possibility of my doing that.”
She nodded-she knew that perfectly well.
“You do understand,” he said.
“Yes, I know.” She paused, then lowered her voice and said, “Is there some thing, some thing I could do? I don’t care what.”
“Well…”
“I will work. They have women, who work, on Russian ships.”
“And sometimes in Holland as well, on the tugboats and barges. But Noordendam is a freighter, Miss Bromen.”
She began to answer him, to argue, then gave up, he saw it happen. After a moment she said, “Is there food here, maybe?”
That he could do. He signaled to the boy and asked him for something to eat.
“Beignets?” the boy said. “There is a bakery nearby.”
As DeHaan reached into his pocket for money, he wondered how much he had. Quite a lot, actually, and of course he would give it to her. When the boy left, he said, “Miss Bromen, what happened to you? Can you tell me?”
“I am running from Organyi, ” she said, with a sour smile- what else? The Russian word meant the organs of state security, secret police. “It’s a game you must play, in my work. They want to use you because you are a journalist, and journalists talk to foreigners.”
“You worked for them?”
“No, not completely. They asked me to do things, I said I would, but I did not do well, was not-clever. I did not defy them, you cannot, but I was stupid, clumsy-any Russian will understand this. And I never became important, never spoke to important people, because, then… And was better to be a woman, weak, though they wanted me to go with men. Then I would say I was virgin, would almost cry. But they never went away, until purge of 1938, then one was gone, another came, then he was gone.
“But, it did not last and, one day, in Barcelona, here comes the wrong one, for me. He did not believe I was stupid, did not believe tears, or anything. He said, ‘You will do this,’ and he said what would happen if I did not do it. With him, one and one made two. So then I ran. Left everything I had, got on train to Madrid. Maybe France was better idea, but I was not thinking. I was frightened-you know how that is? I had come to the end of my courage.”
She paused, remembering it, and drank the last of her coffee. “But they did not chase me, not right away. I think maybe the bad one in Barcelona did not want to say, to report, what happened, but later he had to, probably because there was someone above him who also knew how one and one makes two. Then, one day in Madrid, I saw them, and the one friend I had did not want to talk to me anymore. It was then second week in May, and again I ran. To Albacete. By then, I had very little money. I had sold watch, pen, Cyrillic typewriter. I learned from refugees, from Jews, how to do it. It was strange, how I found them. When you are running away you go to the city, and then to a district where you feel safe, and there they are, they have done the same thing, found the same place. Not with rich, with poor, but not too poor so that you don’t belong. Then, in the markets, in the cafs, you see them. Ghosts. And you, also, are a ghost, because the self you had is gone. So it is recognition, and you approach them, and they will help you, if they can. But I think you know all this, Captain, no?”
“It is on my ship,” DeHaan said. “Any ship-we are part of the world, after all. So most of my crewmen can’t go home. Maybe never again in their lives.”
“Can you?”
“No. Not while the war goes on.”
The boy returned from the bakery with a plate of fried twists of dough sprinkled with powdered sugar. He placed it on the table and DeHaan gave him a few more dirhams-too many, evidently, the boy’s eyes widened, and he said thank you in the most elaborate way he knew.
The beignets were freshly made, still warm, and smelled very good. Bromen said, “I see these every morning-they carry them through the streets on a palm leaf.” She ate carefully, leaning over the table.
“They’re good?”
She nodded with enthusiasm. He tried one, she was right. “Excuse me,” she said, licking the sugar off her fingers.
“So,” DeHaan said, “you came to Tangier.”
“A dream to the refugees, North Africa. You can go anywhere, from here, if you have a lot of money. You can even work. It’s hard in Spain, after the war they had, people are poor, very poor, and police are terrible. So I came here, my last hope, one week ago. No money, nothing left to sell, only passport. I stole, sometimes, little things- some of the refugees have the gift, but I don’t.”
“I will help you, Miss Bromen. Let me do that, at least.”
“You are kind,” she said. “This I knew in Rotterdam, but I fear it is too late now, for that.”
“Why too late?”
“I have been seen, found. Not conveniently, for them. On the avenue that comes out of Grand Socco, they were in car going the other way, and by the time they stopped, I had run away down a little street and I hid in a building.”
“How could you be sure it was them?”
“It was them. Once you know them, you can recognize.”
DeHaan found himself thinking about the Germans at the Reina Cristina.
“They saw me, Captain DeHaan, they stopped their car. Right where it was, they stopped. That was all I saw, I didn’t wait, so maybe I was wrong. But next time may be when I don’t see them. And then, well, you know. What will happen to people like me.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Do you? They will not kill me, not that minute,” she said. There was more, but she hesitated, perhaps unwilling to use the words she used with herself, then did it anyhow, her voice barely above a whisper. “They will degrade me,” she said.
They will not. DeHaan leaned forward and said, “Let me tell you about money, Miss Bromen, sea captains and money. They have it, but, other than giving it to their families, they have no way to spend it. Only in port. Where you can spend like a drunken sailor-certainly I have spent like a drunken sailor-but those pleasures just aren’t that expensive. All this to tell you that I will buy your freedom, you can tell me what it costs, and it will be my pleasure to buy it for you. A new passport, ship passage, we’ll take a piece of paper and add it up.”
“Will cost time, ” she said. “I know, I have seen them, the richest ones, waiting, and waiting. For months. All the money in the world, can bribe, can buy gifts, but still they wait. If you don’t believe, ask the refugees, I will introduce you.”
“And so?”
“So must be a ship at night. To a neutral port. No passport control going out, no passport control getting off. Disappearance. With no tracks to sniff.”
From DeHaan, a sour smile. “Is that all.”
“I know ports, Captain. I know how they work.”
She was right, and DeHaan knew it.
“No other way can work,” she said. “I am sorry, but is true.”
Then they were silent for a long time, because there was nothing more to be said, and all that remained for him was to stand up and walk away. And he told himself to do precisely that, but it didn’t take. Instead, he made a wry face and muttered angrily to himself. What he said was in Dutch, and not at all nice, but she knew what it meant, and rubbed her eyes with her fingers. Keeping a promise to herself, he suspected.
6 June, 2105 hours. Bay of Tangier.
He’d enlisted, for this brief mission, his best, the bosun Van Dyck, who sat in the stern and steered the ship’s cutter. It was choppy on the bay that evening and DeHaan braced himself against the gunwale as they neared the lights of the city. In his pocket, a rough map, penciled on a scrap of paper. Simple enough, she’d said, there was a small, unused pier at the foot of the rue el Khatib, and a street that led to an old section of the port, where, in time, he would find a row of large sheds that faced an abandoned canal, the fourth one down occupied by a Jewish
