the old German Air Service to join the party, and had served on Goering’s staff when the Reichscommissioner was prime minister of Prussia.

  Goering motioned him to a chair and then dismissed his servant. “Take a glass of wine, Erich, and then tell me everything.”

  The colonel poured a glass, more in obedience than thirst for it. He sipped, set down the wine, then looked at Goering calmly in the face. The Reichscommissioner had not told anyone on his staff of von Kresse’s mission, but had alerted his intelligence people to watch for news of the ship, saying it was of the utmost importance.

  “The Dutch liner Wilhelmina is in distress, sir,” said the colonel. “Specifically, it is on fire. In the middle of the Atlantic. I have the coordinates.”

  “On fire?”

  “Yes, sir. Possibly sinking. It has lowered its boats and sent distress messages.”

  “Mein Gott! Do you know who’s aboard?”

  “No, sir. You did not tell us that.”

  “Certainly not. Are there any ships in the vicinity?”

  “The naval ministry reports three vessels within eight or ten hours’ sail of the Wilhelmina. One French, one Greek, one Italian. The Italian ship may be as close as six hours. It’s a military vessel.”

  “Any German ships?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No German submarines?”

  “That I do not know, sir. Their positions are secret.”

  “Get me Admiral Canaris on the telephone. No, wait. I’ll go in person. Get me a car. At once!”

  “Jawohl, mein herr Reichscommissioner!”

  The man stood, saluted, smacked his heels together, and was gone. Goering stuffed some more food into his mouth, then hurried after.

  When his motorcade was ready, the Reichscommissioner thought upon it and sent it back, requesting instead a small, black, inconspicuous sedan with curtained windows. On this quick trip, he had no interest in advertising his presence, nor his destination. When they reached the headquarters of the Abwehr, the Reich’s principal military intelligence service, Goering had his driver proceed into an interior courtyard so he might enter the building by an obscure entrance.

  Canaris had been chief of the Abwehr since the previous January, an appointment the Führer had made with deliberate disregard for the fact that the admiral had failed to support the Nazi movement in the revolutionary days of the first putsch. An opportunist and something of a dilettante, the son of an extremely wealthy Westphalian industrialist, the slick Greek-German master spy had a pathological fear and hatred of the Soviet Bolsheviks and had been among the loudest cheerers when Hitler finally came to power in 1933.

  Goering had no great faith in the man’s loyalty. Canaris had an aristocrat’s loathing of the S.A. brown shirts and other party street units, and Goering suspected him of a sentimental sympathy with Jewish intellectuals, indeed with intellectuals of any stripe. But the two of them shared a dread of being forced into another war that might pit them against both the European democracies and Russia. A war that might again enlist the United States as one of their foes was utterly unthinkable.

  They also shared a taste in art. Canaris was very fond of the works of Egon Schiele.

  The Reichscommissioner had some doubts about the admiral’s talents for spying on the Reich’s presumed enemies, but he was very, very good at spying on Germans. And he had kept the much-feared S.D. intelligence service at bay through the simple expedient of blackmail. The S.D.’s blond, blue-eyed Aryan model chief, Reinhard Heydrich, was half Jewish, and Canaris had documents to prove it. Heydrich had once been a protégé of Canaris’s until forced out of the navy by Admiral Raeder for raping a shipyard owner’s daughter. Now Heydrich was lieutenant general of the S.S., and desirous of maintaining that rank, and his life. He was very deferential toward Admiral Canaris. So was Goering.

  “My dear Hermann,” the admiral said, rising as Goering was ushered swiftly into his office virtually unannounced. “A pleasant surprise. And congratulations on your forthcoming promotion.”

  “How do you know about that?”

  “Hermann, please.”

  Goering sat down in a chair much too small for him. The admiral was fond of fine French furniture.

  “Wilhelm,” Goering said. “There is a Dutch ship in trouble in the Atlantic. Do you know anything about it?”

  The admiral replied first with a quick, capricious smile. He fetched a slip of notepaper from a neat stack on his desk.

  “The Wilhelmina?”

  “Yes. The Wilhelmina.”

  Canaris glanced over the notepaper and then looked to Goering, his eyes lingering. “About the Wilhelmina, Hermann, I know not only anything, I know everything.”

  “That is something I should always presume. What do you kn
ow?”

  “That it is on fire and probably sinking. That you, Herr Himmler, and the Führer have an interest in it. That the crown prince of England and a very prestigious entourage are on board it, along with the Count and Countess von Kresse representing yourself, a Herr Braun representing Herr Himmler, and an assassin named Olga Maretzka representing the charming Comrade Beria of the charming Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Wilhelmina’s last reported position was forty-three degrees forty-six minutes north, thirty-six degrees fourteen minutes west.”

  Canaris had commanded U-boats in the Great War and later had served as captain of the battleship Schlesien.

  He returned the memorandum to its neat stack and sat back in his chair, his hands folded carefully in his lap.

  “Who else have you informed of this, Wilhelm?”

  “Not Herr Himmler,” said the admiral. “You know that I find him difficult. I have made a report to Admiral Raeder, informing him only that the ship is in distress and that the royal British party and our dear friends the von Kresses are aboard. I said nothing of Her Himmler’s gentleman, or the von Kresses’ reason for being there.” He smiled, a silky expression on his dark face.

  “And?”

  “Unterseeboot 283 is proceeding toward the Wilhelmina, on the surface and at flank speed. It will be there within a few hours. Raeder’s instructions to it are to assist in any rescue effort, with particular attention to the royal party. It would be a dramatic gesture of friendship to the English, and a triumph for the Reich, would it not?”

  “Apparently I need not have come, Wilhelm.”

  “As usual, Hermann. But it is always a delight to see you. May I offer you a glass of schnapps?”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  As the rain stopped, the wind quickened. It didn’t seem to affect the size of the already gargantuan waves that had been marching their way from many miles distant and still threatened their hapless little boat, but it tore at their faces with bitter cold and stinging salty spray. They huddled together under their blankets and canvas in small clusters, with women the dominant figures, especially the still-sobbing Mrs. Parker. Thinking of Lady Diana’s remark as they had left the burning ship, Spencer was reminded of Euripides’ The Trojan Women, these forlorn and noble ladies of their lifeboat party standing now for Agrippa, Cassandra, Helen, and the other forlorn figures of that fifth-century B.C. tragedy, each with her own wretched tale to tell, each with her own separate fate to confront.

  Cassandra’s curse, aside from her own violent murder, was to foretell the fall of Troy yet not be believed. Was Nancy Cunard Cassandra? And who was the unfortunate Mrs. Parker, deprived of her husband for no sensible reason? There was kingdom involved here, as well, and a woman stolen from her husband by the son of a king. Certainly there was tragedy enough, and flames as terrible as those that had consumed that noble city two and a half millennia before. Hector’s son had died by being thrown from the highest wall of Troy. The Parker boy had perished taking a piss. Both deaths were equally pointless.

  And who were the treacherous, infiltrating, and ultimately triumphant Greeks? He, C. Jamieson Spencer, was good for one. So were Chips Channon and the Germans. The most dangerous Greek of all, Spencer supposed, was Mrs. Simpson. They were all here looting the English, but she represented most the soldiers in the wooden horse who would take and destroy the kingdom.

  Spencer’s own possible spoils would not be inconsiderable. If they survived this disaster, his would be the greatest newspaper story of the decade, perhaps any decade. He had been writing and rewriting it over and over in his mind all night and all morning, amending it only to accommodate each new preposterous development. If the world did not yet know of the prince’s dalliance with this plain, coarse, and scheming woman, a person whose singular worthlessness was equaled only by the prince’s own, they would shortly. Spencer felt no reluctance in doing this, no compunction whatsoever. With Lindbergh—if that mysterious figure in the raincoat was Lindbergh—he’d been constrained by a genuine guilt, a distaste for his profession’s penchant for pawing through the sordid tragedies of others. His mind had been full of the image of the Lindbergh’s little boy lying dead in a ditch. But the outrage and scandal that would fall upon this pathetic royal figure was probably the most deserving fate one could wish upon him—if only because they had made Edwina pee in a bucket. Spencer would be in the service of a cause, the cause of providential irony. With every seamy, sensational word that would come from his typewriter, he could be striking a blow far more devastating than any revolutionary’s. And he would feel a kind of joy. One of his aerial kills in the war had been like that. His last.

  Nora was holding his hand. She was smiling at him. She had totally calmed now, as if she had received some answer to her hours of prayer.

  Actually, there was a cheering element in this mean, chill wind. It seemed to be blowing the storm away from them. Spencer turned and saw to the west a faint, pale-pink line drawn across the horizon that grew wider and brighter with each passing minute. The storm had arrived as a harsh, Wagnerian opera curtain; its retreat now took the form of a soft coverlet being pulled off the earth. The pink at the edge of the sky became a light and then intensely cerulean blue. The margin between stormy cloud and clear air was a sharp demarcation, a crescent reaching from horizon to horizon. With amazing rapidity, it passed over them and moved swiftly away to the east. They were left in bright if not warm sunlight. The wind was growing ever brisker, but the huge waves actually seemed to be diminishing.

  “I think we just had a brush with the tail of the hurricane,” Kees said.

  “What bloody hurricane?” Major Metcalfe asked.

  “There was a hurricane on our course,” said Kees. “It must have shifted to the north. We hadn’t time to inform you.”

  Duff Cooper swore and laughed, both rebukes.

  “I speak truly,” said Kees. “It was very busy on the bridge. On the entire ship. In any event, our situation improves. Excuse me.”

  He left his seat and went to the wheelhouse, making Mrs. Simpson move so he could retrieve his Very pistol and a box of flares. With much indignation at being moved, she left that sanctuary and took a seat outside near the others, rewrapping herself in her blanket. Spencer recalled that someone, Chips, probably, had told him she was highly claustrophobic. She was probably relieved to be out of the box that was the wheelhouse, now that it was day and the sun was shining.

  Kees loaded the pistol and fired it with a loud report. The flare arced into the limitless blue and exploded in a ball of flung spark and flame. In such clear air, it could doubtless be seen for miles and miles.

  “I will fire one every half hour,” Kees said. “We have two boxes of flares. I think, with this improving weather, they will not all be necessary.”

  Count von Kresse had gone to talk to Edwina Mountbatten. Neither his sister nor Edwina’s husband objected, or paid much notice. The countess, staring down at the floorboards, seemed quite oblivious to everything. After Parker’s drowning, all aboard the motorboat had become subdued.

  Dagne, however, little moved by Parker’s pathetic passing, was feeling bitter and frustrated, made as unhappy by the improving weather as the others had been cheered. Rescue would mean an end to everything—a different ship, different circumstances, doubtless separation from the prince and his party. Their task would be impossible. And depending on what happened to the Wilhelmina, bearing Herr Braun’s blond body, she might shortly find herself being locked away in a jail cell.

  She could at least still succeed in their mission. Their only hope lay in the few hours that likely remained before they were found, if even hours there were.

  It made her so furious. The whole future of the Reich could be decided here in this small boat—indeed, perhaps, had to be decided here. But she could do nothing. She could think of nothing that could be done. Her brother was no help at this point. He was more an obstacle than an ally. She had her pistol, with five shells still in the magazine, but
to even think of using it was madness. Look what had happened the last time she had resorted to this weapon.

  She envisioned herself, standing with the gun, ordering Mrs. Simpson over the side as some American western movie badman might order passengers out of a stagecoach. Dagne began to laugh. It did not ease her anger.

  “I think we should have more of the wine,” Spencer said, “and try to be as cheerful as we can.”

  “Jolly well right,” said Duff.

  “Is there something better than that dreadful swill we had last night?” asked the prince, who had joined Mrs. Simpson. “It was Belgian, wasn’t it? Flemish stuff. Is there nothing French? The French are all a pack of Jews, but they have mastered the art of the grape.”

  Duff and Spencer hauled out a box that proved to be a case of red wine, the last aboard, though there was some brandy and several cases of Dutch beer. When it came turn to fill his tin cup with wine, the prince made a face but accepted the stuff. He drank thirstily enough.

  Mrs. Simpson had none of it. She looked up with much irritation when the Countess von Kresse took a seat beside her.

  “Did you know poor Herr Parker in Baltimore?” Dagne asked.

  Mrs. Simpson looked both offended and alarmed.

  “No,” she said. “My mother knew his mother. She’s quite prominent. As was my own family. In Maryland.”

  “Yes,” said Dagne. “Your family was in the hotel business?”

  “What?”

  “Didn’t you own a hotel? Or a Gasthaus? Excuse me, a guest house?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Mrs. Simpson looked about frantically. The prince was sipping his wine, thinking upon some absorbing matter, inexcusably inattentive to her. There was no place Wallis could go on the boat without the countess following her if she wished. There was no escape.

  “Didn’t you have paying guests in your house?” Dagne persisted. “Boarders? Herr Parker said this.”

  The prince remained distracted. The countess’s gray-blue eyes had a wild gleam to them. Wallis could not understand what had provoked this assault.