Shadow Divers (38 page)

In the beginning, Chatterton called regularly.

“Richie, I’m going to the U-boat. You in?”

“Nah, I can’t commit,” Kohler would answer.

“What do you mean you can’t commit? Richie, this is insane. You can’t live like this.”

Kohler’s insides were shredding. But he would only say, “I’m sorry, John.” When he got word that weather kept blowing out Chatterton’s U-boat trips, he found himself feeling guilty for his sense of relief.

Kohler steeled his resolve and stayed out of diving. Between the cracks, he drip-fed his passions. He continued to hoard catalogs from the military book clubs, buying every volume that touched remotely on U-boats, cupping the phone receiver to surreptitiously check inventory with book dealers who knew his appetites. He bought a U-boat video game that contained a bonus wall map of the German naval grids, then compared that map to the handmade version he had fashioned from his research in Washington. Among his biggest thrills in 1994 was the closeness with which he found these maps to match.

Kohler expected the onset of fall to provide some respite from his longings. Instead, he found himself thinking about the
U-Who
’s crewmen. For years, he had envisioned the horror of their final moments—the explosion, singed bodies flung upside down, an ocean rushing in. Now that he knew their names, he began to imagine their lives. He pictured Germany as his father had when listening to Mr. Segal’s stories—a land not of goose-stepping soldiers but of families and girlfriends, hometowns, regional delicacies, and plans. He read the crew list and wondered who among the men liked movies and who liked music, whether they rooted for local soccer clubs, if any had written his girlfriend’s name on a torpedo-tube hatch. He could imagine their lives even to the final hours—a can of peaches awarded to the boat’s checkers champion, the cook burning sausages, the radioman playing a phonograph record.

As winter crawled over New Jersey, these thoughts became an obligation to Kohler. More than ever he believed that he owed these men a duty, that they must not lie in an anonymous grave with their fate unknown to their loved ones. And it occurred to Kohler that he likely remained the last person in the world inclined to identify these men. Yet he was unable to move, bound by his own family obligations, and it struck him as strange that his commitment to his family was the very promise preventing him from doing right by the crewmen’s families. Kohler watched the snow fall outside his rented home. For years, snow had meant that Kohler was just a few months from returning to the ocean. This year, he felt like he had never been further from himself, and the snow seemed as if it would keep falling forever.

In early 1995, Chatterton and Kohler met for dinner, but this time it was at a pizza joint, not Scotty’s. In previous years, when the men were themselves, their dinners had lasted for hours. This night, it lasted a slice.

“You staying out this year, too?” Chatterton asked.

“Yeah,” Kohler replied. “I gotta stick with this. Felicia’s driving me crazy, but I gotta see this through for the kids.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Any trademark Chatterton breakthroughs on the
U-Who
?”

“It’s all I think about. I have no ideas. I’m blind.”

“What about the other divers? What’s their direction?”

“Richie, no one wants to go there anymore.”

At home, Kohler was white-knuckling his marriage just to keep it breathing. He had entered marriage counseling, rented a house, locked away his dive gear. Still, the fights grew worse. In the early spring of 1995, he wrote Felicia a twelve-page letter, took off his wedding band, then stuffed his clothes and belongings into a dozen Hefty Steel-Saks and moved onto his friend’s floor in Levittown, Pennsylvania. He was nearly bankrupt from the spending that had been required to repair his family.

For a few months, Kohler took custody of his kids every weekend, summoning just enough strength to shave and get off the floor so that his five-year-old son and two-year-old daughter would believe Daddy was doing great. That lasted a few months. In July 1995, Kohler took over custody of the children. He was ecstatic. He called a real estate agent and requested a home in the best school district within a twenty-five-mile radius of his Trenton, New Jersey, shop. Two weeks later, he and his children moved to a town house in Yardley, Pennsylvania. He hired an au pair, registered his kids in school, scrounged up money for decorations for their rooms, and laid down family rules.

On the other side of New Jersey, bad weather limited Chatterton to just a single
U-Who
trip. As in 1994, he dove the submarine without a plan and came up empty. Stonewalled by the U-boat, he threw the entirety of his creative muscle into the quest he had started the previous year—nothing less than the discovery of several historic, undiscoverable shipwrecks.

He picked up his work on the SS
Carolina,
a passenger liner sunk by U-boat gunfire during World War I. To East Coast wreck divers, there was no greater prize than the
Carolina,
a beautiful vessel from which one hundred ninety-seven passengers and one hundred seventeen crew had been ordered into lifeboats sixty miles offshore before
U-151
sank the ship. Thirteen drowned when their lifeboat capsized overnight. Divers had spent decades searching for the
Carolina,
all to no avail—she remained the only undiscovered passenger liner in New York–New Jersey waters. Chatterton spent the off-season translating and studying German records, interviewing a shipyard archivist, poring over the captain’s log, examining seventy-seven-year-old weather charts. He then assembled his research and put together a vision. He believed the
Carolina
lay in an area no diver had suspected.

On his first trip to the site, Chatterton found a wreck. He cleared sea anemones from the fantail, where his research indicated he would find the ship’s name. There, he began to uncover brass letters—
C-A-R-O-L-I-N-A.
In a single day, he had found and identified the SS
Carolina,
for decades the most coveted prize among Northeast wreck divers.

A few weeks later, Chatterton made a trip to a wreck that some suspected was the freighter
Texel,
another ship sunk by a U-boat during World War I. Chatterton devised a plan based on his study of
Texel
photographs and deck plans: he would search the bow area for reference points like portholes that he knew to be positioned near the ship’s name. Legendary diver Gary Gentile assured him that the bow was too busted up to yield the name. Chatterton went anyway. He found the brass letters. They spelled
Texel.
In the course of a year, Chatterton had discovered and/or identified four historic shipwrecks. Some began to call him the greatest wreck diver in the world. He sank further into despair.

Chatterton redoubled his efforts to crack the
U-Who.
He drew blanks. Ideas flowed into his head for other projects, mosaics of imagination, perseverance, and vision that promised discovery in whatever he fancied—except for the
U-Who.
At conferences at which he was asked to speak about diving the
Lusitania
or the
Carolina
or his other recent accomplishments, people invariably asked about the U-boat, a subject so depressing to Chatterton that he stopped attending these events.

For the first time in his career, Chatterton heard the clock tick. He was forty-three years old, already an elder statesman in a sport that wore down athletes half his age. Divers no longer wanted to explore the
U-Who.
If Chatterton got bent or broke bones in a car accident or developed cancer, the submarine likely never would be identified. Then the casual and the lazy would simply waltz in and proclaim it
U-869.
“We’re virtually certain of it,” they would announce—nightmare words to an artist.

Yet Chatterton was at a loss as to what to do next. Nightly, he lay awake in bed, telling the ceiling and the heavens that he would do anything to pull proof from the wreck, that he would help anyone who had an idea, that he would share his knowledge, that he would risk his life inside that U-boat if only he could conceive a vision. Friends like Yurga told him, “You’ve gotta cut yourself a break. You’ve done more in the last year than most great wreck divers do in a lifetime.”

In his darkest moments, Chatterton brushed cheeks with the idea of quitting. He imagined a time when he could run out for pizza or take his car for a spin without seeing the
U-Who
’s crushed control room before him, a time when he no longer wondered if he was who he hoped he was. The fantasy always felt good for a minute, but it always ended with Chatterton thinking, “When things are easy a person doesn’t really learn about himself. It’s what a person does at the moment of his greatest struggle that shows him who he really is. Some people never get that moment. The
U-Who
is my moment. What I do now is what I am.” When he thought that, Chatterton would snap out of his brush with quitting, sit down at his desk in front of Horenburg’s knife, and start drawing sketches of the places on the
U-Who
he planned to go next.

Now separated from Felicia, Kohler began to receive invitations to go diving. The first came from Chatterton. Kohler told him what he would tell all his friends that season: “I can’t dive. I physically and mentally can’t do it. My head’s not in it. I’ll die.”

As the 1995 dive season wound down, Kohler continued as a full-time father and businessman. He slept irregularly, running to midnight emergency business calls and making French toast for his kids when he returned. His children settled into a routine.

In September 1995, Kohler went to the Hudson City Savings Bank to do a glass job. There he met a very pretty, thirty-year-old blue-eyed blonde who complained of a problem door. When Kohler deduced that part of the problem was that the woman had been kicking the door with her high heels, he took a liking to her. The woman, Valentina Marks, looked a bit indignant at Kohler’s bemusement. That made him like her more. He asked her to dinner. It went well. He asked her to dinner again. It was the real thing.

Kohler told her about the
U-Who,
and she leaned into his conversation and asked to know more, especially about the fallen crewmen. Tina was of German descent. She attended Oktoberfest in Germany every year with her father. Even before Kohler confessed it, she knew he felt an obligation to these men.

In Tina’s house or in the park or even on the phone, she would lie on her back, close her eyes, and ask Kohler to describe the details of the things in life that moved him, a process she called “painting colors.” Often, Kohler painted a trip to the
U-Who,
from the moment the
Seeker
pushed away from its dock to the feeling of gliding down the anchor line to moving respectfully past the crewmen’s remains. Kohler told her of finding a skull and then replacing it so that the dead crewman might look out over his comrades, and Marks understood why he’d done it. She painted colors for him, scenes of Germany and the Black Forest and Neuschwanstein Castle, and of affection for her own German heritage and family. They watched
Das Boot
together and she remained on the edge of her seat for the entire movie. He told her about the intensity of his commitment to diving. She said she believed that everyone needed a room of one’s own. As the months passed, Kohler began to paint colors of making a future together with Tina.

In late 1995, Kohler received the same phone call he had placed two years earlier. It was from Chatterton; his marriage was in trouble. They met at Scotty’s. Chatterton’s situation was different from Kohler’s. Though he and Kathy were fighting, there had been no suggestion that Chatterton give up diving. The couple had simply grown apart. Each had a passion—Chatterton’s was diving; Kathy’s was pistol shooting—and each had become increasingly devoted to that passion. Over the years, the marriage had evolved into an arrangement of convenience. He understood currents, and the flow of the marriage was moving away from him.

“Maybe the worst part,” he told Kohler, “is that the U-boat is hanging over me. It’s with me at work and home. I take a step back and look at myself and I’m not who I used to be. I’m not as friendly. I’m not as happy.”

“John, you have so much to be happy about,” Kohler said. “You just had one of the greatest diving years in history. In two summers you conquered the world. In two summers you discovered the universe of shipwrecks while guys like Bielenda barked at the moon. How can you be unhappy at a time like this?”

“The U-boat is different,” Chatterton said. “The U-boat is our moment.”

For several minutes, neither man said anything. Finally, Chatterton spoke.

“You coming back, Richie?” he asked.

“I just don’t know,” Kohler said. “It’s been a very long time.”

Kohler spent the winter of 1995–96 contemplating a future with Tina. His life had stabilized, his kids were happy, and his business was growing. Some days, he did not dare consider a return to diving. Then spring began to dab warmth into the air and Marks said it would be a shame if a man turned his back on his passion. Kohler unlocked the storage shed at his shop. He picked up his dry suit. The trademark red by which other divers knew him from across the Horrible Inn’s parking lot was as bright as it had been the day he and Chatterton first dove the
U-Who
together. He walked to the phone and dialed. Chatterton answered.

“John, it’s Richie,” he said. “I’m back.”

The divers met at Scotty’s. Chatterton had never seen Kohler so alive.

“You’ve done worlds of stuff over the last two years,” Kohler said. “I, on the other hand, have done shit. But I’ve got one big advantage on you, John. I’m back with a vengeance. I’m a madman two years in the making. You’re out of ideas? You don’t know where to turn next? Let me tell you this: we’re not stopping until we solve this thing. The proof is on that wreck, I know that in my heart.”

Kohler reached into his briefcase and pulled out his long-entombed
U-Who
file. The divers began work on a plan. Their approach was primitive and ferocious. They would force their way into the electric motor room, the only unexplored compartment aboard the
U-Who.
That room and part of the adjoining diesel motor room remained blocked by a steel escape trunk, the vertical tunnel through which crewmen could escape a flooding or sinking boat. For years, the divers had figured the trunk to be unmovable, the electric motor room to contain nothing but machinery. Now they vowed to move the trunk at whatever risk and whatever cost. And it would no longer be good enough to presume that the electric motor room contained no identifying artifacts; they were going to bash their way in and see for themselves. The divers finished their dinners and shook hands. For two years, each of them had been removed from himself. Now reunited, the first draft of a plan secured on a napkin, they looked to be exactly where they were meant to be.