Cut and Run (20 page)

Juliana said nothing. What was there to say? Her mother had never mentioned such suffering. Never.

“In any case,” Aunt Willie went on, “there was nothing left in their country for Rachel and Abraham. They chose to emigrate to the United States, and we drifted apart. It happens.” Wilhelmina was silent for a moment, lost in the past, but she recovered herself and dipped into her paper bag for the cookies, six of them, wrapped in waxed paper. “Here, have a cookie. By the way, have you noticed we're being followed?”

Juliana turned sharply from the window, but her aunt grabbed her arm, stopping her from looking around. Nodding that she was back under control, Juliana whispered dubiously, “Are you sure?”

“Of course,” Wilhelmina said without arrogance and let go of Juliana's arm. “I lived under German occupation for five years. I know when I'm being followed—and I don't like it. The Nazis did too much of it during the war. Now I have no tolerance even for the neighborhood children tagging along behind me.”

Under different circumstances, Juliana might have considered her aunt hopelessly paranoid. But not now. Not after Matthew Stark's wild, unnerving visit to the Club Aquarian and her own mad flight to Rotterdam.

Her voice deceptively calm, she asked, “What does he look like?”

“A Nazi.” The old Dutchwoman's mouth was a straight, uncompromising line.

“Aunt Willie, for God's sake.”

“He followed us onto the train. He's very blond—”

“So am I. So are
you.
That doesn't make us Nazis.”

Wilhelmina ignored her niece. “His hair is cut short, and he's neatly dressed. Too neatly, in my opinion. A young man shouldn't be too tidy. I know you think I'm narrow-minded, but that's my way.” She shrugged, lifting her heavy, square shoulders. “The war's been over a long time now, but I will never forget—or forgive.”

Juliana didn't comment on her aunt's views. “What do you think we should do about this guy?”

“For the moment, nothing.”

“And just let the sonofabitch follow us?”

Aunt Willie smiled. “I like your spirit, Juliana. But don't worry—we'll get rid of this Nazi in Antwerp.”

When they arrived at the train station in Antwerp, Aunt Willie moved quickly through the crowd, assuming her niece would keep up. She did.

“The Nazi doesn't know we've spotted him,” her old aunt said. “Ha! Such arrogance. But it makes our task much simpler.”

She took Juliana firmly by the elbow, and together they leaped into a bus, leaving their tail behind.

Wilhelmina was beaming. “Well, that was easy.”

“Jesus, Aunt Willie,” Juliana said, but she was impressed, although not at all relieved to have confirmed that Aunt Willie was right: the man had been following them.

O
tis Raymond ducked into the fishing shack and collapsed onto his bunk, lying on his back on the stinking mattress. With the back of one skinny hand, he wiped some of the dirt and sweat off his face. He was sweating and shivering at the same time. It wasn't as cold as Washington, but colder than he was used to. All the campaigns he'd been involved in had taken place in warm climates. He liked the heat, had gotten to where he couldn't stand the cold. He'd told the guys, “Gimme mosquitoes, dysentery, malaria—just keep your friggin' snow.”

He could almost feel his bones rattling inside him. He kept getting thinner, must have picked up a worm or something, and he couldn't keep up with the younger guys, even some of the older ones, the fitness freaks. Christ, he was what, forty? Never thought he'd live even this long.

With a squeaky chuckle, wheezing, he sat up. “You call this living?”

His head wasn't right, either. Too much booze, too much dope, even though Bloch was pretty strict about that stuff. God wasn't as straight as the sergeant. But Otis found ways around rules and regulations; he always had. He had a bottle stashed now. Wouldn't make much difference, though, if he drank it or not. No matter what he did lately, he kept thinking about the old days and the guys he'd saved—but mostly about the ones who'd died. He'd hated having guys go on his ship. He remembered how the poor dumb fucks, the unlucky bastards, would scream for their mothers and girlfriends and wives, or how they'd yell, “fuckin'shit,” or just scream and scream without any words at all, and he could still see the blood and guts and bones and smell the dead and dying stink of them. They'd have to dip the chopper in water, him and Stark, to clean out the blood and guts.

He'd seen men die since Vietnam, but it wasn't the same. Maybe because he was older, maybe because they weren't the first, maybe because he just didn't give a shit anymore—it just wasn't the same. He didn't give a flying fuck if he died himself. When he'd first gone to Vietnam, he didn't figure on living at all. Didn't know what to do with himself when he did make it out. Go back home and pick tomatoes?

He still didn't give a damn whether or not he died. Christ, if he did, would he be risking his scrawny neck to help Ryder and get information to Stark?

“Shit,” he muttered, getting out his bottle. “Ryder's an asshole—Stark, too. What the hell they want me to do? Screw 'em.”

He drank from the bottle and lay back in his bunk. The mattress was full of bugs. He woke up every morning with bites all over him. Fuck it. He didn't care.

“Hey, Stark, buddy.” Tears welled up in his eyes. “Man, I'm counting on you.”

Matt'd get Ryder's ass out of the fire, but Otis had quit believing that was the main reason he'd gotten Stark involved. Yeah, he wanted to help Sam, why not? But more than that, he wanted Stark to take out Bloch. He might be the only one who could do it. If he stayed on the story, he'd end up at the camp.

Someone had to do something about Bloch. Goddamn wild animal, the sergeant was. Always had been. Otis didn't know why the hell he'd signed up with the fucker, except he didn't have shit else to do and Bloch was offering good money. Stark'd known right from the start what the sergeant was, told Otis, too, but he'd ignored him, just like he'd ignored his daddy who kept telling him he could come on home, he could stay with him and Mamma, find a regular job, eat good. Jeez, when was the last time he'd seen his old man? Five, six years? Probably dead by now.

He drank some more, the warm booze dribbling down the sides of his mouth and onto the mattress, maybe killing off a few bugs. Bloch slept in the main house, living it up, the bastard.

If Matt could see him now. Otis sniffled, imagining his old buddy's black eyes on him, telling him like no words could what a stupid asshole he was for taking orders from Bloch. For not telling him in the first place Bloch was involved. What the hell. Matthew Stark was on the story now, thanks to Otis Raymond. They'd all be thanking him soon. Yeah. The Weaze'd be responsible for saving Ryder's stupid ass and seeing Bloch go down.

Good ol' Weaze.

Nobody had ever expected him to do shit. He remembered how surprised everybody was when he got noticed for his marksmanship at North Fort. Fucking wowed them, he had. Ended up a door gunner because of it. “We can use you, buddy,” they'd said.

He grinned and closed his eyes. They burned from lack of sleep, too much bad living, and too many goddamn memories. But shit. It'd all be worth it. Stark'd say to him, “Hey, good going, Weaze,” the way he had before, back in 'Nam, when Otis hadn't been brave so much as plain doped-up crazy. This time he was being brave. He knew the risks, knew what he was doing. Yeah, after this, he'd haul out his medals. Brag a little.

The door to the shack creaked open, and Bloch and two of his bodyguards walked in, just like they'd been out fishing all day. Bloch was even cleaned and pressed. Beside him, Otis had always felt like a dirty, slimy worm. It was the one thing the sergeant liked about him, called it proper respect.

Otis wiped the dribbled whiskey off his mouth. He didn't care if Bloch saw the bottle. He squinted at the sergeant and the guards from the gloom of his corner and wished they'd shut the fucking door. They were letting in the cold air.

“Raymond,” Bloch said.

Out of habit, Otis climbed to his feet. The rules of soldiering were all that made sense to him anymore, maybe all that ever had. He sucked in what was left of his stomach. “Sergeant?”

“You've been out of camp, Raymond.” Bloch's voice was steady, his tone without condemnation or doubt. “You went into town without permission.”

No use denying it, so Otis just stared straight ahead. He couldn't figure out why, but he wasn't seeing anything. Just blankness, not even dark. Nothing. It was weird.

Bloch shifted his position on the dirty floor. “You made a telephone call while you were there. Do you want to tell me about it?”

“Do I need to, Sergeant?”

“No,” he said softly, almost sadly, but Otis knew better. Bloch didn't have feelings. “I don't suppose you do, Raymond. The call was to Washington, D.C. You talked to Matthew Stark, didn't you?”

Otis didn't move, didn't speak. No point in bluffing. Bloch already knew who he'd called and what he'd said. Bloch knew everything. Otis wasn't surprised, he wasn't impressed, he wasn't even scared. That was just Bloch. One thing: Stark'd handle him. Otis wished he'd have a chance to warn Stark that Bloch was onto him, but what the hell. Matt was good.

“Raymond?”

Otis idly scratched an insect bite on his forearm, and suddenly he smiled. His mind wasn't going after all. Shit. The uncontrollable visions, awake or asleep—they weren't the mindless wanderings of a fucking lunatic.

They were the dreams of a dead man.

Yeah, he thought. Bloch can't kill me. I'm already dead.

J
uliana and Wilhelmina got off the bus near a small tenement building just outside the diamond district. As they walked up the front steps, Wilhelmina scowled at the dead geraniums sticking up out of the window boxes. There was no excuse for such laziness. She rang the doorbell, and a round, bald-headed man came to the door and let them in, introducing himself as Martin Dekker. He was younger than she'd expected, perhaps in his late forties. But these days most people seemed so young. They didn't remember the war, the bombings, the starvation, the treachery of the Nazis and their collaborators. And if people like herself didn't tell the young, refused to talk, how could they know? What assurance could there be that it all wouldn't happen again?

She introduced herself and Juliana, speaking Dutch. She didn't bother to translate, assuming Juliana could follow along well enough.

“I'm so glad you came,” the Belgian said cheerfully, leading them upstairs as he jingled a huge ring of keys. “There's still been no word from your brother.”

“Have you called the police?”

Dekker shook his head. “I thought I should wait for you.”

And let me go through the trouble, Wilhelmina thought irritably. People always seem to sense her ability to make difficult decisions. She didn't like to any more than they did and wasn't, in her opinion, more competent to do so, but she wasn't one to leave the dirty work to someone else. It was peculiar how people wanted her to be decisive and then were uncomfortable with her because she was.

“It's not like Mr. Peperkamp to disappear like this,” Dekker went on. “He's always been such a good tenant. Now he's late with his rent, and—” he made an exaggerated sigh of despair “—and nothing from him. Not a word.”

Wilhelmina hoped he didn't expect her to pay her brother's rent. She only wanted to find him, not settle his debts. Not getting the desire response, the landlord unlocked the door to Johannes's apartment and excused himself, thumping quietly back downstairs.

“He doesn't speak English?” Juliana asked.

“I don't know,” Wilhelmina said. “I didn't ask.”

They went into the two-room apartment. A fat, half-smoked cigar lay cold in a brass ashtray, and the sleeve of one of Juliana's recordings stood in front of the elaborate, outdated stereo system. She was smiling, and her hair was longer. Johannes owned all her recordings. Wilhelmina didn't own any, but sometimes she heard them on the radio.

“For so long I've thought of Johannes as the muscular, stubborn boy he was before the war,” she said, half to herself, except that she spoke in English. “He won so many speed skating races on the canals. I would watch, all bundled up, drinking hot cocoa with my friends.”

Juliana asked softly, “Did you learn to skate yourself?”

“Mm, yes, but I've forgotten long since.” There had been too many years when she'd had to devote so much of her energy just to survival and then to putting aside the past and going on. Not forgetting, of course—simply going on.

For the first time in her life, Wilhelmina felt sorry for her older brother. Johannes Peperkamp, the famous diamond cleaver. The cutter with the incomparable eye.

Now he lived in dreariness.

Ignoring Juliana's look of concern, she went into the galley kitchen, little more than a converted closet off the sitting room, and automatically put on a kettle for tea. The kitchen was clean enough, but there were no begonias in the windows. She could feel the loneliness that had crept into her brother's life. There was none of the cheerfulness and sparkling cleanliness in this place that there had been in his big apartment with Ann.

She inspected the refrigerator. Four kinds of cheeses and half an eel were neatly wrapped and there was a tin of butter cookies, but the milk had soured and a basket of mussels was beginning to smell. Even during his days of fame and greater fortune, Johannes hadn't been an extravagant man. He was naturally frugal and spent little money on himself. What he was saving it for Wilhelmina didn't know, and yet she did the same. And neither was one to waste food. There had been too many days in their lives without it.

“It doesn't feel right here, does it?” Juliana asked, standing behind her aunt.

Without speaking, Wilhelmina shook her head and turned off the heat under the kettle. She no longer wanted tea. Together, she and Juliana went into the bedroom, but there was nothing there either, nothing to say, nothing to find. The double bed was neatly made, and on the bureau were two photographs, one of Ann, laughing, just a touch of the familiar sadness behind her eyes, and one of their wedding day before the war. Wilhelmina could remember more clearly than she could remember anything that had happened last week how she and Rachel had wished that one day they would have a marriage like Johannes and Ann had. What dreamers they'd been.

Now there were no more dreams, only memories.

“Let's go,” she said.

“Aunt Willie…”

“I'm fine. We'll bring Mr. Dekker the eel. That will have to satisfy him.”

But downstairs in the entryway, a dark figure was trying to communicate with the Belgian landlord in bad French. Juliana let out a small cry and jumped backward, but too late.

The black-brown eyes turned to her. “Shit,” he said.

She stared back at him, insolent and unapologetic. “Fancy meeting you here, Mr. Stark.”

“Jesus Christ, why the hell couldn't you stay out of this?”

So this was the American reporter, Wilhelmina thought, observing him with interest. He was rather tough-looking, with dark, distant eyes, but there was something in the scarred face she found compelling. Nothing obvious or boastful—just there. Competence, knowledge, pain. If she had to guess, she would say this was a man who understood that objectivity wasn't so easy to maintain. In her mind, that was good. She believed objectivity was wrong.

She glanced at Juliana, whose expression was one of distaste mixed with acceptance—and, she thought, excitement. How interesting. Juliana often seemed so vague and bored with the real things of life, at least from what Wilhelmina could tell from her limited experience with her niece.

Matthew Stark sighed heavily, dread clouding his eyes, and Wilhelmina felt her heart skid. This was not a man given easily to emotion. Something was wrong.

“I gather you two don't know.” He paused, his mouth straight and hard, but not uncaring. “Johannes Peperkamp was found dead of a heart attack earlier today in Amsterdam. He'd left his shop with a Dutchman whom I have reason to believe was named Hendrik de Geer. I'm sorry.”

Amsterdam, Wilhelmina thought. Of course, Amsterdam.

Hendrik…

She closed her eyes, hardly noticing how they burned, and her mind filled with images, old pictures, living now only inside her. She saw her brother as a young man, tall and laughing as he swept beautiful Ann onto the ice.

“Aunt Willie, are you all right?”

Juliana's soft voice, filled with grief and shock, broke into her memories, and Wilhelmina took the last step down into the entryway, level with Matthew Stark. Juliana followed unsteadily. Catharina had spoiled her daughter, Wilhelmina thought. Juliana knew so little of the world. She had money and sophistication, fine clothes and a magnificent education, an incomparable talent, but she'd experienced cold or hunger or even death, as common as it was. Now Johannes was dead. And Rachel. Juliana's white, frozen face seemed inconsequential. Wilhelmina found it difficult to feel sympathy toward someone who'd never really suffered.

And it was sad—wrong—that her niece had never really known her own uncle. But that wasn't Juliana's fault. None of this was her fault, and Wilhelmina regretted her silent criticism. Juliana was good and kind, and Wilhelmina was proud of her. She was her niece, the last of the Peperkamps.

Oh, my God.

But Wilhelmina shook off this thought. It strained her imagination to think Johannes would have turned over the Minstrel's Rough and four hundred years of Peperkamp tradition to their pianist niece. Even at her best, Juliana wouldn't be likely to take the Minstrel tradition seriously. Not since Amsterdam had any of the Peperkamp siblings mentioned the stone. Surely Johannes had tossed it into the sea. And yet, how could he?

Dear God, Wilhelmina thought with a sharp, sudden, terrible sense of loss. My brother is dead. Gone.

“I'm all right,” she said finally, because she had to, for herself if no one else. “Johannes lived a long life. He was a good man.”

“I know,” Juliana said.

Wilhelmina looked at Matthew Stark, his expression unreadable as he watched Juliana. Yet she could feel the tension in him, telling him to stay where he stood when what he wanted to do was to go to Juliana. Ahh, no, she thought, he's half in love with her already.

The dark eyes lifted to the old Dutchwoman. “You're Juliana's aunt—Willie, is it?”

“Wilhelmina,” she said, her voice clear and strong. There was nothing now to do but go on. Find Hendrik. Stop him. She would mourn her brother forever, but in private. Meanwhile, it seemed there was work to be done.
Hendrik—what treachery are you up to this time?
“My name is Wilhelmina Peperkamp.”

“Another Peperkamp. Johannes and Catharina's sister?”

“Yes. I live in Rotterdam.”

“Do you know why your brother was in Amsterdam?”

“To pick up diamonds.” The lie came without effort; she had no reason to trust this American, no reason to tell him anything. “I'm feeding his cat.”

“You came all the way from Rotterdam to feed a cat? Okay, if that's the way you want it. Don't tell me a damn thing if you don't want to. I'll find out what I need to on my own. Just go back home, both of you. Get the hell out of this mess.”

“We'll keep your advice in mind, Mr. Stark,” Wilhelmina said impatiently. She hated to be told what to do. “But right now you've brought us sad news, and I think you should go.”

“All right. Do you know anything about Hendrik de Geer?”

“
Goeden dag,
Mr. Stark.”

“That means?”

“Goodbye.”

Stark turned his hard gaze to Juliana. “You want me to leave?”

Juliana stared at him a moment, and Wilhelmina could see the doubt in her niece's eye. My heavens, she thought, Juliana wants to tell him no! Achh, what was this?

But Juliana nodded stoically. “Yes, I think you'd better.”

Without a word, Matthew spun around and left. Wilhelmina stood beside Juliana and watched him pound down the steep front stairs. “A difficult man,” she said.

“I know, but I'm not sure it's wise to let him go off on his own like this, Aunt Willie. He knows things he hasn't told us.”

“And we know things we haven't told him, don't we?”

“Yes, but—” Juliana's jaw set hard. “I don't know about you, Aunt Willie, but I have no intention of just going home and forgetting about this—and no Vermont, either, dammit.”

“Vermont? What's in Vermont?”

“Safety. Innocence. It's where Mother wants me to go.”

“Bah. Some things you cannot escape. Shall we go?”

“Where? I'd like to follow Stark back to the United States—”

“So would I.”

“But you don't have a passport.”

“I do. I planned one day to go to New York to see your mother, but I changed my mind.”

“Why?”

“She was the one who left.”

“I should have guessed. You have your passport with you?”

“Yes. When I decided to go to Antwerp this morning, I thought I might have to go to New York, to see your mother.” Hendrik, she thought, Hendrik…Had it finally come to this? She felt so tired suddenly, so old. “Come, we'll have to take care we're not followed.”

She gave the eel to the landlord, who had been standing by unobtrusively, and explained she would be back later to settle her brother's affairs.

“What happened?” Martin Dekker asked, apparently not having followed the English exchange. “Where's your brother?”

She looked at the Belgian and said, her voice quiet and steady, “He's dead, Mr. Dekker. Johannes is gone.”