Dark Voyage (6 page)

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?”

“We think so. We’re painting directly over Hyperion Line colors, so no chipping or sanding. We’re using scaffolds and bosun’s chairs, hung over the side, and all our best hands—the whole crew will be involved in this—and we’ve got plenty of rope, cans, brushes, everything.”

DeHaan had made a point of that, planning logistics, with the bosun before they left the chandlers in Tangier. He had once, in some forgotten port, watched sailors in the Soviet navy as they smeared paint on with their hands.

“We have only an hour for drying,” DeHaan went on, “and we’ll have to spray water on the stack to cool it down, and thin the paint so it seems faded. It will look awful, but, that’s no bad thing.”

Sims’s silence implied satisfaction. The helmsman kept steady on 320 degrees, slightly west of north, and the quarter moon was fully risen, its light broken on the rough surface of the sea.

“Our ETA,” Sims said, back again to what was really on his mind. “How close do you think we can come?”

DeHaan’s voice was tolerant. “Seventeen hundred nautical miles to Cap Bon, Major, past Morocco and Algeria and much of Tunisia. We’re rated at eleven knots an hour, and we’re actually doing about that, so, by simple mathematics, it’s six and a half days. The weather forecast is fair, for the Atlantic, but once we enter the Strait of Gibraltar, we’re in the Mediterranean, where storms, you know, ‘come up out of nowhere.’ Well, they do, and there’s tons of Greek bones on that seafloor to prove it. But, the way we think in the trampship business, if not Monday, then Tuesday. All we can ever promise is not to be early.”

“We have three nights,” Sims said. “For our little man to show a little light. Still, one is, understandably, concerned.”

One is, terrified.
Not of dying, DeHaan thought. Of being late.
Rule Britannia.

0420. Off Rio de Oro.

Refuge.
This hour in his cabin as the sun came up was DeHaan’s night, but he rarely used it for sleep. That came beyond dawn, for three hours, before he went back to the bridge for his eight-to-twelve. He was used to it—sleeping again in the afternoon—and he’d somehow found a way to like it, which, according to the way he’d been raised anyhow, was pretty much the secret of life. He shifted for new comfort on the narrow bunk and stared at the dark porthole at the other end of the cabin.

Not far. The refuge, in steel painted gray, was ten by twelve: a bunk with drawers beneath it, a wardrobe with small desk attached, chair bolted to the floor, sink and toilet in a small alcove behind a curtain. There was a two-shelf bookcase fixed to the bulkhead, the wall, above the desk, which held his forty-book library, his wind-up Victrola, and an album of records in thick paper envelopes. Beyond that, the
Noordendam:
the ceaseless hum and rattle of the ventilator fans, the creak of the ship as it rose from a trough, the pacing of the watch officer on the bridge above his cabin, bells on the half hour, and the engine, drumming away beneath him—let it catch its breath for one heartbeat and his blood raced before he even knew what he’d heard. And, beyond the
Noordendam,
the sound of the wind and the sea.

This presence, this perpetual music, in all its moods, was not to be resisted, and sent him wandering through his own life, or those in the forty-book library. The read, the unread, and the oft read. A few Dutch classics—Multatuli’s
Max Havelaar
and Louis Couperus—and some not so classic—a trio of military biographies and a flock of fat historical novels, which were good friends when he was too tired for anything but his native language. A Dutch translation of Shakespeare’s plays was better to look at on the shelf than to read, though he had worked through
Henry V
more than once, because it felt like fiction.

Conrad, of course. In whom a Polish sea captain fought a losing battle with a London literary migr. He had
The Mirror of the Sea,
bought in expectation of philosophy but soon abandoned, guiltily, with a promise to return and do better. The ghastly
Nostromo,
magnificently written but so evil and miserable in its story that it was not to be read,
Heart of Darkness,
which he liked, also
The Secret Sharer
—could that actually
happen,
a cabin shared?—and
Lord Jim,
a real sea story and a good one. One of his mother’s brothers had virtually lived the same life, except that, threatened by fire in a cargo of jute in the Malacca Straits, he
hadn’t
jumped, and his ship
did
sink, taking Uncle Theo with it.

Conrad shaded off, as DeHaan saw it, to what he really liked, adventure stories with intellectual heroes. These were not so common, but what there was he returned to again and again.
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
the story of a military intelligence officer, T. E. Lawrence, sent to stir up Arab rebellion against the Turks during the Great War, when Turkey fought alongside Germany. In the same way, Malraux,
Man’s Fate
and
Man’s Hope,
in English, and even Stendhal,
The Red and the Black
and
The Charterhouse of Parma,
by “the Hussar of Romanticism,” who’d fought, an officer under Napoleon, in all the desperate battles of the Russian campaign and lived to write novels. Those he had in Dutch, along with
War and Peace,
which could be read at the bleakest moments of life at sea and still provide, somehow, almost magically, consolation, a world away from the world.

DeHaan looked at his watch, it was almost four-thirty in the morning. He lit a cigar, and watched the drifting smoke as it rose in the air. They were running at
Dead Slow
now, had been for an hour, as Ratter and the bosun supervised the preparation for painting. He heard the squeak of block and tackle, shouted commands, a curse, a laugh—work under way sounded like nothing else. The porthole remained black but the edge of dawn was out there somewhere, and soon the engines would stop and he would hear the steam winches on deck and the slow, grating slide of the anchor chain as it was run out.

DeHaan ran his eye across the shelves, along the row of faded covers—books did not fare well in sea air—past the nautical almanacs, his Bowditch,
The American Practical Navigator,
Nicholl’s
Deviation Questions and Law of Storms,
past his dictionaries, to the end of the middle shelf, to the Baedeker for France, and a few novels in French.
My Mother’s House, The Vagabond, Claudine in Paris,
and
Claudine at School
.

Colette.

He was a slow reader in French, very slow, but there was a simplicity in these books, a joyous shimmer, in the words and beyond, that coaxed him along. And more. It wasn’t just the schoolgirls, kissing and petting and scheming against the headmistress—erotic in a hundred ways but nothing wrong with that—it was also the garden. The
rue
. The cat and the sky. It was, as DeHaan put it to himself, the perfect compass south to his north—to the cruelly practical life he had to live outside this cabin. A dream world, the winding road and its plane trees, the
auberge
with its rusty garden chairs on the gravel beyond the French doors.

These were not illusions. He had been there. And at the end of that road, in a lumpy bed in that
auberge,
Arlette had wondered why he chose to leave it. To make his money, she supposed, one had to do that. And, she said, with a melancholy twitch and wriggle to make her point, so went the sorry world. Not two years ago, he realized, the last spring before the war. He’d met her in a caf in Amsterdam—she was there with a girlfriend who knew a fellow captain—and,
Noordendam
in drydock in Rotterdam, they’d gone off to Paris, and then to the countryside.

His life with women had always been a victim of his life at sea—brief affairs recollected at length. Occasionally close to mercenary—gifts, whatnot—and sometimes passionate, but typically on the great plain that lay between. The last time, after parting with Arlette that spring—forever, she’d said—had been the previous October, in Liverpool, with a woman he’d met at a rather refined club for naval officers. She was an ambulance driver, a WREN, young and pink and immaculate and talkative, and so fiercely intent on pleasing him he suspected she never felt a thing. A sad evening, for him, after Arlette.

A flaming redheaded Breton, fire goddess, with a floating walk and a hot temper, a hot everything. At a crucial moment on their first night together, what his hand found pulsed, and the heat of it surprised, then inspired him. “It’s my skin,” she said later, during a brief repose, a Gauloise hanging from her heavy lips. Very white, and
thin,
she said, so the touch of a hand set her alight. Always? No, not always. But now. “I knew it would be like this,” she pouted, accusing him of exciting her. Of course she was flattering him, enticing him, making him her own—he knew it, and was flattered, and enticed. Still, she wasn’t lying, her skin
was
pale, and delicate, her grandiose behind, after lovemaking, flushed and mottled in the light of the night-table lamp.

She was, he thought, a couple of years older than he was. She worked in the shops, she said, first this job, then that, it was all the same. And she had come to Amsterdam, she more or less told him, for an adventure, bored with those men she could have met in Paris. What, he wondered, would become of her, now that the Germans occupied the city? This vision worried him; she was not a woman who would avert her eyes, was not someone who could disappear into the scenery.

The light in his porthole had turned to dawn, and when DeHaan felt the ship lose way and the anchor was let down he rose from his bed and went to take a look. They were a mile off the coast; low hills, gray sand, a light surf that broke against a cliff. He took off his shoes and sighed with pleasure, shed his shirt and trousers, and slid beneath the blanket on his bunk. He finished the cigar, tapped it out in a metal ashtray, and closed his eyes.

They’d spent two days in Paris, after the countryside, then he had to take the early train back to Holland and went alone to the station, past a market, a church, streetsweepers with a water truck. Very soft, the light in Paris, at that time of day.

As DeHaan went up to the bridge for his eight-to-twelve, the painting was fully under way, scaffolds slung over the side, ABs handling the tackle that operated the bosun’s chairs. Back at the stern, a loud splash was followed by sarcastic hoots of “Man overboard!” followed by some ripe curses from Ratter and the order to “haul that sonofabitch back on board, goddamnit!” Beneath a bright sky, his funnel now wore half a stripe of Spanish green—so he’d named the color—and he could see the bosun dangling up there, peering nearsightedly at the blistered iron, each stroke of the brush applied with concentrated finesse. “Fucking Rembrandt himself,” Ratter said, when DeHaan joined him.

“Not so bad.” It had been one thing to scheme about the deception, something else to actually do it. Ratter felt the same way, he guessed, but neither of them would say it. Yet. “Looks like we’re on schedule,” DeHaan added, determinedly cheerful.

He took a turn around the ship, then went down to the lower deck, where Sims had his men caring for their weapons—stripping and oiling Sten guns and two lethal-looking Brens, machine guns with small tripods on the barrel, whetstoning knives with rubber handles, loading ammunition belts. Most of the men had their shirts off, and chatted amiably as they worked. They would likely have preferred to be on the top deck, in the sunlight, but a German air patrol was always a possibility and Sims well knew it. DeHaan wished them all a good morning, then returned to the bridge, where Cornelius was waiting with his breakfast. Thickly cut bacon, almost warm, between two slabs of bread, and strong coffee. Fresh bread was produced daily on all merchant ships, and the conventional wisdom said that one got either good cooking or good baking, but the
Noordendam
’s cook had clearly been left out of that equation. DeHaan chewed away at his sandwich, dense and rubbery, and stared out at the empty sea.

When he was done, he strolled onto the bridge wing, coffee in one hand, and swept his binoculars along the shore. Ratter was below him, at the foot of the ladderway, and DeHaan called out, “Anything stirring, this morning?”

“One of the lookouts saw a truck, about oh-six-thirty.”

“There’s a road, up there?”

“Not on any map we have—maybe a goat track. The road goes inland.”

“What sort of truck?”

“All I saw was a dust cloud, moving north.”

DeHaan looked again, slow and careful, but there was nothing.