Cut and Run

Fourteen

J uliana and Wilhelmina got off the bus near a small tenement building just outside the diamond district. As they walked up the front steps, Wilhelmina scowled at the dead geraniums sticking up out of the window boxes. There was no excuse for such laziness. She rang the doorbell, and a round, bald-headed man came to the door and let them in, introducing himself as Martin Dekker. He was younger than she’d expected, perhaps in his late forties. But these days most people seemed so young. They didn’t remember the war, the bombings, the starvation, the treachery of the Nazis and their collaborators. And if people like herself didn’t tell the young, refused to talk, how could they know? What assurance could there be that it all wouldn’t happen again?

She introduced herself and Juliana, speaking Dutch. She didn’t bother to translate, assuming Juliana could follow along well enough.

“I’m so glad you came,” the Belgian said cheerfully, leading them upstairs as he jingled a huge ring of keys. “There’s still been no word from your brother.”

“Have you called the police?”

Dekker shook his head. “I thought I should wait for you.”

And let me go through the trouble, Wilhelmina thought irritably. People always seem to sense her ability to make difficult decisions. She didn’t like to any more than they did and wasn’t, in her opinion, more competent to do so, but she wasn’t one to leave the dirty work to someone else. It was peculiar how people wanted her to be decisive and then were uncomfortable with her because she was.

“It’s not like Mr. Peperkamp to disappear like this,” Dekker went on. “He’s always been such a good tenant. Now he’s late with his rent, and-” he made an exaggerated sigh of despair “-and nothing from him. Not a word.”

Wilhelmina hoped he didn’t expect her to pay her brother’s rent. She only wanted to find him, not settle his debts. Not getting the desire response, the landlord unlocked the door to Johannes’s apartment and excused himself, thumping quietly back downstairs.

“He doesn’t speak English?” Juliana asked.

“I don’t know,” Wilhelmina said. “I didn’t ask.”

They went into the two-room apartment. A fat, half-smoked cigar lay cold in a brass ashtray, and the sleeve of one of Juliana’s recordings stood in front of the elaborate, outdated stereo system. She was smiling, and her hair was longer. Johannes owned all her recordings. Wilhelmina didn’t own any, but sometimes she heard them on the radio.

“For so long I’ve thought of Johannes as the muscular, stubborn boy he was before the war,” she said, half to herself, except that she spoke in English. “He won so many speed skating races on the canals. I would watch, all bundled up, drinking hot cocoa with my friends.”

Juliana asked softly, “Did you learn to skate yourself?”

“Mm, yes, but I’ve forgotten long since.” There had been too many years when she’d had to devote so much of her energy just to survival and then to putting aside the past and going on. Not forgetting, of course-simply going on.

For the first time in her life, Wilhelmina felt sorry for her older brother. Johannes Peperkamp, the famous diamond cleaver. The cutter with the incomparable eye.

Now he lived in dreariness.

Ignoring Juliana’s look of concern, she went into the galley kitchen, little more than a converted closet off the sitting room, and automatically put on a kettle for tea. The kitchen was clean enough, but there were no begonias in the windows. She could feel the loneliness that had crept into her brother’s life. There was none of the cheerfulness and sparkling cleanliness in this place that there had been in his big apartment with Ann.

She inspected the refrigerator. Four kinds of cheeses and half an eel were neatly wrapped and there was a tin of butter cookies, but the milk had soured and a basket of mussels was beginning to smell. Even during his days of fame and greater fortune, Johannes hadn’t been an extravagant man. He was naturally frugal and spent little money on himself. What he was saving it for Wilhelmina didn’t know, and yet she did the same. And neither was one to waste food. There had been too many days in their lives without it.

“It doesn’t feel right here, does it?” Juliana asked, standing behind her aunt.

Without speaking, Wilhelmina shook her head and turned off the heat under the kettle. She no longer wanted tea. Together, she and Juliana went into the bedroom, but there was nothing there either, nothing to say, nothing to find. The double bed was neatly made, and on the bureau were two photographs, one of Ann, laughing, just a touch of the familiar sadness behind her eyes, and one of their wedding day before the war. Wilhelmina could remember more clearly than she could remember anything that had happened last week how she and Rachel had wished that one day they would have a marriage like Johannes and Ann had. What dreamers they’d been.

Now there were no more dreams, only memories.

“Let’s go,” she said.

“Aunt Willie…”

“I’m fine. We’ll bring Mr. Dekker the eel. That will have to satisfy him.”

But downstairs in the entryway, a dark figure was trying to communicate with the Belgian landlord in bad French. Juliana let out a small cry and jumped backward, but too late.

The black-brown eyes turned to her. “Shit,” he said.

She stared back at him, insolent and unapologetic. “Fancy meeting you here, Mr. Stark.”

“Jesus Christ, why the hell couldn’t you stay out of this?”

So this was the American reporter, Wilhelmina thought, observing him with interest. He was rather tough-looking, with dark, distant eyes, but there was something in the scarred face she found compelling. Nothing obvious or boastful-just there. Competence, knowledge, pain. If she had to guess, she would say this was a man who understood that objectivity wasn’t so easy to maintain. In her mind, that was good. She believed objectivity was wrong.

She glanced at Juliana, whose expression was one of distaste mixed with acceptance-and, she thought, excitement. How interesting. Juliana often seemed so vague and bored with the real things of life, at least from what Wilhelmina could tell from her limited experience with her niece.

Matthew Stark sighed heavily, dread clouding his eyes, and Wilhelmina felt her heart skid. This was not a man given easily to emotion. Something was wrong.

“I gather you two don’t know.” He paused, his mouth straight and hard, but not uncaring. “Johannes Peperkamp was found dead of a heart attack earlier today in Amsterdam. He’d left his shop with a Dutchman whom I have reason to believe was named Hendrik de Geer. I’m sorry.”

Amsterdam, Wilhelmina thought. Of course, Amsterdam.

Hendrik…

She closed her eyes, hardly noticing how they burned, and her mind filled with images, old pictures, living now only inside her. She saw her brother as a young man, tall and laughing as he swept beautiful Ann onto the ice.

“Aunt Willie, are you all right?”

Juliana’s soft voice, filled with grief and shock, broke into her memories, and Wilhelmina took the last step down into the entryway, level with Matthew Stark. Juliana followed unsteadily. Catharina had spoiled her daughter, Wilhelmina thought. Juliana knew so little of the world. She had money and sophistication, fine clothes and a magnificent education, an incomparable talent, but she’d experienced cold or hunger or even death, as common as it was. Now Johannes was dead. And Rachel. Juliana’s white, frozen face seemed inconsequential. Wilhelmina found it difficult to feel sympathy toward someone who’d never really suffered.

And it was sad-wrong-that her niece had never really known her own uncle. But that wasn’t Juliana’s fault. None of this was her fault, and Wilhelmina regretted her silent criticism. Juliana was good and kind, and Wilhelmina was proud of her. She was her niece, the last of the Peperkamps.

Oh, my God.

But Wilhelmina shook off this thought. It strained her imagination to think Johannes would have turned over the Minstrel’s Rough and four hundred years of Peperkamp tradition to their pianist niece. Even at her best, Juliana wouldn’t be likely to take the Minstrel tradition seriously. Not since Amsterdam had any of the Peperkamp siblings mentioned the stone. Surely Johannes had tossed it into the sea. And yet, how could he?

Dear God, Wilhelmina thought with a sharp, sudden, terrible sense of loss. My brother is dead. Gone.

“I’m all right,” she said finally, because she had to, for herself if no one else. “Johannes lived a long life. He was a good man.”

“I know,” Juliana said.

Wilhelmina looked at Matthew Stark, his expression unreadable as he watched Juliana. Yet she could feel the tension in him, telling him to stay where he stood when what he wanted to do was to go to Juliana. Ahh, no, she thought, he’s half in love with her already.

The dark eyes lifted to the old Dutchwoman. “You’re Juliana’s aunt-Willie, is it?”

“Wilhelmina,” she said, her voice clear and strong. There was nothing now to do but go on. Find Hendrik. Stop him. She would mourn her brother forever, but in private. Meanwhile, it seemed there was work to be done. Hendrik-what treachery are you up to this time? “My name is Wilhelmina Peperkamp.”

“Another Peperkamp. Johannes and Catharina’s sister?”

“Yes. I live in Rotterdam.”

“Do you know why your brother was in Amsterdam?”

“To pick up diamonds.” The lie came without effort; she had no reason to trust this American, no reason to tell him anything. “I’m feeding his cat.”

“You came all the way from Rotterdam to feed a cat? Okay, if that’s the way you want it. Don’t tell me a damn thing if you don’t want to. I’ll find out what I need to on my own. Just go back home, both of you. Get the hell out of this mess.”

“We’ll keep your advice in mind, Mr. Stark,” Wilhelmina said impatiently. She hated to be told what to do. “But right now you’ve brought us sad news, and I think you should go.”

“All right. Do you know anything about Hendrik de Geer?”

“Goeden dag, Mr. Stark.”

“That means?”

“Goodbye.”

Stark turned his hard gaze to Juliana. “You want me to leave?”

Juliana stared at him a moment, and Wilhelmina could see the doubt in her niece’s eye. My heavens, she thought, Juliana wants to tell him no! Achh, what was this?

But Juliana nodded stoically. “Yes, I think you’d better.”

Without a word, Matthew spun around and left. Wilhelmina stood beside Juliana and watched him pound down the steep front stairs. “A difficult man,” she said.

“I know, but I’m not sure it’s wise to let him go off on his own like this, Aunt Willie. He knows things he hasn’t told us.”

“And we know things we haven’t told him, don’t we?”

“Yes, but-” Juliana’s jaw set hard. “I don’t know about you, Aunt Willie, but I have no intention of just going home and forgetting about this-and no Vermont, either, dammit.”

“Vermont? What’s in Vermont?”

“Safety. Innocence. It’s where Mother wants me to go.”

“Bah. Some things you cannot escape. Shall we go?”

“Where? I’d like to follow Stark back to the United States-”

“So would I.”

“But you don’t have a passport.”

“I do. I planned one day to go to New York to see your mother, but I changed my mind.”

“Why?”

“She was the one who left.”

“I should have guessed. You have your passport with you?”

“Yes. When I decided to go to Antwerp this morning, I thought I might have to go to New York, to see your mother.” Hendrik, she thought, Hendrik…Had it finally come to this? She felt so tired suddenly, so old. “Come, we’ll have to take care we’re not followed.”

She gave the eel to the landlord, who had been standing by unobtrusively, and explained she would be back later to settle her brother’s affairs.

“What happened?” Martin Dekker asked, apparently not having followed the English exchange. “Where’s your brother?”

She looked at the Belgian and said, her voice quiet and steady, “He’s dead, Mr. Dekker. Johannes is gone.”