Hoek shrugged. How would I know?
2 June. Office of the Port Administration, Tangier.
DeHaan knew who Yacoub was the moment he saw him. He belonged to a certain tribe, native to the port cities, to Penang and Salonika, to Havana and Dar es Salaam. It was a tribe of young men, young men of humble origin who, with only their wits to help them, meant to rise in the world, and, to that end, had obtained a suit.
They wore it all day, every day, and, because they were rarely the original owner, worked hard to keep it looking the best it could. Next, with help from an old book or an old man, they taught themselves a foreign language, maybe two or three, and practiced at every opportunity. Then, at last, to go with the suit and the language, they learned to smile. How glad they were to see you! What did you need? Where did you want to go?
In the port office, hidden away in a maze of piers and drydocks, Yacoub’s suit was gray, his smile encouraging, his English good, his French better. He looked at the clock, and hoped DeHaan would not mind waiting for him at the small souk just off the corniche for, say, twenty minutes? Not too long? His apologies, but he did have some work that had to be finished.
A small souk, but crowded-stalls packed together in a narrow alley, where a thin stream of black water ran down a drain in the pavement, and the smell, aging goat hide and rotten fruit, was almost visible. A good place for the ancient flywhisk, DeHaan thought, brushing at his face, and a good place for recalling the time-honored clichs about the eyes of veiled women. He bought an orange, and enjoyed it almost as much as the act of dropping the peels in the street, according to local custom. When he’d finished it, and found the water pipe and rinsed his hands, Yacoub fought free of the crowd.
He led DeHaan from stall to stall, from camel saddle to copper pot, as though he were a guide and DeHaan a tourist. They spent a minute on the weather, then DeHaan asked about hiring crew. Yacoub was not optimistic. “They have vanished, sir. The war has taken them.”
“And the hiring hall?”
“You may visit, and see for yourself.” What he would see, according to Yacoub, were a few murderers and thieves, and a one-legged drunk with one eye-“Formerly a Lebanese pirate, some say”-if he hadn’t already shipped out.
This was highly embroidered, but DeHaan got the point. “There must be a few,” he said. “Not quite murderers and thieves. War or no war, men leave ships.”
“Not many, these days. And often enough they don’t go back to sea. This is, after all, Tangier; here you can hide from the war, find a woman, find a way to make a little money-sailors are good at many things, as you know-in a city that doesn’t care what you do.”
“But, surely not all of them stay ashore.”
“Never all. But, of those few who leave, fewer still wish to change ships, and they don’t last long. The blackboard at the hiring hall is covered with jobs, Captain, top to bottom.”
DeHaan declined to offer on a wellworn prayer rug. The merchant looked up to heaven and lowered the price, then Yacoub hissed a few words under his breath and the man went away.
“I will ask my friends,” Yacoub said. “My friends who know things, but there is perhaps one other possibility. Tangier has many sailors’ bars, all sorts, the famous Chez Rudi, for example, and various others, some of them dangerous. But there is one, in a small street in the medina called rue el Jdid, that is known as l’Ange Bleu, the Blue Angel, though it has no sign. Sometimes sailors go there to look for old friends, if they see their ship in port, and sometimes they go to look for a new berth. Quietly. And if the master of a ship were to offer good money, it’s said, the man might be interested. And, even if he’s not, he will tell his friends about it.”
They walked out of the shadowed souk and onto the corniche. A fine morning in June, the wind soft and suggestive, legions of strollers out to faire le promenade. For that moment, at least, the romantic soul who’d called the city “the white dove on the shoulder of Africa” had got it right. And Yacoub, inspired by the day, now began a discourse on the local gossip-rich Englishmen and Americans, lovers in love with the lovers of their lovers, poets and lunatics, intrigues at the sultan’s court. And scheming pashas, who conspired with foreigners in their reach for power.
“Always foreigners,” Yacoub said. “Perhaps we deserve our history, but heaven only knows the blood we’ve spilled, trying to stop them from coming here. Spanish armies, French legions, German agents, British diplomats- since the turn of the century, fighting us and each other. And then, at last, that special curse all its own, French bureaucrats, so in love with power they made rules for snake charmers.”
“It is their nature,” DeHaan said. “Nobody really knows why.”
“I believe that Holland, also, is a colonial nation.”
“Yes, in the East Indies, we are.”
“And South America as well, no?”
“There too-in Suriname, Dutch Guiana.”
“Do you think it just, Captain?”
“It began a long time ago, when the world was a different place, but it can’t go on forever.”
“So we believe, and some of us hope that Britain will help us, if we help them to win this war.”
“Nobody can see the future,” DeHaan said, “but promises are sometimes kept, even by governments.”
“Yes, now and then,” Yacoub said.
Politics, DeHaan thought. Too often the destiny of Yacoub’s tribe. Because, with the suit, and the language, and the smile, they had turned themselves, unwittingly, into perfect agents. Knowing everyone, going everywhere, they were recruited for this scheme or that, for national independence or foreign ambition, given money, made to feel important, and then, all too often, sacrificed.
Yacoub was silent for a time, as they walked past the Club Nautique and the ship chandlers’ warehouses, headed for the pier that led to the Port Administration building. When they paused at the foot of the pier, he said, “If you would care to accompany me to the office, Captain, I believe there is mail being held for you.”
On the harbor launch that took him out to the Noordendam, at anchor a mile offshore, DeHaan had time to read, and consider, two letters. The first was a copy of a bank draft, sent to him from the Tangier branch of Barclay’s Bank, received by wire from their office in London. The draft, from the Hyperion Line, with a London address, could be read as a response to his earlier wire to Terhouven, informing him of the ship’s change of administration. A substantial amount, a number familiar to DeHaan, it was sufficient for refueling and stores, as well as the paying off of the crew.
Crews were traditionally paid off at the end of a voyage-formerly that meant Rotterdam but those days were gone-so Terhouven had chosen a call at a Moroccan port as a substitute. What else did it mean? He wondered. His next destination was an unnamed port in the Baltic, pending the arrival of the courier, but it seemed he would be going north in ballast-except for the secret apparatus-so, logically, he would be taking on cargo in the Baltic, then heading he knew not where.
But, now that the crew was to be paid, it would not be their new home port-which he assumed was London, maybe Liverpool, or Glasgow. They had to be going somewhere, once their mission was completed, but Hallowes had not been specific, saying only that it would be the final voyage as the Santa Rosa. He hadn’t meant that it was to be the Noordendam ’s final voyage, had he? No, they would never do that. Britain, desperate in the grip of the U-boat blockade, needed every merchantman afloat. So DeHaan told himself.
The second envelope bore no stamp. It was addressed to Captain E. M. DeHaan, NV Noordendam, with By Hand written in a lower corner. This was in typescript, produced, it appeared, by an old portable machine that lived a hard life-the ribbon had not much ink left to it, the top of the a was broken, and the t had lost its bottom curl. Inside, a sheet of cheap lined paper, not folded but very carefully torn off, saving the other half for later use. The language was English-the Russian version.
1 June, 1941
Captain DeHaan: As you are in port, could you grant me interview? I talked with you in Rotterdam, in 1938, for newspaper article. Thank you, I am at Hotel Alhadar.
Best wishes,
Then, signed in pencil, Maria Bromen.
He remembered her well enough, a Russian maritime journalist who wrote for Na Vakhte, On Watch, a
