“He doesn’t speak English?” Juliana asked.
“I don’t know,” Wilhelmina said. “I didn’t ask.”
They went into the two-room apartment. A fat, half-smoked cigar lay cold in a brass ashtray, and the sleeve of one of Juliana’s recordings stood in front of the elaborate, outdated stereo system. She was smiling, and her hair was longer. Johannes owned all her recordings. Wilhelmina didn’t own any, but sometimes she heard them on the radio.
“For so long I’ve thought of Johannes as the muscular, stubborn boy he was before the war,” she said, half to herself, except that she spoke in English. “He won so many speed skating races on the canals. I would watch, all bundled up, drinking hot cocoa with my friends.”
Juliana asked softly, “Did you learn to skate yourself?”
“Mm, yes, but I’ve forgotten long since.” There had been too many years when she’d had to devote so much of her energy just to survival and then to putting aside the past and going on. Not forgetting, of course—simply going on.
For the first time in her life, Wilhelmina felt sorry for her older brother. Johannes Peperkamp, the famous diamond cleaver. The cutter with the incomparable eye.
Now he lived in dreariness.
Ignoring Juliana’s look of concern, she went into the galley kitchen, little more than a converted closet off the sitting room, and automatically put on a kettle for tea. The kitchen was clean enough, but there were no begonias in the windows. She could feel the loneliness that had crept into her brother’s life. There was none of the cheerfulness and sparkling cleanliness in this place that there had been in his big apartment with Ann.
She inspected the refrigerator. Four kinds of cheeses and half an eel were neatly wrapped and there was a tin of butter cookies, but the milk had soured and a basket of mussels was beginning to smell. Even during his days of fame and greater fortune, Johannes hadn’t been an extravagant man. He was naturally frugal and spent little money on himself. What he was saving it for Wilhelmina didn’t know, and yet she did the same. And neither was one to waste food. There had been too many days in their lives without it.
“It doesn’t feel right here, does it?” Juliana asked, standing behind her aunt.
Without speaking, Wilhelmina shook her head and turned off the heat under the kettle. She no longer wanted tea. Together, she and Juliana went into the bedroom, but there was nothing there either, nothing to say, nothing to find. The double bed was neatly made, and on the bureau were two photographs, one of Ann, laughing, just a touch of the familiar sadness behind her eyes, and one of their wedding day before the war. Wilhelmina could remember more clearly than she could remember anything that had happened last week how she and Rachel had wished that one day they would have a marriage like Johannes and Ann had. What dreamers they’d been.
Now there were no more dreams, only memories.
“Let’s go,” she said.
“Aunt Willie…”
“I’m fine. We’ll bring Mr. Dekker the eel. That will have to satisfy him.”
But downstairs in the entryway, a dark figure was trying to communicate with the Belgian landlord in bad French. Juliana let out a small cry and jumped backward, but too late.
The black-brown eyes turned to her. “Shit,” he said.
She stared back at him, insolent and unapologetic. “Fancy meeting you here, Mr. Stark.”
“Jesus Christ, why the hell couldn’t you stay out of this?”
So this was the American reporter, Wilhelmina thought, observing him with interest. He was rather tough-looking, with dark, distant eyes, but there was something in the scarred face she found compelling. Nothing obvious or boastful—just there. Competence, knowledge, pain. If she had to guess, she would say this was a man who understood that objectivity wasn’t so easy to maintain. In her mind, that was good. She believed objectivity was wrong.
She glanced at Juliana, whose expression was one of distaste mixed with acceptance—and, she thought, excitement. How interesting. Juliana often seemed so vague and bored with the real things of life, at least from what Wilhelmina could tell from her limited experience with her niece.
Matthew Stark sighed heavily, dread clouding his eyes, and Wilhelmina felt her heart skid. This was not a man given easily to emotion. Something was wrong.
“I gather you two don’t know.” He paused, his mouth straight and hard, but not uncaring. “Johannes Peperkamp was found dead of a heart attack earlier today in Amsterdam. He’d left his shop with a Dutchman whom I have reason to believe was named Hendrik de Geer. I’m sorry.”
Amsterdam, Wilhelmina thought. Of course, Amsterdam.
Hendrik…
She closed her eyes, hardly noticing how they burned, and her mind filled with images, old pictures, living now only inside her. She saw her brother as a young man, tall and laughing as he swept beautiful Ann onto the ice.
“Aunt Willie, are you all right?”
Juliana’s soft voice, filled with grief and shock, broke into her memories, and Wilhelmina took the last step down into the entryway, level with Matthew Stark. Juliana followed unsteadily. Catharina had spoiled her daughter, Wilhelmina thought. Juliana knew so little of the world. She had money and sophistication, fine clothes and a magnificent education, an incomparable talent, but she’d experienced cold or hunger or even death, as common as it was. Now Johannes was dead. And Rachel. Juliana’s white, frozen face seemed inconsequential. Wilhelmina found it difficult to feel sympathy toward someone who’d never really suffered.
And it was sad—wrong—that her niece had never really known her own uncle. But that wasn’t Juliana’s fault. None of this was her fault, and Wilhelmina regretted her silent criticism. Juliana was good and kind, and Wilhelmina was proud of her. She was her niece, the last of the Peperkamps.
Oh, my God.
But Wilhelmina shook off this thought. It strained her imagination to think Johannes would have turned over the Minstrel’s Rough and four hundred years of Peperkamp tradition to their pianist niece. Even at her best, Juliana wouldn’t be likely to take the Minstrel tradition seriously. Not since Amsterdam had any of the Peperkamp siblings mentioned the stone. Surely Johannes had tossed it into the sea. And yet, how could he?
Dear God, Wilhelmina thought with a sharp, sudden, terrible sense of loss. My brother is dead. Gone.
“I’m all right,” she said finally, because she had to, for herself if no one else. “Johannes lived a long life. He was a good man.”
“I know,” Juliana said.
Wilhelmina looked at Matthew Stark, his expression unreadable as he watched Juliana. Yet she could feel the tension in him, telling him to stay where he stood when what he wanted to do was to go to Juliana. Ahh, no, she thought, he’s half in love with her already.
The dark eyes lifted to the old Dutchwoman. “You’re Juliana’s aunt—Willie, is it?”
“Wilhelmina,” she said, her voice clear and strong. There was nothing now to do but go on. Find Hendrik. Stop him. She would mourn her brother forever, but in private. Meanwhile, it seemed there was work to be done. Hendrik—what treachery are you up to this time? “My name is Wilhelmina Peperkamp.”
“Another Peperkamp. Johannes and Catharina’s sister?”
“Yes. I live in Rotterdam.”
“Do you know why your brother was in Amsterdam?”
“To pick up diamonds.” The lie came without effort; she had no reason to trust this American, no reason to tell him anything. “I’m feeding his cat.”
“You came all the way from Rotterdam to feed a cat? Okay, if that’s the way you want it. Don’t tell me a damn thing if you don’t want to. I’ll find out what I need to on my own. Just go back home, both of you. Get the hell out of this mess.”
“We’ll keep your advice in mind, Mr. Stark,” Wilhelmina said impatiently. She hated to be told what to do. “But right now you’ve brought us sad news, and I think you should go.”
“All right. Do you know anything about Hendrik de Geer?”
<
br /> “Goeden dag, Mr. Stark.”
“That means?”
“Goodbye.”
Stark turned his hard gaze to Juliana. “You want me to leave?”
Juliana stared at him a moment, and Wilhelmina could see the doubt in her niece’s eye. My heavens, she thought, Juliana wants to tell him no! Achh, what was this?
But Juliana nodded stoically. “Yes, I think you’d better.”
Without a word, Matthew spun around and left. Wilhelmina stood beside Juliana and watched him pound down the steep front stairs. “A difficult man,” she said.
“I know, but I’m not sure it’s wise to let him go off on his own like this, Aunt Willie. He knows things he hasn’t told us.”
“And we know things we haven’t told him, don’t we?”
“Yes, but—” Juliana’s jaw set hard. “I don’t know about you, Aunt Willie, but I have no intention of just going home and forgetting about this—and no Vermont, either, dammit.”
“Vermont? What’s in Vermont?”
“Safety. Innocence. It’s where Mother wants me to go.”
“Bah. Some things you cannot escape. Shall we go?”
“Where? I’d like to follow Stark back to the United States—”
“So would I.”
“But you don’t have a passport.”
“I do. I planned one day to go to New York to see your mother, but I changed my mind.”
“Why?”
“She was the one who left.”
“I should have guessed. You have your passport with you?”
“Yes. When I decided to go to Antwerp this morning, I thought I might have to go to New York, to see your mother.” Hendrik, she thought, Hendrik…Had it finally come to this? She felt so tired suddenly, so old. “Come, we’ll have to take care we’re not followed.”
She gave the eel to the landlord, who had been standing by unobtrusively, and explained she would be back later to settle her brother’s affairs.
“What happened?” Martin Dekker asked, apparently not having followed the English exchange. “Where’s your brother?”
She looked at the Belgian and said, her voice quiet and steady, “He’s dead, Mr. Dekker. Johannes is gone.”
Fifteen
U.S. Senator Samuel Ryder, Jr., adopted a carefully constructed expression of pensiveness and control as he looked across his walnut desk to the wine-colored leather chair where Hendrik de Geer sat, rumpled, ashen-faced, spent, tired old man, reeking of sweat and gin. Ryder felt no sympathy. His aides had volunteered to call security—had pleaded with him to let them call—but the senator had refused. He’d insisted de Geer be ushered into his office, into the quiet, formal surroundings of a United States senator.
The room was unchanged from the days when it had been occupied by Samuel Ryder, Sr., the longtime senior senator from Florida. When elected, Sam had brought out all the furnishings that had been in storage—the desk, the carpets, the chairs, the mementos. Everything. There was only one addition: a portrait. It had been painted shortly before the senior Ryder’s death, an ominous picture of a man remembered for his soft baby blue eyes and deadly incisiveness, and it hung above the desk, behind his son, where Sam, Jr., wouldn’t have to look at it all the time.
“Are you absolutely positive that Johannes Peperkamp didn’t have the stone?” Ryder asked, concealing the panic brought on by the Dutchman’s succinct, unemotional testimony about the events over the past few days in Amsterdam. “He must have!”
“That’s what I thought as well,” the Dutchman replied calmly.
Did you kill him? Ryder’s mind burned with the question, but he didn’t ask it, instead convincing himself that the operational details of de Geer’s activities weren’t his concern. He licked his lips, rubbing one finger into the polished walnut of the edge of his desk. He refused to meet the Dutchman’s impassive, penetrating gaze, as if that would dissociate him even more from the events he’d put into motion.
“Then who has it?” Ryder asked.
“No one. The Minstrel is lost—if it ever existed.”
Ryder slapped his slate blotter. “It has to exist, and it can’t be lost!”
“Why, because you don’t wish it?”
“Dammit, man, do you know what this means?”
The Dutchman leaned back deeper into the chair, looking as if he might fall asleep—or fall down dead—at any moment. He had disengaged himself. “It means you must devise another plan to get Bloch his money,” he said. “You’re a clever man, Senator Ryder. You’ll think of something. With Rachel Stein’s death, you no longer have any hold over me. Even if I did know where to locate the Minstrel, I would no longer feel compelled to get it for you. If I’d known about her death before I left for Antwerp, I’d never have gone.”
“I don’t believe she was ever your sole motive for going along with me. It was a factor, to be sure, but the Peperkamps were your friends—”
“That was many, many years ago. Now, I’m afraid, they would all be delighted to hear of my death. You know what Rachel Stein said about me. It’s all true.”
“Did you kill her?” Ryder asked suddenly in a low, hoarse voice, regretting his words almost immediately. He couldn’t believe he was articulating such an accusation! Why couldn’t he be as cool and unperturbable as de Geer—as Matthew Stark had always been? Steelman. The chopper pilot the men all wanted to ride with. His skill, his uncompromising sense of duty, his steady nerves, his reliability were all highly regarded by the men he transported, dusted off, and aided in combat Ryder himself had never commanded such respect. It was something he’d learned to live with.
The Dutchman withdrew a cigar and a small pocketknife, shaking his head in feigned despair. “The man you must think I am, to kill an old woman, to throw her down on the ice.” He sighed, deftly cutting off the end of the cigar, pocketing the knife, and putting the cigar in his mouth. “I was sitting in your car when Rachel died. I had no interest in killing Rachel Stein. I’ve done enough to her.”
Ryder rubbed his forehead with all eight fingers, his thumbs planted firmly under his cheekbones as if holding his head together. “Then it must have been an accident after all.”
Hendrik de Geer laughed a cold, unpleasant laugh, the unlit cigar sticking on his lip. “You’re a fool, Senator Ryder—a blind, dangerous fool. You don’t believe that any more than I do. You told Sergeant Bloch about Rachel, didn’t you? He can arrange to have old women pushed down as easily as he can blackmail a United States senator.”
“He’s not blackmailing me,” Ryder said sharply. “I’m helping him establish himself as a self-sustaining force for freedom—”
“Oh, spare me, Senator. I’ve been in this world a long, long time. You need not make your excuses to me. How much did you tell Bloch?”
Ryder didn’t answer at once. He folded his hands on his blotter and sat very still controlling his anger and distaste for the Dutchman. At the moment, it was more important to think clearly. He had to debate with himself what to tell Hendrik de Geer and what to handle himself. How would the Dutchman react to a full account of Ryder’s conversations with Bloch?
But de Geer was impatient—and, as always, entirely too perceptive. “You told him everything, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t—”
“Don’t lie to me!” The Dutchman didn’t raise his voice, but the intensity of his words deepened the piercing blue of his eyes and brought him forward in his chair, the unflappable impassiveness shattered. “You told Bloch what you know about the Minstrel.”
“I had to—don’t you see? Look, de Geer, you know Bloch. He wants the diamond. You must get it for him, don’t you understand? If you don’t…for God’s sake, man, if you don’t he’ll go after it himself. Do you want that to happen?”
“That’s not my problem,” the Dutchman said, rising, his disgust underlining his words.
Ryder fought the urge to jump up and plead his case, and he felt the familiar gnawing of indecision, the aching emptine
ss of simply not knowing what to do. “I can’t control Bloch—he’ll go to the Peperkamp women, he’ll try each one until he’s positive none has the diamond or until he gets it. Or he’ll expect me to do this, despite my valid unwillingness to be involved on that end. You can’t let this happen! De Geer—for God’s sake, help me!”
Hendrik de Geer lit his cigar with a match, puffed, shook out the match, and dropped it on the senator’s desk, where its smoking melted through layers of wax. The room filled with the smoke of the cigar. Without pleasure, the Dutchman looked at Ryder and smiled. “I’ll help myself.”
Alice Feldon wasn’t relieved to see Matthew Stark wander into the Gazette newsroom. She was standing at her desk as usual, glasses on top of her head, her nails painted something called African Violet. Stark couldn’t have spent more than a few hours in Antwerp. She’d just come from fighting the money boys upstairs about his bebopping around, spending the paper’s money with no discernible progress on any kind of story, large, medium, or small.
“You’re the ones who’ve been telling me to give the man a chance,” she’d said. So go suck an egg, she’d felt like adding.
Yes, they’d replied, but did she know how much it cost to fly to Belgium?
Stark moved past her desk, his black leather jacket unzipped. Underneath was a black denim shirt and, for a change, heavy charcoal cords. And those damn boots, of course. Alice tried to imagine him in tassel loafers and couldn’t. The man was informal to the point of insolence. But she knew he gave such matters little or no thought. People could take him or leave him. He didn’t give a damn which.
“I thought you were in Antwerp,” she said.
“I was.”
“And?”
The black-brown eyes were leveled at her. “And now I’m back.”
“Jackass,” she said, unintimidated. “I want a progress report on my desk in an hour. You can’t be trusted, Stark.”
Cut and Run Page 18
