Girl in the Blue Coat(4)

“With the almond paste?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

Mrs. Janssen’s coffee is scalding and strong, a soothing anesthetic. It burns my throat, so I keep drinking it and don’t even realize how much I’ve had until the cup is back on its saucer and it’s half empty. Mrs. Janssen immediately fills it to the top.

“The coffee’s good,” I tell her.

“I need your help.”

Ah.

So the purpose of the coffee becomes clear. She’s given me a present. Now she wants a favor. Too bad she didn’t realize I don’t need to be buttered up. I work for money, not kindness.

“I need your help finding something,” she says.

“What do you need? More meat? Kerosene?”

“I need your help finding a person.”

The cup freezes halfway to my lips, and for a second I can’t remember whether I was picking it up or putting it down.

“I need your help finding a person,” she says again, because I still haven’t responded.

“I don’t understand.”

“Someone special to me.” She looks over my shoulder, and I follow her line of vision to where her eyes are fixed on a portrait of her family, hanging next to the pantry door.

“Mrs. Janssen.” I try to think of the right and polite way to respond. Your husband is gone, is what I should tell her. Your son is dead. Your other sons are not coming back. I cannot find ghosts. I don’t have any ration coupons for a replacement dead child.

“Mrs. Janssen, I don’t find people. I find things. Food. Clothing.”

“I need you to find—”

“A person. You said. But if you want to find a person, you need to call the police. Those are the kinds of finders you want.”

“You.” She leans over the table. “Not the police. I need you. I don’t know who else to ask.”

In the distance, the Westerkerk clock strikes; it’s half past eleven. Now is when I should leave. “I have to go.” I push my chair back from the table. “My mother will have cooked lunch. Did you want to pay now for the sausage, or have Mr. Kreuk add it to your account?”

She rises, too, but instead of seeing me to the door, she grabs my hand. “Just look, Hanneke. Please. Just look before you go.”

Because even I am not hardened enough to wrench my hand away from an old woman, I follow her toward the pantry and pause dutifully to look at the picture of her sons on the wall. They’re in a row, three abreast, matching big ears and knobby necks. But Mrs. Janssen doesn’t stop in front of the photograph. Instead, she swings open the pantry door. “This way.” She gestures for me to follow her.

Verdorie. Damn it, she’s crazier than I thought. We’re going to sit in the darkness now, together among her canned pickles, to commune with her dead son. She probably keeps his clothes in here, packed in mothballs.

Inside, it’s like any other pantry: a shallow room with a wall of spices and preserved goods, not as full as it would have been before the war.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Janssen, but I don’t know—”

“Wait.” She reaches to the edge of the spice shelf and unlatches a small hook I hadn’t noticed.

“What are you doing?”

“Just a minute.” She fiddles with the latch. Suddenly, the whole set of shelves swings out, revealing a dark space behind the pantry, long and narrow, big enough to walk into, too dark to see much.

“What is this?” I whisper.

“Hendrik built it for me,” she says. “When the children were small. This closet was inefficient—deep and sloping—so I asked if he would close off part of it for a pantry and have the other part for storage.”

My eyes adjust to the dimness. We’re standing in the space under the stairs. The ceiling grows lower, until, in the back, it’s no more than a few feet off the ground. Toward the front, there’s a shelf at eye level containing a half-burned candle, a comb, and a film magazine whose title I recognize. Most of the tiny room is taken up by Mrs. Janssen’s missing opklapbed, unfolded as if waiting for a guest. A star-patterned quilt lies on top of it, and a single pillow. There are no windows. When the secret door is closed, only a slim crack of brightness would appear underneath.

“Do you see?” She takes my hand again. “This is why I cannot call the police. The police cannot find someone who is not supposed to exist.”

“The missing person.”

“The missing girl is Jewish,” Mrs. Janssen says. “I need you to find her before the Nazis do.”





TWO




Mrs. Janssen is still waiting for me to respond, standing in the dark space, where the air is stale and smells faintly of old potatoes.

“Hanneke?”

“You were hiding someone?” I can barely get the words out as she re-latches the secret shelf, closes the pantry door, and leads me back to the table. I don’t know if I’m more shocked or scared. I know this happens, that some of the Jews who disappear are packed like winter linens in other people’s basements rather than relocated to work camps. But it’s too dangerous a thing to ever admit out loud.

Mrs. Janssen is nodding at my question. “I was.”

“In here? You were hiding someone in here? For how long?”