Flowers From Berlin (15 page)

THIRTEEN

Red Bank, and the United States Navy Yard that had been located there since 1933, was fifteen miles due southeast of Newark. For Siegfried, however, the distance was an exasperating drive of thirty miles, through the incessant trafficked clutter of the towns on the New Jersey side of Staten Island. The drive each way took two hours.

Siegfried purchased a detailed road map at a Flying A station along Route One south of Perth Amboy. He filled his car with gasoline for two dollars and studied the map before proceeding. The map told him that Red Bank was located across a one-mile inlet from the Atlantic Ocean. When the spy came to the town of New Monmouth, he left the coastal road and drove directly toward the inlet. He found it easily. He then drove the length of it until he found an area in which he could park his car without causing suspicion. Thereupon, he slung a camera case over his shoulder and set out on foot, across a field which, after a walk of about a mile, led to a promontory overlooking the inlet.

Siegfried stood overlooking a river to which he did not know the name. He scanned in every direction on his side of the water. There were no houses and no parks. He was blessedly unobserved.

Across the river he could easily see the navy yard. The view was invigorating. So much so, that for a few seconds Siegfried lost his concentration. He mused how it might feel to stand above the Rhine or the Danube in a similar vantage point. Thoughts of Germany returned him to earth, and his work.

The spy walked to the southeast along the bluff and made careful note of the path that he had taken. As he walked toward a slightly wooded enclave he realized that he was following an old footpath. He kept his eye to the ground.

The grass had grown on the path in the same manner as the rest of the field. He scanned for evidence of people: discarded soda bottles. Cigarette butts. Gum wrappers. He found none. He concluded that few people came to this particular place. Yes, the view was spectacular, but it was spectacular all along this inlet. And Siegfried had purposely come to the least accessible spot on his side of the water.

He arrived among a clump of trees. He settled onto the ground and waited for several minutes. Convinced that he was alone, he took out his Celestron 1000 telescope and trained it across the water at Red Bank.

On the scope's third adjustment, the navy yard came perfectly into focus. On the fifth adjustment, the spy could move in tightly enough to read the insignias on the uniforms of the sailors.

He scanned, moving the telescope in methodical patterns up and down, left to right. He found a ship flying a Union Jack. The angle at which the vessel was berthed allowed him to read the legend off the ship's stern:

HMS Adriana

Sunderland

Siegfried studied the ship. It was a frigate, probably about 120 meters from bow to stern. It was particularly hefty for a British frigate, he concluded.
The Adriana
was a seagoing bulldog, anxious to work but not upset over the prospects of a fight, either.

Siegfried closely scrutinized the top deck and found it was packed with especially large guns. Normally, frigates were scaled down for escort duties in convoys. So why not the
HMS Adriana
?

But what puzzled Siegfried most was that the
Adriana
was a frigate at all. He had expected a military cargo ship of some sort. It would have been armed, of course. Everything that ventured beyond sight of native land was armed these days. But why, the spy asked himself as he scanned the decks closely, readjusting his telescope in the process, was a big brawny frigate parked at a U.S. Navy yard in Red Bank, New Jersey? And why were there both British and American naval personnel busy aboard the
Adriana
?

Why, indeed? Siegfried reminded himself—that's what he was there to discover. The spy set his telescope onto the soft grass by his side. He smoked a Pall Mall and gazed across the river for several minutes, waiting for an explanation to emerge. None did. He smoked another cigarette and took in the view across the river with his naked eye. What in hell was he watching? What the Americans lacked in subtlety, he reminded himself, the British made up in tight-lipped trickiness. Together, what were they up to? Was he witnessing a small piece of a grander picture? If so, what was it?

He raised the spyglass again. The
Adriana
was briskly taking on cargo. Several teams of sailors were conveying crated goods onto the ship. As Siegfried studied the activity, it suddenly was clear to him that the cargo fell into two groups.

One group consisted of hundreds of large wooden coffin-sized crates that had apparently been trucked to the bow end of the ship. These crates, which seemed quite heavy from the way the sailors reacted to them, were in turn being loaded onto smaller trucks and driven into the lower hold of the ship. It took eight sailors to lift a crate onto a truck. Siegfried calculated that each crate must have weighed seven to eight hundred pounds, considering the difficulty the sailors were having.

Why
,
aren't more men assigned to each crate, he wondered instinctively. Then, seeing how quickly the trucks were moving, he realized the answer. The crates were being loaded as quickly as possible.

Why?

There was only one possible answer. Whoever was receiving the cargo was in a hurry. The second type of cargo was being loaded every bit as quickly. But these crates were much larger, about the size of small shacks. No team of men could possibly handle these. Large, sturdy, mechanized forklifts were busy at the stern of the ship moving these crates onto steel platforms. The platforms were then lifted by derrick and deposited through a deck hatch into the stern hold of the ship.

Siegfried set the telescope aside and calculated. These crates had to contain extremely heavy equipment, perhaps even motor vehicles of some sort.

He looked again. The containers were much too small for tanks or trucks. Generators, maybe? But what would be the urgency for generators? Ammunition? Never. Not packed like that. Not handled like that. Parts for antiaircraft weapons? He studied the crates carefully. Possible, he concluded. But that was merely a guess. He made mental calculations over how long each type of cargo took to be loaded onto the
Adriana
. He wondered if he was seeing the first day of loading or the fifth. Or the last.

The spy searched both sorts of crates for any markings that might identify the contents. There were absolutely none. Whatever the
Adriana
was taking on for transport back to England, she was taking it on in utmost secrecy.

The further question posed itself to Siegfried: did the crew even know what they were loading'? Siegfried decided to find out.

Next, Siegfried's attention focused on the navy yard, itself. He studied the patterns of work performed by the teams of sailors. He made meticulous mental notes of the ratio of officers to enlisted men. And he carefully studied the activities of the visiting British as opposed to the resident Americans.

Then Siegfried studied the main gate. There were two sentries on duty, both with side arms. The gate was open, but could be securely shut if necessary. The spy put his Celestron 1000 on its tripod and lay flat for an hour with the lens aimed at the gate. Siegfried barely breathed as he studied the traffic that came and went from the yard, and the protocol of the main gate.

Then, toward afternoon, he felt he had diagnosed it. Any civilians arriving had to show passes and go through a security check. Men—and a few women—in military uniform passed through with a simple salute. American naval officers came and went with the greatest ease of all.

Siegfried finally sat up. He stretched and by force of habit reached for another Pall Mall. He looked around to make certain that he was still alone. He was. He rubbed his eyes. They were tired from staring through the telescope.

The spy exhaled a long stream of smoke and then withdrew from his camera bag a sandwich, an apple, and a thermos filled with coffee. He lunched calmly and watched the other side of the river with his naked eye until sunset.

*

The old man who called himself Elmer had been a fixture around Reilly's—at least for the past week. He habitually wore an old suit and on his gray head he wore a peaked cap from another era. He was bent slightly and his face was lined. He was unshaven and sometimes had difficulty speaking, as if his back teeth were missing.

Reilly's was the murkily lit watering hole for the sailors who toiled at the Red Bank naval yard. On a busy night when the ships were in, the place jumped. The old man held court at the end of the bar and liked to play darts against the English seamen, who could always beat him. Elmer also gravitated toward young Billy Pritchard, an American ensign. Pritchard was fuzzy-cheeked and quiet, a kid from Ohio away from home for the first time. The Navy had promised him he would see the world, and so far he had seen South Carolina and New Jersey. To Elmer, Pritchard made somber comments about going AWOL, but the old man always talked sense into him. Besides, unlike the Brits who flocked around Reilly's in astonishing numbers, Billy Pritchard did not know how to grip a dart before throwing it. Elmer could always beat him.

Buck was the bartender. He was a big porky red- haired guy with a moon-shaped face and a County Cork accent. He had rejoiced in serving booze to thirsty seamen since the bleakest days of Prohibition. Buck owned the joint and liked it when all the ships were docked. But Buck already had the bad news, courtesy of a British warrant officer.

"English sailors'll be pullin' out next week," Buck confided to the old man. "Don't tell no one I told you. All shore leave's canceled August 27."

"The English like it here," Elmer said, his gray brows narrowing with a mischievous glint. "They like our women. They ain't going nowhere."

"There's a friggin' war gonna start, old man," Buck said. "These English boys'll be fightin' it."

"Already fought a war," the old man recalled. "Won it, too."

"There's gonna be another. In Europe, anyway." Buck blew his breath into a glass and polished the glass with his apron. He cast a jaundiced eye upon Elmer. "Lucky you're old,"

Buck said to him. "You ain't going to fight."

"Lucky you're middle-aged," Elmer shot back at him with considerable irritation. "I was in the last one."

Buck took a long look at Elmer's lined, sickly face. A new enlightenment came over

the bartender, "Hey. Sorry, old-timer," he said with sudden affection. "Let me draw one for you. On the house."

"Don't mind," the old man said, watching Buck place a beer mug beneath Elmer's favorite spigot. "Don't mind at all if I do." Elmer accepted the drink and turned with new enthusiasm toward the English sailors behind him. "Not a man in the house can beat this old man at darts!" he proclaimed boisterously.

"Penny a point, Elmer," said an English sailor who, like the others, never bothered to collect after trouncing the aging American. "Think you can afford to lose again?" More often than not, the Englishmen bought Elmer a meal instead.

"Never lost yet to you young saps!" Elmer said gruffly, snatching some darts from a table.

"What about yesterday?" a sailor asked him.

"Don't remember yesterday," Elmer said. "Here! Show you how it's done." Elmer's first shot hit the black border on the edge of the target. "That's practice," he said. "Just warmup."

"Go get 'em now, Elmer," someone said.

The old man's point total lagged considerably behind his opponents'. Meanwhile, Elmer caught snippets of conversation from the English sailors. The place to visit in New Jersey, they said, was Atlantic City, though the older crewmen remembered it as being much grander before the Depression. And two sailors had almost been severely injured or even killed when the gears slid on the derrick loading the crated motorcycles and sidecars from General Motors onto the
Adriana
. Those big crates weighed a ton and a half, complained one sailor, and one of them had tumbled fifty feet across the Two Deck.

The brothels were better in New York than in Philadelphia, the enlisted men reached consensus, but with the latest shipment of cargo, there was no time for extended leave.
The Adriana
was even being loaded on weekends, as fast as the coffin-sized crates could arrive. Desmond, Baldwin, and Condon had sprained their backs loading those boxes, someone else complained. Why did Smith & Wesson have to pack fifty machine guns to a crate, anyway?

Elmer threw another dart. It hit the metal rim of the target and ricocheted away. Billy Pritchard, sitting sullenly toward the end of the bar, nearly caught it in the butt. The Englishmen laughed merrily.

Elmer hung around with them a little longer, then repaired to Billy's side when the Brits wanted a more competitive game. Elmer and Billy were about the same size and saw things eye to eye. Billy was slumped over a drink.

"What’s the matter, Billy boy?" Elmer asked.

"Dunno," said the young man. "Thinking about home too much, I guess."

"Why don't you telephone home? Talk to Mom and Pop?”

Pritchard looked at Elmer as if the latter were crazy. "Long distance?"

"Yeah."

"Who's got the money for that?" the ensign asked with irritation.

"I'll treat you. I got a secret telephone. Not tonight. But I'll show you sometime."

Pritchard looked at Elmer in the dim light of Reilly's. "Yeah," he said after several seconds. "A secret telephone. Sure." He glanced at his watch. "Hey, I got to get back to base," Billy said next.

Then he stood, paid, and lurched toward the door. Elmer watched him go.

Elmer assumed Billy's place at the end of the bar and ordered a vodka with a chaser. Through the mirror behind Buck, Elmer watched the dart game in progress. He tuned in the conversation.

"Try not to hit me in the ass, mates," Elmer said, exaggerating an English accent.

"Who'd you think I am? Hitler?"

"You look more like Uncle Joe Stalin to me," someone answered with a Midlands twang.