Spain.’
‘Yes, I suppose you are right,’ I said.
‘I went to
Tomas asked for a cigarette. After lighting it he said, ‘You don’t want to hear about frogman training?’
‘Just tell me what you think is interesting.’
‘You are a funny sort of bastard.’
‘I had orders to report to the depot. Everything had gone wrong that Thursday; the bank manager was gunning me for a lousy ?12 and the MG had plug-trouble on the Great North Road — you remember what motor spares were like during the war — and this fat swine in the garage where I stopped was fiddling some petrol for two blokes with Boston haircuts and a van full of tinned fruit. I hung around fuming, but he told me I should be grateful for one of his precious spark plugs. “I reckon it all goes to you blokes in the services nowadays,” he said, as though we were living on the fat of the land. “Yes,” I said to him, “it must be a tough war back home, listening to Itma and knitting socks,” and then these other two got nasty and after some words he said he didn’t want any money for the plug, so I left. I can remember every minute.
‘It was from that time that I began to feel afraid of the deep water. I was quite O.K. diving in daylight or near the surface, but I couldn’t bear working with the thought that under me there was just darker and darker depths of water until you were just swallowed up.’
Fernie Tomas shouted to Augusto to make sure he didn’t forget the engine temperature, and Augusto said he wouldn’t.
‘You don’t know what it’s like on a midget,’ said Tomas. It was a plain statement of fact. I didn’t. ‘Imagine that you’ve crossed the North Sea inside the bonnet of a motorcar, jammed against the engine. You dress yourself in underwater gear. Much more incredible and inefficient than modern equipment. You dress in a space much smaller than a telephone booth, and then clamber through the flooding chamber, which has a nasty habit of going wrong and leaving you jammed in a tight-fitting coffin. But you may be lucky; the hatch cover isn’t jammed or fouled so you can crawl out into the ocean. You walk along the top of the midget submarine — it’s not much wider than a plank and getting narrower and narrower as you move forward. The pointed bow upon which you are finally balancing is bumping with great metallic crashes against a vast anti-submarine net which stretches as far as you can see in every direction. The rungs of the net are nearly as big as a steering wheel and you hold on to one to steady yourself as you wield the cutting tool. All the time the skipper keeps the motor running so that the bow will continue to nudge the net, but the deck grinds and grates and perhaps a flow of fresh water throws the buoyancy out, or rain makes it even darker than before. Your metal boots slip off the tightrope you are on.’
Tomas rubbed his arm and shivered. ‘I had a recurring nightmare in which I slipped off the deck and fell into the bottom of the sea.’ He shivered again. ‘So of course it happened. I grabbed the net as the submarine slid to one side. The motor had failed and the current swept it back out of control. I was alone in the sea hanging on to the net.’
Tomas rubbed his forehead and took a stiff drink. I poured him another. He said nothing until I said, ‘What did you do?’
‘I climbed up the net rung by rung.’ Tomas’s white hands clasped the blanket. ‘I held on to the top of the net until a German boat came along in the morning to check it. They told me afterwards that they had to prise my fingers away from the metal to get me into the boat. I was the only survivor of the force that attacked. They gave me food and I slept the clock round in the local navy barracks. I could only speak schoolboy German, but it was enough to hold a conversation. On the second day I had dinner in the German officers’ mess, and I supposed I’d had a few extra drinks to celebrate being alive. In the normal way I would have been sent to a P.O.W. camp and there the matter would have ended, except for something one of the officers said at dinner that night.
‘Two bodies had floated up under the port screws of the big cruiser. They had tried to move them but there was no diving unit within a hundred miles. He said there was no option but to run the screws. He hoped I’d understand. It wasn’t a thing a sailor liked to do, he said.’
Tomas sniffed and swirled his whisky around in his glass. ‘I said that if they would give me my equipment back and recharge the oxygen cylinder I’d have them up in a jiffy. Everyone in the mess said what a sense of comradeship that showed — that I would do that to retrieve my friends’ bodies for a ceremonial burial, which the German Navy would be honoured to give them.’
Tomas looked up at me; I hadn’t smiled.
‘It’s easy to be cynical now and see it as a put-up job, but at that time the propaganda pundits had got us all acting like the cast of a British film. You know what I mean?’
‘Don’t I just,’ I said.
‘Anyway, they had a couple of Kriegsmarine officers accompany me and they said could they use the apparatus. I wasn’t keen about that. They didn’t press it. They were professionals, just as you’re a professional. They knew what sort of process getting information really is.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘collecting information is like making cream cheese from sour milk. If you squeeze the muslin bag to force it — it’s ruined.’
‘Yes, that’s the way it went; they collected their information drip by drip, and all the while I was living in their officers’ quarters and had a servant and good food and they were telling me not to hurry and perhaps I would like to be sure that there were no other bodies near by. After they’d had a big funeral with lots of stuff about fellow-sailors challenging the mighty ocean deep and all that, I was sent down to Cuxhaven to a P.O.W. unit. The food was ghastly and I was treated like a convict. One night, when I was feeling as low as it’s possible to get, one of the German officers that I’d stayed with in Norway visited me, together with a man named Loveless.’
‘Graham Loveless?’ I asked. It was Smith’s nephew.
‘Yes,’ said Tomas. ‘I told them that I had been a member of the British Union of Fascists. They said that if I joined the Legion of Saint George (what was later called the Britische Freikorps) they could arrange that I lived with German naval officers. They said that I would only be called upon to use the underwater equipment to save life or property or against our mutual enemy — the sea.’
Tomas looked at me and shrugged.
‘And you fell for it?’ I said.
‘I fell for it,’ said Tomas.
‘Then you met Giorgio Olivettini?’
Tomas didn’t fall into the trap; he walked into it slowly and deliberately. He looked at me and said, ‘Yes, I saw him soon after that. He told you?’
I tried a simple lie. ‘I guessed,’ I said, ‘when I saw you on the U-boat the night Giorgio died.’
‘That was you, was it?’ said Tomas. ‘Yes, I sometimes did a night swim for pleasure.’
I knew he was lying. He had obviously been out doing his heroin-delivery service that night, but I said nothing.
I poured a drink for both of us; the whisky helped Tomas to relax. He finally said, ‘It was a Moray eel.’
I offered him some ice from the refrigerator. ‘It was a Moray,’ he said again. I put a cube into his glass and two cubes into my own. ‘It was a Moray,’ Tomas screamed as loud as he could scream, ‘a Moray, do you hear?’
‘O.K.,’ I said.
‘They tear you to pieces. Huge Moray eels as big as pigs, they have teeth like razors. They terrify me. There are thousands along this coast, many of them eight feet long. They live in the rocks as a rule, but these were living in the cracked pressure hull.’
I remembered the gashes across Giorgio’s body. Perhaps it was true. Tomas began to speak quickly. ‘He was a lieutenant when I first met him. The Wehrmacht had a pretty low opinion of the Italian armed forces, but these
