by Mal Peet
The major turned to face them at last. “What is this woman’s name, Dr. Lubbers?”
“Bib . . . Mrs. Barbara Grotius.” The name came out indistinctly; his jaw somehow got in the way of his tongue. His mouth tasted of salt and something metallic.
“Grotius?”
“Yes, Major.”
The German considered the name, and Dart realized that he was wondering if it sounded Jewish.
“Her husband is the dwarfish man downstairs?”
“Yes.”
The major looked directly at Bibi for the first time. “And what is her problem? What are you treating her for?”
“Mrs. Grotius has a leg ulcer.”
“Ulcer?” The major did not seem to know the word.
“An open sore that refuses to heal,” Dart said, then thought, Dear God, is he weird enough to want to see it? He tried to think. It was like scaling a cliff when all you want is to let go and fall. A voice in his head said, Ask about the ear.
“How is your ear, Major? The scar tissue seems healthy, from what I can see.”
“It is satisfactory. It is taking a long time to heal; my wounds always do. But there was no infection.”
“Good.” Dart attempted a smile, which hurt. “We got to it in time, then.”
The pale stare hardened.
Oh, shit. I’ve gone too far.
The crunch of boots on broken glass, and then the corporal’s voice came up the stairs. The major turned away from Dart and went to the door. Then he looked back. “I would clean myself up a bit, if I were you, Doctor. You’ll frighten your patients if you turn up looking like that.” Something like a smile made a brief appearance on his face. “You will have some bruising, I think.”
“It’s nothing, really.”
“I regret your injury. The corporal overreacted, perhaps. My men are operating under unusual pressures at the present time.”
Dart had no idea how to respond. He found himself nodding sympathetically, one hard-pressed professional to another. The German left the room.
Bibi’s hand flew to Dart’s and gripped it fiercely. Then she released it as if it were red hot. The major was speaking again.
“Dr. Lubbers, would you come out here, please?”
Dart went out onto the landing. The white face seemed to hover in the gloom. Behind it, the masks watched balefully from the wall. The major gestured with his head towards the attic stairs.
“Do you know what is up there?”
“No.” The word came out high-pitched and false, and Dart hurriedly made a fuss of coughing and dabbing at his mouth. “Excuse me. No. I’m sorry, I have no idea. I’ve never been up there.”
The German peered up into the darkness. He flicked the light switch at the foot of the stairs on and off, unsurprised when nothing happened.
Dart felt light-headed, close to hysteria. He somehow managed to force his voice into a confidential murmur. “If it’s anything like the rest of the place, it’ll be full of crap.”
The fleeting humourless smile crossed the German’s face again. He looked up into the shadows once more, hesitating. Then he turned his back on Dart and went down the stairs to the shop. “Take care of yourself, Doctor,” he called.
Dart heard his curt commands, laughter, then the dying peal of the doorbell. He waited several moments and then went downstairs. He gazed dumbly at the wreckage for a long moment, then went into the workshop. Pieter Grotius was standing at his bench, holding on to it, his head lowered. The room was a shambles. His rainbow of paint pots had been raked from the shelf, and puddles of colour lay on the floor.
“Pieter? Pieter, are you all right?”
Grotius didn’t look up. He began nodding his head slowly, and then the movement seemed to take over his whole body until he was rocking back and forth, his breath coming in short gasps. Dart put his hands on the little man’s shoulders. They felt rigid, not made of flesh. When the rocking didn’t stop, Dart didn’t know what else to do. So he hoisted himself up onto the bench and sat there, his left hand still on Pieter’s shoulder. After a while, there were cautious footsteps on the stairs and he heard Bibi call her husband’s name. Pieter Grotius straightened and drew a long breath with a hiccup in it. When his wife appeared in the doorway, he went to meet her, and the couple embraced without speaking. Bibi rested her cheek on the crown of Pieter’s head. Her huge eyes met Dart’s, but he could not understand what they were telling him. He felt in his coat pocket and pulled out a cigarette and his lighter. The cigarette tasted vile, but he smoked it anyway, watching the pools of paint on the floor slowly merge. A snake of green crept towards a spill of orange. Just as the two colours met, he heard the jolly tinkle of the doorbell again and feet slushing through glass.
“Are you there? Are you all right?” Trixie’s voice. She stopped in the doorway. “Jesus,” she said. “The bastards.”
She went to Pieter and Bibi and spread her arms around both of them. All three remained motionless and silent for some time; they looked like models for some tragic monument. Then Trixie came to Dart and looked at him, at the flesh swollen over the cheekbone, the sticky trail of blood through the stubble on his jaw.
“Ouch,” she said. She raised her hand and rested it on the undamaged side of his face. “Is it bad?”
“I’ll live. I can spare a few teeth.”
She managed a smile. “I suppose you can. There’s not much to use them on, is there?”
A little later, when the others began to clear up, Dart went upstairs to retrieve his gun and the rest of his things. He stood before the window and stared sightlessly at the now silent and empty square. Although he still could not control the trembling that ran in waves beneath his skin, his terror had given way to a sullen anger. Only four days had passed since his banishment from the farm. He had warned Tamar that this would happen. But the bastard had known anyway and hadn’t cared. Hadn’t cared because all that mattered to him was keeping Dart away from Marijke while he spun his sticky web around her.
He picked up the leather bag and turned to go. His eye fell on the little puddle of blood and mucus on the floor. Then he stood motionless, because he had seen, absolutely clearly, the logic of it all. Tamar had banned him from the farm and, yes, he’d known that it would greatly increase the chances of Dart being taken by the Germans. But it wasn’t that Tamar didn’t care. Oh, no. It was what he intended. It was obvious, really. If their positions were reversed, if Dart was at the farm with her, not Tamar, would he want Tamar turning up all the time? Or would it be very convenient if Tamar were to disappear, permanently? Yes. By God, yes. That would be exactly — exactly — what he would want.
This line of reasoning could have frightened him, but it did not. He gained a certain strength from it. Because, after all, what can be imagined can be achieved.
At the head of the stairs, he paused to straighten a mask that had been knocked askew.
While the SS were raiding the Marionette House, Cook Sergeant Erich Grabowski was riding a bicycle along an empty country road south of Apeldoorn. There were all sorts of reasons why he shouldn’t have been. He should have been on duty, for a start. Then there was the fact that his regiment had been put on security alert as a result of that awful Nazi sod Rauter getting himself shot. It was also the case that Erich should not have taken the bike without special permission. And he definitely should not have been riding it through an area of suspected terrorist activity. Not alone, anyway, and not without his rifle.
But Erich had done a deal with another sergeant about the duty rota. He didn’t give a toss about Rauter, who was just a glorified copper anyway. The bike had cost him two cans of meat. And he had never, on any of his Sunday rides, met a so-called terrorist. The people around here all seemed very peaceable. Depressed, of course, and hungry; but violent? No. And as for the rifle, what use would it be? Even with his glasses on, he’d never been any good with one. That was why they’d made him a cook. Thank God.
None of that really mattered anyway. S
ergeant Grabowski would have cycled down that lonely road in spite of anything, because in a little cottage just beyond Loenen lived an agile young widow who slept with him in exchange for food. In the gas-mask canister that hung from his neck there was a can of pressed pork, and in the rolled-up rain cape strapped onto the bike’s carrier there was half a kilo of margarine and a bag of flour. In the breast pockets of his tunic there was a slab of military chocolate and a pack of cigarettes. He didn’t smoke, but the widow liked to.
Two kilometres north of Loenen he swung onto a narrow lane that ran alongside the heath, bypassing most of the village. The widow didn’t want him seen by the neighbours. Half a kilometre from the cottage, there was a gateway and, as usual, Erich stopped there. The gate itself had gone, but the two stout posts remained. He propped the bike against one of them and did the things he always did. He took his cap off and ruffled his thinning hair to make it look more than it was. He unbuttoned his tunic and eased his back. He cupped his hands in front of his mouth and exhaled into them, sniffing to check the smell of his breath. Finally he unbuttoned his trousers and waited to pee.
That was when he noticed the tyre tracks.
They’d been made by something fairly heavy, because the tyres had pressed deep through the pine needles into the dark mud. The pattern of the tread was quite distinct. An army vehicle, of course; there wasn’t any other kind. Erich scanned the surface of the lane. There were no muddy tracks on it. So whatever it was, this vehicle had gone in through the gateway, and it hadn’t come out again. Odd, really. The tracks had definitely not been there last Sunday, and Erich was pretty sure that no patrols from his unit had been down this way in the past week. Nothing much went on in the camp that Cook Sergeant Grabowski didn’t get to hear about.
The mystery of the tyre tracks went completely out of Erich’s head very soon after his arrival at the widow’s cottage. But on his way back to Apeldoorn he paused at the gateway. He studied the tracks again but didn’t dismount from the bike because he had spent longer at the cottage than he had meant to. The afternoon had already shrunk to a band of steely-grey light along the western horizon, and the tyre tracks led into wet and forbidding shadows.
It was two days later that Grabowski finally found the nerve to report his discovery to his platoon commander. When Lieutenant Redler came to the field kitchen late on Tuesday afternoon, he looked haggard and his uniform was mud-spattered. He wolfed down the food that Erich had kept hot for him. Then Erich handed him a mug of tea and told him. Amazingly, Redler didn’t ask what in God’s name the cook sergeant had been doing, poking about in the Dutch countryside fifteen kilometres from where he should have been. He simply listened, watching Grabowski through the steam rising from the mug.
When Erich had finished, Redler said, “Stay here,” and walked off. He was gone for five minutes, and Erich spent the time thinking about how much he was going to miss the nimble widow. When the lieutenant returned, he led Erich into the tent behind the kitchen, put a small leather case down on the trestle table, and took out a sheaf of maps. He selected one, opened it out, and said, “Show me.”
While Redler and Grabowski were map-reading in the field kitchen, Dart was standing in the asylum garden watching the rooks. There had now been three consecutive days of dry sunny weather, and it occurred to him that it might soon be spring. The elms were still bare, but the rookery built among their branches was busier and more argumentative than he remembered. Were the rooks breeding? Dart was perfectly ignorant of bird behaviour, but as he watched he saw that several of the ragged black shapes returning to the trees carried twigs in their beaks. They were refurbishing last season’s nests and furiously scolding neighbours who were doing exactly the same thing. Or were they still arguing over who was going to mate with whom?
He heard someone call “Ernst!” and it took him a couple of seconds to remember that it was his name. He turned and saw Trixie Greydanus approaching.
When she was beside him she said, “Awful creatures, aren’t they?”
“Are they?”
“I think so. Sinister. You always see them pecking at dead things on the road. And I hate the noise they make.”
“I rather like it,” Dart said. “They sound almost human sometimes.”
“I think you’ve been keeping company with the wrong kind of humans, in that case,” Trixie said. “Let me see your face.”
He turned to her. The swelling over the cheekbone had gone down a little; now there was a dark indigo stain, yellow at the edges, that had spread under his eye. The right side of his top lip was still split and swollen, giving him a lopsided, sarcastic expression.
She grimaced, and then stood on her toes and kissed him on the good side of his mouth. He was so surprised that he looked at her properly for the first time in weeks. He saw that the freckles had faded and the flesh was tighter over her jawbone. The face was narrower. The soft crescents below her eyes were now webbed with tiny creases, like the skin on cream. She looked like the older and more serious sister of the summery girl he had met all those months ago. He thought that if he were to take hold of her shoulders he would feel bone beneath the thin raincoat, that she would be easy to break.
“What was that for?”
“To kiss it better, of course. And because I think it’s probably a long time since anyone kissed you.”
He thought, Don’t you dare feel sorry for me, damn you. But he put a smile on his face and said, “Oh, you’re quite wrong there. I kiss a different nun every night.”
She grinned and became younger again. “Lord, how I would love to believe you,” she said. “Come on, let’s walk round the garden. These birds are getting on my nerves.”
She wanted to put her arm through his. Not just for his sake, although she’d never seen anyone more needy. But his hands were jammed into his coat pockets and his arms were tight against himself.
When they’d reached the first turn in the path she said, “I’ve just come from the farm.”
“Ah,” he said.
“Christiaan has a message for you.”
“Yes?”
“He was very shocked by what happened at the Marionette House on Sunday. He’s glad you’re safe. He said you did very well.”
Dart stopped walking and faced her. “Is that the message?”
Trixie was taken aback by the chill in his voice. Her smile failed her. “No, no. He says that because of what happened he is cancelling his last order to you, and that if you want to, you may return to the normal schedule in seven days’ time, the twentieth. Does that make sense to you?”
“Yes.” He kept his face expressionless.
“He also said that you might want to think about what happened on Sunday in a positive way. That maybe now the SS have raided Pieter and Bibi’s and found nothing, it’ll be safer to work from there. What do you think?”
Dart touched his wounded lip while he considered the question. “Christiaan’s probably right. But I also think he hasn’t thought about Pieter and Bibi. About how they must be feeling right now. And I don’t think that’s . . . fair.”
Trixie said, uncertainly, “Is that what you want me to tell him? That you don’t think it’s fair?”
“Yes,” Dart said. “Tell him that.”
Willy Vekemans awoke not long after dawn, as he always did. There must be some sort of clock in his body, he supposed, because very little light had found its way into the boarded-up bedroom. Or maybe it was the birdsong, which was lovely and complicated here in the woods. Or maybe it was his bowels, which were terrible because of all the tinned meat they’d been living on for . . . how long? A week? Today was what, Thursday? No, Wednesday. He was losing track.
Aaah, there it went again, the spasm twisting through his gut, somehow bringing with it the memory of the dead bodies lined up beside the road. Please God, no, don’t let me think about that. He swung his legs off the bare mattress and felt around on the floor for his boots, then went out into the hall. In the living room two slan
ts of light fell across Eddy Dekker, who stirred slightly on the sofa, then lay still again. From the other bedroom came the irregular sound of Wim’s snoring, like a summer fly bumbling against a windowpane. This worried Willy for a moment, because he thought that Wim was supposed to be on watch. Or was it Koop? Yes, maybe it was Koop.
Willy unbolted the back door and opened it. The bent grass, once a lawn, was pearled with dew. Something, a fox perhaps, had left a trail through it. He carefully peeled a strip of damp wallpaper from the wall beside the door to use in the toilet and stepped out into the day. He got halfway to the little wooden privy under the trees and then stopped, spellbound. From somewhere close by a blackbird unfurled its song and spread it, like golden handwriting, on the chill morning air. It was so bright, so pure, that Willy imagined he might be able to see it if he could find the place in the sky where it was written. He lifted his face to the light and was killed by a quick burst of machine-gun fire that hit him square in the chest.
It was Koop’s unbreakable rule that all five members of the group never slept in the same bungalow. He and Oskar had spent the night in the third bungalow from the track. At first they were not sure that what had shocked them awake and brought them scrambling into the hall was in fact gunfire, simply because it had stopped almost as soon as it had begun. They squatted either side of the front door, listening to a dense silence. After a very long few seconds they heard the unmistakable sound of a Sten gun firing a long burst, and then an amazing amount of answering fire from off to their left. They stole to the window of the living room and peered through a slit in the boards. They saw four SS troopers in camouflage smocks run, stooped, through the pines and bracken. The third man was lugging a Spandau machine gun. They disappeared beyond the last bungalow, off to the right. At the same time there was another outbreak of firing from the direction of the track.
