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seamed with black lines where cuts and blisters had healed over coal dust. There were a few communists, some secret, some not, supposedly on Hitler’s side since the pact of 1939, and a few who didn’t think the Nazi doctrines were all that wrong. But, in the end, they were all sailors, who couldn’t leave the life of the ships because they were—and they would say it just this way—married to the sea. A hard life, seen from the shore, brutal and dangerous and, often enough, mortal. Even so, it was in their blood, and it was the only life they wanted to live.
    Kees stood by DeHaan’s side as the men broke ranks and headed for their inspection stations. Taciturn and reflective by nature, he made no comment, but for a single interrogatory puff of pipe smoke whipped away by the wind.
    “There’ll be an officers’ meeting in the wardroom, before lunch,” DeHaan said, answering the puff.
    Kees nodded.
Just not enough trouble for some people in this world, they have to go looking for more.
He didn’t say it out loud but he didn’t need to—DeHaan understood him perfectly.
             
    1830 hours, Villa Cisneros.
    DeHaan had anchored
Noordendam
well out in the bay. She could have tied up at the deepwater pier but her master chose, perhaps, not to pay the dockage fee—penny-pinching always a credible motive in the world of tramp steamers.
    “Ever been here?” DeHaan asked the AB steering the ship’s cutter. There was a chill in the desert air as night came on, and he pulled his leather jacket, sheepskin-lined, around him and held it closed.
    “Can’t say as I have, sir.”
    “Seems quiet,” the other AB offered.
    Benighted, maybe, or, better, godforsaken.
But seamen tended toward diplomacy with officers present. A thousand souls in the town, according to one of DeHaan’s almanacs. Well, maybe there were, hidden away in a maze of bleached walls and shadows, but, from just off the pier, the place was deserted.
Not much of anything, in Rio de Oro.
Four hundred coastal miles of sand and low hills, and abundant salt, which they sometimes exported—a last tattered shred of the Spanish Empire. But, a neutral shred, and that made it useful.
    They tied up to a bollard on the pier and, as DeHaan climbed the stone stairway to the street, a desert wind, smelling of ancient dust, blew in his face. Eight months earlier, on a street in Liverpool, he’d discovered the same smell, had puzzled over it until he realized that it rose from the foundations of old buildings, newly excavated and blown into the air by
Luftwaffe
bombs.
    It was only a minute’s walk to the Grand Hotel Cisneros—Leiden had told him where to find it—which turned out to be three stories high and two windows wide, a stucco building that had been white at the turn of the century. The lobby seemed vast—a high ceiling with a fan, black-and-white tile floor, dead palm tree in a yellow planter. The clerk, an elderly Spaniard with the face of a mole and a wing collar, stared at him hopefully as he came through the door. In one corner, Wilhelm, in Barbour field jacket and whipcord trousers, was reading a book.
    He greeted her, his words echoing in the empty lobby. From Wilhelm, a crooked grin—clearly they couldn’t talk here. She rose and said, “My car’s just out the back.”
             
    DeHaan didn’t envy much in this world but he envied Wilhelm her car. It was parked in a small square behind the hotel, between a 1920s moving-company truck and a Renault sedan, a flock guarded by a mustached shepherd in a sheepskin vest and hat, with a rifle slung diagonally across his back. Wilhelm handed him a few dirhams, which he tucked away as he inclined his head by way of saying thank you.
    “It’s wonderful,” DeHaan said. A low, open sports car, weathered by sand and wind to the color of chromatic dust—probably green if you thought about it, with a tiny windscreen, a leather strap across the hood, bug-eyed headlights, and the steering