Alan Furst: Dark Voyage

A flaming redheaded Breton, fire goddess, with a floating walk and a hot temper, a hot everything. At a crucial moment on their first night together, what his hand found pulsed, and the heat of it surprised, then inspired him. “It’s my skin,” she said later, during a brief repose, a Gauloise hanging from her heavy lips. Very white, and thin, she said, so the touch of a hand set her alight. Always? No, not always. But now. “I knew it would be like this,” she pouted, accusing him of exciting her. Of course she was flattering him, enticing him, making him her own-he knew it, and was flattered, and enticed. Still, she wasn’t lying, her skin was pale, and delicate, her grandiose behind, after lovemaking, flushed and mottled in the light of the night-table lamp.

She was, he thought, a couple of years older than he was. She worked in the shops, she said, first this job, then that, it was all the same. And she had come to Amsterdam, she more or less told him, for an adventure, bored with those men she could have met in Paris. What, he wondered, would become of her, now that the Germans occupied the city? This vision worried him; she was not a woman who would avert her eyes, was not someone who could disappear into the scenery.

The light in his porthole had turned to dawn, and when DeHaan felt the ship lose way and the anchor was let down he rose from his bed and went to take a look. They were a mile off the coast; low hills, gray sand, a light surf that broke against a cliff. He took off his shoes and sighed with pleasure, shed his shirt and trousers, and slid beneath the blanket on his bunk. He finished the cigar, tapped it out in a metal ashtray, and closed his eyes.

They’d spent two days in Paris, after the countryside, then he had to take the early train back to Holland and went alone to the station, past a market, a church, streetsweepers with a water truck. Very soft, the light in Paris, at that time of day.

As DeHaan went up to the bridge for his eight-to-twelve, the painting was fully under way, scaffolds slung over the side, ABs handling the tackle that operated the bosun’s chairs. Back at the stern, a loud splash was followed by sarcastic hoots of “Man overboard!” followed by some ripe curses from Ratter and the order to “haul that sonofabitch back on board, goddamnit!” Beneath a bright sky, his funnel now wore half a stripe of Spanish green-so he’d named the color-and he could see the bosun dangling up there, peering nearsightedly at the blistered iron, each stroke of the brush applied with concentrated finesse. “Fucking Rembrandt himself,” Ratter said, when DeHaan joined him.

“Not so bad.” It had been one thing to scheme about the deception, something else to actually do it. Ratter felt the same way, he guessed, but neither of them would say it. Yet. “Looks like we’re on schedule,” DeHaan added, determinedly cheerful.

He took a turn around the ship, then went down to the lower deck, where Sims had his men caring for their weapons-stripping and oiling Sten guns and two lethal-looking Brens, machine guns with small tripods on the barrel, whetstoning knives with rubber handles, loading ammunition belts. Most of the men had their shirts off, and chatted amiably as they worked. They would likely have preferred to be on the top deck, in the sunlight, but a German air patrol was always a possibility and Sims well knew it. DeHaan wished them all a good morning, then returned to the bridge, where Cornelius was waiting with his breakfast. Thickly cut bacon, almost warm, between two slabs of bread, and strong coffee. Fresh bread was produced daily on all merchant ships, and the conventional wisdom said that one got either good cooking or good baking, but the Noordendam ’s cook had clearly been left out of that equation. DeHaan chewed away at his sandwich, dense and rubbery, and stared out at the empty sea.

When he was done, he strolled onto the bridge wing, coffee in one hand, and swept his binoculars along the shore. Ratter was below him, at the foot of the ladderway, and DeHaan called out, “Anything stirring, this morning?”

“One of the lookouts saw a truck, about oh-six-thirty.”

“There’s a road, up there?”

“Not on any map we have-maybe a goat track. The road goes inland.”

“What sort of truck?”

“All I saw was a dust cloud, moving north.”

DeHaan looked again, slow and careful, but there was nothing.

They were under steam by 1020. There was a cloud bank on the far horizon, but a long way west, and rain rarely came to this coast, so DeHaan felt reasonably safe. The Noordendam was no more, her name chipped and sanded off; she was now the Santa Rosa, on the bow and stern, with Valencia, her home port, added beneath the latter. It was Van Dyck’s job to change the name on the ship’s life preservers, and he would repaint them later that morning.

As they moved north, into the open sea, DeHaan had Ratter take the bridge. One final job remained-he could have ordered it done, normal practice, but, for whatever reason, he felt he had to do it himself. He went to the stern, unfolded the Spanish flag, and ran it up the low-angled mast. He’d had a look at the ship’s copy of Lloyd’s Register and he knew her checkered history. She was the ex- Kavakos-Piraeus — built at the Athenides yards in 1921- ex-Maria Vlasos-Larnaca, ex-Huittinen-Helsinki, then, at last, in 1937, Santa Rosa-Valencia, now owned by the Cardenas Steamship Company SA.

A new life, DeHaan thought, as the flag snapped and fluttered in the breeze. Ghost Ship, Section IIIA — London. Making, according to her faked manifest, for the Turkish port of Izmir, to take on a cargo of hides, baled tobacco, and hazelnuts.

9 May. Hamburg.

S. Kolb.

So he was called, on his latest passport-Mr. Nobody from the state of Nowhere. He was bald, with a fringe of dark hair, eyeglasses, a sparse mustache-a short, inconsequential man in a tired suit. He lay on a bed on the top floor of a rooming house in the Zeilerstrasse, not far from the docks, a narrow room with a window at one end. It was a warmish night, and still, and the curtains hung limp in the dead air. Outside, the city was silent, with only the intermittent call of a foghorn from the sea beyond the harbor.

S. Kolb had been in this room for ten days, most of his time spent lying on the bed, reading newspapers. This was, in general, the way he spent his life, except when he had to work, and that was only now and then, for an hour, sometimes, or twenty minutes. But he hadn’t worked at all in Hamburg, this was simply the place from which he was to go to another place. He’d worked in Dsseldorf, where he’d committed murder, and in Karlsruhe, where he’d collected a sheet of paper.

The paper, specifications for a machine, was hidden in plain sight, in a file with similar papers, in his briefcase. Nothing unusual, for a salesman of industrial machinery, supposedly working for a company in Zurich. No border guard, not even an SS officer on a Monday morning, would know that it mattered. And it actually might, he thought, though he was one of those men who had always suspected that, in the end, nothing mattered, and he’d more or less built his life on that principle.

What certainly did matter, at that moment, was a message from an Englishman called Brown. A decent, dog-and-garden sort of a name, he thought, euphonious, that implied a euphonious sort of a life-the odd revolver and lockpick aside. Of course Brown was no more his real name than S. Kolb was his, and if there was any distinction to be made, it lay in certain filing cabinets, where Brown was designated a workname, and S. Kolb an alias. Mr. Brown, a fattish, placid fellow, who hid from the world behind pipe and sweater, was just then responsible for getting S. Kolb out of Hamburg, and S. Kolb found himself wondering, for the hundredth time, just how the hell he was going to manage it.