Page 91 of Winter's End
Patting his shoulder, Zoe covered him with a sheet so that only his toes were exposed and pushed the gurney out from behind the makeshift ward toward the freight elevator. He was the fifth of the high-profile refugees she had transported that day – mostly the Jewish doctors in hiding who continued to treat their fellow refugees.
Moving smartly through the corridor in her starched nurse’s uniform, she pushed the elevator button for the basement.
Gerritt met them in the morgue. “I think, for the moment, we have met the limit of the ‘deceased’ we are able to accommodate here,” he said. “But perhaps it is safe to move ten or twelve people into the old pathology lab – and then, if we need to, we can put the hardiest among them into the sub-basement.”
Zoe adjusted the nurse’s cap she had pinned to her hair. “We can do that,” she said, though her heart broke to think of the spartan conditions these people would be forced to endure.
She lifted the sheet from the face of the ‘deceased’ physician. “I am affixing a nametag to your big toe,” she told him. “It is not your real name, of course.”
She completed the task quickly, and eased the gurney nearer to his ‘deceased’ companions. “Will you be all right here?” she asked.
The older man offered a wan smile. “I have never been much addicted to daytime napping,” he said. “But it is infinitely moreattractive than the prospect of eternal sleep at the hands of Hitler’s thugs…”
“Amen to that,” his colleagues murmured.
Zoe smiled and pulled the sheet back over the old man’s head.
Gerritt moved from one to other of the counterfeit corpses. “A little drill,” he said. “The door to the morgue will be locked. Entry is restricted to Zoe and myself and the few trusted nurses who bring your food.”
He paused. “This soft knock,” he demonstrated, “will signal to you that one of us is about to enter. Anything but this distinct knock and you run and warn the others.”
Zoe heard the murmured assents.
“You may sit up and walk around a bit for a while after meals,” Gerritt continued. “Use the toilet or whatever. But as mealtimes approach – and you know the timing – please assume your prone position until you can confirm who has entered.”
His voice grew increasingly sober. “Lastly,” he said, “If you detect any sort of commotion outside these doors, take the stairs down to the sub-basement until,als god, the danger has passed or you exit through the ambulance bay…”
God help them if they are forced to run into the streets, Zoe put a hand over her heart.“What would become of them then?
...
The population of the makeshift ward had been reduced by more than half, Zoe guessed – including the youngest children, who were the first to be relocated with their parents or hiding parents.
Her gaze swept those remaining for the storyteller who tugged at her heart, and who had refused to leave, in spite of the danger, until the last of the refugees were safely moved.
She watched him talking with a pair of teenaged boys who, like him, had decided to stay until the others had been moved. Kurt threw his head back, as if laughing at something one of the teens had said.
Zoe shook her head slowly from side to side.A hunted German refugee, she reflected.Who would have believed, in this time of bitter war, that she was losing her heart to a German?
MILA
Mila pushed food around her plate. It was another of those rare evenings with just the three of them at the table. But more and more often, conversation between them was stilted.
Her mother, still opting for dinner in her room most evenings when her father’s German guests were at the table, seemed to be shrinking into herself, neither strong enough to oppose what her husband was doing, nor meek enough to support it. Her apathy was awash in a sea of red wine, leaving Mila sad and helpless.
And what could she expect her father to share? She watched him out of the corner of her eye. That his shipping business was busier than ever? That he was helping the enemy transport food and supplies for enemy German troops? Moving another shipment of arms from Berlin with which to murder Dutch citizens?
She passed the scalloped potatoes when he asked for them.
Perhaps she could tell him about Lotte Strobel’s death at the hands of his Nazi ‘business partners’– about the daughter they had left both motherless and homeless, dependent on the kindness of strangers.
Or remind him that, on just the other side of their handsome doorway, innocent Dutch were being starved and murdered by the disciples of an arrogant madman…
She gazed at the huge bouquet of pink and white orchids resplendent at the center of the table.
What would he say of her calculated ‘tryst’ with the traitor Reimar de Boer – of the part she played in his failed assassination, or her passion for the man who fired the shot?
“Will you want a new frock, Mila, for your evening with Franz Becker?” Her father broke the silence.
