Tamar (32 page)

She moved away from him, pulling her shabby raincoat tighter around herself. She went to the door and stared out at the wet grass, the naked trees.

“Rauter,” she murmured. “God help us now.” Then she turned quickly to face him. “Christiaan, they’re not looking for you, are they?”

“I’ve no reason to think so. But the Germans will turn the whole area inside out. We’re all going to have to keep our heads down.” He rubbed the back of his thumb across his unshaven chin, thinking. “Where’s Rosa? Isn’t she with you?”

“Agatha’s looking after her. Why?”

“I think it would be a good idea for you to stay at the farm tonight. You and Rosa. Would you mind? I’d feel happier knowing Marijke’s not alone.”

“Okay.”

“Thanks.” He kissed her forehead. Then he sighed and said, “Right. I need to get back.” He struggled to pull the door fully open. For just a second he looked like an old man. “Tell her I might not be able to get home for a while and not to worry.”

And he thought, Home. I’m not meant to call it that.

Trixie said, “I can’t tell her not to worry. But I can tell her you love her, if you like.”

When she’d gone, Tamar went back to the room behind the dispensary. The stale air now carried the acrid smell of burnt silk as well as cigarette smoke. Dart didn’t look up when he entered. He busied himself checking and folding the silks, fiddling with the transceiver controls, closing things down.

When the silence became absurd and he could no longer bear it, Tamar said, “Mind if I open the window?”

Dart shrugged. “Sure. Be my guest.” He lit another cigarette with tremulous fingers.

Tamar opened the small window halfway. He inhaled some cleaner air and turned to look at Dart. The brown bottle of Benzedrine had appeared beside the revolver on the bureau.

He said, “I realize that it’s not the ideal time to tell you this, but I’ve decided to close down transmissions from the farm. In the circumstances I —”

He stopped because Dart held his hand up, rigid in a halt gesture, and shook his head slowly and deliberately.

“No.”

Tamar closed his eyes and found that he had an immense desire not to open them again. To sleep just where he stood. Not to have this conversation . . .

“Dart, you can’t just say no like that. I’ve thought carefully about it, and —”

“No,” Dart said again. He sat staring at his fingers where they rested on the small black suitcase. He kept his voice more or less level. “You can’t do that; you don’t have the authority. I’ve got procedures, timetables, frequencies. Only London can change those.”

“I’m sorry, but that’s not the case. In the field I am authorized to make those changes. And I’ve made my decision.”

Dart looked up now, and Tamar flinched when he saw what was in the other man’s eyes.

“Oh, right. You’ve made your decision, have you? Well, that’s just fine and dandy, isn’t it? It’s all right for you, for Chrissake, never in one place more than a day or two. I’ve got the Germans tracking me every time I send and nowhere to go to. Do you understand?”

He got to his feet and advanced on Tamar, who folded his arms but held his ground.

“Do you
really
understand? Last week the bloody detector vans were in the town when I left. They must have been this close —
this close
— to locating me.”

He held his thumb and forefinger a centimetre apart and jabbed them at Tamar’s face. And although it was irrelevant, Tamar realized then that Dart had lost a lot of weight. His clothes were looser on him. The dark hair was long and oily. The unnaturally bright eyes were deeper in their sockets.

Dart’s voice edged a shade closer to hysteria. “You let this shitstorm happen, and now you’re telling me I can’t use the farm anymore? You’re telling me I can’t use the only safe bloody station I’ve got? No,
no
! You can’t do that. Who the hell do you think you are?”

“Dart! Calm down, for God’s sake. I know the risks you run. I do everything I can to protect you.”

“Everything except let me use the only place I feel safe!”

Tamar wanted to reach out and hold him, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. “Look,” he said, “you and me, we always knew the risks we were running. You said last night that you felt you were living on borrowed time. I feel the same way. But . . . but I have to think about Marijke. I can’t keep putting her at risk. It’s not . . . fair.”

It was a feeble word. Childish. It brought an ugly smile to Dart’s face.

“Fair, huh? All right, Commandant. Let’s talk about what’s fair. Let’s talk about me stuck here all winter in this freezing shithole full of nutcases. Except for when I get to take a little stroll into town in order to play cat and mouse with the bloody Gestapo. Let’s talk about me in this . . . this tomb, sending your long-winded so-called reports when my fingers are so stiff with cold that I can’t even feel the bloody key.”

“Dart, I —”

“And now let’s talk about you, shall we? Where are you all this time? You’re tucked up in Marijke’s nice warm bed with a belly full of food and your hand on her —”

“Shut up. Shut up! This conversation stops, right now.”

But it didn’t.

“And you know what? She deserves better.”

“Dart, I’m warning you . . .” Tamar couldn’t finish the sentence. He was dismayed to see that Dart’s eyes were filling with tears.

“She deserves better. That’s what’s so damn well unfair. You’re a death candidate, and you know it. So am I. And she deserves something better than either of us.”

Tamar stared, finally speechless. Dart’s last three words hung in the air like smoke.

My God, Tamar thought. Oh, my God.

Oskar didn’t return from Apeldoorn until well after dark. He dismounted stiffly from the bike when he was in sight of the bungalows and flashed his torch four times, then went in.

“It looks bad,” he told them. “Seems they’ve brought men to the Apeldoorn jail from all over. Definitely from Deventer and Zwolle. A woman says she saw a truck with prisoners in the back, and one of them was her brother-in-law, and she’s sure he’s been held in Groningen for the last six months.”

Koop said, “How many? Any idea?”

“I’ve been trying to figure that out. There were around fifty in Apeldoorn already, we know that. So I reckon a hundred guys, maybe more.”

“Sweet Jesus,” Willy murmured.

“What else?” Koop asked.

“Well, I got this secondhand, but, according to someone who knows a nurse at the hospital, all hell broke loose there first thing this morning. A military ambulance with motorcycle escorts came screaming in. The Germans herded all the Dutch staff into the canteen and shut them in, under guard. Then they emptied a ward and stuck a couple of heavies on the door. No one except the German doctors have been allowed in. Also, the operating theatre was in use this morning, but for what nobody knows. And, listen to this, that pig Schongarth was at the hospital twice today.”

“Rauter,” Eddy said. “Has to be.”

Koop rounded on him. “Don’t talk crap. The son of a bitch had more holes in him than a Swiss cheese. I looked at him. He was finished.”

“The driver, then,” Wim said. “Or the other guy.”

“Oh, come on.” Koop was exasperated now. “We emptied two magazines apiece into that car. We killed those bastards twice over. Must have done.”

“So what are you saying, Koop? That Schongarth went to the hospital twice and spent two hours visiting a corpse?”

Koop shrugged and turned away.

“There’s something else,” Oskar said. “Something I really don’t like the sound of. I knew I wasn’t going to get out of town before the curfew, so I went to my aunt Anna’s house for a couple of hours, to wait till it was good and dark. I was just getting ready to leave when a boy turns up. God knows how he knew I was there. Anyway, this kid lives with his grandparents right opposite the prison. He tells me that at about six o’clock, three buses — buses, mind — pulled into the yard. SS men driving them. They parked the buses up and disappeared. That’s it.”

A lengthy silence.

Eventually Willy said, “A hundred men. Three buses. Is anyone thinking what I’m thinking?”

“They wouldn’t, would they?” Eddy said. “Not all of them.”

“Hey,” Koop said. “What are you on about? If they were seriously thinking about shooting everyone in the prison, why the buses? They’d do it in the yard. They’d round up half the town and make them watch. No, it’s not that. Anyway, a hundred guys or more? I don’t think so. It’s going to be something else.”

“I’ll tell you why the buses,” Willy said. “They’re going to take them down to where we shot Rauter. That’s where they’ll do it. And you know it.” He stood up. “They’ll do it tomorrow. That’s why they’ve brought the buses there tonight. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going outside.”

“What for?” That was Koop.

“I’m going to either throw up or pray. Probably both.”

Willy was halfway to the back door when Koop called his name.

“Willy? Instead of whingeing to God, why don’t you do something useful?”

“Like what?”

“Go get the Bren.”

“What?”

“Go get the Bren gun. I reckon you may be right about tomorrow. But I’m not going to sit here wringing my hands while it happens. And nor are you.”

Schongarth’s orderly woke him, cautiously, at six forty-five for breakfast. Coffee, brandy, a sweet pastry, and the death list. Blearily Schongarth added the numbers up three times, getting three different results. But since each one was more than two hundred and forty-three he didn’t give a damn. He’d done it. He thanked God and tipped the brandy into his coffee.

While it was still dark, a hundred and fifty men from Rauter’s security forces began arriving at the lonely stretch of road near De Woeste Hoeve. They sealed off the area and posted guards at the inn and at the few cottages in the vicinity. They set up checkpoints on the road, north and south. Then they waited, chilled by the damp morning air. At a quarter to eight the three buses, along with two trucks, arrived from Apeldoorn. These contained a total of one hundred and sixteen captives, all of whom knew what was going to be done to them.

At almost the same time, the Amsterdam candidates were shot to death in the garden of a tea shop close to the Amstel River. There had been a short delay while members of the security police used their fists and rifle butts to assemble a satisfactory number of spectators.

Simultaneously, but without the benefit of spectators, the Amersfoort prisoners died on the rifle range outside the camp. Munt’s hastily assembled thirty-eight men and boys were executed on the sand dunes near Scheveningen with the morning light in their eyes and their backs to the grey and level sea.

Koop’s plan, if you could call it that, was for Willy, Eddy, and himself to cycle across the heath carrying the dismantled Bren gun and two Stens. Then they’d try to take up a position overlooking the place where they’d ambushed Rauter’s car. If Willy was right about what the Germans were planning, the three of them would open fire on the execution squad. The Bren was ideal for the job. It was unlikely they’d be close enough to hit anything with the Stens, but they’d make a lot of noise. With any luck, at least some of the prisoners might escape in the mayhem that ought to result. It was crude, it was desperate, and it was terrifyingly dangerous, but no one had a better idea; doing nothing was not an option.

And at first it seemed that luck was with them. By nine o’clock they’d taken up a good position just east of the road without encountering a single German. But that was because by then most of the Germans had gone.

Oscar Gerbig, head of the Apeldoorn security police, had been put in charge of the executions at De Woeste Hoeve. It was a big job, and he had approached it methodically. The prisoners would be shot in five batches of twenty and one of sixteen. They would be lined up on one side of the road, with their hands tied behind their backs — to prevent embracing and so forth — and shot by a forty-strong firing squad drawn up on the opposite side. One of the benefits of this arrangement was that five of the six groups would have to walk to their deaths past the bodies of their fellow terrorists. Before giving the order to fire, Gerbig would read out the reasons for the execution. A Dutch collaborator called Slagter would translate.

Gerbig had not, however, anticipated the singing.

At five minutes to eight, he gave the signal for the first twenty prisoners to be marched up. As the bus door was pulled open and the men stumbled out, there came a chorus of song, ragged at first, but then swelling and steadying as the prisoners in the other vehicles found their voices. Gerbig recognized the tune. The condemned men were singing a hymn by Martin Luther.

“A mighty fortress is our God,
A bulwark never failing;
Our helper He, amid the flood
Of mortal ills prevailing . . .”

They continued singing as they were lined up to face the rifles. Gerbig had to raise his voice to make himself heard. Slagter’s translation was inaudible. Irritated, Gerbig shrugged and gave the order to fire. The echoes of the volley were quickly snuffed out by the moist air.

It took about five minutes to kill each group, since some of the men needed finishing off with pistols. Only one tried to make a run for it: that was Jan Thijssen, the national leader of the Raad van Verzet, the Council of Resistance. He was easily retrieved. Weakened by torture and hunger, he managed only a few metres of the hopeless distance to the trees.

It was all done, and the hymn long silenced, by eight thirty. Gerbig got his men to arrange the bodies in an orderly line; it stretched an impressive distance. On a post at the head of the row, Gerbig had a notice put up:
THIS IS WHAT WE DO WITH TERRORISTS AND SABOTEURS
. He left a squad of men with the bodies, and for the next hour or so they stopped all travellers along the road and forced them to read the notice and view the massacre. The display was still taking place when Koop and his companions slithered on their bellies to the edge of the tree cover and gazed at the road.