Girl in the Blue Coat(20)
Was I a complete fool to trust Ollie after all? I thought he was safe, but it’s not like you can tell a Nazi informant just by looking. I move toward the coatrack, but before I can take my coat, Ollie nods toward the door. On the other side, two figures approach, one of them clearly Judith.
“What is this meeting?” I ask again.
“It’s about to start,” he says, raising his eyebrows again. “If you’re going to leave, be careful on your way out. The door closes fast.”
So he won’t stop me if I try to leave, but if I do choose to go, I’ll also be missing out on my chance to ask Judith about Mirjam. My only lead, my only clue, and a decision to make in less than a second. How much do I want to find this missing girl?
“It’s us,” a sharp voice whispers. “It’s Judith and Sanne.”
Ollie opens the door, and I don’t leave through it.
Judith really is stunning, with her pale parchment skin, molasses-colored hair, and a gaze that could cut glass. Sanne, the other girl, is friendly-looking, plump, and pretty, with white-blond hair that floats with static electricity when she takes off her hat. “Sorry we’re late; roads blocked,” Sanne explains, lightly patting Ollie’s shoulder and moving to greet Leo and Willem.
Before I have a chance to say anything to Judith, she brushes past me, too—either preoccupied or deliberately ignoring me—and takes a seat on the sofa.
“Judith,” I begin, but Ollie interrupts me by clearing his throat. Later, he mouths to me. After the meeting. You promised.
He sits on the edge of the sofa, and Sanne takes one of the chairs. It’s a fluid movement, one that says she’s done it a million times, that in this meeting everybody knows their place.
“Hanneke?” Ollie looks up at me. I’m the only one left standing, halfway between the door and the sofa. “Hanneke, are you sitting?”
One seat remains, a squat velveteen footstool. I move toward it slowly and sit down.
“Everyone, this is Hanneke,” Ollie says. He doesn’t introduce me further, so they must have been expecting me. There must have been a vote, or a discussion at least, about my presence. “As I told you all before, I vouch for her.”
He says this last part seriously, and with it, he puts me in a terrible position. Because I can’t say now that he shouldn’t vouch for me. How will Judith ever talk to me about Mirjam if I say I can’t be trusted? But still… what has he just implied that I can be trusted with? What is he bringing me into?
“Now,” Ollie continues, “the first order of business is to discuss the ration-card bottleneck. The Germans are getting more and more strict with—”
“Wrong,” Willem interjects. “The first order of business is for us to agree what it is that we’re celebrating. It’s been my birthday twice already this month.”
“And Leo and I have already been engaged several times,” adds Sanne.
Willem turns to me and explains, “We can’t tell people what we’re really doing, so we always have a pretend celebration in mind, that we’ll all use as our excuse if we’re stopped.”
“We used to say it was Bible study,” Sanne says. “But once I was stopped and the soldier asked me which book we’d been reading. I told him Genesis, because it was the only one I could remember, and then we decided none of us knew the Bible well enough to have that be our cover.”
“It can be my birthday,” Leo says. “It really is next week, so it’s plausible.”
“As I was saying,” Ollie breaks in again. “The ration-card bottleneck. The forged ones aren’t being produced quickly enough. We’re taking care of sixteen more people, just since last month. It’s too time-consuming for one person to produce all those cards. We need to find another forger or come up with another solution.” I don’t like the way his eyes land on me when he says that last part.
“In Utrecht, they’ve got someone on the inside of the ration-card office,” Willem says. “They arranged a fake theft. The worker reported that the office had been broken into. Really, he’d stolen them himself and passed them on to resistance groups.”
The conversation moves around me while I try to keep up. Ration-card fraud. I’m a solo criminal who has walked into a den of them. But instead of using the ration cards to sell goods for profit, like I do, they pass the cards to the resistance. For what? Food and goods for resistance workers? People in hiding?
“Judith, do you think your uncle might know anybody?” Ollie asks. “With his Council connections?”
The Jewish Council. Judith’s willingness to be out at night and her boldness at the school make more sense knowing that her uncle is on the Council. As the Jewish leadership appointed to be liaisons with the Nazis, they communicate German orders and have a little more freedom than other Jews.
Judith shakes her head. “Even if he does, you know I can’t ask him. He’d disembowel me if he knew I came to these meetings.”
“I can see if Utrecht has any ideas,” Willem says. “Maybe their contact in the ration office knows somebody in our ration office.”
So these five in Amsterdam are part of a larger network, spread into the suburbs and maybe through the whole country. In spite of my fear at being here, I can’t help but feel professional curiosity. Their operation must be huge. How do they find enough merchants to work with them? How good is their forger? Are the soldiers stationed in Utrecht more or less lax than the ones here in Amsterdam?