Girl in the Blue Coat(61)

To my left, another movement. The soldiers have settled their disagreement over Ollie’s papers, and now the three of them are walking purposefully toward the first woman with the carriage. They gesture for her to remove the child, do it quickly. While their flashlights are pointed at her, Ollie looks up, searches for me frantically in the crowd. Go, he mouths when he catches my eye. Hurry.

I touch the back of Mirjam’s coat, and she swivels to look at me.

“Mirjam.” I’m barely moving my lips. “Come with me.”

Mirjam recoils, shaking her head in fear. Meters away, Ollie tells the guards that this isn’t the right carriage; he needs to see the other one. I can hear his shoes clipping on the stones, and I can tell he’s trying to walk slowly enough to buy me a few extra seconds. Thank you, Ollie.

“Mirjam, it’s okay. I know who you are.”

No, she mouths.

Over by Ollie, the woman pushing the second carriage takes her baby out of it. The baby starts to cry, a thin, piercing wail, but the sound provides enough cover that I can mutter instructions to Mirjam.

“We have to run. Follow me. People are waiting.” I reach down and lace my fingers through Mirjam’s. Her hand feels small and bird-fragile in mine. She’s so young.

Ollie has the camera and the film, the camera that represents hundreds of lives. He’s walking it past us, and in the moonlight his face is filled with terror, begging me silently to run, run now, leave Mirjam behind if she won’t follow me. I can’t. I’ve come too far. I’m holding her hand.

“Now,” I hiss. I tug Mirjam’s hand, pulling her to the side. Mirjam resists. “Now,” I plead.

The soldiers take their places again. “Hurry,” one says. “Move.”

And now everyone is marching again, and I’m marching with them. What have I done? Why didn’t Mirjam listen to me? Ollie is receding, back farther in the shadows with the precious cargo he came for, and I’m getting closer to the bridge, with its wide-open, deadly spaces. If we get all the way to the train station, they might make me board. We have to try running.

Forty more steps until the bridge. Thirty-five. We’re coming upon the final alley, the last place we could run before the bridge. I start pulling Mirjam toward it. Why won’t Mirjam follow me? Something’s wrong. Her hand twists in mine, struggles, breaks away.

She’s running, but not in the direction I am. She’s running directly onto the open bridge. Oh God, oh God, what is she doing? It’s the worst direction she could have run in. Her blue coat flies behind her, flapping in the cold, running, running away from me.

“Stop!” I cry out at the same time a soldier yells, “Halt.”

“Halt,” he calls out again, his boots clattering against the cobblestones. What should I do? Try to distract them? Run after her? Tell everyone else in this transport to run, too?

“Stop,” I start to say again, halfway between the alley and the transport.

Suddenly, the wind is knocked out of me as a pair of strong arms wrap around my waist and drag me back toward the alley.

“Let me go!”

“Let you go?” Ollie growls in a loud, ferocious voice. “I don’t think so. I saw you try to escape.”

Mirjam is still running along the cobblestoned street, then onto the bridge with its thick iron rails. Her legs are spindly. Her shoes clatter against the wooden planks faintly, under the heavier sound of soldiers’ boots. I claw at Ollie’s hands around my waist, trying to pry them loose. The camera digs into my hip, and he holds me tighter.

“I am overruling these guards on this matter! You are obviously a part of this—of this conspiracy plot. I’m taking you in for questioning immediately!”

“Please,” I say, and I’ve never heard my voice sound so desperate.

“No,” he whispers, and this time it’s real Ollie, talking to me, and not the Ollie pretending to be a soldier. “You can’t.”

“Please,” I beg Ollie. “They’re going to—”

Bang.

And they do. They shoot her. In the middle of the bridge, in the back of the neck so that blood bursts from her throat, slick and shining in the moonlight.

“No,” I cry out, but my words are muffled by another gunshot.

Mirjam’s knees buckle under her as her hands fly up to her neck, but I know she’s dead even before she hits the ground. It’s the way she doesn’t bother to break her own fall, the way she crumples to the ground with her head and shoulders hitting the cobblestones.

The prisoners stare, gaping, at the body in the middle of the bridge, some of them letting out shocked screams, some of them clasping their hands in silent horror. The boy who called out to his mother earlier is crying, and she still has her hand over his mouth so the tears and the muffled sobs squeeze through her fingers.

The young guard, the one who shot her, comes back to his post. “A warning,” he calls. His voice wavers; he wasn’t expecting this to happen, and he doesn’t know what to do now.

“Let’s go,” he calls out. “Quickly.” He’s not even going to move her. He’s going to make the other prisoners walk right around her, leaving her in the middle of the bridge for the milkmen and street cleaners to find in the morning.

Ollie pulls me along, away from the bridge, one arm wrapped around my waist and the other holding the camera.