I
1914
George Enos was gutting haddock on the noisome deck of the steam trawler Ripple when Fred Butcher, the first mate, sang out, 'Smoke off the starboard bow!' That gave George an excuse to pull the latest fish off the deck, gut it, toss it down into the icy, brine-smelling hold, and then straighten up and see what sort of ship was approaching.
His back made little popping noises as he came out of this stoop. I'm getting too old for this line of work, he thought, though he was only twenty-eight. He rubbed at his brown mustache with a leather-gloved hand. A fish scale scratched his cheek. The sweat running down his face in the late June heat made the little cut sting.
He followed Butcher's pointing finger with his eyes. 'A lot of smoke,' he said, whistling low. 'That's not just another Georges Bank fishing boat, or a tramp freighter, either.' His Boston accent swallowed the r's in the final syllables of the last two words. 'Liner, I'd guess, or maybe a warship.'
'I think you're right,' Butcher said. He was little and skinny and quick and clever, his face seamed by wind and sun and spray till he looked to have ten more years than the forty-five or so he really carried. His mustache was salt and pepper, about evenly mixed. Like Enos, he grew it thick and waxed the ends so they pointed toward his eyes. Half the men in the United States who wore mustaches modeled them after the one gracing Kaiser Wilhelm's upper lip.
Captain Patrick O'Donnell came Out of the cabin and pressed a spyglass to his right eye. 'Warship, sure enough,' he said, his Boston mixed with a trace of a brogue. 'Four-stacker-German armored cruiser, unless I'm wrong.'
'If you say it, Captain, we'll take it to the bank,' Fred Butcher answered. That wasn't apple-polishing. O'Donnell had spent years in the U.S. Navy, rising to chief petty officer, before he retired and went into business for himself. He'd seen German warships at a lot closer than spyglass range; he'd exercised alongside them, out in the middle of the Atlantic, and maybe in the Pacific, too.
'She's going to pass close to us,' Enos said. He could see the great gray hull of the ship now, almost bow-on to the Ripple. The plume of black coal smoke trailed away behind.
Captain O'Donnell still had the telescope aimed at the approaching ship. 'Imperial German Navy, sure enough,' he said. 'I can make out the ensign. Now-is that the Roon or the Yorckl' He kept looking, and finally grunted in satisfaction. 'The Yorck, and no mistaking her. See how her cranes are pierced? If she were the Roon, they'd be solid.'
'If you say so, Captain. You're the one with the spyglass, after all.' Enos' chuckle suited his wry sense of humor. He took another naked-eye look at the oncoming Yorck. The cruiser was nearly bow-on. When he spoke again, he sounded anxious: 'We see her, Captain, but does she see us?'
The question was anything but idle. As the Yorck drew near, she seemed more and more like an armored cliff bearing down on the steam trawler. The Ripple was 114 feet long and displaced 244 gross tons. That made her one of the bigger fishing boats operating out of Boston harbor. All at once, though, Enos felt as if he were in a rowboat, and a pint-sized rowboat at that.
'How big is she, Captain?' Fred Butcher asked. The huge hull and great gun turrets gave him pause, too.
'At the waterline, 403 feet, 3 inches,' O'Donnell answered with the automatic accuracy of the longtime Navy man he was. 'She displaces 9,050 tons. Four 8.2-inch guns, ten 6-inchers, crew of 557. Four-inch armor amidships, two-inch belts at the ends. She'll make twenty-one knots in a sprint.'
'If she runs us down, she won't even notice, in other words,' Enos said.
'That's about right, George,' O'Donnell answered easily. He took pride in the strength and speed of naval vessels, as if having served on them somehow magically gave him strength and speed as well. Even so, though, his glance flicked to the American flag rippling atop the foremast. The sight of the thirty-four-star banner rippling in the brisk breeze must have reassured him. 'They'll see us just fine. Here, if you're still worried, I'll send up a flare, that I will.' He dug a cigar out of his jacket pocket, scraped a match against the sole of his boot, and puffed out a cloud almost as malodorous as the coal smoke issuing from the Yorck's stacks.
As if his cigar had been a message to the German cruiser, signal flags sprouted from her yards. O'Donnell raised the telescope to his eye once more. The cigar in his mouth jerked sharply upward, a sure sign of good humor. 'By Jesus, they want to know if we have fish to sell!' he burst out. He turned to Butcher. 'Tell 'em yes, and don't waste a second doing it.'
The affirmative pennant went up almost as quickly as the order had been given. The Yorck slowed in the water, drifting to a stop about a quarter-mile from the Ripple. Then everyone aboard the steam trawler whooped with delight as the German cruiser let down a boat. 'Hot damn!' yelled Lucas Phelps, one of the men minding the trawl the Ripple had been dragging along the shallow bottom of Georges Bank. 'The Germans, they'll pay us better'n the Bay State Fishing Company ever would.'
'And it all goes into our pockets, too,' Fred Butcher said gleefully. On fish that made it back to Boston, the crew and the company that owned the boat split the take down the middle. Butcher went on, 'We're light five hundred, a thousand pounds of haddock, that's not ever gonna get noticed.'
The happy silence of conspiracy settled over the Ripple. Before long, the eight men in the Yorck's lifeboat came alongside the trawler. 'Permission to come aboard?' asked the petty officer who evidently headed up the little crew.
'Permission granted,' Patrick O'Donnell answered, as formally as if he were still in the Navy. He turned to Enos. 'Let down the rope ladder, George.'
'Right.' Enos hurried to obey. He liked extra money as well as anybody.
Dapper in their summer whites, alarmingly neat, alarmingly well shaved, the German sailors looked out of place on the untidy deck of the Ripple, where some of the haddock and hake and cusk and lemon sole that George hadn't yet gutted still flopped and writhed and tried to jump back into the ocean. Blood and fish guts threatened the cleanliness of the sailors' trousers.
'I will give you for six hundred kilos of fish forty pfennigs the kilo,' the petty officer said to O'Donnell in pretty good English.
O'Donnell scowled in thought, then turned to Butcher. 'Would you work that out, Fred? You'll do it faster 'n' straighter than I would.'
The first mate got a faraway look in his eyes. His lips moved in silent cal culation before he spoke. 'Two hundred forty marks overall? That makes sixty bucks for… thirteen hundred pounds of fish, more or less. Nickel a pound, Captain, a hair under.'
'Herr Feldwebel, we'll make that deal,' O'Donnell said at once. Every body on board did his best not to light up like candles on a Christmas tree. Back in Boston, they'd get two cents a pound, three if they were lucky. Then O'Donnell looked sly. 'Or, since it ain't like it's your money you're playing with, why don't you give me fifty pfennigs a kilo-you can tell your officers what a damn Jew I am-and we'll throw in a bottle of rum for you and your boys.' He turned and called into the galley: 'Hey, Cookie! Bring out the quart of medicinal rum, will you?'
'I've got it right here, Captain,' Charlie White said, coming out of the galley with the jug in his hand. He held it so the German sailors on the Ripple could see it but any officers watching from the Yorck with field glasses couldn't. The smile on his black face was broad and inviting, although George expected the rum to be plenty persuasive all by itself. He was fond of a nip himself every now and then.
The petty officer spoke in German to the seamen with him. The low-voice colloquy went on for a minute or two before he switched back to English: 'Most rimes, I would do this thing. Now it is better if I do not. The bargain is as I first said it is.'
'Have it your way, Feldwebel,' O'Donnell answered. 'I said I'd make that deal, and I will.' His eyes narrowed. 'You mind telling me why it's better if you don't take the rum now? Just askin' out of curiosity, you understand.'
'Oh, yes-curiosity,' the petty officer said, as if it were a disease he'd heard of but never caught. 'You have on this boat, Captain, a wireless telegraph receiver and transmitter?'
'No,' O'Donnell told him. 'I'd like to, but the owners won't spring for it. One of these days, maybe. How come?'
