Tamar (29 page)

But what really bothered Rauter was that he hadn’t managed to get all the Jews out. There were still several hundred of them — plus some queers and other rubbish — in the concentration camp in Westerbork. He’d been trying to get them shipped off to the east since September, but the damned trains still weren’t running. And now it was probably too late. Even more worrying was that his special groups were still —
still
— finding handfuls of Jews in Amsterdam and elsewhere. Incredible. They hung on like worms in the gut. He was reconciled to the idea that he might be the last good man to leave Holland. But the idea that a Jew might emerge from its rat hole to wave him good-bye sickened him.

Burdened by such thoughts, Rauter got into his car at dusk and was driven back to his headquarters in Didam. There, alone, he ate a large meal of soup, roast chicken, and
apfelstrudel.
Then, drinking his coffee, Rauter made the decision that ended his career. His weekly conference in Apeldoorn with Artur von Seyss-Inquart, the Reichskommissar for the Netherlands, was scheduled for the following afternoon. In addition, he had to attend a meeting at army headquarters earlier in the day. It occurred to him that it would make sense to travel to Apeldoorn now and get a good night’s sleep in his usual hotel. He was, understandably, tired.

He summoned his valet. “Run me a bath. Lay out my other uniform and clean underwear.”

“Sir.”

“Then tell what’s-his-name, the driver, to have the car outside at ten o’clock. And pack my laundry. I’ll have it done in Apeldoorn, since no one here seems to know how to iron a shirt properly.”

The car was a big BMW convertible painted a dull greygreen without markings or insignia. The roof was folded back, and a large suitcase containing Rauter’s dirty washing was strapped on top of it. His orderly, Lieutenant Exner, sat in the back. Rauter was a very large man — two metres in height and weighing almost a hundred kilos — and chose to sit in the front where he had more legroom. His new driver was a young Austrian corporal recently invalided and back from the Russian front, where he had lost half his right ear to frostbite. Exner passed forward one of the two Schmeisser machine pistols from the backseat. Rauter placed it across his lap. When the car pulled away, the driver had some trouble with the unfamiliar gearbox, and Rauter cursed him.

Koop and his men had been busy since nightfall. Getting across the town was no safe or simple matter. In recent days the Nazis had been behaving unpredictably. Sometimes they didn’t bother to police the curfew; sometimes they had patrols on almost every street. Tonight the resistance men had been lucky. They made their rendezvous without seeing a single German.

Using the scrapyard to hide the stolen Nazi staff car had been Eddy’s idea. Stealing the car had been such a brilliant thing to do, such fun, that it had taken them some time to realize the horrendous problems that came with it. Oskar’s cousin, cautious Willy Vekemans, thought they should just dump it, but the others were against him. Then Eddy, who was driving, had said, “Listen. If you want to hide, do you hide in an empty place or in a crowd?”

“What are you saying?” Koop had asked.

“I’m saying that if we are going to keep this damn thing, we need a place where there are other things like it. Where it looks like it belongs.”

“So what do you have in mind? A German transport depot?”

Eddy had grinned and said, “That would be perfect, but actually I was thinking about the scrapyard.”

Before the war, the yard had been a tidy little family business. There’d been a petrol pump in front of the house, a couple of workshops out the back, and a small field populated by dead and cannibalized machinery. In 1941 the father and the two sons had been taken as forced labour to Germany. They had never been heard of again. The mother had struggled on for a while, then packed up and gone to live with relatives in Rotterdam. Ironically, the abandoned yard was fuller now than it had ever been. The German and Dutch police used it to dump wrecked military and civilian vehicles that obstructed key roads. Farmers used it to dispose of bits of shot-down aircraft that had landed inconveniently in their fields. There was so much wreckage that it had burst through the hedges.

So that was where the group had stashed the stolen staff car. They’d backed it into a row of wrecks, between a burnt-out three-tonne truck and an ancient high-sided van. They’d chocked up the front axle and taken the wheels off, hiding them and the battery in the smaller of the workshops. They’d draped a muddy tarpaulin over the car and, just as Eddy had said it would, it had become invisible. Later, when they had “liberated” the Waffen-SS uniforms, they’d taken those to the scrapyard too, concealing them in the workshop’s roof space. The British Sten guns were kept in the empty house itself, wrapped in oilcloth under a heap of old bedding and rugs that rats had nested in and pissed on. Koop had figured that no intruder would fancy poking about in that lot, and so far he’d been correct.

Tonight’s mission was the fifth time the group had used the car and the uniforms, and they had a pretty smooth routine going. Willy and Koop brought the guns and the bag of ammunition magazines out to the car, then went to watch the road. Eddy and Wim fitted the wheels and the battery while Oskar fed the tank with petrol from one of the jerrycans locked in the boot. They worked efficiently in the dark, needing only the briefest moments of torchlight. When it was done, all five men went into the workshop and transformed themselves into SS troopers. For night operations like this, it was really only necessary to wear the soft field service caps, the greatcoats, and the jackboots; but Koop always insisted on the whole getup, and no one was inclined to argue. Oskar wore the staff sergeant’s uniform because his German was fluent; if talking couldn’t be avoided, he would do it. He got into the front passenger seat.

Eddy pressed the starter, and the engine fired on only the second attempt. “God,” he said, “don’t you love these German cars?”

Tamar stalled the motorbike twice on the overgrown concrete road to the canal, but by the time he was on the towpath he had mastered it. The night was less dark now, which meant he could see but also be seen. And the bike’s engine was terribly — terrifyingly — loud.

Pregnant, he thought. My God!

To the right, below him, the broken moon raced through the water.

Fifteen minutes later he cut the engine and freewheeled down the embankment onto a narrow lane that ran alongside the canal. He peered in both directions, listening. He kicked the bike back to life and rode north until he came to a track leading up to the heath. He threaded his way between clumps of gorse and stretches of bracken; in several places the thin nubbly fingers of birch trees reached out to whip him. In the open areas of pale grass and isolated pines, he felt horribly exposed. When he guessed he was less than four hundred metres from the Arnhem–Apeldoorn road, he stopped and turned off the engine. He could hear nothing at all other than the normal sounds of darkness. The light wind was in his face, so if there had been heavy German transport he would surely have heard it. Or maybe not; his hearing might have been impaired by the noise of the engine and his extreme tiredness.

He locked a magazine into the Sten and restarted the bike. The track met another, running north, parallel to the road. Tamar swung the bike onto it. He was intensely anxious now. It occurred to him that if the Germans were moving up tonight, they might well have sent scouting patrols ahead. If so, he was very likely to run into one on this track, and he would have little chance of seeing them before they shot him out of the saddle. And he had very pressing reasons for wanting to stay alive.

Hanns Rauter turned to the man in the backseat and said, “I hope you are not too cold, Exner. I know you do not share my enthusiasm for fresh air.”

The lieutenant sat even more upright. “I am perfectly comfortable, Herr General, thank you.”

This was not true. The suitcase perched on the back of the BMW stuck out over the rear seat. If Exner leaned back, the edge of the case tipped his cap over his eyes in a ridiculous fashion. And he didn’t dare slump. The lieutenant was therefore forced to adopt an unnaturally upright position, like a man struggling to control his bowels. Also, he had been dying for a cigarette for some time. But the general was a notorious nonsmoker, and Exner had not dared to ask permission.

“Good,” Rauter said. After a second or two, he turned his head once again. “If you want to smoke, Lieutenant, please do so. It will not bother me. Another advantage of an open car.”

“Thank you, sir,” Exner said. He felt in his breast pocket for his cigarette case.

There were only a few bends in the road, and Oskar’s opinion was that they should set up shop close to one of them. It would give any German driver less time to assess the situation. Koop’s view was that a genuine roadblock would be set up on a straight stretch of road where anything coming could be seen from a long way off.

“And,” Koop had said, “we are, for tonight, Germans. So we do things the way the Germans do, okay? And another thing, if we make a truck stop suddenly, the guys in it will get all twitchy and reach for their guns. But if we do it on a nice safe stretch of road, all they’ll do is moan, like it’s a boring routine keeping them from their food and their beds. Which means we’ll just stroll up, very friendly like, and do them before they suspect a thing.”

“Koop’s right,” Wim had said. “Let’s do what they’d expect and surprise the life out of them.”

Which was what they did.

Tamar left the motorbike in a small copse of tilted pines and crawled up the low slope to the road. At the top of the rise, a line of ghost-white birches and rusty bracken gave him some cover. The road here ran dead straight, a grey band dissolving into the darkness.

He had imagined that by this time, twenty minutes before midnight, he would hear the sound and even see the hooded lights of the German convoy. He had hoped, although desperately, that he would find Koop’s roadblock on this particularly deserted stretch. Yet the road, as far as he could tell, was empty. He had no idea what was going on. He had no idea what to do.

Something sagged inside him. It was hopeless. Marijke had been right; he had risked everything for nothing. He was exhausted. Marijke was pregnant with his child, and maybe he didn’t have the energy or the luck to get back to her. His back and his arse ached. His brain ached. He was almost overwhelmed by the desire for warmth and safety and sleep. He slithered back to the pines and sat against the front wheel of the bike, savouring the warmth from the engine, the Sten across his lap. He would rest for a few minutes and then begin the dangerous journey back.

His head fell forward, jerked upright, fell again. His hands slid from the gun onto the harsh carpet of pine needles. He smiled in his sleep when he heard a woodpecker drumming its beak against a distant tree.

He woke up, gasping. There was drool on his chin. Woodpecker? He stood, staggering slightly, fumbling with the Sten. It came again, on a scrap of wind: a faint rapid hammering.

Gunfire. Machine guns.

They’d set themselves up on an open stretch just south of a boarded-up inn called De Woeste Hoeve. Eddy had angled the car so that the black-and-white cross on its side would be clearly visible to oncoming traffic. Willy, restless and anxious, had wandered a hundred metres or so down the road, so he was the first to hear the motor. He sprinted back and called to Koop.

“I don’t think it’s a truck. You want to get off the road?”

Koop said, “No. There’s no time. Get ready.”

A pair of hooded headlights came into view.

Exner had had some trouble lighting his cigarette. He’d had to bend down behind the front seats to shelter his lighter. Still hunched over, taking his first drag, he heard Rauter yell.

Eddy knew from the sound of it that it was a BMW. Lovely engine. Sweet as a baby’s heartbeat. He cocked his Sten and looked across at Oskar, who was smiling as he stepped forward and raised his hand. Koop and Wim switched on the lamps, illuminating the crude
HALT
sign. Eddy clambered over the ditch that ran alongside the road and moved up so that he would be behind the vehicle when it stopped. He knew that on the other side of the road Willy was doing the same thing.

Rauter knew immediately it was a trap for the simple reason that only fourteen days earlier he had issued an order cancelling all roadblocks in country areas. Without looking at the driver, he roared, “Don’t stop! Drive through them!”

The young Austrian corporal was confused. Unfortunately he had not been told of the general’s order regarding roadblocks. When Rauter yelled at him, he had been thinking (again) about his beautiful fiancée and whether or not she would want to marry a man with half an ear. He stamped on the pedals and caught the brakes and the accelerator at the same time. The car slewed, and he fought to straighten it and bring it safely to a stop. Beside him, Rauter was struggling upright, clutching his Schmeisser in one hand and hanging on to the top of the windscreen with the other, cursing viciously.

“Shit,” Oskar said. The BMW had stopped too soon, too quickly. It was maybe eighty metres away, and you couldn’t guarantee hitting anything with a Sten at that range. He wasn’t sure where Eddy and Willy were: beyond the car, level with it? Still ahead of it? It looked like someone was trying to get out. Someone was yelling in German.

Oskar glanced over his shoulder at Koop and Wim.

Koop said, “Walk, nice and easy. Don’t run. Stay in line.”

So the three of them strolled down the road.

Rauter’s bulk made it difficult for him to stand up between the front seat and the dashboard. He was awkwardly upright, off balance, when he swung his machine pistol towards the three approaching silhouettes and pulled the trigger. The gun jammed.

“Exner!” he screamed. “Exner!”

Exner had been thrown forward against the driver’s seat and onto the floor. Hauling himself up, bleeding from the nose, he was amazed to see the general staring white-eyed down at him, yelling, struggling with a gun. Exner got to his feet and picked up his own weapon from the floor.