Girl in the Blue Coat (Monica Hesse)

A long time before Bas died, we had a pretend argument about whose fault it was that he’d fallen in love with me. It’s your fault, he told me. Because you’re lovable. I told him he was wrong. That it was lazy to blame his falling in love on me. Irresponsible, really.

I remember everything about this conversation. It was in his parents’ sitting room, and we were listening to the family’s new radio while I quizzed him for a geometry exam neither of us thought was important. The American singer Judy Garland was singing “You Made Me Love You.” That was how the conversation began. Bas said I’d made him love me. I made fun of him because I didn’t want him to know how fast my heart was pounding to hear him say the words love and you in the same sentence.

Then he said it was my fault, also, that he wanted to kiss me. Then I said it was his fault if I let him. Then his older brother walked in the room and said it was both of our faults if he got sick to his stomach listening to us.

It was only later that day, when I was walking home—back when I could walk home without worrying about being stopped by soldiers or missing curfew or being arrested—that I realized I’d never said it back. The first time he said he loved me, and I forgot to say it back.

I should have. If I’d known what would happen and what I would find out about love and war, I would have made sure to say it then.

That’s my fault.

JANUARY 1943

ONE

———

Tuesday

Hallo, sweetheart. What do you have there? Something for me?”

I stop because the soldier’s face is young and pretty, and because his voice has a wink in it, and because I bet he would make me laugh during an afternoon at the movies.

That’s a lie.

I stop because the soldier might be a good contact, because he might be able to get the things that we can’t get anymore, because his dresser drawers are probably filled with row after row of chocolate bars and socks that don’t have holes in the toes.

That’s also not really the truth.

But sometimes I ignore the whole truth, because it’s easier to pretend I’m making decisions for rational reasons. It’s easier to pretend I have a choice.

I stop because the soldier’s uniform is green. That’s the only reason I stop. Because his uniform is green, and that means I have no choice at all.

“That’s a lot of packages for a pretty girl.”

His Dutch is slightly accented, but I’m surprised he speaks it so well. Some Green Police don’t speak it at all, and they’re annoyed when we’re not fluent in German, as if we should have been preparing our entire lives for the day when they invaded our country.

I park my bicycle but don’t dismount. “It’s exactly the right number of packages, I think.”

“What have you got in them?” He leans over my handlebars, one hand grazing into the basket attached to the front.

“Wouldn’t you like to see? Wouldn’t you like to open all my packages?” I giggle, and then lower my eyelashes so he won’t see how practiced this line is. With the way I’m standing, my dress has risen above my knee, and the soldier notices. It’s navy, already tighter than it should be, frayed at the hem and several years old, from before the war. I shift my weight a little so the hemline rides even higher, now halfway up my goose-bumped thigh.

This interaction would feel worse if he were older, if he were wrinkled, if he had stained teeth or a sagging belly. It would be worse, but I would flirt the same anyway. I have a dozen times before.

He leans in closer. The Herengracht is murky and fish-stinking behind him, and I could push him into this canal and ride halfway home on my disgrace of a secondhand bicycle before he paddled himself out. It’s a game I like to play with every Green Police who stops me. How could I punish you, and how far would I get before you caught me?

“This is a book I’m bringing home to my mother.” I point to the first parcel wrapped in paper. “And these are the potatoes for our supper. And this is the sweater I’ve just picked up from mending.”

“Hoe heet je?” he asks. He wants to know my name, and he’s asked it in the informal, casual way, how a confident boy would ask a bucktoothed girl her name at a party, and this is good news because I’d much rather he be interested in me than the packages in my basket.

“Hanneke Bakker.” I would lie, but there’s no point now that we all carry mandatory identification papers. “What’s your name, soldier?”

He puffs out his chest when I call him soldier. The young ones are still in love with their uniforms. When he moves, I see a flash of gold around his neck. “And what’s in your locket?” I ask.

His grin falters as his hand flies to the pendant now dangling just below his collar. The locket is gold, shaped like a heart, probably containing a photograph of an apple-faced German girl who has promised to remain faithful back in Berlin. It was a gamble to ask about it, but one that always turns out well if I’m right.

“Is it a photograph of your mother? She must love you a lot to give you such a pretty necklace.”

His face flushes pink as he tucks the chain back under his starched collar.

“Is it of your sister?” I press on. “Your little pet dog?” It’s a difficult balance, to sound the right amount of naive. My words need to have enough innocence in them that he can’t justify getting angry with me, but enough sharpness that he’d rather get rid of me than keep me here and interrogate me about what I’m carrying. “I haven’t seen you before,” I say. “Are you stationed on this street every day?”

“I don’t have time for silly girls like you. Go home, Hanneke.”

When I pedal away, my handlebars only barely shake. I was mostly telling him the truth about the packages. The first three do hold a book, a sweater, and a few potatoes. But underneath the potatoes are four coupons’ worth of sausages, bought with a dead man’s rations, and underneath those are lipsticks and lotions, bought with another dead man’s rations, and underneath those are cigarettes and alcohol, bought with money that Mr. Kreuk, my boss, handed me this morning for just that purpose. None of it belongs to me.

Most people would say I trade in the black market, the illicit underground exchange of goods. I prefer to think of myself as a finder. I find things. I find extra potatoes, meat, and lard. In the beginning I could find sugar and chocolate, but those things have been harder recently, and I can only get them sometimes. I find tea. I find bacon. The wealthy people of Amsterdam stay plump because of me. I find the things we have been made to do without, unless you know where to look.

My last question to the soldier, about whether this street is his new post —I wish he’d answered that one. Because if he’s stationed on the corner every day now, I’ll have to either consider being friendly to him or change my route.

My first delivery this morning is Miss Akkerman, who lives with her grandparents in one of the old buildings down by the museums. Miss Akkerman is the lotions and lipstick. Last week it was perfume. She’s one of the few women I’ve met who still care so much about these things, but she told me once that she’s hoping her boyfriend will propose before her next birthday, and people have spent money for stranger reasons.

She answers the door with her wet hair in pins. She must have a date with Theo tonight.

“Hanneke! Come in while I get my purse.” She always finds an excuse to invite me in. I think she gets bored here during the day, alone with her grandparents, who talk too loudly and smell like cabbage.

Inside the house is stuffy and dim. Miss Akkerman’s grandfather sits at the breakfast table through the kitchen doorway. “Who’s at the door?” he yells.

“It’s a delivery, Grandpa,” Miss Akkerman calls over her shoulder.

“It’s who?”

“It’s for me.” She turns back to me and lowers her voice. “Hanneke, you have to help me. Theo is coming over tonight to ask my grandparents if I can move into his apartment. I need to figure out what to wear. Stay right here; I’ll show you my options.”

I can’t think of any dress that would make her grandparents approve of her living with her boyfriend before marriage, though I know this wouldn’t be the first time this war made a young couple reject tradition.

When Miss Akkerman comes back to the foyer, I pretend to consider the two dresses she’s brought, but really I’m watching the wall clock. I don’t have time for socializing. After telling her to wear the gray one, I motion for her to take the packages I’ve been holding since I arrived. “These are yours. Would you like to make sure everything’s all right?”

“I’m sure they’re fine. Stay for coffee?”

I don’t bother to ask if it’s real. The only way she would have real coffee is if I’d brought it to her, and I hadn’t, so when she says she has coffee, she means she has ground acorns or twigs. Ersatz coffee.

The other reason I don’t stay is the same reason why I don’t accept Miss Akkerman’s repeated offer to call her Irene. Because I don’t want her to confuse this relationship with friendship. Because I don’t want her to think that if one day she can’t pay, it doesn’t matter.

“I can’t. I still have another delivery before lunch.”

“Are you sure? You could have lunch here—I’m already going to make it—and then we could figure out just what to do with my hair for tonight.”

It’s a strange relationship I have with my clients. They think we’re comrades. They think we’re bound by the secret that we’re doing something illegal together. “I always have lunch at home with my parents,” I say.

“Of course, Hanneke.” She’s embarrassed for having pushed too far. “I’ll see you later, then.”

———

Outside, it’s cloudy and overcast, Amsterdam winter, as I ride my bicycle down our narrow, haphazard streets. Amsterdam was built on canals. The country of Holland is low, lower even than the ocean, and the farmers who mucked it out centuries ago created an elaborate system of waterways, just to keep citizens from drowning in the North Sea. An old history teacher of mine used to accompany that piece of our past with a popular saying: “God made the world, but the Dutch made the Netherlands.” He said it like a point of pride, but to me, the saying was also a warning: “Don’t rely on anything coming to save us. We’re all alone down here.”

Seventy-five kilometers to the south, at the start of the occupation two and a half years ago, the German planes bombed Rotterdam, killing nine hundred civilians and much of the city’s architecture. Two days later, the Germans arrived in Amsterdam by foot. We now have to put up with their presence, but we got to keep our buildings. It’s a bad trade-off. It’s all bad trade-offs these days, unless, like me, you know how to mostly end up on the profitable side of things.

My next customer, Mrs. Janssen, is just a short ride away in a large blue house where she used to live with her husband and three sons, until one son moved to London, one son moved to America, and one son, the baby of the family, moved to the Dutch front lines, where two thousand Dutch servicemen were killed when they tried but failed to protect our borders as the country fell in five days’ time. We don’t speak much of Jan anymore.

I wonder if he was near Bas, though, during the invasion.

I wonder this about everything now, trying to piece together the last minutes of the boy I loved. Was he with Bas, or did Bas die alone?

Mrs. Janssen’s husband disappeared last month, just before she became a customer, and I’ve never asked any more about that. He could have been an illegal worker with the resistance, or he could have just been in the wrong place at a bad time, or he could be not dead after all and instead having high tea in England with his oldest son, but in any case it’s none of my business. I’ve only delivered a few things to Mrs. Janssen. I knew her son Jan a little bit. He was a surprise baby, born two decades after his brothers, when the Janssens were already stooped and gray. Jan was a nice boy.

Here, today, I decide Jan might have been near Bas when the Germans stormed our country. Here, today, I’ll believe that Bas didn’t die alone. It’s a more optimistic thought than I usually allow myself to have.

Mrs. Janssen is waiting at the door for me, which makes me irritated because if you were a German soldier assigned to look for suspicious things, what would you think of an old woman waiting for a strange girl on a bicycle?

“Good morning, Mrs. Janssen. You didn’t have to stand out here for me. How are you?”

“I’m fine!” she shouts, like she’s reading lines in a play, nervously touching the white curls escaping from her bun. Her hair is always in a bun, and her glasses are always slipping down her nose; her clothes always remind me of a curtain or a sofa. “Won’t you come in?”

“I couldn’t get as much sausage as you wanted, but I do have some,” I tell her once I’ve parked my bicycle and the door is closed behind us. She moves slowly; she walks with a cane now and rarely leaves the house anymore. She told me she got the cane when Jan died. I don’t know if there’s something physically wrong with her or if grief just broke her and made her lame.

Inside, her front room looks more spacious than normal, and it takes me a moment to figure out why. Normally, between the china cabinet and the armchair, there is an opklapbed, a small bed that looks like a bookcase but can be folded out for sleeping when guests visit. I assume Mr. Janssen made it, like he made all the things in their house. Mama and I used to walk past his furniture store to admire the window displays, but we never could have afforded anything in it. I can’t imagine where the opklapbed has gone. If Mrs. Janssen sold it so soon after her husband’s disappearance, she must already be struggling with money, which I won’t allow to be my concern unless it means she can’t pay me.

“Coffee, Hanneke?” In front of me, Mrs. Janssen disappears into the kitchen, so I follow. I plan to decline her coffee offer, but she’s laid out two cups and her good china, blue and white, the famous style from the city of Delft. The table is heavy and maple.

“I have the sausage here if you want to—”

“Later,” she interrupts. “Later. First, we’ll have coffee, and a stroopwafel, and we’ll talk.”

Next to her sits a dust-covered canister that smells like the earth. Real coffee beans. I wonder how long she’s been saving them. The stroopwafels, too. People don’t use their bakery rations for fancy pastries; they use them for bread. Then again, they don’t use them to feed black market delivery girls, either, but here is Mrs. Janssen, pouring my coffee into a porcelain cup and placing a stroopwafel on top so that the waffle sandwich softens in the steam and the sugary syrup inside oozes around the edges.

“Sit, Hanneke.”

“I’m not hungry,” I say, even as my stomach betrays me with a growl.

I am hungry, but something makes me nervous with these stroopwafels, and with how eager Mrs. Janssen is to have me sit, and with the irregularity of the whole situation. Has she called the Green Police and promised to deliver them a black market worker? A woman desperate enough to sell her husband’s opklapbed might do such a thing.

“Just for a minute?”

“I’m sorry, but I have a million other things to do today.”

She stares down at her beautifully set table. “My youngest. Jan. These were his favorite. I used to have them waiting when he came home from school. You were his friend?” She smiles at me hopefully.

I sigh. She’s not dangerous; she’s just lonely. She misses her son, and she wants to feed one of his old classmates his after-school snack. This goes against all my rules, and the pleading in her voice makes me uncomfortable. But it’s cold outside, and the coffee is real, and despite what I just told Mrs. Janssen about my millions of tasks, I actually have an hour before my parents expect me for lunch. So I set the parcel with sausage on the table, smooth down my hair, and try to remember how to be a polite guest on a social call. I knew how to do this once. Bas’s mother used to pour me hot chocolate in her kitchen while Bas and I studied, and then she would find excuses to keep checking in to make sure we weren’t kissing.

“I haven’t had a stroopwafel in a while,” I say finally, trying out my rusted conversational skills. “My favorites were always banketstaaf.”

“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 relatches 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?”

“Where should I begin?” She picks up her napkin, twisting it between her hands.

I don’t want her to begin at all. Ten minutes ago I was worried Mrs. Janssen might have called someone to arrest me; now I know she is the one who could be arrested. The punishment for hiding people is imprisonment, a cold, damp cell in Scheveningen, where I’ve heard of people disappearing for months without even getting hearings. The punishment for being a person in hiding—an onderduiker—is immediate deportation.

“Never mind,” I say quickly. “Never mind. I don’t need to hear anything. I’ll just go.”

“Why don’t you sit down again?” she pleads. “I’ve been waiting all morning for you.” She holds up the pitcher of coffee. “More? You can have as much as you like. Just sit. If you don’t help me, I’ll have to find someone else.”

Now I’m conflicted, standing in the middle of the kitchen. I don’t want her bribe of coffee. But I’m rooted to the spot. I shouldn’t leave, not without knowing more of the story. If Mrs. Janssen tries to find someone else, she could be putting herself in danger, and me, too.

“Tell me what happened,” I say finally.

“My husband’s business partner,” Mrs. Janssen begins, the words spilling out in a rush. “My husband’s business partner was a good man. Mr. Roodveldt. David. He worked with Hendrik for ten years. He had a wife, Rose, and she was so shy—she had a lisp and it made her self-conscious— but she could knit the most beautiful things. They had two daughters. Lea, who had just turned twelve and was the family pet. And the older daughter. Fifteen, independent, always off with her friends. Mirjam.” Her throat catches at the last name, and she swallows before continuing.

“The Roodveldts were Jewish. Not very observant, and in the beginning, it seemed that would make a difference. It didn’t, of course. David told Hendrik they would be fine. They knew a woman in the country who was going to take them in. That fell through when the woman got too scared, though, and in July, after the big razzia, when so many Jews were taken, David came to Hendrik and said he and his family needed help going into hiding.”

“And Hendrik brought them here?” I ask.

“No. He didn’t want to put me in danger. He brought them to the furniture shop. He built the Roodveldts a secret room behind a false wall in the wood shop. I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t know?” I can’t imagine my own parents being able to keep such a secret from each other.

“I knew Hendrik was spending more time in the shop. I thought he was just working longer hours because David was no longer around to assist him. I thought the Roodveldts had gone to the safe house in the country. I didn’t know that all of them were right there, in hiding.”

“When did he tell you?”

“He never told me. Last month I was home alone when I heard knocking at my door. Frantic knocking; it was after curfew. I thought Hendrik had forgotten his key, but when I opened the door, there was this girl, this pale girl, wearing a blue coat. She’d grown so much. I hadn’t seen her in a few years, and I wouldn’t have recognized her if she hadn’t introduced herself. She told me my husband had been hiding them, but now she needed a new safe space. She said everyone else was dead.”

“Mirjam Roodveldt.”

Mrs. Janssen nods. “She was shaking, she was so scared. She said the Nazis had come to the factory that night and gone straight to the wood shop. Someone betrayed Hendrik, an employee or customer. Hendrik wouldn’t show them the hiding space. He pretended he had no idea what they were talking about. Because he wouldn’t speak, the officers began threatening him. And David heard. And he tried to help. But the officers had guns.”

She gulps in a breath. “When the shooting was done, Hendrik was dead, and David, and Rose, and Lea. Only Mirjam managed to escape.”

It must have been complete chaos. I’ve heard of people imprisoned, taken away and never returned. But four people, including a woman and a child, shot dead in cold blood?

“How did Mirjam escape?” I ask. “They shot everyone else. How would one young girl manage to escape from Nazis with guns?”

“The bathroom. The shop has a restroom in the front. The Roodveldts could use it once the sales floor was closed. Mirjam had just gone in to get ready for bed when the Nazis came, and she ran out the front door when she heard the gunshots, to the closest safe place she could think of. My house. That was three weeks ago. I was hiding her until last night.”

“What happened last night?”

Mrs. Janssen reaches into the pocket of her sweater and pulls out a folded slip of paper. “I wrote everything down so I would have the timeline exactly right for you.”

She traces the first line with her index finger. “She was here yesterday at noon, because I went in to bring her some bread and a copy of Het Parool. She liked to read the news of the underground, over and over again, memorizing even the classified advertisements.”

“Are you sure it was noon?”

“I’d just heard the Westerkerk strike, and people outside had left for their lunch hours.” She looks back down at the paper to find her place again. “She was here at a quarter past four, because I went in to warn her that Christoffel, my errand boy, was going to drop something off, and so she would need to be still. She was here at five thirty, because I asked her if she wanted some dinner; she told me she had a headache and was going to lie down. Right after, my neighbor Mrs. Veenstra asked me to come over. Her son, Koos, hadn’t been home, and she was scared for him. After I sat with her for an hour, Koos came up the street. His bicycle had lost a tire; he walked it twenty-five kilometers. I went home and called out to Mirjam to ask if she was feeling better. She didn’t answer. I assumed she’d fallen asleep. A while later, I opened the door to see if I could bring her anything.”

“She was gone?”

“Vanished. Her bed was empty. Her coat was gone. Her shoes were gone. She was gone.”

“What time was it by then?”

“Around ten. After curfew. Sometime between five thirty, when Mirjam said she was going to lie down, and ten, she disappeared, and there is no explanation.”

Finished with her story, she refolds the paper and starts to put it back in her pocket before handing it to me instead. There are matches near the burners on Mrs. Janssen’s stove. I fetch one now, strike it against the box, and let Mrs. Janssen’s penciled sleuthing burn into sulfur and ash.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“What are you doing, keeping written records of the girl you’ve been illegally hiding?”

She rubs her forehead. “I didn’t think of that. I don’t know these rules. It’s why I need your help, Hanneke.”

The Westerkerk chimes again in the background. Another quarter hour has passed. Before, I was using the time as an excuse to leave, but now it really is getting late. I fold my arms over my chest. “You were visiting with a neighbor for an hour. Couldn’t Mirjam have walked out then?”

“Mrs. Veenstra lives right across the street. We sat on her steps and faced my house; it wasn’t too cold yesterday. Mirjam couldn’t have left through the front door without me seeing her.”

“You have a back door?” I shouldn’t be getting her hopes up by asking questions like this, when I’m not planning to help her. But the situation she’s described is strange and unbelievable, and I keep feeling like she must be explaining it wrong.

“The rear door doesn’t close properly—it hasn’t for years. I used to get so mad at Hendrik; to think of a furniture maker not making the time to fix his own door. Finally last year I got fed up with asking and I installed a latch myself. When I noticed Mirjam was gone, I checked it. It was still closed. She couldn’t have left through the back entrance and closed a latch on the inside of the door.”

“A window?” It sounds unlikely even as I’m saying it. This neighborhood is wealthy, the kind of place people would notice unusual things like girls climbing out windows.

“Not a window. Don’t you see? She had no way to leave. And no reason to. This was the last safe place for her. But she can’t have been discovered, either. If the Nazis had come to take her, they would have taken me, too.”

There has to be a rational explanation. Mrs. Janssen must have turned away for a few minutes at Mrs. Veenstra’s and not seen the girl leave. Or maybe she has the timing wrong, and the girl disappeared while Mrs. Janssen was taking an afternoon nap.

The explanation doesn’t matter, really. I can’t help her, no matter how sad her story is. It’s too dangerous. Survival first. That’s my war motto. After Bas, it might be my life motto. Survival first, survival only. I used to be a careless person, and look where it got me. Now I transport black market goods, but only because it feeds me and my family. I flirt with German soldiers, but only because it saves me. Finding a missing girl does nothing for me at all.

From outside the kitchen, I hear the front door squeak open, and then a young male voice call out, “Hallo?” Farther away, the sound of a dog barking. Who is here? The Gestapo? The NSB? We hate the Gestapo, and the Green Police, but we hate the Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging most of all. The Dutch Nazis, who have betrayed their own people.

Mrs. Janssen’s eyes widen until she places the voice. “Christoffel, I’m in the kitchen,” she calls out. “I forgot he was coming back today,” she whispers to me.

“Pick up your coffee. Behave normally.”

Christoffel the errand boy has curly blond hair and big blue eyes and the tender skin of someone who hasn’t been shaving long.

“Mrs. Janssen?” He fumbles with his hat in his hands, uncomfortable to have interrupted us. “I’m here for the opklapbed? This is the time you said?”

“Yes, of course.” She begins to rise, but Christoffel gestures for her to stay seated.

“I can manage on my own. I have a cart, and a friend waiting outside to help.” He nods toward the window, where a tall, stout boy waves from the street.

When he disappears for his cart and his friend, Mrs. Janssen sees my alarmed face and reassures me. “Not that bed. Not Mirjam’s. He’s taking the one in Hendrik’s office. I barely go in that room anymore. I asked Christoffel if he could find a buyer, and I was going to use the money to help support Mirjam.”

“Now?”

“Now I’ll use the money to pay you to help me.” I’m shaking my head in protest, but she cuts me off. “You have to find her, Hanneke. My older sons—I may never see them again. My youngest son is dead, my husband died trying to protect Mirjam’s family, and her family died trying to protect him. I have no one now, and neither does she. Mirjam and I must be each other’s family. Don’t let me lose her. Please.”

I’m saved from having to respond by the squeaking wheels of Christoffel’s pushcart, to which he and his friend have lashed Mrs. Janssen’s other opklapbed. It’s more ornate than the one in the pantry, the wood smooth and varnished and still smelling faintly of lemon furniture oil. “Mrs. Janssen? I’m leaving now,” he says.

“Wait,” I tell him. “Mrs. Janssen, maybe you don’t need to sell this bed now. Wait a day to think about it.” It’s my way of telling her I’m not going to be able to agree to this proposition.

“No. I’m selling it now,” she says definitively. “I have to. Christoffel, how much do I owe you for your trouble in picking it up?”

“Nothing, Mrs. Janssen. I’m happy to do it.”

“I insist.” She reaches for her pocketbook on the table and begins to count out money from a small coin purse. “Oh dear. I thought I had—”

“It’s not necessary,” Christoffel insists. He is blushing again and looks to me, stricken, for help.

“Mrs. Janssen,” I say softly. “Christoffel has other deliveries. Why don’t we let him go?”

She stops searching through her pocketbook and folds it closed, embarrassed. Once Christoffel leaves, she sinks back to her chair. She looks tired and old. “Will you help me?” she asks.

I drain the rest of my cold coffee. What outcome does she think I can deliver? I wouldn’t know where to start. Even if Mirjam managed to escape, how far could a fifteen-year-old girl with a yellow Jodenster on her clothing get? I don’t need to take Mrs. Janssen’s money to know what will happen to a girl like Mirjam, if it hasn’t happened already: She’ll be captured, and she’ll be relocated to a labor camp in Germany or Poland, the type from which nobody has yet to return. But how did she get out in the first place?

There has to be a rational explanation, I tell myself again. People don’t disappear into thin air.

But that’s a lie, actually. People disappear into thin air every day during this occupation. Hundreds of people, taken from their homes.

How can she expect me to find just one?

THREE

———

Mama’s lips are a thin, tight line when I get home. “You’re late.” She accosts me at the door; she must have been watching through the window.

“It’s twelve fifteen.”

“It’s twelve nineteen.”

“Four minutes, Mama?”

Our apartment smells like frying parsnips and sausages, which I brought home yesterday. It’s a small space: just a front room, a kitchen, a toilet, and two tiny bedrooms, all on the second floor of a five-story building. Cozy.

Papa reads a book in his armchair, using the page holder he made to keep the book flat as he turns the pages with his good left arm. His shriveled right arm is tucked into his lap.

“Hannie.” He calls me by my pet name as I lean over to kiss him.

The injury happened before I was born, during the Great War. He lived on the Flanders side of the Dodendraad electric fence that had been built to separate occupied Belgium from Holland. My mother lived on the Dutch side. He wanted to vault over to impress her. He’d done it once before. I didn’t believe that part of the story when he first told it, but then he showed me a book: People had managed to cross the Wire of Death in all kinds of ingeniously idiotic ways, using tall ladders or padding their clothes with porcelain to deflect the shock. This time when he tried to cross, his shoe grazed the wire and he plummeted to the ground, and that was how my father immigrated to Holland.

The right half of his body, all the way down his leg and partway up his face, has been paralyzed ever since, so he has a twisted and slow way of speaking. It embarrassed me when I was a child, but now I barely notice.

Papa gently pulls me closer to whisper in my ear. “Your mother is anxious because they came looking for Mr. Bierman. Be nice to her.”

Mr. Bierman runs the greengrocer across the street. Jews haven’t been able to own businesses for months now, but his wife is a Christian and he transferred the papers to her name. They have no children, just a flirtatious white cat named Snow.

“Who came?” I ask. “The NSB filth?”

Papa puts one finger to his lips and then points to the ceiling. “Shhhh.” Our neighbor upstairs is a member of the NSB. His wife used to braid my hair and make me spice cookies on Sinterklaas Day. Behind me, Mama rattles the lunch tray, setting food down on our small table, so I kiss Papa’s other cheek and take my place.

“Why were you late, Hannie?” Mama asks.

“To teach you not to panic when it’s only four minutes after the time I usually get home.”

“But you’re never late.”

I’m never asked to find missing girls, either, I think. Without meaning to, I’m picturing Mrs. Janssen again, worrying over an empty pantry.

Mama ladles me a spoonful of parsnips. We eat better than a lot of people. If Papa and Mama left the house more, they would probably start to question what exactly it is that I do to bring home so much food.

“It was nothing.” The peppery sausage warms my mouth. “A German policeman stopped me.” That’s true, of course. I just don’t mention that it happened early this morning, before I learned about Mirjam.

“I hope you didn’t provoke him,” Mama says sharply. I’m not the only one in the family who has been changed by the war. She used to teach music lessons from our apartment, and Chopin would stream out the windows. Nobody has the money for music anymore, or the translating work Papa used to do.

“He spoke Dutch,” I say, as a way of responding without answering. “He sounded fluent.”

Papa snorts. “We fattened him up after the last war so he could come back now and starve us during this one.” Germany was so poor after the Great War that lots of families sent their children to Holland, to grow strong on Dutch cheeses and milk. They would have died without us. Now some of the boys have grown up and returned here again.

“When do you need to go back to work?” my mother asks me.

“I have another twenty minutes.”

Officially, I work as a receptionist for an undertaker. It wasn’t my ideal position, but I didn’t have many options. No one wanted to hire a young girl without work experience or typing skills. Mr. Kreuk wouldn’t have, either, but I didn’t give him a choice. I’d already been turned away from seven other shops when I saw the HELP WANTED sign in his window, and I refused to leave until he gave me a job.

Mr. Kreuk is a good man. He pays me fairly. He gave me my other, secret job, which pays even more.

In Holland, and probably everywhere else in Europe, the Germans have issued us monthly ration cards with coupons for food, clothing, kerosene, rubber. The newspapers tell you what you can purchase: five hundred grams of sugar, two liters of milk, two kilograms of potatoes. That’s where Mr. Kreuk comes in. Mr. Kreuk uses the ration allowances of the dead to stock up on supplies, then resells them at higher prices. At least this is how I think it works. I don’t ask questions. All I know for sure is that several months ago, Mr. Kreuk came to me with a stack of cards and asked if I would do some shopping.

It was terrifying the first time, but I was even more scared to lose my job, and after a while, I became good at it, and after a longer while, it began to feel noble, even. Because the Nazis were the ones who made us have rations to begin with, and if I flout their system, then I am also flouting them. High-priced ham: the only revenge I have been able to get on the people who killed Bas, but I’ll cling to even that small satisfaction.

What we’re doing is technically illegal. War-profiteering, it would be called. But Mr. Kreuk isn’t wealthy, and I’m certainly not, either. It seems to me like what we’re really doing is trying to reorganize a system that has come to make no sense in a country that has come to make no sense.

“Hannie.” Mama has obviously been trying to get my attention. “I asked what you said to the Green Police.”

Is she still fixated on that? If only she realized how many soldiers I encounter every week. “I told him to get out of our country and never come back. I suggested he do rude things with tulip bulbs.”

She covers her mouth in horror. “Hannie!”

I sigh. “I did what I always do, Mama. I got away, as quickly as I could.”

But Mama’s attention is no longer on me. “Johan.” Her voice drops to a whisper and she clutches my father’s good arm. “Johan, they’re back. Listen.”

I hear it, too. There’s shouting across the street, and I run to the window to look from behind the curtain. “Hannie,” Mama warns me, but when I don’t come back, she gives up. Three NSB officers in their beetle-black uniforms pound on the Biermans’ door, ordering Mr. Bierman to come out.

His wife answers, her hands shaking so intensely that it’s obvious even from a distance.

“Your husband was supposed to present himself for deportation last week,” the oldest-looking officer says. Our street is narrow, and he’s not being quiet. I can hear almost everything he says.

“He—he’s not here,” Mrs. Bierman says. “I don’t know where he is. I haven’t seen him in days.”

“Mrs. Bierman.”

“I swear. I haven’t seen him. I came home from shopping, and he was gone. I searched the whole house myself.”

“Step aside,” the officer instructs, and when she doesn’t, he shoves past. Mama has come up beside me. She grabs my arm so tightly I can feel her fingernails through my sweater. Please, let Mr. Bierman really be gone, I beg. Please let him have escaped while Mrs. Bierman was shopping.

Mama is moving her lips, praying, I think, although we don’t do that anymore. The soldiers reappear in the doorway, this time dragging another man. It’s Mr. Bierman, bleeding from the nose, his right eye split and swollen.

“Good news, Mrs. Bierman,” the soldier says. “We found your husband after all.”

“Lotte!” Mr. Bierman calls as they force him toward a waiting truck.

“Pieter,” she says.

“I should bring you, too, to keep him company,” the soldier offers. “But I feel bad punishing a good Christian woman who is too stupid to know where her husband was.” His back is mostly to me, so I can’t see his face, but I can hear the taunt in his voice.

“Lotte, it’s all right,” Mr. Bierman calls from the truck. “I’ll be home soon.”

Still she doesn’t cry. She doesn’t do anything but watch and shake her head back and forth as if to say, No. No, you won’t be home soon.

The truck drives away, and Mrs. Bierman still stands in her doorway. It’s an intrusion to watch her, but I can’t avert my eyes. Mrs. Bierman used to give me presents for Sinterklaas Day, too. And when I visited their shop, she would let me taste the strawberries, even if we weren’t buying any.

Mama yanks me away from the window, grabbing my sweater and pulling me to the table. “Finish eating,” she says stiffly. “It’s not our business; there’s nothing we can do.”

I shake her hand loose, ready to protest, to remind her about the Biermans and their strawberries. But she’s right. There is nothing I can do that will repair what just happened.

We finish eating mostly in silence. Mama makes a few attempts at conversation, but they crumble. The food doesn’t taste like food. When I can’t manage any more, I excuse myself, saying I have a few things to do before going back to work.

“Don’t be late. It’s a good job you have,” Mama reminds me. She loves my job. She knows mine is the only steady paycheck in the house. “You don’t want Mr. Kreuk to question whether he made the right decision in hiring you.”

“He doesn’t.”

I just want a minute away from my parents, my work—a minute to close out the rest of the world. In my bedroom, I pull the window shades closed and open the bottom drawer of the bureau, feeling around in the back until I find it: a faded diary, from a birthday when I was nine. For a week I wrote faithfully, describing friends I liked and teachers who were mean to me. Then I abandoned it for five years and didn’t pick it up again until I met Bas, when I transformed it into a scrapbook.

Here is the school photograph he gave me, casually asking for one of mine in return. Here is the note he slipped in my books, telling me that my green sweater matched my eyes. He signed it B, and that was the first time I realized he preferred Bas instead of Sebastiaan. A nickname from the middle of the name, like a lot of Dutch boys do, rather than the beginning.

Here is a ticket stub from the first film we ever saw together, the one where I begged my best friend, Elsbeth, to come along, too, in case I got tongue-tied around Bas. This memento is doubly painful, because I don’t have Elsbeth anymore, either, because she is gone in a different way.

Here is a ticket stub from the second.

Here is the tissue that I used to blot my lipstick the night he first kissed me.

Here is the tissue I used to blot my tears the night he told me he would be volunteering for the military when he turned seventeen. Here is the lock of hair he gave me the day before he left, at his going-away party. I gave him something, too. It was a locket with my picture in it. That was how I could guess what German girls would do. I was so stupid then.

I close the book quickly, shoving it into the back of the drawer and covering it with clothes. I’m thinking of Bas. And without meaning to, I’m also thinking of Mirjam Roodveldt again. I’m annoyed with myself for it, for wasting time thinking about that missing girl from the pantry, who I know nothing about, who could only get me into trouble.

Except that I do know one thing about her: The film magazine on the shelf in the pantry—I’m almost positive that the photograph it was opened to was a scene from The Wizard of Oz, a movie about a girl who gets caught in a tornado and wakes up in a fairyland. I so desperately wanted to see it, but it hadn’t yet come to Holland when the war broke out. So I never saw The Wizard of Oz, but now I’m thinking of Judy Garland singing in Bas’s parlor while Bas told me he loved me on the sofa, and we laughed and laughed and memorized the words to her song.

Bas would have agreed to help Mrs. Janssen. I’m sure of that, without a doubt. Bas would have said that this was our chance to do something real and important. Bas would have said it like it was an adventure. Bas would have said, Obviously you’ll decide to help her, too; the girl I love would completely agree with everything I’m saying, because Bas wouldn’t know anything about the kind of girl I am now.

And what would I say in return? I would say, You think I would agree with everything you’re saying? You’re awfully full of yourself. Or I would say, My parents depend on me to keep us all alive. Helping Mrs. Janssen means endangering my whole family. Or I would say, Things are different now, Bas. You don’t understand.

I would give so much to be able to say anything to him. Anything at all.

Finding this girl is not who I am anymore. That action is soft; I am practical. That action is hopeful; I am not. The world is crazy; I can’t change it.

So why am I still thinking about Mirjam Roodveldt?

So why do I know that this afternoon, unless I manage to talk myself out of it, I’ll go back to Mrs. Janssen’s?

FOUR

———

Things that have changed about my country in the past two years: everything and nothing.

When I get on my bicycle after lunch, the Biermans’ shop assistant is selling vegetables to a customer, as though the store’s owner wasn’t just put into a truck and carted away, as though Mrs. Bierman’s world wasn’t just turned upside down.

Back at work, Mr. Kreuk has actual work for me, the kind my official job entails. There’s a funeral tomorrow, and I need to write a notice for the newspaper and arrange things with the florist. But at half past one, Mr. Kreuk comes to my desk and shows me the draft of the notice: I’d written the wrong address for the church.

“Are you feeling all right?” Mr. Kreuk is a round little man, with circular glasses that make him resemble a turtle. “You don’t usually make mistakes.” He blinks and stares at his shoes. We’ve known each other for almost a year, but he’s so awkward. Sometimes I think he became an undertaker because it was easier for him to spend time with the dead than the living.

“I’m sorry. I guess I’m a little distracted.”

He doesn’t pry. “Why don’t I handle the ad and the flowers? I have a few errands for you this afternoon: the butcher’s and then to Mrs. de Vries’s.” He winces while saying her name, and now I see why he’s given me a pass on the newspaper mistake. It’s an exchange for dealing with Mrs. de Vries.

“Thank you,” I tell him, and grab my coat before he can change his mind. I’ll deal with Mrs. de Vries later. First I’ll go to Mrs. Janssen.

Outside, something new: Long Live the Führer has been written on the building across the street in white paint, still wet, and now I’ll see it every time I leave work. Did the shop owner do it as a show of Nazi support? Or did the Nazis do it as propaganda? It’s always hard to tell.

There have been acts of protest since the start of the occupation—an organized worker strike that was squashed quickly and left dead bodies in the streets. Papa thinks there should be more. It’s easy for him to say, when his leg keeps him from participating. Mama thinks Nazis are beasts, but she wouldn’t care as much if they stayed in Germany. She just wants them out of her country. After the war, people will sit around and recall the brave ways they rebelled against the Nazis, and nobody will want to remember that their biggest “rebellion” was wearing a carnation in honor of our exiled royal family. Or maybe people will sit around and speak German, because the Germans will have won. There are those who would celebrate that, too. Who believe in the Nazis, or who’ve decided it’s smarter to support the invaders. Like Elsbeth. Elsbeth, who—

Never mind.

I almost turn around twice on my way to Mrs. Janssen’s. Once when I walk past a soldier interrogating a girl my age on the street, and once just before I ring the doorbell. When Mrs. Janssen sees me, her face breaks into such a relieved smile that I nearly turn around a third time, because I’m still not quite sure what I’m doing here.

“You decided to help me.” She flings opens the door. “I knew you would. I knew I made the right decision to trust you. I could see in your face. Hendrik always said—”

“You haven’t told anyone else, have you?” I interrupt. “Before or after me?”

“No. But if you hadn’t come back, I don’t know what I would have done. I’ve been sitting here worrying about it.”

“Mrs. Janssen. Stop. Inside.” I grab her elbow and guide her into her own sitting room, where we sit on her faded floral couch. “First, I haven’t agreed to help,” I tell her, because I want to be clear. “I’m here to talk to you about it. To consider it. For now we’ll just talk about Mirjam, and I’ll consider it. But I’m not a detective, and I’m not promising anything.”

She nods. “I understand.”

“All right. Then why don’t you tell me more?”

“Anything. What would you like to know?”

What would I like to know? I have no idea what the police would ask. But usually when I’m finding black market objects for people, I begin with a physical description. If they need shoes, I ask what size, what color. “Assuming I decide to help you, it would be nice to know what Mirjam looks like,” I say. “Do you have pictures? Did Mirjam bring any with her? Any family photographs?”

“She didn’t have time to bring anything. Just the clothes on her back.”

“What were those? What was she wearing when she disappeared?”

Mrs. Janssen closes her eyes and thinks. “A brown skirt. A creamcolored blouse. And her coat. The workroom in the furniture store got so drafty you had to wear a coat all the time back there. She was wearing that on top of her clothes. It was blue.”

“Like this?” I point to the royal blue on Mrs. Janssen’s Delft saucers in the china cupboard.

“More like the sky. On a sunny day. With two rows of silver buttons. I lent her other clothes while she was here, but when she disappeared, her original things were the only clothes missing.”

I keep asking questions, about any physical detail I can think of, mentally drawing a girl in my head. Curly dark hair, falling to her shoulders. A slender nose. Bluish-gray eyes.

“The Roodveldts’ neighbors might have a photograph,” Mrs. Janssen offers. “After the Roodveldts disappeared, the neighbors might have tried to save some things from the apartment.”

“Do you know anything about the neighbors?”

She shakes her head. That means I can’t go to the apartment and ask questions. Not when the Roodveldts’ unit is probably occupied by an NSB family already. Amsterdam is a crowded city, where even in normal times it’s difficult to find housing. Now, when a Jewish family disappears, a family of sympathizers reappears in its place, carrying on as if they’d always lived there. Besides, the war makes friends turn on each other. The neighbors might have been the ones to reveal the family’s secret hiding place.

Where else could I find a photograph?

“Have you been to the hiding place in the furniture workshop?” I ask.

She nods. “The day after Hendrik was—the day after it happened. Completely ransacked. The Germans took almost everything, or maybe the Roodveldts didn’t bring much to begin with. Hendrik’s secretary might have tried to save something, but she left on her honeymoon the day after the raid. I can write to her, but I’m not sure when she gets back.”

“Where did Mirjam go to school?”

“The Jewish Lyceum, since Jewish students were segregated. I don’t know where it is.”

I do. It’s right along the Amstel River in a redbrick building with tall windows. I pass by it all the time and now add it to my mental file on Mirjam. I have a location in which I can place the girl I’ve created in my head.

“What happens next?” Mrs. Janssen asks. “Are you going to speak with your friends about this?”

“Friends?”

“Who are going to help you? Who know about these things?”

Now I’m beginning to understand why Mrs. Janssen came to me. Because she has no idea how illicit activities work. The resistance, the black market—she thinks we’re all one network, sharing information, plotting against the Germans. But what I do for Mr. Kreuk works only because my link in the chain is so small. If I were to be caught and questioned about Mr. Kreuk’s operation, I could say that I didn’t know if he’d involved anyone else, and that would be telling the truth.

I don’t have a resistance network. My profiteering shopkeepers will be useless for this task. I don’t have anything, really, except an imaginary picture of a girl I’ve never seen, who I still haven’t fully promised Mrs. Janssen I’ll find.

“I need to see the hiding space again,” I tell Mrs. Janssen.

She lets me in by unlatching the hidden hook, and then calls after me. “I already looked in here. Before you came, I went through everything yesterday.”

I wait for my eyes to adjust. The space is maybe four feet wide. All but a few inches are taken up by the unfolded opklapbed. I pull back the quilt, examining the sheet below, doing the same for the mattress and pillow. On the narrow shelf, the magazine I’d noticed earlier, an old issue, from before the war. Mrs. Janssen probably had it among Jan’s old things and gave it to Mirjam as something to read.

None of the magazine’s pages have notes or markings on them, but tucked underneath is the latest issue of Het Parool, the paper Mrs. Janssen mentioned giving Mirjam yesterday. People read the resistance papers voraciously, then passed them along. Mrs. Janssen’s neighbor or delivery boy must have given this one to her.

I fold up the opklapbed to look at the floor underneath, peeling back the thin rug.

Nothing. Nothing anywhere.

But what did I expect to find? A letter from Mirjam explaining where she went? A trapdoor, where a Nazi could have sneaked in and carried Mirjam away? When I emerge into the kitchen, rubbing my eyes against the brightness, Mrs. Janssen starts to set out coffee again.

“Is your neighbor across the street home?” I ask her. “Mrs. Veenstra? The one whose son got waylaid?”

“I don’t think so.” She frowns. “Did you want to interview her? She doesn’t know about Mirjam.”

I shake my head. “Stay at your door. And sometime in the next five minutes, open it and come out. Anytime in the next five minutes. Just don’t give me warning when.”

Wrapping my arms around my waist against the cold, I cross the street to the house belonging to Mrs. Veenstra and stand on the steps, my back facing Mrs. Janssen’s home. After a minute it comes: an audible click, followed immediately by a yapping dog. When I turn around, Mrs. Janssen stares at me, confused.

“I don’t understand,” she says when we’re back in the house. “What were you doing?”

“I noticed it earlier when Christoffel left with the opklapbed. Your door is so old and heavy; it can’t be opened without making a sound. And as soon as that dog next door—”

“Fritzi,” Mrs. Janssen supplies. “The neighbor boy’s schnauzer.”

“As soon as that dog hears the door, it starts barking. Even if you were looking in completely the other direction, you would have heard the dog and noticed Mirjam leaving through the front door.”

“That’s what I said.” She’s cross at my conclusion. “I already told you that. She couldn’t have left through that door. And I already looked through Mirjam’s hiding place. You’re wasting time doing things I already did.”

“Did you already find her?” My voice is sharper than it needs to be; I’m covering my inexperience with false confidence. “You keep telling me I’m doing things you already tried, but unless you already found her, I need to see everything with my own eyes. Now, take me to the back door.”

She opens her mouth, probably to tell me again that Mirjam couldn’t have escaped through there because of the inside latch, but then thinks better.

The rear door is a heavy oak, and it’s immediately apparent what she meant by it not closing. Age and the settling of the house have warped the door completely, so that the top half of the door bulges away from the jamb. That’s why Mrs. Janssen has added the latch. It’s heavy, made of iron, and when engaged, it holds the door properly shut. When it’s not engaged, a thin stream of air seeps in through the top.

She’s right. I can’t think of any way that a person could leave through this door and lock the latch behind herself.

Mrs. Janssen is staring at me. I haven’t told her that I’ll help, not officially. And yet I haven’t walked away. It’s so immensely dangerous, much more than anything I’ve allowed myself to do.

But Mrs. Janssen came to me, the way Mr. Kreuk had come to me, and I’m very good at finding things.

I can feel myself getting sucked into this mystery. Maybe because Bas would. Maybe because it’s another way to flout the rules. But maybe because, in a country that has come to make no sense, in a world I cannot solve, this is a small piece that I can. I need to get to Mirjam’s school, the place that might have a picture, the place that might explain who this girl is. Because assuming that Mrs. Janssen is correct in her timeline, assuming the dog always barks when someone leaves, assuming Mirjam couldn’t have gone through the back door, assuming all that is true, it seems this girl is a ghost.

FIVE

———

I’ve been gone from my daily tasks for nearly an hour. If I don’t get back to my deliveries, Mrs. de Vries will complain.

The line at the butcher’s is almost out the door with tired housewives trading tips on where they’ve managed to locate which hard-to-find item. I don’t wait in the line. I never do. As soon as the butcher sees me come in, he waves me toward the counter while he disappears into the back. It took me at least a dozen visits to build this relationship. The first time, I listened while he told another customer that his daughter loved to draw. The second time, I brought some colored pencils and told him they were old ones I’d found in the back of my closet. They were obviously brand-new, though, and I watched his reaction to this: Would he allow himself to believe a white lie, if it meant he got something he wanted? Later, I talked about a sick grandmother, and her sick, wealthy friends who were willing to pay extra money for extra meat.

When the butcher returns, he’s carrying a white paper parcel.

“That’s not fair,” a woman behind me calls after she sees the exchange. She’s right; it’s not fair. The other customers never like me much. They might like me better if I were hungry like them, but I’d rather not starve.

“Her grandmother is sick,” the butcher explains. “She’s caring for a whole family at home.”

“We’re all caring for people at home,” the woman presses on. She’s tired. Everyone is tired of standing in so many lines for so many days. “It’s just because she’s a pretty girl. Would you let a boy skip the line?”

“Not a boy who looks like your son.” The other people in line laugh, either because they think it’s funny or they just want to remain in the good graces of the man who supplies their food. He turns to me and smiles, whispering that he’s tucked a little something extra into my packet for me to take to my family.

It started to rain while I was in the butcher’s shop, fat, slushy drops mixed with ice. The roads are dark and slick. I put the meat in my basket, covering the package with a newspaper, which soaks through in minutes. At the door of Mrs. de Vries’s apartment, my teeth chatter and water slides off my skirt and pools into my shoes, which would matter more if my feet hadn’t already gotten soaked in the rain. The soles of my shoes are worn through and growing useless in wet weather. I knock on the de Vrieses’ door, and inside I hear the clinking of china. “Hallo?” I call. “Hallo?”

Finally, Mrs. de Vries answers, overdressed as usual in a blue silk dress and straight-seamed stockings. She’s in her thirties, with regal features, two irritating twins, and a husband who publishes a ladies’ magazine and spends so much time at work that I’ve met him only once.

“Hanneke, come in.” Mrs. de Vries waves me vaguely into her apartment but doesn’t bother to take her packages, or to thank me for coming out in a monsoon just to bring her some beef. “My neighbor and I were having tea. You don’t have anywhere to be, do you? You can wait in the kitchen until we’re finished.” She nods toward the older woman sitting on the sofa but makes no introductions. It’s clear she doesn’t mean to interrupt their conversation to tend to me. Mrs. de Vries is one of those people who behave as if the war is a nuisance happening in the periphery around her. Today I ignore her suggestion to wait in the kitchen, even though she obviously considered it an order. I don’t want to make it easy for her to forget that I’m here, so I set her packages on a table, stand in her foyer, and drip.

The neighbor in question, a gray-haired woman, arches one eyebrow at me and clears her throat before turning back to Mrs. de Vries. “As I was saying. Gone. I heard about it only this morning.”

“I don’t believe it,” Mrs. de Vries says. “Does anybody know where they went?”

“How would we? They stole off in the middle of the night.”

“Hanneke, would you get us some more biscuits from the kitchen?” Mrs. de Vries calls, picking up a crumb-filled plate and holding it aloft until I walk over and get it.

In the kitchen, a half-empty tin of store-bought buttery cookies sits on the table. I cram two of them in my mouth as I refill the plate. A pair of solemn eyes stare at me from around the corner. One of the twins. I can never remember their names or tell them apart; they’re equally spoiled. I could give him a cookie, but instead, I shove another one deliberately in my mouth and lick the crumbs off my lips.

“So you think they went into hiding, then?” Mrs. de Vries asks her neighbor. “They weren’t rounded up?”

“Certainly not rounded up. I should know. I have friends in the NSB. I’ve told them before, several times, that there was a Jewish family living in my building. If they’d been taken, I would know. The Cohens sneaked away like thieves in the middle of the night.”

I bring the cookies back into the sitting room, making as much rattling as I can to catch Mrs. de Vries’s attention. She sips her coffee. “I can’t believe nobody saw them! You’re sure?”

“I was hoping to at least get a look in their apartment. My son and his wife have been looking for a larger place—she’s expecting, you know—and it would be so nice to have them in the building.”

The neighbor is vile. They both are, with their oily, refined support of the Nazis. But also rich. I don’t think Mr. Kreuk considers morals when he chooses who to sell to. If they can pay, they can buy.

“Mrs. de Vries,” I finally break in, gesturing toward the window, where outside the sky is cloudy but not raining. “I’m sorry, but I really should go soon. It was pouring earlier, but it looks like there’s a break in the weather now. May I leave your things?”

If the nosy neighbor weren’t here, Mrs. de Vries would insist on inspecting the contents of the parcel. As it is, she just raises one eyebrow. “I didn’t realize your schedule was so important, Hanneke. Fetch my handbag from the hallway closet.”

She hands me a few bills, and I don’t even bother to count out her payment before putting it in my pocket and leaving, traipsing wet footprints over her parquet floors.

———

The Jewish Lyceum. Should I go there now? It’s a little after 3:00 PM, on a day that began with me delivering lipstick to a woman at her grandparents’ house and has become something very different, and all at once I am exhausted. I am exhausted by the enormity of the day. I am exhausted by the things I’m always exhausted by: the soldiers, the signs, the secrets and strategies and effort. I’m exhausted enough to know that I probably shouldn’t go to the Lyceum right now, because being exhausted means I won’t be thinking as quickly on my feet. I’ve learned that through working the black market.

On the other hand, now is the perfect time to sneak into a school. Classes will likely be dismissing for the day, with enough commotion that nobody would notice an out-of-place person walking the halls. The Lyceum is only a few blocks away; I’d practically have to ride past it on my way home. And when you’re trying to find things, it’s better to find them as quickly as possible, before someone else takes what you’re looking for. I’ve learned that through the black market, too.

I roll my bicycle to a stop in front of the Lyceum. The school’s architecture reminds me of the school I attended.

Three years ago: My friends and I would all have been sitting on the steps outside right now, arguing about where to go before our parents expected us home. Elsbeth would announce that she didn’t have enough money to go anywhere, then sit back while two or three boys fought over who would get to pay for her coffee or pastries, and then she would wink at me to show she really did have enough money—she just liked the dramatics. A few others would try to protest that they couldn’t come because they had to study. Finally, Bas would announce that we were all going to Koco’s, and that he would personally fail the test to help the grading curve for the people who were so concerned with studying.

Now Elsbeth is gone, in the way I don’t like to think about.

And Koco’s had Jewish owners. Nine months after the invasion, a fight broke out in the shop, which led to the earliest major roundup and hundreds dead.

And Bas will never have to study again.

My whole life has been demolished, brick by brick. It happened two and a half years ago, but standing in front of this school makes me feel like it happened two weeks ago. Or like it’s still happening, again and again, every day.

In the school, it’s quiet. Eerily. No students in the halls, no sounds from the classrooms. At first I think I’ve misjudged the time and the day is already over, but when I peek into one classroom, there are students; they’re just so few in number. Only five pupils are left in this room. The rest must be gone, taken by the Germans or in hiding or worse. A whole school, torn apart. This was Mirjam’s world. Until she went into hiding, this was where she went every day, leaving traces of herself behind, I hope.

Two students, girls of twelve or thirteen, look up when I walk past their classroom. I wave to show them I mean no harm, but their faces fill with fear and they watch me until I pass.

In the next room, a thin man in spectacles lectures in front of a chalkboard while a girl in one corner studiously takes notes. That was where I used to sit, in the front right corner, and Bas would try to get my attention through the window when he passed, pressing his nose against the glass or mouthing Booor-ring as he pointed at the teacher. In the other corner, one of the boys catches my eye. And he winks at me. He winks and then laughs, and the instructor whirls around, barking at him to be quiet. The boy is dark and moon-faced and looks nothing like Bas, but the gesture is so much like him that immediately I step away from the window, trying to stop memories from flooding back.

It wasn’t a good idea for me to come here. I don’t know why I didn’t listen to my instincts. It was unsafe and poorly planned. Anyone could see me, and I don’t have a good story to tell if they do. I need to come back later for the photograph. I’ll come with real coffee; I’ll come with bribes.

Booor-ring, he used to say through the classroom windows.

This school feels like a maze. I can’t remember the turns I took when I came in the building. There’s an exit straight ahead of me, and even though it’s not the one I entered through, I head toward it.

“Can I help you with something?”

A woman stands in the doorway of what I assume is the school office. She’s taller than I am but looks only a few years older, with sharp, wary eyes and her hair piled in a knot on top of her head. She wears a cardigan with a yellow star sewn to it. Jood. “Are you lost?”

“I was just leaving.”

She hurries to catch up with me, planting herself between me and the doorway. “But why were you here? You’re not a student.”

“I was…” But a lie won’t come, not as easily as it usually does. “I was looking for a photograph.”

“Of?”

“Just of students.”

“Of students,” she repeats. “Which students?”

“Never mind. I’ll come back another time. I shouldn’t have bothered you.” I try to slide around her, but she shifts her position so the only way I could exit would be by literally pushing her aside. She’s testing me, to see how desperate I am to get what I came for.

“Of whom?” she persists. “Why are you really here?” She grabs my arm. “Why are you really here?” she asks again, softly.

“Bas,” I whisper, before I can stop myself. It just slipped out. The composure I had fifteen minutes ago is coming undone, thread by thread. Everything about this school makes me think of him—the chalkboard smell and the writing desks, and how it used to feel to have his schedule memorized and know precisely the minute when I might walk by him in the hall. He wasn’t a dedicated student, but he passed anyway because everyone loved him, students and teachers both.

She jerks her head and her grip tightens. “We don’t have any students named Bas. Who is Bas?”

But now I’m spilling the emotions I work so hard to keep bottled. “Bas died. I loved him.”

Her face softens, but her eyes are still suspicious. “I’m sorry. But we don’t have any pictures of him. Whoever Bas is. We don’t have pictures at all. A fire damaged our records a few weeks ago.”

“I’ll go.”

She hasn’t let go of my arm. “I don’t think you should. I think I should take you to the principal. You are trespassing.”

My wits are slowly returning. I twist my arm so she’s forced to drop it, and brush past her again. “I need to go.”

“Stop. What’s your name?”

But she won’t report me. Who could she report me to? A Jewish woman wouldn’t want to draw attention to herself for any reason, even to report a crime. She doesn’t have any recourse.

“Stop,” she says again, but it’s halfhearted. I continue toward the exit, and she doesn’t do anything. I can feel her eyes on me, though, watching as I walk out the doors of a building that reminds me too much of things that hurt to remember.

The cold wind slaps my face as I pedal home, brings me back to my senses, makes me furious with myself. All I had to do was find a picture, and I failed. I should have come with my bribery coffee and a wellpracticed story. I could have said I was looking in on a girl I used to babysit for, or who used to live next door. I come up with stories every day. I should have done that, but I didn’t, and now I’ve ruined one of the few leads I had. Stupid. Amateur. Careless.

I run a few more errands for Mama, and then when I try to get home, soldiers have blockaded the streets I would normally take. They’re having a march, another one, a chance for rows of them to peacock through the streets in their helmets and black boots. They sing, too. Today it’s “Erika,” a song about German girls and German flowers. It crawls like a maggot into my head and gets stuck, unwelcome lyrics and music playing on a loop.

By the time I finally get to my front door, I can barely stand. A velvety aroma hits me as I walk inside. Mama is making hot chocolate. Why? I’ve told her that the little we have left should be saved for a celebration. Mama isn’t the type of person to think of errant celebrations, at least not anymore.

“Hot chocolate—did I forget someone’s birthday?” I unwind my stilldamp scarf and hang it on a hook near the door. If I were younger, I would curl up with the chocolate and tell Mama about my hard day. If I didn’t have to keep this house together, I would tell my parents that I’d been asked to do a job that was too big for me and let my mother pet my hair.

“We have a visitor,” Mama says. I can’t tell if her smile is the real one or the false one she makes because her lips have forgotten how to smile naturally. It looks almost real.

Only then do I notice the figure in the chair seated across from my father —the hair, the freckles, the slightly crooked nose—and my heart jumps and falls at the same time.

Bas.

But of course it’s not. I’m lonely enough to let myself believe that for one second, but I’m not hopeful enough to let myself believe it for any longer. It’s not Bas. It’s Ollie.

SIX

———

Ollie. Olivier. Laurence Olivier, when Bas was feeling silly, after the English film star. Bas’s serious older brother, who looks almost like him, except his hair is not as red and his eyes are not as blue, and now that I’m seeing him sitting with my father, I’m realizing he doesn’t look very much like Bas at all, actually; it was just a trick of the eyes and the heart.

Ollie was finishing his first year of university when Bas died; now he must be nearly through his studies. They were never close. Bas was quick to laugh, and Ollie took himself so seriously. At their house on Saturday evenings, Ollie would heave dramatic sighs every time he thought Bas and I were disrupting his work. I haven’t seen him since the memorial service, the horrible, body-less memorial service, where Mrs. Van de Kamp clung to Ollie and cried, and I felt sick to my stomach because I wanted to cry, too, but didn’t feel I deserved it. I tried stopping by the Van de Kamp house once, early on, but Mrs. Van de Kamp made it clear that she didn’t want to see me, and honestly I couldn’t blame her.

But here is Ollie Van de Kamp now, sitting in my front room, losing a game of chess to my father. “What brings you here?” I ask as he stands to greet me, kissing me formally on the cheek.

“My mother. She was just wondering about you, and I told her the next time I found myself in your neighborhood, I would stop in and see your family.”

“And a wonderful surprise it is,” my father says, “because Ollie is terrible at chess and he’s agreed to play for money.”

This is why I don’t want to be around Ollie. Because it’s not only his looks that are all wrong. Bas would beat the shirt off my father in a game of chess, gleefully teasing him while my father pretended to be upset. Ollie is losing methodically and gracefully. Ollie is like ersatz Bas.

“You made the chocolate.” I return to a safe topic, both for something else to say and because the rude part of me wants to convey that I don’t think Ollie’s visit warrants it.

“She wasn’t going to.” My father playfully jabs the air at my mother. “I told her we should.”

“I told her we shouldn’t,” Ollie offers. “I knew I couldn’t stay long. There’s no point in wasting it on me.” He mustn’t have exerted himself too much in protest. The cup next to him is almost empty.

“Will you stay for dinner, Olivier?” my mother asks. “It’s just spinach and potatoes with the skin.” Across the room, my father grimaces at the description of the food. The Bureau of Nutrition Education has distributed endless flyers encouraging us to eat potato skins, drink skim milk, try cow brains. My mother religiously follows the recipes in these pamphlets as her main acknowledgment of the war. “I’m happy to set another plate. Though we’re eating late tonight; you might not have time to get home before curfew.”

Now I know her smile is forced. It’s barely after six and curfew isn’t until eight. Ollie would have plenty of time to get home. It’s just that inviting Ollie for dinner, even if she likes him, is a step out of the ordinary, and that always makes her worry.

“Thank you, Mrs. Bakker. But I’ve already eaten. Actually, I was hoping Hanneke might come for a little walk with me.” He rubs his neck exaggeratedly. “I’ve been hunched over books studying most of the day. It would be good to have a walk and catch up.” Mama looks at the wall clock. “Just down the street,” he assures her. “I’ll have her back before curfew.” He nods toward the coat I never had a chance to take off. “And look, you’re already dressed for it. Unless you’d rather we just stay in and talk with your parents.”

Something about the final suggestion makes me feel his invitation isn’t one after all. He’s suggesting that we go for a private walk, but if we don’t, he’ll say what he needs to in front of my family.

“I’ll be back soon,” I reassure my mother, and then look to Ollie. “Very soon.”

———

Even though the rain has stopped, it’s still damp, the kind of frigid humidity that makes you feel icicled and wet all the way through.

Ollie doesn’t bother to offer me his arm. He just places his hands carefully in his pockets and begins to stroll, assuming I’ll follow him, and because I don’t have a choice, I do. “It’s been a long time,” he tells me. “Your hair is longer. You look older.”

“Better than the alternative,” I respond immediately with the joke my father always uses whenever someone tells him he’s looking older. Ollie cocks his head.

“What’s the alternative?” he asks.

And then I don’t know what to say, because the only alternative to growing older is to be dead, and after Bas, Ollie and I don’t make those kinds of jokes anymore.

“Where are we going?” I ask instead of answering.

He shrugs as if he hasn’t really thought about it. “Het Rembrandtplein?”

It’s one of my favorite squares in Amsterdam, with a statue of the painter in the middle and cafés around the border, where Mama used to take me for special treats. Coffee for her, hot anise milk for me. I haven’t been able to stand the taste of anise milk for two and a half years. I was drinking it when I heard the radio broadcast that the Dutch had surrendered.

Ollie asks me about my job, and I ask him about his studies, and he says he’s moved out of his parents’ home to live with a roommate closer to the university. But I can tell both of us are only half listening, and by the time we reach the corner, I drop the pretense. “Why are you really here, Ollie? I don’t think your mother just thought of me.”

“I would bet that my mother thinks of you every day,” he says, “since you’re a connection to Bas.”

I can’t tell if he’s meant that to be as painful as it is.

“But you’re right,” he continues. “That’s not why I’m here.” Ahead of us, another couple walks slowly, heads tilted toward each other the way people do when they’re newly in love. Ollie stops, pretending to read a plaque on a wall, but I’ve used this trick myself enough to recognize he’s creating distance so the other couple won’t hear him. “What did you want at the Jewish Lyceum, Hanneke?”

“The what?”

He repeats his question.

I swallow. “Why would I go to the Jewish high school?”

“Do you think you have to lie to me?”

“I already graduated from school. Not with marks like yours, but they gave me a diploma and everything.”

“Hanneke, stop playing dumb. I’m not the one whose mother is waiting for her at home, worried about curfew. I can have this conversation until dawn or we’re arrested. Whichever you prefer.”

He smiles tightly, and I give up. “If I was there, how would you have found out about it?”

“My friend Judith is the school secretary. She visited me just an hour ago because she wanted to tell me about a strange thing that happened.”

Judith. That must be the Jewish girl with the sharp eyes and messy bun.

“Judith said a girl had come by and claimed to be looking for pictures of a boy named Bas, whom she loved and who was dead. It scared her. She thought it might be a Nazi scout, and she came to me because she was terrified.”

The couple in front of us has stopped, too. The woman looks angry. So this isn’t a first date, as I thought, but people who have known each other long enough to fight. “But how did you know it was me?” I ask.

“I asked Judith to describe the person who visited her, and she said it was a tall girl, about eighteen, with honey-colored hair and angry-looking green eyes. She said she was—let me make sure I get this right—‘the girl Hitler is dreaming of to put on his Aryan posters.’” He pauses, giving me a chance to deny it. I don’t bother. There are photographs of me in the Van de Kamps’ home. He could easily show one to Judith, at which point she would confirm that it was me she had seen.

We’ve reached the statue, in the middle of the plaza. Ollie pulls on my sleeve, turning me to face him, and leans in close under the shadow of Rembrandt. “So what were you doing there?”

 “I was looking for something. That’s all.”

“I know that. But it obviously wasn’t a picture of Bas, who wasn’t Jewish and didn’t go to that school.”

“I can’t tell you.”

He rolls his eyes, as if I’m being a difficult little girl. “You can’t tell me? Do you think it would be too hard for me to understand?”

It’s the voice I used with Mrs. Janssen, to chastise her for writing down Mirjam’s story, and I’m irritated that Ollie is using it on me. What would he know about understanding? I might be three years younger, but he’s the one who is tucked away in a university. He knows nothing of the real world.

“Unless—” he starts again, and his eyes flicker. “Hanneke, you weren’t there on behalf of the NSB, were you? I heard through a few people that you were involved in the black market, but is the NSB the side you’re on?”

The smart answer would be to tell him yes. Because then he would leave me alone. He’d ask no more questions, and I’d never have to see him again. But my pride gets in the way of agreeing to such a grotesque lie. “Of course not.”

“Then what? Tell me. I won’t be angry. I promise.”

I look into his not-quite-as-blue-as-Bas’s eyes. The Jewish Lyceum is the only lead I’ve been able to think of. “Can you introduce me to Judith properly?” I ask. “Can you ask her to meet with me?”

“It’s Judith you’re interested in?”

“No. I’m just—I’m looking for someone, and I think Judith might be able to tell me more about them.”

He’s turned away from me now, toward the base of the Rembrandt statue, pretending to read the inscription but looking at it for much longer than he would need. When he finally speaks, it’s very quiet. “Are you asking about het verzet?”

“No, Ollie, I’m not insane.” I’m surprised Ollie would even bring up the resistance. He’s never been a rule breaker. “It’s something else.”

“Hanneke, I’m not going to help you if you don’t tell me why you want my help.”

“It’s nothing bad, Ollie. But I won’t tell you, because it’s too d—” I cut myself off. I almost said it was too dangerous, but that word would only make him less likely to help me. “Because it’s dishonorable. I promised someone I wouldn’t tell.”

“Because it’s too dangerous? Is that what you were going to say?”

I press my lips and look away.

“Hanneke.” He’s speaking so softly I can barely hear him. I’m watching his lips move more than listening. “Whatever you’re doing, stop. Stop now.”

“Please take me to Judith. Tell her I just need a few minutes. I won’t get her in trouble.”

“Time to go home, Hannie. Your mother will be worried about curfew.”

He’s businesslike again; I’m losing him. Finally, I make a calculated decision because I don’t see any other options. Because Mirjam has been missing for almost twenty-four hours already. Because Ollie might be pedantic and boring, but he could never be a Nazi. “Ollie. I need to talk to Judith because I’m looking for a girl. Named Mirjam. She’s just fifteen. Just Pia’s age.”

It was manipulative to bring up Pia, Ollie and Bas’s little sister. The whole family loves Pia. I loved her, and the way she used to tell me she couldn’t wait until I married her brother and became her sister for real. He’ll propose after he finishes university, she assured me. He’s crazy in love with you.

“You’re bringing Pia into this?” His pale eyes are flashing. Let him be angry. I’ve said worse things to get what I want. I’ll probably say worse things yet before this war is over. What I said worked, from the way he’s clenching and unclenching his jaw.

“Ten minutes,” I say. “I only need to talk to Judith for ten minutes. I can go back to the school to find her if I need to, but I don’t think she wants that. It’s a good thing I’m doing, Ollie. I promise.”

He turns away and rakes his hand through his thick strawberry-blond hair. When he turns back and speaks again, his voice is a little louder, almost normal. “It’s too bad you didn’t come to university, Hanneke. You meet very nice people. I joined the student supper club. That’s where I met Judith; we get together a couple of times a week.”

“When?”

“The next meeting is tomorrow.”

“Where?”

Before he can answer, a loud, throaty chuckle interrupts. German soldiers, two of them. I catch enough of the conversation to realize that, bizarrely, they’re talking about Rembrandt. One of them is telling the others that his favorite painting is The Night Watch. Too bad for the soldier that when the war broke out, curators removed The Night Watch from Het Rijksmuseum, rolling up the canvas and trucking it to a castle in the country somewhere.

“Rembrandt.” The art fan points at the statue and then at us. “A good painter,” he continues in mangled Dutch. “Rembrandt.”

This soldier is older. Around him, I should behave like a daughter, not a girlfriend. I’m preparing to compliment his taste, but Ollie answers before I need to. “Rembrandt! One of our best painters,” he responds in German. He sounds calm, his accent is impeccable. “Do you know Van Gogh?”

The soldier holds his nose and waves away an imaginary smell, making it clear he doesn’t think much of Van Gogh. His friend laughs, and Ollie laughs, too. “No Van Gogh!” he jokes.

It’s nice to have someone else do the talking for once, to not have to summon the energy for another false conversation. After a few minutes, Ollie places his hand on the small of my back and steers me away from the statue. “Good night,” he tells the soldiers, who wave back cheerfully.

Once we’ve left the square, he doesn’t speak again the rest of the walk, and neither do I.

My life now is filled with guilt, often; anger, frequently; fear, usually. But it’s not normally filled with self-doubt. I’ve constructed this new life carefully enough to feel that I’m protecting myself and my family as best I can. But in the past twelve hours, I’ve accepted a dangerous assignment. I’ve lost my composure in front of a stranger, and ripped open the sutures of my Bas-shaped wound, all over again, because they never seem to heal. And now I’m filled with nothing but doubt. Am I doing the right thing?

It’s only after Ollie leaves me at home, after finishing the hot chocolate at Mama’s insistence, that I realize he never told me where it was, this meeting of his student group. But that night, when I’m getting ready for bed, I find Ollie’s hot chocolate napkin in my coat pocket, scrawled with an address near the campus of the Municipal University of Amsterdam.

⋯⋯⋯

The first time I met Bas:

He was fifteen, I was fourteen. I’d seen him at school and I liked his curious kitten eyes and the way one curl fell over his forehead no matter how many times he pushed it back. Elsbeth was a year older than me, so she was in the same class as him already. She knew his two friends, and one day we walked out of the building and his brown-haired friend called out to Elsbeth and asked her if she could settle something. “Which do girls prefer?” he asked. “Blonds or brunets?” Elsbeth laughed, and because she didn’t want to give up her opportunity to flirt with either boy, she told them she liked both equally well.

“Ask my friend,” she said, because she was always doing that, making sure I got equal attention, pushing me to the center in ways that made me annoyed and then grateful. “Ask Hanneke.”

“What about you? Which do you prefer?” the blond friend asked me, and I still don’t know how I was so bold, because I looked past both of them to where Bas was sitting on a ledge, and his auburn hair caught in the sunlight.

“I like redheads,” I said, and then I blushed.

The first time I kissed Bas:

He was sixteen, I was fifteen. It was after our first trip to the cinema, our first real trip, when I didn’t feel the need to make Elsbeth chaperone. I suggested a street early that we get off our bicycles and walk. I said it was because the weather was nice, but really I wanted to be alone with him before my parents could see us outside the window.

“You have something in your hair,” he said, and I let him brush it out even though I knew there was nothing in my hair, and when he kissed me, he dropped his bicycle and it clattered to the ground, and we both laughed.

The last time I saw Bas:

He was seventeen, I was sixteen.

It was getting late. My parents had come to his going-away party, too, but they had already left. Mama said I could stay an extra hour, as long as Elsbeth and I walked home together. Bas and I kissed again and again in a dark corner of his dining room until my hour was up. I’ll never forget his hand, pressed against the window as he watched me—

That’s not what really happened.

I’m not ready to think about the last time I saw Bas.

SEVEN

———

Wednesday

I just don’t understand.” Mrs. de Vries bows her head, as if she can’t even look at me because she’s so disappointed. “I asked for Amateurs.”

I stare at the green-and-white cigarette pack in my hand, trying to arrange my face into an appropriate expression of understanding, when what I really want to do is slap her. I have found her two packs of cigarettes. In 1943, in this absurd country of ours, I have managed to find her two packs of cigarettes—not just cigarette paper and tobacco to roll, which are hard enough to get ahold of, but actual cigarettes—and she’s upset because these don’t have the right label on them?

“I couldn’t get that brand, Mrs. de Vries. I’m sorry. I tried.”

“Honestly, you would think I’d asked for the moon. I don’t understand what makes it so difficult. I wrote down for you exactly what I was looking for.”

She did ask for the moon, very nearly. I had to try four different contacts; eventually I got these cigarettes from a woman who gets them from a German soldier. She says he’s her boyfriend and he gives them to her; I think she might steal them. I also think he’s not her boyfriend but someone paying her for what she does in the bedroom, but I don’t ask questions. And I only go to her when I don’t have any other options.

Now my temples are pounding. I don’t know whether to yell or laugh at Mrs. de Vries. Her worries are so pedestrian, so soothing in an absurd way, like a holiday from all the things that real people have to care about. One of the twins tugs desperately on Mrs. de Vries’s skirt while the other, the one who always looks naughty, like he has something to hide, tries to poke his head into my bag to see what else I may have brought.

“Stop that,” Mrs. de Vries chastises the skirt-puller. “We’ll have tea as soon as Hanneke leaves.”

“Mrs. de Vries.” I try a new approach to keep her on track. “If you don’t want these, I won’t have a problem finding someone else who does.” The minute hand on her grandfather clock ticks another notch toward the top of the hour. I have somewhere to be.

“No!” She grabs the cigarettes, clutching them to her chest, only now realizing I don’t have to give them to her, that she could be left with no cigarettes at all. “I’ll take them. I just thought… if there were any others.”

What does she think, that I’ll slap my hand to my forehead and say, “But of course! I forgot that I actually did have the brand you wanted. I’ve just been hiding them from you”?

“Mama, it’s crowded in here,” the naughty twin says, staring at me and poking his tongue between his lips. “I’m tired of it being so crowded.”

“I’m leaving soon,” I assure him. Horrid child.

———

The Municipal University of Amsterdam is where I might have gone, if the war hadn’t started. I wouldn’t have taken it seriously. It just would have been a way to pass time until Bas’s mother thought he was old enough to inherit his grandmother’s wedding ring. Bas would have gone here, too. What would he have studied? He never talked about his career dreams; he wasn’t the type to look more than a few months in advance, and I can’t picture an adult Bas. It both bothers and reassures me that, in my mind, he’ll always be seventeen.

The university doesn’t have a central location; its buildings are scattered through the city. But everyone knows the Agnietenkapel. It’s one of the oldest buildings in Amsterdam, a convent from the fifteenth century, and the address Ollie gave me is on the same street.

I’d planned on changing clothes before I got here, clinging to some vague memory of the vanity I used to have when going to parties, but Mrs. de Vries has made me late and I don’t have time. I’m in a mauve wool dress that I inherited from Elsbeth, which fits me well but is such a regretful color that she and I used to call it the Tonsil. Her grandmother had given it to her. Elsbeth was relieved when it was too small and she got to give it away to me. It used to feel like a joke between us, whenever I wore it. Now it feels like a practicality: It’s hard to buy new clothes, so I wear all the ones that fit me, even the ugly ones, even the ones that remind me of better times.

This supper club will be a roomful of boys carrying chewed-up pencils in their pockets—they’re probably studying architecture, like Ollie is—and girls citing philosophers I’ve never heard of. On the rare occasions I run into one of my old friends who did continue on to college, I feel both inferior and dismissive. None of them would survive on their feet if they had to. I’m defensive about everyone in Ollie’s supper club before I even knock on the door.

Ollie peers through the window on the door, and I show him my jar of pickles when he opens it. I meant to bring something better but ran out of time to make anything. Instead I’ve brought the canned goods that a grocer gave me as a secret present this afternoon. Nobody in my family likes them anyway.

Ollie isn’t wearing the jacket and tie I expected. His clothes are even more ragtag than mine are: rolled-up shirtsleeves smudged with graphite as if he’s spent the day at a drafting table.

“Welcome,” he says in a cautious voice that makes me wonder if I’m truly welcome at all.

He waves me into a small, bachelor’s apartment. A sofa and a couple of chairs are clustered on one side of the room, opposite a kitchenette with mismatched cups drying on the countertop. There are only two other people in the room: a boy with full lips and heavy-lidded eyes, and another boy, handsome with wavy hair, who looks like the American film star William Holden. Both of them drink tea, or tea substitute, out of chipped cups.

“The famous supper club,” I say. “And I was concerned I wouldn’t be able to find you in the crowd.”

Ollie is not amused. He holds out both hands for my coat, hanging it on the prong of a swaying coatrack. I don’t know why I’m being tart. He’s doing me a favor. I’m nervous, I think. If he were a new contact I had to impress, I’d be able to wear a better mask, but I can’t un-remind myself of the fact that this is Ollie, who I’ve known for years. “Judith isn’t here,” I notice out loud. “She’s coming, isn’t she?”

“She’s coming.” He has tired eyes, up-all-night-studying eyes. “But you can’t accost her right when she gets through the door. Sit through the regular meeting first. She wasn’t excited about talking with you. The least you can do is show a little restraint and prove you aren’t a complete lunatic.”

“Half a lunatic?”

“Do you promise?”

“I promise,” I say. “I went out on a limb for you and I don’t want you to embarrass me.”

“Ollie, are you going to introduce me to the other people in the room, or should I sit mutely in the corner and try to refrain from breathing?”

He grimaces, then relents, turning toward the other two boys.

“And Ollie?” I say.

“Yes?”

“Thank you. For inviting me.”

Ollie nods an acknowledgment before leading me the rest of the way to the coffee table. “This is Leo.” He gestures to the one with the full lips first. “He lives here—we’re in his apartment.” Now he turns to the one who looks like William Holden. “And this is Willem, my roommate.” One name I won’t forget, at least. Willem is the Dutch version of William, just like his American movie star doppelgänger.

Leo drops his cup into the saucer with a clatter, wiping his hand on his pants and banging against the coffee table as he moves to greet me. Willem smoothly kisses both of my cheeks and offers me his place on the sofa, moving to a less comfortable-looking chair. He has a friendly, open face. I bet everyone who meets him thinks they must have met him before.

“You were Bas’s girlfriend, right?” he asks, once I’ve settled in and smoothed my dress over my knees. “I only met him once, but he made me laugh. Ollie says he made everyone laugh.”

“He did make everyone laugh.” Usually I’d be put off by a friend of Ollie’s presuming to know anything about Bas, but Willem’s face is too earnest not to like. “My mother used to say he could charm the hands off a clock.”

“I’m glad to meet you. We’re just expecting two more. Tea?”

I shake my head, declining. “This club is smaller than I thought it would be. Cozy.”

“There are more of us. We try to meet in smaller groups instead of having everyone at once,” Willem explains. “If there’s a raid, we don’t want them to have a way of catching us all. The only time we’ve all ever been in a room together was for our friend Piet’s wedding. Otherwise, it’s small groups. Smaller is better for the work that we do.”

“Work?”

“We do lots of things,” Leo interjects, opening the jar of pickles I set down and fishing one out. “Right now, what we’re trying to figure out—”

“Let’s wait.” Ollie cuts him off from across the room, still posted by the window on the door. “Until Judith and Sanne arrive.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t bring something more to eat,” I tell Willem and Leo. “I came straight from work.”

Leo snorts, spearing another pickle. “You don’t see any of us carrying cakes, do you?”

“So are the others bringing the food? Or do you take turns, or…”

A thin dribble of vinegar trickles down Leo’s chin; he catches it before it hits the table. “What, now?”

“The food. Does one person host, and bring everything, or do you take turns?” His stare is blank. He has no idea what I’m talking about. I whip my head over to Ollie by the door. His shoulders are hunched up around his ears so his strawberry hair disappears into his collar, and the infinitesimal tilt of his head tells me he’s been listening to everything we’ve said. Leo is still waiting for me to explain my question.

“I’m sorry,” I say stiffly. “I got confused. Would you excuse me? I forgot to ask Ollie something.”

He doesn’t turn to face me, even though he’d have to be deaf not to hear me stomp up behind him. When I’m standing so close our sleeves are touching, I whisper quietly enough that Willem and Leo won’t overhear.

“Ollie. Where did you bring me?”

“What do you mean?” He raises his eyebrows.

“You know what I mean. What kind of meeting is this? Judith’s not even coming, is she?” My heart has started to thud. “Who are you really watching for?”

Was I a complete fool to trust Ollie after all? I thought he was safe, but it’s not like you can tell a Nazi informant just by looking. I move toward the coatrack, but before I can take my coat, Ollie nods toward the door. On the other side, two figures approach, one of them clearly Judith.

“What is this meeting?” I ask again.

“It’s about to start,” he says, raising his eyebrows again. “If you’re going to leave, be careful on your way out. The door closes fast.”

So he won’t stop me if I try to leave, but if I do choose to go, I’ll also be missing out on my chance to ask Judith about Mirjam. My only lead, my only clue, and a decision to make in less than a second. How much do I want to find this missing girl?

“It’s us,” a sharp voice whispers. “It’s Judith and Sanne.”

Ollie opens the door, and I don’t leave through it.

Judith really is stunning, with her pale parchment skin, molasses-colored hair, and a gaze that could cut glass. Sanne, the other girl, is friendlylooking, plump, and pretty, with white-blond hair that floats with static electricity when she takes off her hat. “Sorry we’re late; roads blocked,” Sanne explains, lightly patting Ollie’s shoulder and moving to greet Leo and Willem.

Before I have a chance to say anything to Judith, she brushes past me, too—either preoccupied or deliberately ignoring me—and takes a seat on the sofa.

“Judith,” I begin, but Ollie interrupts me by clearing his throat. Later, he mouths to me. After the meeting. You promised.

He sits on the edge of the sofa, and Sanne takes one of the chairs. It’s a fluid movement, one that says she’s done it a million times, that in this meeting everybody knows their place.

“Hanneke?” Ollie looks up at me. I’m the only one left standing, halfway between the door and the sofa. “Hanneke, are you sitting?”

One seat remains, a squat velveteen footstool. I move toward it slowly and sit down.

“Everyone, this is Hanneke,” Ollie says. He doesn’t introduce me further, so they must have been expecting me. There must have been a vote, or a discussion at least, about my presence. “As I told you all before, I vouch for her.”

He says this last part seriously, and with it, he puts me in a terrible position. Because I can’t say now that he shouldn’t vouch for me. How will Judith ever talk to me about Mirjam if I say I can’t be trusted? But still… what has he just implied that I can be trusted with? What is he bringing me into?

“Now,” Ollie continues, “the first order of business is to discuss the ration-card bottleneck. The Germans are getting more and more strict with —”

“Wrong,” Willem interjects. “The first order of business is for us to agree what it is that we’re celebrating. It’s been my birthday twice already this month.”

“And Leo and I have already been engaged several times,” adds Sanne.

Willem turns to me and explains, “We can’t tell people what we’re really doing, so we always have a pretend celebration in mind, that we’ll all use as our excuse if we’re stopped.”

“We used to say it was Bible study,” Sanne says. “But once I was stopped and the soldier asked me which book we’d been reading. I told him Genesis, because it was the only one I could remember, and then we decided none of us knew the Bible well enough to have that be our cover.”

“It can be my birthday,” Leo says. “It really is next week, so it’s plausible.”

“As I was saying,” Ollie breaks in again. “The ration-card bottleneck. The forged ones aren’t being produced quickly enough. We’re taking care of sixteen more people, just since last month. It’s too time-consuming for one person to produce all those cards. We need to find another forger or come up with another solution.” I don’t like the way his eyes land on me when he says that last part.

“In Utrecht, they’ve got someone on the inside of the ration-card office,” Willem says. “They arranged a fake theft. The worker reported that the office had been broken into. Really, he’d stolen them himself and passed them on to resistance groups.”

The conversation moves around me while I try to keep up. Ration-card fraud. I’m a solo criminal who has walked into a den of them. But instead of using the ration cards to sell goods for profit, like I do, they pass the cards to the resistance. For what? Food and goods for resistance workers? People in hiding?

“Judith, do you think your uncle might know anybody?” Ollie asks. “With his Council connections?”

The Jewish Council. Judith’s willingness to be out at night and her boldness at the school make more sense knowing that her uncle is on the Council. As the Jewish leadership appointed to be liaisons with the Nazis, they communicate German orders and have a little more freedom than other Jews.

Judith shakes her head. “Even if he does, you know I can’t ask him. He’d disembowel me if he knew I came to these meetings.”

“I can see if Utrecht has any ideas,” Willem says. “Maybe their contact in the ration office knows somebody in our ration office.”

So these five in Amsterdam are part of a larger network, spread into the suburbs and maybe through the whole country. In spite of my fear at being here, I can’t help but feel professional curiosity. Their operation must be huge. How do they find enough merchants to work with them? How good is their forger? Are the soldiers stationed in Utrecht more or less lax than the ones here in Amsterdam?

My mind only snaps back to attention when I hear the end of one of Judith’s sentences: “…and then bring the cards to the Schouwburg.”

“To the theater?” I interrupt, wondering what I’ve missed of the conversation. “Why would the cards go there?”

“You don’t know about the Hollandsche Schouwburg?” It’s the first time Ollie has addressed me in the meeting, and he seems disappointed.

Of course I do. I’ve been there with him, even if he doesn’t remember it. The winter I was fifteen, the Van de Kamps invited me to go see the Christmas premiere with them at the Schouwburg, an old playhouse that Mama let me wear her pearls to visit. Their whole family went. I sat next to Ollie, actually, holding hands with Bas on the other side. Ollie had only just started university; he was wearing new spectacles, serious and important.

“It’s a theater,” I say. “Or was. It’s closed now, isn’t it?”

Ollie nods. “It was a theater. They’ve renamed it the Jewish Theater, and now it’s a deportation center. Jews are rounded up around the city and brought to the Schouwburg, kept for several days, and then transported—to Westerbork mostly, but sometimes other transit camps.”

The dignified theater with velvet curtains is now a massive holding cell for German prisoners. I have clients who live right in that neighborhood. It’s disgusting, the way the Germans take our lovely things and poison them.

“I didn’t know,” I say.

“Where did you think Jewish people were sent?” Judith asks.

“To work camps, or to be resettled in another country. I’m not ignorant,” I say. Work camps is what we’ve always been told. I just never thought about how, exactly, the Jewish prisoners would get to them.

“‘Work camps’?” Judith scoffs at my description. “You make it sound as if Jews are just going to a job. You have no idea, the sadistic things we’ve heard about those camps.”

Before I can ask her to explain more, Sanne jumps in, peacemaking. “It makes sense that you wouldn’t know more,” she tells me. “The Nazis try to hide everything they’re doing. At the Schouwburg, they make everyone stay inside until it’s time for their transport. The Council arranges food and blankets, and that’s about all they can do. Judith volunteers there a few times a week, and her cousin works in the crèche.”

“There’s a nursery?”

Judith makes a face. “Because the Nazis thought it would be too disorderly, to have the children in the theater with their parents. The toddlers and smaller children wait in the crèche until it’s time for their families to depart.”

I don’t know what to say to that, and I don’t have to. Ollie clears his throat again, to regain control of his meeting. “So Willem will talk to Utrecht,” Ollie says. “When do you think you can talk to them, Willem?”

“Wait,” I say.

“And then, after Willem and Judith consult with—” Leo begins.

“Wait.” Everyone stops talking then and looks at me. “The Schouwburg. Is that where everybody goes, or only the people who were asked to report?”

Leo looks confused. “What do you mean?”

“If someone wasn’t actually scheduled for deportation, and they were just found on the street, but they had Jewish papers, would they be brought to the theater, or to another prison somewhere?”

Ollie’s voice is neutral as he answers my question. “There are a few smaller deportation centers in other parts of the city. But for the most part, yes. There’s a good chance that a Jewish person who wasn’t where she was supposed to be would be brought to the Schouwburg.”

I notice his use of she, acknowledging that I’m not merely curious about procedure in general but about one person in particular. This discussion about taking ration cards to the theater has inadvertently led back to my reason for being here tonight. “Mirjam could be there?” I ask. “Right now?”

Judith and Ollie look at each other.

“Theoretically,” Ollie says carefully.

“How do I find out if she is?”

“It’s difficult.”

“How difficult?”

Ollie sighs. “The Jewish man who was assigned to run the Schouwburg, we rely on him for a lot of things. I can’t approach him with a personal favor. We have to use our resources strategically. We have to think about what actions will be best for the largest group of people, for the movement as a whole.”

“But maybe if I could just get a message to her. That would be possible, wouldn’t it?”

He rubs his hands over his eyes. “Can we finish the business on our agenda? And then talk about this at the end of the night?”

“Your agenda?”

If I were an outsider watching this conversation, I would tell myself to stop pushing, that no one wants to help someone behaving childishly. But in this moment, I can’t help it. Ollie brought me here under a false pretense, and I’ve finally learned a piece of information that could be useful, but he’s told me help is impossible without really explaining why.

The others resume talking, about the ration-card bottleneck and fake identification papers. None of this helps me with Mirjam. She’s fifteen. How would she know to find a fake ID through the resistance? How would she know how to do anything? She’s probably alone and afraid, and she’s been missing for forty-eight hours now. Could a fifteen-year-old girl manage to elude capture on the streets for forty-eight hours?

As the official business winds down, I glue my eyes to Judith and pull her aside the minute she’s not talking to anyone else.

“Judith?”

“Yes?”

“Can I talk to you for a minute?”

“We’re talking,” she says stiffly, but every syllable really says, I don’t know why Ollie let you come.

“I wanted to first apologize. For sneaking into the school like that, and for scaring you.”

“You didn’t scare me,” she says archly. “It takes so much more than that to scare me at this point.”

“Surprised you, then,” I compromise. “I’m sorry I walked into the school and didn’t tell you what I was really looking for.”

“You could have gotten me in trouble.”

“I was desperate.”

“We’re all desperate.”

If Judith was a soldier, now is when I would lower my eyes and talk softly about how she was right and I couldn’t possibly understand any of it. But Judith’s not a soldier. She probably deplores sycophants. “I’ve apologized,” I say. “And I meant it. And I can do it again if you want. But I came tonight because I wanted help, regarding a girl who was also one of the students at your school.” I stare at the bridge of her nose, which is easier than staring at her eyes, willing her to speak first. I’m stubborn enough to remain silent.

“Mirjam Roodveldt,” Judith says. The air between us parts. “She went to the Lyceum until a few months ago.”

“You knew her. Were you lying? I mean, when you said the photos were destroyed in a fire, is that the truth?”

“I wasn’t lying. The photos were destroyed in a fire. I lit it myself.” She juts out her chin, as if daring me to question this act. “I didn’t want the Germans to have one more list of all the students who were left. Not that it matters. They find everyone anyway.”

Something clicks in my brain. When the war first started and Germans burned down buildings, we hated them for it. But recently I’ve heard of public records buildings burning down, and I wonder if some of them are resistance jobs meant as acts of protection.

“You did know her, though? Dark hair? Petite? She might have worn a bright blue coat?”

Judith bites her lip. “I remember when she got that coat. She tripped and caught her old one on a rusty piece of fence and ripped a big chunk out of it. Ripped a chunk out of her knee, too. I remember thinking she was going to have a scar for life. She came back a few days later with stitches and the new coat. It was raining that morning and she asked me if she could come inside before the doors opened so it wouldn’t get too wet.”

“What else do you remember about her?” I can barely get out the words. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I didn’t expect to find anyone else who knew her. Some twisted part of me maybe believed that Mirjam Roodveldt was a specter created by Mrs. Janssen. But she is real.

“Why do you care so much about her?” Judith looks at me shrewdly. “Is she a friend?”

“No. I’m—I’m being paid to find her.” It’s technically the truth, and right now it seems easier than explaining everything else, about me, and Bas, about how finding Mirjam feels like a task that will put order to the world. I’m still embarrassed by how vulnerable I was in front of Judith when I met her at the school.

“Just her?” Judith looks skeptical. “You’re here because you’re looking for just one person?”

“Please, do you remember anything else?”

Judith sighs. “Not a lot. She was beautiful; I think she had a lot of admirers.”

“Anyone she was particularly close with? Was there anyone she might have gone to, or told where she was going into hiding?”

“I’m just a secretary. I only talked to the students if they came in late and needed a pass or something else like that. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t know anything else?”

“I did bring some things for you, though I doubt they’ll be of any help.” She leans over to her handbag and pulls out a rectangular white envelope, unaddressed and unsealed. “Just some old school assignments from her desk. Sometimes students disappear without having a chance to clean out their books or papers. I always think, just in case some of them came back… In any case, I went through my collection, and this is what we had of Mirjam’s.”

She hands me the envelope, and I quickly thumb through the contents. The top three pages are all math assignments, and the next two are biology quizzes. No photographs, nothing that looks immediately useful. I try to hide my disappointment; it was kind of Judith to bring this for me, and I don’t want to seem more petulant than I already did earlier in the meeting.

“Ollie says you have connections,” Judith says.

“It depends on what you mean by connections.”

“Ollie says you can find things. We need more vendors we can trust, and we need people who can introduce us to them.”

“That’s not why I came here,” I say.

“I see.” She’s staring at me evenly. It takes work for me not to return her gaze, to instead focus on Mirjam’s schoolwork in my lap. Before I can look more closely at the other papers, Ollie puts his hand on my shoulder, and I look up in relief.

“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 rulefollowers 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?”

“What are you talking about, Ollie?”

“I’m talking about that’s why. That’s why I brought you. Because despite your insistence that you don’t want to get involved, you know that what’s happening in this country is wrong, and you’re already in a position to help us.”

“None of that means I’m ready to risk my life. I already take care of my parents, and they would starve if something happened to me. I’m already looking for a missing girl. That’s how I’m resisting. I keep people fed, and I’m going to find a girl I was asked to find. Isn’t that enough, for one person to save one life? What you want from me is too much. I’m not ready to do more, and it’s not fair for you to ask.”

Ollie’s voice softens and so do his eyes, quiet and blue. “I think you are willing to risk your life. You’ve felt this is wrong for a very long time. You were fourteen and you were already talking about how evil Adolf Hitler was. Remember the dinner?”

I can’t look away from him. I know what he’s referring to. A dinner conversation from four years ago, at the Van de Kamps’. I was talking and talking about Hitler, while Mrs. Van de Kamp tried to distract me by passing the peas and then the rolls, and then finally she came out and told me that polite people didn’t discuss politics at the table. Bas hadn’t even been paying attention. Ollie was listening, though. I think he was even nodding along. But that was years ago. That was a lifetime ago. Ollie knows nothing about me now, certainly not enough to make these grand, sweeping speeches. He doesn’t know that Bas is dead because of—

Ollie gives my shoulders a final shake, and then releases them, raking his fingers through his hair. “We’re losing, Hanneke,” he says softly. “People are disappearing faster and faster, and being sent into God only knows what hell. One of the earlier transports? The families of deported men received postcards from their sons and brothers saying they were being treated well. Then the families received notices from the Gestapo, saying the men had all died of disease. Does that make any sense to you? Healthy young men—first they send postcards saying they’re fine, and then suddenly they’re dead? And now nobody sends back any postcards at all.”

“Do you think all the Jews are being killed?” I ask.

“I’m saying we don’t know what to think, or what’s true. All we know is that farms and attics are busting at the seams with onderduikers. The country is running out of places to hide people who desperately need to be hidden. We need help, more help, quickly, from people in strategic positions like you.”

“You don’t know me,” I whisper. “There are things about me where if you knew them, you wouldn’t—”

“Shhh.” He cuts me off.

I start to protest, but he presses a finger to his lips. His whole body has gone stiff, and his ear is cocked as he listens to something. We’re both frozen now that I hear it, too: German shouting, in the distance but growing closer. Muffled crying, and unorganized feet on cobblestones. These days, the sounds only mean one thing.

Ollie realizes it at the same time. “A roundup.”

The sounds are getting closer. My eyes meet Ollie’s, our argument immediately forgotten. He raises his wrist and frantically peels back his coat sleeve. I don’t understand what he’s doing, until he taps his watch and shows me the time. We spent so long arguing in the street that now we’re about to miss curfew. Both of us are on foot today, and we’re still a mile from my house.

We can’t be found, not in the middle of a roundup, when soldiers are already dangerously engorged with power.

“This way!” a soldier barks. His voice echoes off the cobblestones. “Move!” The voice is just around the corner. The soldier and prisoners will be on our street any minute.

“We need to—” Ollie starts.

“Follow me.” I reflexively grab his hand, pulling him toward a small side street. We walk quickly down that one, and then turn onto another side street, and then another. For once, I am grateful for Amsterdam’s winding street plan.

Beside me, Ollie’s gait is relaxed, but his upper body looks tense, and we speak to each other in gestures while ignoring the shouting I can still hear from a few blocks over. Both of our palms are sweating. I don’t want to have to see the people the soldiers are taking away. It’s cowardly, but I don’t want to be reminded that because I have blond hair and the right last name, they’re not taking me.

The street we’re on now is barely more than an alley, so narrow that I could nearly touch the buildings on either side with my outstretched arms. It’s safer than a main road because there’s less chance of being seen; it’s more dangerous than a main road because if someone does see you, there’s no way to run. I’m clutching Ollie’s hand so hard we’ll both have bruises tomorrow.

Our surroundings are beginning to look familiar. We pass a bookstore, closed for the night, whose owner I find coffee for sometimes, and an optometrist, and a cobbler who is willing to trade shoes for beer. I know where this street ends: near a dancing studio where Elsbeth and I were forced to take horrible waltzing lessons.

From there, it’s only a short walk home. If Ollie and I needed to, we could knock on a neighbor’s door, pretending to borrow an egg, and one of them would probably let us in. We’re almost safe. In the distance, I can still hear the cries from the raid. I quicken my pace to put more space between myself and that fear. Suddenly Ollie squeezes my hand even harder.

Two silhouettes wait at the end of the street, with long shadows that I know are guns.

We have to keep walking. There’s no alternative. There never is. I know their uniforms are green, and so we have to keep walking. We have to pass them; it would look suspicious to turn and walk in the opposite direction. I wish Ollie weren’t with me. Nazis don’t like it when you wink at them while with another boy. It probably reminds them of what could be happening at home.

Their guns are pointed down. They’re talking with each other in German too fast for me to fully understand. One of them slaps the other on the shoulder and laughs. It doesn’t even look like they’ve come from the raid. They were just out on their regular patrol, and it was our misfortune that we chose the same street

I fold myself in close to Ollie’s body, making sure there’s more than enough space for the soldiers to pass.

“Good evening,” Ollie says in German as we quietly squeeze through. I nod and smile.

We brush by, and my body begins to un-tense. We’ll be at the end of this alley in just a few seconds. Next to me, Ollie is doing the same things I am: keeping a measured pace, making it look like we’re in no hurry to be anywhere.

“Wait!”

We have no choice, so we stop and face them. Several meters behind us, one of the Green Police has turned around, starting in our direction. I glance briefly back to the end of the alley, but Ollie firmly tugs on my hand. Don’t try running, he’s saying. Not while they have guns.

“Wait,” he calls out again, closing the gap between us. “Wait, don’t I know you?” He leans in, inches from my face.

Does he? It’s hard to tell in this light. Where could he know me from? Is he one of the soldiers I’ve flirted with? Someone Mr. Kreuk has sent me to sell to, laughing at his bad jokes until the transaction is done? Or has he seen me more recently, going into the Jewish Lyceum?

A curtain flutters in a nearby house. Inhabitants all along this street are crouched in their living rooms, silently watching us.

“I do know you,” he guffaws.

“I don’t think so,” I murmur, keeping my voice friendly. “I’m sure I’d remember you.”

“Yes,” he says. “You’re the couple. The romantic couple!”

“We are!” It’s Ollie, next to me, who answers the soldier. He’s responding in German, talking more loudly than I’ve ever heard him. His accent is still impeccable, but he’s slurring his words like he, too, has been out for a night of drinking. “Rembrandt!”

“Rembrandt!” the German agrees, and now I recognize him: the one from the square last night.

Ollie slings one arm around me. “How is our good friend, the fellow art lover? My fiancée and I love Rembrandt, don’t we, darling?” He looks at me pointedly, and even though my heart is beating out of my chest, I reach up to Ollie’s hand and give it an affectionate squeeze.

“Our favorite,” I manage.

“If you come to Germany one day, we have magnificent art.”

“We will,” I promise, with what I hope is a friendly smile. “After it’s all over.”

His eyes narrow. “After what’s all over?”

After the war, is what I meant. After we all get to return to normal. I don’t think what I just said is offensive, but the soldier obviously didn’t like it. “After,” I say again, beginning to improvise an explanation.

“After our wedding!” Ollie exclaims. “After all the wedding madness!”

Bless you, Ollie, Laurence Olivier. I’m not used to other people being as fast on their feet as I am when it comes to dealing with Nazis.

“So nice to see a couple in love.” The soldier pinches my cheek with cold fingers. “It reminds me of my wife, back home, when we were young.”

“To your wife!” Ollie raises an imaginary glass in the air.

“To my wife!”

Ollie winks at me meaningfully, lasciviously. “Maybe we should get home, my soon-to-be wife.”

“To your wife!” the Green Police yells.

“To my wife!” says Ollie.

“Kiss her!” he says, and so Ollie does.

There, in the street, for the benefit of the German Green Police and the people who are cowering in their houses but peeking out from their curtains, Ollie cups my face in his hands and kisses me. His mouth is soft and full, his eyelashes brush against my cheek, and only he and I know that our lips are shivering in fear.

⋯⋯⋯

Things that have changed about me in the last two days: everything and nothing.

I’m still lying to my parents, they’re still worried about me, I still ride around a changed city on a used bicycle with a stubborn tire and feelings of perpetual numbness and fear warring in the pit of my belly.

But the things that I’m lying about are much bigger, the things I’m doing much more dangerous. I’m an accidental member of the resistance, and if I am caught, instead of slapping my wrist for black market beer, the Germans could kill me.

I also kissed my dead boyfriend’s brother.

The last time I saw Bas:

I did go to the sad, stupid going-away party his parents held for him, the one in which his mother spent most of the time crying and his father stood in the corner so tight-lipped and still that people kept bumping into him and then saying, “I’m sorry; I didn’t see you standing there.” I did give Bas a locket with my picture in it; he did give me a lock of his hair.

I did kiss him in the dining room.

But when I left, he came running after and said he had something else for me. It was a letter. It was a letter in case he died. I was supposed to open it if the navy contacted his family, and inside it would talk about how much he loved and missed all of us, and how happy we had made him.

At least that’s what I imagine letters like this usually say. I wouldn’t know. I never opened Bas’s. When he gave me that envelope on the street, I told him the letter could only court bad luck. I told him that in order to prove how unnecessary it was, I was going to destroy it as soon as I got home.

And I did. I ripped it to pieces and threw it out with the trash.

So I’ll never know what Bas’s final, final words for me were. Sometimes I think they were to tell me he loved me. Sometimes I dream that I open the letter and inside it says, “I never forgave you for what you made me do.”

NINE

———

Thursday

It’s nice to see you socializing again, Hannie,” Papa says. My mother is gone this afternoon, a rare excursion into the outside world to visit her sister in the country. Because of the curfew, she’ll probably stay overnight, so it’s just Papa and me, alone. I came home from work to make him lunch, and now he’s reading in his chair while I’m sitting with Mirjam’s packet of school things, biding time until one afternoon delivery, and then I will go meet Judith and her cousin at the theater. Mr. Kreuk is running a funeral later; I’m hoping that he won’t notice if I don’t come back to my desk.

“Socializing?” I repeat after Papa, distracted.

“Out with friends, like last night. I can’t remember the last time you did that.”

He’s right. It’s been years. There used to be a group of us. Bas the ringleader. Elsbeth the brazen. Me, part of the inner circle but not quite as audacious, not as sparkling. Happy to bask in the glow. Other friends, moving like small moons around me and Bas and Elsbeth, the two other people I loved the best. Last night, all I could think about was how strange it was to be pulled into a resistance meeting. I didn’t think about how strange it was to be pulled again into a group of friends.

“Ollie’s not really a friend, Papa. He’s just—” I realize, belatedly, that any way I qualify the statement will only bring suspicion. “I suppose he is a friend. It’s nice to have someone to talk to.”

“You’re young. It would be nice to have someone to more than talk to.” He winks, and I toss a cushion at his head. “Now you abuse an invalid?”

I toss another one. “What would Mama think if she heard you encouraging me to stay out late with boys?”

“She never minded when you stayed out late with Bas. Though we always thought the two of you would—”

Papa realizes what he’s about to say and breaks off in midsentence. I should say something to end the silence, but I can’t find the words. Instead I stare into my lap and look at Mirjam’s paper at the top of the stack. “What are you reading?” Papa asks.

“Old letters and schoolwork,” I say, which is true, I just don’t mention that they’re not my old letters and schoolwork. “Should we turn on the radio?”

He nods eagerly; I knew the suggestion would distract him from more questions. Information and communication with the outside world—it’s so valuable. The Nazis already turned off most of the private telephone lines. We don’t have ours anymore, though people in some wealthier neighborhoods where sympathizers live still do. There’s a rumor that the Germans are going to demand we hand in our radios, too. Papa and I already pulled an old, broken one from a closet to turn in instead of our nice one.

As it is, we’re supposed to listen only to approved propaganda. It’s illicit to tune in to the BBC, which, along with underground newspapers, is our only source of real news now that the Dutch papers have been taken over. The Dutch government in exile broadcasts through that channel sometimes; we call it Radio Orange. Mama forbids the BBC entirely, terrified of getting caught, but Papa and I don’t mind it at a low volume, with all the windows closed and towels stuffed under the doors to keep sound from escaping. Papa listens to the words that the British newscasters say. My English isn’t as good as his, so I muddle through and he helps me later with anything I’ve missed.

The radio tuned to a droning hum, I go back to Mirjam’s belongings in my lap. The dates on the pages are all from the late summer or early fall, just weeks before she would have gone into hiding. Her papers all have high marks on them, and she kept a running tally of her grades compared to everyone else’s. She was a good student. Much better than I ever was. In addition to the schoolwork, she’s kept a few torn-out magazine pictures of fashionable dresses and grand houses.

The quiet hum of the radio has been overtaken by a rhythmic sawing sound. Papa is snoring in his chair. As I sort through the papers, another flutters out. This one is smaller than the others, and folded intricately into a star pattern. The folding is familiar—I once spent two days learning to fold my notes just this way, instead of paying attention in math. It was a popular way girls in my school passed notes; Elsbeth learned first and then taught the rest of us.

It takes me a minute to remember how to open it, but once I find the right corner to start with, the rest comes back easily. It’s the only paper written in casual printing rather than the formal cursive of a school assignment, and the handwriting is tiny. It looks like the sort of note Elsbeth and I used to pass, composed in secret behind our textbooks and handed off as we passed in the hallway.

Dear Elizabeth,

I’m sitting in math, and the teacher has this loose sole on his shoe, and every time he takes a step it makes the rudest noise you ever heard. It’s practically indecent, and everyone is laughing at it. I wish you were in this class. I think T noticed me today, a proper noticing, not just accidentally stepping on my foot, or handing me my pencil after I drop it next to his desk, or saying “Excuse me” when I run into him in the hallway. (Have I mentioned I’ve tried all these things, Elizabeth? Have I mentioned I have become so pathetic that I have resorted to standing near doors when I know he’s going to walk through them? Yes, darling, it is true. I am literally throwing myself in harm’s way so he will talk to me. I can’t believe that when we were little, he used to come and eat toast at my house after school and now I can’t even say two words to him.) But! Today was different. Today in literature class I stood up to give my presentation and I made a little joke, and T laughed, a genuine chuckle, and afterward he told me it was a funny joke. A funny joke! So I’m not as pathetic as I feared. (Or am I?)

I miss you, dearest duckie, and write back soon, sooner, soonest!

Love and Adoration,

Margaret

I read the letter again, and then once more, the familiar rhythms of friendship sparking out from the page.

Didn’t I tell Elsbeth about the first time I made Bas laugh in a note just like this one? How many notes did I once write, full of secrets and stories and folded into a perfect star? How many did I receive? Elsbeth gave me a box for them once, for the dozens of folded star-letters. It was an old cigar box that had been pasted over with colorful papers, and then shellacked with varnish: a just-because present. I asked her if she made it herself, and she laughed. “God, no. I’m not going to get my hands dirty like that. I just saw it and thought you’d like it, silly. To put notes in.” That was Elsbeth. Generous and careless, giving presents that never made you feel indebted for receiving them, because they were done so casually. “You should tell Bas that another boy gave it to you,” she said. “Make him jealous.”

Do I still have that box somewhere? Would I still recognize myself in those letters?

Here is the thing about my grief: It’s like a very messy room in a house where the electricity has gone out. My grief over Bas is the darkness. It’s the thing that’s most immediately wrong in the house. It’s the thing that you notice straight off. It covers everything else up. But if you could turn the lights back on, you would see there are lots of other things still wrong in the room. The dishes are dirty. There is mold in the sink. The rug is askew.

Elsbeth is my askew rug. Elsbeth is my messy room. Elsbeth is the grief I would allow myself to feel, if my emotions weren’t so covered in darkness.

Because Elsbeth isn’t dead. Elsbeth is living twenty minutes away, with a German soldier. She says she loves him. She probably does. I met him once. Rolf. He was handsome and tall; he had a friendly smile. He even said the right things, like how he knew all the boys wanted Elsbeth and he felt lucky to have her, how he worked for someone high up in the Gestapo and if I ever needed anything, I should let him know because a friend of Elsbeth’s was a friend of his. I shook his hand and wanted to throw up.

So right now, when I’m looking at these schoolgirl notes, it’s like the light in my messy room has been flicked on, just for a moment. I’m not distracted by Bas. I can see Elsbeth again.

This note is such an optimistic one, exactly like the ones we would have written long before the war, as we puzzled through who might love us and who didn’t, who ignored us and who didn’t.

Who are Elizabeth and Margaret? Did another student’s papers somehow get mixed in with Mirjam’s? The girls sound like good friends, placed in different homerooms, maybe in different grades like me and Elsbeth. I add it to the mental list of things I need to ask Mrs. Janssen and Judith’s cousin. What more have I learned about Mirjam since I first drew the imaginary picture of her almost forty-eight hours ago at Mrs. Janssen’s? She was popular with boys. She was a good student, a little hard on herself, competitive enough with her classmates to bother keeping track of their grades. She was spoiled, maybe? After all, her parents gave her a new blue coat when her old one ripped, and lots of families now would insist the old coat just be repaired, even if they were able to find such a nice new one. She is… dead? She’s alive?

She left a house that could not be left, where the back exit was sealed and the front door was monitored.

Mirjam. Where did you go?

TEN

———

It’s lucky, for Judith and her cousin to have an uncle who could help them get a place at the Schouwburg. Jews are hardly allowed to work anywhere anymore. Positions at the theater must be prized like the jobs at the Jewish hospital. I heard that those come with a special stamp on identification cards that allows Jews to be out past curfew, to not be deported. Lucky has become such a relative term, when the standards to meet it involve only not being treated like a criminal in your own home city.

The theater is white, with tall columns. When I was here last, with Bas’s family, a colorful banner hung from its face, advertising the holiday pantomime. Now when I bicycle up to it, the front of the theater is naked. Posted outside are two guards who halt me at the door and ask for my identification card. I don’t know if telling them that I’m here to meet Judith will get her into trouble, so instead I tell one that I’ve brought medicine for my neighbor, who was taken in last night’s roundup. I hold up my own bag as if there’s something important inside.

“I’ll only be a minute. My mother said you’d never let me in,” I improvise, “because she thinks it’s not in your power, and you’d have to ask your boss.”

They exchange glances with each other; one of them is about to refuse me—I can see it in his body language—so I lean in conspiratorially and lower my voice. “It’s just that her rash was really disgusting. I saw it myself.” I can only hope these two particular guards subscribe to the antigerm fanaticism that the Nazis are well known for. I put my hand to my stomach, as if even thinking about the rash makes me queasy. Finally one of the soldiers stands aside. “Thank you so much,” I tell him.

“Be quick,” he says, and I do my best to look purposeful while stifling my pride over talking my way past them. I’d never used that tactic before, and I’ll have to remember it.

The smell hits me first.

It’s sweat and urine and excrement and some other undefinable odor. It feels like a wall, extending to either side of me and over my head, and there’s no way to climb over it.

What has happened to this theater? The seats have been wrenched from the floor and they’re piled in stacks. The stage has no curtains, but the ropes that used to open them still hang from their pulleys, swaying and ghostlike in the middle of the stage. It’s dark, except for the emergency bulbs that glow like red eyes along the border of the theater. And people. Old women on thin straw mattresses that line the walls, which they must sleep on, because I don’t see anything else that could be used. Young women huddling next to suitcases. It’s unbearably hot.

On the other side of the door, just a few feet away, the door guards are talking about nothing in particular in cool, clean air while my stomach clenches and heaves as I struggle not to vomit right here in what used to be the lobby. Is this what my neighbors have been brought into? Where Mr. Bierman was taken, and everyone else who has disappeared?

“Please.”

I turn to face the older man speaking in a soft voice behind me. “Please,” he says again. “We’re not allowed to talk to the guards, but I saw you just come in, and—do you know, can I be sent to Westerbork? My wife and children were sent there yesterday. They say I’m supposed to be sent to Vught, but—I’ll do anything, I’ll give anything, if I can be sent to Westerbork instead.”

Before I can answer, another hand tugs on my sleeve, a woman who has overheard the conversation.

“Can you get a letter out?” she asks. “I need to send a note to my sister. I came with our mother, and she died in the room they’re using for sick people, and I just want my sister to know. Just a letter, please.”

“I can’t,” I begin, but I feel more people pressing in, more voices asking for help; it’s confusing and disorienting and everyone’s faces are dark and shadowed. “I can’t,” I start to say again, when another arm grabs me, this one roughly, and pulls me backward.

“What are you doing in here?” a voice hisses. Someone is holding my coat; I try to wrench myself away, but the hands don’t let go.

“Stop,” I start to scream. Before I can finish the word, a palm clamps over my mouth. “Hel—” I try again, when the hand slips.

“Shut up, Hanneke! It’s me.”

Judith. It’s just Judith. My brain registers the voice before my body does; my arms keep flailing, and it takes a moment before they stop. She half drags me back toward the door, flashing her identification card to the guards and depositing me outside in front of the theater. While she stands with her arms folded across her middle, I gag in the street, trying to rid my lungs of the stench inside, and my brain from the memory of all those people. A white square of cloth appears in front of me.

“Here.” Judith hands me her handkerchief. “Don’t vomit on the street.”

Already behind her, the two guards who let me in are peering around Judith to see what’s happened to the girl with the medicine. The handkerchief scratches against my lips. I wipe my mouth, forcing myself to stand. “I’m sorry.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I didn’t expect it to be like that,” I say finally.

“What did you expect it to be like? A hotel? A teahouse? Hordes of people are kept in there for days with almost no working toilets. Did you think some actors would come on the stage and do a pantomime?”

I don’t bother to answer. Anything I say will make me sound naive. I was naive. I knew it was a deportation center, but those words were abstract until I saw what they meant. All I can think about now is the sea of faces swimming in front of me, waiting and waiting in what used to be a beautiful theater.

I can believe all the rumors Ollie told me, about what might happen to the people who are taken from that place and never returned. I can believe there are postcards written by prisoners at work camps, who think they will be fine until they are dead. I can picture Mirjam Roodveldt’s girlish handwriting, being forced to compose one of those postcards.

“Hanneke?” Judith’s voice has lost a little of its harshness. “Are you okay?”

“I was only going in to find you and your cousin.” I cough out the words, choking on my disgust. “You told me to meet you here.”

“I told you to meet us outside the theater.” Judith jerks her head toward the ornate stone building across the street. “The theater’s nursery is on the other side of the road. Can you walk now?”

My senses are still swimming as I follow her across the street into the building. I try to banish everything I’ve just seen from my mind; it’s the only thing that will let me focus on the task at hand. My brain gobbles up the new information around me, as if each new thing it sees will help me forget an old thing in the theater.

No guards are posted in front of this building. It looks like a regular nursery. Indoors, too: When we walk into the foyer, a young girl in a white nurse’s cap paces back and forth with a sobbing toddler, trying to calm him. She gives me a funny glance; I don’t know if they’re used to getting strangers in here, and I must still be pale and sick-looking. But she smiles in recognition when she sees Judith behind me.

“Are you working here today? I didn’t think it was your shift.”

“I’m just visiting Mina. My friend is, too.”

Judith leads us to a room that looks like a traditional hospital nursery, bassinets filled with sleeping or fussing babies. One girl with her back to us is bent over a crib, but she stands when Judith calls her name. Mina is short and compact to Judith’s willowy height, but they have the same teeth and the same brilliant eyes. “Cousin.” She greets Judith with a kiss on the cheek. “I was just wondering where you were. Did you get—”

“Permission. Yes. They only ask for a name and address, for after.”

“We always do. But they have to understand that names might change, and we can’t promise to keep track.”

Judith nods, obviously understanding this code, which I assume is related to the fake ration cards they’re creating for Jewish families. She touches me on the shoulder. “I have things to do,” she says. “I’ll leave you with Mina and be back for you in an hour? If I can, I’ll see if my uncle can look at the records, to tell you if Mirjam has been brought through.”

Once she’s gone, Mina smiles. “I have work, too. I have to take baby Regina out for some fresh air. If you don’t mind coming with me, then I can answer questions while we walk. It would be nice to have some company. I never get company anymore, and I love the babies, but sometimes it would be nice to talk to people who can speak in syllables. Judith says you want to know about Mirjam?”

Mina has a way of talking so that sentences come out in a ripple, without pausing to take breaths. I have to adjust myself to get used to her bubbliness. How can she manage it, working across from the building she does?

“I knew Mirjam a little,” Mina continues. “I had a few classes with her. Here, could you get me one of those for Regina?” She nods toward a pile of washed blankets and gestures for me to help her wrap one of the sleeping babies in a pink flannel.

Eventually I manage to parcel Regina into a lumpy bundle, while Mina picks up a bag, presumably filled with diapers and supplies. “Would you carry this?” she asks. The strap digs into my shoulder. Who would have thought babies require so many accessories?

“There we go.” Mina tucks Regina into a baby carriage. “Nice and cozy, aren’t we?” She looks up at me and rolls her eyes. “I have three brothers. All younger. I was changing diapers when I was still in diapers. Should we walk?”

Mina leads me through the back exit, which leads to a small courtyard, and then through a gate belonging to a neighboring building. “Shortcut.” Mina winks, and finally we’re on a cobblestoned street.

A pair of older women smile when they see the baby carriage, and Mina smiles back. “Can we peek?” one woman asks, and Mina stops so they can coo at the sleeping baby. As soon as the woman tries to reach into the carriage, though, Mina swiftly starts walking again.

“I need to keep her moving,” she calls over her shoulder. “She didn’t sleep at all last night; she’ll wake up again unless I keep walking.”

“So,” she says to me after we’ve reached the end of the block, “tell me about yourself. How do you know Judith? Are you in university? What are you studying? Do you have a boyfriend?”

I pick through her questions and decide to start by answering the middle one. “I’m not in university. I have a job.”

Her face lights up at this news. “I want to have a job! I want to be a photographer and travel all over the world. I’ve already taken classes.”

She’s so… I search for the right word. Exuberant. Earnest and exuberant, like the world is full of possibilities.

“Can we talk about—” I cut myself off while Mina stops to adjust Regina’s blankets, and start talking again once we’re moving. “Can we talk about Mirjam?”

“What do you already know about her?”

I hesitate. “That she was smart. Top of the class. Maybe a little competitive.”

“Now, that’s an understatement. She was completely preoccupied with grades. I think it was her parents, though. They gave her rewards for good grades. On her own, I didn’t get the impression she would have cared.”

I suppress a smile. It shifts the perspective I have of the studious missing girl, but it sounds like me—like Mama and Papa telling me that if I only applied myself, they knew I was smarter than the middling grades I brought home. Somehow, the Roodveldts actually managed to get Mirjam to perform, though, while my parents eventually gave up.

“What did she care about?” I ask.

Mina purses her lips. “Domestic things, I guess? She would actually talk about things like china patterns, or about how many children she wanted to have, or how she would dress them. Things like that.”

She says this incredulously, like there’s something strange about domestic ambitions, but the description only makes me ache for Mirjam. I know what it’s like, to have modest, simple wishes, and then have even those taken away from you.

“Were you friends?”

Mina pauses. “The school wasn’t big, so you knew everyone in it. I invited her to my birthday last year because my parents made me invite all the girls. I can’t even remember if she came. I don’t think I’d say we were really friends. She was more popular than me.”

“Are there pictures from your party?”

“My camera was broken then. I got a brand-new one for my birthday, but the film I asked for was special and it hadn’t arrived yet. Ursie knew Mirjam better. Ursie and Zef, those were her better friends at school.”

“Where can I find Ursie and Zef?”

Mina looks at me curiously. “Gone. Ursie left school right before Mirjam, and Zef right after. I saw Ursie here at the Schouwburg, before her family’s transport.”

Mirjam’s entire class, disappeared one by one, all of them in hiding or taken through that theater. This is all completely insane, and every new piece of information only compounds the insanity. I’m trying to find a girl who vanished from a closed house. Who cannot be reported missing, because if the police found her, it would be worse for her than if they’d never gone looking at all. In which the last people to see her before she appeared at Mrs. Janssen’s are all dead. And in which her friends, the only living people who might be able to guess where she might have been likely to go, are now gone themselves.

“Was there a girl in your class named Elizabeth? Or Margaret? Even not in your year, but anywhere in the school?”

Mina frowns. “No, I don’t think so.”

“It’s just—” I shift aside the heavy bag Mina has given me, pulling the paper from my pocket. “In Mirjam’s things, I found this. It’s a letter to an Elizabeth from a Margaret. I’m trying to figure out who it belongs to or how it got there.”

Mina leans over, scans the letter, and laughs.

“What?”

“It’s Amalia,” she says.

“Who is?”

“Mirjam’s best friend. Mirjam knew her from her other school, before all the Jews were forced to come to the Lyceum. She was always writing her notes in class. A few times she got in trouble and had to read them out loud.

“But her name was Amalia? Not Elizabeth?”

“Mirjam said they liked to joke that they were like sisters. And royalty. To be honest—and I feel badly saying this—she was a little irritating about it.”

“Margaret and Elizabeth. The English princesses.” The letter makes sense now. Mirjam must have written it to Amalia in class one day, but was forced into hiding before she could send it.

“Do you know where Amalia lives? Or her last name? Do you know how I can find her?”

Mina bends over to adjust the baby’s blankets again. “I don’t know her last name,” Mina says. “And I don’t think she lives in Amsterdam anymore. She wasn’t Jewish. Mirjam said Amalia’s parents were going to send her out of the city.”

“Where?” I ask.

Mina shrugs. “Somewhere near Den Haag? Not Scheveningen, where the prison is, but what’s the littler beach?”

“Kijkduin?” I guess.

“That’s right. Mirjam showed us a postcard once of Amalia’s aunt’s hotel—some sea-green monstrosity she owned in Kijkduin. Let me see the letter again.”

She strains her neck to read the tiny writing as we bump along the sidewalk. “Hmm. T might be—” She breaks off, bending over to dislodge a pebble from the wheel.

“You know who T is? A boy Mirjam might have liked?”

“It might be Tobias?”

Tobias. Tobias. “Was he Mirjam’s boyfriend?”

“Tobias Rosen was everyone’s boyfriend, in our dreams. The handsomest boy in school. Last week he smiled at me, and I’m still half blind from the glow.”

“Last week?” My ears prick up. “He’s still around, then?”

“Or was until a few days ago, at least. He’s been out, but I heard he was just sick. His father is a dentist; that’s about all I know about him personally. He was also too popular.”

“Do you think he liked Mirjam back?”

“Someone did send Mirjam flowers on her birthday. The florist brought them to the school yard before class, and Mirjam had to carry them into the building. She was the deepest shade of pink. The flowers didn’t have a card on them, but all of us were teasing her about them except for Tobias. He was staring straight at his desk. If he comes back to school, do you want me to ask him for you?”

“Ask him if he’ll meet with me. That would be even better.”

“All right. Maybe I could talk to other classmates, too. It would be nice if you could come back and visit sometime. I don’t have very many friends left.” She peers at me through dark lashes. “Do you think you could? Oh wait!”

She stops the carriage so abruptly I nearly trip over it.

“We’re here,” she says. I haven’t been paying attention to our route, but we’ve walked a good distance, and now we’re near Amsterdam Centraal, the main train station.

“We’re here?” I repeat. “What are we here for? I thought we were just going for a walk.”

“My delivery.”

Oh. Damn. I should have paid more attention to her conversation with Judith. Mina has brought me along to one of her own exchanges. That’s why the bag she gave me is so heavy. The blankets must be covering what she’s really transporting: documents, ration cards, maybe even a pile of money to pay off an inside man. I must be carrying a modest fortune in illegal papers. I force myself to stay calm.

“Well, not quite here.” Mina cranes her head to the sky, orienting herself. “We’re supposed to meet by the weather vane.” There are two clock towers on Amsterdam Centraal. One of them is a real clock; the other looks like a clock but is really a weather vane, and the hands swing in the wind. Mina pushes the baby carriage to the vane, scanning the crowd. “There she is.” She raises her hand to someone halfway across the plaza.

The woman approaching is well dressed, neat blond hair and an expensive-looking suit. Mina’s contact. She reminds me a little of Mrs. de Vries. “Am I late?” she asks.

“No, no,” Mina tells her. “You’re right on time.”

“I didn’t bring anything. Was I supposed to bring something? I think someone told me—”

“You didn’t need to bring anything. I was happy to help you out. Are you ready?”

The woman nods and then holds out her arms. I scan the surrounding crowd to make sure no one is watching, then unsling the bag and begin to pass it to Mina to remove whatever she needs for the lady. Mina ignores my outstretched arm, bending over the baby carriage and scooping up Regina in one practiced, fluid motion.

“Her name is Regina,” Mina says. And instead of taking the bag from me, Mina kisses Regina on her forehead, whispers something I can’t hear, and hands the blond woman the baby.

“Oh!” The woman pulls back the blanket, touching the tip of Regina’s nose. “Such a pretty name. Do I keep it? My husband always said if we had a daughter, he wanted to name her after his mother.”

Mina swallows. “You have a daughter now,” she says finally. “So you’ll take care of her the best way you see fit. Do you have a car waiting?”

“Around the corner.”

“So you’re all set.”

The woman looks like she wants to ask more questions, but instead she walks back into the milling crowd. Mina watches until she disappears.

ELEVEN

———

That was the delivery?” I whisper. “That was the delivery you had to make?” Mina nods, and starts to walk away, back in the direction we’ve come. “Wait. That was—Mina, what just happened?”

She stops, looking uncertain as she takes the bag from my shoulder and sets it in the carriage. “We never do it unless we have permission from the parents. Some of them refuse to be separated. We only hide the ones whose families believe they’ll be safer away. I thought you knew.”

That was the dialogue I overheard earlier, between Judith and Mina. It wasn’t a code, and had nothing to do with people receiving false papers containing names different from the ones they were born with. Mina was warning Judith that parents who gave up their children might not be able to find them again, after the war.

“How many?” Mina is only fifteen, and her head barely reaches my shoulder. The idea that she does this regularly, in broad daylight… “How many children have you placed?”

“Just me? More than a hundred. Judith works on the inside of the Schouwburg, tracking down families and getting permission. It’s easier to hide a baby than an adult, since people don’t need papers until they’re fourteen. We have an inside person in the theater who alters the records to make it look like the children never arrived at the crèche.”

Baby Regina wasn’t a foil, hiding the illicit delivery. Baby Regina was the illicit delivery.

Mina has done this more than a hundred times. A hundred shootable offenses, and then she gets up the next day and does it again, and still she talks about school and boyfriends and what she wants to do after the war. One time, out of that hundred, I helped her.

Mina gives me a sidelong glance. “I thought you knew,” she says again. “Judith didn’t tell you?”

“Judith didn’t tell me.”

“Are you mad?”

I don’t know what I am. This delivery is just one in the long line of involvements I didn’t mean to have. But that theater was so dark, and Regina was so young, and we can do so little, all of us. What am I supposed to say? That I wish we had left Regina in the nursery to be deported? What am I supposed to believe—that Mirjam alone is worth taking risks to save, just because she was the one I was asked to find? That now that I’ve seen what I’ve seen in the deportation center, I’ll be able to forget it?

“I don’t know what I feel,” I begin. “I feel—”

“Let me see the baby!”

The voice belongs to a man, speaking in giddy Dutch with a heavy German accent.

“Good afternoon, young ladies! It’s a beautiful day in a beautiful city!”

I know this soldier. Not him in particular, but this type. This is the type of soldier who tries to learn Dutch and gives children pieces of candy. Who is kind, which is the most dangerous trait of all. The kind ones recognize, somewhere deep inside their starched uniforms, that there is something perverse about what they’re doing. First they try befriending us. Then the guilt creeps up on them, and they work twice as hard to convince themselves that we’re scum.

“Keep walking,” I mutter to Mina. He doesn’t know for sure that we’ve seen him; he might not even be talking to us.

“Ladies!” he calls out again. “Let me see the baby! I just learned that my wife had our daughter! Let me see what I’m getting myself into!”

He walks excitedly toward us. He can’t be allowed to see that there’s no baby in the carriage. He’ll ask to see our papers. He’ll take us both away. Mina will lead back to baby Regina. The whole crèche will be investigated. I usually have to worry only about myself, but when you work in a system, you are responsible for everyone’s safety.

Over to my left, Mina smoothly adjusts her scarf. It looks like she’s simply tightening it against the chill, but I can see she’s really shifting it so it covers the Star of David on her coat. I mentally piece together a story: The baby is sick, and the soldier mustn’t get too close or he’ll catch the illness. That’s what I’ll say. Something repugnant, something with vomit.

Beside me, Mina is, improbably, smiling. “Congratulations!” she calls in German as he approaches. She has to realize how disastrous it would be, to call attention to workers from the crèche pushing around empty baby carriages. But when the soldier approaches, she reaches in the carriage and begins to open the bag. What does she have in there? A gun? False papers? Why haven’t I run yet?

Instead, the bag is full of—I look twice to make sure I’m not imagining things—wood. Stubby tree branches, splintery scrap boards, even pieces of wadded-up paper that look like garbage.

“Unfortunately, we don’t have a baby for you to hold,” Mina apologizes. “Only kindling. We didn’t have enough in rations; we’ve just come from scavenging. But congratulations.”

“Too bad.” He looks genuinely disappointed.

We both watch the soldier walk away, hearing the congratulations of other passersby who overheard the exchange. I don’t speak until I’m sure he’s out of earshot.

“I carried that bag the entire time,” I say to Mina.

“You did.”

“Do you know how heavy it was?”

“I’ve carried it myself, a dozen times. I’ve been carrying around the same kindling for months. But it works. If I’m ever stopped, I just look like any other Dutch citizen, collecting firewood. It’s not illegal to scavenge for wood scraps.”

“Why?”

“Why do we do it? So I have an excuse to be pushing around an empty buggy with no baby in it.”

“But then why bring the carriage at all?” I ask. “Why not just carry the baby to the station?”

“Because.”

“Because?”

Mina’s eyes flit down to the carriage and then immediately back up again, like she didn’t want me to notice the movement. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s get back,” she says.

“Mina, is something else in that carriage?” I ask.

“No. Why would you think that?”

I don’t believe her. I keep thinking of how many times she stopped to adjust Regina’s blanket on the walk here. How much could the blanket have moved? Is that really what she was doing?

Before she can stop me, I lean into the carriage, feeling under the firewood bag with my hands. At the front, nestled along one of the sides, I feel something hard and rectangular beneath a patch of fabric. The patch seems to be some kind of pocket, but I can’t immediately figure out how to open it. I start to pull.

“Don’t!” Mina begs me. Her cheerfulness has finally disappeared.

“What is it?”

“Please don’t. I’ll tell you everything, but if you take it out here, you could get us killed.”

I stop. Get us killed? This, coming from a girl who just smuggled a Jewish baby through the occupied streets of Amsterdam? “What is ‘everything’? Tell me now. What’s inside the carriage? Weapons? Explosives?”

She looks miserable. “A camera.”

“A camera?”

Mina lowers her voice. “I read about some photographers in an underground paper. They take pictures of the occupation. They document it, so when the war is over, the Germans can’t lie about what they did here.”

“It’s a group? And you’re part of it?”

Mina blushes. “No, they’re all professionals. But a lot of the photographers are women. They can hide cameras in their handbags or grocery bags and take pictures without anyone realizing what they’re doing. That’s what gave me the idea.”

“Instead of a handbag, you used a baby carriage,” I say. “The lens?”

“I cut a tiny hole for the lens in the front. You can’t see it unless you’re really looking. Now every time I take a baby for a walk, I can take secret photos. I have the whole war on my camera, and on rolls of film.”

“What kinds of secret pictures?”

“Razzias. Soldiers. People being herded into the theater. People being taken from their homes while their neighbors do nothing to help them.

“But I have good things, too,” she continues. “Photographs of the resistance, so people will know that some of us fought back. Photographs of crawl spaces where onderduikers are hiding. And every child from the theater—I take photographs of them, to help them reunite with their families after the war.”

“How many photographs do you have?” This is a whole section of the resistance that I’d never even heard of. The Nazis have forbidden us from photographing them, and even if most of us wanted to, film is hard to come by. It’s one of the harder things for me to track down on the black market.

“Hundreds,” Mina says. “Camera film is all I’ve wanted for every birthday since I was eight. I had a lot saved up.”

“What does Judith think of what you’re doing?”

Mina’s face darkens. “She doesn’t know. And don’t tell her, please. She and Ollie and everyone, they wouldn’t understand. Because it’s taking risks without actively saving as many lives as possible. But I still think it’s important. Even if it doesn’t make sense. It just feels like it’s the way I’m supposed to be helping.”

I don’t respond. I understand something being important to you even when it doesn’t fully make sense, even when others would think you were crazy. That’s been every moment for me since I agreed to help Mrs. Janssen. Even though I understand what she’s feeling, is a collection of photographs the same as what I’m doing? Those photographs would threaten everyone’s safety. “I’ll think about it,” I say finally. “I won’t tell her yet.”

I wouldn’t even know what to say. I watched a whole afternoon unfold under my nose, and I misread everything that was happening, from start to finish. All the clues were in front of me, but I still didn’t see them.

———

Judith is waiting for us back at the crèche.

“Did everything go all right?”

“It was fine,” Mina assures her. “The host family are good people.”

“Good enough, at least.” Judith sighs. She rolls her head and rubs the back of her neck with one hand. She must be exhausted, working at the school from the early morning and then coming here when she’s finished. She looks at me.

“I have news for you.” She waits until Mina has gone back in the nursery and checks to make sure the other attendants are not within hearing distance. “I talked to my contact. He went through the records for the past three days. According to the files, nobody named Mirjam Roodveldt has passed through the theater.”

“Is your contact sure?”

She grimaces. “Nazis insist on excellent records. Everybody who comes through has papers.”

“Thank you. Thank you for checking.”

“You don’t have to thank me. And, Hanneke, I said she hadn’t come through yet. But it’s only a matter of time.”

TWELVE

———

When I get home, Ollie is waiting on the doorstep of my building. We haven’t spoken since last night, the night with the drunk soldiers. This is what I’m going to call it in my mind. “The night with the drunk soldiers” is a much easier way to remember it than as “the night with the desperate kiss.”

After the kiss, the soldier laughed, clapping both of us on the back in congratulations before moving along with his friend. Ollie and I remained trembling in place, watching their backs until they turned out of the alley. Then both of us, following the same, silent cue, started walking again, more cautiously this time, in case something else came around the corner.

We didn’t discuss any of it. It’s just something that happened, like things happen now, like things will probably happen again. When we reached the front stoop, the black curtains above us fluttered, meaning my parents were watching out our window, waiting to see if I got home.

Now Ollie rises from my steps to greet me. “I brought back your mother’s bicycle,” he says. She’d lent it to him last night so he could make it back to his apartment as quickly as possible; he swore he knew a route that soldiers didn’t often patrol. “And I saw Judith while you were out with Mina. I didn’t know they were going to take you along. I wish they hadn’t. It’s too soon, to involve you in a drop-off without your consent.”

I raise my eyebrows. “I forgot. You’re the only one who’s allowed to involve me in resistance activities without my consent?”

Pink spreads from his cheeks to his ears. “I’ve been thinking about that. How maybe I should have warned you. I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry. That was one thing Bas was never very good at. It wasn’t even that he hated to apologize. It was more that he hated to stop fighting. There was nothing he loved more than a debate, dragging me into silly arguments, pushing me to passionately defend positions I didn’t really care about.

“What did you think about all of it?” he asks.

“I’m still thinking about all of it.” For a minute I consider telling him more, but I don’t think I have the words yet, for everything going through my brain.

“I see,” Ollie says.

“Judith and Mina are very brave.”

“You could be brave, too. Just think about it. Come to our next meeting.”

I look away. “Did you only come by to return the bicycle, or did you want to come inside?”

He folds his arms in front of his chest and shifts his feet. I wonder if he feels as embarrassed about what happened last night as I do. “All right,” he agrees, surprising me. “I won’t stay long, though. It’s my turn to make dinner; I can’t leave Willem hungry.”

Upstairs he leaves his coat on until I gesture for him to take it off and hang it in the coat closet. He’s wearing his architect’s uniform of rolled-up shirtsleeves, smudged around the cuffs. My father has left a note on the table telling me that some neighbors took pity on him with Mama out of town, and invited him for dinner. I wish I’d known the house was empty before I asked Ollie up.

“Tea?” I quickly add, “It’s not real.”

“No, thank you.”

I was already heading to the kitchen when he declined, and now I pause, unsure, in the middle of the room. If he’s refusing tea, then what are we supposed to make forced conversation over?

Ollie paces around the apartment, looking at my father’s books, craning closer to see the titles but not removing any of them from the shelves. “I used to have this one.” He points to a collection of essays, mine, out of place among Papa’s foreign dictionaries. “I don’t know where my copy went.”

“I think that probably is your copy. Bas gave it to me.”

“Probably to impress you. I don’t think he read it himself.”

“I heard the German army isn’t doing well in Stalingrad,” I say, quietly so the neighbors won’t hear, my contribution to this awkward dialogue. “On the BBC.”

“You speak English?”

“Some. Papa’s teaching me.”

And then we’ve run out of conversation again, and it’s so strange the way an ill-timed kiss can make someone feel like a stranger. “Ollie. About last night.” He doesn’t say anything, and so I keep talking, as if I think he doesn’t remember when we kissed for the amusement of drunken soldiers in the street. “With the soldiers. What we did. When we…”

“You did a good job with the soldiers. You hide from them better than I do.”

He shrugs. “It’s a skill with practical applications.”

“Do you get tired of the acting and pretending?” I ask.

“Not if it keeps me alive.”

I’m relieved by the matter-of-fact way he dismisses the incident, but also annoyed. It makes me feel like I’m a girl who made too much of a kiss that meant nothing.

“Did Mina help you with Mirjam?” Ollie asks, changing the subject like a gentleman.

“I need to find a boy named Tobias. His father is a dentist. I’m going to start visiting practices tomorrow.” Ollie nods but doesn’t say anything. “I feel like I’m racing against an alarm clock, but I don’t even know when it’s set for,” I confess. “For everything I figure out, there’s another problem to solve. I feel like I’m running out of time.”

“We all are,” Ollie says. “For us, for our little group, for the whole resistance—this war is a race against how many people we can save, and whether we can do it faster than the Nazis can take them.”

“If Mirjam ends up in the Hollandsche Schouwburg, she’ll never get out. I just know it. It smells like—” I start to say uitwerpselen, but realize that excrement is not a strong-enough word.

“Like what?”

“Never mind.”

Ollie pauses in front of a family photograph tucked on one of the shelves: the three of us on vacation in the country, Mama and I on either side of Papa, each with a hand on his shoulder. You can’t see from the photograph how red my nose got that day from the sun, but I remember it. It burned, and the skin peeled for days afterward. “That dress looks so familiar,” he says, pointing to the photograph. “Why would I remember that dress?”

The dress is gingham with buttons at the collar. I look at it and feel my face turn red. I know exactly why he remembers it. “I don’t know,” I lie. He picks up the photograph to look more closely, and when he does, the little wrinkle on his forehead is so familiar it takes my breath away. “You look like him,” I blurt out. “You look like Bas.”

He winces, almost imperceptibly, before answering. “Not really.”

“In this light you do,” I insist. “In the light of my apartment you look like him.”

“Maybe your family should trade apartments with mine. My parents would probably pay a lot of money for that light.” His voice is somewhat bitter, but mostly sad. “They just miss him so much. We all do. That was why—” He breaks off.

“Why what?”

He sighs. “When I came here the first night, I was hoping I could get you to join the resistance. And I was making sure you weren’t working for the NSB, putting Judith in danger. But I was also just worried about you. When Judith told me what you said about Bas, I just felt so sorry for you. I thought you might be really… damaged.”

“Damaged,” I repeat, and it doesn’t hurt to hear him say that. It’s almost a relief, to have someone else speculate over the things I think privately

“But it’s normal to miss him,” Ollie says. “Pia and I talk about him all the time. Him and his obnoxious jokes, his laugh, what he would have become.”

The apartment seems very still all of a sudden; I lean forward to hear every word coming out of Ollie’s mouth. “What would he become?” I whisper.

“An attorney. And then a politician. City-level. He’d only want to hold offices where he could meet all his constituents. He’d sponsor socials and dances. He’d love his family.” Ollie’s eyes are wet, and he’s looking at me. My throat is tight. It would be so easy for us to grieve together.

“The dress is from that day,” I whisper. “That’s why you remember it. I was wearing it that day.”

That day. I don’t need to say any more than that. Ollie puts his hand to his stomach, like I’ve punched him there. The dress is from the day we found out about Bas. Pia came to tell me. I ran to the Van de Kamps’ home, and Mrs. Van de Kamp slapped me, hard, across the face, and Ollie stood there in the middle of their sitting room like if he moved the world would collapse. I went home, and tears poured down my face for hours and hours while Mama stroked my back, until they finally stopped coming because I was all dried up inside, and that was the last time that I cried.

“Oh,” Ollie says. “I didn’t remember.” “I’m going to make tea,” I say. “You don’t have to have any if you don’t want.”

Ollie follows me into the kitchen. He stands behind me—I can feel his eyes follow my movements. My hands are shaking when I reach for the kettle, and he steadies it for me, helping me place it on the burner.

“The Hollandsche Schouwburg,” he says finally.

“What about it?”

“It smells like death.” Ollie finishes the sentence I started earlier but couldn’t complete. “That’s what it smells like in there. Death and fear.”

Fear. That’s right. That was the odor I couldn’t place before. That’s the smell of my beautiful, breaking country.

———

I’ve been leaving something out, shielding myself. Before, all those times, when I remembered the tissue with my tears on it after Bas told me he was joining the military.

I don’t like to remember that they were tears of pride.

The Netherlands tried to remain neutral. We wanted to be like Sweden, allowed to be left alone. Hitler said he would. Up until the day he invaded our country, he said he would leave us alone.

I was the one who said that joining the military would be a symbolic stand, anyway, against the Nazis.

I was the one, all along, who had been saying how the Germans shouldn’t be allowed to just do whatever they wanted, to conquer country after country.

I was the one who accompanied Bas to the navy office, and watched while he enlisted. The officer there kept asking if he was sure. The draft didn’t begin until men were eighteen, the officer said. In the army, they didn’t even accept volunteers younger than that. Why didn’t Bas go home, the officer suggested, and wait a year in case he changed his mind.

I was the one who told the officer that Bas had come to the navy so he didn’t have to wait in order to be brave. I talked that officer into signing him up.

Bas wouldn’t have joined if he didn’t think it would make me happy.

And it did make me happy. Until it made me sad.

I thought I knew so much then. I thought the world was so blackand-white. Hitler was bad, and so we should stand up to him. The Nazis were immoral, and so they would eventually lose. If I had truly paid attention, I might have realized that our tiny country had absolutely no hope of defending itself, not when bigger countries like Poland had already fallen. I should have guessed that when Hitler told our country in a radio address that he had no plans to invade and we had nothing to fear that it meant his soldiers were already packing their parachutes and we had everything to fear. Joining the military wasn’t a symbolic statement. It was a fool’s errand.

So that’s why I hadn’t talked to Ollie in more than two years. That’s why I dream of Bas coming to me, angry that I never read his letter. That’s how I learned that being brave is sometimes the most dangerous thing to be, that it’s a trait to be used sparingly. That’s why, if I’m being honest with myself, I’ve become obsessed with finding Mirjam. Because it seems like a fair and right exchange: saving one life after destroying another.

I’m to blame for Bas’s death. Bas was stupid to love me. I only got him killed. It was my fault.

THIRTEEN

———

Fifty-two hours. I learned of Mirjam Roodveldt’s disappearance fifty-two hours ago. Two sleepless nights. Three encounters with German soldiers. One rescued baby. One still-missing girl. I haven’t seen Mrs. Janssen since I first agreed to help, so I bicycle to her house as soon as Ollie leaves, in the twilight before curfew, to tell her everything that has happened. She installs me at the kitchen table immediately, producing more real coffee and a plate of small croissants. When I bite into one, my mouth fills with almond paste. Banketstaaf, my favorite. Mrs. Janssen remembered from last time and had them waiting.

“I thought of a few more things also,” she says after I sketch out what I’ve learned so far. “About Mirjam. I’m sure they’re not helpful; they’re just things I keep thinking about.” She produces a piece of paper, squinting. “Number one: You said it would be dangerous to go to the neighbors, but Mirjam once mentioned a nice maintenance man in her building. Maybe you could talk to him? Number two: She liked the cinema a lot. She knew all the stars. Are there movie houses open still? You could try seeing if anyone had seen her there. Number three: She was a quiet girl, Hanneke. She didn’t like talking about her family; it made her too sad. She wasn’t afraid to ask about my family, though. Even Jan. Some people are afraid to ask about him, but Mirjam asked me lots of questions. I would come in to bring her a cup of tea, and we would talk and talk until it was late. And she was polite. She hated beets, but she never complained about eating them, not once. She never complained at all.”

Mrs. Janssen looks up at me. “Should I go on?”

“No. No, that was very helpful.”

So much happened today: the hidden camera, and Ollie, and the horrible red glow of the barren stage at the theater. I almost haven’t had time to work through how it all made me feel. And when I do think about it now, I feel ashamed.

Because when I first told Mrs. Janssen that I would find Mirjam, I had been viewing her as a discrete puzzle that I could try to solve. A way that I could put order back in my corner of the world. A way that I could take revenge on the Nazi system—a missing girl, like a missing pack of cigarettes. A way of finding the person I used to be. But in that horrible theater, and now in Mrs. Janssen’s kitchen listening to her talk about Mirjam uncomplainingly eating beets, I am finally thinking of her as what I know she has been all along: a life, a scared girl, one of many.

“Should I burn this paper now?” Mrs. Janssen asks, holding up the notes she just read from.

I hesitate and then nod. “Yes, probably.”

“All right.”

She searches for the matches near the stove but doesn’t seem to see them, even though they’re less than a foot from her hand.

“Mrs. Janssen, where are your glasses?”

Her fingers fly up to her nose, where two deep marks are still indented on the bridge. “Oh. I dropped them. Behind the armoire.”

“When?”

“The morning after you left.”

“That was a couple of days ago.”

“I know where everything is in this house, for the most part.”

I feel nauseated with this thought of her, bumping around the house with her cane, half blind, ordering almond pastries on the chance that I’ll come over to eat them, wishing that she still had someone to ask about her son. She’s so alone now.

I brush the crumbs off my fingers. “Take me to the armoire. I’ll get your glasses.”

She leads me through the house to her bedroom, talking. “I’m just getting used to living alone. The boys or Hendrik would have helped me with my glasses. And then Mirjam, she would have. There’s just always been someone around to help me. You know, I used to be a career girl, like you. Forty years ago, when almost no women worked, I met Hendrik because he hired me to be his shop assistant. I thought I was so independent, but then my life became about caring for other people, and now I don’t want to be alone. I never would have thought.”

Mrs. Janssen’s armoire looks clunky and heavy, made of oak. I won’t be able to move it on my own. Underneath, I can see Mrs. Janssen’s glasses, but the space is too slim for my arm to squeeze through

“I was going to ask Christoffel, the next time he came,” she offers. “It should be tomorrow.”

“We don’t need Christoffel. Do you have a long rod?” I ask. “Something very thin, maybe for closing the drapes?”

After several minutes of us both searching for something, Mrs. Janssen finally disappears into her back garden and returns with a flat wooden stake, slightly dirty at the bottom, and a seed packet affixed to the top depicting beets. “Will this work?”

I use the rod to push Mrs. Janssen’s glasses out the other side. She thanks me profusely while dusting them off, and then adjusts them across her nose, and a minute later we’re sitting back at the table.

“It could be that all this means nothing,” I tell her, “but I do have a few names. People who might have known Mirjam well. It’s all far-fetched, but did Mirjam ever talk about her friend Amalia?”

She purses her lips. “I don’t think so.”

“Ursie? Zef?”

“Ursie, maybe? But I could be confusing her with my seamstress. Her name is Ursie, too.”

I’ve saved the most promising for last. “Tobias? He might have been her boyfriend?”

“She did talk about a boy she liked, but I don’t remember.… Let me think.”

It seems strange, to think of Mirjam talking about a boy while she was in hiding, mourning her family and fearing for her life. But I suppose love doesn’t stop, even in wars. There’s only so much time a day that you can spend being terrified of something before your instinct to feel natural human emotions would kick in.

“Oh!” A light has gone on in Mrs. Janssen’s eyes. She reaches for her cane, scooting her chair back from the table. “I’ve just remembered something.”

“What? What is it?”

She stands and goes to the pantry. I hear rustling and the sounds of jars clanking, and when she returns, she’s carrying several jars of food.

“I’m not hungry,” I say, confused, but Mrs. Janssen shakes her head; she’s brought the jars over for a different reason.

“The day before Mirjam disappeared, I asked her if she would help me by wiping down the dusty jars in the pantry,” Mrs. Janssen explains. “I had to let go the woman who used to clean for me because I worried she’d hear Mirjam. Anyway, Mirjam had gotten most of the way done when my neighbor stopped by, so Mirjam stopped dusting and went to hide. This is what the ones she finished look like.” Mrs. Janssen pushes forward a jar that is wiped down and smooth. “Now look at these.”

At first, they appear the same as the ones Mirjam finished dusting. But when the light in the room shifts, something looks different. Someone has drawn a design in the dust, with an index finger probably—it reminds me of the designs I used to make on the windows before I cleaned them.

Mrs. Janssen rotates two of the jars, so I can see them right side up. The dust drawing on the first jar is an M. The second one is a T.

“I noticed them yesterday and thought they were just doodles,” Mrs. Janssen says. “But they’re not. They’re M and T.”

“Mirjam and Tobias,” I say

“Do you think it means something?”

Do I think it means something? Something like Mirjam running away from a safe place to try to find a boy she liked? Something like Mirjam risking her life for a relationship whose only evidence so far is a cryptic note, a dusty trail on jar lids, and some flowers Mina says Mirjam once received at school? It would seem crazy to rational people. But isn’t this something like I would have done? Even if I hadn’t seen Bas in months, wouldn’t I still be thinking of him every day, mentally tracing his name on everything I saw? Isn’t that what I’m doing now still?

Isn’t love the opposite of rational?

Mrs. Janssen polishes her eyeglasses again while she waits for me to answer, rubbing off dust particles they picked up on the floor, murmuring something about the garden stake.

“Hmm?” I ask her absentmindedly.

“I was thinking I should keep the garden stake nearby in the house. The one you used to get my glasses? It could be useful for when I need to reach in small spaces.”

I sit up, a lightning bolt down my spine.

“What did you say?”

“I’m sorry. You were trying to concentrate.”

“No, no. You’re helping,” I tell her. “This stake was in your back garden?”

“Yes. I have a little plot of vegetables. Not now, obviously; it’s winter. But in the summer. Why?”

“I need to see the back door again.”

“Why?”

I brush past her, down the dim, narrow hallway to the back door. It’s just as I remembered from last time: When it’s not latched properly, there’s a large, gaping crack of air, and the door blows open. The latch is heavy and black and looks to be made of iron. What I’m thinking could work—I’m sure of it. Theoretically, at least. Experimentally, I lift the latch up and let go. It falls back down, missing the eye and failing to lock. The same thing happens the next time. This is why she thought it would be impossible to lock the door behind you. The latch wouldn’t naturally fall into place.

Mrs. Janssen is getting impatient behind me. “I don’t understand,” she says finally.

“Shhh.” I lift the lock again.

I’m about to decide I must have been wrong. Then, on the fourth try of letting go, the latch naturally closes with a satisfying click.

I whirl around to see if Mrs. Janssen noticed. “See? Did you see that?”

“But it doesn’t matter if you get it to close on its own,” she protests. “You’re standing right in front of it. Mirjam couldn’t do that from the other side of a locked door.”

“Hand me the garden stake. I’m going outside for a minute.” Mrs. Janssen’s vegetable plot is just a small square of frozen dirt. In the dead of winter, nothing is growing, but stakes with seed packets affixed to them stick out of the ground, labeling herbs and vegetables. There’s a small hole missing where the beet stake should go. “Mrs. Janssen?” I call through the closed door. “Watch out, all right? I’m going to poke this through the door.”

Jabbing upward, I use the vegetable stake to poke around until I feel it—the iron latch inside the door—and I try to use the stake to swing the latch up into place. The first time, it swings back down with a thud. But on the fifth try, I manage to swing the latch up at exactly the right angle, so that when it comes down again, it clicks into place with a heavy noise.

I’ve locked an unlockable door from the outside.

Mrs. Janssen opens the door, staring at me as I stand in her back garden with her dirty garden stake, the one I’ve just used to do what she thought was impossible. “How did you think to do that?”

“Girls in love will do desperate and creative things.”

Today has been a very long day, but I have solved two things. First, I have learned the identity of the T in Mirjam’s letter. Second: I still don’t know where Mirjam is, but at least I know she didn’t walk through walls to get there.

FOURTEEN

———

Friday

Tobias still hasn’t been in school. That’s what Mina tells me, when I visit her at the crèche the next afternoon.

“Sick?” I ask. “Or gone? Does anyone know?”

She doesn’t know anything, just that he hasn’t been in school, which could mean he has a cough, or it could mean he’s gone into hiding, or it could mean he’s dead. It could mean Mirjam is already dead, too. After yesterday afternoon at Mrs. Janssen’s, I was feeling so optimistic. But now I’ve spent the morning visiting dentist after dentist, looking for Tobias or his father with no luck. How long do I keep looking for Mirjam? She’s been gone for four days. As more time passes, any trail leading to her will only run colder. At what point does it grow so cold that I accept that Mirjam has either been killed or slipped so deep into the cracks of the underground that we will never see her again? Not yet. I’m not to that point yet. But when? Will I be able to tell that I’m there? Will I be able to walk away?

She’s not dead, I tell myself.

After I’ve been at the crèche only a few minutes, Judith calls to discuss business with Mina.

“I’ve saved up two pounds of ersatz coffee,” Mina tells her on the telephone. “I was thinking of having a little party, if you know of any friends who are free this evening.”

“Everyone I know is in the mood for tea these days,” I hear Judith say on the other end of the line. “Nobody wants coffee.”

Mina explained the telephone code to me already. Tea is light-complexioned children, who look more ethnically Dutch, and coffee is those with darker features. Families want blond toddlers, whose presence can easily be explained away.

I should go, I mouth finally. I have time to visit one more dentist.

Mina cups her hand over the phone receiver. “Judith is telling me there’s a gathering at Leo’s tonight. She wants me to invite you.”

“I’ll think about it,” I say. And I will. I have been. I know they need my help, but I need to find Mirjam first.

“I wish I could go. I would if I were older,” Mina says.

“Maybe.”

“She says maybe,” Mina tells Judith. “I know, I know, but that’s all she’ll say.” I can imagine what Judith is thinking on the other end of the line: that she and Mina are Jewish, with Jewish names and Stars of David sewn onto their clothes, and they still risk their lives every day. I am blondhaired and green-eyed with pristine papers, and I still haven’t agreed to help them. She’ll think that, and it’s true, because everyone is running out of time. I’m just not ready yet. Not quite.

Mina hangs up the receiver and looks slightly embarrassed. “Judith implied that if you don’t go tonight, she’s not going to use her contacts in the theater to ask about Mirjam again. She says the group has too much important work to spend time helping people who don’t offer anything in return.”

“I’ll go.”

———

Earlier this morning I told Mr. Kreuk I needed to miss work to go to the dentist. And then I went to six of them. One after the other, pretending to have an aching tooth, asking at each one for Dr. Rosen. I started with the two nearest the Jewish neighborhoods, then spiraled farther out. This afternoon I’d already arranged to meet with a prospective contact, a baker in North Amsterdam, so I cross the river by ferry and, after meeting the baker, go to a dental office in a tidy residential neighborhood. Inside, the receptionist is already wearing her coat. “The doctor was about to leave,” she says. “It’s nearly five.”

“My tooth really hurts. Doesn’t Dr. Rosen have just a few minutes?” I wait for her to tell me that there is no Dr. Rosen, which is what has happened at every office so far.

She sighs. “Dr. Rosen is out sick. You would have to see his partner instead, Dr. Zimmer.”

“His—what?”

“Dr. Rosen is sick. But I’ll get Dr. Zimmer for you. If you’re sure it’s an emergency?”

As soon as she disappears from view, I slink behind her desk. A large appointment book lies open on top. Off to one side, a wire mail holder, filled with bills. I flip through them quickly, hoping to find one with Dr. Rosen’s home address, as I listen with one ear to the receptionist in the next room. No home addresses. Everything is addressed to the clinic. My eyes move up to the walls behind the desk, scanning diplomas and certificates. One corner has photographs: a dark-haired couple, who I assume are the Rosens, standing with—I step closer to make sure I’m seeing correctly. The boy with the round face who winked at me at the Lyceum. The cheeky, nervy boy who reminded me of Bas. Tobias.

“What are you doing?” The receptionist glares at me from the doorway.

“Do you have a spare handkerchief? I’m a receptionist, too. Sometimes I keep them in my desk.”

She frowns and plucks me one from her pocket. “Dr. Zimmer can’t see you today. He has a personal engagement after work. He told me to make you an appointment for tomorrow afternoon. He doesn’t usually do Saturday appointments, but you can come in at one.”

“What about—” I’m inventing as I go. “Maybe Dr. Rosen could see me at his house. Do you have the address?”

I’ve gone too far; she looks really suspicious now. I put my hand to my heart. “Goodness, I don’t know what came over me, asking for Dr. Rosen’s home address. I guess people will do anything when they have a sore tooth. Tomorrow, one o’clock.”

A ferry is just arriving as I bicycle up to the port. The disembarking passengers are mostly businessmen coming home from work, but also young couples and mothers with small children. A crowd of young people waits near me to board the ferry, joking and jostling each other about school and movies and some farmer they must have passed on their outing. Maybe I should have stayed at Dr. Rosen’s office. Maybe I should have been honest with Dr. Zimmer’s secretary, or pretended to be concerned about the ailing Rosen family and asked where I could deliver a pot of soup.

Wait. I recognize one of the voices from the crowd of young people. I scan the group until I pick out the familiar blond head. It’s Mrs. Janssen’s errand boy, the one who sold her opklapbed on the day she asked me to find Mirjam.

“Christoffel!”

He turns and his face flushes red when he recognizes me. “Hanneke, right?”

The students surrounding him, the boys especially, have gone silent, jabbing one another with their elbows as they try to figure out who I am and how Christoffel knows me.

“Right. From Mrs. Janssen’s,” I say, trying to ignore the gawking crowd.

“Mr. Tof—Mr. Cool—aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?” a wiry, donkey-nosed boy shouts from behind him.

Christoffel flushes at the nickname. He is a handsome boy who doesn’t quite realize it yet. I bet the girls have started to. He seems young for his age, but in a year or two he’ll grow out of his awkwardness and have willing girlfriends lining up around the corner. “I’m seeing Mrs. Janssen later tonight,” he says. “My father had a little present for her from Den Haag—he goes back and forth for work—so I said I’d take it to her.”

Den Haag, back and forth on the train? That’s impressive. It must be an important job. Finding a ticket is difficult for most people now that the trains have been taken over by the German army for their own transportation. Dutch men mostly avoid them because soldiers prowl our public transportation looking for workers to send to their war-effort factories. So either Christoffel’s father is a powerful businessman, or he’s a member of the Red Cross, which has an office in Den Haag. Or he is a member of the NSB.

“Are you here on a school outing today?” I ask. “Did you have fun?”

“It was fine. I don’t know. I don’t really like big group outings. I don’t really even like bicycling, but I don’t know if I’m allowed to say that.”

“Not and stay Dutch, you can’t.”

“What about you?” Christoffel asks. “What were you doing in North Amsterdam?”

“Nothing. The dentist.”

“I hope it went all right. I used to cry and cry when I had to go to the dentist.”

“It’s scary for little kids,” I say

“Little kids? That was last year.” His blush deepens even more when I laugh at his joke, and he smiles for having thought of it. Sweet, fumbling kid. “Well. I should go back to the group,” he says finally. “They’re already teasing me because I can’t stay out with them tonight. Papa leaves early to go back to Den Haag for work tomorrow.”

“It was nice to see you,” I say.

He turns to walk away, but something else about his last statement paws at my brain. His second mention of Den Haag. Why was I just thinking of that city? Something to do with Mirjam. Something Mina knew.

“Wait, Christoffel. I have a favor to ask,” I say. He turns back. “Do you think your father could make a small side trip? To a hotel in Kijkduin? I need to get a letter to someone there, and in the mail it would take forever. But if your father is already going there…”

“What kind of letter?” he asks.

I’m already taking out a pencil, using my knees as a table as I scrawl out a note. It will be harder for him to refuse if I hand him something already finished. “Nothing special,” I say. “It’s just that the postal system is so unreliable these days, and I’m trying to track down an old friend through a mutual acquaintance. I want to make sure it actually gets there.”

Whatever I write now must be beyond reproach. Unlike Ollie, who I’ve known for years, I know virtually nothing about Christoffel. Whether his father is or isn’t NSB, Christoffel could be a sympathizer. He’s only sixteen, but I’ve seen members of the Nationale Jeugdstorm, the Dutch version of the Hitler Youth, far younger than Christoffel marching around public squares, performing drills.

Dear Amalia,

We’ve never met, but I understand that we have a pair of mutual acquaintances—Mirjam and Tobias. I wonder if you may have heard from them recently. I live in Amsterdam now and was hoping to introduce them to some other friends who are visiting. Please respond as soon as possible; I only have a short amount of time.

I add my name to the bottom of the message and mention that any response can be returned via the same man who delivered the letter. Then I read over the short note again, weighing whether to put in any more details. My pencil hovers just over the page. Finally, I decide to add just one more line.

I am a friend.

Behind Christoffel, the other students call for him to hurry up. I start to fold the paper in thirds, the way I would a normal letter, but instead decide to crease the paper into the complicated star pattern that Mirjam’s letter to Amalia was folded into. I do it so Amalia will believe that I can be trusted, that I’m a girl just like her. I also do it because Christoffel won’t dare unfold this letter to read it—he’d never be able to refold it into this shape. Across the face I write, in block letters, AMALIA. C/O PROPRIETOR. GREEN HOTEL, KIJKDUIN. I hope there’s not more than one green hotel.

“Thank you,” I say. The ferry has almost crossed the river. Passengers are beginning to line up their bicycles to get off quickly.

“Christoffel! Let’s go! Come on, Mr. Cool!”

He blushes again at the nickname, which must be a private joke of some kind. I don’t wait for him to leave before elbowing my own way to the front of the line for disembarkation. I don’t want him to think he still has the option to give me back the paper, or that he has any other choice but to do me this favor.

FIFTEEN

———

Everyone but Judith has arrived at Leo’s when I get there. I sit down on the stool I sat on last time, next to Sanne, who is obviously delighted that I’ve shown up and who promptly tells me to close my eyes and hold out my hands. When I do, she gives me a tiny glass filled with juniper-scented liquid.

“Jenever?” I can’t remember the last time I had good alcohol.

“I got a little bottle for my birthday five months ago and hid it. So well, apparently, that I couldn’t find it until this morning. Everyone gets two thimbles.” I tip my head back to down the gin in one swallow. It burns and makes my eyes water.

“You’re here.” Ollie has come over to squat beside me. His eyes look tired but surprised and happy to see me.

“Judith told Mina I had to come.”

“I’m glad.” He reaches over and brushes his knuckles quickly over my cheek, an affectionate gesture, a gesture that comes from the Van de Kamp family. Mr. Van de Kamp used to do it to the children. Bas used to do it to me. It sends heat through my skin, and I immediately push the gesture from my mind.

When Judith doesn’t show up at the appointed time, Willem jokes that she has forfeited the right to one of her thimbles, and he should get to drink it instead. When she hasn’t shown up ten minutes later, Leo says that he wants Judith’s other one.

But when she hasn’t shown up ten minutes after that, the joking has stopped and we all eye one another silently. “Probably she’s held up at the school or theater,” Willem says. “Or there were more road closures.”

“I bet she’s coming down the street right now,” Sanne says, forcing a wide, unnatural smile as she goes to the window to check. “She’s always mad at me for making her late when we go places. This time I’ll get to show her that it’s not always my fault. Sometimes she’s late on her own!” She stares outside for a few hopeful minutes before returning to her seat. The clock gets louder and the silence gets heavier.

We hear footsteps outside the door, and all of us relax, but as soon as they approach, they disappear. Just a passerby hurrying home.

It’s Ollie who speaks next, in a pinched voice he struggles to keep neutral. “Does anyone here know where Judith’s uncle lives? I wonder if it might be time for us to—”

Before he can finish, the door bangs open and Judith tumbles in, carrying a valise and brushing new-fallen snow off her coat. My chest lets out a breath I didn’t know I was holding, and Sanne squeals in relief, jumping up to first embrace, then shake Judith. “We were worried,” Sanne chastises.

“I’m sorry.” Judith returns Sanne’s hug, but her smile looks forced.

“Oh, you’re all sweaty,” Sanne says. The drops running down Judith’s face—I’d assumed they were melted snow, but they’re perspiration.

“I ran to get here. I knew I was late.” She looks wan and shaky. Willem notices, too; he pours her a double serving of Jenever without first asking if she wants one. She accepts it but doesn’t drink, holding the glass in both hands.

“Take my seat?” he offers, and makes sure she sits down.

The color has returned to Ollie’s face. He clears his throat to get everyone’s attention. “Let’s socialize after the meeting. We need to get started,” he says, all business again. “Leo says we’re having trouble getting enough food for the onderduikers. Meat, especially. I’m glad Hanneke came again today. I was hoping she might know—”

“Wait,” Judith interrupts. “We didn’t decide yet. We didn’t decide what our pretend gathering is about today. What we’ll tell people about why we’ve come here.”

“It’s not important, Judith,” Ollie says. “We’re running late. It doesn’t matter right now.”

“It does matter.” Her eyes look oddly bright and shiny.

“It’s fine. You—”

“It does matter. I have an idea. For what to celebrate. It should be my going-away party.”

“Your what?” Sanne’s voice is strained. “What are you talking about, Judith?”

Judith wipes away tears with the back of her hand. “They’ve started to round up the family members of the Jewish Council,” she says. “My uncle can’t protect me anymore. I got my notification late this afternoon to report to the Schouwburg for transport.” Her face completely dissolves.

Ollie is the first to react, wrapping his arms around Judith, the most tender I’ve ever seen him be. Sanne reaches for Judith’s hand, and Willem and Leo simultaneously produce handkerchiefs from their pockets. I don’t know what to do. I haven’t even known Judith a week. I don’t deserve to be as upset by this news as everyone else; I don’t deserve to be upset at all. She asked me to help and I wouldn’t. She asked again, and I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t, even though I had connections, even though it was less dangerous for me than for her and Mina. I came tonight only because she told me I had to. It doesn’t matter if I would have gotten there eventually on my own. I didn’t get there in time.

“I bet that was the Nazi plan all along,” Sanne says viciously. “Recruit important Jews for the Council. Make them think that they have real influence and that joining will let them help their families. And then, when the Nazis get everything they need from them, deport the Council, too. The Council was supposed to be safe.”

“It’s despicable,” Willem says quietly.

“It’s worse than despicable,” Sanne says. “It’s evil.”

“All right.” Ollie tries to control the room again. “We knew this might happen.” He looks at Judith. “Do you have everything you need?”

Judith takes a wavering breath before answering. “The essentials, at least. One bag of things, and I’m wearing most of my clothes.” No wonder she’s sweating. I should have noticed Judith looked heavier than usual. Her coat buttons are strained and at least two other skirts peek out from beneath the one she’s wearing on top. “Do you have my place ready?”

Ollie nods. “It’s too close to curfew to take you tonight. You’ll stay with Willem and me tonight, and you and I will go tomorrow or the next day, whichever is safer.”

“Where?” Sanne asks. “Where are you taking her?”

“He can’t tell you,” Judith says, at the same time that Ollie shakes his head. “Not until I’m safely there. The fewer people who know, the better. You know the rules.”

“Judith, what about Mina?” It’s the first time I’ve spoken in this conversation. It’s a horrible question: Is your cousin, the one with the bubbly laugh and the dimples in her elbows who takes secret photographs of German atrocities—is she now a prisoner of the same theater she worked so hard to rescue people from?

“Mina is safe. She got her notice today, too. It was waiting for her when she got home. I took her to her hiding place just before I came here; Ollie already had it set up. Her parents and brothers will go to theirs tomorrow. It’s been planned for weeks. Just in case.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. I’m apologizing for so many things with that sentence, but she doesn’t look at me again.

In no time at all, it’s almost curfew. We need to start leaving now, in groups of two. Sanne and Leo gather around Judith, embracing her and whispering things in her ear. When she’s said her good-byes, Ollie takes her tapestry valise and puts his hand on the doorknob. “Are you ready?” he asks quietly.

“I’m ready,” she says, and then he takes her out into the night.

SIXTEEN

———

Saturday

When I wake up the next morning, my jaw aches like I spent the night clenching it, grinding my teeth together. I know I dreamed of Judith and Mirjam Roodveldt. “Why weren’t you a better friend?” Judith asked me, but when I tried to answer her, she was really Elsbeth. “Why don’t you come and find me?” Mirjam asked, but when I told her I was looking for her, she was really Bas. I woke up again and again in the night, never sure of where I was, or when it was, or who was alive and who was dead.

When I stumble out of my bedroom, still in my nightclothes, a whacking sound alerts me that Mama is on a cleaning tear. It happens a few times a year. This morning, Mama stands on our balcony, beating the rug with a broom. Papa sits at the table with a rag, polishing all of our silver, which lies in neat piles around him. “She’s denying me food until I finish,” he whispers. “Me—an invalid. I need to go into hiding.”

I try not to let my face register as I pick up a rag and sit beside him. Hiding. Judith. My father is smiling, and the air is filled with the tangy smell of silver, and Judith and Mina have been folded into the Amsterdam underground. Gone.

Papa waits for me to respond. I try to remember what I would usually say to him, but our normal banter doesn’t come easily to me. “Cruel woman,” I manage finally, rubbing one of the candlesticks. “Mistreating you that way.”

It’s nine o’clock in the morning. Later than I’m usually allowed to sleep on Saturdays. Still more than three hours to waste before I have to leave for my appointment with Dr. Zimmer. And who knows how many hours to waste before I can find out whether Judith made it to her hiding spot. It’s going to be a long, horrible morning.

I’ve finished only two candlesticks when Mama lugs the rug back inside and sees what I’m doing. “Good, Hannie, you’re awake. I have another job for you.”

I pause, the rag in my hand. “I don’t have to clean?”

“Your closet,” Mama says. “So many papers, you can’t still need them all. Sort through them to figure out which can be used for kindling.”

It’s an odd relief to be in my bedroom, sorting papers, while my parents do chores in the next room. It’s familiar and mundane, and requires just enough concentration to distract me from what happened last night. After a few minutes, Mama knocks on the door, bringing bread and jam. “See? I’m not such a cruel woman.” She pretends to be stern, but her eyes aren’t angry.

Mama kneels next to me and picks up the item I’ve just set aside, a birthday card from when I turned sixteen. “Do you remember this birthday? We all went ice-skating. Elsbeth wore that short skating skirt, and Bas challenged me to a race because he thought it would be funny, him against your forty-year-old mama—”

“But then you beat him. He wouldn’t stop claiming you tripped him when no one was looking.”

She reads the card again, and for a minute there are no sounds but the fluttering of papers as I sort them in stacks. “You must think I’m truly cruel sometimes now,” she says quietly. “I must drive you crazy with my worrying.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about. The ways I frustrate you. The way you look to your father for reassurance when you can’t stand my questions.”

She’s right; I think these things at least three times a day. I say them to her at least once a day. But not now, while her face looks so lost and vulnerable.

“It’s just that I’ve seen wars, Hanneke,” she continues. “I know what can happen in them. I know what can happen to young girls in them. I try to protect you so you can grow up and not have to worry as much as I do. There is nothing in the world I care about more than you. Do you understand?”

I nod, flustered, but before I can figure out how to respond, Mama puts the birthday card down again, rising to her feet and brushing the dust off her skirt. She kisses the top of my head, perfunctorily. “Enough of a break. Back to the rugs.” Moments later, the whacking on the balcony starts up again.

Mama’s right that this closet had become a mess; some of these papers are years old. Papa and I are both packrats: he because of sentimentality and me because I never want to throw away anything that could be worth something. These days we find uses for things two or three times again. Mama will keep some of these papers to light fires; others will be used to wash windows or line our shoes.

“Mama, where are your sewing scissors?” I call into the hallway, thinking of the way my feet got so cold when I was trapped in the rain the other day. “I was going to make some liners.”

Once I have the scissors, I place my shoes on top of a sheet of newspaper. Before making the first tracing, though, I see the newspaper I’m about to ruin is from Mama’s birthday. Papa won’t want me to use that one; he saves the newspapers from our birthdays every year. The one underneath is an issue of Het Parool, one that I vaguely remember being given by a customer several weeks ago, one that I should have destroyed long before now rather than store in my house. I’ll use it to make liners. I like the idea of that small rebellion, carrying a paper piece of the resistance in my shoes.

Mama’s shears have been freshly sharpened, and they cut through newsprint like nothing. I’m halfway through cutting the second liner. The scissors slip through my hands to the ground.

I can’t believe what I’m seeing.

I bring the shredded newspaper closer. Am I imagining things? But no: There it is, inadvertently circled by the tracing I’d made. I read the newsprint again, the words swimming in front of me.

“Hannie, what was that noise?”

Mama’s voice comes like I’m hearing it from underwater, far away and muted. “What?” I ask finally, unable to drag my eyes away from the paper.

“What happened to my floor?” She sighs, coming into the room. I look down dully. The shears are sticking out of the floor, gouging a hole in Mama’s maple. “Oh, Hannie. I’ll get the floor polish; we’ll see if we can—”

“I need to go.” I scramble to my feet, riffling through my closet for a clean skirt and pulling off my nightgown without even asking for the privacy I usually demand while changing.

“You need to go? Where?”

My blouse and skirt hideously clash; I’ve put on the first clothing my hands touched. “You’re wearing that?” Mama frowns. “Why are you getting dressed now?”

“I have to go.”

“But we’ve barely started the chores! Hanneke, that blouse really doesn’t match.”

I brush past her and collect my coat from the closet. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Hannie!” Mama is still calling after me as I run downstairs, take my bicycle, and start down the street.

I pedal furiously through my neighborhood, taking the potholed roads I usually avoid because I know today they’ll be faster. Is it just a coincidence? What I saw in the paper, was it just a coincidence? It wasn’t, though. I know it wasn’t.

Across the street, an old classmate of mine is shopping at Mrs. Bierman’s store. She waves her hand in greeting, but I don’t stop. I don’t stop, either, for the customer of Mr. Kreuk’s who calls out my name, wanting to place an order for next week’s delivery.

When I get to Mrs. Janssen’s house, I leave my bicycle leaning against it, more exposed than I would usually, pushing past her as soon as she answers the door.

“Is something wrong?” She doesn’t have her cane, and she grasps the armrest to balance herself against the sofa.

“I need to get in the hiding place again.”

“Why? What have you found?”

In the kitchen, I open the pantry, shoving canned goods aside. Mrs. Janssen limps behind me. “Do you think there’s something we missed?” She watches me as I unlatch the secret door, pushing into the small room. “Hanneke, what did we miss?

We didn’t miss anything. We looked at every square inch of that barren, sterile room, Mrs. Janssen with her bad eyes and me with my good ones. We saw everything in the room. We just didn’t see everything the right way.

I’m worried for a second that Mrs. Janssen will have thrown away what I’m looking for. But it’s still there, the old issue of Het Parool that Mirjam was reading on the day she disappeared, already growing a little yellow around the edges.

Quickly, I unfold the paper I’ve brought with me from home. Just as I thought, it’s the same one—a back issue from last month. Even though I know both newspapers will be identical on every page, I take Mirjam’s copy back into the kitchen where it’s light, and flip to the same section I’d inadvertently circled while I was making the shoe liners.

“What are you doing?”

“Shhh, I’m trying to think.” I hold up a finger to silence her. Mrs. Janssen had always been so specific about the timeline of Mirjam’s disappearance: Shortly before Mirjam disappeared, Mrs. Janssen brought her this edition of Het Parool. Before, I’d thought of the two events—the newspaper delivery and the disappearance—as completely unrelated to each other. But what if they were a chain reaction, in which one caused the other? What if Mirjam saw something in the paper that caused her to run?On the first day, when Mrs. Janssen told me about Mirjam’s disappearance, she told me that Mirjam loved to read every line of Het Parool, even the classified advertisements.

My eyes find the item I’d circled back home in my own newspaper copy: a simple three-line notice in the middle of the page.

    Elizabeth misses her Margaret, but is glad to be vacationing in Kijkduin.

It can’t be a coincidence. This whole time, I thought I should get in touch with Amalia because she might have a guess about where her friend might have run to. I never suspected that Mirjam would try to run to her. Did Mirjam get on a train bound for Kijkduin?

“Hanneke, tell me,” Mrs. Janssen says. I’d almost forgotten that I was still sitting in her kitchen. “You’ve been staring into space. Tell me! What is going on?”

“I think I know. I think I know what happened.”

⋯⋯⋯

The first time I met Elsbeth:

She was seven, I was six. I was crying because it was my first day of school and I didn’t know anyone except a boy who lived in the apartment below me and liked to pull my hair.

She said, “What’s your name?”

I said, “Hanneke.”

She said, “My name is Elsbeth.”

She had a pretty ribbon in her hair, and she took it off and tied it to my braid instead. “You should keep this. It looks better with blond hair anyway,” she said. “And you don’t have to cry about that boy. Boys are silly. The first thing you need is a best friend.”

SEVENTEEN

———

Stupid. I am stupid. I let my memories of Bas dictate what I thought happened to Mirjam. I’m the one who assumed that if Mirjam ran from a hiding space, it would be because she wanted to be with Tobias. Why didn’t I realize that she could have been running to someone she loved just as much, in a different way?

The wind bites at my neck, down my blouse to my collarbone. I must not have buttoned my coat; it’s flapping wildly behind me as I pedal. I try to gather it around my throat with one hand, but only succeed in veering into the path of an old man. He darts to the side of the road and curses after me.

What happened? Amalia’s parents were going to send her to live with her aunt. That much, Mina had told me. But then what? At some point, once she was already with her aunt, she placed a greeting for her friend in the paper. Did Amalia know Mirjam was hiding at the furniture store? Were they in some sort of communication? Did they plan it out ahead of time, a secret message in the classified section of an underground newspaper? Was that the signal for Mirjam to run—or did she just see this greeting from her old friend, become overwhelmed by emotion, and decide to leave at the last minute?

Either way, why wouldn’t she tell Mrs. Janssen? She must have known how terrifying her disappearance would be.

I pedal madly through the streets. Now that I have a lead, the gears in my brain begin to spin. I’ll need to find Christoffel, to find out whether his father made it to Kijkduin and returned with a response from Amalia. If Christoffel’s father didn’t get to the hotel, I’ll need to get there myself and search every room. Either way, I should go to the train station and see if I can find the regular conductor for that route. A fifteen-year-old girl in a bright blue coat traveling alone might have stood out. But how would she have gotten on the train? The station agent wouldn’t have been allowed to sell a ticket to someone whose papers were marked Jood. I need to ask Mr. Kreuk if I can have a few days off. I need to find out if there’s an underground transport, a way that Mirjam might have gotten to Kijkduin without riding on the train. I need to go back home first, to change clothes and come up with a story to tell Mama. I steer my bicycle in that direction and am so lost in my plans that, a block from my house, I almost run over Ollie, who is standing in the middle of the street and waving his arms to get me to stop.

Something’s wrong.

Obviously something’s wrong; he’s standing in the middle of the road, waving like a lunatic.

But he’s not waving like a lunatic. Ollie is waving his hands listlessly, like he almost wishes I wouldn’t see him and wouldn’t stop. When I screech to a halt in front of him, they drop to his sides.

“What are you doing here?” I demand. “I was just thinking about you. I have new information and need your help.”

He kneads his hand into his side; he’s been running and now he has a cramp. “I just looked for you at your house; your mother said you rode off in this direction. I need to talk to you.”

“Good. You’ve found me.”

“It’s serious.”

“I know it’s serious. I found something at Mrs. Janssen’s house. Actually, I found it at my house, but I didn’t realize what it meant until—” Something is propelling me to keep talking, because if I’m talking, then Ollie won’t be able to tell me what it is that’s making his mouth twist like a scar.

“I have some bad news,” he says. “I think we should find a place to sit.”

“I don’t want to find a place to sit. I discovered something today. We don’t have time to sit.” I force a laugh, like he’s being funny. “Ollie, catch your breath, and let’s go.”

“No, Hanneke. Something happened.”

“Something did happen. I know where Mirjam is. Let’s go.”

He doesn’t follow me. He doesn’t try to convince me again, either. He just stands there, letting me get all these protests out of my system, letting me feel how heavy the air around us has grown. “I can take you back to your parents, if you want. Or we can go to my house.”

“What is it, Ollie? Is it—” Even now, I pause, because until I say the words, they’re not true. “Is it Judith? Did something happen on the way to her hiding place?”

“Judith is still at my house. It’s not Judith.”

“Is it Willem?” I’ll rip their names off like a bandage, starting with the ones that would hurt the most. Let it be Leo, I think. Let it be the person I know least well of all. There’s something wrong with me for thinking like this, for wishing bad luck to Leo, but I know everything in life has to have a trade.

“Hanneke. Listen to me. I went to the theater to try to talk to Judith’s uncle. And it’s happened, Hanneke. Last night Mirjam was brought to the Hollandsche Schouwburg.”

EIGHTEEN

———

What?” I push Ollie away from me, repelling everything he just said. “You’re wrong.”

Of course he is wrong. Mirjam is not in the Schouwburg. My arms flail out at him, wanting to make him take it back.

“Hanneke, there was a big roundup late last night.” He catches my wrists in his and holds them against his chest. “They were looking for people whose names were on their list, but when they couldn’t fill their quotas, they started taking anyone they found who had Jewish papers. Dozens of people were brought in who weren’t scheduled to be deported yet. One of the names on the list is M. Roodveldt. Mirjam is at the theater and she’s scheduled to be transported in two days.”

“But I know where she’s going now,” I insist. “She went to Den Haag. They couldn’t have caught her, because she wouldn’t still be in Amsterdam. She wouldn’t—”

“Maybe she got out of the city, but she was captured and brought back in. Or maybe her temporary hiding place was raided before she got out. A lot of things could have happened. All we know is that someone with her name is there.”

Roundup. Raided. Roodveldt. His words float above me, but none of them make sense. Ollie’s heart beats beneath my hands. “We’ll need to figure out what to do next, then,” I say finally. “To start, we have to go to the theater. You’ll distract the guards. We have to go and get her out right now.”

“Hanneke. Listen to yourself.”

“You’re right. First we’ll get Judith’s uncle to help us. He’ll—”

Ollie presses down on my hands. “No.”

“Let go. You don’t have to come with me, but you have to let me go.”

“No,” he says. “Hanneke, do you want people to be killed? You cannot risk the network that we have spent a year building, just to go back and ask questions about one girl. We don’t have anyone left on the inside now. Judith and Mina are out. Judith’s uncle won’t help us. He’s terrified for his own life; the Council doesn’t have any of the sway we thought it did. If you storm in now without knowing anything, you’re putting the whole operation at risk.”“But—”

“No.”

He’s right. Even through my anger and frustration, I understand he’s right. It’s a logical argument that I might make myself if this were about any person other than the one I’ve been trying so hard to find. Why wasn’t I at the Schouwburg last night? I was congratulating myself for tracking down Tobias’s father, and I should have gone to the Schouwburg instead.

“Everything I’ve done is a waste. All of this—visiting dentists, talking to school friends—I should have just planted myself outside the theater the second you told me about it. Maybe I would have seen her go in and been able to help her.”

Ollie takes his hands from mine and cups my face, holding my eyes steady. “You didn’t know what the right thing to do was. Amsterdam is a big city, and Mirjam could have been anywhere.”

“But, Ollie, what if it’s not her in the theater?”

“Hanneke, I wish it wasn’t her, but it is.”

“No, listen. M. Roodveldt? Maybe it’s a different name. Margot or Mozes, or… lots of names start with M, Ollie. Is there anybody in the theater who saw her or talked to her, who can say for sure?”

“I can’t find out without asking questions that will give us away. We’ve decided we need to pause and regroup, now that they’re deporting the Council’s families.”

Think, I instruct myself. Think rationally. If I can’t get into the theater, how else can I find information? “Maybe if I found someone who lives across the street, or works nearby. Maybe they would have seen her go in.”

Ollie’s mouth opens, a quick movement he tries to cover up.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he says, but it’s not nothing.

“Ollie, what is it? Is there someone who might have seen something?”

“I can’t tell you,” he protests. “It’s against the rules.” “Damn the rules, just tell me. Who saw something? Please, Ollie.” “Hanneke, we have the rules we do for a reason. We need to think of the greater good.”

But I hear an opening in what he’s saying, and I take it. “I know your ‘greater good,’ Ollie, but if the good that you’re working so hard for is one that won’t work to rescue a fifteen-year-old girl, then is it worth it anyway? What kind of society are you trying to save?”

Finally he exhales, angrily. I’ve upset him with my begging. “We are not going to help you get Mirjam out of the theater,” he says. “We can’t. But I will do one thing—one thing—to help you verify that it really is her in there, so that you don’t spend the rest of the war not knowing. And I’m only doing it because you running around asking office workers if they saw her… that puts all of us at risk.”

My shoulders go limp with relief. “Thank you, Ollie. Thank you.”

“Only this. Don’t ask for anything else.”

He looks around to make sure nobody is watching, then takes a piece of paper from his pocket and scrawls something on it. An address, I can tell from upside down. “Memorize it, destroy it,” he instructs. “It’s where Mina is staying. She might be able to help.”

Ollie looks down at his watch. “I have to go, right now. I can’t risk being late getting Judith to her hiding place. I’ll come and meet you when I can. It might be late.”

“But—”

“Later, Hanneke.” He looks regretful almost immediately; he’s already doubting the help he’s given me. I try to smile, to show him I’m grateful, that he made the right decision, but I can’t hold it for long

After he’s left, I wheel my bicycle into an alley so I can memorize the address the way Ollie wanted me to. As soon as I read the numbers on the page, I know Ollie has made a mistake. What he’s given me can’t possibly be the right address. I’ve been to it before. I go there every week.

NINETEEN

———

The bell rings, but nobody comes to answer it. It seems that no one is home, but when I press my ear against the door, there’s a faint scuffing sound, like chairs pushed back from a table. Finally the door chain rattles as someone locks it. One blue eye appears in the gap between the door and the jamb.

“Mrs. de Vries,” I say

“Hanneke.” She arches an eyebrow. “I haven’t ordered anything. I wasn’t expecting you.”

“I’m not here for a delivery. I’m here for something else. Can you let me in to talk?”

“I don’t think so. It’s not a good time.”

She peers beyond me into the empty hallway, as if willing me to go away. I can’t even begin to imagine what I look like: mismatched clothes, my hair loose and tangled, a run in my stockings.

“It’s all right, Mrs. de Vries,” I say, leaning in close. “I know.”

“You know? What do you know?”

Again, I wonder if Ollie got the address wrong. Mrs. de Vries is as haughty as ever, an icicle of a human being. I lower my voice to barely a whisper. “I’m a friend of Mina’s.”

Her eyes flicker. She reaches her hand to her throat but covers the gesture by adjusting the brooch at her collar. “You should go, Hanneke. I don’t need anything from you today.”

“Please let me in.”

“Really, this is quite out of the ordinary,” she hisses. “I’m going to speak with Mr. Kreuk about this the next time I see him.”

“We can telephone him now if you want. But I’m going to stand in this hallway until you let me in. I’ll say hello to all your neighbors.”

Finally, she closes the door to unlatch the chain, and when she opens it again, I step through before she can change her mind. Inside, the twins sit on the floor, playing with toy cars. Everything looks normal, exactly as this apartment has looked every time I’ve come to visit. No suspicious sounds. Nothing out of place.

Mrs. de Vries stares at me, taking out a cigarette as I stand in her foyer. She doesn’t offer to take my coat. Neither of us knows what to say to the other.

“I came to see Mina,” I say finally. “Where is she? It’s important.”

“Is something wrong? Do the police suspect my apartment?”

“It’s a personal matter.”

Mrs. de Vries exhales a trail of smoke before turning her back to me. For a minute I think she’s ordering me out of her apartment, but I realize she means for me to follow her. I’ve never been invited back this way, down a long hallway with multiple doors on either side. The de Vries family is even wealthier than I’d realized; the furnishings in the rooms we pass are ornate and expensive-looking, with paintings on the walls and a rich, textured wallpaper. She stops in the doorway of what I assume is the twins’ playroom; two rocking horses sit in the corner, and child-size shelves are lined with books and toys.

“Hanneke? A little assistance?” Mrs. de Vries has walked to one of those shelves and is looking back at me with irritation, waiting for me to help her push it aside.

I brace my feet on the rug, sliding the shelf over. Behind it, cut into the wall, is a small cupboard door, big enough for a person to squeeze through, but only on hands and knees. Mrs. de Vries nods permission for me to open it, and when I do, I see two oxford shoes and a pair of ankle socks. Mina quickly drops to her knees and tucks her head out of the crawl space.

“Hanneke! I thought I heard your voice!”

Once she’s free from the cupboard, Mina throws her arms around me. “I didn’t think I’d get to see anybody. Judith said it was too dangerous. Did Ollie get her into her hiding space? What’s happened since I’ve been here? It feels like a year even though it’s only been a day.”

Before I can figure out which question to answer first, another scraping sound comes from the crawl space. Mina hears it, too. “It’s all right, you two,” she says. “It’s safe.”

“You’re not alone?” I blurt out

Another pair of legs, wearing brown men’s shoes, appears in the space Mina has just crawled out of. They belong to an old man with a white beard, blinking into the light. He’s followed by an older woman, fussylooking, with impeccable hair and makeup.

“This is Mr. and Mrs. Cohen,” Mina explains to me. They both nod cautiously in greeting. “This is my friend Hanneke Bakker.”

“A pleasure to meet you,” I murmur, while trying to figure out why the name sounds familiar.

“Is everything all right, Dorothea?” Mrs. Cohen asks Mrs. de Vries. “The inner walls in this building have always been so thin, we couldn’t help but overhear.”

I turn to Mrs. de Vries. “The Cohens are—”

“My neighbors. Yes. They’ve been staying with me for a few days.”

Mr. Cohen extends his hand. He smells faintly of cigarettes and leather, a reassuring smell that reminds me of my grandfather.

“But when your other neighbor was here—” I cut myself off. When the woman with the fox fur stole was here, Mrs. de Vries acted as though she was pleased the Cohens had disappeared. But then, what else could she do?

The Cohens nod politely at me, and then Mrs. Cohen suggests to her husband that Mina and I might like some privacy. They leave; Mrs. de Vries stays, as if unwilling to allow any conversations in her house she is not privy to.

“Here, I’ll show you our hiding place,” Mina says, taking my hand and pulling me toward the cupboard entrance before I have a chance to say no. The entrance smells like paint, the only clue that this hiding space has been recently constructed. The craftsmanship is impeccable. From the outside, it looks like it was built at the same time as the rest of the apartment. There are even scuff marks on the baseboards. Mrs. Janssen’s hidden pantry is amateurish by comparison.

“We only have to go in here when strangers come,” Mina explains. “The rest of the time we can move around the apartment.” She closes the cupboard door again, and the entrance all but disappears. “When I got here yesterday, they made me practice, again and again, seeing how quickly all of us could gather our things, get into the hiding place, make sure we hadn’t left anything out that would give us away. You should see one of our drills.”

“I’d like that, but not now,” I mutter, distracted. When Mina shut the hiding place door, it created a breeze, causing the window curtain to flutter open and reveal a view of a large, familiar stone building.

“The Schouwburg,” I whisper. “This apartment building is right across the street from the Schouwburg.”

I’ve only ever seen out the front windows of the de Vrieses’ apartment building. Because I’d never been invited farther into the family’s living quarters, I never put together what the view would be from the rear. Now I know why Ollie gave me this address.

“Mina. Did you—” My mouth has gone dry. I swallow and start again. “Did you see the group arrive yesterday after the razzia?”

“This is important. Did you see Mirjam? Did you see her be brought in with those people?”

“Mirjam was in that group?”

“I don’t know. Someone with her last name was. So you didn’t see her? Are you sure?”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Her eyes fill with tears. “I didn’t know to look for her.”

Another door closing. Another hope slipping away.

“I did take pictures,” she offers, using her sleeve to wipe her eyes.

“You took pictures?”

“You took pictures?”

“I left behind clothes so I could fit my new camera in my suitcase. I wanted to still be doing something. Even if I’m stuck in here, I can still take pictures of everything happening out there.”

“Can I see them? Your pictures?”

Her face falls. “They’re not developed yet. I just took them a day ago.”

“Let’s get someone to develop them, then. I’m sure we can find someone to trust.” Mentally, I scroll through my list of black market clients, thinking of the artistic ones who might have basement darkrooms. There was the owner of an art gallery once, but when I went to his house, he had pamphlets with Adolf Hitler’s face lying on the coffee table.

Mina shakes her head. “We can’t—they’re Anscochrome.”

“What do you mean?” I’ve never heard this word before

“They’re Anscochrome. It’s a color film, the special brand I was waiting for at my birthday. Most photographers won’t have dealt with it before; it’s a German-American brand. Even if we wanted to risk getting it across the border to a sympathetic German photographer, it would take weeks to come back.”

“But maybe a teacher at an art school, or someone who works at a newspaper… they could rush it, or—”

“It’s not a matter of hurrying. It’s that regular photographers might mess this film up.”

“Give the camera to me,” Mrs. de Vries says. It had been so long since she’d spoken I’d almost forgotten she was still in the room. There she is, in the corner, her arms folded elegantly. “Give it to me,” she repeats, a note of irritation in her voice. “I’ll take it to one of my husband’s business contacts.”

“His business contacts?” I repeat blankly.

“He publishes a magazine,” she reminds me. “A fashion magazine, full of photographs.”

“But Mina just said that this is special film.”

“And he has special contacts.” She raises one eyebrow. “He knows all sorts of people with access to technology in private darkrooms. I won’t promise, but I’ll try. Give it to me.”

Mina looks at me again, and I nod at her to give the camera to Mrs. de Vries. “Please be careful,” she begs. “It’s so expensive, and those photographs are dangerous.”

Mrs. de Vries stares at her. She knows about danger; she is hiding three Jewish people in her house.

“Can you go right now?” I ask her. “Can you go this afternoon? Ollie said the next transport is in just two days. I need to know if the girl I’m looking for is in the theater, as soon as possible. Can you please go now?” I don’t know if it’s because Mrs. de Vries knows that I know her secret, and she thinks she has to obey me, or if it’s because she wants this over with quickly so I’ll leave her apartment. Whatever the reason, she now walks briskly out of the room, heels clacking on parquet floors, and by the time I catch up to her, she’s already pinning on a navy hat.

“I’ll be back soon,” she says. And then, because she’s still Mrs. de Vries, she says, “Please refrain from touching too many things while I’m gone.”

She slips on her coat, and then it’s just Mina and me, and nothing left to do but wait.

TWENTY

———

Mina and I stay in the playroom, perched uncomfortably on child-size furniture, while Mr. Cohen entertains the children, kneeling on the floor and letting them drive their cars up his legs and arms. Mrs. Cohen helpfully washes dishes in the kitchen and makes us cup after cup of ersatz tea.

“You need to be another mountain,” one of the twins informs me, rolling his car on my shoe. “So we can each have our own.”

I jerk my foot away. “You could each be your own mountains.”

Mr. Cohen smiles. “How about I tell a story instead? There will be lots of fast cars and fast horses and mountains in it.” He’s so patient with them; I wonder if he has grandchildren of his own.

“Hanneke, I’m worried about something,” Mina says, moving her chair closer to mine.

“What is it?”

She glances over to Mr. Cohen and the twins and lowers her voice. “The thing that I showed you when we went for a walk. It’s still there.” She reads my bewildered expression and raises both hands to her face, mimicking a gesture I immediately recognize. Her other camera. It’s in the carriage, and she didn’t have time to retrieve it. “Do you think it’s okay?” she asks.

Even if I didn’t, I don’t see what could be done about it, or what use there would be in me making her worry any more than she’s already worrying. “I’m sure that if one of your coworkers finds it, she’ll keep it for you,” I reassure her. The guards seem to leave the crèche alone anyhow.

After a while, the children start to complain that they’re hungry. Mina finds potatoes and parsnips in the pantry, and boils them along with leaves of kale. We all eat silently. The children start yawning, and Mr. Cohen goes to put them to bed.

“Hanneke, you’re going to miss curfew,” Mrs. Cohen warns me. “You should go.”

It’s too late to leave now. I want to be here the second there is any news. Have I done the right thing, pressuring Mrs. de Vries to go out the way that I did? Mrs. Cohen takes up a pile of socks from Mrs. de Vries’s mending pile and quietly begins to darn them. Mr. Cohen reads a book. The evening drags on. The sky outside turns from bruise-colored to pitch-black.

My parents will have started to worry an hour ago, with Mama turning white around the edges and Papa making loud jokes to cover up his own concern. After worry will come anger: Mama at me for being so selfish and not keeping track of the time, and Papa because I’ve worried Mama and because he’s mad at himself for not being able to go out and find me. I don’t know what comes after the anger stage. I’ve never tested their patience enough to find out. Tonight I’ll have to.

In the distance, a church clock strikes another hour. The four of us exchange worried glances, and guilt begins to gnaw the pit of my stomach. Why didn’t we ask for the address of Mrs. de Vries’s photographer friend, or at least a name? Why did I insist she had to go now, when tomorrow morning wouldn’t have made much of a difference? I don’t like Mrs. de Vries, but I don’t want anything to happen to her.

“She wasn’t doing anything illegal,” Mina says. “It’s not illegal to visit a friend.”

“I just hope that if she was stopped, it was on the way to the photographer’s and not on the way back home,” Mrs. Cohen says. Her perfectly applied lipstick has begun to fade. “They might not question a roll of undeveloped film, but if—”

“Hush, Rebekkah,” Mr. Cohen stops her. “Can’t you see—”

He doesn’t finish. The lock in the door begins to turn. The four of us freeze in our seats. Mrs. de Vries comes in, her cheeks flushed, but otherwise unharmed. Ollie follows her inside.

“I got back an hour ago,” Mrs. de Vries explains. “But there were soldiers loitering on the corner. I didn’t think it was safe to walk past them, so I hid in an alley like a street beggar until they left.”

“I was already hiding in the alley across the street,” Ollie explains as Mina runs to hug him. “I could even see Mrs. de Vries in the shadows in her own alley, but I didn’t dare call out to her; it was completely absurd, like we were actors in a stage farce. I thought the soldiers would never leave.”

“Did you take Judith? Is she all right?” Mina asks.

Ollie nods. The farm where he’s taken her is crowded, he says, and it has six people hiding there already, sleeping in a barn. But it’s safe, with only a few soldiers assigned to patrol that region.

Mrs. de Vries removes her hat, smoothing her hand over her hair. “The children are in bed?”

“Sleeping,” Mrs. Cohen reassures her

“Did you find him?” I ask. Now that she’s safe, I feel less guilty for asking her to go. “Your photographer friend?”

Mrs. de Vries pulls a small packet from her coat pocket. The envelope looks the wrong shape to contain photographs from an entire roll of film. “Slides,” she explains. “I understand that’s how this film works?” She raises an eyebrow at Mina, who nods. “I don’t have a projector. My husband’s coworker said he would lend us his, but obviously I wasn’t going to tow it through the streets tonight. You can at least look at the slides to see if you can find your friend.”

She doesn’t wait for a thank-you, instead murmuring that she needs a hot bath. The Cohens excuse themselves as well. It’s so late it’s almost light, and they’re both swaying in place. After everyone else has gone to bed, Mina and Ollie and I crowd around a desk in Mr. de Vries’s empty study and remove the slides from the envelope—translucent images, each just an inch wide. The squares are so small and the people are so many it’s going to be nearly impossible to pick out one in the crowd.

“If we hold them up to a lightbulb, we’ll be able to see the images a little better,” Mina suggests. She makes sure the blackout curtains are fully closed before turning on the lamp at Mr. de Vries’s desk. Gently, using only the tips of her fingers, she begins to pick up the slides one by one.

“They’re in color!” Ollie exclaims.

Mina nods proudly. “I already told Hanneke. My parents bought it off the black market. I can’t even imagine how much it cost.”

Nor can I. I’ve never been asked to find any, but it’s got to be outrageously expensive.

“Is this the right order?” I ask.

“Yes, that’s the order I took them, at least.”

Together, the three of us lean over the slides. The pictures don’t begin with Mirjam’s roundup, as I’d expected them to. Instead, the first image is from the summertime, of a public park, with grass, and flowers, and in the foreground, a row of men with yellow stars on their jackets and their hands in the air, and on their faces, terror, clear even in miniature.

“That was the first time I used my new camera,” Mina whispers. “That was the first razzia I saw, too. I passed it on the street. Someone told me later those men were executed.”

“Are all the photos you take like this?” I ask her.

“I ration the color because it’s so expensive,” she says. “But the blackand-white photographs are like this, too—they show the same things.”

Even though Mina already told me the film was in color, I couldn’t imagine how stunning the images would be. They show the corners of the war we aren’t supposed to talk about. A hungry child. Two soldiers jeering at a frightened Jewish man. A basement full of onderduikers, waving at the camera to show they’re all right. The color makes everything so saturated, so current, just like real life. When I look at black-and-white photos, it feels like I’m looking at something historical. But it’s not historical. It’s happening right now. Mina’s work makes sense to me now. Each image is her own small rebellion.

Finally, we reach the photographs from yesterday at the theater. They tell a miniature story: In the first, a tram has just arrived, a streetcar, repurposed for these transports. It’s full of people wearing Jodensters, carrying suitcases or cloth grocery bags. A woman with a rose-colored hat holds the arm of a man in a fawn-colored fedora. Two stooped ladies who could be sisters are dressed in matching lilac. The colors are beautiful and make my eyes ache.

In the second frame, everyone from the tram stands near the rear entrance of the theater. A soldier has his arm outstretched, obviously organizing them into rows. In the foreground, I can make out a teenage boy in a chocolate-brown coat sticking his tongue out at the soldier, in an unseen act of defiance.

We spend several minutes examining each frame. The story continues to unfold: A disorganized crowd of people become neat lines; couples cling to each other’s hands for support.

Peach and red. Green and black.

It’s not until the fourth-to-last frame that I see what I’m looking for. The picture is of the same scene as the others: scared people carrying suitcases. There are the captured prisoners, three or four abreast, filing into the theater.

There, in the bottom corner, is Mirjam.

TWENTY-ONE

———

Once there was a mouse caught in our walls. It only seemed to make noise when I was in the room alone; Papa and Mama never heard it, and if I brought it up, they would look over my head and say, “Right. Your mouse.” I was nine, maybe, and eventually even I began to think the mouse wasn’t real. It was a pretend playmate I must have invented for company. Then one day Elsbeth came over to play, the mouse appeared by her chair, and she screamed bloody murder. That was the moment when the mouse became real, really real. When someone else saw it. When I wasn’t alone.

“That’s her.” I point to the slide.

“What?” Mina asks. “Where?”

“The corner. In the right.”

She crowds in, shoving her shoulder against mine. “Are you sure? It’s so blurry and small.”

Nearly out of frame is a girl with curly hair wearing a coat the color of the sky. The face is blurry, not that seeing it would help me anyway, this girl I’ve only met in description. What’s not blurry is the bright blue coat, and, if I squint hard enough, a row of minuscule double-breasted silver buttons marching down the front. There she is, the girl who ran from a safe hiding space, the girl who was slightly spoiled, who loved a boy and had a best friend, who did well in school only to please her parents. Maybe her face is blurry because she’s doing exactly what I like to think I would be doing: looking for an escape route rather than following the rules.

“Do you think Mrs. de Vries has a magnifying glass?” Ollie suggests. “Is there any way to see it a little closer?”

“It’s still so hard to see,” Mina says.

“It’s still so hard to see,” Mina says.

“It’s her,” I say definitively. It’s her because I feel a pang in my heart when I look at this photograph. All the other people being herded into the theater seem to be with others—families or neighbors. She’s alone.

“She’s right there, Ollie,” I say. From the window of the room I’m sitting in, I could see the building where she’s being held, less than one hundred meters away.

“It’s her,” Ollie says evenly. He’s watching me, wondering what I’ll do next. “It’s what we thought it would be.”

“We have to get her out.”

He’s shaking his head even before I finish the sentence. He expected this.

“Yes, Ollie,” I continue. “Look at her. She must be so terrified.”

“Hanneke, nothing has changed since I told you that we couldn’t help you.”

“It has changed. We have a safe place for her, right here, across the street. Mina and Judith know the theater. Why won’t you help me, Ollie?”

(click to continue reading - Bloggger crashes every time I add new stuff to this page, so I split it into two parts)