Girl in the Blue Coat(23)

“It’s almost curfew. I’ll walk you home; Judith and Willem and Sanne will follow in a few minutes.”

Judith stands to put on her scarf.

“Thank you,” I say formally. “For trying to help me.”

She pauses. “My cousin might have known Mirjam better. She doesn’t come to these meetings, because she’s just a kid, but she helps us sometimes. She’s still a pupil at the school. I could arrange a meeting with her. Possibly.”

“Please,” I say greedily. “Should I come to the school tomorrow morning?” I’m sure I can find an errand for Mr. Kreuk that will require me to be in that neighborhood.

“Come to the Schouwburg in the afternoon. We’ll both be volunteering there. Meet me outside. You can see what we’re all about.”

I don’t want to see what they’re all about, and Judith knows that. It’s why she suggested the Schouwburg to begin with. Judith might have offered to help me further, but it came with a price.

“Ready?” Ollie asks me.

I tuck Judith’s envelope into the waistband of my skirt so I won’t have to carry it visibly down the street.

“Be careful,” Ollie calls out to Judith and Willem.

Willem calls back, “Be safe.”





EIGHT




You had no right.”

“No right to what?” Ollie scans both sides of the street before pulling me to the left, closing the door behind him.

“You’re in the resistance.” I don’t bother to phrase it as a question. Ollie walks steadily ahead, but his shoulders tense at my statement. It’s a sullen, vindictive cold outside, colder than it’s been in months, and my breath vaporizes as we hurry along the canal.

“We don’t have to talk about this now.”

“You’re in the resistance. You said you were inviting me to a supper club.”

He halts. “It was a supper club. It used to be. We’d talk about books and politics. I joined with Willem and Judith. When Judith had to leave school because she was Jewish, some of us decided that we couldn’t have a group to just eat dinner. We had to try to fix what was going wrong.”

He starts walking again and I chase after. He’s so smug with his half explanations, and so cavalier about the fact that he’s dragged me into this. “I can’t believe you, Ollie.” Everything I’ve felt in the past two days, every emotion, every fear, every bitter word I didn’t say to Mrs. de Vries, every doubting thought I had about finding Mirjam Roodveldt—all of it comes spilling out now, on the street, at Ollie. “How could you do this? Why didn’t you tell me that’s where you were taking me?”

“Because what if someone had stopped you on the way?” he says. “I wanted you to be able to truthfully say you were on your way to see a friend. I didn’t know how well you could lie.”

I can lie so very well, better than he thinks. Ollie has never seen me, flirting with soldiers while vomit rises in the back of my throat, or convincing my parents that my job is all flower-ordering and consoling sad families. Ollie has never seen the way I make everyone believe that I am a whole person after Bas’s death. Ollie is the one who shouldn’t be able to lie. “You, in the resistance,” I say finally. “You’re such a rule-follower.”

He cackles, an explosive, mirthless noise. “Don’t you think rule-followers are the best people to organize against the Nazis? It’s not all daring rescues and explosions. It’s a lot of tedious paperwork.”

“Ollie, why did you bring me?” I demand as he walks ahead. “I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t want to be involved in any of this. You could have just arranged for Judith to meet me at a café. Why are you trusting me at all? I could tell the police everything that I saw.”

He whirls around and his eyes are cold. “Are you going to? Are you going to go to the police? Do you think what we’re doing is wrong?”

“You know I don’t think it’s wrong.” Not morally. But in this world, you can be right, or you can be safe, and the type of danger Ollie is dabbling in makes my own work look like nothing. It’s not finite and contained, like dealing in black market goods or finding Mirjam. It’s huge and sprawling, an endless hole of needs that would swallow me whole. The Nazis might imprison a black market worker. They might imprison people who hide Jews, or send them to labor camps. But resistance workers caught in the act of stealing ration cards, working to overthrow the German regime? Those workers could be shot. The lucky ones, at least. The unlucky ones would be tortured first. How many more ways can my careful world be upended?

“I just don’t want to join,” I say. “I’m an Aryan poster girl, remember, Ollie? I don’t help the resistance. I find black market cheese.”

“We need black market cheese! We need food for the onderduikers in hiding. We need false identification papers. We need girls who are pretty so the soldiers don’t notice that they’re also smart and brave and working against them.”

“Judith already made me feel guilty. She made it clear how altruistic the rest of you are. I’m not.”

He grabs my shoulders, a sudden movement that throws me off balance. “Did you ever think that maybe you’re better than you believe you are, Hanneke?” We smell like wet wool, both of us do, and his fingers are cold even through the layers of my coat. I start to push his arms away, but he tightens his grip. “Did you ever think that maybe that’s why I brought you?”