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fifty-eight wide, draft of twenty-five feet, single funnel, derricks fore and aft, blunt in the bow, round in the stern, carrying nine thousand tons of cargo—enough to fill three hundred boxcars—with a top speed of eleven knots. On a fair day with a decent sea. They were similar to the eye, and not unlike a thousand others.
    “Are there ship’s papers—for the
Santa Rosa
?” DeHaan said.
    “No point. You could only use them if you’re boarded and, if you are, the game is over. A merchant crew wouldn’t survive interrogation, and there’s too much on the ship that would give it away, under close inspection. However”—she reached behind the driver’s seat and retrieved a soft package wrapped in brown paper and tied with string—“here is my contribution.”
    She untied the string, turned the paper back, and handed DeHaan a ship’s flag—the heavy cotton fabric softened and faded by service in ocean weather. A Spanish flag, the monarchist version reintroduced by Franco in 1939. Two horizontal red bars—blood-red, and not subtle about it—held a wide band of yellow with a coat of arms: between columns, beneath a flowing pennant with motto, an eagle in profile is protected by a checkered shield. DeHaan, from northern Europe, the land of forthright stripes, had always thought it looked like a medieval war banner.
    “Seems well used,” he said.
    “It is.”
    “Did you buy it?”
    “Tried. But, in the end, we stole it. There was a message from Leiden, back in April, ‘Obtain a used Spanish maritime flag.’ Well, it wasn’t to be found in the local souks so we—me and a friend, a trusted friend—took the ferry over to Algeciras for a day. Not much you can’t find there, since the war ended—a single boot, sacred paintings marked with a hammer and sickle, old pistols—but they were fresh out of used flags. So we came back to Tangier, went to the chandler, and bought one. New and crisp, sharp, bright, and wrong.
    “I tried everything I could think of—washed it in lye, soaked it in seawater, left it in the sun for days—but this flag had its pride and it wouldn’t age. Finally my friend said to soak it in bath salts and bake it dry, which led to an amusing fire in the oven and a visit with the firemen. By the time they left, the flag was a little
too
used—which is to say, black.
    “Now Leiden had used the word
obtain,
which left us a certain, latitude, so my friend had a bright idea: yachts. Plenty of them stranded in Tangier and Casablanca, at the yacht clubs, and of course the people who own them, some of them anyhow, give parties. Well, we found the flag we wanted—on a huge motor yacht that belonged to the count of Zamora, known in Tangier as ‘Cookie,’ and pure Groucho Marx. Likely raised some hell in his day but it was probably nineteenth-century hell, because Count Cookie is an extremely old man and doesn’t give parties. But we did get ourselves invited to a
cocktail Amricain,
at a nearby slip, on a yacht called the
Nride,
owned by some Italian aristocrat. This grew into a real party, by the way; caviar in the piano, ice cubes down the cleavage, fan dancing with the drapes—a
very
sporty crowd and they didn’t miss a trick.
    “So, after midnight, I went up on deck for a breath of air, walked back to the pier, went three docks over, and out to the last slip. Only problem was, I had this idiot who’d followed me around all night and now he follows me out to the motor yacht. Definitely a
Mitteleuropa
type, but nave, or maybe just stubborn, because I’m the girl of his dreams. ‘Mademoiselle Wilhelm,’ he says, ‘you are lovely in moonlight.’
    “We’re standing at the foot of the gangway, at this point, and I flirt with him and tell him I want that flag. Must have it. Crazy Dutch artist, he thinks, drunk, sexy, has to have a Spanish flag. Well, why not. So we tiptoe across the gangplank and onto the deck, and lower the flag. And, lo and behold, it’s an antique—the old