they’d had to admit to themselves that they’d made all the love they could, had been a last meal.
Like the one with Arlette. Late April of 1940, tragedy on the way, only a few weeks left but nobody knew that. “Our last night,” she’d said. “You will take me to dinner.” She chose the restaurant, the Brasserie Heininger, down by the Place Bastille, and DeHaan had known it was a mistake the moment they entered. It was much too splendid, white marble and red banquettes and gold mirrors, lavishly mustached waiters rushing past with platters of langouste and saucisson, the tables jammed with smart Parisians, laughing and shouting and flirting and calling for more wine, all of them wildly overheated with war-is-coming fever.
Not for us, he’d thought. She’d asked him to wear his uniform, hat and all, and he had, while she’d squeezed into an emerald dress from some earlier, leaner time. And, there they stood, behind a velvet rope, a rueful DeHaan now too well aware that they were meant for the bistro, not the brasserie. While they waited, a handsome couple swept in the door, said something clever to the matre d’, and seated themselves. The matre d’s look was apologetic, but these were people who did what they liked. DeHaan, battered captain’s hat hidden, he hoped, beneath his arm, just tried to look like he didn’t care.
Then the propritaire showed up. He could have been no one else, short and harassed, waiting uneasily for whatever would go wrong next. But this-this he could fix. “I am Papa Heininger,” he told them. He never said a word about it, but DeHaan knew it was the uniform, even a merchant captain’s uniform, which, to him, meant something. “Table Fourteen, Andr,” he said to the matre d’, shooing him off. Then, to DeHaan, “Our best, Captain, for you and madame.”
And so it was. Every eye followed the procession to the holy table-who are they? With a flourish, the matre d’ whipped away the rserv card, then seated Arlette with dramatic care, clasped his hands maestro-style and said, “To begin, I think, les Kirs Royales? And champagne to follow, of course, yes?”
Yes, of course, what else. And, after that, the perfection of excess. Choucroute, sauerkraut with bacon, pork, and sausage, again Royale, which meant more champagne, poured over the sauerkraut-the Roederer he’d ordered just wasn’t enough. And, when the old lady who sold flowers in the street came walking among the tables, he bought Arlette a gardenia. She put it in her hair, snuffled a little, kissed him, was laughing again a moment later, excited, happy, triste, drunk on champagne, all the things she liked best and all at once.
As they waited for their coffee, DeHaan nodded at the mirrored wall above the banquette. “I might very well be wrong,” he said, “but that hole in the corner looks as though it was made by a bullet.”
“It was,” she said.
“Wouldn’t they, repair it?”
“Never! It’s famous.”
Well, he thought, in the dim light of the Reina Cristina bar, there would be more.
He looked at his watch, where was the ferry? The barman brought him another beer. At a nearby table, two men were talking German. He could see them in the mirror; hard-faced types, smoking hard, coarse and loud and serious. A strange conversation, how some people got in over their heads, in hot water, didn’t know what was good for them. Almost as though it were a scene played for his benefit-they talked to each other, but they were really talking to him. One of them met his eyes in the mirror, lingered, then looked away. No, he thought, it’s nothing. Just this damned city, its harsh wind and shadowed streets, which had overheated his imagination.
Arlette, the brasserie. “Now, home,” she’d whispered to him as l’addition arrived on its silver tray. A particularly Gallic twist to this bill, in DeHaan’s eyes, because it was much too low, the Kirs Royales and champagne nowhere to be found. They had been, it seemed, honored guests, but not too honored-one didn’t eat for free, that wasn’t honor, that was decadence.
By then it was very late, the tables mostly deserted, and the propritaire opened the door for them as they left, letting in the cool April night. DeHaan thanked him, the propritaire shook his hand and said, “Au revoir, bientt.”
Goodby, we’ll see you soon.
1 June. Rue de la Marine, Tangier.
DeHaan found the office in a fine old building off the Petit Socco. A cage elevator moaned softly as it climbed, one slow foot at a time, to the third, the top floor where, down a long hallway of trading companies and shipping brokerages, a glass door said M. J. HOEK and, below a black line, COMMERCE D’EXPORTATION. Hoek’s secretary, a Frenchwoman in her forties, knew exactly who he was. “Ah, here you are-he’s been waiting for you.” She led him briskly down a corridor, trailing a strong scent of sweat and perfume. “Captain DeHaan,” she announced, opening the door to an inner office. A large room, lit by grand, cloudy windows that looked across the street to the Compagnie Belge de Transports Maritimes building, its name carved across the limestone cornice.
Hoek’s kingdom was crowded but comfortable-wooden filing cabinets topped by stacks of unfiled correspondence, a black monster of a nineteenth-century safe, commercial journals and directories packed together on shelves that rose to the ceiling, where an immense fan turned slowly, with a gentle squeak on every revolution. All of this ruled from a massive desk between the windows, where Marius Hoek sat in a swivel chair. His face lit up when the door opened and he wheeled himself around the desk to greet DeHaan. “Best office furniture they ever invented,” he said. The wheelchair, DeHaan saw, had been pushed into a corner.
“So,” Hoek said, moving back behind the desk, “the sailor home from the sea. Shall I send out for coffee? Pastry?”
“No, thank you,” DeHaan said, taking the chair on the other side of the desk.
They were silent for a time. It had been a long month, for both of them, since they’d met for dinner, and that was acknowledged without a word being spoken. Finally, Hoek said, “They wired us that you’d be coming, something to do with a courier.”
“Yes-plans for his reception. Though it could be ‘her,’ now that I think about it.”
Hoek nodded- always the unseen possibility. “Details, details,” he said, almost a sigh. “You know, DeHaan, I had no idea…” He took off his glasses and rubbed the dents on the bridge of his nose. “Well,” he said, putting the glasses back on, “let’s just say it’s more work than I imagined.”
DeHaan was sympathetic. “And complicated.”
“Hah! You don’t know. Well, maybe you do. Anyhow, I barely have time to earn a living.” After a moment he added, “Supposing that I could-because the business has gone to hell all by itself, never mind this other nonsense.”
“No customers?” DeHaan said, incredulous.
“Oh, plenty of customers, customers crawling up the walls. The whole world wants the minerals, now more than ever, and they bought like crazy in the thirties, what with all the rearmament. ‘Strategic materials,’ that’s the gospel, and they’ll take whatever you have. Cobalt and antimony. Phosphates. Asbestos. Lead and iron ores. Turns out that anything you can dig from the earth either blows up or keeps you from being blown up, starts fires or stops them. So, there isn’t much you can’t sell, but just try shipping it. And, if you can, it’s torpedoed, or bombed, or hits a mine, or just disappears. Peace was a much better arrangement-for me, anyhow. But not for everybody, I’ll tell you that. They’re getting rich in Switzerland, the greedy bastards, because they’re buying for Germany.”
“And you won’t ship to Germany.”
“I never would have, believe me. But now I do, sometimes. Never direct, always to a third country, a neutral, but it’s no secret, no matter what the manifest says. I do it because I’ve been told to, by our imperious friends, in order to seem neutral. It makes me sick, but who cares.”
“They’re not wrong, you know,” DeHaan said.
“Maybe not, but, if that weren’t bad enough, suddenly I’m fighting for the British! Bless their valorous hearts and all that, but I signed up to fight for Holland.”
“We both did.”
“And now, it’s the same with you.”
“It is, and they didn’t ask. What happened to Leiden?”
“Shoved aside, I assume. ‘There’s a war on, sonny.’” Hoek spread his hands- the way of the world. “So now, they’re in charge of my life, as well as all the others who’ve joined up, though I can’t tell them that.”
“Still you’ve managed, to recruit.”
“I’ve tried. Too often-made a total ass of myself in the expatriate community. Which is small, and incestuous, and lives on gossip. I’m very indirect, but in the end you have to ask, and some of them are horrified. ‘Keep it to yourself,’ I tell them, but they won’t, not for long.”
“But, surely, a few…”
