Dark Voyage (21 page)

They will not.
DeHaan leaned forward and said, “Let me tell you about money, Miss Bromen, sea captains and money. They have it, but, other than giving it to their families, they have no way to spend it. Only in port. Where you can spend like a drunken sailor—certainly I have spent like a drunken sailor—but those pleasures just aren’t that expensive. All this to tell you that I will buy your freedom, you can tell me what it costs, and it will be my pleasure to buy it for you. A new passport, ship passage, we’ll take a piece of paper and add it up.”

“Will cost
time,
” she said. “I know, I have seen them, the richest ones, waiting, and waiting. For months. All the money in the world, can bribe, can buy gifts, but still they wait. If you don’t believe, ask the refugees, I will introduce you.”

“And so?”

“So must be a ship at night. To a neutral port. No passport control going out, no passport control getting off.
Disappearance.
With no tracks to sniff.”

From DeHaan, a sour smile. “Is that all.”

“I know ports, Captain. I know how they work.”

She was right, and DeHaan knew it.

“No other way can work,” she said. “I am sorry, but is true.”

Then they were silent for a long time, because there was nothing more to be said, and all that remained for him was to stand up and walk away. And he told himself to do precisely that, but it didn’t take. Instead, he made a wry face and muttered angrily to himself. What he said was in Dutch, and not at all nice, but she knew what it meant, and rubbed her eyes with her fingers. Keeping a promise to herself, he suspected.

6 June, 2105 hours. Bay of Tangier.

He’d enlisted, for this brief mission, his best, the bosun Van Dyck, who sat in the stern and steered the ship’s cutter. It was choppy on the bay that evening and DeHaan braced himself against the gunwale as they neared the lights of the city. In his pocket, a rough map, penciled on a scrap of paper. Simple enough, she’d said, there was a small, unused pier at the foot of the rue el Khatib, and a street that led to an old section of the port, where, in time, he would find a row of large sheds that faced an abandoned canal, the fourth one down occupied by a Jewish refugee who managed to exist by adjusting compasses aboard merchant vessels. DeHaan had only to knock on the wooden shutter and someone would open it.

He’d asked her, more told her, to leave with him then and there, for safety’s sake, and go immediately to the ship, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Almost pleading, she said there were a few small things to be retrieved from the hotel but, most of all, she had to tell people, people who had cared for her, that she was leaving. When he tried once more, she offered to take the port launch, but he couldn’t let her do that—the Spanish police had a passport control at the dock. No, he would pick her up in the ship’s cutter. Back on board at noon, he’d looked up the rue el Khatib in
Brown’s Ports and Harbors,
where, on the map of Tangier, it lay at the very edge of the page, on the ragged eastern border of the port—no longer a port at all, really, long ago deserted by commerce and left to crumble away. The map had a small street coming in from the west, while the street leading away from the port, on her map, was not shown.

Van Dyck slowed the engine as the pier came into view. By now, the lights of the main port were well west of them, but, by dead reckoning based on the flashing Le Charf beacon, they’d found the foot of the rue el Khatib. He hoped. This was not the most sensible thing he’d ever done, and Van Dyck didn’t like it, had been particularly uncommunicative since they’d left the ship. Ratter didn’t like the idea either—a woman passenger on board—but it was only for two days, DeHaan explained, until they reached Lisbon. From Ratter, at that point, a quizzical, one-eyed glare—
why are you doing this?

No choice,
he thought, as they neared the shore. And, really, what did it matter, one more lost soul? Kovacz, Amado and his mates, Shtern, Xanos the Greek soldier, his German communists, all of them really, fugitives in one way or another, set to wandering the world.
Always room for one more on the good ship Noordendam.

Van Dyck cut the engine and used the boat’s momentum to glide alongside the dock. DeHaan stood, ran a rope around a cleat, and tied them off. It wasn’t long for the world, this pier—the boards rotten and sprung, one side sagging toward the water, the corner post nowhere to be seen.

“Is this it?” Van Dyck said.

“Yes, it should be.”

“Will you want me to come along?”

“No, you stay with the boat.”

“Safe enough to leave it, Cap’n.”

“I know, but no point in both of us going.”

Van Dyck held the cutter against the pier as DeHaan stepped off. “Want me to hold on to that?” he said, pointing to DeHaan’s head.

DeHaan took off his captain’s hat and tossed it to the bosun. Who was right, he thought—alone at night on the docks, it was better to be just a common sailor.

At the end of the pier, a lone streetlamp cast a circle of yellow light. DeHaan paused beneath it, a swarm of night moths attacking the bare bulb above him, squinted at the map, put it in his pocket, and set off down a silent street of closed shops. No lights here, no radios, only a few stray cats. The street stopped dead at a high wall, but the map told him to turn left, and he found an alleyway, just wide enough to walk through, between the wall and the last building. The end of the alleyway disappeared into shadow, and he hesitated briefly, then went ahead, running his hand along the wall as he walked. At the far end, a dirt path bordered by underbrush led to a sandy field, then passed beneath an immense tank that had once been used for oil storage. Here the path widened to a dirt road, then turned sharply and ran beside an ancient brick warehouse with black broken windows.

Which went on forever, it seemed. He kept walking, past boarded-up entries and loading platforms, another wall now on his right.
Penned in,
he thought. Likely there was a road on the opposite side of the building that went down to the bay, but there was no sense of water here, only night, and deep silence, but for a few cicadas beating away in the darkness. At last, he reached the end of the warehouse and found a railroad track, weeds grown up between the ties, a faint odor of creosote still lingering in the air.
As it used to.
When he was twelve, in the port of Rotterdam, brave with his friends, amid rusting machinery and alleys that led nowhere. He stopped for a moment, took the map from his pocket, and lit a match. Yes, that carefully drawn ladder meant a railroad track, with crosshatched lines showing three canals beyond it. Where were they?

He reached the first one a few minutes later. Dead fish, dead water, an Arab dhow half sunk at the far end. Again he lit a match to look at the map, then, just as he shook it out he heard, thought he heard, a voice. Just for an instant, a high voice, one or two notes, like singing. But, as he tried to figure out where it was coming from, it stopped, and the silence returned—a complete hush now, the cicadas gone.

At the end of the canal, he found a tributary, a second canal, with a cinder path beside it and a long row of sheds that disappeared into the darkness. It was the fourth in line that he wanted—she’d put an
X
in a box on the map. He counted four, and stood before a heavy wooden shutter. Could there be people inside? He heard nothing. He put a tentative hand on the shutter, then knocked. The shutter moved. He stepped back and stared at it. On one side of the shutter, an iron ring that took a padlock had been pried free, leaving three screwholes in a patch of yellow, splintered wood, freshly gouged, while the metal hasp, with closed lock still on the ring, had been bent back on itself. He knocked again, waited, then took the bottom of the shutter in both hands and rolled it up, to reveal a doorway.

“Hello?” He said it in a whisper, then again, louder.

Nothing, and the door stood ajar.

He pushed it open, and counted to ten.
Go back to the pier. You do not want to see what is inside this shed.
But he had to, and stepped through the door to find a square room with plaster walls, the air heavy with mildew. There was a straw mattress with a blanket on it, and a row of books at the foot of the wall, held up by rocks used as bookends. On the opposite wall, on a rough pine table, a lantern lay on its side in a puddle of kerosene, which had wicked up into a sheaf of papers and half a bread. On the floor, a few more papers.

“Is anyone here?”

He said it just to say it, first in German, then again in French, knowing there was no point, knowing there would be no answer. And knowing, also, that whoever had been here was not coming back.

Sick at heart, shaken, and very angry, he left the shed and walked away. Maybe someone was watching him, maybe not, he almost didn’t care. And he was a fool, he knew, for being without the Browning pistol, lying peacefully beneath his sweater, but he’d never thought to bring it. Well, he would fix that—if he lived through the night, if he ever saw his ship again, and if he were, ever again, tempted to leave it. He walked at full speed, almost a trot, but it was after ten by the time he reached the alleyway, the street of closed shops, and, at last, the pier. As he approached the cutter, Van Dyck said, “What happened?”

“Not there,” DeHaan said. He stepped heavily into the boat, whipped the rope free of its cleat, and sat in the bow.

Silently, Van Dyck handed him his hat, then went to start the engine, which chose that moment to balk. Both of them swore as Van Dyck fiddled with the choke, then tried again. “We’ll row the goddamn thing if we have to,” DeHaan said.

“Take it easy, Cap’n. It’s just flooded.”

DeHaan could smell that perfectly well, and settled in to wait. “Where’d she go?” Van Dyck said.

“I don’t know. Maybe somebody took her.”

Van Dyck was silent, but his face closed in a certain way—the world had grown more evil than he ever thought it would. Again he tried the engine, which coughed a few times, then started with a belch of black smoke. “That’s better,” Van Dyck told it, opening the throttle. He put the engine in gear, and, with a wide, sweeping turn, headed the cutter back toward the bay.

They were a minute or two out when a car came roaring down the road from the port and, tires screeching, skidded to a stop at the edge of the pier. “Oh Christ,” DeHaan said. “Now we’re going to be shot.”

“What?” Van Dyck said.

DeHaan knelt on the floorboards and gestured for Van Dyck to do the same. But the shots never came. Instead, a man and a woman leapt from the car and ran to the end of the pier. He was an old man, and he could barely run, but he did his best, waving his arms, yelling words they couldn’t hear.

“Cap’n?” Van Dyck said.

“Better turn around.”

0800 Hrs. 7 June, 1941. 3550
′
N/620
′
W, course NW 275. Fog and heavy SE following sea. Departed port of Tangier at 0340 hrs., w/41 crew aboard. Two eastbound vessels sighted. All well on board. E. M. DeHaan, Master.

With his log entry completed, and Ratter taking the forenoon watch, DeHaan stood on the bridge wing with the AB lookout, who peered dutifully out into the gray mist through his binoculars, though he couldn’t see much of anything. DeHaan found his heart much eased, that morning—back at sea, back where he belonged, swaying with the roll of the ship, staring down at the foamy bow wave in gray Atlantic water. He didn’t mind the fog, which had its own smell, salty and damp—God’s own perfect air out here in the breeze. On the ocean liners, a few hours from landfall at the end of a voyage, passengers could always be counted on to ask the nearest steward about a certain unpleasant scent, decay perhaps, as the temperature climbed. “That’s land, sir,” the steward would say. “You can smell it long before you see it.”

From somewhere north of them, the low moan of a foghorn. On the other side of the bridge door, Ratter reached up and pulled the cord above his head and their own foghorn, just aft of the bridgehouse, gurgled for a moment, sent a steaming spurt of water onto the roof, then produced a great shuddering bellow that rattled the glass in the windows. DeHaan looked at his watch—a wardroom meeting, at nine, so he could stay on his bridge. The morning log entry was true enough, all
was
well on board as
Noordendam,
steady and determined, steamed west through the fog, easily making her knots with a following sea.

Maria Bromen was settled in Ratter’s cabin, next to his own, while his first officer had moved in with Kees. She’d taken a long shower the night before, DeHaan had listened to it through the bulkhead as he lay on his bunk and tried to read. A complicated story from Bromen, once she’d been seated in the cutter. She said that she and her refugee friend had returned to the shed just before eight o’clock, saw that someone had pried up the lock, and, without going inside, left in a hurry, going to the room of another refugee. There followed a nightmare—someone who had the use of a car would take her to the pier, but that someone, always at a certain caf, was not there, couldn’t be found, until it got so late he
had
to be found, and, finally, was, at last, though almost not in time.

But all’s well that ends well.
In a few hours they would anchor for repainting, then, as
Santa Rosa,
dock at Lisbon on the evening of the ninth. For Bromen, a chance to slip away into the night. After leaving her at the coffee shop, the day before, he’d stopped at Barclay’s Bank and obtained a substantial packet of American dollars, so she would disembark with money to spend, and DeHaan could at least hope she would find a way to survive. It was possible, he thought. As Spain was technically neutral but slanted toward Germany, Portugal was neutral but a quiet ally of Britain, an alliance that went back to the fourteenth century. So Portuguese officials might look the other way, might not be so eager to please their German friends. Thus, with false papers and a little luck, she could wait out the war in Lisbon. As long as the
Organyi
didn’t find her. There he couldn’t be sure, because they were, it was said, everywhere, and relentless. Still, a chance. And maybe, with very good false papers and a great deal of luck, she might even get across the ocean. To a much safer place.