Dark Voyage (25 page)

“You’re aware that he toured the ship, this morning? He went everywhere, down to the engine room, crew’s quarters.”

“I didn’t know, but so what? What’s he going to do? Put it down to curiosity and forget it, we have more important things to worry about.”

12 June, 0510 hours. Off Vigo.

A hundred miles east of them, in the dawn mist. DeHaan had always liked the port—a huge bay, easy docking, a town that welcomed sailors. A Dutch fleet had taken Vigo, during one of the eighteenth-century wars, fighting alongside a British squadron. The instructor at the naval college had shown them an old map, drawn in the odd perspective of the period, a line of big ships riding little semicircle waves. Then, during the Napoleonic Wars, it had played some role, what? The British? The French fleet?

There was a knock on the port window of the bridge. Ruysdal, the lookout, was motioning for him to come out on the wing.

“Over there, Cap’n.”

Rising and falling on the low swell, a cluster of drifting shapes. DeHaan squinted through his binoculars. “Put a light on it,” he said.

Ruysdal worked the searchlight, and a yellow beam settled on the cluster. Bodies. Maybe twenty of them. Some of them in dark clothing, others wearing skivvy shorts—they’d been asleep when it happened, a few wore life jackets, and two of the men had roped themselves together at the wrist. DeHaan looked for insignia, for some identification, but, even with the searchlight, the gray dawn hid it from him. “Can you see the name of a ship? Anything?”

“No, sir.”

There was more; debris, pieces of wood, a strip of canvas, a white life preserver—but if there was a name on it, it floated face down.

“Stop the ship, sir? Put out the cutter?”

DeHaan watched, looking for a sign of life as the bodies lifted and turned in the ship’s bow wash and slipped away astern. “No,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do.”

Ruysdal kept the light focused on the bodies until they disappeared from the edge of the beam. “Damn shame, sir, whoever they are.”

“I’ll note it in the log,” DeHaan said, returning to the bridge.

13 June, 1920 hours. Off Brest.

The dinner conversation was in English, mostly, but sometimes German, for Kovacz and Poulsen. They managed—everybody helped their neighbor, it was better than silence, and better, come to that, than the smoked fish and beans.

“Where are we tonight, Captain?” Kolb said.

“Off Brest, approximately. Well off, about two hundred miles.”

“The minefields,” Ratter explained.

“Yes,” Kovacz said. “Big naval base at Brest.”

“And submarines,” Mr. Ali said.

“They come out of La Rochelle, I think,” Ratter said. “Not that it makes any difference, they’re all watching us.”

“Easy prey,” Kolb said. “But why bother?”

“They’ve sunk neutral ships, both sides have,” Ratter said. “Maybe somebody just wants to put another mark on their score, so they push a button.”

“Or, a bad mood,” Mr. Ali said.

“Yes,” Ratter said. “Why not?”

Nobody had a reason why not—such things did happen, and always would.

“It is vile, this war,” Maria Bromen said. “All of them.”

“It will end,” DeHaan said. “Some day.”

“War?” Kolb said.

“This war.”

“Have you heard the one about Hitler and the end of the war?” Kolb said. “He’s in his office and he’s looking at his portrait, and he says to it, ‘Well, they’re trying to get rid of me, but you’re still hanging there. What will become of us, when the war is over?’ And the portrait says, ‘That’s easy, Adolf—they’ll get rid of me and hang you.’”

A translation followed, with a few laughs. Mr. Ali gave a BBC report, and comment on that held out until dessert. More oranges, gratefully received, then Ratter went to the bridge to relieve Kees and the rest returned to their cabins. DeHaan and Maria Bromen were the last ones in the passageway, standing in front of their doors.

“So then, good night,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “Sleep well.”

Claudine in Paris
? DeHaan stood musing in front of his library and tried a paragraph. Long Atlantic rollers now, below him, the ship taking her time on the way up, engine at work, then down into the trough.

14 June, 0645 hours.

RAF skies, today. They’d crossed 50N latitude at dawn, if they were on schedule. The ship log seemed to think so, though he wouldn’t feel certain until Ratter shot the noon sunsights. Something of a border, fifty-north, France falling away to the south, the English Channel off the starboard beam as
Noordendam
swung away from the minefields that guarded the Western Approaches. Swung away, as well, from the lights of neutral Ireland, a safe haven. Better that they couldn’t see them, he thought—he’d certainly considered putting Bromen ashore there, before they curved over Britain into enemy waters, but they had no time to make port, couldn’t abandon her alone in the cutter, and, come to that, couldn’t afford to abandon the cutter either.

So she had to stay aboard. His passenger. Of course he’d hoped for more, but that hope had climbed some interior hill, then tumbled down the other side—the midnight knock at the midnight door to remain locked away in his imagination. Because she would say no. Say it tenderly, no doubt, but he very much didn’t want to hear her say it. And having her so near him made it much worse.
Proximity.
One of Desire’s great inventions, wasn’t it. Office partition, apartment wall, bulkhead—one would not, in fact, become a spirit and float through to the other side, but the thought was there.

A turn around the deck.
He told the helmsman to stay on course and left the bridge. The sea had grown stronger overnight,
Noordendam
’s prow nosing through heavy swells as spray flew high above the bow and sent up little puffs of steam as it hit the deck. DeHaan stood dead still. This couldn’t be what he knew it was. He trotted forward and knelt down, the salt spray stinging his eyes, and pressed a hand against the iron surface. Then he ran for the bridge.

The siren’s wail produced both fire crews, sprinting for their hoses, and Ratter and Kees. Shouting over the siren, he told them where it was. Ratter got there first, wrapped his hand in his shirttail and spun the wheel that opened the hatch to the number one hold. When he threw the hatch cover back, gray smoke poured up from below. “Get a hose over here!” Kees yelled. An AB poked a nozzle into the opening and DeHaan had to grab him as he pulled the lever back and the high-pressure stream whipped the hose and almost sent him into the hold. “Give me that,” DeHaan said and Kees handed him a flashlight. But, lying on his stomach and peering down into the darkness, he could see only a shifting cloud of smoke.

“What the hell is it?” Ratter said.

No answer. Hold fires were caused by spontaneous explosions, from dust, or slow combustion in damp fibers. “There’s ammunition in those crates,” Kees said. “Or worse. It’ll blow us open.”

Ratter put a foot on the first of the perilous steps, iron rungs, that descended into the hold. It was thirty feet, three stories, to the keel, sailors died when they fell down there, and the rungs extended only six inches—the shipyards didn’t sacrifice space needed for cargo. Ratter coughed as he climbed down and, as DeHaan followed, said, “I’ll thank you not to step on my fucking hands, Eric.”

“Sorry.”

Kees slithered backward off the deck and DeHaan watched his foot turn sideways, probing for purchase on a slippery rung. Above them, the AB adjusted the hose so that the white stream of water hissed past their heads—one slip of the hand and all three of them were finished. Someone on deck, maybe Kovacz, growled, “You’re too close.”

Some intelligent soul now turned on the lights—which meant the electrical system hadn’t burned, and revealed one of the trucks, with its hood and cab in flames. “Turn off the hose and hand it down,” Kees yelled.

“Don’t try it,” DeHaan shouted.

“Don’t worry about that,” Kees shouted back.

The light helped them go faster. Too fast, DeHaan’s foot skidded off a rung and he grabbed the one above him with both hands, the flashlight clattering as it landed below.

By the time they reached the bottom, all three were breathing through handfuls of shirt. Kees turned the hose on and played the stream over the burning truck. The fire in the cab went out immediately, but burning gasoline in the engine kept coming back to life. They moved forward, sloshing through an inch of brown water, finally lying down in it and sending the stream up into the engine from below. That did it. “Should I hit the crates?” Kees said.

“No, better not,” DeHaan said.

Standing in front of the charred, smoking hood, Ratter said, “Trucks catch fire by themselves. Happens all the time.”

“You didn’t drain the tank?” DeHaan said to Kees.

“I thought they’d need to drive it right away.”

DeHaan walked over to the crate nearest the truck, one of the eight-by-eights, and felt for heat. The wood was smoke-blackened and warm to the touch, but no more than that. “Would’ve caught, in time,” he said.

“Sabotage,” Ratter said.

“Maybe.”

“That little German.”

Like a graceful bear, Kovacz clambered quickly down the rungs, a rag tied bandit-style over his nose and mouth, then stood with them and stared at the burnt truck. “It catches fire? All by itself?” he said, taking a pair of fireman’s gloves from his back pocket and putting them on. He walked over to the truck, waving the smoke away from his face, and yanked the door open. “Ignition switch is on,” he called out. “Maybe the wires heated up.”

“Too much time since we loaded,” Ratter said. “Battery wouldn’t last that long.”

“Ever hear of it?” DeHaan said.

After a moment, Kees said, “Once. On the
Karen Marie,
some kind of big touring car.”

“So it can happen,” DeHaan said. Then called out to Kovacz, “Anything in there that doesn’t belong?”

“Not that I can see.”

“Get rid of him,” Ratter said, meaning Kolb.

“How would I do that?” DeHaan said. “Hang him from a crane? With the crew assembled?”

“You can, you know,” Kees said. “And quietly, if you have to.”

“That’s crazy,” DeHaan said. But Kees wasn’t entirely wrong. DeHaan was, according to the Dutch Articles, “Master next to God,” and that meant he could do pretty much anything he wanted.

Kovacz backed out of the cab, then opened the hood. All four of them peered at the engine, the smell of burned rubber hose heavy in the air. “Nothing,” Ratter said. “How the hell did he do it?”

“Wait a minute,” Kovacz said. He reached below the engine and peeled a black scrap of fabric off the metal. “Oily rag?”

Silence. They stared at each other, all of them with tear streaks running through the soot below their eyes. Kees coughed and said, “Maybe the woman did it.”

“Or somebody in the crew,” DeHaan said. “Or maybe it was in there when we loaded it.”

“Ignition switch on?” Kovacz said.

“If it stalled on the dock, and nobody checked . . .          ,” DeHaan said. Stranger things had happened, they all knew that, and hold fires were often mysterious. “Anyhow, they have two more,” he said. “Let’s hope that’s enough. Johannes, I want you to take a walk around the ship—paint locker, places like that, you know what I mean.”

Ratter nodded. “What do we tell the crew?”

“Oily rags,” DeHaan said.

2010 hours. Off the Irish coast.

True Atlantic weather, now, barometer falling, maybe a storm system up north. Kolb didn’t show up for dinner, but in this kind of sea the ship’s pitch and roll could keep passengers in their cabins. “Feeling all right?” DeHaan asked Maria Bromen as they left the table.

“It doesn’t bother me.”

“Go up on deck and watch the horizon, if you have to.”

“I will do that,” she said. Then, “Could you tell me, maybe, where we are?”

When they reached the chartroom, he unlocked the door, turned on the light, and spread a chart out on the slanted top of the cabinet. She stood close to him, he could smell soap. Nice soap, nothing they had on the ship. “We’re about here,” he said, pointing with the calipers.

“So tomorrow, here?”

“Sea’s against us. We’ll be lucky to be off Donegal Bay.”

“Do you have, a certain time, to be somewhere?”

“Yes, but in this business you give yourself an extra day. Always, if you can.”

“And you mustn’t tell me where we’re going.”

“I shouldn’t,” DeHaan said, feeling slightly silly.

“Who I would tell? A whale?”

DeHaan smiled and slid the chart back in its drawer. “Don’t you like surprises?”

“Oh, some, yes. This one, I don’t know.”

He turned the light off and held the door for her. Once again, they stood by their cabin doors and said good night. DeHaan’s was halfway closed when she said, “It’s possible . . .”

He came back out. “Yes?”

“You have a book, I could read?”

“Come and see if there’s something you like.”

He closed the door behind her, started to sit on the bunk, then leaned against the bulkhead as she looked over the library.

“Dutch, French, more Dutch,” she said, disappointed.

“There’s some in English—don’t you read it?”

“Hard work, for me, with dictionary. What’s this?”

“What?”

“This.”

He walked over to the bookshelf. She had her finger on a Dutch history of eighteenth-century naval warfare. “I don’t think . . .” he said.

When she turned around, her face was close to his and her eyes were almost shut.
That sullen mouth.
Dry, but warm and extravagant, and very soft. And delicate—they barely touched. She drew away and ran her tongue over her lips. Not so dry, now. For a time they stood apart, arms by their sides, then he settled his hands on her hips and she moved toward him, just enough so that he could feel the tips of her breasts beneath the sweater. By his ear, her breath caught as she whispered, “Turn off the light.”

He crossed the cabin and pulled the little chain on the lamp. It took only a few seconds but when it was done she’d become a white shape in the darkness, wearing only underpants, long and roomy, almost bloomers. She stood still, waiting while he undressed, then said, “Take them down for me.” He did it as slowly as he could, finally kneeling on the floor and lifting each foot to get them off. She liked him down there and hugged him for a moment, a strong hug, arms around his neck, then let him go and ran for the bed.