No Greater Love - Eris Field Page 0,31

suffered under the German occupation but Dutch-Jews did not just lose their homes and everything they owned—they lost their lives.” He fought to control his growing fury. There was no point in discussing the refugees with his mother. “Did Carl write about anything besides the house?” he asked with a sense of misgiving.

“Yes.” She frowned. “I seem to remember him writing a letter to you but you were too ill to be disturbed.”

“He wrote a letter to me?” Pieter tried to keep his voice neutral. “Where is the letter?”

“I really don’t remember. I didn’t want to bother you with any of his problems or requests.” She wiped away a tear without disturbing her makeup. “You were so terribly ill.”

“Did he write again?” Pieter was fighting to control his urge to shake the information out of her.

“No.” She frowned. “I think he may have called but you were in isolation in the hospital.” She sighed. “It was such a worrisome time for me.”

“Has he contacted you recently?” Pieter ground out the words between clenched teeth as he fought to control his urge to shake the information out of his mother.

“The last time he wrote it was personal business. He asked me to register his marriage in Den Hague.” She gave a delicate sniff as she met her son’s questioning gaze. “I was very surprised that he would marry at his age, after so many years of never marrying.”

“Who? Did he say who he was marrying?” Pieter’s voice was barely audible. How could Carl not let him know? But maybe he had in the letter his mother had misplaced.

“It was a non-Dutch name, not a name I knew. A foreigner. That is why he wanted me to register the marriage in Den Hague.”

“Can you look it up in your records?”

“Information between a client and his solicitor is private,” she said haughtily, but after a glance at Pieter’s ashen face, she capitulated. “It was an odd name. I don’t remember the last name but the first name was something like Jan Ann. I remember thinking that it was a strange name, certainly not a Dutch name.”

A surge of bitter desolation encompassed him. Janan was married, lost to him for all time. Beneath the sharp agony of his loss was the stinging pain of his mother’s deceit. Carl had tried to contact him and his mother had blocked his attempts. It must have been important for Carl to telephone him. “How long ago?’

“Oh, months ago.” She tossed her head. “It was just a small matter. I sent one of my assistants to do it.” She frowned. “You can’t expect me to remember the exact date.”

Pieter stumbled from the room. He had to get away from his mother. He had to reach the library before he fell apart. Everything he had dreamed of was gone. Janan was married to another and would never be his. All his struggles to stay alive were for nothing. He huddled in the corner of the leather Chesterfield sofa unable to stop shaking.

Why had Janan done it? She must have felt the same magic that he had that night. She must have known that he would come back as soon as he could. Why had she married Carl? To take care of him? To protect him from his nephew? But why marriage? He moaned as he tried to re-group. What was he going to do?

He stood, unsteady on his feet, and straightened his tie. How could he live when he had lost everything? Work. Work was all he had left in his life. Sigmund Freud had said that work was the last bastion. He would go to the Refugee Center and work until he dropped. They needed him, and he needed them.

As soon as Pieter settled himself on the train for the thirty-minute ride that would take him to the Osdorp refugee camp in the western suburb of Amsterdam, he took out his notebook and reviewed the next week’s work. He forced himself to concentrate. Twenty-three refugee camps in The Netherlands with over 14,000 refugees pouring in every year requesting asylum, nearly a third of them children. He rubbed his hand across his face. What irony. The only European country with more refugees was Germany, the country that had deported and killed so many people in the quest of a pure German population was now struggling with masses of people from diverse cultures seeking asylum.

He thought wearily of the child refugees he worked with. So vulnerable. He shuddered at the