by Alan Furst
And, lo and behold, they did!
Dangling helplessly between caution and lust, he’d broken to the latter, and, when Frulein Lena finally knocked at his door, long after midnight, he had invited her to share his bottle of apricot brandy. So thick, so sweet, so lethal. And, she agreed. It was quite some time before anything happened, but, when they reached the last quarter of the bottle, a polite conversation between strangers was ended by a big apricot kiss. God, she was as lonely as he was, soon enough strutting around the room in those very corsets—pink, however, not black—that had set his imagination alight. And, he did not have to dismantle them, as he’d feared, she did that herself and took her sweet time doing it as he watched with hungry eyes. And, soon enough, he was to learn that secret depravities did lurk—the same ones shared by humanity the world over but never mind, they were new and pink that night, and slowly but thoroughly explored. Even, at last, that final depravity, the most secret of them all, which lay hidden beneath the seventh veil, so-called, which is archetypically never dropped.
Well, she dropped it.
And betrayed him.
She’d met him, a few days after their night together, in a tearoom—bright yellow, with doilies and frilly curtains and everything too small, and she’d brought good news from Brown. This involved former Comintern operatives on a Latvian fishing trawler that would make an unscheduled call at the city on the twenty-seventh. He was to be spirited away by these men, ethnic Russians from the Latvian minority, and left at an Italian port—Nice, formerly French, lately Italian, and reputedly flexible for suspicious passengers, coming or going, who traveled with money. And, she was eager to report, she had a fresh, new identity for him, that old S. Kolb was getting a little shopworn, nicht wahr? These papers she would present to him, in his room. And this would take place tomorrow afternoon. At which time, her look said it all, unspeakable delights awaited him.
And, then, he knew. She’d sold him, or was about to, or was thinking about it. What, exactly, was he reading? Her eyes? Voice? Soul? He couldn’t say, but his antennae blazed, and that was all it took. And, an experienced operative, he’d learned that in the matter of flight sooner was always better. So he took her hand above the bundt cake, told her he could barely wait, might they go somewhere right away, and be, together? It took a fraction of a second before she reacted, and in that instant he shivered as though the Gestapo had stepped on his grave. “Tomorrow, my sweet,” she said.
He said he would be right back, then it was off to the toilet, lock the door, out the window, and up the alley. Maybe they were waiting for him but he didn’t think so. They would be at the hotel, tomorrow afternoon, or when he got back. Why? But he had no time for that—he scuttled up the street and ducked into an office building, where he hid in the office of an insurance brokerage—a potential client concerned that his heirs should not suffer penury. Thirty minutes later he was on his way out of town, possessions easily abandoned, as they had been in countless other hotels. In his profession, one didn’t keep things.
But really, why? He didn’t know. Maybe she’d been theirs from the beginning, maybe it was just that day, maybe because of the weather, maybe because he’d led her into sin. Poor, helpless Frulein Lena, tempted, and seduced. He’d certainly been told and told, don’t ever do that. Well, he had, too bad, and now began a new nightmare, the nightmare of the local trains. All aboard for Buchholz, Tostedt, Rotenburg. Always locals—trolleys, if he could get them—never an express, never first-class, these were subject to constant passport controls. He slept standing up, or sitting in the corridor, packed into crowds of sweaty bodies, soldiers, workmen, housewives, Germans who, despite war and bombs and Adolf Hitler, had to go to Buchholz, or Tostedt, or Rotenburg.
Was he on a list? What had she done? Hard to betray him without betraying herself, so it had to be managed anonymously. “I think the man who calls himself S. Kolb is a spy. He stays at this address.” Well, if that was the case, he wasn’t on an important list—these we want—he was perhaps on a long list—these we want to talk to. A sea of denunciations in a state like Germany, Frulein Lena’s would be one more. Still, he couldn’t register at a hotel, he couldn’t cross a border, so he had to live on the trains. And, in time, if he were lucky, he would arrive at Stuttgart, his last-chance city.
His arm’s-length contact, for emergencies only, please. He’d memorized the wording, which had to be exact, and the procedure, which had to be scrupulously observed. So, reaching Stuttgart at last, he began:
For sale: a woman’s bicycle and a man’s bicycle, one is red, one is green, 80 reichsmarks for both. Goetz, Bernstrasse 22.
The day the listing appeared, he was to go to the local art museum, climb to the third floor and there, at twenty minutes past two in the afternoon, contemplate Ebendorfer’s Huldigung der Naxos—Homage to Naxos, a hideous, romantic rendering of a Greek shepherd, who sat cross-legged before a broken column, played his pipe, and gazed at the snowcapped mountains in the distance.
Spend ten minutes, no more, no less. Did they know, he wondered, how long ten minutes, in the company of Ebendorfer, could be? In the event, no spies came. Only two well-dressed women, who glanced at him and spoke briefly, commenting, no doubt, on his execrable taste. Poor S. Kolb; filthy, smelly, hungry, frightened, and, now, ridiculed. By three, he was on the sweet little train that chuffed its way to Tbingen.
He paid homage to Naxos again, the following day, and, once more, as a museum guard terrified him with a friendly nod, the day after that. Then, just as he was about to abandon the shepherd, a well-dressed gent appeared at his side.
“Do you admire Ebendorfer?”
“Well, I know the one in Heidelberg.”
Rescued! The two-part protocol completed. Then his savior said, “Wretched thing,” stood for a moment in perverse admiration and added, “It really is perfect, you know.”
The next day they took him to Baden-Baden, where he slept on a cot at the back of a shop. Forty-eight hours, he spent there, listening to the little bell that rang every time the door opened, to the chatter between customer and clerk, to the assertive ring of the cash register. Finally, the man from the art museum reappeared, wheeling a bicycle, and told S. Kolb he would be riding to the village of Kehl, where he was to visit a certain house near the bridge over the Rhine, and someone would take him out of Germany.
Thus, Baden-Baden. A bald little man with a fringe of hair, glasses, a sparse mustache, a tired suit, walking a bicycle through the immaculate streets—surely he did not belong in the same world with these splendid SS gods. Could he be, um, a Jew? A few irritated looks suggested precisely that but nobody said anything. Baden-Baden was for health, for vitality, for cleanliness of body and mind, by day, and gymnastics at night—Yah!—so nobody wanted to bother with scruffy S. Kolb. As long as he didn’t enter a hotel or a restaurant, he could be allowed to walk his bicycle down the street. One of them waved him along, hurry up.
This made him so nervous he climbed on the bicycle and tried to ride it. But the seat was too low and his knees stuck out, and he veered right, then left, as they laughed at him—big, hearty SS laughs. Of course he would kill most of them, in time, by means of one paper or another, but this was obviously not the moment to remind them of that. He fell only twice on the road to Kehl, where a surprise awaited him.
An eighty-year-old woman, at least that, who dressed him in the uniform of a zoo guard, hat and all, put his suit in a small valise, gave him some papers with passport photographs—close enough—then took him across the bridge into Strasbourg. She could barely walk, held on to him with one hand while the other gripped a cane, and was so bent over he had to lean down to hear her when she spoke. “They don’t bother me at the border, and they won’t bother you.” And they didn’t, as he helped mother cross into France. Still, his heart fluttered as they waited on line, the old woman knew it, and squeezed his arm. “Oh calm down,” she said.
Once past the control—very casual, for them, she said she would
take the train back, and he tried to thank her for what she’d done but she wasn’t interested in gratitude. “The bastards killed my son,” she said, “and this is my way of thanking them.” He saw her off on the train to Kehl, then went looking for his sort of hotel.
It was different here, he always noticed it right away, it smelled different. Because, here in Strasbourg, it was still France—despite the decrees that followed the surrender of 1940, the province of Alsace returned to German statehood. Still France—despite occupation, despite Vichy, despite its own police, who could be as bad as the Gestapo and worse. Still France—where escape was always possible. That’s what made it France.
31 May. Algeciras, Spain.
It took three hours to cross the Strait of Gibraltar, Tangier to the port of Algeciras. The current was stiff here, running through the narrow passage into the Mediterranean—submarines, once in, could not get out unless they surfaced—and this, at times, made for a memorable crossing. But not that day; the sun sparkled on the water, the Arab and Moroccan passengers sheltered beneath the canvas awning, while DeHaan managed to get off by himself, found a private length of railing, and watched the African coast as it fell astern.
He’d been directed to this meeting by a second wireless message from the NID, deciphered and handed to him by Wilhelm. It was much like the earlier one, arcane ranks of numbers and letters embracing a brief message, dry as a bone, in fact an order, with no room for discussion or dissent. “They seem to want you in Spain,” Wilhelm said, in her studio.
Ice cold, but, at least, efficient. A plain Citron picked him up at the Plaza de la Victoria—Franco’s victory, that year—on the Algeciras waterfront and took him out a white, dusty road, very nearly a car width wide, through pasture occupied by long-horned red cattle, then an endless forest of cork oak. Someone’s estancia, the naval intelligence people apparently lived well, or had friends who did, and that turned out to be the case.
A servant in a white jacket waited at the door of a vast Edwardian house—a triumphantly English presence, with its battery of chimneys, in the Andalusian landscape—and led him through a grand entry hall—DeHaan looked for the suit of armor but it wasn’t there—through a library and a red plush parlor to a tile-floored conservatory on a garden, with a view of shrubs and parterre which could survive the arid climate only with the attention of a platoon of gardeners. The house and grounds seemed untouched by the guerra civil, which implied considerable political skill on the part of the owners, who’d had to deal, in the midst of war and chaos, first with the Republicans and their communists, then with the Nationalists and their fascists. And not a brick out of place.
“Commander Hallowes,” said a tall man, rising to meet him as the servant faded away. “I am pleased you could come.”
He had a smooth, youngish face and prematurely white hair, wore a coffee-colored linen suit and a striped tie, which likely indicated membership in something or other, and DeHaan sensed there was more to the name—a title, honorific initials—so much a part of him they did not require mention. He stood easily, relaxed, before a wall of cacti in glazed urns, gestured toward a pair of cane chairs and said, “Shall we sit here?” Next to DeHaan’s chair was a table where a drink awaited him, along with a dish of almonds.
“I’m over from Gibraltar,” Hallowes said as they settled themselves. “I’d have had you come there but it’s a difficult place to meet, anyone going in or out from the mainland is carefully watched, openly by the Spaniards, covertly by the Germans—they like to believe, so my friends allow me the use of their house.”
“One could do worse,” DeHaan said.
“Yes, quite.”
DeHaan had a sip of his drink, some kind of golden aperitif that tasted of herbs and secret recipes—the taste elusive, but very good.
“So,” Hallowes said. “Were you banged up on Crete?”
“Not too badly. Some damage to the hull, lost all our glass, but nothing we can’t fix. We had one AB knocked cold, two seamen deserted in Alexandria, when they saw the cargo, and our assistant cook was shot during the raid.”
“Morale good, even so?”
“Yes, even so.”
“Ready for more, then.”
“I’d say we are. Is it all over now, Crete?”
“Yes, all over. We evacuated everybody we could, but more than ten thousand were taken prisoner. However, they lost seven thousand men, so it was quite expensive for them. They took a chance, because they feared we’d use the airbases to raid the Roumanian oilfields, and they got what they wanted, but they did pay dearly. We hope that means they won’t try the same thing on Malta, because we really must have it—if we can’t disrupt their supply lines, there’ll be hell to pay in North Africa.”
Outside, a gardener in a straw hat began to sprinkle water on a potted geranium.
“Speaking of airbases,” DeHaan said, “we thought we’d have air cover, in Crete.”
“Yes, well, that’s the problem—the Mediterranean problem. It was difficult on Crete, but, frankly, it’s worse on Malta. All they had there, the first year, were three Gloster Gladiators, little biplanes, and much cherished, called Faith, Hope, and Charity. They’d been discovered in crates, in the hold of an aircraft carrier, and they were valiant. Unfortunately, only Faith survives.”
“Can you get a convoy in?”
“We’ve tried, and will again, but the rate of loss is fifty percent. In any event, that’s not where you’re going—we have bigger things in mind for you. To begin with, we plan to turn you back into the Santa Rosa. At the stroke of midnight, you know, abracadabra.”
It wasn’t much of a joke, but DeHaan managed a smile. “Isn’t somebody going to notice, one of these days? That there are two of us?”
“Oh, I shouldn’t concern myself about that,” Hallowes said. “Anyhow, this will be the Santa Rosa’s final voyage, and, when it’s over, well, then we’ll see. What comes next.”
Hallowes waited, but DeHaan just finished his drink. He had, for a moment, a whiff of dj vu, as though this had happened before, perhaps the Dutch captain of a seventy-four-gun ship-of-the-line meeting with a British admiral, as they laid plans to fight Germany, Spain, France, whoever it was that year. Finally DeHaan said, “This voyage, in the Mediterranean?”
“Baltic.”
“Up there.”
“Yes, that’s right. Part of our scheme of high-frequency direction finding, HF/DF, we say, or Huff-Duff, like the Americans. Silly sounding but very real, and crucial now, for my people. We can destroy them, if we can find them, and we’ve got to get better at that, and right away. The numbers are ‘most secret’—that’s always the way with numbers isn’t it—but I don’t mind telling you that we’ve lost over sixteen hundred merchant ships since 1939, half to submarines, and if we can’t get our fixes, on their planes, U-boats, warships, faster and better, we’ll starve as the guns go silent.”
Hallowes finished his drink and called out, “Escobar?”
DeHaan could hear him, shuffling through the adjoining rooms. Hallowes ordered two more aperitifs. “I mean, why not, right?”
When the servant had left, DeHaan said, “And the details?”
“Being made final, as we sit here. To be transmitted by courier—no W/T for this operation, so expect him. Meanwhile, make sure you’re well fitted out: oil, water, food, everything. And if the Tangier chandlers can’t help you, let us know about it.”
“We can top off. We will have to, for the Baltic, that’s thirty-five hundred miles, but they took good care of us in Alexandria, your people saw to that, Dickie, and so forth.”
“I’m sure they did,” he said, pleased. Then, “And so forth?”
“Well, the people at the base.”
“Oh.”
“Out of curiosity, why are you using a freighter? Isn’t this sort of thing done by airdrop?”
“What we’re moving is too big, Captain. Antenna masts, forty feet high, specially fitted trucks, and the reception equipment itself
is delicate, and heavy, the worst of all combinations, so it can’t be trusted to parachutes. And, there is a lot of it—we want a coastal observation station, fully mounted. That means they’ll listen to all the frequencies, not only HF, but VHF, UHF—produced by sparks from spark plugs jumping to magnetos in aircraft engines, and the low end as well, because some German ships, disguised merchant raiders, are using Hagenuk radio, an ultra-shortwave system with a range of only a hundred miles, and, with our present stations, we can’t hear them. Anyhow, even at night, it would be difficult for intrusion aircraft. Big German radars, up in that part of the world, so what we need is the rusty old tramp, rusty old neutral tramp, helpless and slow, wandering the seven seas to make a few pesetas for the owner.”
DeHaan was silent for a moment, then said, “All right, the Baltic. Not a big sea, as they go, but it takes in quite a few countries.”
“It does, and all of them difficult, at the present moment.”
Yes, DeHaan thought, that’s the word. The USSR, and Finland, a German ally, just defeated in a war with the Russians, who’d occupied Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia a year earlier, Sweden neutral, Denmark occupied, and Germany itself. Difficult.
“But it’s wiser just now,” Hallowes went on, “not to give out coordinates. If I were you, I’d expect the courier in a week or so, then you’ll know. You may even be, surprised.”
And far enough away so that if I yell you won’t hear it.
The servant arrived with the drinks, and Hallowes said, “You’ll stay for lunch?”
“Espadon, they call it.”
DeHaan took a second helping—a sweet, white-fleshed fish. “Best I’ve had in a long time,” he said. “Though, when it’s fresh caught, there isn’t much in the Mediterranean that isn’t good.”