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“No, it’s not funny at all,” Nola finally responded.
Canidy saw in the reflection that the captain’s face had tensed.
Nola added, “It certainly wasn’t when I was accused of it.”
He was refueling U-boats? Jesus H. Christ! I should shoot him myself!
“Do I understand you to say—”
“Your government boys impounded my boat out at Montauk last year, about six months after I bought it.”
“‘My boys’? What boys?”
“Your government bureau of investigating.”
“The FBI?”
“Yes. They said that I was using the Annie to run fuel to the German submarines.”
“You’re here now, so I assume you weren’t?”
“No,” he said coldly. “I was not.”
Canidy smelled something different in the air, then realized that it was a warm draft coming from a floor vent. The engines had warmed and were producing heat for the pilothouse. A fishy-smelling heat.
“But they still impounded your boat?”
“Yes. I found out—much later—it was because I had had the boat in the docks at Massapequa, being worked on. When my Annie had been the Irish Lass, belonging to someone else during Prohibition, she was a rumrunner. And when these workers, the ship—what is the word?”
“Shipwrights?”
“—these shipwrights went deep into the holds, they discovered bulkheads that were not right. They removed them and found the large compartments. One had fourteen cases of vodka still in it. I was shocked. But, so what? It is legal to have liquor now. Yes?”
“Yeah.”
“But word got back to Montauk that the Annie had been a rumrunner, and that it had these special bulkheads. Then the story became that the owner of the Annie—who looked Italian and spoke the language like a native—had sympathies to Mussolini and the Germans and instead of running rum behind those bulkheads he was running diesel fuel in bladders to the U-boats. And as everything about the story was true except the part about Fascist sympathies and fuel running, it all became the truth. People believe what they want to believe, yes? And the government took my boat.”
Canidy looked off to starboard and could see in the distance the lights of the military terminal on the western shore of the bay, at Bayonne, New Jersey. Liberty ships were being loaded there, with more in the bay waiting their turn, just as at the Brooklyn Terminal.
“I do not blame them; it’s their job,” Nola went on and gestured toward the ships at Bayonne. “These U-boats are causing great damage to our efforts to win the war.”
He stopped and chuckled to himself.
“Listen to me. ‘Our’ efforts. I am doing nothing. I am not a U.S. citizen. I am only a Sicilian fisherman. And not even that now.”
He turned and looked at Canidy.
“If I could,” he added, his voice rising, “I would blow those bastards and their U-boats out of the water myself!”
Can
idy saw that there was a burning intensity in Nola’s eyes.
Is he trying to convince me of something with this little speech?
“I will tell you something,” the captain continued, his face softening somewhat. “I did not want to leave Sicily. I had to, because of that bastard Mussolini.” He paused. “It is not safe for me there. Mussolini’s men do unspeakable things. And they accused some of my uncles and cousins of being mafia and took them to the prisons on the small islands. It was only time before they accused me of the same.”
Canidy saw that Nola had tensed, his hands gripping the helm tighter.
