The Drydock and the Mermaid

About the Book

Jack Starling, a young American, has been in Copenhagen for four months and washes dishes at Divan I, an upscale restaurant in Tivoli Gardens. He has no work permit and his job is technically illegal but no one seems to care that much and he needs the work since he has moved in with his girl friend, Tove Svensen, with whom he is in love, and has no intention of leaving the city. They are a loving couple and incredibly happy. They make no plans for the future but neither wants this wonderful time together to end.  

Along the way Jack strikes up a friendship with the most interesting, urbane, articulate, sophisticated, intellectual person he has ever met.  Pete Sorensen is a drunk and part time psychotic but at one time  was a biblical scholar of repute, a full professor of Asian Studies at Copenhagen University and during the war, now 16 years past, the leader of the most feared anti Nazi resistance group in all of Denmark, The Vipers.

Jack’s  military background as an intelligence operative in the Far East becomes known to Inspector Magnus Johansen, Director of the Copenhagen office of the International Police.  He has Jack picked up by the local police for washing dishes without a permit and brought to his office across the street from Tivoli Gardens. Jack has no idea Magnus was a young member of the Vipers and at that time a devout follower of Pete Sorensen.  In return for maintaining and even intensifying his relationship with Sorensen, who manages to hold down a customer service job at a prestigious international bank in Copenhagen,  between stays at the asylum,  Magnus offers our hero a real job at a nearby shipyard as a ships rigger in the biggest drydock in Northern Europe.

“You mean you want me to spy on him,” says Jack, not too happy with the proposition.

“Something like that,” smiles Johansen.

Jack takes the job, after all it will double his income, and goes to work for Aksel Holmgren who manages the drydock and crew of ten very experienced riggers. He assimilates very well and quickly learns the art of rigging from, as his mates were fond of saying, the very best scaffold hangers on the face of the earth.  He is happy and likes the work a great deal.

It is not long before he finds out that Aksel was also a member of the Vipers working under their leader Pete Sorensen.  He learns that a raid on a Nazi munitions plant in June, 1944 went very badly and all the Vipers, save three, were mowed down by well placed German machine guns.  They were obviously betrayed.  Pete, Aksel and Magnus escaped miraculously by swimming across the harbor and vanishing into the city.

It has always been obvious, to anyone knowing the entire story, that one of these three is a Quisling, a rat, an informer.  But which one?  Sixteen years have gone by and they have each led productive lives, discounting Sorensen’s stays in the asylum, of course. No signs of regret or remorse....that were visible in any event.

Magnus is hoping Pete will reveal something to Jack during one of their drinking sessions at John’s bar.  Aksel wonders why Magnus prevailed on him to hire the inexperienced American who knows nothing about rigging and speaks no Danish.  Pete questions Jack’s judgement in shacking up with a shop clerk with a small farming background. “You can certainly do better, my boy!”

As the story unfolds Jack is drawn deeper and deeper into this dangerous  morass of deceit and camouflaged reality involving car bombs, giant trolls and a hangman’s noose.

About the Author

between stays at the Charleston, South Carolina V.A. Hospital where he underwent seven surgical procedures to remedy a severe case of diverticulitis. Still recovering, he has nothing but praise for the hospital and his surgeon, Dr. Derya Tagge. He writes about what he knows. He was a “spy” during the cold war, a professional politician serving five years as Executive Director of one of the most powerful county organizations in the East, as well as Director of Administrative Law for the State of New Jersey. Tom also spent two years in Denmark working as a ships rigger at a drydock in Copenhagen. He thinks of The Drydock and the Mermaid as his ode to Danmark and her people.