Hitler's Boat Read online

  My worry grew as André’s silence prolonged itself. We were watching out for any announcement from the Tass agency about a transfer to the Canadians of one of their own that would have fled through the Nazi lines to take refuge with his wife next to the Soviet heroes. But nothing. On the first of May, at eight in the morning, in the solemn decor of Bruckner’s seventh symphony, Radio-Berlin claimed the fake news of the Führer’s heroic death in combat with the Bolsheviks. On the seventh of May, the new chancellor, the Great Admiral Dœnitz, signed the surrender of the Reich without any condition.

  How could I have known that the first news about André would come from the sea, on board the Helgoland sailboat? Yet, we were alerted when the newspapers reported that the German cutter had beached on reefs in the Chaleur Bay, only to be saved by a Coast Guard duffle-boat up to the harbor in Paspébiac.

  The crew had vanished in the woods, and the police was organizing a search across the whole Gaspésie peninsula, because the boat belonged to the Führer. Built in 1936, it had won the Spanish Cup the following year for a rich Hanseatic ship owner, who then had given it to Hitler as a birthday present. He used it for a few short cruises on the North Sea, abundantly filmed by the Propaganda Ministry, and then stationed it in Kiel, next to the U-Boat, under the responsibility of Admiral Dœnitz.

  During the war, huge concrete fortifications protected it from the Allies’ bombing. And, in May of 1945, the Helgoland escaped ahead of the English troops who could not stop it like they had been ordered to. It headed for the Atlantic, sporting a Swedish flag to pass through the Cuxhaven strait by fooling the enemy’s patrol boats. According to the rumors, it was carrying Nazi high dignitaries to South America. It was believed that its low tonnage would allow it to go up the Rio Ocho, to the capital of Paraguay, where General Julius Strœssner would have welcomed representatives of the Third Reich, even if they had fallen from grace.

  The American government cabled its ambassador in Asuncion, so that she would exercise a discrete watch over the fluvial port. On the off chance that a few local agents were given the descriptions of Martin Borman and Hitler, whose body was still being searched for in vain. You can hardly imagine the commotion that would be created, in August 1945: the apparition of the Helgoland beached in the Chaleur Bay, fifteen thousand kilometers north of the anticipated location. In the same location, I might add, where your father had landed, two years earlier, for a secret mission in Quebec. But this correlation, only Perceval and I would be able to establish.

  Without really believing it much, we were hoping that André had come back to the country with his wife and was preparing to contact us all to organize a meeting with the press and the military organization. As for the policemen, no matter how much they interrogated the people from the village, no one knew which crew had abandoned “the German’s boat” thusly, on its keel, in the middle of the night. A few days after the shipwreck, the body of a German sailor was found at the bottom of a cliff, where a sign now says to the tourists to “let nature follow its course,” so that they are not tempted to rescue the agonizing Northern gannets that have foolishly hit their heads on the rocks. The course of nature, the heart of man, the two rarely ever agree, don’t you think?

  In Kiel, the Helgoland’s home base, the British discovered that an important character, carrier of a Führerbefehl (order written by Hitler’s very hand), had gone to sea with two crewmembers a few days before the German surrender, accessing that the name of the ship did not appear in the departure registry.

  And then there was that phone call. It is possible you might remember that cool evening at the end of August: you were already seven years old. A swarm of wasps had attacked you. I was tending to your stings with a pink ointment that you hated the smell of. Your face swollen, you could barely see or speak. We were talking with Perceval on the porch of the country house that I had inherited from your father’s father (my successive widowhoods require this precision).

  I was holding you on my lap: a woolen blanket shielded us from the cold air that was coming from the nearby river. Beneath the rumble of the rapids, we could hear the blocks of the drive crash against each other in a dry and chaotic rhythm like the gunshots at the end of a fight.

  I showed you the bare light bulb that dangled among the spirals of flypaper. “It’s your grandfather’s dam that is lighting us,” I explained. “But the bastards of high finances stole it from us.”

  “You’ll make a revolutionary out of that child!” Perceval said. He did not know that I was already signed up in the Communist Party and that I was acting deliberately. You had fallen asleep in my arms. Your uncle quietly put down the pieces on the chessboard in the position taken on the fortieth move of a match he was playing against your father for nearly two years.

  When Perceval had “discovered” a code in von Chénier’s speeches and had signaled it to his superiors, he had hidden the existence of another number that announced a gambit of the queen from them. He encrypted his reply, a Sicilian Defense, in the Radio-Canada bulletin that he wrote and that the Canadians were using to communicate with their enigmatic informant.

  Out of superstition, we left the chair empty in front of the black pieces. We would turn on the shortwave radio; the speaker of which covered in green fabric and mahogany marquetry, seemed to be from beyond the grave and not from across the Atlantic. From there, André’s voice came to us, insolent and declamatory; so familiar despite the magnetic distortions. His faraway computing came to move the wooden pieces on the folding table that was still sticky in some places from the strawberry jam you had dropped on it.

  But on that August evening of 1945, Radio-Berlin was not broadcasting anymore. On the usual frequency, we could only hear the crackling of emptiness. The position of the match had not changed in three months.

  At twenty-seven, Perceval was dying from blood cancer, which he kept from me, but that I knew about thanks to his doctor’s confiding in me. In the middle of his emaciated face, already shadowed from inside as if by death, his cobalt blue eyes, slit like almonds, moved with a vigor as intense as his calculations on the white and black squares.

  “I lost!” he said, standing up after a while. “André can checkmate me in three moves. Unstoppable!”

  “Maybe he didn’t see it…”

  “I did!”

  A great sadness then washed over me. The true loser was me, who could feel two sons slipping away from life with a force as irresistible as the one that had brought them to this world through my spread legs.

  It was then that the telephone sounded two brief rings and then the long one that was reserved for us on the line we shared with our neighbors. “Sure… Sure… Right away!” Perceval said in a blank voice before hanging up. It was Captain Dansereau, of the provincial police. He wanted to see him immediately about your father.

  “That boat, the Helgoland, brought us some news,” he settled to say.

  The gold crest with Her Majesty’s coats-of-arm shone on his khaki cap that he adjusted by pulling on the visor. He slipped his whip under his left elbow and crouched to hug you. The copper buttons made you give out a cry.

  “You’re hurting me, daddy!”

  Then, he pushed my chin up with his outstretched index finger and smiled at me saying, “See you, kiddo!”

  Turning his back to us, he left, went down the three rotten steps of the porch, crossed the wet lawn while whistling “Slow boat to China,” then turned right towards his Jeep and disappeared behind the beveled glass encased in the front door that had remained ajar and that a resinscented wind made oscillate on its hinges. The lights went on and momentarily banished our reflections from the window: a forty-four-year-old woman with red hair and who was too thin was holding a black haired boy against her hip; his face swollen by wasp stingers.

  Like in the story of the Holy Grail, Perceval had left his mother to become a knight, or rather to remain one. But at the end of his run, redemption was not waiting for him, only Captain Dansereau who had told him he
had received “guests from Germany” and refused to go into more detail over the phone.

  I only fell asleep in the morning, with Veronal and scotch. It took some time for your cries to pierce through my anesthesia and make way into my nightmares. I put on my bathrobe and ran to the shores of the Jacques-Cartier River.

  A stranger was sitting at the end of the floating quay, legs dangling, shoulders strong, but lurching from fatigue. He was making ripples that made you laugh with a cable attached to the back barge where you were jumping for joy in the middle of the rapids. Only the cable, which he held nonchalantly, was preventing you from following the current and killing yourself on the rocks that were invisible from here at the bottom of that line, where the river comes to an abrupt stop after having passed the dam’s dyke.

  I screamed. He stood up with difficulty and turned around to face me: in his fifties, a wrinkled blue suit with white chevrons, a red tie with white polka dots, browns eyes that did not blink and that were sizing me up without haste from beneath a felt hat that hid them. His massive jaw was biting down on a curved pipe with a Bavarian styled earthen bowl. He pointed it out to me and said, “Nice work, right? A friend from Berlin gave it to me…”

  Contrary to my expectation, he was not speaking German, but French with the accent from the Saint-Roch district in Quebec. He was smoking tobacco that had an acrid smell that remains, to me, the smell of death. I was very afraid for you, of course, because he had just to open his hands with the rope, which he hid behind for you to go and hurt yourself on the rocks in front of your grandfather’s old office; but I also feared for Perceval from whom I still had no news.

  I could feel, the void between the slick and humid planks of the quay under my bare feet. In a hysterical voice, I ordered you to sit. You grumbled but obeyed, and then you started playing with an empty can in the water at the bottom of the hull.

  “That child is soaked. You have to bring him back to me,” I told the visitor.

  “You think so? To raise real men, women are worth nothing… But you don’t have to be afraid of me; I am Captain Dansereau of the provincial police. Sit down, I have some really bad news.”

  “You dirty Nazi bastard!”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, furrowing his brow like someone suffering from a migraine.

  “So you already know… It was a good thing I came for a visit. My German friend was right. He’s a perceptive man. Compliant, but it’s best not to make him brood. Your sons abused his patience. They played a nasty trick on him. So he insisted on expressing his annoyance. First in Berlin… I don’t think you’ll be hosting von Chénier and his wife. And then here, last night, with Perceval… The poor man had an accident. He was driving too fast. He missed a turn near the Éboulements. From the top of a cliff: it is unforgiving. Despite the prevention campaigns we keep multiplying, drivers continue to lack caution. It makes for widows and orphans like you and your grandson… Actually, when I told him about your isolated house in front of the rapids, my friend got worried about the risks of drowning. But I said I would come to give you cautionary advice. And what do I see when I get here? Young Christophe venturing out on the waters, who I’ve just saved, while his grandmother is sleeping off the scotch… Don’t protest. I went up to your room and I smelled your breath just before…”

  Despite the summer sun, I was shivering more and more as that man spoke; my teeth were clattering and my legs were quivering so much that I had to kneel down. Looking satisfied, he tied the cable to a moss-covered pole, emptied his cold pipe in the river and said, after a sigh, “There. I’m leaving you. With the last recommendation of a man of the law: don’t abuse alcohol. It loosens the tongue and impudent ramblings make my friend brood.”

  His steel heels sounded hollow as he made his way back to solid grounds; he passed me on my left, caressed the back of my neck and said I looked “charming like this,” walked away and then came back towards me and gave me an envelope. Since I stayed with my arms dangling, my gaze vacant, he threw it in front of me:

  “The Germans wanted me to give you that.”

  Later, when I had heard his car drive away at the end of the wood path, and after I had brought you back to the house, shivering and suddenly scared, I read the document left by Dansereau. It was written in a gothic character and described three moves by the black chess ponds that, in the match between my two sons, led to a checkmate against Perceval.

  I did not have a choice. I had to keep quiet. I could not expose Dansereau, a policeman beyond suspicion and friend of power, without exposing my own role and accusing myself. At the time, high treason still led directly to the gallows. So I acted surprised – my despair, on the other hand, was entirely real – first when I was told about Perceval’s death, and then when the newspapers published the true identity of von Chénier: this André Chénier, whose family was obviously interrogated.

  I was not ready to risk my life, and yours even less, to prove to a scandalized public, thirsty for vengeance, that my son was in reality a hero. It was soon forgotten that there had been an ally informant working for the Canadian programming of Radio-Berlin. I was happy that the scandal hadn’t stained Perceval, and that I could talk about your “father” whose name of Perkins you would take to protect your true origin.

  Since I was keeping quiet, Dansereau did not worry me any longer. Neither did his threats nor his caresses. Toward the end of the 1960s, when you were starting to serve your sentence, I learned he had died in a particularly horrible manner, which appeared like the only real existing proof of God that I know: he fell into a tank of sulfuric acid during a fight with strikers in a factory of paint products.

  You will find it interesting to know what happened to the Helgoland, the boat on which the “German friend” had come to us. Endless judicial discussions established that since they could not give the sailboat back to its original owner, Canada had to consider it as ‘spoils of war.’ So the navy inherited it, re-baptized it Pickle, and transformed it into a boat school for its cadet officers. It is now rotting in the port of Halifax and there is talk of selling it in an upcoming auction.

  Who was Dansereau’s German friend? I do not know. Forty years later, as I am writing down these lines, all these people are probably dead and buried.

  Together with this letter, you will receive my written will, dated and signed. You will see that I am not leaving much and that I spent almost everything my third husband had left me in the West Indies. Will you hold that against me too?

  Your grandmother who adores you,

  Virginia Perkins

  34 Saint-Sacrement Street

  Quebec

  PART THREE

  NOTEBOOK ONE

  At the age of forty-five, Christophe Perkins received a letter from his grandmother that was like a smack behind the head didn’t wake him as much as it shook him up. And so were explained the mysteries of his childhood: the notes his “father” would scribble down quickly while listening to the radio; the never-ending game of chess he was pretending to play against himself; Virginia’s anger when, later in his teenage years, he dared to condemn his Nazi “uncle” von Chénier. “Shut up,” she had yelled. “You don’t know who you’re talking about!”

  They kept lying to me, Christophe thought on that September morning, as he sat in the front of an outboard motorboat, at the port in Halifax, a month after Virginia’s death. He saw the wheat silos and the oil tanks scroll by in front of the grey city that layered up tone on tone through the fog. Getting farther from the Transportation Ministry’s quay, the office worker–his face dull beneath the bright yellow of his fisherman’s raincoat – sped up, covering the sound of the ringing bells of the buoys with his engine’s backfire.

  “There she is!” The office worker yelled as he pointed to the front. Christophe turned around and in order not to lose his balance, leaned on the bow of the boat that was jumping on the waves. In the brisk wind, his angular face – usually pale – was reddening, accentuating the lightness of his
blond, tussled hair. His teary eyes were studying the Helgoland like one watches a prey. The black mast and the sharp keel formed a cross with their reflection on the oily sea.

  The engine stopped. With a muffled thud; the canoe hit the pleasure craft that was heeling portside quite a bit.

  “You’re taller than I am,” said the office worker. “You go first.”

  Christophe pulled himself up on the bridge and tied the rope he’d caught to a cleat. With the glow of a flashlight, they visited the flooded hold of Hitler’s old yacht; the water, which was seeping through the poorly caulked planking, was up to their thigh boots. But they did not find any major water entry. The unusual fairing material – tempered steel – alone revealed the ship had long ago belonged to the Kriegsmarine before carrying Dansereau’s German friend to Canada.

  Had the killer left any trace of his passing?

  The engine, though, dated back no more than ten years, as with the autopilot, the radar and the UHF device. The Helgoland, Christophe thought, would only be seaworthy after long and costly repairs, but hitting the shell with his screwdriver proved that beneath the thick layer of algae and seashells, the timber was still good.

  “I’m buying it!” he told the office worker.

  Back in the office of the port’s management, he closed the transaction by paying the twelve thousand dollars the Canadian Marine was asking for. “Half of the pitiful fortune Virginia left me.” Then he returned to his hotel, the Duke of York, which cigars used to stink out ages ago.