The Pitards, page 5
‘Are you still with the Agen?’
‘No. I’ve got my own ship now, the Tonnerre-de-Dieu.’
‘Ach so!’
He wasn’t hungry but he ate the sausages because it was a tradition to eat sausages at that time of day on each of his port calls. Then he caught a taxi to the agent’s office, because he hadn’t been there before.
All shipping agents have the same office, the same counter, the same back lounge and the same bottle of whisky. Lannec encountered the same plump and bald fellow he’d seen in the morning.
‘Well?’
‘You’ll have finished unloading in an hour. There was an extra crane and a crew available, so I put them on the job as well. As for Madame Lannec …’
Lannec looked up sharply.
‘I mentioned her to the police. They wanted to see her to ask for her passport …’
‘Well, it’s perfectly valid …’
‘Yes, it is. Madame Lannec showed it to them. But she declared she didn’t intend to come ashore. As for your bos’n, he’s with a French doctor this very moment.’
All shipping agents have a comfortable armchair for smoking a cigar and drinking whisky while talking business.
‘In addition, I’ve got an offer to make. Are you in a hurry to get back to France?’
‘Tell me what you’ve got.’
‘A big load of railway equipment to deliver to Iceland. About a thousand tons! It’s a big rush, and we first thought of a motor-powered sailboat, but the captain said no because he had a wooden hull …’
‘Hang on. What did my wife tell you?’
‘Not me, skipper. She told the police! She said she had no reason to go ashore. As for the freight, they are offering …’
Lannec downed his whisky in one gulp and cast a longing glance at the maritime chart on the wall showing the vast expanse of stormy sea between Hamburg and Iceland. He could have marked all the places where at that time of year the waves rise up like sheer walls to eight or even ten metres in height.
‘As it’s a rush job, they’re not going to quibble about pfennigs per ton …’
Lannec stood up and served himself a second glass of whisky.
‘I’ll take it!’ he said.
Big pieces of steel make an awkward cargo, because if they’re not well stowed they can make a hole in the hull as soon as the ship rolls. And it was a lousy course to set in November, especially in a boat as narrow as the Tonnerre-de-Dieu.
But so what!
‘When do we load?’
‘This afternoon. I’ll bring the charter party to the boat. The lading will be completed by tomorrow evening.’
He went and had another pint in a bar near the station and finally got back to the familiar surroundings of the harbour. He’d got mud on his shoes, and his hat was wet. The cranes were just finishing the unloading as he went back on board, and the bos’n was back from the doctor and giving Moinard his medical certificate.
Lannec went straight down to the mess room.
‘Campois!’
The sad, scared face of the steward appeared.
‘What did she say?’ the captain whispered as he pointed at the closed cabin door.
Campois took a yellow envelope from under the green baize on the table, where he had hidden it. The message said: ‘I am not leaving. The ship is mine as much as yours.’
That was Mathilde’s reply, and in a fit of anger Lannec slammed his two fists into the cabin door.
‘Mathilde! Mathilde! I need to talk to you …’
Scuffling noises from inside, then the door opened a slit, and a calm figure with a wan face appeared.
‘We’re taking on freight for Iceland!’
‘So what?’
‘You can’t come along with us.’
‘We’ll see about that.’
‘But tonnerre de Dieu, what the …’
The door slammed shut, and Lannec had no choice but to go and talk to Moinard.
‘Georges, old chap, we’ve been offered a golden opportunity: rail wagons in parts for Reykjavik.’
Moinard looked at the smoke-grey sky and the sea that even in the harbour was tossing around like water boiling in a pot.
‘What do you say?’
‘And your wife?’
‘Now do you think I’m going to turn down a bargain just because one of those Pitards …’
He thumped his hand on the desk in the chart house before reaching the conclusion:
‘We’re taking it, tonnerre de Dieu! And that’s her hard luck! As if women were allowed to steer the boat …’
Half an hour later he was in his cabin, wiping the mud off his shoes and giving a good brush to his trouser cuffs.
‘Gilles!’ he called as the second mate came into the mess room. ‘How about a night on the town?’
‘If you like.’
They went ashore together, leaving Moinard to oversee the loading of the freight.
‘I know a restaurant, over here …’
They got lost and spent half an hour finding the restaurant, where they got a table next to the window.
It was here that more than six years ago Lannec had once picked up a short, dark woman as hard as a hazelnut and taken her to the cinema. That’s why he looked at all the women in the place, but they were already taken or paid no attention to the two sailors.
‘Paul’s in love, isn’t he? Of course he is! You can tell me! Whether it’s Marcel or Paul, what difference does it make?’
He was overexcited. He was talking loudly and ordered three bottles of Rhine wine one after the other.
At three o’clock they went for a walk under the colonnade of the Central Station, which with its two rows of shops is always packed with people.
‘How about that one? A pity she’s on her own …’
They needed two women, and half a dozen times they followed pairs of women only to turn around after a while on realizing they weren’t interested.
All the same, that was where on another occasion, last year …
‘There won’t be any fun in Reykjavik! And I can think of someone who’s going to be as sick as a dog on the way there. But tell me, do have you a clue what she’s after?’
They’d already downed three or four glasses of spirits, and Lannec was talking to Monsieur Gilles as a chum. The second mate’s head was buzzing, and his eyes were glazed.
‘No, I don’t.’
‘And nor do I, tonnerre de Dieu! If only she would admit she lied to me! But it wasn’t a lie! I know that Marcel, and I should have guessed there was something going on … Look over there! …’
Two women were passing by and dawdling in front of shop windows. The men took up position behind them. They smiled, and the girls smiled back.
Lannec knew only twenty words of German, but he was fluent in English.
The two couples sauntered from shop window to shop window and finally went into a cinema together.
One of the women was tall and sturdy, with a nice face and a kindly, ironical smile. Lannec chose her. The other woman was shorter and slimmer, with a small, pointed bosom. She couldn’t keep still and kept on teasing Monsieur Gilles, who smiled awkwardly.
They had yet another drink at the cinema bar. Then they went to have an aperitif in a restaurant with live music, just like Chandivert’s.
Lannec was flushed with excitement. He chattered away in a mixture of French and English with his few German words thrown in, whereas his partner, Anna, answered in English.
For dinner, the girls took the two men to a kind of bistro in Sankt-Pauli, and Monsieur Gilles spent half the time on the dance-floor with his new friend.
‘Have you really got your own boat? Is it a big one?’
‘Really big!’
‘Why aren’t you in a uniform?’
Now they were drinking sparkling wine, and Lannec was loudly explaining the difference between German champagne and the real stuff from France.
By midnight they were drunk. In a whisper, Monsieur Gilles begged his partner, who was called Else, to slip away with him discreetly. But she didn’t want to part from her sister, because she claimed Anna really was her sister.
‘All aboard! …’ Lannec thundered. ‘We’ll show you what real champagne is like!’
The plan nearly came unstuck when the women took fright on seeing the dock area that had to be crossed. Monsieur Gilles carried his partner in his arms over the puddles and the mud and nearly fell over.
‘Ahoy there, Tonnerre-de-Dieu!’ Lannec shouted once they reached the plank that served as a gangway.
Campois emerged from the dark and threw a lantern over to him.
‘Lend a hand to these ladies!’
They weren’t at ease until they were on board and they only calmed down in the mess room, where the two men took their coats.
‘Champagne!’ Lannec ordered. ‘And find that tin of caviar that must be there somewhere …’
He stared furiously at the cabin door.
‘Come over here, sweetheart!’
He’d forgotten Anna didn’t understand French. But he smacked a few noisy kisses on her cheeks, any old how, thinking that behind that door Mathilde would go pale on hearing what he was doing.
‘Three bottles! Four bottles!’ he yelled to Campois, who scurried around as if he were the one at fault.
Lannec was dreadfully tired but he clenched his teeth and cast his eyes over Anna with stern determination to find her attractive.
‘Don’t think of holding back, Monsieur Gilles! We’re on our own ship now …’
His small eyes smiled, hardened and smiled again, then he felt like punching down the cabin door.
‘Our own ship, tonnerre de Dieu!’
5
He never needed to be woken up. Whatever the circumstances, Émile Lannec was up at six – and at five, or even four, in the summer. When he opened his eyes this time, he found the cabin light on and himself on his bunk still in his socks and trousers. As he stood up and made his way to the bathroom to slap water on his face, he saw a couple of images in his mind’s eye and was pleased … Gentle Anna kissing him on the mouth in a strangely liquid way and stroking his chest through his open shirt … Monsieur Gilles tottering over to the opposite side of the mess room with the other girl …
He brushed his teeth energetically, rinsed out with mouthwash and to get rid of the lingering taste lit his first pipe of the day. When he opened the cabin door he was wearing carpet slippers without socks, had his trousers askew on his hips and had done up only half the buttons on his workday pea-jacket. It was still dark in the mess room. He stood still for a moment, listened to the sound of breathing and made out a face and a naked female foot.
He walked on with a shrug and went into the galley, where Campois was making filter coffee. He noticed empty champagne bottles and dirty glasses on the sideboard and gave a joyless wink to the steward.
‘Give me my coffee.’
He drank it standing up, half in the galley and half on deck. It was a very cold day. The same workmen’s trams were there as the day before. When daylight broke through the dark air he could make out black shapes scurrying along beside the factory walls and imagined red noses and chilly hands stuffed into coat pockets.
‘Haven’t they started the lading yet?’ he asked Campois on seeing the gaping holds.
‘Something came up, I don’t know what, but they’re only loading this morning.’
Still sleepy men trickled off the forecastle deck to fetch their mugs of coffee. Then there was a noise from below, and Moinard appeared, buttoning up his jacket. He gave his hand to the skipper as he did every morning and refrained from mentioning what had happened during the night. He simply said:
‘We have to be at berth 27 by seven. There were some problems yesterday, but the agent told me that they’ve all been sorted out.’
‘Good! Stand by to weigh anchor!’ Lannec ordered.
He went down and found the mess room in a light as cloudy as the half-empty glasses cluttering the table. Monsieur Gilles had made up his bed on the bench seat and was sleeping with his mouth open and his hand trailing down to the floor. One of the women was using his overcoat as a pillow and the other, lying awkwardly, was beginning to open her eyes.
‘Shake a leg!’ Lannec grunted as he gave them a shove.
He wasn’t even trying to speak German now. He’d also forgotten that the women understood English. His small eyes were hard, and in his work clothes he made such a brutal impression that the women barely recognized their partner of last night.
Anna wanted to go back to sleep. The other girl moaned and asked for a glass of water. Lannec poured it out for her and then pulled them both upright and handed them their clothes in a pile.
Monsieur Gilles sat up in his bunk and looked on the scene with alarm. Like all young men, he was slow to gather his wits.
The girls’ dresses were crumpled, and their silk stockings were twisted halfway down their legs. One of Anna’s suspenders was broken, and the girls’ skin, especially their thighs, looked livid in the poor light.
Lannec popped into his cabin, came back with two 100-franc notes and gave one to each girl. They protested because they wanted marks, but Lannec paid no attention and hustled them to the stairway.
He lent an ear to the noise from the deck. The hawsers were being pulled in already. Less than six minutes after opening their eyes, Anna and Else, still damp from sleep, were back on the cold, grey quayside as the ship’s anchor was winched up.
Lannec went back to the bridge to be with Moinard and took charge of the manoeuvre, but at one point he couldn’t not glance at the two figures lingering on the quay, looking quite pathetic. He nudged his mate with his elbow and tried to smile.
He hadn’t bothered to get to the bottom of what he remembered from the night before and began to wonder whether he’d made love to Anna or not.
‘So where is it then, this berth 27?’
No! As far as he was concerned things couldn’t have gone that far. As for Monsieur Gilles …
‘Dead slow ahead!’
It was a difficult manoeuvre in such a crowded harbour, and Lannec, with the stem of his pipe firmly clamped between his teeth, made it a point of honour to complete it in the least possible time, without any hesitation but not without giving his mate a fright.
Berth 27 came into sight, with wagon wheels, axles and bogeys piled up on the dock, but there seemed scarcely enough room for the Tonnerre-de-Dieu between two Baltic clippers – small ships of 400 tons – that were already tied up.
‘There’s something funny going on,’ Lannec muttered as he leaned over and put the engines in reverse.
He could smell it. He saw five men on the quayside watching the Tonnerre-de-Dieu dock. The shipping agent emerged from the group, came up to the water’s edge, cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted out something Lannec could not understand.
‘Do we stick with it?’
The shore group included the masters of the two clippers, who must have been the ones in yellow clogs. The whole thing looked like a conspiracy. Lannec grasped that at first glance.
‘Just you wait and see!’ he grunted.
He scared the lot of them. He moved abreast the first clipper, almost shaving its side, then abruptly went astern, slipped straight in to the gap and brought the Tonnerre-de-Dieu to a halt at the berth within an inch of crushing the bowsprit of the other boat.
The proof that something unhealthy was afoot was that nobody moved a limb to secure the hawsers until the shipping agent himself took it on. He came on board straight away, waving his arms, in quite a state, and explained in his poor French that the load to Iceland was off the books.
His eyes were puffy and his pupils narrow, but Lannec, who listened to the agent without responding, scanned and rescanned the competitors on shore who seemed to be challenging him.
What was going on was this: the Icelanders who had ordered the railway equipment had specified in the charge sheet that delivery had to be made in the shortest time available, but that, price for price, preference should be given to Danish-flagged vessels, since Iceland belonged to Denmark.
The previous day the Danish consul had learned that the Iceland mail boat would be leaving Copenhagen in five days’ time and would take only six days to do the trip to Reykjavik.
Two clippers had undertaken to get the freight to Copenhagen in time for trans-shipment.
‘Give me five minutes!’ Lannec said to the agent.
It did him good to have an obstacle to overcome. In five minutes he was ready: not in a suit fit for a commercial traveller or a bank clerk, as he had been last night, but in heavy blue twill, with his captain’s cap on his head and stubble on his cheeks.
By ten in the morning Moinard had still not heard from him. The stevedores cooled their heels on the dockside, and the clipper captains paced up and down, glancing now and again at the French tramp with fury in their eyes.
At 10.30 a taxi drew up. Lannec bounded out of it and went up to the agent, who was in more of a state than ever.
‘Load up!’ he yelled even before he got on board.
Game over! He’d won the match. He’d crisscrossed Hamburg from one consul to another and called Copenhagen on the telephone and he was still chomping on a fat cigar he’d been given somewhere or other.
The cranes screeched into action at his signal, and a first carriage chassis with its wheels attached swung through the air and over the hold.
On the other hand, when he got to the bridge he gave Moinard an odd look, and before saying anything, he poured himself a drink, coughed, filled his pipe and fiddled with things that were lying around. He was playing for time.
‘Um, by the way, Georges …’
As usual, the self-effacing tone that Lannec put on and his shifty eyes meant that he’d done something stupid, or at least unwise.
‘Do you know what I did to win?’
As each steel part settled into the hold, the whole ship shuddered, and it seemed the plates of the hull might come apart.
‘Four days to Copenhagen and six days on the ocean-going mail boat made a ten-day trip, plus the cost of trans-shipment. On the charter party I guaranteed we would do it in ten days, with a penalty for each day late.’
