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bastard must have had it from before the civil war. And, of course, he hears us, or someone in the crew does, because just about the time we get it unclipped, somebody yells in Spanish and we run like hell, laughing all the way.
    “Now this is a big flag, and, even folded, it can’t go back to the party, so we run to his car, a Lagonda, of course, put it in the trunk and he drives me back to my studio, an old garage, where I have a headache and get rid of him. An hour later my friend shows up, worried sick, thought I was in jail, but we drove right past the guard at the gate of the club.”
    It was dark on the hilltop and very quiet, a lean slice of waning moon had risen just above the horizon.
New moon on the twelfth,
DeHaan thought. Which was why the operation was planned for that night, and, if it didn’t go, would have to wait for June. “We shouldn’t stay here too long,” he said.
    “No, you’re right.” She set about starting the car.
    “I’ll send a boat for the paint,” he said. “Tomorrow morning.”
    “I’m in Room Eight.”
    DeHaan folded the paper back over the flag and retied the string as the engine started. “Thank you for this,” he said.
    “My pleasure,” she said. “Fly it, ah, proudly?”
    “I suppose,” DeHaan said. “Might as well.”
             
    0920 hours. Rio de Oro Bay, off Villa Cisneros.
    DeHaan used the chartroom as his office. A bank of teak cabinets filled one wall, with wide drawers that held charts for the seas of the world. Such seas might fold, in the right storm, but not the charts.         There was desk space atop the cabinetry, with calipers, pencils, chronometer—all the paraphernalia of navigation. One door led to DeHaan’s cabin, the other to the deck.
    The AB Amado, prompt to the minute, knocked politely, two diffident taps on the door. “Yes?” DeHaan said.
    “Able Seaman Amado, sir.” This in English.
    “Come in.”
    He was a shaggy man in his late thirties, with a mustache and a slight limp. There were three Spaniards aboard the
Noordendam
—one was a fireman, and barely verbal, a second, eighteen years old, served as cook’s assistant and messroom boy. The third was Amado, formerly a ship’s carpenter on a Spanish tramp, who’d signed on as an AB in Hamburg in 1937. Which meant less status, and less pay, but this was a rescue and Amado was happy to be alive.
    “Please sit down, Amado,” DeHaan said, indicating the other high stool pulled up to the cabinets. “A cigarette?”
    “Please, sir.” Amado was sitting at attention.
    DeHaan gave him a Caporal and lit it, then lit one of his little brown North State cigars. DeHaan had boxes of them, but he could only hope they would outlast the war.
    “The speech yesterday,” DeHaan said. “It’s been explained to you?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “And that’s all right?”
    Amado nodded. He took a deep drag of the Caporal and let the smoke out slowly, turning one hand to an angle that meant he wanted to say much more than his English would allow. “Yes,” he said. “Very much.” DeHaan saw that he was one of those men whose fire had been banked to an ember, but that ember was carefully tended.
    Amado now told his story. DeHaan already knew most of it—from the bosun, who served as petty officer and father confessor to the deck crew—which was just as well, because the conversation was hard work for both of them, though the story was simple enough. When civil war came to Spain, it also, in time, came to Amado’s ship, a Spanish ore-carrier hauling chromite, from Beira, in Portuguese East Africa, to Hamburg. As they neared the German coast, somebody called somebody a name and a fistfight started, which grew quickly into a brawl between Republican and Falangist crewmen—red and black neckerchiefs appearing like magic—then spread to the officers, except for the captain, who locked himself in his cabin with a loaded shotgun and a demijohn of rum.
    In a matter of minutes, the