Page 4 of Winter's End
Two more shops, she saw – a juice vendor and akaffieshop she’d patronized over the years – were closed and boarded up. Zoe felt the air sucked out of her. More food shops forced to close because they had no goods to sell.
She passed the green grocer’s, glanced at half-filled crates of carrots, potatoes, and beets, a few winter melons, and wilting heads of cabbage available to those who could afford them. More than four years into a war thrust upon them had made more and more Hollanders – even those like her parents, who had never before put a hoe to the soil – dependent on what they could grow themselves, or catch.
Zoe shivered in her woolen coat. With the cold descending, the Nazis commandeering the lion’s share of food, and spring planting months away, the last of even these meager crops would soon be gone.God help us,she silently mouthed the words, to survive till winter’s end.
Sighing, she ducked into a small café situated between the struggling produce market and a fish vendor. She chose it not because the food was good or plentiful – nothing was plentiful these days unless the shopkeeper had forged an arrangement with the Nazis – but because it was well-suited for her purpose. Pulling off her cap, she stuffed it into a pocket, then wriggled out of her coat and found a place for it high on the crowded coat rack.
She chose a small table near the kitchen and looked up at the young man waiting to take her order. He was tall, slim, and fresh-faced, not much older than she, Evi guessed. He set a glass of water in front of her and smiled in a way that told her he could be interested in more than what she wanted for lunch.
At twenty-four, Zoe knew she was pretty. She was also one of the youngest veterinarians in Haarlem, if not in all the Netherlands, having graduated from high school at sixteen and finished her veterinary studies just before the rowdy student protests against the Nazi invasion had triggered university shutdowns. She loved her work, and her work for the Resistance, but it left little time for a social life.
She turned her attention to the paper menu, crossed through with black marker where choices were no longer available.
“I will have a herring sandwich on pumpernickel bread,” she said. “With butter if you have it,” she said. “And coffee.”
The young man looked as though she had given him a gift. “Straightaway, mademoiselle.”
Zoe smiled at his use of the French.
She kept her head down when her food arrived, and ate the sandwich quickly, leaving her guilders on the table before the waiter appeared with the check.
Making her way back to the coat rack, she stood with her back to the café’s diners and fussed about with her left hand as if to adjust the scarf around her neck. All the while, her right hand moved quickly from pocket to pocket among the jumble of outerwear on the rack.
She was stuffing two small leather cases into the pocket of her coat when she heard the call from behind.
“Mademoiselle!”
She felt the blood drain from her face.
“Your earring!” the server called, coming up behind her. “It was on the floor beneath your table.”
Zoe closed her eyes and wrapped her coat close around her. She was not wearing earrings.
“Not mine, I fear,” she turned to face the waiter, touching her naked earlobe. “No earrings today. It must belong to someone else. But thank you,” she managed to smile.
He looked deflated. “Aah…yes, I see…Well…please do come in again.”
On the street outside, perspiring in the cold, she took a deep gulp of air and fingered the leather cases in her pocket. It was what she likedleast, of all the duties she had taken on for the Resistance, snooping through other people’s pockets.
It was stealing, really, she knew it was stealing, there was no other word for it. But it was necessary, seizing identification papers that could be altered for Jews and other enemies of the Reich who were forced to run for their lives.
Still, she tried to even her breathing and kept her head down as she walked. Random German checkpoints could turn up anywhere, and SS observers might decide to stop you for no reason at all.
...
In her own small office, Zoe closed the door and slipped the two leather cases out of her coat pocket. One, she saw, contained a Swiss passport in the name of Josef Huber, born January, 1918 in Geneva. The other held a Dutch ID card in the name of Johanna Stoepker, born 1909 in Amsterdam. Altered and fitted with the photos of desperate escapees, they might help to save two lives.
Zoe hated that she needed to do this. But she hated the Nazis more, and the identification papers, she knew, could be replaced without too much fuss by their rightful owners.
She placed the cases in the bottom of her handbag beneath a jumble of keys, make-up, and other paraphernalia, intending to pass them on to Daan Mulder when he returned. She hung the bag and her coat on a peg behind the door, and put her white coat on over her dress.
Straightening, she opened the door.
MILA
Mila Brouwer whirled once before the tailor shop’s three-sided mirror, watched the taffeta skirts of the lavender dinner dress dance against her legs.
“Very good, Gita” she said. “A quick press at the hemline and the dress will be perfect. I can come back for it if you like.”
