She shrugged and said, “I don’t care. If there is a chance to escape, to find a place where they will leave me alone, I will take it. There’s no time to explain, but I grew up in a country that was a prison, and it happened that I was one of the ones who couldn’t bear it. So I managed, with my work, to get away. Not far enough, but almost.” She looked at him. “Almost, right?”
“Yes, almost.” It surprised him, how angry he was. He wouldn’t let her see it, but to be this close, the lights of the evening city just beyond the wharf, made him angry. What difference would it make, if she were there?
“I know it is inconvenient,” she said. “To take me-wherever you are going. You can say no, I won’t argue. They are waiting for me, the two men in their car, out on the street. They expect me to return, that’s what they told me.”
“No,” he said. “I won’t send you back. But you may not thank me, later on, for taking you away.”
She raised a hand, as though to touch him, then didn’t. “Then I’ll thank you now,” she said. “Before anything happens.”
They walked back down the pier, toward the Noordendam, past the slow, rumbling trucks with a few sailors sitting on a long crate. At the ship, the bosun was directing the attachment of steel cables that hung down from the crane, and, as DeHaan and Maria Bromen went up the gangway, the first section of a tower rose slowly into the air.
11 June, 0240 hours. At sea.
“Steady on course three one zero.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
“We’ll bear northwest for an hour or so. And make full speed.”
The helmsman shoved the arrow to Full — Ahead, two bells sounded and, a moment later, the answering bells came back from the engine room. Behind them, the pilot boat, returning to port, and the fading lights of the coast. Cornelius came to the bridge with a mug of coffee and a can of condensed milk. DeHaan drank off some of the coffee, added the thick milk, and stirred it with the end of a pencil. “How’s everything below deck?” he said.
“We’re glad to be away, Cap’n.”
“Yes, me too,” DeHaan said.
Cornelius stood by his side for a time, watching the sea ahead of them. When he turned to go, DeHaan said, “Coffee’s good today, tell the cook I said so.”
Cornelius said he would, and left the bridge. DeHaan looked aft, at the Spanish flag flapping in the wind, and their wake, phosphorescent in the moonlight. An eight-day voyage lay ahead of him. According to Brown’s Almanac, Lisbon to a point due west of Glasgow was eleven hundred nautical miles, a hundred hours, four days at their speed of eleven knots. There were two routes to choose from, after that, Elsinore-by-Kiel Canal-Elsinore the British, rather Shakespearian form of the Danish port Helsingr, while the Kiel Canal ran through the northern heart of Germany. But that idea was beyond brazen. Instead, they would take Elsinore-by-Skaw, which meant the port of Skagen on the northern tip of Denmark. There was a shorter route, by way of what were called “the belts”-channels through the Danish islands-but the curve around to the Baltic would’ve swung them too close to the German coast. Going further east, down the three-mile pinchpoint between Helsingr and the Swedish coast, it was less than a day to Malm, and only a few hours east to the Smygehuk.
Back up to Malm for the sawn boards, he thought. And Kolb’s departure, then on to Ireland, in theory, and Maria Bromen’s departure. Another week, if they got there. So then, for two weeks, she would be in Ratter’s cabin.
1900 hours, dinner in the officers’ mess. All the officers, except for Kees on dog watch. Maria Bromen, back in dungarees, black sweater, and canvas deck shoes; and their traveling spy, Mr. Brown’s “meager little man.” He was certainly that-short and seedy, bald, with a fringe of dark hair, eyeglasses, and sparse mustache. And very diffident. He was, DeHaan observed, rather adept at diffidence. As everyone gathered for dinner, Kolb waited to see who went where, waited cleverly, shifting about, until all the others were seated, then took the remaining place. DeHaan said, “Miss Bromen has rejoined us for the voyage north, and we have one more passenger, Herr Kolb.” DeHaan went around the table with names, and Kolb nodded and mumbled, “Pleased to meet you, sir,” in heavily accented English.
“From where do you come, Herr Kolb?” Mr. Ali said.
“From Czechoslovakia,” Kolb said. “Up in Bohemia, where it’s German and Czech.”
“You are German, by birth?”
“Some part,” Kolb said. “It’s all very mixed, up there.”
“And your work?” Kovacz said.
“I am a traveler in industrial machinery,” Kolb said. “For a company in Zurich.”
“Business goes on,” Ratter said. “War or no war.”
“It does seem to,” Kolb said, not quite reluctantly-it wasn’t his fault. “War or no war.”
Cornelius served the dinner: barley soup, black sausage and rice, and Moroccan oranges. Maria Bromen, using a thumbnail, deftly carved the skin off her orange, then ate it in sections.
When dinner was over, and DeHaan headed for his cabin, Ratter caught up with him in the passageway. “Who is he, Eric?”
“A favor for the British, he’s going to Malm.”
“Is he dangerous?”
“Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know. Is he?”
“He’s just a passenger. I didn’t really want to take him, but they insisted, so here he is.”
“Everybody’s been wondering, since yesterday.”
“Let them wonder,” DeHaan said. “One more unknown, leave it at that.”
“You’re aware that he toured the ship, this morning? He went everywhere, down to the engine room, crew’s quarters.”
“I didn’t know, but so what? What’s he going to do? Put it down to curiosity and forget it, we have more important things to worry about.”
12 June, 0510 hours. Off Vigo.
A hundred miles east of them, in the dawn mist. DeHaan had always liked the port-a huge bay, easy docking, a town that welcomed sailors. A Dutch fleet had taken Vigo, during one of the eighteenth-century wars, fighting alongside a British squadron. The instructor at the naval college had shown them an old map, drawn in the odd perspective of the period, a line of big ships riding little semicircle waves. Then, during the Napoleonic Wars, it had played some role, what? The British? The French fleet?
There was a knock on the port window of the bridge. Ruysdal, the lookout, was motioning for him to come out on the wing.
“Over there, Cap’n.”
Rising and falling on the low swell, a cluster of drifting shapes. DeHaan squinted through his binoculars. “Put a light on it,” he said.
Ruysdal worked the searchlight, and a yellow beam settled on the cluster. Bodies. Maybe twenty of them. Some of them in dark clothing, others wearing skivvy shorts-they’d been asleep when it happened, a few wore life jackets, and two of the men had roped themselves together at the wrist. DeHaan looked for insignia, for some identification, but, even with the searchlight, the gray dawn hid it from him. “Can you see the name of a ship? Anything?”
“No, sir.”
There was more; debris, pieces of wood, a strip of canvas, a white life preserver-but if there was a name on it, it floated face down.
“Stop the ship, sir? Put out the cutter?”
DeHaan watched, looking for a sign of life as the bodies lifted and turned in the ship’s bow wash and slipped away astern. “No,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do.”
Ruysdal kept the light focused on the bodies until they disappeared from the edge of the beam. “Damn shame, sir, whoever they are.”
“I’ll note it in the log,” DeHaan said, returning to the bridge.
