Dark Voyage by Alan Furst Page B

pursue—shooting up the patrol boat would have produced fighter planes from Bizerta, and that was a battle no one, at least that morning, wanted.
So then, let us agree to disagree.
    Instead, the Sea Otter circled above the
Noordendam
and, clumsy as it was, tilted itself left and right, which at least suggested, to the waving crew below, a jubilant waggle of the wings. As it left, flying due north, DeHaan understood that it could only have come from a destroyer, watching them on radar from over the horizon, and receiving their radio signal. A poor man’s aircraft carrier—lowering its seaplane to the water for takeoff, then hauling it back up after a landing at sea. DeHaan ran his binoculars across the northern horizon. Empty, nothing to be seen. Still, they were out there somewhere, the Royal Navy, themselves in dangerous waters, keeping watch on their boxes and wires.
             
    She woke, slightly damp, and sent him to open the window. A warm night, the sea dead calm, some cloud, some stars, and the silence of a darkened city in time of war.
    “What time is it?” she said.
    He went to look at his watch on top of the bureau, said “Ten after three,” and returned to the window, conscious of her eyes following him as he walked across the room.
    “How lovely, I was afraid I’d slept too long.” She leaned over and turned off the lamp, got out of bed and came up behind him, skin lightly touching his, and reached around his waist.
    “In front of the window?”
    “Why not? Nobody can see me.”
    Everywhere, her touch was light as air, and he closed his eyes. “I don’t think you mind being teased,” she whispered. “No, I don’t think you do. Of course, if you do, you must tell me. Or, even, if you don’t mind, you may tell me that. May say, ‘Demetria, I like you to do this to me,’ or maybe there are other things, you need only say them, I am a very understanding sort of person.”
             
    Later, back in bed, he asked, “What did it mean—the Greek word you said?”
    “Yassou?”
    “Yes.”
    “Means ‘hello.’”
    “Oh.”
    They were quiet for a time, then she said, “Are you married, Eric?”
    “I’m not,” he said. “I almost was, when I was twenty, just out of the naval college. I was engaged, to a nice girl, very pretty. We were in love, most of the way, anyhow, enough, and she was willing to be the wife of a sailor—never at home, but . . .          I didn’t.”
    He’d grown up amid the families of merchant officers, the wives eternally alone, raising children, knitting miles of sweaters. He was often in their homes—perfectly kept, the air thick with the smells of wax and cooking, and thick also with sacrifice, absence, clocks ticking in every room. And, in the end, though he couldn’t say what else he wanted, he knew it wasn’t that.
    “And your family?”
    “In Holland, my mother and sister. I can only hope they are surviving the occupation. I can’t contact them.”
    “Can’t?”
    “Mustn’t. The Germans read everything, and they don’t like families with relatives in the free forces. Better, especially for someone like me, not to remind them you exist. They are vengeful, you know, will bring people in for questioning, lower their rations, force them to move.”
    “Still, at least they are in Holland. The Dutch are decent people, I think, with sensible politics.”
    “Most, but not all. We have our Nazis.”
    “Everyone has
some, chri,
like cockroaches, you see them only at night. And, if they come out in daylight, then you know you have to do something about it.”
    “More than some. There is a Dutch Nazi party. Its symbol is a wolf trap.”
    She thought about it, then said, “How utterly horrible.”
    He nodded.
    “And you? Perhaps a bit to the left?”
    “Not much of anything, I’m afraid.” This was no time to talk about the unions, the Comintern, the brutality—the knives and iron pipes—of politics on the docks. “I believe