Tamar (29 page)

Tamar stood up. He had that look of weary determination that was all too familiar to her. “Where’s the motorbike now?”

“In the dairy,” Dart said.

“How much petrol is there in the tank?”

Marijke took her hands from Dart. “Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head. “No, no.”

Dart glanced up at her, then looked at Tamar and shrugged. “It’s half full, maybe more.”

Marijke moved round the table and grasped Tamar’s wrists tightly. “Listen,” she said. “Don’t be stupid. There’s not a road you could take that’s safe. If the Germans catch you on that bike . . .” She was unable to finish the sentence.

Tamar said, “I’ll go along the canal path and then take one of the tracks across the heath. I can’t imagine the Germans will stray from the main road, not in armoured cars and trucks. There’s just enough moon. I won’t need to use the headlight. I’ll be okay.”

Now there was anger as well as fear in Marijke’s voice. She shook his wrists. “Listen to me! We’ve no idea where Koop is. Are you crazy enough to think you can cruise along that road looking for him and his stupid roadblock? For all we know, he and the others might be dead by now anyway. And if they are, well . . .”

“Well what?”

“Well, it’s too bad. We have to live. We have to carry on. Especially you. You’re too important to risk your life for crazies like Koop.”

Tamar opened his mouth, but before he could speak Marijke said, “You are too important to me.”

So here it was, at last. Exposed. It felt to Tamar that the truth was a huge, breathing presence that had entered the room, crowding it. He stared into Marijke’s fierce wet eyes because he couldn’t find the nerve to look at Dart. When at last he managed to, it seemed that Dart hadn’t reacted at all; he hadn’t even lifted his head. Now he merely reached out and carefully extinguished his cigarette in the little heart-shaped ashtray.

If Marijke was aware of what she had said, there was no sign of it in her face.

Tamar cleared his throat. “I have no choice. Even if Koop and his men get away with this stunt of theirs, even if they do it without killing anyone, there’ll be hell to pay. Remember what happened at Putten. Not a single German died in that ambush, but Rauter still burnt half the village and shipped six hundred people off to concentration camps. If Koop shoots up a few Germans, we’ll lose a lot of people. People we need will be lined up and shot. All for a truckload of pork. I have to stop him. I have to try.”

Dart, his head still lowered, said, “I have a scheduled transmission from the asylum at eight twenty. Do you by any chance want to tell me what to send?”

“I’ll be back before dawn,” Tamar said. “We’ll go through it then.”

“And if you’re not?”

“If I’m not, you know what to do. Send the signal that we are blown, and get the hell out.”

Dart counted one and two and three in his head, then said, “And Marijke?”

Tamar said, looking into her eyes, “Take her with you.”

At the kitchen door Tamar checked the Sten and gave it to Marijke while he wrapped his scarf twice around his neck and buttoned the shabby jacket.

He said to Dart, “Please go and see that everything’s okay.”

Reluctantly Dart took his revolver from his coat and went outside.

When she heard the outer door close, Marijke said, “I know what I said. I’m sorry. I meant it.”

“It’s all right. Don’t worry. I suppose —”

“I beg you. Please don’t go. Please,
please,
don’t go.”

Tamar took her face in his hands. “Marijke, you mustn’t do this.”

She was still holding the gun across her body, between them.

She said, “I’m pregnant.”

Tamar stared at her blankly, as if she had spoken in Greek or Japanese. Everything around him seemed to sway slightly. Eventually he said the stupid thing that men always say.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. And if you get killed now, I’ll never forgive you.”

He kissed her on each eyelid to stop her looking at him.

Then Dart came back in. “Everything’s fine,” he said.

SS Lieutenant General Hanns Albin Rauter, head of internal security for Holland, was unhappy. This was by no means unusual. Indeed, Rauter considered happiness to be a form of mental deficiency. He had observed so-called pleasures such as dancing, drinking, and sex, and found them stupid and grotesque. As one of very few people gifted with a cool and analytical mind, he knew that only a small number of individuals were strong enough to reject happiness and gratification in order to shape the history of the world, and he was one of them. There was nothing arrogant in this, of course. The Nazi Party and the Third Reich were an unstoppable force for good, and he was merely its servant. There was no doubt in his mind about any of these matters. However, he had a problem; one that he was trying to deal with calmly and rationally. To put it simply, his problem was that Germany was going to lose the war.

He had spent the day of 6th March at the front line, now very close to the German border. It was here, he was sure, that the final battles would have to be fought. Unless, as he fervently hoped, the Americans saw sense and joined with the Führer to defeat the barbaric Russians. Inevitably, though, Germany’s armed forces would have to regroup to defend the fatherland. Protecting them as they did so might be difficult. Sabotage of road and rail routes by terrorists could be a problem, and Rauter had met senior officers to discuss this. Although he hadn’t said so, he thought the Dutch resistance was crap. It was divided into all sorts of quarrelsome factions, and a good dose of public executions had taken the edge off their appetite for defiance. Also, it seemed to him, the Dutch were unlikely to rise up and take on the Wehrmacht. For one thing, they were too damn hungry — he’d seen to that. They were more likely to keep their heads down and wait for the Americans to turn up with chocolate and cigarettes. All the same, you could never be sure that some self-appointed hero wouldn’t crawl out of the woodwork and blow up a vital road or bridge.

But what really bothered Rauter was that he hadn’t managed to get all the Jews out. There were still several hundred of them — plus some queers and other rubbish — in the concentration camp in Westerbork. He’d been trying to get them shipped off to the east since September, but the damned trains still weren’t running. And now it was probably too late. Even more worrying was that his special groups were still —
still
— finding handfuls of Jews in Amsterdam and elsewhere. Incredible. They hung on like worms in the gut. He was reconciled to the idea that he might be the last good man to leave Holland. But the idea that a Jew might emerge from its rat hole to wave him good-bye sickened him.

Burdened by such thoughts, Rauter got into his car at dusk and was driven back to his headquarters in Didam. There, alone, he ate a large meal of soup, roast chicken, and
apfelstrudel.
Then, drinking his coffee, Rauter made the decision that ended his career. His weekly conference in Apeldoorn with Artur von Seyss-Inquart, the Reichskommissar for the Netherlands, was scheduled for the following afternoon. In addition, he had to attend a meeting at army headquarters earlier in the day. It occurred to him that it would make sense to travel to Apeldoorn now and get a good night’s sleep in his usual hotel. He was, understandably, tired.

He summoned his valet. “Run me a bath. Lay out my other uniform and clean underwear.”

“Sir.”

“Then tell what’s-his-name, the driver, to have the car outside at ten o’clock. And pack my laundry. I’ll have it done in Apeldoorn, since no one here seems to know how to iron a shirt properly.”

The car was a big BMW convertible painted a dull greygreen without markings or insignia. The roof was folded back, and a large suitcase containing Rauter’s dirty washing was strapped on top of it. His orderly, Lieutenant Exner, sat in the back. Rauter was a very large man — two metres in height and weighing almost a hundred kilos — and chose to sit in the front where he had more legroom. His new driver was a young Austrian corporal recently invalided and back from the Russian front, where he had lost half his right ear to frostbite. Exner passed forward one of the two Schmeisser machine pistols from the backseat. Rauter placed it across his lap. When the car pulled away, the driver had some trouble with the unfamiliar gearbox, and Rauter cursed him.

Koop and his men had been busy since nightfall. Getting across the town was no safe or simple matter. In recent days the Nazis had been behaving unpredictably. Sometimes they didn’t bother to police the curfew; sometimes they had patrols on almost every street. Tonight the resistance men had been lucky. They made their rendezvous without seeing a single German.

Using the scrapyard to hide the stolen Nazi staff car had been Eddy’s idea. Stealing the car had been such a brilliant thing to do, such fun, that it had taken them some time to realize the horrendous problems that came with it. Oskar’s cousin, cautious Willy Vekemans, thought they should just dump it, but the others were against him. Then Eddy, who was driving, had said, “Listen. If you want to hide, do you hide in an empty place or in a crowd?”

“What are you saying?” Koop had asked.

“I’m saying that if we are going to keep this damn thing, we need a place where there are other things like it. Where it looks like it belongs.”

“So what do you have in mind? A German transport depot?”

Eddy had grinned and said, “That would be perfect, but actually I was thinking about the scrapyard.”

Before the war, the yard had been a tidy little family business. There’d been a petrol pump in front of the house, a couple of workshops out the back, and a small field populated by dead and cannibalized machinery. In 1941 the father and the two sons had been taken as forced labour to Germany. They had never been heard of again. The mother had struggled on for a while, then packed up and gone to live with relatives in Rotterdam. Ironically, the abandoned yard was fuller now than it had ever been. The German and Dutch police used it to dump wrecked military and civilian vehicles that obstructed key roads. Farmers used it to dispose of bits of shot-down aircraft that had landed inconveniently in their fields. There was so much wreckage that it had burst through the hedges.

So that was where the group had stashed the stolen staff car. They’d backed it into a row of wrecks, between a burnt-out three-tonne truck and an ancient high-sided van. They’d chocked up the front axle and taken the wheels off, hiding them and the battery in the smaller of the workshops. They’d draped a muddy tarpaulin over the car and, just as Eddy had said it would, it had become invisible. Later, when they had “liberated” the Waffen-SS uniforms, they’d taken those to the scrapyard too, concealing them in the workshop’s roof space. The British Sten guns were kept in the empty house itself, wrapped in oilcloth under a heap of old bedding and rugs that rats had nested in and pissed on. Koop had figured that no intruder would fancy poking about in that lot, and so far he’d been correct.

Tonight’s mission was the fifth time the group had used the car and the uniforms, and they had a pretty smooth routine going. Willy and Koop brought the guns and the bag of ammunition magazines out to the car, then went to watch the road. Eddy and Wim fitted the wheels and the battery while Oskar fed the tank with petrol from one of the jerrycans locked in the boot. They worked efficiently in the dark, needing only the briefest moments of torchlight. When it was done, all five men went into the workshop and transformed themselves into SS troopers. For night operations like this, it was really only necessary to wear the soft field service caps, the greatcoats, and the jackboots; but Koop always insisted on the whole getup, and no one was inclined to argue. Oskar wore the staff sergeant’s uniform because his German was fluent; if talking couldn’t be avoided, he would do it. He got into the front passenger seat.

Eddy pressed the starter, and the engine fired on only the second attempt. “God,” he said, “don’t you love these German cars?”

Tamar stalled the motorbike twice on the overgrown concrete road to the canal, but by the time he was on the towpath he had mastered it. The night was less dark now, which meant he could see but also be seen. And the bike’s engine was terribly — terrifyingly — loud.

Pregnant, he thought. My God!

To the right, below him, the broken moon raced through the water.

Fifteen minutes later he cut the engine and freewheeled down the embankment onto a narrow lane that ran alongside the canal. He peered in both directions, listening. He kicked the bike back to life and rode north until he came to a track leading up to the heath. He threaded his way between clumps of gorse and stretches of bracken; in several places the thin nubbly fingers of birch trees reached out to whip him. In the open areas of pale grass and isolated pines, he felt horribly exposed. When he guessed he was less than four hundred metres from the Arnhem–Apeldoorn road, he stopped and turned off the engine. He could hear nothing at all other than the normal sounds of darkness. The light wind was in his face, so if there had been heavy German transport he would surely have heard it. Or maybe not; his hearing might have been impaired by the noise of the engine and his extreme tiredness.

He locked a magazine into the Sten and restarted the bike. The track met another, running north, parallel to the road. Tamar swung the bike onto it. He was intensely anxious now. It occurred to him that if the Germans were moving up tonight, they might well have sent scouting patrols ahead. If so, he was very likely to run into one on this track, and he would have little chance of seeing them before they shot him out of the saddle. And he had very pressing reasons for wanting to stay alive.

Hanns Rauter turned to the man in the backseat and said, “I hope you are not too cold, Exner. I know you do not share my enthusiasm for fresh air.”

The lieutenant sat even more upright. “I am perfectly comfortable, Herr General, thank you.”

This was not true. The suitcase perched on the back of the BMW stuck out over the rear seat. If Exner leaned back, the edge of the case tipped his cap over his eyes in a ridiculous fashion. And he didn’t dare slump. The lieutenant was therefore forced to adopt an unnaturally upright position, like a man struggling to control his bowels. Also, he had been dying for a cigarette for some time. But the general was a notorious nonsmoker, and Exner had not dared to ask permission.