The Water Market

Chapter 1: Seized Cargo

The Carlotta Bay died the way most merchant ships died in 1942—not from torpedoes or mines, but from paperwork.

She was a Liberty-class freighter, eleven thousand deadweight tons, carrying crated aircraft engines and powdered milk from Norfolk to Freetown. Her captain, Arthur Haskins, had routed her close to the Moroccan coast to avoid the wolf packs running the mid-Atlantic, and for three days the gamble held. Then her number-two boiler cracked a tube and she limped into Safi with her starboard engine barely turning.

Safi was Vichy French.

The harbor pilot came aboard smiling. The customs officers came aboard smiling. The naval officer who presented Captain Haskins with a detention order came aboard smiling widest of all.

"A formality," the officer said in English polished to a diplomatic shine. "Your vessel carries war matériel. France is neutral. You understand."

Haskins understood. He was a tall man, lean as a heron, with the kind of posture that suggested his spine had been installed by the Bureau of Standards. He had been at sea for twenty-six years and held a commission in the Naval Reserve. He understood that neutral meant whatever the man with the gun said it meant.

"My crew will remain aboard," Haskins said.

"Of course," the officer said.

By nightfall, the crew was ashore.

Thirty-one men stood on the Safi dock in the thin February rain, their seabags confiscated, their wallets emptied into envelopes that no one would ever see again. They were merchant mariners—engineers, oilers, wipers, able seamen, a cook, a steward, a radioman, and a morphine-addicted ship's doctor named Peter Mallan who kept his hands in his pockets so no one would see them shake.

And there was Eli Dugan.

Eli was listed on the crew manifest as an ordinary seaman, which was technically true in the sense that he had signed articles and could tie a bowline. Everything else about Eli was extraordinary, though not in ways the Merchant Marine appreciated on paper.

He was thirty-four, medium height, with the compact build of a man who had learned to make himself small in crowded rooms. His face was forgettable by design—brown hair, brown eyes, a jaw that was neither strong nor weak, features that a witness would struggle to describe to a police sketch artist. This had been professionally useful in Chicago, where Eli had run numbers for Abe Rosen's South Side operation for the better part of a decade.

The indictment had come down in October of '41. Wire fraud, conspiracy, tax evasion—the kind of charges that stuck because they were boring enough for a jury to believe. Eli had walked out of his apartment on Drexel Boulevard with two suitcases and a forged Seaman's Certificate and had not looked back.

He had not looked back because looking back was a habit of men who got caught.

Now he stood on a Moroccan dock in the rain, watching French soldiers sort his crewmates into two trucks, and he was doing what he always did in unfamiliar territory.

He was counting.

Twelve guards. Two officers. Three vehicles, including a command car with a cracked windshield. The guards carried MAS-36 rifles, bolt action, five-round magazines. Their uniforms were sun-bleached and patched at the elbows. Two of them were sharing a cigarette.

Eli filed all of it.

"Where are they taking us?" Nick Fusco asked. Nick was nineteen, a wiper from Bayonne, New Jersey, with dark curly hair and the kind of open, earnest face that made older men want to either protect him or rob him. He had been at sea for four months.

"Interrogation center, probably," Eli said. "Maybe a consulate. They'll sort it out."

He did not believe this.

The trucks were pointed south.

Consulates were north.

"Into the trucks," a guard said in French, then repeated it in broken English. "Into the trucks, Americans. Quickly."

Captain Haskins climbed into the lead truck with the rigid dignity of a man boarding his own court-martial. He sat on the bench, straightened his cap, and looked at each of his men as they climbed aboard.

"We are crew of the SS Carlotta Bay, United States Merchant Marine," he said. "We will conduct ourselves accordingly. No one speaks to the French without my authorization. No one trades, no one bribes, no one begs. We are Americans, and we will be treated as such."

The truck lurched south.

Eli sat near the tailgate, where he could watch the road unspool behind them. Safi's white buildings shrank. The road narrowed. The rain stopped and the land turned brown, then ochre, then the color of old rust.

They drove all night.

By dawn, the landscape had become something Eli had no reference for. He had grown up in tenements and pool halls, in the back rooms of barbershops where the adding machines never stopped clicking. He knew concrete and brick and the particular gray of Lake Michigan in November. He did not know sand that stretched to every horizon like a sea with no water in it.

The trucks stopped twice for fuel from drums strapped to the running boards. The guards let the prisoners urinate by the roadside but offered no water until noon, when a single canteen was passed among thirty-one men.

Eli took one swallow and passed it on.

He watched who drank long and who drank short. He watched who complained and who stayed quiet. He watched the guards and noted which ones avoided eye contact and which ones enjoyed it.

By the second night, three men were vomiting from the heat and the motion. Doc Mallan attended them with the distracted competence of a man whose mind was elsewhere—specifically, on the medical bag that had been confiscated with everything else.

"Where the hell are we going?" asked Teddy Broome, the Carlotta Bay's bosun, a barrel-chested man from Galveston with forearms like dock pilings.

"South," Eli said.

"I can see that. South where?"

"Wherever they need men to work."

Broome stared at him. "Work?"

"There's a railroad they've been building. Trans-Saharan. I read about it in Oran, before we shipped out. The French have been using prisoners to lay track since '40."

"We're not prisoners," Haskins said from the front of the truck. "We're detained merchant seamen. There are conventions."

Eli said nothing.

Conventions, in his experience, were like locks. They only worked on people who agreed to be stopped by them.

On the third morning, the trucks crested a ridge of black rock and descended into a valley that looked like a wound in the earth. Below them, in a shallow depression ringed by gravel flats, sat a compound of wooden barracks, guard towers, and a rail spur that ran south into nothing.

A sign over the gate read: CAMP SEPT — CHANTIER FERROVIAIRE.

Railroad worksite.

The trucks passed through the gate. The Americans climbed down into dust that tasted like chalk and heat that hit them like an open furnace door.

A French officer in a clean uniform and a képi stood waiting. He was perhaps fifty, with a neat mustache and the paunchy comfort of a man who ate better than his prisoners. His name was Commandant Brachet, and he welcomed them in the tone of a hotel manager apologizing for an overbooked lobby.

"You will be housed in Barracks Seven," he said. "You will work. You will eat. You will follow the rules. If you follow the rules, you will be well. If you do not follow the rules—" He shrugged. The shrug said everything the words did not.

Eli looked past Brachet at the camp.

He counted.

Four barracks. Two guard towers, manned. A cookhouse with smoke coming from its chimney. A machine shop with an open bay door. A water tank on stilts, rusted at the seams. And beyond the wire, stretching south along the rail bed, hundreds of men in ragged clothes swinging picks and hauling ballast under a sun that had no mercy in it.

Black men, mostly. Senegalese laborers, he would learn. But also Spaniards, Poles, a scattering of Greeks, and now thirty-one Americans.

"Welcome to the desert," said a voice behind him.

Eli turned. A man leaned against the barracks wall—thin, sun-darkened, with a week's beard and eyes that had seen the underside of too many bad deals. He wore the remnants of a Spanish Republican uniform.

"How long have you been here?" Eli asked.

The man smiled. It was the smile of a card player showing an empty hand.

"Long enough to stop counting," he said. "My name is Rafael Vidal."

"Eli Dugan."

"American?"

"Chicago."

Rafael nodded as if this explained something. "Chicago," he repeated. "Then you know how a racket works."

"I've seen a few."

Rafael looked at the water tank, then at the guards, then at the men staggering along the rail bed.

"Good," he said. "Because this camp is the biggest racket in the Sahara. And the house always wins."

Eli looked at the water tank too.

The house always wins, he thought.

Until someone counts the cards.