Alan Furst: Dark Voyage

Six days earlier, the steamship Von Scherzen had not appeared in Hamburg harbor, and while the men at the port office wouldn’t exactly say what had become of her, their faces hardened a certain way when he inquired, which suggested that she was at the bottom of the sea. But she would not, at any rate, be part of the escorted convoy of German ships which had been scheduled to sail to Lisbon. He would, they told him, have to wait for a berth on a different ship, and they deeply regretted the inconvenience.

So did he. This was difficult work, equal parts danger, discretion, and waiting, a mixture that was, to say the least, hard on the nerves. Its traditional palliatives were alcohol and sex-yet more danger and discretion required here, but one had to do something. One could go mad reading newspapers. But newspapers were, at least, safe; women were not. Of course he knew that the port of Hamburg virtually swarmed with prostitutes, one could have anything one could pay for, but many of the men who sought them out were known to be traveling alone, far from home, and such men were, especially under the present regime, of interest to the police. It was caution and discipline that had kept S. Kolb alive all these years but now he sighed miserably as he felt their chains tighten around his chest. No, he told himself, this is not for you.

Or was he, perhaps, being too hard on himself? He was, as it happened, waiting for a woman-this was the third night he had waited-and there was a bottle of apricot brandy hidden, from himself as much as anyone else, at the back of the top shelf of the room’s armoire. This woman, known only as Frulein Lena, was his single contact in Hamburg and he had gotten in touch with her when the Von Scherzen didn’t appear. She had somehow, and one could meditate at length on that somehow, signaled his predicament to Mr. Brown, and it was now her job to bring him news of a revised set of travel plans, which would reach Hamburg by means of a clandestine W/T set.

No secret radio could transmit from Germany-the Gestapo listened to all frequencies and would have a position fix on it soon enough-but coded messages could be received. This situation echoed that of ships at sea, naval and civilian, which could listen to transmissions but had, otherwise, to maintain radio silence. Some irony in this, Kolb thought, the governments of the warring nations had thereby attained a certain ideal level of supervision: one could only be instructed, one could not ask questions, one could not talk back.

So, by necessity a good soldier, he waited for orders. But he did allow himself some measure of speculation, to wit: if Frulein Lena were to come to his room with instructions for his exfiltration from this wretched city, could she not also, perchance, provide an hour of tender oblivion? Kolb closed his eyes and set his newspaper on the floor. All hail to caution, yes, but with Lena he shared a secret life-would she perhaps be amenable to a secret tryst? Did he dare to ask? She was colorless and plain, somewhere in the middle of her life, quite heavy, and thoroughly bound in corsets, her iron bulk, in his imagination, tumbling free, prodigiously sweet and plentiful, as they were-only God knew how-dismantled.

No, he did not dare. Life had taught him one lesson: trust nobody. If only he had learned that in time, he would not be in this city, in this woeful room with curtains where green knights rode across a yellow field. In the Austrian city of Lenz, his father had worked as a clerk in a bank, and the young S. Kolb, on finishing secondary school, had been installed as a junior clerk in that same bank. Where he was, a year later, found to be embezzling money, moving a small portion of the funds into an account in his own name. He was confronted, humiliated, discharged, and threatened with prosecution. His family, with terrible effort, had managed to make good on the missing money, and the police were never notified.

He had, however, not stolen the money. Someone else-he suspected a senior officer of the bank-had done it, and left a trail that led to him. This he told his parents, and they wanted to believe him, but, in their hearts, they couldn’t. Thus he learned the brutal lesson: life was governed by deceit, and by power. Not the Golden Rule, the Iron Rule. Kolb had to leave his hometown but managed, by persistence, to find a job as a clerk in one of the government ministries in Vienna. The armaments ministry, it so happened. And soon enough, in a caf on the elegant Krntner Strasse, he met a genial young woman who, in time, introduced him to a rather less genial foreign gentleman, who taught him a clever method by which he could supplement his meager salary.

That was many foreign gentlemen ago, he thought, nostalgic for his youth, those long-gone days of Mr. Hall and Mr. Harris and Mr. Hicks-tubby old Brown was a recent incumbent, having materialized, the way they did, only last January. Pleasant and mean, all of them really, explaining nothing but what was required.

In the long hallway that led past his room, Kolb heard footsteps, a heavy tread, but they passed by his door and receded down the corridor. Kolb looked at his watch and saw that it was after midnight. Not that it mattered-women came to men’s rooms in these places, at any time of the day or night. Frulein Lena, meine Schatze, meine kleine Edelweiss, where are you? Perhaps he’d been abandoned, simply left to fend for himself. For a time, he dozed, then woke, startled, to three discreet taps at the door.

9 May. Off Kenitra, French Morocco.

The dog watch, four to eight in the evening, was traditionally split in two, so everybody could eat dinner. DeHaan stood the first half, on the ninth, and, in fine rain and mist, squinted through droplets on the windows as Noordendam butted north, beam on to a short, steep sea, with the northern trade blowing spray over the bow. Out on the wings, the lookouts’ oilskins ran streams of water. Major Sims came up to the bridge and said, “Filthy weather, out there.”

DeHaan looked for a tactful answer-Sims had obviously not been at sea in filthy weather, because this was far from it. “Well, tomorrow we’ll be going east,” he said. “In the Mediterranean.”

Sims was clearly pleased with the answer, and nodded emphatically. “One tries, of course, to keep one’s people occupied,” he said. “But, you know how it is, the way they feel now, the sooner the better.”

They stood in silence for a time, then DeHaan said, “There’s one thing about this, mission, Major, that I really don’t understand.”

“Only one?”

“Isn’t a commando operation usually done with a submarine?”

“Ideally, it is. And it started out that way, I believe, but we only have so many, and they’re mostly up north. In fact, we were damned close to canceling the thing, then somebody came up with the idea of a merchant ship. A neutral.”

Noordendam was laboring too hard, DeHaan thought, and had the helmsman come a few points west.

“Truth is,” Sims said, “where we’re going, it’s not healthy for submarines. Our side has the east and west ends of the Med, with Gibraltar, and the fleet at Alexandria, but, in the middle, that’s another story. There are French airbases at Algiers and Bizerta, Italian planes across the Sicilian Channel at Cagliari, and they have a naval base at Trapani, and, since January, the Luftwaffe is operating from an airfield in Taormina, in Sicily. Submarines don’t like airplanes, Captain, as I’m sure you know, and add the destroyers, which fly seaplanes from their decks, and you stand a rather good chance of losing your submarine.”

“And a commando unit.”

“That’s not really the thinking, I’m afraid. It’s the Andrew, the Royal Navy, wanting to keep what it has. You can replace commandos.”

And tramp freighters. “I suppose you can,” DeHaan said. “Anyhow, we’re proud to do our part.”