Tamar (16 page)

Tamar had little doubt that they would run into German checkpoints before they reached Renkum. He’d talked it through with Banjo and the British officers.

“Banjo has achieved the impossible, getting these trucks for us,” he said. “And the trucks themselves are our ace card because the Germans will think we must be some sort of official convoy. There’s a good chance that they’ll just wave us through. There’s also a chance that they won’t.”

“Understood,” the brigadier said. “Then what?”

“Well, I’ll try to bluff them. What’s in our favour is that no one in his right mind would be taking three truckloads of British soldiers down to the Rhine in broad daylight.”

“Absolutely,” the jolly major agreed. “We’ve got craziness on our side. Terribly sensible, the Germans. Gives us the edge.”

“So,” Tamar went on, “if we are stopped, the drivers will keep the engines running. I’ll do the talking. Your men must remain perfectly still, even if the backs of the trucks are opened. But if anyone starts to pull the sacks away, they must yell and scream and attack the Germans without hesitation. I know they have no weapons, but that’s what they must do. Is that all right?”

“Fine,” the brigadier said. “It’s what they’d do anyway, I imagine. I’ll go and have a chat with them.”

As it turned out, there were two checkpoints. The first one, a solitary German private with his motorbike propped against a tree, made a gesture that urged them to hurry onwards, rather than stop. The second was a different matter.

Peering ahead, Tamar saw a single figure on the road: an SS trooper cradling a machine pistol. He reached over and touched the driver on her arm, and she slowed. A second German wandered casually onto the road, lifting his rifle from his shoulder. Just off to the right was a wrecked cottage, a vehicle of some sort parked in front of it.

Tamar looked back; the other trucks were close behind. He stuck his arm out of the window and signalled to them to slow down.

The German with the machine pistol stayed where he was. He gestured to the man with the rifle, who approached Tamar’s truck.

“Your papers, please.”

The driver dug into her overalls, produced the little booklet, and passed it through the window. The German scanned it and gave it back. Then he stepped backwards and looked at the other two trucks. In German he said, “What are you carrying and where are you going?”

She shrugged and pulled a face that said, I don’t understand.

Tamar leaned across her, shoving his identity papers towards the soldier. “Potatoes,” he said.
“Kartoffeln
.
”

The German gazed at him. Tamar saw the exhaustion in his face and made a gesture: Come here, look. He opened the door and stepped down into the road. At the corner of his vision he saw the other German do something with his machine pistol and then lift it. The trooper with the rifle walked cautiously down the blind side of the truck; while he was doing so, Tamar looked over at the half-destroyed cottage and saw the snout of a heavy machine gun poking from the fractured shutters of an upstairs window. He walked to the back of the truck and fiddled noisily with the bolts. He lowered the tailgate, speaking in German, cloaking the words in a rough Dutch accent.

“Potatoes, see? It’s been a good year for them, all things considered. This truckload,
ja,
is for Arnhem. The other two for headquarters at Apeldoorn.” He nudged the German. “Nothing but the best for them, eh?”

The German stared into the truck, straight at part of an exposed foot that he didn’t seem to see.

Tamar reached past him and hoisted a half-full sack onto the road. “Take these,” he said. “Why should those bastards have them all? Here, take them.”

The young German looked at the sack, then at Tamar. “You speak good German,” he said.

“Of course!” Tamar straightened, stood stiffly like a man on a parade ground. “I was for two years in the Reich. A guest worker. Machine tools, in Essen, until my lungs packed up. You know Essen?”

The young German grimaced. “A shithole,” he said. “I’m from Heidelberg.”

Tamar smiled and shrugged. “Ah, yes. Heidelberg. They tell me it is very beautiful.”

The German looked at Tamar and then at the slumped sack of potatoes. “All right,” he said, “I’ll take these. You can piss off.”

“Thank you,” Tamar said.
“Danke.”

He walked slowly back to the cab and climbed in.

They got to the woods above Renkum when the weakened sun was almost at the foot of the sky. The British emerged from under the sacks and spilled out. They at once began to change into their uniforms, which they had carried in their bundles and bags. They carefully packed the borrowed civilian clothes and heaped them into one of the trucks, then moved away, forming quiet groups in the deep shade of the trees. When the trucks had gone, Tamar called together the funereal brigadier, the mad young major, and Banjo, and they walked through falling gold and russet leaves to the edge of the wood.

Tamar indicated markers as they went. “This is the way we will come tonight. Remember this, the big beech tree. Remember this ditch. Here, the wooden posts with wire attached.”

They came eventually to a broken gate where the woods ended and the bare fields stretched down to the Rhine.

Tamar handed his binoculars to the English brigadier. “There’s a German position way over to the left, just where the river veers south. See it? Just beyond that small group of buildings. Now, track all the way to your right. The group of trees throwing the long shadow. Got that?”

“Ah, yes,” the Englishman said. “There’s another one. They look well settled in. What are they, do you know? Mortars? Heavy machine guns?”

“That sort of thing,” Tamar said. “Now I want you to look this way a bit until you see a more or less straight line running down towards the river, through those hedges.”

“Got it.”

“Good. That’s a drainage ditch. It’s over a metre deep, and there’s water at the bottom of it in some places. That’s our route. It’ll get us to within a hundred and fifty metres of the bank. After that, there’s an open meadow, and we’ll just have to take our chances.”

The brigadier handed the binoculars to the major, who studied the ditch. “Looks about, what, a kilometre or more long?” he said. “Hell of a distance to crawl.” He sounded as though he was looking forward to it.

“We’ll set off at ten,” Tamar said. “That should give us plenty of time. The hardest part will be the walk we’ve just taken, through the woods. It’ll be pitch dark by then, with any luck, so single file all the way, okay? Each man must keep hold of the man ahead of him. Anyone who gets lost stays lost. We can’t go looking for strays.”

“Fair enough,” the brigadier said. “What’s the drill when we get to the far end of the ditch?”

“You stay where you are; I’ll go down to the river. At midnight, I flash a V signal with a torch, which will tell your people over there to launch the boats. When they reach this side, I’ll flash the same signal to you. Please be watching — I don’t want to have to do it more than once. Then you climb out of the ditch and walk straight ahead to the water, where I’ll meet you. No running. Concentrate on staying together.”

“Understood,” the brigadier said. He turned to the major. “Right, Digby. We’d better get back and brief the men.”

“We’ll be along in a minute,” Tamar said. “There’s a couple of things Banjo and I need to talk about.”

When they were alone, the two men stood staring out at the fading landscape.

“It’s bloody chancy,” Banjo said.

Tamar looked up at the sky, where gathering sheets of cloud were streaked with a bruised red.

“Darkness and surprise, that’s pretty much all we’ve got going for us.” He grinned at Banjo. “And our luck’s good. We got this far.”

“Yeah. I didn’t think we would. So, how do you want to do it? Are we going to be in the ditch with these guys, or d’you want me to cover one side and you the other?”

“I’ll walk beside them, about ten metres this side of the ditch. You’re going to stay here.”

“Like hell I am,” Banjo said.

“You’re going to stay exactly here,” Tamar said. “Because if anything goes wrong, the only thing these men can do is try to get back. And they’ll need someone to cover them this end.”

“Tamar, listen to me. What if you bump into a patrol down there? On your own you don’t stand a chance. I’m coming with you.”

Tamar said, “If it comes to a firefight in the dark, it’ll not make much difference if there’s one or two of us. We’d be as likely to shoot each other as anyone else. No, you’re staying here. That’s an order.”

It was the first time he’d used those words. They sounded false and pompous, a quotation from somewhere. He half expected Banjo to laugh in his face. Instead, he shrugged and turned away to look back at the river.

“Come on,” Tamar said. “Let’s go.”

But the other man put his hand on Tamar’s arm. “Look,” he said. “You might be right about our luck.”

Tamar turned and saw that in the chill dusk the river had begun to conceal itself. It was exhaling a fine mist, like human breath on winter air. Already veils of vapour blurred the far bank, and the low dark horizon seemed to float on shifty nothingness.

Nightmarish hours later, Tamar was down there in the hanging fog, alone, close to the invisible water. The strain of listening and staring into darkness had made his body ache and stiffen. He had simply, stupidly, not realized how noisy the business would be. Coming through the woods, the blundering and cursing file of British soldiers had sounded like a stampede of blind beasts. Then he had walked alongside the ditch, probing the night with his Sten. If there had been a German on the same track, they would have banged their faces together before they saw one another. And from the ditch there had come a continuous scrabbling and splashing and murmuring; a march of vast rats that must surely have been audible from any distance.

But, amazingly, they had made it. And now the British were slumped in the ditch behind and to the right of him, and he was wondering what the bloody hell was happening. He had lain on his belly in the dreadfully empty meadow and flashed the signal across the water. He had estimated that it would take fifteen minutes for the assault boats to cross the river; twenty-five had passed now, and there was neither sign nor sound of them. He had moved a short distance westwards because the current ran that way and the boats might have drifted; he had stumbled against the stump of a wall, the remains of some small waterside building, and stayed there in its ruins. The river mist seemed to contain some sort of light within itself, because he could distinguish it from the surrounding night; but both were impenetrable. Rigid with anxiety, he repeated the signal, knowing that the timetable was unravelling. The English major might come wandering along, like a schoolmaster wondering what his boys were up to. Banjo might take it into his head to come down. The British soldiers, lying bruised and wet and lost in a drain, might do anything. Shit! Where were the boats?

He heard them before he saw them. A faint splash like a rising fish, and then another. Peering forward, he saw patches of darkness take shape in the mist. He moved out of the ruins and went towards where they might land. He heard a louder splash, and then a man was standing blackly in front of him. A suppressed voice, English.

“Hello? Ride across the river?”

Tamar tried to speak but found that his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. He sorted himself out and said, “Wait. Hold on.”

He turned and Morsed the torch towards the ditch. Nothing happened at first, and then he heard a whispering that paused and resumed and then became a continuous rhythmic noise. A column of amorphous shapes appeared and grew in the darkness, and the whispering became the sound of men moving steadily through long wet grass.

The invisible man who stood beside him said, “Brilliant job, son. Ruddy brilliant. Thought we’d seen the last of these blokes. You all right for smokes?”

In the hidden room at the Mendlo asylum, Dart paced back and forth between the couch and the blacked-out window. He stopped to check that the equipment was ready, despite knowing that it was. He broke open the Smith and Wesson revolver and removed the cartridges, turned them in his fingers, and put them back again. He adjusted slightly the positions of the notepad and pencil. He sat on his chair and fingered the precise spot on his cheek where Marijke had kissed him good-bye and carefully re-created the precise texture of her lips. He paused, frozen, when he could not remember if she’d had her eyes closed at that moment or not. The fact that he could not remember suddenly depressed him. He felt so tired and so incredibly bored that the effort of staying in the tiny room almost overwhelmed him. He went to the couch and opened the medical bag. He spilled the Benzedrine tablets onto the desk next to the transceiver and counted them, twice. There were seventy-two, and he wondered why. Because it was six dozen, of course. The bloody British, he thought, with their dozens and feet and inches and pounds and ounces and their twelve pence to the shilling and twenty shillings to the pound. Always out of step. Always in some awkward world of their own. He poured some water from the jug into the stained cup and washed two of the pills down his throat. It couldn’t do any harm.

She would be asleep now. In a nightgown, nightshirt, her underwear? Curled into herself? Sprawled on her back? He sat down again and lit another cigarette. Twenty-three minutes before he could lose himself in the hiss and warble that the headphones would feed into his head. He perched the cigarette on the base of the oil lamp and felt inside the lining of his coat for the slithery sheets of code.

There were plenty of people in the beautiful and damaged medieval town of Deventer who deeply disliked Ruud van der Spil. On the face of it, they had good reason to. Not only was he an outsider, an Amsterdammer, but he was prospering. His bar, the Village Constable, was the only one still open for business in November 1944, and business, for Ruud, was good. Famished townspeople trudging home through the rain and early darkness were enraged by the piano music and the incredible aromas — frying pork chops, schnitzel, garlic, beer, coffee — that drifted out into the night air.