by Michael Dean
‘Our captain gave them a few cartons of cigarettes,’ Joel told Manny. ‘I’ve never met a Mof yet that you couldn’t buy.’
The boat then headed inland again. They tied up at a small dock – one Manny didn’t recognise. Joel led them up on deck, then up the gangplank. Manny sniffed thankfully at the fresh air. Out here, it was salty - tangy with the smell of the open sea.
As the boat set sail again, they made their way along the quay. A couple of streets in from the docks was a redbrick building, with barred windows. A notice above the door said Document Distribution Centre. They walked straight past it. A dark, slender young woman in a grey coat came toward them. Joel nodded to her. She met his eyes, but walked past, without a word.
‘Irene Derenbosch,’ Lard whispered to Manny. ‘She’s the librarian at the local public reading room. She’s been watching this building for us. If there was anything wrong, she would have said something.’
Manny nodded. Lard should not have told him that, it put Irene in danger. But he was pleased enough to know what was going on. They stood on the pavement, a little down the road from the building, watching. Two Orpos came out with a civilian, in mackintosh and slouch hat. They watched as the civilian locked up; then he went one way and the Orpos the other.
‘They’re going to lunch,’ Lard whispered sotto voce, to Manny. He had obviously appointed himself Manny’s guide.
They waited. After a couple of minutes, the civilian came back and unlocked the door. ‘He’s the cashier,’ Lard said. ‘He was happy to help us.’
At Joel’s signal, the four of them walked into the Distribution Centre, bound the willing cashier - stuffing a rag in his mouth, to make it look good, when the Orpos returned - and put him in the coal bin. As they finished doing this, they heard a scream. A female office worker had been sitting typing away in a side office. They found some twine and tied her to her chair, putting some tape over her mouth.
The cashier had left the strong room open. He would later claim he had been storing old records, when he was surprised. There were hundreds of the new-issue ID cards, on shelves. Joel looked through one quickly, then passed it on: ‘Just look at that.’
It was amazing how complicated they were. They were in three parts, to include all personal data. There was space for a photograph, and fingerprints in two places. There was a special stamp. The knokploeg stuffed a wooden box full of ID cards.
There were also hundreds of ration cards, on the shelves. These were in tear-off strips, marked with a number, and the food they were valid for: kaas, brod and so on. They helped themselves to plenty of those. They also took some clothing coupons – marked Textielkaart. .
Outside, they stopped on the pavement. ‘So where’s the car,’ muttered Ben Bril.
‘Car?’ Manny said. ‘What car?’
The others ignored him.
It appeared after a couple of minutes – an old D.K.W. There were so few cars on the streets of Amsterdam, that the chances of getting stopped in the city centre were high. Out here, in the outer suburbs, it was safer.
As it slowed, and drew to a halt, Manny recognised the driver - the leader of the Catholic toughs, Gerrit Romijn. They all piled in, hauling the boxes full of documents after them.
‘All well?’ Gerrit called out.
‘All well,’ Joel said.
They drove in silence for another five minutes or so.
‘Do you know where you are?’ Joel asked him.
‘No idea.’
Joel grinned. ‘Just as well.’ A minute or so later, Gerrit stopped the car. ‘Knokploeg Headquarters,’ Joel announced. ‘The new one.’
Ahead of them was a large coal shed, with wooden double-doors, a wooden gable and a sloping roof. Ben Bril jumped out and opened the doors. Gerrit got out of the driver’s seat, and made his goodbyes. Lard Zilverberg replaced him, and drove the car gingerly into the coal shed, stopping on a raised metal plate, slightly larger than the car. He cut the engine.
Ben got back in the car. There was a whirring sound, and the lift-bridge, with the car on it, started to lower. They came to a halt on the cement floor of a concealed room, below the coal-shed. As the others got out of the car, Lard drove it forward, off the lift-bridge. The lift-bridge was raised again, completing the ceiling of the concealed room.
‘Hydraulic,’ said Lard, proudly. ‘My dad and I did it. This used to be my family’s coal business.’
‘Lard’s dad will put some coal sacks down in the coal shed, up there. Covering the lift-bridge’ Joel jerked his head up at the ceiling. ‘Then it looks like any other coal shed. Nobody would guess there’s a room below.’
‘It’s … fantastic,’ Manny said. He nodded to himself, taking it all in. There was a tier of three bunks in the concealed room.
The boxes were opened. At a table in the corner, Lard started to fill in false names and addresses on ID cards for Joel and Manny – the wanted men.
‘You’re Willem Verduyn,’ he told Joel Cosman.
They knew a photographer who would take photographs later. Lard took an impression of their fingerprints now, though.
‘That’s why we let you come along, Manny,’ Joel said, with a twinkle in his eye. ‘We had to get your fingerprints here.’
‘You are now Piet Maasland, a teacher of art,’ Lard said to Manny. ‘Where would you like to live?’
Manny came up with an address near Artis, in the neighbourhood where he dreamed of living with Tinie, after the war. Lard filled in the address, and handed the ID card over. Manny stared at it, fascinated.
‘I could help you with these,’ he murmured to Lard. He took a long look at the bunk beds. ‘Can I stay here?’ he said. He was thinking of Tinie; she would be safer with him out of the way.
Joel grinned. ‘’Course you can, Manny-boy. If that’s what you want.’
*
Huib Lievers, Robert Roet’s contact in Holland, had started off selling bric-a-brac from a barrow. He was good at it. He was a hail-fellow-well-met, mouthy Amsterdammer – born talking, as they say. Born selling, too. He quickly prospered; renting one back-street shop, then another.
He employed what he euphemistically referred to as removal men - at the beginning they even helped transport heavy pieces of furniture and paintings. But pretty soon Lievers discovered that negotiations, with both buyers and sellers, went more smoothly with the removal men’s heavy presence in the background. Before long, his shops were little more than a front for an extortion and protection racket that covered most of the working-class Pijp district.
The police were closing in on him when the invasion came. To get away, he became one of the first Engelandvaarders - and was transformed from hustler to hero overnight. He had tea with the Queen, in the garden at Chester Square. Wilhelmina asked if he would go back, working for Holland, as so many others had. Lievers thought, why not?
The Queen passed him to the head of the B. I. – Bureau Inlichtingen, Dutch Intelligence - a flamboyant bull of a man called François van’t Sant. General van’ t Sant interviewed Lievers, and read him for what he was. The BI, reckoned the general, did not need obvious wide-boys like Lievers – he even had a pencil moustache.
Pretending to be impressed, van’t Sant did what he always did with potential Dutch agents not up to B.I standards – he passed them to the SOE with a high recommendation. van’t Sant’s antipathy to the head of SOE’s N section, Nigel Laming, went all the way back to 1916. They had fallen out over a case, when the two of them had been based in Rotterdam.
N section were naturally on the lookout for Dutch nationals to drop back into Holland. They regarded Lievers as quite a catch. For one thing, his mother was German, so he spoke the language perfectly. He was landed back on the Dutch coast by Motor Torpedo Boat, to set up his own circuit.
One of his Dutch reception committee, at Scheveningen, smilingly said there was a checkpoint ahead, as they were walking along together. Better to hand over his pistol, and let them smuggle it through. Lievers handed it over
, butt first, whereupon he was handcuffed and taken to the old Colonial Building, on Mauritskade.
The first interview lasted forty hours, with short breaks for sleep and food. But to Lievers’ amazement, he was not tortured or beaten. He was allowed to wear his own clothes. The food was adequate; he was even given a small tobacco ration. He had a spacious cell. His SOE training had made much of stool pigeons, but there was nobody else in the cell with him.
He was interrogated by an ordinary-looking chap in his mid-forties - balding, dressed in grey flannels and a tweed jacket, smelling of tobacco. He introduced himself as Herr Giskes, of the Abwehr. Giskes had the manner of a policeman, and his questions about Lievers’ background and contacts sounded, to the experienced Lievers, like the police questions of his boyhood and early youth.
When these initial questions were finished, Giskes gave Lievers a cigarette and smoked one himself. ‘I used to work for a tobacco company,’ he confided, absently.
‘You can have as many ciggies as you like.’
Lievers was silent.
Giskes knew every detail of every course of Lievers’ SOE training. He took Lievers back through it. He knew every instructor, every participant, every weapon. He knew the interior decoration at The Vineyards, the big house at Beaulieu where Lievers had done his radio training. He knew which plays Peter Follis, the Disguises instructor, had been in before the war. He knew which jokes ‘Killer’ Green made, while demonstrating burglary techniques.
At the end of the first session, Giskes gave him a guided tour of the cells, showing him a dozen captured Dutch agents. All of them, Giskes said, were ‘singing like nightingales.’ Lievers believed him. Seeing them all there, captured, was demoralising. As it was meant to be.
In the end, Lievers was broken not by torture, but by hopelessness.
*
Robert Roet had been provided with forged travel passes and train tickets from Scheveningen to The Hague, and from The Hague to Amsterdam. Reaching
Amsterdam’s Central Station just before midday, he stored his rucksack containing the wireless transmitter and his gun in a locker. Then he had five or six oude jenevers – the real thing! - throwing them down his throat at the station bar.
He had five hours to kill before he was due to meet Lievers. He surprised himself by deciding to find Manny. He would drop in on the Hirschfeld house.
As he crossed the bridge over Herengracht, strolling by weeping willows, memories of Else stirred him, in a way they never had before. He cherished her vulnerability, her innocence, her unaffected joy at him. Even her plainness was poignant to him.
He understood, with a frightening finality, that he had made a mess of his life. There was no appeal against such a realisation. He had had no happiness, and precious little contentment. Such worldly success as he had, was dross. He had run out of steam, prematurely old, and he had nothing. He deserved the burning misery, that no amount of gin could cauterize. The Black Birds were flying – wiping out the light
Else answered his authoritative rap on the door and threw herself into his arms. She was loving and unjudgemental. And he was massively disappointed. The reality let him down - again. The greater the expectation, the more it let him down. As he arrived, he couldn’t wait to leave. It was always like this …
She took his hand and led him into the parlour. There, her hands on his shoulders, she looked up into his eyes.
‘You’ve lost weight. Have you been drinking?’
‘These are hard times.’
‘We knew you were coming.’
‘Good. I always want you to know my codename. If anything happens, I don’t want to just disappear. I’m called Jan Veen now. What’s that?’ He nodded at a Hebrew primer, hurriedly placed face down on a table, when she had rushed to open the door.
‘I’m learning Hebrew. Trying to … ’ She dropped her gaze, then blurted out ‘If they kill me, I want to know who I am, before I die.’
He nodded. He thought it was a good idea. It was not his way, but he approved.
She made him coffee, real coffee, and put sweet biscuits - kichels – on a plate.
‘These are good,’ he said.
‘I made them!’
She looked pleased with herself. It irritated him.
‘How’s Max?’
‘Oh, you know. Working hard..’
‘What’s he doing?’
‘Don’t you know?’
‘No.’
‘I thought everybody knew. He’s Secretary General for Trade and Industry.’ She looked proud. ‘People say he’s the most influential Dutchman in Holland.’
‘That’s like being the most influential lunatic in the asylum.’
‘Oh Robert! You always judge him so harshly.’
‘So he works for the Nazis?’
‘No! He works for the Dutch people. He gets the best deal he can for us all.’
‘Where’s his study?’
Else jumped up, automatically doing his bidding. Then a look of panic crossed her face. ‘You can’t …’
‘Oh, yes I can. I’ll find it anyway, Else.’
‘It’s on the second floor. Second door on the right.’
‘Else get me some paper, please. And a pen.’
For a moment, both of them wondered if she would obey. She stood up, walked out without a word, and was gone a long time. When she came back, she had a writing block and a pencil. ‘This was all I could find,’ she said.
He nodded, took the writing materials and went upstairs to Hirschfeld’s study.
Dust motes flew in the sterile-looking room, overlooking Wertheim Park. Robert wondered if there would be anything relating to Hirschfeld’s work here. Hirschfeld was certainly the type to take work home, but would the Nazis trust him with anything secret, and so worth having?
On the desk, there were notes and a draft of a speech Hirschfeld had made to some shipyard workers. None of the drawers in the desk were locked. There was a file of articles on the Special Account Facility he had set up, before the invasion. It was simple and ingenious: Any German company wishing to trade with Holland paid the money directly to their central bank, in Berlin. A Dutch company did the same – only to the Dutch central bank. The two central banks then dealt with each other..
Robert sat at Hirschfeld’s desk, methodically reading his way through every document in it. A pattern emerged: German uniforms were being made in Holland, and so were German boots. Germany would be taking Dutch electricity. Farm produce, too, was being diverted to the Reich. Dutch industry was being re-tooled to make weapons for the Nazis. Robert began copying down facts, figures, locations, details.
It was clear from Hirschfeld’s notes that he was opposing these measures; it was equally clear that he was failing.
Else was watching him from the doorway. ‘I can’t let you do this if it will get Max into trouble.’
Robert shook his head, copying information. ‘It won’t,’ he said. Else still looked miserable. ‘Look Else, there is great propaganda value in this. The Moffen clearly want to make a slave-state out of Holland, no matter what they say. And it might help us to identify some targets.’
He didn’t say that he already had the best target of all, Manny’s sketch of the shipyard where the Arminius was being constructed.
‘So where’s Manny?’ he said, when they were back in the parlour.
Else’s coarse, sad features sagged. ‘He’s on the run,’ she said, miserably. They say he killed an Orpo. It’s ridiculous but …’ she shrugged.
Robert burst out laughing. ‘Killed an Orpo! Manny! They’ve got the wrong man, surely?’
‘Oh Robert! It isn’t funny.’
‘Do you know where he is?’
‘No, but Tinie will.’
‘Tinie Emmerik?’
‘Yes. I’ll give you her address.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Will I see you again?’’
‘I’ve no idea.’
*
It was less than a five-m
inute walk to the Jewish Quarter. Robert crossed Jodenbree Straat, suddenly feeling, not exactly happier, but at least more alive and alert. It was years since he’d been here – down in the teeming lower depths. It made him tingle.
These grimy streets were permanently crowded. Some of the alleyways were so narrow, even the Boldoot - the night soil cart – couldn’t get through. Robert glanced up at the tenement windows. He saw a tobacco worker, high up at a third storey window, placidly rolling cigars. The man looked at him and smiled.
Vendors were plying their trades in the street, because there was no room in their houses. Robert passed rag sellers, sellers of fat to make candles, sellers of trashy glass jewellery and trinkets, sellers of cloth, of second-hand sewing-machines, of nougat. Trash, all of it. Pathetic.
Ragged children in wooden shoes scampered over piles of excrement and dodged between the vendors. Two boys, in torn pullovers and filthy short trousers, were having a sword fight with long wooden swords. Their legs were unnaturally thin, like sticks of French bread.
Behind them was a ragamuffin of about ten, standing passively next to his mother, who sat weaving on her doorstep. Robert realised he was blind – trachoma - there was a lot of it in the Jewish Quarter. He slipped a coin into the boy’s hand. It was a stuiver – five cents – the first coin he found. The boy looked disappointed, as he felt it. Robert thought about giving him a kwartje, but didn’t. The boy’s mother ignored him, not breaking the rhythm of her weaving.
The stench was medieval, as the fetid brown waters of the Oude Schans, the Uilenburgergracht, the Markengracht and the Nieuwe Heerengracht all competed to impose their distinctive gamey reek.
These wretched folk of the Jewish Quarter, Robert thought, were a world away from the thriving Jews of the Spinoza Quay and Seraphati Straat – or the white-table-cloth Jews of the Transvaal, Retief Straat or Plantage. Let alone the handful of mansion-Jews of Lairesse Straat, out beyond Vondel Park. It took the Nazis to unify them all.
He turned into Batavia Straat.
Tinie had never met him, but she gave a cry of recognition as soon she opened the door: ‘Oh! It’s Robert, isn’t it? You’re Manny’s father.’ Before he could say a word, she kissed him three times, right-left-right, on alternate cheeks, in the Amsterdam fashion. ‘Oh, Manny will be so pleased! Come in, come in. Sit down.’