hermit in a tree, handsomely rendered on the label. Saint Gerlac came in very large bottles, with ceramic stoppers to reseal the beer if its drinking were perchance interrupted-by a rain of gold coins or an unexpected birth-and had to be finished later.
By seven-thirty they’d entered the Oresund, channel to the Baltic and the narrowest part of the Danish pinchpoint, with an occupied, blacked-out port of Helsingr on the Danish side, and pretty lights in the Swedish Hlsingborg, three miles across the sound. The Noordendam stayed well to the neutral side of the water, so passed close to Hlsingborg.
A long, slow dusk, that time of day. DeHaan’s cabin was dark, beer bottles and sandwich plates on the floor, clothes piled neatly on a chair. “Can we go and see it?” she asked, climbing out of bed. DeHaan unlatched the brass fitting on the porthole and opened it wide-a warmish evening, the air felt good on his skin. They were close in to Hlsingborg, close enough to see the wooden buildings in the harbor, all painted the same shade of red, close enough to see a long row of sailboats, and a man who’d walked his dog out to the end of the sailboat dock and waved to the freighter as it went by.
“Would be nice,” she said. To be here together.
“It would, some day.”
“Some day.” Which will likely never come, she meant. “Does something happen tonight?”
“We get where we’re going, about two in the morning, we unload a cargo, and then with a little luck we’re bound for, well, not home, but somewhere like it.”
“Ah,” she said. “I thought so.”
“You knew?”
“It’s in the air, like before a storm.”
At the municipal pier, two boys stood waist-deep in the oily water and splashed each other.
“You know how to swim?” he said, only half joking.
“You would let me?”
It took him a slow moment to understand that this was a woman’s question, not a fugitive’s question, and he put his arms around her and pulled her back against him. It felt so good he didn’t speak right away, finally said, “Never,” then added, “Also the water’s too cold.”
“This country is too cold.” The municipal dock fell away behind them, replaced by a cluster of tiny houses where the town turned back into an old village. “But what if it should happen that we could go, somewhere?”
“Then we’d go.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere in the countryside.”
“Which countryside?”
“France, maybe. At the end of a little road.”
“Oh? Not by the sea?”
He smiled. “With a view of the sea.”
“Like in a book,” she said. “You would be on a terrace, with a spyglass.” Using circled thumbs and forefingers she made a pretend spyglass, pointed it at the porthole and squinted one eye. “‘Oh the sea, how I miss it.’ You would too, my sweet friend.”
Now the edge of Hlsingborg was gone, and they steamed past flat, rocky coast in gray light. “It’s like this until we get to Copenhagen,” he said.
“I was there. I like those people, the Danes, and they have good food. Very good food. Or, anyhow, they used to.”
“It’s not so bad for them, not so bad as other places.”
“Will be bad. You’ll see.”
They were quiet for a time, not happy that they’d strayed back to real life. “You feel good back there,” she said. “So interested.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.” Gently, she unwrapped his arms and went to the bookshelf where he kept the wind-up Victrola. She took the album of records off the shelf, then chose one. “Is this good?”
It was the Haydn cello quartet. “I like it.”
“Can we play it while-we go back to bed?”
“For ten minutes, then it ends.”
“Let it end.”
“It will go chk-taca, chk-taca.”
She made a face, a scowl, annoyed that she couldn’t have what she wanted. “Stupid thing,” she said.
They passed a darkened Copenhagen, then the lights of Malm. A Swedish patrol boat shadowed them for a time, a little too close for comfort, then backed off without bothering to challenge. Likely they assumed the Santa Rosa was hauling war materials, down to Kiel or Rostock, and were disinclined to irritate their German neighbors, staring at them across the strait. DeHaan was back on the bridge by then, just after midnight, where he thought about her and thought about her, mostly why now thoughts, about how the world gave with one hand and took away with the other.
They rounded the Swedish coast soon after that, coming into the Baltic, and, a kind of miracle, on time. No, he thought, not a miracle. Hard work. Particularly Kovacz, down in the engine room, holding Noordendam to her best eleven knots. Fighting his war against a rickety pipe system, mending it at the elbows where the steam liked to break free and see if it could scald somebody, putting his heart’s blood into the rise and fall of the great brass piston rods. There should be a medal for them, Kovacz and his firemen and oilers, or a mention in dispatches. But there would be nothing like that, of course, because for this kind of work there were no dispatches. Perhaps a muted smile from Hallowes but they’d never see it. There would be one final, arid message from the NID, DeHaan thought, a destination, then silence.
Ratter was out on the bridge wing, shooting his stars, his Gothic Sextant With Artificial Horizon aimed up at the heavens, because they had to hit 5520?N and the longitude right on the nose. Ratter, too, deserved a medal. Andromedae, Ceti, Eridani, Arietis, Tauri, Ursae Majoris, Leonis, Crucis, and Virginis — just like Odysseus, patron saint of any captain so mother-dumb he could get lost in the Aegean. Ratter took another reading, then peered at his almanac: “Corrections for the Moon’s Upper and Lower Limbs.” At least the stars were visible, with only a few drifting shreds of moonlit cloud. Black night and driving rain would have been welcome, except that they never would have found their position. So they had to be visible, and they were, in this thin summer darkness, and too bad for them.
“Johannes?”
“Yes.”
“Getting what you need?”
“Pretty much, I am.”
“How are we doing?”
“Good. We’re just off Cuba.”
21 June, 0250 hours. Off the Smygehuk.
The Noordendam ran dark now. And silent-bell system turned off, crew ordered to be quiet, engine rumbling at dead-slow speed on a flat sea. A mile off the port beam, one fishing village, a few dim lights in the haze, then nothing, only night on a deserted coast.
On the bridge, DeHaan and Ratter, the AB Scheldt out on the wing, a green signal lamp held at his side, while Van Dyck waited with a crew at the anchor winch. DeHaan looked at his watch, he had a few minutes to wait, so called down to the radio room, using the newly installed voice tube. “Mr. Ali, everything as usual?”
Ali’s voice was excited. “It is not, sir, it is not. The whole world is transmitting! Up and down the bandwidth-one stops, another starts.”
Ratter could hear the tone but not the words. “What’s going on?”
“Heavy wireless traffic,” DeHaan said. Then, to Ali, “Anything in clear?”
“A few words in German, maybe harbor boats. But the cipher, dear me! And fast, sir, a lot that must be sent.”
“Any idea where it’s coming from?”
