Carla Neggers - Cut and Run

It wasn’t in Amsterdam. This trip was an act of desperation-a ruse. The Minstrel was not here. There was no safe-deposit box.

Hendrik moaned aloud. “What am I to do?”

Run…

It was his first impulse. Always his first impulse.

He gulped the gin and rose from his chair, stumbling as he made his way to his bunk. His eyes brimmed with hot, worthless tears, blinding his vision but not the images that burned in his head.

Catharina tearing at his sleeve, screaming “No, no, no!”…the unearthly emptiness of the house…the smug looks of the Green Police when Hendrik had confronted them.

Images. Memories. But what was done was done. That the Steins and the Peperkamps had been captured by the Nazis wasn’t his fault. He had been cheated-lied to!

And yet he hated himself, now more than ever before, with desperation and anger, without hope. The cool detachment of recent years was gone. He knew he couldn’t change. Johannes was right. As always, Hendrik thought he could handle everything. Make everyone happy. Get the stone, get Ryder off the hook with Bloch, maintain his own position with Bloch, keep the Peperkamps out of it. He’d never considered the possibility that Johannes wouldn’t have the Minstrel’s Rough.

Hendrik swore fiercely but broke off when a young deckhand rushed into the cabin. “It’s the old man-something’s wrong.”

The Dutchman threw down the gin and moved quickly, but when he got to the deck, Johannes Peperkamp was lying on his back, ashen and unconscious. The sharp, cold wind gusted, but the old man made no attempt to get out of it.

“My God!” Hendrik felt a faint pulse in Johannes’s neck and tore open the old cutter’s jacket and shirt. “My friend, don’t die now. It won’t help either of us.”

He pounded on Johannes’s chest and screamed to the deckhand, a red-faced boy, and together they administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation, Hendrik continuing to scream orders.

“It’s no use,” the deckhand cried, tired and repulsed. He’d never touched a dying man before.

“Keep going!”

“I’m cold-”

“Damn you, there’s still a pulse!”

The boy sat back on his knees, frightened. They’d picked up Hendrik in Antwerp-he was an old friend of the captain’s-and the boy had steered clear of him. “He’s not going to make it.”

Hendrik gave the boy a fierce look and said in a low, deadly voice, “Keep going or I’ll kill you. I can do it.”

“You’re crazy,” the deckhand said, but he kept going.

It was dawn, and a pinkish light glowed over Central Park. Juliana sat at her piano. It was quiet in her apartment; there was no music on the rack. She rolled up the sleeves of her flannel nightgown and shut her eyes.

Behind her, the aquarium bubbled. She could hear herself breathe.

She had tried to call Uncle Johannes in Antwerp. He wasn’t at his shop or his apartment. She didn’t know where else he could be.

She had resisted the temptation to call her mother at the bakeshop. She would be there, baking cookies. Speculaas. Dutch spice cookies. For Christmas.

Juliana’s fingers found the keyboard. They brushed the cool ivory.

She played.

Something, nothing. She didn’t know what. Her fingers were her only cues. They knew the right keys, the right phrasing. Her mind wasn’t involved. It didn’t matter, not here, not alone. Everything blended together. Scales, arpeggios. Beethoven, Schoenberg. Eubie Blake, Duke Ellington. Music poured out of her, uncontrolled, and filled the room.

The sound ended the silence and the bad thoughts.

When you have bad thoughts, her mother used to say when Juliana was small and woke up crying from her nightmares, you should try to think of something else. Something happy. Imagine yourself at a picnic in the country with your father and me. Picking wildflowers. Playing in the stream.

Think happy thoughts.

Repress.

It was always easier to do at the piano.

She played until she hurt, and when she stopped, tears and sweat poured down her face and her back and between her legs, and her muscles ached, and she didn’t know how long she’d been at it. Hours? Minutes?

The first bright light of morning shone over Central Park. She went over to the couch and sat where Matthew Stark had sat and watched the street below fill with people. She would remain upstairs, alone, playing piano and talking to her fish.

Thinking happy thoughts.

“Stark-shit, man, I was hoping you wouldn’t be in.” Weasel’s voice was low and nervous over the telephone. “Thought maybe you’d be a step ahead of me, you know?”

Matthew held the phone with one hand, his forehead with the other. He’d drunk a few too many beers last night during the last period of the hockey game, trying to figure out what the hell to do about his promise to Weasel. What did he have to work with? A gorgeous flake of a piano player. A diamond that maybe existed, and then again maybe didn’t. A screwup of a United States senator that only some warped sense of obligation to Weasel kept Matthew from going to see and ask some questions. A Dutchman who might already have exited the scene. A dead Hollywood agent. A couple of Peperkamps.

And Weasel himself. A half-dead former door gunner who’d been able to hit eighty-four targets with ninety-six bullets but still didn’t know that the Sam Ryders of the world didn’t need his help.

What he had to work with, Stark had decided, was zip. But some ingrained, persistent item in his code of honor had flipped on, and he knew he couldn’t walk away and just let events take their course. He’d tried to call Juliana Fall late, after the hockey game, to say he was sorry for needling her and charm her into telling him whatever it was she wasn’t telling him. He’d gotten her goddamn message machine, the golden voice saying she couldn’t come to the phone right now. Drinking his final beer, he’d wondered what she was doing, who she was with tonight. He’d conjured up an image of her, pale blond hair flowing over her raccoon coat, a delicious mix of J.J. Pepper, jazz pianist, and Juliana Fall, concert pianist. A mix that didn’t exist. She was one or the other, not both, maybe not either.

He hadn’t left a message.

Now he was back at the Gazette, avoiding Feldie and wondering if maybe the best way to keep Otis Raymond alive was to do nothing. Tell the little jackass to crawl back into his hole and stay there. To live, dammit.

“You know I’m never a step ahead of you,” Matthew said now, aware Weasel would love that. “What’s up?”

“You make any progress on the diamond?”

“No.”

“Shit, Stark, maybe you have lost it.”

Matthew took no offense. “Whoever said I had anything to lose?”

“I do, buddy,” Otis Raymond replied, confidence creeping back into his voice. One thing he knew: he could count on Matt Stark. Hadn’t they survived as a scout pilot and scout gunner, part of a “pink team,” when so damn few did? “Hey-I ain’t got time for bullshit. Got a pencil? Jot this one down: Johannes Peperkamp, diamond cutter, Antwerp. I don’t have the spelling.”

“I don’t need it,” Matthew said, swearing to himself. “Where’d you hear that name?”

“Things starting to hang together, huh, Stark?”

“No, things are not starting to hang together, goddamnit.” His head was pounding; from now on, he’d limit himself to two beers. “Where the hell are you getting your information? Damn it, Weaze, level with me. I can’t get a handle on this business if you don’t give me everything you’ve got. Who’s behind all this, who-”

“I can’t talk, man.” Weasel’s voice dropped even lower. “Folks know I’ve given you this much, I’m dead.”