Cut And Run. Carla Neggers
although she couldn’t understand why. Lazy or not, he was the scariest sonofabitch she’d ever known.
Catharina’s hands shook as she poured tea from a white porcelain pot. She had prepared the tray of Darjeeling, little sandwiches, round scones, two pots of jam, and a plate of butter cookies herself. Rachel understood that her sudden appearance was a shock for Catharina. Forty years ago they’d said goodbye in Amsterdam, and Catharina, who stayed there a few more years, had cried and promised she would stay in touch. Rachel hadn’t shed a tear or made a promise, because she had already cried a lifetime of tears and no longer believed in promises.
“Don’t be nervous,” Rachel said kindly. She added sugar to her tea. They were strangers, she and Catharina. And yet, how could they ever be? “I haven’t been to New York in so long. There’s no other city quite like it, is there?”
“No, there isn’t,” Catharina said. She added a drop of cream to her tea but didn’t touch it.
“But how are you, Catharina?”
“Fine, I’m fine.”
“That’s good.” Rachel concealed her own awkwardness as she tried some of the tea. “I can see why you opened a bakeshop. You were always a wonderful cook, and you took such pleasure in it. Nobody could make the meager rations we had in the war tolerable the way you did—and remember your beet stew?” Rachel laughed, not a happy, carefree laugh, but still a laugh. “It was ghastly, but much better than anything we’d had in weeks.” She was suddenly silent, observing Catharina’s discomfiture with a small sigh. Did her old friend never think about the war? Rachel asked softly, “Adrian’s a decent man?”
“Yes, wonderful.” Catharina seemed relieved at the switch in subject. “He’s so kind and strong.”
“He’s a banker?”
“Yes, and he loves it.”
“I’m glad. I’ve often wondered what would have happened to you if he hadn’t come along when he did. Holland—” Rachel shrugged and thought perhaps it would be best not to dig any deeper than was strictly necessary. “You needed to get out of there. Wilhelmina would have suffocated you. Have you been back?”
“To Amsterdam, once, when Ann died. Johannes was inconsolable; I’d always hoped they’d die together.” She quickly picked up a scone, absently coating it with raspberry jam. “And to Rotterdam seven years ago, when my daughter made her Dutch premiere in the church in which Adrian and I were married. He didn’t come—he and Willie have never gotten along, and their fighting would have spoiled everything.”
“Does she still think you’ll come back?”
“Of course.”
Rachel nodded, remembering the tough, solid woman who was Catharina’s senior by a dozen years and had been Rachel’s closest friend. Wilhelmina Peperkamp had held the Nazis in the strongest contempt from the very beginning, long before Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, certainly long before the German occupation of The Netherlands. Rachel had never met anyone more reliable. “Yes, I can believe that.”
“Do you see her?”
With their five-year age difference, the friendship between Wilhelmina Peperkamp and Rachel Stein had been more a meeting of equals. Catharina had always been the baby. They’d all protected her—Wilhelmina, Johannes, Rachel, her brother Abraham. Everyone. They’d seemed to believe that if they could prevent the war from touching her, they could somehow preserve some of their own innocence. But the war had touched her. Nothing they could have done would have stopped that. It had robbed her of her youth, her girlhood. Rachel saw that now, understood, but she wondered if Catharina felt she’d failed them all.
“How can I see Willie?” Rachel said with a snort. “You know she doesn’t travel, and I won’t go back. She sends me cards at the holidays. She tells me about you, Juliana, her begonias.”
“Do you write to her?” Catharina asked.
“No, but of course that doesn’t stop Willie from doing what she feels is right. If it did…” She lifted her small shoulders in a noncommittal shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe then I would write. Catharina.” Rachel sighed, taking a tiny sandwich of smoked salmon. She wasn’t hungry, but she knew she needed to eat. Five years of near starvation had developed in her a practical attitude toward food. “Do you have any idea why I’m here?”
“I can guess.”
“I’ve seen him,” Rachel said without further preamble. “I’ve seen Hendrik de Geer.”
Catharina shut her eyes and held her breath, and Rachel thought her old friend was going to faint. “Catharina?”
She opened her eyes. “I’m all right,” she said weakly. “I’m sorry.”
“Please, don’t.”
“I’d convinced myself he was dead.”
“Hendrik dead?” Rachel hooted. “He’ll outlive us all. He’s blessed that way, you know—or cursed. Remember the time he brought us the chocolate? We’d had nothing but sugar beets to eat for days and Hendrik showed up with chocolate. I thought I’d never tasted anything so wonderful. He was so proud of himself, and we were too thrilled even to think to ask him where he’d gotten it. But you know Hendrik. He’s the kind who picks up the world each morning and gives it a good shake. For once, Catharina, I want it to go the other way around. I want the world to give Hendrik de Geer a good shake.”
Catharina stared down at her tea, which had become cold, the cream filming on the top. She hadn’t touched her scone. “Where did you see him?”
Rachel nibbled on a watercress sandwich. “On television, two weeks ago. It was fate, I think. Abraham and I have retired to Palm Beach.” Fleetingly, she thought of the last thirty years, during which she and her brother had become two of the savviest, toughest Hollywood agents. It seemed so distant now. The past, Amsterdam, seemed so much closer. “I never liked Los Angeles, I don’t know why. Anyway, now I have a whole new group of politicians to watch. I always watch politics, of course, since Hitler. One of our senators is Samuel Ryder—very handsome, charming, on the whole too conservative for me, but nothing I can’t live with. One day I’m watching the local news, and a reporter catches Sam Ryder as his car pulls up to the curb and starts firing questions at him—you know how they will—about some controversial bill he’s sponsoring, and sitting beside him is Hendrik de Geer. Hendrik! In a limousine with a United States senator.”
The bell at the door tinkled, and Rachel looked around, pausing as two young women entered the shop, loaded down with shopping bags. Rolls of bright Christmas wrapping paper poked out of one bag.
“You’re certain?” Catharina asked.
“Absolutely. After all these years, do you think he’s changed? No, he looks just as he did in Amsterdam. I knew immediately it was he. My stomach told me, before my brain.” She remembered how she’d run to the bathroom and vomited. That was something she would never admit to Catharina, for whom, she felt, she must remain especially strong. “I called Ryder’s office at once and demanded to know why he was riding around with Hendrik de Geer, and, of course, they thought I was crazy. But I persisted, and finally they put the senator on.”
“You told him—”
“I told him everything I could think of about Hendrik. Yes, that’s exactly what I did. I talked and talked; everything just poured out of me, because now I think the time has come. I told him Hendrik de Geer betrayed me and my family and the people who were hiding us to the Nazis and that he was a Nazi collaborator and has never answered for what he did.”
Catharina regarded her old friend with despair. “He’s never even admitted he did anything wrong. Oh, Rachel, what’s the point? You know what he is—”
“That’s the point. I do know what he is!”
Rachel balled one tiny hand