George answered. Didn’t even look him in the eye. She was poring over her English–German pocket dictionary.
‘Jesus. German’s hard! I can’t make head or tail of these bloody papers. I’m looking words up that must have fallen out of use decades ago, or else it’s nouns rammed together to make a new word and I just can’t fathom it. It’s nothing like Dutch or Spanish. And the verbs! The verbs are fucking ridiculous. Auf. Aus. An. A million damned prepositions. This is going to take forever.’
Van den Bergen leaned in to kiss her but his lips met with fresh air. She’d already retreated to the kitchen. Setting medicine bag and nappies down, he plonked the veg on the kitchen worktop, eyed the soil-covered potatoes and nodded approvingly. The carrots looked good too.
‘I’ve got your stuff, Tamara. Willem’s not been back, I don’t think.’
‘Save your breath,’ George said.
‘Whoever grew these veggies must have some incredible compost. This potato’s as big as my head!’ He lifted out the potato in question, grinning at the prizewinner, then picked up a big bunch of carrots by their long, leafy foliage. For the first time, he noticed the veg box’s provenance, now that it was no longer obscured by the carrot leaves.
He felt the blood drain from his face. ‘Oh my God. Tamara?’
George stretched and yawned. ‘She’s gone. Oh, and thinking about it, the car I thought was following us was green.’
‘Gone? What do you mean “gone”? Gone where?’ His hunch had been correct. The room was spinning, his breathing shallow and quick.
George shrugged. ‘No idea. A walk? The newsagent? Who cares? She’s a grown-up.’
‘Where’s the baby?!’
CHAPTER 30
Van den Bergen’s apartment, minutes later
‘Answer your phone, damn it!’
George observed Van den Bergen as he paced the hall, waiting for his daughter to pick up. He stopped at the doorway to his bedroom. The floor creaked beneath him as he took several paces inside, checking that Eva was still asleep in her cot.
‘She’ll be fine,’ George said, loud enough for him to hear, but not so loud that the baby might wake. ‘She was only going to the shop for some chocolate and milk. Honestly, Paul—’
‘Tamara. This is Dad again. Please call me and let me know you’re safe.’ Van den Bergen stalked back down the hall towards George, his normally strong, gravelly voice breathy and cracking with fear.
Throwing his phone down onto the kitchen table, he rubbed his face and made a howling sound like an animal, suffering and in pain.
‘Are you crying? Seriously?’ George rubbed his arm, baffled by the overreaction. ‘She’s gone to the shops in broad daylight in the most boring suburb of the most laid-back city in the world, for God’s sake. What do you think’s going to happen?’
He removed his hands, revealing red, watery eyes filled with sorrow. ‘Den Bosch. Or Baumgartner. Two dangerous, heartless traffickers. That’s what’s going to happen.’
George flung a stack of Deutsches Reich papers towards him. ‘It’s your anxiety. You’re fast-forwarding to the apocalypse. Stop it.’
But he was up on his feet, already donning his raincoat. ‘I’m going after her.’
He was just about to step through the front door when his phone rang.
‘Oh, thank God,’ Van den Bergen said, the relief audible. ‘Please come back as quick as you can. I was worried.’
‘See?’ George said, smiling as he peeled his outer layer off and took a seat opposite her. ‘No drama necessary. A grown adult woman goes out to buy chocolate. That’s not headline news, Paul.’ She switched to English. ‘You need to calm down.’
He nodded. Popped a chewable antacid onto his tongue and chased it down with a couple of painkillers and a swig of cranberry juice. ‘We’re going on holiday when all this is over.’
‘Mexico?’ George winked at him.
‘Maybe not.’ Finally, the utter desolation in that melancholy face left him and was replaced by a smile.
Methodically, he began to photograph the Nazi paperwork, emailing the images over to Hakan in Berlin.
‘Hang on,’ George said. She picked up a sizeable pile of letters, all from late 1942 to 1944, bound with string, and almost all addressed to Hendrik. Freeing one or two from their yellowed envelopes, she glanced at the contents and realised they were personal letters. ‘Hey. Guess who these are from.’
Van den Bergen looked up, his eyes like saucers behind the smudged lenses of his reading glasses. No response beyond a blank look.
‘SS Obersturmführer Bruno Baumgartner!’
‘Really?’ He stood and came round to her side of the table, peering over her shoulder.
‘Yep. You want to get these snapped and pinged over to Hakan first. I really want to know what they say. I wish to God my German was better.’ She ran her finger over the indents in the page where the typewriter keys had bashed against the heavy, parchment-like paper. An SS livery at the top with an Amsterdam address. ‘This guy must have been important,’ she said. ‘He gets his own letterhead.’
Van den Bergen spread the first couple of letters out and started to photograph them. ‘Let’s see what Hakan says.’
He made a call to his Berlin-based ally, with whom he had joined forces in a previous case of missing children. Made it clear that this was by no means part of an official police investigation but that the translation was urgently required. ‘If you can just give me the gist, that would be great. We need to know what we’re dealing with here.’
George could hear Hakan talking on the other end of the phone. The words were indistinct, but she could make out his German intonation. Her cheeks flushed hot as she remembered standing in her hotel room in her bath towel, flirting with the Turkish-born, violin-playing German who was so very easy on the eye and who had been so deeply flustered by the encounter. Concentrate, George. She wondered if he was still single. Lovely Hakan. Stop it, you silly cow.
Van den Bergen turned to speak to her, distracting her from lascivious thoughts about a man who wasn’t her partner. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and whispered, ‘He can’t get to them until this evening. He’s having his car serviced.’ He rolled his eyes at what he clearly deemed to be a terrible excuse.
High-pitched wailing from down the hall brought the call to a swift end.
‘I feel like shit,’ George said. ‘I’m going to get some reading done.’
Unwilling to face watching Van den Bergen turn into an entirely different man with Eva in his arms, George repaired to the guest bedroom and closed the door. She took out Rivka Zemel’s diary, thumbing through the pages. There couldn’t be more than two or three entries left. Trying to focus, though the tempest that was little Eva raged on only feet away, on the other side of the door, George read. Fully expecting the diary to end abruptly, where Rivka would almost certainly be carted off by the Nazis to some gas chamber at the end of a fateful train journey, she swallowed hard, inhaled deeply and picked up where she’d left off…
Imagine my surprise when the front door slammed. All that while we’d been crouched in our room between the rooms, expecting the German soldiers to burst in on us at any moment. There had been screaming after the shot had been fired. I recognised Famke’s voice as she’d shrieked for them to let her go, telling them that she was just the housekeeper and knew nothing. But despite the commotion, the first face to appear in our secret doorway, flooding the pitch-black place with light once again, was Kaars’s.
He told us that they’d gone, and wasn’t it lucky that the officer had only fired his gun into the ceiling through sheer frustration that he hadn’t been able to find anything? Shmuel was finally able to indulge in a violent coughing fit that saw him bring up blood. Poor, poor Shmuel. I fear that this secret little room may be the death of my brother. He has grown so weak.
Once again, I begged Papa that we take Ed up on his offer to arrange a safe passage to England – there are Jewish communities, establis
hed during the time of the Russian pogroms, in London, Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds. Ideally though, I long to go to New York.
Anna Groen – soon to be Mevrouw Hendrik van Eden (how romantic and exciting!) – has been showing me photos that her uncle sent from the glittering city that was once called New Amsterdam. He owns an import-export business there that brings everything from Far Eastern silks to rare Dutch tulip bulbs all the way to America. Everyone in his photographs, including him, looked terribly dashing, as though they had just walked off set in one of the Hollywood studios. Though the Americans are hard at war with the Japanese, and I hear that many have been stationed in England, too, in order to boost the British air force’s bombing power, life over there looks a good deal better than it does here, in our tiny windowless space in the Verhagen house.
Kaars and Ed have managed so far to spirit as many as forty families out of the country on merchant ships destined for all sorts of wonderful destinations where the Germans and their filthy allies have no jurisdiction. Obviously, they’ve been doing this out of the goodness of their hearts – that is the purpose of the Force of Five. Brechtus and Arnold have forged contacts at the docks, mainly with shipping companies and civilians who own boats. It has apparently been surprising how willing some are to help the Jews, merely from a deep-seated need to right some of the Nazis’ wrongs. What has happened as a result, however, is that the grateful Jewish families have been giving Kaars gifts of paintings that they cannot take with them and which they do not want Hitler’s thugs to seize.
At first, I didn’t believe that people could give away such treasures so willingly, but I did witness the extremely well-off Cohen family give him a Dutch School still life and a small Vermeer. Imagine that! They said diamonds were easy to conceal on their persons but a gilt-framed masterpiece was not so easy. Papa should realise that we have no such luck as to own assets that can be used to barter with or simply given as tokens of gratitude. We desperately need to go.
In fact, as I write this, there is an insistent knock at the door yet again. I have only moments before Mama turns the light off and plunges us all into darkness. It is them, though. Kaars has banged three times on the wall as a warning. Please God, we will…
George opened her eyes, sat up, plumped her pillows and blew her streaming nose on a long piece of toilet roll. She was surprised to see Van den Bergen standing in the doorway. He had a harried look about him, clutching a now-sleeping Eva against his chest and shoulder. His lower eyelid was flickering, the way it did occasionally when he was under extreme pressure.
‘Tamara’s still not back, George.’
She looked at the clock, but it had stopped. ‘How long has she been gone?’
‘An hour.’
‘Jesus. I must have fallen asleep.’ She rubbed her eyes. ‘Have you phoned her?’
‘Three times. She’s not picking up. I need to go and look for her.’
‘Yep. Put the baby in her cot and go. I’ll watch Eva.’
Feeling certain that Van den Bergen was overreacting and that Tamara was in all likelihood sitting in the local café with some old acquaintance she had bumped into, George yawned and stretched. She was foggy-headed, thanks to a deep afternoon sleep and the effects of the Lemsip she’d brought from London. As she sought the place in Rivka’s diary where she’d left off, it occurred to her that Van den Bergen’s panic wasn’t entirely unfounded. It was strange for a mother to leave her baby for an hour without pre-arrangement. Perhaps Tamara was suffering from postnatal stress.
Resolving not to add to her lover’s mounting hysteria, she read on.
Please God we will remain undiscovered.
Nothing more was written on that page. George wondered for a moment if this was the end of young Rivka’s story. But no. She turned the page to find another entry. It was the last, however.
27 April 1943
Dear diary, earlier today Ed arrived at the Verhagen house carrying a box. He was terribly flustered – his blond hair was dishevelled, his skin flushed red and with a thin veil of sweat. Normally, he’s such a composed chap. I soon understood why, however. He asked that I conceal the box inside our cunning room between rooms, suggesting that we put it in the cavity behind the skirting board, which he knew was hollow as he had been privy to Mr Verhagen’s construction methods when there was first a plan to hide my family. When he said it was extremely important that the box remain secret and that it contained evidence of dastardly doings within, we all agreed. Papa was concerned that if the Nazis succeeded in finding us after two failed attempts, then it would do us no good to be harbouring incriminating objects.
Ed would tell us nothing more other than the dire news that somebody within the Force of Five had turned and that we must neither try to open the box and view its contents nor must we breathe a word of its existence to anyone – even Kaars. When Papa pushed him on what he meant by ‘turned’, Ed just said that one of his fellow freedom fighters and lifelong friends was in league with the SS and was giving up Jews in return for cash. As we enjoyed a swift parting embrace – and oh, that had such a melancholy finality to it – he told us that he had found a new safe location. He made a promise that he would be moving us as well as dealing with the box tonight.
As I sit here writing by the flickering light of my lamp, it must be the early hours of the morning. Ed has not returned and I am so, so fearful for his safety. I am trying to conjure his handsome, strong face and joyful blue eyes in my imagination, but I find myself so overwhelmed by dark thoughts that I can only visualise the composite parts of the face of the man I intend to marry, and not the whole.
Dear Ed, please come back to me and move us to safety. The war will surely be over in a week or two. Hitler is buckling under the pressure exerted by the Soviets on the Eastern Front. The allies are growing in confidence. We Zemels, however, are still in fear for our lives and the Nazis are getting even more aggressive and extreme in their violent bully-boy tactics, like fighting dogs backed down a dead end.
I must put out the candle. There is knocking at the door. Could it be Ed? There are footsteps upstairs as the rest of the household wakes. Now, a man is speaking to someone. It must be Mr Verhagen. Now, there is German being shouted. ‘Raus! Raus! Wir wissen wo die Juden sind!’
They know where the Jews are. Us! They’re coming inside.
Please God, no! I fear we cannot evade capture again.
The diary entries ended abruptly and George was surprised to find she was crying. What had happened to Rivka and her family? Ed had found the rotten apple in the barrel. But what terrible fate had befallen the clandestine couple?
Van den Bergen’s key was in the lock. She threw back the covers, expecting him to walk in with Tamara, who had almost certainly just taken liberties with her old man’s free babysitting service. Except Van den Bergen was alone. All the colour had leached from his face, leaving even his lips a ghostly off-white.
‘She wasn’t there. Nobody in the shops has seen her.’
CHAPTER 31
Van den Bergen’s apartment, then an Uber taxi, later
‘Get your lazy arse over here and parent your daughter,’ George shouted down the phone to Numb-Nuts.
On the other end of the line, Tamara’s wanker of a husband was making some kind of lame excuse about a fungal infection in his foot and needing to be at his parents’ place. ‘And besides, Tamara’s made it pretty clear she doesn’t want to see me.’
With his raincoat half on, half off, Van den Bergen grabbed George’s phone and barked at his son-in-law. ‘She’s gone missing, you prick. I’m going to try to find her. If you’re not over here in twenty minutes to take Eva, I’m going to strangle the life out of you with my bare hands. Have you seen the size of my hands, Willem? Because they’re very big, extremely strong gardener’s hands, and I’ve had a hell of a lot of theoretical practice over the years, fantasising about choking the living daylights out of you with these very big hands. Do you understand?’
He thrust
the phone back at George. ‘I cut him off,’ Van den Bergen said, pulling on his coat properly. ‘He’ll be here, if he knows what’s good for him.’
‘I wish you’d call the station and get them to send a couple of uniforms out to the farm, instead of going yourself.’ George folded her arms, watching Eva sitting merrily in her inflatable ring, chewing on the pages of a fabric baby book. Left holding the baby, and she wasn’t even hers. Nice. ‘It’s dangerous to go alone. It’s getting dark. You don’t know the lay of the land. It’ll be pitch black out—’
But Van den Bergen shook his head and snatched his car keys from the side. ‘I’m suspended, remember? Persona non grata. And she’s only been gone just over an hour. She doesn’t qualify as a missing person yet. There’s no way they’ll send a squad car out into the country on my hunch.’
‘They’ve got a point.’ She searched his eyes to see if there was any indication he was actually listening to her. ‘She didn’t answer her phone at first, did she?’
‘There’s a veg box from Bosch, Boom & Tuin on the side. That tells me everything I need to know. Den Bosch has had eyes on her, George. I’ve felt like someone has been watching me of late. I’m sure I was followed to the allotments the other morning. The guy threatened me in person, didn’t he? He basically said that I need to butt out, or else. Well, this is the “or else”.’
‘Don’t go alone, Paul. At least wait for Numb-Nuts, so I can come with!’
She knew she’d lost him when he opened the front door. ‘Nappies and wipes are in a bag by my nightstand. Change her on a mat on the floor, not the bed. She’s starting to really roll around now.’
And he was gone.
Silly bastard. George wasn’t sure how to feel. Frightened that something dreadful would befall him? It wouldn’t be the first time. Van den Bergen’s best trick was ignoring everyone’s advice and getting into tight corners. But then, was she any different? Didn’t that come with the territory?
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