but some scrap iron-for Tangier.
“Lose anybody?”
“Only one, an oiler. A Finn, or so his book said. Good oiler, but a terrible drunk. Hit people-he was pretty good at that too. I tried to buy him out of jail, but they wouldn’t do it.”
“In Paramaribo? They wouldn’t take a bribe?”
“He hit a pimp, a barman, a bouncer, a cop, and a jailer.”
“Christ!” A moment later, Terhouven smiled. “In that order?”
DeHaan nodded.
Terhouven finished his lamb and bread, wiped his mouth, then made a face. “Too dumb to live, some people. You replace him?”
“Couldn’t be done. So, as of this evening, we’re at forty-two.”
“You can sail with forty-two.”
“We can.” But we need more and you know it.
“It’s the war,” Terhouven said.
“Pretty bad, lately, everybody’s undermanned, especially in the engine room. On a lot of ships, when they reach port, they have the crew on deck after midnight, waiting for the drunks to come out of the bars. ‘Climb aboard, mate, we get bacon twice a day.’”
“Or somebody gets hit on the head, and wakes up at sea.”
“Yes, that too.”
Terhouven looked over the tray to see if there was anything else worth eating. “Tell me, Eric, how come no uniform?”
“All I knew was ‘a dinner,’ so…”
“Is it wrecked?”
“No, it lives.”
“You can have another made here, you know.”
Across the table, Wilhelm said to Hoek, “Well, I went to the flower market but he wasn’t there.”
DeHaan was done with dinner, had had all he wanted and liked it well enough. He’d been everywhere in the world and eaten bravely, but he could never quite forget his last plate of fried potatoes and mayonnaise in a waterfront caf in Rotterdam. He took out a packet of small cigars-a Dutch brand called North State, cigarette- shaped but longer, the color of dark chocolate, and offered it to Terhouven, who declined, then lit one for himself, inhaled the brutal smoke, and coughed with pleasure. “Wim,” he said, “what is this dinner about?”
Terhouven hesitated, was about to tell all, then didn’t. “The Hyperion Line is going to war, Eric, and the first step is taken here, tonight. As for the details, why not wait and see-don’t spoil the surprise.”
The waiters returned, the first holding the door, the second bearing a tray piled high with mounds of little pastries that glistened with honey, the third carrying two bottles of champagne in buckets of ice. He raised the buckets proudly and grinned at the dinner guests. “Celebration!” he said. “Open both bottles?”
“Please,” Hoek said.
When the waiters left, Hoek opened the briefcase by his feet and unfolded a Dutch flag, red, white, and blue in horizontal bars, took it by the corners, and held it above his head. Commander Leiden rose and drew from an inner pocket a sheet of good paper with several typed paragraphs, cleared his throat, and stood at attention. “Captain DeHaan,” he said, “would you stand facing me, please?” From somewhere in the neighborhood, the sound of whining Arabic music was faintly audible.
Leiden, in a formal voice, began to read. This was admiralty language, stern and flowery and impressively antique- hereby s and whereas es and shall not fail s, a high wall of words. But plain enough to DeHaan, who blinked once but that was all: Leiden was administering the oath of enlistment in the Royal Dutch Navy. DeHaan raised his right hand, repeated the phrases as directed, and swore his life away. That done, the conclusion was not long in coming. “Therefore, in the name of Her Royal Majesty, Queen Wilhelmina, and by order of the Commissioners of the Admiralty of the Royal Naval Forces of the Netherlands, it is our pleasure to appoint to commission the present Eric, Mathias, DeHaan, to the rank of Lieutenant Commander, in the sure and certain knowledge that he shall perform with full honor and endeavor…”
It went on for a time, then Leiden shook his hand and said, “You may salute, now,” which DeHaan did, and Leiden returned the salute as Terhouven and Wilhelm applauded.
Looking at Terhouven, DeHaan saw a joker’s delight, thought, why no uniform indeed, you sly bastard, but saw also eyes that shone brighter than they should.
They ate the pastries and drank the champagne and talked about the war. Then, at midnight, the man who worked as Hoek’s attendant and chauffeur, a pink-cheeked migr called Herbert, arrived and Wilhelm and Hoek left them. They could hear the chair bumping along the cobbled alley toward a car parked in a nearby square.
“Quite a character,” Leiden said. “Our Mijnheer Hoek.”
“A big heart in him,” Terhouven said.
“Surely that.” Leiden paused to finish the last of his champagne. “He has never married, officially, but it’s said that two of his servants are actually his wives, and that the children in the house are his. It’s not unknown here. In fact, if he were Mohammedan, he could have four wives.”
“Four wives.” From his tone of voice, Terhouven was considering the domestic, not the erotic, implications.
“Only two, for Hoek, and it’s no more than gossip,” Leiden said. “But he does maintain a large household, which he can easily afford.”
“Well,” DeHaan said, “why not.”
“We agree. Whatever their peculiarities, you soon discover, as part of a government in exile, the importance of patriots who have their wealth abroad.”
“And want to spend it,” Terhouven said.
“Yes, but not only that. What you saw here tonight was the North African station of the Royal Dutch Navy’s Bureau of Naval Intelligence.”
Terhouven and DeHaan were silent, then Terhouven said, “May one ask how you found them?”
One may not — but Leiden never said it. Terhouven was himself a patriot of this category and that, by the slimmest of margins, bought him an answer. “They volunteered-at the consul’s office in Casablanca. There were others, of course, more than you’d expect, but these two we decided we could trust. If not to be good at it, at least to be quiet. This sort of connection excites people, in the beginning, and they simply must tell, you know, ‘just one friend.’” He spoke the last words in the voice of the indiscreet, then turned to DeHaan and said, “You can depend on them, of course, but one of the axioms of this work is that you don’t abandon your, ah, best instincts.”
DeHaan began to understand the dinner. For a time, he’d thought he might be asked to serve on one of the Dutch warships that had escaped capture in 1940 and gone on to fight alongside the British navy. Now he knew better. Yes, he was newly a Luitenant ter Zee 1ste Klasse, but-and Terhouven’s presence confirmed his suspicion-it was the Noordendam that was going to war.
“And Wilhelm?” Terhouven said.
“Our wireless/telegraph operator. And, just as important, she knows people-migrs and Moroccans, plain folk and otherwise. An artist, you see, can turn up anywhere and talk to anyone and nobody cares. Very useful, if you’re us. She was among the first to apply, I should add, and her father was a senior officer in the army. So, maybe it’s true, blood will tell and all that.”
“Are they to give me orders?” DeHaan said, not sounding as neutral as he thought.
“No. They will help you-you will need their help-and they may serve as a retransmission station for our instructions to you.”
“Which are?”
“What we want you to do, and this is the broad answer, is to carry on the war. We, which is to say Section IIIA of the Admiralty General Staff, currently find ourselves crammed into two small rooms in D’Arblay Street, in Soho. Some of us have to share desks, but, frankly, we never had all that much space in The Hague, and we’d learned, over the years, to accept a certain, insignificance. With Holland a neutral state, as she’d been in the Great War, the government had better things to do with its money than to buy intelligence. We had the naval attachs in the embassies, ran a small operation now and again, watched a few ports. Then the roof fell in and we lost the war in four days-the army hadn’t fought since 1830, nobody anticipated attacks by parachute and glider, the queen
