“Do we still have the projector?”
“It took some searching, but we found it in the hawser locker.”
“Of course, where else? Does it work?”
“Don’t know what will happen if we put film in it, but I hooked it up and it ran. There were rats living in the speaker, they’d eaten the wires, but Kovacz put it back together.”
The projector had been on the Noordendam before DeHaan came on as captain, nobody had any idea where it came from. “Movie at twenty-one hundred hours,” he said. “Have the bosun rig up a canvas screen on the foredeck.”
A lovely night for a movie; a great white sweep of stars spread across the black sky, a light headwind that snapped and billowed the canvas screen, so that James Cagney sometimes swelled, sometimes jerked violently, to great cheers from the audience. The projector worked, after the necessary ten minutes of fooling around, though it ran slightly fast, so that the actors appeared to be in a bit of a hurry. The sound, however, from the rewired speaker, was not so good, the voices muffled, as though the characters were eating bread, and sometimes the music swam, odd and otherwordly- Footlight Parade, the supernatural version.
None of it mattered. The officers and crew sat on a hatch cover and had a fine time-some of them couldn’t understand a word of it, but that didn’t matter either. It was a Busby Berkeley movie, so there was plenty to look at; crowds of girls in skimpy costumes and, soon enough, in bathing suits, forming and re-forming in a water ballet that ended in a grand climax, a fountain of swimmers, sleek and sinuous, waving their arms like graceful birds.
Ratter ran the projector and DeHaan sat by his feet. Looking out over the seated crew, it struck him how few they were, only a handful of men, really, on the vast reach of the deck, beneath an ocean sky. A few minutes into the movie, Maria Bromen appeared on deck, a little hesitant, uncertain where to sit. DeHaan waved her over and made space by his side. Evidently she’d washed her clothing and hung it up to dry, because someone had found her a pair of dungarees and a sweater, and she wore a scarf over her head, knotted beneath her chin. “Do you always have movies?” she said.
“Never. But the first mate found this in Tangier.”
After a moment, she said, “The English is difficult, for me.”
“James Cagney has trouble with his wife, but Joan Blondell, his secretary, is secretly in love with him.”
“Ah, of course.”
Then, a little later, “What happens now? He’s a sailor?”
“Plays a sailor, in the production number.”
“So. He fights!”
“Well, sailors in a bar.”
After the fight, a song:
Here’s to the gal who loves a sailor.
It’s looking like she always will.
She’s every sailor’s pal.
She’s anybody’s gal.
Drink a gun to Shanghai Lil.
10 June, 0300 hours. Port of Lisbon.
They had to have a pilot, entering the Tagus River, picked up off the town of Cascais, in order to cross the sandbars that built up at the mouth of the river. Pilots tended to be outgoing and talkative, seemed to enjoy that part of the job, and this one was no different. To DeHaan, he spoke English. “War has slowed down,” he said. “Except for Libya, and that goes nowhere. Advance, retreat, advance.”
DeHaan agreed. From the last newspaper he’d seen, and Ali’s reports of the BBC, it certainly seemed that way.
“It may be the time for diplomats, now,” the pilot said. “Hitler has what he has, and the British and Americans will find a way, with Japan. Is this how you see it?”
“One could say that.” DeHaan was being polite. “But the occupation is a hard thing, for Europe.”
“For some, yes. But it was not good before the war, with the communists, and men who could not find work.” He paused, then said, “You are not Spanish, are you.”
“Dutch.”
“I thought you could be German. How does it happen that you are captain of a Spanish ship?”
“The last captain quit, without notice, and I was what they could find. Likely it won’t last, though.”
“Crew is Spanish?”
“Some. You know how it is with the merchant tramps, everyone from everywhere.”
“Truly. And there is a lesson for the world, no?”
DeHaan agreed, and busied himself with the log, then spoke back and forth with the engine room. When they were safely in the Tagus, made fast to two tugboats, and the pilot boat came alongside, DeHaan wasn’t sorry to see him go.
Four in the morning, DeHaan on the bridge. With the tugs fore and aft, the Noordendam made slow way upriver, past pier after pier, while the city beyond lay still and silent, the final hour of its darkness broken only by streetlamps and a few lights dotted across the hills. Always, a part of him came sharply alive at these moments. To be awake while the world slept was a kind of honor, as though command of the imaginary night watch fell, for just that moment, to him.
By 0530 they had, as promised by the tugboat captain, tied up to the pier at the foot of the rua do Faro, a white F 3 painted on the side of the cargo shed. DeHaan, in normal times, would have left the bridge for his cabin, but these were not normal times, and he stayed where he was. As the first light of dawn settled on the city, the waterfront came to life: stevedores, lunch boxes in hand, heading for a shape-up on the neighboring wharf, the night’s last whore going slowly home on her bicycle, the local seagulls coming to work, a sun-bleached black Fiat pulling up in front of the cargo shed, an army truck arriving next, a few yawning soldiers, lighting cigarettes and chatting among themselves, forming a ragged line at the foot of the pier, followed by an elderly couple with a suitcase, who stood back from the soldiers and settled in to wait. As DeHaan watched, more civilians arrived, until he’d counted forty or so, then stopped counting as the crowd grew.
At 0750, Kees showed up for the forenoon watch. “What goes on, out there?”
“I’m not sure. A crowd of refugees, it looks like.”
“I thought this was all a secret.”
“Well, keep an eye on it,” DeHaan said, heading for his cabin, anxious for a few hours of dead sleep.
But this was not to be, not right away. In the corridor that led to his cabin, the chartroom door stood open and Maria Bromen was seated on a stool. She stood when she saw him. “I came to say goodby.”
She had repaired herself as best she could-her suit and shirt pressed, sensible shoes polished, hair pinned up. “They loaned me the iron,” she said. “It looks right?”
“Oh yes, looks perfect. But I thought you would leave at night.”
“Don’t you sail today?”
“We’ll try-we’re a few hours late, but there are things that have to be done, so it will be after midnight.”
“Still, I will go now, and I wanted to thank you. There is more I want to say, but I think you know. So, thank you, and I wish you safety, and happiness.”
“There’s some kind of commotion out there,” DeHaan said. “Maybe you’d better wait for a while.”
“Yes, refugees, I saw them. They want to get on your ship, to leave this city, but the army won’t let them. It has nothing to do with me.”
“They have no idea where we’re going.”
“They don’t care. There will be rumors-South America, Canada-and they will offer money, jewelry, anything.”
After a moment he said, “Well, good luck, and be careful. Is there anything you need?”
“I have everything, because of you. I will be richest Russian girl in Lisbon.”
DeHaan nodded and met her eyes, he wanted to keep her. “So then, goodby.” He extended his hand and she shook it, formally, Russian-style. Her hand was ice cold.
“Perhaps we will meet again,” she said.
“I would like that.”
“One never knows.”
