Tamar (43 page)

She opened her mouth but couldn’t make a sound.

“We’re getting out,” Dart blurted. “Right now. We’re blown. Grab whatever you need. Not much. A bag. Coat, shoes. Hurry, for God’s sake. I’ve got the ambulance outside.”

“Ernst, please, what’s happened?”

“We’re blown, I tell you. Betrayed. A call from Apeldoorn. Something to do with de Vries’s group being taken. One of them must have talked. Koop got away. He’s out on the heath somewhere. Never mind! Do as I say, Marijke. Get ready to leave, now. Where’s Christiaan?”

“The barn.”

She moved then, trying to shove her way past Dart. He took her by both arms and held her back. “No! I’ll get him.” He pulled her into a fierce and terrible embrace, then released her. She stumbled back against the wall.

“We’ll be all right,” he said reassuringly; for a moment it was as if they were having a different conversation altogether. Then all his mad urgency returned.

“Marijke, for pity’s sake do as I say. We have no time. Get your things, now.”

She fled from him up the stairs.

At seven minutes past two Tamar’s headphones went dead. He shifted his gaze from the notepad to the transceiver. The needle on the voltage meter had slumped to zero. Softly cursing himself for his carelessness, he pulled the headphones off and stood up. He went to the angle of the floor and thatch and dragged out the other battery. He had connected one of the two leads when he heard what might have been a shuffling footstep below. He crouched at the open trapdoor and looked down, seeing nothing.

“Marijke? Darling, is that you?”

When no one answered he waited a second, listening, hearing nothing. He lowered his head a little way through the opening. He was torn between caution and his anxiety about the signal; he could picture the British radio operator with her pencil poised, listening to silence, imagining terrible things. He went back to the dressing table, hesitated, then picked up his revolver and put it in his jacket pocket. He descended the ladder. The small windows to his left threw angled beams of strong dusty light across the aisle. Between these shafts there were areas of dense shadow cast by the partition walls; the sequence of brilliance and darkness confused his eyes. He was in the act of taking the gun from his pocket when something moved out from between two partitions on the right of the aisle: a tilted silhouette. It lifted an arm, and light fell onto the barrel of a pistol.

Dart had almost reached the barn stairs when the shots — three, maybe four — split the air. He stopped dead, filled with a dreadful joy that almost made him cry out. Then he forced himself onwards, holding the revolver out in front of him with both hands. When he reached the upper floor he paused, peering through the baffling streams of light. There was a body sprawled beneath the trapdoor, half propped against the ladder. The head was thrown back over the left shoulder and Dart could not see the face. The clothes told him it was Tamar. He had obviously fallen through the hatch when Koop shot him. So Koop was still up there. Dart advanced down the aisle to within five metres of the body and stood ready to shoot him when he came down the ladder.

Interminable seconds passed during which Dart could hear nothing but his own jagged breathing. The desire to look at the corpse was almost irresistible, but he kept his eyes and the gun aimed at where the ladder disappeared into the loft.

“Koop?”

He hadn’t meant to speak. The strangled whisper didn’t seem like his own voice, and it was as if he were under someone else’s control when he moved forward. He stood in front of Tamar’s body and called again. “Koop? Koop, for Christ’s sake, man! Are you all right?”

It was possible, Dart realized, just wonderfully possible that Tamar had shot Koop at the moment of his own death, that at least one of the shots had come from Tamar’s gun. He looked down at the body at last and saw that yes, Tamar’s revolver was lying close to the curled fingers of the right hand. He saw too that there were wet holes in the dark sweater and that the lower rungs of the ladder were slick with blood. The leather jacket was spread open, and there was more blood on the lining. Two identity booklets protruded from the inside pocket.

“Koop! Can you hear me?”

Nothing. Stooping quickly, Dart took the two IDs and wiped the blood from them on his sleeve. He thumbed one open and saw Marijke’s face. He stuffed the booklets into his coat pocket and again clasped the Smith and Wesson in both hands and stepped back. He opened his mouth to call Koop’s name again but the word died on his lips because a gun barrel jabbed into the base of his skull.

“Boo.”

“Jesus! Koop, you —”

“No, don’t turn round.”

“What? What are you —”

“Shut up. Now, arms out straight sideways, gun in the right hand. Come on, do it!”

Dart did it.

“Slide the safety catch on, and drop the gun on the floor.”

The pistol thudded onto the boards, and then the muzzle of the Luger was no longer pressed against Dart’s head.

“Now you can turn round, sonny boy.”

Dart turned. Koop’s gun was aimed at the middle of Dart’s face. It did not shake or waver at all. Koop’s smile was yellow, and his tone of voice was pleasant.

“One of the things I hate about you,” he said, “is that you think I’m stupid.” The Luger gestured briefly at Tamar’s body. “He thought so too. But you’re worse than him. You really thought I’d be stupid enough to trust you. You thought you could use me. And that upsets me.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

“Yeah, I think so. Later, when you’ve taken me where I want to go.”

He hobbled back a step and twitched the gun towards the stairs. “Let’s go. Lead the way.”

Dart sidled past Koop and forced his legs to take him towards the stairs. He’d gone ten paces before the unbearable injustice of it all made him unravel like a severed rope. He turned and faced Koop even though the Luger’s muzzle was close to his throat. His outburst was like that of a child denied a long-promised treat. His hands beat against the sides of his thighs and ridiculous tears filled his eyes.

“No, no! I can’t. I won’t. This isn’t right. It doesn’t go like this! It’s not —”

Koop clubbed him on the side of the face with the Luger, and he went down. His head was full of wet stars, and he scrabbled backwards on his hands and heels until his back hit a timber upright.

Koop swayed above him in a halo of brilliant light. The gun came up, aiming at Dart’s gaping mouth.

“Damn you, then,” Koop hissed. “Rot in hell.”

Dart lifted his hands to ward off the bullet, and in that halted instant Koop turned away from him, staring wide-eyed to his right. The arm and the hand with the gun in it swung away. A massive rapid hammering filled the barn. Koop had a fit of grotesque movements like a jerked puppet. Soft explosions tracked across his chest and left shoulder and sent a fine spray of red matter into the bright dusty air. Above Dart’s head splinters erupted from the woodwork. Koop toppled backwards; when he hit the floor, he made a gargling noise and then lay still.

Dart raised his head and looked towards the stairs. He could see only the upper part of Marijke’s body. Her face was a white mask painted with huge eyes. She lowered the Sten and placed it on the floor before climbing the final steps. Dart got to his knees and held his arms out to her. She ignored both him and the man she had killed, and walked, entranced, towards the body at the foot of the ladder.

Dart said, “Marijke. My love, don’t.”

But by then she had got there and thrown her head back and begun to howl like an animal.

Dad said, “Trixie told me the first thing that puzzled her, when she got to the farm, was that the ambulance wasn’t there. She knew it had been there, because there were fresh tyre prints on the muddy parts of the track. But it wasn’t now, and Ernst Lubbers couldn’t have driven back towards Mendlo, because she’d have met him on the road. She started to get seriously worried when she found the door to the farmhouse wide open, even though it was a cold day. She went inside and called Marijke’s name several times. The kitchen stove was warm, and there were two used cups and plates on the table. The bedrooms were empty. She went out into the garden, then the big barn. No sign of anyone. She was very nervous by then. She said that the silence was not like ordinary silence. When she went into the little barn, the one with the radio room in the roof, there was a funny smell, a bad smell, like scheet, fart. She said she somehow knew that something awful was in there, and she didn’t want to climb the stairs but forced herself to. There was a Sten gun lying on the floor at the top. The trapdoor up to the loft was open. The ladder was lowered, and there was a body lying next to it. It was Christiaan Boogart.”

Yoyo had been silent and as still as stone for a long time, but now he inhaled loudly and his fingers tightened on mine. Dad’s hands were clasped together. I noticed for the first time how coarse and marked they were and that the first two fingers of his right hand were yellowed by nicotine. They were not the hands from my childhood. They belonged to a stranger. His head was lowered, and I saw how thin his hair was.

“Trixie couldn’t move for quite a long time. Her blood was ice, she said. She was sure, you see, that if Christiaan Boogart was dead, Marijke would be as well. She was convinced she would find her friend’s body somewhere in the barn. Then it occurred to her that Christiaan might not be dead, so she made herself climb the last couple of steps and walk towards him. That’s when she saw the feet. They were sticking out of one of the stalls on the right-hand side. When she drew level with them, she saw that the body was a man’s. She described him as looking like a tramp. She didn’t know who he was. She’d never seen him before. He had terrible wounds across the front of his body, and his mouth and eyes were gaping open. He had a German pistol in his hand. The wooden partition behind him was splattered with blood. Trixie edged past him, and when she got close to Christiaan’s body, she knew at once that he was beyond help.”

Dad stopped talking. He reached forward and picked up the stained identity booklet from the table, where I’d laid out the contents of the box. He opened it and stared at the photograph again.

“I didn’t even know what he looked like,” he said. “Never saw his face until today. It’s so . . . strange.”

His voice had thickened. I wanted to go over to him and hold him then, but I knew I couldn’t. It was as though he had a sort of barrier around him, a barrier that he needed until he’d told us everything. So I just blinked my tears away and waited.

He took a long breath. “Trixie went up to the radio room. She said it was a dreadful thing to step over the body onto the ladder. There was blood on the rungs, and it was awful, putting her feet on it. The loft was empty. The radio thing, the transceiver, was still set up. He must have been using it when it happened. So she went down again and walked the length of the barn, looking in all the stalls, dreading finding Marijke in one of them. She said that when she dreams about that afternoon that’s what she’s doing: searching shadowy rooms along an endless corridor, expecting to find some horrible thing. When she didn’t find Marijke or anything that might have explained what had happened, she rode away. She couldn’t think what else to do.”

Yoyo said, “Where did she go, Jan?”

“To the asylum. She was still hoping that Marijke and Lubbers might have gone back there, perhaps by some roundabout route. If they hadn’t, she would have to tell Veening what she’d found. She must have been in a bad state when she got there. But she discovered who the dead tramp in the barn was. His name was de Vries. A resistance guy, but sort of an outlaw. A psycho, according to Trixie’s aunt, Agatha, although I don’t suppose that’s the word she used. He’d shown up at the asylum with a German bullet in him, and he’d been holed up there for a few days. Veening and Agatha had been very keen to get rid of him. So Lubbers had arranged to drive de Vries to a safe house somewhere. Not the farm; Trixie said Albert Veening was sure of that. Veening thought de Vries must have put a gun to Lubbers’s head and made him go there. But that’s not what happened, as I now know.”

Dad rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and then lit another cigarette. The flame of his lighter trembled.

“Anyway. Telling me all this had pretty much worn Trixie out. The poor old love looked drained. Rosa looked pretty haggard too. It had been rough on her, translating the story for me. Once or twice I’d thought she was going to refuse to continue. But I think she realized that there was a huge unburdening going on and had decided not to interfere. When Trixie stopped talking, she sat back in the chair with her eyes closed, maybe because she was exhausted. Or maybe because she didn’t want to look at me.

“I was completely baffled. I think I was still trying to believe that some sort of mad mistake had been made, that Trixie’d got the names wrong. Something was very wrong, because I knew my father wasn’t dead; I’d been with him less than a week ago. Eventually I managed to stand up and go to the window. I watched a crow wander across the lawn as if it owned it. Then Rosa started to say something, I don’t remember what, but stopped when Trixie sort of gasped. We both turned to her, thinking that she was in pain. But it wasn’t that.