Page 7 of Winter's End
In short order, she injected the pup with the vaccines she needed, all the while talking softly and sending reassuring smiles to her young master.
“There! All done,” she said, setting Bella on her feet on the floor, laughing as the pup shook her little body as though she were shaking off water.
“She is good to go,” Zoe laughed. “No need for me to see her again until she reaches her first birthday.”
She watched the family troop out to the desk, wondering as always that even now, when most families had little enough to sustain themselves, they managed to provide for their pets.
She turned and washed her hands, put fresh paper on the examining table. Of course, theklineik’saccounts receivables grew longer by the month, and vaccines were increasingly harder to come by, but neither she nor Daan would think of turning away an animal in need so long as they were able to help.
It was nearly four before she heard Daan’s voice, talking animatedly to Lise.
“You are back,” said Zoe, hands in her pockets. “How was Amsterdam?”
The owner of the petkliniekwas bent at the supply cabinet alongside Lise, systematically filing syringes, nail clippers, and other supplies into compartmented bins.
“Ah,” Daan said, rising. “It was as we expected,” he told her, a meaningful look in his eyes. “Busy day, traffic heavy as ever, but all good to go, Zoe. Good to go.”
Zoe nodded, interpreting his message. Tonight. The transfer was a go.
“Good,” she said. “Everything is in order. I may need to leave a bit early.”
Daan Mulder rose to his full height, an unimposing five foot-eight, a stocky figure with unruly blonde hair and a pock-marked face that belied both his inner and outer strength. He had recently married the love of his life, Ilke, a busy attorney with no time for the Resistance but with no opposition to Daan’s commitment. Zoe trusted Daan’s instincts completely.
“You may leave any time you like,” he told her. “It is going to be a long, cold night.”
MILA
The lavender dress arrived at five, as promised, just as Mila stepped from the shower. “Put it on the bed, Reit,” she called to the maid. “I will be out in a moment.”
Hondje, her little Maltese ball of white fluff, waited at the foot of her bed. Poor Hondje. She hadn’t had much time for him of late. She smiled and ruffled his top knot.
Toweled off and powdered, she brushed her red-blonde hair into a loose chignon and put on the amethyst earrings her father had given her weeks ago for her twenty-fifth birthday.
She put down the brush and slumped for a moment against the mahogany dressing table. Her father. What was she to do about the growing chasm between her love for him and her passion for the work of the Resistance?
Millions of their countrymen were making do with wilted vegetables while her father’s table groaned under the finest delicacies, thanks largely to the Germans who dined with them. Her father was a businessman, a smart businessman, a man who’d spent years building the shipping company that had kept her family in silks and satins long before the war made them scarce. It was not his fault that the Germans needed his shipping routes. How else could they move the goods, and the machinery, that kept the Nazi machine functioning? And how else could he keep his business running?
She pulled on silk stockings – a gift from a recentdinner guest– and drew a lacy slip over her shoulders. Four years into this bitter war, fewer than a quarter of Holland’s Jewish population was left, and those mostly in hiding – and as more Jewish families feared the threat of deportation, many were children placed reluctantly with willing Dutch hiding families.
Was her father a collaborator? Of course, he was. The thought made her blood run cold.
As would his blood run cold, she knew, if he had any idea what his only daughter was up to each night after those endless, wine-soaked dinners.
EVI
Evi heard the stifled cry.
She looked up from her homework. “Mam?”
Lotte had been hunched over the banned radio receiver, listening to the illicitradio Oranje.
“Nothing that concerns you,lieveling,”she said. “More student protests in Amsterdam.”
University students had raged against the Blitzkreig from the moment it had smashed across the Dutch border. This was hardly news.
“Mam, what is it really?”
Lotte sighed. “Two students were shot this morning by a Nazi firing squad in Amsterdam. They said it was in retaliation for the death of an SS officer - not that these Nazis need a reason. Any excuse to flaunt Herr Hitler’s power.”
