‘I’m not worrying. I’m just asking myself a few questions. For example, does your colonel know we’re borrowing his yacht?’
‘Of course not.’
‘And aren’t there British patrol boats on the Elbe at night?’
‘Of course there are. We just have to be careful and start out late.’
‘And what if one of them still stops us?’
‘We show our ID cards and make up a story of some sort.’
‘Such as?’
‘I haven’t thought of one yet. I’ll start thinking about it seriously when their searchlights illuminate us.’
‘I’m glad we’re so well prepared. So even if we do get across the river without being stopped, what then?’
‘Then we tie up the Albatross IV at one of the moorings in Kuh-werder basin, make our way unnoticed to the dockyard, get past the British sentries and hide somewhere near the Leland Stanford. When the smugglers turn up we take them on and then sail triumphantly back across the Elbe at dawn, the greatest maritime heroes since Sir Francis Drake. I’ll get promoted and marry Erna. You’ll get promoted too and will be able to marry whoever you want: all women love a hero.’
‘Oh well, that all sounds just fine,’ Stave said, closing his eyes.
‘Have you got a better plan?’
‘I don’t even have a worse plan. When do we meet? And where?’
‘Sellmer's Cellar Bar, near the fisherman's harbour in Altona: 7 p.m. We can eat and check the coast is clear down at the port, stroll leisurely down to the Baumwall, and then get our skates on.’
The chief inspector stared out of the window. The sky to the west was dark; he could see a sheet of paper dancing over Karl Muck Platz in the first real breath of wind there had been in days. ‘We should meet up an hour earlier,’ he said. ‘It's going to get dark earlier than normal. There's a storm on the way.’
There was a brief silence on the other end of the line. ‘At least that means we’ll have enough wind. I’m a fair weather sailor though,’ MacDonald said with a false air of nonchalance. ‘Maybe I’ll learn a thing or two tonight. See you at 6 then.’ He hung up.
Stave told Erna Berg he was going out on an investigation somewhere in the city, left the building and hurried home. His letter to Karl was still on the door. Back in the apartment he changed his clothes, vague memories of his childhood drifting through his head: port, starboard, tacking manoeuvres. To turn the boat to the left, you had to turn the rudder to the right. Or was it the other way around? Not left, port. Stave had never really been out on the actual river in a boat. He hoped MacDonald knew what he was doing. He did, however, remember one thing from his childhood excursions on the Alster: you were likely to get wet. He remembered dinghies leaning to one side, water lapping over his feet, frothing, arms and legs wet: one of his friends had fallen over the side and nearly drowned.
He pulled on some old rough trousers he had last worn when he was doing up the apartment to try to impress Anna. He had neither sailing shoes nor any sort of sports shoes and this was hardly the moment to go looking for some on the black market. He would have to make do with his ordinary street shoes and hope he didn’t ruin them, given that they were the only pair he had. And an old, dark blue shirt. A white one would show up at night. A battered old hat. He would take his rain cape too. The chief inspector rolled up the heavy waxed cape and squeezed it into an ancient leather rucksack, along with a pair of handcuffs. Finally he took his FN22 out of its holster, checked the magazine and put it in with the other things. He tried to tell himself that it was exciting, an adventure.
He got down to the Altona fishermen's harbour just before 6 p.m. The street alongside the Elbe was broad, lined with little narrow sheds made of brick, metal or wood. Next to them were warehouses for the fishermen's valuable catch, a few smokers’ bars and a couple of restaurants. The very walls stank of rotten fish. Above the city the black clouds were rolling in. Gusts of wind alternated with calm. The chief inspector tried to time them: the gusts of wind were getting more frequent, and lasting longer. It was going to be an interesting crossing, he thought. People were dragging carts along the cobblestones, here and there trucks with coughing and spluttering engines crawled up to the warehouses. Out on the Elbe red buoys bobbed up and down. The ships from the North Sea would come in a bit later and the sailors would unload their cargo of fish over steel rollers directly into the warehouses. The steel rollers blocked the entire river-banks so a few years back boats had been banned from landing their catches during the day, but even so the first customers were arriving. Restaurant owners, housewives, servants from the villas taken over by the British: workers whose job it would be to sort out the fish to be smoked, waiters with cigarettes in their mouths, British military police in thin green uniform shirts looking up apprehensively at the sky wondering if they would be off duty before the storm arrived. It was only a few minutes walk uphill from here to Röperstrasse, Stave realised. He could be with Anna in five minutes.
A steep narrow staircase led down to Sellmer's Cellar Bar. It was a big room with low ceilings and a view of the river on one side, some three dozen round tables, half of them already occupied. Stale cigarette smoke mingled with the scent of old fish and old cooking fat. Stave spotted MacDonald in the furthest corner of the room, at a table overlooking the river.
‘You know there are two British military police outside?’ Stave said.
‘The food here is so bad that not even the British come in,’ the lieutenant answered cautiously. He too was in dark, civilian clothing, with a rucksack on the chair next to him. On the other hand he was wearing light sailing shoes that no German could have afforded. Stave didn’t mention them. As long as they sat here at the table, nobody would notice.
‘What do you recommend?’ the chief inspector asked.
‘Well, the sole won’t kill you.’
‘Do you eat here often?’
‘I like the captain,’ MacDonald nodded towards the picture on the wall opposite of a weathered, white-bearded seaman in oilskins and a pipe in the corner of his mouth, staring earnestly into the distance.
‘I’ve seen worse paintings,’ Stave mumbled. ‘Not many, though.’
The lieutenant laughed. ‘This is where sailors come to talk about getting away from here, where restaurant owners and housewives come to talk about food. Spend one evening here and I find out more about the mood of the local populace than I would in a hundred interrogations. My superior officers are always amazed by the breadth and depth of my reports.’
‘You’ll go far.’
‘As far as Palestine if things don’t work out tonight.’ MacDonald waved over an elderly, scrawny waiter who was clearing up at the next table, carefully pocketing a few scraps of tobacco for re-use. ‘Two sole and two beers,’ he ordered, dismissing the look of surprise on Stave's face. ‘Don’t worry. You’re not officially on duty.’
‘That's not what I’m worried about. I haven’t drunk alcohol for months, if you exclude the bottle of brandy we polished off the other night. And that had pretty dreadful consequences the next day. I’m out of practice and likely to see everything double, then end up leaning over the side of the boat throwing up into the Elbe.’
‘The beer has no more body to it than the sole.’
Half an hour later Stave had to acknowledge that MacDonald hadn’t been exaggerating. The sole was at least a day old. The chef had tried to disguise it by leaving it so long in the fat that the scales had turned black, while the beer was served up without a head in greasy half-litre glasses.
‘Just like it used to be in Scotland in the good old days before the war,’ the lieutenant said, clinking his glass against Stave's.
The chief inspector, who hadn’t had a full meal since 1945, didn’t bother to make a sarcastic remark. He wolfed down the sole, scraping the last remnant from the bones, washing it all down with the weak brew, which did indeed taste somewhat bitter. But all the time Stave had the vague feeling MacDonald was watching him with as
tonishment and a degree of sympathy, and only finished his own fish so as not to embarrass his German colleague.
Stave felt guilty in respect of Karl who had said he was coming by for dinner, but by the time he got home — if he got home -he would be hungry and would have no trouble downing a second meal. ‘I could get used to this,’ he said, knocking back the last drops. ‘I’m paying,’ MacDonald said, nodding to the waiter. By now all the tables were full. So little light came through the dirty windows that the room was getting darker and darker. It was too early for dusk, though, Stave thought. That meant the storm clouds were approaching fast. He was about to make an observation to that effect when a loud bang resounded outside. Automatically MacDonald went for his gun.
‘It's not a German panzer,’ Stave reassured him, ‘just thunder.’
‘Do you hear the rain?’ the lieutenant asked, as the skies opened above them.
A continuous stream of people poured down the steps towards the entrance, damp patches on their shoulders, wet hair, bright eyes. Even Stave felt relieved: no more brown, brackish water from the taps.
MacDonald prodded him: ‘Time for us to go.’
‘You really think this is the right moment to set off across the Elbe? Why not wait a bit? It's almost certainly just a heavy shower.’
‘The point is that right now there's nobody out there. Come on!’ Casually he threw a bundle of Reichsmarks on to the table, pulled out a waterproof and put it on. Stave didn’t have exactly the same kit, but pulled on what waterproofs he had. Moments later they were outside on their own, the only figures to be seen far and wide on the banks of the Elbe. The cobbles were slippery, water running in dark rivulets between the ruins. The dimmed yellow lights of an approaching truck. No pedestrians. Stave pulled the brim of his hat down over his eyes and turned up his coat collar. They hurried past the bulky buildings of the landing stages. The entrance to the Elbe Tunnel ahead of them looked like a cube of light-coloured stone crowned with a dome from which a flood from the heavens ran like a waterfall. They could have crossed the river without getting their feet wet if they used the tunnel but the underpass, built way back in the Kaiser's day, was blocked with iron-railed gates. For a brief second, Stave flirted with the idea of trying to break through them. Then dismissed himself as an idiot. What tool did they have? And in any case two men trying to break through the gates were likely to draw attention.
Further along the Elbe, gusts of wind blew clouds dark and heavy with rain along the river. The chief inspector's feet were damp, his trouser bottoms wet and clinging to his shins.
‘This is how I imagine summer in Scotland,’ he japed at MacDonald.
‘Oh no, we get a lot more rain than this,’ the lieutenant replied, his mood getting better by the second.
They were at Baumwall, the wooden planking along the quayside wet and slippery. The chief inspector took a look around, but there was nobody in sight. The spire of St Michael's church jutted above the ruins of a chandler's shop, grey and forbidding and surrounded by dark clouds, like something from an old horror film.
‘Hurry up,’ MacDonald shouted over the noise of the torrential rain.
‘It's a canoe!’ Stave exclaimed.
On the river in front of them, between two mooring posts, lay a little wooden boat, long and narrow, like the fin of a whale, with a white-painted stern, a dark teak deck to the fore and aft of a tiny cabin, more of a cockpit really To the chief inspector it looked no bigger than the seating space of a kayak. To the fore was a wooden mast with a boom almost the same length, along which the wind blew the reefed sail into the shape of a sausage. The Albatross IV might be thirteen metres long but the lieutenant had neglected to mention that it was little wider than a man. It looked more like a wooden torpedo.
‘We’ll never get over the Elbe in that thing. Not in this weather.’
‘Swedish quality workmanship. It's a lot more stable than it looks,’ MacDonald assured him. ‘Just be careful getting on board. The teak is slippery.’
Stave stumbled into the little cockpit, banging his right knee against the long arm of the rudder. He sat there massaging it as the lieutenant cast off the lines to fore and aft and elegantly leapt aboard the Albatross IV as the little vessel drifted away from the quay. ‘We can make do with the mainsail,’ he said, nodding at the sail unfurled from the mast.
The chief inspector pulled at the rough rope until the yellow sail unfurled and landed on him. There's no way people aren’t going to notice this, he thought to himself, and the sound it made flapping in the wind would be heard as far away as the tower of St Michael's. Yet nobody hailed them as they drifted out, the wind billowing the sail so far to the left that at one stage Stave thought they would tip over. But the little craft stabilised and shot out on to the river, into the choppy grey waves, white-tipped from the wind. The sky above them was a dark void with occasional streaks of lightning. Cold and damp soaked into the skin. While MacDonald worked at the helm for all the world like a fourteen-year-old boy in seventh heaven, Stave stared at the river, at the veils of rain drifting over it, but there was nothing to be seen, no dark shadows, no puff of smoke from a steamship, no bow waves from a fast-moving vessel.
‘The coast is clear,’ he called over the noise of the wind.
‘We only need ten minutes,’ MacDonald called back.
The chief inspector wished he still had the watch Margarethe had bought him for their fifth wedding anniversary, but when the black market started up he had sold it for a couple of pounds of coffee, which he had in turn traded down at the station for any news of his missing son from soldiers returning from the front or the gulags. He counted off the time in seconds, looking up and down the river and across it at the bulk of the dry dock, which grew ever larger, waves crashing against its concrete walls. The chief inspector tried to make out any sign of movement. But there was none. Another five minutes, he reckoned. The Leland Stanford lay on the sheltered other side of the dock, away from the Elbe. Would someone be there standing guard? If so, they would spot the Albatross IV at the very latest when they turned into the Kuhwerder harbour. Would an American seaman think they were some pleasure sailors turning into the harbour because they had been caught unawares by the storm? Or would he be suspicious?
The little yacht cut through the waves like a knife. Stave could feel himself physically relax: he was beginning to have faith in the elegant little craft, and to at last understand the basis for MacDonald's childlike enjoyment. Maybe I should try this some time, he told himself. He had no hobbies. Maybe he could take a dinghy out on the Alster? Maybe with Anna, and Karl? But when he thought about it, it all seemed so improbable that he forced himself to abandon the daydream.
They shot past the giant dry dock. The wind dropped, the grey water was calmer, their little vessel righted itself. The rain was still coming down in showers. The Leland Stanford lay next to them along the quayside. ‘Ignore it,’ MacDonald said quietly. ‘There could be somebody on the bridge with a telescope.’
The chief inspector stared straight ahead. No matter how inconspicuous we try to make ourselves, he thought, they will still notice us and the appearance and colour of our waterproofs. And if they then spot us again on the docks a few minutes later, they will start asking questions.
‘We’ll tie her up at the ferry pier, jump off and head along the riverbank towards Harburg rather than Blohm & Voss,’ he said. ‘We want whoever is on board the freighter to think we are heading into the town to shelter from the rain. As soon as we get past the first shed we can make a wide turn and head back towards the dock.’
‘Aye, aye, sir,’ MacDonald called back.
Stave fumbled with wet fingers at the rope to lower the sail. The Albatross IV began to slow down like a tired swimmer as it drifted in towards the wooden dock. The Scotsman leapt ashore, pulled the stern of the vessel closer in to the dock and tied it up to a post. Stave struggled with his rope until eventually the lieutenant took it from his hands and said, ‘Is that how you do
your shoelaces?’ But Stave had already turned away and was fetching their rucksacks from the little cockpit. He was afraid his gun might have got wet and would no longer work. ‘Let's get into cover,’ he said.
Right at that moment a shaft of lightning hit one of the cranes on the dock. For a moment Stave was blinded by the bright light, then deafened by the peel of thunder that followed it. A metallic stench of electricity filled the air.
‘I think it might not be a good idea to hide in one of the cranes until the smugglers get here,’ MacDonald commented.
They hurried along the pier until they found themselves behind a three-metre-high wall of a bombed-out construction shed. They ducked down and made a broad curve around the harbour wasteland. Stave was limping and, unlike MacDonald, the trained soldier who instinctively located and hid behind every possible cover, from heaps of rubble to bushes, had to keep stopping to look for his next hiding place. And even then it was hard work because his damn ankle kept hurting. About a hundred metres from Blohm & Voss they crossed the access road and hid behind the wreck of a boiler engine on the railway lines parallel to the road.
‘Can you see anyone keeping watch?’ the chief inspector spluttered.
‘There always is. Probably inside the guard house. Having a smoke.’ MacDonald nodded towards the red glow that appeared from time to time in the rain-soaked little shed. ‘If he’d done that in the war, he’d have been dead long ago.’
Stave nodded towards a pile of old ship parts stacked like a wall a little bit to their right. ‘That junk is almost as high as the fence. We could climb over it out of sight of the guard.’
‘Just watch you don’t cut yourself on the rusty iron.’
They tossed their rucksacks over the barrier, then the chief inspector grabbed hold of a chunk of metal and pulled hard on it. ‘It seems stable enough,’ he whispered, despite himself. He pulled himself higher, nearly slipping. His hands were covered in yellowish machine grease. He wiped them on his trousers. And then he was on top. He paused to catch his breath, lying flat on the wall of junk machinery. He could hear the British soldier cursing under his breath somewhere nearby. He hoped the guard wouldn’t look in their direction. He put one foot lower until he could find a foothold in the wall of old iron strong enough to support his weight. Then he tried again to find one lower, but suddenly found himself stuck. He heard a sound like somebody tearing a sheet of paper, and realised it was his own waterproofs. He felt water on his shoulder. It will cost me a fortune on the black market to replace this, he thought. Then at last he was on terra firma, grass-covered cobbles.
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