"Right." Enos hurried to obey. He liked extra money as well as anybody.

Dapper in their summer whites, alarmingly neat, alarmingly well shaved, the German sailors looked out of place on the untidy deck of the Ripple, where some of the haddock and hake and cusk and lemon sole that George hadn't yet gutted still flopped and writhed and tried to jump back into the ocean. Blood and fish guts threatened the cleanliness of the sailors' trousers.

"I will give you for six hundred kilos of fish forty pfennigs the kilo," the petty officer said to O'Donnell in pretty good English.

O'Donnell scowled in thought, then turned to Butcher. "Would you work that out, Fred? You'll do it faster 'n' straighter than I would."

The first mate got a faraway look in his eyes. His lips moved in silent cal culation before he spoke. "Two hundred forty marks overall? That makes sixty bucks for… thirteen hundred pounds of fish, more or less. Nickel a pound, Captain, a hair under."

"Herr Feldwebel, we'll make that deal," O'Donnell said at once. Every body on board did his best not to light up like candles on a Christmas tree. Back in Boston, they'd get two cents a pound, three if they were lucky. Then O'Donnell looked sly. "Or, since it ain't like it's your money you're playing with, why don't you give me fifty pfennigs a kilo-you can tell your officers what a damn Jew I am-and we'll throw in a bottle of rum for you and your boys." He turned and called into the galley: "Hey, Cookie! Bring out the quart of medicinal rum, will you?"

"I've got it right here, Captain," Charlie White said, coming out of the galley with the jug in his hand. He held it so the German sailors on the Ripple could see it but any officers watching from the Yorck with field glasses couldn't. The smile on his black face was broad and inviting, although George expected the rum to be plenty persuasive all by itself. He was fond of a nip himself every now and then.