"It's time for the Kapitän to hand out the pennies," said Lt. Brandt. He guided Cadet Markus Pieters by the elbow to the junior officer's position, next to the highest-rated enlisted man.
       "I hope to make more than pennies, sir," said Markus. His mouth felt dry with nervousness, but he forced a laugh, which came out like a strangled bark.
       Lt. Brandt stared at him. The second in command's pale face placed him in his forties, but despite the tradition of submariners to grow beards, the lieutenant was clean-shaven. In fact, he looked incapable of growing a beard. He blushed now, something he seemed to do easily, a red bloom consuming his cheeks. Then he left to assume his position at the head of the line.
       Markus felt his own cheeks heat. Damn it--I need to impress him, not make a fool of myself. His teachers at the Academy had stressed the need to get on the good side of the Wachoffizier during the pre-officer training year serving in the Kriegsmarine. The Kapitän would rely on his second in command when writing the report on the cadet's performance.
       Remembering to close his mouth so he at least didn't gape, Markus leaned his head forward to look down the U-boat. This was his first Sunday morning ritual where the enlisted men and officers lined up down the center of the U-boat from bow torpedo tube to the pocked iron door hiding the boat's stern. Everyone held out a left hand, palm up.
       The smell of sweat from forty-five perpetually unwashed men, of diesel fuel and fried onions, of the single lavatory for the boat that one could flush only on the surface--all this hung in an unholy blend in the air.
       This Sunday morning ritual seemed a strange practice. But then again, the Kapitän was famous for sinking more tonnage and getting out of more scraps than most U-boats, so who was Markus to judge?
       "Kapitän zur See," called out Lt. Brandt.
       The chatter among the enlisted men died abruptly, and the Kapitän came into view at the head of the line. He proceeded down the file of men, squeezing past some as he ducked through the circular watertight doors between compartments.
       The outfitters for U-boats provided only the minimum room for human beings to move, sleep, and perform the sundry jobs of a submariner. All the rest of the hull was taken up by torpedoes, metal pipes of all sizes winding along the decks and bulkheads, wooden lockers, and food storage--crates of potatoes, apples, and canned meat under the sailors' bunks, and bread, cans of ground coffee, and boxes of noodles stuffed into any otherwise unabused empty cranny. All this was bad enough for sailors who had to be locked in the bowels of the boat for months at a time. But the hams and sausages, hanging from the ceiling so that one had to duck and dodge as they swayed, constricted what was a tight, unpleasant space right down into raw claustrophobia.
       As the Kapitän passed each man in the line, he looked at them with his dark brown eyes above a bushy black beard and put a penny in their outstretched hand. The Kapitän had a gold ring on one finger of his right hand, set with tiny blue sapphires and white diamonds. The blue gems formed the image of an iris set into the white of an eye made of the diamonds. Jakhendar, an evil eye ring--Markus's grandmother had told him once of that design. When he had asked her why someone would want to wear an evil eye, she had laughed, said something in Romani, and tousled his hair.
       Markus looked at the penny in his hand the Kapitän had placed there. Just the wartime zinc, silver-colored Reichspfennig.
       When Markus looked up from the penny, he saw the backs of the officers as they hurried off to handle the business of the U-boat. He turned to the enlisted sailor next to him, a tall, dark-haired man with piercing blue eyes. "What do I do with it?" he said, holding up the penny.
       "Keep it or not, sir. It don't matter," the man said.
       A couplet from a poem his grandmother would recite came unbidden to Markus's mind:
       A pfennig or a thaler that you accept from me,
       One year or a hundred, you'll serve as may be.
       He had forgotten those lines. Grandmother Petra had died many years ago. She had been an imposing but quirky woman, insisting that Markus memorize several odd poems that nobody else had ever heard of. She also claimed to see things from the past or the future. Markus didn't believe in all that Gypsy stuff. In any case, he was glad she hadn't been able to see the things happening now--she would have been horrified to hear the rumors of the Reich's treatment of her people.
       Markus sighed. The rumors about the Roma disturbed him, but what could one Cadet do? He would serve the navy with honor and hope what he heard was greatly exaggerated.

       Later that day, after this first penny ritual, the Kapitän took him aside. "Cadet, are you German--I mean, by blood? There is something not German about you."
       Markus felt his heart beat faster. "Pieters is Dutch, sir." He didn't mention that his grandmother was from Slovakia.
       "Hmm." The Kapitän squinted at him silently, then handed him a brass key. The head of the key was shiny gold, but the brass of most of the blade, tip, and teeth had corroded in patches to a patina of mottled light blues.
       "You may open any door on the U-boat," said the Kapitän, rubbing his beard. "But not the lazarette."
       "Lazarette, sir? Isn't that where the stern torpedo tube is?"
       "This model is a throwback to the first war. No stern tube. Remember, you may not open the door to the lazarette."

       Lt. Brandt showed Marcus the workings of the fifty-meter length and five-meter width of the U-boat: dials, valves, innumerable pipes along the walls, and turn wheels to monitor dive plane levels. He showed him how to listen at the Gruppenhorchgerät hydrophone array station to eavesdrop on the rotating crews of merchant vessels up to five leagues away. He lectured Marcus on the G7e torpedoes, which needed to be heated to 30 degrees Celsius for optimal range and speed.
       His first time on a military ship, Marcus wasn't sure what to expect from the enlisted men, but they seemed quiet whenever he was around as if a conversation always seemed to stop when he approached. He asked Lt. Brandt about them, and the lieutenant told him they were dependable men. They were all the original crew from the start of the war--they had never suffered a casualty among the enlisted men.
       "No casualties at all, sir? That makes me feel easier," said Marcus.
       "Yes, among the enlisted men. Now let me show you how to prime the electric batteries for underwater propulsion."

       A few days later, Markus woke at the end of his sleep cycle and left through the curtain that separated the officers' quarters and the rest of the boat. 'Quarters' was a bit lavish for what they really were: an alcove just big enough to house their narrow bunk beds sandwiched between the bulkhead above and the bow battery compartment underneath. He stood in the through passage of the U-Boat, the spine that ran down the center where the men received their pennies on Sunday.
       Something caught his notice down on the surface of the deck. A crude symbol of an eye evidently scratched with charcoal stared up at him. A thrill ran up his spine, and an icy pang stirred in his guts.
       "What is this?" he said to an enlisted man carrying a can of diesel with both hands.
       The man studied the symbol. "Looks like we got ourselves an artist, sir," he said with a broad smile before continuing down the passage.
       Markus knew sailors were a superstitious bunch. Over mugs of cloudy Kellerbier in the evening, Academy instructors talked of odd but benign beliefs, such as blood spilled--even just a nick on the finger--at the start of a voyage granting luck or that turning a loaf of bread upside down was inviting bad luck. But the beliefs ranged to the strange and sinister, too, like the story of the U-Boat that would disappear from under one storm cloud and appear anywhere there was another storm cloud. Or the story of the World War I Kapitän, who was secretly a Gypsy and sold his soul to the devil to gain control over water and air.
       Markus was Roma enough to be annoyed that the most outlandish stories always had a Gypsy selling their soul to the devil or working some dark magic or other. In any case, mastering water and air might have been enough in the Great War, but in World War II there were depth charges. Depth charges definitely surpassed water and air. Markus smiled and walked toward the central command room to find Lt. Brandt for his next lessons.

       Soot covered the lazarette door as if it was the inner door to a furnace. The keyhole to the lazarette was on a shiny, clean panel of iron set in the door below a latch.
       "What is that scratching sound, sir?" said Markus, staring at the lazarette door.
       "Sound?" said Lt. Brandt. "That's the pressure on the hull as we change depth."
       "No, it sounds like scratching from the lazarette. God, it sounds as if something is trying to get out."
       Lt. Brandt raised his shoulders as if in confusion. "The ship makes many strange noises." But he was blushing again.

       On his next sleep shift, Markus woke but found his body incapable of movement. It was pitch black, but he didn't think the light was out--were his eyes locked shut? A faint smell of decay hung in the air. He breathed in gasps. He struggled to open his eyes, to move his arms up, but couldn't. Then at once the pressure left his forehead, and his hands moved again, though opening his eyes showed it was still dark. He scrambled out of his bunk and into the boat's center passage. All was dark and silent. But there, far down the aft of the boat, through the three sets of watertight doors, a light flickered, a light from the open door of the lazarette.
       Markus jerked awake on his cot--for real this time--with his heart pounding wildly. He pulled himself up on his elbows and looked around. Dim light shone through the curtain that was still drawn, and another officer in the bunk above him snored softly.
       Just a nightmare, only a nightmare. He settled himself back down under the blanket and waited for his heart to slow down. Even when it did, he found no more sleep on that shift.

       Sleep still eluded him on the next rest shift. Just when he was about to doze off, he heard the scratching sound from when he was near the lazarette and saw the soot-covered door in his mind's eye in the bunk's darkness. He resolved to wait out his shift and make up the sleep on the next one. So he stared at the bunk above him for a time, walked back and forth on the boat, and returned to the bunk to end the last two hours of the rest shift again, staring in the gloom.
       That day he would drop things, was irritable, had a tremor in his left hand, and of course, was drowsy. But these were nothing he hadn't experienced having to study all night at the Academy for an exam.
       He could not make up the sleep on the next shift, though, as again the scratching sound came, and he saw the lazarette door whenever he started to fall asleep, and he would jerk awake with his heart pounding.
       During his work shift he found it difficult to talk, slurring his words. His mind fumbled ideas. He slipped and fell to the deck more than once, eliciting surreptitious chuckles from some of the men. He dreaded the next sleep shift. When the sleeplessness in it clung to him just like the previous two shifts, he rose at the end exhausted and drunk with fatigue. His ears were ringing, and his eyes burned.
       As he sat picking at a stale bread bun at the table for the officers, he thought he saw a rat scurry from the wall to his foot on the floor. He jerked away, looked under the table, but nothing was there. Stupid, really--there were no rats on a U-boat. Hallucinations. From lack of sleep.
       A memory crystallized in his befuddled mind. A group of students at the Academy made a bet among themselves for who could avoid going to sleep the longest. Laughing and drinking coffee at first, after a couple of days, they were a wreck. One man seemed to go insane. He insisted people were coming to get him and other students had to restrain him from jumping off the top dormitory's tower to his death.
       That is what I have to look forward to. Insanity. Heat flushed through his body, and he ground his teeth in a sudden flare of anger. He threw the bun on the table, stood up, and walked back to the lazarette door.
       Nobody was aft. No scratching noise, no noise at all.
       Calm now, he took the rough key from his pocket and put it in the keyhole, felt the key's teeth catching against the inner tumblers, heard a click, and pulled the ponderous door open by the latch. It surprised him how easily it opened.
       The door to the lazarette was lower than the rest of the aft room outside it, so the light from the room illuminated only the entry. Even when his eyes grew accustomed to the shadows, the room was too dark to make anything out. Some new stench overpowered the normal stink of the U-boat here--the smell of rotting fish at the docks. Did they keep dead fish here? As his eyes adjusted, however, a form began to materialize in the darkness, the shape of a man sitting in a chair facing the door.
       Oh God, someone hiding in there has seen me! Markus's mouth gaped in a wide O for a terrible second as he took this in. Then he clamped it closed, stepped back out of the lazarette, and reached to grab the latch, his hand trembling. But there was his key, on the sooty floor near the door. He stooped, picked it up, and started to pull the door closed, but it got stuck with a metallic screech.
       "Scheisse, Scheisse, Scheisse!" he whispered as he pushed on the door with shaking hands. What was the person thinking who was sitting there watching his panic? Who was it? Markus wondered what had possessed him to look in the lazarette.
       Finally, the door gave in and clanged shut. The lock's noise as the tumblers fell into place was the most beautiful thing he had ever heard, and he stared at the secured lock, his forehead slick with sweat.

       An hour later, he noticed the soot on the key from where it had fallen on the floor also marked his left hand with a black mark on his palm. Water, soap, mineral spirits, violent scrubbing--nothing would remove the mark. Actually, it was larger than before now, an oval that broke only where the fate and headlines intersected in his palm.
       He stopped scrubbing and caught himself in the lavatory mirror. He gaped at the reflection of his bloodshot eyes above deep bags looking back out at him. Again, unbidden, the words came to his mind:
       A pfennig or a thaler that you accept from me,
       One year or a hundred, you'll serve as may be.
       The Kapitän had given him a direct order to not look in the lazarette. He had done so. They might very well court-martial and even shoot him for this. Why, why had he looked?
       Who had been in the lazarette? Who knew he had disobeyed the Kapitän's rule?
       At the next sleep shift, he sat hunched up on the bunk, his mind buzzing. He pulled his pillow over and absently rubbed the corner on his palm. Then he stopped. What was on his bunk, under where the pillow had been? A small dark object.
       He picked it up. The light was good enough to see the hard thing was a cloth-wrapped bundle tied with twine about half the length of his finger. He pulled the twine loose and unwrapped the bundle.
       A smell of rot embraced him. Inside the cloth was a leathery finger bone.
       With a start, he dropped the cloth and bone onto the bunk. He pulled the curtain open with one hand and with the other savagely brushed them off his bunk into the hallway.
       A hex. Someone had hexed him. But why?
       Suddenly the sleep that had eluded him for days beset him, and he crumpled insensible to his bedsheets. When he woke at the end of his rest shift, he felt miraculously refreshed.

       Two days later, it was Sunday. The Kapitän handed out a penny to the officers ahead of Markus and then stopped at him. Markus had both hands in his pockets.
       "Your left hand," said the Kapitän.
       After two days of scrubbing and washing, his left hand was pink, the skin cracking and flaking, but still, the stubborn black mark had refused to disappear. Markus removed his trembling hand from his pocket and held it out, the oval mark clear.
       The Kapitän stared at his palm. Then instead of a penny, he took a Reichsmark from his pocket and put the larger coin in Markus's palm. The Kapitän moved down the line, handing out pennies.
       "Looks like someone got a bonus," an enlisted man whispered to another.
       "The Cadet's got it," another said. They seemed more at ease after this, joking and laughing amongst themselves.
       Was this a hazing thing? Had they accepted him into their band of brothers? The hex under his pillow must have been part of the hazing. But now, nobody would meet his eye, not even the officers, and a scarlet-faced Lt. Brandt told him that his duties would be to attend the Kapitän until further notice.

       For the next week, Markus followed the Kapitän on his duties. The Kapitän liked to stand watch on the surface at night on the bridge. He, Markus, and two enlisted men would scan the moonlit horizon for the dark glimpse of an unlit ship. Markus had slept regularly since he had entered the lazarette, his mind sharp and his body relaxed.
       Mostly the Kapitän told him to just stand by and watch or do menial work that an enlisted man could do just as well. Markus wondered now if he was expected to learn command by watching the Kapitän. Perhaps he was being groomed for promotion. He had shown initiative in entering the lazarette, hadn't he? Submariner Kapitäns were an independent lot--they didn't just follow orders and hope to be successful. Maybe the key was a test.
       Who or what had been in the lazarette, though? It didn't make sense that the Kapitän would have a sailor sit in there waiting for days. Then he had it--back at the Academy, one student liked to sneak out of the dormitory at night to visit Kiel's taverns. Several students played a prank on him by stuffing some clothes with rags and topping the dummy with a visor cap that looked like the officer cap that the strict prefect liked to wear. They propped the dummy against a window in the adjoining room, right above the thick vines that served as a way to climb to the student's rooms. The pranksters were rewarded with a scream one night and the moonlit sight of the angry student extracting himself from a bed of tulips under the window.
        The Kapitän must have left something like that dummy in the lazarette, but with dead fish mixed in with straw for the smell. Markus smiled. At least I didn't have to fall into a tulip bed.

       A week later, they were standing watch on the surface under a full moon when Lt. Brandt came up the bridge ladder to bring the Kapitän an intelligence report. Despite the two enlisted men next to them, they discussed the message from High Command. A large British convoy had slipped out of a U-boat net the German Admiralty had set. The convoy would reach its port within a few hours. Only their U-boat was between the convoy and the port's safety.
       "Kapitän, the destroyer screen is thick," said Lt. Brandt. "We do not have time to set up a safe approach. The ocean here off the coast of England is too shallow to get below the thermal layer."
       "Take us near the seafloor at full submerged speed towards the screen. That will present minimum profile as we approach."
       "That will let the fox into the chicken roost, sir," said Lt. Brandt, his wide eyes glowing white in the moonlight. "But how will the fox get out again?"
       For a long moment, the only sound was the waves slapping the boat's sides. "The fox will get out of the roost," said the Kapitän. "You know how."
       Markus noticed one of the two enlisted men looking at him. Markus tapped his own binoculars, and the man turned back to scan the distance.
       Dread settled over Markus. His heart was racing. This must be the normal fear before battle, he thought, and tried to pierce the darkness with his binoculars.

       They got past the screen of destroyers, and the fox ran from hen to hen, leaving a bloody trail.
       "Cadet, take a peek," said the Kapitän, and he stepped away from the battle periscope. Markus sat on a little chair in the tiny room, the Commander's Control Room, a hatch port away from the Central Control Room below them and the immersed bridge above. He stood and looked through the periscope.
       Though it was still nighttime, it looked as though it were daylight, there was so much burning from the freighters. Sheets of flame leapt into the air amid tremendous billowing smoke above four sinking freighters--the Kapitän had fired all four bow torpedo tubes at different targets, and not one had exploded prematurely, missed, or been a dud.
       After a couple of seconds, the Kapitän pressed him away and shouted, "Down scope. Cadet, climb down into the Central Control Room. Stay next to Lt. Brandt at all times."
       Under the Commander's Control Room, squeezed in the room's corner to avoid impeding the com officers and steersmen, Markus heard the Kapitän's orders from above as he guided the U-boat to avoid this destroyer or that one. The Kapitän clearly was a master of his craft. But though Markus didn't understand what was happening, the number of pings from the destroyers' ASDIC sonar readings grew in frequency until they were unrelenting. The men's voices as they repeated the Kapitän's orders sounded strained and anxious. The depth charges rang out like thunder as they got closer and closer. One depth charge exploding close to the boat could crumple the hull like paper and send them all to their deaths.
       An explosion roared near the ship, and paint flecks fell around them. A lightbulb aft in the cabin popped and went out, casting everyone's faces in a half shadow.
       A blond sailor with a bleeding gash above his right eye stuck his head into the cabin. "Kapitän, the starboard electric motor is out, and water is gushing in through a hole in the bulkhead over the electric motor controls."
       "Sir, the boat has lost half of its ability to maneuver," said Lt. Brandt.
       Markus did not know how they could hope to escape. Then he noticed the other men in the cabin looking at him. Whispers. One petty officer pointed at him.
       Should I do something? What do they expect from me?
       Hands seized both his arms. A sailor on both sides and the Kapitän behind.
       "We have no choice. The lazarette," said the Kapitän, carrying a lit lantern, the oily smoke pouring up out of the glass.
       The sailors on each arm forced Markus down the passage to the stern. Many light bulbs had shattered, giving the boat a nightmarish gloom. Acrid smoke stung Markus's nostrils. Between an exploding depth charge's crack of thunder and the rocking of the boat, an eerie silence descended in the darkness, broken only by coughing or the groaning of a man holding his head. No alarms rang to help the destroyers on the surface find them.
       In the compartments before they reached the lazarette, the Kapitän's lantern illuminated face after face, some bone white, turned up towards the top of the boat, many rapidly stroking their beards. One man clung his hands together in a tight knot, eyes closed, rapidly whispering a prayer. Many sailors caught sight of Markus and followed him intently as he passed. One man held out something--a flash of silver in the light--a penny.
       At the lazarette, the Kapitän opened it with his own key. He stepped in and set the lantern on a hook that dangled from the ceiling.
       In the three-by-three meter room, a desiccated corpse sat in a chair facing the door against the far stern wall. On the leathery and cracked skin of its face, the corpse had a full white beard that spilled to the floor. Its hands, resting on the armrests of the chair, had long, twisting fingernails like obscene claws. One finger on the right hand had a gold ring set with the same evil eye design as the Kapitän's. A dark loop perhaps of leather tied the corpse's jet black hair in the back in a single ponytail, which then trailed out to the floor. Human skulls and bones lay on the floor around the room. The corpse wore a Kapitän's uniform that had been out of style since the end of the First World War.
       Markus gasped and felt his stomach run cold. The sailors clapped shackles onto his hands and feet, chaining him so that he sat on a space on the floor, his back propped up against the front legs of the chair with the seated corpse behind him.
       "Leave us," said the Kapitän, and the two sailors bolted out of the lazarette, leaving Markus and the Kapitän alone with the seated corpse.
       "Kapitän," called Lt. Brandt down the length of the boat. "We are running out of time."
       "It must be done right," yelled the Kapitän back at him. Then he turned to Markus. The Kapitän had a long knife in his right hand, the kind that hunters would dress a deer with. It looked ancient. In his left hand he held a brass bell by the stem, similar to the bells used in church. "Cadet Markus Pieters. You opened this door of your own will, and so you must make your bed here evermore."
       The shackles bit into his wrists as Markus strained against them. He was panting, and as he opened his mouth to beg for his life, the words came again, the words from his grandmother's poem:
       A pfennig or a thaler that you accept from me,
       One year or a hundred, you'll serve as may be.
       "What?" said the Kapitän, the knife poised. "What did you say?" Then the Kapitän's eyes widened, and he shrank back.
       Markus turned his head back and saw the corpse's arm, the leatherlike skin furrowed with dusty cracks. The arm raised above the armrest, a twisted forefinger extended.
       "Wait," whispered a voice that sounded like the rasping of a furnace bellows, though the mouth of the thing did not move.
       Markus could feel the Kapitän's eyes on him.
       What were the next lines? Markus tried to remember as the seconds ticked by, marked in double time by Markus's beating heart. The corpse's arm lowered.
       Then Markus had it:
       Windward and leeward the shores you must go,
       From jungles of Brazil to snow of Sapporo.
       The dead arm raised again. There were more lines--almost a pressure in his mind to say them, but he held them back.
       Another depth charge detonated almost upon them. The Kapitän fell across Markus, and the lantern above them swung madly, causing jagged shadows of the bones and skulls to play across the floor. The Kapitän scrambled back to his feet.
       A pfennig or a thaler, that you accept from me,
       Bound to my service by the turning of a key.
       "Kapitän, our steering is out. They can straddle us," yelled Lt. Brandt.
       "You paid the price for glory in your war," said the Kapitän to the corpse. "Now I have a covenant for glory in mine." He faced Markus. "Your crimes have been seen, and so you will be forever unseen. I commit you to the dark watcher of the sea." He shook the bell, a rich peal ringing out, and in a violent motion he brought the tip of the knife toward Markus's chest. Markus clamped his eyes shut.
       He expected the piercing of the knife, but instead, he felt only a pressure over his left shoulder. He peeked from under his lids. The corpse was now leaning forward over Markus, its hand clamped on the Kapitän's arm, preventing the knife from stabbing Markus. The twisted nails of the corpse were cutting into the Kapitän's arm, blood trailing down toward his hand holding the knife.
       "Must remember," came the corpse's whisper. "It calls me. The sea."
       Markus continued:
       Windward and leeward the shores you must go,
       Bloodless bones on board with the hungry sea below.
       One more couplet left, but did the corpse already know the last two lines?
       The Kapitän was jerking his arm back, trying to free it from the dead arm that held him.
       "Incoming depth charges, Kapitän." A hoarse voice from Lt. Brandt, who stood at the door now, his normally blushing face bone white for once. "They will be right on us. We are dead men."
       With his free hand the Kapitän groped for the pistol holstered at his belt. Then his hand clutched the weapon, aiming it at Markus.
       At the deafening crash, Markus thought the Kapitän had shot him, but when he opened his eyes, it was black, and cold water was pouring over his legs. Acrid smoke stung his nose, and screams rang out all along the boat. A man nearby yelled, "Mutter! Mutter!"
       "Finish." In the darkness came the whisper in his ear despite the alarms blaring and the screams.
       Markus coughed, the smoke strong now. "Save me first," he said, and then another explosion deafened him, and cold water slammed into his body, and he couldn't breathe. He lost consciousness as the water vibrated, an underwater buzzing sound seemed to come from everywhere, a white underwater light shone nearby, and the water rapidly warmed.

       "He's awake." The voice spoke in English.
       Markus opened his eyes. It was dawn, the sun rising above red clouds. He clutched at his wrists. Painful flesh, but his shackles were gone.
       "Easy there." Two British sailors leaned over him. "You were the only one we could save. The war's over for you."
       They helped him up and let him lean against the railing on the port side of the destroyer, the side facing away from one remaining unsunk freighter, black smoke trailing out of it.
       When he had heard their depth last, they had been sixty meters deep. There was no rational way he could have survived.
       Markus remembered what his pockets held, and he fished them out. He held out the sooty key in his right hand, and in his left was the Reichsmark, its zinc surface stained with a single blot of dried blood.
       Staring at the black sea, Markus said the last two lines of the poem, his voice rough and unnatural, sounding like someone else's:
       A pfennig or a thaler that you accept from me,
       Your blood or the blood of others must spill upon the sea.
       He dropped the key and mark in the water. The still air came to life for a moment and moved across his cheek. The wind made a whisper, then died away.