Still plastered, he wandered Madrid’s blacked-out nighttime streets. No moon tonight-only a lot of stars. They were beautiful, but they shed next to no light on things. They might as well have been La Martellita. Or had she shed altogether too much light? That seemed much too likely.
Lurching through the warm darkness, Chaim burst into tears. A woman he couldn’t see said “?Pobrecito!” -poor little one! But he wasn’t even one of those. He was only a drunk on leave, and somewhere down inside he knew it.
Julius Lemp wore a clean uniform-he’d even had it pressed after the U-30 came into Wilhelmshaven. He’d shaved off his at-sea beard. He stood at ramrod-stiff attention before the engineering board and barked out “Reporting as ordered, sir!” to its head. He might almost have served in the Kriegsmarine ’s surface fleet. Almost: he hadn’t replaced the stiffening wire in his white-crowned officer’s cap. A limp cap marked a U-boat skipper every time.
“At ease, Lieutenant,” the boss naval engineer said. Lemp sagged out of his brace, but not very far. The senior engineer was a rear admiral. Neither his gold-encrusted sleeves nor his craggy, weathered face encouraged subordinates to relax. He checked some papers on the table in front of him. After a moment, he nodded to himself. “It seems your boat has been using the Schnorkel longer than any other.”
“Yes, sir,” Lemp answered woodenly. As if the head of the board hadn’t known that without looking at his precious papers! And as if he and his almost equally distinguished colleagues didn’t know why! You were the fuckup who got stuck with the experimental gadget!
But the rear admiral didn’t say anything like that. He just stared at Lemp over the tops of his reading glasses. “And what is your opinion of it?” He raised a hand before Lemp spoke. “Be frank, please. No one is taking written notes or rating you on your response. We really want to know what you think.”
“Sir, I’ve been frank in my reports,” Lemp said. “The thing is useful-no doubt about that. I’m faster underwater with it than without, I can get closer to my targets without being spotted, and I can charge my batteries without surfacing. Those are all good cards to have in my hand.”
“Drawbacks?” one of the other men on the board inquired.
“It’ll suck all the air out of the inside of the boat and feed it to the diesels if the antiflooding valve closes,” Lemp answered dryly. “That leaves the crew trying to breathe exhaust fumes.”
“And you recognize this when it starts smelling better inside the U-boat, eh?” the rear admiral asked, his voice bland.
Lemp opened his mouth, then closed it again. For all his forbidding appearance, the senior man owned a sense of humor after all. Lemp tried to make himself seem as naive as he could. “Sir, I don’t know what you mean.”
All five men on the board chuckled, though a couple of the noises sounded more like coughs. “The devil you don’t,” the rear admiral said, wrinkling his beak. He glanced at the papers again. “And how’s this Beilharz, the puppy who came along with the snort?”
“He’s about two meters’ worth of puppy, sir,” Lemp said.
“That should be fun on a U-boat,” the senior man observed. “How often does he hit his head? Has he got any brains left at all?”
“He wears a helmet-but he is pretty good about ducking,” Lemp replied. “He’s pretty good all the way around. I wanted a second engineering officer the way I wanted another head when he came aboard-meaning no offense to you gentlemen, none at all, but we’re crowded enough as is.”
“And you wanted the Schnorkel the way you wanted another head, too,” the rear admiral said. He did understand why Lemp’s boat had it, then. Well, anybody with three working brain cells would.
“That, too, sir,” Lemp agreed. “But he’s worked out well. He keeps the snort going-and when it isn’t going, he keeps the regular engineering officer posted so we don’t end up asphyxiating ourselves.”
“All right. That’s good to hear. I said we wouldn’t take notes, but do you mind if I write that down so it goes in his promotion jacket?”
“Of course not, sir,” Lemp said. “I’ll put it in writing myself, if you like.”
“Never mind.” The rear admiral scribbled. “If he gets promoted away from you, will you still be able to use the Schnorkel?”
“Oh, absolutely, sir. He’s trained a couple of my petty officers. They don’t quite have his feel for it-he acts like he grew up with it-but they can take care of it well enough and then some.”
“Good.” The rear admiral didn’t say I was hoping you’d tell me something like that. He’d assumed an officer smart enough to command a U-boat was smart enough to see that an important piece of equipment shouldn’t depend on one man’s mastery of it. And he’d been right. Lemp shuddered to think what would have happened to him had he confessed to the board that only Beilharz could make the snort behave.
One thing he didn’t have to worry about, anyhow. But there were others that he did. A captain who hadn’t spoken before said, “This isn’t an engineering question, but it is important to the performance of your boat and crew.”
“Sir?” Lemp did his best to project attentive interest.
“Are your men thoroughly loyal National Socialists, ready to follow the Fuhrer ’s lead with iron determination?”
That was the last question Lemp had expected. But even Clausewitz had defined war as the extension of politics by other means. And politics, more and more, got extended into this war. If the rumored deal with England and France came off… Worry about that later, Lemp told himself. He answered the question as simply as he could: with a crisp, “Yes, sir!”
But the captain didn’t seem satisfied. “How do we know they are?” he pressed.
Because they didn’t mutiny and take the boat to England. Lemp swallowed the flip comeback. These people, and the people set over them, would only hold it against him. He said, “Sir, we were ashore here when the traitors tried to strike against the Fuhrer. Not a man went over to them. Not a man said a word anyone could imagine disloyal.”
“We have reports that there is grumbling during cruises,” the captain declared.
Lemp cast his eyes up to the heavens. Whatever this fellow might have done, he’d never made a wartime cruise in a submarine. “Sir, they’re U-boat men,” Lemp said, hoping the other officers on the board had some idea of what he was talking about. In case they didn’t, he spelled it out: “They’re crammed into the pressure hull. The food is bad. No one has a bunk or any privacy at all. Nobody washes much. The heads don’t work all the time. Oh, and the lads’re liable to get killed. I’d worry about them if they didn’t piss and moan.”
“About the Fuhrer?” The captain sounded disbelieving.
“About anything and everything,” Lemp answered, as firmly as he could.
“This cannot be permitted.”
“I don’t know how you can stop it.”
“Summary punishments might do the job.”
“Maybe, sir, but I think they’d help the enemy more than us, and I’d be surprised if you found any other U-boat skippers who told you different.”
The board members looked at one another. Maybe they had heard the same thing from other U-boat commanders. If they hadn’t, Lemp’s comrades in arms had missed the chance of a lifetime to speak truth to the powers that be.
At last, the captain who acted like the National Socialist loyalty officer spoke in a grudging voice: “We have received no complaints about your dedication to the Reich, Lieutenant Lemp.”
“I’m glad to hear it, sir.” In half a dozen words, Lemp spoke his own truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. If the higher-ups suspected him, they wouldn’t just beach him, not the way things were since the failed coup against the Fuhrer. They’d fling him into a camp, and things would roll downhill from there.
Maybe something of that abject, alarm-tinged relief got through to the rear admiral who headed the board. A smile stretched his face into angles that looked unnatural. “This is secondary, Lieutenant. The data on the Schnorkel are what we needed most. After your refit and liberty, we’ll give you something new to try.”