George Washington's Ghost

Angela loved the heat, the year-round blaze of colour of the vegetation and the company of their three youngest children – their eldest, Hans junior, commanded a destroyer in the Baltic Fleet, and Gretchen, had married an English archaeologist, and was in Oxford completing her post-doctoral studies in Latin American history – Wilhelm, Karl and Amelia, all now in their teens, all talked of one day using their Foreign Ministry bursaries to go to university in New England and return, if it was possible, to live and work in the Americas.

When the call from his wife was put through to his second-floor office overlooking San Juan Bay, von Schaffhausen had picked up the handset, and trailing the connecting wire, wandered out onto the balcony to enjoy the breeze that sometimes fluttered off the water in the mornings.

The battered, fire-scorched hulk of the SMS Weser, one of the merchant motor vessels secretly taken in hand by the Kaiserliche Marine under the 1971 Naval Estimates, to be converted for commerce raiding in the event of war, was alongside the so-called ‘Liner’ quay about a hundred metres away. The ship was in a sorry state, still leaking diesel from ruptured plates, listing two or three degrees to starboard as her combined Kaiserliche Marine and Royal Navy crew – leastways, the survivors – did what they could to keep the ship afloat and to make emergency repairs.

Further out, anchored in the middle of the bay, the antique Dominican armoured cruiser San Miguel trained her two 190-millimetre, and her casemate-mounted 127-millimetre guns on the still, near-sinking commerce raider.

“How are things this morning, meine Liebe?” The German Minister’s wife inquired with her customary brightness.

Von Schaffhausen guffawed.

“Tolerably dire, mein Liebling.”

“Oh, dear, as bad as that?”

Actually, as was invariably the way of things, now that he heard his wife’s voice on the other end of the typically crackly Dominican line – one of his pet projects had been to bury the current, tangled over-ground telephone network within the Concession underground but there had never been the necessary funds to start the project – things did not seem anywhere near as ‘dire’ as they had a few minutes ago.

Angela had always had that effect on him.

Perhaps, for the good of the Fatherland he ought to have let her go, unsullied to the altar at Trier with Lothar?

No, she would have been wasted on his old friend…

Everywhere they had gone on their travels Angela had been a marvel. Here, her personal project had been to open up and develop the formerly tented ‘fever ward’ extensions to the small German Hospital at La Puntilla, organising the other ex-patriot women, trawling the small, German community for anybody with nursing experience. Inevitably, the Dominicans had refused to help; and even if von Schaffhausen’s requests for medical and humanitarian assistance from German ships in the region, or over-optimistically, from home had ever been answered before, it was unlikely that the blockade of the Concession by sea and land would be lifted to allow such aid in now.

Less than six weeks ago, two great cruise ships of the Hamburg-Atlantic Line had been moored in San Juan Bay, their wealthy passengers filling the grubby, down-at-heel hotels of the Dominican capital, their Imperial Reichsmarks and British Pounds Sterling fuelling the sclerotic wheels of the island’s failing economy. When there was a liner in port the Concession came alive, like that mythical Scottish village, a ‘Brigadoon’ in the tropics. The harbour front bars and restaurants came alive, people from the surrounding villages poured in to sell their wares, not to mention their daughters and sometimes, their sons, to the oh-so-respectable burgers from the German heartland who came to San Juan to party, and to taste forbidden fruits in the knowledge that practically everything was for sale. It was like a never-ending carnival and von Schaffhausen’s job had been to make sure the party never stopped. Mostly, he and Angela picked up the pieces, overseeing the administration and the welfare of the German families living in the Concession.