“Do you know anything about the neighbors?”
She shakes her head. That means I can’t go to the apartment and ask questions. Not when the Roodveldts’ unit is probably occupied by an NSB family already. Amsterdam is a crowded city, where even in normal times it’s difficult to find housing. Now, when a Jewish family disappears, a family of sympathizers reappears in its place, carrying on as if they’d always lived there. Besides, the war makes friends turn on each other. The neighbors might have been the ones to reveal the family’s secret hiding place.
Where else could I find a photograph?
“Have you been to the hiding place in the furniture workshop?” I ask.
She nods. “The day after Hendrik was—the day after it happened. Completely ransacked. The Germans took almost everything, or maybe the Roodveldts didn’t bring much to begin with. Hendrik’s secretary might have tried to save something, but she left on her honeymoon the day after the raid. I can write to her, but I’m not sure when she gets back.”
“Where did Mirjam go to school?”
“The Jewish Lyceum, since Jewish students were segregated. I don’t know where it is.”
I do. It’s right along the Amstel River in a redbrick building with tall windows. I pass by it all the time and now add it to my mental file on Mirjam. I have a location in which I can place the girl I’ve created in my head.
“What happens next?” Mrs. Janssen asks. “Are you going to speak with your friends about this?”
“Friends?”
“Who are going to help you? Who know about these things?”
Now I’m beginning to understand why Mrs. Janssen came to me. Because she has no idea how illicit activities work. The resistance, the black market—she thinks we’re all one network, sharing information, plotting against the Germans. But what I do for Mr. Kreuk works only because my link in the chain is so small. If I were to be caught and questioned about Mr. Kreuk’s operation, I could say that I didn’t know if he’d involved anyone else, and that would be telling the truth.
I don’t have a resistance network. My profiteering shopkeepers will be useless for this task. I don’t have anything, really, except an imaginary picture of a girl I’ve never seen, who I still haven’t fully promised Mrs. Janssen I’ll find.
“I need to see the hiding space again,” I tell Mrs. Janssen.
She lets me in by unlatching the hidden hook, and then calls after me. “I already looked in here. Before you came, I went through everything yesterday.”
I wait for my eyes to adjust. The space is maybe four feet wide. All but a few inches are taken up by the unfolded opklapbed. I pull back the quilt, examining the sheet below, doing the same for the mattress and pillow. On the narrow shelf, the magazine I’d noticed earlier, an old issue, from before the war. Mrs. Janssen probably had it among Jan’s old things and gave it to Mirjam as something to read.
None of the magazine’s pages have notes or markings on them, but tucked underneath is the latest issue of Het Parool, the paper Mrs. Janssen mentioned giving Mirjam yesterday. People read the resistance papers voraciously, then passed them along. Mrs. Janssen’s neighbor or delivery boy must have given this one to her.
I fold up the opklapbed to look at the floor underneath, peeling back the thin rug.
Nothing. Nothing anywhere.
But what did I expect to find? A letter from Mirjam explaining where she went? A trapdoor, where a Nazi could have sneaked in and carried Mirjam away? When I emerge into the kitchen, rubbing my eyes against the brightness, Mrs. Janssen starts to set out coffee again.
“Is your neighbor across the street home?” I ask her. “Mrs. Veenstra? The one whose son got waylaid?”
“I don’t think so.” She frowns. “Did you want to interview her? She doesn’t know about Mirjam.”
I shake my head. “Stay at your door. And sometime in the next five minutes, open it and come out. Anytime in the next five minutes. Just don’t give me warning when.”
Wrapping my arms around my waist against the cold, I cross the street to the house belonging to Mrs. Veenstra and stand on the steps, my back facing Mrs. Janssen’s home. After a minute it comes: an audible click, followed immediately by a yapping dog. When I turn around, Mrs. Janssen stares at me, confused.
“I don’t understand,” she says when we’re back in the house. “What were you doing?”
“I noticed it earlier when Christoffel left with the opklapbed. Your door is so old and heavy; it can’t be opened without making a sound. And as soon as that dog next door—”
“Fritzi,” Mrs. Janssen supplies. “The neighbor boy’s schnauzer.”