by Alan Furst
Refuge. This hour in his cabin as the sun came up was DeHaan’s night, but he rarely used it for sleep. That came beyond dawn, for three hours, before he went back to the bridge for his eight-to-twelve. He was used to it—sleeping again in the afternoon—and he’d somehow found a way to like it, which, according to the way he’d been raised anyhow, was pretty much the secret of life. He shifted for new comfort on the narrow bunk and stared at the dark porthole at the other end of the cabin.
Not far. The refuge, in steel painted gray, was ten by twelve: a bunk with drawers beneath it, a wardrobe with small desk attached, chair bolted to the floor, sink and toilet in a small alcove behind a curtain. There was a two-shelf bookcase fixed to the bulkhead, the wall, above the desk, which held his forty-book library, his wind-up Victrola, and an album of records in thick paper envelopes. Beyond that, the Noordendam: the ceaseless hum and rattle of the ventilator fans, the creak of the ship as it rose from a trough, the pacing of the watch officer on the bridge above his cabin, bells on the half hour, and the engine, drumming away beneath him—let it catch its breath for one heartbeat and his blood raced before he even knew what he’d heard. And, beyond the Noordendam, the sound of the wind and the sea.
This presence, this perpetual music, in all its moods, was not to be resisted, and sent him wandering through his own life, or those in the forty-book library. The read, the unread, and the oft read. A few Dutch classics—Multatuli’s Max Havelaar and Louis Couperus—and some not so classic—a trio of military biographies and a flock of fat historical novels, which were good friends when he was too tired for anything but his native language. A Dutch translation of Shakespeare’s plays was better to look at on the shelf than to read, though he had worked through Henry V more than once, because it felt like fiction.
Conrad, of course. In whom a Polish sea captain fought a losing battle with a London literary migr. He had The Mirror of the Sea, bought in expectation of philosophy but soon abandoned, guiltily, with a promise to return and do better. The ghastly Nostromo, magnificently written but so evil and miserable in its story that it was not to be read, Heart of Darkness, which he liked, also The Secret Sharer—could that actually happen, a cabin shared?—and Lord Jim, a real sea story and a good one. One of his mother’s brothers had virtually lived the same life, except that, threatened by fire in a cargo of jute in the Malacca Straits, he hadn’t jumped, and his ship did sink, taking Uncle Theo with it.
Conrad shaded off, as DeHaan saw it, to what he really liked, adventure stories with intellectual heroes. These were not so common, but what there was he returned to again and again. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the story of a military intelligence officer, T. E. Lawrence, sent to stir up Arab rebellion against the Turks during the Great War, when Turkey fought alongside Germany. In the same way, Malraux, Man’s Fate and Man’s Hope, in English, and even Stendhal, The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma, by “the Hussar of Romanticism,” who’d fought, an officer under Napoleon, in all the desperate battles of the Russian campaign and lived to write novels. Those he had in Dutch, along with War and Peace, which could be read at the bleakest moments of life at sea and still provide, somehow, almost magically, consolation, a world away from the world.
DeHaan looked at his watch, it was almost four-thirty in the morning. He lit a cigar, and watched the drifting smoke as it rose in the air. They were running at Dead Slow now, had been for an hour, as Ratter and the bosun supervised the preparation for painting. He heard the squeak of block and tackle, shouted commands, a curse, a laugh—work under way sounded like nothing else. The porthole remained black but the edge of dawn was out there somewhere, and soon the engines would stop and he would hear the steam winches on deck and the slow, grating slide of the anchor chain as it was run out.
DeHaan ran his eye across the shelves, along the row of faded covers—books did not fare well in sea air—past the nautical almanacs, his Bowditch, The American Practical Navigator, Nicholl’s Deviation Questions and Law of Storms, past his dictionaries, to the end of the middle shelf, to the Baedeker for France, and a few novels in French. My Mother’s House, The Vagabond, Claudine in Paris, and Claudine at School.
Colette.
He was a slow reader in French, very slow, but there was a simplicity in these books, a joyous shimmer, in the words and beyond, that coaxed him along. And more. It wasn’t just the schoolgirls, kissing and petting and scheming against the headmistress—erotic in a hundred ways but nothing wrong with that—it was also the garden. The rue. The cat and the sky. It was, as DeHaan put it to himself, the perfect compass south to his north—to the cruelly practical life he had to live outside this cabin. A dream world, the winding road and its plane trees, the auberge with its rusty garden chairs on the gravel beyond the French doors.
These were not illusions. He had been there. And at the end of that road, in a lumpy bed in that auberge, Arlette had wondered why he chose to leave it. To make his money, she supposed, one had to do that. And, she said, with a melancholy twitch and wriggle to make her point, so went the sorry world. Not two years ago, he realized, the last spring before the war. He’d met her in a caf in Amsterdam—she was there with a girlfriend who knew a fellow captain—and, Noordendam in drydock in Rotterdam, they’d gone off to Paris, and then to the countryside.
His life with women had always been a victim of his life at sea—brief affairs recollected at length. Occasionally close to mercenary—gifts, whatnot—and sometimes passionate, but typically on the great plain that lay between. The last time, after parting with Arlette that spring—forever, she’d said—had been the previous October, in Liverpool, with a woman he’d met at a rather refined club for naval officers. She was an ambulance driver, a WREN, young and pink and immaculate and talkative, and so fiercely intent on pleasing him he suspected she never felt a thing. A sad evening, for him, after Arlette.
A flaming redheaded Breton, fire goddess, with a floating walk and a hot temper, a hot everything. At a crucial moment on their first night together, what his hand found pulsed, and the heat of it surprised, then inspired him. “It’s my skin,” she said later, during a brief repose, a Gauloise hanging from her heavy lips. Very white, and thin, she said, so the touch of a hand set her alight. Always? No, not always. But now. “I knew it would be like this,” she pouted, accusing him of exciting her. Of course she was flattering him, enticing him, making him her own—he knew it, and was flattered, and enticed. Still, she wasn’t lying, her skin was pale, and delicate, her grandiose behind, after lovemaking, flushed and mottled in the light of the night-table lamp.
She was, he thought, a couple of years older than he was. She worked in the shops, she said, first this job, then that, it was all the same. And she had come to Amsterdam, she more or less told him, for an adventure, bored with those men she could have met in Paris. What, he wondered, would become of her, now that the Germans occupied the city? This vision worried him; she was not a woman who would avert her eyes, was not someone who could disappear into the scenery.
The light in his porthole had turned to dawn, and when DeHaan felt the ship lose way and the anchor was let down he rose from his bed and went to take a look. They were a mile off the coast; low hills, gray sand, a light surf that broke against a cliff. He took off his shoes and sighed with pleasure, shed his shirt and trousers, and slid beneath the blanket on his bunk. He finished the cigar, tapped it out in a metal ashtray, and closed his eyes.
They’d spent two days in Paris, after the countryside, then he had to take the early train back to Holland and went alone to the station, past a market, a church, streetsweepers with a water truck. Very soft, the light in Paris, at that time of day.
As DeHaan went up to the bridge for his eight-to-twelve, the painting was fully under way, scaffolds slung over the side, ABs handling the tackle that operated the bosun’s chairs. Back at the stern, a loud splash was followed by sarcastic hoots of “Man overboard!” followed by some ripe curses from Ratter and the order to “haul th
at sonofabitch back on board, goddamnit!” Beneath a bright sky, his funnel now wore half a stripe of Spanish green—so he’d named the color—and he could see the bosun dangling up there, peering nearsightedly at the blistered iron, each stroke of the brush applied with concentrated finesse. “Fucking Rembrandt himself,” Ratter said, when DeHaan joined him.
“Not so bad.” It had been one thing to scheme about the deception, something else to actually do it. Ratter felt the same way, he guessed, but neither of them would say it. Yet. “Looks like we’re on schedule,” DeHaan added, determinedly cheerful.
He took a turn around the ship, then went down to the lower deck, where Sims had his men caring for their weapons—stripping and oiling Sten guns and two lethal-looking Brens, machine guns with small tripods on the barrel, whetstoning knives with rubber handles, loading ammunition belts. Most of the men had their shirts off, and chatted amiably as they worked. They would likely have preferred to be on the top deck, in the sunlight, but a German air patrol was always a possibility and Sims well knew it. DeHaan wished them all a good morning, then returned to the bridge, where Cornelius was waiting with his breakfast. Thickly cut bacon, almost warm, between two slabs of bread, and strong coffee. Fresh bread was produced daily on all merchant ships, and the conventional wisdom said that one got either good cooking or good baking, but the Noordendam’s cook had clearly been left out of that equation. DeHaan chewed away at his sandwich, dense and rubbery, and stared out at the empty sea.
When he was done, he strolled onto the bridge wing, coffee in one hand, and swept his binoculars along the shore. Ratter was below him, at the foot of the ladderway, and DeHaan called out, “Anything stirring, this morning?”
“One of the lookouts saw a truck, about oh-six-thirty.”
“There’s a road, up there?”
“Not on any map we have—maybe a goat track. The road goes inland.”
“What sort of truck?”
“All I saw was a dust cloud, moving north.”
DeHaan looked again, slow and careful, but there was nothing.
They were under steam by 1020. There was a cloud bank on the far horizon, but a long way west, and rain rarely came to this coast, so DeHaan felt reasonably safe. The Noordendam was no more, her name chipped and sanded off; she was now the Santa Rosa, on the bow and stern, with Valencia, her home port, added beneath the latter. It was Van Dyck’s job to change the name on the ship’s life preservers, and he would repaint them later that morning.
As they moved north, into the open sea, DeHaan had Ratter take the bridge. One final job remained—he could have ordered it done, normal practice, but, for whatever reason, he felt he had to do it himself. He went to the stern, unfolded the Spanish flag, and ran it up the low-angled mast. He’d had a look at the ship’s copy of Lloyd’s Register and he knew her checkered history. She was the ex- Kavakos–Piraeus—built at the Athenides yards in 1921—ex-Maria Vlasos–Larnaca, ex-Huittinen–Helsinki, then, at last, in 1937, Santa Rosa–Valencia, now owned by the Cardenas Steamship Company SA.
A new life, DeHaan thought, as the flag snapped and fluttered in the breeze. Ghost Ship, Section IIIA—London. Making, according to her faked manifest, for the Turkish port of Izmir, to take on a cargo of hides, baled tobacco, and hazelnuts.
9 May. Hamburg.
S. Kolb.
So he was called, on his latest passport—Mr. Nobody from the state of Nowhere. He was bald, with a fringe of dark hair, eyeglasses, a sparse mustache—a short, inconsequential man in a tired suit. He lay on a bed on the top floor of a rooming house in the Zeilerstrasse, not far from the docks, a narrow room with a window at one end. It was a warmish night, and still, and the curtains hung limp in the dead air. Outside, the city was silent, with only the intermittent call of a foghorn from the sea beyond the harbor.
S. Kolb had been in this room for ten days, most of his time spent lying on the bed, reading newspapers. This was, in general, the way he spent his life, except when he had to work, and that was only now and then, for an hour, sometimes, or twenty minutes. But he hadn’t worked at all in Hamburg, this was simply the place from which he was to go to another place. He’d worked in Dsseldorf, where he’d committed murder, and in Karlsruhe, where he’d collected a sheet of paper.
The paper, specifications for a machine, was hidden in plain sight, in a file with similar papers, in his briefcase. Nothing unusual, for a salesman of industrial machinery, supposedly working for a company in Zurich. No border guard, not even an SS officer on a Monday morning, would know that it mattered. And it actually might, he thought, though he was one of those men who had always suspected that, in the end, nothing mattered, and he’d more or less built his life on that principle.
What certainly did matter, at that moment, was a message from an Englishman called Brown. A decent, dog-and-garden sort of a name, he thought, euphonious, that implied a euphonious sort of a life—the odd revolver and lockpick aside. Of course Brown was no more his real name than S. Kolb was his, and if there was any distinction to be made, it lay in certain filing cabinets, where Brown was designated a workname, and S. Kolb an alias. Mr. Brown, a fattish, placid fellow, who hid from the world behind pipe and sweater, was just then responsible for getting S. Kolb out of Hamburg, and S. Kolb found himself wondering, for the hundredth time, just how the hell he was going to manage it.
Six days earlier, the steamship Von Scherzen had not appeared in Hamburg harbor, and while the men at the port office wouldn’t exactly say what had become of her, their faces hardened a certain way when he inquired, which suggested that she was at the bottom of the sea. But she would not, at any rate, be part of the escorted convoy of German ships which had been scheduled to sail to Lisbon. He would, they told him, have to wait for a berth on a different ship, and they deeply regretted the inconvenience.
So did he. This was difficult work, equal parts danger, discretion, and waiting, a mixture that was, to say the least, hard on the nerves. Its traditional palliatives were alcohol and sex—yet more danger and discretion required here, but one had to do something. One could go mad reading newspapers. But newspapers were, at least, safe; women were not. Of course he knew that the port of Hamburg virtually swarmed with prostitutes, one could have anything one could pay for, but many of the men who sought them out were known to be traveling alone, far from home, and such men were, especially under the present regime, of interest to the police. It was caution and discipline that had kept S. Kolb alive all these years but now he sighed miserably as he felt their chains tighten around his chest. No, he told himself, this is not for you.
Or was he, perhaps, being too hard on himself? He was, as it happened, waiting for a woman—this was the third night he had waited—and there was a bottle of apricot brandy hidden, from himself as much as anyone else, at the back of the top shelf of the room’s armoire. This woman, known only as Frulein Lena, was his single contact in Hamburg and he had gotten in touch with her when the Von Scherzen didn’t appear. She had somehow, and one could meditate at length on that somehow, signaled his predicament to Mr. Brown, and it was now her job to bring him news of a revised set of travel plans, which would reach Hamburg by means of a clandestine W/T set.
No secret radio could transmit from Germany—the Gestapo listened to all frequencies and would have a position fix on it soon enough—but coded messages could be received. This situation echoed that of ships at sea, naval and civilian, which could listen to transmissions but had, otherwise, to maintain radio silence. Some irony in this, Kolb thought, the governments of the warring nations had thereby attained a certain ideal level of supervision: one could only be instructed, one could not ask questions, one could not talk back.
So, by necessity a good soldier, he waited for orders. But he did allow himself some measure of speculation, to wit: if Frulein Lena were to come to his room with instructions for his exfiltration from this wretched city, could she not also, perchance, provide an hour of tender oblivion? Kolb closed his eyes and set his news
paper on the floor. All hail to caution, yes, but with Lena he shared a secret life—would she perhaps be amenable to a secret tryst? Did he dare to ask? She was colorless and plain, somewhere in the middle of her life, quite heavy, and thoroughly bound in corsets, her iron bulk, in his imagination, tumbling free, prodigiously sweet and plentiful, as they were—only God knew how—dismantled.
No, he did not dare. Life had taught him one lesson: trust nobody. If only he had learned that in time, he would not be in this city, in this woeful room with curtains where green knights rode across a yellow field. In the Austrian city of Lenz, his father had worked as a clerk in a bank, and the young S. Kolb, on finishing secondary school, had been installed as a junior clerk in that same bank. Where he was, a year later, found to be embezzling money, moving a small portion of the funds into an account in his own name. He was confronted, humiliated, discharged, and threatened with prosecution. His family, with terrible effort, had managed to make good on the missing money, and the police were never notified.
He had, however, not stolen the money. Someone else—he suspected a senior officer of the bank—had done it, and left a trail that led to him. This he told his parents, and they wanted to believe him, but, in their hearts, they couldn’t. Thus he learned the brutal lesson: life was governed by deceit, and by power. Not the Golden Rule, the Iron Rule. Kolb had to leave his hometown but managed, by persistence, to find a job as a clerk in one of the government ministries in Vienna. The armaments ministry, it so happened. And soon enough, in a caf on the elegant Krntner Strasse, he met a genial young woman who, in time, introduced him to a rather less genial foreign gentleman, who taught him a clever method by which he could supplement his meager salary.
That was many foreign gentlemen ago, he thought, nostalgic for his youth, those long-gone days of Mr. Hall and Mr. Harris and Mr. Hicks—tubby old Brown was a recent incumbent, having materialized, the way they did, only last January. Pleasant and mean, all of them really, explaining nothing but what was required.