Oh. Damn. I should have paid more attention to her conversation with Judith. Mina has brought me along to one of her own exchanges. That’s why the bag she gave me is so heavy. The blankets must be covering what she’s really transporting: documents, ration cards, maybe even a pile of money to pay off an inside man. I must be carrying a modest fortune in illegal papers. I force myself to stay calm.
“Well, not quite here.” Mina cranes her head to the sky, orienting herself. “We’re supposed to meet by the weather vane.” There are two clock towers on Amsterdam Centraal. One of them is a real clock; the other looks like a clock but is really a weather vane, and the hands swing in the wind. Mina pushes the baby carriage to the vane, scanning the crowd. “There she is.” She raises her hand to someone halfway across the plaza.
The woman approaching is well dressed, neat blond hair and an expensive-looking suit. Mina’s contact. She reminds me a little of Mrs. de Vries. “Am I late?” she asks.
“No, no,” Mina tells her. “You’re right on time.”
“I didn’t bring anything. Was I supposed to bring something? I think someone told me—”
“You didn’t need to bring anything. I was happy to help you out. Are you ready?”
The woman nods and then holds out her arms. I scan the surrounding crowd to make sure no one is watching, then unsling the bag and begin to pass it to Mina to remove whatever she needs for the lady. Mina ignores my outstretched arm, bending over the baby carriage and scooping up Regina in one practiced, fluid motion.
“Her name is Regina,” Mina says. And instead of taking the bag from me, Mina kisses Regina on her forehead, whispers something I can’t hear, and hands the blond woman the baby.
“Oh!” The woman pulls back the blanket, touching the tip of Regina’s nose. “Such a pretty name. Do I keep it? My husband always said if we had a daughter, he wanted to name her after his mother.”
Mina swallows. “You have a daughter now,” she says finally. “So you’ll take care of her the best way you see fit. Do you have a car waiting?”
“Around the corner.”
“So you’re all set.”
The woman looks like she wants to ask more questions, but instead she walks back into the milling crowd. Mina watches until she disappears.
ELEVEN
That was the delivery?” I whisper. “That was the delivery you had to make?” Mina nods, and starts to walk away, back in the direction we’ve come. “Wait. That was—Mina, what just happened?”
She stops, looking uncertain as she takes the bag from my shoulder and sets it in the carriage. “We never do it unless we have permission from the parents. Some of them refuse to be separated. We only hide the ones whose families believe they’ll be safer away. I thought you knew.”
That was the dialogue I overheard earlier, between Judith and Mina. It wasn’t a code, and had nothing to do with people receiving false papers containing names different from the ones they were born with. Mina was warning Judith that parents who gave up their children might not be able to find them again, after the war.
“How many?” Mina is only fifteen, and her head barely reaches my shoulder. The idea that she does this regularly, in broad daylight… “How many children have you placed?”
“Just me? More than a hundred. Judith works on the inside of the Schouwburg, tracking down families and getting permission. It’s easier to hide a baby than an adult, since people don’t need papers until they’re fourteen. We have an inside person in the theater who alters the records to make it look like the children never arrived at the crèche.”
Baby Regina wasn’t a foil, hiding the illicit delivery. Baby Regina was the illicit delivery.
Mina has done this more than a hundred times. A hundred shootable offenses, and then she gets up the next day and does it again, and still she talks about school and boyfriends and what she wants to do after the war. One time, out of that hundred, I helped her.
Mina gives me a sidelong glance. “I thought you knew,” she says again. “Judith didn’t tell you?”
“Judith didn’t tell me.”
“Are you mad?”
I don’t know what I am. This delivery is just one in the long line of involvements I didn’t mean to have. But that theater was so dark, and Regina was so young, and we can do so little, all of us. What am I supposed to say? That I wish we had left Regina in the nursery to be deported? What am I supposed to believe—that Mirjam alone is worth taking risks to save, just because she was the one I was asked to find? That now that I’ve seen what I’ve seen in the deportation center, I’ll be able to forget it?
“I don’t know what I feel,” I begin. “I feel—”
“Let me see the baby!”
The voice belongs to a man, speaking in giddy Dutch with a heavy German accent.