Calling Marie, she tapped her knee with her biro until she picked up. ‘Any joy finding Baumgartner?’
‘None,’ Marie said. ‘Me and Elvis both went round to his surgery but the secretary said he’s gone on holiday to visit family. He won’t be back for a week. She wouldn’t give us contact details.’
‘What? Isn’t that obstruction of justice?’
‘She said she didn’t have a number or anything. There was no room for manoeuvre, given we’re not in a position to arrest him or Den Bosch until we’ve had confirmation from the UK police that the Bosch, Boom & Tuin van from your ferry was actually found to have trafficked people on board.’
‘When do you hope to hear back from them?’
Eva gurgled loudly, grabbing at her two-handled cup and sucking at the spout. Water gushed in rivulets onto her sleepsuit.
‘Say that again,’ George said, frowning at the happy little girl who understood none of the gravity of the situation and was high as a kite on liquid paracetamol and ice cream.
‘End of play today,’ Marie said. ‘And I’ve asked one of the traffic lads here to check the ANPR cameras on every motorway to track Baumgartner down.’
George remembered the car that had been following them on the way to Van den Bergen’s apartment. ‘What does Baumgartner drive?’
‘A green S-Type Jaguar.’
‘Jesus.’ She swallowed hard. Felt in the very marrow of her bones that Baumgartner had kidnapped Tamara. She had to warn Van den Bergen that he was walking into a deadly trap. ‘Marie, the silly old fart’s gone out to Den Bosch’s farm. As soon as his son-in-law picks up his daughter, I’m going to get a cab there myself. Please, please, please get as many bodies as you can over there ASAP. You, Elvis, as many uniforms as you can muster. I’ve got a really nasty feeling that this is going to end badly. Van den Bergen will try to take these two bastards on single-handedly; you know what he’s like.’
‘Yes,’ Marie said, falling momentarily silent. ‘I know. I’m on it.’
Standing on the balcony, staring at the screen of her phone, George lit a cigarette, careful to blow the smoke out into the open. Van den Bergen wasn’t there to enforce the no-smoking rule and her nerves were shot. Screw it. She’d already called him twice to warn him, but the old fart wasn’t picking up.
She had put on a DVD of In the Night Garden that she had brought over from the UK for Eva. The tiny girl was occupied and poo-free for now, but that wouldn’t last for long.
‘Come on! Come on!’
Where the fuck was Numb-Nuts? Five minutes into the wait, it was still too early to expect his arrival. Silently, she cursed Eva’s parents for being such flaky wankers and for abusing Van den Bergen’s generous nature. She considered her own mother. No, it definitely wasn’t entirely Van den Bergen’s fault. You couldn’t pick your relatives.
She called Cornelia Verhagen. Straight to voicemail.
Fidgeted. Thought about Rivka Zemel and Ed Sijpesteijn as she played This Little Piggy with Eva, wondering what could have happened to the ill-fated young couple. How little the world had changed over the decades: families were still being torn apart by war; people were still handing over everything they owned to secure a passage – albeit potentially fraught with danger – to a new homeland and better life; the most deep-rooted, truest love in the world could still be destroyed by the vagaries of everyday life and the violence of men.
Still no Numb-Nuts.
‘Come on, you twat!’ She checked her watch. Ten minutes. Van den Bergen wouldn’t even be on the motorway yet. He was safe…for now.
Her phone pinged. An email. She was delighted to see Hakan had copied her in on his translations so far:
Dear Paul,
Thanks for emailing over photos of the old documents. Translation is a time-consuming thing, so I have only made a small dent in the box’s contents so far.
I can tell you that the invoices are from Hendrik van Eden to SS Obersturmführer Bruno Baumgartner for ‘services rendered to the Deutsches Reich’. When I match the invoices to the receipts – the Germans were sticklers for administrative precision, so it is easy to tie everything together, thanks to a system of accounting reference numbers – it is clear that Hendrik was selling information on the Dutch Resistance to the Nazis, with Baumgartner being his main contact.
One receipt clarifies that Hendrik had informed the Nazis that the Verhagens were hiding a Jewish family – the Zemels – in their house. He also sold information concerning the whereabouts of the Meijers family, the Stern family, the Liebermans, the Levys, the Rosenthals, the Herzbergs, the Wolffs and the Lipschitzes. In total, seventy-six Jews from those families alone were transported to Treblinka, including children as young as two years old. There are still scores of invoices left, which I haven’t even looked at.
Hendrik sent letters detailing the personal lives of many of his friends, including Kaars Verhagen, Ed Sijpesteijn, Arnold van Blanken and Brechtus Bruin. He tells Baumgartner in one letter that he suspects Van Blanken and Bruin are homosexuals in a relationship, and that Bruin’s grandmother is of Roma or Sinti origin. He recommends highly that both Van Blanken and Bruin be arrested as a result. It is strange that letters addressed to Baumgartner are in this box, but the ink is a little messy and has a slight purple hue to it. I think they look like carbon copies, and they all have receipts and payment slips attached. Again, it seems that this is Baumgartner and Van Eden’s fastidious accounting procedure. Perhaps all of their correspondence was typed or written up in duplicate and both men had copies of everything.
The tone of all of Hendrik’s letters that I have so far read is friendly. I can tell that he and Baumgartner mixed socially, as Hendrik mentions ‘seeing you at the club, where Anna was delighted you were sitting in the front row, applauding her performance. I swear, if she wasn’t my darling fiancée, I might think she was sweet on you, Bruno.’
‘Hendrik van Eden, you duplicitous old bastard. Your secret’s out. So, this is what Ed found out about you. You were rumbled, mate.’ George checked her watch again. Numb-Nuts should be knocking on the door at any moment, provided his indulgent fool of a mother was dropping him off in the car, rather than making him come on a tram across town. ‘Hurry up, arsehole.’ She wondered how Van den Bergen was faring.
She turned her attentions back to Hakan’s email…
The letter that you asked me to focus my translation efforts on was in a sealed envelope, you say. Well, you already know that it was addressed to Bruno Baumgartner, intended to be sent to his home address in Teniersstraat in Amsterdam’s Museum Quarter. (I’ve googled it. What a whopper of a mansion house! I spoke to my friend in the Bundesarchiv – the archive that holds military records. Much was destroyed during the war, but still, many documents remain. Baumgartner’s grand house had been requisitioned by the SS from a wealthy Jewish merchant, Avram Solomon, and his family.)
Here is the letter, word for word, written by hand by Hendrik and translated to the best of my abilities. His penmanship is somewhat shaky in this missive, and when you read on, you’ll understand why:
Just as George was about to read a letter that she felt might hold the key to this curious mystery, the doorbell sounded.
‘At last!’
Struggling to don her duffel coat whilst carrying Eva on her hip, she opened the door to see a perplexed-looking Numb-Nuts on the step.
‘Jesus. Couldn’t you have got here any quicker?’
‘Where’s Paul?’
‘Not here. And neither should I be. Nappies and whatnot are in the changing bag. She needs feeding.’
‘Can’t I come in? I thought Paul wanted to speak to me. I thought it was something to do with Tamara. Has she forgiven me? Is she here?’ His face was illuminated by an electric smile that was powered purely by self-delusion, clearly.
‘No to all of that. Now, why are you standing there like a turd? Take your daughter!’
His smile faltered and sputtered out, as though somebody had pulled t
he switch. He put his trainer-clad foot over the threshold, onto the clean wooden floor in the hall.
‘Off,’ George said. ‘That’s clean space. Your shoes are dirty.’
‘They’re not dirty. I didn’t step in anything.’
‘You’ve been outside. Where do dogs, cats, foxes, birds and tramps piss, Willem?’
‘Outside. But—’
‘Can you see dried-in dog piss?’
‘No.’
‘Then your shoes are dirty. And I’ve got heroic shit to do for your wife. Out!’
Handing Eva over, planting a hasty kiss on the baby’s forehead, George pushed her left arm into her coat, stepped into her boots, whipped her handbag from the console table in the hall and slammed the door in Willem’s face. Left him standing at the top of the stairs like the feckless, hapless tagnut he was. She waved to the baby and blew her another kiss. Poor little Eva didn’t deserve the bullshit she’d been served up. And who knew? By the end of the night, it was entirely possible the kid’s mother would be dead. She’d be left to Numb-Nuts.
Shaking her head at the imagined tragic scenario, George’s pinging phone told her the Uber was outside.
‘Groenten Den Bosch farm and fast, please. It’s a matter of life or death.’
The driver looked nonplussed. ‘Postcode? The postcode I am given is not work.’
Using Google as her guide, she gave him directions good enough to get him within striking distance. He was clearly discombobulated at having to drive her to the middle of nowhere in the failing light, so George took her last twenty euros out of her purse and waved them in his face.
‘Step on it.’
‘Like in cop films,’ he said, grinning at her through the rear-view mirror. He sounded like a Somali. She spotted his ID dangling from his sun visor.
‘Yes, Ibrahim. Exactly like in a cop film. Hurry!’
Ordinarily, she would have loved nothing more than to chat to this taxi driver and ask him how he came to be driving an Uber in Amsterdam. Perhaps he’d been a pirate or in the militia. Perhaps he’d been trafficked himself. But George didn’t have time. She was heading to the edge of the cliff. But first, before she fell, she wanted to read the letter to Baumgartner. Even if she was going to her death at the hand of a tattooed psychopath and his debonair old sidekick, she wanted to solve the riddle.
Dear Bruno,
I write this letter with no small degree of anger in my heart. You have betrayed me. At a point when I felt that you and I were akin to brothers in our trusting bond and friendship, I realise all this while you had been plotting to take what was mine and cast me aside. Anna didn’t need to tell me, though she confessed when I confronted her. You and she have been having an affair behind my back for a year. A year! You, Bruno Baumgartner, are a lying, cheating cad. I do not care if you have me arrested on some kind of trumped-up charge of treachery. Have me shot! You may as well kill me, for I am already dead inside.
Did we not do great work together, rounding up the Jews who had gone into hiding so that Amsterdam would be cleansed of its problem for good, leaving only Aryans behind? The Führer wished it, and we made his dream come true, albeit in a small way. I betrayed my own countrymen to help the Deutsches Reich maintain stable control in the Netherlands, thinking that German governance would benefit us a good deal more than a weak liberal Dutch leadership that would pander to the British and the Americans, or else buckle at the first sign of the Soviets on our doorstep. Yet all of that seems to count for nothing.
You never wanted my support or friendship. You wanted Anna – the gorgeous girl on my arm – forgetting that she is the love of my life and that we are to be married. Or, should I say, were. I know she is carrying your child, Baumgartner. It sickens me to think that you have planted your rotten German seed in fertile ground that belonged to me. When you do die, I hope death will come to you not from a bullet but from the weight of guilt as it painfully crushes your heart, for you have crushed mine.
I wish a plague of hellfire on your head, Bruno Baumgartner. I wish I had never met you, and when the Nazis fall to the Soviets and the communists come to cut off your balls and string you up in Dam Square outside the palace, I shall deny ever having had any dealings with you whatsoever. I wish for what’s left of your pathetic life to be a wasteland of pain and misery.
Hendrik van Eden
Baumgartner had had a son with Anna Groen. Surely that was André Baumgartner. The ages were right. Had the septuagenarian doctor killed his father’s love rival and all his friends in some fit of revenge, decades after the war had ended? And where did Den Bosch come into this story?
With many questions still unanswered, George was irritated to see that the cab was bouncing up a country lane she didn’t recognise. But surely she was almost there. The blood was rushing in her ears. I’m coming, Van den Bergen, she thought. Wait for me!
But hang on. Hadn’t they driven past this farm shop a few minutes ago?
‘Are we going round in circles?’ she asked the taxi driver, panic engulfing her in an icy deluge of cortisol.
He shrugged. Pointed to the satnav mounted on his dashboard. ‘Address not here. Lost.’
CHAPTER 32
En route to the Den Bosch farm, later
‘I feel sick as a dog,’ Marie said, as Elvis took the curve of the slip road too fast in a pool car that couldn’t handle his boy-racer cornering. ‘Drive like a normal person, will you?’
With the dongle connected to her laptop, she was determined to get the information George needed, if only the damned signal stayed strong.
‘I’m doing the best I can. This thing starts to shake like the spin cycle on my mum’s old washing machine the minute you get it up to a hundred kilometres an hour. But if we’re going to get to the Den Bosch farm in time for a showdown, I need to floor it.’ Elvis’s Adam’s apple lurched up and down, as though it too felt sick.
In truth, Elvis looked peaky in the glow of the motorway lights, the shadows accentuating his newfound cheekbones. Too thin to put up much of a fight against that beefcake Frederik Den Bosch, Marie assessed, despite years of training on the job. The Rotterdam Silencer had turned Elvis from an aspiring tiger into a house cat. Their odds weren’t good.
Struggling to hit the keys reliably, Marie logged into the register of births, deaths and marriages to find the entry for André Baumgartner.
‘He’s got to be here somewhere,’ she said. ‘Seventy-five years old…’ She calculated the years in which he might have been born, depending on whether he was a winter or summer baby. ‘Damn it! This connection’s terrible. And I’m going dizzy. Ugh.’
‘Try not to get travel-sick,’ Elvis said. ‘You’ll need to get out fighting at the other end, knowing Van den Bergen.’ He flashed a dawdling BMW in the fast lane to get the hell out of his way. ‘Bloody old men in their souped-up cars. Why do they bother if they’re going to trundle along at sixty kilometres an hour?’ He glanced over at her. ‘Do you really have to do that now? Can’t it wait?’
‘Don’t you want some answers? The boss has risked his career on these two cases, and they’re connected. Knowledge is power, Dirk.’ Marie could see a sheen of sweat glistening on his forehead and upper lip. His hair was flattening out with sweat. ‘Now, worry less about what I’m doing and take it easy, for Christ’s sake. I’d like to get there alive.’
The dongle’s light showed green one moment and orange the next, telling her that the connection was dipping in and out. Hardly surprising, this far into the countryside. As night descended, all she could see out here were the flat, black expanses of the polders, punctuated by the odd dyke, its water glistening in the fledgling moonlight like a strip of mother of pearl in a black lacquered tabletop. Giant wind turbines were spinning slowly; brooding giants, seeming to stride through an otherwise pristine agricultural horizon. No phone masts though, and hardly any Wi-Fi signal.
Marie thought about her slide into accidental traffic duty thanks to Van den Bergen’s fall from grace. Sinc
e her son had died, all she had was work. Her life had disintegrated into so much meaningless dust. This was her chance to help put things right. Bring back the only light that remained in her life apart from the odd Skype session with an overweight German whom she’d never quite managed to date – the intrigue of solving murders.
‘Did you check your service weapon?’ Elvis asked, indicating to pull off the motorway.
‘Twice. Fully loaded and in working order.’
‘I wish we could have got uniformed backup. I feel bad that we’re as good as it gets.’
The dongle was glowing green. The page she required was starting to load on her laptop. Good. ‘If Minks gets wind of Van den Bergen going vigilante on a murder case that was taken off him, when he’s meant to be suspended, his career will definitely be over. Our careers will be finished too. It’s a gamble, but—’
‘If he’s got the wrong end of the stick, and there’s nothing going on at the farm…’
‘Aha!’ Marie punched the air as the photographed entries of the birth register from over seventy years ago were displayed clearly, in scrolling, copperplate writing, typical of the mid 1940s. ‘There we have it. The birth of André Baumgartner. Daddy was SS Obersturmführer Bruno Baumgartner. And guess who Mummy was? Anna Groen! Didn’t George say Hendrik van Eden was engaged to Anna Groen? But hang on, Groen is listed as Mejuffrouw – Miss. She didn’t marry her SS officer. Cooee. That must have caused quite a bit of gossip after the war. I wouldn’t have liked to be in Anna Groen’s shoes if she stayed in the Netherlands and they found out her illegitimate son had a Nazi for a father. Nice.’
‘What about Den Bosch?’ Elvis asked, navigating his way along a country lane, full-beamed headlamps on the car picking out the hedgerows in triangular white shafts of light. ‘He’s about the right age to be Baumgartner’s son. Neo-Nazi grandson of a Nazi. Not sure if that would count as a case of nature or nurture, but sounds about right.’
The Girl Who Got Revenge Page 23