by Alan Furst
So, down to the port, take the launch out to the ship, and farewell Tangier, native maidens waving from the shore. One maiden who would not be waving was the Russian journalist, and for that he was thankful. Because he had been wondering about her. Something wrong with that letter, he thought. What’s she doing here, really? Of course he did have some time, maybe the morning, to do whatever he wanted—rare pleasure, for him. But no time for that, surely. That meaning the typical Soviet nonsense. What do you think about the world situation? Would you work for peace and justice? Maybe you’ll talk to us now and again. Need money? No, with all the details he had to think about, he didn’t need to subject himself to that. Though if he were honest with himself he would have to admit she’d been perfectly correct the last time they’d met. Straight as a stick, she was. Slavic and serious. What else?
6 June, 0820 hours. Hotel Alhadar.
Hard to find, in an alley off an alley, grim and dirty and cheap. The desk clerk sat behind a wire cage, worry beads in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and, beneath his tasseled fez, a mean eye—who the hell are you? “She is not here,” he said.
DeHaan retreated, feeling foolish and betrayed and annoyed with himself. Then she appeared, as if by magic, catching up to him as he hurried down the alley. “Captain DeHaan,” she said, out of breath. “I saw you go into hotel.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well, good morning.”
“We go in here,” she said. A few steps led down to a tiny coffee shop, dark and deserted. DeHaan hesitated, he didn’t like it.
“Please,” she said. “I must get off street.”
What? He followed her in, they sat down, a young boy came to the table, and DeHaan ordered two coffees. “I hoped you would come,” she said. It wasn’t courtesy, she meant it.
Across the little table, she was much as he remembered her, though now he realized she was older than she was in his memory. No one would ever call her pretty, he thought. But you would look at her. A broad, determined forehead, high cheekbones, eyes a severe shade of green, almost harsh, a small mouth, down-curved, ready for anger or disappointment, thick hair, a dulled shade of brown, like brown smoke, swept across her forehead and pinned up in back. She wore a pale gray suit and a dark gray shirt with a wide collar—shapeless and lax, as though worn for a long time—and carried a heavy leather purse on a shoulder strap. But the detail that stood out, above everything else, was the presence of some inexpensive and very powerful scent, the sort of thing to use if you were unable to bathe.
He took out his packet of North States and offered her one. “Yes, thank you,” she said. Even in the cellar gloom of the coffee shop he could see shadows beneath her eyes, and, when she held the small cigar to his match, her hand trembled.
“Is there to be an interview?” he said.
“If you like.” For a moment she pressed her lips together, then turned her face away.
“Miss Bromen,” he said.
“A moment, please.”
She concentrated for a few seconds, then pushed the hair back off her forehead. “I read your ship was in Tangier, and I remembered it. I remembered you.”
“Yes? From Rotterdam.”
“Yes, Rotterdam.”
He waited for more, but she inhaled her North State and said, “It’s hard, not to have cigarettes.”
Silence. Finally, DeHaan said, “You’re writing stories, in Tangier?”
Slowly, she shook her head.
“Then . . .”
The coffee arrived, thick and black, in tiny cups, with a bowl of brown, crystalline sugar in broken lumps. She put one in her cup and stirred it as it fell apart, started to take a second, then didn’t. “I am running away,” she said, her voice casual, without melodrama. “It is not easy. Have you ever done it?”
“No,” he said. Then, with a smile, “Not yet.”
“Better you don’t.”
“I’m sure of that.”
“You must take me away from here, Captain, on your ship.”
“Yes,” he said. When her face changed, he hurried to add, “I mean, I understand. Of course there’s no possibility of my doing that.”
She nodded—she knew that perfectly well.
“You do understand,” he said.
“Yes, I know.” She paused, then lowered her voice and said, “Is there some thing, some thing I could do? I don’t care what.”
“Well . . .”
“I will work. They have women, who work, on Russian ships.”
“And sometimes in Holland as well, on the tugboats and barges. But Noordendam is a freighter, Miss Bromen.”
She began to answer him, to argue, then gave up, he saw it happen. After a moment she said, “Is there food here, maybe?”
That he could do. He signaled to the boy and asked him for something to eat.
“Beignets?” the boy said. “There is a bakery nearby.”
As DeHaan reached into his pocket for money, he wondered how much he had. Quite a lot, actually, and of course he would give it to her. When the boy left, he said, “Miss Bromen, what happened to you? Can you tell me?”
“I am running from Organyi,” she said, with a sour smile—what else? The Russian word meant the organs of state security, secret police. “It’s a game you must play, in my work. They want to use you because you are a journalist, and journalists talk to foreigners.”
“You worked for them?”
“No, not completely. They asked me to do things, I said I would, but I did not do well, was not—clever. I did not defy them, you cannot, but I was stupid, clumsy—any Russian will understand this. And I never became important, never spoke to important people, because, then . . . And was better to be a woman, weak, though they wanted me to go with men. Then I would say I was virgin, would almost cry. But they never went away, until purge of 1938, then one was gone, another came, then he was gone.
“But, it did not last and, one day, in Barcelona, here comes the wrong one, for me. He did not believe I was stupid, did not believe tears, or anything. He said, ‘You will do this,’ and he said what would happen if I did not do it. With him, one and one made two. So then I ran. Left everything I had, got on train to Madrid. Maybe France was better idea, but I was not thinking. I was frightened—you know how that is? I had come to the end of my courage.”
She paused, remembering it, and drank the last of her coffee. “But they did not chase me, not right away. I think maybe the bad one in Barcelona did not want to say, to report, what happened, but later he had to, probably because there was someone above him who also knew how one and one makes two. Then, one day in Madrid, I saw them, and the one friend I had did not want to talk to me anymore. It was then second week in May, and again I ran. To Albacete. By then, I had very little money. I had sold watch, pen, Cyrillic typewriter. I learned from refugees, from Jews, how to do it. It was strange, how I found them. When you are running away you go to the city, and then to a district where you feel safe, and there they are, they have done the same thing, found the same place. Not with rich, with poor, but not too poor so that you don’t belong. Then, in the markets, in the cafs, you see them. Ghosts. And you, also, are a ghost, because the self you had is gone. So it is recognition, and you approach them, and they will help you, if they can. But I think you know all this, Captain, no?”
“It is on my ship,” DeHaan said. “Any ship—we are part of the world, after all. So most of my crewmen can’t go home. Maybe never again in their lives.”
“Can you?”
“No. Not while the war goes on.”
The boy returned from the bakery with a plate of fried twists of dough sprinkled with powdered sugar. He placed it on the table and DeHaan gave him a few more dirhams—too many, evidently, the boy’s eyes widened, and he said thank you in the most elaborate way he knew.
The beignets were freshly made, still warm, and smelled very good. Bromen said, “I see these every morning—they carry them through the streets on a palm leaf.” She ate carefully, leaning over th
e table.
“They’re good?”
She nodded with enthusiasm. He tried one, she was right. “Excuse me,” she said, licking the sugar off her fingers.
“So,” DeHaan said, “you came to Tangier.”
“A dream to the refugees, North Africa. You can go anywhere, from here, if you have a lot of money. You can even work. It’s hard in Spain, after the war they had, people are poor, very poor, and police are terrible. So I came here, my last hope, one week ago. No money, nothing left to sell, only passport. I stole, sometimes, little things—some of the refugees have the gift, but I don’t.”
“I will help you, Miss Bromen. Let me do that, at least.”
“You are kind,” she said. “This I knew in Rotterdam, but I fear it is too late now, for that.”
“Why too late?”
“I have been seen, found. Not conveniently, for them. On the avenue that comes out of Grand Socco, they were in car going the other way, and by the time they stopped, I had run away down a little street and I hid in a building.”
“How could you be sure it was them?”
“It was them. Once you know them, you can recognize.”
DeHaan found himself thinking about the Germans at the Reina Cristina.
“They saw me, Captain DeHaan, they stopped their car. Right where it was, they stopped. That was all I saw, I didn’t wait, so maybe I was wrong. But next time may be when I don’t see them. And then, well, you know. What will happen to people like me.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Do you? They will not kill me, not that minute,” she said. There was more, but she hesitated, perhaps unwilling to use the words she used with herself, then did it anyhow, her voice barely above a whisper. “They will degrade me,” she said.
They will not. DeHaan leaned forward and said, “Let me tell you about money, Miss Bromen, sea captains and money. They have it, but, other than giving it to their families, they have no way to spend it. Only in port. Where you can spend like a drunken sailor—certainly I have spent like a drunken sailor—but those pleasures just aren’t that expensive. All this to tell you that I will buy your freedom, you can tell me what it costs, and it will be my pleasure to buy it for you. A new passport, ship passage, we’ll take a piece of paper and add it up.”
“Will cost time,” she said. “I know, I have seen them, the richest ones, waiting, and waiting. For months. All the money in the world, can bribe, can buy gifts, but still they wait. If you don’t believe, ask the refugees, I will introduce you.”
“And so?”
“So must be a ship at night. To a neutral port. No passport control going out, no passport control getting off. Disappearance. With no tracks to sniff.”
From DeHaan, a sour smile. “Is that all.”
“I know ports, Captain. I know how they work.”
She was right, and DeHaan knew it.
“No other way can work,” she said. “I am sorry, but is true.”
Then they were silent for a long time, because there was nothing more to be said, and all that remained for him was to stand up and walk away. And he told himself to do precisely that, but it didn’t take. Instead, he made a wry face and muttered angrily to himself. What he said was in Dutch, and not at all nice, but she knew what it meant, and rubbed her eyes with her fingers. Keeping a promise to herself, he suspected.
6 June, 2105 hours. Bay of Tangier.
He’d enlisted, for this brief mission, his best, the bosun Van Dyck, who sat in the stern and steered the ship’s cutter. It was choppy on the bay that evening and DeHaan braced himself against the gunwale as they neared the lights of the city. In his pocket, a rough map, penciled on a scrap of paper. Simple enough, she’d said, there was a small, unused pier at the foot of the rue el Khatib, and a street that led to an old section of the port, where, in time, he would find a row of large sheds that faced an abandoned canal, the fourth one down occupied by a Jewish refugee who managed to exist by adjusting compasses aboard merchant vessels. DeHaan had only to knock on the wooden shutter and someone would open it.
He’d asked her, more told her, to leave with him then and there, for safety’s sake, and go immediately to the ship, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Almost pleading, she said there were a few small things to be retrieved from the hotel but, most of all, she had to tell people, people who had cared for her, that she was leaving. When he tried once more, she offered to take the port launch, but he couldn’t let her do that—the Spanish police had a passport control at the dock. No, he would pick her up in the ship’s cutter. Back on board at noon, he’d looked up the rue el Khatib in Brown’s Ports and Harbors, where, on the map of Tangier, it lay at the very edge of the page, on the ragged eastern border of the port—no longer a port at all, really, long ago deserted by commerce and left to crumble away. The map had a small street coming in from the west, while the street leading away from the port, on her map, was not shown.
Van Dyck slowed the engine as the pier came into view. By now, the lights of the main port were well west of them, but, by dead reckoning based on the flashing Le Charf beacon, they’d found the foot of the rue el Khatib. He hoped. This was not the most sensible thing he’d ever done, and Van Dyck didn’t like it, had been particularly uncommunicative since they’d left the ship. Ratter didn’t like the idea either—a woman passenger on board—but it was only for two days, DeHaan explained, until they reached Lisbon. From Ratter, at that point, a quizzical, one-eyed glare—why are you doing this?
No choice, he thought, as they neared the shore. And, really, what did it matter, one more lost soul? Kovacz, Amado and his mates, Shtern, Xanos the Greek soldier, his German communists, all of them really, fugitives in one way or another, set to wandering the world. Always room for one more on the good ship Noordendam.
Van Dyck cut the engine and used the boat’s momentum to glide alongside the dock. DeHaan stood, ran a rope around a cleat, and tied them off. It wasn’t long for the world, this pier—the boards rotten and sprung, one side sagging toward the water, the corner post nowhere to be seen.
“Is this it?” Van Dyck said.
“Yes, it should be.”
“Will you want me to come along?”
“No, you stay with the boat.”
“Safe enough to leave it, Cap’n.”
“I know, but no point in both of us going.”
Van Dyck held the cutter against the pier as DeHaan stepped off. “Want me to hold on to that?” he said, pointing to DeHaan’s head.
DeHaan took off his captain’s hat and tossed it to the bosun. Who was right, he thought—alone at night on the docks, it was better to be just a common sailor.
At the end of the pier, a lone streetlamp cast a circle of yellow light. DeHaan paused beneath it, a swarm of night moths attacking the bare bulb above him, squinted at the map, put it in his pocket, and set off down a silent street of closed shops. No lights here, no radios, only a few stray cats. The street stopped dead at a high wall, but the map told him to turn left, and he found an alleyway, just wide enough to walk through, between the wall and the last building. The end of the alleyway disappeared into shadow, and he hesitated briefly, then went ahead, running his hand along the wall as he walked. At the far end, a dirt path bordered by underbrush led to a sandy field, then passed beneath an immense tank that had once been used for oil storage. Here the path widened to a dirt road, then turned sharply and ran beside an ancient brick warehouse with black broken windows.
Which went on forever, it seemed. He kept walking, past boarded-up entries and loading platforms, another wall now on his right. Penned in, he thought. Likely there was a road on the opposite side of the building that went down to the bay, but there was no sense of water here, only night, and deep silence, but for a few cicadas beating away in the darkness. At last, he reached the end of the warehouse and found a railroad track, weeds grown up between the ties, a faint odor of creosote still lingering in the air. As it used to. When he was twelve, in the port of Rotterdam, b
rave with his friends, amid rusting machinery and alleys that led nowhere. He stopped for a moment, took the map from his pocket, and lit a match. Yes, that carefully drawn ladder meant a railroad track, with crosshatched lines showing three canals beyond it. Where were they?
He reached the first one a few minutes later. Dead fish, dead water, an Arab dhow half sunk at the far end. Again he lit a match to look at the map, then, just as he shook it out he heard, thought he heard, a voice. Just for an instant, a high voice, one or two notes, like singing. But, as he tried to figure out where it was coming from, it stopped, and the silence returned—a complete hush now, the cicadas gone.
At the end of the canal, he found a tributary, a second canal, with a cinder path beside it and a long row of sheds that disappeared into the darkness. It was the fourth in line that he wanted—she’d put an X in a box on the map. He counted four, and stood before a heavy wooden shutter. Could there be people inside? He heard nothing. He put a tentative hand on the shutter, then knocked. The shutter moved. He stepped back and stared at it. On one side of the shutter, an iron ring that took a padlock had been pried free, leaving three screwholes in a patch of yellow, splintered wood, freshly gouged, while the metal hasp, with closed lock still on the ring, had been bent back on itself. He knocked again, waited, then took the bottom of the shutter in both hands and rolled it up, to reveal a doorway.
“Hello?” He said it in a whisper, then again, louder.
Nothing, and the door stood ajar.
He pushed it open, and counted to ten. Go back to the pier. You do not want to see what is inside this shed. But he had to, and stepped through the door to find a square room with plaster walls, the air heavy with mildew. There was a straw mattress with a blanket on it, and a row of books at the foot of the wall, held up by rocks used as bookends. On the opposite wall, on a rough pine table, a lantern lay on its side in a puddle of kerosene, which had wicked up into a sheaf of papers and half a bread. On the floor, a few more papers.