Amsterdam 2020 (Amsterdam Series Book 2) (16 page)

Joury squeezes back, refusing to let go.  Salima has to release herself by pulling on Joury's wrist with her other hand.  “Stay brave,” she says, “and eat something.”  She turns and leaves.

The rest of the plan goes without a hitch. 

Only later does Salima find out they only had a few minutes in which Joury could be under propranolol without brain damage.  If her father had decided to pray over her dead body, it would've been a disaster.  Luckily, Joury's father is a heartless bastard.  He wouldn't allow Joury's mother to visit her in the hospital.  Not even when he was told that Joury was going to die.

“Where is she now?” Salima asks Sander, a few days later.  She is disappointed  she didn't get to see Joury before she went underground. 

“I don't know.  If I did, I couldn't tell you.  My guess is she is out of the country.”

“In Copenhagen?”

“As I said, I don't know.”

Joury's rescue changes something in Salima.  One of Jana's friends notices first, an ambiable older woman, who remarks at mosque, “Salima is becoming such a young lady.”  She doesn't mean that Salima's body has developed or that she is becoming pretty, both which are true, but that her deameanor has become calm, deliberate, and poised.

Her true self, her spontanteous and cheerful self, is carefully hidden away.  She feels as if the core of her body has turned into something cold and rigid—like steel. 

She becomes fearless.

Boerenmarkt

On Saturdays, Salima goes to the Farmer's Market on Noordermarkt off of Prinsengracht, not far from where she lives.

She meets Uncle Sander with his small vegetable truck, helps him set up a table and stand, then serves customers.  They do not pass out fliers or any subversive material.  It would be far too dangerous.  IRH soldiers mill around, just waiting to catch someone doing something illegal.  But hard as they try, they cannot keep people from speaking with one another.

During her break, Salima goes from one food vendor to another.  Many are friends, members of the Resistance, passing on information.  Someone needs a travel pass to get out of the country.  A safe house needs a plumber.  New refugees are coming up the
Varken Weg.

Salima buys herself a small plate of
poffertjes
, then ambles through the tables, which are covered in white canvas canopies to keep off the drizzle.  Rows and rows of tables overflowing with hand
made cheeses, eggs, fresh fish, bread, honey, herbs, spices, nuts, homemade cakes, fruits, and flowers.  One table offers mushrooms in all shapes and colors, collected in Dutch forests or brought in from France or Belgium.

The Islamists don't quite get the Dutch obsession with mushrooms, but they do understand that the produce is highly perishable and quite valuable.  They allow mushroom farmers and merchants wide-ranging travel passes.  Which makes them excellent liaison officers. 
An important link in the Resistance.

Salima sways over the boxes of mushrooms, breathing in their heady aroma. 
They smell of damp earth and underground tunnels—the old mines used for mushroom farming, which also provide havens for refugees.

As her fingertips dust the tops of the cèpes, morilles, and chanterelles, she shows her ring.  A simple silver ring with a pig's tail design.  She wears it on her wedding ring finger.  If an IRH soldier nears, she turns the design inside toward her palm.  She points to the orange ear-shaped griolles, and asks for a quarter kilo. 
A farmer named Ton, recognizes her ring and her voice.  “Don't turn around,” he says softly.  “Shirzad Sahar just walked in from Boomstraat.”

Salima groans with dread.  “What's he doing here?”

“Just looking around right now.  You'd better come back behind the table.”

Salima slips around the booth and sits in a corner under the awning against the van.  The cooling engine warms her back and smells faintly of gasoline.  She can just see Shirzad over the mushroom boxes.  

Five Landweer
officers and two IRH soldiers stand behind him.  He wouldn't bring so many unless he planned on making an arrest.  He walks slowly into the middle of the bazaar, looking over the tables, as if a famous chef composing the day's menu based on the freshness of the vegetables.  He smiles, his hand passing over a crate of ginger crisp apples.  He speaks to no one.  Just looking.  Taking it all in.

Customers drift away, giving him wide berth.  His reputation precedes him. 

Fascism attracts sadists, but Shirzad is worse than a sadist.  Eventually sadists become uncontrollable megalomaniacs, and their bosses have to curb or eliminate them.  But Shirzad is beyond anything so human as sexual perversion.  He is a cool efficient machine, without an ounce of compassion, carrying out sharia law to the letter. 

Torture is part of his job, and he does it well.  He takes his prisoners to Rijksmuseum, which the Islamic Council has commandeered for government offices, down to the basement vaults, airless and climate controlled, where watercolors and delicate oil paintings were once stored.  People say he was trained in torture by the American CIA in Iraq.  It must be true.  He approaches torture as a science.  People do survive it, but they are never the same.

He is not driven by ambition or power.  He is an effective bureaucrat.  Salima suspects after work he returns home and eats a pleasant dinner with his family.  They say he is a loving husband, and that during Eid al-Fitr, he gives 10 percent of his income to the poor, rather than the 2.5 percent
zakat
required of every Muslim.  She stares at him hard.  How do two men live in one body?  A well-known philanthropist, a family man who dotes on his daughters, an amateur historian of ancient Assyrian culture, and a torturer.   

She has seen Shirzad Sahar before.  Twice at Chop-Chop Square on Friday afternoons after the midday prayer, and once when Grand Mufti Fawaz Jneid spoke before a crowd at Stationplein in front of the train station.  He presides at executions and floggings without a trace of emotion.  Some call him “The Terminator.”

Shirzad claims to have a sixth sense for hunting down rebels.  He walks into the center of the bazaar, turning slowly several times, pausing as if receiving radio signals.  He watches the customers.  He watches the vendors.  He sees who is scurrying away, who pretends he isn't there.  He smells their sweat, hears their thumping hearts, senses the change in their breathing, their tensing muscles. 

Everyone knows what is coming. 

Salima inhales nervously, sucking her veil into her mouth.  She yanks it out so she can get air, telling herself not to be frightened.  Not to draw him to her.

He raises his hand, turns one step to the right, and brings it down. 

Three Landweer spring out behind him and upend a table, arresting a potato vendor, accusing him of smuggling in pork sausage.  Salima hitches a breath.  Not a member of the Resistance, as far as she knows.

But Shirzad is not done.

As the Landweer
drag off the vendor, two more smash up his stand.  Shirzad steps away nonchalantly as if he'd merely purchased a snack of organic purple potato chips, continuing on between the tables as before. 

He pauses, as if catching a pleasant aroma, then starts his spin, more slowly this time.  He raises his arm . . . and points at her.

“Run,” hisses Ton, bracing his hips against the table.

As Landweer
officers charge the mushroom stand, Salima slips unnoticed behind Ton's van and zigzags through the market.  She takes the arm of a burka clad woman who always stands by the flower vendor, a lookout for the Resistance.  “
Razzia
,” she whispers hotly.
  “
Tell Sander and the others.”  The woman nods and disappears.

Salima is pretty sure she was not Shirzad's target.  Still, it wouldn't do to lead them back to Sander or anyone else.  She must leave. 

As she weaves her way through the streets, she reviews in her mind what Ton knows.  Information he knows goes one way.  He knows the troop movements of the IRH, but nothing of the Resistance in Amsterdam.  Ton names his contacts after mushrooms.  He knows her as
Truffel
, but to be safe, she might need new ID papers. 

At best, he will be imprisoned or sent to a work camp.  He will be hard to replace.

How did Shirzad find out?

Nine, January 2018

Postbode

After a year of distributing fliers and documents for Uncle Sander, Salima receives her first assignment as a
postbode—
mailman—a transporter of refugees.  She gets very good at it.

In the evenings, a shopper, usually a burka clad woman, stops by Freyja Natuur Winkel, and, while watching Salima weigh out a kilo of golden pears, tells her where to meet her contact the next morning and what code words to use.  Salima meets her contact, who tells her where to make the pickup.  A different assignment and a different contact each day.  She finds her charges and delivers them into the hands of another contact.  She travels on trains and boats, bicycles across the countryside to farms and old pig factories.  The refugees fade into the landscape, hidden and absorbed into farm life, or get transported to Denmark or Scotland.

As soon as Salima finishes a “delivery,” she forgets everything she has said and done.  Immediately.  It is not a hard task.  Alcohol is usually involved, aboard the barge, with Pim and Nasira and the rest of the
Watergeuzen
.

But nothing ever goes as smoothly as all that.  Her charges are often far more desperate than expected.  They need coats and shoes just to survive the day, and certainly before they are moved to Denmark.  They are often sick or injured.  Sometimes they are so frightened and paranoid they cannot follow instructions.  Sometimes a contact is late.  Or a Landweer
officer wanders into the neighborhood.  Or, at the last minute, she gets word IRH soldiers are making a roundup.  Or the
Bloed van God
militia are cruising the streets. 

Failures are common.

One day she arrives to deliver food and medicine to a safe house in de Pijp, a neighborhood below the canal belt.  Eight Christians she met in Aachen, smuggled up the
Varken Weg
and hid in Amsterdam until another
Postbode
can whisk them out of the country.  A family with four children. 

In WWII the practice was to separate the children and parents because the children were easier to hide, added to other families in plain sight.  But it caused a lot of trauma after the war.  The children who survived wondered what happened to their parents, who often had died.  Sometimes parents tried but couldn't find their children, returning home in despair, blaming themselves, loathing their own survival.  Sometimes the children didn't want to leave their adoptive families.

The Resistance tries to keep families together when they can. 

As Salima bikes by the safe house, she sees one curtain is half open, the signal something is amiss.  She pedals past.

Each safe house has a hiding spot where refugees abscond whenever someone comes to the door, or if they hear neighborhood raids.  In this house, the hiding spot is a crawl space beneath the floorboards, not more than eighteen inches high.

When Salima returns to Freyja's, Sander tells her IRH soldiers have temporarily moved into the house.  It is not unusual.  Housing for soldiers is limited in the city.  If a place appears deserted, they take it and use it. 

The Christians under the floor will have to be totally silent until they leave.

“What if we start a fire in back?” Salima suggests.  “The
Kroots
will run out the front, and we can sneak them out.  Or what if we create a disturbance outside, a fight or something?”  All options seem too dangerous, a fire too precarious.  There are others hidden in the neighborhood.  

Usually during her deliveries, Salima tries not to look too hard at the faces of her clients—better not to be able to describe them.  Better not to get attached.  But an adorable bright-eyed girl in this group makes that hard.  A little Heidi.  Ten-years old, with blond braids and a gap between her front teeth, she is sweetly maternal to a younger brother, rocking him, singing a lilting Slavic tune; the boy will let no one else hold him.

That night Salima thinks of the girl and her family, thirsty and hungry, hiding under the feet of Islamists, who are stuffing their faces, making jokes about dirty pork-eating
kafir
and what they plan to do to the next Christian girl they find.  It makes Salima crazy.  If they are very brave, they might sneak out while the soldiers sleep upstairs and find food.  She can only hope they were quick enough to have grabbed some food before hiding under the floorboards.

When the IRH soldiers finally leave and Salima makes a food delivery, only seven come out of hiding, thin, white, and weak.  Six days without food or water.  One of the children has died. 

Salima takes Heidi's body from her father's arms and buries her in the courtyard.

She bikes home to celebrate her eighteenth birthday.

Secretary

“We need someone to work undercover in the Landweer
.”

Gerda shifts in her seat, grimacing.  Hansen, who stands behind her, pours a glass of water, taps out a few white pills from an amber bottle, and places them in front of her.  She wrinkles her nose, takes the pills, and continues.  “Because of the personnel shortage, the Islamic Council has decided young, unmarried Muslim women from good families may hold secretarial and low-level administrative jobs in the government.”

Salima stares at her, a hard lump in her throat, gnawing excitement in her stomach.  The Islamic Council goes through cycles of tolerance, followed by crackdowns.  They loosen up only when they have to—like when they started to let women go to university to become nurses and doctors.  They had passed laws that women could not work only to realize there was no way to staff women's hospitals.  Cornered, they opened up the university to women medical students.  They do a lot of this kind of thing.

It's not so easy turning the clock back to Medieval Europe.

“I want you to seek employment with the Landweer
. 
Perhaps your father could put in a good word for you.  If not, I am sure you will find another way to position yourself.  Appear helpful, positive, decisive, and rigorously religious.  Never hesitate.  Shirzad Sahar is brilliant at spotting any sign of hesitation.  A flicker of indecision in your eyes, and you're on your way to Bijlmerbajes Prison.”

“Shirzad Sahar?”  Salima gives an involuntary shiver.  She recalls the man strolling imperiously in the farmer's market, tapping his black baton on each vendor's table, his sadistic game of Duck-Duck-Goose.

“We want you to get close to him.”

“You mean work in his office?”

“Yes, if possible.  You must convince yourself you are one of them.  You believe the United Nations of Islam is the will of Allah.  You believe the End of Days is coming.  You believe there will be only twelve legitimate caliphs, and Talaat Saleh is the eighth.  You believe that after the armies of Islam defeat the armies of Rome, Islam will reign the world in peace until the anti-Messiah appears in Jerusalem.  Your lies must become real to you.”

“What will I do there?”

“Pim will be your contact.  Every day he will meet you on your way home from work—at a fruit stand or newspaper kiosk.  You will pass on your information and arrange for the next day's meeting in a different place.  You will have access to rubber stamps, official IRH documents, and travel papers.  Steal as many as you think will go unnoticed, and give them to Pim.”

As she must, Salima asks permission from Rafik to seek employment.  He is cool to the request.

“I thought you enjoyed working for Uncle Sander.”

“I do.  But I need to do something more challenging than deliver vegetables,” Salima pleads.  “I am taking the job of someone who isn't capable of anything more.  Besides, I might find a suitable husband if I am in an environment where I can meet men.”

Rafik blinks slowly.  She sees his disbelief.  Not for a second does he think she is interested in finding a husband. 

“I would prefer that you do not go this route,” he says, pressing his lips together in concern.  “If you are sure this is what you want, I will not stand in your way.  Are you sure you know what you are doing?  You put your family at great risk.”

“I will be careful,” she says meekly.  That is all that is said about the matter.

She does not ask for his help in getting the job.  She decides to go through the women at the mosque, befriending some of the older women, and finally Shirzad Sahar's wife, Sanne, who often leads Quran Tajweed.  With the help of Nasira, who brings up the question about women in the workplace, she listens closely without participating.  Shirzad's wife is surprisingly adamant.  “It is a waste of human resources to keep women at home.  The Islamic State would be far stronger if it allowed women to take a more active role.”

Clapping fills the room.  Salima can hardly believe her good luck.  Such liberalism from the wife of a Landweer officer! 

Later, she approaches Sanne.  “I was moved about what you said about women at the forefront of Allah's army.”  Salima continues along these lines, flattering her, saying she has paved the way for younger women, and could she help her find a job.  “I know I am young, but I am efficient and organized.  I want to serve the Caliphate.”

Sanne agrees to talk to her husband, and a few days later tells Salima to report to Landweer headquarters in the Rijksmuseum.  “The Minister of Documents needs an assistant.  He's a bit of a fool, and you'll end up doing his job and getting no credit.  But he is a nice man.”

The next day Salima presents her ID card to two armed, gray-uniformed IRH soldiers at the entrance of the Rijksmuseum.

The last time Salima walked these hallways, she was madly packing away 17
th
century Flemish paintings.  Soon after the Jenever Theater Murders, the museums had cried out for help.  The Van Gogh Museum, the Rijksmuseum, The Royal Palace, the Stedlijik Museum, Museum Van Loon, Museum het Rembrandhuis.  She, Jana, and hundreds of volunteers spent weeks knee deep in straw, newspaper, and twine, crating sculptures and canvasses.  The curators, certain the Islamists would destroy everything, became generals, leaning over maps, planning evacuation routes, ordering packers and movers and crate builders, arguing about humidity.  Much was sent to the Hadron Collider, the rest shipped to Reykjavik.  They worked around the clock.

The walls are barren now, empty dark squares where paintings once hung, with hooks and frayed wires for the alarm system.  A few Islamic propaganda posters hang along the major hallways.  But the ceilings are too high, the posters look lost, the effect, cheap and futile.

She enters a large salon that looks out over the Museumplein.  The Minister of Documents, Bora Burakgazi, turns out to be an amiable family man, with a pink face, big belly, and short beard.  He is secretly fond of Scotch whiskey, and, by the look of his eyes, indulges heavily at every opportunity.  Salima is glad to discover that he is always an hour late to work. 

In the guise of preparing for his arrival—starting coffee, sorting mail, straightening his desk, printing out his daily schedule—she rifles through the metal filing cabinet, where hundreds of names of suspects and other important information are collected in alphabetical order.  She takes a few cards at random, hides them in her burka, then tears them up and flushes them down the toilet during her break.

Few women work in the Landweer
offices, and the men try to ignore them, which suits her fine.

They have a few computers, but eschew any kind of network or sharing.  They think, rightly so, that a network makes them vulnerable to sabotage and infiltration.  She is not allowed on a computer and uses an old electric typewriter.  She types out forms in the corner, unnoticed.

Often, before a raid, Shirzad bursts into Bora's office, his orders clipped and excited.  Bora has her type up the arrest warrants, which she takes to various offices to be stamped and processed.  She asks Bora if she may take her break early—she needs to run to the drug store for “female necessities.”  Bora flicks his hands as if beating off flies, and tells her to hurry back. 

She scampers to the nearest public phone and calls Pim about the raid. 

Shirzad returns hours later, kicking desks and tables, utterly furious.  The Resistants had cleared out in the middle of a meal.  He seems most upset that they had been eating Genoa salami and pork cracklings, the seats “still warm from their traitorous asses.”  He goes on to say that, “smuggling will be the ruin of the country.”

Smuggling is the only thing keeping us alive
.  Salima tries to clear her head of such thoughts.  Shirzad can read minds, the clerks say.  She sits quietly at her desk.  Because she is veiled, he has never seen her face.  She doesn't think Shirzad has ever noticed her.  She would like to keep it that way. 

The more competently she performs, the more Bora trusts her, and eventually, as Sanne Sahar predicted, she does most of his work for him.  After two months she is allowed to work on the computer to fill out forms.  No information is stored on the memory.  It must all be copied onto disks, and stored in a locked drawer.  They use the computers only as slightly updated typewriters.  It's like driving a tank to do your grocery shopping.  They store only blank forms on the computer.

Shirzad tells Bora that he plans a raid on the town of Den Helder, the most northern town in western Holland—an important rendezvous point for getting refugees on boats and out of Holland.  He has finally figured out who the leader of the Resistance is there, and decides to strike.  “I hear he is gay.  He won't last long under interrogation.  He'll spill the names of the rest of his group.”  He says this with a cheerful smack of his lips.  It is 2 PM when he storms into Bora's office.  The raiding party is to set out at five.