“Not that I can see.”
“Get rid of him,” Ratter said, meaning Kolb.
“How would I do that?” DeHaan said. “Hang him from a crane? With the crew assembled?”
“You can, you know,” Kees said. “And quietly, if you have to.”
“That’s crazy,” DeHaan said. But Kees wasn’t entirely wrong. DeHaan was, according to the Dutch Articles, “Master next to God,” and that meant he could do pretty much anything he wanted.
Kovacz backed out of the cab, then opened the hood. All four of them peered at the engine, the smell of burned rubber hose heavy in the air. “Nothing,” Ratter said. “How the hell did he do it?”
“Wait a minute,” Kovacz said. He reached below the engine and peeled a black scrap of fabric off the metal. “Oily rag?”
Silence. They stared at each other, all of them with tear streaks running through the soot below their eyes. Kees coughed and said, “Maybe the woman did it.”
“Or somebody in the crew,” DeHaan said. “Or maybe it was in there when we loaded it.”
“Ignition switch on?” Kovacz said.
“If it stalled on the dock, and nobody checked…,” DeHaan said. Stranger things had happened, they all knew that, and hold fires were often mysterious. “Anyhow, they have two more,” he said. “Let’s hope that’s enough. Johannes, I want you to take a walk around the ship-paint locker, places like that, you know what I mean.”
Ratter nodded. “What do we tell the crew?”
“Oily rags,” DeHaan said.
2010 hours. Off the Irish coast.
True Atlantic weather, now, barometer falling, maybe a storm system up north. Kolb didn’t show up for dinner, but in this kind of sea the ship’s pitch and roll could keep passengers in their cabins. “Feeling all right?” DeHaan asked Maria Bromen as they left the table.
“It doesn’t bother me.”
“Go up on deck and watch the horizon, if you have to.”
“I will do that,” she said. Then, “Could you tell me, maybe, where we are?”
When they reached the chartroom, he unlocked the door, turned on the light, and spread a chart out on the slanted top of the cabinet. She stood close to him, he could smell soap. Nice soap, nothing they had on the ship. “We’re about here,” he said, pointing with the calipers.
“So tomorrow, here?”
“Sea’s against us. We’ll be lucky to be off Donegal Bay.”
“Do you have, a certain time, to be somewhere?”
“Yes, but in this business you give yourself an extra day. Always, if you can.”
“And you mustn’t tell me where we’re going.”
“I shouldn’t,” DeHaan said, feeling slightly silly.
“Who I would tell? A whale?”
DeHaan smiled and slid the chart back in its drawer. “Don’t you like surprises?”
“Oh, some, yes. This one, I don’t know.”
He turned the light off and held the door for her. Once again, they stood by their cabin doors and said good night. DeHaan’s was halfway closed when she said, “It’s possible…”
He came back out. “Yes?”
“You have a book, I could read?”
“Come and see if there’s something you like.”
He closed the door behind her, started to sit on the bunk, then leaned against the bulkhead as she looked over the library.
“Dutch, French, more Dutch,” she said, disappointed.
“There’s some in English-don’t you read it?”
“Hard work, for me, with dictionary. What’s this?”
“What?”
“This.”
He walked over to the bookshelf. She had her finger on a Dutch history of eighteenth-century naval warfare. “I don’t think…” he said.
When she turned around, her face was close to his and her eyes were almost shut. That sullen mouth. Dry, but warm and extravagant, and very soft. And delicate-they barely touched. She drew away and ran her tongue over her lips. Not so dry, now. For a time they stood apart, arms by their sides, then he settled his hands on her hips and she moved toward him, just enough so that he could feel the tips of her breasts beneath the sweater. By his ear, her breath caught as she whispered, “Turn off the light.”
He crossed the cabin and pulled the little chain on the lamp. It took only a few seconds but when it was done she’d become a white shape in the darkness, wearing only underpants, long and roomy, almost bloomers. She stood still, waiting while he undressed, then said, “Take them down for me.” He did it as slowly as he could, finally kneeling on the floor and lifting each foot to get them off. She liked him down there and hugged him for a moment, a strong hug, arms around his neck, then let him go and ran for the bed.
Where it was all rather forthright, to begin with, but that didn’t last.
The Noordendam creaked and groaned in the night sea. Much better than a room, he thought, the rough blanket wound tight around them, the two of them wound tight around each other.
“They brought it aboard in Rangoon,” he said. “The last item in the shipment, a big wooden barrel. Some poor Englishman, they said, colonial administrator, going home to his family burial ground in England. They’d filled the barrel with brandy, you could smell it, to preserve the body. So we put it down in the hold but we had a bad storm, in the South China Sea, and it got stove in and began to leak. Well, we couldn’t leave it like that, not in high summer, so we opened it up and there he was, in his white tropical suit, along with some watertight metal boxes, packed with opium.”
“What did you do with it?”
“Overboard.”
“And him?”
“Got him a new barrel, an old paint drum, and filled it with turpentine.”
“I grew up in Sevastopol,” she said. “So I am Ukrainian, Marya Bromenko. ‘Maria Bromen’ came later. I thought, for Western journals, maybe better. Such ambition I had. My parents had great hopes for me-my father kept a little store in the port; tobacco, stamps, whatnot. For me he wanted education, not so easy but we managed. We managed, we managed-better than most. Always we had something on the table-potatoes, in the bad times, potato pancakes, in the good, as you can see.”
“See what?”
“I am big down below, not so much on top, a potato.”
He ran his fingers down her back. “Mm, not much like a potato.”
“I know you think so. I knew the first time I saw you, how you felt.”
“It showed?”
“To a woman, we know. But still, I was as I was, never to be a ballerina, and I hated the idea of becoming one more teacher. So, a journalist. I went to the university, in Moscow, for a year, but 1919, you know, the civil war, sometimes no class, or you had to march. And you had to say the right thing, because they would ask you about the other students, who’s a spy, and you had always provocation-‘Don’t you hate that bastard Lenin?’-and I got tired of it, weary, and afraid, and I thought, maybe better, go home to Sevastopol. I think I had, even then, a premonition, that I would get in trouble with these people.
“But my dear father wouldn’t give up-he got me a job, with a little journal we had there, news of the port and the ships. I worked hard, and eventually I found a good story, about the Lieutenant Borri, a French minesweeper that brought troops to Odessa, and her captain, one of those French adventurers who write novels. Claude Farrre, he was called, a villain, but interesting. It was this story that got me hired at N’a Vakhte, where, to begin with, I wrote from the woman’s view. What do you eat, on board your ship? Do you miss your sweetheart, at sea? Small stories, soft at the edge. Like Babel, though not so good, more like, maybe, Serebin. They are called feuilletons, leaves, that’s the technical name. You always had to put in a little communism-the food is better than under the czar, I miss my sweetheart but I am working to build socialism. We all did that, you learned how to do it, to keep
