Tamar (36 page)

A loud voice from below, boots on the stairs. Dart kneeled beside Bibi, wrenched the bag open, pulled stuff, any stuff, out. Bibi leaned forward, took Dart’s face in her hands, and kissed him on the forehead. She fell back in the chair with tears in her eyes. Dart took hold of her ankle with his left hand and the loose end of the bandage in his right.

The door flew open.

One grey monster entered, then a second, and a third. Two with rifles; the other, the corporal, with a machine pistol. They filled the room.

“Stand up. Stand up!”

Dart looked at them over his shoulder and raised his right arm from the elbow. A shaky salute, perhaps, or a sign meaning wait. He didn’t know which, just that he had done it before somewhere and it had worked. But not this time.

“Stand up! Raise your hands!”

He stayed on his knees but half turned towards them, using his hands to explain that he was in the middle of a medical procedure. The corporal stepped forward and clubbed Dart on the right-hand side of his face with a gloved fist. The crunch that Dart felt was mixed up with the sound of the other two Germans working the bolts of their rifles and Bibi’s scream.

Dart collapsed sideways and somehow stopped himself from plunging headfirst into the glass cabinet of hollow eggshells painted with clowns’ faces. The cabinet shook and the egg heads wobbled on their little wooden stands. His own head was full of fizzy noise like a receding wave sucking shingle from a beach. When the darkness drew back, he got himself up onto his elbows. The first thing he noticed was that his lower lip was connected to the floor by a sticky thread of blood and dribble. The second thing was a pair of highly polished boots and, above them, way, way above them, a colourless face beneath the peak of a cap with a death’s head insignia.

“Ah. Dr. Ludders, is it not? We have met before.”

Dart wiped the mess from his mouth with his sleeve and mumbled, “Lubbers, Major. Not Ludders. Lubbers.”

“Of course. Ernst Lubbers, if I remember correctly.”

His face was, impossibly, more bleached out than before. Its only colour was in the rim of red below each eye and the pink scar that ran down the ragged lobe of his ear. He said, still looking down at Dart, “Who struck this man?”

After some shuffling of jackboots the SS corporal said, “Sir, he failed to obey —”

The major turned abruptly. “Corporal, we are looking for terrorists. This man is a bloody doctor. Don’t you know the difference?”

“Sir.” The corporal’s face was a blank.

“Have you checked the rear of this building?”

“Not yet, sir.”

“Do it now.”

When the troopers had gone, the pale major made a leisurely inspection of the cluttered room, surveying the posters, stooping to examine a framed photograph of Pieter and Bibi Grotius posing with the infamous Jew Charlie Chaplin. He made no comment. He lifted a Russian doll from a shelf; it rattled slightly. He twisted the body and separated the two halves and took out a smaller doll, and then found another inside that one. The fifth doll, no bigger than a clothes peg, was the last and did not open. The major seemed disappointed. He went to the window and gazed out, arms folded.

“An excellent view from here,” he said. “An ideal command post.”

Dart’s consciousness was coming and going. He wondered if it might be okay to go to sleep. Instead, he got to his feet, supporting himself on the back of Bibi’s chair. She stared up at him, her eyes wet, her face almost as white as the German’s.

The major turned to face them at last. “What is this woman’s name, Dr. Lubbers?”

“Bib . . . Mrs. Barbara Grotius.” The name came out indistinctly; his jaw somehow got in the way of his tongue. His mouth tasted of salt and something metallic.

“Grotius?”

“Yes, Major.”

The German considered the name, and Dart realized that he was wondering if it sounded Jewish.

“Her husband is the dwarfish man downstairs?”

“Yes.”

The major looked directly at Bibi for the first time. “And what is her problem? What are you treating her for?”

“Mrs. Grotius has a leg ulcer.”

“Ulcer?” The major did not seem to know the word.

“An open sore that refuses to heal,” Dart said, then thought, Dear God, is he weird enough to want to see it? He tried to think. It was like scaling a cliff when all you want is to let go and fall. A voice in his head said,
Ask about the ear.

“How is your ear, Major? The scar tissue seems healthy, from what I can see.”

“It is satisfactory. It is taking a long time to heal; my wounds always do. But there was no infection.”

“Good.” Dart attempted a smile, which hurt. “We got to it in time, then.”

The pale stare hardened.

Oh, shit. I’ve gone too far.

The crunch of boots on broken glass, and then the corporal’s voice came up the stairs. The major turned away from Dart and went to the door. Then he looked back. “I would clean myself up a bit, if I were you, Doctor. You’ll frighten your patients if you turn up looking like that.” Something like a smile made a brief appearance on his face. “You will have some bruising, I think.”

“It’s nothing, really.”

“I regret your injury. The corporal overreacted, perhaps. My men are operating under unusual pressures at the present time.”

Dart had no idea how to respond. He found himself nodding sympathetically, one hard-pressed professional to another. The German left the room.

Bibi’s hand flew to Dart’s and gripped it fiercely. Then she released it as if it were red hot. The major was speaking again.

“Dr. Lubbers, would you come out here, please?”

Dart went out onto the landing. The white face seemed to hover in the gloom. Behind it, the masks watched balefully from the wall. The major gestured with his head towards the attic stairs.

“Do you know what is up there?”

“No.” The word came out high-pitched and false, and Dart hurriedly made a fuss of coughing and dabbing at his mouth. “Excuse me. No. I’m sorry, I have no idea. I’ve never been up there.”

The German peered up into the darkness. He flicked the light switch at the foot of the stairs on and off, unsurprised when nothing happened.

Dart felt light-headed, close to hysteria. He somehow managed to force his voice into a confidential murmur. “If it’s anything like the rest of the place, it’ll be full of crap.”

The fleeting humourless smile crossed the German’s face again. He looked up into the shadows once more, hesitating. Then he turned his back on Dart and went down the stairs to the shop. “Take care of yourself, Doctor,” he called.

Dart heard his curt commands, laughter, then the dying peal of the doorbell. He waited several moments and then went downstairs. He gazed dumbly at the wreckage for a long moment, then went into the workshop. Pieter Grotius was standing at his bench, holding on to it, his head lowered. The room was a shambles. His rainbow of paint pots had been raked from the shelf, and puddles of colour lay on the floor.

“Pieter? Pieter, are you all right?”

Grotius didn’t look up. He began nodding his head slowly, and then the movement seemed to take over his whole body until he was rocking back and forth, his breath coming in short gasps. Dart put his hands on the little man’s shoulders. They felt rigid, not made of flesh. When the rocking didn’t stop, Dart didn’t know what else to do. So he hoisted himself up onto the bench and sat there, his left hand still on Pieter’s shoulder. After a while, there were cautious footsteps on the stairs and he heard Bibi call her husband’s name. Pieter Grotius straightened and drew a long breath with a hiccup in it. When his wife appeared in the doorway, he went to meet her, and the couple embraced without speaking. Bibi rested her cheek on the crown of Pieter’s head. Her huge eyes met Dart’s, but he could not understand what they were telling him. He felt in his coat pocket and pulled out a cigarette and his lighter. The cigarette tasted vile, but he smoked it anyway, watching the pools of paint on the floor slowly merge. A snake of green crept towards a spill of orange. Just as the two colours met, he heard the jolly tinkle of the doorbell again and feet slushing through glass.

“Are you there? Are you all right?” Trixie’s voice. She stopped in the doorway. “Jesus,” she said. “The bastards.”

She went to Pieter and Bibi and spread her arms around both of them. All three remained motionless and silent for some time; they looked like models for some tragic monument. Then Trixie came to Dart and looked at him, at the flesh swollen over the cheekbone, the sticky trail of blood through the stubble on his jaw.

“Ouch,” she said. She raised her hand and rested it on the undamaged side of his face. “Is it bad?”

“I’ll live. I can spare a few teeth.”

She managed a smile. “I suppose you can. There’s not much to use them on, is there?”

A little later, when the others began to clear up, Dart went upstairs to retrieve his gun and the rest of his things. He stood before the window and stared sightlessly at the now silent and empty square. Although he still could not control the trembling that ran in waves beneath his skin, his terror had given way to a sullen anger. Only four days had passed since his banishment from the farm. He had warned Tamar that this would happen. But the bastard had known anyway and hadn’t cared. Hadn’t cared because all that mattered to him was keeping Dart away from Marijke while he spun his sticky web around her.

He picked up the leather bag and turned to go. His eye fell on the little puddle of blood and mucus on the floor. Then he stood motionless, because he had seen, absolutely clearly, the logic of it all. Tamar had banned him from the farm and, yes, he’d known that it would greatly increase the chances of Dart being taken by the Germans. But it wasn’t that Tamar didn’t care. Oh, no. It was what he
intended
. It was obvious, really. If their positions were reversed, if Dart was at the farm with her, not Tamar, would he want Tamar turning up all the time? Or would it be very convenient if Tamar were to disappear, permanently? Yes. By God, yes. That would be exactly —
exactly
— what he would want.

This line of reasoning could have frightened him, but it did not. He gained a certain strength from it. Because, after all, what can be imagined can be achieved.

At the head of the stairs, he paused to straighten a mask that had been knocked askew.

While the SS were raiding the Marionette House, Cook Sergeant Erich Grabowski was riding a bicycle along an empty country road south of Apeldoorn. There were all sorts of reasons why he shouldn’t have been. He should have been on duty, for a start. Then there was the fact that his regiment had been put on security alert as a result of that awful Nazi sod Rauter getting himself shot. It was also the case that Erich should not have taken the bike without special permission. And he definitely should not have been riding it through an area of suspected terrorist activity. Not alone, anyway, and not without his rifle.

But Erich had done a deal with another sergeant about the duty rota. He didn’t give a toss about Rauter, who was just a glorified copper anyway. The bike had cost him two cans of meat. And he had never, on any of his Sunday rides, met a so-called terrorist. The people around here all seemed very peaceable. Depressed, of course, and hungry; but violent? No. And as for the rifle, what use would it be? Even with his glasses on, he’d never been any good with one. That was why they’d made him a cook. Thank God.

None of that really mattered anyway. Sergeant Grabowski would have cycled down that lonely road in spite of anything, because in a little cottage just beyond Loenen lived an agile young widow who slept with him in exchange for food. In the gas-mask canister that hung from his neck there was a can of pressed pork, and in the rolled-up rain cape strapped onto the bike’s carrier there was half a kilo of margarine and a bag of flour. In the breast pockets of his tunic there was a slab of military chocolate and a pack of cigarettes. He didn’t smoke, but the widow liked to.

Two kilometres north of Loenen he swung onto a narrow lane that ran alongside the heath, bypassing most of the village. The widow didn’t want him seen by the neighbours. Half a kilometre from the cottage, there was a gateway and, as usual, Erich stopped there. The gate itself had gone, but the two stout posts remained. He propped the bike against one of them and did the things he always did. He took his cap off and ruffled his thinning hair to make it look more than it was. He unbuttoned his tunic and eased his back. He cupped his hands in front of his mouth and exhaled into them, sniffing to check the smell of his breath. Finally he unbuttoned his trousers and waited to pee.

That was when he noticed the tyre tracks.

They’d been made by something fairly heavy, because the tyres had pressed deep through the pine needles into the dark mud. The pattern of the tread was quite distinct. An army vehicle, of course; there wasn’t any other kind. Erich scanned the surface of the lane. There were no muddy tracks on it. So whatever it was, this vehicle had gone in through the gateway, and it hadn’t come out again. Odd, really. The tracks had definitely not been there last Sunday, and Erich was pretty sure that no patrols from his unit had been down this way in the past week. Nothing much went on in the camp that Cook Sergeant Grabowski didn’t get to hear about.

The mystery of the tyre tracks went completely out of Erich’s head very soon after his arrival at the widow’s cottage. But on his way back to Apeldoorn he paused at the gateway. He studied the tracks again but didn’t dismount from the bike because he had spent longer at the cottage than he had meant to. The afternoon had already shrunk to a band of steely-grey light along the western horizon, and the tyre tracks led into wet and forbidding shadows.

It was two days later that Grabowski finally found the nerve to report his discovery to his platoon commander. When Lieutenant Redler came to the field kitchen late on Tuesday afternoon, he looked haggard and his uniform was mud-spattered. He wolfed down the food that Erich had kept hot for him. Then Erich handed him a mug of tea and told him. Amazingly, Redler didn’t ask what in God’s name the cook sergeant had been doing, poking about in the Dutch countryside fifteen kilometres from where he should have been. He simply listened, watching Grabowski through the steam rising from the mug.