Tamar (30 page)

“Shoot them, Exner! Shoot them!”

Exner looked ahead and saw a stop sign and three Waffen-SS men walking towards the car.

“General?”

“Goddamn it, Lieutenant, shoot those men!”

Baffled, Exner opened fire.

Wim, Koop, and Oskar were still fifty casual metres from the BMW when they saw the flashes and heard the bullets sing off the road into the darkness. Wim went onto one knee, Koop and Oskar stood, and all three of them let rip with the Stens. The sound hammered into the night, like typewriters writing the same brilliant white word over and over again.

Off to the right of the BMW, Willy had taken the precaution of lying facedown in the long damp grass on the far side of the ditch. He had no intention of being caught in the crossfire, especially with that mad sod Eddy on the opposite side of the road. By the conjunction of the moon and his good luck he was able to see clearly the silhouette of the man in the back of the car who was standing and firing at Koop and Wim and Oskar. He pushed the button of his Sten to
burst
and let off half the magazine, and the silhouette magically disappeared.

By the time Exner died, Rauter had cleared his own gun, but before he could use it, the windscreen exploded into a prickling frost. He turned his face away from it and noticed that his driver had thrown himself back against his seat and was twitching like someone having a fit. Then something tore into Rauter’s face and thumped into his chest, and he fell sideways.

Koop and Wim and Oskar shot at the car until their magazines were empty. Then, although there was no longer any returning fire, they reloaded and fired continuously as they walked towards it, because none of them wanted to be the first to stop. When they did stop, the silence rang in their heads like a vast bell. All five men slid fresh magazines into their Stens and, at a signal from Koop, Willy and Eddy ran crouching onto the road until they were alongside the BMW. When Willy said “Now!” both men stood and aimed their guns into the car.

It was immediately obvious that the three men in it were no longer a threat to anybody. All the same, Willy moved slowly and carefully when he reached in to pick up the two machine pistols and the cigarette that smouldered on the blood-spattered back seat. He called to Koop, who went to fetch the lanterns. Eddy noted approvingly that the motor was still running, despite the hot water spewing out of the holes in the radiator. One of its headlights was intact, spilling a cone of light onto the road.

Koop trained his lantern onto the big man who was slumped across the body of the driver. His face had been opened up on one side, and there were entry wounds on the front of his greatcoat. Koop studied the man’s insignia and whistled softly. He opened the dead man’s coat and saw the flashes on the lapels of the tunic: gold oak leaves on green panels. There was no need to look for the man’s identity papers.

“Jesus,” he said.

“Koop?” Eddy said. “Koop? Who is it?”

“We get out of here. Now.
Now!
”

Koop switched his lantern off and began to walk, almost run, back towards their car. The others followed. Eddy caught him by the arm. “What?
What?
”

“We’ve killed the big one,” Koop said.

There was no doubt that the gunfire had come from the south. Tamar’s need to get back to the farm was overwhelming. On the other hand, he had to find out what the hell was going on. It was his job to know. He stood knee-deep in the bracken, gazing down the almost invisible road.

The atmosphere in the stolen staff car was weird. It was as if, Eddy thought, they were drunk. As if they were kids again, coming home far too late from a party in his father’s borrowed van: that same heady mix of bravado and fear of punishment. Willy, Wim, and Oskar would all talk at once, then fall silent, and then start jabbering again. Crazy mood swings.

Eddy stared fixed on the unlit road ahead, driving faster than was really safe. He felt a sudden pain in his jaw and for a mad instant wondered if he’d been shot. Then he realized that his teeth were tightly clenched. Relax, he told himself. Relax and take care of the driving.

Then Koop said, “We can’t go home,” and they knew it was true.

Tamar kept the bike in a low gear, its engine stumbling slightly. He was certain he was heading towards something terrible, and the desire to find it and get it over with was almost stronger than the need to be cautious. He forced his hand to stay steady on the throttle, the Sten bumping against his chest. He passed the junction to Loenen, then saw, or thought he saw, a dim light ahead. He killed the engine instantly and wheeled the bike to the edge of the road. He propped the machine, then slithered down into the ditch and crept towards the light.

The ditch became shallower as he went forward. By the time he was able to see that the patch of brightness was a car’s headlight, he was forced to bend almost double. When he guessed he was close to the light, he leaned back against the side of the ditch, listening, holding his breath. Black rags of cloud drifted across the moon. There was nothing to hear, except, perhaps, a faint spilling of water. It was quite possible, he thought, that he had crept up on a Nazi patrol; that a German was taking a leak just a metre or two away. He turned onto his belly and lifted his head until his eyes were just above the level of the road.

It was a long, low-slung car without a roof. No markings, but German, obviously. There appeared to be no one in it. Tamar listened and could hear no voices, no movement, no sound at all other than that quiet trickle. He felt around until his hand found a pebble. He threw it and ducked back down, hearing it strike metal and then skitter across the road. Nothing happened. Dragging what might be his last breath into his lungs, he stood up.

It was a BMW staff car with three dead occupants. Tamar walked around it, his flesh twitching, moving the gun restlessly. The number of bullet holes was incredible. There were two dead men in the front and one in the back. Their blood was shiny black in the moonlight. The man in the front passenger seat was lying across the driver. Both he and the one in the back were officers, or had been. As far as Tamar could make out, working by broken moonlight, there were no weapons in the car. He put his Sten down on the bonnet and used both hands to explore the big man’s body. The face was pulpy and still warm, and Tamar’s hands recoiled from it. He fumbled inside the man’s greatcoat and found the thin wallet where the ID was. He took it to the front of the car and kneeled so that he could read the document in the dull gleam of the surviving headlight.

“Oh, dearest Christ.”

He stood and grabbed the Sten and blundered into the darkness back towards the motorbike. His feet slithered, and he almost fell. He had slipped on spent cartridge cases; now, looking down, he could see that there were dozens, scores of them lying on the road.

“Koop,” he cried into the night. “Koop, in God’s name, what have you done?”

The hideout was a cluster of four wooden bungalows deep in the pine woods at the eastern fringe of the heath. Before the war, they had been the holiday homes of well-off Jewish families from Amsterdam, but these families no longer existed in any recognizable form. The houses themselves now sagged like grieving relatives. Once, the narrow lane that led to them from an obscure country road near Loenen had been tidily gravelled; now it was a couple of faint ruts either side of a meandering strip of tall grass. The labyrinth of footpaths that threaded the area had become ghostly traces. Koop and his men were among the very few people who knew them.

The group had done the buildings up in a way that made them look even more derelict than they already were. The windows had been crudely boarded up, but the gaps in the rough boards happened to provide views of all approaches, and they were wide enough for gun barrels. The holes in the shingled roofs were useful lookouts for a man armed with a machine gun. The place was fairly well stocked with food — most of it with German labels — and the group kept spare clothes there, as well as the heavy Bren gun the RAF had dropped to them eight months earlier. There were also three bicycles, all with good tyres.

It was Eddy and Wim who had first used the bungalows as a hideout. They’d slipped away there for a day or two whenever the Nazis were rounding up able-bodied men for export to Germany. Now, in the incredibly black early hours of 7th March, it was clear to all of them that they might have to stay for quite a while.

They sat on what was left of the living-room furniture in the bungalow nearest the track. The windows were blacked out with blankets taken from the abandoned bedrooms; one had a pattern of merry rabbits dressed in pyjamas. Koop had taken the candle into the decaying kitchen and come back with a bottle of schnapps, which he passed round. It had circulated twice before Eddy Dekker ended the silence.

“Well, my brave boys, what are we going to do now?”

The obvious question, and the hardest. But it broke the dam; now everybody had something to say.

“Rejoice.”

“Koop, are you sure it was him? Absolutely sure?”

“Don’t be so stupid. This is a disaster.”

“I said, Christ, I said, I told you it wasn’t a bloody truck!”

“Yeah, it was him.”

“You know what? I’m glad. One of the most evil bastards to walk the earth —”

“God forgive me, but I just didn’t want to stop firing.”

“Koop, don’t hog that bottle.”

“How many did we kill tonight?”

“Three. The driver —”

“No! Let me ask this again!” It was Willy Vekemans.

Silence. Then Koop said, “Willy, don’t start. We all know —”

“Yes,” Willy said. “We all know. There will be reprisals. That’s the word nobody has used yet. But there, I’ve said it. So come on. How many people have we killed tonight?”

Koop stood up, holding the schnapps. He pointed the neck of the bottle at Willy’s nose.

“Listen. Do you think I haven’t thought about that? Don’t you think it was the first bloody thing that went through my mind when I saw it was Rauter? So don’t you get all self-righteous, Willy Vekemans. It’s not us who line innocent people up against the wall and shoot them. If I remember correctly, it’s the bloody Nazis who do that.”

“I’m not being self-righteous, Koop. I went into this tonight with my eyes open, like everybody else. We all know what Tamar told us, and we —”

“Tamar!” Koop spat the word out. “Yes, we all know what that bloody errand boy told us.
Do nothing
is what he told us. He runs off to England, has a nice break, comes back and tells us to do nothing. Well, thank you very much, Commandant. Wish you’d told us sooner. Could have saved us a lot of trouble. I could have saved us a lot of trouble if I’d shot the soft sod when he stood there in the marshes with his hands in the air.”

Koop thrust the bottle into Willy’s hands and threw his own arms up. “
I surrender! I surrender!
That’s Tamar’s message to the gallant Dutch resistance. Great, bloody great.”

“Koop . . .”

“Hey, Koop, come on . . .”

Oskar raised his voice against the angry babble. “I think we should stop this right now.
Right now
. Okay. We know what we have done tonight. And what the Germans will do as a result. Personally, I think there is very little we can do to stop them. Except for one thing, of course.”

Silence, then the cry of a nocturnal bird.

“We can give ourselves up. It might be enough for them.”

“Don’t talk so bloody daft, man.” Koop’s voice was harsh. “What do you want? To be a saint? A martyr? You spent too much time in Sunday school, my friend. What, we give ourselves up, the Gestapo have their fun with us, and all’s square? Don’t be stupid. We’ve just killed the top Nazi in Holland. You seriously think that our five dead bodies would make up for that? I don’t think so. They’d do whatever they fancied with us, then shoot God knows how many people anyway. It’d make no difference.”

Oskar said, surprisingly, “I agree with you. But I tell you this: I’m not prepared to hole up here not knowing what’s going on. Someone ought to get back to Apeldoorn and find out what’s happening. And since it’s my suggestion, I’ll go.”

“No one leaves here tonight,” Koop said flatly.

“Fair enough. I’ll go at first light. The curfew will have ended by the time I get there. In the meantime, I think we should try to get some sleep instead of sitting around here arguing and bullshitting.”

“Amen,” Eddy Dekker said. “Because in the morning we’re going to have to decide what to do with the car.”

And that started another argument.

As dawn was breaking on 7th March, a German patrol scouting ahead of the delayed troop movement to Apeldoorn spotted a stationary car on the road ahead. The captain in command was understandably nervous, suspecting that the apparently empty and shot-up machine was a trap. He brought his armoured car to a halt two hundred metres away and studied the BMW through his field glasses. There appeared to be at least one body in it. He radioed the convoy south of him and was ordered to investigate at once and report back. The captain took two men with him, and they approached the car with extreme caution.

There were an amazing number — a ridiculous number — of bullet holes in it. He recognized Rauter at once, despite the wrecked face, because the lieutenant general had pinned a medal on his chest at a parade only a week ago. Steeling himself, he pressed his hand to the left side of Rauter’s neck. The flesh was very cold, but below the ear there was a beat, faint as a hatching butterfly. He dashed to the armoured car and seized the mouthpiece of the radiophone from his startled driver.

Rauter was taken to the military hospital in Apeldoorn. He had several flesh wounds and a shattered jaw, but the major problem was the bullets that had penetrated his lung. All the same, they pumped blood into him and kept him alive.

In the afternoon, Rauter’s deputy, Eberhardt Schongarth, went to visit his boss. As was usual by this time of day, Schongarth was fairly drunk, and he slumped into the chair beside the general’s bed. He was not expecting, nor was he ready for, a conversation. So he was dreadfully surprised when Rauter spoke. Schongarth struggled to look upright and alert. Even if he had been sober, he would have found it difficult to understand what Rauter was saying. The general had lost some of the right side of his face, which was swathed in dressings, and could only speak in small groups of words punctuated by gasps.