by Alan Furst
He gripped the Walther firmly and thought no surprises, please. No stubborn captain who took the care and protection of his cargo as a sacred trust—no fanatics, no heroes. De Milja moved quickly, from the shadows of the jetty to the first step of an iron gangway covered with tattered canvas that climbed ten feet to the deck. On deck, he went down on one knee. Deserted, he thought. Only the creak of old iron plates as the ship rose and fell, and the grating of the hawser cable as it strained against its post on the jetty below. The smell was even stronger here, his eyes were tearing. De Milja listened intently, heard, no, didn’t hear. Yes, did. Bare feet on iron decking. Then a voice—a native of the Dutch East Indies speaking British English—very frightened and very determined. “Who is there?” A pause. “Please?”
De Milja ran, low to the deck, and flattened himself against the base of a cargo crane. From here he could see a silhouette, standing hunched over, a few feet from the open door of the deck cabin, peering about, head moving left, then right. In one hand, a long shape. What? A rifle? It occurred to de Milja to point the Walther at the man and blaze away but he knew two things—he wouldn’t hit him, and somebody, even in the tense, hushed interlude between bombing attacks, would hear a pistol shot and just have to stir up French or German security to go and see what it was all about.
De Milja stepped out where the man could see him, extended the pistol, and called, “Stand still.”
The silhouette froze. De Milja worked out the next phrase in his uncertain English. “Let fall.” He waggled the pistol once or twice, there followed the clatter of an object dropped on the iron deck. Whatever it was, it didn’t sound like a rifle. He approached the man. He was young, wearing only a pair of cotton pants cut off below the knee and a cloth tied around his forehead. De Milja stooped cautiously, retrieved what the man had dropped: a wooden club. “Others?” he said.
“There are none, sir. No others,” the man said. “Just me. To keep the watch.”
De Milja lowered the pistol. The watchman smiled, then made a certain motion with his hands and shoulders. Whatever you want, it meant, to me it’s not worth dying for.
De Milja nodded that he understood. The young man had a family, in Sumatra or Java somewhere, and if circumstance carried him to the ends of the earth where people had gone mad, well, it was their war, not his.
At first, he didn’t know how to do what de Milja needed but he knew where to look, and from there the solution to the problem was evident. Raise the large, metal arm beside the box to its up position, then move around the Malacca Princess, find its various equipment, for loading and anchorage and warning and identifying other ships and just about anything you could think of, and throw all those switches to the on position.
Then wait.
“Your things,” de Milja said.
“Sir?”
De Milja pointed to his own pants, shirt, wallet, pistol. The man nodded vigorously and together they went below while he collected a small bundle, then moved back to the main deck.
Where they waited. The ship rocked gently and creaked, the nearby harbor felt deserted. In the dock area, activity continued; trucks, visible even with taped headlights, moving invasion matériel to be loaded onto barges. By 1:30, de Milja began to worry. What if the British had taken too many losses and decided to halt operations for the night? No, it wasn’t possible.
It wasn’t. At 1:50, the air-raid sirens began to wail, all along the wharf and from the city of Calais. De Milja smiled at the watchman, and pointed at the sky. The man nodded, returned the smile, tight and conciliatory. He understood fighting very well, he understood that de Milja was in the act of fighting; a sort of noble privilege. He just wasn’t all that pleased to have been drawn into it—no insult intended, sir.
Poor Charles Grahame, not much success in life. Still young, but the pattern was set. Public school with a name that made people say “Where?” A year at the University of Edinburgh, a year at the Scottish Widows Assurance Society in the City of London. Then, war on the way, an attempt to join the RAF. Well, yes, of course, what they needed just then were meteorologists.
So he joined the Royal Navy, and with grit and determination worked his way into the naval aviator school. He got through it, assigned to the aircraft carrier HMS Avenger.
Not to fly fighter-bombers, oh no, not Charley. Tall and gangly, curly hair that wouldn’t stay, ears like jug handles, freckles everywhere, and a silly grin. The headmaster of his school used to say that God didn’t quite get around to finishing Charles.
The Royal Navy assigned him to fly the Swordfish torpedo plane.
The Swordfish was a biplane—top and bottom wing and a fixed wheel—that looked like a refugee from World War I. It carried a single torpedo, slung beneath the cockpit. “Quite serviceable, though,” the flight instructor said. Its airspeed was 150 miles an hour. “But it will get you there, eventually,” the flight instructor said. Saying to himself immediately thereafter now whether or not it will get you home is entirely another matter.
Not much talent as a pilot. Charles’s method of achievement was to learn the rules and follow them to the letter. Do this, then do this, then do that. A different age might have found this approach greatly to its liking but, bad luck, Charles lived at a moment when spontaneity, the daring solution, and the flash of genius were particularly in fashion.
The carrier HMS Avenger was steaming in circles in Aldeburgh Bay in the first hours of 17 September, just after midnight. Charles Grahame climbed into the open cockpit beneath the top wing and his gunner/torpedo-man, Sublieutenant Higbee, sat in the gunner’s cockpit behind him. They took off, then turned south, in a formation of six Swordfish assigned to attack Calais harbor.
The formation hugged the coastline, protected by coastal antiaircraft defenses. A single ME-109 might have done for all of them, so hiding, down at six thousand feet, was their best—in fact their only— defense. The night was warm and still, moonlight turned the clouds to silver and sparkled on the water below the planes. They flew past navigation beams at Shoeburyness and Sheerness, then turned east at Herne Bay, headed for Margate.
At Margate, a rendezvous with a flight of Hurricanes, well above them somewhere, godlike, lords of the high cloud. The Hurricane squadron leader came on his radio moments later. “Hullo Hector, hullo Hector. This is Jupiter, we’re above you right now, and we’re going to keep you company on the way to destination. Radio silence from here on, but we did want to wish you good hunting. Roger and out.”
Charles Grahame knew that voice, it had a mustache and it drove a Morgan and its friends called it Tony and it got the girl and, really, worst of all, it knew it. Oh well, he told himself. Just get on with it. Not everybody could be lord of the manor.
Coming into the Strait of Dover, the Germans started shooting at them. Puffs of antiaircraft burst that hung in the air like painted smoke. Something tossed the Swordfish’s port-side wings in the air, and something else flicked the plane’s tail. Charles worked the controls to see if they still responded, and they did, as much as they ever did.
The Swordfish flight attacked in a three-and-three configuration, Charles the wingman on the left in the first wave. Higbee yelled “Good luck, Charley,” above the singing of the wind in the struts, his voice at nineteen a high tenor. Then all hell broke loose—somebody down there took Charley Grahame pretty damn seriously after all because they tried to kill him. Tracer streamed past the cockpit, flak burst everywhere, a bullet hit the fuselage with an awful tinny rattle. “Easy does it,” Charles said to himself. Now he concentrated on doing what he’d been taught. Step One, the approach. Well, they’d managed that well enough. Step Two, acquire the target. By now Higbee should be ready to fire. But Charles couldn’t see a thing. Not a bloody thing. He was whipping along, three hundred feet above the water, below him, theoretically, the harbor at Calais. But what he could see was a dark, confused blur, the moon lit up water here and there, but it meant nothing to Charles. He’d been instructed to attack a troop t
ransport, or, almost as good, a tugboat. A barge, which could carry eight hundred tons of supplies, was a very desirable third choice. But Charles couldn’t find a harbor, a city, or indeed anything at all. Probably it was France, probably . . .
Good heavens!
Right in the middle of the torpedo run, somewhere over on his left, a ship had lit up like a Christmas tree; cabin lights, searchlights, docking lights, navigation lights—and in the muddy darkness of the blacked-out coast it looked, somehow, celestial. Higbee and Charles both gasped. “Hold fire!” Charles yelled and threw the Swordfish into a tight left bank that made the plane shudder. Higbee had, just at that moment, been about to fire, a shot that would have sent a torpedo on its way to harrowing a mighty groove in the Protestant cemetery of Calais.
“Is it a trick?” Higbee’s voice was dangerously close to soprano now but Charles never noticed. A trick! No, damn it, it wasn’t a trick. That was a ship and he’d been reliably informed that this was Calais and his job was to shoot a ship in Calais and now that was exactly what he meant to do. To which end, he traversed the city of Calais, drawing the fire of every antiaircraft gun in the place but, somehow, the Swordfish was too big and slow to hit.
Charles did it right—one-two-three right. Got enough distance away from the target before circling back, and adjusting his altitude to one hundred feet. The ship grew, bigger and bigger as they plunged toward it, its lights twinkled, then glared brightly. At the end it seemed enormous, a vast, glowing city. “Torpedo away!” Higbee screamed, his voice wobbly with excitement. The plane bucked, then, freed of weight, accelerated. Charles pulled back on the stick, his training calling out climb, climb.
Emerging from a blizzard of lights and tracer and cannon fire, the clumsy Swordfish worked its way upward through the thin night air. Then, suddenly, Charles felt the plane quiver and he was, for an instant, blinded. A flash, so intense and white it lit the clouds, and seemed to flicker, like lightning. Now you’re shot, he thought. But he was wrong. The plane had been hammered, not by a shell but by a concussive blast.
Higbee had actually hit something.
He had hit the Malacca Princess, in its final moments a shining beacon in the harbor at Calais. The torpedo had done what it was supposed to do—run straight through the water, found its target, penetrated the rusty old plate amidships and, there, detonated. Causing the explosion, almost simultaneously, of the Malacca Princess’s cargo: a hundred thousand gallons of volatile naphtha.
Now you could see Calais.
The Malacca Princess burned to the waterline in a half-hour— actually it melted—burned like a dazzling white Roman candle, burned so bright it lit up every troop transport and tugboat and barge in the harbor.
25 October 1940.
Only one couple at the auberge by the sea at Cayeux. They used to come up here from Paris in the autumn, the secret couples, park their cars so the license plates couldn’t be seen from the road, register as Monsieur and Madame Duval.
But, with the war, only one couple this year. They didn’t seem to mind the barbed wire, and they didn’t try to walk on the cliffs—where the German sentries would have chased them away. This couple apparently didn’t care. They stayed in the room—though that quite often happened at the auberge at Cayeux—and what with all that staying in the room, they brought sharp appetites to the dinner table in the evening, and enough ration coupons so that no awkward explanations had to be made.
They made love, they ate dinner at the table in the bow window, they watched the sea, they paid cash. It made the owner feel sentimental. How nice life used to be, he thought.
The flan was made with fresh eggs from a nearby farm, and de Milja and Genya cleaned the plate quite shamelessly, then lit cigarettes. The waiter—also the owner and the cook; his wife did the accounts and made the beds—came to the table and said, “Will Monsieur and Madame take a coffee?”
De Milja said they would.
While it was being made they looked out the window at the sea. Long, slow rollers ran into the shore, white spray flying off the crests in the driving wind. The dark water exploded as it hit the rocks at the base of the cliff, a pleasant thunder if you were warm and dry and having dinner.
“One wouldn’t want to be out there now,” Genya said. She was in a sadder-but-wiser mood that evening, and it made her voice melancholy. What she’d said was normal dinner conversation, but the reference was deeper; to German invasion fleets, to the victory won by the British.
“No,” de Milja said. “It’s no time of year for boating.”
She smiled at that. Canotage, he’d said. A word that summoned up the man in straw hat and woman in frock, her hand trailing idly in the river as they floated past a lily pad.
Genya’s cigarette glowed as she inhaled. She let the smoke drift from her nostrils. “Probably,” she said, “you haven’t heard about Freddi Schoen.”
“Freddi.” De Milja smiled.
“His friend Jünger was leaving Paris and he took me to lunch. Freddi won an Iron Cross. To do with a naval exercise off the Belgian coast somewhere. There was disaster and he took command and, and—did all sorts of things, Jünger’s French didn’t really last through the whole story. But he was very brave, and they gave him a medal. Posthumously.”
“I always wondered,” de Milja said, “why the Freddi Schoens of Germany didn’t do something about Hitler before he maneuvered them into war.”
“Honor,” Genya said. “If I’m allowed only one word.”
The waiter came with coffee, real coffee, very hard to get in Paris these days unless you bought on the black markets.
“We’re not serving sugar tonight,” the waiter explained.
“Oh, but we don’t take sugar,” Genya said.
The waiter nodded appreciatively—a gracious and dignified lie, well told, was a work of art to a man who understood life.
The coffee was very good. They closed their eyes when they drank it. “I’ve learned to like small things now,” de Milja said. “War did that, at least.”
When he looked up from his coffee the light of the candles caught the ocean color in his eyes and she took his hand on top of the table and held it tight.
“You are to be loved,” she said with a sigh. “No doubt of that.”
“And you,” he said.
She shook her head; he’d got it wrong there.
Late that night it rained hard, water streamed down the windows and the sound of the sea was muffled as it broke against the cliff. It was cold and damp in the room. De Milja opened an armoire and found an extra blanket, then they wrapped themselves up and began to make love. “We’re on a boat,” she whispered. “Just us. In the middle of the sea. And now it’s a storm.”
“Then we better hang on to what’s valuable,” he said.
She laughed. “I’ve got what I want.”
Some time later he woke up and saw that her eyes were shining. She caught him staring and said, “See what you did?” He got himself untangled from the coarse sheet and moved next to her. Her skin was very hot. Then she wiped at her eyes with her fingers. “I hope you love me, whatever happens,” she said.
The letter came a week later. He was sitting at a table in a tiny apartment. She had gone to Switzerland, she would be married when she got there. Please forgive her, she would love him forever.
He read the letter again, it didn’t say anything new the second time. He was changing his identity—once again—that week. Becoming someone else in order to do whatever they wanted him to do next, and papers were always a part of that. Still, poor old Lezhev might have lasted out another month if he’d been careful with him. But de Milja ached inside, so the passport and the work permit and all the rest of it went into the blackened little stove that sat in the corner of the room. There was no heat, it was snowing out, the papers burned in a few minutes, and that was the end of it.
Now he was valuable.
And when they brought him out, to neutral Spain, he was handled very carefully. De
Milja knew what it took—people and money and time—and stood off and marveled a little at what they thought him worth. The finest papers, delivered by courier. An invitation to dinner at the chateau of Chenonceaux, a castle that spanned the river Cher, which happened to be the boundary between German-occupied France and Vichy France. He arrived at eight, had a glass of champagne, strolled to the back of the grand house, and found a fisherman and a small boat on the other side of the river. Then a truck, then a car, then a silent, empty hotel in the hills above Marseilles, then a fishing boat after midnight.
No improvisation now.
Now he was the Poles have someone in Paris, also known as I can’t tell you how I know this, or forgive me, Colonel, but I must ask you
to leave the room. Or maybe he was Proteus or whatever code name they’d stuck on him—he was not to know. This kind of attention made him uncomfortable. First of all it was dangerous—he had learned, since 1939, how not to be noticed, so it had become second nature with him to fade away from attention, and he’d gotten so he could sense it feeling for him.
Second of all, he didn’t like to be managed, or controlled, and that, with some delicacy, was exactly what they were doing. And third, all this was based on the assumption that he was good, and that wasn’t quite the word for it. He was, perhaps, two things: unafraid to die, and lucky so far—if they had an unafraid-to-die-and-lucky-so-far medal, he would take it.
He and the watchman, for instance, sprinting for their lives down the slippery jetty, had survived by sheer, eccentric chance. Burning planes zooming over their heads, antiaircraft fallback, then a shattering explosion that cut the Malacca Princess’s neighbor, the Nicaea, in half and showered down burning metal. They jumped into the harbor, like reasonable men anywhere, where bits and pieces of tramp freighter steamed as they hit the water. When German and French police ran by, cursing and with guns drawn, they ducked below the water. Who wouldn’t? Later, in the jumble of streets around the docks, he and the watchman knew it was time for them to go their separate ways. De Milja shook his hand, and the man smiled, then ran like the wind. All this wasn’t, to de Milja’s way of thinking, definable by the word good.