by Mal Peet
“You’ve done well.”
He turned. She had her grandmother’s ancient black coat draped over her shoulders and her arms tightly folded. Tamar thought she looked fragile — something he’d never thought before.
“Yeah, not bad. What should we plant here? Potatoes?”
“We’ve been eating the seed potatoes for the past two weeks,” Marijke said. “Hadn’t you noticed?”
“Ah. What else then?”
“There’s carrot seed. I don’t remember what else. I haven’t checked.”
“Fine,” he said. “We’ll sow carrots.”
She leaned against him, her head sideways on his chest. “Are you sure you want to do all this?”
“Yes, of course. We have to, don’t we?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure if I believe we . . . Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it.”
He wanted to touch her face, but there was soil on his hands. He took her by the shoulders and made her look at him. “It’s worth it,” he said. “We’ll be all right.”
So she smiled and then looked away from him. “If we’re going to sow, we’ll have to fix these fences to keep the chickens out. We ought to clip their wings too.”
“We’ll do it,” he said. “We’ll do everything. You’ll have to show me how, though. I know damn all about this business. Now, come on. Let’s get inside. You look cold.”
She put her left hand on his chest to stop him and looked into his eyes. “You have to promise me something,” she said. “Promise me that if you have to go you’ll take me with you. Don’t leave me here alone. I can’t do that anymore.”
“I won’t go. I’m staying here. We’re staying here together.”
“Promise me anyway.”
Tamar packed the transceiver away and descended the barn stairs shortly after eleven o’clock. He was almost at the door when he remembered what she’d said, what he’d promised her. He turned back and went into the loose box and hung the lantern on a harness peg. When he had lifted away the boards from the back wall, he reached down into the gap and pulled out the canvas bag. He took Nurse Gertrud Berendts’s fake ID over to the lamp and studied Marijke’s sombre little photograph, then put the booklet into his jacket pocket with his own. Just in case.
When he crossed the yard, the night sky was a vast tracery of stars.
Dart put the tray on the low table next to the lamp, where Koop could see what it held: a small bowl of broth, a slice of pulpy bread, and a glass of water. Dart took a cigarette from his packet and put that on the tray too. Then he sat down on the chair. Koop watched with rat-bright eyes.
“I didn’t betray you,” Dart said. He managed to keep the tone of his voice dead flat.
Koop turned his face away and said nothing.
“Think about it,” Dart said. “If I wanted you dead, I’d have killed you before now. A pillow over your face while you were unconscious. An overdose of morphine. I admit I considered it. Everyone would be a lot safer if you were out of the way. Especially the people here. And I like them a lot more than I like you.”
Koop’s gaze rested on the food. Eventually he said, “So why didn’t you?”
“Because you called me a traitor and I want to know why.”
“Give me some of that water.”
Dart stood and carried the glass to Koop, who took it in his right hand, which shook. Koop drank, urgently.
“Go slow,” Dart warned. When Koop leaned back, breathing fast, Dart took the glass and put it back on the tray. He sat down again. “For one thing, I didn’t even know where your group was hiding.”
Koop lost control of himself. “Of course you bloody did! You both did!” He shook his head from side to side, gasping, struggling to hold back tears of rage. “You bastard! Why are you doing this?”
Dart waited. Then he said quietly, “I’ll tell you again: I had no idea where you were.”
Koop took a long breath that had a sob in it. “He said, ‘I know where to find you.’ I know where to find you. That’s what the bastard said to me. So don’t tell me you didn’t know as well.”
“He? You mean Tamar? When did he say this?”
“That morning. At De Woeste Hoeve.”
“What morning? You mean the morning of the executions? You were there? You went back?”
“Yeah.”
“Christ,” Dart said. “What . . . Why were you there?”
Koop didn’t answer.
“Cigarette?”
Koop shook his head stubbornly, a man nobly refusing a bribe. Then he sighed. “Yeah. Okay.”
Dart lit the cigarette and put it between the fingers of Koop’s right hand. Koop inhaled and coughed, and Dart could see the pain in the other man’s face as the spasm pulled at the wound in his back. He held the glass of water to Koop’s lips. Koop drank.
“I’m all right,” he said.
“Good.” Dart sat down again without taking his eyes from Koop’s face. “So you were there at De Woeste Hoeve that morning. And you met Tamar. Is that right?”
Koop exhaled smoke cautiously and watched it drift into the brightness of the lamp. He faced Dart for the first time. “Are you telling me you don’t know anything about this?”
Dart looked into Koop’s eyes and said, “Yes, that’s what I’m telling you. Tamar told me nothing about any of this.”
Koop smoked the rest of the cigarette in silence. Dart picked up the tray and carried it to the bed.
“You need to eat. Think you can manage?”
Koop drank the broth straight from the bowl. When he had drained the thin liquid, he ran his tongue round the inside of the bowl to get at the solid bits. The effort of all this seemed to exhaust him, and he slumped back against the headboard with his eyes closed. Dart felt the need to hurry now.
“Koop? Did you know Tamar was going to be there, that morning?”
“No. The bastard sneaked up on us from behind. We were looking at . . .” Koop’s eyes opened, blinked, then stayed open, staring at the lamp. “We were watching the road. He appeared from nowhere. He stuck his bloody Sten in my mouth. In my mouth.”
Beautiful, Dart thought. Perfect. But go carefully. He said, “But he didn’t pull the trigger. He could’ve blown your head off, Koop, but he didn’t.”
Now Koop turned his gaze on Dart, who had to force himself not to recoil. The man looked like a reptile choking on its own venom.
“Because he’s a gutless bastard. He couldn’t do the job himself, so he betrayed us to the bloody SS. He got them to do his dirty work, the scumbag.”
Koop groaned, clenching his yellow teeth. His breathing broke up into short desperate hisses. Dart watched him suffer for perhaps a quarter of a minute before he carried the chair to the bed.
“Koop. Listen to me. Tamar didn’t tell me where you and the others were. I didn’t know. Do you understand what I’m saying?” Dart waited until Koop opened his eyes, then he said, “How bad is the pain?”
“Bad enough.”
“I want to give you another shot of morphine. Then I need to change your dressings. Are you going to let me do that?”
Koop looked into Dart’s eyes, and Dart held his gaze.
“Yeah, all right,” Koop said. “What happened to your face?”
When Koop had fallen asleep, Dart went to the wireless room. The corridors were intensely dark, but darkness was his element now. He walked across the dispensary and through the false cupboard as if in broad daylight. When he had closed the concealed door behind him, he went to the bureau and lit the lamp. It created a balloon of uncertain light that left the corners of the little room in deep shadow. He was full of nervous excitement but very tired, and he had that familiar prickling under his skin as if his bloodstream were full of insects. He emptied the Benzedrine bottle onto the desk and counted the tablets, even though he already knew that there were only eighteen left. He put sixteen back into the bottle and washed the other two down with a mouthful of stale water.
He sat down and took a notepad and pencil
from the bureau drawer, then smoked a cigarette while staring blankly at the paper. He stubbed it out and very quickly filled three quarters of a page with random letters arranged into groups of five. When he had finished he crumpled the paper into a ball then smoothed it out flat, folded it neatly three times, and put it in his pocket.
Despite the cold, he stripped down to his shirt. He dragged one of the batteries over to the recharger and connected the leads. He climbed onto the machine and began to pedal, unsteadily at first, but then with a fast robotic rhythm. The Benzedrine took him and lifted him. Soon he was beyond the threshold of hurt and exhaustion, flying across the night towards the beacon that was Marijke Maartens. At any moment she would turn to see him. And then he would watch it dawn in her face, the joyous understanding that their love had always been inevitable.
There are chance events. There are coincidences, and something people call luck. And there are happenings so perfect that they get called miracles. After the German raid on the asylum, long after, Dart decided that there had to be something else, some secret working of the world, that went beyond even the miraculous. If he hadn’t fallen asleep in his room fully dressed; if, despite his exhaustion, he hadn’t clicked awake at six in the morning. If the madwoman Sidona hadn’t somehow got out onto the front lawn for a long-delayed appointment with her angel. If the Germans had come straight into the asylum, rather than wasting precious time positioning their machine gunners on the road. If Koop had been unconscious, rather than struggling to his feet for some reason. If Sidona had blurted to an astute officer that there was a dark angel living in the roof. So many ifs — far too many to be dismissed as simple chance. The truth was that the world had wanted what he, Dart, wanted. He was being carried by the world’s hidden mechanisms towards what he was meant to do. There could be no other reasonable explanation.
He had snapped awake because the spiders were trying to suffocate him again, only to find that this time the spiders were his own hands. He’d pushed them away and gone to the window. His normal trembling became a cold shivering as the sweat cooled on his body. Light was seeping slowly into the bottom edge of the sky, and it took him some time to realize that it was raining.
He stood watching the slow growth of the dawn, and then his eye was caught by something white moving across the lawn. Sidona. The rain had plastered her white shift to her body; her breasts and belly and thighs were pinkly visible. Dart sighed and was halfway to the door when he heard Sidona begin a prolonged wail. He went back to the window to see her kneeling on the grass, arms outstretched towards the road. The SS vehicles paraded into his line of vision as if she had conjured them up: a staff car followed by two trucks, each with their canvas sides rolled up to reveal a machine gunner and maybe eight other men peering through the rain at the female lunatic. Dart almost died of shock. He could not move. The convoy halted, and now there was nothing to be heard other than the idling engines and the babble of Sidona’s unearthly language. Then someone shouted, in German, and there was laughter.
Dart moved then. He grabbed the medical bag and his coat and ran to Koop’s room. He wrenched at the key and shouldered the door open. Koop was standing, supporting himself on the footrail of the bed. Dart ran at him, stooped and lifted Koop’s good arm over his shoulder. Koop’s balance went and his weight fell onto his wounded leg. He screamed. Dart shoved Koop’s face into his shoulder to muffle the man’s mouth.
“Be quiet. The Germans are here, understand? Understand?”
Koop’s eyes were rolling, but he nodded.
They got as far as the door before Dart realized. “Shit,” he moaned, on the verge of panic, of tears. He dropped the bag and put Koop’s hand on the back of the chair. Koop leaned, trembling, his breathing hoarse. Dart flew across the room and ripped the sheets and blankets from the bed. He stuffed them into the bottom of the wardrobe, shoved the pillows on top of the bundle, and closed the wardrobe doors as gently as his fear would let him. He eased open the door onto the corridor. It was empty.
Dart half carried, half dragged Koop to the landing on the second floor. There he had to lean on the banister, already exhausted. From below he heard a woman’s voice — Agatha’s? — protesting, and then a louder German voice and something crashing to the floor. He adjusted his balance and elbowed open the door that led to the back corridor. Heavy boot steps were already on the lower flight of stairs. Shouts and wailing came from a perplexing number of directions. By the time they reached the dispensary, Koop’s breathing had become a low persistent moaning, and Dart’s terror was rising up in his chest like a thick bubble. When they were inside, he simply dropped Koop onto the floor because there was no other way he could lock the door behind them. Then he dragged Koop over to the cupboard. He saw that the leg of his pyjamas was blotched with blood and was terribly afraid that they had left a trail. If they had, they would die in the next few minutes, and it was too late to do anything about it. He thought of Marijke, had a sudden brilliant vision of her. To have got this close, and still have to die . . . The unfairness of it almost set him snivelling like a child. Koop’s head was lolling about now, and his eyes seemed to have come loose.
“Don’t pass out, you bastard,” Dart hissed, stepping over him to yank at the hook on the cupboard wall. The concealed door swung open.
He propped Koop on the couch, slid the wooden bar across the inside of the door, and stood, stooped, on shaking legs. He was drenched with sweat; he could feel it trickling down his legs and chest. He dragged in air. His lungs felt full of thorns.
Koop’s face was corpse white, but his eyes had steadied. He looked around the room and then at Dart. “It stinks in here,” he said faintly.
“Shut up!”
Dart emptied the bag onto the bureau and took out the Smith and Wesson revolver. He realized that he did not know where to stand. The place he chose might very well be the place where he would die, and such a choice was impossible for him. He would have sobbed if Koop hadn’t been there. In the end, he took the chair and sat on the far side of the door, opposite the couch. He put his elbows on his thighs and hung his head, the gun pointing at the floor. His gaze focused on the signet ring on his left hand. He laid the revolver between his feet and slid a fingernail into the ring, easing the engraved plate open just enough to see the tip of the cyanide capsule. The urge, the temptation, was so strong that it made him shudder. When he jerked his head up, he saw that Koop was watching him.
Dart stood and took the Luger from his coat pocket and laid it on Koop’s stomach. Koop wrapped his right hand around the gun but didn’t lift it. He looked up at Dart and grinned in an awful twisted way and then closed his eyes. Sprawled, bloody, holding the pistol, he looked like a police photograph of a suicide. Dart went back to his chair and picked up the Smith and Wesson. Five minutes passed like a year.
It was Koop who sensed them first. His eyes flicked open, and his wolfish face turned towards the cupboard. He moved the Luger down onto his right thigh and thumbed the safety catch off. Dart felt slight vibrations in the floorboards just before he heard a faint metallic clack. He stood up. As he did so, he heard the dispensary door crash open against the wall with extraordinary violence. He somehow stifled the cry that rose in his throat. There was utter silence for perhaps two seconds, then fast heavy footfalls. Voices. A question, in German. Another. Dart heard what he thought was Albert Veening’s voice, and then the door into the cupboard from the dispensary was wrenched open. A bright thread of light appeared along the bottom of the inner door. A torch was being shone into the cupboard. Dart raised the revolver, holding it with both hands, aiming at where he imagined the soldier’s chest to be. He was close to fainting; the edges of his vision were already dissolving. The thread of light faded, then returned, then vanished. Someone spoke in German, and then a different, louder voice gave an order. Boots hammered across the floor. The voices moved away. A second or two later the dispensary door slammed shut.
Dart slumped as if his spine had melted. He realized t
hat his mouth was open and that he hadn’t drawn breath for some time. He licked his lips, which felt as coarse and dry as scoured bone, and turned to face Koop, who was looking back at him, shaking his head, telling him not to speak or move.
They remained motionless, staring at each other, for perhaps a whole minute. Then Koop gestured with his Luger and Dart went and pressed his ear to the door, but all he could hear was the thick, unsteady echo of his own heart.
The rain paused later in the morning, and an uncertain grey light found its way into the wireless room. Albert Veening finished his work on Koop and straightened up. He looked a hundred years old.
“You will stay in this room, Mr. de Vries,” he said. “It’s unlikely that the SS will be back, but I’m afraid I can’t take any chances. If Ernst has to go elsewhere, Sister Agatha will take care of your needs. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go downstairs. This morning’s visit by the German bloody army has set my patients back ten years at least. It’s bedlam down there.”
When he had gone, Koop looked up at the ceiling. “I can’t stay in this shithole. I’ve got things to do.”
Dart had just about managed to climb out of the pit that terror and exhaustion had dug for him. He’d taken four of the last Benzedrines, and he was waiting for them to begin their work. The early signs were there: his head was less full of clouds, and his right foot had started tapping on the floor without him telling it to. He studied Koop with an almost scientific curiosity. What the man had been through that morning should have taken him through death’s door; instead, it had perked him up. There shouldn’t have been any blood left in him; but there were spots of livid colour in his cheeks and a new quickness in his eyes. He fed on the things that killed other people.
Dart said, “Where’s the gun? The Luger.”
“Down the back of the couch. Don’t try to get it off me.”
“I don’t intend to. How’s the pain?”
Koop gave Dart a suspicious look. “I can handle it. I don’t want any more of your morphine.”
