Dark Voyage (15 page)

“Anyhow, it’s good to see you,” Wilhelm said.

“I had to get away from that damn ship,” DeHaan said. “We’re ordered to anchor here, for the moment, but I expect we’ll be off again soon enough.”

“Was it terrible?”

DeHaan was surprised, but apparently it showed. “We were in the war,” he said. “A few close calls. Other people had it much worse, but it was bad enough. We had a tank, deck cargo, catch fire—we weren’t sure how that happened, maybe an antiaircraft round—and we had two hoses on it, a lot of water, but every time we stopped it glowed red. The people in Alexandria had loaded it fully armed, a crazy thing to do, and the ammunition kept going off. It should’ve gone over the side, but we couldn’t get near it, and it was too heavy anyhow. The deck got very hot, and we had bombs under there.”

“Was anybody hurt?”

“Earlier, we lost a man.”

“I’m sorry, Eric.”

“Yes, I am too, but we were lucky not to lose more.” He believed in the modern idea that it was good to talk about bad experiences but now he saw that it wasn’t really so, not for him. “What do you mean, ‘fully engaged’?”

“Oh, something big’s going on here, we’re only a small part of it, but we’ve bribed half the clerks at the electric company.” She paused, then said “Who knows” in a dark, ironic voice, as though she were telling a ghost story.

“This is coming from Leiden’s office?”

“No, it’s the British now. We’ve either been promoted, or demoted, or maybe just under new management, it’s hard to know. Whatever it is, it’s
grown,
and they ask all the time, in that crusty way they have, if we can get help. Which isn’t so easy, but we’ve tried. And been turned down, more than once, which makes poor Hoek furious.”

“Can I do something?”

“I doubt they’d like that. Maybe lucky for you, because the police have been around. Someone’s not happy.”

“Moroccan police?”

“Spanish. Anyhow, they say they’re police, show you a badge, but . . .”

“What do they want?”

“They ask about so-and-so, who you’ve never heard of. I get the feeling they just want to get in the house and have a look, and maybe scare you a little.”

“Does it work?”

“Of course it does, these men in their suits, very serious, it makes you wonder what they know.” She shrugged.

In the other room, the shower was turned off. “So, then,” Wilhelm said, “the price of cheese.”

30 May. Baden-Baden.

For S. Kolb, the nightmare continued.

Now in a nightmare spa town, amid crowds of SS officers dripping hideous insignia—skulls, axes, god-awful stuff—chins held high, girlfriends hanging on their arms. Their left arms—the right was reserved for saluting, for heilhitlering each other, every thirty seconds.
Nazi heaven,
he thought.

Three weeks earlier, he’d been marooned in Hamburg, waiting for his case officer, the Englishman who called himself
Mr. Brown,
to find him a way out of nightmare Germany, as the ship he was to take to Lisbon had been inconveniently sunk. There he’d moldered, in a sad room on a sad street near the docks, waiting for the agent
Frulein Lena
to return, and, alone for days with only newspapers for company, had been overwhelmed by fantasies about this woman—stern, middle-aged, corset-bound, but more wildly desirable lonely hour by lonely hour. She only
seemed
to be a stuffy doughmaiden of the
Mittelbourgeoisie,
he decided. Beneath that whalebone-clad exterior, banked fires smoldered, secret depravities lurked.

And, lo and behold, they did!

Dangling helplessly between caution and lust, he’d broken to the latter, and, when Frulein Lena finally knocked at his door, long after midnight, he had invited her to share his bottle of apricot brandy. So thick, so sweet, so lethal. And, she agreed. It was quite some time before anything happened, but, when they reached the last quarter of the bottle, a polite conversation between strangers was ended by a big apricot kiss. God, she was as lonely as he was, soon enough strutting around the room in those very corsets—pink, however, not black—that had set his imagination alight. And, he did not have to dismantle them, as he’d feared, she did that herself and took her sweet time doing it as he watched with hungry eyes. And, soon enough, he was to learn that secret depravities did lurk—the same ones shared by humanity the world over but never mind, they were new and pink that night, and slowly but thoroughly explored. Even, at last, that final depravity, the most secret of them all, which lay hidden beneath
the seventh veil,
so-called, which is archetypically never dropped.

Well, she dropped it.

And betrayed him.

She’d met him, a few days after their night together, in a tearoom—bright yellow, with doilies and frilly curtains and everything too small, and she’d brought good news from Brown. This involved former Comintern operatives on a Latvian fishing trawler that would make an unscheduled call at the city on the twenty-seventh. He was to be spirited away by these men, ethnic Russians from the Latvian minority, and left at an Italian port—Nice, formerly French, lately Italian, and reputedly flexible for suspicious passengers, coming or going, who traveled with money. And, she was eager to report, she had a fresh, new identity for him, that old
S. Kolb
was getting a little shopworn,
nicht wahr?
These papers she would present to him,
in his room
. And this would take place
tomorrow afternoon
. At which time, her look said it all, unspeakable delights awaited him.

And, then, he knew. She’d sold him, or was about to, or was thinking about it. What, exactly, was he reading? Her eyes? Voice? Soul? He couldn’t say, but his antennae blazed, and that was all it took. And, an experienced operative, he’d learned that in the matter of flight sooner was always better. So he took her hand above the bundt cake, told her he could barely wait, might they go somewhere right away, and be, together? It took a fraction of a second before she reacted, and in that instant he shivered as though the Gestapo had stepped on his grave. “Tomorrow, my sweet,” she said.

He said he would be right back, then it was off to the toilet, lock the door, out the window, and up the alley. Maybe they were waiting for him but he didn’t think so. They would be at the hotel,
tomorrow afternoon,
or when he got back.
Why?
But he had no time for that—he scuttled up the street and ducked into an office building, where he hid in the office of an insurance brokerage—a potential client concerned that his heirs should not suffer penury. Thirty minutes later he was on his way out of town, possessions easily abandoned, as they had been in countless other hotels. In his profession, one didn’t keep things.

But really, why?
He didn’t know. Maybe she’d been theirs from the beginning, maybe it was just that day, maybe because of the weather, maybe because he’d led her into sin. Poor, helpless Frulein Lena, tempted, and seduced. He’d certainly been told and told, don’t
ever
do that. Well, he had, too bad, and now began a new nightmare, the nightmare of the local trains. All aboard for Buchholz, Tostedt, Rotenburg. Always locals—trolleys, if he could get them—never an express, never first-class, these were subject to constant passport controls. He slept standing up, or sitting in the corridor, packed into crowds of sweaty bodies, soldiers, workmen, housewives, Germans who, despite war and bombs and Adolf Hitler, had to go to Buchholz, or Tostedt, or Rotenburg.

Was he on a list? What had she done? Hard to betray him without betraying herself, so it had to be managed anonymously. “I think the man who calls himself S. Kolb is a spy. He stays at this address.” Well, if that was the case, he wasn’t on an
important
list—these we want—he was perhaps on a
long
list—these we want to talk to. A sea of denunciations in a state like Germany, Frulein Lena’s would be one more. Still, he couldn’t register at a hotel, he couldn’t cross a border, so he had to live on the trains. And, in time, if he were lucky, he would arrive at Stuttgart, his last-chance city.

His arm’s-length contact, for emergencies only, please. He’d memorized the wording, which had to be exact, and the procedure, which had to be scrupulously observed. So, reaching Stuttgart at last, he began:

For sale: a woman’s bicycle and a man’s bicycle, one is red, one is green, 80 reichsmarks for both. Goetz, Bernstrasse 22.

The day the listing appeared, he was to go to the local art museum, climb to the third floor and there, at twenty minutes past two in the afternoon, contemplate Ebendorfer’s
Huldigung der Naxos—Homage to Naxos,
a hideous, romantic rendering of a Greek shepherd, who sat cross-legged before a broken column, played his pipe, and gazed at the snowcapped mountains in the distance.

Spend ten minutes, no more, no less.
Did they know, he wondered, how long ten minutes, in the company of Ebendorfer, could be? In the event, no spies came. Only two well-dressed women, who glanced at him and spoke briefly, commenting, no doubt, on his execrable taste. Poor S. Kolb; filthy, smelly, hungry, frightened, and, now, ridiculed. By three, he was on the sweet little train that chuffed its way to Tbingen.

He paid homage to Naxos again, the following day, and, once more, as a museum guard terrified him with a friendly nod, the day after that. Then, just as he was about to abandon the shepherd, a well-dressed gent appeared at his side.

“Do you admire Ebendorfer?”

“Well, I know the one in Heidelberg.”

Rescued! The two-part protocol completed. Then his savior said, “Wretched thing,” stood for a moment in perverse admiration and added, “It really is perfect, you know.”

The next day they took him to Baden-Baden, where he slept on a cot at the back of a shop. Forty-eight hours, he spent there, listening to the little bell that rang every time the door opened, to the chatter between customer and clerk, to the assertive ring of the cash register. Finally, the man from the art museum reappeared, wheeling a bicycle, and told S. Kolb he would be riding to the village of Kehl, where he was to visit a certain house near the bridge over the Rhine, and someone would take him out of Germany.

Thus, Baden-Baden. A bald little man with a fringe of hair, glasses, a sparse mustache, a tired suit, walking a bicycle through the immaculate streets—surely he did not belong in the same world with these splendid SS gods. Could he be, um, a
Jew
? A few irritated looks suggested precisely that but nobody said anything. Baden-Baden was for health, for vitality, for cleanliness of body and mind, by day, and gymnastics at night—
Yah!
—so nobody wanted to bother with scruffy S. Kolb. As long as he didn’t enter a hotel or a restaurant, he could be allowed to walk his bicycle down the street. One of them waved him along,
hurry up
.

This made him so nervous he climbed on the bicycle and tried to ride it. But the seat was too low and his knees stuck out, and he veered right, then left, as they laughed at him—big, hearty SS laughs. Of course he would kill most of them, in time, by means of one paper or another, but this was obviously not the moment to remind them of that. He fell only twice on the road to Kehl, where a surprise awaited him.

An eighty-year-old woman, at least that, who dressed him in the uniform of a zoo guard, hat and all, put his suit in a small valise, gave him some papers with passport photographs—close enough—then took him across the bridge into Strasbourg. She could barely walk, held on to him with one hand while the other gripped a cane, and was so bent over he had to lean down to hear her when she spoke. “They don’t bother me at the border, and they won’t bother you.” And they didn’t, as he helped mother cross into France. Still, his heart fluttered as they waited on line, the old woman knew it, and squeezed his arm. “Oh calm down,” she said.

Once past the control—very casual, for them, she said she would take the train back, and he tried to thank her for what she’d done but she wasn’t interested in gratitude. “The bastards killed my son,” she said, “and this is my way of thanking
them
.” He saw her off on the train to Kehl, then went looking for his sort of hotel.

It was different here, he always noticed it right away, it smelled different. Because, here in Strasbourg, it was still France—despite the decrees that followed the surrender of 1940, the province of Alsace returned to German statehood. Still France—despite occupation, despite Vichy, despite its own police, who could be as bad as the Gestapo and worse. Still France—where escape was always possible. That’s what made it France.

31 May. Algeciras, Spain.

It took three hours to cross the Strait of Gibraltar, Tangier to the port of Algeciras. The current was stiff here, running through the narrow passage into the Mediterranean—submarines, once in, could not get out unless they surfaced—and this, at times, made for a memorable crossing. But not that day; the sun sparkled on the water, the Arab and Moroccan passengers sheltered beneath the canvas awning, while DeHaan managed to get off by himself, found a private length of railing, and watched the African coast as it fell astern.

He’d been directed to this meeting by a second wireless message from the NID, deciphered and handed to him by Wilhelm. It was much like the earlier one, arcane ranks of numbers and letters embracing a brief message, dry as a bone, in fact an order, with no room for discussion or dissent. “They seem to want you in Spain,” Wilhelm said, in her studio.

Ice cold, but, at least, efficient. A plain Citron picked him up at the Plaza de la Victoria—Franco’s victory, that year—on the Algeciras waterfront and took him out a white, dusty road, very nearly a car width wide, through pasture occupied by long-horned red cattle, then an endless forest of cork oak. Someone’s
estancia,
the naval intelligence people apparently lived well, or had friends who did, and that turned out to be the case.

A servant in a white jacket waited at the door of a vast Edwardian house—a triumphantly English presence, with its battery of chimneys, in the Andalusian landscape—and led him through a grand entry hall—DeHaan looked for the suit of armor but it wasn’t there—through a library and a red plush parlor to a tile-floored conservatory on a garden, with a view of shrubs and parterre which could survive the arid climate only with the attention of a platoon of gardeners. The house and grounds seemed untouched by the
guerra civil,
which implied considerable political skill on the part of the owners, who’d had to deal, in the midst of war and chaos, first with the Republicans and their communists, then with the Nationalists and their fascists. And not a brick out of place.