travelers on a budget. But no longer. An artillery shell had hit the upper corner, during the war, so a few windows were boarded up, there was a black burn pattern on the wall above them, and, everywhere in the hotel, the evil smell of old fire.
No matter, he wouldn’t be here long. In Stuttgart, he’d come back under Mr. Brown’s control, and damned thankful for it, at the time. Saved his worthless hide, no doubt. Truth was, if you had to live the clandestine life, you’d better do it in a clandestine system-you’d live longer, as a rule, because going it alone was almost impossible. Still, there’d come a moment, standing in front of that wretched painting in the museum, when he’d been tempted to disappear, to live some other way. Not now, he’d thought, not in the middle of a war, when everybody had to fight, on some side. But later on. Maybe.
Such ingratitude! After all, they’d taken great pains to protect him. Like grandma’s precious china bowl-ugly thing, you hated it, but you took care not to break it. They’d slid him carefully out of Strasbourg, into the Unoccupied Zone, Vichy, and down the length of France, in an ambulance, a truck, even a horse-drawn vegetable wagon-Kolb with a smelly old farmer’s beret pulled over his ears. Handsome living, if you lived that way. Sharing the local food, whatever poor stuff they had. Once a pretty girl to sit with on a train. And, finally, into Port Bou-the Pyrenees border crossing-in a hearse. An assistant undertaker, thank God, the coffin they’d carried had been heavy and elaborate, lined with black satin, it didn’t look like there’d be all that much air to breathe in there. And who wanted to die in a coffin?
Of course, when they spent time and money on you, they weren’t trying to save your life, rather trying to find some way you could lose it working for them. So, he thought, they had something in mind.
In Lisbon, apparently. Earlier that evening, he’d seen their little man, come down from the consular office in Barcelona, he supposed, an hour north of Tarragona. Well, he hadn’t really seen him-it was dark in the cinema, a Spanish knight up on the screen bashing a few Saracen heads before breakfast-but he was a familiar presence. Rather heavy, with an asthmatic wheeze, and clearly regarding the man eight rows down one seat in from the aisle as little more than a package. Other than a brief protocol-“I trust this seat’s not taken, can you tell me?” “An old lady was there, but she’s gone away”-he’d only sat beside him for the requisite half hour before vanishing, the newspaper left behind on the seat.
Would it have cost him so dearly to add a few words? A whispered Good luck, or something like it? Something human? No, not him, not even a comment about the moronic movie, just labored breathing, and a difficult newspaper with hand-lettered instructions on the inside of the back page-as always. Which added up to the night train to Lisbon, and then, no doubt, his next hotel, likely somewhere near the docks. The docks, the docks, always the docks, crowded with spies. There were some in his profession, he knew, who didn’t live that way at all-who traveled first class, who strolled through casinos with a woman on each arm, but that wasn’t his legend. Damn his genes anyhow. Born to a clerk, looked like a clerk, they’d made him a clerk. It was all a great clanking machine, wasn’t it, that went round and round with little puffs of steam and never stopped.
Damn, he was hungry, his stomach gnawed at him. Didn’t help his mood much either. But the food in the seedy restaurants got worse as you moved south. At least in the north they fed on potatoes, here it was oil and beans, beans and oil, all of it laced with garlic, the sacrament of the poor, which didn’t agree with Kolb. And the same damn story in Lisbon, no doubt.
The night train to Lisbon — more poetry than fact, that description. After a local up to Barcelona, S. Kolb spent the better part of two days on a broken wicker seat in a third-class carriage, in with the sausage eaters and the cranky infants, a few obvious refugees, and an endless parade of tired soldiers. The cast changed, but Kolb remained, as they puffed slowly across the Spanish countryside, standing in this station or that, or marooned far out in the middle of nowhere.
It was after midnight when he finally arrived at Lisbon’s Estaco do Rossio and found the woman in the green scarf waiting for him on the platform. She drove him not to a hotel on the docks, but to what he took to be a rooming house, up in the Alfama district, below the Moorish citadel. No, not quite a rooming house, he was told, a hideaway for various agents, headed here or there, and best not to see the others, or let them see you. He did hear them, though they were quiet in their rooms, and broke the rule only inadvertently, opening his door at the same moment his neighbor did. A tall, spindly fellow, professorial, who stared at him for a moment, then stepped back inside and closed the door. A surprise to Kolb, the way he looked. Kolb had heard him, on the other side of the wall, moaning in his sleep, and had imagined a very different sort of man. Still, not so bad in the hideaway-at least they fed him-his beans in oil brought up on a tray, with a tiny chop that might have been goat. Stingy, the British Secret Intelligence Service.
He saw Mr. Brown the following morning. Plump and placid, pipe clenched between his teeth, so you had to work like hell to understand his clenched words. But Kolb did, in fact, understand all too well. After hearing of his travels, while making notes on a pad, Brown said, “We’re sending you up to Sweden.” Kolb nodded, secretly very pleased. A neutral country, clean and sensible with large, accommodating women-a bit of Kolb Heaven, after all the hell he’d been through. “You don’t speak the language, do you?” Beyond Skoal! not a word, but Skoal! might be perfectly adequate.
“How do I get there?” Kolb said.
“We’re sending you up on a freighter. Dutch merchantman disguised as a Spanish tramp. They’ll let you off in Malm. Ever been there?”
“Never.”
“It’s quiet.”
“Good.”
“Then, perhaps, to Denmark.”
Occupied. But politely occupied.
“Of course from Denmark, one can easily travel to Germany.”
“They may know who I am-I suspect Frulein Lena denounced me.”
“We’re not sure she did, and she’s with the Valkyries now. Anyhow, you’ll have new papers.”
“All right,” Kolb said. As if it mattered whether he agreed or not. Still, there was a glimmer of hope-Sweden, where, if they caught him, he would be interned. If they caught him? Oh they would catch him all right, he’d make damn sure of that.
“Don’t mind?” Brown said, eyes narrowing for a moment.
“A war to be won,” Kolb said.
Brown may have sneered, he wasn’t sure, there was only a puff of smoke, rising from the bowl of his pipe. Could that have been a sneer? “Indeed,” Brown said, and told him he’d be leaving after midnight on the tenth. “You’ll be taken to the dock,” he said. “Can’t have you wandering around Lisbon, can we.”
8 June, 1600 hours. At sea.
DeHaan came to the bridge for the first half of the split dog watch. The repainting was still in progress, but getting toward the end. The crew, he thought, had never worked this hard. It had been decided, at the wardroom meeting, that they would be told only that the ship was headed north, its destination secret, with a call at Lisbon and no liberty. Was it the idea of a secret mission that inspired them? Something clearly had, because they put their backs in it, every single one of them, the full crew toiling away on the scaffolds, and working fast. And, this one time at least, the weather held. The idea that an important operation could be ruined by a few showers of ocean rain seemed almost absurd, but the history of war said otherwise and DeHaan knew it.
Ratter came loping up the ladderway with a burlap sack in one hand and a glint in his eye. “Care to see what I bought in Tangier?”
He reached into the sack and brought forth a round tin canister with hand-lettered marking at the center. FUTLIHT PARED, 1933, it said, then, JAMS CAGNI/JONE BLONDL.
“Ten reels,” Ratter said. “Probably all of it, or there’s another movie in there somewhere.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“Thieves market.”
Strange things wandered through the world of ports, DeHaan thought, living lives of their own. Had this walked away from a Tangier cinema? A passenger liner? A complicated journey of some sort, anyhow, to arrive on the Noordendam.
“I thought,” Ratter said, “we might show it as a reward, after the painting.”
“I can repay you, from the mess fund.”
“No, no. It’s my gift, to the ship.”
