Darkness into Light Box Set

by Michael Dean

  He had no desire for the company even of the few knokploeg members he respected – Joel mainly, also Lard - Ben for his fighting skill. Robert and Joel had gone for a drink once, to the Kamer Twintig, an unpretentious watering-hole round the corner from the coal shed hideout. A respectful Joel had tried to get Robert to talk about his army career, about the Queen, about Prince Bernhard. But Robert had knocked back beer after beer with jenever chasers, in sullen silence. Neither of them suggested repeating the experience.

  Robert returned to the Kamer Twintig on his own, though - again and again- even to the same corner table. This predictable pattern of behaviour was in wilful disregard of his SOE training, but Robert didn’t care. The evening before they were due to go Schiedam, to steal the limpet mine, he sat there as usual. It was nine o’ clock on a dark rainy night, and he was twiddling his glass of jenever in the bar’s gloomy, tatty interior, one of a total of three customers.

  He picked at the squares of Gouda cheese and mustard, in a saucer. He thought of Charlotte Black. It had occurred to him, many times, to visit one of the brothels along the docks - whores were one of the professions thriving during the occupation. But he couldn’t. He felt as old and as dead as an extinct volcano.

  He imagined himself rotting in a grave, blissfully free of life, buried in a valley, with dead hills his guardians. If he had believed in God, he would have asked God to kill him. But he didn’t believe in God, any more than he believed in anything else.

  The Black Birds. The Black Birds. Dragging himself any further through life was pointless. It wasn’t fear of tomorrow’s operation at Schiedam. Fear would have been a sign of life. He was indifferent to the coming operation, too

  He tried to look back, as there was no point in looking forward: He had hauled himself to the top of the mountain – coming from nowhere to succeed in the army, to become ADC to Prince Bernhard. It was not that there was nowhere else to go, rather that there was nothing left of him to go there – go anywhere. He was finished, dead inside. If he had had any curiosity as to why he was in this state, he would not have been in it.

  As a kind of mindless exercise, the mental equivalent of press-ups, he put up a token resistance to his inner demise: Else Hirschfeld loved him with all her being. That was a minor embarrassment, nothing more. He had a son. Ha-ha! He gave a dry, cackling laugh aloud, at the thought of the sarcastic runt that was Manny. He had work to do for his country – but it no longer interested him. Why not? Don’t know. He didn’t care that he didn’t know. He suddenly jumped up and strode outside, banging too much money down on the counter, as he left.

  Back at the hideout, Joel was out, somewhere. Tinie was sewing, putting the finishing touches to the NSB uniforms. Manny was sitting on the bottom bunk, sketching her sewing. The sight of Manny sketching lit a blazing fury in Robert.

  ‘Come on,’ the father said to Manny. ‘You can’t go to Schiedam tomorrow with no unarmed combat training at all. Haven’t had any, have you? Come on, you little pansy.’

  Tinie looked alarmed. Manny shrugged, put his sketch down and walked over to his father. Robert tripped him and threw him violently on the cement floor. Tinie said ‘Stop it!’ crisply. Manny got to his feet and faced his father again.

  ‘This is how you kill a sentry, silently,’ Robert said, chopping at Manny’s windpipe, hard enough to make him choke.

  ‘Robert, I said stop it,’ Tinie said. ‘That’s enough.’ She stood up.

  Robert ignored her. ‘Try and punch me.’

  ‘What are you trying to prove?’ Manny was gasping, fighting for air.

  ‘Shut up. Try and punch me.’

  Manny stepped forward and swung in an ark. Robert caught his wrist and bent his arm behind his back and upwards, until he yelped: ‘You’re breaking my arm.’

  Robert let him go. He stuck his chin out, without a word, but unmistakeably inviting the punch. Manny feinted with his left, then shot a fast right jab into the side of Robert’s mouth, with all his strength. There was a crunch. Manny thought he had broken Robert’s teeth.

  Robert gave a bloody grin, sank to his knees, then rolled onto the floor, half under the car. Manny thought he was larking about. He just stood there. Robert didn’t move. Then he twitched, oddly. Then he was still.

  Tinie jumped off the bunk, and bent down over him. ‘Manny, I think he’s dead.’

  *

  When Joel Cosman came back to the hideout, moments later, he found Manny and Tinie side by side, holding hands like Hansel and Gretel, standing over the dead body of Robert Roet.

  Joel knelt down beside Robert, then rolled him clear of the car. ‘For Christ sake. What happened?’

  Manny was in shock. ‘I … I … I hit him.’

  Joel was sniffing Robert’s mouth. ‘He’s bitten through his cyanide tablet.’

  ‘What shall we do?’ Tinie said.

  Joel thought for a moment. ‘Get rid of the body. And his clothes. And the transmitter. And his gun. Dump the lot in the canal.’

  Joel opened the boot of the car. He hauled Robert’s body up, under his armpits, with Robert’s head rolling against his chest. Tinie helped him, lifting Robert’s legs by the ankles. They pushed and rolled the dead weight into the boot. Manny stood motionless, watching them, turned to stone by the enormity of his father’s death. Breathing heavily, Joel heaved the transmitter on top of Robert’s body. It bashed his dead face. Tinie helped him pack Robert’s clothes and gun in his rucksack. That was then tossed on the back seat of the car. Joel threw Robert’s false ID to Manny. ‘Burn this.’

  Manny tried to catch it and dropped it.

  Tinie picked it up. ‘I’ll see to it,’ she said.

  Joel got into the driver’s seat of the car, then waved to Tinie to pull the lever on the wall, which activated the hydraulic system. The machinery whirred smoothly; the car rose up. When the ceiling was in place again, Tinie heard the car start up, above them, and pull out of the hideout, taking Robert and his worldly effects away to be thrown into the canal. Manny heard nothing, saw nothing. He felt cold.

  *

  The four-man knokploeg team set off for Schiedam on a moonless night. There was Manny, Lard Zilverberg, Ben Bril - replacing Robert - with Joel Cosman driving. All of them were in NSB uniform.

  A cover story had been unexpectedly easy: Manny had spotted that this month marked the tenth anniversary of the founding of the NSB - the Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging, the biggest Nazi party in Europe, outside Germany. Manny, Lard and Ben were senior officers in the Amsterdam NSB, going to Rotterdam for a celebration. Joel was an NSB chauffeur.

  Getting enough petrol for the trip had been the main problem. Manny had solved it, making use of his inside knowledge of Hirschfeld’s life. They had sneaked into the compound where his official car was kept overnight, and drained the petrol tank. So Hirschfeld was helping a resistance operation, albeit unwittingly. This gave Manny much gleeful pleasure.

  To the knokploeg, Manny talked of Hirschfeld as a Nazi, even though he knew his Uncle Max had his own resistance contacts, and that he was in touch with Gerbrandy’s government in exile. Once, a while ago, he had asked his mother if the Nazis were aware of Hirschfeld’s resistance links. She had shrugged, which he assumed meant yes.

  There were two bottles of champagne in the back of the car, ostensibly to celebrate the great NSB anniversary. Cheekily, there were also a few copies of Volk en Vaderland, the NSB newspaper. Manny and Lard, the two in the back, had opened a bottle of champagne, and were passing it backwards and forwards, swigging from it. Occasionally, they passed it to Ben, in the front. Joel had also taken a swig or two, while driving.

  The road-block, on the main Amsterdam-Rotterdam road, was just north of Leiden, reminding Manny of his sunshine days as a law student. There was a makeshift barrier, with a couple of Maréchaussee - Dutch gendarmes - standing at it.

  Joel had their forged ID cards ready. He waved them arrogantly out of the wound-down window as he slowed to a crawl. One of the gendarmes s
ignalled the car to halt, but saluted when he saw the blue flashes on the NSB uniforms. The gendarme gave the ID cards a cursory inspection, handed them back, then saluted again, before waving the car on.

  As they pulled away, Manny’s tenor voice rang out with one of the anti- NSB songs which had made its author, a certain meneer Van Atten from Rotterdam, one of the most popular men in the Netherlands:

  May I ask you one sad question?

  Did you know about the tenth of May?

  Did we Dutch stand hard against the Germans?

  Or did you go missing, on that day?

  Did the young men of the Netherlands,

  Fight against the German fire.

  Or did you go and hide your head,

  In next door’s farmer’s barn, instead?

  Never a great one for subtlety, Manny then lowered his NSB uniform trousers, seized the front page of Volk en Vaterland, and wiped his arse on it.

  ‘Oy!’ Ben Bril protested. ‘That stinks.’

  ‘I know!’ Manny shrieked back. ‘It’s an NSB newspaper.’

  They all burst out laughing. Manny’s laughter was particularly wild, obliterating not so much the death of his father, or even that he had been its unwitting instrument, as the death of the hope that one day his father would love him.

  He took another huge swig of champagne, then launched into Van Atten’s song about Rost van Tonningen. But the others had had enough. The massive Lard folded him in half and sat on him, until he promised to put his trousers back on, and stop singing.

  They were expecting another check outside Delft, but none materialised. They took the Vlaardingen- Hook-of-Holland road toward Schiedam, by-passing Rotterdam. When they reached the docks, Manny used his sketch to give directions to Joel, to the gate he had used last time. Joel eased the car past it, turned into a side street, then into another, smaller one, where there were no lights, and parked against the kerb. He switched off the car’s lights. They sat there in silence. It was black as a Nazi’s soul, and death still.

  Joel Cosman looked at his watch. ‘Five past twelve,’ he announced.

  Manny had it from Johnny, the communist contact, that the first tour of the perimeter by sentries was at half-past midnight. ‘We could go in,’ Manny said. He was breathless.

  Joel shook his head. ‘Wait for the sentries,’ he said. Then he put his head on one side and went to sleep.

  Manny looked at Lard, wide-eyed. Ben Bril shrugged. The sound of Joel breathing filled the car. At twelve twenty-five, Joel woke up. ‘Wait there,’ he said. ‘I’m going to check they’ve gone past.’

  Joel slipped off into the darkness. At quarter to one he still had not returned. ‘We should go after him,’ Manny said, his voice high with panic. Lard shook his head. Ben Bril said ‘No’, softly.

  Five minutes later, there was a soft tap on the rear window. Manny screamed. Ben Bril swivelled his broad shoulders and grunted. Joel opened the driver’s door. ‘Idle bastards were late,’ he said. ‘But they’ve gone now.’

  ‘Moffen?’ Ben Bril asked.

  Joel shook his head, in the darkness. ‘Nah. Dutch police. The SD Manny saw must be daytime only. They were armed, though.’

  ‘Surprising,’ Manny muttered. The Dutch police had been disarmed, but maybe they made an exception for night-guards on installations.

  Manny led the way to the gate. It was higher than he had remembered it. And there was barbed wire at the top. Joel nodded at the three strands. ‘Someone’s cut it,’ he said. You could just make out that all three strands had been cut in the middle, with the two halves pushed together.

  ‘Communists?’ Manny whispered.

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘How did they know when we were coming?’ Lard said.

  ‘They didn’t. They did this after Manny’s visit. Nobody spotted it.’ Joel cupped his hands together in front of his groin. ‘Up you go, Manny,’ he said.

  Manny put a foot in the stirrup of Joel’s cupped hands. Joel straightened, lifting him effortlessly to the top of the gate. Manny hauled himself over, pushing aside the strands of cut barbed wire, and dropped down on the other side.

  Lard helped Ben, then Joel, up and over the same way. Lard, as by far the biggest and heaviest, stayed on watch outside the gate.

  Manny led Joel and Ben to the shed where the munitions were stored. There was no sign of a guard, or any other activity, inside the perimeter of the docks. The Prinz Eugen was a huge black mass, in its dry dock.

  Joel took out the burglar’s key Robert had made from piano wire. He applied Robert’s training – from the criminal arts part of the SOE course – which Robert had passed on to the knokploeg. The padlock on the shed yielded quickly. Manny led them to where the depth charges and the limpet mines were. He had imagined, a million times, that the refit may have finished - that they might have been put back in the Prinz Eugen. They were still there.

  ‘Take a depth charge as well?’ Ben Bril murmured to Joel.

  Joel Cosman shook his head. ‘One limpet mine’s enough to blow the Armenius to hell.’

  He lifted the mine and grunted – it was clearly heavier than he had expected. ‘OK let’s go.’

  Joel was clutching the limpet mine to him like the breastplate of a medieval suit of armour. Its concave centre piece ran down his sternum, its wings stuck out uncomfortably from his chest, just within the ambit of his arms. The long fuse dangled from the bottom and trailed on the ground. He led the way outside, walking flat-footed to spread the load. Ben closed the padlock on the shed behind him.

  Joel staggered back toward the gate with the limpet mine, gruntingly accepting Ben’s offer of help when they were about half way there. They arrived back at the gate, with the bulk of Lard Zilverberg pacing on the far side of it.

  ‘Help me up to the top of the gate,’ Manny said. ‘Then hand the mine up to me.’

  Joel nodded, breathing heavily. Ben Bril picked Manny up bodily, lifting him first from under both armpits, then pushing him up with a hand excruciatingly in his groin. Manny sat astride the top of the fence, taking plenty of cuts from the barbed wire, despite the communists’ cutting it.

  Ben mimed to Joel to make a springboard by bending his knee. This Joel did and Ben jumped on it, holding the limpet mine above his head and throwing it over the fence, in an incredible feat of strength. Manny, at the top of the fence, helped it over. Lard Zilverberg broke its fall, though its weight sent him thudding down onto the pavement.

  Manny jumped down. Ben then helped Joel over. At the third attempt, he managed to pull himself to the top, then jumped down. Lard and Joel manhandled the mine back to the car. It just fitted into the boot, but stuck out enough to stop the boot lid being closed. They discussed using the side-roads back to Amsterdam, but decided to chance it.

  Joel had the one working pistol the knokploeg possessed. He resolved to shoot his way past the gendarmes at the roadblock on the way back, if necessary. But their luck held. It was nearly three in the morning by the time they reached the outskirts of Leiden. The road was deserted, the control point abandoned. The gendarmes had gone home.

  *

  Else had been released from her cell at the old Colonial Building, after three days – when Rauter was finally convinced that Tinie had left her flat in Batavia Straat, and would not return.

  It was obvious to Rauter, and even to the rabid van Tonningen, that neither Else nor Hirschfeld knew where Manny and Robert Roet were. So Hirschfeld, to van Tonningen’s fury, was allowed to return to work, as if nothing had happened – especially as they required the detail on factory production for Giskes’ plan to trap RAF bombers.

  Hirschfeld produced what was required of him immediately, and sent it over to van Tonningen’s office. He made no attempt to dissemble or mislead - he was too frightened. He feared that the days when he could work against Rauter or van Tonningen were gone forever.

  He guessed that Peter Lambooy had got wind of his narrow escape. Either that, or reporting directly to Rauter, as th
e NSM Director of Production was openly doing now, gave him a greater sense of his own power. At any rate, Lambooy clearly felt he had established a mastery over the Secretary General, even though Hirschfeld was, in theory, considerably senior to him.

  This new dominance was signalled by the frequency of their meetings, by who called the meetings, and above all by the venue. Lambooy summoned the Secretary General to his office at the docks whenever he felt the need. Hirschfeld dropped everything and obeyed the summons. He had become Lambooy’s creature - Lambooy’s victim.

  Lambooy’s Jew.

  Lambooy had managed to establish, in the collective mind of the Occupying Authority, that blame for the sabotage-induced production delays on the Armenius - his own area of responsibility – lay with Hirschfeld. The excuse for these frequent meetings was that an ongoing anti-sabotage operation was in hand, periodically reviewed.

  The Director of Production had identified workers, particularly among the skilled fitters, who could be persuaded to turn informant, in exchange for a large bribe. The men who had sabotaged the Armenius’s propeller, the easiest of the saboteurs to identify, had confessed under torture. They were shot. The incidence of casual, ad hoc sabotage – grit in the engine oil, material going missing – had been greatly reduced.

  Hirschfeld was still resisting having specialists sent over from Germany to oversee work on the ship, fearing that once Dutch autonomy in production was breached, a flood of German supervisors would take over everything. On this, at least, he had so far prevailed over Lambooy.

  New propellers had now been fitted, and the Armenius had resumed sea-trials. Although she was not yet seaworthy, she was due to be officially launched at a ceremony presided over by the Reichskommissar for the Occupied Territory of the Netherlands, Dr Arthur Seyss-Inquart.