Dark Voyage Read Free

won’t tell you that.”
    “In oils?” DeHaan said, meaning
not oils, of course
.
    “No. Gouache, principally, though lately I’m back to charcoal pencil.” She took a cigarette from a tortoiseshell case with Bacchus and girlfriend on the lid, tapped it twice, and lit it with a steel lighter. “Back to life drawing.” She shook her head and smiled ruefully that such an odd thing should be so.
    At the door, a firm knock, and three waiters with trays.
             
    The dinner was served in traditional dishes set out on the low table. Bowls of aromatic yellow soup, soft bread still hot from the oven, a grandiose
pastilla
—minced pigeon breast and almonds in pastry leaves, a platter of stewed lamb and vegetables. Once the dishes were set down, glasses packed with crushed mint leaves were filled with boiling water, poured ritually by the chief waiter, who raised and lowered the spout of a silver flagon as the stream curved into the glass. When he was done, the waiter said, “Shall we remain to serve you?”
    “Thank you,” Hoek said, “but I think we’ll manage by ourselves.”
    This was in French, which DeHaan understood, some of the time, and also spoke, some of the time, and in his own particular way—“the French of a beast,” according to Arlette. He had good German and English, like almost everyone in Holland, and, a year earlier, after the invasion, he had added to his forty-book library a Russian grammar. He had no professional, or political, reason for this, it was more akin to chess, or crossword puzzles, a way to occupy the mind in the long hours off-watch, when he needed to distract himself from the captain’s eternal obsession: every beat of the engine, every tremor and creak of the ship, his ship, at sea. Thus he found an absorbing if difficult pastime, though in addition to studying the grammar he’d more than once fallen asleep on it, and showered it with ashes, seawater, coffee, and cocoa, but, a Russian book, it endured, and survived.
    Terhouven, seated next to him, said, “How was Paramaribo?” He tore himself a length of bread, took a piece of lamb from the platter, studied it, then swished it through the sauce and put it on the bread.
    “It’s the rainy season—a steambath when it stops.” They’d taken a cargo of greenheart and mora wood, used for wharves and docks, from Dutch Guiana up to the Spanish port of La Corua, then sailed in ballast—mostly water but some scrap iron—for Tangier.
    “Lose anybody?”
    “Only one, an oiler. A Finn, or so his book said. Good oiler, but a terrible drunk. Hit people—he was pretty good at that too. I tried to buy him out of jail, but they wouldn’t do it.”
    “In
Paramaribo
? They wouldn’t take a bribe?”
    “He hit a pimp, a barman, a bouncer, a cop, and a jailer.”
    “Christ!” A moment later, Terhouven smiled. “In that order?”
    DeHaan nodded.
    Terhouven finished his lamb and bread, wiped his mouth, then made a face. “Too dumb to live, some people. You replace him?”
    “Couldn’t be done. So, as of this evening, we’re at forty-two.”
    “You can sail with forty-two.”
    “We can.”
But we need more and you know it.
    “It’s the war,” Terhouven said.
    “Pretty bad, lately, everybody’s undermanned, especially in the engine room. On a lot of ships, when they reach port, they have the crew on deck after midnight, waiting for the drunks to come out of the bars. ‘Climb aboard, mate, we get bacon twice a day.’”
    “Or somebody gets hit on the head, and wakes up at sea.”
    “Yes, that too.”
    Terhouven looked over the tray to see if there was anything else worth eating. “Tell me, Eric, how come no uniform?”
    “All I knew was ‘a dinner,’ so . . .”
    “Is it wrecked?”
    “No, it lives.”
    “You can have another made here, you know.”
    Across the table, Wilhelm said to Hoek, “Well, I went to the flower market but he wasn’t there.”
    DeHaan was done with dinner, had had all he wanted