Alan Furst: Dark Voyage

DeHaan glanced at Terhouven and saw that they’d both managed polite smiles-Leiden may have been “office navy” but they were not. Terhouven said, “Might as well kill this,” and shared out the last of the gin, while DeHaan fired up one of his cigars.

“All right,” Leiden said, acknowledging a comment that had not actually been spoken, “maybe we better get down to business.”

It was after two in the morning when they left the little room and walked back down the rue Raisuli, which had grown steeper during dinner. Terhouven and Leiden were staying at a private home near the Mendoubia gardens, while DeHaan was headed for the waterfront. It was a warm night, a spring night, with a breeze off the water and a certain lilt to the air, well known to the town’s poets but never named. Anyhow, the cats were out, and the radios turned down-likely out of consideration for the neighbors.

A man in a doorway, the hood of his djellaba up so that it shadowed his face, cleared his throat as they passed by and, when he had their attention, said, “Bonsoir, messieurs,” his voice cheerful and inviting. He hesitated a moment, as though they knew who he was and what he was there for, then said, “Messieurs? Le got franais, ou le got anglais?”

It took DeHaan a moment to think that through, while a puzzled Terhouven said, “Pardon?”

“Le got,” DeHaan said, “means taste, preference, and franais means that it is a woman you have a taste for.”

“Oh,” Terhouven said. “I see. Well, gentlemen, it’s on the Hyperion Line, if you care to make a night of it.”

“Another time, perhaps,” Leiden said.

They came, a few minutes later, to the rue es Seghin, where they would part company. Terhouven said goodby, adding that they might be able to meet the following day. Leiden shook hands with DeHaan and said, “Good luck, then.” He held DeHaan’s hand a moment longer, said, “We…” but did not go on. Finally he said, “Well, good luck,” and turned away. He was, as he’d been all night, bluff and brisk, professional, yet just for an instant there’d been an edge of emotion to him, as though he knew he would never see DeHaan again, and Terhouven’s glance, over the shoulder as he walked off, confirmed it.

DeHaan headed for the Bab el Marsa and the port. Le got hollandais, he thought. Drunk and lonely and sent off to die at sea. But he found that thought offensive and made himself take it back. In the North Atlantic, and everywhere in Europe, all sorts of people had their lives in their hands that night but there was always room for one more, and as to who would see the end of war and who wouldn’t, that was up to the stars. When DeHaan was fifteen, his father, captain of the schooner Helma J., had gone copra trading in the Celebes Sea, taking rafts up the jungle rivers, buying at native villages, bringing the copra out in burlap sacks. Then one day he went up the wrong river and was never seen again and, for a horribly awkward half hour, the head of the Helma J. syndicate had sat in their parlor in Rotterdam, staring at the floor, mumbling “poor man, poor man, his luck ran out,” and leaving an envelope on the hall table. One year later, through floods of his mother’s tears, DeHaan had gone to sea.

It was almost three in the morning by the time DeHaan reached the dock. The port launch was long ago tied up for the night but his chief mate had sent the Noordendam ’s cutter for him, crewed by two ABs, who wished him good evening and started the engine. DeHaan sat silent in the bow as they chugged off through the harbor swell, past dead fish and oil slicks lit by moonlight.

0800 Hrs. 4 May 1941. 3512? N/610? W, course SSW. Low cloud, light NE swell, w/wves 4/6 feet. No vessels sighted. All well on board. J. Ratter, First Officer.

For the time being, he thought, reading the first officer’s entry as he began the forenoon watch, which ran from eight to twelve in the morning. A traditional captain’s watch, like the four-to-eight, and the dreaded midwatch. Midnight to four, which called for endless mugs of coffee, as one stared into the night and waited for dawn, but he’d never sailed on a ship where it was any other way. At “the hour of the wolf,” when life flickered, and sometimes went out, a captain had to be on his bridge.

He said good morning to the new helmsman-always an AB, able-bodied seaman-at the wheel, and saw that Ratter, his first officer, hadn’t gone down to his cabin at the end of his watch but was out on the starboard wing of the bridge, sweeping the horizon with his binoculars. U-boats might well be out hunting, even this close to the British air cover from Gibraltar, and from the open deck of the bridge wing you could see much better than on the enclosed bridge. Not that it mattered, DeHaan thought, they couldn’t run and they couldn’t fight. They could break radio silence, a hard-and-fast rule for merchant ships since the beginning of the war, but that wouldn’t save the Noordendam.

Still, despite the war, despite anything, really, it eased his heart to be back at sea.

The Atlantic on a spring morning, six miles off the coast of Africa. Low cloud bank on the horizon, gray, shifting sky, sea the color of polished lead, stiff breeze from the northeast trades, gulls swooping and crying at the stern as they waited for the breakfast garbage. The real world, to DeHaan, and reassuring after the strange dinner four nights earlier. The blazer was back in his locker, and DeHaan was himself again-faded denim shirt rolled up above the elbows, gray canvas trousers, tie-up leather ankle boots with rubber soles. And a single badge of authority: a captain’s hat, a very old and hardworn friend-the gold stitching of the Hyperion Line insignia, twisted rope in the shape of an H, faintly green from years of salt air-which he wore with peak tilted slightly over his right eye. A good Swiss watch on a leather strap, and that was that.

Done with his survey of the horizon, Ratter came in off the wing deck and said, “Morning, Cap’n.”

“Johannes.”

Ratter was in his thirties, with a long, handsome, serious face and dark hair. Three years earlier, he’d lost an eye in a wheat-dust explosion on the Altmaar, one of the Noordendam ’s sister ships. There’d been no glass eye for him at the hospital in Rangoon, so he’d worn a black eye patch on a black band ever since. He was a good officer, conscientious and bright, who had long had his master’s papers and should have had his own ship by now, but the financial contractions of the 1930s had made that impossible.

“Service at oh nine hundred?” he said.

“Yes,” DeHaan said. It was Sunday morning, and an inviolable shipping tradition called for him to conduct a Divine Service, followed by captain’s inspection. He didn’t mind the latter so much, though he saw through all the tricks, but the former was a burden. “Compulsory today,” DeHaan added. “That means everybody. You already have the bridge, and you can keep the helmsman. Kovacz will take the engine room”-Kovacz, a Pole, was his chief engineer-“and I want everybody else on the foredeck.”

“All right,” Ratter said. “Full crew.”

DeHaan turned to the helmsman. “Come a point to starboard, and signal half speed.”

“Aye, sir. Point to starboard, half speed.” He turned the wheel-highly polished teak, an elegant survivor of the East India trade-and shifted the lever on the engine-room telegraph to Half Speed Ahead. From the engine room, two bells, which confirmed the order.

“I’m going to have to make a speech,” DeHaan said, clearly not happy about it.

Ratter looked at him. This never happened.

“We’re not going to Safi for phosphates.”

“No?”

“We’re going to Rio de Oro,” DeHaan said, using the official name for the strip of coastal sand known commonly as the Spanish Sahara. “Anchoring off Villa Cisneros-and I don’t want to get there much before nightfall, so, save the oil.” After a moment he added, “We’re changing identities, you might as well know it now.”