Midnight in Europe (30 page)

“We are,” de Lyon said. “All the way to Valencia.”

“Maybe you have something to do with the cargo,” Machado said.

“It is ours,” de Lyon said. “We are serving the Spanish Republic.”

“Well, that’s all right with me.” He stood and said, “Let me show you your cabin, it isn’t much to look at, but better than hammocks in the crew quarters.” At the end of a narrow passageway, a small room with a porthole and two cots.

“Just right for us,” de Lyon said.

“Good,” Machado said. “Passengers don’t work on freighters, but I wonder how you would feel about standing a watch? We’re two hands short, so it would help us out.”

De Lyon and Ferrar glanced at each other, then Ferrar said, “We’ll be happy to help out.”

“I had in mind the midnight-to-eight, split in half, four hours each and you can trade off if you like.”

“Anything special we have to do?” Ferrar said.

“Stay awake. I expect it will be a quiet voyage.” Machado looked at his watch. “We’ll be sailing in a few hours, we only came here to pick you up.”

Machado returned to his office. Ferrar put his small valise at the foot of the cot next to the wall. He’d gone shopping in Paris for clothes to wear at sea—a long-sleeved cotton undershirt with three buttons at the neck, canvas trousers, and canvas shoes with rubber soles. When he started to change clothes, he saw that de Lyon was doing the same thing. “I’ll take the midnight-to-four,” Ferrar said.

The
Santa Cruz
carried a crew of seventeen; mostly ordinary seamen and stokers—the ship was coal fired—a bosun who served as second officer to the captain, a radio operator, and a cook. Like many merchant marine crews, they came from everywhere: a few born in Mexico, others were Portuguese, Algerians with French passports, two Germans, three from Venezuela. They had signed on at various times, from seamen’s hiring halls in various ports, and spoke, like almost all merchant seamen, a kind of pidgin English that allowed them simple communication, especially in areas of work at sea.

One of the Germans was called Horst. He’d had a number of last names over time, a conspirative necessity, because he’d been a member of the communist seafarers’ union in Hamburg, which had fought it out with the Nazis in the early thirties. That war they
lost, and the survivors had fled the Reich. Horst had managed to ship out on a Turkish freighter and then, two years later, had found a berth on the
Santa Cruz
. He was in his thirties, a thickly built stoker, his face scarred from fighting on the Hamburg docks.

In Constanta, where the ship often called on its Black Sea voyages, he favored a bar in the port where you heard German spoken and the beer wasn’t bad—it wasn’t German beer but it wasn’t bad, and you could fall into conversation with other German sailors, many of whom had the same history as Horst. When Machado gave his crew a few hours’ liberty after they returned from Odessa, Horst made for his favorite bar. Soon enough, a fellow seaman, speaking German, settled down beside him at the bar and bought him a beer. “Just come into port?” he said.

“Yes, about an hour ago.”

“From …?”

“Odessa.”

“I’ve been there, not a bad place for sailors. But you have to watch out for the Russians; they drink and they look for a fight. And, if they hear you speaking German … well, you might have trouble.”

“We didn’t have liberty in Odessa, not this time.”

“Really? Why not?”

Horst shrugged. “I don’t know, we weren’t there long, maybe twenty-four hours.”

“Delivering goods?”

“No, loading cargo.”

“Really? Want another one of those?”

“I wouldn’t say no.”

“I’m called Emil.”

“And I’m Horst. From Hamburg.”

They turned on their barstools and shook hands. Horst had a hand that for years had held a shovel and his skin was like sandpaper. Emil, however, had a soft hand.

“Not much gets loaded in Odessa,” Emil said. “Sometimes grain. Was that your cargo?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

Horst knew perfectly well what the
Santa Cruz
had in its holds but he wasn’t going to discuss that with a stranger. “I don’t know, some kind of machinery, in crates.”

“Not the usual.”

“Oh, we carry every damn thing there is. Not cattle. I did that once and I’ll never do it again, I’d rather get a job in a factory. Ever work on a cattle boat?”

“No, so far I’ve been lucky.”

“What ship are you on now?”

“I’m waiting for a berth—that’s hard in Constanta.”

“If you say so.”

“Anything on your ship, the …?”

“
Santa Cruz
, out of Tampico. We’re short crew but we aren’t hiring on, as far as I know. It’s the owners, saving a little money.”

“That’s how they are, the bastards.”

“You’re a socialist? You sound like one.”

“I gave up on politics when I left Germany. But, before that, I was in the union in Rostock.”

“So you had to leave, like me.”

“That’s what happened, but maybe I did the wrong thing.”

“Thinking of going back?” Horst said. Then he said, “My turn” and waved to the bartender.

“Thanks. Pretty good beer they have in this place, right?”

“I like it. Are you thinking about going home?”

“Sometimes. I hear it’s not so bad, the wages are good, and all you have to do is say you’re sorry for your sins and that’s that. They need seamen, no doubt about it, so if you mind your manners it’s like you never left.”

“Sounds like you’ve decided.”

“Maybe I have. What about you?”

“No, I’ll stay with my ship.”

“Someone told me they even pay a bonus.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes. You ought to think about it.”

“I’ll have this beer, then it’s time to be off. Nice meeting you, Emil.”
You’re a spy, Emil, a Nazi spy
. Now Horst was glad he hadn’t said anything about the cargo. Then he worried—maybe “machinery in crates” was too much, but he hadn’t wanted to lie, and he wasn’t good at it.

The knock on Ferrar’s door came at ten minutes to four. From the passageway, “It’s Silva, I’m the bosun, watch in ten minutes, you awake?”

“Be right there,” Ferrar answered, wrestling his way into the pullover shirt.

Silva was waiting in the passageway, holding a hooded, rubber rain jacket, a pair of binoculars, and a flashlight. “Here’s what you’ll need,” he said, then led Ferrar up to the deck where an iron stairway climbed past the wheelhouse to a small platform with a railing. “You won’t see much at night,” he said. “Best to watch a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree arc. Also, once an hour, open the hatch above the holds and make sure of the cargo. We worry about fires in the holds, especially this trip, and that’s about it. There’s a helmsman and a radio operator in the wheelhouse, if you have any questions you can ask them.”

Ferrar needed the rain jacket, even in July it was cold at night on the open sea, and the steady wind made it worse. Just below his feet, above the window of the wheelhouse, a searchlight cast a white beam on the black swells ahead of the ship. Now and then, when a rain squall blurred his vision, he wiped the droplets from the binocular lenses with his shirt—he would have to find a rag somewhere before his next watch. He swung the heavy binoculars left and right, then turned around and did it again, but the sky was overcast, there was no moonlight, and all he could see was darkness.

•

Istanbul had forever been a magnet for clandestine operations. Here, east met west and they spied on each other. A year earlier, the Abwehr—German military intelligence—had purchased a hotel with a view of the Bosphorus Straits and now used the top floor as a lookout point, watching traffic in the sea lanes that led to the Sea of Marmara and then to the Aegean. There were two observers that night, a lieutenant and a sergeant, who sat side by side in front of the window and tracked the busy strait with their binoculars. Some time after five o’clock in the morning, the sergeant said, “There’s an old tub for you.”

“Where?”

“Twenty degrees north, single stack.”

“I see her, she’s the”—he worked to bring the name on the hull into focus—
“Santa Cruz.”

The sergeant thumbed through the shipping register by his side. “Out of Tampico,” he said. “Wonder where she’s been.”

“Could be anywhere; Bulgaria, Roumania, Russia.”

“The way she rides in the water she’s hauling cargo,” the sergeant said.

“So she is.”

“Is she worth an inquiry?”

“Why bother? She’s just a freighter, headed for Greece probably.”

“Look at her stack.” Gray smoke boiled from the mouth of the stack then blew away in the wind. “She’s doing the best she can.”

“In a hurry,” the lieutenant said. “So what?”

“I don’t know, I guess we’ll let her go.”

“Hmm.” The lieutenant squinted through his binoculars. “Oh, what the hell, we might as well inquire.” He laid the binoculars on the ledge beneath the window and filled out a form for the wireless operator: date, time, name of ship. “I’ll take this down later,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind knowing the cargo and where she picked it up. Probably nothing we should worry about, but still …”

•

On the
Santa Cruz
, there were two seamen in the wheelhouse, a wireless operator and a helmsman. The radio operator wore headphones, a wireless key close at hand. When the Morse code started up, he wrote the message down in the radio logbook. “What is it?” the helmsman said.

“An operator in Greece, naval base at the port of Salonika. Wants to know what we’re carrying and where we’re going.”

The helmsman moved the wheel a few inches until the compass showed the correction. “Sounds official,” he said. “What do we say?”

“I don’t know.”

“Better go ask Machado.”

The radioman, moving quickly, descended to the captain’s cabin on the deck below the wheelhouse. When he knocked at the door, the captain called out, “Come in.” He was on his cot, propped up on a pillow, reading a book.

“A message from the naval base at Salonika. They want to know cargo and destination.”

Machado thought it over.

“What do I tell them?”

“Acknowledge reception, nothing else. If they try again, do the same thing. We’re in international waters, we don’t have to tell them anything.”

Piraeus Coaling Station, 1:30
A.M
. In a light drizzle, a tugboat maneuvered the
Santa Cruz
to the dock where she would be resupplied with coal and fresh water. Silva came up to the watchman’s bridge above the wheelhouse and found Ferrar, who was standing the twelve-to-four. “Your job in port is to guard the head of the gangway,” the bosun said. “So you carry a sidearm.” He handed Ferrar a leather belt bearing a holstered revolver. Ferrar buckled it on, then went down to the lower deck and stood by the gangway, where Machado was talking to a stoker called Hector.

The port of Piraeus was adjacent to Athens, but the coaling station was a long way from the commercial edge of the city. Thus an enterprising merchant had opened a small store, about a quarter of a mile down the road, that served the steamship crews as they docked for resupply. Machado was in the process of going over a shopping list. “Twenty cannisters of loose tobacco, rolling papers, and get us a few tins of aspirins.”

“What kind?” Hector said.

“It doesn’t matter. Maybe fifteen tins ought to hold us. Buy a few bottles of ouzo, every man will get a drink once a day while it lasts.”

“Anything else?”

“No. I don’t have Greek drachma, so here’s some Turkish lira, I’m sure they’ll take that. You have plenty of money, pay what they ask and bring the rest back to me.”

“Aye, sir,” Hector said.

“Off you go.”

Hector descended to the dock, then, flashlight in hand, walked away down the dirt road that served the coaling station.

Ferrar stood by the gangway, hood up in the rain. At the bow of the
Santa Cruz
, coal rumbled down a long chute attached to a bulky wooden storage tower with a ladder to the top. Machado said, “I have to update my logs, so I’ll be in the office if anybody needs me.”

At three-thirty, the coal and water resupply completed, Machado reappeared. “We’ll be getting under way,” he said. “When did Hector get back?”

“I haven’t seen him.”

The captain was annoyed. Looking at his watch he said, “What the hell is he doing?” Then, “Take Silva with you and go find him.”

Ferrar and the bosun went off down the road. As the lights of the coaling station receded, it grew very dark and Ferrar kept the beam of the flashlight on the ground ahead of them. In fifteen minutes they reached what looked like an ancient stone hut. Inside, illuminated
by a single lightbulb hanging on a cord, the shelves were packed from floor to ceiling with everything that merchant crews might need. Since the ships being serviced were from many countries, the owner spoke a few words of several languages, including English. When Ferrar and Silva came to the counter, the owner seemed anxious and frightened. “What is?” he said. His voice quivered and his eyes darted back and forth, from Ferrar’s face to the revolver.

Silva said, “We’re looking for a man from our ship. A big fellow, did he show up here?”

The owner nodded. “Is gone,” he said.

“How long?”

“Long time now. I saw it.”

“Saw what?”

“He left, then robbers take him.”

“What?”

“I watch him go away, then his light went …” With his hand, the owner imitated the wild path of the stoker’s flashlight, up and down, side to side. “Put him in truck,” the owner said. “Drive away.” He slid one hand across the other, the gesture meant
gone
.

“We better get back to the ship,” Silva said. They searched the road on the walk back to the
Santa Cruz
, but found nothing.

Machado was waiting for them at the head of the gangway. Silva recounted what the store owner had told them, and Machado, mouth grim, said, “There’s a telephone in the port office, I have to call the police.” He paused, then said to Ferrar, “This is a simple robbery, nothing more, is that what you think?”