pontoons, the whine of its engine rising above the bass rumble of the freighter. Friend or foe? An AB came charging up the ladderway onto the bridge. “The lieutenant wants to start shooting.”
“Tell him ‘not yet.’”
As the AB ran off, the patrol boat accelerated to full power, and DeHaan turned to see it making a wide sweep, heeled over with the speed of its turn and, plainly, running away. From what? Not a French plane, a British Sea Otter, a graceless workhorse but armed with. 303 machine guns, and more than a match for the patrol boat, now seen as a white wake in the distance. The Sea Otter did not pursue-shooting up the patrol boat would have produced fighter planes from Bizerta, and that was a battle no one, at least that morning, wanted. So then, let us agree to disagree.
Instead, the Sea Otter circled above the Noordendam and, clumsy as it was, tilted itself left and right, which at least suggested, to the waving crew below, a jubilant waggle of the wings. As it left, flying due north, DeHaan understood that it could only have come from a destroyer, watching them on radar from over the horizon, and receiving their radio signal. A poor man’s aircraft carrier-lowering its seaplane to the water for takeoff, then hauling it back up after a landing at sea. DeHaan ran his binoculars across the northern horizon. Empty, nothing to be seen. Still, they were out there somewhere, the Royal Navy, themselves in dangerous waters, keeping watch on their boxes and wires.
She woke, slightly damp, and sent him to open the window. A warm night, the sea dead calm, some cloud, some stars, and the silence of a darkened city in time of war.
“What time is it?” she said.
He went to look at his watch on top of the bureau, said “Ten after three,” and returned to the window, conscious of her eyes following him as he walked across the room.
“How lovely, I was afraid I’d slept too long.” She leaned over and turned off the lamp, got out of bed and came up behind him, skin lightly touching his, and reached around his waist.
“In front of the window?”
“Why not? Nobody can see me.”
Everywhere, her touch was light as air, and he closed his eyes. “I don’t think you mind being teased,” she whispered. “No, I don’t think you do. Of course, if you do, you must tell me. Or, even, if you don’t mind, you may tell me that. May say, ‘Demetria, I like you to do this to me,’ or maybe there are other things, you need only say them, I am a very understanding sort of person.”
Later, back in bed, he asked, “What did it mean-the Greek word you said?”
“Yassou?”
“Yes.”
“Means ‘hello.’”
“Oh.”
They were quiet for a time, then she said, “Are you married, Eric?”
“I’m not,” he said. “I almost was, when I was twenty, just out of the naval college. I was engaged, to a nice girl, very pretty. We were in love, most of the way, anyhow, enough, and she was willing to be the wife of a sailor- never at home, but… I didn’t.”
He’d grown up amid the families of merchant officers, the wives eternally alone, raising children, knitting miles of sweaters. He was often in their homes-perfectly kept, the air thick with the smells of wax and cooking, and thick also with sacrifice, absence, clocks ticking in every room. And, in the end, though he couldn’t say what else he wanted, he knew it wasn’t that.
“And your family?”
“In Holland, my mother and sister. I can only hope they are surviving the occupation. I can’t contact them.”
“Can’t?”
“Mustn’t. The Germans read everything, and they don’t like families with relatives in the free forces. Better, especially for someone like me, not to remind them you exist. They are vengeful, you know, will bring people in for questioning, lower their rations, force them to move.”
“Still, at least they are in Holland. The Dutch are decent people, I think, with sensible politics.”
“Most, but not all. We have our Nazis.”
“Everyone has some, chri, like cockroaches, you see them only at night. And, if they come out in daylight, then you know you have to do something about it.”
“More than some. There is a Dutch Nazi party. Its symbol is a wolf trap.”
She thought about it, then said, “How utterly horrible.”
He nodded.
“And you? Perhaps a bit to the left?”
“Not much of anything, I’m afraid.” This was no time to talk about the unions, the Comintern, the brutality- the knives and iron pipes-of politics on the docks. “I believe in kindness,” he said. “Compassion. We don’t have a party.”
“You’re a Christian?” she said. “You seem to, ah, like the bed a little too much for that.”
“Small c perhaps. Actually, as master of a ship, I have to give a sermon on Sunday morning. Pure agony, for me, telling people what to do. Be good, you evil bastards, or you’ll fry in hell.”
“You actually say such things?”
“I’d rather not, but it’s in the book we use. So, I mumble.”
“You have a good heart,” she said, “God help you.” She put a hand on his face, turned it toward her and kissed him, a warm kiss for being who he was, and for what would become of him.
He wondered, later on, about this conversation. Was it just conversation, or something more? Interrogation? Of a sort? Bare-assed, perhaps, but, even so, revealing. His life, his politics, who he was. That did hurt him, that idea, since for a time, while she was asleep, his heart ached because dawn would turn them into pumpkins. Why could not this be his usual life? People did live such lives, why was his fate different? Because it was, period. And not so bad; there was, at least, the occasional amour, the chance encounter. But was it chance? Stop, he told himself, you think too much. Lovers ask questions, nothing new there. But meeting her was, well, fortuitous, and he had come to understand, after only a few weeks and the barest touch of experience, that a clandestine world was corrosive in just that way. It made you wonder.
And it was certainly true that, only an hour after he docked at the port of Alexandria, they were after him. First a staff intelligence officer, a captain, sweating in a little office. Thanking him for what he’d done, then asking him to write out a description of what had happened, a report. This was conventional, the captain said, and, if he didn’t mind, he could do the bloody thing right now and they’d chat about it and that would be that.
But that wasn’t that. Because just as they finished, there appeared a sort of Victorian apparition, a phantom materialized from the halcyon days of the British Empire. Heavy and red-faced, with china-blue eyes and an enormous, white, handlebar mustache, and even a hyphenated name-Something-Somethington-followed by “Call me Dickie, everybody does!”
Dickie had heard all about the Noordendam mission-“But must say Santa Rosa, eh?”-and wanted to shake DeHaan’s hand, which, heartily, he did. Then insisted on drinks, and more drinks, at a rather sinister bar buried in the backstreets behind the waterfront, then “a damned nuisance of a tea,” at the khedivial yacht club, founded, he told DeHaan, when the Turkish viceroys ruled the city. The tea was offered by the British overseas arts council, or something like that-so very many drinks-where he was introduced to Demetria. Who stood close to him, with lavish glances, and put a hand on his arm while they talked and, eventually, mentioned supper. So it was off to a restaurant, where nobody ate much, and then, soon enough, the dear old Cecil, DeHaan feeling, somewhere in his astrology, the pull of exceptional stars. Or, put another way, too good to be true.
But so good he didn’t care if it was true. And, he reasoned, she could have done what she needed to do in the little Greek restaurant-table chat would’ve sufficed, it didn’t really need to be pillow chat.
Did it?
The daylight Noordendam, when night finally had to end in Room 38, was not easy on DeHaan. To technicolor memories and a head throbbing with Dickie’s drinks, the freighter added its scent of burnt oil and boiled steam, fresh paint cooking in the sun, fierce clanging and shouting, gray ducts and bulkheads, and the whole thing, topped off by a plate of canned herring in cold tomato mush, pretty well did him in. “I’m going to my cabin,” he told Ratter. “If the ship sinks, don’t call me.”
