The Night Boat

by Robert McCammon

Chapter Seventeen

 

  THEY DID NOT LIKE the foreigner. If he had approached any of them, if he had sat in on any of their card games, or taken a shot of rum or even talked to them, perhaps their feelings might have been different. But he had locked himself away in his below-decks cabin, not speaking to anyone, even paying extra to have a steward bring his meals to him. The black, hard-eyed seamen didn't like that; he would only be on board for a three-day trip, but they didn't trust whites anyway, and this foreigner was very strange.

  The man seemed to dislike the sun; his flesh was a pasty white, his hair dull, tinged with yellow and combed straight back in an old style. He had never come up on the freighter's deck during the day, but there were stories circulating that he'd been seen walking the forward deck in the dead of night, standing at the bow as if trying to sight something off in the distance. And he had spoken to the galley steward in a strange accent: not British or American, but something else. When the freighter tied up at the commercial wharf in Coquina harbor, the seamen were glad to be rid of him. The captain had told the first mate and talk had trickled down through the men that he would not be returning to Kingston with them.

  As the seamen worked their lines, the foreigner emerged through a hatchway onto the deck; he squinted, though the sun was dim in the gray sky, and walked past the men toward the port side where the gangplank would be lowered. He carried a battered brown suitcase and wore a suit, once-white, that had yellowed with age. The men moved out of his way so he could pass. He walked slowly, stepping over lines and cables, and he winced occasionally because today his leg was bothering him; he thought it must be the humidity and the heat, perhaps even rain coming. One could often judge the weather from the pain of shattered bone.

  He waited until the gangplank was secured and squinted again, the light almost painful to him. When he crossed over onto the wharf, one of the seamen behind him muttered, "Damn good riddance. . . "

  The man walked along the wharf for a moment, limping slightly, then stopped to gaze across the village ahead. A small boy lugging a basket of bananas was passing, and the man asked him, "Please. Is there a hotel here?"

  The boy looked up at the stranger, turned, and pointed at the blue house on the hill. "Indigo Inn," he said, then quickly moved on.

  "Danke," the foreigner replied. He gripped his suitcase and began to walk toward the street beyond.

  The jukebox began to throb in the Landfall Tavern as coins tinkled down through metal cylinders. Its treble range had deteriorated, so all that came through the speakers was the bass guitar and the low thud-thudding of drums. The bartender, annoyed because he'd expected this to be an easy day, drew mugs of beer and poured rum for the group of seamen who'd come in off the freighter to quench their thirsts.

  At a back table, sitting alone, the foreigner sipped from a mug of beer; the corner was dark, and he was glad because he was not eager to have the men notice him there. Before him on the table was a tattered piece of the Daily Gleaner dated four days earlier, which he had bought in Jamaica. When he saw the item on the third page he'd had to sit down in his room at the boarding house and read it again very carefully. Then again. He'd made a telephone call to the paper and was referred to an officer at the police station by the name of Cyril McKay. "Yes," the officer had told him, "it's under investigation now, yes, a small island called Coquina to the southwest of Jamaica. Do you have any particular interest?"

  "No," he'd said. "Only curiosity. I was a naval man, you see. "

  And now he'd reached the island. He'd wanted to get out of the sun before starting that long walk up the hill. He looked down again at the two-paragraph item, staring at the headline: WRECKAGE DISCOVERED.

  So strange, so strange, he mused, how one's past never really releases its hold; it always remains - in a phrase, a remembered sight, sound, or smell - a sharp, aching feeling one might have watching the freighters cast off their lines and head for the open sea. He felt swallowed up by those two words. Wreckage Discovered. After all those years? Thirty-five, thirty-six? He had just turned sixty. More like forty years. Enough time for him to grow older and grayer, for the muscles that had been firm and tight to turn to flab, for his long-unused sea instincts to become dull.

  And though he was barely sixty he looked older. That was because of his time spent in the prison, suffering humiliations and beatings from a patriot of a jailer who had spent his fury through his fists, then had calmly sat down outside his cell to discuss the hopelessness of the Nazi cause. The man knew how to beat his prisoners where the bruises didn't show, and they were told that if they cried out they might be smothered in their sleep. The medical records would record them as having died of heart attacks.

  He had never said a word. When they took him to the black room and opened up a hole in the roof for the hot tropical sun to burn down on him he had kept his lips a tight, grim line. Who was your commander? the one who spoke German had asked, while the other, a younger man, had watched. You're the only one who survived; there's no use in being loyal to them anymore. They're dead, food for the fishes. They wouldn't have been so cruel to you! There are women and children back in the Fatherland who want to know what's become of their loved ones! Whose names are they going to have chiseled on the gravestones? Your boat destroyed the Hawklin, isn't that right? And then it got into Castries harbor and torpedoed a freighter moored there, isn't that right?

  Sweat had streamed down his face; the sun had cooked him, searing his flesh through that ceiling hole, but he had not spoken because he was still one of them, still under orders, and he would never betray them as long as he lived.

  "Refill?" someone asked.

  He looked up; the bartender stood over him. "Excuse me?"

  "Another beer?"

  "No. " The bartender nodded, moved away. The German glanced around the room at the freighter's crew. They hadn't liked him, he knew; they had scorned him, as if his pale flesh carried a disease they were afraid of catching. But the freighter was the quickest way to get here and though the cabin he'd shared with a dozen cockroaches had been cramped he hadn't paid very much for it. He had been on a lower deck, and at night he could hear the racket of the huge diesels coming through the bulkheads. It was a good sound, a sound that reminded him of good men and other times and places.

  Someone nudged him roughly on the shoulder and he turned his head. Who was it, grinning from the dark with teeth as large as tombstones? Yes, yes. VonStagel, with his bushy red beard that made him look like a wild Viking. And beside him in the smoky bar the morose, brooding Kreps. Everyone at their cluster of tables was drinking, laughing and shouting; the sounds came from everywhere at once, glasses clinking, someone cursing drunkenly, others singing a bawdy mariner's song about the ladies left behind.

  "Hear, hear!" shouted Bruno, the big-shouldered diesel mechanic. "Bring on the dancing girls!"

  A roar of laughter, plates clattering, chairs scraping the floor. The waiter placed a pink mound of pork on a bed of potatoes and sauerkraut before him. He dug into it hungrily, for tomorrow it would be rations - moist eggs, lukewarm coffee, stale bread, and sausages that would rapidly collect fungus from the dank air.

  ". . . and so what was I to think?" Hanlin, the senior radioman, was asking VonStagel. "There was the petty officer - you remember Stindler, the pompous asshole - standing in the whorehouse balcony holding his prick out and parading so the good people of Berlin could see! My God! Well, anyway, the patrol wasn't long in coming, I can tell you, and they hauled him off in a wagon with his dick still hanging out of his pants! And to think we all thought of him as a saint! St. Stindler we called him on U-172. My God, how wrong could we have been?"

  "And what happened to him?" VonStagel asked. "Did he get his piece or not?"

  "Who knows about that? I only know he's not signed on the new boat. . . "

  Farther down the table, Lujax, the E-motor mate, and Bittner, the diesel stoker, were talking quietly, absorbed in the
ir conversation. ". . . dangerous waters," Lujax was saying. ". . . Atlantic boiling. . . "

  ". . . it's all dangerous now," Bittner replied. "It's a question of strategies. Who's the smartest, not who's the strongest. . . "

  A large Nazi flag had been tacked tightly across one wall so there wasn't a single wrinkle. The chair just beneath it was vacant; the Commander was noticeably, perhaps pointedly, absent. The executive officers were talking, eating, drinking, but watching the door that led out into the street.

  "Sonofabitching Tommies almost got Ernst's boat last week," Hanlin was saying between mouthfuls.

  "I heard something about that," added Drexil, a fresh-faced, raw recruit sitting beside Hanlin. "It happened just off Iceland. . . "

  "Sonsofbitches came out of the sun," Hanlin continued. "Slammed bombs all around the boat, doused their tower pretty well, but they managed an emergency dive. . . "

  "Damned lucky," Kreps muttered.

  Bruno was admiring the tavern girls; there were three of them carrying big trays laden with mugs of beer back and forth from bar to men, from bar to men. Two of them looked fine - blond girls, firm-fleshed and youthful - and he'd heard stories about the taller one from Rudy. The third was a snaggle-toothed monstrosity and not worth crossing the street for. Yet she was the most gregarious of the three, throwing herself down in the laps of the men and joining in their bawdy choruses. "The Paradise," Bruno said. "They've got women over there who dance on your tables!"

  "Ahhhhhhh!' You're horny as hell!" VonStagel chided.

  "I admit it, then! The Paradise! We've got to go! You friggers think it's a joy breaking your back in an engine room for a tour of duty, you're mad! I want to fill my lungs with perfume before I have to smell the stench of oil and piss! The Paradise and then the Seamen's Club! We'll make the rounds tonight. "

  "I'm for it!" Drexil shouted.

  "What the hell?" VonStagel looked around. "Schiller, what about you?"

  And then there was a silence in the room as the door came open. A chill seemed to spread from the door into the Celestial Bar. The noises of eating and drinking died away; in the quiet the sailors could hear a tug chugging off in the harbor, and the distant wail of a foghorn. Boots clattered sharply on the hardwood floor.

  Korrin had come in from the street; two other men had accompanied him, but now they stood back as he swung his gaze around the bar, meeting the eyes of the crew one after one. "Heil Hitler!" he said sharply, clicking his heels together and raising his arm in the Nazi salute.

  The men stood to attention. "Heil Hitler," they replied as one.

  Beneath Korrin's U-boat officer's cap the reddish-blond hair was just taking on flecks of gray, and his face was hard, the eyes fierce and compelling, intensely dark and powerful. He was a tall man, well over six feet, and he was lean and athletic-looking. A slight scar slashed across his upper lip gave it the trace of a scornful curl, and his cheeks bore the jagged scars of fencing wounds. He wore black gloves; a dark brown, rain-dappled coat was draped over his shoulders. Schiller squirmed under his gaze; he felt like an insect being probed by a microscope lens.

  "My name is Wilhelm Korrin," the commander said quietly, his voice softer than Schiller would have expected. "So!" He looked around the room again, the dark eyes narrowing, as cold as the touch of ice on each man's spine. "This is to be my crew. " He turned his head toward one of the men who had come in with him. "Gert, they become younger with every new command. . . but they age quickly. " The aide gave a brief, thin-lipped smile and the commander returned his attention to the seamen.

  "You'll age," he said. "Some of you may be old men when we return. Some of you may die. Some of you may be heroes. But rest assured there will be no cowards. " He held his gaze steady for a few seconds, and the man under his scrutiny nervously shifted his position.

  "Some of you I know from other boats; some of you will be under my command for the first time. What I require is very simple: You will carry out your duties as seamen under the German flag, and you will obey my orders without question. "

  VonStagel lifted his beer, and the commander immediately sensed the movement; Korrin stared at him in silence, and VonStagel lowered the mug from his lips. "We are sailing in the finest weapon the German navy has ever built," Korrin continued. "And as long as you sail under my command each one of you will be a vital part of that weapon. You will breathe with the boat; you'll roll with her, you'll feel her vibrations down in the pit of your guts, and you'll know her like a lover. "

  Korrin rested his hands on the back of a chair, the fingers in those black gloves as long and delicate as a surgeon's. "I regret I won't be joining you for the evening, but I'm needed at Command. Enjoy yourselves tonight; do what you like with whom you like, but be warned. We leave harbor at first light, and any man unable to report must answer to me. Is that understood?" He reached down for a bottle of red wine, poured half a glass, and then held the goblet up. For an instant Schiller saw the commander's face through the glass: distorted, something barely human floating in a sea of blood. "A toast, gentlemen," Korrin said.

  Glasses were hurriedly filled, lifted in silence. "To our good hunting," the commander proposed. He drank a bit of the wine and returned the goblet to the table; without looking at his crew again he rejoined the other two officers and they left the bar together, their boots clattering in the street.

  There was a long silence in the room; someone muttered, and very slowly the activity resumed.

  Bruno shook his head. "It's the Paradise for me," he said. "Now or never. "

  Wreckage Discovered. Those two words had been seared across Schiller's brain. Was it the wreckage of U-198? And if so, why wasn't it where it was supposed to be, down in the murky vault of the sea? He had been the only one to escape, that terrible night so long ago, and now the past had resurfaced, summoning him here to this forgotten place.

  They were all dead, of course. All his friends and crewmates. He had been there at the end, watching the slow fall of the depth charges, seeing the ocean erupt again and again in geysers of white, roiling foam. But something still bound him to them, even after all these years; he was still part of them, still part of that weapon, U-198. Though he was older now, weaker, with failing eyesight and migraine headaches, living a life very different from the one he had once envisioned for himself, he was still a sailor in the German navy, and still a crewman of U-198.

  And perhaps, he thought, if it was his boat he should be there to say a final good-bye to his companions.

  He held up a hand for the bartender to see, and when the man approached he said, "Please. I'd like another beer. . . "