‘No! I don’t know! I just feel it because,’
‘Go on.’
‘Did you ever meet Hannah Kormann? No? She and Adrian were good friends,’ she hesitated, then corrected herself, ‘the word is lovers, I guess. I just hate saying it.’
‘Oh!’
‘Maybe not, I’m not sure, but they were together a lot. I met her once, and I didn’t like her or trust her, and I tried to warn him.’
‘And he didn’t listen.’
‘You know him! He listened, but he didn’t want to believe it, so he didn’t. I told him she was going around with an SS officer, and he said she’d never do that. I told Ted too, and he believed me, but Adrian wouldn’t take it from him either.’
‘But if she loved him, why would she betray him?’
‘She’d have to tell her friend things, wouldn’t she? He gave her a fur coat and fancy clothes, and he took her to concerts, and probably parties and restaurants too. She’d have to do something for all that.’
‘Do you really think Adrian would tell her what he was doing? Oh, Pam, I never told anybody!’
‘What? Told them what?’
‘Adrian and I,’ she could talk about it now, ‘he said he had orders to kill collaborators and we,’
‘What?’
When Jo didn’t go on, Pam grabbed her hands across the table and shook them. ‘Damn him! What did he make you do?’ The story about Mr Cooper made her even angrier. She jumped up, walked back and forth across the room with her hands over her ears, came back and, seeing Jo in tears, sat down and hugged her.
‘If she told her German friend what Adrian did, he’d have to arrest him, she knew that. But she loved him! How could she do that?’
‘Oh, love,’ Pam said scornfully. ‘Someone like Hannah loves herself first, the next one would be the man who protects her, and someone like Adrian would be way down on her list. And so would I, and so would you and Ted and Hans.’
‘But we’re still here! She hasn’t told him about us.’
‘Not yet, maybe not until she needs another story. Who knows? Oh Jo, I don’t want to frighten you. Besides, it’s only what I think, not what I know.’
‘I’m not frightened, I’m angry. I’d like to kill her!’ She drew away and covered her eyes. ‘Don’t look at me, I’m all right, but, Pam, I mean it, I want to kill her. Don’t you?
‘Yes, of course, it’s what she deserves.’
‘Well, that’s what the gun is for!’
‘What gun?’
‘Adrian gave me his gun to hide, the one he killed that man with. Then he forgot it, I guess, or maybe he thought it was safer at Elsie’s house than anywhere else.’
‘If the police came and found it, you’d all be arrested, did he think of that?’
Jo shook her head, ‘He couldn’t! You don’t know how it was, Pam, when we came back, he was exhausted. We both were. I don’t think he thought of anything but putting it someplace safe and going to bed, and we were at Elsie’s, so where else?’
‘Oh, forgive him then!’
‘Don’t be angry with him, please, not now. Let’s talk about Hannah.’ She hesitated and then said, ‘Please, Pam, I'm right, say I am.’
‘To want to kill her? Oh God, why not? Everyone else has blood on his hands, why not us!’
Most of her golden lads were gone, Adrian, Jan, now Ted, who had volunteered to guide people out of the country and wouldn’t be able to come back. One day she would go to visit Marcus and find him gone. She’d always known she shouldn’t fall in love.
Shakespeare had it right, their work was done, wrenched from their hands. They had gone home, to heaven he meant, which was supposed to make her feel better but didn’t. She didn’t believe in heaven, a private grave, yes, she knew about that. All right, now for the golden girls. If she and Jo, no, if she! She had to keep Jo away from Hannah and do it herself. If she were caught, Marcus would care and he would cry, but he would understand.
‘We could go to the hospital,’ Jo began.
‘No, we couldn’t. It’s got nothing to do with them, and we’d get them all into trouble.’
‘Well, when she goes out then. Where does she go when she goes to her German?’
‘I’ve no idea. Hans is still at the hospital some days. Maybe he can find out when she’s free. Only, you know, he won’t want us to do it. He’ll say it’s too dangerous.’
‘It is,’ Jo agreed, ‘but look at everything we’ve managed to do so far, and we haven’t been caught yet.’
‘You really believe that, don’t you? What about Adrian?’
‘What about him? He wouldn’t have been caught if he’d kept his mouth shut!’
‘If he did tell her.’
‘It’s not an if, you know he did.’ Jo’s young face, marked by blue smudges under her eyes, looked at Pam sternly. ‘Don’t say no! If you do,’ she shook a finger at her, ‘I’ll do it alone. I’m the one who knows where the gun is, remember? You know where Hans is, so tell him we need to know what she’s doing.’
When Pam invited him to supper, they talked about his work and that the nursery was closed and she had nothing to do, and she told him the plan. It wasn't easy to convince him they were doing the right thing, but finally he agreed to tell her when Hannah would be going out. He made her promise they wouldn’t do anything except see where she went, not speak to her and, he added reluctantly, only shoot her if they were sure no-one saw them. She thought they’d come a long way if Hans could say ‘shoot her’ so easily.
‘Even in the evening,’ he warned her, ‘somebody might hear or see something suspicious and run to the police.’
‘I know,’ Pam agreed, ‘but we’ll just look like two girls going out together. And I promise we’ll come right back if there are people around. You know I don’t want anything to happen to Jo.’
‘And I don’t want anything to happen to you.’ He went back to the hospital and returned with a piece of paper on which he’d noted when Hannah was off-duty that week.
‘She’s free tonight,’ Pam told Jo the next morning, ‘and Hans says she usually goes out about eight. There’s a German post across the street from the hospital, so we mustn’t hang around.’
‘I could walk past there just before eight and meet you down near the bridge over the Spiegelgracht. If we wear hats and scarves that hide our faces, we can walk back and forth a few times without being noticed. We just have to be sure we meet up and follow her together. Would that work?’
‘Let’s try,’ Pam said. ‘If it doesn’t, she’s got Sunday evening free too, and we can try again.’
By accident they got it right the first time. Walking down from the Leidsestraat, Jo saw a woman come out of the hospital door and stop to unwind and then rewind a heavy scarf around her neck. It had to be Hannah and, staying half a block behind her, Jo followed her as far as the bridge where she and Pam would meet. But there was nobody there, and the street was empty except for a man chaining his wheelbarrow to a lamp post. Watching Hannah walk on, Jo hesitated, afraid to lose her, and then Pam stepped out of a doorway and joined her. ‘I thought you hadn’t come,’ Jo said, ‘and I’d have to turn back. It is Hannah, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, keep walking, but slowly. I don’t want her to see us. We’ve only met once, but she’ll remember what I look like. Where’s she going?’ Hannah had turned into a side street, and they got to the corner just in time to see her stop in front of a row house with a deep portico.
‘Let’s walk on the other side,’ Pam whispered. ‘Why isn’t she going in?’
‘Maybe there’s nobody home,’ Jo said. ‘If her friend lives there, maybe she’s not allowed to be there when he isn’t.’
Hannah walked the few yards back to the corner, then turned and went back to stand in front of the house again. Pam looked around at the other houses, their windows blinded by black paper and curtains. If they were going to do it, this was the right time. She could feel the weight of the gun in her coat pocket, and she put her hand
in and lifted it slightly, then let it drop back down again.
‘Now? Should we do it now?’
‘All right,’ Pam said, ‘if we cross the street, and you go up to her, you could speak to her, and I could come up behind her and,’
‘What should I say?’ They hadn’t rehearsed any of this.
‘Ask her the way to that club, you know, the one down at the square. Just give me a minute to get to you.’
Hearing the tremor in her voice, Jo said, ‘Are you sure, Pam? If I speak to her, we’ll have to do it.’
‘Oh, God, you’re right, I can’t do it, I’m sorry.’ They weren’t going to do it. It didn’t matter how much she deserved it, they couldn’t. She took Jo’s hand, and they walked to the end of the street, where they stood watching Hannah look up at the windows and then walk to the corner and back again.
‘She’s waiting for him,’ Jo said. ‘Let’s go before he comes.’ She reached into Pam’s pocket, pulled the gun out and dropped it into her own pocket. ‘Let’s go home now.’ At the corner they passed a café, went in and sat down in the back. There were some men playing cards at one table, and the bartender was leaning on the bar talking to a woman wearing her coat and hat.
Nobody paid any attention to them and Pam said, ‘I haven’t got any money with me, have you? Never mind, let’s just stay a few minutes until she’s gone. I don’t want to see her.’ She felt relieved and ashamed to be.
When they walked back, Hannah was no longer on the street. Then, at the bridge and too late to avoid her, they saw her leaning on the railing, and she looked up and said, ‘Pam? Is that you? Hello!’ and held out her hand.
‘Oh! Oh, it’s Hannah, is it?’ Ignoring the outstretched hand, Pam pointed to Jo and said, ‘My cousin Anne.’
‘I thought I’d go to the club,’ Hannah said, ‘the one on the Amstelveld, and then I thought, there were so many Germans there last time,’ she shook her head and laughed, ‘it’s no fun really.’
‘We’re just going back to Anne’s friends. She’s visiting for a week.’
‘You don’t live here in Amsterdam? No? I thought we’d met somewhere, I guess not. Pam, how’s Adrian? I haven’t seen him for a long time.’
Jo’s hand tightened on the handle of the gun, and her finger twitched into the curve of the trigger. She would kill her now, the bitch, just for saying that. She felt Pam’s hand on her arm, shook it off, and pulled out the gun. It came up toward Hannah’s chest so swiftly that she had no control over it and, when it fired, the bullet grazed Hannah’s arm.
All three of them screamed at the same time, Jo threw the gun into the water and Pam shouted, ‘Shut up! She didn’t kill you! Shut up!’
‘Oh, God in heaven, it hurts!’ Hannah leaned against the railing, her hand pressed against the pain. A thin line of blood slid out from her sleeve and down her hand, and she lifted it to see what it was and screamed again.
Two streets down on the other side of the canal, a car stopped, started again, turned onto the bridge and drove toward them. ‘Germans!’ Jo said. ‘Come on, run!’
Hannah had turned to look at the car, and she lurched away from them to stand in the middle of the street, the headlights on her, her hands in the air to signal it. They heard the car stop suddenly and somebody shouting, and they ran until they had turned several corners and could hide in a doorway. Jo sat down on the steps and pulled Pam down beside her. ‘I should have killed her,’ she said.
‘I thought you would, and I didn’t want you to. I’m glad you didn’t.’
‘That was her friend in the car, it must be, and she’s telling him. If I’d killed her, she couldn’t, and we would get away with it.’
‘It’s all right!’
‘It’s not! I’ve got you into terrible trouble! She doesn’t know who I am, they’ll arrest you instead!’
‘It’s all right,’ Pam repeated. ‘Please, Jo, please, I won’t let them find me.’
‘They will! Hannah knows where you live, she’ll tell them.’
‘I won’t go back to the apartment, I’ll go to a friend. It’s all right,’ she said again, trying to make them both believe it.
‘Come home with me!’ Jo urged her.
‘I can’t do that!
‘Yes, you can, Elsie will hide you.’ She knew Elsie would never turn Pam away because, if anything happened to her, it was Jo's fault. And if she felt guilty, it was because of that, not because of Hannah, whom she hadn’t murdered after all. She wanted to, which might be as wicked as doing it, but it wasn’t what she felt guilty about. After he murdered Mr Cooper, Adrian had said that he didn’t want her to remember it. But she did. She’d be setting the table or drying the dishes for Elsie, and she’d suddenly see Mrs Cooper lying unconscious a few yards from her dead husband, or Adrian stamping on Hitler’s photo and breaking the glass. Anger had flashed across his face at that moment. When he shot Cooper, he had looked calm, even thoughtful. It was the photo that angered him.
‘It’s over now,’ she told Pam, ‘and maybe it’s good we didn’t do it. Somebody else will punish her!’
‘You believe that? I hope you’re right. If the Germans win, so will Hannah, and we’ll lose. We’ll lose everything.’
They walked as quickly as they could, trying not to attract attention, and got up the stairs to Jo’s room without waking anybody. In her narrow bed, they lay close together and were asleep in minutes. Twice during the night Jo was awakened by Pam’s sighs, ‘Don’t do it’ and ‘Don’t look at me’, and she stroked her face to quiet her. ‘Forget it,’ she whispered, ‘it’s over, forget it.’
She tried to match her breathing to Pam’s, and then laughed at herself for trying. Neither of them had a sister, perhaps they could become that for each other. Not because she was Adrian’s sister, it would be wrong to love her just for that. No, it was Pam she loved. She had known all along that Adrian would never be more than a friend, no matter how much more she wanted from him. And now he was lost to them all, to his sister and brother, parents, friends, to her, to Hannah who might have loved him in her own way. Lost, that was a word for the black hole that lay just in front of their feet, a gaping wound in the earth into which all the young men were falling, one after another, Adrian and Jan, maybe Hendrik would be next, her parents, Elsie, Dirk. Give the enemy enough tomorrows, and nothing she loved or valued would be left. When she felt a kiss on her cheek, she opened her eyes and saw Pam leaning over her. "Are you all right?"
‘I am, yes, but I have to go.’ When Jo sat up, she backed away. ‘I’m going to Marcus,' she said. 'I’ll be safe with him. Be careful, Jo. I love you.’ She opened the door, looked out and was gone.
21 Pam, October 1943
‘Yes, all right, come in.’ Marrie stepped back to let Pam go past and shut the door quickly. ‘Marcus is out.’ She led the way to the kitchen, where Johnny and the children, still in pajamas, were eating breakfast. ‘It’s Marcus’s friend,’ she told him.
‘Pam, is it? Greetings! What are you doing here so early in the morning? Marcus has gone out, but he’ll be back soon. Sit down!’
Pam shook her head. Without Marcus she felt awkward, in the wrong place, she wasn’t their friend nor they hers. ‘May I wait in his room?’
‘Sure,’ he said, just as Marrie said, ‘Could you come back later?’ then, grudgingly, ‘Go ahead.’
Marcus had left his breakfast on the table, and she ate a piece of bread and some slivers of cheese and drank a cup of cold tea. An illegal newspaper lay on the floor, its title decorated with a crown and a drawing of Queen Wilhelmina. ‘Persevere until the End’, she read. ‘It is an obvious fact that the end of our ordeal nears. Nobody knows how long this final stage will last, but it is certain that the terror will increase as we drive the tyrant into a corner. We have been delivered into the hands of evil men who will not shrink from the most outrageous crimes. The misery and sorrow we have been subjected to have no comparison in history. And it is not yet over.’
She pushed the pape
r away. It made her sick to read it, because she knew it was going to get worse. There was no clock in the room and no way to tell how long she had been waiting. When she closed her eyes for a minute and then had trouble opening them, she lay down on the bed. The pillow smelled like Marcus, she’d told him once that sniffing him was like biting into an apple, a faint sweet sharp smell.
He came in so quietly that he was sitting on the bed when she awoke, and he leaned down and kissed her. ‘Can I find you in my bed every morning?’
‘That would be nice.’
‘Will be,’ he corrected. ‘But why this morning? Has something happened at your place?’
‘No, I didn’t go home last night and I’m afraid to now.’ She sat up, leaned against him and closed her eyes. ‘I stayed with Jo.’
‘Who’s Jo? What happened? What have you been doing?’
‘I don’t think I should tell you.’
‘Oh yes you should! Come on, what about Jo?’ She had to explain first about Adrian, her brother, and Hannah, his girlfriend, mistress, the spy, and who Jo was, before she could say they had tried to kill Hannah and failed. When she stopped talking, he said, ‘You didn’t kill her? That’s good, isn’t it?’
‘No, it’s not. She can tell her friend it was me, and she knows where I live, she’s been there with Adrie. I told her Jo was my cousin Anne, so they won’t go looking for her, it’s me they’ll want.’
‘Stay here with me. I’ll go talk to Johnny.’ When he started to get up, she pulled him back.
‘I don’t think they want me here. Marrie didn’t even want me to wait for you. She only said yes because Johnny did.’
‘That’s good enough.’
Through the half-open door, she heard Marcus and Johnny’s voices, not Marrie’s until she said loudly enough for Pam to hear, ‘If they find you here, we’ll all be arrested, you know that, Johnny. Is that what you want?’
‘Why would they come here? How would they know?’ Johnny asked.
‘They know everything! They know you’re not at the theater anymore, Marcus, and you ought to have gone with Süskind and you didn’t. It’s a miracle they haven’t been here yet.’
The Time Between Page 24
