Horse Under Water (6 page)

The next great green Atlantic wave sucked the wooden boat out of the surf. The old fisherman used the oars to keep it at right angles to the beach. Joe tugged the lanyard on the outboard motor. Another wave held us high in its open palm and hesitated before, dashing us back on the sand. I was high in the prow and Joe was below me in the steeply angled boat. He flung his arm out and I heard the splutter of the motor like a sewing machine. The water foamed at the stern and we headed out into the Atlantic as the screw bit the sea.

The fisherman was a walnut-faced man of eighty. He flashed his brown teeth at me as I helped him ship the oars, and scuttled over to the echo-sounder to reconnect it. From the big picnic hampers Giorgio and Singleton produced clear polythene bags, removed the folded rubber suits, and began to pull them on. We chugged westward.

The green skirt of the sea dashed its frilly petticoats at the yellow rocks. Each rock has its dangers
and its name – ‘the Castle’, ‘the Pig’, and the long stretches of vertical strata called the ‘Bibliotek’. As we passed them the old man yelled the name at me and pointed at them. His finger was like a bent cigar. I repeated the name and he smiled a big yellow smile at me. The most dangerous rocks are the ones that are completely covered at high water, the huge flat stone called ‘the Tartar’ or the two finger-like monoliths called ‘the Wolves’.

I watched the echo-sounder. It clicked away, scratching arcs across the strip of paper, building a picture of the ocean bed. Giorgio was smoking one of the cheroots he favoured. The old man was smoking one too, smiling and tugging on the lobe of his ear – in a gesture of pleasure. He guided the boat by sighting the uneven top of Penha de Alte mountain to the north and the distant Cape Santa Maria to the east.

Joe was watching the scratching sounder needle and the compass. He shouted something to Giorgio, who shrugged, and Joe walked along the boat towards me as we turned through a hundred and eighty degrees.

‘We’ve missed it, I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘we are going across again. I could have put a marker buoy down yesterday, but …’

‘No, you did right,’ I told him, ‘let’s keep it discreet.’

Joe heard the sounder change note and the rusty multi-prong anchor (a great luxury in a district where most boats use a slab of concrete) splashed
overboard. The old man was on his feet holding the anchor rope as it snagged the wreck and pulled us into position over it. Giorgio adjusted his compressed-air bottles. I tapped his arm. Under the rubber suit his muscles were as hard as stone. Irregular white patches of the chalk in which the suit had been carefully packed emphasized the strange non-human garb.

‘Check that anchor line first thing when you descend.’

Giorgio listened carefully and nodded. I went on:

‘Singleton is under your personal orders: he goes down only when and if you want.’

‘The boy is good. I tell you that in truthfulness, very good,’ Giorgio said. He handed his half-smoked cheroot to the old man, who puffed delightedly at it.

He pulled his circular face-mask down, eased his feet into the gigantic rubber flippers and carefully put one leg over the side. In spite of the sunshine the Atlantic is cold in October. Giorgio pulled a face behind the mask and dusted a patch of talc from his arm before dropping gently overboard. The water surged over his shoulders and he pushed away from the faded blue side of the boat, kicking out his black legs.

His chunky silhouette shattered into a dozen black moving patches as he sank, and a gush of white bubbles ripped the surface. In parts of the Pacific one can see well over two hundred feet, and in the Med. a hundred is nothing remarkable. But Giorgio had quickly gone.

The old man switched off the motor. It spluttered like a candle, and there was a brief silence before the sea began its background music. Left to the disposition of the ocean the little boat was handed from wave to wave like a rich patient between specialists. At its higher movement I could see a big tanker making a lot of smoke on the horizon. Singleton tried to light a cigarette, but the wind and movement foiled him each time until he flicked the long white shape away, somersaulting it in a curve over the water. The old man saw him waste the cigarette in tacit incredulity. The bubbles continued to rise, break and disappear by the million. He gazed back towards the oyster beds that he had three times asked Giorgio to raid for him. I watched him size up Singleton with a view to tackling him on the subject.

I called Joe over. ‘If Giorgio gets a reasonable idea of what sort of shape it’s in we’ll give London the “contact made” signal tonight. There’s nothing wrong, is there?’

Joe wasn’t so lively today. He said, ‘I’m not so satisfied with our communications.’

‘The set’s O.K.?’

‘Oh, the set is all right. I raise Gib. easily enough, but it’s the delay between Gib. and London. Last night, for instance, I asked for a check on Singleton and the girl as you requested, but this morning they were still deciphering the reply. I had to wait while it came through. It didn’t matter being across water, but it’s things like that …’

‘You are right, Joe. Next time cease transmission.’

‘Well, tonight I’m going to go on the air an hour early. I did think it might be better to transmit via the Lisbon embassy because Gib. are probably leaving us at the bottom of the pile.’

‘Don’t. There are too many ears open between here and Lisbon – the Republican Guard stations, police radio, armed forces. It’s too risky. It would be crazy to be picked up for the sake of this foolish little job. Keep contact through Gib. and we’ll raise hell with London if we have any trouble. Give tonight’s message a
TA
8 priority and send the message “one cup of coffee 9.40 Yellow”.’

Joe raised an eyebrow. ‘I’ll call them at seven and fill up the car …’

Then the old man called ‘pronto pronto’ and I saw the anchor rope juggling up and down, and dark patterns in the waves glued themselves into one shape as Giorgio’s black-rubber head broke the surface. He unstrapped a big lantern from his wrist and passed it into the boat. He removed his dark-green flippers under water and threw those into the boat too. They landed with a wet thud. Then he grasped the gunwales with his white, bloated hands. With one great heave he came unstuck from the wave-tops and toppled into the boat. Joe had the Thermos flask of hot red
vinho verde
ready, and Giorgio emptied it in one gulp and held it out for more. Having finished that, he produced antiseptic from the hamper and poured it over his swollen hands. Blood was still coming
from a bad cut on his left hand, and he stamped the floor of the boat with pain as the antiseptic hit the bloodstream and the brown mixture dropped from his fingers.

After that he stripped off the rubber suit and rubbed himself with camphorated oil and a rough towel. He carefully parted his hair with the aid of a small pocket mirror, slipped into a pair of carefully pressed blue cotton trousers, white shirt and black cashmere pullover before he turned to me and said, ‘It is not extremely difficult.’ He said there was no need for Singleton to dive, and distributed black cheroots. The old man spun the motor and wound in the anchor and we began to wonder what Charlotte had fixed for lunch.

After lunch Giorgio used a magic marker pen to show the position and condition of the U-boat.

‘This is a rock-sided trench. There is what I judge to be a five-knot current pressing the hull against it … thus.’ Giorgio’s command of English was on firmer ground when dealing with reports like this. He made arrow marks across the white paper.

‘This is a type XXI U-boat,’ Giorgio continued. ‘Luckily this is something which I know from drawings, although this is the first I have seen. It is about eighty metres long with about seven metres’ beam. That makes it a big boat. But all this …’ On his side view of the submarine Giorgio now drew a line along the middle and indicated the
area under his line. ‘… is filled with batteries. The space beneath the conning-tower has to be the control room. Beneath that are the magazine and compression tanks. Aft of it accommodation and galley. Aft of that: motors and engines. Forward of the control room there is crew accommodation. That’s there. Nearly sixty sailors on this sort of boat. At that bulkhead the battery-storage ends. The next compartment uses the full depth of the hull and is very big. This is the torpedo stowage compartment. Don’t get hurt going through that bulkhead – it’s a long drop to the floor. This is all full of armed torpedoes, and there is a large break in the hull there,’ he indicated the rear of the T.S. compartment, ‘at the torpedo tank. Six tubes – three each side of the bow. All bow caps closed.’

I noticed that the cuts on the back of Giorgio’s hand were bleeding again.

‘The boat is lying at a slight angle; this section is completely collapsed. The main engines have fallen through the pressure hull and jammed together with broken hydroplane into this rock fissure. Lucky the engine compartment is no concern. The rear-most section is torn completely open and many bodies of men in advanced decomposition are visible inside here. The hull here is very sharp and is dangerous bacteriological risk due to the corpses. Anyone diving here must treat even a small cut immediately.

‘The control section can be searched in twenty diving hours unless the floor has collapsed. There
are ways in which the floor can fall that would make searching under it impossible without lifting apparatus. Another risk is that the hull has been rolled along the ocean floor by water movement subsequent to the control-room floor collapsing. But this is to look on the blackest side of the coin. Tomorrow I shall go inside the hull, if the weather stays as good.’

London: Tuesday

In the West London air terminal they have electric coin-in-the-slot razors. There was time to shave before Jean came to meet me in Dawlish’s old Riley. It was 9.39 a.m.

‘Whatever could you have done for Dawlish that he loans you England’s answer to the space race?’

Jean said, ‘He ripped the bumper off my Mini-Minor yesterday morning. Don’t mention it – he’s still very touchy.’

It’s a wonder he didn’t make you use the car pool.’

‘We’ve been having a little argument with the car pool since you headed into the sunshine.’

‘Don’t say it,’ I said. ‘What was it that Bernard’s file on the C.I.A. estimated they spent per year? And
we
are having difficulty with the car pool.’

‘Never mind,’ she said, overtaking a post van, squeezing past an oncoming bus, tuning the radio and lighting a cigarette. ‘How are things in
Portugal?’ She glanced at me. ‘You don’t seem any more relaxed.’

‘I was all right until I entered this car; anyway I’ve been up since three a.m.,’ I said. The rain beat heavily against the windows. Outside Woolworth’s a woman in a plastic raincoat was smacking a child in a Yogi Bear bib. Soon we stopped at Admiralty Arch.

‘Admiralty Library,’ said Jean. ‘You must leave here by three forty-five at the very latest if you are going to get that BE 072 back to Lisbon this afternoon.’

Inside the library it was jumping with books. A girl read a
Daily Express
headed ‘A Commonwealth Tour for Tony?’

‘You remember all that stuff I sorted through for the Weapons Co-ordination Committee last year?’ I asked.

‘Yes sir,’ she said. She folded up
Woman’s Realm
and the
Daily Express
and tucked them under a pink cardigan and a bottle of hand-lotion in a little secret shelf under the desk.

‘I’ll want some of it again,’ I said. The whole place smelt of damp melton overcoats. ‘I’m trying to trace details of a scientific discovery made by a high-ranking officer, or perhaps a scientist who sailed from Germany during March or April 1945. Also I’ll want to see the Assessment Board Reports
^*
during that period.’ There was a lot to be done before I caught the plane back to Lisbon.

Albufeira: Wednesday

Giorgio worked exactly on schedule. He began the search of the control room. The hull was badly silted up and Giorgio decided that looking around haphazardly wouldn’t do, so he began at the control bulkhead, port side. I’d told him to look for currency of any sort, or any documents, the log book or the metal cases that German naval ships’ papers were kept in.

Within a few days we had a comfortable routine. We would rise about 7.30 to watch the sun come up and have coffee. Then we would go out in the boat and Giorgio would do forty minutes. Singleton would go down for another forty, then Giorgio would do about twenty or so before they came back. By that time mud had been raised so badly that the beam of light wouldn’t penetrate the water. We’d get back for lunch about noon and Charlotte would have been to market, tidied the house and fixed lunch.

Singleton had been pressing for a second dive in the afternoons; but I thought it would look too odd, and Giorgio said that it would bring the air consumption over a twenty-four-hour period up to a point where slow surfacing would be necessary in order to be safe from ‘decompression sickness’. So afternoons everyone sunned themselves on the beach by order. But the following Saturday clouds were flitting around the sun like moths around a candle, and there was a bite in the air whenever the sun vanished. Charlotte said she’d go up to the house and make tea, when I noticed someone walking towards us up the beach. He was a muscular figure, perhaps a little overweight. His black hair was cropped close to his skull and his chest featured more hair than his head. A small gold crucifix dangled from a hair-fine chain around his neck. He wore a small pair of yellow swimming trunks and carried a white towel which he rubbed against his head as he walked. It was only the towel and shorts that marked him as a visitor, for he was tanned to the same ancient-furniture colour as were the local fishermen.

He shouted, ‘Is that a little piece of old England I see there?’

‘Little piece?’ said Charlotte, and she wrinkled her nose and pouted her mouth.

‘Kondit,’ he said, and extended a large, hairy-backed hand to Giorgio, who said, ‘Kondit?’

‘Yes, Harry Kondit.’ He laughed. ‘I’m from the United States – I was hearing that Albufeira had gotten itself some winter visitors. Look, that’s the
end of sunshine for today, why don’t you nice people join me for a drink? I’ll go back to the house and scramble into some clothes and I’ll knock you up in thirty minutes. Knock you up in thirty minutes – isn’t that what you say in England? Ha, ha, ha.’

Charlotte was all for it, of course, and Giorgio seemed keen to break the monotony of handstands. Joe said, ‘He’s a bulldozer, that man; he’s the American I mentioned.’

I said, ‘He’s very nice: check on him.’

The Jul-Bar is the most modern bar in Albufeira. It has plastic, chromium, and mosaic, a G.E.C. refrigerator as big as a phone booth, and an Espresso machine. It is situated half-way down a wide stairway that leads to ‘the Gardens’, which is the main market place and square. As we walked Harry Kondit (‘just call me Harry’) explained to us.

In the market place was a huge ‘transport collectivo’ diesel bus. It had brought farmers and their produce into town. They sat by little heaps of mauve sweet potatoes, green lemons, cabbages, eggs, brown speckled beans and tomatoes.

The black peasant garb is being relinquished from the feet upwards. Few people wear all black, but almost all have a black trilby hat. The old women wear one on top of their head-scarves. A horse with an embroidered harness set with broken mirror and tinkling bells tapped and tinkled past us like a Salvation Army tambourine. Under
the trees local lads kicked their Perfectas and Dianas into angry roars and they cavorted in angry bravado across the steep cobbles.

One passed us with a noise like a Cup Final rattle, and Harry Kondit, who seemed to know everyone in this town, shouted to him, ‘George Porgy – how’s about a drink, kid?’

The little motor bike popped to a halt. On it there sat a white-faced man with a wide moustache and very light blue eyes. He wore the inevitable black trilby with bow at the back, and a grey Spanish-style waistcoat with long sleeves and pointed front.

Almost before the bike stopped he had whirled his hat off and held it across his chest like a shield.

‘Let me do the introductions,’ said H.K. ‘This here is Senhor Jorge Fernandes Tomas. Do I have that right, Fernie?’

‘Sim,’ said Fernie.

Fernie was a thin, neurotic man of perhaps forty years. Although it was late afternoon Fernie was newly shaved, as is the custom in southern Europe. He wore his hair long, and one sideburn half concealed a small scar noticeable around his ear.

‘We’re going to the Jul-Bar, Fernie,’ and H.K. walked on, taking it for granted that he would follow. Fernie propped his two-stroke against the baker’s shop. Through the doorway I saw rosy men, lop-sided loaves and flaming tinder.

We walked up the stone stairway to the café. Brightly painted metal chairs shrieked their protest as H.K. arranged them on the pavement.

H.K. had Charlotte under his wing by now. It took him no time at all to discover that Charlotte had been called ‘Charly’ at school. From that moment on, no one called her by any other name.

H.K. was in no way bashful about describing himself. ‘I said Harry you’ll soon be nudging fifty and what are you? A small-time publishing exec. making twenty-five grand and not much chance of pushing it past thirty. And what are you getting in return? Three weeks in Florida once a year and a hunting trip to Canada if, repeat, if you’re lucky. So what did I do?’

I could see Charly was still converting twenty-five thousand dollars per annum into pounds per week.

‘Were you here in Europe in the Army, Mr Kondit?’ she said, cutting across his narrative with feminine disregard.

‘No, I was not. You remember how General MacArthur told the people of the Philippines “I’ll be back”? Well I was back about eight hours before he was. They weren’t waiting on the beach with dry pants when I hit the surf. No sir. You’re not drinking – I’ll order some more wine! –
Chefe dos mo
ç
os! Estas Senhoras desejam vinho seco.
’

I saw the young waiter catch Fernie’s eye, for, quite apart from the extraordinary pronunciation, he had used pompous phrase-book Portuguese. We got the wine.

We went back to H.K.’s for pre-dinner drinks. He lived a long way down the Praca Miguel Bombarda. It was a simple house with a red-and-white tiled entrance hall. The dark furniture did a heavy dance as we walked across the uneven plank flooring. From the entrance hall one could see right through the house to where the light-grey sea, dark clouds and whitewashed stone balcony hung like a tricolour outside the back door. From the kitchen emerged a smell of olive oil, pimento, cuttlefish, and a wizened woman of sixty who did for H.K. I could detect her feminine hand in the hydrangeas that stood around in terracotta bowls.

‘Hi there, Maria – this way folks,’ said Harry, ‘I’m the only American in the world that doesn’t have an icebox.’ He had fixed the patio with green plants and a parasol. From his balcony one could see the new hotel that was being built. H.K. swirled his drink and looked across at it regretfully. ‘This place is going to be way outside my tax bracket when they get that baby finito.’

Fernie, who hadn’t spoken much until now, asked Giorgio for a cigarette and Giorgio pressed a black cheroot upon him. Fernie’s few words were in clear, fluent Italian, and H.K. noticed me listening. ‘And he speaks German and Spanish just as well as you and I speak our mother tongue, don’t you, Fernie?’ He patted him affectionately on the shoulder. ‘Used to own three boats, Fernie did, but the Government took them away from him. One morning he goes down to the wharf, there’s a padlock on
his office door and two men in grey standing by his boats. No law court – nothing – just seized.’

Singleton said, ‘What reason did they give?’

‘None,’ said H.K.

‘They must have said something.’

H.K. laughed. ‘You’ve not been long in Portugal, sonny. The day the Government hands out explanations is the day after husbands start telling their wives where they’ve been. No sir, there’s nothing like that in this country.’

‘Do you think there was a reason?’ Singleton asked.

‘Me? Now that’s a different thing entirely. Sure it was because Fernie here fought against that son-of-a-bitch Franco in the Spanish business. He was at the siege of Malaga.’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘There weren’t many Portuguese fighting in Spain.’

‘They’ve fought everywhere, these Portuguese,’ said H.K. ‘They say, “God gave the Portuguese a small country as their cradle and all the world as their grave.”’ Fernie Tomas gave no sign of understanding the conversation.

Singleton said, ‘If he fought in Spain I suppose that explains it.’

‘Explains it,’ said H.K., ‘you mean makes it understandable.’

‘In a way it makes it understandable,’ said Singleton.

‘It does, eh?’ said H.K. softly. ‘Let me tell you something, kid. A lot of my buddies were in the
Abraham Lincoln brigade and they weren’t Commies either. They were just guys getting themselves dead so that you wouldn’t have to wear a black shirt and kick in the window of a Jewish candy-store on the way to school.
Nuestra guerra
they call it over there in Spain, but it wasn’t their war, it was his war, my war and, whether you know it or not, your war. It was their war too; the ones that came back Stateside and found a lot of people who’d like to do to them what Fernie’s people did to him – and more. But they didn’t – which was lucky all round – because in 1942 people who would prepare Fascists for wooden overcoats were back in fashion again. So don’t be so tolerant and understanding, you just never know when you might be out of fashion.’ H.K. was still speaking quietly but all other conversation had stopped. The evening Nortrada began to shuffle the leaves of the little palm tree. H.K. touched Singleton on the shoulder in avuncular fashion and said in a different voice, ‘We’re getting a little serious, aren’t we – how’s about another drink? Come and help me fix it, Charly.’

They disappeared into the kitchen. Fernie began talking Italian to Giorgio across the far side of the balcony.

‘What do you know about that?’ said Joe quietly.

‘Ask London for an S.8 on him, and check Singleton again. You can’t be too careful, and that Singleton’s just not for real.’

I watched the waves moving down on to the shore. Each shadow darkened until one, losing its
balance, toppled forward. It tore a white hole in the green ocean and in falling brought its fellow down, and that the next, until the white stuffing of the sea burst out of the lengthening gash.

Charly and H.K. emerged from the kitchen with a big tray of glasses and a jug with can-can girls and
vive la différence
painted on them in gold.

As they came through the door H.K. was saying,’ ‘… it’s the only thing I really miss of the New York scene.’

‘But I’ll do them for you,’ Charly said.

‘Willya really honey? I sure would be grateful. Just one a week would be great. My girl can do the cotton ones O.K., it’s the synthetic fibres that they burn. They have the iron too hot, y’see.’

Then Charly said in a loud clear voice, ‘Mr Kondit – Harry I mean – has made us all a special Martini, and he has got a refrigerator after all.’

‘Now you promised that that would be a little secret between the two of us,’ H.K. said in a mock stern voice, and he pinched Charly’s bottom.

‘That’s an un-American activity,’ said Charly.

‘Oh no,’ said H.K., ‘we still got a couple of things that have to be done by hand.’

Outside, the waves were tripping over, crashing on to and falling through the foamy, hissing scar-tissue of their predecessors. I wondered how long before we would begin doing the same.