Alan Furst: Dark Voyage

But he wasn’t. Not quite.

Officers and crew were taken under guard, the wounded patched up, the ship herded into Hamburg harbor. The Falangists, as fellow fascists, were released immediately, while the Republicans-“Bolsheviks, they call us”-were held at the port. German officials then wired the owner of the ship, who wired back an hour later and objected to the arrests: where, he asked, was he to find a replacement crew? Thus, after a day of questioning and a couple of broken noses, they let most of the Republicans go. “But three,” Amado said, “not come back.”

What the Germans wanted, in fact, was not a few new inmates for their prisons, what they really wanted was the chromite ore, used to harden steel in various war machines-the cargo in the hold of the Spanish ship, and more in the future, all they could get.

But Amado-maybe a ringleader and maybe not, DeHaan wasn’t sure-was not going to board that ship ever again. Which sailed without him, while Amado stayed at a seamen’s hostel in the Altstadt district, where, two months later, DeHaan found him. “Very bad, Hamburg,” Amado said, his face hardening at the memory of it.

From DeHaan, a sympathetic nod, then, “Amado, our ship will be a Spanish ship, for a time.”

Amado looked lost.

DeHaan went to his cabin and returned with the paper parcel. He opened it, and when he showed Amado what it held, the man stared for a time, then his eyes lit up with understanding. “Ah!” he said. “I know this…”

Amado didn’t have much English, DeHaan thought, but he certainly knew deception when he saw it. “That’s right,” DeHaan said. “And you”-he pointed for emphasis-“the captain.” He took off his cap and placed it on Amado’s head. “On the radio, yes? Or, or, when we need you.”

Amado returned the cap with a rueful smile. Not for the likes of me.

“Can you do it?”

“Yes, sir,” Amado said. “Con gusto.” With pleasure.

The bumboat men arrived at dusk, pulling up to the ship’s side in an assortment of feluccas with striped awnings, and announcing their wares as they climbed up the steep gangway along the hull. Waiting for them on deck, Van Dyck, the bosun, and AB Scheldt, with folded arms and policeman’s clubs carried in loops on web belts.

The bumboat men carried suitcases full of tobacco, matches, cigarette papers, French postcards, fruit, chocolate, chewing gum, buttons, thread, needles, writing paper, and stamps, which they spread out on blankets, everything just so. Then they squatted on their haunches and called out the great virtues, and demeaning prices, of their merchandise-these were not, and God was their witness, merely stamps. Business was brisk, DeHaan’s offer of money for small necessities had been enthusiastically taken up, and DeHaan himself, standing with Ratter and watching the show, felt compelled to buy a few things he didn’t need. He’d always liked Levantine bazaars-there was one in Alexandria where the stone corner at the base of a fountain had been worn to perfect roundness, over the centuries, by the brush of robes.

When a young man with three women appeared on deck, Ratter said, “Never fails, does it.” One of the women was young, the other two ageless, all were unveiled, eyes dramatized with kohl, mouths painted carmine. “Tell him no, right? Back to the boat.”

DeHaan shook his head. “Might as well get them laid.”

“You,” Ratter said in his brutal French. “Come over here.”

The pimp wore a sharp green suit. He hurried over to Ratter and DeHaan and said, “Sirs?”

“Are the girls clean?” Ratter said. “Not sick?”

“They are perfect, sir. They have seen the doctor on Monday. Dr. Stein. ”

Ratter stared at him with a cold blue eye. “God help you if you’re lying.”

“I swear it, sir. Sir?”

“Yes?”

“May one beg permission for use of your lifeboats? Under the tarpaulins?”

“Go ahead,” DeHaan said.

A crowd gathered, the girls smiled, blew kisses, fluttered their eyelashes.

The twilight was long gone by the time the last two bumboats arrived. The early merchants had returned to shore, and most of the crew was on the mess deck, eating dinner, with oranges, the Hyperion Line’s contribution from the bumboat market, for dessert.

The bosun and AB Scheldt had gone below, and DeHaan and Ratter waited as the men in djellabas struggled up the gangway. Twenty of them, at least, some carrying wooden crates with rope handles, and breathing hard by the time they reached the deck. One of them laid his crate down, then unbent, coming slowly upright with a shake of the head and a why me? grimace on his dark face.

“Quite a long way, up here,” DeHaan said, sympathetically.

The bumboat man stared for a moment, then nodded in agreement. “Like to broke me fookin’ balls,” he said.

Commandos everywhere.

Five in the first officer’s cabin, Ratter and Kees crammed in with the chief engineer on three-high bunk beds, a few more in the wardroom, sleeping on the floor and on the L-shaped banquette where the officers ate, the rest stashed here and there, with Mr. Ali moving to the radio room to free up the cabin he shared with his assistant. Once upon a time, in that prosperous and hopeful year 1919, at the Van Sluyt shipyards in Dordrecht, the Noordendam had been designed to carry four first-class passengers-wandering souls or colonial administrators-which was common for merchant ships of the day. She had, it was rumored, actually carried one, but nobody could say who it was or where he went, and in the end all it came to was mahogany trim and a bit more space for the ship’s officers who occupied the cabins.

Major Sims, the unit commander, stood the midwatch, midnight-to-four, with DeHaan. Short and trim and, DeHaan sensed, taut with suppressed excitement, he was one of those men with skin too tight for his face and slightly protruding eyes, so that he seemed either irritated or astonished by life, an effect heightened, at that moment, by a deep-brown coat of camouflage cream. “It will wash off,” he said. “With soap and water.” By nature not particularly forthcoming, he did tell DeHaan, in the confidential darkness of the bridge, that he and his men were from “a good regiment, one you’d know,” and that he’d “been asking for a special operation for a long time.” Well, DeHaan thought, now you have it.

A heavy sea, as they headed north, Noordendam rolling and pitching her way through the swells. DeHaan stood at ease by the helmsman, hands clasped behind his back in instinctive mariner’s balance, a posture that Sims soon enough discovered for himself. Some of the commandos would surely be feeling queasy by now, DeHaan thought, with worse to come, but Major Sims seemed, anyhow, to be a good sailor. The mess boy appeared on the bridge and DeHaan ordered two mugs of coffee brought up.

“No change in the ETA, is there?” Sims asked.

“Monday a week, the twelfth, off Tunisia-Cap Bon, just after dark. The estimate has us passing the French airbase, at Bizerta, an hour earlier. Of course, that is an estimate.”

“Quite. When do we go through the Strait?”

“After dusk, on Saturday.”

Sims said “Hm,” in a way that meant he was pleased. “Better after dark, off Gibraltar, with the German coast watch.”

DeHaan agreed.

“When will you become the Santa Rosa?”

“We’ll start rigging at oh-three-thirty, an hour before dawn, then anchor off a stretch of coast called Angra de los Ruivos, paint with the rising sun, and be on our way by ten hundred hours.”

“What’s there?”

“There is, Major, truly nothing there. A dry riverbed, Wadi Assaq, and that’s it.”

They stood silent for a time, the throb of the engine hypnotic. “Five and a half hours, did you say, for painting?”