surface. As DeHaan entered, a man seated in a wheelchair-made entirely of wood except for rubber tires on the spoked wheels-extended his hand and said, “Captain DeHaan, welcome, thank you for coming, I am Marius Hoek.” Hoek had a powerful grip. In his fifties, he was pale as a ghost, with sheared fair hair and eyeglasses that went opaque, catching the light of a lamp in the corner, as he looked up at DeHaan.
Rising from their hassocks to greet him, the other dinner guests: a woman in a chalk-stripe suit and a dark shirt, a man in the uniform of a Dutch naval officer, and Wim Terhouven, owner of the Netherlands Hyperion Line-his employer. DeHaan turned to Terhouven, as though for explanation, and found him much amused, all sly grin, at the prospect of the famously composed Captain DeHaan, who couldn’t imagine what the hell was going on and showed it. “Hello, Eric,” Terhouven said, taking DeHaan’s hand in his. “The bad penny always turns up, eh?” He patted DeHaan on the shoulder, don’t worry, m’boy, and said, “May I present Juffrouw, ah, Wilhelm?”
Formally, DeHaan shook her hand. “Just Wilhelm will do,” she said. “Everybody calls me that.” She wore no makeup, had fine, delicate features, was about thirty-five years old, he guessed, with thick, honey-gold hair cut very short and parted on the side.
“And,” Terhouven said, “this is Commander Hendryk Leiden.”
Leiden was broad and bulky, bald halfway back, with a drinker’s purplish nose, a sailor’s wind-chapped complexion, and a full beard. “Good to meet you, Captain,” he said.
“Come sit down,” Terhouven said. “Enjoy the walk over here?”
DeHaan nodded. “It’s the same restaurant?”
“The private room-who says it has to be upstairs?” He laughed. “And, on the way, a taste of the real Tangier, assassins behind every door.”
“Well, that or couscous.”
Wilhelm liked the joke. “It’s good, Al Mounia, a local favorite.”
DeHaan lowered himself onto a hassock as Terhouven poured him a glass of gin from an old-fashioned ceramic jug. “Classic stuff,” he said.
“They sell this in Tangier?”
Terhouven snorted. He had a devil’s beard and the eyes to go with it. “Not this they don’t. This came across on a trawler in May of ’40 and flew with me all the way from London, just for your party. Real Geneva, made in Schiedam.” He tapped the label, hand-lettered and fired into the glazed surface.
“My friends,” Leiden said, “with your permission.” He stood, glass held high, and the others, except for Hoek, followed his example. Leiden paused for a long moment, then said, “De Nederland.” In one voice, they echoed his words, and DeHaan saw that Hoek, knuckles white where his hand gripped the arm of the chair, had raised himself off the seat to honor the toast. They drank next to victory, Hoek’s offering, and, from Wilhelm, success in new ventures, as Terhouven caught DeHaan’s eye and gave him a conspiratorial flick of the eyebrows. Then it was up to DeHaan, who’d been desperate for the right words from the moment Leiden lifted his glass. Finally, as the others turned to him in expectation, he said, quietly, “Well then, to absent friends.” This was conventional and wellworn but, on that night, with those friends in a Europe held by barbed wire and searchlights, it came back to life.
Terhouven said, “Amen to that,” and began to refill the glasses. When he was done he said, “I propose we drink to Captain Eric DeHaan, our guest of honor, who I know you will come to appreciate as I have.” DeHaan lowered his eyes, and was more than grateful when the toast had been drunk and the group returned to conversation.
Terhouven told the story of his flight from London, on a Sunderland flying boat, his fellow passengers mostly men with briefcases who were rather pointedly disinclined to make conversation. A nighttime journey, hours of it, “just waiting for the Luftwaffe.” But then, “the most beautiful dawn sky, somewhere off the coast of Spain, the sea turning blue beneath us.”
Hoek glanced at his watch. “Dinner should appear any moment now,” he said. “I took the liberty of ordering-I hope you don’t mind, it’s better if you give them time.” A good idea, it seemed, they were happy enough to wait, the table talk wandering here and there. You had to be Dutch, DeHaan thought, to know that the gin was at work. Not much to be seen on the exterior, everyone calm and thoughtful, attentive, in no hurry to take the floor. They were, after all, strangers, for the most part, together for an evening in a foreign city, who shared little more than citizenship in a conquered nation, and its corollary, a certain quiet anger common to those who cannot go home.
“Years since I’ve been back,” Hoek said to Terhouven. “Came out here in, oh, 1927. Looking for opportunity.” An unvoiced naturally lingered at the end of his sentence-Holland was a trading nation which had, for centuries, used the whole world as its office, so commerce in foreign climes was something of a national commonplace. “And I found a way to buy a small brokerage, in ores and minerals, then built it up over the years. They mine lead and iron, in the south, and there’s graphite, cobalt, antimony, asbestos. That’s in addition to the phosphates, of course. That pays the rent.”
DeHaan knew about the phosphates, Morocco’s main export. The Noordendam, as it happened, was scheduled to call at Safi, the port serving Marrakesh on the Atlantic coast, to take on a bulk cargo from the Khourigba mines. So, DeHaan thought, it all made sense, didn’t it-his boss flying down from exile in London, taking his life in his hands, to bring a jug of Dutch gin to celebrate the loading of one of his freighters. Well, all will, in time, be explained. In fact, he had a pretty good idea what was going on, he was simply anxious to hear the details.
“So, your family’s here, with you,” Terhouven said.
“Oh yes,” Hoek said. “Good-size family.”
DeHaan thought he saw a flicker of amusement in Wilhelm’s eyes, an expression on her face he could only describe as not smiling.
Terhouven, making conversation, asked her how long she’d been in Tangier.
“Mmm, not so long, a few years maybe, if you add it all up. I was in Paris, after the war, Juan-les-Pins in the summers, then here, then back to Paris, Istanbul for a while, then back here.”
“A restless soul.” Terhouven knew her type.
She shrugged. “A change of light. And people, I suppose.”
“You’re an artist,” Terhouven said, it wasn’t exactly an accusation.
“After a fashion.”
“After nothing,” Hoek said firmly. “And nobody. She’s shown in Paris and New York, though she won’t tell you that.”
“In oils?” DeHaan said, meaning not oils, of course.
“No. Gouache, principally, though lately I’m back to charcoal pencil.” She took a cigarette from a tortoiseshell case with Bacchus and girlfriend on the lid, tapped it twice, and lit it with a steel lighter. “Back to life drawing.” She shook her head and smiled ruefully that such an odd thing should be so.
At the door, a firm knock, and three waiters with trays.
The dinner was served in traditional dishes set out on the low table. Bowls of aromatic yellow soup, soft bread still hot from the oven, a grandiose pastilla — minced pigeon breast and almonds in pastry leaves, a platter of stewed lamb and vegetables. Once the dishes were set down, glasses packed with crushed mint leaves were filled with boiling water, poured ritually by the chief waiter, who raised and lowered the spout of a silver flagon as the stream curved into the glass. When he was done, the waiter said, “Shall we remain to serve you?”
“Thank you,” Hoek said, “but I think we’ll manage by ourselves.”
This was in French, which DeHaan understood, some of the time, and also spoke, some of the time, and in his own particular way-“the French of a beast,” according to Arlette. He had good German and English, like almost everyone in Holland, and, a year earlier, after the invasion, he had added to his forty-book library a Russian grammar. He had no professional, or political, reason for this, it was more akin to chess, or crossword puzzles, a way to occupy the mind in the long hours off-watch, when he needed to distract himself from the captain’s eternal obsession: every beat of the engine, every tremor and creak of the ship, his ship, at sea. Thus he found an absorbing if difficult pastime, though in addition to studying the grammar he’d more than once fallen asleep on it, and showered it with ashes, seawater, coffee, and cocoa, but, a Russian book, it endured, and survived.
Terhouven, seated next to him, said, “How was Paramaribo?” He tore himself a length of bread, took a piece of lamb from the platter, studied it, then swished it through the sauce and put it on the bread.
“It’s the rainy season-a steambath when it stops.” They’d taken a cargo of greenheart and mora wood, used for wharves and docks, from Dutch Guiana up to the Spanish port of La Corua, then sailed in ballast-mostly water
