by Alan Furst
“Taken,” the sergeant said. “Something took ’em, yes, that’s about it, isn’t it.”
At last, a gulley, where mounds of gray rags lay amid tangled wire in a few inches of water. The survivors of the whole bloody mess, DeHaan realized, soaked and exhausted, with a manned Bren at either end. At the middle of it, the lieutenant struggled to sit upright. “Well, damned glad to see you,” he said, a smile on his dead-white face. One pant leg had been sheared off and his hand was pressed against a bandage wrapped around his thigh. “We will need a lift,” he said, apologizing for the inconvenience. Silently, DeHaan counted the men in the gulley—eleven—and realized they could manage with one boat. The lieutenant saw what he was doing and said, “Four dead, five missing, including the major, I’m afraid, and two so badly wounded we had to leave them.”
DeHaan knew there’d been twenty, plus Sims, and thought he’d miscounted, until he discovered a German officer in with the rest, lying on his side with his hands tied behind his back. Sitting next to him, his guard, one of those teenaged soldiers who looked thirteen—a pinched face, out of some Victorian slum, spattered with blood. On the floor of the gulley, broken aerials, steel boxes with dials and gauges, each of them trailing snarls of copper wire, and two concave disks—one a parabolic mirror with a cracked face—about three feet wide. Some or all of it bolometers, DeHaan thought.
“Looks like you got what you came for,” he said.
The lieutenant nodded. “And a Jerry. Technician, from the insignia on him.” DeHaan could just make out the pinion wheel of an engineering officer on the man’s sleeve. “So a good raid, if we make it back. Could’ve been cleaner, of course, but they had a little protective force, French officers and Tunisian troops, and they just had to make a fight of it. Didn’t last long, but . . .” In the sky, a distant whine, and all the men looked up as it grew louder, then faded into the distance.
“Fucker’s back,” one of the men said.
“He knows we’re down here,” the lieutenant said. “We cut their telephone lines but we didn’t get the radio, not right away. And one of the officers shot off a couple of flares.”
“Last thing he did,” the sergeant said.
“We don’t know who he was signaling,” the lieutenant said, “but we took fire from a second unit as we left. So, they’re out there, somewhere.”
DeHaan looked at his watch. Maybe an hour until daybreak, he thought. Using his Sten as a cane, the lieutenant got to his feet. DeHaan and his crew took a share of the captured apparatus, DeHaan carrying two of the metal boxes. One of them had been smashed in the middle, as though someone had tried to disable it with a rifle butt, and the glass in the gauges was shattered. On top of the control panel was a brass plate with a trademark, Zeiss, and, below that, WRMEPEILGERT 60.
The trek back to the beach was slow, hard work; the lieutenant, and one of his men, needed help in order to walk and DeHaan, near the head of the column, looked at his watch more than once. The magic boxes were light at first but grew heavier over time, while the wind strengthened with the approach of dawn and the chill left his hands and feet numb and settled deep inside him. When they heard the plane they stopped, the sergeant, moving ahead of the column as scout, holding up a hand until it passed. Would the pilot see the darkened Noordendam, anchored off the coast? DeHaan couldn’t find a way to believe he wouldn’t. But, so far, no explosions from that direction. Surely, he thought, that would happen at daybreak, when the real fighter planes would be up and hunting.
A silent march, except for the men who swore as they fell, and it took forever to cross the wadi, where the water was now well above their knees. At one point, after circling the cliff, they found themselves in a strange corridor between narrowing sandstone walls, and the sergeant had them turn around and go back.
DeHaan was watching him, about fifty feet ahead, when one of the men, who must have gone the wrong way when they doubled back, stepped between them. A man he didn’t recall seeing, all those days on the ship, which was very odd, because he certainly had his own, rather flamboyant, style. But, after all, commandos, a special breed. This one wore a heavy beard, had a cloth attached to the back of a kepi and a long rifle slung on his shoulder. The man looked up, saw DeHaan, and, for a moment, they both stared.
Suddenly, from behind, a loud whisper, “Get down you fucking cheesehead.” What? A name stuck to Dutchmen, so it must be him. He started to turn around, then flinched as a Sten fired off and something whizzed past his ear. Now he went down, fumbling beneath the oilskin for the Browning. Somebody else fired as DeHaan turned back to look for the bearded man but he’d vanished. Kepi, French Foreign Legion. He managed to get the pistol free and worked the slide to arm it as men ran past him and somebody yelled, “Get him, Jimmy.” Another burst, where he couldn’t see, and another, which produced an indignant roar, as though somebody’d had his foot stepped on. Indignation ended abruptly by a third, very short, burst.
“They’re over there.”
They were. Stuttering flashes and French shouts and a thousand bees. DeHaan pointed the Browning toward the gunfire and pulled the trigger, shells ejecting past his cheek until they stopped. A few seconds later, silence. Then the metallic snap of magazines being replaced and the voice of the sergeant. “Right, then. Hop it.” One of those wizards with a mystical sense of direction, DeHaan thought, hoped, he now led them off down some new path.
A bizarre procession. The lieutenant hobbling along with his Sten-gun cane, his helper pulling him by the elbow, the German prisoner—a balding clerk, squinting as though he’d lost his glasses—hurried along by a commando at his side, behind them a man with a Bren in one hand while the other dragged the parabolic mirror, which bounced along the slippery rock as he ran low to the ground. DeHaan followed, trying to free the empty clip from the Browning with one hand as he trotted past Patapouf, who lay on his back, arms flung wide, staring up at the rain. DeHaan knelt by his side, reached for the pulse in his neck with two fingers. The commando behind him took a handful of DeHaan’s oilskin and hauled him to his feet. “Gone to God, sir. Leave him be.”
“Patapouf,” DeHaan said. Fatso. The immense stupidity of it clouded his vision.
“I know, sir. Can’t be helped.” A thick accent, high-pitched voice, the teenager with the pinched face. “He stood up to fire, see, and you oughtn’t to do that.”
DeHaan picked up the Enfield and the boxes.
Then, reluctantly, he began to run.
IN ADMIRALTY SERVICE
20 MAY. ALEXANDRIA.
Room 38 in the Hotel Cecil, on the Ras el Tin seafront.
Demetria. She was, she said, Levantine, of Greek origin, and, hair, eyes, and spirit, dark in every way. By day, the headmistress of a school for young women, “very prim and decorous, with uniforms.” But—she’d looked at him a certain way—she wasn’t really like that. The look deepened. Not at all.
True. Freed of her daily life, and a stiff linen suit, her underwear buried somewhere in the tumbled sheets of the hotel bed, she lay back in her flesh, luxuriant, legs comfortably apart—the color the French called rose de dessous casually revealed—and smoked with great pleasure. Black, oval cigarettes with gold rims, and heavy perfume. Idly, she played with the smoke—let it drift from her mouth, then, with little puffs, sent white whorls rolling up to the plaster medallion on the ceiling. “It shames me to say it,” she said, “but I smoke only in secret.”
Something shamed her? DeHaan lay at her feet, across the bed, propped on an elbow. “I won’t tell,” he said.
Her smile was tender. “I was truly proper, you know, once upon a time. Then, my husband went and died on me, poor soul, when I was thirty-eight.” She shrugged, exhaled, puffed at the smoke. “These Greek communities, Odessa, Beirut, Cairo, are very straitlaced, if you are of a certain class. So, wickedness is a problem. Which is strange in this city—it’s very free here, for certain people, but not for someone like me. I did have a few, suitors, for a time, even a matchmaker. Oh D
emetria, for you this gentleman of decent means, completely respectable, la-la-la. No, no, not for me.”
“No,” he said, “not for you.”
“It’s better with the war, God forgive me for saying it, live tonight for tomorrow you die, but, even so, chri, that moment just now was my first petit mort in a long while.” She sighed, and stubbed the cigarette out in an ashtray on the night table.
It was quiet in the room, the wash of the sea on the wall of the Corniche very faint and distant. She lay back on the pillow and raised her heels, inviting him into the parlor. DeHaan slid himself up the bed until he was close to her. From here, a better view, one that proved to be of heightened interest as the seconds ticked by. So, closer still.
“Yassou,” she said.
What? No matter, he couldn’t answer.
Gently, she wove her fingers into the hair on the back of his head. “Oh my dear”—meant to be insouciant but her breath caught on the word—“there too.”
He stared up at the medallion on the ceiling as she snored beside him, one heavy leg thrown over his. Nymphs up there, two, three—five! Should he turn off the lamp? No, darkness woke people up. And he was content to lie still, pleasantly sore, and a little light-headed, as though cured of a malady he didn’t know he’d had. Petit mort, she’d said, the little death, a polite French euphemism for it. Yes, well. A few days earlier, steaming away from Cap Bon, he’d been close to the grand mort, not at all polite.
Headed for the British naval base at Alexandria, over a thousand nautical miles to the east, a four-day voyage, with luck; they would move from the air shadow of the Axis bases to that of the RAF, so the greatest danger lay in the first forty-eight hours. But it was only an hour after daybreak, as he was beginning to think that maybe they’d gotten away with it, that the French showed up. Late, but with panache. A patrol boat, sleek and steely, a handsome bow wave telling the world how fast she was.
A long way from help, they did what they could. The lieutenant had Mr. Ali send a cluster of ciphered numbers, while the commandos, with two Brens and a scoped rifle, waited just below deck. Vain hopes, DeHaan knew, a sea battle didn’t work like that. Amado was readied, sober as could be and scared witless, but the French were in no mood for dithering. Coming up astern of the Noordendam, they ran up the signal flag SN—international code for “Stop immediately. Do not scuttle. Do not lower boats. Do not use the wireless. If you disobey I shall open fire on you.”
Well, that was clear. “Ignore them,” he told the lookouts.
The engines stayed on Full — Ahead while the lookouts swept the forward horizon, but such petulance was not to be taken seriously. There was a snarl from the French loud-hailer, thirty seconds allowed for compliance, then the slow, heavy drumming of a big machine gun and an arc of red tracer that curved gracefully a foot over the bridge. a va?
“Stop engines.”
The patrol boat, bristling with aerials, carrying a cannon on the foredeck and paired machine guns, moved cautiously to come up beside them. “To port, Cap’n.” The lookout sounded puzzled. “At ten o’clock. Some kind of . . . it’s a seaplane.”
DeHaan used his binoculars. It was big and ungainly in the gray sky, cabin hung below a broad wing with fat pontoons, the whine of its engine rising above the bass rumble of the freighter. Friend or foe? An AB came charging up the ladderway onto the bridge. “The lieutenant wants to start shooting.”
“Tell him ‘not yet.’”
As the AB ran off, the patrol boat accelerated to full power, and DeHaan turned to see it making a wide sweep, heeled over with the speed of its turn and, plainly, running away. From what? Not a French plane, a British Sea Otter, a graceless workhorse but armed with .303 machine guns, and more than a match for the patrol boat, now seen as a white wake in the distance. The Sea Otter did not pursue—shooting up the patrol boat would have produced fighter planes from Bizerta, and that was a battle no one, at least that morning, wanted. So then, let us agree to disagree.
Instead, the Sea Otter circled above the Noordendam and, clumsy as it was, tilted itself left and right, which at least suggested, to the waving crew below, a jubilant waggle of the wings. As it left, flying due north, DeHaan understood that it could only have come from a destroyer, watching them on radar from over the horizon, and receiving their radio signal. A poor man’s aircraft carrier—lowering its seaplane to the water for takeoff, then hauling it back up after a landing at sea. DeHaan ran his binoculars across the northern horizon. Empty, nothing to be seen. Still, they were out there somewhere, the Royal Navy, themselves in dangerous waters, keeping watch on their boxes and wires.
She woke, slightly damp, and sent him to open the window. A warm night, the sea dead calm, some cloud, some stars, and the silence of a darkened city in time of war.
“What time is it?” she said.
He went to look at his watch on top of the bureau, said “Ten after three,” and returned to the window, conscious of her eyes following him as he walked across the room.
“How lovely, I was afraid I’d slept too long.” She leaned over and turned off the lamp, got out of bed and came up behind him, skin lightly touching his, and reached around his waist.
“In front of the window?”
“Why not? Nobody can see me.”
Everywhere, her touch was light as air, and he closed his eyes. “I don’t think you mind being teased,” she whispered. “No, I don’t think you do. Of course, if you do, you must tell me. Or, even, if you don’t mind, you may tell me that. May say, ‘Demetria, I like you to do this to me,’ or maybe there are other things, you need only say them, I am a very understanding sort of person.”
Later, back in bed, he asked, “What did it mean—the Greek word you said?”
“Yassou?”
“Yes.”
“Means ‘hello.’”
“Oh.”
They were quiet for a time, then she said, “Are you married, Eric?”
“I’m not,” he said. “I almost was, when I was twenty, just out of the naval college. I was engaged, to a nice girl, very pretty. We were in love, most of the way, anyhow, enough, and she was willing to be the wife of a sailor—never at home, but . . . I didn’t.”
He’d grown up amid the families of merchant officers, the wives eternally alone, raising children, knitting miles of sweaters. He was often in their homes—perfectly kept, the air thick with the smells of wax and cooking, and thick also with sacrifice, absence, clocks ticking in every room. And, in the end, though he couldn’t say what else he wanted, he knew it wasn’t that.
“And your family?”
“In Holland, my mother and sister. I can only hope they are surviving the occupation. I can’t contact them.”
“Can’t?”
“Mustn’t. The Germans read everything, and they don’t like families with relatives in the free forces. Better, especially for someone like me, not to remind them you exist. They are vengeful, you know, will bring people in for questioning, lower their rations, force them to move.”
“Still, at least they are in Holland. The Dutch are decent people, I think, with sensible politics.”
“Most, but not all. We have our Nazis.”
“Everyone has some, chri, like cockroaches, you see them only at night. And, if they come out in daylight, then you know you have to do something about it.”
“More than some. There is a Dutch Nazi party. Its symbol is a wolf trap.”
She thought about it, then said, “How utterly horrible.”
He nodded.
“And you? Perhaps a bit to the left?”
“Not much of anything, I’m afraid.” This was no time to talk about the unions, the Comintern, the brutality—the knives and iron pipes—of politics on the docks. “I believe in kindness,” he said. “Compassion. We don’t have a party.”
“You’re a Christian?” she said. “You seem to, ah, like the bed a little too much for that.”
“Small c perhaps. Actually, as master of a sh
ip, I have to give a sermon on Sunday morning. Pure agony, for me, telling people what to do. Be good, you evil bastards, or you’ll fry in hell.”
“You actually say such things?”
“I’d rather not, but it’s in the book we use. So, I mumble.”
“You have a good heart,” she said, “God help you.” She put a hand on his face, turned it toward her and kissed him, a warm kiss for being who he was, and for what would become of him.
He wondered, later on, about this conversation. Was it just conversation, or something more? Interrogation? Of a sort? Bare-assed, perhaps, but, even so, revealing. His life, his politics, who he was. That did hurt him, that idea, since for a time, while she was asleep, his heart ached because dawn would turn them into pumpkins. Why could not this be his usual life? People did live such lives, why was his fate different? Because it was, period. And not so bad; there was, at least, the occasional amour, the chance encounter. But was it chance? Stop, he told himself, you think too much. Lovers ask questions, nothing new there. But meeting her was, well, fortuitous, and he had come to understand, after only a few weeks and the barest touch of experience, that a clandestine world was corrosive in just that way. It made you wonder.
And it was certainly true that, only an hour after he docked at the port of Alexandria, they were after him. First a staff intelligence officer, a captain, sweating in a little office. Thanking him for what he’d done, then asking him to write out a description of what had happened, a report. This was conventional, the captain said, and, if he didn’t mind, he could do the bloody thing right now and they’d chat about it and that would be that.
But that wasn’t that. Because just as they finished, there appeared a sort of Victorian apparition, a phantom materialized from the halcyon days of the British Empire. Heavy and red-faced, with china-blue eyes and an enormous, white, handlebar mustache, and even a hyphenated name—Something-Somethington—followed by “Call me Dickie, everybody does!”