But this was an evening for a good steak, a glass of wine and possibly some music later on. He did have a schedule, though. He had to be at work by midnight.
In the oak-walled quiet of the Restaurant Maximillian, he spoke German in ordering his chateaubriand rare and was informed by the waiter that it served two persons. The diner’s response was that he wouldn’t be eating quality steak for awhile, so please bring it on along with a bottle of Cabernet, waiter’s choice.
Sehr gut, sir.
The coat-check girl, a very willowy redhead with bee-stung lips, wandered over as he was drinking his initial glass of wine and engaged him in light conversation about was this his first time at the restaurant, where was he from, and so forth. It got to the point where she said she was free this evening after ten o’clock, and if he wished to come back for her she could show him a hot music club that would make him, as she put it, “itchy”.
He smiled and said thank you, but he had to be at work by midnight. What kind of work? she asked, a little dark of disappointment in her eyes.
He told her he was in the nautical trade, and then he wished her a pleasant evening and she went away.
After a leisurely dinner, he continued his stroll. Around the corner he discovered a tavern of orange-painted bricks that had been in operation, more or less, since 1788. In the dark-timbered, slightly-musty but quite pleasant confines he ordered from the barmaid a Tyskie pale lager. She was a personable and angelic-looking young woman with curly blond hair and eyes nearly the color of the lager. Her globes were absolutely huge north of her equator, and she didn’t mind making sure he got many good looks at the way they threatened to burst from her ribboned bodice. Then she leaned in close, smelling of peppermint and peaches, and confided in him that she thought all men were babies at heart, and that what all men truly—truly—desired was a nice pacifier to put into their mouths and suck on to their heart’s content. And what did he think about that? she asked with her red lips twisted to one side.
He said he didn’t really have an opinion on that subject, because he had to be at work by midnight.
What was his job? she asked, as she toyed with one of her ribbons.
The nautical trade, he told her, and then he finished his Tyskie and left.
The night was moving on. So was he. Two streets over, he entered a dimly-lit but well-attended music club and sat at a table to listen to a trio playing piano, muted trumpet and drums. He ordered a glass of ginger ale. He took the music in while staring at the twinkling multicolored lights that clung to the ceiling. After the third song he noted a man in a gray suit get up from a nearby table he shared with a woman and head toward an alcove on the far side of the bandstand. When the man had gone from the room, the woman got up from her seat and came directly and purposefully to his own table.
She was sleek and black-haired and wore a black dress that she’d been poured into. She wore a fashionable hat with a little fluff of lace descending over her forehead and left eye. She stared at him with her sea-green eyes as if she’d been searching for a good piece of meat, and here it was.
She asked him if he would be gentleman enough to save her from a very poor specimen of mankind, and while her escort was gone to the restroom she would be pleased and happy to leave this club and show him another place where one might get to know one much better than here.
He gave her a faint smile, sipped at his ginger ale, and told her he was flattered she’d chosen him as her potential savior, but he had to be at work by midnight and in fact he would be leaving in a few minutes. Also, he said, he wanted her to know her escort must have either come upon an occupied bathroom or suffered a false alarm because the man was even now returning to their table.
Therefore he did not get to tell her he was in the nautical trade.
He checked his wristwatch. It was time. He paid for his drink, left the club and began walking back to the Hotel Goldene Eiche. Again, his pace was neither hurried nor languid. In his room at the hotel, he thought of taking a shower and shaving but decided against both. Then he removed his necktie, his Saville Row suit and white shirt and took from the closet a stained and dirty brown canvas duffel bag. From the contents of the duffel bag he put on faded gray underwear and white worksocks. He put on a red plaid shirt with patches at both elbows. He put on a pair of baggy brown trousers that made a mockery of his fitness and was furthermore stained with the shadows of old grease. He laced up cracked and battered workboots. He pulled a brown woolen cap down on his head, and then shrugged into a canvas jacket that was missing three buttons and bore enough stitches to make Frankenstein jealous. His fine English wallet was replaced with a Polish travesty of cardboard and rubber bands. His equally fine Rolex wristwatch, last year’s model, went away in favor of a tarnished pocketwatch that was possibly new when the British charged from their trenches at the first battle of the Marne. His shaving razor was flecked with rust, his boar bristle toothbrush worn to a nub, his personal bar of soap made from pig’s fat. And smelled it.
He was nearly ready to go.
He left his suit and other belongings on the bed. Everything would be collected later, by someone else. There was no need to study himself in the mirror; he appeared no longer to be a gentleman, but was a scruffy-looking roughneck. Just as planned.
He tied up his duffel bag with his other sour-smelling work clothes in it and left the room. Crossing the Goldene Eiche’s famous lobby with its indoor oak tree and cream-colored sofas that had never hosted an uncreased trouser was interesting, because suddenly he no longer belonged in this rare air. A squat man wearing a bowtie—a house detective?—began striding after him, calling for him to please stop.
He didn’t.
Outside on the street, he asked the doorman to hail a cab for the harbor. He received a haughty glare until the Danzig currency in his fist spoke. Then there was the skittish cab driver to deal with, and again money changed owners. The cab pulled away, with the roughneck and his duffel bag on the back seat.
An instruction was given to stop well before the harbor entrance was reached. That instruction was explicitly followed. The roughneck swung his duffel bag over his shoulder and walked toward the harbor with the smell of Baltic salt, oil, dead fish and the metallic friction of cables and machinery in his nostrils.
Beyond the gate, worklights glowed aboard the dark shapes of moored freighters.
Figures moved about, walking through the beams of illumination. Hammers swung and sparks jumped. A crane engine growled, pulling up crates in a netting. Orders were shouted and re-shouted. Someone flicked a burning cigarette butt into the water like a shooting star. Ropes creaked as the sea moved beneath rust-streaked hulls, and trucks barked black fumes as they hauled flat trailers piled with more crates and stacks of burlap bags.
He stopped at the security hut to sign the detail sheet that was offered to him.
With the bleeding fountain pen he wrote Michael Gallatin, Ordinary Seaman.
Then he swung the duffel bag up over his shoulder again and he walked on in his battered boots toward Slip Number Four and the Norwegian diesel ship Sofia.
Two
Sailor’s Hands
When the last cargo of farm fertilizer in three hundred black oildrums and sixty crates of ball bearings had been loaded in the Sofia’s hold, red dawn was beginning to break. The huge double diesel engines throbbed and knocked, making the old ship vibrate like a tuning-fork and moan like a busted fiddle. Orders were shouted along the deck. Lines were cast off. Brown water stirred up from the muddy bottom by the twin props boiled at the stern. The ship, born in 1921, gave a small lurch as it left the pierside like an elderly dame startled from her nap. The one-hundred-and-fourteen-meter length of Sofia swayed back and forth as she searched for her balance. Her central wheelhouse sat atop an ugly stack of port-holed steel. Two masts spider-webbed with cables and nettings stood fore and aft. Ventilation funnels had been riveted to the deck in no apparent rhyme nor reason; it was the triumph of some Nordic ship designer’s descent into a bottle of aquavit. Everything topside was painted a vaguely-spoiled yellow, mottled with patches of orange rust. The hull was smoke-gray, except for more rust streaks that streamed down from the anchors at the pier-dented bow and clung just above the waterline like a strange species of ivy. The Sofia, an undignified and much-abused mistress of the sea, was rocked by the most innocent of waves and caused to cry out at her joints and rivets and bulkheads and deckboards as if she dreaded any touch of the man she had once loved.