The Tulip Eaters (4 page)

Isaac choked up and then pressed the barrel harder against her head. “And do you know the first question my brother always asked when I snuck into whatever hellhole you found for him to hide in? ‘Where is Anneke? Is she all right? Tell her I love her.’”

“Oh, Isaac, I loved him, too—you must know that! And I protected you. What about the day you were walking down the
Singel
and were stopped by the
Groene Politie?
Don’t you remember?”

“You wore the NSB uniform, that’s what I remember,” he snarled.

“No, you know what I’m talking about. I pretended to fall off my bicycle and the
Duitsers
ran over to help me—”

“Because they saw your uniform and knew that you were a filthy Nazi, too.”

Anneke looked into his angry eyes.
She had to make him understand!
“No! I did it to distract them so you could get away. And you did!” Isaac still glared at her, but said nothing. “What about the food I brought your parents every week? And in the winter of ’44, when your mother was so sick, I brought medicine for her that I stole from my father.”

“What I remember about your Nazi father is that he turned in four of my friends. Shipped them off. Dead now. And we all know why you pretended to protect us, feed us and even made Abram fall in love with you.”

“Why?” cried Anneke. “Why would I have done that if I didn’t love all of you?”

“Because it was all part of your plan to turn in a Jewish family to win more NSB medals to pin on that Nazi outfit you wore. We were just another notch in your belt.”

“You don’t understand any of it.”

“I understand perfectly.” Then Rose wailed from her bassinet. Isaac picked her up and walked to Anneke, baby under one arm, pointing his pistol at her with the other. But Rose kicked and cried in his arms. He tried to switch her to his right side, but she screamed louder. “Shut up,
godverdomme!
”

Anneke saw her chance and sprang up. She kicked out at Isaac and caught him in the knee, grabbed Rose and ran. Off balance, Isaac recovered quickly, shoved the pistol in his pocket and dashed after her. Anneke bolted up the back stairway, adrenaline erasing her pain, and hurtled breathlessly into her bedroom with Rose under one arm. Hands shaking, she slammed and locked the door and then flung open a drawer on the night table.
Where was it?
Her hand closed around the cool metal.

Isaac banged on the door. “I’ll break it down, you bitch!” he yelled. “And when I do, I’ll kill you with my bare hands—and that child!”

Anneke flung the door open. With Rose on her hip, she moved toward him. Isaac lunged forward, his hands reaching for her throat. But when he saw what she held, he stopped cold.

“Get your hands behind you.” She pointed her pistol at the spot between his eyes. She waved its barrel gently up and down. A deadly calm filled her. When she spoke, her words sounded like silk. “I know how to use this, as you are well aware.”

Isaac’s face contorted with rage. “A Luger!” he shouted. “And you say you’re not a Nazi? You lying whore!”

Anneke gave him a small, bitter smile. “Shut your goddamned mouth,” she said softly. Then she saw him frantically try to free the pistol from his pocket. She clicked off the safety. Isaac froze. “Put your fucking hands behind your back.”

“No.”

Anneke hiked Rose higher on her hip and trained her eye down the sights of her pistol. “I never enjoyed killing. But you are threatening me and my family. If you don’t do as I say, what happens will be your fault—no one else’s.”

She saw the artery in Isaac’s neck bulge with each ragged breath he drew. He was clearly calculating his odds, but finally did as she said.
The bastard was listening to her now, wasn’t he?
“Turn and walk slowly down the stairs.” Rose began to whimper and struggle, but Anneke shushed her, jiggling her as they followed behind him.

Isaac quickened his descent, tensing as he glanced sharply behind him. Anneke jabbed the gun barrel into the back of his neck. “Run and I’ll kill you.”

As they neared the foot of the stairs, suddenly Anneke heard the front door open and someone burst into the front hallway. “Papa! Papa, are you here? It’s Ariel!” a man called in Dutch.

Anneke shoved the barrel into Isaac’s neck—hard. “Don’t move!” she said with deliberate calm. Isaac halted like a marionette whose string had been jerked.

She heard this Ariel’s voice coming from the dining room. “Papa!”

“Walk.” Anneke’s voice sounded like the slice of dueling swords as she prodded Isaac with the gun barrel. They crept farther down the back stairway in silent tandem. “Say one word and I’ll kill you both.” He gave her a deadly glare, but obeyed. At the bottom step, Rose slipped on Anneke’s hip and cried out. Isaac whirled around and managed to grab the baby and wrench the Luger out of Anneke’s hand.

“Rose!” Anneke leaped forward to wrest away the baby, but Isaac grabbed the pistol and shoved her aside. Then he turned and pressed the black barrel into Rose’s pink cheek. The baby twisted and screamed, but Isaac held her fast. Now he smiled.

“You! Walk here!” His voice was an evil whisper as he pointed the gun at her. “Slowly, very slowly.”

Horror gripped her as she saw the black pistol sink farther into Rose’s cheek. Then she saw the younger man, Ariel he called himself, on the far side of the room. “Help us!” she pleaded.

“Papa!” he cried. “Put down the gun!”

Barely breathing, Anneke continued her careful approach, trying not to hurry, to alert Isaac. But when she was a few feet away, he pressed the barrel against Rose’s temple so hard that the baby screamed. “Stop!” he thundered.

Anneke halted as he backed away from her. “Isaac!” she screamed. “Don’t!”

Ariel rushed toward them but stumbled on a small rug. By the time he righted himself, Isaac was on the far side, away from him and Anneke. “Ariel, don’t move!” he shouted.

“Papa, I can’t let you do this....”

“Stop right there!” he bellowed, swinging the barrel from Anneke to Rose and back again. “Or pick which one you want to die.”

“No!” he cried. “Neither!”

Isaac gave him a hard look. “Why the hell are you here?”

Out of the corner of her eye, Anneke saw Ariel inch closer to her. She felt a wild hope.
Maybe he could stop him!

“I went to your apartment and couldn’t find you,” he said. “Then I saw the plane reservations and I knew—”

“Enough! Let me do what I have to do!” He clutched Rose tighter and pressed the barrel to her temple.

Anneke fell to her knees, sobbing. “You can’t kill her!”

“Now you will see what it is to watch a member of your family murdered.” His voice was a deadly whisper. “First her, then you.”

“No, please!”
She had to do something.
And then it hit her. “Wait—you don’t know!”

“Oh? And what don’t I know?”

“The baby...” Anneke choked on her sobs.

“Spit it out. It will be last thing you say before I kill you both.”

“Rose, she’s—” Anneke, still choking, uttered her next words. “She’s Abram’s granddaughter.”

“What?”

Anneke, racked with sobs, collapsed onto the carpet. “I was pregnant before Abram died,” she whispered. “I had Nora, his daughter....”

“Get up!” yelled Isaac. “This is just another one of your lies! You’d say anything to save her.”

Anneke struggled to her feet and stood shaking. She looked at Rose, still writhing in Isaac’s arms.
Doomed. My darling Rose is doomed—because of me! And Nora—how will she—

Suddenly, Ariel sprang over the couch, but when he recovered his balance, Isaac had already taken aim at Anneke. The gunshot roared through the air. Anneke’s body jerked backward as blood spurted from her forehead.

“No!” shouted Ariel. He ran to her, knelt and felt wildly for a pulse. Her blood sluiced his hands, slick and hot. He looked up at Isaac. “You killed her!”

Isaac, still holding Rose, dropped the Luger as his knees buckled. Rose tumbled onto the white carpet, still wailing. Ariel saw Isaac’s eyes widen as he clutched at his throat and gasped for air. He fell to his knees, his face contorted.

Ariel rushed to him and cradled his head, moaning. “Papa? Papa, no!”

“My heart—” His voice was a strangled whisper. “Medicine...hotel.”

Frantic, Ariel looked around and then saw the phone on the end table. “I’m going to call for help.” He started to stand.

Isaac grabbed his son’s arm and pulled him down, spittle foaming at the corners of his mouth. His eyes were fading as color drained from them. “Too late for me,” he whispered. “The baby, take the baby!”

Ariel sobbed, holding his father close. “Papa, please!”

Isaac shook his head and held Ariel’s weeping face between his hands. His eyes struck Ariel like an army commander dying in battle. “She’s Abram’s...take her home, raise her Jewish. Promise me!”

“I can’t do that, Papa!”

“Yes, you can,” he said hoarsely. “You can and you
must.
”

“Please don’t make me!”

“Promise me!”

Ariel sobbed. “All right—I promise. I promise!”

Isaac nodded and dropped his hands from Ariel’s face. A half smile played upon his lips. “Abram...” he whispered.

Ariel watched as he convulsed and then was still. Ariel thrust his fingers into Isaac’s neck, digging for a pulse.
Nothing.
“No, no,” he moaned. Ariel stared at him and at Anneke, horrified, until he realized that Rose was twisting on the carpet, howling. Softly sobbing, he picked her up.

Then he heard the sound of a garage door churning. “Oh, God, what do I do?” He clutched Rose to his chest.

Then ran as fast as he could.

5

Nora stood in the blistering Houston sun at Anneke’s freshly dug grave and watched as her coffin was lowered. The funeral ceremony had been a dreary blur. Her black blouse and skirt, damp and clammy, clung to her like wet leaves. Feeling suffocated, she only half listened as the priest recited the Catholic rite. The priest had never known Nora or her mother. She had had to provide him with the highlights of Anneke’s life so he would have something to say.

After Hans died, Anneke had stopped going to church. Her mother had never told her why, nor did Nora ask. Nora had gone only for her father. He would have been crushed if she told him that she didn’t believe in the Pope. She still lit a candle for him at St. Anne’s—on his birthday and on the day he died. She tried to pray after lighting the candle. Just sitting in the silence, surrounded by the glow of stained glass that cast down prisms of color, she always felt restored.

She stared at the coffin in the ground. More candles to light, another dead parent to pray for. Nora glanced around her. It was pitifully sad. She now realized how rarely her parents had strayed outside the world of two they had built and then guarded from outsiders. Other than Marijke, a few colleagues from the hospital stood awkwardly around the grave, telegraphing bleak looks in her direction showing that they were clueless about what to say.
How do you comfort the daughter of a brutally murdered woman?

If it hadn’t been for Marijke holding her up, Nora knew she would not have gotten through it. So many times she had thought she would faint, run or scream.

The aching that filled her now made her realize that she had been unable to truly mourn Anneke’s loss because of her terror for Rose. Now her mind flooded with memories: Anneke’s cool hand on Nora’s hot forehead as she lay in bed with the flu when she was eight; Anneke’s eyes shining with pride at Nora’s graduation from the University of Texas; Anneke’s joy-filled face when she first held Rose in her arms.
Her mother.
The only person in the world who had known her completely. Now she would know what it was to be an orphan, lost and alone.

She bent to clutch a fistful of dirt and let it fall from her hand onto the coffin. It hardly made a sound. That made her heart clench and then she felt dizzy. Marijke wrapped her arm firmly around Nora’s shoulders. Nora took a deep breath and turned from the grave. Nothing she could do for her mother now. After receiving hushed condolences from the few attendees, she and Marijke walked toward Nora’s car.

“Are you all right?” asked Marijke.

“Don’t worry. Once we get home, I’ll be fine.”

Just as they reached the car, someone called to her. “Ms. de Jong?”

It was Richards. He loomed above her. She felt confused. What was he doing here?

As if reading her thoughts, he nodded at the last of the mourners heading toward their cars and shrugged. “We always go to the funerals. Sometimes the murderer—or, in this case, his accomplice—shows up or watches from a distance.”

Nora felt sick. “I...see.” She saw Richards glance quickly at Marijke and mouth,
Wait here.
Marijke nodded and got into the car. Richards took Nora’s elbow and walked with her to a nearby oak tree. The lush green leaves against the cloudless sky seemed so damned peaceful. Nora felt anything but. He released her elbow and stopped. She didn’t like something in his eyes. Her breath caught. “What is it? Have you found Rose?”

“No, no news on that front yet, I’m sorry to say.”

Nora felt tears come to her eyes. She wiped them away.

“Did you see anyone here today you didn’t know?”

She thought and then shook her head. “Just old friends of my parents. My boss, a few colleagues, that’s all.”

Richards nodded. “Well, we have found out a few things I’d like to tell you about.” He pointed to a concrete bench by the oak. “Let’s sit.”

Nora suddenly felt so exhausted she wondered if she could manage those few steps. She wished she could just curl up under that huge, leafy tree and go to sleep. And never wake up.

She sat on the hard bench. Richards sat, reached into his suit pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He shook one out and lit it with a silver lighter.

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

He gave her a half smile. “Goes with the job.”

She nodded. Yes, that’s all she wanted, small talk. If it wasn’t about Rose, then focusing on Anneke’s murder would require more energy than she could muster.

Richards took a deep drag and then exhaled. “We have something to tell finally. The perpetrator checked into a Motel 6 the day before the murder and never checked out. My men were able to get into his room.”

Nora felt some of her energy return. “Was there anything to help us find Rose?”

Richards put up a hand. “Hang on. Let me run through it all first. We found a passport.” He took out a small notepad and read from a worn page. “The fingerprints match those we took from the dead man. Dutch Immigration confirmed yesterday that his name was Wim Bakker, born in Amsterdam, address Westerstraat 453, fifty-seven years old.” He gave Nora a sharp look. “Have you ever heard that name?”

Nora shook her head. “But that doesn’t mean anything. My parents never talked about their life in Holland. All they told me was that they had family there, but that they were estranged and did not want to discuss their past. When I lived in Amsterdam, I tried to find them, but never did. The name ‘de Jong’ is very common in Holland.” She shrugged. “I suppose they could have known this Bakker before they came here, but how would I know?”

“You’re absolutely sure you’ve never heard of him?”

“Yes, of course.” Impatience rose in her. “Who was he? How did he know my mother? Do you have any idea why he killed her?”

Richards shrugged. “We asked the Dutch police to obtain a warrant to search his home, which they did yesterday. All they found was a bed and a few chairs. Looked like he hadn’t been there in a while.”

All she wanted now was to jump up from the bench and run—
somewhere!
It was maddening getting these useless bits of information in drips and drabs.

She stood and paced. “Are they going to find his family? He must have children, friends, maybe an employer. Someone will know why he did this and who was with him. And who took Rose!”

Richards flicked his cigarette on the ground and looked up at her. His eye twitched. Nora stopped. She remembered that twitching when he first saw her mother’s body on the floor. When she was hysterical about Rose and he tried to calm her down. “What is it? What aren’t you telling me?”

Richards avoided her eyes. “It looks like we’re at another dead end.”

“What do you mean?” She made him meet her eyes.

“We just got another call from Dutch Immigration,” he said quietly. “Apparently the ‘Wim Bakker’ whose information was on the passport is not the man who killed your mother.”

“But that doesn’t make sense!”

“The Dutch police have confirmed that Wim Bakker is a heroin dealer who was arrested when he went through Immigration in Amsterdam six months ago. He is now in prison.”

Nora shook her head several times. She needed the puzzle pieces to fit and they didn’t. “But how would this man who killed my mother get his hands on a fake passport?”

Richards stubbed his cigarette out on the grass and straightened. “Dutch Immigration says that because of Bakker’s incarceration, the killer could have gotten it anywhere. When a Dutch citizen is wanted for arrest, the typical protocol is for his passport number and photograph to be placed on a list for the Immigration agents to check in case the criminal tries to leave or enter the country. If the agent finds such a number on the list, they’re supposed to confiscate the passport and immediately alert airport security so the suspect can be taken into custody.”

“So why didn’t that happen?” Nora was furious. “Why was he permitted to go to Schiphol, waltz through Immigration, take a transatlantic flight and enter the U.S.?”

“Because he had an excellent forgery. He replaced his photograph with that of Wim Bakker, but he didn’t change the fingerprints.”

“But wasn’t the passport number the same?”

Richards shook his head. “One digit was altered.”

“How could that happen? Are they just idiots? People must try to get away with this all the time.”

“They told us that the forgery must have been done by a professional.”

“The black market?”

Again Richards shrugged. “They don’t know. Whoever did it had specific knowledge of the special papers and symbols used, the particular sequence of numbers and precisely what information was required.”

“Are the Dutch police going to figure this out?”

“It’s out of their jurisdiction. Immigration is in charge and they’re looking into it.”

Nora sat and felt her shoulders sag with hopelessness. “That’s the Dutch way of saying that they’ve done all they’re going to do.”

Richards stood. “I wish I had better news.”

Nora turned away, forcing herself not to cry. She heard her voice come out in a defeated whisper. “Me, too.”

They walked silently back to her car. Before Richards turned off the path toward his own vehicle, Nora grasped his arm. “What about prints? Did the crime investigators find any?”

Richards shook his head. “We have the killer’s prints, obviously.”

“No, no! I mean the kidnapper. He didn’t necessarily wear gloves, did he? Surely he touched something—the front doorknob, the furniture, maybe even Rose’s bassinet.”

“Well, if the killer wore gloves, we have to assume his accomplice did, too. Besides, we’ve dusted the entire place,” he said wearily. “We did find a few latents, but the FBI isn’t ready to say anything until they’ve run them through Quantico.”

“And when in hell will that be?”

Richards looked at her, surprised. “Soon, Nora. We’re pressuring them.”

Nora thought a moment. “What about footprints?”

“It appears that there was a struggle and movement on the staircase to your mother’s bedroom, and other footprints in the entryway and dining room.”

She looked up at him, feeling almost hopeful. “Maybe they were looking for something. Maybe that’s why they were all over the house?”

Richards shook his head. “We combed the house thoroughly taking prints, seeing if anything seemed to be disturbed. But other than the furniture that was in disarray, nothing else was tossed. When you confirmed that your mother’s jewelry and other valuables were still in the house, it might fit the profile of a robbery gone wrong. That might account for your mother’s murder, but it doesn’t explain the kidnapping. The last thing a robber caught red-handed would do is to take off with an infant.”

“Maybe they didn’t find what they were looking for and the struggle got out of hand before they could.”

“Who knows? It still doesn’t make sense that the accomplice didn’t steal
something.
”

“Except my child.” She shook her head. “I can’t imagine that my mother would let Rose out of her sight or out of her arms, no matter what the struggle.” She looked up at Richards and finally let her tears fall. She was furious to feel so helpless.

Richards took Nora’s shaking hands into his own. They were warm, but Nora drew no comfort from them.
He probably does this for every mother with a missing child,
she thought. She withdrew and began pacing again. If she kept her feet moving, maybe something else would come to her. Something
had
to come to her.

“Once the FBI processes the prints we found in the house, we’ll send them on to the Netherlands. Maybe the killer had a record and they are on file. Maybe the partials we found—they must have belonged to the accomplice—will turn something up, as well.”

“You told me it was unlikely that latent prints would do us much good.”

“We’ll see.”

“‘We’ll see, we’ll see.’ That’s all I ever hear from you people.”

She stood and started to walk to her car. She flung a look back at Richards and spit out her next words. “I’m sick of this. No one is doing enough. You don’t have one damned lead about my daughter and she’s been gone for three days. I’m going to figure this out for myself.” She flung open the car door and started to climb in.

Richards held the door open. “Nora, wait!” His voice brooked no argument. “You can’t do that. You don’t have the resources to track this down and you’ll just do more harm than good.”

Nora yanked on the door, but he held it fast. “Let go,” she said in a menacing voice.

“Obviously, this isn’t the time for us to continue this conversation,” he said tersely. “We’ll discuss it later. But there’s one last thing you need to keep in mind. You have no choice right now but to stay at home.”

“And why is that?”

“Because you have to be there if the kidnapper calls.”

Nora got in and slammed the door closed. She felt a cold resolve as she rolled down the window and met his hard glance. “You know as well as I do that if that bastard wanted a ransom, he would have called days ago.” She refused to give way to tears. “I’m going to find my daughter. You tell your people to lead, follow or get the fuck out of my way.”