The Midnight Swimmer (22 page)

‘I think,’ continued the controller, ‘he’s a bit stupid – or maybe touched.
In any case, he doesn’t speak any German – the only thing he could say to the police when they picked him up was
Polski
marynarz
, Polish sailor.’

The skipper turned to whisper something to the pilot, a
self-assured
looking man – an aristocrat of the sea who wore his peaked
Käpitanmütze
at a rakish angle and smoked a pipe.
The pilot looked at his watch and said, ‘It’s getting late – we don’t want to miss the last of the ebb.’
Arlekin stared at the back of the skipper’s neck and realised the deformed lip had nothing to do with cleft palate: there was a huge ugly wound where the machine-gun bullet that smashed his face had made its exit.
They were all scarred by that heritage: it must never happen again.

Two tugboats were making their way across the river, the tide
forcing them sideways.
The skipper looked up at the controller.
‘Your Pole really should go through customs.
I’ve never done this before – and I don’t want to do it now.’

The controller reached into the breast pocket of his coat and began to flourish what seemed to be identity documents.
‘I’ll clear it with customs, don’t worry.’

The skipper shook his head and waved away the document wallet.
‘You really ought to have gone around to the Neustädter Hafen – and embarked him properly through the
Zollbeamte
.
They have to count all these birds off and then on again.’

‘There’s no sense in talking about what we should have done, we’re here now and there isn’t time to put it right.’

Everyone knew there were no bridges near the docks.
A trip to Neustädter Hafen would have meant a lengthy drive back to the centre of Bremen and then down the opposite bank of the Weser.
And by then the Polish ship would have long departed.

The controller lowered his voice and got confidential with the skipper.
‘Look, I don’t want to get stuck with this fellow –
something’s
not right with him.
If he misses that ship, it means we’ll have to keep him in a police cell – and maybe get psychiatric help too.
And the Polish consul is already away for Christmas, so it could be a long wait for repatriation.
The simple thing is just to put him on that ship – and that’s the end of it.’

‘Make up your mind, Willy.’
The pilot was speaking.
‘We really must get going or we’ll miss the lock at Brunsbüttel.’
He gestured with his pipe to the
Lech
.
‘That old girl can only do ten knots.’

The skipper waved a hand in front of his face as if brushing away responsibility, then gestured to Arlekin.
‘Come aboard – it’s back East with you where you belong.’

By the time it was light, they were abeam of the
Roter Sand
lighthouse
.
Arlekin had just finished a breakfast of rye bread and Twaróg, a sort of curd cheese.
There was also a flask of black tea.
Arlekin still felt a sense of pique.
He knew that the Bremen controller had treated him with less dignity than was necessary.
It was as if it was a matter of personal score-settling.
It worried him and he wondered how much the controller knew.

Arlekin poured the last of the tea and went over to a porthole to look at the bleak seascape of dawn mist.
Roter Sand
lighthouse
was a stately structure from the Bismarck era with two mock Gothic turrets, the larger one housing a light that flashed three times every four seconds.
They were in the
Deutsche Bucht
, known in the British Shipping Forecast as German Bight.
It was a treacherous sea area scored with sandbanks by the outflows of the rivers Ems, Weser and Elbe.
Arlekin regarded the sandy brown water and imagined Saxon longships taking the tide on their way to harry the east coast of England as the Romans withdrew – and then carrying settlers across the North Sea to replace the Romans.

He sipped the tea and looked westwards trying to make out the island of Wangerooge, but the mist was too thick.
Wangerooge was one of the islands that Erskine Childers had written about in
The Riddle of the Sands
.
Arlekin peered hard through the porthole, but there was only swirling mist.
Erskine Childers was more of a riddle than the shifting sands he had written about.
Childers had been a man of complex loyalties – and even more complex
disloyal-ties
.
His life had ended in front of a firing squad – the day after he had made his sixteen-year-old son vow to shake hands with each of the executioners.
Arlekin wondered what it would be like to face a firing squad.
The French were the only Western power that still used them.
And the OAS generals and officers who attempted the putsch against de Gaulle were going to face them soon.

The pilot disembarked from the
Lech
when they reached the Baltic end of the Kiel Canal.
As they lay alongside dock, Arlekin stretched out on a narrow steel bunk and pulled a blanket over his head.
If anyone looked through the porthole they would see only an empty dark cabin, or at best a sick crewman curled up in bed.
As Arlekin lay with his forehead against the steel bulkhead, he heard shouting in German, and then loud footsteps on the deck.
These were real border police.
Were they going to search the ship?
There was more shouting and another voice speaking German, but in an accent that didn’t sound German.
Arlekin wondered if it was the ship’s skipper.
Whoever it was, he was laughing.
Maybe that was a good sign – or good acting.
Then silence.
After what seemed like an hour, Arlekin looked at his watch – only ten minutes had passed.
Then the worst thing happened.
Hatches were being opened and closed: loud echoing, clanging noises.
They seemed to be
progressing
from one end of the ship to the other.
Each time a hatch clanged shut heavy running footsteps echoed around the ship.
There also
seemed to be a lot of people going up and down ladders.
The most frightening noise was the unbearable racket of someone beating a hammer on what seemed to be an empty cistern.
It was as if the hammer wielder was trying to flush a stowaway out of his hiding place.

Arlekin lay facing the cold steel of the bulkhead next to the bunk.
He started planning what he would have to do.
If he pretended to be mentally ill they might leave him alone.
He tried to recollect the faces and gestures of the patients he had seen in a mental hospital.
He especially remembered the lobotomised woman who took an hour to put on a sock – all the while rocking back and forth.
And then, when she finally got the sock on, she pulled it off again and started screaming.
If the searchers came into the cabin, that’s what he would do.
He would pretend to be her.
But he knew he couldn’t do it.
It would be disrespectful to use her like that.
Arlekin had loved the woman.
He still loved her.
He lay motionless as his tears
dampened
the thin mattress beneath his face.

It all ended as mysteriously as it had begun.
The border police must have left the ship.
Arlekin could hear the engines starting up and the slapping sounds of hawsers against the hull as they cast off.
He waited ten minutes before getting up and looking out the porthole.
There was no land: the view was seaward across the broad waters of the Baltic.
Arlekin had just begun to breathe easy when he heard a knocking at the cabin door.
He remembered that he wasn’t to talk to anyone so he ignored the knocking.
He waited for the person to go, but could hear shuffling and breathing on the other side of the door.
The knocking began again in earnest.
He assumed it must be someone coming to take away the breakfast dishes so he opened the door.

The visitor looked like an ordinary Polish seaman.
He was dressed in khaki overalls with a soiled red bandana around his neck and a greasy rag hanging from one pocket.
He smiled broadly and put a finger to his lips.
Arlekin wasn’t sure what was happening.
He wanted to tell his visitor to go away; he was sure the crew had been warned not to fraternise and not to ask questions.
He shook his head and gestured for the other to leave.
But the man in
overalls
just kept smiling and gestured for him to follow.
Arlekin knew the reason for his enforced silence – lest a single word or accent give away his nationality or identity.
He didn’t know how to deal with the visitor.
He considered pushing him away and slamming the
door, but the visitor’s face was too kind and innocent for such a rude response.
The seaman gestured again with a friendly summoning hand.
Against his better judgement, Arlekin followed.

The corridor was narrow and dimly lit by low wattage bare bulbs.
At the end was a hatch that opened to a steep stairwell that descended precipitously through the two lower decks.
At the bottom of the stairs there was another bulkhead hatch which vibrated like a drum head to the loud thumping noise it contained.
The seaman opened the hatch.
He was smiling broadly as he turned to descend a ladder.
Arlekin followed.
The noise was much louder, but not deafening – pleasant, in fact.
At the bottom of the ladder there was a workbench that faced a large panel full of gauges.
The ranks of gauges were separated by a brass clock with roman numerals and a huge wheel of cast iron.
The engine room was dry and warm like a Mediterranean beach in summer and smelt of hot oil.
The man in overalls made a sweeping gesture as if to embrace the room and then pointed to himself with pride: he was the chief engineer.

The engineer picked up a pair of wire-framed reading
spectacles
from the workbench and put them on.
The glasses, precarious and uneven on the tip of his nose, suddenly transformed him from worker to intellectual.
The lens magnified his eyes and made him seem even kindlier and more knowing.
The engineer took his guest by the elbow and led him to the very heart of the ship; the great pounding dark goddess that drove all her tons through the waters at a stately ten knots.
And she was beautiful.

Arlekin stood for a moment in awe.
The piston rods were radiant and sleek limbs in the half light.
They looked like three dancers as they stroked in perfect syncopation to an endless minimalist music.
Arlekin knew something about ships and he knew that he was in the presence of a triple expansion steam engine: a beautiful, but rare survivor into the marine diesel age of 1961.
Her dance was graceful and slow as she turned the crankshaft at a mere sixty revolutions a minute – the pulse rate of a woman asleep and dreamless.
He was almost hypnotised by the slow pendulum movement.
He wanted to sleep too.

Suddenly, the engineer was tugging again at his elbow.
There was something else he had to show him.
The urgency suggested that this was the important thing, the very reason for the engine room tour.
Arlekin was taken to inspect a large brass plaque, a data plate that
was bolted on to the aft end of the engine assembly.
The engineer took a clean rag from his pocket and gave the data plate an
unnecessary
buff, for it already gleamed, then stood back like a curator revealing the museum’s prize exhibit.
The embossed letters read:

Arlekin was abashed, but kept a straight face and didn’t even shrug his shoulders as if to say ‘so what’.
It was amusing, but it was also unfortunate.
His job was to remain an anonymous piece of baggage on the way there and on the way back.
Any speculation about who he was and why he was there could have serious
consequences
.
Arlekin looked blankly at the engineer and jerked his head upwards to indicate he wanted to go back.
He was worried.
The behaviour of the engineer suggested bad security.
Or it may have been part of the plan.