Alan Furst: Dark Voyage

“After a fashion.”

“After nothing,” Hoek said firmly. “And nobody. She’s shown in Paris and New York, though she won’t tell you that.”

“In oils?” DeHaan said, meaning not oils, of course.

“No. Gouache, principally, though lately I’m back to charcoal pencil.” She took a cigarette from a tortoiseshell case with Bacchus and girlfriend on the lid, tapped it twice, and lit it with a steel lighter. “Back to life drawing.” She shook her head and smiled ruefully that such an odd thing should be so.

At the door, a firm knock, and three waiters with trays.

The dinner was served in traditional dishes set out on the low table. Bowls of aromatic yellow soup, soft bread still hot from the oven, a grandiose pastilla — minced pigeon breast and almonds in pastry leaves, a platter of stewed lamb and vegetables. Once the dishes were set down, glasses packed with crushed mint leaves were filled with boiling water, poured ritually by the chief waiter, who raised and lowered the spout of a silver flagon as the stream curved into the glass. When he was done, the waiter said, “Shall we remain to serve you?”

“Thank you,” Hoek said, “but I think we’ll manage by ourselves.”

This was in French, which DeHaan understood, some of the time, and also spoke, some of the time, and in his own particular way-“the French of a beast,” according to Arlette. He had good German and English, like almost everyone in Holland, and, a year earlier, after the invasion, he had added to his forty-book library a Russian grammar. He had no professional, or political, reason for this, it was more akin to chess, or crossword puzzles, a way to occupy the mind in the long hours off-watch, when he needed to distract himself from the captain’s eternal obsession: every beat of the engine, every tremor and creak of the ship, his ship, at sea. Thus he found an absorbing if difficult pastime, though in addition to studying the grammar he’d more than once fallen asleep on it, and showered it with ashes, seawater, coffee, and cocoa, but, a Russian book, it endured, and survived.

Terhouven, seated next to him, said, “How was Paramaribo?” He tore himself a length of bread, took a piece of lamb from the platter, studied it, then swished it through the sauce and put it on the bread.

“It’s the rainy season-a steambath when it stops.” They’d taken a cargo of greenheart and mora wood, used for wharves and docks, from Dutch Guiana up to the Spanish port of La Corua, then sailed in ballast-mostly water but some scrap iron-for Tangier.

“Lose anybody?”

“Only one, an oiler. A Finn, or so his book said. Good oiler, but a terrible drunk. Hit people-he was pretty good at that too. I tried to buy him out of jail, but they wouldn’t do it.”

“In Paramaribo? They wouldn’t take a bribe?”

“He hit a pimp, a barman, a bouncer, a cop, and a jailer.”

“Christ!” A moment later, Terhouven smiled. “In that order?”

DeHaan nodded.

Terhouven finished his lamb and bread, wiped his mouth, then made a face. “Too dumb to live, some people. You replace him?”

“Couldn’t be done. So, as of this evening, we’re at forty-two.”

“You can sail with forty-two.”

“We can.” But we need more and you know it.

“It’s the war,” Terhouven said.

“Pretty bad, lately, everybody’s undermanned, especially in the engine room. On a lot of ships, when they reach port, they have the crew on deck after midnight, waiting for the drunks to come out of the bars. ‘Climb aboard, mate, we get bacon twice a day.’”

“Or somebody gets hit on the head, and wakes up at sea.”

“Yes, that too.”

Terhouven looked over the tray to see if there was anything else worth eating. “Tell me, Eric, how come no uniform?”

“All I knew was ‘a dinner,’ so…”

“Is it wrecked?”

“No, it lives.”

“You can have another made here, you know.”

Across the table, Wilhelm said to Hoek, “Well, I went to the flower market but he wasn’t there.”

DeHaan was done with dinner, had had all he wanted and liked it well enough. He’d been everywhere in the world and eaten bravely, but he could never quite forget his last plate of fried potatoes and mayonnaise in a waterfront caf in Rotterdam. He took out a packet of small cigars-a Dutch brand called North State, cigarette-shaped but longer, the color of dark chocolate, and offered it to Terhouven, who declined, then lit one for himself, inhaled the brutal smoke, and coughed with pleasure. “Wim,” he said, “what is this dinner about?”

Terhouven hesitated, was about to tell all, then didn’t. “The Hyperion Line is going to war, Eric, and the first step is taken here, tonight. As for the details, why not wait and see-don’t spoil the surprise.”

The waiters returned, the first holding the door, the second bearing a tray piled high with mounds of little pastries that glistened with honey, the third carrying two bottles of champagne in buckets of ice. He raised the buckets proudly and grinned at the dinner guests. “Celebration!” he said. “Open both bottles?”

“Please,” Hoek said.

When the waiters left, Hoek opened the briefcase by his feet and unfolded a Dutch flag, red, white, and blue in horizontal bars, took it by the corners, and held it above his head. Commander Leiden rose and drew from an inner pocket a sheet of good paper with several typed paragraphs, cleared his throat, and stood at attention. “Captain DeHaan,” he said, “would you stand facing me, please?” From somewhere in the neighborhood, the sound of whining Arabic music was faintly audible.

Leiden, in a formal voice, began to read. This was admiralty language, stern and flowery and impressively antique- hereby s and whereas es and shall not fail s, a high wall of words. But plain enough to DeHaan, who blinked once but that was all: Leiden was administering the oath of enlistment in the Royal Dutch Navy. DeHaan raised his right hand, repeated the phrases as directed, and swore his life away. That done, the conclusion was not long in coming. “Therefore, in the name of Her Royal Majesty, Queen Wilhelmina, and by order of the Commissioners of the Admiralty of the Royal Naval Forces of the Netherlands, it is our pleasure to appoint to commission the present Eric, Mathias, DeHaan, to the rank of Lieutenant Commander, in the sure and certain knowledge that he shall perform with full honor and endeavor…”

It went on for a time, then Leiden shook his hand and said, “You may salute, now,” which DeHaan did, and Leiden returned the salute as Terhouven and Wilhelm applauded.

Looking at Terhouven, DeHaan saw a joker’s delight, thought, why no uniform indeed, you sly bastard, but saw also eyes that shone brighter than they should.

They ate the pastries and drank the champagne and talked about the war. Then, at midnight, the man who worked as Hoek’s attendant and chauffeur, a pink-cheeked migr called Herbert, arrived and Wilhelm and Hoek left them. They could hear the chair bumping along the cobbled alley toward a car parked in a nearby square.

“Quite a character,” Leiden said. “Our Mijnheer Hoek.”

“A big heart in him,” Terhouven said.

“Surely that.” Leiden paused to finish the last of his champagne. “He has never married, officially, but it’s said that two of his servants are actually his wives, and that the children in the house are his. It’s not unknown here. In fact, if he were Mohammedan, he could have four wives.”

“Four wives.” From his tone of voice, Terhouven was considering the domestic, not the erotic, implications.

“Only two, for Hoek, and it’s no more than gossip,” Leiden said. “But he does maintain a large household, which he can easily afford.”