The Night Boat

The Night Boat Page 20

"FORGIVE ME," the stranger said in a thickly accented voice. "The door was open, and I came in to wait." He held up the paperweight. "Please... where did you get this?" The man dropped his gaze, saw the knife in Moore's hand. "I... meant no harm," he said very quietly.

"Who are you?" Moore asked.

"My name is Frederick Schiller. I was told I could find a room here, and when I walked up from the village I couldn't find anyone..."

Moore stood where he was for a moment trying to place the accent. Of course; it was German. He put the knife down on a table, still cautious.

"Where did you get this?" Schiller asked again, holding the paperweight as if it were a precious jewel.

Moore ignored his interest. "How did you get here?"

"By freighter from Jamaica." He paused for a few seconds, then reached inside his coat and brought out a cheap brown wallet. "I can pay," he said.

Moore waved the wallet aside. "I don't know what your business is on Coquina, Mr. Schiller, but it's a bad time for you to be here."

"Oh? Why is that?"

"There's a storm building. I can see it gathering in the sky, and the last hurricane we had almost tore this place apart."

"My business won't take very long," Schiller replied. "Now... please. This object... where did you find it?"

"Aboard a boat..."

Schiller closed his eyes.

"...or to be more exact, what's left of one." The screen door opened behind Moore and Jana came through. She looked from Moore to Schiller and then back again. "Are you all right?" he asked her anxiously.

She nodded, running a hand across her forehead. "Yes... I'm just very tired. I can't... I can't think very coherently yet."

"Is the young lady ill?" Schiller asked.

"I think I'd better lie down for a while," she said to Moore.

He glanced over at the German. "The kitchen's at the back if you want a cup of coffee. I am going to take her upstairs." He was intrigued by the man now and wondered what his story was. He helped Jana up the stairway to her room at the end of the hall and threw back the covers of the bed for her. When he started to move away she reached up and grasped his forearm, her hair fanning out across the pillows. "I don't understand," she said, searching his face. "I don't understand what's happening here, and I'm afraid, and I don't know what to do..."

He stood looking down at her for a moment and then smoothed the hair away from her forehead, gently, as he had done for another woman a long time ago. "Rest," he said. "Do you want a light on in here?"

"No," she said. She lay very still for a few seconds and then she put her hands to her face. "I saw it... I touched it... Dear God, I can still smell the rot of it on me..."

Moore crossed the room, shutting the terrace doors. When he looked at her again her head was turned away from him, the blond hair almost silver in the pale light. He wondered if she would drift off to sleep; if she did, what would she dream of? The corpse with the mangled brains? The grinning face of a thing that should have been dead forty years ago? She shifted her position, her hands still at her face, and Moore heard her take a long, painful breath. He stood beside her a while longer, then left the door open as he went out.

He walked to his own room and checked the forty-five in the drawer. It was loaded with one clip, and there were two spare clips. He returned the gun to the drawer and went back downstairs.

The German sat holding the scorpion paperweight, a whorl of blue cigarette smoke around his head. When Moore came back into the room he put the object on a table beside his chair. Moore paid no attention to him, but poured himself a shot of rum and took a long swallow. With the afternoon sun hidden behind clouds, the light was a pale gray; though the room was dim and cobwebbed with shadows, he made no move to turn on a lamp.

"So," Moore began, finally turning to him. "What's your business?"

Schiller exhaled a stream of smoke. "The U-boat."

"I thought as much."

The German reached inside a shirt pocket and offered the newspaper clipping. Moore looked at it briefly. "That woman... Dr. Thornton... is a marine archaeologist here to take a look at the boat too. I don't know what interest you might have in the thing, but aside from the historic value it's a worthless hulk. I wish to God I'd never found the damned thing..." His voice trailed off, and he took another drink from his glass.

"And you've been inside?"

"Yes."

Schiller sat back, sighed, pulled from his cigarette. "How much remains?" he asked in a strange, distant voice.

Moore examined him: white hair, sharp nose and chin, high cheekbones, weary, tormented eyes, deep lines across the forehead. Representative of a salvage firm, perhaps, sent from Jamaica to appraise the hulk as scrap iron? No. He was German, and that was too much of a coincidence. "Not enough for salvage," Moore said, testing him.

A thin smile crept across the man's face, then quickly faded. "Salvage? No. I don't care about salvage; I would think she's beyond that by now. It's incredible, you know. I thought by now the sea would have broken her into pieces, that there would be nothing left at all." He raised his eyes to meet Moore's. "It's true, then, just as the paper said." It was a statement, not a question.

Moore sat where he could see the man's face. "It's true."

The German raised the paperweight again; Moore saw that his hand was trembling slightly. Schiller turned it in his grasp, running a finger along its smooth surface. "In 1942," he said, "I was a seaman in the German navy. I was aboard U-198 when she was attacked and sunk by British subchasers out beyond your island."

Moore leaned forward, his expression frozen.

"Yes," Schiller said. His gaze was hard; the eyes, like bits of glass, focused on a spot at Moore's forehead. "I was the only survivor. All the others... except one... went down with the boat, and that man who didn't was burned to death in a spillage of flaming oil. I called for him... I tried to find him but the sea was littered with bodies. The air stunk of smoke and crisped flesh. My boat was gone; it had dropped out from underneath me. Oh yes, I would have done the same had I been the commander. There wasn't time you see. And then I was left alone with the noise of shelling and alarms and screaming..." He caught himself; his eyes softened a fraction and he stabbed the cigarette out in an ashtray. "Forgive me," he said. "I didn't mean to go into that."

"No," Moore said, still stunned. "I understand. But how is it you came to be on Jamaica?"

Schiller absentmindedly wiped his lips with the back of his hand; it was a habit he had kept over the years. All the men who held bridge watch on U-boats had done it to varying degrees, wiping away salt crust as the sea spray thundered against the iron bulwark, again and again, a hundred thousand times a day. Another link with the dead, he realized, touching his mouth. "I live on Jamaica now," Schiller said. "I came back in the late fifties to teach history and the German language at the University of the West Indies at Mona. At least that's what I first told myself. I think perhaps I really returned to the Caribbean because of the boat."

Moore waited for him to continue, but when Schiller was silent he asked, "The boat? Why?"

"Because," Schiller said, with an effort, "as long as I shall live I will be a crewman... the last crewman of that boat." He felt along the sides of the paperweight again and then put it down. "I was never a loyal patriot to the Nazi cause, and perhaps I realized all along that Hitler was driving our country to utter ruin. But for a brief instant of history... a very brief instant... we were glorious, like a flame burning itself into oblivion. That I will never forget."

The room was still; there was a steady drone of insects outside, and the breeze sang through the screen door mesh in a soft whisper. "I don't believe you've told me your name," Schiller said.

"David Moore," the other man told him, putting the glass of rum down and getting to his feet. He switched on a lamp; in the sudden light the German looked more aged than he was. His eyes were filled with memories.

"I would very much like a drink," Schiller said. "Sometimes I need it, you know."

"Yes. Me too." Moore poured rum into another glass and gave it to the man.

Schiller took it gratefully, sipped at it, and then listened to the song of the insects. He stood up, went to the door, and stared out across the darkening harbor. "A beautiful island," he said after another moment. He did not turn back toward Moore. "You do know that my U-boat almost destroyed it?"

"Yes, I do."

"Do you... feel any bitterness?"

"Some would."

Schiller nodded. "An honest answer. This island lay within our patrol grid, you see, and we were ordered to shell the naval yards. We knew the British were repairing some of their ships there... and, well, it was war..."

Moore sat down again, watching the man.

"I remember..." Schiller said quietly, "I stood on the bridge during the first shelling, and I counted the explosions on shore. I felt so distant and detached from what was happening. I knew we were destroying human beings, yes, but still... they were the enemy. On that particular night the subchasers didn't come, and the shelling seemed to go on for hours. Oh, there were shore batteries firing back, but we lay beyond their range, and we watched the flames grow against the night like wild red flowers on a field of black velvet. The commander observed through his binoculars, and after he ordered cease fire, when the echoes of the deck gun had finally all died away, we could hear the screaming..." Schiller was quiet for a long time; Moore stared at him. "When the commander was satisfied, we continued our patrol."

"And you never felt remorse over something like that?" Moore asked.

Schiller turned toward him, his brow furrowed, as if pondering a question he couldn't fully understand. "It was my duty," he said. "But be assured I paid for it, yes, and many times again. We returned to the area some days later; the commander suspected work had been done to repair the yards, and he wished to shell them again, before the work could be completed. Some distance from your island the watch sighted a ship, moving slowly just ahead; we submerged and tracked it for some time. It was a freighter. We attacked with torpedoes, but the warships lying in your harbor were alerted by the flares and caught us from behind. I was on deck at the time, along with the man I've already mentioned. We were swept off in the crash dive..." He paused, staring out toward the sea.

"What happened to the boat?"

"I don't know," the German whispered. "Or rather I should say, I'm not certain." He drank from his glass. "The subchasers circled the area in which the boat had gone down, and they began to release their charges. Their Asdic and sensor devices had targeted my boat and they hammered at it, hour after hour. All this I was forced to observe from the deck of one of the British ships after I'd been hauled into a dinghy. The sea boiled like a volcanic crater, vomiting up sand and coral and fish blown to pieces. I thought about the men inside the U-boat, hoping to find safety beneath tons of water.

"A depth-charge attack is a savage thing, Mr. Moore. You hear the iron bend under the detonations, and you pray to God it will not bend too much and that the rivets will stay sealed. A thread of water bursting through a pin-hole break can cut a man's head off at the greater depths, and a rivet can ricochet like a bullet, pass through flesh and bone and metal bulkheads. And the noise... the thundering shriek of underwater explosions, the squeal of an iron plate, the sound of the Asdic beams like handfuls of gravel tossed against the sides of the boat." He shuddered and looked away. "But you must not make a sound. You must hold back your fear and the screams that threaten to burst from your throat. Because if you scream the men with earphones at their stations perhaps three hundred feet above will hear you, and they will send more charges tumbling down to seek you out. It is a vicious game, a war of taut nerves, when water becomes the enemy instead of the protector and a single cry can seal your death warrant.

"For two days the British subchasers kept up their attack; they knew they had the boat trapped, and though there were long periods of silence the explosions always resumed. They dropped what seemed like a thousand depth charges, then waited for the sound of a cough, or a rattling bucket, or the hissing of breath through clenched teeth, or the shrill scream of imploding iron." His eyes were wild, and they unnerved Moore. "But the U-boat never surfaced. There was some oil, but nothing to indicate a direct hit. From what I could understand the British Asdic had lost the boat, as if it had suddenly vanished, but they were still certain it remained down there. Somewhere."

Moore remembered his dive vividly in that moment - the mountain of sand and coral, and the jagged remnants of what had once been an underwater ledge overhead. Perhaps the U-boat commander had tried to escape the enemy by rising along the Abyss wall, instead of sinking lower, and then had lodged the submarine beneath that ledge to hide from the sensors. And perhaps at the same instant a crewman had operated a lever that had delivered compressed air to the buoyancy tanks. The concussions had caused the ledge to collapse, burying the submarine under tons of sand. That would account for its disappearance. Then the men would have been imprisoned, waiting hour after hour for the air to give out, as the gases and the stench collected and suffocated them. When enough sand had shifted away from the hulk, aided by the hurricane and that final charge blast, the remaining compressed air had lifted the U-boat.

"In time," Schiller was saying quietly, "the subchasers gave up their hunt. I was questioned and put into prison where I remained until the war's end. I returned to Germany, to Berlin. I remember walking the streets to my parents' house. There was hardly anything left. A lone chimney, the front wall and door still standing like a facade. And across the door, in bright-red paint, someone had scrawled 'The Schiller Family Is Dead.'" He blinked, looking away from the other man. "They'd been killed in an air raid."

"I'm sorry."

"No, no. It was war, you see." He finished the rum and put the glass down. "Where is the boat now?"

"In the yard."

Schiller smiled grimly and nodded. "Strange, isn't it, how the fates work? Perhaps, after all this time, my boat has a destiny still."

"Destiny?" Moore was taken aback by his use of the word. "What do you mean?"

Schiller shrugged. "Where will the hulk go? Some maritime museum? Or even the British Museum itself? It's a possibility, I would think. So my boat is not yet dead after all, is it? Perhaps it will sit in a huge hall of warfare on a linoleum floor surrounded by great artillery pieces and even an old, battle-torn Panzer tank. Further down the exhibit there will be a shining Spitfire, or perhaps a reconditioned Junkers. It will be a place for old men to come and relive their days of glory as they slip toward senility; young people will come too, but they'll fail to understand any of it, and they'll laugh and point and wonder how any of this ancient junk could ever have been useful at all."

"Useful!" Moore snorted.

Schiller stared at him for a long time, then finally dropped his gaze. Yes, the man was probably right. Now it could only be a battered, rusted shade of what it once had been, filled with seawater and ghosts.

"In March of 1942," he said, in a voice so low Moore could barely hear him, "it was the most awesome weapon I had ever beheld. I saw it at night, after I'd been transferred from another boat, and the lights in Kiel harbor where it was moored burned a dim yellow to save power. The mist had come in from the sea, and it hung over the boat in thick gray strands; the diesels were in operation, their noise echoing across the water, making the pilings tremble under my feet. I watched the mist being drawn in through the diesel intakes along the superstructure. From where I stood the periscope towers seemed to vanish into the sky; there were men already at work on the decks, and through the open forward hatch a column of smoky white light filtered out. It was a magnificent sight, preparing for sea duty. I can never forget it, nor do I wish to. Yet... I suppose now the boat is nothing."

Moore sat there a moment longer, then walked across the room to refill his glass. Outside, the clouds were heavy in the early evening sky and lights were coming on in some of the village houses. The breeze had quieted, and through the screened door Moore saw a sudden flash on the distant horizon, perhaps heat lightning or a storm crawling across the earth's curve. He didn't want darkness to fall tonight. If only he could keep the light from fading, so he would be reassured of a measure of safety. His eyes scanned the jungle's dark folds. They were out there; he didn't know how many, but they were out there. Waiting.

"I didn't mean to go on about the boat," Schiller said. "It's ancient history. But, you see, that's all I have left."

"The crew," Moore said suddenly, turning to face the German. "Something's happened..." He stopped, and Schiller leaned forward slightly.

"What about them?"

Moore paused, wondering what to say. It was madness to think the man would believe him.

"You found their remains?" Schiller asked. "I'm prepared to help with the identification, as much as I can."

The silence stretched between them, Moore lost in thought and wishing the man sitting opposite had never seen that newspaper item, never come to Coquina. Finally, he motioned toward the kitchen. "If you're hungry I can throw some snapper in a skillet."

"Yes... Danke. That would be very good."

"Why don't you go on back there," Moore said, "and I'll check on Dr. Thornton." When the German had walked through the hallway Moore went upstairs and found that Jana was still sleeping. Before going to the kitchen he went outside, closing and latching all the shutters. He locked the screen door as the darkness rolled slowly across Coquina. Then he latched the front door, as if he could hold the night back with a single slab of wood.