Dark Voyage (2 page)

“My friends,” Leiden said, “with your permission.” He stood, glass held high, and the others, except for Hoek, followed his example. Leiden paused for a long moment, then said,
“De Nederland.”
In one voice, they echoed his words, and DeHaan saw that Hoek, knuckles white where his hand gripped the arm of the chair, had raised himself off the seat to honor the toast. They drank next
to victory,
Hoek’s offering, and, from Wilhelm,
success in new ventures,
as Terhouven caught DeHaan’s eye and gave him a conspiratorial flick of the eyebrows. Then it was up to DeHaan, who’d been desperate for the right words from the moment Leiden lifted his glass. Finally, as the others turned to him in expectation, he said, quietly, “Well then, to absent friends.” This was conventional and wellworn but, on that night, with those friends in a Europe held by barbed wire and searchlights, it came back to life.

Terhouven said, “Amen to that,” and began to refill the glasses. When he was done he said, “I propose we drink to Captain Eric DeHaan, our guest of honor, who I know you will come to appreciate as I have.” DeHaan lowered his eyes, and was more than grateful when the toast had been drunk and the group returned to conversation.

Terhouven told the story of his flight from London, on a Sunderland flying boat, his fellow passengers mostly men with briefcases who were rather pointedly disinclined to make conversation. A nighttime journey, hours of it, “just waiting for the
Luftwaffe
.” But then, “the most beautiful dawn sky, somewhere off the coast of Spain, the sea turning blue beneath us.”

Hoek glanced at his watch. “Dinner should appear any moment now,” he said. “I took the liberty of ordering—I hope you don’t mind, it’s better if you give them time.” A good idea, it seemed, they were happy enough to wait, the table talk wandering here and there. You had to be Dutch, DeHaan thought, to know that the gin was at work. Not much to be seen on the exterior, everyone calm and thoughtful, attentive, in no hurry to take the floor. They were, after all, strangers, for the most part, together for an evening in a foreign city, who shared little more than citizenship in a conquered nation, and its corollary, a certain quiet anger common to those who cannot go home.

“Years since I’ve been back,” Hoek said to Terhouven. “Came out here in, oh, 1927. Looking for opportunity.” An unvoiced
naturally
lingered at the end of his sentence—Holland was a trading nation which had, for centuries, used the whole world as its office, so commerce in foreign climes was something of a national commonplace. “And I found a way to buy a small brokerage, in ores and minerals, then built it up over the years. They mine lead and iron, in the south, and there’s graphite, cobalt, antimony, asbestos. That’s in addition to the phosphates, of course. That pays the rent.”

DeHaan knew about the phosphates, Morocco’s main export. The
Noordendam,
as it happened, was scheduled to call at Safi, the port serving Marrakesh on the Atlantic coast, to take on a bulk cargo from the Khourigba mines. So, DeHaan thought, it all made sense, didn’t it—his boss flying down from exile in London, taking his life in his hands, to bring a jug of Dutch gin to celebrate the loading of one of his freighters.
Well, all will, in time, be explained.
In fact, he had a pretty good idea what was going on, he was simply anxious to hear the details.

“So, your family’s here, with you,” Terhouven said.

“Oh yes,” Hoek said. “Good-size family.”

DeHaan thought he saw a flicker of amusement in Wilhelm’s eyes, an expression on her face he could only describe as
not smiling
.

Terhouven, making conversation, asked her how long she’d been in Tangier.

“Mmm, not so long, a few years maybe, if you add it all up. I was in Paris, after the war, Juan-les-Pins in the summers, then here, then back to Paris, Istanbul for a while, then back here.”

“A restless soul.” Terhouven knew her type.

She shrugged. “A change of light. And people, I suppose.”

“You’re an artist,” Terhouven said, it wasn’t exactly an accusation.

“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.”

“Well,” DeHaan said, “why not.”

“We agree. Whatever their peculiarities, you soon discover, as part of a government in exile, the importance of patriots who have their wealth abroad.”

“And want to spend it,” Terhouven said.

“Yes, but not only that. What you saw here tonight was the North African station of the Royal Dutch Navy’s Bureau of Naval Intelligence.”

Terhouven and DeHaan were silent, then Terhouven said, “May one ask how you found them?”

One may not
—but Leiden never said it. Terhouven was himself a patriot of this category and that, by the slimmest of margins, bought him an answer. “They volunteered—at the consul’s office in Casablanca. There were others, of course, more than you’d expect, but these two we decided we could trust. If not to be good at it, at least to be quiet. This sort of connection excites people, in the beginning, and they simply must tell, you know, ‘just one friend.’” He spoke the last words in the voice of the indiscreet, then turned to DeHaan and said, “You can depend on them, of course, but one of the axioms of this work is that you don’t abandon your, ah, best instincts.”

DeHaan began to understand the dinner. For a time, he’d thought he might be asked to serve on one of the Dutch warships that had escaped capture in 1940 and gone on to fight alongside the British navy. Now he knew better. Yes, he was newly a Luitenant ter Zee 1ste Klasse, but—and Terhouven’s presence confirmed his suspicion—it was the
Noordendam
that was going to war.

“And Wilhelm?” Terhouven said.

“Our wireless/telegraph operator. And, just as important, she knows people—migrs and Moroccans, plain folk and otherwise. An artist, you see, can turn up anywhere and talk to anyone and nobody cares. Very useful, if you’re us. She was among the first to apply, I should add, and her father was a senior officer in the army. So, maybe it’s true, blood will tell and all that.”

“Are they to give me orders?” DeHaan said, not sounding as neutral as he thought.

“No. They will help you—you will need their help—and they may serve as a retransmission station for our instructions to you.”

“Which are?”

“What we want you to do, and this is the broad answer, is to carry on the war. We, which is to say Section IIIA of the Admiralty General Staff, currently find ourselves crammed into two small rooms in D’Arblay Street, in Soho. Some of us have to share desks, but, frankly, we never had all that much space in The Hague, and we’d learned, over the years, to accept a certain, insignificance. With Holland a neutral state, as she’d been in the Great War, the government had better things to do with its money than to buy intelligence. We had the naval attachs in the embassies, ran a small operation now and again, watched a few ports. Then the roof fell in and we lost the war in four days—the army hadn’t fought since 1830, nobody anticipated attacks by parachute and glider, the queen sailed away, and we surrendered. We were humiliated, and, if we didn’t believe that, the British found ways to let us know it was true. In their eyes, we stood with the French, the Belgians, and the Danes—not the ‘brave but outmanned Greeks.’