She hadn’t dared leave it in a pocket for fear Frans Oenen, the killer of those two from the van, would drag the chair away from the bathtub and search through her things. He must know that she had not only found and taken it from under that nest of barbed wire where he had secreted it on a wooden post at that frontier crossing into Belgium, but that she had finally realized who he really was. No alias anymore. One careless comment had revealed it. ‘Collodion,’ he had said not an hour ago to Etienne Labrie, her passeur and his boss. ‘She can hide that cut easily with that.’
Etienne hadn’t known what the stuff was-she had been certain of this. With his usual impatience, he had swiftly said, ‘But only when the stitches have been pulled. Damn it, Frans, we can’t wait that long. She would tear her hand on that wire we had to clear away at the crossing to the south of Reusel. They’ll have brought in the dogs. They’ll not have missed a chance like that.’
After Madame de Belleveau, his ‘housekeeper,’ had soaked the wound in very hot water and salt and had nursed the poison out on their arrival, that good woman had opened the cut and cleansed it throughly while speaking voluminously of the value of bruised sage leaves boiled in vinegar. ‘The Romans and their legions, they swore of such and brought the plant into Gaul where Vercingetorix … Ah mon Dieu, mademoiselle, listen to me, please. That one, he had gathered the tribes at Alesia in 52 B.C., you understand, to take on the challenge of their lives since Julius Caesar, that one, he had surrounded their hill fort and put them all to siege.
‘A terrible time. Rape, slaughter and all the rest,’ she had added shy; with a toss of her head, and had promptly bathed the cut with creosote, the shock of which, cognac or no cognac, had caused her to pass out.
Inadvertently she must have blurted something-her increasing doubts about Frans Oenen’s loyalties. And now his mention of collodion: used by actors, showgirls and others to hide such telltale marks.
The theatre, the Hollandsche Schouwburg, was on the Plantage Middenlaan in Amsterdam.
Renamed the Joodsche Schouwburg by the Occupier in October 1941, it had been used ever since as a holding place for Jews in transit, her father among them, her mother having gone with him.
Salome, a play of Oscar Wilde’s, and the part of Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Judaea, 15 February 1939, a Wednesday evening performance and her eighteenth birthday. Paul Klemper, now using the alias of Frans Oenen, had played the part of Herod so well, the ovation had gone on and on. And now, she asked, what now? Acting still, and perhaps the hardest part ever, that of a traitor and the only one to have a pistol. ‘A Dutch Army Pistool M25,’ he had quipped when showing it to her right after those killings. ‘Very effective in hands like these.’ His own.
He hadn’t looked or acted at all as if Jewish in the restaurant with a crowd of his followers after that performance. He had been as Aryan as now needed, but the Occupier had known the truth and must have let him escape from that holding place with the promise of giving them exactly what they wanted. Herself-and not only what she had been carrying, but what she still knew.
The water was perfect. She would have to do it. Defenceless behind a makeshift curtain in the kitchen, her things on that chair, she gingerly stepped into the copper tub. They had arrived at this house in the country, this maison de compagne, in darkness four days ago and they would leave it in darkness tomorrow at 0500 hours, Monday, 4 October 1943. The truck’s engine had now been changed over to burn gasoline but would they be arrested as soon as they got to whatever entrance Etienne might choose? They were, she now knew, just to the west of Sezanne and to the south-southeast of Retourneloupe and the western edge of the Foret de la Traconne and among the hills that formed the cliff of the Ile de France. They were about 100 kilometres to the east of the Bois de Vincennes and that entrance to Paris.
Behind its rutted single lane and scattering of beech and oak, the house, of stone and stucco, would normally have intrigued and delighted, for there was, she had discovered, an enviable potager. Attic dormers, shutter-flanked windows, faded green trim and white walls still gave, with the turning of the leaves, that wonderful sense of a country retreat. There had been no lights on when they had arrived-the blackout even here, of course-and Arie’s flashlight had soon found the key beneath a stone.
‘Martine, when I awaken her, will know what to do with that cut,’ Etienne had quietly said when she had climbed out and down from the back of the truck. ‘Just don’t let her curiosity about how well you react to pain bother you. Just smile softly when she glances up from the needle, and don’t mind her smoking good tobacco in that pipe of hers.’
‘Martine?’ she had asked.
‘Madame de Belleveau, my Jeanne d’Arc, and the person I am fortunate enough to have known all my life. Now stop worrying about my selling you out to the Boche. Stop thinking Arie or Frans might. Just because we don’t tell our packages any more than is absolutely necessary, doesn’t mean we’re up to mischief. Martine knows little of what we do and asks nothing of it, nor do we come here often because we mustn’t. But she’s been here since the Great War when her husband and my father were both killed on 7 September 1914, during the First Battle of the Marne. Martine has raised me since I was seven, my mother, having felt the job too much, had taken up with one of the enemy. He’d moved in, and really I mustn’t blame her too much. Martine still insists. “Compassion,” she always says. “Who knows what one might do under similar circumstances.”’
He had let that sink in, and then had said, ‘Now I really have told you too much, Anna-Marie Vermeulen, but only so that you will know exactly what I think of them. Arie, too, since his wife and their brand-new baby, the one he hadn’t even seen alive, were both killed when they bombed Rotterdam.’
Arie. ‘Look, I’m sorry I suggested they take me to those ruins, but Corbeny is a very small village and everyone would have seen us.’
‘Be grateful Frans took care of the problem. I wouldn’t have. I’d have let them off with a warning. Tell yourself, as I still am, that it was necessary.’
Frans Oenen-Paul Klemper. She still didn’t know Etienne’s and Arie’s real names, they knowing her only as Anna-Marie Vermeulen because that had been the name Etienne had been given along with that childhood handkerchief by the one who had hired him, she then mentioning it to identify herself when they had met in Amsterdam near the diamond bourse in total darkness, Etienne handing it to her.
It had been Arie who had carted in the firewood to heat the water, Martine who had tested it and had raised a forefinger in pause when he had asked if there was any soap.
A cherished sliver from Provence had been found in a kitchen drawer and still had that lovely smell of lavender and feel of olive oil.
Secreting the coin under herself, letting the warmth envelope her, she reached for the dipper and with that good hand, began to wash her hair. No one could fault her for having done what she had at those ruins. It had been by far the only possible thing.
Nor could she really tell the others about Frans, and he had definitely known this, he must have, because he would then have had to tell them not only what she had been carrying but also what she knew, and of course he had the only gun.
The Sicherheitsdienst who were using him would not have told him everything, but he’d have figured it all out.
Anna-Marie Vermeulen = trainee borderline sorter, Diamant Meyerhof.
* On the evening of 20 July 1944, believing that the Fuhrer has been assassinated, Boineburg-Lengsfeld ordered his second-in-command to see that Karl Oberg and other leading SS in Paris were arrested. But the bomb had failed to do what it was supposed to. Recalled to Berlin and arrested but found guilty only of having obeyed General Heinrich von Stulpnagel’s command to have them arrested, Boineburg-Lengsfeld was dismissed but not executed as others were.