Maelstrom

By Tom Quinn

In the tense atmosphere of the Cold War, John Fisher, a laid-back Australian, lands a job with a shipping line in Rotterdam, blissfully unaware of the concealed financial and political schemes harboured by some of his new friends and colleagues. He soon finds himself entangled in an international scandal involving influential entities, facing relentless pressure from various quarters.

Navigating the challenges of dealing with intoxicated ship captains, irritable harbour masters, and antagonistic customs officers in Rotterdam and Antwerp seems trivial compared to the daunting task of untangling an accounting debacle for his London headquarters. This ordeal culminates in his role as a witness in a fraud trial in Southampton. Amidst this turmoil, a silver lining emerges as he meets and falls for Nina.

However, the stakes escalate dramatically with a murder, thrusting Fisher into a maelstrom of political intrigue

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Mar 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9781035843084

Tom Quinn

Tom Quinn was born in Glasgow in 1948. Leaving school at 15, he worked in a shipping line office for some years, becoming involved in the North Sea Oil industry, at one stage, captaining a barge on the River Clyde. He moved to Rotterdam, the world’s largest port, in 1975 where he continued his career in shipping, making regular trips to other European cities. He returned to Scotland and became a founding partner in a small shipping and forwarding company before emigrating to Australia in 1988. In his time in Australia, as part of his work for the oil industry, he has spent time living and working in Melbourne, Darwin, and visiting Singapore, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. In 2000, he won the HarperCollins Fiction Prize for his first novel, Striking It Poor. Tom is married and now lives in Melbourne with his wife, three children and nine grandchildren. He plays the guitar, reads literature, listens to classical music, and occasionally works as a logistics consultant for a major multinational.

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About the Author

Tom Quinn was born in Glasgow in 1948. Leaving school at 15, he worked in a shipping line office for some years, becoming involved in the North Sea Oil industry, at one stage, captaining a barge on the River Clyde. He moved to Rotterdam, the world’s largest port, in 1975 where he continued his career in shipping, making regular trips to other European cities. He returned to Scotland and became a founding partner in a small shipping and forwarding company before emigrating to Australia in 1988. In his time in Australia, as part of his work for the oil industry, he has spent time living and working in Melbourne, Darwin, and visiting Singapore, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. In 2000, he won the HarperCollins Fiction Prize for his first novel, Striking It Poor. Tom is married and now lives in Melbourne with his wife, three children and nine grandchildren. He plays the guitar, reads literature, listens to classical music, and occasionally works as a logistics consultant for a major multinational.

Dedication

To seafarers everywhere and those who seek adventure.

Copyright Information ©

Tom Quinn 2024

The right of Tom Quinn to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781035843077 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781035843084 (ePub e-book)

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First Published 2024

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Acknowledgement

Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance

– Oscar Wilde

1

FREEZING HORIZONTAL RAIN cut into my face like a knife. April on the coast of Denmark can be bitterly cold.

Halversen was drunk. He was often drunk, as I later discovered. He was the captain, and he was as drunk as a sailor. Russian vodka; guaranteed to blow the top of your head off.

I first met Hans Petter Halversen on board a Norwegian deck-loader in Esbjerg about the start of April 1974. Captain Halversen had stolen a forklift truck, and I was sent up to Denmark to make absolutely, one hundred per cent, sure that we got it back. It was an eight-hour overnight drive from Rotterdam through cold wind and rain. When I confronted him about it, he looked bewildered, Don’t know what you’re talking about, he responded with a look of genuine surprise.

Halversen was tall, very tall, and gaunt, with watery eyes set deep in a big face, crimson from the effects of the North Sea wind and saltwater. He had a vigorous growth of fiery red hair on his forearms, but none on his head. I estimated his age at late fifties or sixty. He invited me into his cabin. Once inside, he had to stoop because was too tall to stand up straight without bumping his bald skull on the deck head.

I’ve just been down on the car deck, I told him. I saw it with my own eyes. Carsten said to tell you to leave it on the ship and put it ashore again when you return to Ijmuiden. He said if you sell it to your pals in Norway you’ll get no more work from us, no more fixtures.

His cabin was an untidy mess. There were books everywhere. We sat down facing one another across a small wooden table. He turned around and fished a half-full bottle out of a tiny cupboard behind him. The sham was forgotten in the face of solid reality. Wasn’t my fault, John, he said. The bloody stevedores left it on my ship. I should charge those careless idiots for the return freight.

That’s not how we heard it, Captain.

The true story was that Halversen had deliberately sailed away from Ijmuiden after closing the stern doors knowing full well that the stevedores’ forklift truck was still aboard. He had personally kicked the protesting driver down the loading ramp a moment or two before driving off. By the time we, in Rotterdam, found out what had happened he had already cleared the harbour at Ijmuiden and was out at sea. Carsten was quite amused. He saw it as a great funny joke.

Halversen raised his eyebrows and shrugged. Fair enough, he conceded. He smiled at me and suddenly affected a free-and-easy air. It was no big deal. Have a drink, matey, he said, offering me a glass of vodka. He had been caught out in a clumsy act of theft, but he wasn’t contrite or even slightly embarrassed. Good old Carsten, he continued. Have a drink, matey. Never mind your Scotch, try this stuff. Bet you can’t get this in Sydney. What in the hell possessed you to make you go to that God-forsaken arse-end of the world?

I was only six months old, Captain. I didn’t know any better.

I was one of the very first. I was, perhaps, the youngest passenger on board the good ship Fairsea when she set out from Naples in May 1949, on her first voyage to Australia.

She had been chartered by the International Refugee Organisation to carry nearly two thousand passengers, including my parents and myself, safely around the world to a new life on a new continent.

Somewhere between Naples and Newcastle, I must have undergone a severe identity crisis, or perhaps my original name just fell overboard by accident. It was Halász János, aged six months who sailed from the Bay of Naples, but it was John Fisher, displaced person, aged ten months who arrived at the Greta Migrant Camp in New South Wales. Perhaps people who undertake long sea voyages as babies catch something from the sea air that causes them to become all romantically maritime and nautical later in life.

By an amazing coincidence, twenty years later, while working for the Australian Department of Customs and Immigration as a clerical officer, I was involved in sorting out some of the international correspondence relating to the m/v Fairsea when she was disabled by an engine room fire 900 miles west of Panama. She was returning from Sydney to Southampton: It was to be her last voyage. The stricken vessel was towed to Balboa.

She had been in the news from time to time as I was growing up. In 1957, there was a big political scare when Hungarian refugees arriving in Melbourne aboard the Fairsea complained about the presence of communist spies in their midst. A few years later, she made headlines again by rescuing a couple of people who had been swept overboard from a French yacht in the Tasman Sea. In her long career, she must have sailed a million nautical miles and carried a million emigrants to Australia.

When I read that she had been sold and was to be towed ignominiously across the Atlantic to Italy for breaking up, I felt a lump in my throat. Her life had gone full circle. It was sad news, like hearing of the death of an old friend. Inexplicably, for the first time in my own life, I suddenly felt abandoned and terribly cut-off living in Australia. Without me ever realising it, the m/v Fairsea had been my umbilical cord, connecting me across time and distance to my natural mother.

I suppose you could say that the shipping business got underway about six thousand years ago. That’s when the Egyptians started building proper wooden vessels that could carry decent amounts of cargo up and down the Nile and out into the Mediterranean Sea.

Until then they only had small boats, more like rafts, made of reeds lashed together.

As Thor Heyerdahl, the world-famous Norwegian adventurer demonstrated in The Ra Expeditions, those reed-built craft were quite capable of going on sea voyages. But serious shipping business only took off when someone designed ships that were powered by oars as well as sails, streamlined for speed with solid decks and raised prows and sterns.

The Rotterdam offices of the Christie Mueller Freight Line were clean and bright and overlooked the Koslighaven. The furniture was modern and of very high quality, expensively framed aerial photographs of the Port of Rotterdam decorated the walls. The ground floor was a warehouse where export cargo was received for measuring marking and palletising. The offices were situated on the floor above. It was always busy and always noisy with the deep-throated roar of hatch motors and deck winches, accompanied by the high-pitched whine of forklifts. There was a constant smell of heavy fuel oil.

The Koslighaven was basically a long rectangular pool of water connected to the main outer harbour and capable of accommodating two large ocean-going ships or four smaller vessels moored to steel bollards on each side. Immediately in front of our warehouse, and on the other side of the basin, were some three-tonne shore cranes, steel giraffes mounted on rails that could move backwards and forwards along the quay to wherever they were needed to load and unload cargo.

Lucas Smit worked in the main outer office. He sat just a few feet away from me on my left. From the windows, directly in front of our desks, we could look out at the river barges arriving from all over Europe and watch them unload or transfer their cargoes onto the sea-going ships.

Lucas was bearded fat and serious; too serious for a man of only twenty-four. He was married to a thin unsmiling girl named Conny. Lucas always wore a white shirt with a badly knotted red tie and looked as if he was worried about something that he would rather not talk about. He had large dark brown eyes matching the colour of his untidy beard and his facial expression reflected his outlook on life, morose, even morbid. Both he and Conny seemed to be thoroughly unhappy.

When he did speak, it was usually to voice a long complaint or make a convoluted justification for something or other that he had done, and he had a way of enumerating everything he said. He would count the salient points off on his short square fingers, one two three as he spoke. He was a contradiction. He seemed to take his work seriously and regard it as very important, but he did very little of it. He had all the charisma of a cold pizza.

Lucas always arrived for work in his big red Opel Rekord, usually a few minutes late.

Nobody knew exactly what Lucas did, but it was something to do with Tomás the fat Spaniard, who owned a café in Katendrecht.

Tomás had a list. Lucas would phone Tomás when he needed more people. For example, on one occasion, a Spanish worker was killed on an American pipe-laying barge in the North Sea. His compatriots were furious and walked off the job complaining bitterly about the lack of safety. According to International Maritime Law, the American company had to repatriate them, and so Lucas chartered an SAS jet to take them from Stavanger back to Barcelona. Tomás was contacted and came to the office with his list.

By the time the plane carrying the first lot of angry and disillusioned Spanish workers touched down at Barcelona Airport, a second lot, their naive replacements, was already through Passport Control and waiting to board the same aircraft to take them to their new offshore jobs in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea.

That was the kind of thing Lucas did. He was also responsible for organising the trucking service to Piraeus in Greece.

Lucas Smit worked for Carsten Ehrentrout, an affable Berliner. I say, he worked for Carsten because Carsten was the general manager and, officially, we all worked for Carsten. In truth, nobody worked for Carsten. We all just did our own thing. Lucas did two things, flesh-peddling, and European trucking.

Carsten was German, which, even as late as the nineteen-seventies, nearly thirty years after the war, should have been an obvious disadvantage in a place like Rotterdam, but everybody liked him enormously. He smiled all the time. He was of medium height and slightly plump. He had brilliant white teeth, a round shiny baldhead and sparking blue eyes behind big square thick-framed glasses. When he smiled, he looked like a Kinderegg. When he tried to be serious, he looked like a professor of moral philosophy. He radiated friendliness. I didn’t know it then, but Carsten was playing a long game, a very long game.

I travelled with him once from Rotterdam, Zestienhoven Airport, to London, Heathrow, and as he reached into his pocket to pay for the airline tickets you couldn’t help but notice that he carried about a dozen different credit cards. They were in a long plastic concertina thing that formed part of his wallet. He waved them about laughing at my surprise. Eeniemeenie-miney-mo, he guffawed, as he stabbed at them with his index finger, making a great joke of deciding which card to use.

You couldn’t help liking Carsten, he thought life was just a ball. He saw every situation as inherently funny and always made you think you were sharing a joke with him. No matter what he was doing, he thought it was hilarious, even as he was doing it. He was always generous to others and especially generous to himself. He lived as if he had oceans of money. He treated his company expense account like a winning lottery ticket. He was constantly amazed at how much fun he was having and was able to have, flying about all over the world, buying new cars, and entertaining friends. Carsten didn’t have contacts and customers, he had genuine friends, and he loved to play at being Father Christmas. He would do anything for anybody.

He had the surprisingly childish sense of humour that one often finds among fully grown-up Germans. Carsten loved simple jokes and would laugh like a drain at the most moronic situation comedies on television then come to the office the next day and insist on telling everyone about them. He was an avid fan of the British comedy, Dad’s Army. He would often stop and listen to barrel-organ music, a common form of street entertainment at that time and happily donate a few kwartjes, twenty-five cent coins. He was about as lowbrow as you could get and still be called a European. On Sunday mornings, he would go out cycling along the dikes with his young son, Theo, and they would come back with their saddlebags full of potatoes that they’d stolen from the polders, just for the fun of it.

Carsten had sudden flashes of inspiration, conceiving fully-fledged commercial projects in a few seconds in roughly the same way that, as they say, Mozart conceived entire symphonies. Mozart only had to write out the music. Carsten only had to implement the lunacy.

We were already busy operating a weekly liner service, shipping steel pipe arriving by barge from Germany, and American oilwell equipment arriving from Houston, Texas, up to Aberdeen in Scotland, but Carsten decided one weekend to start a liner service from Rotterdam to all the little ports in Norway. Just like that. Everything was always full steam ahead with Carsten, he had a blitzkrieg approach to business: No need for research and development or any of that nonsense.

I think Carsten got the seed of the idea from Lucien Van Toren, who just happened to part own a small ship. He came in on the Monday morning grinning from ear to ear and showed me a map of Norway that, I suspect, he’d purchased from his local newsagents on the Saturday afternoon.

Look, John, he said, look, there are dozens of them, all those tiny little ports with practically no roads joining them up to one another. The roads are anyway terrible. Look, there is Hommelvik, and there is Trondheim. Everything goes in and out by sea. It’s the only way. Look, there’s Tromso. It’s anyway an opportunity. Do you know why the Norwegians all like to drive Volkswagen Beetles? It’s because the roads are so narrow that they can’t pass each other, you see, so when they meet one another on the road, the first car must drive over the top of the second one! Ha! That’s a good one. So, you even can imagine it, can’t you? There is no chance for the trucks.

You would think he’d just discovered Norway, the way he was going on about it. It was Erik the Red in reverse; this was Carsten the Green. He was going to teach the Vikings the art of sea freight! Every other shipping company in the North Sea Trade was cutting back, reducing services, economising, but not us, not Christie Mueller.

Halversen was in port that day. He and Nina were there, looking over my shoulder at the map. It might not be economically viable, Carsten, I said, hoping not to hurt his feelings.

We can’t, said Nina, pushing her blonde hair back from her eyes, we can’t even handle the amount of business we’ve got right now. We’re months behind with the invoicing: Negative cash-flow.

Naturally enough, Halversen was all for it. You should cover all the ports you can, he advised Carsten wisely. Always remember that whatever you do, do it wholly and fully and not piecemeal and part: Ibsen said that.

How deeply fascinating, Nina said dryly, rolling her eyes upward for my benefit. She disapproved of her Norwegian compatriot, mainly because of his heavy drinking.

Who is Ibsen? Carsten asked with a puzzled frown. Which office does he work for?

I mean, don’t just play at it, Halversen argued. Do it right. Go in hard. Destroy the competition.

Yes, that’s right, that is what we must do, beamed Carsten. Prima.

It will be a financial disaster, warned Nina with certainty.

Maybe we should get approval from London, I suggested weakly.

Fuck London! Carsten responded with a happy smile.

John is correct, Nina added quietly. We’re not supposed to do anything major without board approval.

But that didn’t stop him. Nothing ever stopped Carsten once he got an idea. If you can measure achievement in the shipping business in terms of fully laden vessels carrying cargoes in all directions, it was a great success. Our competition was aghast, especially old Vermeulen, a local ship owner, whom Carsten hated violently.

2

THE SUPPORT we gained for Carsten’s liner service to Norway was nothing short of a miracle. Harvard Business School had nothing on this guy: How did he do it? He did it by forgetting, for months on end, to send the freight bills to our customers, and then forgetting to follow up and chase them for the massively overdue payments.

Beside his native German, Carsten spoke several European languages with ease. He could talk to me in English while holding the phone on a French conversation and relay the gist of it on another line to someone else in Dutch.

As I said, I think he got the Norway idea from Lucien Van Toren. Lucien was an enigma. Some Dutch people are very tall and thin in an indescribably Dutch way, and, in those days, all the tall ones smoked like chimneys. Lucien was a member of that tribe, lofty and angular, like a suspended skeleton. He smoked incessantly, often lighting a new cigarette with the butt of the previous one. He reminded me of the figures you see in some of El Greco’s paintings, not just tall, but elongated.

In winter, he entombed himself in a black seafarers’ coat with big side pockets and brass buttons which he always kept fastened even when ashore. It hung down below his knees, slightly lower at the front than at the back. He was always coming to see us but never quite making it until the next day. He was always going somewhere, but never actually getting there. No matter where he was as any given time, he was supposed to be somewhere else. Some people have watches that don’t work; Van Toren seemed to have a calendar that didn’t work. He appeared to suffer from angst. He regularly wrote things down in pencil in a small notebook that he carried with him everywhere in the right-hand pocket of his coat. He was immensely antisocial.

Everything about him was incomplete, even his long anxious face. He had a reddish beard, but no moustache, and he wore one earring. The first three fingers of his left hand were stained yellowish-brown with nicotine. He liked to eat raw herring and drink Oude Genever, a strong greenish spirit. I had an unenjoyable, if somewhat surreal, lunch with him once on a canal barge in Antwerp that consisted of mussels and white wine. It was easy to imagine him in a pair of wooden clogs. He walked slowly, moving about like a giant slug, and he spoke as slowly as he walked. He really didn’t belong in the twentieth century.

Lucien Van Toren was morose and uncommunicative. He hardly ever said a word to anyone. Conversations with him were always short, abrupt and strange. He had a stilted and untidy flow of speech, speaking mostly in monosyllables, and you usually found yourself answering in monosyllables. He reduced everybody to one syllable. He used to call me Fish, which was his weird idea of a joke. He referred to Carsten as Trout.

He and Carsten were as thick as thieves. Sometimes Lucien would telephone the office, but he was even less talkative on the telephone and there would be long periods of silence as you waited for him to think of how to say what he wanted in small words, as if long ones would cost more. I think he secretly felt that nobody believed him when he spoke.

Mostly, however, he just dropped in to see us, or rather to see Carsten, the day after he was expected. He really didn’t like using the telephone. I don’t even think he was comfortable with electricity. He knew how to use an abacus. We had a few of them dotted about in the office. I saw him do it more than once, and he was faster than any Arab street merchant, like greased lightning. Slow and calculating with words, but quick with numbers.

He and Carsten always transacted their business in whispers away from the rest of us.

Van Toren would come to see Carsten; they would talk for half an hour and then Lucien would disappear, only to return the next day with a hand-written invoice for several thousand guilders for which a payment cheque would be written immediately.

Once or twice, I caught him looking at me as if he was unsure about how much I knew or what authority I had to ask questions. He rarely smiled. With Lucien there was no bonhomie and mateyness. Everything he did and said was carefully pre-meditated. Demonstrations of good humour were rare and never genuine; with Lucien it was all an act. Everything he did was a means to an end, and he doled out his attentions and kindnesses in strict proportion to how much you could do for him in return.

I could not imagine him loving anyone or grieving over anyone. It would be impossible for anybody to penetrate his thoughts. He went through life pinching and scraping as if he was poor, although he most certainly was not. It was obvious to the rest of us that week by week, month by month, he was accumulating large amounts of money, but none of us could figure out why. It seemed to me that he wouldn’t have had a clue what to do with it.

Marcus Decker, a dark-haired thick-set man in his forties and a regular customer of ours, was visiting the office early one morning. He and I were standing beside my desk drinking coffee, looking out of the window at the shipping. We were talking about a forthcoming export cargo to Libya when Van Toren came into view, climbing up the metal open-tread staircase that led to the front door. It was his custom to mount the stairs slowly, two at a time, and come upon us like an unpleasant surprise.

Dag, Fish. Hoe gaat het? He greeted me as he entered the office. He grinned slightly, shook my hand, without making eye contact, and then stepped back two paces as if to get a better view of my feet. He ignored Marcus, although he knew him.

Good, thanks, Lucien. How are you?

Alles goed.

His lips formed the outline of a smile, there was a short uncomfortable silence, then he asked, Is Trout hier?

Yes. He’s here, I replied. He’s down in the shed.

Ah, okay, in de loods, beneden, he nodded thoughtfully, adopting a serene, satisfied expression, as if I’d just explained the basic idea of the solar system to him and suddenly everything made sense. Then, without saying another word, he turned and slid like an eel down the internal spiral staircase that led from the centre of the main office to the warehouse.

He’s a strange bird, that one, said Marcus, shaking his head after Van Toren