first but grew heavier over time, while the wind strengthened with the approach of dawn and the chill left his hands and feet numb and settled deep inside him. When they heard the plane they stopped, the sergeant, moving ahead of the column as scout, holding up a hand until it passed. Would the pilot see the darkened Noordendam, anchored off the coast? DeHaan couldn’t find a way to believe he wouldn’t. But, so far, no explosions from that direction. Surely, he thought, that would happen at daybreak, when the real fighter planes would be up and hunting.
A silent march, except for the men who swore as they fell, and it took forever to cross the wadi, where the water was now well above their knees. At one point, after circling the cliff, they found themselves in a strange corridor between narrowing sandstone walls, and the sergeant had them turn around and go back.
DeHaan was watching him, about fifty feet ahead, when one of the men, who must have gone the wrong way when they doubled back, stepped between them. A man he didn’t recall seeing, all those days on the ship, which was very odd, because he certainly had his own, rather flamboyant, style. But, after all, commandos, a special breed. This one wore a heavy beard, had a cloth attached to the back of a kepi and a long rifle slung on his shoulder. The man looked up, saw DeHaan, and, for a moment, they both stared.
Suddenly, from behind, a loud whisper, “Get down you fucking cheesehead.” What? A name stuck to Dutchmen, so it must be him. He started to turn around, then flinched as a Sten fired off and something whizzed past his ear. Now he went down, fumbling beneath the oilskin for the Browning. Somebody else fired as DeHaan turned back to look for the bearded man but he’d vanished. Kepi, French Foreign Legion. He managed to get the pistol free and worked the slide to arm it as men ran past him and somebody yelled, “Get him, Jimmy.” Another burst, where he couldn’t see, and another, which produced an indignant roar, as though somebody’d had his foot stepped on. Indignation ended abruptly by a third, very short, burst.
“They’re over there.”
They were. Stuttering flashes and French shouts and a thousand bees. DeHaan pointed the Browning toward the gunfire and pulled the trigger, shells ejecting past his cheek until they stopped. A few seconds later, silence. Then the metallic snap of magazines being replaced and the voice of the sergeant. “Right, then. Hop it.” One of those wizards with a mystical sense of direction, DeHaan thought, hoped, he now led them off down some new path.
A bizarre procession. The lieutenant hobbling along with his Sten-gun cane, his helper pulling him by the elbow, the German prisoner-a balding clerk, squinting as though he’d lost his glasses-hurried along by a commando at his side, behind them a man with a Bren in one hand while the other dragged the parabolic mirror, which bounced along the slippery rock as he ran low to the ground. DeHaan followed, trying to free the empty clip from the Browning with one hand as he trotted past Patapouf, who lay on his back, arms flung wide, staring up at the rain. DeHaan knelt by his side, reached for the pulse in his neck with two fingers. The commando behind him took a handful of DeHaan’s oilskin and hauled him to his feet. “Gone to God, sir. Leave him be.”
“Patapouf,” DeHaan said. Fatso. The immense stupidity of it clouded his vision.
“I know, sir. Can’t be helped.” A thick accent, high-pitched voice, the teenager with the pinched face. “He stood up to fire, see, and you oughtn’t to do that.”
DeHaan picked up the Enfield and the boxes.
Then, reluctantly, he began to run.
IN ADMIRALTY SERVICE
20 May. Alexandria.
Room 38 in the Hotel Cecil, on the Ras el Tin seafront.
Demetria. She was, she said, Levantine, of Greek origin, and, hair, eyes, and spirit, dark in every way. By day, the headmistress of a school for young women, “very prim and decorous, with uniforms.” But-she’d looked at him a certain way-she wasn’t really like that. The look deepened. Not at all.
True. Freed of her daily life, and a stiff linen suit, her underwear buried somewhere in the tumbled sheets of the hotel bed, she lay back in her flesh, luxuriant, legs comfortably apart-the color the French called rose de dessous casually revealed-and smoked with great pleasure. Black, oval cigarettes with gold rims, and heavy perfume. Idly, she played with the smoke-let it drift from her mouth, then, with little puffs, sent white whorls rolling up to the plaster medallion on the ceiling. “It shames me to say it,” she said, “but I smoke only in secret.”
Something shamed her? DeHaan lay at her feet, across the bed, propped on an elbow. “I won’t tell,” he said.
Her smile was tender. “I was truly proper, you know, once upon a time. Then, my husband went and died on me, poor soul, when I was thirty-eight.” She shrugged, exhaled, puffed at the smoke. “These Greek communities, Odessa, Beirut, Cairo, are very straitlaced, if you are of a certain class. So, wickedness is a problem. Which is strange in this city-it’s very free here, for certain people, but not for someone like me. I did have a few, suitors, for a time, even a matchmaker. Oh Demetria, for you this gentleman of decent means, completely respectable, la-la-la. No, no, not for me.”
“No,” he said, “not for you.”
“It’s better with the war, God forgive me for saying it, live tonight for tomorrow you die, but, even so, chri, that moment just now was my first petit mort in a long while.” She sighed, and stubbed the cigarette out in an ashtray on the night table.
It was quiet in the room, the wash of the sea on the wall of the Corniche very faint and distant. She lay back on the pillow and raised her heels, inviting him into the parlor. DeHaan slid himself up the bed until he was close to her. From here, a better view, one that proved to be of heightened interest as the seconds ticked by. So, closer still.
“Yassou,” she said.
What? No matter, he couldn’t answer.
Gently, she wove her fingers into the hair on the back of his head. “Oh my dear”-meant to be insouciant but her breath caught on the word-“there too.”
He stared up at the medallion on the ceiling as she snored beside him, one heavy leg thrown over his. Nymphs up there, two, three-five! Should he turn off the lamp? No, darkness woke people up. And he was content to lie still, pleasantly sore, and a little light-headed, as though cured of a malady he didn’t know he’d had. Petit mort, she’d said, the little death, a polite French euphemism for it. Yes, well. A few days earlier, steaming away from Cap Bon, he’d been close to the grand mort, not at all polite.
Headed for the British naval base at Alexandria, over a thousand nautical miles to the east, a four-day voyage, with luck; they would move from the air shadow of the Axis bases to that of the RAF, so the greatest danger lay in the first forty-eight hours. But it was only an hour after daybreak, as he was beginning to think that maybe they’d gotten away with it, that the French showed up. Late, but with panache. A patrol boat, sleek and steely, a handsome bow wave telling the world how fast she was.
A long way from help, they did what they could. The lieutenant had Mr. Ali send a cluster of ciphered numbers, while the commandos, with two Brens and a scoped rifle, waited just below deck. Vain hopes, DeHaan knew, a sea battle didn’t work like that. Amado was readied, sober as could be and scared witless, but the French were in no mood for dithering. Coming up astern of the Noordendam, they ran up the signal flag SN-international code for “Stop immediately. Do not scuttle. Do not lower boats. Do not use the wireless. If you disobey I shall open fire on you.”
Well, that was clear. “Ignore them,” he told the lookouts.
The engines stayed on Full — Ahead while the lookouts swept the forward horizon, but such petulance was not to be taken seriously. There was a snarl from the French loud-hailer, thirty seconds allowed for compliance, then the slow, heavy drumming of a big machine gun and an arc of red tracer that curved gracefully a foot over the bridge. a va?
“Stop engines.”
The patrol boat, bristling with aerials, carrying a cannon on the foredeck and paired machine guns, moved cautiously to come up beside them. “To port, Cap’n.” The lookout sounded puzzled. “At ten o’clock. Some kind of… it’s a seaplane.”
DeHaan used his binoculars. It was big and ungainly in the gray sky, cabin hung below a broad wing with fat
