Dark Voyage by Alan Furst Read Free Book Online Page A

other two ageless, all were unveiled, eyes dramatized with kohl, mouths painted carmine. “Tell him no, right? Back to the boat.”
    DeHaan shook his head. “Might as well get them laid.”
    “You,”
Ratter said in his brutal French. “Come over here.”
    The pimp wore a sharp green suit. He hurried over to Ratter and DeHaan and said, “Sirs?”
    “Are the girls clean?” Ratter said. “Not sick?”
    “They are perfect, sir. They have seen the doctor on Monday. Dr.
Stein.
”
    Ratter stared at him with a cold blue eye. “God help you if you’re lying.”
    “I swear it, sir. Sir?”
    “Yes?”
    “May one beg permission for use of your lifeboats? Under the tarpaulins?”
    “Go ahead,” DeHaan said.
    A crowd gathered, the girls smiled, blew kisses, fluttered their eyelashes.
             
    The twilight was long gone by the time the last two bumboats arrived. The early merchants had returned to shore, and most of the crew was on the mess deck, eating dinner, with oranges, the Hyperion Line’s contribution from the bumboat market, for dessert.
    The bosun and AB Scheldt had gone below, and DeHaan and Ratter waited as the men in djellabas struggled up the gangway. Twenty of them, at least, some carrying wooden crates with rope handles, and breathing hard by the time they reached the deck. One of them laid his crate down, then unbent, coming slowly upright with a shake of the head and a
why me?
grimace on his dark face.
    “Quite a long way, up here,” DeHaan said, sympathetically.
    The bumboat man stared for a moment, then nodded in agreement. “Like to broke me fookin’ balls,” he said.
             
    Commandos everywhere.
    Five in the first officer’s cabin, Ratter and Kees crammed in with the chief engineer on three-high bunk beds, a few more in the wardroom, sleeping on the floor and on the L-shaped banquette where the officers ate, the rest stashed here and there, with Mr. Ali moving to the radio room to free up the cabin he shared with his assistant. Once upon a time, in that prosperous and hopeful year 1919, at the Van Sluyt shipyards in Dordrecht, the
Noordendam
had been designed to carry four first-class passengers—wandering souls or colonial administrators—which was common for merchant ships of the day. She had, it was rumored, actually carried one, but nobody could say who it was or where he went, and in the end all it came to was mahogany trim and a bit more space for the ship’s officers who occupied the cabins.
    Major Sims, the unit commander, stood the midwatch, midnight-to-four, with DeHaan. Short and trim and, DeHaan sensed, taut with suppressed excitement, he was one of those men with skin too tight for his face and slightly protruding eyes, so that he seemed either irritated or astonished by life, an effect heightened, at that moment, by a deep-brown coat of camouflage cream. “It
will
wash off,” he said. “With soap and water.” By nature not particularly forthcoming, he did tell DeHaan, in the confidential darkness of the bridge, that he and his men were from “a good regiment, one you’d know,” and that he’d “been asking for a special operation for a long time.” Well, DeHaan thought, now you have it.
             
    A heavy sea, as they headed north,
Noordendam
rolling and pitching her way through the swells. DeHaan stood at ease by the helmsman, hands clasped behind his back in instinctive mariner’s balance, a posture that Sims soon enough discovered for himself. Some of the commandos would surely be feeling queasy by now, DeHaan thought, with worse to come, but Major Sims seemed, anyhow, to be a good sailor. The mess boy appeared on the bridge and DeHaan ordered two mugs of coffee brought up.
    “No change in the ETA, is there?” Sims asked.
    “Monday a week, the twelfth, off Tunisia—Cap Bon, just after dark. The estimate has us passing the French airbase, at Bizerta, an hour earlier. Of course, that
is
an estimate.”
    “Quite. When do we go