A Bridge Of Magpies (14 page)

She took her time about beginning, her face wearing
a
withdrawn expression.

'You know about me
and the
City of Baroda.
Maybe I sound slightly "schizo',

'What's really at the back of all this-Jutta? Diamonds? Treasure? The old shakeroo of dead man's gold in a space
95
age wrapping? Captain Kidd
was on
Possession once.. You're not chasing that sort of moonbeam,
I
hope?'

No. The story's unfinished, perhaps unfinishable. Let's first get the record straight. It's taken me years of saving and scrimping to get together enough cash to reach South West Africa. I'm not trying to sound heroic-because you don't feel heroic bashing a typewriter all day and selling houseto-house at night and giving up your holidays in order to earn a few extra pounds. Six thousand miles is a long way to come.
I
had
to see the Bridge of Magpies. Everything about me for the past few years has been geared to that one objective.'

'They must have missed you around parties, with
your
hair.'

'That's the nicest thing you've said to me.'

'You're giving me some unrelated facts plus a motivation which isn't really motivation at all.'

Her look met mine squarely. 'Back there at the wreck I told you about my mother in the single cabin. I never knew who my father was–is.'

'Good God, Jutta! You don't have to be hung up on a thing like that–not in these days!'

Her voice changed in pitch and
register.
'You're rather sweet, you know. No-it isn't that aspect of things that worries me. You see, my mother was on her way to South Africa to marry him. They would have been married earlier, in England, but he was suddenly sent out to the naval base at Simonstown ..

'A naval officer?'

'It's one of the few things I know about him. I've been searching for clues about him very hard for a long time.' '

Your mother's parents ..

She smiled ruefully. They didn't know. About him

or about me, until it was too late'

'He never showed up afterwards?'

'Never.'

'And
I
told you to run home to Daddy!'

'You didn't know then how it could hurt.
I
felt I might
get
some clue to his identity at the Bridge of Magpies. Those things of mine you confiscated are a file on my father. Rather, clues that might lead to his identity. It's been a long time.
British
Admiralty,
German
Admiralty,
Japanese–for what
it 96

was worth. Nuremberg Trials photocopies, U-boat
records.
There are all the false leads I've chased; notes on all the scores of people I've interviewed and corresponded with . .. The more I gathered the more necessary it became to see the wreck and the Bridge of Magpies for myself. The whole
thing
snowballed once I
became
deeply involved. It's been the main purpose in my life for years now.'

She was easing up all the time-as if she'd had it all bottled
up
inside her and had been waiting for the right listener to come along: it gave me a strange, elated feeling to think
I
might be the one.

'Only a super-sleuth
could
have dug up that U-boat tape,' I said. 'I didn't know that anything like it existed.'

'It was luck. I've had it only a few days. Part of the luck I've had ever since I started out for the Bridge of Magpies.'

'Go on.'

'My own
story is
tied up with the way it came into my hands. You see, after my mother died nobody really knew what to do with the wartime waif A woman called Emma Hasler in Luderitz became my foster mother. I lived with her until after the war, when my grandparents took me away to England. Things didn't really work out with them. They tried their best-I suppose-but my father's name was a dirty word to them. I had a pretty miserable childhood.'

'An odd womanhood, too.'

'You think I'm a bit of an oddball, don't you, Struan?' '

You said it, not I.'

Her eyes were full of broken lights,
like a sea
with the sun
on
it.

'My researches have brought me into contact with only one type of man. The old casting-couch principle: information in return for an easy lay.'

'The tape,' I reminded her gently.

She laughed, a little shakily I thought, at something she was remembering. I wanted to know what it was –and I didn't
want
to know.

'When I landed in Luderitz the other day I went straight to Frau Hasler. We'd kept in touch. She really loves me and it's a shame my grandparents ever took me away. Of course J

told her why I'd come back, and that I intended getting to the
City of Baroda
somehow to look for possible clues about my father. At that she produced the tape. It had

been left
in her husband's
care
by the spy Swakop aJl those years ago.'

`Spy?'

`The man who made the recording itself: Swakop. His name's mentioned at the beginning-remember? He was a Nazi spy. He was sent in the U-boat to stir up trouble and lead a pro-Hider movement among the German population of South West Africa.'

'That tape was dynamite if he'd been caught:

'Also an insurance policy.'

'What d'ye mean?'

If he'd been captured he could have used it as a bargaining counter with the authorities. With all its top-secret information it was worth more than solid gold in a currency crisis. I think that really must have been at the back of his mind because he kept the spool though he dumped the recorder after he left the Bridge of Magpies. He had a hazardous desert crossing before reaching Luderitz, Frau Hasler said.'

'I'd also have dumped
a
bulky war-time tape recorder –

pre-transistor model.'

`Swakop was an opportunist. It was pure chance that the I U-boat's ship-to-shore radio was left transmitting and he was able to record all that happened inside the U-boat herself during the final action.'

'It cost
U-160
her life.'

'That's part of my puzzle.'

'Why should a Nazi spy go and see Frau Hasler?'

`Her husband was the boss of the pro-Nazi underground movement. Emma Hasler wasn't one of them. Swakop holed up with the Haslers in Luderitz. She warned her husband he was playing with fire and backing the wrong horse. She
was
right : only a few days after they'd taken me in, someone stabbed Hasler to death.'

`Swakop?'

'No.
He was in the clear. He
vanished only later–Emma Hasler said he always had an
eye
to the main chance. She's never seen or heard of him since. Never knew his real name, even.'

'I begin
to see
why you felt you had to play it back where
you did.
What happened to the other guy, the Jap they came to pick up?'

'He
is one of my ma blind alleys, Every
lead
on him
9R

has run dead. But he must have been important. There's mention of him in German records - a conversation in the early summer of 1943-when Hitler offered his official condolences to the Japanese Ambassador, Oshima, on the death of Japan's great naval hero, Admiral Yamamoto.'

`Yamamoto! Your man must have been a big shot!'

The lead runs dead there-again! The Japanese navy records are hopeless. Who or what Tsushima was I can't find out. The Japs didn't follow the Germans' practice of logging all details of U-boats and their movements. The best I can do is to say that
U-160
sailed from the Japanese base at Penang for the Bridge of Magpies on what was called "an exchange of technical information". Technical information!

Here! in the desert!'

I felt
as
if I'd been coshed by the
past.

'Why go into all this, Jutta? Surely the answer lies-or by-with the naval officers stationed at the Cape?'

The enthusiasm she'd shown up to then ran flat and dry,

`There were 687 British officers who served at Simonstown from 1943 until the end of the war. Try asking 687 men, married and unmarried-years afterwards-whether they sired an unwanted brat who
is
now trying to find out who her father is! Take a look in my letter file if you want to see what the big brush-off really means!'

`Surely the naval records ..

'Of course I worked that angle too. But just you watch the Navy clam up when along comes a girl trying to pin parenthood on one of its boys!'

`Right' I said. 'You've done all this sleuthing and delving and what have you got?'

'I don't know. You threw me out before I could find out.' '

Jutta ..

She hurried on. 'I'm just a woman who hasn't found herself. The search has turned into the main thing in my
life: a way
of existence programmed by a couple of torpedoes which lammed into a ship's side; a mother who died giving me birth; and a father who didn't show up. There've been men of course. Men-and men. I told you about one type, the
quid-
pro-quo
lot. There've been a couple of the other sort: you don't get to my age without being turned on. Then, when I thought J'd found something that was going to stick, my heart fired blanks. I couldn't.'

99

`So you want to find your father-in the hope that it'll put your own
pieces
together
again?'

'That sounds a bit crude for something as deep
as
what I
feel.
Maybe you're partly right. Maybe after I've found him I'

ll get direction and meaning. All I
know
is that the not knowing acts as a drag on me. Or perhaps I'm one of those people not lucky enough to know love. But I do know this-Struan: out there on Doodenstadt I
was
within reach of something .

She made a V of her hands and thrust them hard into her groin, too carried away to guess at the extent of the sexual charge the gesture threw at me.

'And I got in your way.'

`You, or your job.'

'I wish you'd told me what you were after, there by the wreck and the grave.'

'To a stranger-a policeman?'

`What's different now?'

'Nothing, really. Everything maybe. I don't know.'

She'd begun to talk as though I were thinking of changing - my mind about taking her on to Luderitz: I wasn't But she'd said enough – and hinted enough – for me not to want to leave an image in her mind of an unfeeling bastard–not any more.

'I've been a drifter for years ...' I told her about the Greek islands. 'My bivouac was a boat or a bar, whichever was handier. On the primrose path to the Alternative Society, I was pretty close to becoming a juiced-up drop-out. This job is a challenge.'

`So that's why you're acting tough.'

She was unresponsive, so I went on to the story of the
Walewska
oil-spill. I explained that it was the C-in-C's faith which had backed me for the Possession headman's job.

`Good old C-in-C I It takes courage, loyalty and devotion to duty to protect a lot of birds!'

I was losing her-fast. I had to choose quickly. So
on
impulse I broke the secret of the lost city and explained why Koch and I bad banished her and Kaptein Denny. I swore her to secrecy but I wasn't fool enough not to realize, that I'd given her a weapon to use against me if she chose. Her eyes kept going over my face as I spoke. After I'd finished she came and put her hands on
mine.
I wanted the 100

gale to go on for ever, so that I need never take her to Luderitz.

'Thanks,' she said huskily. 'That makes everything
different.
You too, thank heavens.'

I was a little sandbagged by the way she'd come over to my side. But it wasn't the sort of takeover I particularly minded.

'Maybe you'll find out – for me. I'll wait at Emma Hasler's.' I couldn't meet her eyes. I knew it would be a lie if I said yes.

'I wouldn't know where to begin.'

My reply made us both miserable and after that she closed up. There wasn't any more to say and we sat silent and uncomfortable for a long time, while the gale roared overhead and plucked and boomed over Tuscaloosa as if trying to ape the sound of guns. Later I lay broad awake for hours in my bunk listening to the tumult–so
similar
to the one going on inside me–and to the quarrelling and clucking of inyriads of birds descending out of the night and making for their old nesting-grounds on the islet.

The gale lasted two days. You couldn't have called the
Lchabo a
lovers' hideaway during that time: Jutta and I were shut off from one another; so found small jobs for ourselves round the boat, discussing them in impersonal voices. The mast and boom were badly strained and kept me occupied fiddling them and fixing the rigging; and I think Jutta felt relieved when I asked her to stitch the torn sail. It was wet and unhandy, so we brought it below into the big cabin where she worked on it. I could have tinkered with the engine but didn't. It was an excuse (which I wouldn't have admitted to myself) for delaying
as
long as possible at Alabama Cove. On the second morning Jutta had gone on deck while, down in the cabin-I put some final touches to the sail. I heard her call above the wind. 'Struan! Struan I A boat!'

The white sail and the breakers combined to look like a split image-far away near the channel entrance, until one saw the flared bow and characteristic black strake of a Nieswandt cutter. The way she was being handled and the press of sail made me certain it was Kaptein Denny. Then she
came a little closer,
and I spotted
Gaok's unmistakable
figurehead.

'That boat's in
a
hurry, Jutta:

101

'He's alone. I don't see anyone else.'

Goak
finally came almost alongside at the same cracking pace before Kaptein Denny spun her round and tossed me a securing line.

He jumped aboard. His eyes were strained and red and his mouth was bracketed with fatigue. Salt had made a white fuzz on his beard stubble and round the neck of his heavy turtleneck sweater; it emphasized the rough planes of
his
face. However, there was a jauntiness about his stocky figure which I put down to excitement at the storm and his triumph
over
the sea's challenge.