“That may be so,” Kuhlmann responded, “but I speak English only to a moderate degree, and I want to be certain that the exact words I ask to be spoken . . . are the words actually coming from my translator’s mouth. Do I make myself clear?” And just like that, before the submarine ever sailed, Ernst Schneider had two enemies on board.
Schneider did not stand as the commander entered the mess with his under-lieutenant. “Gentlemen,” he said, “join me.”
Kuhlmann never met Schneider’s eyes. He went instead to the coffeepot and slowly poured Josef, then himself, a cup. Only after taking a sip of the bitter liquid did he motion for Josef to sit down. The commander offered nothing—coffee or a nod of recognition—to the party’s official observer. After another swallow, he finally looked at the man and said, “Yes?”
Not intimidated in the least, Ernst Schneider removed a notepad from his jacket pocket. “Commander Kuhlmann,” he began, “I have asked you and your translator to join me as I construct my report on our latest enemy contact.” He leaned forward and dramatically poised his pen above the paper. “Could you explain, please, why the crew of the freighter Gertrude was warned before the attack, at significant risk to this vessel I might add, then not only allowed to go free, but given our own precious provisions and directions as well?”
Kuhlmann seemed to consider the question. “Because it’s my wife’s name?” he answered.
Josef snorted, stifling a laugh as Schneider quickly looked from one to the other. “Pardon?”
“Gertrude is my wife’s name,” Kuhlmann said slowly as if explaining something to a child. “I thought it only fair that we not shoot her too quickly.”
The two men stared at each other unblinking until Schneider, at last, slowly leaned back in his chair and closed his notebook. Placing his pen back into his jacket pocket, he said, “I am pleased that you find this a source of amusement, Commander. I assure you, my superiors will not. Look here, you placed this vessel in jeopardy . . .”
“No, you look here,” Kuhlmann interrupted. “At no time was the 166 in danger. The target was identified as unarmed and lightly crewed. As for allowing the men to go free, what would you have me do, shoot them in the water? The freighter’s crew are noncombatants. The freighter’s supplies were the enemy, not the men. And giving two canteens of water and compass bearings was the least a decent human being could do. Certainly I hope the Allies would do our merchant seamen the same courtesy.”
“The Fatherland is at war,” Schneider growled back. “I am confident the Führer does not desire courteous U-boat commanders.”
“Do not forget who is in charge here, Mr. Schneider. You are overstepping your bounds. I make the decisions on this boat. Only my judgment determines the methods utilized in the prosecution of a target.”
Schneider calmly stood to leave. “Perhaps it is you who are overstepping the bounds, Commander Kuhlmann. Do not forget, I have been briefed on the mission as well. As the official party presence on board the U-166, I am sure that you are aware of my authority to order mission changes according to the coded messages I will be receiving on this voyage. Do not play with me, Commander. You may disregard my bark, but you’ll find my bite eminently worse . . . and occasionally final.”
As Schneider stalked haughtily from the mess, Kuhlmann’s shoulders slumped. Josef, who had not spoken a word during the entire encounter, gave his friend a questioning look. Kuhlmann spoke quietly. “He is right, Josef. Not morally, of course, but in accordance with the wishes of the High Command. We are to take no prisoners and leave no man to oppose the Fatherland ever again.”
“Why don’t you do as they demand?” Josef asked, though he knew the answer.
“I must live with myself after the war. My children must be able to look their father in the eye. I fight for my country, Josef, not for the psychopath who has kidnapped her and turned her into a whore.”
Though Josef agreed, he quickly glanced around to make sure no one heard the words of his friend. “Don’t talk while you are angry, Hans,” he said. “Words such as these will surely get you shot.”
“But I am always angry, Josef. That is the problem.”
To change the subject, Josef asked, “What did Schneider mean when he said he could change our mission? What was that about coded messages?”
Kuhlmann gazed blankly into his coffee cup before answering. When he did so, it was with a suspicious expression. “Again, he is correct, but I do not understand why. Do you remember the day of Hitler’s inspection?”
“Of course. It was less than a month ago.”
“Why were we herded onto the gunboat across the pier? Why do you inspect a U-boat crew on the deck of a gunboat?”
“You told me it was because of the Führer’s security.”
“Yes, this is what I was told at first. However, Admiral Doenitz informed me later, personally, that our mission might have an additional aspect. What that addition was, he did not say . . .” Kuhlmann smiled ruefully and peered at his friend from the corners of his eyes. “. . . and naturally I did not ask.”
“Naturally,” Josef agreed.
“But he did tell me that a special antenna and radio equipment were being added to the U-166 as we stood at attention for Adolf.” Again, Josef glanced around. “So that was the real reason we were inspected on the gunboat. It is insanity. They keep secrets about the boat and its mission from the commander of the boat! The admiral also told me that this swine, Schneider, would be receiving the coded messages and would keep me informed.”
Kuhlmann sighed and stood. Josef stood with him. About to enter the hallway from the mess, Kuhlmann asked quietly, “How are you faring? With . . . you know . . .” He shrugged.
“I’ve thought about killing myself,” Josef responded.
Kuhlmann looked at his friend for a moment without expression. “I don’t blame you,” he said. “You won’t, though, will you?”
“No.”
“Good man,” Kuhlmann said and nodded as the two men exited the tiny room and walked the narrow passageway, each in a separate direction.
CHAPTER 5
July 18, 1942
IT WAS RAINING HARD. IT WAS ALSO SATURDAY, WHICH meant that it was Helen Mason’s morning to open the Hungry Mullet Café. And it was 4:30 AM, which meant that Helen was on time. Helen hated Saturdays. But then, she hated Wednesdays too. And Mondays. And Thursdays and the rest of the week as well. But Saturdays were the worst.
Saturdays meant that Helen had to be up by 3:30 to brush out her hair, put on the smallest possible amount of makeup with which she could still appear to have cared, and slip into the ridiculous white uniform all waitresses south of Virginia seemed to wear. Only then, feeling like a nursing school dropout, would she drive her aunt’s old pickup twelve miles on mostly unpaved roads to unlock a coffee shop that no one patronized until at least 6:00.
The ride in this morning had been horrendous. The driver’s side windshield wiper was not working, forcing Helen to lean over in order to see out the passenger side. It had been raining for two days, and the road from the cottage to Highway 3 was washed out in several places.
She slammed the heavy door of the Chevy pickup and ran through the pouring rain to the café’s back entrance. When she finally got the key in the lock and the door opened, Helen pulled the string to the storage room light and discovered that the electricity was out. At that point, even in a day that is just beginning, any other person might have considered the situation and laughed. Another might have cried, a few would have cursed, but most would have simply trudged ahead, accepting the abuse that life sometimes seems to pile on. Helen Mason, however, had grown so bitter that she barely noticed. She had come to expect the worst. And this morning, like most mornings, she got it. So she merely entered the café, pulled out a chair, and sat in the dark.
Helen was twenty-five years old, a native of Maryland’s eastern shore, and gorgeous when she smiled, which wasn’t often anymore. She was tall and slim with full lips and b
lue eyes. Her blonde hair was silky and curled naturally when it was cut short, as it usually was. She was twenty-two when she met Captain Tyler Mason, twenty-three when they were married, and twenty-four when he was killed.
Captain Mason, an instructor pilot stationed stateside in the Army Air Force, had volunteered to teach a two-week course to a detached wing of the RAF outside London during February 1941. Tyler kissed his bride of four months good-bye for what was supposed to be a brief interlude in their long, happy life together.
The captain arrived safely in Coventry and set about the task of accomplishing his mission. Within twelve days, the entire RAF wing successfully completed the course he taught, and arrangements were made for him to catch a transport back to the States departing a day earlier than he had planned. Before he could board, however, he was killed in a Luftwaffe bombing raid early that morning. Captain Mason’s effects were packed into an army issue, green canvas bag and returned to his widow.
She was inconsolable. Removing her dead husband’s few civilian clothes from their closet, Helen stuffed them into the duffel bag. Out of sight, they were also where she could not smell the cologne that lingered in the collars of the shirts, reminding her of the man she had lost, and continuing to fuel her anguish. Helen’s heartache became a resentment that she nourished like a baby, feeding it a steady diet of newspaper reports and radio broadcasts about the war in Europe. She hated Britain for involving her husband and America for letting him go, but Helen’s loathing rage was reserved for Germany and her soldiers—the monsters who had killed her husband and destroyed her life.
Helen had worked in the army’s main recruiting office in Baltimore, but when Tyler was killed, she angrily refused to go back to work. She was alone in the apartment that had so recently been filled with laughter and love and promise. There were no brothers or sisters to comfort her, for Helen was the only child of an unmarried seamstress whose sole liaison with a furniture salesman a quarter century ago had yielded a child, but not the man’s name. Helen had been raised by her mother until she was fifteen, when her mother, absent often to begin with, simply left one evening and never returned. Helen, thrust suddenly into adulthood, worked after school and evenings scraping together a meager living, determined not to be evicted from the tenement house her mother had abandoned.
Helen’s mother had an aunt who lived on the coast of Alabama. As far as Helen knew, Jean Evans was her only relative. The seventy-year-old woman was a retired schoolteacher, never married, who had worked diligently to maintain ties with her grandniece. As long as she could remember, Helen had received a steady barrage of postcards and letters from Aunt Jean, and she came to treasure the brightly wrapped presents on her birthday and at Christmas.
Aunt Jean had traveled all the way to Baltimore on several occasions after Helen’s mother deserted her in order to build a relationship with the only relative she had left—the young woman who appeared to be having such a difficult time. On several occasions, Aunt Jean even offered Helen the opportunity to live with her in Alabama, but the independent girl always refused and her aunt never made an issue of it.
On the happiest day of Helen’s life, Aunt Jean was at the wedding. She gave the couple three one-hundred-dollar bills as a gift. It was more money than Helen had ever seen. Life, it seemed at the time, had finally turned around for Helen Mason.
Still sitting in the dark, Helen tapped her polished fingernails on the table, wishing absentmindedly that she smoked. At least, she mused, a cigarette would give me something to pass the time. The rain continued to beat a hard rhythm against the café’s windows. I am bad luck, she thought as she sat in the dark. Everything I touch leaks, breaks, leaves, or dies.
Feeling sorry for her grandniece after Tyler’s death, but truly needing help, Aunt Jean asked Helen to move south. The old woman’s chronic sore throat was finally diagnosed as something substantially worse, and so, without much thought, but subconsciously grateful to be needed, Helen gathered everything she owned, including Tyler’s duffel bag, and boarded the train in Baltimore, bound for Mobile.
Aunt Jean met her at the station in a blue 1937 Chevrolet pickup and asked Helen to drive home, which she did, noting much later that her aunt never drove again. Four months after her niece arrived, the old lady died, taking with her yet another piece of Helen’s fragile heart.
In a simple handwritten will, Aunt Jean left Helen everything she owned. This, of course, included not only her cottage and the truck, but in a shocking surprise about which Helen told no one, a cream-colored envelope in the pantry containing twenty-four more one-hundred-dollar bills. On the front of the envelope, in Aunt Jean’s handwriting, were the words: “For Helen with love . . .” She had underlined the word love, and then, beneath that line, she printed:
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night . . .
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates . . .
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley from “Prometheus Unbound”
The light over the back door blinked twice, then came on to stay. Helen stood up and moved to switch on the rest. She unlocked the front door at 5:30 and turned around the Open sign in the window. Helen had two pots of coffee brewed hot and strong at 5:45, just in time for Wan Cooper, the lanky deputy sheriff, who entered the café around 5:50, as he did every day but Sunday.
“Morning, Helen,” he said as the bells clanged against the opening door.
“Good morning, Wan,” she answered without looking up from the cash register where she was counting out change. “Coffee?”
“I’ll get it. You just do your deal. Billy in at six-thirty?”
“Um-hmm . . . as always.”
Billy Gilbert, along with his wife, Margaret, owned the Hungry Mullet Café, a title most people shortened to the Café or the Mullet. The tiny restaurant boasted eight tables in addition to the six counter stools that faced the kitchen and was the only place to get a hamburger south of Foley. Margaret had taught school with Helen’s aunt Jean until both retired—Jean to writing and her cottage, Margaret to the Mullet.
When Aunt Jean died, the Gilberts offered Helen a job. It was a favor to the young woman, prompted by respect for their departed friend and Helen knew it, but still, she appreciated the gesture and, presently somewhat tied to the area as a homeowner, gratefully accepted the position of wait-ress/ cashier/cook. Helen had been employed by Billy and Margaret for almost a year.
She knew the Gilberts needed her too. Billy and Margaret were in their sixties, busy with the café, and though they were not slowing down, both keenly felt the responsibility of their adult son, Danny. Danny was thirty-one years old and had been born with what would one day be known as Down syndrome.
“Hey, Helen,” Wan called from his stool at the counter.
Startled, she looked up and realized she was still at the register by the front door. I can’t keep my mind on anything, she thought disgustedly as she closed the register drawer a little harder than necessary.
“Helen?” Wan tried again.
“What?” she snapped, causing his eyebrows to rise. Immediately Helen shook her head and apologized. “I’m sorry, Wan. I just . . . well, I’m sorry.”
“Hey, no problem,” Wan said. “I was just gonna ask if you wanted me to cook some eggs and toast . . . or put the grits on . . . I’m not being a smart aleck . . .” He was treading lightly now. “I just thought maybe I could help.”
Helen forced herself to smile weakly. “Thanks, Wan. That’d be great. You get some bacon started.”
Wan was almost thirty and had never been married. He had been close a time or two, but for one reason or another, he never followed through. He was six feet tall in his socks, which was how they measured him when he took the county exam for deputy. Soon after Helen had started working at the Mullet, Wan became an every-morning customer, a fact that did not go unnoticed by the Gilberts. Margaret had caution
ed him about Helen’s probable state of mind and intimated that he not be so obvious in his pursuit of the young widow. It was a suggestion Wan tried desperately to keep in mind, but he was smitten. And everyone knew it but Helen.
Before long, the two were seated side by side at the counter, eating the breakfast they had prepared. The rain, still falling in sheets, was obviously keeping the regulars away, and the Gilberts weren’t due for another few minutes.
“So ask me a question,” Wan said.
“What?”
“Ask me a question,” Wan repeated as he took a last bite of bacon. “Ask me anything you want to know about me.”
Helen wasn’t in the mood, but the deputy was a good guy, and she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. “Okaaayyy . . .” She squinted, then said, “Where’d you get your name?”
“Cooper?” he asked innocently.
Helen smirked. “Ahhh, no.”
“Oh, you mean Wan. Well, my mama liked Mexican names.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“But it’s spelled . . .”
“W . . . a . . . n . . . yeah, I know. But she didn’t.”
“But why didn’t someone—your dad . . . anybody—tell her?”
Wan laughed. “You’da had to know my mama.”
The back door opened, letting a gust of wind into the café as the Gilberts, led by Danny, hustled in out of the rain. Helen and Wan stood to greet the wet family, placing their empty plates behind the counter in the open window to the kitchen. “Good morning, everybody!” Danny said enthusiastically as he went immediately to Helen, as he did every day, and kissed her hand. “Good morning, beautiful Helen,” he said. “Hello, Wan.”
“Hey, Danny,” both responded. Helen helped Danny off with his jacket as she greeted Billy and Margaret. She had been apprehensive about their son when she’d first started work at the café. Danny was a large man, and Helen had never been exposed to a person with a mental disability. Once, after observing the fearful expression on Helen’s face as Danny ran toward her, Margaret took the younger woman aside and explained that while her son was physically an adult, mentally he would always exist as a sweet ten-year-old boy.