The Tulip Eaters (9 page)

He hung up
. How could he explain any of it?
Leah would freak out when he showed up with Rose in his arms. He hurried to the gate, struggling with his carry-on and jostling Rose, who seemed to think it was all very exciting. She gurgled and laughed. He glanced furtively around, expecting the police to intercept them at any moment.
God, just get me home!
He almost tripped in his haste to make it to the jetway. The stewardess relieved him of the stroller and he barreled down the aisle. Only when he and Rose were settled in and the plane pulled away was he able to take deep gulps of air.

After liftoff, the smiling stewardess offered him a refreshment. He ordered three tiny bottles of Scotch, poured them into a plastic cup with trembling hands and knocked them back before she fetched Diet Cokes for his seatmates. Her disapproving look was unmistakable
. A sweaty drunk slamming down drinks with a beautiful baby to care for!
He shut his eyes and let the fiery alcohol course through him.

During the flight, Rose alternately cried and slept, but quieted quickly after her bottle or a diaper change—no easy feat in the minuscule bathroom. He was grateful that the baby aspirin had seemed to work and that she was too young to stay awake long.

Ten hours later, they arrived at Schiphol. Bleary-eyed and exhausted, Ariel walked from the gate down the paths he knew so well and collected his luggage. His back and arms were killing him from holding Rose during the long flight. He realized he had forgotten to collect the stroller from the stewardess before deplaning. He felt so exhausted he thought he might collapse. Rose was awake and seemed to be taking in everything she saw and heard. His heart thrashed in his chest as he stood at the red line waiting for the next Immigration agent, hoping it wouldn’t be anyone he knew. He gripped Rose tightly. Surely they hadn’t come all this way only to be discovered now. He closed his eyes and prayed to God for the first time in years.

“Mijnheer?”

Ariel opened his eyes and looked at the agent waving him over to his cubicle. Fortunately, Ariel didn’t recognize him. It was only then that he started to breathe again. He juggled Rose as he reached into his coat pocket and produced his passport. It felt as if the agent took years to examine it. The young man looked at the photograph and then up at him—twice.
Oh, God,
he thought.
It’s all over. They must have found out who I was and put my name on the list.

He knew that agents were provided daily with a list of passengers to be denied entrance. Most were wanted criminals. Ariel saw the young man pull the list out of a red folder. At that moment, his telephone rang. The agent picked up and spoke quietly.
“Ja, die is hier,”
he said.
“Kom maar.”

Ariel felt sick.
Who was coming? And why?

A few torturous minutes later, two burly security guards walked up. He waited in dread. They would arrest him here and now. He would be deported and stand trial in Houston. They would take Rose away. He held her closer.

The agent handed the list to one of the men who ran his finger down the page and nodded to the other guard. Ariel shut his eyes. At least it would be over.

“We’ve got one on row ten,” said the security guard to the agent. He turned to the other guard. “Let’s go.” They walked off.

Ariel almost wept with relief. The young agent shook his head and stamped Ariel’s passport. “It’s always something,” he muttered. As he returned the passport to Ariel’s trembling fingers, the agent nodded at Rose.

“Beautiful child,” he said.

Ariel took a deep breath and managed a small smile.

“Mijn dochter,”
he said.
“Jacoba.”

11

Nora watched impatiently as Richards sat on the sofa. It was six in the evening. Early that morning, she had sent him all the documents she’d found yesterday by courier, including her translation. Richards called around nine. In a harried voice, he said he had just been called out on a double murder of a couple in River Oaks. He would come over when he could grab a few minutes. Nora called the police station around three to find out why he hadn’t shown up. The intake officer told her that Richards was still at the crime scene.

So Nora cleaned the house. Then cleaned it again. Marijke went to the grocery store, she thought, to escape Nora’s manic behavior. Not to mention that they had both been cooped up for a week now, tethered to the house. All Nora could do was to keep moving. The minute she stopped, fear for Rose filled her. Or she thought about her job and her patients.
Had Bryan, an eight-year-old with a medulloblastoma in his cerebellum, come through his surgery all right?
Bryan had held her hand and smiled when she told him not to worry, she would be there during the entire operation. She had promised to keep him safe
. How could she have promised such a thing? She couldn’t even keep her own daughter safe.
She should call and find out, but did not. She couldn’t handle more bad news.

Nora watched as Marijke brought Richards a cup of coffee. He thanked her and took a sip. Nora drew a deep breath, trying not to panic. She had racked her brain all afternoon to make sense of the awful things she’d found in the attic. She still could not believe it. Richards finally put his coffee cup on the table and sat back. His dark brown eyes met hers. They seemed preoccupied.
How much had the new murders diverted his attention from Rose?

She couldn’t stand it anymore. “Well? What did you find out?”

“Not a lot. Not yet, anyway.”

Nora felt as if her entire body was a strung wire, rigid with fear and fatigue. She motioned to Marijke for a cigarette, something she had never done. Marijke raised her eyes, but pulled one from her pack, lit it and handed it to Nora. She nodded her thanks, stood and paced around, almost gagging as she drew the harsh smoke into her lungs. Six days of no Rose and no sleep had made her feel out-of-her-mind crazy. If she didn’t find her baby soon, she wouldn’t make it—she just wouldn’t. “Who have you contacted about the information I sent you?”

“It’s not as if we haven’t done anything, Nora.” She saw the frustration in his face. “Here is what we know so far. The FBI has conferred with the Dutch National Police, the KLPD, and notified the Dutch Ministry of Security and Justice, as well as the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” He took a deep breath. “We talked to Amsterdam Immigration about the false passport in light of the new information. The FBI’s legal attaché to the U.S. Embassy in The Hague is also in the loop.”

Why in hell didn’t anyone realize that they had to act now—immediately!—or she might never find her Rose!
She felt panic consume her. “And you sent everyone the documentation I gave you?”

“Yes, we did.”

Nora stalked to her chair, sat and stubbed out the cigarette in Hans’s blue ashtray on the table.
Her father, the murderer.
She shook off the thought. “What did they find out?”

Richards looked at her with his dark eyes, his voice calm. “Nora, you have to keep in mind that it’s still very early in the case. I know it doesn’t feel that way to you, but we’re still processing the information from the crime scene and the FBI has taken both the murder and Rose’s disappearance very seriously. Even though we don’t have any hard leads yet, we can’t simply drop that investigation and focus all of our energy on the documents you sent us.”

“What do you mean?” She spit her words out as if shot from a machine gun. “Nathan, this is the first real evidence anyone has found that might link the murder and the kidnapping! Obviously that Dutchman—whoever he was—went to a lot of trouble to forge a passport and come here and kill my mother. He might even have been an assassin hired by someone to settle an old score. Or maybe he was an operative with one of the Israeli organizations who track war criminals.” She stopped to take a breath.

She could tell that neither Richards nor Marijke seemed to embrace her logic, but she went on. “The real link here must be related to whatever my mother did as a Dutch Nazi and my father’s murder of a Dutch Jew.” Richards and Marijke listened in silence.

She spoke louder. “We have to find out who Abram Rosen was, if his family is still alive, how my father knew him, why he would kill him, if my mother was really a Dutch Nazi, what she had to do with Rosen’s death and how all of that may be connected to why she was murdered and why Rose was kidnapped—”

Richards held up his hand. “Nora,” he said sternly. “You have to slow down—and calm down.” Nora could tell he was waiting for a signal from her that she understood. To placate him, she took a deep breath and nodded. She had to appear rational. She sat on her hands to keep them from moving.

Richards continued as if he were teaching a child the first letters of the alphabet. “We have to think about this logically,” he said. “You’re talking about information that is over thirty years old involving people and events that occurred in a foreign country during wartime. Those records won’t be easy to find, if they can be found at all.”

“So you haven’t found a single thing that might help us?” She dropped any pretense at being calm.

Richards’s left eye began to tic. “Although the Dutch have promised to give the matter their attention, they told us that any records relating to Abram Rosen are probably long gone, packed away in archives or lost in the confusion after the war.”

Nora felt stunned. “They have no way of tracking down who he was, where he lived or if he had any family we could try to contact?”

“They told us that there were too many Rosens in the Netherlands for them to move quickly. That it would take time.”

“What about just in Amsterdam?” She could hear the flint in her voice. It was the way she spoke when a nurse handed her the wrong surgical instrument in the operating room. “Surely they can narrow it down and start from there.” She picked up an empty wineglass and watched her hands shake as she poured claret into her glass.

Richards said nothing, but she felt him study her. He had to notice the trembling of her fingers and the black circles under her eyes. “They will,” he said quietly, “but we have to be patient. We also contacted Dutch Immigration to see if there is some way to trace your parents’ immigration into the U.S. They had nothing. Neither did U.S. Immigration. We’re not even sure how they got into the country. And, again, I don’t know how pertinent that information is to the murder or the kidnapping.” Richards leaned forward. Nora noticed that his tic had stopped. She saw him watch as she took another shaky sip from her wineglass. He believed she had become unhinged.

“Your information may provide some insight into the murder, and it may not,” he said quietly. “But in my professional opinion, we have a much better chance of finding Rose by working it hard from our end.” He stopped and took a sip of his coffee.

“What about hiring a detective?”

“Good idea,” he said. “I know an ex-cop—Williams. Used him before.”

“Please call him.”

“I’ll fill him in and we’ll go from there.” He pulled his worn notepad out of his breast pocket and scribbled a few words. “But we still don’t have the identity of the killer. Although he may have been Dutch, we can’t even say that with certainty. It could be that he routed his trip through the Netherlands as a way to get into the U.S. Besides, anyone can buy a fake passport on the black market in any country in the world.”

He paused and shook his head. “Even if we take what you found in the attic as true—that it is evidence of some link to what has happened—it still doesn’t explain why the killer’s accomplice would take Rose and not ask for a ransom. Why would he want to keep her?”

Nora brushed her hair back from her eyes and set the wineglass back onto the coffee table—hard. She had to keep her voice modulated, although her anger threatened to destroy the composure she had maintained so far. “Surely they must know something about the judgment out of The Hague condemning my father to death for killing this Abram Rosen.”

“Again, they are looking into it. It seems that the bureaucracy over there is even slower than ours. I’m sorry, but this is going to take more time. You’re going to have to be patient while we run all the traps. I know how you feel, but—”

She pointed a shaking finger at him and felt herself lose control. “Don’t tell me how I feel! It isn’t
your
daughter who was taken by some maniac almost a week ago! You aren’t sitting here day after day, only to be told that the police—and the goddamned
F-B-I
—haven’t found a single lead about who murdered your mother or whether your daughter is dead or alive!”

Marijke sat down next to Nora and patted her arm. “Shh,” she whispered. “You have to stay calm. It won’t help to get angry. We’re all trying to help.” She tried to take Nora’s hand.

Nora shook it off. “No! I won’t stay calm. I’ve been calm for almost six days! We finally have some connection to this nightmare and I want something done about it—now!”

Richards shook his head. Nora could tell her words had affected him, because both of his eyes were twitching madly. His voice, however, was smooth and low. “Nora, every possible line has been thrown into the water. We’re doing the best we can. It’s still far too early to write off the possibility of a ransom call. I’ve seen other cases where the kidnapper has let time pass to increase the panic and terror of the family in order to demand more money.”

Nora stalked to the corner of the room. She took a deep breath, turned and then fixed on Richards. Her voice was deadly. “You know as well as I do that if we were going to get a ransom call, the son of a bitch would have contacted us before now. I told you that at my mother’s funeral.” Her throat felt thick and dry as she said her next words. “Every day that passes means it is more likely that Rose is gone for good—or dead.”

“I can’t tell you whether Rose is alive or not,” he said softly. “What I can tell you is that we’re following established police protocol for the murder and kidnapping. Everything has been done by the book. The course you want us to follow in the Netherlands will take a long time, if it turns up anything at all.”

Nora sagged in her chair. He actually had said it.
I can’t tell you if Rose is alive.
She could barely breathe.
Oh, God, now they’re losing hope. Otherwise, he would never say that.
She forced herself to go on.

“That’s exactly my point! This man—whoever he was—obviously went to a lot of trouble to falsify his passport, fly here and kill my mother. Don’t you find it the least bit relevant that my parents lied about who they were, that my mother seems to have been a Dutch Nazi, and that my father apparently killed this Abram Rosen? Can you honestly sit there and tell me you don’t believe that connecting those dots must be pursued?”

“I don’t know, Nora. But the gist of your questions relates to the distant past. Even if we find your answers, it still doesn’t get us any farther down the road to finding out why Rose was kidnapped. With the killer dead and no way to question him or to know his motive, can you understand how very tough it is for us to identify the kidnapper?”

Nora fell silent. What he said made sense. Her heart just didn’t—wouldn’t—hear it. “But how could the kidnapper manage to be in the house and leave absolutely no trace?” she asked. “Surely there are fibers, fingerprints—something you can go on.”

“As I told you before, the only fingerprints we found are your mother’s and yours. And as I also told you, the killer’s accomplice probably wore gloves.” He sighed. “The latents haven’t panned out. With respect to the fibers, there’s nothing unusual. Carpet, clothing—nothing foreign.”

Nora put her head in her hands. Every hour without hope exhausted her. She forced herself to meet Richards’s eyes. He looked like Nora felt when she lost her first patient.

“As for your theory that the killer was an assassin or that your parents were the target of a revenge killing...”

“Go on.”

Richards shook his head in a sad way. “Nora, it’s too far-fetched. It’s thirty years after the war. Who would wait that long?”

He paused, as if waiting for her to say something. When she didn’t, he went on. “And if the killer was an assassin, why would a war crimes organization bother with one Dutchman who killed one Jew? I know it sounds harsh, but it isn’t like your father was Eichmann or Goebbels.”

Nora shook her head and stared at the wall. She knew that her connections were woven with the slimmest of reeds, but it was all she had. And now he was telling her that she was crazy. She felt tears fill her eyes.

Richards walked toward her slowly, as if approaching a deer that might take flight. She did not move as he walked behind her and placed a hand gently on her shoulder. His voice was even softer than before, a silken thread she felt a sudden urge to snap.

“Even if everything in those documents is true,” he said quietly. “Even if someone came back thirty years later to kill your mother, which sounds crazy to everyone but you, it still doesn’t explain why, or who would take your daughter and keep her.”

Nora turned and looked at him squarely. “You think she’s dead already.”

Richards dropped his hands and shook his head. “I’m not ready to say that.”

“That’s precisely what you’re saying! We keep coming back to the same place. What other leads do you have?
None!
If you’re telling me that I’m supposed to sit here by the telephone for weeks waiting for some idiotic ransom call and for all of those bullshit agencies to get their heads out of their asses, then you’ve got another think coming.” She crossed her arms and glared at him. “I won’t do it.”

Richards stood where he was, his mouth slightly open. Nora whirled around and tried to compose herself. As her fury subsided, a plan suddenly bloomed. She took a breath.
Damn! Why hadn’t she thought of it sooner?