"Thanks," I said. "I might just do that." I reached into my wallet, pulled out a business card that identified me as a columnist for
Shoreline
magazine. Jack looked it over and I said, "Do you have time for a few questions, Mr. Emerson?"
"Jack, please," he said, pocketing my business card and extending a hand, which I quickly shook His hand was dry and wrinkled, and it felt like old paper.
"Lewis Cole," I said.
"Are you planning on doing a story on our little museum?" There was a familiar eagerness to his question.
Here it comes, I thought. Another in a series of the Great Lie, where I get perfect strangers to open to me, to trust me, to answer my questions. The Great Lie I had done on numerous occasions, and it still made me feel like I should wash my hands when I was done. I took a breath.
"To tell you the truth, Jack, I'm just doing some research, some poking around,” I said. “Sometimes it results in a story, sometimes it doesn’t. If you really don’t have the time, I understand.”
He laughed, took out a glass-cleaner sprayer and a roll of paper towels, and started wiping down the countertop. "At this stage in my life, time is the only thing that I have plenty of. Go ahead and ask away."
"Well, are you the director here?"
Another laugh. "Director, exhibit manager, scheduler, tour guide and janitor. All in one. This is pretty much a one-man show, and while being a one-man show means not much in the way of staff discord, it can wear on you after a while."
I looked around the lobby, at the entrance to the displays, and the enormous landlocked submarine out there beyond the parking lot. "Really? I mean, well... "
"I know what you're thinking," he said, wiping carefully from one end of the countertop to the other. "You're thinking that this museum is important, that it highlights the vital military contribution this port has made to the nation and the world, and that a place like this, that honors the men and women who built submarines to defend this land, should be well-funded and well-staffed."
I caught the sharpness in his tone. "One would think."
He put his cleaning supplies back under the counter. "Well, once upon a time, that was the case. When this place opened up, years after the submarine got here, I was on the committee that raised the money and did the organizing. We had a number of volunteers who came in here and helped me out. The fund-raising went well for a year or two. And then things changed. Some of the volunteers moved away, others passed on, and still others got involved in other things. And most of these volunteers were my age or older. The younger generation... well, don't get me started. So we make do with the admission and a few donations here and there. Just enough to keep the place open and pay my magnificent salary."
"It may be small, but there's a lot of good information in those exhibits," I said.
"Ah, so there is, but we have lots more items that I'd love to display, but we don’t have the space for it. We could triple the size of this place and still not have enough room.”
He reached over to a wall behind him and started flipping off light switches, and the
click-click-click
sound was loud in the lobby. "And what brought you here today, Lewis of
Shoreline
magazine? Got a hankering to learn more about Porter and her submarines?"
"A bit," I said, "but I'm also looking to see if you remember a visitor you might have had here a couple of days ago. A dark skinned man, wearing a two-piece black suit, white shirt. He had a mustache. Might have spoken with an accent."
He rubbed at his chin, and I could hear a faint scratching sound as his skin went across his chin whiskers. "No... I'm afraid I can't, but that doesn't surprise me. Most of these days I've been on the phone from the moment I come in to the moment I leave. Tour groups, God help us all, getting ready for their summer season. They call up and say they're going to come, and then they start dickering around. Looking for a group discount. Looking to combine a tour here with a tour at another museum, and couldn't I get a discount for them at that museum as well. Looking for a cheap meal right next door. When it gets that busy on the phone, I hardly even look up. Just take the money and pass over the lapel pin. This guy with a mustache a friend of yours?"
"No, not really."
"Then why the questions?"
"Something I'm working on, something just a bit confidential. Sorry."
He waved a hand. "Ah, don't worry about it. I knew a lot of confidential things when I worked at the yard. Got so that my late wife learned to stop asking so many questions when I got home from work. What else do you want to know?"
"Ever hear of a guy at a shipyard or volunteering here at the museum with a nickname called Whizzer?"
He grinned. "Sounds like a lot of guys my age with prostate problems. We're whizzers all right, clay and night, especially when we've settled down in bed or on the couch. Nope, can’t say that I do. I’m afraid this isn’t being a very productive trip for you.”
Jack ducked into the small office at the rear and came out, struggling to put on a tan jacket while grasping a metal cane in his hand. "How long were you at the shipyard?" I asked.
"Spent ten years in this man's navy, working on the old diesel pig boats. When I got out, spent another twenty years at the yard, following what my dad and my uncles had done, until I dinged up my leg. Got out on disability and puttered around until I joined up here."
He went around the counter, leaning heavily on the cane.
"I've really got to get moving along, if you don't mind. You can walk me out to the parking lot, if you'd like."
"That would be fine," I said.
Outside in the parking lot were my own Ford Explorer and his Dodge pickup truck. With the light growing dim, somehow the
Albacore
looked even bigger. Jack noticed that I was looking at it and said, "One of the first subs I helped build, back in the mid-fifties. You want to hear about secrets. We were all sworn to secrecy when we built that baby, because of the hull design and other new features."
He walked a bit over to the
Albacore
, raised his cane and started using it as a pointer. "All the subs we built during World War Two followed the same design, but this one was radical. It served as a prototype for every type of sub that followed, from the Polaris to the Trident missile boats and the Los Angeles and Seawolf classes. More of a teardrop shape, enables the boat to move faster and quieter through the water. Boy, did she ever. You know, even now, almost a half-century later, the speed and the depths this boat reached are still classified information? Unreal, isn't it."
I joined him, looking at the boat, thinking over what I had seen in the museum that had caught my attention. "Something that strikes me as unreal is that little display I saw, right before the Transitions gallery. About the German U-boats that came here in 1945."
“Ha, yeah, that's a heck of a story, one that still isn't widely known." Jack started walking slowly back to his truck, "You see, back in May ’45, when the war in Germany was over, the U-boats were ordered to surrender. Most did, except for one that went all the way to Argentina. Supposedly there were rumors that that boat carried Hitler or some other Nazi mucky-mucks out, but that story was a load of crap."
"Why's that?"
"For the most part, the Nazi leadership didn't like or even understand their navy. For them to spend months in a U-boat, eating canned food and smelling each other's farts and sweat, no, there's no way they would have put up with that."
We reached his pickup truck, which was rusting and whose tires looked as if they were about a month away from being officially classified as bald. There were two faded bumper stickers on the rear. One simply said, SUPPORT THE PORTER SUBMARINE MUSEUM and the other, THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF BOATS: SUBS AND TARGETS. He unlocked the door and climbed in, and I helped him with his cane.
"The four subs that came here after the war, where did they surrender?"
"On the high seas in the North Atlantic," he recalled. "The U-boats were to surface and announce their location in the clear over the radio, and fly a large black flag, if I recall. Destroyers from the British and the U.S. Navy came by and escorted them here. It was the nearest military port and a good secure place to look things over."
He turned the key in the ignition, and the engine didn't do a thing. There was no clicking sound, no grinding of the engine, not a thing. He looked at me and he was embarrassed. "Damn thing's been giving me fits all month. My idiot son Keith, he promised me he would take care of it, but... damn."
Jack turned the key again and again, and nothing happened.
By now I had found that I liked the old man and his stories, and I quickly said, "Look, if you need a ride, I'll be glad to give you one."
"No, that'll be a bother. I'll give Keith a call and have 'im come up ---"
"I insist, really," I said, thinking about what it must have been like to be young and strong and in the Navy, defending your country, not knowing what your future would be like, probably not wanting to know that you would end up in Porter, disabled and alone, depending on the kindness of tourists to support you.
He nodded, smiled. "I would greatly appreciate that, honestly I would." As Jack got out of his truck, I checked the time, and a relatively fresh promise came to mind, about a drink and conversation.
"By the way, is there a phone around here I can use? I need to call up a friend."
"Over there," he said, motioning with his cane. "There's a pay phone by the doorway."
I left him by my Ford, and at the pay phone I called the offices of the Tyler
Chronicle
, and on the fourth ring I slipped into voice-mail hell, where I had to press numbers and stars and pound keys. It was one minute past five o'clock, and I'm sure the receptionist at the paper I had earlier met had gone out the door about fifty-nine seconds earlier. The fourth time I called the paper I surrendered and got Paula's voice mail, and left a message. "Paula, it's Lewis. I'm stuck up here in Porter for a little while. I'll try you at your apartment. The drink-and-conversation offer is still open, and I should be back in Tyler in a half hour."
I called her apartment, got her answering machine. I left a similar message there, and then hurried back to my Ford.
As we drove through the one-way and somewhat twisting streets of Porter, I said, 'The German subs that came to Porter. Any Nazi officials and bigwigs on those boats?"
"Nope, not at all," Jack said, holding his cane upright between his legs, like an old king holding on to his staff. "Three of the boats were regular attack subs, staffed by kids. I mean, average age of a U-boat captain back then was twenty-one or twenty-two. Can you believe how young all of us were back then? Teenagers, fighting and dying for our country. Now, I can't even t rust my boy Keith, who's almost forty, to remember to fix my truck. Here, take a right at this street."
We were in a part of Porter that looked as if it didn’t get too many tourists. The street was narrow and the homes were old and jammed together in tiny fenced-in lots. This time of the year what lawns existed were still brown and dry. "Okay, that house up there. The small white one."
I pulled into the narrow driveway. The house was two-story but about half the size of my own home. The porch had a sagging couch and a rusting refrigerator flanking the door.
"The fourth boat," I asked. "Did that one have anything special about it?"
"Ah, it certainly did," he said. "That U-boat was one of their big supply boats, and it was headed for Japan. The U-234, I think it was called. On board it had lots of strategic supplies, from electronics to optics to medicine."
Thinking of Reeves and her agency, I said, "Drugs? Like opium, morphine?"
His thin shoulders shrugged. "Who knows. But it was other things on board that got the military here all spun up. A jet aircraft, disassembled and in crates. Plans for the V-One and V-Two rockets. Some mercury. And there were even a couple of Japs who were going along for the ride, who committed hara-kiri out in the Atlantic instead of surrendering. A hell of a story."
Jack reached over and shook my hand. "Appreciate the ride home, Lewis. And if you ever decide to do a story on the museum, or you decide you've got more questions about subs and such, give me a ring."
"That I will, Jack, that I will," I said.
He stepped out onto the driveway and then stopped, stuck his head back in my Ford. "Oh, yeah, one more thing about that last U -boat. The one with all the supplies."
"What's that?" I asked.
"Uranium, that's what," he said. "The boat had several hundred pounds of uranium that the Germans had processed, for their own atomic bomb. With the Allies closing in, they decided to give it to their Axis comrades in Tokyo. Pretty important stuff."
Uranium. Atomic bomb. "I'd say."
He laughed "And another thing. That uranium went missing, right after the U-boat was interned at Porter.
My hands were on the steering wheel and the skin on the back of them started tingling.
"No one knows publicly, and whoever knows privately ain't talking. There was a story in the
Boston Globe
a few years back, about some nuclear-weapons specialist doing a book on World War Two. She was trying to trace all the uranium that we and the Germans and the Japs had, and this shipment from Porter... just went missing. No records of it being disposed, no records of it even existing, except when it was logged in when it came to Porter. Poof. All gone. Just like that.”