by Alan Evans
His long body was burnt nearly black by the sun and he wore only a ragged pair of shorts. A finger of one hand rested gently on the taut-stretched fishing-line that bent over the bulwark of the Mary Ellen then curved down into the river. He waited for the jerk and thrum on the line that would tell him he had a bite.
The Mary Ellen was a motorised lighter built twenty years before to be used as a landing craft in another war, a long steel box with an engine at the stern. She was well found and cared for, even loved by her owner, Michael Garrity. She had rust but he fought it with the chipper and the wire brush so that she scarcely showed a speck of it. He never stopped painting her; when he finished at one end he started again at the other. He regularly had her hauled out on the slip to clean her bottom and her single diesel engine gleamed and ran like a Swiss watch.
She was his home and income in one. He had decked her over at the stern, built a wheelhouse on the deck and below it two cabins, a galley and a saloon with a table and leather-cushioned couches along each side. The accommodation was not luxurious but snug, tidy and shipshape with everything in its place, but it had never known a woman’s touch. Garrity found his women ashore and left them there.
The rest of the lighter clear up to the bow was a hold. Garrity discharged cargoes from ships lying out in the river two or three times a month. He also ran the Mary Ellen as a ferry between the port and the small quarry town on the northern shore, ten miles away across the wide estuary. For a good half of each month he did nothing except tend the lighter and drink quietly in a bar in the town. It was a life that suited him.
It also suited Jake Tyler. He had put the offer to Mike Garrity: “I’ll work for my bed and my grub; I don’t want pay.” Garrity had taken him on. Jake could manage without pay because he had inherited £20,000 from his grandmother not long before. He had deposited it in a small Boston bank which sent him his interest as a cheque every month.
So now he was content to fish and do a little work for Mike Garrity in return for a bunk aboard the Mary Ellen and his keep. He reckoned his next cheque was due in another eight days. When it came it would last out the month as pocket money if used with care. Or he could blow it all in a week. That was a decision to be made but he would take his time over it. He stretched and relaxed.
He heard the newscasts, scattered in short snatches between jazz and swing bands playing in hotels and night clubs in Rio or Montevideo, but did not take them in. The Blitzkrieg in Poland, the declarations of war by France and Britain, did not concern him. He was a United States citizen and a neutral. Little concerned him. He had opted out until he had decided what to do with his life.
Then he sat up, frowning, puzzled. He saw Mike Garrity, short, scrawny and bandy-legged, walking along the quay towards the Mary Ellen. Behind him cruised a pick-up truck, rolling slowly at a walking pace to match that of Garrity. Three men were crowded into the front of the truck and Jake knew them all. The man at the wheel was Otto Bergmann, the other two were his cronies and all were leading lights in the local Nazi Bund. They were bawling out, “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles!”
Mike Garrity was close now and Jake could see his face was red with rage. The little man stepped down from the quay onto the deck of the lighter and Jake asked, “What’s going on?”
Garrity had grown up in the slums of London’s East End. His nasal Cockney voice quivered with anger as he glowered at the men in the pick-up, now halted opposite him on the quay. “They found me in Angie’s bar. Told me Hitler’ll run over England like he’s doing with Poland. They said when that happens I’ll have to lift me cap to them. They were trying to rile me. So I came out and they followed me. Like you saw.”
Jake said, “Well, you made the right move.” All three in the pick-up were big men barely into their thirties.
They had stopped singing now and Otto called, “You keep him safe on board, Amerikaner.” And when Jake did not answer, Otto pressed, “You and Roosevelt might be next, when we’ve done with England.”
“I’m neutral,” Jake said mildly. “Maybe you ought to think about keeping it that way.”
Otto laughed and boasted, “We’ll keep it anyway we like. We run things around here.” He smacked the pick-up into gear and drove away along the quay, all three men guffawing raucously.
Mike Garrity muttered, “Big talk, but mostly true. Him and his sort own most of the town. Hitler has this place sewn up as tight as Berlin.” He spat over the side and started aft.
Jake called after him, “You haven’t been out of this river for more than fifteen years and you swear you’ll never go back to England. What made you so patriotic all of a sudden?”
Garrity turned his head and answered, “That’s my business.” Then he dropped down the hatch that led to the saloon and the two cabins.
Jake Tyler grinned and sprawled his six-and-a-half foot length on the deck once more, groped and found the line, closed his eyes and sighed contentedly. When his cheque arrived in eight days — or was it seven? Anyway …
*
On the other side of the Atlantic his mother said, “Well, maybe I’ll find my boy has come home; that’ll more than make up for going back early.” She sat at her dressing-table in the stateroom. Her husband, William, wrestled with his collar stud and staggered as the liner rocked gently to the swell. Margaret went on, “But I wish we could have stayed for another month like we planned. France was fine, but we only had those two days in London.” Then she looked around the stateroom, spacious and luxurious, and said for the tenth time since they boarded, “My, this is nice.”
William grumbled, “It should be. It cost plenty. But, OK, we could have used that month in London. Sure. Only now there’s a European war. Suppose Hitler’s airplanes bomb London like they did Warsaw?”
Margaret shuddered, “I guess you’re right.”
“I’m damn sure of it.” He pulled on his shoes, black and polished until they shone, then tied the laces. He stood up to put his hands on his wife’s shoulders and look into her reflection in the mirror. “I’ve told you, stop worrying about Jake. He’ll come back in his own good time. And I’ll tell you something else: when he does he can forget about the business. He can do what he likes because it’s his life. I guess I was wrong and I leaned on him too much. Just, I sometimes wonder why I worked so hard, if he doesn’t want it. That was the whole idea; I started with nothing but he’d have a successful operation to move into when he came out of college.”
Margaret stood up and smiled at him, “Maybe he wants to make it on his own, like you did.”
Her evening dress was not new but William liked it and thought her lovely. He grinned, “He’ll make it, all right.” He picked up his dinner jacket and shrugged into it, “C’mon, let’s go and eat.”
She took his arm and they went down to dinner in the restaurant of the Athenia.
*
The commander of the U-boat patrolling on the surface off the coast of Ireland stood at the front of the conning tower and swept the night horizon with his binoculars. He lowered the glasses and rested his eyes for a while, balancing himself wide-legged against the roll and pitch of the boat. He told the look-outs on either side of the conning tower, quietly, “Keep a sharp watch.”
Only an hour before he had received the signal that Germany and Britain were at war.
Chapter Seven – “Montevideo — here we come!”
Smith could see his death in the car parked across the street. This was early in the evening of a dark day of mist and rain at the beginning of November and he had been in Denmark two months now. He peered from behind the shabby curtains of his drab hotel room at the street below. It glistened black under the rain, reflecting the yellow globes of the street lights; there was no black-out in neutral Denmark. She had stayed neutral in the last war and intended to remain so through this one. And who could blame her, living on Germany’s doorstep?
He could see into the café directly opposite where the desk clerk at the hotel would soon go to eat as
he did every evening at this time. That was routine. The bus stop was a dozen yards or so to the right of the café and a few people waited for the bus, standing in a shop doorway nearby. That was also routine. The closed, black car was pulled into the kerb a score of yards on the other side of the café. The men in the car would know the routines.
Smith glanced at his watch then pulled on his old trenchcoat, shoved the big Colt automatic in one pocket and picked up his hat. He locked the door of his room as he left it, ran down the stairs and left the key with the clerk, saw him tuck it into its numbered slot behind the desk. He pushed through the swing doors and then paused in their shelter while he buttoned the coat. He slid a hand into one pocket to grip the Colt but he did not think he would need it. They could see him from the car and its engine had not started. They would not risk a shooting in front of witnesses.
He saw the bus rolling down the street towards him and trotted across to the stop then climbed aboard after the others who hurried out from the shop doorway. The bus pulled away and the car did not follow. If he stayed aboard the bus it would drop him outside Josef’s bar in five minutes, but as it slowed and swung around the first corner he waited until he was out of sight of the car before jumping off.
He walked back to the little bar that stood on the corner and sat down at a table by the window. The bar was nearly full and most of the other tables were occupied. The place was noisy and smoky but when Smith wiped condensation from the window with his sleeve he could see the car still waiting.
When the waiter came Smith ordered beer and sipped it, watching the street and the car. After a while the desk clerk came out of the hotel and ran across the street through the rain to the café. A minute or two later a rear door of the car opened and a man got out, pulling a suitcase after him. He carried the suitcase across to the hotel and disappeared inside. Ten minutes later he emerged without the suitcase and returned to the car. The engine started and it drove away.
Smith had told Carl he would be at Josef’s that evening and arranged to meet him there. Josef’s bar was a meeting place for the drivers of the trucks coming over the border from Germany and Carl was the Dane, fluent in German, running the network on the ground. He chatted with the drivers, bought the beer, quietly offered the bribes.
The Embassy had recommended Carl and Smith had recruited him. Smith was the paymaster and framed the demands for information. His main concern was Kiel and the Kiel Canal, what ships passed through it and when and whether they sailed from one end into the Baltic or from the other into the North Sea. The canal was only fifty miles on the other side of the border in Germany.
Correction: That had been his main concern. No longer. He stared out through the window at the sluicing rain, pale blue eyes bleak and face hard. He recalled standing in the road in Berlin and watching the house burn. He had heard nothing of Sarah, his daughter, and did not know if she was alive or dead, hiding or in one of the camps like Mauthausen. That was the same as being dead.
He got up and went to the telephone on the wall at the end of the bar. He called the cheap boarding-house where Carl had a room and told him, “I’m at Josef’s. I came early. I had some papers for you but I left them on the table in my room. Will you pick them up on your way down? It’s on your way. If the desk clerk is there, tell him I sent you, but I think he’ll be eating. Just take my key and go up.”
He went back to his seat and to watching. He wondered if they had told Carl and was ready to bet they had not, in case he gave it away by a nervous word, a glance or a tone of voice. Carl had sounded normal on the telephone.
And after ten minutes, there he was. He wore a raincoat and rubber boots, held up an umbrella as he bustled along the opposite pavement. He was a big, jolly man who always hid behind a wide smile. He ran up the steps and pushed through the swing doors into the hotel.
There was nothing in the room that Smith wanted. He had detected the three men in the car following him over a week ago and he had followed them. They always went back to a house rented by a member of the German Consulate. They were ostensibly German businessmen as he was ostensibly working for a British firm. Then he had trailed Carl back to the house, and later saw him pay a wad of cash into a bank account. How much had they paid him for Smith’s life?
The window of the hotel room bulged out then burst in a sheet of flame and a spout of smoke. Glass, rubble and torn curtains were vomited across the street and the inside of the room was an inferno. The glass of the window in the bar shook in its frame but did not break. Smith’s ears rang from the explosion. He allowed himself to be carried out into the street with the rest of the crowd in the bar as they spilled onto the pavement, gaping, shouting, questioning. Then after a minute he rounded the corner and walked away.
He was finished here because the Germans knew him so the men in London would have to send someone else. He was also finished with Intelligence work because they had promised him this would be the last assignment. He walked away through the rain, stepping lightly as if a load had been lifted from his shoulders.
*
Véronique Duclos was now a Doctor of Medicine, respected for her work with the victims of the train crash. She still wore the staid clothing and big spectacles she had adopted to gain credibility as a medical student. For too many years she had lived solely for her career, worked and studied to the point of exhaustion. She could not change overnight, but she was looking about her with a light in her eye.
She was going to join her parents in Montevideo for a long vacation over Christmas and into the New Year. There were berths on the liner Formose sailing from Le Havre on 11 November but she found a British ship was bound for Montevideo, sailing earlier, arriving earlier and decidedly cheaper. Véronique, newly qualified, was living on a shoestring. So she booked her passage on the SS Whitby.
Smith joined the Whitby at Southampton a week after leaving Denmark and just before she sailed. She was a tramp steamer bound for South America with a general cargo, and he was one of her few passengers.
He had not been given a command. The two senior officers who interviewed him at Admiralty said they had decided that a shore appointment would give him a chance to recover from the stress under which he had worked for years. They were honest men and could not meet his eyes, showed their embarrassment.
Earlier they had talked of him: “He was promised a command.”
The other had shaken his head, reluctantly but firmly. “God knows we are in his debt and we must try to repay him in some part. But not with a command. He was always unorthodox and made enemies, still has them. And he’s been too long out of the Service. So not a command. Not yet.”
Smith had not believed them and was bitter. He was sure they had been quick to grant his request for Buckley only as a sop to him, some sort of consolation.
That it was. When the big leading seaman tapped on the open door of the cabin Smith grinned a welcome, shook Buckley’s hand then pulled him into the cabin and sat him down on the only chair. Buckley perched on it uncomfortably while Smith leaned against the bulkhead, still grinning. Buckley’s presence brought back memories of happier times, though God knew they had shared hard ones as well. He lightened the gloom. Before joining Whitby Smith had brooded over his failure to get a ship and worried about his daughter, Sarah.
Smith said, “It’s good to see you again. Sorry we’ve only got a shore appointment and not a ship. I hope you’re not disappointed. And what have you been doing since I last saw you?” He thought Buckley looked fit, may have put on some weight but it was around his shoulders, not on his belly.
Buckley answered, “Afloat or ashore, doesn’t matter to me, sir. And this draft could ha’ been worse. As for what I’ve been doing. Well …” He was not happy at this meeting and wished it was over. He thought Smith was unchanged, still restless and with that cold stare that could turn into a quick smile. A good man to lead you but the Lord help you if you got on the wrong side of him. So Buckley did not beat about the bush in case he lost the
courage to start — and this had to be done.
He said, “Not long after I left the Navy — 1919 that was — I got a letter from a lady. She said she wanted to see me and sent the fare for me and my wife so we went down to London on the train. She was in a hospital there. Said she had a little lad, just one year old he was, and she wanted us to take him on, bring him up. Because the doctors said she didn’t have long, and they were right.
“We took him back up north with us. She’d left a pot o’ money in trust for him, so the income would pay for his schooling and the capital would give him a start in life when he came of age. But the solicitor that had the handling of it lost the lot inside o’ two years, so we brought him up like one of our own.
“She’d said the boy’s father didn’t know about him and she didn’t want him to know because he was married with a family. She didn’t want that spoiled. And when the boy was old enough we were to tell him his father had been lost at sea. And that’s what we did.”
Buckley stuck there. Smith had straightened from lounging on the bulkhead, stood with a hand to his head. But it was he who broke the silence, demanding harshly, “Well?”
That started Buckley again: “But then you said you weren’t married and there was the war and that changed everything. I reckoned I didn’t have to keep my mouth shut any more, like I’d promised, and that you should both know the truth. The boy’s name is Robert Hurst. His birth certificate shows his mother named the father as David Smith, seaman.”
Smith thought: Eleanor Hurst. They had been lovers, a brief affaire that had ended, or so he had thought, when he was sent to the Mediterranean to take command of Dauntless. He had a son. That was hard to take in. He became aware of Buckley unhappily turning his cap around and around in his big hands. In 1917 Eleanor had known Buckley as Smith’s right-hand man, learned his solid worth. So she entrusted her child to him. Smith asked, “What kind of—” he was about to say ‘boy’ but remembered: “—man is he?”